Capsule Reviews: Again, for the First Time

Let me cut to the chase: today, three films were released as Blu-ray-style DVDs and I have watched all three. Below are my thoughts and thinkings about each.

Pressure Point (d. Hubert Cornfield) - There's a scene in Tim Robbins's 1995 film Dead Man Walking which rather neatly exposes the cowardice at its heart. Matthew Poncelet, the Death Row inmate played by Sean Penn is being questioned about his racist beliefs by Sister Helen Prejean, the nun whose job it is to help Poncelet reach a kind of grace, and to ask forgiveness for the murder he committed, before being put to death by the state, something Poncelet, Prejean, and the film oppose. So Poncelet says he doesn't like black people because they're lazy. Prejean says "Martin Luther King wasn't lazy" and Poncelet says no, he likes Martin Luther King because he actually did stuff. Prejean zings him by saying "It sounds like what you really don't like isn't black people, but lazy people." Poncelet's reaction is to be quietly flummoxed, the implication being that he thinks she might be on to something here. This exposes the film's cowardice because to begin with, I daresay that not a single racist white person has ever said "Funnily enough, I do like Martin Luther King, though." Second, Robbins shows that he believes an audience is more willing to forgive a man for killing someone for no good reason than they are a man who hates someone for no good reason. In fairness to Robbins, he's not wrong in this belief. What's cowardly about it, not to mention weird, is that in order to make his argument against the death penalty, he strips away anything objectionable about Poncelet (save for the murder itself, but even that he mitigates as much as he reasonably can) so that he doesn't really need to marshal very much in the way of a moral argument.

Though the American Nazi played by Bobby Darin in 1962's Pressure Point (just out from Olive Films), produced by issue-filmmaker Stanley Kramer, isn't in prison for murder (he is in prison, though), for a while there, as I watched it the other day, it seemed to me that Kramer, director Cornfield, and writers Cornfield and S. Lee Pogostin, were constructing a similar escape hatch. Darin's convict has been assigned to the care of a prison psychiatrist played by Sidney Poitier. Darin objects to this because Poitier is black, and Poitier doesn't much care for Darin, but he's there to do a job, and anyway as the film progresses, and we learn about the Nazi's difficult childhood, and the nightmares that still haunt him, you start to think, well, hey...this guy's a racist piece of shit but maybe he can be talked out of being that way.  What a tale of redemption that would be.

Interestingly enough, the film, and I don't want to spoil it, but the film pulls back from that eventually. And even though Kramer's iron fist of compassion can still be felt banging down from time to time, Pressure Point nevertheless is interested in sending a more complicated message then the one it seems to be composing. The last scene between Poitier and Darin (Poitier is unsurprisingly good; Darin is surprisingly good) shows Poitier's doctor absolutely furious at Darin's prisoner. He does not forgive him for his behavior, his crimes, his attitudes, beliefs, or manipulations. The important thing is that we know the doctor considers this case, in hindsight, to have been one of his failures. But he's going to keep doing his job, or trying to. Maybe next time he'll get a sweetheart like Matthew Poncelet, which would be a total walk in the park in comparison.

Death by Hanging (d. Nagisa Oshima) - I mentioned before that even regarding the murder that we know Matthew Poncelet (yes I know, but I'm trying to establish a "theme") committed, in Dead Man Walking director/screenwriter Tim Robbins does whatever he thinks he can get away with to soften that blow for the audience by showing that, for example, Poncelet never wanted to kill either the man or woman he and his friend ended up murdering that night in the woods, but, while Poncelet did indeed pull the trigger on one of them, he was scared and bullied into it by his partner, a much nastier and more sadistic fellow. Not that this excuses, Poncelet, of course, but doesn't it almost?? The unavoidable question in my mind, however, is if you really mean what you're saying, then make an anti-death penalty film about the sadistic friend who wanted to commit those murders. Grow some balls.

An anti-death penalty film that does kinda sorta address this is Nagisa Oshima's Death by Hanging from 1968, which was released today by Criterion. Oshima, best known for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which featured a very interesting performance from David Bowie, and the scandalous In the Realm of the Senses, which featured, well, you know, was always a confrontationally political filmmaker, and he begins Death by Hanging aggressively challenging anyone in the audience who might support the death penalty by asking, via a narrator, "Have you ever been in a death chamber?" We're then walked through the process of preparing someone for execution, and then through the execution itself, though in this case, the convict, a Korean immigrant living in Japan and known only as "R" (Do-yun Yu) doesn't die when he's hanged. He's unconscious, but the doctor present notes that physically there's no difference between his health pre- and post-hanging. This leads the various government and law enforcement officials to blunder through a series of desperate, absurdist theological, moral, legal, and existential debates, which only intensify when R regains consciousness but who is an emotional blank who, it is argued by the Catholic priest (Toshiro Oshido) who was there to administer Last Rites, lost his soul during the hanging and so is, therefore, no longer the man who committed the rape and murder he was convicted of, and so therefore executing him again, which is sort of what most of those present are hoping to be able to do, since that would simplify their dilemma a lot, would be immoral. You wouldn't be executing the murderer.

All of which is really just the beginning of Death by Hanging, an enormously strange and complex film which is described as a satire, and it is that, but plays out more like a piece of absurdist theater. Which in a way is the problem. Even though R is guilty of just about the most appalling crime imaginable, the rape of the girl he murdered is almost laughed about as the government officials go about trying to reenact R's crimes so that he might remember them and become himself again. There's also some blathering about "desire," which seems, er, beside the point. Furthermore, the moral equivalency that Robbins fails to shock anybody by wallowing in in Dead Man Walking is also indulged in by Oshima. But even allowing that execution of a person by the state is often a moral quagmire at best, I refuse to accept that the killing of a man because he raped and murdered a woman is the same thing as a man raping and murdering a woman because he felt like doing it. Worse still, and this is where the absurd nature of Death by Hanging becomes a problem, R eventually understands the terribleness of what he did, but he only got there because of the metaphysically botched execution. Like Robbins, Oshima finds a way to strip away the worst of R and thereby render him palatable, but unlike Robbins he does so by introducing fabulism into the scam. This comes perilously close to making the case that execution is the best thing for people like R, and I somehow doubt is what Oshima had in mind.

Hitch Hike (d. Pasquale Festa Campanile) - Now, if you want to see about a film that at least seems honest about terrible people who do terrible things, you might consider checking out this mean little bit of Italian exploitation from 1977, now out from Raro Video. Walter (Franco Nero) and Eve (Corinne Clery) are arguing (and in Walter's case, drinking) their way through a road trip when they pick up a hitchhiker named Adam (David Hess). Adam turns out to be a violent criminal on the run, and soon Walter and Eve are his hostages. The murders of two policemen, a series of confrontations with Adam's former criminal colleagues, and Adam's repeated sexual aggression against Eve, form a good chunk of the film's plot.

