June Films Update 5

10 more films I watched

1.The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers

Following on from The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship OfThe Ring, Sam and Frodo head for Mordor, intending to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom. They capture Gollum, a former ringbearer, and convince him to guide them. Gollum starts to trust Frodo, breaking some of his ring-sickness.

Merry and Pippin, captured by Uruk-Hai (orcs) and being taken to Isengard and the wizard Saruman, escape when the Uruk-Hai are attacked by Rohirrim (human horse warriors from the kingdom of Rohan). They flee into the forest of Fangorn, where they meet a white wizard.

On the trail of Merry and Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meet the Rohirrim. Initially thinking Merry and Pippin were killed in the battle, they discover and follow their tracks. They too encounter the white wizard. It’s Gandalf, returned from the dead and a bit more angelic. He tells them Merry and Pippin are safe with a friend and they have other business.

That business is in Edoras, the hall of the kings of Rohan. Théoden the king has been failing, his son killed in battle, he has banished Éomer his nephew, his kingdom raided while he did nothing. His (non-) rule has been usurped by Grima Wormtongue, who serves Saruman, wishing to marry Éowyn, Théoden’s niece and become king. Gandalf breaks the spell and restores Théoden. The kingdom is still in peril so they retreat to the fortress of Helm’s Deep.

Back in Rivendell Elrond convinces his daughter Arwen that she should break up with Aragorn as she will inevitably outlive him and so live in grief for thousands of years. She unwillingly agrees and sets out to the Grey havens to sail to the west. Meanwhile Galadriel convinces Elrond to send a company of elves to assist the men of Rohan.

The Uruk-Hai attack Helm’s Deep. In Fangorn Merry and Pippin convince the Ents, the tree-men, to attack Saruman at Isengard. Sam and Frodo are captured by Faramir, the brother of Boromir, once a member of the fellowship who died fighting orcs after trying to take the ring from Frodo. To prevent Gollum being killed Frodo helps Boromir’s men capture Gollum. Boromir doesn’t take the ring though he’s tempted, releasing the hobbits and Gollum, though Gollum has a plan to get the ring for himself now he’s been betrayed.

A lot of things happen in this film; compared to the previous one the storylines diverge as the characters scatter, taking different routes. More elements are introduced, and armies appear and fight. All this is handled with verve and energy, the epic locations glorious, the orcs and wargs grotesque, the heroes succeeding through cunning, force of arms and occasionally knowledge. With two battles at the end it’s extremely satisfying for a middle film of a trilogy.

Watch This: Magnificent fantasy epic
Don’t Watch This: Bad place to start watching fantasy films

2. Carry On Camping

Sid Boggle (Sid James) and Bernie Lugg (Bernard Bresslaw) take their girlfriends Joan Fussey (Joan Simms) and Anthea Meeks (Dilys Laye) to see a film about a nudist camp. Hoping that they will be less prudish in the raw, they plan a camping trip there, only to dis cover that it’s just a normal, slightly expensive camping site, and the owner, farmer Joshua Fiddler (Peter Butterworth) won’t give refunds. They settle down to a chaste and uncomfortable holiday with the men and women in separate tents.

Various other comic characters are also on their way to the camp site. Peter Potter (Terry Scott) really wants to go to the sun (abroad), but his wife Harriet (Betty Marsden) just ignores and overwhelms his objections, punctuated with an irritating laugh. They travel on a tandem bike and are relatively well-equipped, so when first time camper and hiker Charlie Muggins (Charles Hawtrey) needs help Harriet happily invites him to join their tent and meals. Peter tries to leave him behind, but he turned up at the camp site ahead of them, having got a lift.

One last group is coming from women’s finishing school Chayste Place; in charge is Dr Kenneth Soaper (Kenneth Williams) and Matron (Hattie Jakes) who is quietly in love with him; the girls play tricks on them, led by Babs (Barbara Windsor). In the youth hostel they stay at on the way they make the women’s showers look like the men’s and change the room numbers so Soaper intrudes on Matron several times.

Sid, having struck out with Joan, decides to pursue Babs, helping her with various things on the campsite; she and her tentmate have fun flirting with him and Bernie. Most of the girls go on a trip; one stays behind, seduces Peter, which gives him the confidence to throw out Charlie, have sex with his wife and insist on no more camping.

At the end a moment of plot arrives; some hippies set up for a party in the next field. The campers unite to drive them away, only to discover that the Chayste Place girls have gone with them. Sid and Bernie are downcast; Joan and Anthea comfort them and are about to go into their tents to have sex, only for Joan’s mum to turn up and prevent any hanky panky; a goat is set on her to drive her away and the film ends.

