August Film Round Up

Ten films I watched earlier this year

1. The Spy Who Loved Me

A Soviet submarine vanishes; so does a British one. The KGB activate their top spy Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), Agent Triple X. Meanwhile British agent James Bond (Roger Moore), 007, is in Austria with a secret document. He’s chased by Soviet agents including Amasova’s lover, killing him in a ski chase. Back in Britain the document turns out to be the top secret course of the missing British submarine. Someone can track submarines and wants to sell the secret, in Egypt.

Bond follows an unlikely trail of contacts through Egypt*. Amasova is also looking for the submarine tracker. Also there are two assassins working for Karl Stromberg (Curd Jürgens), who developed the tracker, only for his secretary to betray him and sell it (he kills her, also all the scientists in classic Bond villain style). Bond kills one, Sandor (professional wrestler Milton Reid), a very wide man. The other, Jaws (Richard Kiel), a very tall man, almost kills them. When Bond goes to meet M in an office in Egypt, he discovers that M has made an agreement with his KGB counterpart General Gogol to work together, partnering Bond and Amasova. They discover a clue that leads them to Stromberg. Travelling from Egypt to Stromberg’s laboratory in the sea off Sardinia by train (?) Jaws attacks again.

Having started as rivals Amasova and Bond become lovers; however when Amasova learns Bond killed her previous lover she vows to kill him in turn when the mission is over. The film stops being silly spy nonsense occasionally interrupted by amazing sets and fights and for a scene Moore does some acting, frustrated that Amasova can’t get over this; they’re spies and assassins, sometimes on different sides, sometimes together, this is what they do.

Anyway Stromberg has a prototype underwater base that he intends to replicate allowing humanity to colonise the seabed. Having met Bond and Amasova he attempts to kill them, Bond having to escape in his submarine-car.

Looking into Stromberg’s shipping interests they discover the Liparus, a giant tanker, that was launched two years ago, has never been into port and was near the submarine patrol areas at the right time. Amasova and Bond get on board the nearest submarine, USS Wayne (American), to try and find out what’s going on; the submarine is captured. Stromberg’s plan is to launch a nuclear attack from the British and Soviet submarines to kick off a global thermonuclear war, after which everyone will have to live underwater**.

A classic of the Moore era; Bond’s enemies-to-rivals-to-lovers-to-allies arc one of the more interesting ones. Jaws is the quintessential Bond adversary, working well in part because Roger Moore is more convincing when losing a fight than winning (his punches always look a little too languid). Is there a class element, Jaws disguising himself as a telephone engineer, then appearing wearing trouser braces while Bond prefers a blazer, or naval uniform? Moore as the suave gentleman, Jaws as the huge silent killer. Stromberg as a monomaniacal Blofeld-a-like is fine, his demeanour making up for the lacklustre scene where he and Bond meet for the first time, his ridiculous ideas made up for by the magnificent and evil looking base and especially the design of the interior of the Liparus.

Watch This: High energy spy techno-thriller with some of the most fun sections of the series
Don’t Watch This: A film that glosses over the flaws in nuclear deterrence, Stromberg’s flawed plan, and despite Amasova’s competence can’t find it in itself to respect women

* He travels by camel to visit an old friend in a tent; said friend says that the seller is Max Kalba, but to meet him he will have to go through a middleman called Fekkesh. When he eventually reaches the nightclub to meet Kalba the waiter tells him that Kalba owns the club. It seems his contact has some remarkably specific missing information.

** Several flaws, obviously.

2. The Cabinet Of Caligari

Jane Lindstrom gets a flat tire on her car and walks on looking for help. She arrives at the house of Cagliari, a man with a peculiar accent, who kindly lets her stay for the night, sending someone for her car. Then she finds that she can’t leave (though she doesn’t try very hard at this time) nor can she make a telephone call.

She tries to make allies of some of the others; an older woman Ruth, who she later sees being tortured. A younger man Mark, who she’s attracted to. And an older man, Paul, steady, perhaps one who will help her escape. But she realises she’s being spied on, including in the bath. She jumps to some conclusions; that it’s Caligari, and that he’s a voyeur because he’s impotent. She goes to confront him (changing out of the white clothes she’s been in up to now into a slinky black dress) but it doesn’t work and the house appears stranger and stranger.

