Capsule Reviews: An Assortment

Here, read these.
Pearl of Death (d. Roy William Neill) - The truth of the matter is this: I do not think very much of Basil Rathbone's take on Sherlock Holmes, and, really, never have. When I was a kid, he seemed stiff, and now as an adult who has read his fair share of Doyle's stories, I realize that the problem -- which is less Rathbone's than the tone of the movies -- is that he's only playing Holmes's intelligence. If Holmes was just some super smart fellow, he never would have taken off as a character, and yet the defining cinematic presentation of him to date depicts him as just that, and nothing more. It wasn't until Jeremy Brett's relevatory, and frankly kind of batshit, turn as Holmes the series Mystery that I, as a fan of the stories, really understood what had always been missing.

Even so, Pearl of Death is a good entry to the series of films Rathbone made as Holmes, with the completely wrong and out-of-character Nigel Bruce as Watson. The thing about Bruce's Watson, though, is that wrong though he may be, the character is actually funny, bumbling doofy-ness and all. You can't argue with what works. Also working is Miles Mander as Conover, the main villain who wants the titular pearl, and Rondo Hatton in his first appearance as the back-breaking killer known as "The Creeper." Hatton is the reason I checked out Pearl of Death in the first place, as I knew who Hatton was but had yet to actually experience his on-screen presence for myself. And quite a presence it is. His appearance, the result of the long-term effects of poison gas, gave him a quite unexpected career, albeit a small one, in films, mostly as a weird bit of scenery until the Creeper came along. In any case, his very being adds an uneasy tilt, like the swaying camera that zooms in on the freaks in carnival and circus movies, to a solid but otherwise rote movie.

Good Neighbors (d. Jacob Tierney) - This dark Canadian thriller caught me completely unawares. It stars Emily Hampshire, Scott Speedman, and Jay Baruchel as neighbors in an apartment building who become friends, and more in some cases, against the backdrop of a Quebec neighborhood that is being terrorized by a serial killer. So which one of them -- specifically, which one of the two guys -- is the killer, right? Well, that's what I figured this thing was about for about 60% of its running time, and then it blind-sided me. Not with some whiplash of a twist, but a natural progression into a different sort of film, one much more interesting and strange and disturbing. Speaking of, that's one more thing you might be unprepared for if you decide, as I did, to casually, even lazily, purchase Good Neighbors on PPV: it contains one of the most unpleasant and harrowing and awful moments of violence I've seen in many a moon. This scene is also kind of funny, in a way that will make you feel deeply ashamed.

But this is a good movie. Check it out.

The Driver (d. Walter Hill) - I've always been something of an agnostic when it comes to Walter Hill, having been underwhelmed at a young age by several of what I was told were his very best films. But every so often, I'll cave in again and decide to see if I'm more in tune with his stuff, which I should be, by all rights, given my tastes. When it comes to Southern Comfort, which I rewatched not too very long ago, no, I'm not, unless you're talking about the last fifteen minutes, in which case yes, I am. So impressed was I, this time around, with that film's ending that I figured I'd better keep going (it even erased the whole rest of the film in my mind, which still does nothing for me), and so over the weekend I watched The Driver , Hill's second film. Starring three-time good movie-maker Ryan O'Neal as the title character, The Driver is a classic of '70s crime cinema, which puts it right up there pretty high in the genre's Hall of Fame. Like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, the film is about cars, and character types (who aren't given names -- O'Neal plays The Driver, is nemesis Bruce Dern plays The Detective, and so on), and, like so many heist films, which this sort of is without ever quite seeming like it, it's also about doing the job. Not to mention dealing with the shit that comes with that job. It's all so very well-made, so precise and lean -- "expertly sketched", is what a book critic might call it if The Driver was a novel. It's pure cinema, though, and bracingly brutal, too. And Ryan O'Neal should probably send Hill a Christmas card every year, because that part where he shoots that dude from behind the car door must be the coolest thing O'Neal has ever been allowed to do in a film.

Battle Beyond the Stars (d. Jimmy T. Murakami) - These new "Roger Corman's Cult Classic" DVDs they have now are sort of odd. I'm not debating the need for a deluxe DVD of the original Piranha or Humanoids from the Deep or Death Race 2000 or anything like that. But some of these films are so limp, even in their attempts to exploit all the things we want to see exploited (rarely have I see nudity more half-heartedly filmed than in Slumber Party Massacre). And if you're not going to exploit anything, and want to skew younger, then you'd better be as insane as Starcrash. Because if you're not crazy, and you're not exploitive, you know what you are? You're Battle Beyond the Stars, a film whose deluxe DVD exists solely because people think nostalgia is nice.