Some of the setpieces are good. There’s some interesting bits of worldview taken as base level understanding that the jokes are built on. No one likes camping, but they go anyway because that’s what a holiday is. Hippies are annoying, maybe a bit cool. Free Love is okay (the girls from Chayste Place, being younger are free and easy) but both nudity and shagging are better when a bit naughty.

There are all the usual jokes about camping and weather and holidays in Britain, mostly in the early section of the film. During an exercise routine Barbara Windsor’s bikini top flies off. Anyway that’s Carry On Camping, the most popular film in Britain in 1969.

Watch This: Farcical sex comedy with amusing camping scenes
Don’t Watch This: Very convoluted seduction attempts made pointless by the intrusion of modernity (1969)

3. They Live

Nada (professional wrestler Roddy Piper) arrives in Los Angeles looking for work; he finds some on a construction site. Frank (Keith David), another worker takes him to a homeless encampment. The city is heavily divided between haves and have nots, there’s a depression. It is the 80s after all. There’s some weird stuff, a blind preacher saying that "They" have allied with the rich and powerful to take over, the TV gets hacked by someone saying there is a signal that makes people docile and must be destroyed, and when Nada investigates the church that sponsors the encampment he finds the guy on the TV and others with equipment, hiding it behind the walls.

The next day the encampment and church are invaded by police and demolished. Nada sneaks back after and finds some sunglasses. Putting them on he discovers that the city appears in black and white, and the posters, adverts, and even newspapers and magazines have simple propaganda messages hidden in them. He spots someone with a skull face, and when he comments on it she calls for help. Some skull-face cops attack him but he defeats them and takes their guns.

A running fight starts; Nada takes TV station Cable 54 announcer Holly (not skull faced) hostage and has her drive him to her home. He tries to get her to put the glasses on but there’s a fight and he falls down the hill. He meets Frank who offers him money to get away. Frank won’t put on the sunglasses either. They have a long fight about it, neither wanting to hurt the other, each slowly escalating. Nada wins, and Frank realises what’s going on.

They find their way to an anti-alien meeting but it’s raided; using an alien’s wrist device they create a portal to the spaceport, and begin the final sequence of the film, which becomes very violent.

The film’s visions, of Los Angeles divided by wealth, and then of the difference between the usual view and the alien/propaganda version, those are magnificent. “We Sleep, They Live,” proclaims some graffiti. If the fights and other special effects are a little more 80s action-film, they are never quite standard. Nada in a crowd, trying to defeat the aliens only he can see. In the alley fighting Frank, each one slowly increasing the power of their attacks. If the final section isn’t quite as good, then at least we can cheer for the heroes, knowing that the enemy are trying to buy up the planet on the cheap and wreck it for profit. But that’s a fantasy.

Watch This: Classic paranoid action thriller with just an edge of commentary
Don’t Watch This: It’s just guys fighting skull-faced goons

4. Don’t Look In The Basement (1973)

Dr Stephens at a mental health institution believes that the best way to treat patients is to let them work through their delusions. Unfortunately one of the patients hits him with an axe leaving Dr Masters in charge as the live in nurse has left. However nurse Beales was hired last week and she joins the staff.

We are, of course, well into “the patients are running the asylum” territory. Unravelling who is doing what forms much of the film, along with what is in the basement. It drags somewhat, and the two biggest twists aren’t exactly surprising. Gory and occasionally shocking horror.

Watch This: Some good scares and every time you think you’re used to the patients they’re weirder that you think
Don’t Watch This: Just a slow murder film that isn’t interested in the mental health challenges it exploits

5. Alice In Wonderland (1966 BBC Play)

Based on the novel by Lewis Caroll, this adaption rejects the animal masks of other versions, instead having everyone in period dress. Alice makes her way through various slightly psychedelic and absurd circumstances. Everyone is slightly talking past each other and Alice, petulant and self-important as a youth, fails to look anyone in the eye, staring off to the side.

As a child I played the 10 of Clubs in a stage play of Alice In Wonderland; from memory it was all about bright colours and costumes and business (such as 7 year olds could manage). This, a black and white film mostly shot in a garden and big old house, relies on odd camera angles and lenses, together with distant and odd performances to get over some of the strangeness of the original.

