Track Of The Vampire(Jack Hill & Stephanie Rothman, 1966)

First off, I would personally like to thank the world’s movie reviewers, horror bloggers, authors of the various nerd-tastic reference works I like to consult etc., for keeping me in the dark for so long re: the unique qualities of this obscure AIP schedule-filler, thus allowing it to hit me as a real unexpected surprise. Thanks guys - I appreciate it! In some small way, it feels like Christmas when a film I’d never even heard of (well, maybe I read the title once or twice, or saw a poster somewhere..) turns out to be more weird and wonderful than I could ever have hoped.

I didn’t deliberately set out to watch “Track of the Vampire” - it’s the other movie on a double feature DVD I bought primarily to see Barbara Steele in “Nightmare Castle”. Reading the back of the box whilst sitting through the latter in a narcoleptic haze (it’s the only way to watch “Nightmare Castle”), I was intrigued to note that “Track..” is co-directed by two of American International’s most talented b-team directors, Jack Hill (Mr. Spider Baby himself) and Stephanie Rothman (who went on to introduce a welcome dose of feminism into American exploitation in the ‘70s via flicks like “The Student Nurses”). My interest thus piqued, the least I could do was shift this thing up my viewing schedule and check it the hell out. And I’m very glad I did.

To my surprise, “Track of the Vampire” begins not with one of AIP’s trademark animated credits sequences, but with a brilliantly atmospheric ‘town square at midnight’ scene-setter, reminiscent of the way Mario Bava utilised the creepy geometry of old Mediterranean architecture in flicks like “Kill Baby Kill” and “Lisa & The Devil”.



Those can’t be sets, surely…?

Less surprisingly, a monstrous, black-hatted fellow of some description has emerged from the shadows to prey upon a lone female! Fangs! Groping! Cripes, what horrors!



A pretty cool opening, no doubt, but the moment I knew I was REALLY going to love “Track of the Vampire” was when we cut straight to a bunch of beatniks, who are avidly watching what appears to be a severed eyeball attached to a metronome…



In what I assume is a cheeky homage to Corman’s classic “A Bucket of Blood”, our hep-cats begin earnestly discussing the nature of artistic expression, as Karl Schanzer (Schlocker out of “Spider Baby”) explains his new concept of ‘quantum painting’. I think it looks like a lotta fun, and the beatniks seem to agree!




Where the hell is this movie supposed to be set, you may be asking by this point. Europe? America? No my friends, nothing so crude. With a vagueness that borders on genius, “Track of the Vampire” seems to take place instead in ‘60s-HORROR-TOWN, a free-floating principality that those of us who watch too many of these movies may occasionally find ourselves visiting in dreams.

A place where imposing gothic edifices cast leery shadows across cobbled streets and waves crash hypnotically and unceasingly upon the eerily deserted beach, where beatniks beat their chops in cantinas, eccentric artists skulk in their converted crypt studios, and a seemingly endless supply of beautiful, dark-haired girls practice their roles in daring avant garde ballet productions.



Throughout this whole movie, I don’t think we meet so much as one ‘normal’ person – no squares, no policemen, no shopkeepers, no reporters – just the way out kids, occasional surly innkeepers and seekers after truth… and the guy with the fangs.


Damn, I love it here, I wish I could stay forever. It reminds me of happy times in my youth, staggering around seaside towns by night, pissed out of my brain, with the sobering sea air on my face and all of life stretching out ahead of me… (again, guy with fangs notwithstanding).

Anyway, another thrilling stalk n’ strangle sequence is up next, serving to perfectly illustrate the strange and pleasurable art/trash disjuncture that seems to be going on throughout “Track of the Vampire”…



Seriously - one moment we could be looking at brooding, expressionistic framing straight out of a Murnau or Fritz Lang movie, the next it’s like we’re suddenly transported to that stupid bit in “Astro Zombies” where those guys chase each other around a swimming pool for about a hour and Tura Satana shoots somebody…

And as I probably don’t need to remind you, this weird negative zone connecting the two is pretty much EXACTLY where I like to find myself on movie night.



