Film review: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (1972)

The Lone Wolf and Cub films are legendary (there's even a Bob's Burgers episode about them) and I've wondered for years what they were like.  Well, thanks to the Criterion Channel (see, not all foreign films are classy!) now we know.  Essentially, the plot is that a (surprisingly tubby) Samurai Ronin wanders the countryside pushing his (charmingly tubby) toddler son in a fancy wooden pram (that is actually a DEATH MACHINE) searching for assassination assignments to pay for the hotel rooms and hot tubs.  Pretty much every five minutes they are attacked by would-be killers who end up sliced and diced.  And I mean sliced and diced.  Think the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the Black Knight - it's just like that, including the literal fountains of too-red fake blood.  But this being an exploitation film, there's also the odd bare breast thrown in (although the father never shows any interest, as he's too busy caring for his boy, but also because the owner has just tried to kill him - there are a surprising number of female assassins).  Having seen this one we don't really feel the need to watch any of the other five or six films, we get the gist, although apparently the pram (which features Ben Hur like retractable sword-blades coming from its wheels, that get to chop off a couple of feet in full gory technicolor) gets even more outrageously outfitted as the films progress.  I will say this: there are a couple of scenes in this film that are genuinely visually arresting (mostly featuring the wind blowing through the trees) and it certainly delivers on the Samurai/hand-claw/spiked mace/poles-with-blades-coming-out-of-the-ends (another pram feature)/thrown knives, thrown radishes-containing-knives action you could ask for.  But Jami worries about the speech development of Cub given the man-with-no-name-like taciturnity of Lone Wolf.  (The one piece of education we see him impart is when the kid is practicing counting and skips four.)  I personally worry about the amount of slaughter he's being exposed to, but he seems unfazed.  He also knows how to activate the various deadly accoutrements of his transport, so he should be able to take care of himself should something happen to his old man.

Film review: The Big Heat (1953)

This is a film by Fritz Lang, as in Metropolis, M, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, so it should be amazing, but while it's certainly not bad, it's a little disappointing, especially given its reputation as a classic noir.  Part of the problem is that it stars Glenn Ford, who is not exactly suited to nuance.  Another problem is the script: the basic idea is good and there are some good characters (Lee Marvin in an early role as a very hateable heavy, Gloria Grahame as a moll who breaks good, Jeanette Nolan as an icily evil policeman's widow), and the film is never boring, but somehow it seems a little plodding.  The film starts with a man committing suicide and his wife coming downstairs and finding a very long suicide note.  A sly smile plays about her lips and she calls someone (local political bigwig with a shady past Mike Lagana).  Then we are introduced to our protagonist, Dave Bannion, Homicide.  He's easily convinced that it's a suicide but later encounters a woman in a bar who swears that the man who died, who it turns out was a cop, who "worked in records," was not suicidal and was about to go off with her because he was separating from his wife (who very much played the grieving widow when Bannion interviewed her).  He doesn't believe her, but certainly gets more suspicious when her cigarette-burn-covered corpse is found the next day.  Meanwhile we have been introduced to his bucolic home life, with his pretty young wife (played by Marlon Brando's sister) and toddler daughter.  Cue ominous foreshadowing.  Pretty soon Bannion gets even MORE suspicious because his higher-ups (Lieutenant Wilks and Commissioner Higgins) keep warning him off the case - especially after he goes to Mike Lagana's place, insults him and beats up his bodyguard.  But things really hit the fan when (yes, you guessed it) his wife gets into a car that he was supposed to be using and it blows up.  Pretty soon he has resigned from the force in disgust at their corruption and is on a mission.  It's at this point that he runs into Lee Marvin (who is a hoodlum in cahoots with Lagana) and his moll, Gloria Grahame.  She follows him back to the hotel room he's moved into, intrigued at how he is unintimidated by Marvin.  This proves to be a bad move for her, because Marvin finds out and scalds her face with boiling coffee, disfiguring her.  Oh, and I forgot to mention that the "suicide note" we saw at the beginning detailed all of Lagana's corruptions and the cop committed suicide because he was deep in it and couldn't take it any more and wanted Lagana to go down.  But his wife realized what this was and set up a system whereby the note was hidden, only to be released if she died, so that she could hit Lagana up for as much as she wanted to keep her in fur coats.  Bannion passes this info on to Grahame's character, admitting that he wishes he could kill the wife but can't make himself do it (of course he can't - he's Glenn Ford!).  Well, guess what happens.  Grahame also gets appropriate revenge on Marvin, but it costs her.  Oh, and Wilks and Higgins come around and Bannion gets reinstated, which severely undercuts the noirishness of the whole proceedings.  An odd film on the whole - particularly fatal on female characters (four of them die).  It reminds me a bit of a Hong Kong film in that it intersperses extreme (for the 50s) violence with cloying sentimentality (Bannion's daughter and her fondness for The Three Little Kittens).  But Marvin is, as always, magnetic, and Gloria Grahame steals the film as the apparently vapid moll turned angel of vengeance who gets all the best lines.  You wonder why she's not famous today, especially given the scandal that essentially ended her career.