Watch This: Unusual, sometimes extraordinary adaption of a classic
Don’t Watch This: Bringing an idiosyncratic style to a bizarre children’s tale does nothing for you

6. The Orson Welles Story

In a recent introduction to this film Alan Yentob, the film maker and interviewer, told the story of how they flew out, got kept waiting and finally spent the afternoon with Welles in Las Vegas. The two had met before and Welles was in a good humour and more forthcoming than usual. Equally interesting is how it’s this interview that other actors and film makers talk to Yentob about; he name drops Mel Brooks and Tom Cruise as people he’s discussed it with.

The interview is the heart of it, but not the only part. Yentob has done his research, he talks about Welles’ films and life knowledgeably with Welles correcting, expanding or occasionally just giving a brief answer and moving on. By showing us scenes from the films as Welles talks about them much is clarified.

There’s more though. Welles was famously always at odds with studios, and spent a lot of time trying to scrape together the money to make his films. On more than one occasion filming stopped while he flew off for two weeks to do an acting job to get paid so he could resume. Welles himself suggests he’s wasted his time with films, because studios don’t want his vision, they want films they can sell, and more than that they want to control the films rather than unleash the creative people who make them.

Welles talks about techniques, and also about how he thinks film making is editing. And this is why several of his films were cut, re-edited by the studios releasing them, and this caused the major conflict with them.

An excellent retrospective of Welles’ career that is lifted by Welles’ own commentary on his life and films, interspersed with some interesting discussion from some of his collaborators. A film that, if generally on Welles’ side, is happy to point out where he made difficulties for himself.

Watch This: A great interview with the innovative and influential film maker
Don’t Watch This: Films should speak for themselves

7. Vault Of Horror

Five men get in a lift that takes them to a strange basement room with no other doors and no buttons to call the lift back. They help themselves to a drink and start discussing the situation, that turns to dreams they’ve had. Each dream is then shown as a short film; it’s a portmanteau horror film!

Harold Rogers dreams he followed a private detective who found his sister. Trying to have dinner the restaurant won’t let him as it closes at sunset. He kills the private detective, kills his sister for the inheritance. Returns to discover the restaurant open; the night shift is vampires.

In the second dream Arthur Critchett (Terry-Thomas), a very organised and neat man marries the much younger Eleanor (Glynis Johns), who is much less organised and neat. He gets increasingly frustrated until she snaps and does her own reorganisation.

In the third Sebastian (Curd Jürgens), a stage magician, is in India with his wife Inge (Dawn Addams) looking for magic tricks. Most don’t impress him, but a girl with a rope does. They invite her to their hotel room, and when she won’t tell them how it works they murder her. It turns out to be an enchanted rope. When they use it, they are killed in turn.

In the fourth Maitland (Michael Craig) plans a life insurance scam that has him buried alive*. His co-conspirator double crosses him, planning to leave him and keep the money. This goes wrong when two trainee doctors bribe a comic gravedigger** to dig up a fresh body to dissect.

In the fifth, Moore (Tom Baker) is an artist living in Haiti after the failure of his career in London. Then he learns that after he left having sold his work to art dealers for peanuts, the art critic who panned him praised him and they made a fortune. Moore goes to a voodoo priest (sigh) who gives him voodoo painting powers so that whatever happens in a painting happens to the subject. Unfortunately the sceptical Moore finishes a self portrait before believing it; nevertheless he returns to London, paints his enemies and destroys their paintings and themselves before his own portrait inevitably causes him problems.

If you’ve seen one of these portmanteau horror films from this period (based on comic books; at one point a character is reading Tales From The Crypt in a nod) then you know what the ending will be. In case you haven’t I won’t spoil you but it’s a bit of a downer and doesn’t tie up especially satisfyingly. These are a bit wackier and more fun than usual, every character being bad and then encountering equally bad weirdness. The lack of innocent victims lets the films revel in the bad consequences.

Watch This: Fun, occasionally funny set of short horror films
Don’t Watch This: Nasty people have worse things happen to them

* He comments that there’s no money in horror, he’d only get £50 for the story. In 1972

** More comic gravediggers please

8. Vengeance Of She

Carol is compelled to travel south by a mysterious force; when a lorry driver she’s hitching with tries to rape her she escapes and his truck kills him. Swimming out to a yacht on the coast of France she stows away to be discovered by George, his wife Sheila and their friend Phillip a psychologist. Phillip tries to help her; when she gets of the yacht in Africa and heads into the desert she follows.

Kallikrates, the immortal reincarnation of a 2000 year old Egyptian (see She) waits for a reincarnation of Ayesha for the once-in-a-lifetime lighting of the flame of immortality. Men-Hari, the high priest, is using his powers to attract Carol, who looks a bit like Ayesha (the actress has been recast as Ursula Andress did not return for this sequel).