This scene, in which a girl dances across the beach to pad out the running time a little, just goes on, and on, and on, far longer than such a scene ever really should. Being generally in favour of such dreamy nonsense, I was having a lovely time with all the woozy marimba music and compound-eye lenses and stuff, but when it hit the five minute mark even I was thinking “right, that’s enough of that, can we have some kind of event or something now?”


William Campbell plays troubled artist Antonio Sordi, who does a brisk trade knocking out bloodthirsty paintings like this one;


ANY GUESSES WHERE HE GETS HIS INSPIRATION FROM, HUH READERS?


That’s right! Another one bites the dust.

Campbell is superbly creepy, lumbering about and drawling his lines like Robert Mitchum’s punch-drunk older brother.

The scene in which an unsuspecting girl poses for him whilst he stares at a canvas he’s just painted pitch black, ranting about the fate of his ancestor, a controversial artist who was killed by the inquisition in the 11th century, seeing the laughing face of the woman whose evidence condemned him reflected in the black mess, is one of the most grandly ghoulish and unsettling scenes I’ve seen in a gothic horror flick for a long time.


That alone would have done a really nice job of transforming the standard “cornball explanation of why he’s a psycho” sequence into something altogether more enjoyable, but when the scene shifts into a full tilt, Bergman-esque desert dream sequence in which Sordi acts out the drama of his heretical forebear…. man, it’s a knock-out!



If my generalised talk of ‘girls’ in this review seems a tad crass, I apologise, but the fact is “Track of the Vampire”s general sense of oneiric incoherence makes it very difficult to keep tabs on it’s myriad female characters, most of whom look very similar and sometimes even seem to change places, or come back from the dead, or reappear as their own sisters and so on. The whole thing almost has a kind of constantly shifting, Jean Rollin-like drift to it, and if there are some fine and characterful performances from the female cast hidden in their somewhere, I’m damned if I can figure out who was who by looking at the cast-list in order to acknowledge them.


The fact that most of the actresses look distantly familiar from other AIP movies, but that I can never QUITE put names to the faces, only increases this delicious feeling of dislocation, as I stumble through “Track of the Vampire” wondering whether I last saw that girl who was dancing on the beach hanging out in a technicolour castle with Vincent Price, or riding with a wild black & white hotrod gang… or did I just see her out of the corner of my eye in some movie-inspired dream…? Ah, the truth – forever beyond my grasp! Here I sit, like poor old Vincent in one of those Poe movies where his new wife turns into his dead wife or his daughter turns into his mother or whatever, contemplating the possibility that I’m just DREAMING this whole ridiculous movie…


Later on, we get some shots like this one, that lead me to think, holy shit, that’s no back projection – did Roger Corman actually pack everybody off to Europe to make this damned thing…?


Given Corman’s legendary reputation for penny-pinching, I’ve always been kind of curious about how and why he let Francis Coppola go all the way to Ireland to shoot “Dementia 13” in ‘63, so on that basis I guess an overseas jolly for Hill and Rothman wouldn’t have been *completely* beyond the realms of possibility… although the suits at AIP can’t have been too thrilled when they returned with a film this art-damaged and incoherent.


One thing I absolutely love about the best of the black & white ‘60s AIP film is that even as they were poking fun at beatniks and art world pretension, they really do carry a genuine ‘beat’ sensibility that somehow manages to sit neatly alongside their exploitation / pure entertainment agenda. Certainly you’d be hard pressed to find anything in the early ‘60s avant garde as shocking and fragmented as “Dementia 13”, as insightful as “Bucket of Blood” or as uncompromising in it’s rejection of social norms as “Spider Baby”, even as all three still function perfectly well on the level of goofy horror movie fun.

I guess it goes without saying that Corman and Hill and Rothman and Coppola and Daniel Haller were all smart, talented, literate people, and an uncanny sense of vitality and intelligence can’t help but shine through in their work, even as the moneymen crack the whip. And if that latent sense of experimentation can be seen creeping around the edges of those other movies, it’s a pure delight to find it exploding all over “Track Of The Vampire”, a film that, whilst highly accomplished in technical terms, couldn’t have been much more of a free-wheeling daydream if Corman had hired a bunch of Venice Beach hippies to shoot it.