For quite a while, I thought that, whatever sleazy entertainment Hitch Hike might provide, it was never going to actually be interesting. It seemed to be the kind of film I could try to write before I watched it, and end up with something reasonably close the actual shooting script. And for a while I'd have been correct, but eventually things start to zig rather than zag. For one thing, the fact that there's a character named Adam and a character named Eve but this winds up actually not having any significance whatsoever (apart from Adam remarking on it, but only to the extent of saying, basically "Hey how about that") came as a surprise to me. It's certainly possible that to Campanile's eyes, it meant a lot and it just doesn't play the way he intended, but whatever, the effect is the effect. Second, Eve and Walter are presented as a hopeless couple, and it's all Walter's fault -- he's a drunk, and an asshole, and apparently a rapist himself -- he certainly forces himself on his wife often enough (creepily, though not surprisingly, the film does make Eve someone who eventually gives in and enjoys it when this happens, although there's a side of this film that makes me wonder how to read that; I could just be making excuses, though, or hoping someone will make them for me). Anyway, with this kind of set up, you might reasonably expect, however the film turns out as far as who survives and who doesn't, that Walter will be working towards some kind of redemption, doomed or otherwise. And while he does work to extricate his wife and himself from this terrible situation, he's always kind of a dick. Hitch Hike isn't a redemption story. It's the story of an asshole in trouble.

Nowhere is this made more clear than in the film's ending. Another thing you'd expect while watching Hitch Hike is that once a certain thing happens, the film will be over. But while that thing does happen, you realize there's still a half hour to go. What's left? I'll tell you what's left: the kind of moral horror that would have made Jim Thompson proud. I was so impressed with where the film finally went, however clumsy, and even ridiculous it sometimes is, that I'm tempted to think of it as a kind of minor crime classic. It's a hard movie.

Capsule Reviews Again, But Short Ones This Time

Please see below.

The Deadly Bees (d. Freddie Francis) - The other day on Social Media, I was moved to remark that over the course of his career, Freddie Francis directed many films for Hammer Studios, such as Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, and films for Amicus like Torture Garden, as well as interesting yet unaffiliated horror-ish one-offs like an adaptation by Ronald Harwood of the previously unproduced Dylan Thomas script about Burke and Hare, The Doctor and the Devils. In addition, Francis was perhaps an even more accomplished cinematographer, with DP credits on Scorsese's Cape Fear, Lynch's The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, and, most fascinatingly, Edward Zwick's 1989 Oscar contender Glory (my favorite film for a period of time in my youth). That is an interesting and varied career, fellows and ladies.

All that being said, what can one, finally, say about The Deadly Bees? This is a film that Francis directed in 1966, from a script by Anthony Marriott and, more notably, Robert Bloch, from a novel by H. F. Heard. I'll confess that I came to it first via the episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that showcased it, but amusing as I've always found that episode I have often wondered if, removed from that context, the film was really that bad. Well, Olive Films has provided me, and all of us, the opportunity to find out with their release of The Deadly Bees on Blu-ray. And of course, no, it's not that bad. Yes, there's some goofiness early on involving Britain's groovy music scene, from which our heroine Vicki Robbins (Suzanna Leigh) needs a break. But once she's sent, at the behest of her manager, to a rural English village to enjoy some peace as the tenant of a prominent local beekeeper Ralph Hargrove (Guy Doleman) and his wife Mary (Catherine Finn), it's really not that bad. We know, from a subplot involving a police investigation, that someone from that village has been sending letters to the cops threatening to unleash a deadly bee attack, and so the question is, is the culprit Hargrove, or his rival beekeeper H. W. Manfred (Frank Finlay)? All signs point to Hargrove, and Vicki teams up with Manfred to bring him down.

I think Hargrove and Finn are both pretty terrific. Theirs is an awful marriage, Hargrove is a cold bastard, Mary is understandably embittered, and both actors play the day-to-day reality of such a relationship quite well, without ever going into hysterics. Finlay is also really good -- I love the sympathetic yet thoughtful way he says "Poor little dog," regarding an early victim of the bees -- and in general the environment of the village is well sketched. The film is tripped up by Leigh, who simply doesn't seem like an actress here, to be honest, and the special effects -- you'd expect killer bee effects to not be at their peak in 1966, and you'd be right. But otherwise, it's, you know, it's fine. There are worse films. There are probably worse films about bees. I will say, however, that The Deadly Bees ends with one of the strangest and most unintentionally funny non-sequiturs I've seen in a film that's not really all that bad.

A Black Veil for Lisa (d. Massimo Dallamano) - Also just released on Blu-ray by Olive Films from which, when I threw it on last night, I didn't know what to expect, is this Italian thriller from 1968. I thought it was going to be what we in the movie-watching business, and also Italians of all sorts, call a giallo, but it isn't really. It's a cop movie, about the hunt by Inspector Franz Bulon (John Mills) for a mysterious drug dealer, a well as the hitman that drug dealer has hired to kill anyone who is about to give information to the cops. That hitman, named Max Lindt, we actually meet early. He's played by Robert Hoffmann, and when Bulon hunts him down the film gets flipped on its ear because Bulon hires Lindt to kill his, Bulon's, wife. Her name is Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi), and Bulon's love for her is intense to the point of obsession. So when he learns that she's been unfaithful, he snaps.

So what A Black Veil for Lisa turns out to be is Vertigo by way of James M. Cain. John Mills was no Jimmy Stewart, but he was John Mills, and there's something about the silence of his pain and anger that is both moving and unnerving. I wasn't shocked that he hired someone to kill his wife. But while Massimo Dallamano is Massimo Dallamano (I believe the only other film I've seen that he directed is the fairly ridiculous What Have You Done to Solange?), he's certainly no Alfred Hitchcock. I don't know, I just think that if your influence, or source, is going to be so obvious, maybe goose things up a little bit. There's not a whole lot going on here visually, but it's a good enough way to pass the time. It's certainly competent, and I'd wager the storytelling and Mills will be enough to get you through.

Do You Like Capsule Reviews? Well Then Brother Guess What!

Here are a few "capsuled" reviews of films I have recently watched. I hope you enjoy reading them more than I enjoyed writing them.

The Sender (d. Roger Christian) - First up is this 1982 horror film, just out from Olive Films and part of the, I don't know what you'd call it, telepathy-horror subgenre? Anyway, pretty clearly the idea was to follow the path carved out by David Cronenberg's Scanners and Brian DePalma's Carrie and The Fury. It's about a young man who winds up in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt, and the caring doctor who comes to believe that he really can make others feel, and experience, his hallucinations and dreams, which is to say, his nightmares.

The Sender is packed with familiar faces, whose wide variety of credits you simply don't really see coming together in one film anymore. Starring as the doctor you have Kathryn Harrold, who I consider sort of an icon due to her role as Albert Brooks' other half in his masterpiece Modern Romance. Plus besides which, there's just something about her, you know? (Interestingly, given her role in The Sender, Harrold hasn't acted since 2011, and is now a licensed psychotherapist in Los Angeles.) There's also Paul Freeman, best known as Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark as Harrold's boss, and Shirley Knight, who not long ago I saw in the very good, and very early, Francis Ford Coppola film The Rain People. Here, Knight plays a mysterious woman who visits the disturbed young man in the hospital. That disturbed young man, by the way, is played by Zeljko Ivanek, who is one of those character actors who has spent nearly the last forty years being always good in everything. More often than not playing a villain, in 1982 Ivanek hadn't yet been typecast, and it's nice to see him in The Sender playing someone we don't want to punch.

