New Movies Reviews!

As in, a few short-as-possible takes on recently released movies – because, uncharacteristically, I seem to have watched quite a few of them recently.

One Cut of the Dead

(Shin'ichirô Ueda, 2017)

If you’ve not yet seen this high concept Japanese indie mega-hit, let me simply say that you probably should, because it’s wonderful.

Beyond that however, it is the very definition of a film that is almost impossible to write about without spoiling the surprise, so what follows is less of a conventional review, and more just a couple of quick pieces of advice for potential viewers.

1. Though it is being marketed as a zombie film, I’d probably tag this one more as a family drama, disguised as a film-about-filmmaking, disguised as a zombie film, so - keep your monster kid expectations in check.

2. Though the opening half hour might well cause you to question why you’re bothering to watch this thing, stick with it and you will be richly rewarded.

3. Likewise, if you, like me, tend to experience motion sickness when watching shaky-cam handheld footage, this opening act will soon become a horrendous, stomach-churning nightmare. Once again though, please keep it together and keep your eyes on the screen, because blessed relief awaits at the thirty minute mark, and you’ll be disappointed if you missed some important details whilst staring at your shoes feeling nauseous.

And finally, I will note that, despite its low budget origins, this film’s achievements in the oft-overlooked fields of pre-production planning and continuity are quite possibly unparalleled in the medium, and, I believe, deserve to be recognised with some kind of gigantic medal and a hearty round of applause from the entire international film community.

Get Out

(Jordan Peele, 2017)

So yes, I was pretty late getting around to this one. I really liked it though! In particular, I appreciated the way in which Peele manages to spin his “yeah, I see where this is going” Stepford/Bodysnatchers type premise into a considerably more challenging and thought-provoking social allegory than I had been expecting.

By which I mean, I like that he clearly decided that making his bad guys traditional white supremacists would be just too easy, and instead sets his satirical sights upon a slightly trickier target – namely, a very particular slice of white, liberal America that tends to fetishize the black experience whilst failing to respect the existence of black people as independent, self-determining, well… people, basically.

Elsewhere, the film has some fine acting and character interplay and some effective bits of humour, together with an exquisitely rendered atmosphere of unease, top notch cinematography and a handful of queasily surreal images that will live long in the memory. All in all, it rather put me in mind of a slicker and more professional Larry Cohen film, which is certainly no bad thing. (One Larry Cohen film in particular in fact, but… that’s a story we’ll get into in another forthcoming review, I suspect.)

All of these qualities are meanwhile only slightly undermined meanwhile by a script so monumentally unfeasible that plotholers will no doubt be gleefully trooping toward this one with their hardhats and grappling hooks for years to come.

(My biggest personal bugbear: I know there’s probably a point to be made about the black community being ill-served by law enforcement, but even so, surely someone in a position of authority must have noticed that ten plus missing persons cases were all in a relationship with the same woman at the time of their disappearance…?)

The Sisters Brothers

(Jacques Audiard, 2018)

A sprawling, historically detailed pre-Civil War western with an oddball, black comic tone, ‘The Sisters Brothers’ is in many ways an unmistakably contemporary (by which I mean, 21st century) prospect, but at the same time, it certainly wouldn’t have embarrassed the architects of the great, revisionist westerns of the 1970s, in terms of its narrative ambition, production design, immersive visuals and general sense-of-place.

In these days of micro-managed, producer-bedevilled screenplays, I appreciated the way that the film feels, for better or worse, like the sole vision of writer-director Jacques Audiard (who makes his Hollywood debut here I believe, having previously hit big in his native France with ‘A Prophet’ (2009) and ‘The Beat My Heart Skipped’ (2005)). This in spite of the fact that the list of production companies & sundry other entities involved in ‘presenting’ ‘The Sisters Brothers’ takes up an entire widescreen frame of subtitle-sized text. (Honestly, I thought it was a gag, until the opening scene – depicting a massacre - established a considerably less flippant tone.)

In particular, I liked the way that this film’s storytelling moves away from the “leaden gravity of karmic fate” approach so often favoured by westerns, instead adopting a rambling, quixotic framework that allows all kinds of episodic diversions and sidebars to distract us from the main thrust of the title characters’ intertwined arcs, including random bear attacks, shipwrecks, transgender casino proprietors and a tour through the bright lights of Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Adherence to conventional screenwriting doctrine would have seen most of this stuff mercilessly excised, but personally, I’m glad that that these various bits and pieces made the final cut, simply because they are fun and interesting, and help to make the world of the film richer and more involving than it may have been if restricted to a straight-down-the-line, three act type job.

Speaking of rambling however…. well, let’s just say that, whereas the great American westerns of the past were largely united by their zen-like mastery of the ‘SHOW, DON’T TELL’ approach to character development, Audiard by contrast takes the Wes Anderson route here, allowing his characters to bang on interminably about their family backgrounds, personal ambitions and psychological conflicts, sometimes even in the form of fourth wall-breaking, straight-to-camera monologues.

Lord in heaven, I’ve never known such a bunch of touchy-feely cowboys – The Wild Bunch they ain’t. In fact, if sainted Sam Peckinpah was still with us, the effect of a screening of this one on the old boy’s blood pressure might have finished him off for good.

This all culminates in a curious variation on the old ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre’ gold prospecting expedition, in which three of the four grizzled, gun-toting participants gradually come to recognise each other as frustrated, autodidact intellectuals who share a utopian belief in the common brotherhood of man…. leaving only one authentically brutish tough guy amongst their number. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well, but, like most everything else in this film, it at least ends badly in a pretty unusual way, breaking curious new ground within this most heavily codified of cinematic genres.

I’ll admit, all the self-reflective nattering and teary pontificating in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ really got my goat – perhaps simply because it conflicts so strongly with my own personal ideal of the western – but on the other hand, there’s a whole load of satisfyingly cathartic violence here too, so hey - swings and roundabouts.

In most other respects however, this is an admirable piece of proper, old fashioned filmmaking, anchored by a truly exceptional performance from John C. Reilly as the older, more mature of the two brothers. His relationship with his wilder younger sibling (Joaquin Phoenix) touches upon that same ‘old, dying west vs new, incoming civilisation’ conflict that lies at the heart of so many of those brilliant ‘60s and ‘70s westerns - only here, it is civility, settlement and compromise that Audiard sees as the more noble, more poetic option, in contrast to the doomed, twilight-of-the-gods masculine belligerence hymned by directors like Peckinpah and Leone.

Though the film’s occasionally quirky tone and failure connect with me emotionally prevent me from hailing it as a modern classic, there is a lot going on in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ for western scholars to get their teeth into, and it certainly makes for a fine way to pass an evening, irrespective of one’s personal investment in the genre.

Widows

(Steve McQueen, 2018)

Venturing even further toward the mainstream (because Japan Airlines in-flight entertainment neglected to include any English friendly old movies), I actually thought the trailer for this all-star heist movie from Steve McQueen (not *that* Steve McQueen, as I will insist on specifying until the day I die) actually looked quite promising, and indeed, as an intricately plotted crime procedural set in modern day Chicago, it’s rock solid.

In fact, watching it feels very much like reading a rock solid, intricately plotted contemporary crime novel, an achievement which I’m going to assume goes all the way back to Lynda La Plante’s source novel. (I’ve never previously felt the need to read any of her charity shop-filling doorstops, but I do feel somewhat warmer toward them on the basis of this satisfyingly labyrinthine, POV-hopping yarn.)

Outside of all the stuff with gun and gangsters and vans blowing up, there is plenty of swelling music, emotive flashbacks, manipulative ‘tearjerking’ moments and a lot of (perfectly reasonable, let’s face it) commentary on the hard road faced by women and ethnic minorities in contemporary society to endear the film to the Oscar Bait crowd, but I personally didn’t find any of it too cloying, and the relentless mechanics of the plotting keeps the engine ticking over nicely throughout; keeping our eyes always on the next corner, so to speak.

Initially, I thought we might be looking here at a kind of sophisticated, non-exploitative modern Hollywood take on the old Pam Grier/Jack Hill via Pinky Violence formula, wherein we get to enjoy the cathartic release of seeing wronged women exact revenge against a grab-bag of utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid males (representatives of course of an utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid system), but, as ‘Widows’ progresses, characterisation on both sides of the gender divide becomes murkier, casting at least some welcome shade onto the film’s socially progressive right n’ wrong dynamics.

Ironically for a film that so deliberately puts its female characters centre stage, I actually found that by far the most compelling aspect of the story was the material concerning the behind the scenes machinations of a local election, wherein two equally corrupt, duplicitous male candidates from opposite sides of the tracks attempt to put one over on the voting populace of the city ward in which the action takes place.