It would appear to be a can't miss ripoff, in that it is, in Corman's own words, "Seven Samurai in space", but none of the characters who are being recruited by our fresh-faced hero (Richard Thomas) to take down the guy who wants to kill everybody (John Saxon) registers beyond their make-up. Well, George Peppard does, because he's the Han Solo character, and Sybil Danning does because of being Sybil Danning, but that's it. And the other thing that filmmakers who use this structure must remember is that when your samurai stand-ins start dying, it had better be interesting. In other words, if you need to kill one by having their spaceship explode, try to limit that to just one. Here, it seems like half of them go out that way, or in ways so similar as to be indistinguishable. This, I'm afraid, is boring. When James Coburn dies in The Magnificent Seven, he throws his knife into a piece of wood before falling. And don't even make me bring up Toshiro Mifune in the film that got this ball rolling. "Seven Samurai in space" is a premise, not a film.

There's No Hope for Me to Die

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While I freely admit that among the classic Universal monster movies The Wolf Man is far from the best, I also happen to think it gets a pretty unfair rap as a low-rent pretender. Among the things I especially like about that film, which was directed by George Waggner, is Lon Chaney, Jr.'s portrayal of Lawrence Talbot as a lovable lug, kind of a pleasant meathead, whose reaction to the bizarre and terrible turns his life has taken is to be scared out of his mind. There's a pathos to that which eschews the high tragedy aims of movies like Frankenstein for a more blue collar approach -- instead of tragic, The Wolf Man goes for sad.

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So on that level at least, I take The Wolf Man kind of seriously, and could probably become a bit defensive about it, should the situation warrant it. My viewing today of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (d. Roy William Neill) might be that situation. The problem is that this is a direct sequel to The Wolf Man, picking up four years after Talbot's death at the merciful hands of his father. In attempting to rob Talbot's grave, two no-goods sweep away the wolfsbane covering his body, said wolfsbane being the one thing keeping Talbot dead. So now he's not dead anymore, and he's still a werewolf. And, rather intriguingly, the plot of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man centers around Talbot's quest to die, for good.

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After linking up again with Maria Ouspenskaya, the gypsy from the previous film, Talbot begins to track the story of Dr. Frankenstein, who apparently had mastered the powers of life and death. And here I'll not that Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is more or less a direct sequel to James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein as well, with similarly injurious results. The Wolf Man and Bride of Frankenstein end on notes of real heartbreak, which the makers of this later film -- director Neill, producer Waggner, screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who also wrote The Wolf Man -- basically scribble out by reviving not only Talbot, but, obviously, Frankenstein's monster (no Dr. Frankenstein, though, he's still dead, replaced by glaze-eyed Ilona Massey as his daughter, Baroness Elsa Frankenstein). In other words, the two deaths from those films that mattered the most no long matter. Or I guess that depends on how seriously you take sequels to beloved film, and how easily you're able to separate them if you don't like where the follow up leads you. For my part, I can do that pretty easily, so I'm not overly put out by the sacrileges of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

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Instead of being angry for an hour and twelve minutes, I instead took note that this film is to The Wolf Man and the two previous Frankenstein films as The Godfather Part II is to The Godfather, in that, like the Coppola sequel, all the points made by Waggner and Whale are simply half-heartedly underlined by Neill (there's a difference, since Coppola's underlining was quite vigorous). This is not terribly uncommon among sequels, I suppose, but there's something about Chaney's Talbot going from a happy-go-lucky fellow at the beginning of the first film, to a terrified man who wants to be rid of his curse by any means necessary by the end, and then, in the next film, to a man who, no, seriously, really wants this curse taken care of, that put me in mind of Michael Corleone's light-to-dark-to-super-dark journey. So there's that, and then there's Bela Lugosi taking over the role of Frankenstein's monster from Karloff, only to remind the world that whatever his talents, Lugosi was no Karloff, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man's ending, which is so abrupt that you have to wonder if the studio said "The moment you film a castle collapsing, no matter how much left you have to shoot, you must shut down production." That's the only thing that makes any sense, at least.