Films Catch Up 15

As the fifteenth of these, that's 150 films I'd watched but not yet posted reviews for in 2023. Surely I'm done? Not quite!

1. Dr Phibes Rises Again

At the end of The Abominable Dr Phibes, Phibes and his dead wife Victoria disappeared into a hidden tomb below his house, which then collapsed. Three years later (presumably 1924) the moon rises in a rare conjunction and he is reanimated. To his disgust he discovers that someone has stolen the papyrus map that would lead him to the River Of Life in Egypt, where he could resurrect her.

It's been stolen by Darius Beiderbeck who intends to make himself and his lover immortal. Darius has lived for centuries thanks to an elixir but it’s running out. Phibes silent female assistant Vulvania, definitively killed in the last film, is inexplicably resurrected, and they go to Darius’s house, kill his manservant and steal back the papyrus. Everyone sets sail for Egypt, including Phibes’s mechanical band, where he's hidden Victoria.

Beiderbeck’s assistant discovers Victoria so Phibes kills him and throws him overboard in a giant bottle. It’s found on shore and the police detectives, returning from the first film, learn he was on the ship. Talking to the shipping agent they recognise the descriptions of Vulvania, the organ and the mechanical band. Has Dr Phibes risen again?

Everyone ends up in Egypt at the lost tomb, where the river of life has been hidden for two thousand years. It’s going to re-appear when the moon is in the right place. Dr Phibes has been here before it seems, and set up a variety of traps and weird murder methods. Which are more baroque than ever (and not themed this time, Phibes getting slightly less use from this theology degree).

Watch This: Dr Phibes is back, and he’s got even weirder and more inexplicable plans and murders to do
Don’t Watch This: It still doesn’t make sense, and things get gruesome

2. The Food Of The Gods

On Bowen Island in British Columbia a farming couple discover a substance bubbling out the ground “the food of the gods.” It makes their chickens grow, which is good, except they grow bigger than people and can be dangerous. Still, the problems come when other creatures, vermin, eat it and grow.

A professional football player and his buddies travel to the island to go hunting (deer hunting, on horseback). One of them gets separated, is stung by giant wasps and dies. This is a mystery. The football player returns to investigate. He, the farmer’s wife, some passers-by and a food scientist are trapped in the house by giant rats.

Based on an H G Wells story, I’m not sure the film has anything much to offer than attacks by giant rats. I suppose your enjoyment will be dependent on if you like stuffed giant rat heads being pushed at people, or normal sized rats climbing on model cars and houses. They manage to keep the scale consistent which is good!

Watch This: Giant vermin versus people
Don’t Watch This: You’re scared of big rats, maybe big wasps too

3. Rambo

Twenty years after defeating America’s greatest enemies, the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese in Vietnam and [checks notes] the police department of a North West Pacific Town in the US, John Rambo is living peacefully in Thailand where he drives a boat and catches snakes. Some American missionaries want him to take them upriver into Burma to offer medical assistance to a Karen community that is being persecuted by the Burmese army. He refuses, then the female member of the team convinces him; he drops them off.

The village is attacked by a sadistic Burmese officer and his men. The missionaries are captured. The head of the church (a pan-Asian mission based in Colorado) hires mercenaries to rescue them and convinces Rambo to take them up river. Getting there they run into trouble and Rambo goes into Rambo mode.

This is the Rambo series rubbed down to the broadest memories of Rambo, the flawed questions of First Blood and the Cold War anxieties of Rambo First Blood: Part II and Rambo III as mindless violence. For all it’s po-faced grit it’s silly. At the start Rambo has come to terms with his past, and he’s dragged back in, and then, for some reason, he can go home again at the end. This is gesturing at a character arc that is simply not there.

Watch This: Some absolutely brutally terrific action scenes
Don’t Watch This: For any insight into anything, even the Rambo films

4. Something In The Dirt

Levi moves into an apartment in Los Angeles, meets John who lives in the building. Someone died here, falling, though it doesn’t look all that high. Then they discover a quartz ashtray floats and glows and decide to make a documentary about it to try and make some money.

There’s a recurring symbol that might be ancient and appears all over Los Angeles. They uncover more coincidences, which leads them down some odd rabbit holes. There are interviews which become a bit more frequent as the film progresses.

