Exploito All’Italiana: Syndicate Sadists (Umberto Lenzi, 1975)

Despite its lurid English release title – and despite the fact that director Lenzi was responsible for several of the more savage entries in the poliziotteschi canon – ‘Il Giustiziere Sfida la Città’ [literal translation: ‘The Executioner Challenges The City’], which hit Italian screens in August 1975, actually stands as one of the mildest, most easy-going contributions to the genre.

In fact, you’d also need to snip away a few brief moments of violence here and there and you could probably present this one as a family friendly action-adventure movie - about as far removed from the excesses of films like Mad Dog Killer as it’s possible to get whilst still remaining under the wider umbrella of ‘euro-crime’.

For better or for worse – and really, it’s a mixture of both - It appears that the responsibility for this surprising shift in tone sits primarily with the star of ‘Syndicate Sadists’, the late, great Tomas Milian.

After spending the better part of a decade portraying a variety of boggle-eyed peasant tricksters and fevered psychopaths in Italian genre films, the sheer gusto Milian brought to the screen had by this point made him somewhat of a bankable - if unconventional – star in Italy, and it seems he thought he deserved a chance to prove himself as a straight action hero. Apparently the producers/backers of ‘Syndicate Sadists’ agreed, and Umberto Lenzi (now equally late and great, sadly) was engaged to direct what basically amounts to an unashamed star vehicle for the Cuban dynamo.

Lenzi had previously worked with Milian on the preceding year’s ‘Almost Human’ [‘Milano Odia: La Polizia Non Può Sparare’], a stone-cold classic of misanthropic ‘70s crime/exploitation cinema that arguably marks a high watermark for both men’s careers. Such was the intensity with which Milian’s character committed bloodcurdling atrocities in ‘Almost Human’, the film was marketed as a horror movie when it reached the USA, and, again, the extent to which ‘Syndicate Sadists’ pulls a total 180 on any expectations this may have been in place for the director and star’s subsequent crime picture is remarkable.

Having pushed himself about as far into the realms of nihilistic psychopathy as it’s possible to go whilst still returning safely in ‘Almost Human’, it is perhaps understandable that Milian thought his screen persona was in need of a little TLC, lest he spend the rest of his life watching people cower in fear when he passed on the street, and it is plainly obvious that reinventing himself as a card-carrying Good Guy was his main objective in ‘Syndicate Sadists’.

To give you an idea of the level of control Milian exerted over this production, legend has it that whilst en route to Rome to begin shooting, he picked up a copy of David Morrell’s novel ‘First Blood’ (which would of course become the basis for the 1982 film of the same name, introducing the world to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo for the first time) at the airport. Apparently impressed by the book, Milian is said to have demanded that his character in ‘Syndicate Sadists’ be named “Rambo” – in spite of the fact that the name was perceived to be both meaningless and faintly comical to Italian audiences.

Nonetheless though, the star got his way, and ‘Syndicate Sadists’ is all about RAMBO. Everybody in the somewhat anonymous version of Milan in which the film takes place knows about Rambo. Men respect him, women adore him, and evil-doers freeze in fear at the very mention of his name.

Swathed in gigantic driving goggles and sporting a fetching variety of winter jackets, woollen hats and scarves (most of them red) alongside his shaggy hair and full beard, Rambo certainly cuts a striking figure during the movie’s opening credits, as – accompanied by Franco Micalizzi’s rousing crime-funk score - he roars into town on his bright red motorcycle, returning home after an unspecified period out on the road (presumably “finding himself”, or defending sundry innocents from the depredations of criminals, or somesuch).

Part hobo, part hippy, but all two-fisted defender of justice and freedom, Rambo is an action hero wrought from the uniquely eccentric sensibility of Tomas Milian, and, assuming you’re in the right frame of mind to tolerate such a colossal display of egotism on the actor’s part, he’s a pretty awesome guy to have around.

Early in the film, Rambo is reunited with his brother (a mild-mannered cop who has been suspended and victimised for failing to toe the line re: the city’s endemic corruption problem), and our hero accompanies him on a visit to his new place of work - the HQ of a kind of organised vigilante organisation that has been set up to tackle the rampant criminality that has resulted from aforementioned corruption (in the absence of Rambo’s saviour-like presence, presumably).

Here, Rambo wastes no time in stripping down to his vest to out-karate this private police force’s karate experts (Milian’s kung fu is a sight to behold), before he casually out-shoots their gun people on the pistol range, and finally earns himself a warm handshake from the boss of the outfit, who tells Rambo he’s exactly the kind of guy they’d like on their side, if only he’d settle down and accept the offer of a steady job. No dice though of course – Rambo’s a lone wolf, following nothing but the winds of fate.

As you might well have expected, these winds soon lead Rambo directly toward the sharp end of sorting out the city’s law and order problems, after his brother is killed whilst investigating the kidnap of a cute little kid, snatched as part of a feud between organised crime families. Needless to say, our hero’s lone wolfin’ philosophy is temporarily put to one side, and he’s hot on the heels of justice (with a tasty dose of vengeance thrown in for good measure).

What follows is a fairly half-hearted rehash of the old ‘Red Harvest’/’Yojimbo’/’Fistful of Dollars’ formula, as Rambo alternately tangles with both Gang Boss # 1, Senor Conti - played in super-cool, menacing fashion by Luciano Catenacci, whom you may recall as the bald-headed burgomeister in Mario Bava’s ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ – and Gang Boss #2, the tellingly named Paternò, played by no less a personage than Joseph Cotten.

As per usual in his late career appearances in Italian films, Cotten proves an awkward and belligerent presence here, alternately muttering and yelling his lines as he putters ineffectively around the reception room of his hideously decorated out-of-town mansion. It seems that Rambo was at one point a protégé of Paternò, before he went his own way, and upon returning, he is saddened to discover that his former boss has now gone blind (which certainly helps explain the décor), and not a little crazy to boot. Effectively incapacitated by his blindness, Paternò is reliant upon his new right hand man – his son Ciccio, played by Alfredo Lastretti, last seen as the Dario Argento lookalike killer in Lenzi’s Spasmo.

The film retains a certain amount of sympathy for Paternò (the old “he’s out of touch and doesn’t really know what his underlings are up to” excuse), and as such it is Ciccio who becomes the true villain of the piece. Played by Lastretti as a prissily effeminate ‘glowering pervert’ stereotype, it is he who is presumably supposed to be the “sadist” of the film’s English title, as is aptly demonstrated by the film’s most gratuitous incidence of nastiness, wherein he and his goons assault and murder Rambo’s on/off girlfriend Flora (a thankless role for the wonderful Femi Benussi).

Though this scene isn’t remotely as grim or explicit as one might reasonably have expected of a mid-‘70s poliziotteschi, it is shocking simply in terms of its complete irrelevance to the storyline - especially given that Rambo reacts to the news of Flora’s death with little more than a shrug and a grunt (because, hey, what’s a girlfriend or two in comparison to the death of his BROTHER, who was a GOOD COP, and MUST BE AVENGED, etc).

Whilst ‘Syndicate Sadists’ boasts a few action sequences that are a lot of fun, executed with Lenzi’s characteristic flair – see for instance a pool hall ass-kicking extravaganza modelled after the one in Don Siegel’s ‘Coogan’s Bluff’, or the numerous scenes in which Milian screeches around back roads on his motorbike playing cat-and-mouse with the baddies – the sad truth is that, for the most part, the director seems all at sea with Vincenzo Mannino’s comparatively light-hearted script, and the film flounders as a result.

With a tone that veers uneasily between crime movie nastiness and blockbuster heroics, never fully committing to either, the sense of relentless forward momentum that characterises Lenzi’s best films is lost amid an expanse of repetitious, unfocused character scenes that stretch out between the picture’s relatively modest action highlights.

Where the rushed productions schedules and narrative deficiencies of many second tier poliziotteschi tended to be counter-balanced by the gritty violence, madcap energy and evocative location shooting that makes the genre so appealing, Lenzi & Milian’s decision to jettison these saving graces in favour of pursuing a more mainstream action-adventure direction eventually leaves ‘Syndicate Sadists’ looking like a rather muddled, sub-par example of the form; but, it is nonetheless one that I think can prove a great deal of goofy, undemanding fun, if approached with yr expectations in check.

Basically - your enjoyment of ‘Syndicate Sadists’ will depend entirely upon your tolerance for Tomas Milian and his antics. The entire movie essentially exists as a salve to his ego, and in a sense that in itself is hilarious. Personally, I love the guy whenever he is able to keep the comedic side of his persona in check, and thankfully he does so here, playing it straight as an arrow with his charisma in full effect, irrespective of the project’s inherent ridiculousness.

The kind of oddball hero Milian presents here is a character that could ONLY have worked in his hands, and, if you’ve ever watched him in one of his more sweaty/psychotic roles and found yourself wondering what it would be like to see this guy dispensing life lessons to small children, “living by a code” and riding nobly into the sunset on a big, red motorbike of justice – well, this is the movie for you.

Given that Milian returned directly to his more conventional “twitchy psycho” parts in Lenzi’s ‘Rome Armed To The Teeth’ (1976) and ‘The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist’ (1977), I’m assuming that this re-branding exercise didn’t prove an immediate success, but, like most of his characters, he was nothing if not persistent.

In between those assignments, he got another shot at a scruffy / unconventional action hero role, playing hirsute cop Nico Giraldi in the Bruno Corbucci-directed ‘Squadra Antiscippo’, aka ‘The Cop in Blue Jeans’, (1976). This time around, the movie proved such a success that Milian got to reprise the character in no less than eight(!) increasingly comedic sequels, leading right up to his eventual departure from what was left of the Italian film industry in the mid-1980s.

