Iridescent Black & Whites

A Taste of Fear is a tidy little Hammer thriller from 1962 starring Christopher Lee and Susan Strasberg. A pretty young crippled woman returns home from her schooling at the behest of her father only to find him curiously absent with just her new stepmother and chauffeur in attendance, her disquiet deepens when she begins to see visions of her Pops around the house in a less than lively condition. Nicely shot and sporting a tight, lean script ably fleshed by the skilled actors this brilliant little gem builds towards a finale that's as unexpected as it is brutal.

Blake Edwards is mostly remembered for his goofy comedies but he also made a considerable impact in other genres and thrilling Experiment in Terror is a fine example of his earlier work. A bank teller, played by Lee Remick, is forced into committing a heist by a seemingly ubiquitous, asthmatic bampot but his persistent terrorising begins to fall on deaf ears once she’s aided by a Fed, played by Glenn Ford. Stylishly shot and with buckets of atmosphere this thriller packs a fair punch and though, like Taste above, it’s plot is a little hackneyed the quality of script and performances elevate it well above the typical.

Abnormal Acts

David Cronenberg’s son, Brandon, has clearly inherited his father’s penchant for body horror as his impressive debut Antiviral, a sneaky, low budget, high concept scifi flick positively glistens with creepy, twisted fleshiness. Working as a vendor of celebrity infections, our protagonist decides to scoop the competition and takes drastic measures to secure the mysterious affliction that’s struck down a beautiful young starlet. Cronenberg sketches out a nicely jaded dystopia where science has become a slave to the pernicious cult of celebrity and the quiet pacing and performances underpin it’s increasingly unsettling atmosphere. As Pops Cronenberg drifts more and more into mainstream features it’s a relief someone in the family is keeping up the tradition of squirming squeamishness.

 

Although Absentia doesn’t manage it’s budget quite as well as Antiviral it’s still manages a mouldering atmosphere of weirdness that lifts it above the average horror/thriller. After 7 years, a young wife is about to declare her missing husband dead and enlists her wayward sister to help tie up things only for the husband to crawl through the front door rambling incoherently about a close to home kidnapper. The script is a little thin at times and the production a bit low fi but the plot’s menace and weirdness are developed nicely as the character’s emotional churning soon blossoms into a sticky miasma of dread and confusion. A solid, interesting little chiller that’s worth a look and shows that Kickstarter funding might be a viable option for cash starved film makers.

Terrorising TV

Tommy Lee Jones stars as a Vietnam vet who wigs out and takes control of Central Park in the ropey 80’s TV movie The Park is Mine. Using his military skills and his dead buddy’s war plan, Jones seals off the greenery for 48hrs to highlight the plight of neglected vets and faces off against the police and national guard desperate to oust him. Jones shouts his way through the script as if it was written in capitols and there’s a tonne of unintentionally amusing lines and though there’s some action to be had it’s mostly non-lethal in a tragically A-Team kind of way. Like a neutered Rambo, here it is anyway just in case you’re a fan of the so bad it’s good stuff.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown, on the other hand, is a grittier affair, mainly due to it’s docu-drama approach, based as it is on an actual series of murders in ‘40’s Texarkana. A masked man stalks the neighbourhood slaughtering a variety of locals and the police are stymied by a lack of clues and his erratic MO. With a titchy budget and little acting skill on display it’s quite surprising that it manages to muster a reasonably unsettling atmosphere but it does, maybe it’s the murky/cheap cinematography or the weird nature of the crimes themselves but it’s definitely worth a look. Getting a remake apparently.

Featureless Features

I quite enjoyed Andrew Dominik’s snail paced western The Assassination of Jesse James blah blah and even thought Pitt did a decent job but their recent reunion on comedy thriller Killing Them Softly is a surprisingly clumsy and cliched affair. When two idiots rob a mob run poker match Pitt’s fixer is called in to clean up the mess but his employers and employees only lead to frustration. Though nicely filmed It’s a right rambling mess with a unfounded somewhat smug reliance on the ‘characters’ to entertain but is hamstrung by a navel gazing script that allows the assembled talent too much room to overact, underplay and phone it in variously. Shiny bland garbage that even skimps on the violence. 

 

Director Martin McDonagh’s excellent In Bruges was a much needed hit for Colin Farrell but their reteam effort Seven Psychopaths is, like Killing Them, a lazy self satisfied dud that coasts by on ‘quirky’ characters and lacks the poignancy that underpinned their previous comedy thriller. Farrell plays a screenwriter struggling with his next script but finds inspiration, irritation and some jeopardy whilst in the company of his dog-napping, motor mouth friend, Sam Rockwell after he pinches a gangster’s mutt, throw Walken and Woody into the mix and an occasionally amusing, utterly predictable caper ensues. My expectations were probably too high going into this but still there’s little to recommend it. Half hearted hokum.