He's good, too, as is everyone else. And despite my implication that The Sender was merely riding the coattails of Cronenberg and DePalma, it's quite a solid picture. Setting the film almost entirely within the hospital was a good move on the part of director Roger Christian and writer Thomas Baum, and the sketching out of the employee and patient population is accomplished with a lighter touch than you tend to see from this era. While the nature of this story does mean that certain crazy, special effects-heavy sequences don't actually occur in the reality of the story (although, well, never mind), which I at least find a bit frustrating in a general sort of way, those sequences are handled really well, and at times are pretty spooky. And anyway, the film's not a cop out, and it doesn't cheat. Give it a look.

God's Pocket (d. John Slattery) - Of the handful of films that Philip Seymour Hoffman had finished but which had not yet been released at the time of his death in early 2014, the one I was most looking forward to was God's Pocket, the directing debut of actor John Slattery. In addition to Hoffman's starring role, which itself was more than enough for me, the film also featured John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, and Eddie Marsan, all favorites, and was based on a violent and weirdly funny novel of blue collar crime and neighborhood provincialism by Pete Dexter that I'd read years ago, and liked a fair amount. Then it came out, and people didn't like it very much, and anyway it only sort of came out in the first place. So it more or less drifted off my radar. Maybe it was a swing and a miss, which would be too bad, and which might make me sad to actually watch.

But I finally did watch it, and damn it, it's pretty good! I think some people may have been thrown by the fact that Slattery and his cast, which also includes strong performances by Christina Hendricks, Jack O'Connell, and others, do a very good job of translating Dexter's oddball tone to the screen. There aren't a lot of real jokes in the films, and it's often pretty brutal, emotionally and in terms of actual physical violence, but Dexter, and Slattery, recognize that the kind of behavior exhibited by some of these people, and the choices they sometimes make, none of which are unheard of among human beings, are so absurd that it's sort of grotesquely funny, just on the face of it. It's a hard tone to strike, and Slattery strikes it, but I suppose it's also a hard tone to like. But I liked it.

King Kong (d. Peter Jackson) - I was recently moved by illness to revisit this, Peter Jackson's three-hour remake of a 1933 Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack motion picture which perhaps you've heard of. It occurs to me that Jackson's film came out almost exactly ten years ago (give or take a few months), and it's been about that long since I watched it all the way through. I've gone back to the opening Great Depression and Vaudeville montage, cut to Al Jolson's "I'm Sittin' on Top of the World," because I'm quite fond of that bit, as I once was fond of the the rest of it. After my recent viewing of the whole film, I'm still fond of that opening montage.

I should say here that I'm not bothered by the 187-minute run-time. In fact, I'd say most of my favorite stuff is in the set-up. There's something about a remake of a movie like King Kong that, unless you're fucking it up left, right, and sideways, adds a unique sort of tension, for me anyway. I felt it here, and I liked seeing what led Naomi Watts' Ann Darrow (a highlight) to meet Jack Black's Carl Denham (not necessarily a highlight but I appreciate the effort), and then to the boat, and all the people on the boat, or most of the people on the boat. It's like the build-up of a disaster movie, in a lot of ways, and that's often my favorite part of disaster movies.

The problem is that following his triumph with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson apparently lost all control. The absurd cartoonishness of his pre-Heavenly Creatures films (an era I'm not that fond of to begin with) does not marry well with the kind of huge-budget emotional spectacle that he's aiming for with King Kong. And it is emotional. Kong's death is quite moving, and Andy Serkis's performance as Kong is very good (I mean, I guess it is). But when it's just spectacle, or even when it's just people, this thing is a goddamn mess. I've rarely found the one-damn-thing-after-another nature of modern special effects blockbusters to be as enervating as this film was the second time around. The brontosaurus stampede on Skull Island is a complete wash -- at no point did I believe any of the humans were on the same plane of existence as the dinosaurs, and the sequence was just fucking endless. For how many minutes straight must we watch Adrien Brody frantically look left and then right? At a green screen, incidentally, which I swear I could practically see, covered though it was by brontosauri. Plus, I used to think the fight between Kong and the tyrannosaurus rexes was really cool and fun and such, but somehow I'd forgotten that through it all Kong is tossing Ann all over the place. She almost falls to her death but he catches her and throws her to another hand so he can punch a t-rex, and then he has to catch her with his foot while flipping through a whatever-the-fuck kind of tree...it's just too much. Too much by an absurd amount. Never mind that Ann would be dead as hell by the end of it all.

And unlike in The Lord of the Rings, never mind Heavenly Creatures, with the people here Jackson is basically hopeless. All the actors in the 1933 film had a better sense of when to pull back than pretty much anybody here. Clearly, Jackson wanted to honor that era of filmmaking stylistically, but he shouldn't have. Trying to act like that when you're not that kind of actor is death, and I actually think Jack Black (not exactly the subtlest of actors to begin with) knew that right up to the point he delivers the line "It was beauty that killed the beast." And he knew it while delivering it, too. You can almost see him thinking "Oh no, this is going to be too much, this is going to be too much, I should pull back, Peter's wrong about this I need to do someth - 'IT WAS BEAUTY THAT KILLED THE BEAST' - shit goddamnit damn it god shit." Something like that happened, I bet.

Also, that bit where Adrien Brody types "Skull Island" in slow motion while saying each letter out loud, making everybody look at him in terror, is an idea so bad, and a bad idea executed so terribly, that I almost can't believe it, or even speak about it rationally.

What Can You Expect From a Woman Whose Mother Was Hanged?

This week, Olive Films takes a break from releasing idiosyncratic late-20th Century genre films in favor of releasing a pair of mid-20th Century genre films: Jack L. Copeland's Hell's Five Hours, and William Marshall and Errol Flynn's Adventures of Captain Fabian. Onward, can't you?

Hell's Five Hours (d. Jack L. Copeland) - This is one of the more curious super-low-budget noirs I've seen. The only feature made by writer/director/producer Jack L. Copeland, whose long life was otherwise spent as a war photographer and maker of short documentaries and training films, Hell's Five Hours begins with an ominous prologue about the then-new age of rockets, and warning about the dangers of rocket fuel, especially, it then become less a sermon than an imperfect but  intense crime drama about a man whose mind has snapped.

That man is named Nash, and he's played by Vic Morrow. Before the film begins, he's been fired from his job at the rocket-fuel plant by bully named Fife (Robert Foulk). He plans, then, to blow up the plant, something we're led to believe is a cinch to pull off. Along the way, he kidnaps Nancy Brand (Colleen Gray), the wife of plant manager Mike Brand (Stephen McNally). Mike's our hero, and with the cops he works to bring an end to this horror (which is sure to end, one way or another, within five hours, for plot reasons that seemed sensible enough to me, whether or not they actually are) as peacefully as possible.

Among the interesting things to be found in Hell's Five Hours is the near silent first scene (after the narrated prologue), which involves Nash putting his plan into motion, and is very sharply and coherently put together by Copeland. Also the fact that however much we may eventually be tempted to sympathize with Nash, he murders two innocent men before we even know his story. The film doesn't really let you forget that, either, nor does Nash especially regret what he's done, outside of understanding that those dead bodies mean there's no turning back for him. There's a brutality to all the killings -- and there are more than a few -- and the uniqueness of the setting (almost the whole 80 minutes takes place at the plant) combine to make the film seem somewhat imbalanced. I mean, mentally. As in, anything might happen. It's a night-time movie, and it feels like it.