Having never acquired much of a taste for Italian comedy, I’ve not yet dared delve into the Nico Giraldi movies (the posters alone are enough to put me off), but, in retrospect, we can perhaps see ‘Syndicate Sadists’ as an entertaining, if misfiring, first step in this transition between the “bad ass” and “lame ass” phases of Tomas Milian’s career in Italian crime films. And, thank god, it is one in which the laughs he and Lenzi bring to the table are entirely unintentional, as is only right and proper.

Concluding thoughts on... Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

(Poster by Cristiano Siqueira.)

Note to readers:
Having now completed my viewing of 2017’s ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, this is a follow up to my earlier post from January, in which I pre-emptively offered up my thoughts on the first nine episodes of the series.

In contrast to my earlier post, SPOILERS WILL BE RIFE this time around, so please proceed with caution.


1.
So, my prospective death-of-the-American-dream / evils-of-science / nuclear apocalypse angle didn’t really pan out… but I’d still like to think it’s in there somewhere, lurking in the background, particular in and around the ‘Got a Light?’ episode, ready to be picked out of the series’ televisual tarot deck [see below].


2.
In my earlier post, I reflected on fact that the trauma/abuse narrative at the core of the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ seemed to be entirely absent in the first half of the 2017 reiteration. At that point, I saw no indication that Frost and Lynch wished to reconnect with this, given their apparent preference for taking a straight supernatural/science fictional angle on the series’ mysterious happenings, rather than engaging with the subjective perspectives and/or internal life of their characters.

Well, count me dead wrong on this score too, as I was surprised - and impressed – by the way that the final stretch of ‘The Return’ brings these themes back with a vengeance, throwing shadow and suggestion over much of what we’ve previously seen in the process.

In this respect, the final hotel room confrontation between Laura Dern’s Diane and Gordon Cole’s FBI team effectively serves to realign the orbit of the entire sprawling epic we’ve been watching over the preceding weeks – arguably the most jaw-dropping and emotional shattering scene the series has to offer, it is an unquestionable dramatic highlight – the moment when, suddenly, all this shit starts to fall into place on a human level.

In essence, all of Lynch’s cinematic work subsequent to the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’ [well, except ‘The Straight Story’, obviously] has dealt with the idea of people’s identity and perception of reality becoming fragmented and destabilised as a result of trauma too terrible to face. The director explored this notion for perhaps the first time through the characters of Laura and Leland Palmer in 1990-91, and, as such, it is entirely appropriate that ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ eventually resolves itself into an especially bleak and indigestible meditation on this theme.

As will no doubt have already been noted by hundreds of fans and speculators, it eventually becomes clear that the assorted female characters Cooper encounters during his peregrinations through The Lodge in the early part of the series (prior to his ‘rebirth’ as Dougie Jones) in fact represent aspects of the earth-bound women who have been damaged / abused / possessed by the roving spirit of Bob (whether within the skin of his “Bad Cooper” avatar, or his earlier vessel, whose identity will not be clearly stated here JUST IN CASE some lunatic who has not watched the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’ is reading this).

The buxom, opera singer-ish lady, the skeletal elderly woman – these characters may not be played by the same actresses as their potential earth-bound analogues, and there may be no cryptic clues thrown in to help us nail down their origins… but, there is enough of a vague, archetypical similarity for us to make the necessary connections [paging Dr Jung].

The subtlety with which Lynch & Frost suggest (whilst never explicitly spelling out) these links and connections between different fragmented personas, in different worlds, is admirable.

There is a pitch black poetry to the way that Diane (invisible to us for so long in the earlier series) becomes a woman with no eyes, rescued naked from the dark woods by the baffled but dutiful Twin Peaks cops, just like one of the wayward girls Bob’s spirit used to pray upon prior to his embodiment within the Bad Cooper.

Likewise, we are never told in as many words (nor will casual viewers even care to know) that Audrey Horne has seemingly lost her mind and been reduced to a state of Alzheimer’s-like confusion as a result of being raped in hospital by Bob’s Bad Cooper aspect and subsequently giving birth to his demonic child, Richard. But there are enough crumbs of information scattered through the series for us to pick up the pieces and make a whole cookie, if you get my drift, lending purpose and pathos (and a terrible sadness) to the otherwise rather infuriating, audience-baiting scenes between Audrey and her long-suffering present day husband in the process.

Although Lynch’s portrayal of split personalities and mental illness in his work has been legitimately criticised as naïve bordering on offensive in the past (not least by frequent commentator on this blog Gregor), I feel that this idea of a single consciousness/identity being split across different bodies in different dimensions/time zones like a pack of cards proves both emotionally resonant and conceptually fascinating in ‘The Return’, providing the new series with a welcome infusion of the mystery and haunting power that it initially seemed to be lacking.

Admittedly, the rich thematic potential of all this is somewhat undermined by the rather wonky, more overtly science fictional doppelganger/homunculus type business that seems to inform the interplay between the two Coopers and their alternate Dougie Jones aspect, and indeed the Lodge’s peculiar ‘one-in, one-out’ policy [which is perhaps suggestive of some sort of matter vs anti-matter / exchange of energies kind of deal – whatdayathink, hard SF fans?]… but never mind. As I’ve observed before in these pages, offering multiple paradigms through which the same events can be interpreted has always been one of the great strengths of ‘Twin Peaks’, and of Lynch’s work in general.


3.
We need, I think, to talk about the ending. A mercilessly rushed, inconclusive way of concluding nearly eighteen hours of narrative television, there is something horribly, mundanely depressing about the way the indefatigable Agent Cooper’s last minute rush to bring justice (solace?) to Laura Palmer’s restless spirit plays out. Despite presumably being written and discussed by Lynch & Frost far in advance, this conclusion initially feels as arbitrary and unresolved as the unplanned, studio-enforced ending of Season # 2.

But at the same time, it also feels as final as final can be. Needless to say, anyone who was hoping a series of ‘Twin Peaks’ was going to tie itself up into a nice little bow in the final episode was doomed to disappointment from the outset. Of course it was going to totally blindside us with SOMETHING. Why not a last minute descent into the unsettling mysteries of Alice Tremond and Mrs Chalfont (last touched upon in the opening half hour of ‘Fire Walk With Me’, all those years ago)?

(As far as series mythology goes, I had always pegged these marginal characters as people warped or maddened by their close proximity to the dread “room above a convenience store” in which “magicians” Bob and one-armed Mike conducted their original, unseen depredations whilst still in their pre-Lodge earth-bound forms… implications here are potent and nebulous given the circumstance in which they pop up in the final episode of ‘The Return’, but perhaps that’s a digression best left for another day.)

Was I satisfied with the ending? I don’t know. To be honest, I was as flummoxed and faintly upset by it as I’m imagine much of the rest of the viewing public were, but… as with just about every other aspect of ‘The Return’, it’s the kind of thing that, like a painting in the corner of some darkened gallery, we must leave open to subjective interpretation and individual gut reaction.

By way of an example, I will defer here to this article by Samm Deighan, writing at Diabolique magazine, who came away with a far clearer angle on things than I did.


4.
Still though, for all these grasps at wider significance, the sheer quantity of time-wasting and narrative dead-ends scattered throughout ‘..The Return’ remains mind-boggling. The free hand accorded to Lynch and Frost in developing the series may have allowed them to get away with wild flights of fancy and graphic, disturbing content to an extent unprecedented in the televisual medium, but honestly – even with the best will in the world, we could have lived without some of this stuff.

Admittedly, some of these loose ends – such as the brief intervention of Balthazar Getty’s singularly weird crime boss (“Red”) might serve to feed our imagination, prompting us to fill in some more intriguing gaps ourselves, and, even the dead-end conversations between assorted young women at The Roadhouse (which serve to book-end many episodes with discussion of people and events of which we have no knowledge whatsoever) help lend a certain depth to our picture of the 21st century Twin Peaks, suggesting a whole underlying network of fragmented lives, damaged minds and dangerous possibilities existing in close proximity to the threat of The Lodge.(1)

Likewise, it becomes increasingly obvious at the series goes on that certain narrative elements could well be intended as deliberate Brechtian spanners in the works – unnatural, unbelievable or interminably tedious series of events designed to frustrate or reshape viewers’ expectations of a contemporary TV drama.

The failure of any of the many people Dougie Jones encounters to realise - across something like ten hours of screen time and several weeks of fictional life – that he is clearly in a near catatonic state and probably needs some professional help, is very much the prime example of this. Perhaps there is a certain amount of absurdist satirical intent here, some suggestion that man’s agency has diminished to such an extent in the modern world that the best way to get ahead is to do and say absolutely nothing..? If so, it’s perhaps expressed somewhat clumsily, but either way – what’s clear is that each viewer’s enjoyment of Dougie’s story will be directly proportionate to their ability to stop shouting “when the hell is anyone going to NOTICE?!” at the screen, and just accept it on it’s own strange terms.

But, nonetheless - when it comes to stuff like the travails of Chad the Bad Cop, or the time we spend with Shelly and Bobby’s daughter and her stereotypical no good boyfriend, or Jerry Horne indulging in some painfully un-amusing stoner humour whilst lost in the woods, I think we can legitimately ask: what the hell was the point of all that?

In narrative terms, these are total dead-ends, and, whilst many such non-sequiturs in the series can be written off as concessions to Lynch’s wayward aesthetic vision – his love of just filming stuff that he has a ‘feeling’ for – it’s not as if all those workaday scenes of Chad faffing about the place being mildly unpleasant were exactly exploding with cinematic inspiration, y’know what I mean?

