April FIlms Update 2

Ten more films I watched in 2024. This is not the end... there are two more to come before 2024 is over.

**** 

1. The Nurse (1975)

In Italy, winemaker and widower Leonida Bottacin has a heart attack while having an affair with the graveyard caretaker’s wife. Sadly for him his daughters, son, and son-in-law all think this an opportunity. The son-in-law wants to sell the winery to an American conglomerate. The others fall in with this plan. (There’s also a comic relief manservant and maid in the household, plus the teenage grandson).

The doctor suggests that he needs complete rest, and that having sex would almost certainly finish him off, and that a live-in nurse should be hired. The son-in-law had injured his back in Switzerland two years ago, and then had an affair with his nurse Anna (Ursula Andress). They resolve to hire her to nurse him back to strength, then seduce him so he dies.

It's a comedy! Specifically a 70s Italian sex comedy that I watched as I was on a bit of an Ursula Andress kick. At it’s best is when the son-in-law has to do something ridiculous (his demonstration of how to seduce a bed-bound patient, doing his best nurse-in-a-sex-comedy impression leaning over, bending over, tripping along etc is pretty good). The rest of the characters are fairly sketched in, the son is a (former?) military officer described as a former colonial military, which I find a little puzzling unless it’s set somewhat earlier than it was filmed. He constantly tries to do military things and can’t have sex with the maidservant unless there are military sounds, in his bedroom/armoury. At it’s worst is when they try to distract the grandson from the plot by having Anna seduce him. In between there’s some slapstick, some nudity, a few bits of weird sex-arguments and a couple of good jokes.

In Italian it’s L’Infermiera, in English as well as the direct translation it has been released under the titles I Will If You Will, The Sensuous Nurse and Secrets Of The Sensuous Nurse.

Watch This: Sporadically amusing and dubious 70s Italian sex comedy
Don’t Watch This: Sporadically amusing and dubious 70s Italian sex comedy

2. Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women (1968)

Astronauts go to Venus where they find the planet very strange. They think they see women in the sea, mermaid- or siren-like. They are attacked by a flying creature, and kill it; this is the god the women worship. The women try to use their psychic powers to kill the astronauts, this doesn’t work and the astronauts leave the planet. However they leave behind their robot who becomes the new god of the women.

This is all explained by the narration; otherwise this would be even more puzzling. It’s stitched together from a Soviet film, Planet Of Storms (Planeta Bur), where the astronaut footage comes from, following which the American producers added some blonde women with shell bikini tops. It’s more dreamlike, strange, even mystical than you’d expect from this exploitative construction. Still not very good though.

Watch This: Dreamy, strange science fiction mystery
Don’t Watch This: Incoherent in plot, filming, character and sound

3. Diamonds Are Forever

James Bond 007 (Sean Connery) hunts down and kills Blofeld (Charles Gray*) in a short opening sequence (even more foreshortened as the sequence where he strangles a woman with her bikini top was cut from the broadcast version I caught). His boss, M, then insists he get on with some proper work.

What proper work? Investigating diamond smuggling! South African diamonds are going missing and they’re worried that someone will flood the market, dropping prices by breaking the artificial scarcity. The explanation is intercut with the diamonds being taken out the mine by a dentist, who is then killed by two gay hitmen, Wint and Kidd, who also kill the pilot who flies them out and the school teacher who carries them out of the country. They’re cleaning up the supply chain!

A smuggler called Peter Franks is detained by the British and Bond takes his place. He heads to Amsterdam and makes contact with Tiffany Case (Jill St John). Franks escapes and Bond kills him, slipping a card of his own into his wallet to make it seem as though he’s killed James Bond. This potentially interesting idea is used even less effectively than in You Only Live Twice.

They take the diamonds to America hidden in (real) Franks’ body, Bond meets his CIA contact Felix Leiter (Leiter, like Moneypenny, M’s secretary, both appear in the film in the guise of customs or immigration officers). The body’s taken to a crematorium in Las Vegas run by Morton Slumber and the diamonds passed to Shady Tree, diamond smuggler and stand up comic. Wint and Kidd try to kill Bond but he’s rescued at the last minute when the diamonds turn out to be false.

In the Whyte House, a hotel in Las Vegas run by Willard Whyte, a reclusive industrialist who lives in the penthouse, Bond discovers that Shady Tree is doing his act. However Wint and Kidd kill him before learning he doesn’t have the diamonds. Bond, at a loose end, goes to play craps, picks up a woman named Plenty O’Toole and is then ambushed by Morton Slumber’s henchmen and Tiffany Case. They make an agreement to pass on the diamonds.

