The Hunter (d. Buzz Kulik) - What would have been terrific is if Steve McQueen's last film before his death in 1980 at age 50 had been really great. Or that he'd not died in the first place, but keeping our wishes manageable, The Hunter could have been a tense and gripping, stripped down thriller in the The Driver mode, but instead it is, in fact, quite thoroughly bad. Based, I have to think with a great sense of freedom to stray from the known facts, on the career of real-life bounty hunter Ralph "Poppa" Thorson (McQueen, of course), The Hunter feels exactly like the kind of made-for-TV movie that was so common and popular back in those days, and in fact director Buzz Kulik's best-known and easily most enduring work was on the made-for-TV Brian's Song. There's a loose, yet stitched together quality to The Hunter, as it clumsily tries to weave together elements of Thorson's private life -- which includes a former bounty, played by Levar Burton, he let off the hook because the young man is gadget-oriented and can fix things -- as an old-school macho fellow caught up in his modern-day lady's (the ever-delightful Kathryn Harrold) requests to accompany her pregnant self to this new thing they have called "Lamaze classes", and his life as a hardboiled skip tracer.
To underline the disparity, Kulik and his screenwriters (including Peter Hyams who, say what you want, wrote some good shit for Hal Holbrook to say in Capricorn One) toss in a lot of comic relief, mainly of the slapstick variety. The problem is, unlike Paul Newman, McQueen, who at this point was starting to age into Richard Widmark, did not possess a natural gift for comedy, so there's lots of mugging and clownish weariness. Add to that some of the most tedious action scenes, which stem from the weirdly anemic "bounty hunter" portion of our plot, I've ever seen, to the point where a chase through the city made me think "Shit is this still going on?", and you, like me, will soon find yourself feeling sort of depressed.
Hunger (d. Steve McQueen) - There's a -- I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a formula of movie dialogue that involves one character asking another character to explain something, usually a motivation, and the character being asked responds with an anecdote meant to hint at an answer without directly answering. So you'll have somebody say "Why did you become a cop?" and the cop will respond with something that begins "When I was seven years old, my dad got me a dog..." Although I don't doubt that writers I like have used this construction, I nevertheless hate it pretty profoundly. It doesn't have the stones to be stylized, and doesn't have the ear to be naturalistic. It pretends to be the latter, without realizing that nobody speaks in such naked metaphors, nor are they typically able to dredge up wonderfully illustrative childhood anecdotes for any occasion.
Why the suffering on display in Hunger, the very explicit martyrdom, did not ping in the brains of critics as another example of what some of them regarded as crazed masochism in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I couldn't say, because the religion that was once at the heart of the Troubles, though subsequently got fogged up by centuries' worth of other things, is by no means absent from Hunger. But here there's a political element to the core story, without adding a filmmaker's bias, that is easy for some to hang their hats on. And when a priest (Liam Cunningham) pushes Sands for the basic truth behind his decision to starve himself to death and Sands responds with some creative writing bullshit about a foal he had to put out of its misery, an act of mercy which got him in trouble with a schoolmaster, everything just starts to make sense, doesn't it? Or doesn't it? The problems of Northern Ireland did not get easier as time went on. An easy moral stance changed over the decades so that a noble end was being sought through monstrous acts, and to defend the cause started to feel like you were defending the acts. Meanwhile, Hunger is a film that tries to impose on that time a very ugly clarity.
Dark of the Sun (d. Jack Cardiff) - On the subject of morality, legendary cinematographer and occasional director Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun, adapted from a novel by Wilbur Smith, immerses itself in the very rich moral swamp of mercenary armies. Made in 1968, the film is the kind of "men on a mission" movie that Quentin Tarantino claimed was his inspiration for Inglourious Basterds, even though that's not what that movie turned out to be. As deeply as I love Tarantino's film, there is a part of me, the part that routinely looks gift horses in their mouths, that wishes I could see a film all about the Basterds and their various adventures, because brother, films like Dark of the Sun ain't nothing to sneeze at. Anyway, Tarantino did go so far as to borrow parts of Jacques Loussier's score for his World War II epic, not to mention Dark of the Sun's star, Rod "Brief 'Im" Taylor, who not only costars here with Jim Brown, but reunites with his Time Machine costar Yvette Mimieux. The Taylor/Brown pairing turns out to be more significant, as Taylor's Captain Curry is hired by shady government and business types to ostensibly save a group of Congolese civilians from bands of marauders, but also to maybe grab that bag full of millions of dollars worth of diamonds while you're at it.