Me trying to look spiffy

Every year or so one or more of our students (that is, Philosophy Majors) graduates with honors (whatever that means) and we are asked to send someone to introduce them at an "honors reception" where they get their special honors sashes, poor things.  I say "poor things" because we have a very bad history with this sort of thing: on at least two occasions we've forgotten to show up, and the last time I did it I thought I could wing it (because the student was one of my favorites and I had a lot to say) but I got flustered and it was awful.  Well, I prepared SLIGHTLY better this time (although it was awkward, because of the disparity between the two students, and you couldn't over-praise one without it being obvious to the other one) and I actually wore a jacket and tie for the first time in forever.  This picture was taken by A Professional, and the real version has the students on either side of me, but I've cut them out for their own sakes.

Film review: The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

"I'd hate to take a bite out of you - you're a cookie full of arsenic." So says J.J. Hunsecker (a very chilly and buttoned-up Burt Lancaster) to Sidney Falco (a revelatory Tony Curtis), and this film itself fits that description nicely.  For some reason I've always got Ace in the Hole mixed up with this film, so having watched the former, I thought we should watch this. To my annoyance, despite being a Criterion Collection film, it's not on the Criterion Channel, so we had to rent it (thanks Amazon Prime!)  It's very different in look from Ace - that one's in sun-drenched small-town New Mexico, whereas this one is in nighttime New York - but the same black heart beats in both. Both seem quintessentially American but are directed by immigrants, this one by the Scot Alexander McKendrick (who directed The Ladykillers).  Like Ace (and the reason I got them mixed up) it's about the sleazier side of journalism, in this case because J.J. Hunsecker is a hugely influential gossip columnist, while Falco is a press agent who lives to get an item in Hunsecker's column.  At the time the film opens, however, Falco has been frozen out by Hunsecker all week because (Falco suspects) he has failed in a task Hunsecker set him.  This task was to separate Hunsecker's little sister Susan (she's 19, so it looks like there's a good 20 year difference between them) from her Jazz guitarist paramour.  Indeed, it turns out that they are still together and Susan wants to marry him.  Essentially the rest of the movie is Falco hatching a scheme to separate them for good.  Curtis is on-screen for essentially every minute of the film and makes you realize that underneath those pretty-boy looks (commented on by various characters in the film, although probably they do not survive the beating from a fat crooked crop he gets at the end when he realizes that, though he may be sleazy, he's not going to stoop to Hunsecker's twisted level and Hunsecker turns on him) he's a born character actor. Jami and I argued about whether or not this is a Film Noir.  She argues that it isn't because there are good people (Susan and her boyfriend, primarily) and the bad end unhappily.  But it certainly has the hardboiled dialogue and the cynicism of a good noir.  And Hunsecker is a truly loathsome creation, with a very creepy sister-obsession.  Apparently McKendrick smeared Vaseline on the lenses of Lancaster's glasses so you can never quite see his eyes.
As with Ace, I don't really see a wider message in this film, as the days of the power of the gossip columnist have waned, unless you want to stretch it and make it an analogy for fake news, so it just works as a good little character study.  It would work well paired up with Ace and perhaps His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night to show journalists in a better light.  Oh yes, and the music, by Elmer Bernstein, is fantastic.  Check it out!