Mind-bending in places, Jane’s efforts to take control of the situation are always slightly oblique, at a tangent to what’s happening. She never confronts Caligari or anyone else who is stopping her leaving, never asks someone going out to send a message for her. This is all rather unsatisfyingly explained by the twist in the ending; a rather sad conclusion to an interestingly stylised horror film.

Watch This: Twisty, strange, luridly sexual thriller about losing your mind – and finding it
Don’t Watch This: Silly trite ending that undercuts everything that occurred before

3. Mortuary (1982)

Christie’s father, a psychiatrist, is beaten and drowned in his pool. Everyone including her mother Eve insists it was an accident. Christie’s boyfriend Greg joins his friend Josh in going to a warehouse. Josh has been fired from the mortuary; the boss owns the warehouse and Josh knows there are some tires there that he can sell to make up for his unpaid wages. There they witness some sort of occult ceremony and Josh claims he saw one before which is why he was fired. The pair mess about; while separated Josh is stabbed to death, following which Greg sees Josh’s van drive away, thinking Josh has abandoned him as a prank.

Greg and Christie look for Josh, asking their friends at the roller rink. (The roller rink and friends appear several times but nothing actually happens there or with them). Christie thinks she’s being followed and after sleep walking sees a hooded figure. Greg tells Christie that he thought he saw her mother Eve at the occult ceremony. Christie tells him her mother is dating Hank, the mortician, somewhat soon after the death of her husband.

Enter Hank’s son Paul, a weirdo who Christie is distantly nice to. He also works at the mortuary, he’s stalking Christie, he was seeing Christie’s father professionally after his mother killed herself. They ignore him, instead following Eve to the mortuary. There they discover that a séance is going on; she’s not dating Hank, she’s trying to contact her dead husband. Meanwhile Josh’s van has been seen about, though not Josh himself.

The film shifts gears, the weirdness coalescing into a slasher film for the end, the secrets of the mortuary being revealed. All the individual bits come together (not the roller rink friends for some reason) but it’s a bit late, as the film concentrates on Christie, the dullest character, in the earlier sections.

Watch This: Interesting horror as kids and parents go about their lives not noticing the unhinged things going on around them
Don’t Watch This: Just a bunch of horrid things happening to oblivious people

4. Perfect Friday

Mr Graham (Stanley Baker) is the assistant deputy manager of a bank in the West End of London. He’s dissatisfied with his job. There’s a fun bit where he comes in, then his boss the deputy manager, and then finally his manager, the more senior you are the later you can come in. The manager often calls in sick on a Friday when there’s a gold tournament he can go to (it’s 1970, you have to actually go to see it, you can’t watch it on your phone or whatever*).

Lady Britt Dorset (Ursula Andress) comes in with a sob story about needed to borrow £300 to go and see her sick mother in Switzerland, promising that a tax refund will come through to pay it off. She instead spends it on a car and clothes, taking Graham for a joy ride. Graham is more entertained than annoyed – he's unhappy at the bank – and the two have sex.

She’s married to Lord Nicholas Dorset (David Warner), who’s a dissolute aristocrat, always in need of money (dependent on the daily allowance for turning up at the House Of Lords). Graham comes up with a plan to rob the bank. He and Britt make a plan to allow them to continue their affair, by bringing in Nicholas to the bank heist scheme and think it’s his idea to bring Britt into it.

So what we get is a sex comedy with people jumping in and out of bed with Ursula Andress while they put together a complex plan to defeat each of the bank’s security features, and planning on betraying each other. It’s fine at all of this, though the final set of running about and switching cases is muddled, unclear and not very fun.

Watch This: 1970s sex comedy/heist film
Don’t Watch This: Are you doing a heist or conducting an affair, and which is the farce and which the real threat

* Well here’s a place to mention that this film does like the technical details, as most in this genre do, so there’s some phone call shenanigans where as a security measure the bank uses a direct line to confirm someone is coming and they have to divert the call.

5. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1989)

A nanny in London seems to be failing, then she’s sent to Hawaii, where a British rock star wants her to look after his dog. In the same hotel are three children who decide to investigate a volcano; the dog’s basket gets mixed up with theirs. Nanny and children all go into a cave after the dog when there’s an earthquake; after some adventures they find themselves in the underground city of Atlantis.

The city believes itself threatened by the surface, which is a source of legends. They intend to invade, the scientist building the machines and the tyrant ruling having different motives. The nanny and children meet various unlikely characters and have to stop the invasion and escape.

The film is generally poor quality; supposedly loosely based on the Jules Verne novel, the only bit that has been kept is an expedition down a volcano based on weird old clues. The city of Atlantis looks like any low-budget dystopian cityscape. The film does manage some claustrophobia with the cramped sets, so hats off to that. However it’s mostly a wacky idea or character being introduced, then they stumble off and meet the next one.

Watch This: You are on some sort of hollow earth/underground civilisation completist trip
Don’t Watch This: Slow, poorly plotted, lacking in interesting characters

6. The Day Of The Triffids

Bill Masen is in hospital having had an eye operation. The night before the bandages come off there’s a meteor shower that everyone says is unmissable to his annoyance. Unknown to Bill or anyone else strange seeds grow into deadly walking plants, Triffids. When Bill wakes up no one answers his calls. He removes his bandages and it’s a success and he can see. Ironically no one else can; the meteor shower has blinded them.

London is in chaos due to everyone being blinded. A sailor, Bill goes to the railway station to try and get to his ship, encounters Susan, a schoolchild who fell asleep in the luggage car. Also blind people try to force them to help. Leaving London they are attacked by a Triffid when their car breaks down. Hearing radio calls from France they sail there.

Meanwhile on an isolated lighthouse Tom and Karen Goodwin didn’t see the lights due to an argument over Tom’s drinking. They’re doing some biology there, and are unsure what to do when they hear the radio calls and realise the supply boat won’t be coming. Then triffids appear on the island outside and they barricade themselves in. Tom spends the rest of the film trying to figure out how to stop triffids.

Bill and Susan meet up with some people in a chateau in France. Some sighted people are supporting a group of the blind. Thanks to a fence they can keep triffids out, but a man is killed when they go for supplies. Later some escaped convicts – sighted because they were locked up – take over the chateau, but this gives a chance for triffids to break in so Bill, Susan and a woman named Christine are the only survivors. They then spend the rest of the film looking for the navy, who have sailors who were on submarines and so sighted, though there are several adventures on the way.

There’s some good bits here, mostly taken from the novel. The film cuts the complicated triffid backstory and questions about the meteor shower for a simple explanation; they all fell from space. And the ending is abrupt and unsatisfying. In between though the strange new world of the blind, and the triffids, those are pretty good; strange, scary and doomed.

Watch This: Solid adaption of a science fiction catastrophe classic
Don’t Watch This: Disappointing ending

7. Crime Story (1993)

In Hong Kong five men make a solemn pact, a ritual, to destroy the corrupt businessman Wong. One of them, Hung, is a police detective. Wong goes to the police to ask for protection. Reluctantly the chief assigns Eddie Chan (Jackie Chan) who is suffering mentally after killing four gunmen in a crowded shopping mall.

Wong is building sub-standard apartments on land he got dubiously, and his workers aren’t getting paid, all of which he blames on the contractor. He’s then kidnapped with his wife. Chan pursues the car with them in; the wife gets away but they run down a motorcycle cop and Chan gives up the chase to take him to hospital.

Wong is taken away on a boat. Hung is brought in as he’s solved kidnappings before. The police learn that Wong’s wife has received a ransom demand. They tell her to send $60 Million (US) to a variety of different accounts*. Tracking them to Taiwan they stop the money transfer halfway through.

Chan and Hung go to Taiwan, but they have no jurisdiction there and there are no diplomatic relations. Tracking down Simon Ko, who is connected to the accounts, the Taiwanese police raid the place. In the chaos Chan goes after Ko; Hung tries to help him escape but when they’re trapped Ko threatens to expose Hung so Hung kills him. Hung and Chan are thrown out of Taiwan.