As someone who has a particular interest in cinematic violence, I'm fascinated by that curious part of the late 1960s from which Dark of the Sun comes, when an action film might include a shot of someone spraying a crowd of bad guys with a machine gun, each of whom clutch their chest and fall bloodlessly, no more traumatic to audiences than anything you might have seen from post-Code Hollywood, and then one second later show a guy getting stabbed in the face with a burning torch. If the violence in this film settles into anything, it settles into brutality, as was becoming the style at the time. Along with that, of course, must come the moral hand-wringing. On one hand, there's a good reason for that, as Jim Brown's Ruffo, Curry's right-hand-man, actually originally hails from the Congo, and would like their mission to be about something more than making money, and wants his willfully cynical friend to understand that. On the other hand, one of the mercenaries that hitches himself to their mission is actually an ex-Nazi, and when he causes the film to take a tragic turn late in the story, this leads to one of the better examples of someone clouding up and raining all over somebody else I've seen in a while, it also asks me to feel regret after the fact. Which is a little bit disingenuous, actually, and regardless the regret never took hold in me. But even before any of that happened, I wanted to know why in the world the team needed an ex-Nazi who was not just willing, but eager, to murder people with a chainsaw?
Night Creatures (d. Peter Graham Scott) - I've always been interested in the lesser known horror films from Hammer Studios, and this one certainly counts, despite starring Hammer stalwarts Peter Cushing and Oliver Reed. Reed, for once in his life, doesn't seem like he's about to start foaming from his mouth and smashing whiskey bottles over his head, and in fact plays the romantic lead in this rather curious story about a small English seaside village, during the 18th century, whose peaceful existence is disrupted by government officials, headed by Patrick Allen's Capt. Collier, who believe the village is smuggling hootch. Mix this with a subplot about the Marsh Phantoms, a wholly-unconvincing looking hoard of night-demons, I guess, who reportedly bring the unwary to a marshy grave, and the dishonorable Mr. Ash (Martin Benson), whose willingness to do whatever he needs to do to get what he wants, be it money or Imogene (Yvonne Romain), Reed's fiancee', jeopardizes the whole village. Which is smuggling hootch, by the way, as overseen by Rev. Blyss (Cushing) which is an interesting early revelation, and what's all this about the pirate, Captain Clegg, who is often heard about but never seen?
Certain plot elements function sort of as twists but are not at all hard to see looming, but none of that matters. Night Creatures seems to be about too many disparate things in the beginning, but winds up as entirely entertaining, and even unpredictable, obvious twists notwithstanding. What transpires as a result of those twists is both organic and emotional and somehow unforeseen. The damn thing just comes together. It does not aim as high as the best Hammer films, and what it is, in the end, is a yarn, but it's a damn good yarn, told by a crew of professionals, and boasting that great dusky blue stone look of, say, Brides of Dracula. I was very pleasantly surprised.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (d. Edgar Wright) - Edgar Wright's third film is simultaneously not as good as his previous two, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and miles more ambitious in terms of its visual style and scope. Based on a comic books series, my unfamiliarity with which somehow proves to me that I'm too much of a geek, and not enough of a geek, to really belong anywhere in this crazy, lonely old world, by Bryan Lee O'Malley, it's about Scott Pilgrim's (Michael Cera) love life, the turmoils of which are ordinary at their core, but heightened into the world of superhero comics and video games so that in order to cement his relationship with Ramona Flowers (a, let's face it, completely fetching Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, as far as he knows, he has to defeat her seven ex-significant others in Mortal Kombat-style battle. Much of this is quite funny (this may seem like nothing to you, but Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World includes the funniest washing of a character's hands after they've urinated that has ever been put on screen), and the film, not just shot but also set in Toronto, has a nice, unique look that is both snowy in an everyday sort of way, and in the mildly stylized way of a comic panel. Wright really knows what he's doing in terms of transplanting the feel of reading a comic book, moving one's eyes across the panels, to film, with such seemingly simple ideas as using sound effects that you both hear and "see", which arc into the next scene. You'll know what I mean when you see it.
