Films Catch Up May - 1

It's time... to finish writing up the films I watched in 2023. Here's ten of them. Does this complete the year? No, no it does not.

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1. The Ninth Configuration

Towards the end of the Vietnam War the American military has realised that there are a lot of psychotic service members. Some are sent to a castle in the Pacific North West which is a hospital for them. Colonel Hudson Kane arrives to discover that they run it as they wish, which leads to a very odd situation, with pranks and oddness; one of them is trying to put on Shakespeare plays for dogs.

Another is a former astronaut who refused to go up. Kane meanwhile has strange visions of his own. As the film goes on, secrets are revealed. Yet are they true, or are they the products of psychosis?

Swinging wildly between comic absurdity, faux-profound philosophy, tragedy and psychotic weirdness, the film asks questions about forgiveness and damage. It can’t answer them but it gets very deep into it.

Watch This: Complex, layered film combining absurdity and mental illness
Don’t Watch This: None of the problems, the solutions nor anything else make sense

2. Babes With Blades: The Flower Of Sarnia

Azura is the last of the Sarnians, who were destroyed by the Visray Empire. She’s captured on the streets of the mining colony of Draiga, and put into the (all-female) gladiatorial fights. The man in charge of her (a prisoner himself, or at least indentured or something) gives her a Sarnian book that teaches her how to unleash the secret warrior skills of her people. She and other gladiators decide to try and escape and/or kill Commander Sorrentine.

Meanwhile a group of freedom fighters has been raiding, stealing supplies that aren’t getting through to the miners. They have a plan, but Commander Sorrentine has control over the colony’s power. In the event of a rebellion she will seal her section and leave the rest powerless to die. But amongst the loot in her chambers is a big glowy jewel that can be used as a power source.

Cecily Fay, starring as Azura, wrote, directed, produced, choreographed the fights and designed the costumes and production. Best known as a stunt performer, it’s definitely the fights that stand out, with energy and style. The story is familiar, the characters thin, the script and acting patchy. But what do we expect from a film called Babes With Blades? Women having cool fights, and on that the film delivers.

Watch This: Cool fights, fun designs
Don’t Watch This: You want characters and plot that are more than paper thin

3. Vampire In Brooklyn

A ship crashes into the dock in New York; the inspector Silas discovers it is crewed by corpses. Silas’s nephew Julius scarpers (he’s not supposed to be on the dock) and runs into two mobsters; when they threaten him they’re killed by Maximillian (Eddie Murphy). He’s a vampire from a Caribbean island, the last of his kind; he’s looking for a half-vampire woman to awaken her vampire-half and reproduce. He gives Julius vampire blood and makes him his familiar.

Detectives Justice and Rita Veder (Angela Bassett) are put on the ship case. Rita is the half-vampire; she’s dealing with the death of her mother, a paranormal researcher who was mentally ill. She has visions of a woman who looks like herself, but evil, and starts asking questions about her mother's past (she went to the vampire island looking for vampires, found one).

Max tries to lure Rita into embracing her dark side, also him. He impersonates a couple of people, allowing Murphy to do some characters. The funniest is probably when he takes the place of the preacher at Rita’s church, can’t go in and holds the service outside. It goes on a bit though.

Max, out of time and out of place, leans on Julius, who gets him an apartment from his uncle Silas, a man of many parts. Julius, undead but not a vampire, starts to fall apart physically, unable to escape Max, while trying to turn this to his own advantage.

The film makes jarring shifts between police work, vampire horror and several types of comedy. Murphy’s Max cuts an impressive figure, which feels diminished rather than funny when the comedy cuts in. It fails to rise above the sum of its parts.

Watch This: Vampire comedy weaving in a little bit of black and immigrant New York life
Don’t Watch This: Patchy with the horror undercut by the jokes and the comedy spoiled by the darkness

4. Die Another Day

The last appearance of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Bond infiltrates North Korea, takes the place of a weapons dealer, offering conflict diamonds for weapons to Colonel Moon. Moon’s assistant Zao realises something is wrong, Bond attempts to make an escape, attracting the attention of General Moon, Colonel Moon’s father. Bond is captured though not before Colonel Moon is killed and Zao has been caught in a diamond explosion that sticks diamonds to his face. Bond is then tortured for the length of the title sequence (18 months) by a hot dominatrix, ice water and scorpion venom.