Case intends to double-cross but changes her mind after discovering O’Toole drowned in her swimming pool, Wint and Kidd having mistaken her for Case. She hands over the diamonds to Bert Saxby, the casino manager at the Whyte House. They follow Saxby, who hands the diamonds off to a scientist who takes them to a Whyte laboratory where a lot of shenanigans occur. the Whyte corporation alert the police who chase them. Eventually they get away and Bond wants to confront Willard Whyte, but Leiter won’t let him; Whyte is very influential**.

Bone goes rogue, an early example that happens more and more as the series goes on; he and Case are in the honeymoon suite most of the way up Whyte House; he climbs up the outside to the penthouse. There he confronts Blofeld, or rather Blofelds as there is a double. They’ve taken over Whyte’s industrial empire, communicating by phone and intercom using a voice changer. They also refuse to tell Bond what the plan is. Bond kills one Blofeld, the wrong one, is knocked out, taken by Wint and Kidd into a pipeline, which he easily escapes. (?)

Bond turns the tables, using his own voice changer to impersonate Saxby (with the help of Q the MI6 gadgets man) and discover where the real Willard Whyte is. He goes there, defeats the two female bodyguards and releases him; by then Blofeld has escaped in drag, kidnapping Case, and heading for his secret base and the culmination of his plan (a diamond space laser that can destroy nuclear weapons and hold the world to ransom).

This is a very complicated plot, a very busy film. Bond keeps failing to see or be killed by Wint and Kidd, their sinister presence slightly reduced by modern viewers not finding being gay inherently suspicious. It gestures at the idea of people being thought dead turning up again, and people being doubled, but this goes nowhere.

Watch This: One of the classic Bond villain performances, a lot of fun scenes
Don’t Watch This: Keeps getting more and more convoluted, very silly
And so: This is the last Eon-produced Bond film starring Sean Connery (he quit after You Only Live Twice, then came back after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), though not the last time he played Bond. It is also, I think, the last Bond film I have to review on this site, so here’s a list of links:

Dr No
From Russia With Love
Goldfinger
Thunderball
You Only Live Twice
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Diamonds Are Forever
Live And Let Die
The Man With The Golden Gun
The Spy Who Loved Me
Moonraker
For Your Eyes Only
Octopussy
A View To A Kill
The Living Daylights
License To Kill
Goldeneye
Tomorrow Never Dies
The World Is Not Enough
Die Another Day
Casino Royale (2006)
A Quantum Of Solace
Skyfall
Spectre
No Time To Die

And in addition, non-Eon produced ones:

Casino Royale (1967)
Never Say Never Again

* Charles Gray previously appeared in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, playing Captain Henderson, Bond’s contact who is killed in an early scene. In that film Blofeld is played by Donald Pleasance. Interestingly there’s a potential in-film explanation; Blofeld is discovered at a health spa planning to have plastic surgery performed. Bond thinks it is on Blofeld, to allow him to change identity and escape pursuit, but it turns out that he’s actually trying to have a henchman transformed into his double. With such plastic surgery, it’s possible that in the chaos of escaping in You Only Live Twice the file on Captain Henderson was displaced and Blofeld used the picture to transform himself after the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Anyway this amuses me.

** Willard Whyte is loosely based on the real Howard Hughes, industrialist, aviation pioneer, casino owner and a notoriously mentally ill recluse.

4. The Silence Of The Lambs

Clarice Starling is a trainee in the FBI. Jack Crawford of the Behavioural Science Unit takes her out of class to interview Hannibal Lecter, a notorious serial killer and former psychiatrist confined in the Baltimore State Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Crawford hopes to learn something from Lecter that might help with a currently active killer, nicknamed Buffalo Bill, because he skins the overweight women he kills.

Starling finds Lecter erudite, insightful and sinister. Initially he turns her away, then changes his mind after Miggs, in the cell next door, masturbates and throws semen on her. He offers her a clue, which leads her to a storage locker with a preserved severed head in a jar. The head is that of the lover of one of Lecter’s victims.

When another woman’s body, partially skinned, is found in a river in West Virginia Jack Crawford brings Starling out of class again to accompany him. They find something in her throat, a pupa. She takes this to be identified; it’s a Death’s Head Moth from south east Asia, one that needs to be imported and cared for in a specialised way. Looking in the head in the jar they find another pupa. Crawford sends her back to Lecter, to ask for his assistance.

Events accelerate as a young woman is abducted by Buffalo Bill, and she’s the daughter of Tennessee Senator Ruth Martin. The head of the hospital discovers what Crawford and Starling are up to and calls Martin; they fly Lecter out to Memphis. Starling confronts him, having deciphered the information he’s given as being false. Lecter escapes though not before giving her a final clue.

In my memory I always think of this as a subtle movie; it’s not though, the music, the action sequences, the blood, various people explaining what’s going on. It is quite clever though. And if it brought the brilliant, charming villain into the serial killer genre, it can’t be held accountable for how it dominated crime fiction for the next two decades.