But the film also does sort of wear out its welcome. The "seven exes" thing loses its verve after a couple, or a few, or anyway that verve is scattered, to the point that they arbitrarily and even wearily double up on the exes towards the end. And while some of the humor is delightfully anti-hipster (every character in the film being a member of that species), it is occasionally as tone-deaf as any hipster you might imagine. For instance, ironic Bollywood is never going to be welcome. Still, Michael Cera, whose casting was the cause of some controversy by the comic's fans at the time, was very good. Maybe my ignorance is helping me immeasurably here, but in terms of the movie, it's the movie that counts, right? And anyway, if you think Cera in this film is simply rehashing George Michael from Arrested Development, then you might be losing your ability to tell the difference between two different things.
As a final kudos, I would like to note that Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, with the following exchange from Scott and Ramona's first date, captures male thought patterns about as well as I've ever seen:
Ramona: I think an act of God is as good an excuse for a bad date as any.
Scott: This was a date?
Ramona: Did I say date? It was a slip of the tongue.
Scott: Tongue...
Demons of the Mind (d. Peter Sykes) - This apparently all-but-forgotten Hammer film from 1972 is basically a "sins of the father" story about a nobleman named Zorn (Robert Hardy) who has lived much of his life fighting the desire to commit bloody murder. Fearing that he's passed this violent gene down to his son and daughter, Emil and Elizabeth (Shane Briant and Gillian Hills), he keeps them locked in separate rooms in his sprawling manor, and also periodically bleeds them in hopes of ridding them of their depraved tendencies, which include, by the way, incest (the original title of the film was Blood Will Have Blood). The eternally bizarre Patrick Magee features as the shady doctor hired by Zorn to oversee all these various treatments, and to try and expel Zorn's own demons. Naturally, all of this is discovered by outside parties, and things turn out poorly. But the film, I thought, was quite good, and creepily strange, too, in both its mood and its willingness to keep the audience confused. Magee's introduction to the story, for example, leaves several questions scattered behind it, and no one to answer them. But that didn't much bother me, not least because Magee's eventual exit is a stunner. The short version of all this is that there's no reason for Demons of the Mind to be thought of as third-tier Hammer: it's serious, loony, Gothic and bloody.
I Sell the Dead (d. Glenn McQuaid) - McQuaid's debut film, inspired by a particularly wonky brand of horror comics -- I admit I'm guessing slightly here, based ont he occasional freeze frames that then morph into comic book panels -- is about two grave robbers, of the Burke and Hare variety, named Blake and Grimes (Dominic Monahan and horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden) who, after being freed from the iron fist of their previous employer (Angus Scrimm), go freelance and find their graverobbing experiences growing more and more bizarre. The find themselves unearthing the undead, a business which proves very lucrative, until they find themselves at odds with a rival graverobbing gang. It's all pretty slight, and occasionally over-stylized, but it's also a pretty fun time. Monahan and Fessenden pull their weight, ably supported by people like Ron Perlman, and the last half of the film, which is considerably more eventful and pulpy, is actually better than the first half, which is a rare quality. This movie isn't much, but it's enough.
One Million Years B.C. (d. Don Chaffey) - Speaking of Hammer, I just saw this somewhat atypical-for-them film over the weekend, and two things struck me. One is that I never knew that this was a Quest for Fire-esque grunting-and-pointing caveman movie, with no English dialogue at all. This revelation both impressed and, somehow, disappointed me. The other thing that struck me is that somewhere, someone is no doubt furiously typing up a thesis on how Stanley Kurbick spent roughly one-sixth of his career ripping this film off. Most obviously, Kubrick included a shot of cavemen getting pummeled by falling rocks during one of Alex's fantasies in A Clockwork Orange which is actually from One Million Years B.C., but the multiple shots of dry, rocky vistas at dusk that opens 2001 is reminiscent of the opening of the Chaffey film. So obviously Kubrick was a no good thief who never had an original idea of his own, and he also never had the stones to include a single pterodactyl fight in any of his films. Game, set, match, Chaffey and Co.