There is a refreshing ‘first thought/best thought’ feeling about the film’s incongruous mix of beautiful, well-executed sequences and total junk, a spirit of knowing good humour and energy that makes the resulting film a hoot, even as the events on-screen make about as much sense as a 3am conversation in the bar at an Italian scriptwriter’s convention.

“HEY,” seems to be the unspoken message from Hill and Rothman, “WE WENT TO FILM SCHOOL AND LEARNED A BUNCHA NEAT STUFF; NOW ROGER CORMAN’S HIRED US, AND HE LET US MAKE THIS THING! PRETTY CRAZY, HUH?”

A starry-eyed rampage through the back roads of the mid-‘60s subconscious disguised as a commercial b-movie, “Track of the Vampire” blows my mind.


Of course, every dream is followed by the crude awakening when you realise you’ve got to put your trousers on and get the hell to work in the next twenty minutes, and a modicum of internet research reveals that my vision of Jack and Stephanie hanging out on the beach together, sharing a few sticks of tea and crafting this mad movie was sadly pretty wide of the mark.

The real circumstances behind “Track of the Vampire”s creation are as follows:

One day, Roger Corman acquired the rights to an obscure Yugoslavian movie, the intriguingly titled “Operation Titian”, for the price of a milkshake, but subsequently deemed it too dull to bother releasing. (I’m guessing this is where all the atmospheric location shooting and chase sequences came from?)

Meanwhile, Jack Hill was busy shooting a whole bunch of footage for another film that never got finished for some reason (all the beatnik/mad artist stuff, presumably?), and Corman, utilising his uncanny ability to pull a feature film out of just about anything, decided he might as well crowbar the two together into, well… SOMETHING, roping in Stephanie Rothman to write and shoot enough additional scenes to establish some sense of coherence.

And if “some sense of coherence” would be a pretty generous description of the film that eventually emerged, I think we’ve still got to give it up for all concerned – “Track of the Vampire”, ladies and gents, a wholly ACCIDENTAL masterpiece of ‘60s weirdo horror.

As a final note, IMDB tells me that Sid Haig turns up in this movie, portraying “Abdul the Arab”.

I’ve watched it twice now, and don’t recall seeing any “Abdul the Arab”.

He’s probably in there somewhere though. Maybe he’s hiding. It’s just that kinda movie.

Sweet dreams.

Expresso Bongo(Val Guest, 1959)

“Y’know something Dixie? If I didn’t have my bongos to work it out on, I’d flip my lid!”

A modern viewer would be forgiven for not necessarily expecting to find a wealth of thrills n’ spills within a vehicle for none-more-sappy pretty boy Cliff Richard. But with British exploitation legend Val Guest at the controls, I’m guessing a lot of squares got plenty shook up when “Expresso Bongo” hit their daughters’ eyeballs back in ’59.

Before we get to the film proper though, I think it’s the least we can do to briefly salute the terrific credits sequence, wherein the names of cast & crew are cleverly incorporated into restaurants menus, jukeboxes, shop windows and the like. Imagine the effort they must have put into that pinball machine shot in an age before digital manipulation. That’s craftsmanship that is!



Anyway, with Cliff proving just as much of a wet blanket as a movie star as you might expect (he is actually upstaged by his own hair), “Expresso Bongo” is instead largely carried by Lawrence Harvey, fresh from his success in “Room At The Top” the same year. Harvey turns in a human-dynamo performance as unscrupulous hustler/manager Johnny Jackson, a disillusioned jazz drummer trying to make a buck off the music scene any way he can in the cruel environs of pre-Beatles Soho. Johnny is something of a Frankie Machine-like character, and, like Algren’s antihero before him, when Johnny moves, he moves like a street-punk, acting on wild impulses and dishing out hip non-sequitors thick and fast. “Get yourself a car, baby”, he advises a passing hooker, “love on wheels – it’s the only game in town!” At one point he gets in the phrase “beating those pagan skins”, a full five years before Wilfrid Bramble in “A Hard Day’s Night”!


