ian-433 Reviews

Alien (1979)

Uniquely alien

[9/10 · 23 June 2010]

An austere, despairing vision that far from finding any wonder or beauty in space instead dares to find a universe of limitless horror. 'Alien' remains the ultimate fusion of the horror and sci-fi genres.

Its underlying fascination lies in its keynote title. No film has ever imagined anything as uniquly, unsettlingly 'alien' as this. Not just the monster itself - a parasitical predator that has fine-tuned Darwinian adaption to the ultimate in survival - but also the derelict spaceship which harbours the egg from which it springs, after waiting millennia in gestation. No one has ever bettered designer HR Giger's concept of complete non-human otherness.

This was only Ridley Scott's second feature. His highly acute visual style (developed after years as a leading director of UK commercials) brilliantly establishes mood. His direction of drama is detached, almost eavesdropped in snippets, not allowing the audience to get too close to the protagonists. It's an approach that keeps the narrative single-mindedly on track.

And the tone is relentlessly bleak. The Nostromo's crew inhabit a dehumanised industrial complex of a spacecraft with few concessions to comfort. Among them there seems to be little more than indifferent companionship. The planet they visit is a hellish world of ferocious storms, smothering vapour and barren terrain. Jerry Goldsmith's music is correspondingly sparse, almost grudging in conceding any high notes.

Everyone remembers John Hurt's famous stomach-churning demise. But perhaps the most telling shot in the film is the one of Jones, the ship's cat, peeking out from behind a corner as the Alien devours a victim, feline eyes glinting in wary fascination at a primal scene it can empathise more instinctively than its hapless companions...

The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

"Something of your own perhaps, Karl..."

[7/10 · 12 January 2010]

Modest Hammer potboiler with all the studio's virtues intact: good acting, economical direction, neat photography, an unpretentious script and tight pacing. Edward de Souza and Jacqueline Daniel are the English honeymoon couple menaced by a chateauful of vampires led by Noel Wilman. Clifford Evans does a forceful job as the grizzled Van Helsing figure; it's just a pity they didn't develop his character a bit more. Befanged Transylvanian minxes Jacqueline Wallis and Isobel Black add to the sex quotient. Director Don Sharp gets right down to business from a splendid opening sequence set in that oh so familiar graveyard at Bray Studios. The trusty forest location at Black Park - another familiar day's outing for the Hammer crew - is well used, too. If only the bats at the climax looked a bit more real. Not a full-blooded Hammer classic, but quite perfect in its own minor key.

The Shining (1980)

More an opaque gleam in Kubrick's eye

[7/10 · 9 November 2009]

Jack Nicholson, Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick sounded a teaming to die for when announced in 1979. But King's straightforward horror premise has had to bear the burden of Kubrick's portentous cinematic self-importance.

Still, he builds up the atmosphere pretty well at the beginning with those majestic helicopter shots of the Rockies, and of the lonely hotel beset by winter silence, given even more eerie dissonant resonance by Bela Bartok's music.

The technical mastery, always Kubrick's forte, is there indoors, too. The immaculate camera-work (by John Alcott, who lensed 'Barry Lyndon'), with its severely symmetrical compositions and long flawless tracking shots, sets up the scenes superbly, especially when Nicholson meets or imagines the satanic bar-tender Lloyd.

The problem is that as the story progresses it becomes worryingly clear that Kubrick has no firm idea of how to direct a horror film. When it comes to actually delivering the shock moments, all he can manage is a quick melodramatic zoom-in to try and startle up scenes that just fail to exude the frisson intended (the first appearance of the twin girls, the word 'Redrum' on the mirror, the ghostly guest who says "Great party!", or the clunking flashback images of the butchered twins). And was anyone sitting in the director's chair when Nicolson indulged his ludicrous, eye-rolling "Little pigs, little pigs" moment?

Like virtually all of Kubrick films it's undeniably watchable. It's his most commercially successful film and, after shaky reviews, has gained a reputation as a genre milestone. Except it's really just an elaborate dead-end.