General Moon visits Bond who has not talked, and remains defiant. Then there is a spy swap between Bond and Zao (still diamond-encrusted) and Bond is sedated and locked in a cell. He is visited by his boss, M, who tells him that there was a leak from the prison he was held; Bond denies it. M says he should have died and if it was up to her he’d still be in there. Bond escapes, swims from the facility to Hong Kong where he makes contact with Chang, a Chinese hotel manager/intelligence agent. There he offers to track down Zao for them (he killed Chinese diplomats) which they accept, so he now actually is working for a foreign power*.

The Chinese send him to Cuba where he tracks Zao to a clinic where they alter your DNA with bone marrow transplants and also change your face. Bond meets Jinx (Halle Berry) an American; she is also infiltrating the clinic. Bond interrupts Zao, Jinx kills a doctor; the clinic blows up and they all escape.

Zao was paying with diamonds; this diamond is marked with the logo of Gustav Graves. An eccentric billionaire, he’s made a fortune from an Icelandic diamond mine whose diamonds resemble those of conflict diamonds. Graves is in London, getting a knighthood. Bond returns to London where he is brought back into the fold of MI6, a sadly uninteresting return. From here events proceed; Bond meets Graves in his fencing club, fights him, is sent to investigate Graves even though MI6 already has an agent in place, Miranda Frost. They go to Graves diamond mine/ice speed record testing ground/ice hotel/geo(aqua?)thermal power plant/diamond space mirror base to see a test of the diamond space mirror. Jinx turns up; Bond is betrayed, has several fights including a car fight and the film then explains the plot in time for a return to Korea and finale.

Despite their efforts to be up to date – an invisible car, VR MI6 Training, a space-age medical cell where Bond is kept – this feels somehow tired. They’ve been overtaken by fiction, the action movie genre is absorbing the impact of The Matrix, and Bond in particular has been struck by the parody of Austin Powers. In the real world 9/11 has taken place, and Bond’s antics seem a little… frivolous. Bond as cold war dinosaur versus satellites, computers and information warfare, that’s what the Brosnan years are set up for. For taking on fanatics with boxcutters on airlines, he’s not there. Graves explains that when he wanted to look for a persona to take on, he chose Bond “…that unjustifiable swagger, the crass quips, the self-defence mechanism concealing such inadequacy…” Bond’s not hurt by this, and why should he be. He’s already faced a dark mirror of himself in Goldeneye in a man he actually liked. This is just a pale imitation.

Watch This: Fun stunts, a few good jokes
Don’t Watch This: The decline in jokes, plot, theme and ideas since Goldeneye is noticeable, and the film is so pleased with itself for cramming in bits from the previous nineteen Bond films

*  This is the 20^th** Bond film, and they love to make callbacks, but somehow not to Tomorrow Never Dies when he worked with a Chinese intelligence operative. Not even a “Colonel Wai Lin sends her regards.”

** See Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again for another opinion 

5. Violent Night

Santa Claus is drinking in Bristol; he’s depressed. A department store Santa offers to pick up his tab when he goes*; Santa leaves via the roof, vomits and flies away with his reindeer.

The stop of the evening that’s the focus of this film is the Lightstone family mansion. Matriarch Gertrude has invited the rest of the family; son Jason, his estranged wife Linda and their daughter Trudy; grasping daughter Alva, her self-obsessed actor boyfriend Morgan Steel and Alva’s son, the obnoxious proto-social-media-influencer Bert. Alva is trying to impress Gertrude who is caught up in some business. Trudy is worried she hasn’t been taken to see Santa. Jason gives Trudy a walkie-talkie he says will reach Santa; listening in, her Christmas wish is for him and Linda to get back together.

The staff are a gang of mercenaries intending to rob Gertrude; the leader uses the name Mr Scrooge and the others have Christmas themed codenames, also dressed seasonally. (Gertrude’s decorations tend towards the nutcracker, which someone points out as she’s a commanding woman in traditionally masculine business, also gets used for torture). There’s hundreds of millions of dollars of cash that the Lightstone private military company stole in Iraq**.