As we follow Johnny through his nightly routine of crazy scams, Guest gives us a surprisingly candid tour of sordid West End nightlife, initiating us into a world of struggling club musicians eyeing up stockings in department store windows on their fag breaks, of down-and-out movie moguls hussling for change (“I was the one who introduced the bubblebath to show-business” yells one), and of teenage girls roaming free, carefully maintaining that post-war balance between innocence and experience, and seemingly with nothing better to do than bicker about how tall Dave Brubeck is (I LOOKED IT UP, HE’S 5’9”, NOW HOW ABOUT A DRINK FOR CHRISSAKE?).


Down-on-the-street as it may be though, “Expresso Bongo” still deviates from the realities of British pop management by making clear that Johnny is avowedly heterosexual. Furthermore, his main squeeze Maisie (Sylvia Syms) is an aspiring singer who pays the couple’s bills by working as stripper, providing Johnny (and Guest’s camera) with a happy excuse to take a butcher’s into one of those basement clubs where the nice boys and girls don’t venture.

And so get this – not only does the opening fifteen minutes of “Expresso Bongo” defy expectations by giving us swear words, wanton caffeine abuse and open references to prostitution… it’s actually got boobs!


And that’s not the half of it!



Jess Franco eat your heart out.

Never mind all that though; we’ve scarcely got time to catch our breath before Maisie drags Johnny along to the Tom Tom Club, where expresso-crazed kids are going wild to the sound of The Shadows!



I think it’s The Shadows anyway – they look like a bit of an uncharacteristically rough lot here, but the twangtastic sounds emanating from my TV speakers leave no doubt that that’s Hank Marvin himself wringing whammy bar gold from his Strat.


Oh YEAH!

The band have a filthy Link Wray-style rumble goin’ on, and in fact this whole scene is freakin’ fantastic, until you-know-who sticks his oar in…


Cliff is a stone drag, but Johnny sees stardust in the highly organized system by which doting girls take charge of his bongos, keeping them constantly within reach of their hero as he roams free around the club, and a fateful 50/50 management deal is inked over breakfast the next morning.


“Nice shooting kid, reminds me of my two weeks in the guards!”

Clearly a big hype and a new stage-name is needed to bum rush Johnny’s new charge into the charts, and in a moment of pure inspiration, Bongo Herbert is born!

Yes, that’s right - Bongo Herbert.


Henceforth, I’m going to make sure I refer to Sir Cliff as ‘Bongo Herbert’ at every possible opportunity.

Anyway, a couple of additional scams pulled on Meier Tzelniker’s almost offensively Jewish Denmark St label boss gets Bongo onto wax, some equally scam-assisted TV appearances provide publicity, and hey presto, the kid’s a hit! (Not that he's outselling "Cha Cha Chinee" or anything, but hey, early days.)



I thought I’d share this shot of Johnny and Maisie’s West End pad, just because the film seems to encourage us to see it as a rat-hole, whereas I think it looks like paradise;



Christ almighty. America gave us Gene Vincent’s black glove, The Killer marrying his cousin, Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’ and Big E himself. Only England could retaliate with Bongo Herbert in a smoking jacket, dedicating “Shrine On The Second Floor” to his mother.


“Bastards!”, exclaims Bongo’s senile father to no one in particular, like some prototype Father Jack. A welcome change of pace.


“Flash those Purleys, Bongo!” Johnny’s retirement fund looks less certain after Herbert is introduced to veteran American singer Dixie Collins (an enjoyably ballsy performance from Yolande Donlan). Dixie takes a shine to Bongo (and his ticket sales), and doesn’t think much of the underage star being taken for a neat 50% by his manager on grounds of highly dubious legality…


So do you think maybe Dixie, Bongo, Johnny and Maisie (who I note is STILL WORKING AS A STRIPPER, despite her boyfriend’s newfound riches) will all learn some tough lessons about the fickle whims of showbiz before this drama is through…? Only time (in this case about twenty minutes that are markedly less interesting than the preceding hour) will tell!