Powerless Paranormals

Red Lights is a starry thriller about psychics and sceptics that, despite the classy production values, has little original to say about either and isn't particularly thrilling. Cillian and Sigourney play a pair of sceptical paranormal investigators who debunk about exposing charlatans and the deluded but when a once-famous medium, played by De Niro, rolls back into town things get all serious and they're faced with someone with seemingly genuine powers. It's well acted, nicely shot and there's a surprisingly realistic representation of the work of parapsychologists but that's all thrown away by a denouement of unabashed mumbo jumbo.

Clint's Hereafter, on the other hand, takes on a more traditionally dim-witted perspective on the paranormal and is just as unsatisfying. Matt Damon leads the cast playing a reluctant medium who slowly ties the disparate threads of the story together into one giant mawkish, internationally-flavoured lump of schmaltz. Eastwood can make decent films and though it looks nice and the characterisation/script are of a reasonable standard I found the plot is too earnest, too po-faced that I almost fell asleep twice. One for the true believers only.

Mild Bogglers

The removal of a longstanding French moustache sparks an enigmatic and paranoid thriller called, unimaginatively, La Moustache. As the mundane event unravels the urbane architect’s relationship and sense of reality, the film reveals itself to be something other than straightforward but unfortunately it’s this pivoting, intended to deepen it’s mysteries, that is it’s undoing. Despite the decent performances and cinematography the film fluffs it’s tensions with a fairly stark change of pace and a drift into rather clichéd ambiguity. It’s still a good watch just a little unfulfilling.

Mark Romanek’s 80’s debut Static is a modest but peculiarly effective drama about a bereaved inventor who builds a device which offers glimpses of heaven and gathers the odd-bod residents of his small town to witness his ingenuity. With a quiet humour softening the tragedy of the main character and some great acting from Keith Gordon and Amanda Plummer Romanek marshals a delicate atmosphere and some poignant observations on our oh-so-human condition. Even though, like La ‘Tache, this stumbles a bit with the denouement it’s a much more interesting and successful film.

Animal Antagonisms

Peter Weller stars a rising exec tormented by a jumbo rat in 80's psych-horror/comedy(?) Of Unknown Origin. When Weller’s wife and kid take a holiday, he neglects his work for the task of ridding himself of the irritating rodent invader but the slow burning feud takes it’s toll and descends into all out man v rat war. The production is horribly dated and plot totally preposterous but Weller puts in a suitably tormented performance that manages to stitch together all the nonsense. Not great but surprisingly not awful.

Stephen King's canine horror Cujo, also from 1983, shares the simple man vs beast storyline as Origin but lacks the competent acting to bring it to life. A backwater mechanic's lumbering St Bernard gets rabies and after munching the family hounds a woman and child for a couple of days when they arrive to pick up their car. It's got a decent reputation but this little thriller bored my rigid and by the end I was wishing that more of King's usual one-note characters had got the chomp too.

Hip Hop Historicals

Ice T uses his clout to gather the heavyweights of rap for his excellent documentary Something From Nothing. The focus is squarely on the craft of writing rhymes and his own legendary status ensures his interviewees are happy to relax and share their writing secrets with a fellow rapper. There's a few notable absences and a little too much Kanye West for my tastes but overall this is a thoroughly entertaining history of rap that, thankfully, eschews the macho posturing and bling that sullies their art.

Run DMC and the Beastie Boys collaborate in the 1988 nonsense thriller Tougher Than Leather. DMC gets released from prison and rejoins the band with the prospect of a new tour but when their friend is murdered they go looking for revenge instead. The plot, performances and production are pretty awful but it’s fortunately  festooned with cracking old school performances from both bands and steeped in some badass period ‘charm’. Great fun but for fans of the music only.

Sound Small Screenery

The Deadly Tower stars Kurt Russell as notorious sniper killer Charles Whitman in a taut dramatisation of his clock tower rampage. Made for American TV this modest little feature sticks, as far as I can discern, to the facts of the terrible tragedy and this spartan almost documentary approach actually adds to the tension and brutality as Whitman's careful preparation soon turns into callous mass murder. Whitman's robotic character and lack of dialogue isn't exactly a demanding role but Russell does a decent enough job, much like the rest of the cast and despite the bare bones production there's plenty of atmosphere with a leaden dread giving way to the manic randomness of the slaughter.