Both Colin Farrell as the Teflon-coated old money candidate who secretly hates the hypocrisy of the role his domineering father has groomed him for, and Brian Tyree Henry as the ruthless gangster who has reinvented himself as the “progressive social change” candidate simply because he believes politics will offer him better kickbacks and a longer lifespan, are fantastically monstrous creations, and it’s great too to see old Bobby Duvall pretty much napalming the joint in a ferocious turn as Farrell’s aforementioned father.

To be honest, the interlocking sisters-doing-it-for-themselves narrative suffers in comparison, feeling a bit underdeveloped, in spite of the vast acres of screen-time allotted to filling in the protagonists’ respective back stories. Nonetheless though, performances remain strong, and the film believably conveys the destabilising trauma that can ensue when every day, more-or-less-law-abiding citizens suddenly discover that their lives sit precariously atop a steaming mountain of corruption, violence and extortion.

The eventual emotional impact of all this is muffled by a few loose ends and a BIG PLOT TWIST which feels poorly handled and unnecessary, but hey, you can’t have everything. Overall, ‘Widows’ is a solid crime film that lives and breathes within the conventions of its genre despite its wider thematic concerns, and its heart is certainly in the right place.

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to see S. Craig Zahler’s controversial cop epic ‘Dragged Across Concrete’, but I’d imagine it could make for an interesting “compare and contrast” with this one. Something tells me I’ll probably rate ‘..Concrete’ more highly as a film, but I’m pretty sure I already know which of the two I’d rather hang out with were they to take on human form, if you get my drift.

The Predator

(Shane Black, 2018)

I’m assuming that, by this point, this awkwardly monikered sequel/reboot/whatever must have already been consigned to obscurity, from whence it will be distantly recalled as one of the biggest franchise-killing turkeys ever to have strutted its way through the gates of the Fox backlot onto the baking streets of Hollywood. I’d normally be content to leave it there, sizzling on the sidewalk, but the curvature of the earth adds about ninety minutes to the reverse leg of my annual Tokyo / London flight, so – ladies and gents, ‘The Predator’.

Actually, in truth, I feel a certain sympathy for this effort simply because I’m aware that director Shane Black is a close friend and long term collaborator of Fred Dekker, a man still revered by us horror fans as the creator of ‘Night of the Creeps’ (1986) and ‘The Monster Squad’ (1987). Indeed, Black & Dekker (ha! I only just noticed…) share the sole screenplay credit for ‘The Predator’, although god only knows what percentage of the movie they originally had in mind actually made it to the screen after what I imagine to have been a torturous nightmare of uncredited re-writes, executive producer ‘notes’ and studio-mandated re-shoots.

Nonetheless, the movie (during its first hour, at least) retains a breezy, happy-go-lucky b-movie feel that is actually somewhat endearing, including a few dialogue exchanges which I’m sure must have come straight down the line from Dekker’s sainted keyboard. (In particular, I enjoyed the running gag about the Predator not technically being a predator at all, because it hunts for sport rather than for food, with a character at one point likening it more to “an intergalactic bass fisherman”.)

With its definitive article title rendered even more redundant thanks to the fact that the script actually features several Predators, ‘The Predator’ is, undoubtedly, a bad movie, rife with forehead-slappingly dumb ideas and mindless, video game-y nonsense. Crucially however, it is not an unenjoyable bad movie.

Unlike most second tier Hollywood action product, the first hour here is neither boring nor charmless, and it’s muddled totality can perhaps best be appreciated by considering it as the kind of movie that some ‘80s trash maven like Albert Pyun or Fred Olen Ray might have made, had they been gifted with an eighty million dollar budget and a cruise liner full of Red Bull-huffing digital effects “artists”.

Would Pyun or Olen Ray’s Predator movie have included cute alien doggies who chase and swallow hand grenades? Probably!

Would they have presented us with the idea that a bus-load of inmates from the psychiatric ward of a military prison might actually turn out to be a gang of lovable, good-natured goofballs who can be safely left in charge of children and trusted with an array of city-block-levelling firepower? Sure, why not!

Would they have tapped into some paint-by-numbers Spielberg type shit by having a hard-done-by autistic kid take possession of a Predator helmet and wear it out as a Halloween costume, using its powers to take care of bullies, etc..? Well, ok, perhaps that’s a little bit far off the low rent sci-fi action movie tracks for Pyun and co, but if you can get some school holiday/family TV appeal into the bargain it’s all money in the bank, right?

Well, either way -- you know that whole business with the hot lady biologist being whisked off by helicopter to a top secret pentagon alien research lab built into the side of a mountain, where visitors need to strip naked for the ‘decontamination chamber’, whilst a white-coated scientist-who-looks-like-Gary-Busey-but-isn’t cracks wise over the body of a sedated Predator they have restrained on the examination table (absolutely NO danger of it waking up and slaughtering everybody, no siree)..? THAT is some prime ‘80s trash sci-fi business right there, no question about it.

(The only difference is, in the ‘80s, there would have been boobs. But, as we all know, they don’t exist anymore (at least outside the context of grim, taboo-breaking ordeal movies about how sex is horrible and people would rather cut bits of themselves off with rusty knives), so no dice, lechers.)

In this spirit, I’d go so far as to say that – bearing in mind I was sitting in an air-conditioned tin can thousands of feet above the plains of Siberia when I watched it - I actually found much of ‘The Predator’s run-time uproariously entertaining, in an “I can’t actually believe what I’m seeing here” kind of way.

My enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that the film’s in-flight presentation had been “edited for content” in the most hilarious fashion, leading to dramatic exclamations of “FUDGE!”, confusing references to a female character’s “pudding” and macho soldier guys who tell each other to “shut the heck up”. (I’d assumed that this kind of melon-farming TV redubbing was now a thing of the past, so I’m delighted to see it making a comeback.)

It’s a shame then that the film’s final act more or less squanders this good feeling and proceeds to become extremely boring and charmless – an interminable, knocked-up-inside-a-PC, sound & fury styled action finale in which the sight of characters the film has tried its best to make us care about getting violently killed off inspires little more than a passing shrug as we wait in vain for the damned thing to be over.

Unfortunately, this finale also serves highlight my least favourite aspect of the film – namely, the generic “bombastic action movie music” that seems to have been plastered wall-to-wall across the entire picture without even the slightest attempt to match it to the on-screen action. It’s like some kind of hellish anti-muzak, designed to keep you aggravated and on edge, and it gets pretty tiresome after a while. Perhaps this is just normal now though, I don’t know?

In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t know. Like the reason why Fred Dekker hasn’t been allowed to write or direct a film in over 25 years, despite his brief run in the late ‘80s suggesting he might be quite good at it, for instance. Eat my pudding, Hollywood!

Just a Quick Note...

...to let you know that I had been planning to share a few more paperback scans with you over the next few weeks, to cover the time I'll be out of the country. Unfortunately however, a few days before I went on my holidays, my trusty old laptop pretty much packed in, severely limiting my ability to carry out computer-related tasks.

Researching, buying and setting up a replacement will have to wait until I get back in June, and could prove an ardous process, given my fervently held belief that home computing technology reached its peak in about 2006. Actually, my old printer/scanner is on it's last legs too, so I should probably get a new one of those whilst I'm at it, so.... what I'm trying to say is, there could be delays. My apologies in advance. Blame the devil-gods of Built-in Obselescence.

Bloody NEL: Dracula’s Brother by Robert Lory (1973)

Until I picked this up somewhere the other day, I’d never heard of this series of Robert Lory 'Dracula' books. (This is the third in a series of five, following on from ‘Dracula Returns’ and ‘The Return of Dracula’, apparently.)

Once again, this is a reprint of a U.S. book, published earlier the same year by Pinnacle, and the book’s copyright notice bears the telltale name of ‘70s paperback kingpin and ‘Nick Carter – Killmaster’ overlord Lyle Kenyon Engel.

Despite this copyright however, Robert Lory was a genuine writer, and there is no reason to believe this is not his work, presumably written on spec for Engel's publishing operation.

Much like Marvel’s '70s 'Tomb of Dracula' comics, these books seem to feature Dracula running around getting into scrapes in the modern world, acting almost as a kind of sympathetic / super-heroic figure, whilst a bunch of human protagonists follow in his wake, trying to piece together the secrets of his power - insofar as I can tell, at least.

A quick skim read doesn’t suggest that there’s much in the way of atmos or strong horror content going on here, but there is a whole bunch of hoo-hah about Atlantis, a load of occult profanations, and lots of run-of-the-mill action / adventure / espionage type stuff, so…. what can I tell you folks, this thing looks nuts.