The scene in which a passing dog-walker sees No Good Boyfriend apparently shoot himself in the woods whilst is (unnamed?) new girlfriend looks on is meanwhile staged by Lynch like the ominous crescendo of some unravelling mystery… but it is never subsequently followed up, or lent any significance. It’s a well executed Lynchian scene, but, devoid of either wider context or resolution, its potential as such is wasted.

Basically, for all of ‘..The Return’s eventual strengths, there are still long stretches here that are difficult to interpret in any way other than as time-wasting filler, or as fragments of ditched/developed story ideas that somehow remained in the final cut, flapping pointlessly in the breeze.

And, whilst I’m on the subject, perhaps it’s just me, but some of the celebrity cameos are absolutely cringe-worthy too. Monica Bellucci dream? That famous kid who looks like Beck popping up as Andy and Lucy’s son? Gimme a break. Smugly indulgent, middle-brow alterna-Hollywood bullshit of the highest order, these sequences gave me flashbacks to Jim Jarmusch’s unspeakable ‘Coffee & Cigarettes’ – an incidence of cosmic horror I really could have done without.

(I also could have done without all those Pitchfork-y careerist indie bands trying desperately to look cool in each episode’s musical interlude, although it was nice to see Julee Cruise making a brief return, and, to my great surprise, Nine Inch Nails certainly played a blinder in ‘Got a Light?’.)


5.
And so, in conclusion….? Well, who knows. Perhaps ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ was ahead of its time, and perhaps, more likely, it simply stands outside of time. It is certainly quite a thing - that’s about all we can say for certain at this point.

Given David Lynch’s apparent disinclination for another bout with the Hollywood machine as he enters old age, ‘..The Return’ could well end up becoming the epic final statement of this unique cinematic artist, and, in that context, it’s certainly not a text his fans are going to stop talking about or thinking about any time soon.

With critical faculties engaged, ‘..The Return’ is a curate’s egg, essentially. Some aspects of it work very well, others do not. (That's the line I've tended to fall back on when people have put me on the spot and asked "WHAT DID YA THINK OF IT?", anyway.) It’s just getting anyone to agree on which bits are which that’s liable to pose a problem. With the sheer plethora of images, ideas and stimuli it throws at us, often sans context, it’s as much a televisual Rorschach test as anything else. (Drink full, and descend.)

Like much of Lynch’s more extreme works in the past though – from ‘Eraserhead’ through to ‘Inland Empire’ – ‘..The Return’ is an achievement so unbeholden to cultural convention that to some extent  it transcends/bypasses the aforementioned critical faculties entirely, jamming our mental fuseboxes with indulgent/errant content until sparks fly and all certainty is shorted out. All we’re left with in the ensuing stumble through the darkness is the hope that some visceral, entirely subjective emotional reaction will blaze up for each of us and light the way. Personally, I got a few of these sparks from time to time; others (such as Deighan, linked above) evidently got a hell of a lot more of them.

Commenting on my previous post, reader Patrick made the point that the aesthetics of ‘..The Return’ draw significantly from Lynch’s perspective as a visual artist, and in this respect the series can feel more like a visit to a contemporary art exhibition than a narrative entertainment; you go in cold, you look around, you hope something’s going to hit you and light you up. Maybe it does, but if not, well, hey, that person over there in the corner is really freaking out over it, so what do I know?

A massive, half-digested - perhaps undigestable - mass of audio / visual spaghetti for the ages, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ may not always entirely hit the spot for us informed and well-fed 2017-18 viewers, but it could yet find its niche as some kind of degraded video scripture / i-ching oracle utilised by children of some pollution-warped future generation as yet unborn. As Lynch himself quipped recently in response to an entirely unconnected query, "watch this space!"

-------

(1)Here’s a bit of wild TP speculation for you: given that Getty’s sole scene involves his character – who seems a rather time/space bending sort of intense fellow – subduing Richard Horne with magic tricks of a distinctly menacing nature, I couldn’t help but recall Mrs Chalfont’s grandson – a medium/avatar of The Lodge seen in the second series and ‘Fire Walk With Me’ who also, you’ll recall, “does magic tricks”. In linear terms, the age gap perhaps doesn’t quite add up, but just thought I’d throw that out there. Of course, the recurring references to magic tricks and “magicians”, cards, dice, coins and gambling throughout all three series of ‘Twin Peaks’ could probably be thesis material in and of itself, but….

Pan’s People: The Saint Sees it Through by Leslie Charteris (1962)

…and finally, our whistle-stop tour of Pan’s dawn-of-the-‘60s crime list brings us to ‘mad’ Manhattan in the company of ol’ Simon Templar.

As far as perennial series characters go, I must confess I’ve never really cared for The Saint. I mean, he’s just such a smug bastard, isn't he? I mean, I know that’s kind of the point of the character, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to take an interest in his shenanigans. In fairness, perhaps Roger Moore is more to blame for my distaste than Leslie Charteris, but nonetheless.

I will however make an exception for the sake of the artwork for this particular edition, which is superb - so busy, so much colour... yet it works brilliantly.

Sadly however, I’m once again not coming up with much more online than “cover artist: unknown”.

Anyway, feast your eyes chums, because we’ll be back to movie reviews for a while from next week, likely as not.

Pan’s People: The Little White God by Edwin Brock (1965)

After Paris and L.A., we move to the more familiar environs of South London, circa 1965.

I love the Times quote on the front. (For the uninitiated – Z Cars.)

Edwin Brock (1927-1997) was primarily known as a poet, and this seems to have been his only novel. Once again, it looks as if it might well be worth a read. And, yet again, beautiful cover art too – a quintessential example of 50s/60s Brit-crime imagery that, frustratingly, I can’t find an artist credit for online. Good ol’ Pan.

Pan’s People: Experience With Evil by John Ross Macdonald (1958)

Over the past year or so, I’ve really been getting into the work of Ross Macdonald (he soon dropped the ‘John’, for whatever reason).

Coming on as if Raymond Chandler had knocked the ‘frustrated-literary-novelist’ bit on the head and settled into a routine of knocking out two hard-boiled thrillers per year, the Macdonald books I’ve read thus far have all been absolutely first rate, mixing up the requisite laconic humour and restless plotting with consistently sublime prose and an acute sensitivity for the tragic quirks of human nature, all baked in an atmosphere of creeping malaise and cynicism that is pure mid-century California noir.

If you’re into crime fiction and yet to discover Macdonald, doing so is an experience I can highly recommend.

‘Experience With Evil’ originally appeared in 1953 under the delightful title ‘Meet Me At The Morgue’, and though it doesn’t feature Macdonald’s signature character Lew Archer, I’m nonetheless confident that Pan’s blurb-ists weren't lying when they deemed it “a kidnap mystery for the connoisseur”.

The cover – by our old pal Sam “Peff” Peffer – is of an equally fine calibre (no firearms pun intended), and in fact, finding this book a few months back represented a rare quadruple win for my paperback collection: a great writer, great art, great condition, and a great price (£2). Satisfying!

Pan’s People: The Law of The Streets by Auguste Le Breton (1959)

Staying in France, this one is also high on the ‘to read’ pile, needless to say.

I haven’t been able to pin down an art credit for this cover, but there’s a sketchy/blurry/over-busy quality to it I quite like; it’s just a touch crazier than the usual ‘classy’ Pan house style. Postcards at the usual address if you’ve got a name we can attach to it.

Pan’s People: Villainy Unlimited by Derick Goodman (195?)

N.B. – I’m unsure whether or not this Pan edition actually dates from 1957 – only the copyright / first publication date is given. Given the Pan catalogue number (G327) I’m guessing 1959/60-ish.

Since I last shared some Pan paperback covers here in 2016, I’ve been fortunate enough to add some really great new Pans to my collection, particularly with regard to the imprint’s always interesting crime list. So, the next few weeks seems as good a time as any to share them with you. Expect a new post every few days.

As I’ve observed in the past, these books remain cheap and easy to find, without too much of a cult cache or a collector’s market sniffing around them, but nonetheless they are frequently things of beauty – none more so than this wonderfully atmospheric cover by Dave Tayler. (Source.)

The silky light and shade here reminds me of a golden age Hollywood movie poster more than anything, and, needless to say, the book itself sounds like a fascinating read too – I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck into it at some point (perhaps during a future trip to Paris, fingers crossed).

Half Time Report: Twin Peaks: The Return(2017)

PLEASE NOTE: For the avoidance of confusion, I’ve chosen to refer to the third series of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 as “Twin Peaks: The Return”, or “Twin Peaks 2017”. The blu-ray box set sitting next to my TV may herald it as “A Limited  Series Event”, but that makes it sound like promo for a range of aftershave or something, so I’ll avoid it and just stick to shorter suffix if nobody minds.

ALSO: As a side effect of my decision to stick to general impressions rather than being drawn into the discussion of individual plot points or story elements in the text below, this post remains largely free of spoilers, so – readers who are even later than me in catching up with the new ‘Twin Peaks’ are advised to read on and fear not.

Given that I posted my reflections on revisiting the original 1990-91 run of ‘Twin Peaks’ almost exactly two years ago, I suppose there may conceivably be some readers wondering what I made of the series’ much heralded 2017 reiteration. So, eight months late (which in fairness beats the 40+ years of lateness that apply to most of my posts here), it’s time for me to come down from the mountain and present my thoughts on the first 50% of this project’s epic eighteen episode run, which I have been watching for the first time this month.