With a screenplay adapted by Wolf Mankovitz from his earlier stageplay, “Expresso Bongo” features a solid backbone of witty, quickfire dialogue, risqué situations and sturdy characterization, the like of which you’d never have expected to find in a cheap-shot pop star vehicle. Add great performances from everyone except Cliff, lively direction and all the additional attractions described above and clearly the result is a veritable rollercoater ride to the edge of oblivion by the excitement-starved standards of British commercial cinema in 1959.

For all the unexpected enjoyment though, there’s also something teeth-grindingly frustrating about “Expresso Bongo” – dark hints of the kind of routine disappointment that Val Guest would make his bread and butter in the dark days of the ‘70s sex comedy boom.


Largely, I think this is because it is a rock n’ roll movie almost completely devoid of rock n’ roll. Sure, the scene with The Shadows is great, but beyond that… Cliff/Bongo’s material is drippy fare indeed, and his on-screen presence carries about as much of a sense of rebellion as the Pope’s Christmas message. In fact, I don’t think anyone even dares invoke the R’n’R beast throughout the movie – characters talk about being “a singer” or working “in showbiz”, and disappointingly that’s exactly what they do. He even seems to lose his bongos after the opening club scene!

This being a 1959 movie in which delinquent teens hang out in coffee bars working out their frustration on those aforementioned pagan skins, you might also reasonably expect to find some choice beatnik action going on in “Expresso Bongo”, but that too is notable by its absence. Johnny may talk pretty hip on occasion, but sadly it’s just part of his constantly rolling patter, and there's nary a goateed hipster or a 'jazz' cigarette in sight.

In fact, the only subculture Val Guest manages to shine a light on here is, I’m guessing, the one he knew best – the seedy world of cutthroat managers, sex workers and low level showbiz hustlers.


Curiously, I found that “Expresso Bongo” also bears a certain comparison to a film whose maker’s intentions were the exact opposite of Guest’s easy-going commercial agenda, Peter Watkins’ Privilege. Both films centre on a carefully stage-managed pop singer who is denied his own voice as his bland good looks are used to channel the agenda of his controllers. And more notably, both films see their stars publicly declaring their religious faith as part of a mutual agreement with the Church of England… not an idea that I think has any real-life equivalent in the world of ‘50s/’60s British pop stars.

It’s also interesting (and faintly chilling) to note that Paul Jones – who in “Privilege” found himself overseeing a fascistic Christian ceremony in a football stadium – actually converted to Born Again Christianity during the ‘80s, following his attendance at an evangelical event in a football stadium… in the company of noted bible-basher Cliff Richard. Bongo Herbert strikes again.

Deathblog:Dennis Hopper1936 – 2010

Well this has come as a bit of a shock this evening – I didn’t even know he was ill, to coin a phrase.

Obviously there’s a hell of a lot more, both good and bad, to be said about Dennis Hopper than I’m going to say here (he’s one of those rare people who lived a life so packed with incident it actually *demands* an exhaustive doorstop of a biography).

Beyond all the tales that immortalise him as a maniac, a legendary fuck-up, the ultimate Hollywood beatnik outlaw etc. though, I’ll personally remember Hopper as the guy who proved his artistic worth beyond question by getting his shit together long enough to direct one of my all time favourite films, Out Of The Blue.





So yeah, Hopper sure was quite a fella, and pulled off some tremendous stuff in his time both on-screen and off, but you’ll have all the obits in the papers and on proper movie blogs to tell you about that tomorrow. Like I say, for me it’s all a distant second to that one movie. R.I.P.

Demon Lover Diary.

You remember our friend Donald Jackson, the man who brought the world Roller Blade, Hell Comes To Frogtown and, by extension, the reality-defying trauma that is The Roller Blade Seven?

Well a few years before he moved to Hollywood to get the ball rolling on that lot, Jackson was still living in his native Michigan, and made his directorial debut in 1977 with ‘Demon Lover’, by most accounts a reasonably bizarre/enjoyable regionally produced b-movie that did ok business on video in the ‘80s.