Bloody NEL: House of Bondage by Alfred Bercovici (1979)

As I'm sure any collector of pulp paperbacks would, I instantly grabbed this one when I saw it rise to the top of the £1 bin at a charity book fair recently, and didn’t really give it a second thought until I got it home and, upon closer inspection, realised that it must rank as one of the most horrid volumes to have ever graced my library.

The icky tagline and weirdly unappealing artwork perhaps don't bode well, but when it comes to the actual content of the book… good god. Basically, this thing reads as if Guy N. Smith had turned his hand to writing a soft porn novel in the spirit of the briefly ascendant ‘Mandingo’ / ‘Goodbye Uncle Tom’ “slavesploitation” sub-genre.

Skimming through, you’ll find toe-curlingly cheery descriptions of non-consensual slave/master sex, interspersed with sadistic punishments, and seemingly endless melodramatic diatribes from a variety of comically stereotyped ‘Southern Gothic’ character types, all dished up in what seems to be a spirit of bottomless cynicism, with any fig-leaf of anti-racist sentiment crucially undermined by the author’s decision to voice the black characters with a kind of childish, nattering, broken English dialect that makes them all sound like congenital idiots.

Goofy, barrel-scarping trash of the lowest order this may be, but I’m afraid I just can’t dial my sense of humour dark enough to extract any yukks from it; there’s a feeling of sheer nastiness here that just plain stinks.

A quick web search doesn’t turn up any info on Alfred Bercovici, and this seems to have been his only published work, under that name at least.

Another American reprint, ‘House of Bondage’ originally came out via Popular Library in 1978. Their version has a slightly more respectable “bodice ripper” type cover, but I’d still sure hate to see a map of the U.S.A. detailing the areas in which it sold best.

Bloody NEL: Croc by David James (1977)

Chapter Fourteen

Officer Glenn Stapleton entered the precinct arrest and booking room with a black rubber boot filled with a badly mangled human foot and lower leg wrapped in his jacket. He had been ok riding across town with the grisly thing in the trunk of his car, but the sweat had popped out on his forehead when he carried it into the station, and now his stomach was doing flipflops, threatening at any moment to send him into dry heaves. Last night’s party wasn’t helping his situation much either, and he vowed, like he had many times before, not to do it again.

----

Speaking of monsters, here’s an absolute whopper from New English Library’s glory days of posy-‘Jaws’ monsterism. Just look at that damned thing! Magnificent. (Tragically, an artwork credit once again eludes me.)

Given that this is a reprint of an American novel clearly modelled on the success of ‘Jaws’, I can’t get over the sheer gall of declaring it to be “in the tradition of ‘Night of the Crabs’”, given that NEL first published the latter book - by Shropshire-based author and rarely acknowledged BITR hero Guy N. Smith – in 1976, the same year that Belmont Tower released ‘Croc’ in the U.S. I mean, I don’t have the actual months of publication to hand, but that “tradition” must have taken root pretty damn quickly on both sides of the Atlantic, I suppose..?

Bloody NEL: Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock (1975)

Once again, I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks, so whilst I’m gallivanting, I’ll leave you in the company of some recent additions to my paperback mountain, beginning with a few from the ever-pungent exploitation vats of New English Library.

Even before the late ‘70s saw paperback racks suddenly overflowing with sharks, crocs, rats, bears and crabs (more of which in a few days), monsters already seem to have often taken pride of place on NEL’s SF covers (see To Outrun Doomsday, for example), and, in their own weird sort of way, these delightful bat-headed spider things feel as iconic as anything in the realm of ‘70s British paperbacks. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a name to attach to the cover art anywhere online, but as ever, info or speculation is welcomed in the comments.)

Likewise, I’ve always had a real soft spot for Michael Moorcock’s early straight science fiction novels, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to this one – originally published in ’68 as ‘Blades of Mars’ - or it’s predecessor ‘City of the Beast’.

Basically these books are an unabashed homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus stories (lest we forget, Moorcock began his literary career, aged 17, as the editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’), and verily, they are red-blooded stuff, full of grand sentences, with many commas, ending in proud exclamation points!

(Perhaps the fact that NEL also reprinted the Burroughs books in the ‘70s had something to do with their decision to acquire these particular Moorcock works? Who knows..)

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that Moorcock was knocking out this delightfully old school stuff at the same time that he was championing the most far out voices of SF’s experimental / psychedelic new wave as the editor of New Worlds. But then, that goes straight to the heart of what makes him such a unique and vital figure in the field of popular culture really, doesn’t it? At any given point in his career, he has contained multiples, and his determined refusal to acknowledge a dividing line between high and low culture, between intellect and entertainment, between reality and fantasy, should stand as an inspiration to us all.

Noir Diary # 3: He Ran All The Way (John Berry, 1951)

Within the grand index of blunt-poetic film noir / pulp fiction titles, I think “HE RAN ALL THE WAY” ranks as a pretty good one. Perhaps not quite up there with the abstract magnificence of ‘Blast of Silence’ or ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, but it definitely fits in nicely alongside ‘Everybody Had a Gun’ or ‘They Drive by Night’ in the “slightly more literal” category.

It’s a shame then that the film itself finds indolent small-time hood Nick Robey (John Garfield) running only as far as his nearest swimming pool, after he finds himself holding the bag when a botched payroll robbery leaves both his more experienced partner (Norman Lloyd) and a cop bleeding out somewhere behind his departing heels.

Desperately trying to concoct a short term survival strategy whilst literally treading water in the crowded public pool, Robey strong-arms himself into an uncomfortable “meet cute” situation with Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters), an insecure young woman so startled by Robey’s amorous attentions that she is persuaded to let him accompany her back to her family’s brownstone apartment -- where he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie, holding Peggy’s mother, father and pre-teen brother at gun-point in what modern viewers will swiftly identify as an early example of the now familiar Home Invasion sub-genre.

I suppose it must have been decided at some point that “HE BASICALLY STAYED IN ONE PLACE” or “HE REFUSED TO LEAVE” just didn’t quite cut it as titles, but no matter; where sprinting enthusiasts may find themselves disappointed by ‘He Ran All The Way’, fans of the more socially conscious / gritty realist strand of early ‘50s film noir are in for an absolute treat. In every sense other than the lack of running, this one is about as good as it gets.

As you may be aware, John Garfield stands as about the closest thing ‘40s/’50s Hollywood ever got to a martyred saint. After a career largely spent bucking the demands of the studio system and instead championing radical theatre and progressive social causes, Garfield found himself blacklisted with immediate effect after he refused to “name names” when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. It has since been widely assumed that the stress caused both by this and by the simultaneous collapse of his marriage were the main factors which led to his sudden death from a pre-existing heart condition in May 1952, aged just 39.

Shot at around the same time that Garfield was called to testify before HUAC, ‘He Ran All The Way’ represents the star’s final film appearance, and, in retrospect, it provided him with one hell of a way to go out.

As an early champion of the “method”, Garfield perhaps drew upon his own feelings of persecution and impending criminalisation to help transform Nick Robey into an unsettling, sweat-drenched case study in twitchy, working class delinquent paranoia. Simultaneously pitiable and self-pitying, feckless and sadistic, Robey is unpredictable and delusional enough to become genuinely frightening – the kind of guy capable of flipping out and doing just about anything in a moment of rage, only to breakdown and cry with remorse when it’s all too late. At the same time though, he is also weirdly sympathetic – the archetypical dumb, overgrown kid who was probably raised with a daily beating, and never got an even break.

Garfield delivers a powerhouse performance here that can’t help but dominate the film, and if Robey sometimes feels like a character we’ve met a hundred times before, that’s probably because we’ve seen variations of this kind of performance style refracted through the prism of subsequent generations of actors for whom Garfield’s example kicked open the doors, be it Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, Hopper or whoever.

Speaking of tragic heroes of the black-list era, I’m assuming that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – who, strangely, used ‘Werewolf of Paris’ author Guy Endore as his “beard” on this occasion – needs no introduction. Although Trumbo has found himself re-evaluated in recent years as a dignified man of letters and the subject of bittersweet, Oscar-bait biopic, his work here serves to remind us that, at its best, his writing wasn’t merely hard-boiled in the conventional sense, but mercilessly cynical and – if you’ll forgive the neologism - dark as fuck.

Systematically assaulting the fragile fictions that his characters use to keep their self-identifies intact, Trumbo’s screenplay for ‘He Ran all the Way’ eventually leaves all of the principal players brutally exposed, with barely a hint of authorial sympathy to fall back on.

Robey’s dysfunctional background for instance is sketched in about as concisely as is humanly possible. When we first meet him, he is in the process of being woken from his slumber, late in the morning, by his dissolute, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (a wonderful bit part from Gladys George, whom you may recall from her turn as Miles Archer’s wife in ‘The Maltese Falcon’).

