Quick, quick, gotta get it in before Monday’s over!

(February 20)

——The Seventh Victim (1943)——

This was my last title in the Val Lewton horror collection and a very good one, abet with a very strange story. A girl at a boarding school finds out that her sister has stopped paying for her schooling and in fact has gone missing. The girl goes to New York in order to find her, and the first part of the film plays as a nice solid mystery of the missing sister. When we finally do meet the sister though, well, that’s when things get weird. The sister has a fascination with killing herself. She’s joined a creepy Satanic cult, which now wants her dead for being unstable. Her husband hides these details from her sister and her psychiatrist hides her from both of them. The ending is both stunning and original.

What I most liked about the film though was the excellent use of noir-ish lighting. Shadows are used quite effectively to build tension and create suspense, but more than that the compositions have been created quite painterly. Several shots, like the one of a noose, the one of the sister trapped by the Satanists in a chair, or of the Satanists sitting in a circle just acting creepy, are amazingly well put together for a B-movie of this type. Val Lewton does it again, folks.

(MUST SEE)

(February 21)

——The Memory of a Killer (2003)——

This film reminded me a lot of another similar foreign crime film that got a lot of attention for how radical people thought it twisted the genre, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002). Mainly it reminded me of that film because, while they are both very good films, both were never quite as amazing to me as everyone else made them out to sound. Don’t get me wrong, The Memory of a Killer is a very good, very well made crime film. It just didn’t blow my mind like it apparently did some other people.

This Dutch film is about an aging hitman who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He is contracted to kill two people, one a corporate hit, the other a teenage girl. Our hitman refuses to kill kids though, and when he lets them know that he won’t do it they try to take him out. Like you’ve probably already figured out, they don’t complete their job and he goes on offensive against them, digging up their dirty secrets and wiping out the bad guys.

If that were the movie I probably would be raving about this one by now. The one misstep I thought was in adding the parallel cat and mouse game with a cop obsessed with the girl and finding the truth to his case. While in his story there are some pretty good scenes of comic relief, most of it seems silly and tears us away from what we really want to see, our killer of the title of the film. It was with his portion of the film that I thought the film lost any of the originality that it had. I like my noir grittier than that. While it doesn’t by any means ruin the movie, it keeps it from being great. Still, a good movie worth seeing.

(SEE)

——Class of 1984 (1982)——

The first two thirds of this film are essentially a punk 80’s remake of Blackboard Jungle (1955). After that though, the film turns much more violent and much less optimistic. That last act of the film is essentially a very violent (and very fulfilling) revenge opus. Anyone into that sort of thing or 80’s horror should probably check this out.

For those not familiar with the plot of Blackboard Jungle, Class of 1984 is about a music teacher who gets his first teaching job at a big inner city school. Punks, drugs, and violence have taken over. The movie was unfortunately very prophetic of how things were to become. In 1982 it was apparently very shocking for the students to go through a metal detector in order to get into the school. Anyway, some of the students are actually there to learn, but they are subverted in their goals by the punks who run the school, the main one actually being quite proficient at the piano but unwilling to go along with any school sponsored activity. The new teacher calls out the leader of the punks but gets nothing but trouble because of it. They start harassing him to such an extreme that it finally leads to the revenge fueled orgy of violence I mentioned earlier.

The film has a lot of very memorable images in it, but probably the most striking involves Roddy McDowall as the Science teacher who can’t get through to his students and befriends the new music teacher. He’s seen at the start of the film carrying a gun into school to protect himself from the students, and bemoans the fact that he can’t seem to get a single student interested in learning. After the punks skin and mutilate all of his lab animals to get back at him for stopping them from beating another student he pulls out his gun in class and forces the students to learn at gunpoint. The scene is extremely startling, both in how excited he gets when students correctly answer questions they were asked with a gun to their head, and for the look of pure fear in the students’ eyes. The movie asks a lot of scary questions, and at the same time is an extremely entertaining revenge film to boot.

(MUST SEE)

(February 22)

——Dune (1984)——

I’m a fan of Dune and more than that, a fan of David Lynch’s. And while this film has a whole lot of potential, that doesn’t stop Dune from being a whole lot of crap. I love the art direction in this film. I love a lot of the ideas. But man, does this movie suck. That stems mostly I think from the writing. Oh boy, does the voice-over in this movie suck. Lame, lame, lame! Only the most fanatic science fiction and David Lynch fans should even think about watching this. [Note: This is a review of the theatrical version of the film.]

(AVOID)

——Room Service (1938)——

Oh those Marx brothers. How can you not love them? This is kind of an interesting departure for them, as it gets rid of a lot of the tropes that their films had become famous for. Gone is that part of the movie where Harpo plays the harp and Chico plays at the piano, gone also is Groucho’s constant mugging for the camera, Chico’s struggles with English and Harpo’s mime sight gags. This film finally gets rid of a lot of the conventions that had followed them from their vaudeville days. For the most part I liked that this was more of a straight comedy narrative, but things definitely felt like they were missing. I really enjoyed this movie but it doesn’t come close in my mind to some of the comic genius that was a part of their earlier films together. You have a feeling that the studios might be taming their chaotic madcap energy. That said, the movie is still wicked funny, and a worthy addition to their film library. I’m curious to see where the films go after this one.