At some point in the near future, I will aim to follow this up with another post, in order to assess how these half-digested impressions, opinions and hypotheses hold up once I have completed by viewing of the series.


1. Running on Empty: Episodes #1 - #6

Though episode # 1 sailed by nicely on the excitement and anticipation of being back in this world and meeting these familiar characters again, I’m afraid I can’t avoid the fact that episodes #2 to #6 proved a real drag. My experience of watching them was in fact characterised by a slow realisation that ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 was shaping up to be a considerable disappointment – either an entirely cynical venture on the part of David Lynch & Mark Frost, or else a colossal artistic miscalculation.

It’s not that the footage and ideas of which the seemingly endless, disjointed narrative strands that comprise these episodes are objectively bad, or boring, or offensive or anything, but… how can I best put this?

The core episodes of the original 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ (which I would define as including everything up to and including the unmasking of Laura Palmer’s killer) were alternately mysterious, terrifying, funny and charming.

That’s not just a random list of subjective hyperbole either – it’s a very specific one. It is difficult for a piece of narrative film to maintain any of those feelings over an extended period of time, yet ‘Twin Peaks’ succeeded in delivering a intoxicating mixture of all of them, in over-powering quantities, week-on-week. That – more than any of the cultish Lynchian weirdness that people immediately associate with the show – is the reason why it made such an impression on viewers, and why it has acquired such legendary status.

This achievement is thrown into stark relief by the fact that the initial batch of episodes of the 2017 ‘Twin Peaks’ – as master-minded by a pair of creators now gifted with total freedom and seemingly unlimited resources – initially fail to deliver on any of these qualities.

Somewhat uniquely in my experience of watching film and television, they furthermore beg our indulgence in asking us to sit through an expanse of footage longer than some directors’ entire filmographies, before any equivalent redeeming qualities may or may not eventually begin to coalesce.

Should I wish to, I could prattle on for thousands of words about the myriad things that annoyed me through the arid expanse of episodes #2 to #6, but in retrospect, it occurs to me that what really irked me about them was basically the way that – just like show’s original run – ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 taps into the aesthetic of its era.

Just as the unique qualities of the ‘Twin Peaks’ 1990-’91 grew from the mutated framework of an ‘80s-‘90s daytime soap opera – complete with fuzzy, over-saturated colour, pungent promises of romance and melodrama, luxuriantly appointed sets and lush, overbearing musical cues – so ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 correspondingly anchors itself in the aesthetics of a 21st century HBO-style high-brow TV show.

Specifically, this equates to a visual tone of almost oppressively crystal clear, HD faux-reality – the cinematic equivalent of a modern office’s remorseless overhead strip-lights. The ‘relatable’/everyday qualities of the people who inhabit this environment meanwhile are heavily sign-posted at every turn, and we are repeatedly invited to join characters who are barely more than ciphers (despite reams of expositional back story) as they seemingly wallow dewy-eyed in the emptiness and alienation of their lives (in between exchanges of on-message wise-cracks and gratuitous displays of solipsistic decadence, that is).

As you will have gathered, this is not really an aesthetic I favour, and as such I found these early episodes a frustrating experience.

There are wonderful moments scattered through these episodes, of course. (Seeing Harry Dean Stanton, still full of spark and strength in one of his last ever screen appearances, is a particular highlight, even if the trailer park he manages seems to have been mysteriously teleported to Twin Peaks from the entirely different town in which it was located in ‘Fire Walk With Me’.)

The overall feeling though is one of blandness, with the bulk of the discursive plot strands subsisting purely on the level of somewhat diverting, mildly entertaining filler – somewhat akin to spending an afternoon watching random videos of people doing odd things on Youtube.

But, it is very much worth pointing out at this stage that the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ also took its sweet time to fully emerge from its soap opera / murder mystery cocoon. It was only with the revelation of Agent Cooper’s unconventional investigative methods, and his first vision of The Man From The Other Place (which must have been absolutely mind-boggling to unsuspecting viewers on first broadcast) that it became clear we weren’t in Kansas anymore, whilst further moments of capital letter Weirdness were doled out very sparingly thereafter.

By contrast, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 inevitably showcases it’s dedication to the cause of High Weirdness right from the outset – indeed, it ostensibly piles it on in quantities hitherto unknown on broadcast TV. But, in retrospect I feel that the early episodes I’m discussing here were nonetheless operating on a similar ‘slow-build’ principle to the original series. Whether or not ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 will eventually succeed in blowing minds or upsetting expectations to an extent comparable to the 1990-91 run remains an open question at this point in my viewing (although it seems unlikely, given that a relentless tirade of trademark Lynchian hoo-hah have basically reduced our expectations to “literally anything could happen next”). But, for the moment, I can give them the benefit of the doubt.


2. Paradigm Ambulance?

As I outlined in my previous ‘Twin Peaks’ post, I feel that the success of the series – and indeed the success of the trilogy of L.A. based quasi-horror films that Lynch has subsequently completed – relies to a significant extent upon the non-dogmatic interplay between psychological/expressionistic and overtly supernatural explanations of the on-screen events. (1)

To put this as simply as I can: in the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’, what is the nature of the dark, evil thing – a thing too frightful for them to even mention it out loud, let alone assigning a name to it - that The Book House Boys and the other virtuous characters stand in opposition to?

Is it the gateway to another order of being, occupied by a malign power so alien in nature that – in classic Lovecraftian tradition – human sensory organs can only comprehend it in a garbled, fragmentary manner?

Or, is it the equally unspeakable truth of a network of child abuse and sexual exploitation that has existed beneath the surface of the town’s public life for so long that it has touched the lives of just about everybody?

The answer is of course that it is both – they are one and the same, and it is the frisson between these two paradigms that provides the series with much of its indelible power.

By disregarding this precarious balance, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 is in danger of ultimately coming up empty, its events signifying little beyond their surface level function as an extended horror/science fiction potboiler.

Whilst the human drama of the new series is too diffuse and fragmentary for us to really dig into any of our characters emotional lives beyond their involvement in the Frost/Lynch mind-maze, likewise The Black Lodge / Other Place – so terrifying and inexplicable in the past – becomes merely banal in its 2017 reiteration. Stripped of the dense layers of fear and obfuscation that shadowed its existence in the original series, it is treated here simply as a routine (if admirably surrealistic) SF conceit.

To my great surprise in fact, the thing that is most sorely missed in ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 thus far is the sense of palpable fear and cosmic dread that has been a trademark of David Lynch’s work ever since ‘Eraserhead’.

As soon as those deep, dark drones start rumbling, the light fittings start flickering and the camera starts slowly edging around the next corner, anyone familiar with the director’s work will know the time has come to brace themselves accordingly. It may be have become a cliché by this point, and Lynch’s apparent desire to move on from it is perhaps understandable, but his failure to replace his ‘old faithful’ with any new ways to terrify us here is pretty dispiriting.

Although ostensibly upsetting and berserkly violent things happen with great frequency in the new ‘Twin Peaks’, few of them succeed in making any real impact. It’s as if, somehow, the man who once managed to make shots of ceiling fans and traffic lights resonate with soul-withering malevolence has here decided to rush through depictions of spectral hobos tearing people’s faces off and psychotic dwarfs murdering women with ice-picks as if he was just getting from A to B on a routine sit-com assignment.

Minor plot points and gnomic coded messages may still be dangled before the us as if they were tantalising hints of some ungraspable mystery, but, once we’ve become accustomed to the existence of the Lodge and basically accepted it as some sort of alternate dimension from which weird people, some good and some bad, occasionally emerge to fuck with us… well, beyond that, what mystery is left to uncover, really?

With the personal/‘psychological’ interpretation of events entirely off the table, are the precise details of what these beings are up to really all that important, or even interesting?

With the ‘supernatural’ plot-line thus rendered as innocuous as a surprisingly psychedelic episode of ‘The X Files’, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ often feels not just bland, but empty, hollowed out – chronically lacking in the thematic resonance and murky emotional depths that characterised the original series.

Moreso that the aesthetic/storytelling lapses I’ve griped about earlier in this post, I feel this will be a difficult obstacle for Frost & Lynch to overcome in subsequent episodes, but…. perhaps my constant comparisons to the original series are unhelpful here. Fingers crossed our writers are just re-setting the table here for some entirely different kind of thematic significance, as yet unguessed at by myself.


3. Picking up steam: Episodes #7 – #9

Although I think it’s best to retain my extended griping above, just in order to capture a range of arguments and observations that I hope will prove interesting on some level, I’m cautiously going to declare that my belief that, from episode # 7 onwards, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ has really been picking up steam, moving – albeit with painstakingly leisure – toward territory that has the potential to engage and fascinate us anew, and to pull us in directions that will hopefully render my desire to constantly reference back to the achievements of the original series happily unnecessary.

The new and not-so-new characters are finally starting to get their hooks into me, and the infuriating narrative non-sequiturs are finally starting to coalesce into something that suggests they may all actually be going somewhere meaningful, rather than just padding out the run-time with endless shaggy dog stories.

Still early days yet – even after nine hours! – but sparks of that old Lynch magic are finally starting to fly; in slo-mo, the match is being struck, throwing shadow on the rambling, inconsequential world we’ve been occupying for the past six/seven hours.

Particularly of note here of course is Episode # 8 (‘Got a Light?’), a sure-to-be-preceded-by-‘infamous’ benchmark of televisual headfuckery, which seemingly aims – with the same grandiose avoidance of subtlety that has characterised all of David Lynch’s 21st century work – to elicit the same dropped jaws and baffled expressions of disbelief from viewers that the original ‘Man From The Other Place’ sequence must have inspired back in 1990.