Adventures of Captain Fabian (d. William Marshall) - I have to confess something, which is that Errol Flynn is a fairly large blind spot for me. I've seen The Adventures of Robin Hood, and I think I love it the appropriate amount, but it's actually possible that just recently I hadn't seen any of his other films. It's perhaps because of this ignorance that when I looked at the Olive Films Blu-ray of his 1951 film Adventures of Captain Fabian I was surprised to discover that in addition to starring in it, he also wrote it. I wondered if screenwriting had been a large part of his career, though I soon learned that no, it wasn't (of course he wrote that pretty famous memoir, and also a forgotten novel called Showdown). Apart from Adventures of Captain Fabian, Flynn only has two screenwriting credits: a short directed by Jack Cardiff, and for which Flynn is only credited with writing the outline, called The Story of William Tell, from 1953, and, from 1959, the same year he died at the age of 50, a film called Cuban Rebel Girls. That film, from what I've fathered, features Flynn playing himself as a war correspondent, during Castro's overthrow of Batistsa. It was made with Castro's support. At least his support, one might assume.

So anyway, the point is, as a write Flynn had a strange career. There's not much of that part of his creative life to pick through, and Adventures of Captain Fabian will for now have to stand, along with that memoir My Wicked, Wicked Ways, as the most readily available and accessible. And it's fascinating! To begin with, that title...well, no. Here's the premise: set in pre-Civil War New Orleans, the film tells the story of Lea (Micheline Presle), a servant whose cruel mistress is engaged to marry a prosperous businessman (Vincent Price) with whom Lea is having an affair. The plot is fairly complicated, and it involves a murder which Lea did commit but which could reasonably be chalked up to self-defense, all of this in the middle of her "dealings," as it were, with Price's character, though she's sprung by Flynn's Captain Fabian, perhaps only because he wants to take down Price because of shady business dealings...anyway. I can't summarize it all here. But I think you get the idea.

All of which, the above I mean, is why Adventures of Captain Fabian is both so interesting and so much fun. To begin with, that title is misleading, and my guess is it was imposed on the project by a producer or investor or some such fucking guy. But it implies, doesn't it, some amount of swashbuckling, for which Flynn, in his heyday, which had passed by 1951, was best known, but this film has no swashing of buckles. To speed things along, I'll just say it: Adventures of Captain Fabian is a film noir. For one thing, while Price plays the one unambiguous villain, it's Lea, the femme fatale, who does terrible things but has her reasons, who drives all the evil and violence. Also, Flynn's Captain Fabian doesn't have "adventures." He has this one, in which he's duped. He's not a pirate, he's a businessman. He has a taste for revenge, sure, but don't we all? And while he has more resources than your typical film noir hero, he gets bounced around enough by people he shouldn't trust to qualify.

Why this film noir plot was stapled to a mid-19th century setting is something I don't know, though it could be that Flynn simply though it would be interesting to do it that way, and if so he wasn't wrong. As a result, though, it might seem, for a bit, that Adventures of Captain Fabian is "silly." But we're all adults here, and we know that melodrama is a stylistic choice, not a mistake. Inappropriate or poorly executed melodrama is known as "camp," and I fear that Adventures of Captain Fabian might be mistaken for camp by those who either misunderstand melodrama (and there's straight melodrama in this: a Theremin is used to indicate overwhelming anger, for example) or can't accept noir in a setting other than that which has been agreed upon. But that's what Adventures of Captain Fabian is. It's not a forgotten masterpiece, but it's a damn fun movie.

Stomp a Mudhole

Olive Films continues its tradition of predictably unpredictable DVD and Blu-ray releases this week with a pair of thrillers from the 1980s: Criminal Law and Street Smart. I saw them both, everybody! Read on!

Criminal Law (d. Martin Campbell) - In 1988, Gary Oldman made his Hollywood debut. Prior to doing so, he'd become impossible to ignore in a string of idiosyncratically raw UK films that made him: Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Stephen Frears' Prick Up Your Ears, and the lesser-known (I admit I haven't seen it) Nicolas Roeg film Track 29, written by Dennis Potter. It was time to take Hollywood by storm, obviously, and he did so with Criminal Law, a quintessentially '80s legal psycho-thriller of the "We're not so different, you and I" variety. Co-starring Kevin Bacon as the psycho, Oldman stars as a flashy defense attorney who gets defendant Bacon, the wealthy son of an obstetrician played by Elizabeth Shepherd, off a rape-and-murder charge by simply flouting the judge's rules and focusing his entire case on dismantling the credibility of a single eyewitness (by arguing, essentially, "Sometimes people are wrong, so she probably is too, in this specific instance). Why the judicial process is the one realm of employment nobody ever seems to want to get right on screen, or care if it's gotten wrong in their filmed entertainment. But anyway, Criminal Law is pretty egregious in this regard, early on.

And the film (whose director would enjoy well-deserved praise for his career highlight, Casino Royale, almost twenty years later), never really gets better as far as credibility goes, but it does have Oldman, flying off the rails almost every fifth minute as he's assaulted by the guilt that comes with the realization that the man he saved from prison was actually guilty, and has killed again. Oldman is a fine actor, but let us not pretend that, especially in his early years, he didn't have a tendency to untether his entire self from all reality. As an actor, I mean. What suited Sid and Nancy doesn't suit Criminal Law, but he seems to have believed it at least might. On the other hand, there's a moment in the film where his character stumbles upon a mutilated corpse at night in a rainy park, and instead of slowly backing away in mute horror, as most actors would stoically play it, Oldman -- and I am prepared to give him credit for this, rather than Campbell, without knowing which deserves it -- runs screaming. Even shrieking! It's a moment of full-on gonzo terror, which your hero's not supposed to feel. But Oldman does.

As an overall film, Criminal Law does get better as it goes along, despite a Jerry Goldsmith score that nakedly rips of the Peter Gabriel song "Rhythm of the Heat" and Tess Harper coming off faintly ridiculous as one of the detectives working the murders (along with Joe Don Baker, who should've had top honors here). The last clutch of thriller moments are well staged by Campbell, with the same sense of clarity that would be a signature of his masterpiece Casino Royale. It has a good last shot, too, though one marred by an audio-based decision the means nothing as far as I can tell, but it was the '80s, so somebody evidently decided the film wasn't stupid enough (they were wrong). As for Oldman, he seemed to realize something was off about all this, as the best-known of his subsequent retreat from Hollywood are the J. R. Ackerley adaptation We Think the World of You and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Then again, this takes us only to 1990, and then he's back in the US with State of Grace. Which is better than Criminal Law, and things settled down and got better after that.

Street Smart (d. Jerry Schatzberg) - One thing you can't say about Gary Oldman's career is that it has lacked variety. You could say that about Morgan Freeman, however, a very fine, versatile, naturalistic actor who began working in TV and films in his 20s but didn't truly get noticed until he was in his 50s. That moment came for him in the late 1980s, and I'd wager that more people, have seen just one of his films since 1987 than had seen everything he did prior to that combined (excluding The Electric Company, maybe). Anyway, that moment was Jerry Schatzberg's Street Smart in which Freeman plays a mean New York pimp named Fast Black. Early in the film, Fast Black deals with a violent john by beating him down. The man has a heart attack and dies. At the same time as this throws Fast Black's life into a legal turmoil, a journalist named Jonathan Fisher (Christopher Reeve) decides, under a serious deadline, to make up a story about the life of an also made up pimp. Which his editor (Andre Gregory, going too far in every direction) loves. Then the DA (Jay Patterson) handling Fast Black's prosecution, and Fast Black's own lawyer, read this desecration of journalistic ethics and both think Fisher's talking about Fast Black. So here things for Fisher start to go pear-shaped.