Santa arrives and is interrupted by the mercenary Tinsel, who scares off the reindeer. Santa throws Tinsel out the window where he’s impaled on an icicle. After being attacked and killing Frost, Santa picks up a walkie talkie and hears from Trudy. There then follows a Die Hard/Home Alone (the film references both of these explicitly) sequence as the mercenaries try to kill what they think is the Santa impersonator, as well as get the money. Santa gets more into the violence, which apparently he was when he was a Norse God***, eventually picking up a sledgehammer. Mr Scrooge eventually sees some of Santa’s actual magical tools, and explains why he hates Christmas.

It’s a “Santa rediscovers the true meaning of Christmas (horrendous violence on terrible people,” film. Exactly which bits of the various Santa beliefs in use are just waved away with the explanation “Christmas Magic.” Using the Naughty List to discover the names of the villains was good; the Die Hard style twist moderately well executed.

Watch This: Violent Christmas themed action film, occasionally pretty funny
Don’t Watch This: Turning a bad Santa up to eleven by having him mutilate the bad guys is a step too much

* A curious Americanism in a moderately good British cellar pub scene

** There was a Leverage episode about this ten years ago, it seems untimely to be honest. For that matter Lightstone is definitely not Blackwater, the former name of a real PMC.

*** The evidence for this is very thin

6. Battle Taxi

Pete Stacey trained to be a jet fighter pilot, but the Korean War is on and they need helicopter pilots so he’s part of an Air Rescue unit. Their job is to pick up pilots who’ve been shot down. As well as being short of helicopter pilots, the number helicopters being red-lined – unavailable for use due to damage – keeps rising.

Stacey takes unnecessary risks, when a unit is being attacked by a tank, he uses flares to try and distract it, his helicopter getting shot up. He’s sent to a forward base because a big offensive is underway. On his way back from a mission he hears about a pilot who went down in the water. No one else is available, and this is too far, he’ll run out of fuel. He makes the rescue, then daringly steals fuel from a North Korean fuel truck. The fuel is of poor quality, and so the engine fails the next day, leading to the final action sequence and Stacey learning his lesson.

A few good helicopter scenes and real maintenance and logistics concerns sadly don’t lift the film from an obvious and cliched story. If you told me that this was made by the USAF informational films department to convince pilots to pay attention to rescue procedures I’d not only believe you, I’d be more impressed by the scenes where they show pilots slides to convince them to pay attention to rescue procedures as it would be much funnier.

Watch This: 1950s helicopter action
Don’t Watch This: Pilot doesn’t want to fly helicopters learns their worth

7. The Man Who Turned To Stone

At the La Salle Detention Home For Girls there have been a number of mysterious deaths amongst the inmates. Young idealistic social worker Carol Adams investigates, though the other staff are more interested in maintaining order and the inmates don’t trust her. One tries to tell her there’s screams before every death, everyone says she’s making things up. Then she finds a secret laboratory.

Carol tries to get Dr Rogers to report this. It turns out the manager Mr Murdoch is part of a hundred year old society that avoids death by sucking the lifeforce out of people; if it doesn’t happen they slowly petrify as has happened to Eric, the hulking manservant.

It’s a very silly concept, that almost hides the true horror; that any kind of abuse can go on in the detention home because it’s full of bad girls who lie.

Watch This: Good hearted social workers and psychologists struggle with evil prison guards
Don’t Watch This: People get murdered by electrically stealing their lifeforce and no one cares as they’re criminals

8. Hell Drivers

Tom Yately arrives at Hawletts a truck company looking for a job. They’re moving ballast (gravel) from a quarry to a building site. It’s a 20 mile round trip and they have to do at least 12 trips a day. The man to beat is Red, who’s also the road steward; he regularly does 18 trips and offers a gold cigarette case if anyone can beat him. They can’t because he uses a dangerous short cut.

It's dangerous work, they drive like maniacs (the footage often sped up). The crew are generally rough in a friendly fashion except for Red. Tom makes friends with Gino, who is Italian. He’s been seeing the boss’s secretary Lucy, and intends to ask her to come back to Italy and marry him. But it seems likely to everyone else she won’t go.