John Carpenter's TV movie effort Someone's Watching Me is a psychological thriller about a woman endlessly stalked by a stranger after moving into a new apartment. Carpenter skillfully, carefully builds the tension as the besieged Lauren Hutton's torment escalates and violence becomes inevitable. The script is a bit workmanlike and the plot a little hackneyed (only after being retread for the past 30 years or so but there's plenty to enjoy here with Hutton putting in an excellent effort while Carpenter works his particular nerve jangling magic to excellent effect.

Buddy Cop Double Dose

Flashpoint is a 1980's thriller that reeks of it's era with dodgy music, full fat machismo and acting of spurious quality. Two disgruntled border patrolmen uncover a crashed plane, sniper rifle and a big bag of cash in the desert and soon find their good fortune has a price when their tentative investigations provoke the attention of the NSA. The two leads Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams lazily chew their way through the hamfisted scripted and although the plot has potential it's doused by the shouty posturing, dull witted characterisations and unnecessary subplots. Wouldn't bother unless your fond of the alt-theories surrounding Dallas '63 or shit films.

A few years later and Off Limits sees Gregory Hines and Willem Dafoe offer a better expression of the buddy cop formula by playing a pair of jaded, wisecracking detectives struggling with crime in Saigon during the Vietnam war. When a prostitute turns up dead the duo find themselves hunting a serial killer amidst the chaos of the city, bumping into a sexy nun, psychotic colonel and a camp counterpoint along the way. There's plenty of action stuffed in beside the fairly formulaic thriller plot but it's the commendable performances of Hines and Dafoe which rescue the film from mediocrity and they've strong support from Fred Ward and Scott Glenn. It's not amazing, just a solid, fairly entertaining retro cop drama with a decent soundtrack.

Crooked Country Trips

Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman chew lumps off each other in the sleazy 70's thriller Prime Cut. When Hackman's rural gangster refuses to pay his dues the Chicago mob send ice-cool Marvin down country to make things right. Both leads consummately trade variants of smiling menace but the wry scripting keeps things fresh and although it's pretty formulaic stuff it has a certain grubby period charm what with the lady auctions, human sausages and a Combine harvester chase scene. A solid, occasionally barmy, tale of sex trafficking and hubris that gets plenty of good stuff from Hackman and Marvin but is otherwise unremarkable.

There's far less charm in the greasy backwoods thriller Poor Pretty Eddie but it more than makes up for it by it's sheer derangement. A sultry Jazz singer gets stuck in hillbilly hell after her car breaks down and ends up in a motel run by a soused cabaret wash up and her two male companions, a giant idiot and a lusty Elvis impersonator. Unaccustomed to guests of colour her presence causes ructions and it's not long before she finds herself in serious danger after attracting the eye of the unstable young lothario, Eddie. The script is perfunctory and it looks terrible but it's quite loopy in a 70's shlock/exploitation sort of way and Shelly Winters as the mother hen provides good ham throughout. Low brow & raw, it's probably only going to appeal to trash cinema collectors.

HBO Home Truths

HBO has built up a fair catalogue of high quality TV productions and The Notorious Bettie Page is a good example of their efforts. Shot in a beautiful monochrome the biopic follows the career of the (in)famous model who appeared in a bevy of glamour and bondage magazines in the 1950's. Gretchen Mol fleshes out the naive, big hearted wannabe starlet with panache and is supported with a number of recognisable faces but the script/plot are a little timid and like so many biopics it struggles to balance the events of the subject's history with the necessary character development. Still it's a good watch and I can think of worse ways to spend 90mins than stare at Mol romping about in her undercrackers.

Citizen X is a dramatisation of the true story of a Soviet serial killer who managed to kill 50 before being caught. Stephen Rea's trammeled detective is tasked with the hunt by his sly boss, played by Donald Sutherland, and the pair must thwart Moscow's interference and professional incompetence in their years long search for the murderer. Though it's not as pretty to look at as Bettie Page the script and performances provide an effective atmosphere of quiet, tragic desperation though Rea does occasionally drift into Droopy-esque levels of morosity.

Black & White Gold

Sullivan's Travels is a delightful Preston Sturgess movie about a Hollywood film maker who, bored with churning out frothy comedies, wants to change direction and adapt 'O Brother, Where Art Thou' a worthy, depression set drama. As he's never experienced poverty he decides to live like a hobo to gain some understanding (much to the consternation of his studio execs) and a light, rather lovely comedy roadtrip ensues. With a quick witted script and some fine acting from Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea as the pair of psuedo bums, Sturgess balances the laughs, a little romance and a few poignant lessons about life effortlessly into what is a thoroughly enjoyable film and probably one of the best films I've seen in ages.