The Haunted Palace (1963)

Dry ice and shadows in Corman country

[7/10 · 26 February 2007]

The darkest of Roger Corman's Poe chillers, though this yarn owes more to HP Lovecraft than Edgar Allan's poetry. Vincent Price gives his all time greatest performance in a dual role as possessed and possessor, aided by a wonderfully literate script by Charles Beaumont. It gives Price no leeway to indulge his tendency to sometimes ham it up.

Here, he keeps tight dramatic restraint on himself, making his gradual transformation from kindly innocent to the reincarnation of his warlock ancestor a virtuoso portrayal of inner turmoil overwhelmed by fiendish evil. Corman even provides a last good role for Lon Chaney Jr (as he'd done previously for Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone) as a ghoulish henchman.

Undeniably, 'The Haunted Palace' does have a rather ponderous pace and music score that makes the film seem stretched as Price wanders down just one more hidden corridor. Floyd Crosby's widescreen cinematography is also unrelenting, capturing the drab, muted blue and brown pastels of a Puritan village plagued by witchcraft. And the barely glimpsed green demon lurking inside the vault was perhaps a mistake.

But Corman's skill on a 15-day schedule and a cheap budget is evident throughout. He introduces Chaney in a splendidly done sudden shock appearance that will still make unwary audiences jump (asked why he is preparing a room in the dark, he tells Price, "One becomes accustomed to the darkness... here").

True Corman fans will rank this chilling piece of American Gothic among his best. Not least where an exasperated Chaney asks the possessed Price when he will be satisfied avenging himself on the descendants of those who burned him at the stake. "Not until this village is a graveyard," Price promises Chaney sibilantly. "Not until they too have felt the kiss of fire on their soft flesh... all of them."

The Living Daylights (1987)

Worse than bad, dull

[4/10 · 16 January 2007]

Timothy Dalton's debut as a more introspective James Bond is the only striking thing about this 14th 007 entry. It opens promisingly pre-credits but plumbs depths of banality thereafter. It's not even shoddy film-making, it's just bafflingly dull and uninteresting.

Dalton, a surprise but inspired choice, hasn't quite got the presence of Connery or Moore, but he hints at an intensity that might have developed into something closer to Ian Fleming's original conception.

But he gets little help from behind the camera. The plot, an unintriguing yawn about arms-smuggling, would have seemed out of date in a TV episode of 'The Saint' 20 years previously. Worse, both main villains are vague, buffoonish characters that exude no menace whatsoever.

John Glenn's direction is characteristically nerveless. An ex-editor, he handles the thrills moderately efficiently but seems indifferent to the rest of the story. A tired, desultory music score by John Barry, once a mainstay of the series, further slows down the action. And it's a poor Bond pic that can't come up with even one set of any interest! In fact, why do men's toilets feature even once in a Bond film, never mind twice?

Likewise, Alec Mills' photography can't find any real visual interest in Gibraltar, Tangier or Morocco. In the early Bonds, Ted Moore could establish the drama and exoticness of a location in just a couple of shots. Mills lends nothing in the way of mood apart from a parting shot of ice-covered mountains in the twilight, as Dalton and heroine D'Abo flee the KGB.

If it wasn't for Dalton's debut you'd wonder why they bothered. These daylights are barely alive.

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Corman saves his best shot for last

[8/10 · 25 April 2006]

Last of Roger Corman's eight low-budget Edgar Allan Poe chillers and his most accomplished production. Like 'The Masque of the Red Death', Corman filmed this in England, and for once was able to shoot on location. He (and Hammer DP Arthur Grant) make immaculate use of Castle Acre priory and the surrounding Norfolk countryside.

The literate script, by a young Robert Towne, provides an intricate re-working of Poe's story and stars Vincent Price and Elizabeth Shepherd give excellent performances.

A handful of sequences – Shepherd chasing a black cat up a precipitous bell-tower, the sombre landscapes of the honeymoon, Price hypnotising her as an after-dinner diversion that goes frighteningly wrong - show Corman's by now confident mastery of the genre. He is less interested in sudden shock and even the music is more restrained. Horror critic Carlos Clarens, though, thought it "polished the usual Corman vigour to a glaze" and the over-stretched finale is undeniably flat.