For ‘Demon Lover’, Jackson and co-producer/star Jerry Younkins hired a guy named Jeff Kreines, who drove in from out of town to work as the cameraman/DP. Kraines’ girlfriend Joel DeMott, a budding documentary-maker, tagged along to shoot some “making of..” footage and…. well let’s just say she got a lot more than she bargained for on that slippery slope between documentary gold and stark raving terror.

The video below is a ten minute montage of clips from the resulting ‘Demon Lover Diary’ (1980), and I think it speaks for itself:



If your jaw hasn’t hit the floor by the time they get to Ted Nugent’s house, well… I guess we must just be very different people.

I would dearly love a chance to see the entirety of ‘Demon Lover Diary’ (far more than I actually want to see ‘Demon Lover’), but sadly by attempts to track down a copy have thus far proved fruitless. If you can put me on the right track, please get in touch.

An excellent feature on the film can be found over at Bleeding Skull, who also give us the skinny on DeMott’s equally excellent-sounding Seventeen (1983).

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2010)

Ok, so, not a full review here, but I’m just gonna write a few paragraphs to let you know that I went to a preview screening of Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant” a couple of weeks ago (yeah, I know it’s been out in the States for a while, but it’s released in this country this week I think), and, well…. good grief, it absolutely blindsided me. Probably the best Hollywood film I’ve seen in years. And I’m not just saying that because it’s directed by some legendary genius German guy either – I mean, it’s actually more action-packed and tightly plotted and characterful and above all funny than anything the folks in LA who are supposed to specialise in such hearty fare seem to have been able to manage of recent.

I went to the screening on a whim, mainly because I was interested in seeing why a defiantly independent director like Herzog would suddenly drop everything and make a cop movie staring Nicholas Cage, and what kind of flawed, oddball movie would emerge from the process. But I certainly wasn’t expecting to enjoy it half as much as I did. Maybe the key here is: I didn’t know it was a comedy. The pre-release publicity for the film has conspicuously failed to make that point clear, and with a high-minded, non-genre director taking on subject matter that touches on crime, corruption, poverty, addiction, prostitution, racism and god only knows what else, screwball shenanigans weren’t exactly what I was expecting. But the fact is, this film is just freakin’ hilarious.

I guess I saw it with a more appreciative crowd than one might find at the local multiplex, but still, people were almost literally rolling in the aisles, applauding between scenes, laughing ‘til they choked – I can’t remember the last time I went to a screening in which the audience shared such a collective “wow, this KICKS ASS” sort of feeling. I think I got a taste of the same experience an audience in the ‘60s might have had, going to see “Dr. Strangelove” for the first time, expecting a dark meditation on the cold war. And if William Finkelstein’s screenplay for “Port of Call” is obviously not on a level with the Kubrick/Southern script (too caught up in it’s generic cop-procedural logic to fully engage with its near-apocalyptic social context, perhaps?), you’ll understand that it’s still the highest possible praise if I say there were at least *moments* in “Bad Lieutenant” that approach the same chilling sane/insane satire.

I was going to say something along the lines of “Werner Herzog is not best known for his sense of humour”, but thinking about it, that’s not quite fair. All the Herzog films I’ve seen have had definite elements of humour, even if they’re sometimes hard to spot. Like David Lynch, I suspect he’s one of those guys whose idea of funny-ness is so outside the norm that things he thinks are a tremendous gas are often missed entirely or just mistaken for bloodyminded weirdness. Tune into the right wavelength whilst watching, say, “Fitzcarraldo” though, and I’m sure you could find yourself in stitches.

And if the humour in “Bad Lieutenant” arises primarily from the script and the extraordinary performances (more of which later), things are only intensified by moments in which Herzog seems to step out from the shadows and burst the film’s bubble of headache-inducing post-CSI faux-realism completely, throwing in outbursts of outright gonzo wackiness so jarring it’s hard to believe the studio let him keep them in the final cut. And the brilliant thing about such zaniness is that it’s so completely contrived; it’s as if Herzog is hopping from foot to foot shouting “comedy, huh? Yes, I can do comedy! Look – I am one real crazy guy!”, whilst everyone else looks on baffled, willing to let The Great Director have his fun with rubber crocodiles and visible boom mics and so forth before they get back to the proper furrowed brow, drained colour stuff.

