Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984) DVD Review

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“You only get peace when you can impose it.” Lamberto Bava, son of the iconic Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, never quite achieved the creative heights of his father's catalogue of cinematic treats (Mario kick started the entire giallo movement with The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1963), but he has nonetheless carved out a recognised and beloved niche in Italian genre cinema. Macabre, Body Puzzle, A Blade in the Dark, Delirium, and particularly Demons, will all be familiar to aficionados of European exploitation movies, but whereas Demons dispensed with characterisation and any shred of plot logic in favour of scatter gun gore, Lamberto's 1984 action thriller Blastfighter crafts a character-rich story which dispenses frequent action while still keeping the viewer emotionally invested...

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Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Bo A. Vibenius, 1973) DVD Review

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“You better start praying, One Eye.” Perhaps better known under the title They Call Her One Eye, Bo A. Vibenius' stripped-back revenge thriller is an unusual sight to see come from Sweden, where serious art house cinema is more the norm. Mixing overt stylistic flourishes with hardcore sleaze, the tale of Frigga – a mute young woman recovering from a horrific ordeal in childhood – proves to be a tough but rewarding viewing experience, wrought from highly charged emotion and brutality...

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"Celebrityville" is OUT NOW!

MY NEW BOOK IS AVAILABLE NOW!!!

Kindle eBook, Paperback, and Kindle App editions can be bought worldwide via Amazon - click here for more information - also coming soon to Smashwords!

Murder, mayhem, revenge, and a painfully public celebrity divorce - "Celebrityville" is a crime thriller with a humorous bite - won't you help a buddy out and spread the word?

"Brother of Mine" (2013)

"Brother of Mine" is a short dramatic film in which Sean Connell ("Skinner") plays Thomas, a man seeking revenge in the long-running wake of a family tragedy.


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New short film coming soon...

Last week I shot a new short film with Sean ("Trapped", "Signing Off", "Skinner") and his brother Ben ("Trapped", "I Am Zombie Man 2") - editing is underway, and so here's a couple of preview screenshots.

The film will be posted up on my YouTube Channel as soon as it's done, which won't be too long.

Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1974)

Find more Shameless Screen Entertainment DVD reviews here. 

The following is the third of three reviews for the "Shameless Slasher Nasties Box Set" - it's a 3-disc DVD comprised of Killer Nun, Torso, and Night-Train Murders.

Like Killer Nun (included in this box set), Aldo Lado’s riff on Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) found its way onto the Department of Public Prosecutions list of 72 banned video nasties in the 1980s. However, similarly to Berruti’s film, Night Train Murders was later acquitted (33 titles in total were acquitted, leaving 39 that were ‘liable to deprave and corrupt’ anyone who viewed them).

 

While the trailer seems to suggest a lurid and fast-paced thriller, Lado’s ‘rape and revenge’ flick is in fact much more reliant on suspense and slow-build tension – and a script loaded with brutal social commentary. Furthermore, despite Lado claiming to have never seen Craven’s vicious Vietnam-weary The Last House on the Left (itself heavily inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1959 film The Virgin Spring), there are numerous similarities between the two films – two girls fall victim to a gang of thugs (one of whom is a junkie) only for them to in-turn fall victim to the upper middle class parents of one of the victims (one of whom is a Doctor). That said, the two films differ in two key ways – Craven’s documentary-like film is far more directly plotted, while Lado’s visually luxuriant film possesses far more twisted characters.

 

Opening amidst the heavily populated consumer haven of a German shopping district on Christmas Eve, Lado’s social criticism gets off to an early start – the safety of this scene getting interrupted when the two antagonists (“Blackie” and “Curly”) mug a boozy Santa Claus. They escape the police by hopping aboard a departing train – the same train that is carrying Margaret and her friend Lisa on their way to spend the holidays in Italy – and so a night of depravity is set in motion.

