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Reviews
The Battery (2012)
Just when you thought you couldn't take yet another low-budget zombie movie, here's one that is actually worth seeing.
The thought of yet another low-budget zombie movie filled me with dread, but I was hearing good word of mouth about Jeremy Gardner's $6000 zombie pic THE BATTERY, so I gave it a whirl at Amsterdam's Imagine film festival. And am very glad I did, as it turned out to be probably my favourite film of the all the ones I saw there.
It's a (nearly) 2-hander about two guys crossing rural New England and, very occasionally, fighting off zombies. The title is a baseball term referring to the partnership between the pitcher and the catcher. Or something - forgive if if I've got that wrong; I don't know much about baseball, but it doesn't matter anyway.
And that's pretty much all you need to know about the plot.
Like the best zombie films, it's more about the living than the dead. This is a double-pronged character/relationship study (which thankfully never degenerates into the bad soap of The Walking Dead) rather than an action movie and there isn't an awful lot of gore, so younger viewers with ADD might get fidgety. But anyone who enjoys a well-crafted screenplay and nicely-drawn characters will have a blast. The climax, which makes a virtue out of the film's low budget, is particularly ingenious.
There are no wobblicam, jitterbug editing, CCTV, found footage, flashy camera effects or modish colour grading. Just a brace of good performances against a backdrop of leafy green countryside in broad daylight, beautifully edited & classically filmed so that (and this is a novelty these days) you can actually SEE what's going on.
Also has an excellent soundtrack.
Jûsan-nin no shikaku (1963)
A very good samurai movie
A provincial lord kills and rapes with impunity, but no-one can touch him because he's the Shogun's younger brother. After one of the wronged parties publicly commits hara-kiri, a minister decides enough is enough and, though his hands are officially tied, drops big hints to a trusted samurai before telling him the Japanese equivalent of 'this conversation never took place'.
The samurai gathers eleven others (the twelfth will join them later), tells them it's a suicide mission (naturally they're all up for it) and they hatch a plan to ambush the evil lord on the long journey from Edo (the ancient name for Tokyo) to his home province. But the would-be assassins are outnumbered four to one by the lord's crack team of bodyguards, whose leader is a resourceful man...
This is the first of Eiichi Kudo's films I've seen, and now I can't wait to watch the others. Like Masaki Kobayashi's Hara-Kiri and Rebellion, it's in fabulous widescreen black and white. The sprawling cast of characters is a little confusing at first, but gradually some of the individual samurai begin to stand out from the crowd - the cool swordsman, the cynical wastrel, the joker with gambling debts.
There aren't really any memorable duels like the one in Hara-Kiri, but the final battle is terrific. The samurai take over a village, convert it into one big labyrinthine mousetrap, and close off alternative routes to ensure their target and his men will end up there. It's a superbly choreographed and sustained set-piece, and unbelievably tense. There are several similarities with The Seven Samurai; Kudo provides us in advance with a map of the area in which the showdown will take place, and ensures the two sides can be easily distinguished from one another by the hue of their costumes, so even though the action is chaotic, we don't get lost.
Highly recommended for fans of The Seven Samurai and Jidaigeki in general. If you can read French subtitles, it's available on a beautifully restored Region 2 DVD in a boxed set from the French company Wild Side. If British or American DVD distributors have any sense, they'll get it subtitled into English as well.