“If you were a real man, you’d be out looking for a job,” she scolds her son. “If you were a man, I’d punch your teeth in,” he snaps back, before making a cheap shot about her looking worse for wear for her hangover. Oof. It’s hilarious to observe such a comically dysfunctional mother/son relationship, but, when it comes to figuring out how our protagonist ended up as such a mixed up, deadbeat punk, what more could we possibly need to know?

(We only meet Mrs Robey once more in the film incidentally, when the police come calling after Nick is identified as the perpetrator of the robbery. She appears to be enjoying a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, and basically tells them that she doesn’t give a damn if her son lives or dies. Nice lady, huh?)

Through the remainder of the film, Trumbo’s obsessive unpicking of character dynamics helps generate uniquely grim sense of tension, as the five participants in the confined, hot-house apartment set-up flex and pull against each other like the strands of a cat’s cradle. As Robey’s destabilising influence intensifies, all of the component relationships that make up the Dobbs family – father/son, daughter/parents, husband/wife – find themselves compromised and turned upside down.

Wallace Ford in particular does great work here as the father, Fred (‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ reference, anyone?), and the scenes that depict his young son’s respect for him disintegrating as he sacrifices his masculine authority by taking a cautious, safety-first approach to dealing with the killer in their midst, are heart-breaking.

Perversely, even as he threatens and insults them, Robey also seems to become fixated with the idea of gaining the family’s acceptance. Presumably recognising their home as the kind of loving, mutually supportive environment that he has so lacked in his own life, he finds himself trying to insert himself into their daily routine as if he were some long lost eldest son, sub-consciously framing Ward as a substitute for his own absent father figure, even as another part of him viciously mocks the older man for his passivity and supposed cowardice. It is only when Robey realises that this acceptance will – obviously – not be forthcoming that becomes enraged and turns to violence.

In all cases though, the characters gain a real depth as their desperation increases. During the early part of the film – before Robey first pulls a gun on the family - we’re inclined to wonder why Peggy Dobbs would tolerate his already slightly unhinged, passive-aggressive behaviour, even to the point of inviting him back home to meet her folks after their first meeting.

A later scene between Peggy and a co-worker at her bakery job however clarifies for us that she feels so starved of male attention, and is so lacking in the self-confidence to go out and find any herself, that, when Robey initially comes on to her at the pool, she’s so taken aback that she deliberately overlooks the atmosphere of violence and suspicion dripping off her new suitor, and, once their physical attraction to each other has been established, finds herself willing to do just about anything to stop him leaving without her… even though that is the very thing upon which her family’s safety depends.

In her own way, Peggy is revealed to be as desperate and self-deluding as Robey. Torn between the bosom of her family and the desire to break away and establish an independent life for herself, she represents something very different from the procession of femme fatales, wronged wives and dilettante daughters we normally encounter in film noir, and Winters – a consistently underrated performer who went on to play a long series of these “doomed, mixed up floozy” roles – makes her into just as much of a fascinating and unpredictable piece of work as Garfield does his character.

If ‘He Ran All The Way’ has one weakness, it is probably it’s tendency to veer toward one of those “filmed stage play” type movies that became all the rage on the more cerebral side of Hollywood during the 1950s, as the kind of resurgent theatre so beloved of Garfield began to exert a greater influence upon the industry. (You know, ‘All About Eve’, ’12 Angry Men’ - that sort of thing. Actually, Robert Aldrich’s 1954 film of Clifford Odets’ scabrous Hollywood bridge bonfire ‘The Big Knife’, with a thinly veiled analogue of John Garfield as its central character and Winters in a supporting role, is a perfect example too.)

Unlike some films in this vein however, ‘He Ran..’ rarely suffers too badly from its limited scope, and never feels anything less than thoroughly cinematic. Which brings us neatly the third corner of this movie’s black list triangle – the considerably less feted figure of director John Berry.

Unlike Garfield and Trumbo, Berry was only just beginning to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘name’ when the Feds came knocking (he directed the highly regarded noir ‘Tension’ in 1949), and as a result he seems to have struggled to make much headway after he returned from exile in France (where he directed several of the Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution movies) in the ‘70s, working only intermittently on a decidedly odd bunch of projects through until he slipped out of the industry in the ‘80s.

This is a shame, because, on the basis of his work here, Berry certainly had the necessary chops to have done some really great work, had circumstances been different. The opening scenes depicting the robbery and Garfield’s flight to the swimming baths are great examples of the kind of down-on-the-street location shooting that started to bring a new energy to noir and crime films from the late ‘40s onward, and his approach to blocking the action within the cramped apartment set within which the latter two thirds of the film take place remains novel and involving throughout.

Taking a few notes perhaps from John Huston’s old “power relationships expressed through the framing” jive in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Berry manages to keep the lid pushed down tight on the movie’s pressure cooker plotting, giving his actors enough space to let rip whilst never allowing things to boil over into melodrama.

The film’s quality is further enhanced meanwhile by some superb photography from the legendary James Wong Howe. Though he has relatively little to work during interior scenes, the few nocturnal exteriors we get to see, as the increasingly paranoid Robey sneaks glances through the blinds, seeing sinister figures passing in the night, look absolutely fantastic. Minimal lights gleams like liquid gold off the bonnets of pitch black automobiles as they slide through gaps in the deep, inky blackness, highlighting stark silhouettes lurking on the corners of the screen. It’s pure noir, and pure brilliance – a beautifully expressionistic method of shooting urban environments that Howe would go on to perfect a few years later in a similarly talky movie with a few rogue strands of noir lurking in its DNA, Alexander Mackendrick’s ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ (1957).

All of these strengths – Howe’s sleek visual poetry, Berry’s dynamic direction, Trumbo’s writing and a set of feverishly intense performances from the central cast - come together for what I believe has to be one of the greatest and most devastating ironic finales in all of film noir. I won’t spoil it for you here though, so instead let’s talk about the political undercurrents that – somewhat inevitably, under the circumstances – can be found lurking beneath the surface of this ostensibly simple story.

In view of the personnel involved, it’s not surprising to discover that ‘He Ran all the Way’ attracted the attention of our old friend Thom Anderson, who included it on the list of films he considered key exemplars of what he termed film gris - a short-lived trend of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that saw a small group of left-leaning filmmakers using the tropes of the low budget crime thriller to offer a critique of American capitalism, and to explore collectivist alternatives to Hollywood’s usual brand of heroic individualism.

Whereas pictures like Thieves Highway and Force of Evil were explicitly polemical in this regard however, ‘He Ran All The Way’ is a lot more circumspect, keeping things sub-textual for the most part. Indeed, it is easy to watch the film without even considering the possibility that it is trying to make a political point; I know that I certainly did. It was only later, noting that the film made it onto Anderson’s list and considering the background of the people who made it, that it got me thinking about just how well the hard-boiled crime idiom lends itself to an anti-capitalist message.

This isn’t exactly a new idea of course, and wouldn't have been in 1951 either. After all, the Warner Bros gangster films of the 1930s provide about as savage a critique of free market capitalism as could possibly be wished for, whilst many of Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining stories explore the human cost of greed and civic corruption. Specifically in terms of film noir though: where there is money, there are guns, and where there are guns, there is death (and sex, but that’s another story). It ain’t exactly a subtle equation, but what more could an aspiring socialist filmmaker need to get the ball rolling?

In ‘He Ran All The Way’, the Dobbs family seem happily devoid of any of these things when we first meet them. Although they clearly struggle to make ends meet, for the most part they seem satisfied with their lot in life, and I don’t think any family members mention money (or a lack thereof) at any point. They function as a tight-knit, collective unit, with each member keeping the well-being of the others in mind at all times.

When Nick Robey crashes into their life however, he brings money – loads of it. Flashing it around, boasting of how much he got away from the robbery with, he tries his best to revel in the status it confers. He also brings his gun of course, wielding it with all the shaky-handed, phallic substitute ‘certainty’ you’d expect. He mocks the family for their lack of ambition, for the drudgery of their dead-end jobs and for their failure to pursue their individual dreams (and, through his hold over Peggy, he brings the dangerous promise of sex into the picture too of course). Under the stress of his assault, the functionality of the family unit begins to deteriorate, as long repressed resentments and independent desires begin to surface.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Robey attempts to win the family’s gratitude by ordering in a lavish banquet for them. Like the sainted peasants in some revolutionary melodrama however, they take a united stand and refuse his food, recognising it as the fruit of his ill-gotten gains and returning to their own simple fare instead.