 

Amongst the passengers are a cross-section of 1970s European society – including happy families, students, Catholic priests cheating at chess, and a group of well-heeled adults discussing the very nature of morality, democracy, and if there is a middle-ground between liberalism and totalitarianism. Indeed it is within this last group that we meet one of the key antagonists – ‘The Lady on the Train’ – an upper middle class woman who hides her sexual perversions in her handbag and behind her veil. It is with this character that the social criticism of the script is most potent, unleashing her inner demons via a toilet-bound tryst with Blackie – in this way depravity is almost treated like a sexually transmitted disease that brings out the worst in her suppressed character. It’s quite literally a clash of the high society and the seething proletariat.

 

As the film progresses, the social commentary continues to come thick-and-fast as the tension slowly builds – seemingly happy marriages are shown to be on the rocks, and the very nature of temptation and shame are embodied brilliantly in the figure of a bourgeois voyeur. Indeed, the film really explodes once we’ve swapped trains and the central protagonists and antagonists find themselves secreted away in a booth with each other – and it is here that Ennio Morricone’s score (central to which is a chilling, stalking harmonica) creates an almost unbearable amount of anxiety as events take a dramatic and violent turn for the worse.

 

Cast in a sinister and seductive blue light, Gabor Pogany’s cinematography expertly melds vice, violence, and virgin innocence, while Alberto Gallitti’s exceptional editing fizzes with inspired cross-cutting and sound design that blends two distinct worlds into a distillation of the troubled underbelly of (at the time at least) modern European life. While The Last House on the Left focussed more on up-front violence, Night Train Murders instead opts for chillingly lifting the veil on the potential moral squalor inside any one of us – and it is precisely this kind of rich thematic texturing that proves Lado’s film to be an extremely rewarding entry in the ‘rape and revenge’ sub-genre.

Shameless Screen Entertainment do themselves proud with a clean and crisp transfer, and a nice audio presentation that preserves all of the Godfather-like use of clattering train wheels on the soundtrack; trailers round out the package. The 3-disc 'Shameless Slasher Nasties Box Set' also comes with an essay insert from noted film writer Kim Newman (providing brief but informative context), and the set itself comes with impressive cover art that mimics a rental videotape (complete with "Be Kind and Rewind" sticker).

Pentuple Bill Mini Musings: Nerds, Dates, and the Summer of '73...

Revenge of the Nerds II, III and IV:
In "Nerds In Paradise" the gang are back (although not so much from Gilbert as Anthony Edwards is the does a 'one day of filming' appearance) and they're off to Florida to represent Lambda Lambda Lambda at a gathering of various fraternities. Cue the Alpha Betas seeking revenge for being booted off the Greek Council at the end of the first movie and silliness ensues. The comedy in this series never came thick & fast ... it didn't have the machine gun yuks of Airplane, and it wasn't in the era of gross-out gags of which American Pie is the most representative. Basically - Nerds in Florida, Alpha Beta's seek revenge, wins & losses occur, the Nerds win.

"The Next Generation" sees a fresh batch of geeks arrive at Adams College (from the first movie), which is now run by the nerds, but an old Alpha Beta alumni isn't happy, so he recruits Ted McGinley from the first movie and makes him Dean in order to cause trouble for all Nerd kind. Wins and losses occur, Louis has to rediscover his identity, and the Nerds win ... although part of the final act was missing for some strange reason after the DVR decided to skip 5 minutes.

"Nerds In Love" finds Booger getting married to the chick from that episode of Friends where Joey couldn't have sex, so he was repeatedly "there for her" (due to a paid fertility study). Hot chicks seem to have entirely come around to the idea that "once you go Nerd, you never go back", so the geeks are fighting off the ladies with sticks. A baby is on the way, a soon-to-be-father-in-law and his son-in-law attempt to sabotage the wedding for the sake of the 'blue blood' family tree, wins & losses occur - Nerds conquer, and everybody lives happily ever after.

At least the second had some of the edge of the first, because unfortunately the third and fourth were PG-rated TV-Movies.


Date Night:
Steve Carrell and Tina Fey are a "boring married couple from New Jersey", and somehow they find themselves chased by the mob in the Big Apple. Silliness ensues, with a few good gags and a likableness from the two leads. Comedy cannon fodder for a brain-off night.