Before The Third Man, Carol Reed & Graham Greene worked together to fashion a wonderfully poised thriller called The Fallen Idol released in 1948. The young son of an Ambassador is left in the company of the butler, Mr Baines, and his harsh housekeeper wife for a weekend and quickly becomes embroiled in a web of secrecy and witness to the eventual dissolution of their relationship. Beautifully shot and with taut, restrained performances from the adult cast the tension builds deliciously until the climax and a torrent of emotion is unleashed. This is an excellent thriller that's sadly over shadowed by the pairs subsequent success.

Wordsmith Protagonisms

John Cusack grumbles and stumbles around as the famous author and drunkard Edgar Allan Poe in serial killer thriller The Raven. When a couple of corpses turn up murdered in circumstances similar to Poe's stories the police reluctantly recruit him to help solve the case and he finds himself and his paramour in grave danger. Cusack is decent enough as the lead but his Poe is more convivial drunk that incurable souse and there's not much life in the script nor much ambition in the plotting so it all plays out as a fairly bog standard thriller. A shame that an author of such grisly, macabre horrors should receive such timid and unimaginative treatment.

H.G. Wells gets a shot as a hero in the romantic thriller Time After Time when one of his chums escapes to the 1970's after being exposed as Jack the Ripper. Acclimatising themselves to their new temporal surroundings both men indulge in their proclivities, ie free love and knifey slaughter, before continuing their clash of wit and will. Malcolm McDowell and David Warner add some heft to the charming script and though most of the film is spent on Wells' romancing of a bank clerk there's some genuine menace to the cold calculating Ripper which evens it all out nicely.

Nolte in Ninety Six

Nick Nolte's a fairly patchy actor but he puts in an excellent turn in Mother Night, based on Kurt Vonnegut's novel of the same name. Nolte plays an aging American playwright arrested for his Nazi past and when tasked with writing his memoirs, reveals he was actually a spy recruited by the Americans who secreted coded information into his WW2 radio broadcasts. This is a bittersweet, intelligent meta fiction about the perils of patriotism and group identity and has a script and cast that nicely flesh out the nuances and consequences of the character's various deceptions.

A different Nick Nolte turns up in the crushingly formulaic thriller Mulholland Falls also released in 1996. Set in 40's L.A. Nolte leads the infamous 'Hat Squad' who keep the city clean of organised crime but get into some hot water while investigating the murder of a nuclear scientist's lover. I'm not sure why the hackneyed plot and factory floor script attracted such a bevy of famous faces but they growl, mumble, over and underact their way through the 90 or so mins of predictable. A year later and this attempt at neo noir was outclassed in every department by L.A. Confidential.

Hypnotic Malefactors

A series of random murders in Tokyo trouble a worn down detective in the brilliantly opaque thriller The Cure. Already distracted by his wife's mental illness our protagonist is baffled by the grisly, mysterious crimes but once he encounters the peculiar catalyst of these horrors, a seemingly amnesiac young man with a gift for hypnosis, his grip on reality slips and the subsequent battle of wits changes everything. Impeccably shot with two excellent, understated performances at it's core the initial fugue like atmosphere is slowly suffused with a menace and dread that's deeply unsettling and which culminates in a profoundly disturbing final scene. Possibly one of the best psychological thrillers I've seen.

The hypnotic gifts of another miscreant, Count Cagliostro, propel events in 1949's melodrama Black Magic starring Orson Welles. I've never read Dumas' novel but am familiar with the story of the mystic/charlatan extraordinaire Balsamo and it makes for good entertainment in this sumptuous period piece stuffed as it is with intrigue, indiscretions and mesmerisations. Orson has a field day as the ambitious main character who achieved great fame for his healing powers but over reaches once invited into the presence of Marie Atoinette. Almost a direct opposite to The Cure, this is a light, mildly amusing historical romp with little to say but plenty of charm.