Reeve is very good here as one of my favorite types of character in crime fiction: the man who has lived a decent life (one assumes as much in this case anyway) only because the opportunity to live otherwise never presented itself. His subsequent contact with the world of pimps and hookers intoxicates him, and he not only cheats on his girlfriend (Mimi Rogers) with a prostitute (Kathy Baker), but he practically does so at a party in front of her. The central thing about Fisher is that he's a stupid, naive piece of shit. He's surprised when Fast Black, who he begins spending time with, treats his women violently, and also briefly thinks he can talk the pimp out of such behavior. He's soon disabused of this notion, at which point he decides to live and let live, because he's enjoying himself too much.

This is a pretty weird movie, in a lot of ways. Its moral sense and concept of justice that is appropriate in society is kind of a mess. Schatzberg and screenwriter David Freeman seem to want the audience to hate Jay Patterson's DA, even though he's right about absolutely everything, and never does anything unethical or immoral or cruel. It's just that he's trying to do things by the book and he seems pretty uptight. Fuck him, I guess! The film also wants to announce its own social significance, even though by doing so it comes off as hypocritical. At one point, a black female journalist asks Fisher why he chose to write a story that focused on the worst in black culture, and she accuses him of being racist. Then she disappears from a film that is doing the exact same thing, and actually becomes that exact same thing even more, when Fast Black's violence ramps up, and Street Smart becomes more of a crime thriller.

But it's best when it's a crime thriller, and it's best when it focuses on Fast Black. Freeman is really great here. This was his breakthrough role, as I've said: just two years later, in 1989, he starred in Lean on Me, Driving Miss Daisy, and Glory. All in one year! And he's been delivering good or great performances ever since then, but of course he's been forced to be noble pretty much that whole time. He's so alive and immediate and frightening in Street Smart that you'd sort of assume that once people noticed what he could do, they'd want to see him play his full range. But apparently not.

We May Not Die Hideous Deaths

When a group of artists breaks up, be they musicians or, I don't know, let's say comedians, what the individual members of that group go on to do or not do in their creative lives is often the subject of much fascination and debate. Sometimes even mockery, if you can imagine that for one second, and eventually, usually, down the road, a reassessment of some kind. I get the feeling, for example, that currently the solo albums of Paul McCartney are broadly regarded with more warmth than the solo albums of John Lennon. It wasn't always thus, by any stretch, and this could just be a byproduct of McCartney having so much more post-Beatles work than Lennon (obviously), but anyway, there it is. What's interesting about that example, though, is that the way people talk about solo Lennon and McCartney indicates that both men are or were still in The Beatles and they never were not in The Beatles. The albums they recorded outside of their work with The Beatles was just another way they went about being in The Beatles.

Much the same thing could be said about the various members of Monty Python after that groundbreaking British comedy team broke up, as they've done more than once over the years. Their TV sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974, and from 1971 to 1983 they wrote, directed, produced, and starred in several films, at least two of which, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, have survived and will continue to survive as classics (The Meaning of Life is pretty underrated, incidentally). But Monty Python as we know it pretty much ceased to exist in 1983, yet of this most influential of all sketch comedy groups' six members -- John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman -- only two of them, Cleese and Gilliam, could be said to have enjoyed a level of fame and artistic success that would seem appropriate, given their previous cultural impact (for those thinking "But Eric Idle has done very well for himself," yes indeed he has, but that success could hardly be said to have been independent of Monty Python). It would not be difficult to argue that comedically speaking, the true masterpiece to come from the group is Fawlty Towers, the sitcom Cleese co-created, wrote, and starred in with Connie Booth in the mid-to-late '70s, while the film department of Python was really chugging along. Beyond that, Cleese also has the hugely successful film A Fish Called Wanda that he wrote and starred in, and he's appeared in dozens and dozens of films, including parts of the James Bond and Harry Potter franchises. For his part, Terry Gilliam has had one of the more unusual careers as a film director I can think of. It's been a struggle, famously so, but when at the very least you get Brazil and Time Bandits out of the struggle you can rest assured that you've left your mark.

That the other four haven't left the same kind of mark post-Python is not a criticism. Leaving aside Idle (please), Michael Palin's many series of travel documentaries is hardly negligible, for one thing, plus he's a published novelist and so forth. Palin, and Idle too come to think of it, has shown scant interest in making films, other than as an actor, and even then with a steadily decreasing frequency. All of this despite the fact that film seemed to be the future of Python, or the Pythons -- as a group or individually. I'd bet good money that more people have seen Monty Python and The Holy Grail than have seen more that a handful of their television sketches. But really only Gilliam has shown any passion in that arena, his stylistic idiosyncrasies showing through even in The Holy Grail, which he co-directed with Terry Jones, his devotion to depicting the Dark Ages as filthily as possible seeming on paper to be at odds with the comedy, but instead helped to create something truly unique. When he had full rein to indulge in this way, he produced Jabberwocky, his first non-Python film as a writer and director; the results are a bit iffy, so it was perhaps Jones (and to some degree Cleese, who during the making of Holy Grail butted heads with both directors because he believed their artistic fiddling about had nothing to do with comedy) keeping his head screwed on straight, and having maybe a more classical/traditionalist approach to filmmaking, who kept the tone of that film right where it needed to be.

Terry Jones would go on to direct Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life without Gilliam. They don't feel like the work of the same director, though this could be a result of settings and the stories being told -- Life of Brian is naturally sunny and dusty, The Meaning of Life is largely indoors or set in the English countryside, etc., but one might sense that Jones is trying to find his way to a degree that Gilliam, as much of a mess as Jabberwocky is, never had to worry about. He imbued The Holy Grail with his style, it became a part of the Python style, and he carried it back out again into his own films. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas may have nothing to do with Monty Python, but it still feels like there's a connection that is more than just superficial. As a filmmaker, Jones never established that same strong personality (I might argue that as a performer he certainly did, however, and while Cleese is my own personal favorite of the Python group -- really going out on a limb on that one, I know -- Jones may have been the most idiosyncratic). His biggest shot at doing so came in 1989 with Erik the Viking, a comedy-fantasy that he wrote, directed, and has a small (fittingly ridiculous) part in, and which will be released tomorrow on DVD and Blu-ray by Olive Films.

You should know, if you don't already, that this will not be the first home video release of Erik the Viking. Perhaps I'm jumping the gun here, I can't tell anymore, but for a DVD release in 2006, Jones delegated to his son the opportunity that had been provided to him by the studio to re-edit the film. Bill Jones, the son, ended up delivering a cut of the film that was 75 minutes long. That's down about half an hour from what made it to theaters in 1989. I don't think it's going too far to infer that this suggests a certain dissatisfaction with the film, on the part of both Terry and Bill (who'd been involved with the project before the re-edit), but I've never seen that cut, or heard the Terry Jones commentary track that accompanies that disc, so what do I know? I do know the theatrical cut, I saw this film in the theaters and more than once on home video during my teenage years, and now again the other day on Blu-ray. The movie was a flop, Jones's career as a director basically stalled out (he does have a new one, fairly big, coming up though), and even when I was thirteen or fourteen years old I think I knew that whether Jones was conscious of it or not, Erik the Viking played out like someone was hoping people would mistake it for a Gilliam film (whose career was more robust then than it is now) and thereby elevate it in whatever way one elevates Gilliam's films (pardon the confusion here, but like him or not -- I do both -- it's never easy to know where to place Gilliam).