As we progress we learn that they lost some of the original footage and recreated it. How much is real, how much recreation. A special effects creator is mentioned. It has been through several editors. John lost control of the project. How much is left that is real?

None of course, this is fiction. It’s comedy, it’s mystery, it’s horror, it has no answers, it laughs at the idea of answers, it gives us several answers.

Watch This: A darkly funny mockumentary that sometimes manages to present something actually wonderful
Don’t Watch This: Two fairly awful people hang around trying to exploit something or someone, maybe us

5. The Stepfather

A man strips, washes off blood, shaves his beard, changes his hair and leaves a house where a family is lying dead. A year later he has changed his identity, Jerry Blake, real estate agent, moved towns and married a woman named Susan, who has a daughter called Stephanie. Jerry is very keen to sell houses to families, he’s all about family. Yet his relationship with Stephanie is fraught. She’s sixteen, growing up, has her own ideas. He’s very traditional, very protective. Wants to keep her under his wing.

The brother of Jerry’s former wife, who was out the country at the time of the murder, gets a newspaper reporter to run a story on the anniversary. At a barbeque this comes up in conversation and Jerry is disturbed by it. Later he retreats to his basement workshop and rants about it, where Stephanie hears him.

Jerry refuses to talk to Stephanie’s therapist, so the therapist makes an appointment to see a house. He probes too much and Jerry kills him. He fakes a car accident and bonds with Stephanie in her grief. This breaks down when he sees her kissing a boy and he accuses the boy of rape.

Thinking that this is over, he plots his escape, secretly quitting his job and starting a new identity, applying for a new job in insurance (protecting families with life insurance is his passion.)

The brother-in-law has done some detective work. He learns that Henry Morrison, Jerry’s former identity, is also false, he had assumed the name of a dead man. He also learned he left his job two weeks before the murders. From this he makes the assumption that he created a new identity from a dead man, and must have set up a new life within a moderately short distance of Seattle (the film is set in a commuter town outside Seattle). He calls at the house as part of his search for all the J Blakes, this puzzles Susan, who calls the real estate agents and learns Jerry has quit without telling her. Confronting him, he initially bluffs, then the film turns to the final, violent, slasher-y ending.

Terry O’Quinn as the too-perfect all-american husband and (step) father is excellent. His performance gives a real creepiness to a film that layers on the suspense, having us wait to find out what will make Jerry snap.

Watch This: Creepy horror film that lurks in the fruitful ground between psychological thriller and slasher
Don’t Watch This: The oily villainy of Jerry really ought to turn everyone off

6. Cellar Dweller

In the 1950s Colin Childress, a comics artist, draws “Cellar Dweller,” a horror comic. Looking for inspiration in an evil magic book, the monster he draws appears and murders a woman; to stop it he sets the house on fire, leaving everyone to think he killed the woman and then died.

In the 1980s his isolated house is an artist’s retreat. Whitney Taylor, a comics artist inspired by Cellar Dweller, comes; the director Mrs Briggs is unimpressed, preferring more avant garde art forms. Her rival from art college is also there. The cellar where Childress drew is off limits, but Whitney manages to get permission to use it. Inspired by the book, Childress and the others in the house she begins to draw a monster stalking them. Meanwhile her rival tries to discredit her.

It rather silly, from top to bottom. Whitney draws in ink, one draft, including the shading that was introduced by the comics process. The monster is unstoppable. The attempt to discredit her by faking video evidence of plagiarism is obviously false (the rival is not a good video artist).

Watch This: Some ridiculous scares
Don’t Watch This: Monsters from comic books and/or magic books are not for you

7. Vanishing Point

Kowalski is a car delivery driver. He’s in Denver, Colorado and picks up a white Dodge Challenger that’s been souped up, for delivery in San Francisco. It’s Friday night. Although the car isn’t due until Monday he makes a bet at a bar he can make it by 3 PM Sunday. The man he bets with is his dealer, he takes some benzos so he can go without sleep.

The police try to stop him for speeding. He runs them off the road. A black, blind DJ known as Super Soul has been listening to the police radio, and encourages him, spreading the word. Also plays some cool soul music. Eventually the radio station is raided.