And in a way, this renders these ‘wacky’ scenes more gut-bustingly funny than they could ever have been if Herzog actually WAS the absurdist funster we know he isn’t… y’know, it’s kinda like the whole glaring inappropriate-ness of them, combined with Herzog’s misfiring enthusiasm for his idea of making a cer-azzy movie…? If you get what I mean..? Anyway, it’s great.

Well assuming you don’t get me, and assuming you could care less what Werner Herzog thinks or does, here is a phrase I never imagined I’d find myself writing for Breakfast In The Ruins: the real reason you should watch this movie is Nicholas Cage.

Now we all know Nicholas Cage has been in some shitty movies recently. Ok, so actually he’s been in a lot of shitty movies over a sustained period of time. In fact, his name may be on the verge of becoming virtually synonymous with shitty movies. To be honest, the only thing he had left in the ‘plus’ column for me before I saw this was his turn in “Wild At Heart” all those years ago. So take it from someone who went in not really giving a damn about the guy: he absolutely knocks it out the fucking park in “Bad Lieutenant”.

I know I’ve already thrown around a lot of superlatives in this review, but he really does turn in one of the greatest comic performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s simply breathtaking. Over the top in all the best possible ways, but never verging into cartoon-ish Johnny Depp territory, Cage bestrides this film as a beserk, tragic colossus, tearing chunks out of his co-stars as his character lurches around through a haze of cocaine psychosis and severe back pain like some crackhead Richard III.

Alternately shuddering with rage and staring desperately into the middle distance as chaos piles up around him and occasionally collapsing into perversely touching moments of sentimental reverie, Cage’s exaggerated mannerisms and inspired line delivery not only succeed in rendering just about every scene laugh-out-loud funny and unpredictable (no mean feat over the space of two solid hours of screen-time), but also in bringing a staggering intensity to the film that I think allows Herzog in turn to raise his game, elevating what could have merely been a cynical black comedy into a magnificent example of one of his trademark one-man-against-the-world epics, operating on the same cosmic scale as his earlier masterpieces, in spite of the frenetic pace and blunt American brutality.

Throughout the film, we’re never sure quite what Cage’s character is trying to achieve or where his sympathies lie, and I don’t think he knows either. Like Herzog’s other quixotic protagonists, he’s just ploughing on tirelessly through obstacles and mental/physical trauma that would lay a lesser man down in a matter of hours, in search of something he won’t even recognise until he hits it headfirst. To make the grindingly obvious comparison, Cage really seems to pick up here where Klaus Kinski left off in the Herzog classics of yore, and if you think a comparison between the two actors is patently absurd, well – wait ‘till you’ve seen this movie, then come back to me.

In fact, whoever you are and whatever you think: just see this movie. I fear “Port of Call” is liable to be one of those films that will miss its true audience in the cinema - Werner’s rubber crocodile moments probably render it a bit too off-beat for mainstream audiences, and its toxic combination of grotesque depravity and moral ambiguity is unlikely to win it many fans in squaresville, but sadly the eyes of the art-house crowd are also liable to glaze over as soon as they get to “Nicholas Cage plays a cop..”.

(I can't help but note that the American posters for the film were universally horrid, going for the full mianstream thriller approach, whereas the European efforts have been slightly rejigged to take the 'critical plaudits / cult hit' route.)

Like “The Big Lebowski” before it though, I predict “Bad Lieutenant” will gain a whole new life on video, as news of its uncanny greatness travels by word of mouth. In fact, I’d put money on its being ranked as a future classic, but until then I guess it’s up to us weirdos to try and ensure it gets some recognition as the astonishing work it is. So please: see it, see it, tell your friends to see it and then see it again with them when they go to see it. It’s worth seeing.

Phew, rave reviews for two newly released films in the space of a week? I’ll have to rename the blog if this carries on...

And shit, that was *quite a few* paragraphs, wasn't it? Sorry.