No, blame the sequels and prequels for that.

Watch This: Clever inventive and hugely influential thriller
Don’t Watch This: Gruesome and frankly outrageous in it’s conception of psychopathy and serial killers

5. Abigail (2024)

A team of six criminals kidnap a 12 year-old girl. They take her to a remote mansion, where their employer tells them to wait for 24 hours after which they will be paid. One of them does a bit of reading of the others, determining their background, and possibly their weakness.

Abigail turns out to be a centuries old vampire, the mansion an elaborate trap. She’s the daughter of another vampire, who is a notorious crime boss. Each of the kidnappers has inconvenienced his crime empire in some way.

She really is a neglected daughter though.

It becomes a mystery, a cat-and-mouse game through the mansion, a game of betrayal. Sadly the revelations of people’s past, mostly explained through dialogue, fail to land, overwhelmed by the vampire action sequences. Some of these are quite good, Abigail’s ballerina aspects imbuing gruesome and bloody fights with grace.

Watch This: Vampire crime trap horror
Don’t Watch This: A lot of desperate and unpleasant people get killed by a tween-appearing ballerina

6. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is studying for a PhD at the London School Of Economics when 9/11 happens; he joins the US Marines and is shot down in Afghanistan. Recovering from his injury he’s recruited for the CIA by Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner); they have him finish his PhD and then join a Wall Street investment firm to try and track terrorist funding. Also while in rehabilitation he meets Dr Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley) and the two start dating.

Fast forward to the present day (2014) and Ryan becomes suspicious when the markets behave oddly after Russia loses a vote at the UN, and discovers that billions of dollars of assets controlled directly or indirectly by Russian Oligarch Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh) are missing. Harper wants to know more so Ryan uses an audit as an excuse to go to Russia and investigate. Unfortunately his tradecraft is terrible so not only is Cathy suspicious, so is Cherevin and on arrival the bodyguard/driver assigned him tries to kill him in his hotel room.

Ryan intuits a plot which he tells to Harper who is his contact in Moscow (to Ryan’s surprise). He guesses there will be a terrorist attack following which Cherevin will sell off US assets, causing markets to crash. This will be 9/11 (again) followed by the Great Depression (again) and completely deniable (the terrorist attack probably isn’t deniable).

Ryan meets Cherevin, the two commiserate on the two wars in Afghanistan that they respectively took part in. Cherevin has sold the company that was a problem, forestalling the audit. Ryan invites Cherevin to dinner with a plan to try and get access to his officer while he’s out. Cathy arrives and Ryan has to explain he’s not having an affair, he’s in the CIA. They go to dinner with Cherevin. Ryan pretends to get drunk and sneaks into the office to download the files leaving Cherevin, a known sexual predator alone with Cathy; they get away with this but then Cherevin attacks their base and kidnaps Cathy. Ryan gets her back and they flee the country.

With the data Ryan again intuits the target of the attack; Wall Street. As is traditional for Jack Ryan films, he, an analyst, has to take action. Anyway a competent action spy thriller, with some interesting ideas that it fails to use in a significant manner.

Watch This: Spies, fights, tricks, some clever plot twists
Don’t Watch This: Oddly cast, incoherent

7. Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire

Following on from Godzilla Vs Kong, King Kong, a giant gorilla(-ish) is inside the Hollow Earth, exploring and fighting monsters. On the surface of the Earth Godzilla, a giant lizard(-ish) fights other giant creatures, the Titans, at the start of this film defeating a giant crab thing in Rome, then curling up to sleep in the Colosseum.

A Monarch (monster observation organisation) observation post in the Hollow Earth picks up a strange signal. This causes Jia, the last survivor of the tribe from Kong’s home Skull Island, to have nightmares and visions. It also activates Godzilla who goes to a French nuclear power plant to suck up energy, then to the Arctic to fight a Titan there and suck up the cosmic radiation or something. It’s related to Kong finding a new passage in the Hollow Earth where he meets another giant ape, a young one, who leads him to the home of a tribe of giant apes.

The king of the apes has his tribe mining stuff, he keeps them under control because he has a crystal that causes pain to an ice Titan so it obeys him. Kong and this Skar King fight, Kong is injured and escapes. Dr Andrews, Monarch scientist, travels to the Hollow Earth to find the source of the signal, bringing Jia, a giant monster veterinarian, a comic relief conspiracy theorist podcaster, and a disposable pilot with her. The observation post has been destroyed, though some parts for giving Kong a cool robot arm are still there. They follow clues to a temple and another tribe of the people who lived on Kong’s island. There are carvings that explain the backstory and a prophecy which I’m not going to rehearse here.