(SEE)

——Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)——

This was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. For some reason I remember not hearing the greatest things about it when it first came out, and then I quickly forgot about it, probably because it came out well before I became seriously interested in film. Francis Ford Coppola made one hell of a wild ride though with this film, the best part of which being the amazing cinematography. This film is just amazingly shot. I’d love to see this on the big screen just to see all the detail and color the way it was meant to be seen.

This version of the film for the most part closely follows the plot of the book before going much more dramatic in the final act. What I found really interesting about the film though was that this was really the first Dracula film I’ve seen where it was as much a love story as a horror film. Winona Ryder as Mina seems much more romantically interested in the more exciting and sexual Count Dracula (Gary Oldman, doing what he does best) than she does with her fiancee played by Keanu Reeves (yeah, we don’t blame her). As Doctor Van Helsing we have Anthony Hopkins, acting it up like this is the greatest film roll he’s ever received. What a delight it is to see him talking about decapitating and stabbing through the heart the women the men love. What a sick fuck he is, you say.

While non-fans of the genre might not get an equal kick out of this as, say, I do, I think it is still probably worth most people’s effort to check this out. This is probably one of the best vampire movies I can think of, and definitely the finest made one.

(SEE)

——Holiday (1938)——

Even though this is part of the brand new Cary Grant Box Set, this is really more of a vehicle for the always delightful Katharine Hepburn. Watch this one with Bringing Up Baby (also 1938) and enjoy a fantastic double header showcasing one of the greatest romantic/comic duos in screen history.

Holiday is about Cary Grant’s character meeting a girl and falling in love, only to find out that he might not have fully realized what kind of girl he got himself in with. See, he’s been working ever since he was a small child and has come to the realization that there is more to life than just making money. While he’s still young he wants to take an extended holiday and figure out life for himself, at which point he’ll go back to working for what he wants to work for. On one such holiday at Lake Placid he meets a girl, falls in love, and they get engaged. He goes to meet the family, only to learn that he has a lot more to learn about his fiancee. For one, she just happens to be part of one of the richest families in America.

In meeting the family he meets her alcoholic brother, beaten down by his father’s need to have him continue in the family business and her sister, played by Hepburn, an artistic dreamer stifled by her family’s money. She just wants to enjoy life. And surprise, surprise, she and Cary Grant (who does quite a few great rolls and tumbles I didn’t know he had in him) hit it right off. Hepburn thinks Grant is a great edition to the family and does everything she can to make things work between him and her sister, even though as the story goes on it becomes painfully obvious to everyone involved that they should be together instead of her sister. I’ll leave the rest of the good stuff to you, and I’ll tell you that this film is a delight well worth it.

(MUST SEE)

(February 23)

——Sabrina (1954)——

Is there a more beautiful or elegant creature than Audrey Hepburn? You’d be hard pressed to find any actress in Hollywood more glamorous in my mind, with the possible exception of Grace Kelly, especially after watching this film. And hey, you can’t really go wrong with a Billy Wilder movie that just also happens to costar William Holden and Humphrey Bogart.

Sabrina is about a skinny girl who grows up living at the estate of a rich family her father chauffeurs for. Her entire life she is in love with the younger of two brothers, a womanizing slacker playboy played by Holden, who also happens to completely ignore her until she comes back from a cooking school in Paris looking all Hepburn-esq glamorous. She uses her new ugly duckling that was never ugly turned swan status to create the picture book romance with him that she’s always wished for. One problem though: he just happens to be engaged to a woman that will bring about a huge corporate merger that his workaholic brother (played by Bogart) set up to start a new plastics company. Bogart works on getting her away from his brother and close to him so that he can ship her off back to Paris and out of the picture. Of course, love stories have a funny way of going away from plan…

This doesn’t really stand up with Wilder’s best films, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t a delight to watch. Hey, if I’m recommending a romantic comedy, then you know it can’t be bad.

(SEE)

(February 24)

——The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)——

This has been deemed by many to be one of the true film classics, and this new two disk DVD from Warner Brothers really proves why that is deservedly so. I haven’t watched any of the second disk yet (that’ll probably come some rainy day in the future) but I do have many wonderful things to say about the transfer of the film itself. It looks amazing! You seriously never expect a color film from the Thirties to look this good, but damned if they didn’t take that Technicolor process and squeeze every bit of color and detail out of it for one of the best damn digital transfers of an old movie that I’ve ever seen.

But on to the movie itself. This is an action/adventure movie for a time before irony became so prevalent in modern art. The good guys are good, the bad guys bad, the two lovers are meant to be together, yadda yadda yadda. Some parts can seem a little dated at times (although they are never actually called the “Merry Men” that’s definitely what they are, as everything other than a major action sequence warrants lots of gut busting laughter from them.) The plot isn’t really deep at all. The characters don’t have particularly deep motivations for what they do. But the whole thing is loads of fun anyways, just because. I read that they pretty much invented the modern action movie sword fight with this movie when the stunt coordinator decided that they shouldn’t fence on screen, but that it should look more like they were physically fighting. Errol Flynn just throws himself into the action sequences with quite some flair. He seems to be having a ball, just like Robin. That’s what’s really fun about this movie, that everyone seems to be having a great time. This is one of those big Hollywood movies that just works right. You don’t try to make sense of it or find deeper meaning in it. You just sit right back and enjoy the ride.

(MUST SEE)