Cemetery Junction:
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's coming-of-age comedy drama is a skilled balance of romanticism and realism set during the summer of 1973 in Reading, a place the 'Swinging Sixties' seemingly passed-by. Filled with well-observed slices of period history (e.g. social attitudes to sex, race and class), it's well worth having a look at. Thoughtful, enjoyable, but also real, the characters are grounded and satisfyingly complex and the plot moves with a considered and controlled sense of pace. Definitely worthwhile seeing.

Pentuple Bill Mini Musings: August 2010...

Westworld:
I'd only seen this once before - when I was about 12 - and while it has aged, horribly so at times, it's still an interesting concept. I couldn't help but think as I watched it "I wonder what a modern day remake of this would be like" as there's a lot of ideas that could be wrestled with in an even more in depth manner, with modern techniques, that are somewhat skimmed over or technically limited in the original movie.

The third act is a bit weak, it doesn't strive to fully investigate the subject matter, and it hasn't aged spectacularly well, but I still dig it for what it's worth. However, an intelligent remake that delivered heavily on the ideas as much as technically impressive action, would be something worthwhile. I guess we'll possibly find out in 2012.

Good Will Hunting:
It's another one of those movies where you don't see it until years later (13 years later in this instance), but you're all-too-aware of the numerous parodies and famous lines ("How do you like them apples?"). It was on TV the other day and I figured why not? The script is impressively researched, the 'Boston feel' is convincing, and the characters are interesting and complex ... no wonder it got so much praise.

Final Destination 3:
The first movie was quite good and memorable to boot, even if it did come out in the wake of Scream when horror had become a bit of a smart arse instead of a convincing genre. The second movie upped the ante on deliciously intricate death sequences, and that's really what the whole series is about. However in 2006 when 'Final Destination ... on a roller coaster' presented itself I wasn't interested, but four years later here we are. The deaths aren't intricate or as inventive as the previous movies, and the ending makes you wonder "was there any point in bothering?" but it has some moments.

The fourth movie is on Sky Movies soon so I'll check that out, but I'm not holding out much hope for the franchise now, especially with the abysmal titling of the fifth movie - "5inal Destination" ... so, what, "Five-in-al Destination"? Hmmm...

Revenge of the Nerds:
Old school 80s comedy - with Ted McGinley (who I know from Married With Children) and James Cromwell in it no less. Relatively tame and slow paced by today's standards, and not especially 'jam-packed' with ideas, it does speak of its time and no doubt if I was of the right age when it was new I would have absolutely loved it, but I'm just a bit too young to really see the attraction in this movie - not that I particularly disliked it, I was just a decade late to the party.

Still, I now 'get' the references to it in shows such as Family Guy and Robot Chicken.

Colin:
Much has been made of this being "the £45 zombie film" ... perhaps, but with an awful lot of favours, people, contacts and free work thrown into the mix. It could do with being about 20 minutes shorter and a little more focused and organised in its plotting, but overall I was quite impressed by it.

The film is, it has to be said, let down by the visual presentation - but then again that was part of the charm of it that so enraptured the slow-to-pay-attention mainstream media - but its real strength comes in numerous scenes that are well observed and/or pack an emotional punch. There is a subtlety to the film in the way big emotional situations are played out with little-or-no dialogue and instead with merely looks, careful framing, and an eye for explosive detail - the little visual cues that convey an essay's worth in a moment.

Certain sequences go on too long (such as a battle in a house with a hoard of the undead, and the dangers of someone's cellar), and the camerawork can be annoyingly shaky and dark at times ... but for every niggle or slight downside, there's a fantastic little idea thrown into the mix.

Working well with its low budget station, the zombie apocalypse playing out frequently as nothing but gunshots in the distance and a few newspaper headlines is a great way to sell a lot with very little. The film's full of these things and that makes it stand out. It's a great indie zombie flick, which really takes the subject matter seriously and deals with it in a mostly subtle manner - and what's more, on a few occasions it successfully struck an emotional wallop.

In a way it's a shame that so much attention has been given to the "£45" angle - although I can fully understand it, and condone it, as a marketing and attention-acquiring gimmick - but it does hide the real quality going on beneath the very low budget outer shell. It'll be interesting and exciting, to say the least, to see what the Director can do with a bit of money at his disposal.