Essentially, this episode represents a self-contained, stand-alone David Lynch short film; but, unlike the similarly disjointed sequences that have also given this impression during the preceding episodes, ‘Got a Light?’ is an extremely distinctive and powerful David Lynch short film, harking directly back to the grotesquery and abstraction of ‘Eraserhead’ and early shorts like 1970’s ‘The Grandmother’, amped up to proportions the younger Lynch could only dream of by means of studio production values and the possibilities allowed by the (perhaps somewhat excessive) application of CGI effects.

So audacious in fact is this fifty minute diversion from all televisual norms that I’m almost inclined to believe Lynch simply grabbed a credit card from the production office, hired a bunch of visual effects artists and just started making the damn thing without seeking anyone’s approval, leaving somebody (Frost presumably) to desperately justify its existence by crow-baring in some tenuous connections to the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe.

Ironically, these forced and rather silly series references serve to rather spoil the overall effect of what is otherwise a perfectly unsettling surrealist tour de force on Lynch’s part – one that, for all that it may initially seem entirely disconnected from the rest of ‘Twin Peaks’, nonetheless succeeds in tearing open a whole new can of potential thematic concerns, through which the comparatively mundane episodes that surround it can perhaps be re-evaluated.


4. New patterns emerge?

In ‘Got a Light?’, Lynch seems to be introducing us to the notion that, at the point of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, some dark spirit entered the USA. Moving forward eleven years from there – and using a set of imagery highly reminiscent of atomic-era American monster movies – he portrays some beings apparently spawned from this event literally emerging from the New Mexico soil and infiltrating and/or violently destroying various symbols of the dream-like innocence that the director has always assigned to the beloved, electrified 1950s of his childhood.

In view of this, it is worth noting that allusions to American nationhood and the faintly melancholic reflections on “American dream”/national heritage type imagery that seems to pop up with peculiar persistence throughout the opening half of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’.

Alongside the expected celebration of the FBI as a great, inclusive national institution and general force for good in the world (once again, ‘Twin Peaks’ surely provides the Feds with the best PR they’ve received at any point in their existence), we have Gordon Cole – his desk backed by a giant blow up of a mushroom cloud – gazing longingly at the flag, and earnestly contemplating the photograph of Mt. Rushmore that Albert hands him at the start of their sojourn in South Dakota (“FACES OF STONE”).

In Las Vegas meanwhile, Dougie Jones (our sleeping hero) gazes blankly at the statue of a gesticulating cowboy that stands in the centre of the disconcertingly clean public square fronting the bland, new-build office complex that houses the insurance company for which he works. In a later scene, we find Dougie and Janey-E in the waiting area of a similarly anti-sceptic police station. As the cynical, self-absorbed Vegas cops waste their time, Dougie finds himself staring at the forlorn, loosely rolled American flag that sits in the corner of the room, as a warped, Caretaker-ised version of ‘America the Brave’ plays distantly on the soundtrack, and, of course, an electrical socket crackles ominously.

This reminds me in turn of one of The Log Lady’s cryptic messages to Deputy Hawk, in which – you’ll forgive me for not checking back to get an exact quote – she speaks of electricity being everywhere, crackling through the air, over the water and the woods, putting me in mind of the expressions of elation inspired by the electrification of the plains and the spread of electric lights to remote parts of the USA during the early 20th century. (I’m particularly reminded of Richard Brautigan’s beautiful I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone from ‘Revenge of the Lawn’.) The Log Lady goes on however to note that the power of which she speaks is getting dimmer, and harder to find – she says there’s not so much of it around, these days.

Could Lynch be moving here toward some kind of elegiac reflection on the slow death of America? Is he encouraging us to cross-reference these moments of patriotic nostalgia with the depression, violence and confusion that seems to characterise the air-conditioned lives of the show’s 21st century characters? Well, it’s just a thought. (2)

This all coincides of course with Lynch’s continued fascination with the sinister properties of electricity – a long-running trope within his work that reaches new heights in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’. Rather than simply sign-posting the inter-connections between different orders of being (or, warning of the proximity of evil) as they have in past works, the fizzing sockets, crackling bulbs, humming power lines and so on seem at times here to be reaching a kind of continuous, rolling crescendo, drawing an inevitable comparison with the language of fire and light frequently employed by the denizens of the Lodge and their earthly intermediaries, and taking us, by implication, straight back to that ultimate holy fire - the nightmare of nuclear incineration depicted so vividly in ‘Got a Light?’

That episode title – uttered by the black-faced “woodsmen” creatures as they mechanically thrust unlit cigarettes in the face of prospective victims – speaks for itself in this context (as above, so below), as does Hawk’s unravelling of his ancient Native American map of the Twin Peaks area, with its ominous warning of the “black fire”.

The ‘blue rose’ (the code name for Gordon Cole’s covert unit within the FBI) is of course often used as an example something that does not occur within nature. Opponents of nuclear power have likewise often characterised atomic science as “unnatural”, raising spectres of a warning against “meddling in forces beyond our understanding” common to both Frankensteinian mad science narratives and also to the kind of occult/black magickal dabbling that – reflecting the fearful warnings of The Log Lady – could easily lead ill-prepared humans into communion with the denizens of the Lodge.

In view of the clear science fictional slant evidenced in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, I’m sure you’ll all recall Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-quoted “sufficiently advanced science indistinguishable from magic” jive.

Given that ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ seems keen on going far more deeply into the origins of Cole’s “Blue Rose” investigations and their thoroughly X Files-y background in the US Army’s ‘Project Blue Book’, could we be looking at a ‘Twin Peaks’ that ends – in the ultimate example of bombastic narrative one-upmanship – with some supernaturally mandated countdown to Armageddon..? (Or, here’s hoping, something a little more original and thought-provoking, drawn from these same themes.) Fire Walk With Me, indeed.

---

That’s all for now – TO BE CONTINUED once I’ve been able to gather my thoughts after watching episodes #10 - #18.

---

(1) I won’t clog up space by going into it here, but I’d actually contest that ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Inland Empire’ can all easily be read as taking place within the same “world” as ‘Twin Peaks’ – an idea that is lent further weight by the parallels with those films’ plot lines that creep into the 2017 series. In essence, all three of these films concern characters who are victimised by dark, evil powers from another order of being, manipulated by them into carrying out assassinations and other acts for reasons unknown, then abandoned to states of madness, fragmentation of identity and/or death. The flickering of electricity that heralds manifestations from beyond, the garbled messages of unclear significance delivered by its messengers, and the weird, unheimlich human forms they assume – none of this will be new to viewers of ‘Twin Peaks’, and no further evidence should be needed I feel to establish all of these works as part of the same shared universe.

(2) Through much of his work, Lynch seems to have been positing an “innocence corrupted” narrative of American society, presenting his shimmering, guilt-free suburban ideal of the 1950s – with a particular emphasis on the hope and excitement that that decade’s technology and engineered seemed to represent – and contrasting it with a creeping tide of cynicism, uncertainly, psychosis and moral turpitude that he seems to imply has weakened and eventually destroyed this ideal through subsequent decades. In ‘Blue Velvet’, we can see this latter strain portrayed as a kind of “worm in the apple” corrupting suburbia from within, and this interpretation can also obviously be placed upon the overriding narrative of the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’.

Subsequent to this I think, it is notable that Lynch’s trilogy of L.A.-set films take place in a world that is already thoroughly corrupt, sinking deep into a noir-ish abyss and impossible for the kind of honest, avuncular characters that Lynch often champions to negotiate without finding their personalities shattered into pieces. It’s as if he is admitting that the battle has already been lost, that the America he knew as a child has already fallen, torn apart by the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century. (This, essentially, is the story he gives us in miniature through the oddball science fictional imagery of ‘Got a Light?’)

Annual Report:The Sweeney / 1978.

If there’s one thing I always like to find under the tree on Christmas morn, it’s a bloody good annual, and as such, I’m happy to be able to revive the ‘Annual Report’ feature I instigated here two years ago, this time with a look at one of the gifts I was lucky enough to receive during the recent festive period – The Sweeney Annual, as published by Brown Watson in 1978.

For readers outside the UK who may be unaware of the precise significance of The Sweeney, or indeed unfamiliar with the concept of annuals as a whole – never fear. Basically the cover reproduced above tells you everything you need to know. I’m sure that your own home country must have boasted its own equivalent TV show (and questionable cash-in merchandise thereof) during the 1970s, thus equipping you perfectly to conceptualise the riches that The Sweeney Annual (1978) is about to rain down upon us, swept in upon a magnificent tide of orange, brown and grey. [If you do require further clarification however, here's a wiki link.]

As was usual practice in this era, the writers, artists, editors and designers who contributed to The Sweeney Annual remain entirely anonymous – and indeed a case could be made that they may have been happier that way, given the obvious haste with which this volume seems to have been thrown together. There’s not even a contents page, or any introductory text – it just gets straight down to business with the comic strip below.

As you’ll note, the art here is a tad inconsistent, although the decision to lead with a story in which The Sweeney take on international terrorists, rather than the domestic crooks who normally filled their schedule, is an interesting one. Otherwise, the mixture of casual racial stereotyping and a notable lack of the usual pungent Sweeney badinage leave me feeling a bit “meh” about this one, although there are some very nice individual panels here and there.

After a space-filling article on ‘Famous East End Criminals’ (no prizes for guessing which one gets the most space), we move on to that highlight of any annual – the crossword!