Phillip tries to break the spell over Carol, but can’t succeed until he reaches the lost city. There he meets with Za-Tor, Men-Hari’s father, who opposed this plan. Things get unnecessarily complicated, with rebellion, lies, magic and fate. Overall an inferior sequel, failing to take advantage of the modern setting, and lacking in either the humour or the sense of dignity that the original She had.

Watch This: Occult story at the interface of modernity and old school adventure
Don’t Watch This: just accentuates the orientalism of the original with worse acting

9. The Dark (1979)

The Mangler is a serial killer who is attacking people in Santa Monica Los Angeles. He’s killed Shelly Warner. The police are doing their normal ineffective job, but the local people, having become aware of the attacks, blame them for not doing more.

Trying to find out more is TV reporter Zoe Owens. Also on the case is Roy Warner, Shelly’s father, a bestselling author who is out of prison after killing his wife’s lover. Estranged from his daughter, he follows a parallel track.

The key to the case might be psychic De Renzey, who foresaw the death of a young man in the manner of the Mangler. She didn’t get his name so the police, with nothing to work on, dismiss her. She is haunted by poltergeist like activity.

A rather silly serial killer film, that gives away the twist in the opening – it’s an alien with super strength and laser eyes who kills people because it’s an alien. Somewhat unsatisfying, Roy Warner’s prickly character and De Renzey’s weird psychic act are the highlights.

Watch This: Alien serial killer film
Don’t Watch This: Poorly constructed alien serial killer film

10. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

In the Arctic, in 1794, Captain Walton intends to drive his crew and ship on to the pole despite being icebound. They discover a man; Victor Frankenstein, who tells Walton his tale.

Brought up with Elizabeth, the love of his life, Victor is devastated when his mother dies giving birth to his brother William. He vows to conquer death, studying, experimenting with electricity and eventually going to the university of Ingolstadt.

Professor Waldman has been a long way down the path of creating life, but discourages Victor and his friend Henry. Then when cholera comes, Waldman is killed by a man while vaccinating people. The man is hanged. Victor takes the man’s body, Waldman’s brain, parts from other people* along with electricity from eels and amniotic fluid to create a creature.

Victor is horrified at the creature’s appearance, tries to kill it; it escapes and is driven away by the townspeople. Victor falls ill, is nursed back to health by Elizabeth. Meanwhile the creature tries to do good things for a poor family, learns to speak and later read and write by spying on them and conversing with a blind member. When they see him they drive him away. He finds Victor’s journal in his coat pocket and learns about his creation.

Returning home to marry Elizabeth, Victor’s happiness is ruined when his brother William is killed and their servant Justine blamed. Victor knows it is the creature. He and the creature meet and make an agreement; that Victor will make a bride for him. However when the creature brings Justine’s body Victor breaks the promise in disgust. On Victor’s wedding night the creature kills Elizabeth and Victor brings her back to life; this ends in tragedy and Victor hunts the creature into the Arctic. When Victor dies the creature emerges; refusing Captain Walton’s offer to join the ship, he burns himself on Victor’s funeral pyre. Walton decides to take the hint and turns back to port.

Without taking the “Mary Shelley,” bit of the title too seriously (though it takes it more seriously than most adaptions), what this adaption does do is show us that all these people are ruled by emotions. Victor isn’t engaged in a cerebral search for scientific knowledge, he’s on a crusade to save those he loves from death. The creature just wants to live, to survive, maybe to love, and when that’s denied him he goes on a murderous rampage. All the various townspeople in Ingolstadt and Geneva are swept up in the emotions of events.

The film looks fantastic, enormous sets where Victor sets up his laboratory, and in the family home where everyone somehow manages to dominate the huge spaces. In part because it’s well cast. Indeed my only question is, what kind of film is this? It’s not a horror film, and though the closest adaption of the novel yet committed to film, it has it’s own clear interpretation of events. It is it’s own thing, alone, and so glorious and tragic.

Watch This: Lovely looking film about love, betrayal, revenge and obsession, also bodies and weird proto-steampunk machinery
Don’t Watch This: Lots of people being stupid, trying to conquer death

* In the novel Mary Shelley never gives the details, in part because that’s not what she’s doing, and within the novel Frankenstein, regretting his actions, doesn’t want anyone else to follow in his path. Novel Frankenstein uses human remains as part of his work, but he’s more of a biochemist; reading between the lines he grows organs and stitches them together, making the creature large to make the task easier. Still, this interpretation is plausible if against the spirit of the book.