This of course sends Robey into a calamitous rage which sees his supposed gesture of kindness transformed into a weird new form of torture, as he forces his prisoners to eat the luxury food at gun point; a reflection perhaps of the way that, for all its promises of benevolent progress, American capitalism countenances no alternatives, having essentially spent the entire modern era refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer from the rest of the world.

Admittedly, it could be argued that the psychological complexity of the film’s characters makes such a straight allegorical reading problematic, but it’s certainly there if you want it, and it adds a particularly dark caste to the Dobbs family’s prospects of future unity after their trauma ends and the credits roll, given the nature of the circumstances that eventually lead to Robey receiving the tarmac-and-lead-based reward we know lays in store for all such independently motivated, overgrown J.D. psychopaths.

Looking back with almost seventy years-worth of retrospect, it seems deeply ironic that, whilst the McCarthyite assertion that Hollywood movies were subliminally spreading dangerous communist sedition has generally been judged by history as wrong-headed, paranoid hysteria, close textural analysis of a film like ‘He Ran all the Way’ might have helped give credence to all of HUAC’s worst fears.

As the final film on Anderson’s chronological list, ‘He Ran all the Way’ can be seen to represent the last gasp of ‘film gris’ before the blacklist shutters slammed down. As Nick Robey’s fist grabs at the air and his wild eyes close for the last time, it also bids farewell to one of the best – and certainly one of the most influential – actors of the noir era.

That’s quite a weight of historical significance for a quick n’ nasty low budget thriller to shoulder, but the movie itself is more than solid enough to take the load. Standing alongside ill-starred classics like ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950) and Ida Lupino’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ (1953), it is one of the very best crime movies to have emerged from this particular time and place.

Blood Island Journal # 3: Mad Doctor of Blood Island (Gerado de Leon & Eddie Romero, 1969)

Back on Blood Island a year or so after all that business with the sludge monster and the sacrificial virgins, and things actually seem to have changed quite a bit for this non-continuous quasi-sequel.

For one thing, the island itself seems a bit more developed than it was the last time around. The islanders now enjoy the benefit of some paved roads, a pony and trap and at least one electric generator. Sadly, there are far fewer totem poles, but the main village now boasts a “government house”, whatever that is.

For another thing, the outrageous colour palette of the previous picture has been toned down, with the exotica / tiki bar vibes scaled back slightly (perhaps to a “7”, down from “10”), lending a marginally more naturalistic feel to proceedings that reflects the film’s curiously morose, down-beat emotional timbre. Despite the promise of that irresistible title (what’s the matter doc, Market Street not good enough for ya anymore?), it looks as if shit’s about to get real on the ol’ Isla de Sangre.

Which, I must confess, is a development that is not entirely to my liking. Watching ‘Mad Doctor..’ for the first time, I found myself missing the goofy charm and over-saturated excesses of ‘Brides..’. Though a “dark and brooding” approach can often work well for Filipino horror (look no further than Terror is a Man for a perfect example), I have my doubts re: how far it can really go when it comes to distracting our attention from the meandering pacing and slapdash production values inherent to these late ‘60s Hemisphere horrors.

Thankfully however, Romero and de Leon at least came up with a fool-proof strategy to help keep the mid-west drive-in crowds in their seats – namely, cranking up the gore and sleaze to what at the time must have seemed fairly preposterous levels.

This intent is clearly signalled by one of the most attention-grabbing pre-credits sequences this side of Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’, in which we see an anonymous, stark naked Filipino girl fleeing through the (rather scrubby looking) jungle, before getting bloodily mauled by a hairy-handed green zombie / monster. Yikes!

Following this unambiguous statement of intent (surely the exploitation movie equivalent of a hand-on-heart oath of allegiance?) however, we’re soon back to the grind of PLOT and TALKING, as a new shipment of outsiders approach the torrid coast of Blood Island – but hey, at least a wealth of “so, why are we going to this island again?” type expository chat allows us to clearly establish who’s who this time around.

This is just as well, because, as seems to have become a trademark of Eddie Romero’s films in particular, ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ has, frankly, too many characters.

Shipping in on the boat, we firstly have an American couple (John Ashley and Angelique Pettyjohn) who have come in search of Angelique’s estranged father. I’m not sure if the reasoning behind the father’s presence on Blood Island is ever made clear, but he seems rather like one of those “trading company agent” type characters found in colonial-era South Seas tales. He’s certainly a sweat-drenched, alcoholic misanthrope who seems to have been driven mad by the malarial climate, at any rate.

Played by one Tony Edmunds (in his only screen role), he initially rejects the opportunity to re-establish a relationship with his daughter (presumably because it would upset his busy schedule of sprawling around in a state of fever-ish dissolution). (1)

Also on the boat is an alternative Filipino protagonist, Carlo, played by Ronaldo Valdez. Having been raised on the island, he is heading back there to track down his mother (played by veteran Pinoy character actress Tita Muñoz), after receiving the news that his father has died. *She* seems be ensconced as the live-in servant and lover of one Dr Lorca (Ronald Remy, star of Hemisphere’s earlier ‘The Blood Drinkers’ (1964)).

As you might well imagine, this guy is the “Mad Doctor” of the title, although disappointingly he never really gets very “mad” here, in the usual horror movie sense of the term. In fact, he remains disconcertingly chilled out through most of picture, regarding the assorted hullaballoo caused by his errant experiments with a sense of expressionless neutrality. Whether Remy was heroically resisting the urge to over-act (going instead for “cold scientific distance”), or simply lacked the necessary charisma for the role, is largely a moot point however, and will likely depend on your level of sympathy for the production.

In addition this lot meanwhile, we also have another significant character, Marla (Alicia Alonzo), an island girl who seems like a twisted and vengeful variation of the upstanding Alam from ‘Brides..’. A childhood playmate of Carlo, she now seems fixated both on seducing him, and on taking revenge against Dr Lorca for the death of her lover, Carlo's late father.

So, yes – if you’re thinking that this seems like an awful lot of human drama to try to cram into a movie that is basically being sold on the promise of seeing naked girls being torn apart by a slimy green monster, you have a point.

Some commentators have suggested that the introduction of a parallel storyline involving Filipino characters could have been an attempt to broaden the film’s appeal for local audiences, but actually this seems doubtful. ‘Mad Doctor..’, like its predecessors, was shot in English, with the majority of funds coming from overseas, and - insofar as I’m aware – the possibility of a theatrical release in The Philippines was never even considered.

Nonetheless, it’s certainly nice to see that the filmmakers were confident enough by this stage to devote a significant portion of screen time to characters of their own nationality, and it is interesting to note that this coincides with the introduction of a more pervasive sense of melancholy than was present in the old fashioned, “white folks getting into trouble in the jungle” tales that characterised the preceding Blood Island films.

For all the monsters and bloodthirsty japes, just about everyone in ‘Mad Doctor..’ is basically deeply unhappy, with most of the characters struggling with grief or loss in one form or another. The arched eyebrow “humour” that dominated dialogue exchanges in ‘Brides..’ has largely vanished, whilst the Carlo / Dr Lorca storyline incorporates a queasy undertone of incestuous desire which culminates in a handful of uncomfortably harrowing, taboo-skirting scenes in the film’s final act

If all this sounds pretty intriguing on paper however, I wish I could report that it was a bit more enjoyable on celluloid. Unfortunately, the means by which Romero and de Leon choose to unpack these complex character relationships – think long stretches of bland, monotone dialogue and repetitive shot / reverse shot editing patterns – soon poses a challenge both to viewers’ attention spans, and potentially their very wakefulness.

Never fear though, because the monster is here, and, if he’s not even remotely as much fun as ‘Brides of Blood’s world-beating sludge-beast, he certainly scores a few points in terms of sheer unpleasantness.

This time around, the film’s wacky, quasi-scientific premise involves Dr Lorca’s technique for reviving / extending animal life through the direct injection of chlorophyll - which results, inevitably, in the creation of one or more shambling, psychopathic moss-zombies.

Half-man, half-cactus, is the general idea here I suppose, and, though fairly laughable from a make-up POV, the green paint-splattered, paper-mache headed menace that periodically emerges to terrorise Blood Island nonetheless has a genuinely icky feel to it that puts me in mind of the muesli-faced fiends found in second string Italian zombie movies of the early 1980s. This comparison remains pertinent with regard to what the creature actually does too; boy, he sure goes for it!

Succumbing to the temptations of the cartoonish, full strength gore approach inaugurated earlier in the decade by Herschell Gordon Lewis, de Leon and Romero cheerfully employ a range of special effects that make Lewis seem like a champion of gritty surgical realism by comparison, transforming ‘Mad Doctor..’s monster attack scenes into a ludicrous rampage of flying mannequin limbs, screaming, blood-splattered naked people and shock zooms into piles of steaming entrails, sure to leave any seasoned connoisseur of trash cinema beside themselves with delight.