The Skar King and the Ice Titan threaten to wreck the Earth; Kong can’t beat them on his own. Godzilla is immensely territorial so teaming up will be tricky. In fact Kong may have to fight him, possibly destroying the pyramids in the process, just to get Godzilla to pay attention.

Anyway, plenty of giant monster fights, a lot of very silly bits of story. The team being sent down to the Hollow Earth is clearly nonsense, Dr Andrews bringing her teen adopted daughter, a cool guy she used to date (might have actually useful skills), a weird bloke she owes a favour to, and the driver (assigned the death required to show peril). Jia’s discovery of people like her (non-verbal, psychic etc) is quite nice. But really the human stories are disposable.

Watch This: Monster fights, some cool settings
Don’t Watch This: The plot’s very basic, mostly there to stitch together the monster fights, and despite (because of?) this is nonsensical

8. The Boss Baby

7 year old Tim Templeton has a huge imagination. Then a baby brother arrives; he wears a suit and it turns out he can talk. Tim tries to catch him out.

Eventually this Boss Baby explains the situation; most babies are sent to Earth become regular babies and eventually grow up. Some, the ones who aren’t ticklish, instead go to work for Baby Corp, controlling the supply of babies. This Boss Baby has been sent because love for babies is falling thanks to Puppy Co, who are taking all the love. Tim’s parents work for Puppy Co.

Tim and the Boss Baby come to an arrangement, Tim will help the Boss Baby get into Puppy Co and figure out what’s going on, so Boss Baby can go back to Baby Corp and Tim can go back to being his parents’ favourite (only) child.

It’s a ridiculous animated kid’s spy film. Some of the jokes are pretty good (where babies come from, Tim not being believed about Boss Baby being a guy in a suit who can talk etc). The madcap action sequences go a bit long. On the other hand it’s for kids, do they like it? Well one did.

Watch This: Modestly entertaining baby spy cartoon
Don’t Watch This: It’s all very silly

9. Wonka

Willy Wonka, magician, inventor and chocolatier arrives in town with recipes for amazing chocolates, 12 silver sovereigns and a dream to make it big. Prodnose, Fickelgruber and Slugworth, who have formed a chocolate cartel, break up his demonstration. Unfortunately he has got lodgings in Mrs Scrubbits establishment where he signed a contract he didn’t read (he’s illiterate). He’s indentured for debt and has to work in her laundry with a group of other misfits.

He distracts Scrubbits by having her fall in love with her business partner Bleacher by making him look like a Bavarian nobleman; goes out to the zoo to collect giraffe milk for his chocolates. He invents an automated laundry machine so he can come and go as he pleases. He creates an underground chocolate selling ring, making friends with the other misfits, in particular the delivery girl Noodle.

The chocolate cartel have been reducing the quality of their chocolate and store the excess in a vault under the cathedral, guarded by a chocolate-addicted priest and chocolate-addicted monks. They bribe the chocolate-addicted chief of police to try and shut Wonka down.

It’s a musical prequel to Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, or Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, take your pick. It’s equally inconsistent with both! It’s very pantomime, the practical sets better than most of the CGI. And Hugh Grant plays all the Oompa Loompas (initially no one believes Wonka when he tells them that a small orange man is stealing his chocolates). Being inconsistent with the later films does avoid the question of what happened to all Willy Wonka’s friends, why is he alone in those films. What happened to not-his love interest Noodle? (She’s not his love interest because his only love is chocolate, though as he has to learn to depend on his friends, also his ambition for chocolate is due to his love for his mother the film is a bit half-hearted about that).

Watch This: Song, dance, magic, chocolate
Don’t Watch This: Even assuming a chocolate-centred economy and a population of chocoholics, this film is a big pile of nonsense

10. The Wrong Trousers

Wallace, an inventor with a house full of wacky gadgets, buys a present for his dog Gromit. They’re techno-trousers, and by programming them Wallace gets them to take Gromit for a walk, to Gromit’s dismay and eventual sabotage. However inventing isn’t making much money (Wallace is able to monetise his inventions in later films in the series) so they decide to rent out the spare room.

A penguin takes the room, or rather Gromit’s room, putting Gromit in the spare room. Redecorating it, Gromit discovers the techno-trousers can walk on walls and ceilings. However the penguin causes problems, driving Gromit first into the doghouse in the yard, and finally out the house.

The penguin reprograms the trousers, alters one of Wallace’s inventions to put him in them. Then he puts a rubber glove on his head and becomes Feathers McGraw, rooster and wanted criminal, and uses Wallace and the trousers to steal a diamond. Wallace and Gromit must stop him, somehow.

A stop-motion animation with immense charm, brilliant design and a love for old movies, with many references.

Watch This: Hilarious and exciting animated film
Don’t Watch This: Rather silly