Malcolm in the Outskirts

Joseph Losey directed Malcolm McDowell and Robert Shaw (who also penned the adaptation) in a curious, enigmatic 1970 chase thriller Figures in a Landscape. The film opens with a helicopter scouring the countryside in search of two escapees, Shaw and McD, who, still bound by their never named captors, are in a desperate race to reach a unspecified mountainous border crossing. The spartan plot with it's deliberate obfuscation of almost all details and the stark cinematography foster an atmospheric backdrop for our central duo, who, driven a little mad by captivity and the intensity of their pursuers bicker, reminisce and murder their way across the land towards freedom harried by the seemingly ever present chopper. It's success lies in the two brilliant, searing performances at it's core, with Shaw and McDowell throwing everything they've got into these febrile, traumatised yet determined men. A fantastic film that's seemingly fallen between the cracks but has now tumbled out onto YouTube.


Malcolm McDowell appears in another cryptic thriller, a decade or so later, called The Caller that in the most part is even more abstruse. McDowell plays an unnamed caller at a woodland cabin inhabited by a peculiar single white female, their uneasy encounter soon develops into a vastly more convoluted relationship with a darker tone and some ugly twists. I'd like to say more but it's definitely one of those plots best left unspoiled however I will tell you that while Figures never provides answers to it's questions, The Caller does and the denouement is, er, quite a surprise. McDowell's ambiguous, slightly google eyed performance outshines his co-star's fractured turn and though the script is strong it falters in the final furlong. This film is all about the ideas & the mind games however and in that regard it deserves plenty of credit for it's ambition and chutzpah. A very strange but highly enjoyable little oddity.

Craic & Hack Jobs

Brendan Gleeson plays a bored, feckless Garda stuck in an Irish backwater in the dark comedy The Guard, The rural quiet is disturbed when some drug traffickers reconnoiter the area for a large delivery of product and the FBI send Don Cheadle to assist in their capture. Gleeson dominates the film with some brilliant one liners and his hilarious Churchill dog face but with Cheadle, Mark Strong and Liam Cunningham providing solid support and a surprising poignancy mixed through the script it's a thoroughly enjoyable romp.

Gleeson and Cunningham reunite in supporting roles in the Denzel/Reynolds spy thriller Safe House. A bored 'housekeeper' has his tedium shattered when a high value, treasonous agent is brought in for interrogation followed by a hit squad that'll do anything to stop him coughing up his info, the pair escap and a series of noisy flashy action sequences and stagey battle of wits ensue. Denzel phones in one of his competent but lackadaisical performances while Ryan tries too hard to convince as a cross eyed tough man and the script, plot and action are straight from Hollywood's factory floor - hardly worth bothering with.

Soggy Whitebread

Guy Ritchie returns with another dose of Holmesian antics starring Jude Law & Downey Jnr in the meh-some Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows. I guess the success of the first film emboldened Ritchie as he really let rips with his trademark guffing about, with a bullet time bonanza, not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-it-is dialogue and lumbering attempts at humour which results in him squeezing out an unabashed action film, largely devoid of intelligence and with a central character that bears little resemblance to Doyle's cerebral sleuth. The two leads are still as ill suited and uneasy in their respective roles as before but, thankfully, their ineptitude is somewhat offset by more admirable performances from Rapace and Harris. It's reasonable multiplex fodder I suppose but insubstantial and entirely forgettable.

Equally as half witted is Man on a Ledge, an almost 80's-dumb thriller about a revenge heist perpetrated by a on the run convict. Sam Worthington mumbles and looks confused throughout his balancing act and as the plot unfurls into mediocrity it drags in Ed Harris and Jamie Bell to the uninspired shenanigans. There's little tension and with a humdrum script that spoon feeds the plot out it's pretty much the epitome of mangled, soul less factory product being churned out in Hollywood these days. Out of the two, and it pains me to say this, I'd recommend Ritchie's film as at least it has some gloss.

Conventional Boxes

Trapped in a bunker after a nuclear strike, a bunch of NYC residents find it hard to maintain their sanity in The Divide, directed by Xavier Gens. Michael Biehn initially leads the survivors as they come to terms with what's happened but as the days pass tensions erupt and the safety they sought evaporates. The acting is not bad and it's got a suitably grim atmosphere with some nice patches of dread here and there but it's way too predictable and as the events unfold it swiflty limps into pretty typical B-movie fare.

Stephen Dorff plays a secret agent, kidnapped, locked in a trunk and tortured for the President's location in the preposterous Brake. Presumably some bigwig greenlit this project after the success of Buried as they're essentially the same film, man in a box for 90 mins with slightly different accoutrement, in this case Dorff gets a CB radio, torch & telephone to play with and I suppose his performance is reasonable but it's so ridiculous I found it distracting and like Divide suffers from a distinct lack of imagination. If you're looking for some fairly brainless entertainment I'd go with The Divide if I were you.