Film review: Fallen Angels (1995)

We actually watched this a couple of days ago but I didn't get around to reviewing it.  It's the third film by the Taiwanese/Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, and I sense a theme.  As in the other two, In the Mood for Love (2000) and Chungking Express (1994), the film is about couples who want to connect but somehow can't.  This is supposed to be a sequel to Chungking and makes several references to it, and is so similar as to be almost redundant.  Both films feature two separate storylines whose characters only tangentially interact, both involving couples.  Fallen Angels actually ends with the woman from one story connecting with the man from the other, which is more of a link than Chungking involves.  Fallen Angels also cuts back and forth between the storylines (like the film of The Two Towers) rather than telling one story complete, followed by the other as Chungking does (like the book of The Two Towers).  Jami suggested that the two films would make a good limited TV series with hour-long episodes, each of which is a separate story line, and I agree.  Neither film is really a perfect whole, which is where In the Mood for Love succeeds (and is his strongest and most mature work).  The two earlier films are more exercises in style (neon-drenched shots of Hong Kong at night in Angels and heaving throngs of daytime markets in Chungking) and whimsy (the obsessions and romantic hangups of the various failed lovers).  In brief, the first story is about a disaffected hitman and his female assistant (who scouts locations for him and washes his laundry when he leaves his apartment, but also fantasizes about him to the extent of masturbating on his bed) while the second is about a strange young man who went mute as a youngster (after eating an expired can of pineapples - a clear reference to one of the characters from Chungking), lives with his father, and makes a strange kind of living breaking into various stores afterhours and opening them up to reluctant shoppers (shots of him forcibly washing the hair of/feeding icecream/selling melons to people who do not want his services).  He keeps running into a woman who is perpetually calling her intended lover Johnny on payphones (ah, the pre-cellphone 90s) and then crying on his shoulder as she finds out he is in love with Blondie (who in turn shows up in the other storyline pursuing the hitman, who is not interested in a commitment) and eventually falls for her.  But after a brief reciprocation, she abandons him.  Meanwhile, the hitman agrees to one final hit before his intention of settling down and owning a business (after being impressed by our other mute protagonist) but alas does not survive it.
Is it worth watching?  Sure - it's kinetically shot and you get a real sense of place, but it is a bit teenage-y.  Lots of emo music and general mooning around.  But you have to see In the Mood for Love (sumptuous!) and if you had to choose between Angels and Chungking, pick the latter, especially for its second story, which is genuinely charming.

Film review: Ace in the Hole (1951)