Erik the Viking is a comedy about Norse mythology that stars Tim Robbins as the titular character, a man who, though a Viking, finds less satisfaction in raping and plundering than many of his friends and fellow villagers do, including his father played with no small amount of commitment by Mickey Rooney (because might as well cast Mickey Rooney as an elderly Viking). That basic premise, which is just a starting point, is a classic Python reversal; it's really a classic reversal as a premise for sketch comedy, period (it also would have felt right at home in a novel by Terry Pratchett). What's less usual is what it's used to set up. As the film opens, Erik and his fellow Vikings are raiding a village. Erik hacks into a tent occupied by a woman named Helga (Samantha Bond). Erik is planning to rape her, not because he wants to but because he's a Viking; however due to this reticence Helga is able to talk to him, with some anger, about the evil he and his people are doing. So Erik backs off, but as he does so two of his comrades burst in. They're about to rape Helga and Erik fights them. He kills one, and then runs the other through with his sword, yet in doing so the sword also pierces Helga, and she dies. Now what?

He visits the local witch named Freya (Eartha Kitt) because the war-like nature of the Vikings doesn't feel natural to him. Over the course of the subsequent conversation, Erik learns that Ragnarok, the Norse word for the end of the world (essentially) is upon them. There's one way to stop Ragnarok, involving the blowing of the Horn Resounding, so Erik goes back to his village and recruits a team of Vikings to go on a quest to find the Horn Resounding and stop Ragnarok.

Sounds pretty funny, right? Well it kind of is. Erik the Viking isn't a deathless comedy classic, but there's a lot of fun to be had watching a film that draws as reference and inspiration for its jokes not something contemporary, but actual ancient ideas and ways of thinking. Of course the contemporary enters into things, unavoidably so, because why else are we laughing at the casual reactions to death and violence and things like that if not because we're so very much not Vikings ourselves? Going on the quest with Erik are a father (regular Gilliam actor and co-writer Charles McKeown) and his son Sven (Tim McInnerny, from Black Adder). The son has never been able to successfully enter the "berserk" state during battle, a state for which Vikings are known and feared. And so comedy (and an emotional payoff) is mined from an ancient Norse conception of the concept of bloodlust. This isn't to say that Erik the Viking is tiresomely high minded or proud of itself, but I don't think a film comedy with a frame of reference broader than Judd Apatow could ever imagine should be dismissed. I also think it's worth mentioning that with a film like this, you can compare its approach to comedy with that of Apatow, and think that in its approach to Vikings the film, whatever its faults, which are numerous and real, feels somehow more honest than Nicolas Winding Refn's ostensibly more "authentic" Valhalla Rising. This is the sort of thing that can come out of the world of Monty Python, and pretty much nowhere else.

I mean, here's a comedy that also deals with rape and makes jokes about murder but uses both as a catalyst for various characters to become better people within the framework of the world they actually live in, not the one the viewers live in. It has elements of Mel Brooksian parody without ever actually being that. It has monsters and other practical effects, which set a very appealing mood like in early Gilliam films; it uses John Cleese as the villainous flip on his Robin Hood in Gilliam's Time Bandits (in which Cleese wasn't villainous, just deeply, hilariously cynical; otherwise, look at Robin Hood's scene and Cleese's main Halfdan the Black scene in Erik the Viking side-by-side -- they're pretty much the same); it even eventually becomes ethereally serious, in a way that both evokes the last third of Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and sort of refutes it, being somewhat more sunny in its philosophy than Gilliam's bit. But while watching Erik the Viking you can't avoid Gilliam, and in this way you can't avoid Python. Not that you should have to, or even want to -- I originally wanted to see Erik the Viking in 1989 because of the strong Python connection. And if that long serious bit late in Erik the Viking doesn't work, and is in fact pretty tedious, and in fact ultimately rolls back certain things in the story that I really wish it hadn't, well, that similar bit in Baron Munchausen can be faulted for all the same things.

I realize that it seems as though my point is that Terry Jones is merely ripping off Terry Gilliam. I don't think that. I do think that Gilliam's success had to be on his mind when making Erik the Viking, but as Paul McCartney's Ram and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band are in cultural/historical terms thought of as merely extensions of The Beatles, Gilliam's early films and certainly Erik the Viking are both steps away from and to Python. An obvious point, maybe, but everything goes out of fashion eventually, and Python was going out of fashion by the time Erik the Viking came along. "Had already gone out of fashion," you'd almost have to argue. Cleese's A Fish Called Wanda came out just one year before, but if you think about it, that film is not especially Pythonesque. It's a romantic comedy caper, but darker and R-rated enough to give it all an appealingly grown-up edge. Compared to Erik the Viking (and I'm not foolish enough to think that Erik the Viking is better than A Fish Called Wanda), Cleese's hit film takes place in the everyday world we all live in. But of course the tragedy of Erik the Viking isn't that it's not funny (I think it's funny) or that it has flaws (A Fish Called Wanda has flaws), it's that it's weird. Flops that are weird aren't given any credit for being weird. People simply say "What were they thinking!?" They don't then go on and try to understand what they were thinking. So Erik the Viking was a flop because it was strange in a way that had just recently gone out of style. It's as simple as that.

Contrast this, if you will, with Yellowbeard, a film from 1983 directed by Mel Damski and co-written by and starring (sort of) Graham Chapman. Chapman had such a strange place within Monty Python -- never mind that he was one of the funniest (my second favorite, for the record), but by all accounts some of the most ridiculous and surreal non sequiturs were his (the famous, defining, hilarious, and sudden ejaculation "Burma!" in one Python sketch was Chapman's, for example); yet when the films were being made it somehow fell to Chapman, and not Michael Palin, who now perhaps seems like a more obvious choice, to play the straight man/protagonist/everyman. Chapman wasn't necessarily playing all of these at once (in Life of Brian he was, though), but he was chosen to be the center of these absurdist films. This despite the fact that on a personal level his life was the most chaotic. Chapman was an open homosexual, which caused a fair amount of controversy but against which the other Pythons were ready, willing, and able to stand with Chapman; he was also an alcoholic, and this caused a great deal more upheaval in the group. It was dealt with, one way or the other, and I for one have never seen the effects of his addiction on screen (he really was a natural comic genius, whose frequent pairings with Cleese -- they were also writing partners -- stand in my mind as one of the great comic pairings in history); the point of course is that Chapman could do all of that, and he could also be ridiculous and silly at the drop of a hat. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Python.