Considerably less delightful for most viewers however will be the rather unique “in-camera effect” that is utilised throughout the film’s horror sequences. Basically, this consists of the camera operator relentlessly cranking the zoom function in and out again, in time with some pulsing rhythm of his own devising, much in the manner of a child fooling around with a video camera for the first time at a family picnic.

Personally, I found this gimmick absolutely infuriating. It makes many of the film’s livelier scenes feel disorientating and difficult to follow, and some potentially great visuals are ruined forever by the murky motion blurring which results. Individual tolerance may vary however, and I can at least appreciate the fact that enjoyment of this technique is largely a matter of context.

Say what you will about the folks behind Hemisphere, but they certainly knew their market, and I can well imagine that, in a Saturday afternoon matinee full of screaming kids, having this pulsating, zoom-y weirdness kick in whenever the monster is nearby must have proved very effective. For your humble correspondent however, sitting alone beside the blu-ray player half a century later in earnest contemplation of a cinematic text (god help me)… not so much. (2)

Unfortunately, a further – significant - obstacle for most 21st century viewers attempting to enjoy ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ hoves into view about halfway through, when the filmmakers decide to include a short, but still extremely unpleasant, display of real life animal cruelty.

Regrettably, the ill treatment of animals is an aspect of Filipino culture that can often be seen creeping into the nation’s genre cinema, but there can be no cultural justification for the reprehensible conduct we see here, as some unfortunate pigs and goats are tied down and stabbed as part of a staged “tribal ritual”.

Thankfully, this footage is mercifully brief (comprising only a few seconds of screen time), but it’s still pretty difficult to stomach, so – viewer discretion (and/or a speedy hand on the remote control) is advised.

Moving swiftly on however, ‘Mad Doctor..’s non-zoom-damaged, non-animal slaughtering segments can at least boast a few other attractions that may (or may not) make the whole thing worth ploughing through, including, but not limited to:

1. Loads of lascivious, erotic dancing from the island’s more shapely young residents (I suppose the extended dance party finale of ‘Brides of Blood’ must have gone down well with audiences).

2. The spiriting sight of the gum-chewing, slightly Southern accented John Ashley unleashing some gone-to-seed white guy kung fu as he scatters spear-wielding guards like nine-pins, as well as rocking an incongruous powder blue suit and wing-tip collar to complement his kiss-curled, Ricky Nelson-type looks.

3. The unique presence of Angelique Pettyjohn, an unconventional leading lady whose emergence from bed when disturbed by a moss-zombie banging at her door (a scene coincidentally blessed with some splendid, Bava-esque gel lighting) must have lingered long in many adolescent imaginations. Gamely gallivanting around Blood Island in a frilly pink mini-dress being menaced by zombies, snakes, surly tribesmen and the like (Tito Arevalo’s bombastic scoring gives equal weight to all of these potential threats), she’s a great screamer who leads me to want to use the word “lascivious” twice in the space of a few paragraphs. (3)

Having got that out of the way, I’d like to move things on to a brief discussion of this film’s assorted promotional ballyhoo – chiefly dreamed up by Hemisphere marketing consultant and later Independent International Pictures mogul Sam Sherman – which is a lot of fun, and must have played a significant role in ensuring that ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ remains probably the most infamous and fondly remembered of the “blood island” films, despite being arguably the weakest instalment in the series, in purely cinematic terms.

Shot on spec by Romero using Caucasian teenagers apparently rounded up from the domestic quarter of the nearest U.S. military base, the film’s “green blood” prologue, in which patrons are encouraged to drink whatever hideous fluorescent potion the distributors managed to hand out whilst reciting the “Oath of Green Blood” is an absolute hoot, whilst the film’s demented trailer – inexplicably featuring a voiceover performed by legendary underground theatre performer and New York eccentric Brother Theodore – is an absolute classic too.

For all this attention-grabbing tomfoolery however, ‘Mad Doctor..’ for the most part remains a rather grim, potentially headache-inducing trudge of a viewing experience. Despite the polystyrene walled dungeon finale and occasional moments of classical gothic atmos in fact, the film in retrospect seems interesting for the way in which it moves beyond the campy, ‘40s-derived template that still defined most low budget horror films of the late ‘60s.

Instead, the dour pessimism and envelope-pushing content lurking behind the garish marketing materials makes the feel – at a push - somewhat more like a precursor to the more explicit and downbeat horror films that would begin to emerge from both Europe and the USA during the 1970s. Certainly, if the purpose of a horror film is to be horrible, ‘Mad Doctor of Blood Island’ succeeds about as well its production circumstance could have allowed, providing enough unsavoury content to warp the minds of monster kids and morality campaigners alike. Apparently it managed to fly under the radar of the latter group however, and must have proved sufficiently popular with the former that Dr Lorca returned, less than a year later, in ‘Beast of Blood’. Sanity allowing, I’ll be landing once again on the golden sands of Blood Island soon to bring you the low down on that one. God help us all.

---
(1) As an aside, I found it interesting that the “alcoholic dad” character is identified by the islanders as “Mr. Willard” – presumably a nod to Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, which is curious, given that both Eddie Romero and John Ashley worked behind the scenes on the Filipino shoot for ‘Apocalypse Now’ a few years later.

(2) Yes, in case you were wondering, anecdotal evidence suggests that these movies were regularly screened to pre-teen crowds throughout the USA, with any trims for gore and nudity presumably at the mercy of the theatre manager’s scissors. What a great time to have been alive!

(3) At this point, I think we are duty-bound to mention Pettyjohn’s later claim that she and John Ashley were doing the deed for real during their brief love scene in ‘Mad Doctor..’. Though naturally nothing to support this assertion survives on screen, it’s certainly a pretty steamy sequence, and, given that Pettyjohn went on to become one of the few ‘legitimate’ actresses to move into hardcore porn during the ‘70s whilst Ashley is widely remembered as an irrepressible horndog, such shenanigans don’t seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

Exploito All’Italiana: Roma Violenta (Marino Girolami, 1975)

Released in the USA under the name ‘Violent City’ (but definitely not to be confused with the 1970 Sergio Sollima / Charles Bronson joint of the same name), ‘Roma Violenta’ (no translation needed, I’m assuming) represents the Italian poliziotteschi at its most reactionary and utilitarian, boiling the right wing fantasies of ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Death Wish’ down to a sticky, unpalatable paste, and serving it up with a skimpy garnish of cut price action and lurid sadism.

The film is historically significant however for introducing the world to Euro-Crime icon Maurizio Merli, and to his signature character Commissario Betti – an expressionless, blonde moustached human torpedo on a one-man mission to crack the skull and/or puncture the lungs of every small-time hood who dares set foot in one of Italy’s major metropolitan areas.

Generally assumed to have been cast as a result of his passing resemblance to Franco Nero, who had recently had recently scored big at the box office playing crusading cops in Enzo Castellari’s ‘High Crime’ (1973) and ‘Street Law’ (’74), Merli’s dead-eyed, suspect-pulverizing persona must have proved popular with audiences, as he went on to reprise the Betti character in both Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Napoli Violenta’ and Girolami’s ‘Italia a Mano Armata’ [export title ‘Special Cop in Action’] the following year, before essaying a series of similarly two-fisted Inspectors and Commissarios in films for Lenzi, Stelvio Massi and other directors throughout the late ‘70s.

An entirely generic distillation of everything you might expect of one of these movies, ‘Roma Violenta’ begins the only way it could, with a bunch of gun-toting, stocking-masked punks hi-jacking a city bus and stealing valuables from the passengers. Of course, it all goes wrong, and of course an innocent bystander (a seventeen year old boy – guaranteed to elicit maximum hand-wringing from proponents of the poliziotteschi’s none-more-macho mindset) is callously gunned down. A promising life, senselessly wasted! Is Commissario Betti going to stand for this? Hell no!

In between blustering through the offices of his uncaring, desk-jockey superiors, angrily demanding more men and more money for his ‘special squad’ to combat this intolerable crime wave, Merli is soon on the trail of the bus robbery’s perpetrators, thus treating us to an explanatory demonstration of his no nonsense approach to police-work.

This basically consists of Betti meeting with his top undercover man Biondi (played an impossibly youthful-looking Ray Lovelock), who tells him, “it was that guy over there”, prompting our hero to trap said guy in an empty bus (irony, ‘Roma Violenta’ style) and beat the living shit out of him (information gathering, ‘Roma Violenta’ style).