Remember what I said about suspecting this annual was put together in a bit of a hurry? The prevalence of pages like the one below speaks for itself I think.

I love the combination of the photo and title/font accompanying the text story below. It would have made a great readymade record cover for some second wave aggro-punk band that might have formed a few years after this was published.

If the earlier comic strip was a bit of a disappointment, the colour one scanned below is an absolute belter I think, neatly compressing everything that was good and right about The Sweeney into a concise six pages. A bang-up job by whichever anonymous British comics freelancers were responsible.

No, me neither.

There follows another boring article about the applications of science in modern policing, but…. cor, strewth, turns out maybe I should have scanned those bits for you anyway – looks like we’ve got to take a test! What is this, school!?

And, that’s it! Final page – we’re outta here!

To check your answers to the Sweeney crossword and quiz, please check Found Objects postings for January 2018.

The 25 Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2017.

Reminders of a better world, more or less.

1. Belladonna of Sadness 
(Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973)

Words like “astounding” and “inexplicable” don’t even begin to do justice to this one-of-a-kind motion picture, wherein a team of ambitious creatives working for manga godhead Osamu Tezuka’s short-lived animated film studio were somehow allowed to create a feature length psychedelic fantasia loosely inspired by Jules Michelet’s 19th century mystic reinterpretation of the European witchcraft mythos, ‘La Sorcière’.

Constructed principally around hundreds of ink & water-colour images created for the project by idiosyncratic illustration genius Kuni Kukai, the film is further enlivened both though the application of every kind of wild and ramshackle animation technique that anime circa 1973 had to offer, and by a hair-raising freak-rock/avant-jazz/enka score from composer Masahiko Satô.

The resulting exploration of feudal suppression, female empowerment, psychotropic delirium and manichean cosmology is by turns erotic, grotesque, harrowing, frightening, transgressive and almost overpoweringly beautiful, throwing weighty symbolic/sexual imagery around with the wild abandon of Alexandro Jodorowsky gate-crashing an acid test in the offices of Metal Hurlant magazine. It’s pretty damn far-out, and if you’ve not yet seen it, you really should.

2. Lone Wolf & Cub: Babycart at the River Styx 
(Kenji Misumi, 1972)

One of my greatest cinematic pleasures in 2017 has been finally getting around to watching the ‘Lone Wolf & Cub’ series in its original (non-‘Shogun Assassin’-ated) form. Though the first film (‘Sword of Vengeance’) is decent enough, it is with this second instalment that things really take flight, as the usually mild-mannered Kenji Misumi unleashes one of the most spectacularly surreal celebrations of extreme violence ever seen on screen.

Any sense of narrative structure or physical logic is soon lost as blood and limbs fly, colours dance and trampolined bodies pirouette through the air in slo-mo, transforming Kazuo Koike's austere manga into a psychedelic nightmare of bushido melodrama taken to ever more ridiculous extremes.

Utilising both sheer excess and an almost cartoon-like sense of visual imagination, Misumi and his collaborators take advantage of the unusual degree of freedom offered by Shintaro Katsu’s independent ‘KatsuPro’ studio to deliver a fantastical martial arts epic as jaw-dropping as anything achieved by Hong Kong’s more technically accomplished action cinema…

3. Lone Wolf & Cub: Babycart to Hades 
(Kenji Misumi, 1972)

….and, this somewhat less celebrated third movie in the series is just as good! Picking up exactly where he left off, Misumi & co. if anything go even crazier in this one, whilst the director also somehow finds time for some surprisingly tender moments, expanding upon Ogami and Diagoro’s father-son relationship and allowing us a glimpse of the latter’s fairly unique experience of the world, reminding us of the affecting mixture of bloodshed and pathos that defined Misumi’s best entries in the ‘Zatoichi’ franchise.

Also, the finale of this one, in which Ogami Itto literally takes on an entire army single-handed, is arguably the highlight of the entire series – a sequence so extraordinary and shamelessly absurd, you’ll scarcely have time to question where exactly Ogami went in Tokugawa-era Japan to get his baby-cart kitted out with a brace of apparently recoil-free sub-machine guns, before the next onslaught of carnage rains down. Rarely if ever have depictions of man’s inhumanity to man been so seamlessly transformed into pure, guilt-free, exhilarating entertainment.

4. Vampyr 
(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1931)

I think I can just about get away with classing this as a ‘first time viewing’, because although I had  tried to watch my old VHS copy of Carl Th. Dreyer’s exceptionally strange film on a number of occasions, the picture quality was so bad I never made it to the end.

Catching up with ‘Vampyr’ a somewhat more watchable presentation was therefore long overdue, and, as you may recall, I wrote at great length about the film – particularly with regard to its status as a (conscious or unconscious) source text for ‘60s and ‘70s euro-horror – here.

5. C.H.U.D. 
(Douglas Cheek, 1984)

Speaking as someone who has been busy reading and writing about horror films for a number of years now, you’ll forgive me for asking: why did no one tell me about ‘C.H.U.D.’?

I mean, I realise that Douglas Cheek’s film does have a certain following in some circles of horror fandom, but I’m frankly amazed that a film this good doesn't enjoy a position in the canon of ‘80s American horror at least equivalent to that enjoyed by the work of directors like Frank Henenlotter, Stuart Gordon or Bill Lustig (all of whom are, to some extent, appropriate touchstones here). Maybe the stupid name has something to do with it? (Yes, I’m duty-bound to report that it’s “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”, in case you were wondering.) I dunno.

Anyway, make no mistake, this movie is both a great achievement and a great time, mixing socially conscious, satirical scripting and down-on-the-street NYC location footage worthy of Larry Cohen at his finest with wild ‘80s monster splatter and tension-ratcheting action scenes that are a match for any of the aforementioned filmmakers.

The performances are excellent too, helping to create a cast of well-drawn, unconventional characters whose fate we really care about, thus allowing Cheek to pull off that extremely rare balance – a horror movie that treats people and their lives with appropriate weight and respect, without sacrificing any of the black-hearted fun and craziness we expect of a somewhat light-hearted ‘80s horror flick. Seriously, it’s great – check it out.

6. The Man Who Knew Too Much 
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

Again, I’m not certain this really counts as a “first viewing”, as I’m sure I must have watched it when I made my way through all the Hitchcock classics as a teenager, but if so, I remembered so little about it that returning to it on blu-ray proved a revelation.

Approximately 200 times more palatable to a 21st century viewer than your average British film from 1935, this is seventy-something event-packed minutes of exquisitely crafted entertainment, proving that Hitch had his game honed to perfection even at this early stage, and making it abundantly clear why certain Hollywood big-wigs were soon competing to buy him a boat ticket.

The moment towards the start, when the sound of cracking glass turns the film from a comedy of manners into a cut-throat spy thriller in a split second, is unforgettable – as is the victim’s heroic demonstration of English understatement in announcing that he’d actually quite like to sit down, as the red stain expands across his chest.

Peter Lorre is absolutely wonderful (when was he not?), the Albert Hall sequence is as good as everybody says it is, and the intensity of the armed siege/shooting match that provides the film’s climax is decades ahead of its time. As for that matter is the inclusion of a heroine with enough gumption to grab a rifle from a policeman and use her clay-pigeon skills to blast the last remaining villain straight off a rooftop.

7. Scarlet Street 
(Fritz Lang, 1946)

Also seeming somewhat ahead of its time – at least in terms of raw emotional cruelty – is this singular highlight within Fritz Lang’s already quite highlight-packed post-war American filmography, turning a story that could in lesser hands have simply been an excruciatingly florid melodrama into one of the most heart-breaking achievements of the classic Hollywood era.

As is often the case, Lang’s exploration of the struggle of individuals to define and express themselves within the infernal machinations of the urban environment feel as contemporary as ever, and Edward G. Robinson’s performance as the mild-mannered amateur painter inadvertently blundering into a trap more comprehensively terrible than anything his well-meaning brain can conceive, is… well I can’t think of any suitably impressive hyperbole right now, but you get the idea.

Relentlessly cynical in its peeling back of the motives behind human enterprise and ambition, ‘Scarlet Street’ is pure Film Noir in thematic terms, but the pathos that Robinson brings to the film, together with Lang’s unique directorial vision, make it so much more besides.

8. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence 
(Nagisa Ôshima, 1983)

Given the horror stories that have (understandably) surrounded all discourse concerning Japanese POW camps in the UK for so many decades, I was interested to see where a Japanese director would take such subject matter – failing to remember of course that Nagisa Ôshima’s condemnation of his own nation’s chauvinistic/nationalistic culture has been so strident over the years that he had pretty much become an outcast from the Japanese film industry by the time he embarked on this project.

As such, Ôshima’s take on things in moral/political terms doesn’t really depart significantly from what we might have expected of a suitably intelligent/unprejudiced Western director, but it is his aesthetic and emotional vision that sets the film apart.

Although the decision to go for the cleanest and calmest prison camp in cinema history may initially seem questionable, this gives the film a unique visual aspect that immediately situates it somewhere outside the usual conventions of war/POW movies, with swathes of carefully choreographed green and white giving the impression of some bizarre, perpetual cricket match taking place between guards and prisoners, lending a sense of tragic absurdity to the acts of ritualised brutality that are occasionally enacted, and providing a perfect counterpoint to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s indelible minimalist score.

Though everybody seems to remember the performances of Sakamoto and David Bowie here, representing their respective nations’ somewhat homoerotic ideal of the perfect soldier, personally I found the parallel relationship between Tom Conti (as the titular Mr Lawrence, Japanese-speaking surrogate for author Laurens van der Post) and Takeshi Kitano (making his dramatic debut as an initially feckless camp guard) to be far more interesting, and the real heart of the movie.