If it remains Corman's best work, it's also a disappointing reminder of the directorial promise he failed to fulfil (a projected 1965 version of Poe's 'The Gold Bug' was never made). Still, 'Tomb of Ligeia' renders with remarkable precision a wistful mood of dappled sunlit ruins,fluttering candles and hidden curses that defines English Gothic romance.

Live and Let Die (1973)

Lean, mean, but lacklustre

[6/10 · 31 October 2005]

Roger Moore's debut as 007 was a bit wan but, in retrospect, probably his best outing. He looked pretty lean and mean for a 45 year-old. For a British audience, Moore (The Saint, The Persuaders) was the natural successor to Sean Connery.

Director Guy Hamilton makes this an expertly staged but somehow lacklustre affair. While the background voodoo theme is suitably bizarre, the main McGuffin about drugs smuggling is rather under-whelming for a Bond movie. Yaphet Kotto is a potentially strong baddie but has too little to do amid the familiar carnage and boat chases. And the introduction of the series' first out-rightly comic character in Sheriff JW Pepper presaged the self-defeating lapse into self-spoofing the films would increasingly take.

Nor does a heavy-handed score by Beatles producer George Martin help. Unlike regular Bond composer John Barry's music, Martin's is ponderous, overlaid onto the action rather than organic to it.

Still, Paul McCartney's blistering title-song really jolts Bond into the 70s. And Live and Let Die does have one of the best jokes in the entire series, in the opening sequence when a CIA agent, watching a New Orleans jazz funeral, innocently asks a nondescript fellow bystander: "Who's funeral is it…?"

The Premature Burial (1962)

Midnight in the garden of good and evil

[7/10 · 12 October 2005]

Intensely gloomy it may be, but an impressive example how a determined cinematic stylist can make a real virtue of a low budget. This was the third of director Roger Corman's AIP chillers based on Poe stories, and the only one not to star Vincent Price. Here, Ray Milland is the protagonist whose family history of catalepsy makes him fear burial alive.

Entirely shot on the sound stage, Corman and his regular art director Danial Haller have created a wonderfully expressionist garden of gnarled trees and shrubs wreathed with dry ice. Even the interior of Milland's mansion seems like a grave, notably in the scene where Hazel Court and Richard Bull take tea in a drawing room with wood-panelled walls, dark green wallpaper, with the dead tree pressing oppressively against the windows.

A number of other directorial touches make even this relatively minor Corman effort a winner. Court's shadow passing phantom-like over the sleeping Milland. The sudden shock moments when the sinister gravediggers Sweeny and Moe appear. And the blue-suffused dream-sequence in which Milland hallucinates the fate he fears most is quite masterfully shot, cut and scored (Ronald Stein).

A dark, dank little gem.

The Raven (1963)

Once upon a midnight dreary...

[5/10 · 6 June 2005]

Roger Corman's spoof of Roger Corman horror films remains one of the more amusing parodies of the horror genre (a hard thing to bring off well). Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff bring magic to their roles as a trio of rival sorcerers in Plantagenet England. Also in the cast, Hazel Court pouts peachily, while a wooden young Jack Nicholson seems to be doing a bad impression of Stan Laurel.

Unsentimental and quite vicious when it wants to be, it's as gorgeously coloured and styled as you'd expect. But Corman's other Poe-inspired chillers for American International were more tightly plotted. Here, Richard Matheson's storyline is formless, especially the first half. It's only when Corman startlingly cuts to Karloff's entrance on top of his slimy green castle's staircase that it takes some sort of shape.

The final duel of magic is worth waiting for. Price and Karloff, face to face on ornamental thrones, transmute the elements against each other before culminating in a crossfire of emerald and sapphire-hued rays that emanate from their fingertips.

Likable (with Lorre especially irresistible as the incorrigible Dr Bedlo), but that slack first half lets it down.