Already, the film’s political stance has been taken to such a comical extreme that for a moment I almost suspected it had crossed the line into a Judge Dredd style parody of fascistic law enforcement. Certainly, as Merli beats this unarmed youth to verge of death whilst demanding he “confess”, it is difficult for our sympathies to remain fully on the right side of the law… but then, I’m bleeding heart, liberal do-gooder, so what the hell do I know?

Perhaps in order to off-set this potential drift of audience sympathy, ‘Roma Violenta’ is notable for its failure (or refusal?) to in any way engage with the lives and activities of its criminal antagonists. Surprisingly, there is no suggestion at any point in the film that the teen hoods and low rent villains Betti combats are connected to an organised crime network or criminal syndicate, and, disappointingly, there are no cigar-chewing, Lionel Stander Mafiosi, twisted, Tomas Milian-style psychopaths or calculating John Saxon overseers to liven things up either.

Though some solid performers (John Steiner and the ubiquitous Luciano Rossi, for example) are on hand to play the more experienced crooks, none of them are ever given the chance to develop much of a personality, and for the most part the film’s baddies remain nameless, gun-toting young hooligans, whose criminal ambitions are limited to opportunistic hit-and-run attacks and the occasional, poorly planned armed robbery. All of which rather makes a mockery of Belli’s repeated insistence that he needs greater resources and special legal dispensation to fight this existential threat to law & order, needless to say.

Under such circumstances, even the most brutal of crime films would normally at least pay lip service to the social inequalities that might lead young people to embark on such crime sprees, but no dice here. In classic Michael Winner tradition, these punks come out of nowhere like goblins, depriving the well-to-do of their gold watches and man-handling their women, before scampering off again, leaving blood and bodies in their wake.

Having noted during the opening credits that the great Richard Conte appears in ‘Roma Violenta’, I could barely wait to see him pop up as a suave, sadistic mob boss (a stereotype he’d gleefully perfected over the years in everything from ‘The Big Combo’ (1955) to Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Il Boss’ (1973)), but again, the film defies our expectations by casting Conte as a good guy - namely, one “Mr Sartori”, a campaigning lawyer who invites Betti to join his freelance vigilante justice group after our man (inevitably) quits the police force in disgust.

Now, in any other crime movie, when a venerable Italian-American character actor invites our protagonist to shake hands with a group of men who are lined up in what appears to be a meat locker, and distributes glossy photos of some people he wishes them to track down and hospitalise… well, we might reasonably expect our hero to contemplate the possibility that his strict moral code has been somewhat compromised. But, as we have established, ‘Roma Violenta’ is a movie of very little brain, and Mr Sartori’s earnest dedication to the pursuit of justice is never questioned.

Instead, he very nearly finds himself becoming one of the film’s several vengeance-justifying sacrificial victims, when a gang of particularly scruffy-looking villains invade his home and hold him at knife-point. It is at this point that Mr Sartori’s previously unmentioned daughter descends the stairs, and the uncredited actress playing her gets to enjoy a full three seconds of screen time before – you guessed it – she is stripped naked and raped by the thugs.

A drearily nasty business, replete with cynically opportunistic frontal nudity, this sequence gains a touch of class from Conte’s appalled reaction shots; a real pro, even when working in such reduced circumstances, he sells his character’s wide-eyed horror very well.

Predictably, this treatment is about par for the course for female characters in ‘Roma Violenta’. There are a few brief scenes in which Merli goes to visit his girlfriend (played by Euro-cult regular Daniela Giordano), who appears to manage a hotel, but this has no connection with anything else that happens in the film, and basically feel as if it has been tacked on solely in order to establish that Betti is in a monogamous relationship with a woman - lest the audience suspect that he might actually be some kind of weirdo, vis-a-vis his “lone wolf” lifestyle and apparent enthusiasm for inflicting sadistic beatings upon younger men.

Nameless Girlfriend aside however, I’m not sure there is a single woman this movie who gets to speak more than a single line of dialogue before being arbitrarily murdered or assaulted…. which I’ll admit puts me in a bit of a critical quandary. After all, if I’m to continue to defend Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ or Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza films against accusations of misogyny, citing the argument that they are merely portraying (rather than endorsing) a hyper-masculine world in which women are forcibly denied a voice, surely I should do ‘Roma Violenta’ the same courtesy...?

As much as I hate to recognise distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cinematic culture though, at some point I suppose you’ve just got to draw a line in the sand and – in this case - declare that Peckinpah and Fukasaku made critically-engaged, emotionally-nuanced films which can (at a stretch) be read as implicit critiques of the kind of toxic machismo they specialised in portraying. Marino Girolami on the other hand…

Well -- I don’t know. For all that I’ve torn it apart above, I don’t want to come down too hard on ‘Roma Violenta’. As egregious and simple-minded as its content may sound in the abstract, the actual execution here is so pulpy and paper-thin that it is impossible to really take offense.

As with his other Euro-Cult calling card (1981’s hugely entertaining Zombi Holocaust), Girolami essentially directs here as if he were pasting together a cheap fumetti comic book, banging through scenes in a rough, first-take-best-take manner that, whilst it rarely crosses the line into actual incompetence, suggests an attempt to wring maximum impact from a bare minimum of effort.

Wasting no time on such niceties as character, narrative depth or visual interest, Girolami comes down hard on the pacing, producing a movie that – whilst it scarcely contains a single line of dialogue that doesn’t feel like a perfunctory reiteration of genre cliché – is rarely dull, remaining eminently watchable, and indeed rather likeable, in an “after a few beers” kind of way.

The film’s overall highlights are probably the moments in which robberies and assaults are staged on crowded city streets, complete with gawping by-standers and barely choreographed chaos, including a hilarious skit in which some purse-snatchers get their asses kicked by an undercover police karate expert, made up in drag as an old lady.

Merli’s numerous beat downs meanwhile are creditably staged, complete with quick edits and bone-crunching sound effects that could have come straight from a slightly sluggish kung fu movie, and, though comically under-cranked, the obligatory car chase also packs a punch, hitting all the necessary poliziotteschi pleasure points, as a bunch of those tiny ‘70s Italian cars we all love so much roar precariously around an unfinished motorway flyover, allowing Girolami to make the most of his minimal resources, cannily switching back and forth between overhead shots and ‘bumper-cam’ for a touch of proto-‘Mad Max’ excitement.

By far the best thing ‘Roma Violenta’ has going for it though is the music, which comes courtesy of producer Guido de Angelis, working as usual in collaboration with his brother Maurizio. And, the de Angelis boys are really on top form here too, working out a kind of propulsive, disco-influenced progressive rock sound with a strong melancholy undertone provided by some poignant lead playing on keyboard, flute and harmonica. As exemplified by compilation staple New Special Squad, it’s a stone-cold classic of ‘70s cop movie music, and comes highly recommended.

And…. that’s about all I have to say about ‘Roma Violenta’, to honest. It may not be one of the better poliziotteschi pictures, but, if you can turn off your brain (and your conscience), stop asking questions, and simply revel in the surfeit of ‘70s Cop Vibes it provides (mm, all that fuzzy, nicotine-stained brown), it’s a pleasantly psychotic timewaster.

I do wonder what Girolami thought about the fact that, whilst he was treading water on stuff like this, his own son (the aforementioned Enzo G. Castellari) was busy outclassing him with a series of vastly more accomplished additions to the genre, hitting his peak the following year with one of my all-time favourite European action/crime films, ‘The Big Racket’, but…. that’s another story, I suppose. For now, let’s knock this one on the head and hopefully we’ll get around to it one day.

Deathblog: Larry Cohen (1936-2019)

I’ve been a fan of Larry Cohen’s work for about as long as I can remember.

Ok, perhaps not quite that long, but certainly since I first acquired a DVD player at some point in the early 2000s, and made the then newly reissued ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’ (1982) one of my inaugural impulsive purchases in this exciting new format.

I mean, who wouldn’t? Just look at the damn thing.

Long story short, I fucking loved it. I still do. It’s one of my absolute favourite movies. To this day, I’ve rarely seen a film that dared to be so much better, so much more original, than the constraints of its genre, budgetary status and marketing materials lead the audience to expect. I mean, most filmmakers would probably have been content just to have created a down-on-the-street New York crime story so compelling that it could made for a respectable addition to the ‘Mean Streets’ / ‘Serpico’ canon in its own right; but to then amp it up with decapitated sunbathers, sinister Aztec cultists skinning people alive and David Carradine blasting a tommy gun in the face of stop motion god-monster on top of the Chrysler Building..? Good grief.

Whoever this Larry Cohen guy was (and his “WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY..” credit leaves little room for authorial ambiguity), I immediately knew he was on my wave length (or rather, I aspired to be on HIS wave length, I suppose).