It's not impossible that the reverence in which I and many others hold Graham Chapman is goosed by the fact that he died (he's the "dead one" of the group; most groups of a certain vintage have at least one) in 1989 (to give you some idea of myself, I still remember the day) at the infuriating age of 48. So yes, perhaps that's it, but I'm not dissuaded from that reverence by watching Chapman's work. I'm not even dissuaded from that reverence by watching Yellowbeard, another flop, a not beloved film, a film best known at this stage probably because co-star Marty Feldman died suddenly of a heart attack while making it (because his diet was rich in dairy and eggs, Mel Brooks has postulated). Also in the cast are Peter Cook, Madeline Kahn, James Mason, John Cleese, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin, Peter Boyle, Eric Idle, Kenneth Mars, David Bowie (in one of the more pointless cameos I've ever seen), and Spike Milligan. Plus others. Yellowbeard tells the story, and I might as well get this out of the way quickly, of a viciously ridiculous or ridiculously vicious pirate named Yellowbeard (Chapman) who escapes from prison and goes in search of the treasure he hid, while the English government, represented mainly by Idle, follow in hopes to be led to that treasure, and also while an old enemy (Boyle) pursues him for not just wealth but also revenge, plus there's stuff about a map and Yellowbeard's son, and so on and so on. The plot doesn't matter, of course. The jokes do, and though there's no particular style brought to the material by director Mel Damski, in terms of comedy it's more aggressively Pythonesque than Erik the Viking. It's quite offensive, in fact. I don't remember any rape jokes in Erik the Viking even though that crime comes up a lot in the film, but Yellowbeard has a ton of rape jokes. At one point, Yellowbeard denies that he has a son with Betty (Kahn) because, he says, the last woman he raped he also killed. Hoo boy. But listen, I wouldn't hesitate to argue that that's actually funny, because the period being depicted in this film, and the kind of person Yellowbeard is meant to be, would have regarded rape as nothing to get worked up about. So that's the joke. That's what we're mocking by laughing at it. I know, that's not the thing to do now, but maybe...well, whatever. Yellowbeard would never be made today. "It wouldn't be the first head I ever ate!" Yellowbeard says at one point, and you can take that quote literally. It's funny.

Yellowbeard was also a flop. That doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that the film finally kind of backs away from the heedlessly offensive material referenced above. How could someone like Yellowbeard who thinks nothing of rape and murder go out of his way to save a bum from being caught in an explosion he, Yellowbeard, had orchestrated? There's a fair chunk of that in the last half hour of the film, and it strikes me as wildly disingenuous, or would do if I didn't strongly suspect those bits were forced upon the film by the studio. A commentary track on this disc would have been very welcome, but apparently nobody much cares about it now. It's considered bad and unfunny, but I don't think it's either one of those. It's a product of an era that's gone, of a sensibility that's gone, of a type of humor that we still claim to worship but which is also gone. Flying in the face of what I said earlier, it's less Pythonesque than Erik the Viking because Mel Damski could not have been more of an outsider, but there's still John Cleese in there, and Chapman. More than anything, there's Chapman, who didn't do much outside of Python that we can easily see now. Yellowbeard is one of the few films he made, and damn it, it's not a great film, but it's funny.

A Monster of Death

The 70s and 80s sure were a strange time for the horror genre, both in print and on film. Various novels and films, like The Exorcist and Carrie and The Other and so on, were such huge successes, probably because we as a society were still reeling from Watergate or whatever, that they kicked open the barn doors and allowed the genre to come stampeding out and multiply, much like cattle do, you see. The point is, those who could publish your book or (more to the point, as we'll now leave books behind, though what happened there is by no means irrelevant) greenlight your movie discovered that horror was not just some disreputable niche, or rather, if it was the niche was enormous and the disrepute was something that almost everyone in the world had long ago accepted about themselves. In short, horror films were cheap to make and would always, pretty much, make a profit. The upside of this was that a lot of good films got made that otherwise would have never made it past the screenplay stage (it also meant that some talented filmmakers who were not otherwise interested in horror were able to use its commercial viability to at least get a film made, and that distance from the genre could pay off beautifully -- see William Huyck and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil, for instance). The downside, of course, was (well, is) that in some cases, possibly a lot of cases, quality control could become a secondary concern, so the cheapness of the genre became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  All of this led to some very bad movies, and some very strange movies, and often movies that were both.

See for example Satan's Blade, which Olive Films will be releasing on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow. So far the only film made by director L. Scott Castillo, Jr. (who also produced and developed the story, which was then banged into a script by Thomas Cue, who also co-stars), filmed in 1980 but not released until 1984, Satan's Blade is a slasher film, as so many horror films were at the time.  It is, however, one of the oddest slasher films I've seen, given that for great big chunks it doesn't seem to want to be, or has forgotten that it's supposed to be, a slasher film, or even a horror film. At first, actually, it's a crime film. A bank is closing, at what looks to be about noon, and two masked armed robbers bust in on the two women who were left to close up the whole bank. The robbers empty the tills, don't seem terribly concerned about things such as vaults, and one of them uses a knife to pop off the buttons on the blouse worn by one of the terrified women. Anyhow, they get their money and shoot both women to death. Cut to the robbers making it back to their hideout cabin where it's revealed that they're both women themselves, if you can even believe it, and much exposition is enjoyed concerning George, an unseen third member of their crew, and how the more hardboiled of the two women wants to double-cross him. "Doesn't $50,000 sound much better divided by two?" And immediately I thought, "You did all this for, basically, less than $17,000 each?" Even if one of them double-crosses the other two (which is going to happen) that person will have committed three murders for $50,000. Which some people will do, but don't then strut around like you're some mastermind. Enjoy your one year off before you have to start delivering pizzas in Belize.

But it doesn't get that far because they're both killed, including the hardboiled one, who is stabbed by someone mysterious. The cabin where all this murder happened turns out to be a rental, one of many at what I guess is a ski resort, though I, admittedly no skier, would have to regard it as fairly shitty as ski resorts go. Shitty or not, the next day it enjoys an influx of customers, including two married couples who are friends and want to rent a cabin together, and a Bevy Of Sexy Girls, who want to ski in their nighties probably. Now, try to remember, the night before in one of these cabins a double murder has taken place. Two policemen, played by Fred Armond and someone with the name Ski Mark Ford, were shown in the murder cabin, looking at creepy symbols drawn in blood on the wall, but when asked by the managers of the ski resort if, now, the day after the murders, it's okay to rent out that same cabin to perhaps the pair of married couples, the cops say "Yeah, that should be okay, we'll keep an eye on it." While not as devoted to the art of homicide investigation as we in the civilian population might wish them to be, that their continued presence is assured has to offer some comfort. In the end, the murder cabin is rented to the Bevy Of Sexy Girls, which in some ways makes the whole thing beside the point because the story focuses on the clump of married people. These include Al (Cue) and his wife Lil (Janeen Lowe), and Lisa (Elisa R. Malinovitz), who is married to Tony (Tom Bongiorno). Tony has just passed the bar exam, and now it's time to reconnect with his wife. The problem is he's irresistible to women, and one of the Sexy Girls, named Stephanie (Stephanie Leigh Steel), has her eye on him. You can see Tony and Stephanie below:

I mean, check out Tony. I wouldn't mind knocking off a piece of that shit myself. No wonder his struggle to resist temptation and devote himself to the woman he married ends up taking up so much of Satan's Blade. Because that's what happens. We're given all the set-up of a slasher film, including the local legend about a crazy mountain man/killer, as well as a sampling of blood early on, but little effort is put into creating any kind of atmosphere of dread or suspense. Instead the question becomes, will Tony fuck Stephanie, or is he, in fact, the perfect man?