Dirty Harry (1971)

Something wild about Harry

[29 January 2005]

Don Siegel's highly polished .44 magnum-opus, with Clint Eastwood as the daddy (or should that be mutha?) of all maverick cops. Given an A-picture budget by Warners, Siegel delivered a tremendously taut thriller, as provocatively amoral as anything he had done in his 20-year career of expert B-pics like The Killers.

Dirty Harry also gave Eastwood a definitive Hollywood identity after leaving spaghetti westerns behind. It may lack the humour of Siegel and Eastwood's first collaboration, Coogan's Bluff, but it packs a much more uneasy political punch.

Inspector Harry Callaghan is the taciturn, laconic spokesman of Nixon's Silent Majority, elevated to iconic status. His dialogue with criminals is delivered behind the barrel of a devastatingly phallic Magnum hand-gun. "Feel lucky, punk?" he taunts one wounded miscreant in a famous line he repeats at the end of the film.

There's just enough moral ambiguity about Harry in this film to escape it being an endorsement of vigilantism – but if it poses resonating questions about how a liberal society can be held hostage by those outside the law, it also contrives a worryingly two-dimensional picture of psycho-killer Scorpio (Andy Robinson) - and of Harry, himself – with which to frame those questions.

Made by the veteran director in the same year as Hollywood-new wave young gun William Friedkin shot The French Connection, it's just as coolly authoritative and exciting. Siegel uses Bruce Surtees' always serviceable photography of San Francisco locations with flair (years before, he had shot the low-budget but excellent The Line-Up there). The swooping helicopter shot out of the baseball stadium, as if to rush the audience away (either as witnesses or as voyeurs) as Eastwood presses his foot on Scorpio's wounded leg, shows Siegel's smooth mastery of the medium.

Siegel made the insouciant Charley Varrick with Walter Matthau next, after which his career went into slow decline.

From Russia with Love (1963)

Not quite the best, but almost...

[9/10 · 16 January 2005]

It boasts so much élan that this second James Bond film should be the best… but somehow isn't quite. A tall, muscular Sean Connery is at his most dourly authoritative, Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya are heavyweight villains, Daniela Bianchi is a beautiful and vulnerable heroine, and the 'Hitchcockian' plot - based on Ian Fleming's best novel – is appropriately Byzantine.

Yet it's probably the most dated of the Bond series. With its Balkan intrigue, gypsy-girl fights and Orient Express setting this is the one Bond film that might have been made in the 50s – except its violence and sexual charge could only belong to the permissive 60s.

The vicious fight between Connery and Shaw in the cramped train compartment is a tour de force of editing (Peter Hunt) and still one of the best fight-sequences in the entire series (and in cinema). The first encounter between a near-naked Connery and Bianchi in Bond's hotel-room has a cool but electric daring, with a hint of kinkiness when we find Lenya filming them via a two-way mirror.

It's certainly director Terence Young's best film. Ted Moore's Technicolor photography is as anonymously superb as always, making almost every camera set-up count in establishing the Istanbul location. Look how creatively Young, Moore (and Hunt) use light and space in staging the rendezvous in the St Sophia mosque, for example.

John Barry took over as composer here and the music is so much more wittier, really making the action more three-dimensional, from the damp, sinister piano chords that warn of SPECTRE, to the mocking trumpet that underscores Shaw on the train stalking Connery on the station platform.

Unlike later Bonds, From Russia with Love is a real film; the makers aren't yet spoofing themselves. Even the small parts here – SPECTRE's reptilian planner Kronsteen, Bulgarian hit-man Crilencu, gypsy-chief Vavra - are played with real conviction.

Apart from 007's exploding attaché-case (the first of Q's gadgets), it's the only Connery-Bond to be uninterested in technology. Perhaps that's what stops it being the definitive one.

Never mind; the producers got the balance perfect in Goldfinger the following year.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Great fun from terrible science

[9 March 2004]

Reasonably imaginative telling of the Jules Verne tall tale. The initial period Edinburgh and Iceland locations are charmingly right. Twentieth-Century Fox splashed out on some rather spectacular sets and effects for the earth's interior - some really quite haunting, like the cavern that opens onto a forbidding subterranean sea. Pity the back-projected monsters look so tatty, even though they used real lizards. Worse, the model work in the finale is just needlessly dire.