Learning more about ‘Q’s production circumstances over the years, my admiration for what Cohen managed to achieve with it has only increased. Like all of his films, it basically just began with a good idea and a throw of the dice. (He always claimed that he launched the production in a fit of pique after being fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s ‘I, The Jury’, making initial calls to cast, crew and financial backers from his studio-booked hotel room and shooting the first footage for ‘Q’ the very next day.)

Looking back over Cohen’s filmography, it’s fair to say that this impulsive approach to movie-making – zero pre-production planning, total faith in on-set improvisation – was both his greatest strength and his Achilles’ heel. Sometimes he rolled a five, sometimes an eight, but on ‘Q’, he ended up with a double six staring back at him. Everything just comes together beautifully. Though fans of the equally extraordinary ‘God Told Me To’ (1976) could make a strong argument to the contrary, I still think it’s his masterpiece.

Cohen also claimed – in his characteristically entertaining audio commentary - that he met Michael Moriarty randomly, in a restaurant ferchristsake, immediately offered him a part in the film and began rewriting the script around him, resulting in what is almost certainly the best performance in either man’s career.

He also very nearly ended up in jail (surely only the intervention of friends in high places can possibly have kept him out of the cells) after causing a major security incident in New York City when – asking no one’s permission, as per usual – he had his people climb to the top of the Chrysler Building, hi-jack the hanging baskets used by steeplejacks carrying out renovation work, and start blasting away at an invisible monster with prop machine guns… whilst simultaneously stealing footage of the people on the streets below fleeing in panic!

Though Cohen perhaps never pulled off anything else quite so audacious / insane [delete as applicable], his best films of the ‘70s are full of similarly electrifying moments, in which the violent drama of the fictional narrative crashes headfirst into the real world, capturing the reactions of unsuspecting bystanders (see Andy Kaufman going crazy in the midst of the St Patrick’s Day parade in ‘God Told Me To’, or Fred Williamson staggering across Times Square with a bullet wound in ‘Black Caesar’(1973)). Although he seems to have largely curtailed these shenanigans from the mid ‘80s onward (perhaps considerations of safety and sanity began to win out), these outbursts of chaos are emblematic off the off kilter, anything-could-happen-next energy that defines the entirety of Cohen’s career.

Though he was still a young man when the ‘60s hit, Cohen never really seems to have embraced that decade’s counter-culture. In spite of the gonzo antics outlined above, he was never exactly what you’d call a rock n’ roll kinda guy. In fact, his aspirations early in life involved becoming a borsch-belt comedian or nightclub crooner, before unsolicited script submissions led him toward a career in network TV and, subsequently, independent filmmaking.

(All this is outlined, by the way, in Steve Mitchell’s 2017 documentary ‘King Cohen’, which I watched this week in preparation for writing this post; an excellent doc, and solid gold for anyone who enjoys listening to movie people talking – recommended.)

Despite this however, Cohen’s films and scripts are united by a rebellious spirit, and almost always manage to sneak in an element of pointed social criticism, hidden in plain sight beneath a thin veneer of commercial ballyhoo. Dealing candidly (sometimes furiously) with issues of societal inequality, race / gender / age discrimination and institutional corruption, his writing exhibits a near-obsessive distrust of authority, counselling profound suspicion of the motives of police and government, and frequently pitting unpredictable, potentially dangerous, outsiders against a hierarchy of ineffectual, morally tainted patriarchal figures.

These concerns are perhaps most immediately evident in Cohen’s directorial debut, ‘Bone’ (1970), an extraordinary and uncategorisable social satire which proved impossible to market at the time, and that remains sadly underappreciated to this day. (I reviewed it here as part of a Yaphet Kotto blogathon way back in 2010, though I can’t really vouch for the veracity of my writing or opinions at that time.)

Even more transgressive in their own way though are Cohen’s 1974 hit ‘It’s Alive’ and it’s two sequels – films whose outrageous, envelope-pushing subject matter allowed goofy, bad taste monster attack scenes to exist side by side with harrowing, elemental human drama, whilst also asking their audience to reflect on such startling sights as (in ‘It Lives Again’, 1978) an army of heavily armed riot police surrounding a hospital specifically for the purpose of killing a new born child, whilst a small band of dissidents try to smuggle the expectant mother into a mobile delivery room hidden in the back of a furniture truck. (Although, this being a Larry Cohen film of course, those dissidents prove to be pretty far from heroic themselves.)

Aside from anything else, the first ‘Alive’ film stands as a clear precursor to the work of both David Cronenberg and Frank Henenlotter, and its key scene - in which John Ryan sits in a hospital waiting room nervously anticipating the birth of his first child, only to instead see a nurse staggering through the door to the maternity ward with her throat torn out - remains one of the most jaw-dropping moments in all of ‘70s horror, created with little more than one good actor, one TV soap opera set and a few squirts of fake blood.

In all of the aforementioned films, there is something dangerous; something new and uncomfortable, giving voice to ideas not normally encountered in commercial genre cinema. Cohen’s persistent refusal to tow the usual line when it comes to deciding which characters are ‘good’, which are ‘bad’, and what should be done about whatever the status quo-upsetting threat under consideration happens to be, allows his work to remain provocative and unnerving to this day.

First and foremost I think, Cohen was a great writer. (This seems a good point at which to drop in mention of his voluminous screenwriting work, which included the creation of the ‘Maniac Cop’ franchise and the 2002 high concept thriller ‘Phone Booth’, amongst many others.)

One of the all-time great ‘high concept’ guys, most of Cohen’s scripts seem tailor made for a “give it to us in one sentence” pitch meeting, but he never failed to wring maximum dramatic value from his latest Crazy Idea, foregrounding character and consequence to give added weight to movies that could easily have become goofy timewasters. In an alternate universe – if he’d had lunch with Rod Sterling, or if he’d got to grips with prose - he could easily have slotted into the pantheon next to Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon or Ray Bradbury.

When the films Cohen directed did fall down or emerge as merely average, it was the vagaries of the execution (variable performances, uninspired camera work, botched effects, wonky pacing or simply a lack of time/resources) that let them down. His ideas and his instincts were always on-point, and, given the seat-of-his-pants circumstances under which he worked, it’s remarkable that he rarely, if ever, came up snake eyes.

To date, I’ve never seen a Larry Cohen film that wasn’t worth watching at least once, but, having said that, his extended catalogue is pretty damn vast, considering his preference for outré subject matter and his constant battles with studios and distributers. I’ve been gradually trying to fill in the gaps for myself over the past few years, but, watching the aforementioned documentary served to remind me just how many titles I still have to go.

In ‘King Cohen’, you will hear Martin Scorsese speak eloquently about the importance of Cohen’s near forgotten 1977 FBI biopic ‘The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover’. You will learn that his 1987 Stephen King sequel ‘Return to Salem’s Lot’ featured an elderly Sam Fuller teaming up with Michael Moriarty to battle vampires (now THAT I’ve got to see), or that he gave Bette Davis her final movie role in an ill-fated comedy named ‘Wicked Stepmother’ (1989), introducing a ‘body swap’ element into the script in order to allow him to finish the film after health problems and bad feeling led Davis to bail before the completion of shooting.

And, that’s before we even mention his 1980 horror-comedy ‘Full Moon High’ (four years before ‘Teen Wolf’, folks), or ‘Original Gangstas’ (1996), the post-‘Boyz N The Hood’ gang warfare movie he made in collaboration with Fred Williamson, casting genuine gang members in Gary, Indiana.

One suspects that Cohen’s dice hand may finally have failed him on some of these lesser known oddities, but you know, he who dares etc… I look forward to catching up with them at some point.

What a wild rampage of a career. Though Cohen effectively retired from directing in the 21st century (his 2006 ‘Masters of Horror’ episode ‘Pick Me Up’ – a final collaboration with Moriarty - was the only exception), he continued to keep the wolf from the door by writing prolifically for films and TV (in particular, the success of ‘Phone Booth’ seems to have made him the go-to guy for phone-related DTV horror flicks, strangely enough) – but I’m really glad that Mitchell’s aforementioned documentary came through in time to top off his filmography with an appropriately heartfelt tribute to his achievements.

Of course, the summary I’ve banged out above barely begins to scratch the surface of a full life of creative endeavour. How many spec scripts did he sell over the years, only to see them disappear into the ether? And I’m sure that a devotee of ‘60s American TV could probably write an even longer obit post, running down his successes and innovations in that field.

However you approach his career though, Larry Cohen stands as a pioneering figure in the realm of self-sufficient, independent American cinema, a persistent thorn in the side of slick, studio conformity, and a relentless champion of a wilder, weirder, angrier voices within popular entertainment. He will be much missed.