Kowalski has various weird adventures. Off road he meets with a man who’s collecting snakes for a preacher. He picks up two gay men from their broken down car with a Just Married sign who are heading for San Francisco. They try to hold him up and beats them up and throw them out the car. A hippie biker helps him; scouting the route and giving him pills. The hippie’s girlfriend is riding around the desert on a motorbike in the nude.

Kowalski was a Vietnam Vet, then later a police officer before being thrown out for attacking a superior who was trying to rape a woman. Also a rally car driver. His motives are obscure, the forces mobilised to stop him extreme. (Obviously the film was inspired by a variety of real events).

Watch This: Cool Early 70s American car chase action film
Don’t Watch This: Kowalski has little to say, his actions as devastating as those of the cops after him

8. The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

It’s 1894, Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) confronts Professor Moriarty, who has just been acquitted of murder. They spar verbally and Moriarty makes plans to get his revenge with a crime that will discredit Holmes.

Soon after, Holmes and Watson are in their 221B Baker Street rooms, Holmes experimenting with the effect of violin notes on flies. Ann Brandon arrives; her brother Lloyd has received a picture of a man with an albatross around his neck. The same picture was sent to her father before his death.

They rush to Lloyd who has been killed by being strangled AND having his skull crushed, excessive and thus a clue. Holmes resolves to solve this case, neglecting a request from the Tower Of London where a new gemstone is being delivered. He goes undercover as an entertainer at a garden party Ann attends (her friends trying to distract her from her sorrows etc.) singing “Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside”.

1894 was still in living memory; Arthur Conan Doyle had only been dead nine years when this was made. And already we drift away from the original tales. Watson (Nigel Bruce) is the bluff, older man in a bowler hat, not quite the idiot sidekick he later became, representing duty and persistence in opposition to Holmes’s brilliant flightiness. Anyway a couple of fun bits, and a moderately clever attempt to steal the crown jewels.

Watch This: Old School Sherlock Holmes, the 19^th century, foreigners, Moriarty and the Crown Jewels!
Don’t Watch This: None of the crimes, nor the detecting, are especially interesting

9. Bulldog Drummond’s Bride

An explosives expert robs a bank. The police set up road blocks – he’s been on a spree so they have plans – so he and his gang hide the money in a radio in a nearby apartment. Unfortunately for them this is Bulldog Drummond’s apartment.

Drummond is, as ever, trying to get married to Phyllis Clavering. She’s in France with an aunt, and sends a telegram asking for the radio to be sent. There follows a frankly baffling series of attempts by various members of the criminal gang to get hold of the radio by invading the flat, then trying to figure out what’s happened. Inevitably Scotland Yard tells Drummond to drop the case, so when he goes to France he’s arrested on suspicion of being the thief.

This was the last one they made in this sequence (because for some reason there were earlier and later efforts, it's been rebooted several times) but not the last one I watched due to complete inefficiency on my part. Anyway, this is the usual stuff, Algy being late and wrong, Tenny being indispensable as a manservant, Phyllis actually having some things to do and plenty of fights, knock outs and mistaken identity.

Watch This: Silly 1930s crime adventure
Don’t Watch This: The heroes don’t take anything seriously, frankly they deserve everything they get

10. The Changeling (1980)

John Russel is a composer. His wife and daughter die in a car accident, so he moves back to Seattle where he went to university, to find a new way forward in a new place. His friends get him to teach at the university, and Claire, a woman from the historical society, finds him a big spooky mansion to rent.

Strange things occur. All the taps turn on. There’s a weird hidden room. A red stained glass window breaks. A music box plays a tune he thought he’d just composed. He gets the handyman in, he consults with Claire.

They wonder if the house is haunted, possibly by a girl killed outside the house in 1909. They hold a séance, and John records it, and on the recording gets a name, Joseph Carmichael. The name of local senator who has been appearing in the news and at the concerts John went to. Foreshadowing!

There is a secret, and a ghost, and worse than that when they try and question the senator they learn whose town it is, and who’s in charge. Creepy ghost story that gets violent.

Watch This: Some good spooks and scares and in between an enormous melancholy
Don’t Watch This: All this never really addresses Russel’s issues