Chan then tries to investigate Hung. He attempts to look into Hung’s phone records, but Hung uses his contacts to get them erased, leaving Chan with only once clue. Going to a brothel to attempt to get Hung’s mistress to turn on him, Hung arrives, distracts Chan and gets her to change her story. Eventually Chan and Hung both go to the ship Wong was on, and their conflict comes into the open.

A more serious action film than those Jackie Chan made his name with. Because of this there’s a lot of people being sent to the hospital, and rather than being light-heartedly told off after something goes wrong, Chan sits in the hospital corridor full of regrets. As a thriller it has great stunts and occasional tense moments.

Watch This: Tense and gritty martial arts thriller
Don’t Watch This: Very silly for all it’s attempts at grim seriousness

* The film is quite serious for Jackie Chan; this section as Mrs Wong has to go around different banks and computer people are trying to frantically track transactions comes close to the screwball comedy of his other films of the period. This is heightened by some of the limitations of the technology of the time; Mrs Wong is told to take an extra battery for her now comically large mobile phone, and changing it fails to add the tension it’s supposed to.

8. The Dark Knight

In Gotham City the Joker commits a daring bank robbery, killing all the other members of the crew and getting away with millions. It’s a mob bank, used for money laundering. Between this, the Batman, and Jim Gordon’s Major Crimes Unit the organised crime in the city is feeling the pinch; on top of this is incorruptible District Attorney Harvey Dent who also appears to be lucky when it comes to assassination attempts.

With raids on the money laundering banks* they turn to the last money launderer, Lau, who was in town trying to do a deal with Wayne Enterprises. Bruce Wayne, the Batman, didn’t actually want to do business with him, instead just looking at the books to find out how dodgy he is. Lau hides all the money ahead of the last raids and flees to Hong Kong where he can’t be extradited. The Joker interrupts the meeting where he explains the situation to the heads of the organised crime gangs by video link, offering to kill The Batman for half the cash. They turn him down, and he stops them from killing him by having a jacket filled with explosives.

Batman kidnaps Lau, returning him to Gotham; using Lau's testimony Dent and his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (see Batman Begins for her complex relationship with Bruce Wayne) put hundreds of gangsters in jail. When the top ones get out on bail they give the Joker everything he wants; he kills the judge, the police commissioner and makes an attempt on Dent’s life at a fundraiser Bruce Wayne is holding for him. He threatens to kill the mayor, then demands that Batman turn himself in for his crimes.

In a complex and cascading series of events the Joker turns people against themselves, sets up traps to have the police or citizens massacre each other, in an attempt to prove that the only thing between his style of murderous anarchic mayhem and regular people is one bad day. And sometimes he succeeds but in the end, at terrible cost, the Batman manages to put a stop to him.

What to make of this film fifteen years on? It’s still a good superhero film, with a little meat on the bones. Batman interrogates The Joker in a cell and when driven to it attempts to torture him, but it doesn’t work, The Joker only tells him exactly what he wants to say and it's mostly lies. The Joker’s point on the fragility of society is well taken. And The Batman hardly has an answer. He doesn’t want people to be like him; he wants to put down the bad guys to let people have the time and space to make better lives for themselves. To let the structures and institutions do what they’re supposed to. But it’s all cartoonish. That the Joker has something to say is refreshing** yet simplistic.

Am I asking for too much from the film? It entertains, the setpieces extraordinary, the conflicts primal, the characters exuding presence. If only all superhero films could manage that much.

Watch This: Superb Batman film, the moral struggles almost as compelling as the physicals ones
Don’t Watch This: Clown terrorist fights vigilante dressed as Dracula, everyone loses

* Okay, let’s be clear, the film does not care what money laundering is. That there are physical mob dollars sitting in the bank vaults is actually the worst of all possible money laundering ideas. The point is to get large amounts of untraceable cash into legitimate, tax paid bank accounts so they can be used in the legitimate economy. If you’re going to keep it as a giant pile of cash then Lau’s plan of putting it in a secret secure location is much better than in a bank but not part of the banking system! Anyway, never mind that, a huge pile of dollar bills is a dramatic thing for people to be chasing for the middle part of the film.