As we suspected Tom’s not actually been abroad; he’s been in prison. He visits his home where it turns out his mother blames him for his brother being on crutches. Returning, he and the other drivers go to a village dance. When a fight breaks out Tom leaves, not wanting to get in trouble with the law. The others turn on him for cowardice. The last straw for him is when damage done by their bullying is stopped out of his wages. He and Gino come up with a plan; Gino will drive Tom’s truck number 13, allowing Tom to have a clear run in Gino’s truck number 3 and beat Red. But Red drives truck 13 off the road killing Gino. Lucy, stricken by this, reveals what’s going on; Cartley, the depot manager and Red have taken the contract, but staffed it with less trucks and drivers, making them all drive in this risky manner and pocketing the extra cash. There’s a final truck-based confrontation.

This is a 1950s British noir crime film, in the rough world of lorry drivers. If there’s a flaw then it’s that the sped-up driving sequences appear farcical today. The cast is quite extraordinary, with Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom and Patrick McGoohan as Tom, Gino and Red, and more supporting names and faces still recognisable; Sean Connery, David McCallum, William Hartnell, Sid James; also Jill Ireland who married David McCallum after meeting him on this film.

Watch This: Tough driving film with some clever story work
Don’t Watch This: The driving is bad and everyone knows it's dodgy

9. Master Of The World

An extinct volcano in Pennsylvania makes strange noises, explosions and also a voice quoting an ominous bible verse. Agent of the US Department of the Interior John Strock (Charles Bronson) visits the two country’s top experts in flight, Prudent and Evans; the two are arguing violently over whether the propeller should go on the front or the back. Evans is engaged to Prudent’s daughter Dorothy. Strock suggest putting a propeller on front and back; they then fly up the volcano to investigate, only to be shot down and find themselves aboard a curious airship, the Albatross.

Robur (Vincent Price) has built this flying machine, decades ahead of anyone else, and recruited a crew who are in very natty uniforms that his captives also have to adopt. After a few scenes of investigating the airship, some genial hospitality and airship operations Robur explains his plan; to end war by bombing the armed forces of the world.

Evans, a Virginia gentleman, is initially disgusted when Strock promises not to escape, thinking him a coward. Later Strock explains; as an agent of the government who is at war with Robur he does not consider himself bound by it, willing even to forsake his honour. Eventually Robur’s intervention in a battle in North Africa causes damage to the ship and himself to be injured which gives the captives their chance.

There’s some use of stock footage for the battles; this is mostly fine but the aerial view of London is clearly Elizabethan rather than Victorian. Based on a Jules Verne novel, or rather two, combining Robur The Conquerer and Master Of The World.

Watch This: Fun family-friendly aerial period adventure
Don’t Watch This: The film can’t decide how much of a villain Robur is, which would be okay if that ambiguity was in service of anything

10. Slave Girls (1967)

AKA Prehistoric Women. David Marchant’s on safari in Africa. Tracking a wounded leopard he ignores the white rhino signs and is captured by locals. They insist he has offended the spirit of the white rhino and are going to sacrifice him. He touches the white rhino statue, there’s a flash of lightning and he escapes through a crack in the wall.

He finds himself in a hidden jungle valley and meets a blonde woman (Sarla). They’re immediately captured by brunette women who take the two to their village which has another white rhino statue. Queen Kari, dark-haired, rules, is very cruel to the blonde women who are slaves, takes a fancy to David who rejects her. He’s sent to the men cave, who are also slaves.

Some complex backstory is explained; this is the land of the White Rhino (the snow-capped mountains look like a rhino) but they hunted them to extinction. They made the statue to fool everyone into thinking they were protected but then Kari revealed the truth, enslaved the men and fair-haired women with the help of devils. The devils demand one fair haired woman every now and then(?) to be bride of the white rhino. David convinces the slaves to join him, takes the rhino mask off a devil to reveal it’s a black man. A fight breaks out; they win. David says he will stay with Sarla who sadly gives him a rhino broach, breaks the statue and returns him to his own time where the statue breaks and they let him go as the curse is lifted; in an epilogue a party of English appear at the safari camp including a woman who is identical to Sarla, but with rather more clothes on.

A classic white man in Africa adventure as ridiculous as you might expect; strange mystical goings on, ancient civilisations (ruled by white people), cruel queens and the whole thing unprovable. Frankly this made all the safari scenes/sketches from comedy and cartoons from my youth fall into place, in particular Carry On Up The Jungle (review forthcoming).

Watch This: Ridiculous adventure, an excellent specimen of the genre
Don’t Watch This: There are better examples of this type of film, including less racist ones