For his part, director Castillo may have wanted to inject a little more humanity into the then-burgeoning slasher subgenre than we were/are used to seeing, and good on him for having that impulse, I guess, but he spends a lot of time showing people do things like carry bags upstairs, or talk about going to bed. A scene between Al and Tony, where they stay up late getting drunk, is pitched by both actors at a level that indicates to me that neither man has ever had so much as a sip of champagne in their entire lives (although in fairness, you could say the same thing about just about every film that has ever featured someone who is supposed to be roaring drunk, including Network, and I'm pretty sure William Holden had a nip or two in his day; one film where you'll find a really aces drunk performance is Waiting for Guffman, where being badly drunk is played for both laughs and verisimilitudinous discomfort by Catherine O'Hara. Just FYI). And so on. The film is built on this sort of nonsense that is meant to be drama but is so thoughtless and absurd that you just kind of tilt your head at it. After the meeting between Stephanie and Tony pictured above, the way the film subsequently plays out means the audience is evidently meant to accept that Stephanie goes walking through the woods for literally hours. And not so she can be murdered in the woods, but just so she can not be around. Why? I'll be straight with you, I'm not sure I have an answer to that.

Eventually, murders happen, and here I'll give Satan's Blade some credit. For one thing, holding the majority of your violence until the last twenty minutes is something that even the most famous slasher films actually used to do -- see Halloween and Friday the 13th, for cryin' out loud. It's only later that the murders in such films started to be parceled out for most of the film's length. So anyway, that's not really a problem, nor is it really a problem that the gore effects are pretty weak, because you work with what you got, and not every low-budget horror film had a Tom Savini to turn to. So with my forgiving heart open to Satan's Blade, I will say that once it becomes a horror film it's, you know, it's okay. Much of it is bad, certainly, but there is one bit involving one character hiding under a bed that, considering that this was filmed in 1980, is both rather good and may have been ripped off by lots and lots of people. I don't know. I wish I could track down definitively the first time this idea was used, but my memory is for shit. If it was first used by L. Scott Castillo, Jr. in Satan's Blade, then I tip my hat to him. On top of that, the violence is surprisingly pitiless, if that turns your crank at all, and I didn't see the final twist coming. And, as twists go, this one works. In the end, none of this adds up to very much, but you take what you can get.

Best of Luck

When Roy Scheider died in 2008, a bunch of us cinephiles or whatever got to reminiscing, as you do, and I said to my friend Greg Ferrara, formerly of Cinema Styles, currently of TCM, that in my view Scheider was a better actor than Dustin Hoffman (I assume one or the other of us had brought up Marathon Man), who had by that point been canonized several times over while Scheider was regarded by most as little more than a highly dependable actor who everybody liked. No small achievement as far as building a reputation goes, I'll grant you, but pretty small beans when set beside his performances in films like All That Jazz, Sorcerer, Jaws, and on and on. Anyway, Greg responded by saying something along the lines of "The fact that I had to stop and think about that tells me you're onto something." So you see, I was right all along. I bring this up because since he died, my belief that Scheider was one of the greats has only strengthened, as has my frustration that outside of the films already mentioned he didn't have a career filled with the kinds of roles that would place him where he truly belonged. By and large, Scheider made the kind of films which would ensure that he'd be thought of as dependable and beloved, and not much more.

But even so. In my opinion, the Dustin Hoffmans of the world would have done well to mix in more of the type of film that Scheider built a career from. There's something about being able to plug into the small films as well as the big ones, the formulaic and the innovative, that allows for Scheider's brand of breezy, virtuosic, and varied naturalism. He could move from the existential horror of Sorcerer to what I guess you could all the existential joy of All That Jazz without changing himself fundamentally, without accents or makeup, but if that's not range then what is? He played a lot of cops, too, but even within that you have seen-everything tough guys he played in The Seven-Ups and The French Connection, the brave, good-hearted, but in-over-his head police chief in Jaws, as well as, and here we come to the point, the "weary modern cop," which is a certain type, pretty much always a middle-aged guy because part of being wearily modern is seeing everything you felt a connection with fade away. Scheider plays this type in Night Game, a thriller from 1989 written by Spencer Eastman and directed by Peter Masterson. Almost completely forgotten (the cover of the VHS I used to see, but never rent, at Blockbuster way back when recently came back to me in a rush) it was recently revived via a release to Blu-ray by Olive Films, and I gotta say, it's good to have it around.

Scheider plays Mike Seaver, an ex-minor league baseball player and current Houston homicide detective who, when we meet him, is still rebounding professionally from something that happened to him on the job in Dallas. He's also just proposed to Roxy (Karen Young), his much younger girlfriend. A life of regret that is further weighed down by having seen too much on the job (much of this is to be inferred from Scheider's performance and from casting Scheider in the first place) is threatening to brighten up, in other words, except there's a serial killer on the loose. He kills blonde women, at night, and the timing, placement, and pattern of the murders, it's eventually believed, point to a connection to the Astrodome. It's to the film's credit that Seaver doesn't jump unreasonably to this conclusion, which just happens to be true; on the other hand, this film is called Night Game.

If this sounds like a dull, run-of-the-mill '80s cop thriller, well, to some degree it is. The murders, as staged by Masterson, sort of go through the motions of being suspenseful -- a woman sees someone following her, she runs, she trips or whatever, etc. The only time I cringed in sympathy or suspense during one of these scenes was when one of the victims, shoeless so that she might run better, is shown about to step on a nail. Masterson, best known then as now for The Trip to Bountiful, for which Geraldine Page won an Oscar, and the Gene Hackman/Terri Gar romantic comedy Full Moon in Blue Water, which, okay, maybe it's not well known but my brother liked it (it also receives an incongruous post-modern wink in Night Game) clearly doesn't care about that stuff. He also doesn't care that the audience is going to clue in very early that the blonde-haired Roxy fits the victim profile and so she's probably better look over her shoulder. It's not that Masterson doesn't use this -- he does, twice. But the time he puts more effort into the time it doesn't pay off than the time it finally does.

No, what Masterson cares about, and what Scheider makes possible, is all the small stuff. The "character bits" I guess they're called. The subplot about Seaver's relationship to Roxy and her mother won't stun you with its blinding newness, but these are real people whose lives move along even as the bodies pile up, because those are the day-to-day facts. Which is to say that Masterson is "saying" this, or anything else, but the little moments of life are what clearly matter to him, and which Scheider brings off without an ounce of ostentation. He just falls into it. He looks like a guy who's been doing everything that he's ever done for a very long time, but this tiredness is offset by Scheider's physical leanness and overall air of competence which, if you're on the wrong side of him, made him seem dangerous (this is why he's so effective in Marathon Man). Scheider is one of the few actors who could look just as at home clutched in a mortal struggle with a psychopath as dozing in a recliner, a half-empty can of beer nearby. Again, if that's not range...

Night Game also benefits from being set in Houston, rather than New York or Los Angeles, and from a cast that, in addition to Scheider and Young, includes Richard Bradford, Lane Smith, and Paul Gleason. Those last two combined to probably play more assholes than any other two actors during the 1980s, but actors get as much work as they did because they're good and because they're pros, as they show here. The police station, as a result of the casting and the setting, has a real idiosyncratic life to it, not one that is self-consciously quirky, but one that has built up by the real people within it. In this regard, it's a shame that Masterson was hemmed in by what either he or the studio regarded as the constraints of the genre (the myth that everyone believes in) because there's a terrific cop drama buried in here. What we get instead is a solid cop thriller that draws its strength from Scheider. And who better to leach from than a guy who couldn't fake it if you paid him?