** In Batman Begins, Ras Al Ghul is an eco-terrorist, reactionary and conservative, wanting to destroy Gotham as it’s corrupt; Batman doesn’t disagree with the diagnosis, but with the cure. In The Dark Knight Rises [SPOILERS review forthcoming] Bane is an acolyte of Ras Al Ghul, again wanting to destroy Gotham for it’s corruption, and also in revenge for Batman killing Ras Al Ghul. The Joker has a fundamentally different philosophy, he’s not the dark mirror of the others, he’s a guy who likes it when things get weird and terrible as an end, not a means. And he's also a liar; Ras and even Bane are straightforward about what they want, even as they use misdirection tactically. The Joker is indifferent to truth.

9. Amityville: Dollhouse

Divorcee Bill Martin has built a house on an abandoned lot for his blended family; he brings his jock son Todd, and regular daughter Jessica. His new wife, widowed Claire has a nerd son, Jimmy, who has a pet mouse. In the shed that pre-dates the house Bill finds a dollhouse that looked like the house from The Amityville Horror. Presumably not a horror fan he doesn’t recognise it and puts it in the garage.

The fireplace (the last remaining bit of the previous house) keeps turning itself on. Jessica’s birthday present, a bike, gets mangled in the garage so at the last minute Bill gives her the dollhouse. She finds some miniature dolls to go with it; her aunt and uncle don’t like it.

Jimmy hates the new house and the new family. His mouse escapes into the dollhouse and Jessica is confronted by a huge mouse, possibly in a dream. Claire dreams of Todd, and has visions of him while having sex with Bill. Bill has dreams of the family being killed, and voodoo dolls, which worries him as he had a dream of his parents dying in a fire as a child, and then they died in a fire. Jimmy dreams of his undead soldier father.

Todd and his girlfriend investigate the shed, find some clues to the previous house, they try to have sex but are interrupted by a giant fly. Later while babysitting the others, Todd invites his girlfriend over and she’s horribly burned by the fireplace. All the jokes about Bill building the house become serious. Then when Claire finds a bruise on Jimmy she blames Bill and throws him out. There then follows a confusing final sequence.

The dollhouse is unexplained, which is fine, and when it’s used well it’s fun. But the entering into it bit is confused, it seems like there ought to be some consistency to the method and there isn’t. The children are stock characters, and Claire’s dreams of her hot, hunky stepson are weird and offputting without going anywhere either. Much as I hate to say it, maybe she should have been imagining her deceased husband, that would be more in the Amityville vein. Potentially more interesting than the Amityville evil lamp, it turns out to be a bit of a damp squib.

Watch This: Some good evil dollhouse bits and a moderately competent look at trying to put two families together
Don’t Watch This: People get maimed, have sexy thoughts and attacked by giant creatures for no particular effect

10. 100 Years Of Horror

Sir Christopher Lee presents this 1996 overview of Horror films, apparently cut from a tv series. He begins by explaining that he, and other practitioners, don’t find the word horror especially good as a description*, preferring dark fantasy; that these films are differentiated by an emphasis rather than a genre.

Perhaps so; after a brief look at some very old films that might be considered horror it goes on to consider various films, grouped by monster or occasionally by actor. But it’s a brief look in every case. We see a little of the way that Dracula or Frankenstein developed, the arrival of the Slasher film in the 80s and some scattered bits on effects and techniques. Sadly there’s little space in the film for anything other than a few words in an interview, and a description of a film, finding it’s chronological place. Something of a curiosity, and for the beginner who might wish to know a bit about the history of the genre, with many good films from the past for them to investigate; also some not so good ones.

Watch This: An outline of 20^th century horror films
Don’t Watch This: No depth or special insight into the topic

* Horror as a genre, they claim, got it’s name from the British film classification of “H” for Horrific, used between 1932-1951, indicating that persons under 16 should not be admitted.