Echoing the stylised, almost abstract nature of its visual presentation, ‘Merry Christmas..’ eventually tells us very little about history or World War II or the assigning of blame for war crimes, but as a more general study of cultural differences and the intricacies of achieving meaningful communication across such divides, it is an interesting and rewarding piece of work that I feel retains great relevance in our bitterly disordered world.

9. Night Train Murders 
(Aldo Lado, 1975)

Can crass and derivative subject matter be elevated to a higher plain simply through the application of superior directorial skill and cinematic craftsmanship? YES, is the answer Aldo Lado enthusiastically throws back at us cinematic navel-gazers here, as I outlined in my review of this film just a few weeks ago.

10. Cops Vs. Thugs [“State Police vs Gangsters”/ ‘Kenkei tai Soshiki Boryoku’] 
(Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)

Made at the height of his success as mastermind of the ‘Battles Without Honour and Humanity’ series, this stand-alone jitsuroku flick sees Kinji Fukasaku mustering all of the frenetic style and production values he brought to those films, but narrowing his focus to concentrate purely on the mutually beneficial relationship that develops between Bunta Sugawara’s, shall we say, “easy going” police inspector and Hiroki Matsukata’s ambitious yakuza under-boss.

By foregoing the sometime bewildering patchwork of alliances and betrayals that can make the ‘Battles..’ films hard work and instead maintaining a central human focus, Fukasaku manages to turn this film into one of the very strongest expressions of his particular take on the corrupt foundations underpinning Japan’s post-war reconstruction, cannily subverting the usual moral assumptions that accompany such “cops & robbers” melodrama, and offering Matsukata one of the best roles of his career in the process. (Always wonderful to see Bunta do his thing of course, but Matsukata steals this one.)

Though not as extreme or unhinged as some of Fukasaku’s other yakuza pictures (if ‘Street Mobster’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’ score 10 in this regard, you can maybe count this as a 7), ‘Cops Vs Thugs’ can still boast more hair-raisingly intense sequences of violence and chaos than any crime movies being made elsewhere in the world during the 1970s, and counts as yet another entry on the ever-growing list of Fukasaku films that can be considered essential viewing for anyone with an interest in crime films, post-war Japanese culture or... I dunno, life in general.

11. Lone Wolf & Cub: White Heaven in Hell 
(Yoshiyuki Kuroda, 1974)

If it had taken place in a stand-alone film, or as part of some other on-going chanbara series, the hi-octane ski battle that forms the centrepiece of this sixth and final entry in the ‘Lone Wolf & Cub’ franchise – wherein Ogami Itto and Diagoro (in his snowmobile-adapted baby-cart) slice their way through an entire armys-worth of ninja/samurai opponents whilst propelling themselves at speed down a seemingly endless 90-degree sloped mountainside – would be the stuff of absolute legend, whispered about in tones of cosmic reverence by fans of action movies, martial arts and wild, violent cinema in general across the globe.

Such are the lofty standards set by earlier ‘Lone Wolf..’ instalments however, we instead find ourselves merely shrugging, and chalking this up as the third best one. What an extraordinary series of films.

12. The Public Enemy 
(William A. Wellman, 1931)

Yes, I’d never seen this one before, but, as a fan of violent crime movies, I thought it was high time I went back to the source, and, what can you say? 80+ years later, this one still packs a punch.

It’s such an Alpha-and-Omega of American gangster movies that reiterating the plot and events within is almost surplus to requirements, but needless to say, all of the genre’s key themes are clearly set out here – most notably the depiction of a black market underbelly running exactly parallel to the economic boom experienced by the USA in the early 20th century, and initially presented here with all the get-up-and-go gusto usually reserved for more mainstream depictions “American dream” style capitalism, continuing to appeal to our sympathies for such ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit and implicitly inviting us to draw comparison between the legitimate and illegitimate forms of enterprise, even as the cut-throat brutality underpinning the latter is portrayed in fairly uncompromising terms.

As the aggressive desire for personal betterment initially embodied by Jimmy Cagney eventually leaps the fence into full-blown psychopathy, it feels like the dark curtain of the depression falling over the prohibition boom years, and his career-making performance here is utterly crazed, grotesque to the point of being almost goblin-like, as he reveals himself capable of unhinged, seemingly improvised acts of violence that remain shockingly unpredictable to this day. By the final reel, he’s less a human figure, and more like a distant, more disreputable cousin to Karloff’s creature in ‘Frankenstein’ – a lurking monster, temporary lord of his kingdom, but so utterly isolated from the world around him he’ll be lucky to life through the night.

If all this sounds pretty familiar, well, it would do. Everything from ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Mean Streets’ to the ‘Scarface’ remake and ‘King of New York’ to some extent draws from the blue-print established by this movie, but the old story has rarely been told with the kind of concise, under-cranked intensity that Wellman achieves here.

For all this dense network of influence and genre creation furthermore, I also need to give a shout-out to ‘The Public Enemy’s’ final scene/final shot, which remains utterly unprecedented – using a heavy dose of expressionist technique to create a deeply unsettling and ambiguous tableau that feels more like something from a post-‘Psycho’ horror movie than anything you’d expect to see in a ‘30s studio film, even one as controversial and violent as this. If Wellman was aiming to leave his viewers with busted chops and unanswered questions, he succeeded mightily.

13. Free Fire 
(Ben Wheatley, 2017)

And, this year’s “’Bone Tomahawk’ award for the new movie that even a grumpy bastard like me can get behind” goes to…

To be fair, I have yet to subject Ben Wheatley’s immoderately entertaining single location gun fight extravaganza to the scrutiny of a second viewing, but on the first go round it pretty much blew me away, as I recounted here back in April.

 
14. Rituals 
(Peter Carter, 1977)

Often unhelpfully classified as a slasher film, Peter Carter’s gruelling wilderness survival horror nightmare sees Hal Holbrook heading up a troupe of badly behaved medical professionals (think M.A.S.H. twenty years on), whose annual adventure camping weekend / rural booze-up takes a darker-than-unexpected turn when an unseen figure initially begins sabotaging/stealing their (poorly prepared) equipment.

As per ‘Night Train Murders’ discussed above, a convincing sense of realism and a set of engagingly naturalistic, New Hollywood-type performances help raise this one way above the pack of ‘Deliverance’ rip-offs (I’d probably put it neck-and-neck with Walter Hill’s ‘Southern Comfort’ for the position of the all-time best “city folks run into trouble in the woods” movie), and, when it tips over the edge into full-on horror territory in the final act, the preceding slow build lends a sense of grim intensity that makes it feel like an above-ground, male prototype for Neil Marshall’s ‘The Descent’ (2005).

Very much the epitome of a “gnawing yr finger nails to the root & wiping the sweat from yr brow” movie, this one comes highly recommended.

15. Inquisition 
(Jacinto Molina, 1977)

To the surprise of – well, myself at least – Paul Naschy’s directorial debut and sole entry in the witch hunter/tortures of the inquisition subgenre turns out to be one of the best movies he ever appeared in (if you put your ‘serious cineaste’ hat on for the occasion instead of your ‘whooping drunken horror fan’ one, at least). My review from October can be found here. (Pictures of my ‘whooping drunken horror fan’ hat are not available for public view.)

16. Woman On The Run 
(Norman Foster, 1950)

Truth be told, there are a number of films at the more artistically ambitious end of the critically-adored Film Noir canon that have always left me a bit cold, what with their top-heavy, flashback-based structures, overbearing literary allusions, cluttered, expressionistic mise en scene and so on.

Much of the time in fact, I tend to get more out of the kind of straight-forward, lower profile crime pictures that reside on the B or C lists of many Noir buffs; the kind of movies that establish a single, solid narrative through-line and pursue it to the bitter end 70-odd minutes later, letting all that miscellaneous fancy stuff accumulate around the edges. And ‘Woman on the Run’, recently rescued from near complete obscurity/oblivion thanks to the efforts of San Francisco’s Film Noir Foundation, is very much a case in point.

So basically: Ann Sheridan’s husband has dropped out of sight after witnessing a gangland murder. She teams up with a shady/charming wise guy reporter (Dennis O’Keefe) to find him before the cops do. That’s all you need to know, plot-wise, but, as this good little burner of a magazine story races to the finish-line, Foster’s movie also gives us the opportunity to enjoy a wealth of exquisitely observed San Francisco location footage, much whip-smart dialogue between the two leads and a succession of absolutely great one-scene-wonder character parts. Most pertinently meanwhile, it also allows us to gradually piece together a somewhat moving picture of a strained and unconventional love story between two rather complex and difficult individuals, as outlined with a good deal of feeling by script-writer Alan Campbell (better-known as the husband twice over of Dorothy Parker).

Although a beautifully played plot twist and a literal roller-coaster of a finale help cement ‘Woman on the Run’s credentials as a cracking crime picture, it could be argued that it eventually proves more memorable in its capacity as an extremely unusually structured romantic drama; either way however, it certainly makes for highly rewarding viewing, providing practically the dictionary definition of a “little gem” within the endless mountain of largely fogotten B&W-era Hollywood product. Well worth tracking down…

17. The Flesh & The Fiends 
(John Gilling, 1960)

…as is this unfairly neglected British Burke & Hare/grave-robbing extravaganza, which I discovered toward the end of my October horror marathon. Transformed into a bleak social allegory by writer/director Gilling, it is an accomplished piece of work, pretty damn grim by the standards of 1960, and blessed with excellent performances from both Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence. (Review here.)