Still James Mason is fine as always, though anyone would struggle with some of the lines he's given. Nor does the script let Thayer David quite plumb the depths enough [sic] as the dastardly villain. Pat Boone looks like be wandered in from a Brigadoon musical on the next soundstage, embarrassing everyone with his singing (and in a Hollywood-Scottish accent, to boot!) - in fact, why on earth did the producers want to insert a couple of songs into it anyway?

It's left to Bernard Herrman's music to lend the grim note missing in Henry Levin's cheerful direction, giving the proceedings just the ominous edge they need.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

`Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a giant hound.'

[19 February 2004]

The 1939 Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce production may be the definitive version, but Hammer's sole 1959 attempt at Sherlock Holmes remains the most atmospheric colour remake.

Peter Cushing and Andre Morrell make a more than passable Holmes and Watson double-act, and the rest of the cast are just right although Christopher Lee always seemed too stiff as a goodie.

Jack Asher's evocative photography is the real delight. No other version has captured so beautifully the muted greens, browns and golds of Dartmoor in England's myth-laden west country. What a shame that modern film stocks seem to have lost the softer warmth of Fifties Technicolor.

Hammer, as you might expect, played up the horror elements of the 'hound of hell' legend a bit too crudely. But David Oxley, as the Baskerville scion who brings about the curse, deserves his place in Hammer's gallery of depraved aristocrats. Accompanied by a crash of thunder in the prologue, director Terence Fisher captures him in long shot at the top of the stairs, possessed with fury as he tells his drunken fellow revellers that the servant girl they had intended to rape has fled. A hushed reaction shot of the others, before Fisher cuts back to a medium shot of Oxted. `I have her!' His face lights up with demonical inspiration. `We'll set the pack on her.!'

Maybe it does rather fall between two genres, but this hugely enjoyable Hammer yarn has left a footprint in each.

The Brides of Dracula (1960)

Terence Fisher serves up the High Gothic!

[7 January 2004]

Probably Hammer's best horror, even though it doesn't have Christopher Lee. But David Peel is equally formidable as an aristocratic young disciple, and Peter Cushing's Dr Van Helsing is still the scourge of vampirism in Victorian Europe.

It begins with a wonderfully spooky tracking shot over a misty woodland lake (actually Black Park next to Pinewood Studios) and ominous narration (`Transylvania, land of dark forests, dread mountains and black unfathomable lakes. Still a place of magic and devilry as the 19th century comes to a close.'). Hammer gothic depended heavily on photography for mood and Jack Asher lit their early horrors masterfully, but the always budget-conscious studio let him go as his often exquisite set ups took to long.

Pretty Parisian Marianne Daniel (Yvonne Monlaur), en route to her first teaching appointment in a Transylvanian finishing school, is lured into spending a night at the forbidding Chateau Meinster by its haughty Baroness. Explaining away the extra dinner place set by servant Greta, the Baroness says it is for her absent son, `feeble-minded' and locked away in another wing (`We pray for death, both of us. At least, I hope he prays.'). When naïve young Marianne lets Meinster out, Greta cackles in demented glee as a wolf howls into the night (`There's a wolf down there. And an owl. He'll get them all astir, trust him.').

It all comes together in Brides of Dracula. Script, characterisation and acting (Cushing, Peel, Martita Hunt as the Baroness, Freda Jackson as Greta all splendid; even the comic turns - the inimitable Miles Malleson as a sceptical country doctor and Henry Oscar as pompous schoolmaster Herr Lang - are just perfect).

And its horrors, as directed by Terence Fisher, are sudden and violent. Bitten by Meinster, Cushing purges the wound with a red-hot branding iron, doused by holy water. But perhaps the single most macabre moment Hammer has ever devised is the scene where Greta sits astride a new grave like a hellish midwife, urging Meinster's latest victim to rise out of her coffin.

Can Cushing save the village daughters from a fate worse than death? The stakes are high!