18. Tarkan & The Blood of the Vikings 
(Mehmet Aslan, 1971)

Do you think that a detailed knowledge of Turkish comic books, popular nationalist sentiment and period-set filmmaking in the ‘60s and ‘70s would possibly help me make some sense of this extraordinary motion picture, in which a heroic Turk-man with dyed blonde hair claims close kinship with Atilla the Hun, whilst virgin-sacrificing Vikings meanwhile dress like Asterix & Obelix cosplay participants, wolf-hounds cry tears of grief and imperfectly inflated giant octopi stalk the rocky coastline of Norway in search of human victims?

Probably not, to be honest.

What I can at least tell you is that this movie plays out as if the people behind films like ‘Casus Kiran’ and ‘3 Dev Adam’ were given about 20 times their usual budget to make a blood-thirsty historical epic, and the results are much as we might have expected. Which is to say, exuberantly action-packed, psychotically violent, shamelessly prurient, almost entirely mindless and wonderfully, joyously, unrelentingly crazy. Awe-inspiring stuff.

19. Burial Ground / Nights of Terror 
(Andrea Bianchi, 1981)

Though it is liable to live forever in cult film infamy for its truly bizarre adult-child/maternal incest sub-plot, it should not be forgotten that Andrea Bianchi’s unbelievably ragged zombie farrago is still more fun than the proverbial barrel of monkeys, even leaving aside this unsettling diversion.

Not so much “scraping the barrel” as chewing straight through the bottom of the barrel and drooling all over the floor, this really seems like a film that has grown into existence like some kind of out-of-control fungus, created without the input of any conscious human thought.

It’s as if Bianchi was hired to shoot a few minutes of “random zombie stuff” to be projected on the screen during a scene in another film in which the characters go to the cinema to see an amusingly bad zombie movie… but he enjoyed himself so much he just kept on rolling until the thing reached feature length.

Why did the zombies come back to life? Who are all the people in the house, and how do they know each other? Why is any of this happening? Viewers who feel they may demand answers to these fairly basic questions are advised to look elsewhere, whilst the rest of us can allow the paper-mache faced wonders of ‘Burial Ground’ to roll over us with all the crushing force of a rusty, flat-tired bicycle.

Heed the Profesy of the Black Spider, and behold the Nigths of Terror!

20. Werewolf of London 
(Stuart Walker, 1935)

A wildly imaginative and authentically weird addition to the golden age of Universal horror, I enjoyed this one a great deal, as discussed here.

21. La Papesse / ‘A Woman Possessed’ 
(Mario Mercier, 1975)

This extremely unusual, seriously intended French occult movie tells the tale of a young man in a remote rural area who gets mixed up with some sort of strange cult that purports to boast a history stretching back thousands of years, and furthermore claims to be able to bestow immortality upon its adherents. In reality however, the cultists seem chiefly concerned with instigating in a variety of wince-inducing public bondage/humiliation rituals as a means of ensuring quasi-fascistic obedience to the authority of their rarely glimpsed High Priestess / demi-goddess.

Under such circumstances, I for one might require some further convincing before signing up, but our man is so down with the programme that he even attempts to ingratiate himself with the cult by ‘offering’ his unwilling wife to them as some kind of non-consensual slave/victim. What follows is a series of drab, almost documentary-like BDSM ordeals that has me wondering at times whether I had accidentally wondered into a ‘specialist’ film intended for an audience to which I definitely do not belong.

I’m glad I stuck with it however, because the second half of the film, wherein the cult decamp to some ancient ruins for some proper, ‘70s style bacchanalian rites, is much more my scene. Things all get a bit Jean Rollin as the female cultists don colourful diaphanous gowns and start gyrating to wild, synth-heavy psychedelic rock, and, as psychotropic substances are imbibed and nude sacrifices prepared, things become pretty damn weird, with a succession of sequences that stick out in my memory as being so strange I wonder whether some of those psychotropic vibes rubbed off on me. Was there really a scene where the abused wife character runs away and ends up encountering some kind of invisible demons who life in-between the rocks on some craggy outcrop, or did I just fall asleep and dream that?

I probably need to watch this again, it seems. Preferably when no one else is around. Honestly though, from what I remember, I enjoyed it a great deal; pitched somewhere between a ‘70s erotic horror movie and a tripped out witchcraft documentary, it’s rich in that kind of low budget, shoe-string sense of Frenchness what I can’t quite find a word for (trace a line between Bénazéraf and Ogroff, and you might end up here). It’s pretty well made, not quite as horrible and rapey as I’ve probably made it out to be above, and certainly unlike anything else I’ve watched this year.

22. Fortress
(Stuart Gordon, 1992)

Word on the street (please don’t ask which street) is that this muscle-bound sci-fi prison movie began life as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he dropped out and was replaced by Christopher Lambert, presumably precipitating a corresponding plunge in budget and prestige. Unexpectedly however, it turns out Arnie was a big fan of ‘Re-Animator’, and that it was he who recommended Stuart Gordon to this project’s producers as a potential director – a suggestion for which anyone who has ever sat down to watch ‘Fortress’ owes the big lug a considerable debt of thanks.

As is pretty much always the case, Gordon succeeds here in making the absolute best of unpromising subject matter and limited financial means, turning what could easily have been an utterly forgettable straight-to-video actioner into an accomplished and highly entertaining b-movie of a markedly superior stripe.

In fairness, the script for ‘Fortress’ was already quite a lot of fun, with a handful of genuinely good SF ideas thrown in alongside the expected clichés, but it is the steady hand and distinctive ‘feel’ Gordon brings to proceedings that really gets things off the ground, contrasting Lambert’s musclebound blandness with lively performances from solid ‘80s character players like Kurtwood Smith, Vernon Wells and (of course) Jeffrey Combs, crowbarring in an impressive abundance of gory special effects, and generally riding the wire between legit action/sci-fi goodness and “unintentional” STV hilarity with ease.

(The film’s finale, during which a liberated Lambert fights a robotically-controlled articulated truck with a flamethrower whilst his wife gives birth in a nearby barn, provides a particularly special moment of the latter.)

Though no one is ever likely to dredge ‘Fortress’ up as a lost classic, it stands alongside John Carpenter’s Ghost of Mars as proof that the arid plains of ‘90s American genre cinema could still turn up the occasional tarnished gem of good ol’ fashioned pulp movie-making, as tends to be found wherever talented directors are given the freedom to do what they do within the limits imposed by commercial necessity.

23. The Hanging Woman 
[‘La Orgia de los Muertos’] 
(José Luis Merino, 1973)

This fairly obscure Spanish horror film starts off looking like it’s going to be a bit of chore, mixing suitably moody location-shooting with some hum-drum “reading of the will” type stuff, but stick with it and you’ll eventually be rewarded with a séance, black magic, zombies, Frankensteinian experiments, gratuitous nudity, entry level gore and (for some reason) a great deal of fisticuffs.

The hero looks (and indeed behaves) somewhat like a younger, blonder version of Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King, there’s a bearded, pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes stand-in, and Paul Naschy guest-stars as a perverted hunchback gravedigger. I think the word I’m looking for here is, “huzzah!”.


24. L’Ossesso / ‘Enter The Devils’ / ‘The Eerie Midnight Horror Show’
(Mario Gariazzo, 1974)

To be honest, I don’t remember all that much about this many-titled Italian horror oddity beyond the fact that I enjoyed it. When it comes to Italio-horror of this vintage though, that sense of total memory lapse and/or fading, half-remembered dream recognition is often a sign that you’re on to a winner.

Potentially a misbegotten attempt to transform an Erotic Castle Movie into an Exorcist clone mid-way through production, this one begins with a shapely young art historian being hired by a wealthy art collector to restore an unusual crucifixion sculpture extracted from a rural medieval church with a shady history of pagan/orgiastic goings-on. Back at her studio, the saviour comes to life (in the form of Ivan Rassimov!) and has his wicked way with her, after which she finds herself possessed by the lascivious evil spirit of …. something or other.

After that, you’re pretty much on your own, but like I say – I dug it. Just keep your wine glass full whilst viewing, and you can’t go wrong. Oh yeah, and Luigi Pistili plays the exorcist, which is splendid.

“Allegedly based on a true story,” states the trivia page on IMDB. Well I’m glad to hear it aspired towards some kind of story, at least.

25. Godzilla 
(Gareth Edwards, 2014)

Perhaps I’m just going soft in the head, but… am I alone in thinking this was actually pretty good? As may be gleaned from the fact that I waited three years and watched it on a DVD bought for £3 from the supermarket, my expectations were none too high, which perhaps accounts to some extent for my sense of being pleasantly surprised.

The action/destruction scenes here are tense and exciting, the monsters are imbued with genuine weight and presence despite their CGI origins, and the human drama hits all the necessary/traditional disaster/monster movie bases with an earnestness and lack of self-awareness that I found quite refreshing.

Also, I particularly appreciated the way that, much as the original ‘Godzilla’ tapped into the Japanese public’s (entirely understandable) fear of atomic energy and nuclear annihilation, Edwards here has the balls use his film’s ridiculous monster bash subject matter to touch upon such global, 21st century nightmares as unusually devastating natural disasters, electro-magnetic pulse waves, passenger jets falling out of the sky and colossal environmental fuck ups, dwelling upon the details of these (essentially plausible) catastrophes to an extent that occasionally becomes slightly uncomfortable for a Hollywood popcorn flick.

----

And on that note, Happy New Year everybody! Thanks for reading and we’ll see you back here at some point in January.