We're gradually working our way through everything Billy Wilder has ever done, and we arrived at Ace in the Hole yesterday.  I may have mentioned that we now have The Criterion Channel, which is a streaming service to replace the much-missed FilmStruck, and this came up under their "Film Noir" classification.  I suppose that fits (although not as snugly as Wilder's wonderful Double Indemnity) but more in general sour-view-of-humanity than in the usual rainy-streets-and-gumshoes plot elements.  It stars Kirk Douglas in all his brash manly glory, being unlikable as only he can be.  The film opens with him (as Chuck Tatum, star newspaperman) arriving in Albuquerque in a car being towed by a breakdown truck.  He hops out at the offices of the Albuquerque Sun=Bulletin (yes, for some reason it's an equals sign) and swaggers in to land a job.  The editor, Boot, is a straight-shooter whose slogan "Tell The Truth" is mounted on the wall in needlepoint.  Tatum confesses to him that he has been fired from every major newspaper in every major city in the US for various reasons (usually drink, but occasionally libel or sleeping with somebody's wife).  His plan is to latch on with a small newspaper and hope for a Big Story that will hit the wires and get him re-hired in a big city again.  Boot is skeptical but recognizes talent in the clips Tatum shows him and hires him, even after Tatum has teased him about his habit of wearing a belt and suspenders, because he's over-cautious.  Cut to a year later and we find Tatum out of the snazzy suit he arrived in and wearing a belt and suspenders.  And fed up, because no big story has arrived or looks likely to.  Boot comes in and says "cheer up - you can go and cover the Rattlesnake festival!"  Itching to get out of Albuquerque, Tatum scoops up cub reporter Herbie Cook and off they go.  They drive for a while, with Tatum advising Herbie about how useless his (Herbie's) journalism school education was, because he (Tatum) learned all you need to know on the streets selling those newspapers.  And the core truth he learned was that people only care about bad news.  So, for example, instead of thousands of rattlesnakes at a festival, much better would be 50 loose in Albuquerque, and the story progresses until 49 have been caught, and only one needs to be found, but in fact it's locked in Tatum's desk drawer.  Here we learn that Tatum is very much prepared to manipulate the news for his own gain and to keep a story going.  At this point they pull over to the side of the road at a "trading post" in the middle of nowhere to get gas.  But the place is strangely deserted.  In a masterfully constructed sequence, Herbie goes inside to investigate and finds only an old lady praying fervently - so fervently she won't answer him.  He goes back out to tell Tatum and a police car drives by  with its siren blaring, and turns left past a sign to an ancient Indian cliffside village (admission free).  Intrigued, Tatum instructs Herbie to follow, and on the way we pick up perhaps the most unflatteringly-portrayed character I've seen in a Wilder film (beating even Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity), a platinum blonde named Lorraine Minosa.  And this is where the film really kicks into gear: the siren is because Lorraine's husband, the owner of the trading post and son of the praying woman, Leo Minosa, has become trapped in a rockfall deep in the caves.  Tatum goes in to check on him and hears that he believes he is being punished by the spirits of the Indian dead for stealing their relics to sell at his trading post.  Tatum realizes that this is the story he's been waiting for, and immediately takes control of the narrative.  (Tatum actually refers to the real case that Wilder based this on, the 1925 ordeal of Floyd Collins in Kentucky when explaining to Herbie how a story about one person trapped is much better for story purposes than a story about many.) At first it just looks like he's sensationalizing the story (playing up the curse element), but things take a nasty turn when Tatum hooks up with corrupt local sheriff Gus Kretzer and ensures that Leo will not be rescued in a matter of hours by going in and reinforcing support struts, but his rescue will instead take days (to make the story blow up) by drilling downwards through a hundred feet of solid rock.  The sheriff agrees, and keeps other reporters away in return for Tatum's assurance that he will get him reelected.  As with the real Floyd Collins case, crowds gather (and in a running joke, the entrance fee, originally "free", keeps going up and up every time we see a shot of the entrance), a fair arrives, musicians write and perform a "Leo" song, and Lorraine, who never loved Leo and wanted to leave, decides she will hook up with Tatum instead.  But a snag arrives: Leo gets pneumonia and will die.  Can they change tacks and go in the front to rescue him in time?  Or has the drilling disturbed the cave so much that is no longer possible?  Meanwhile Tatum's New York paper has re-hired him and Herbie is ready to join him in the big time.
Somebody once said that Wilder had a "head full of razor blades" and let's just say that this doesn't end any happier than either Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard.  Is it a realistic portrayal of the press?  Apparently they didn't think so at the time, and it actually features in Boot, an exemplary figure, committed to journalistic excellence.  Perhaps best not to seek a message and just enjoy a good old melodrama, with Kirk Douglas at his scenery-chewing best.  I didn't recognize anyone else (although Boot was also in a key role in Double Indemnity), but Lorraine is amazing.  She reminds me of the appropriately named Anne Savage in Detour.  Only, unlike Savage's character, Lorraine doesn't get killed, she does the killing.

Film review: The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

This is a less-known Kurosawa, in part because it's set in the present day (although, so are Ikiru and High and Low, so...)  It does star Mifune, but he is, for the most part, rather low-key.  It has a number of plot similarities with Hamlet, so you could lump it in with Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear) for a nice little trilogy, but it also has enough differences to make that stretching it a bit.  What to say about it?  It's beautiful, for one thing: very film noir in its use of shadows and pools of light and practically every frame is arranged geometrically.  I'm normally bad at noticing things like that, but it's impossible to miss in this one.
The film starts with a wedding - a very western wedding: they play the Wedding March and there's a giant cake.  But it's being held in what looks like a boardroom of a company, and it's very much a Company Affair.  The bride is the daughter of the Vice President (we never meet the President in the film, I now realize) and the groom, his trusted secretary, is an almost unrecognizable bespectacled Mifune.  The place is teeming with reporters who comment cynically about the proceedings, which are happening, it emerges, in the midst of a scandal for the company (and another company - it's hard to keep track of the machinations).  A couple of speeches are given (the second by the bride's brother, who is drunk, a pretty much constant state of affairs for him) which are very undiplomatic about the fact that the bride is disabled, and that we should pity her.  One leg is significantly shorter than the other and she has to use a crutch.  The brother's speech actually ends with him threatening the groom not to mistreat his poor sister.  Then the cake is wheeled in and it's a giant model of a building, with a rose sticking out of window on one of the upper floors.  The significance of this is that a member of the board of this company committed suicide by jumping out of that very window.  Shocked gasps all round.  Next we get a montage of various attempted convictions of members of the company, one of which is foiled because the President tells him that he should "take things to the bitter end" and he throws himself in front of a truck.  Basically, everybody in power gets off scot free because the cops either can't get their hands on key evidence or their witnesses kill themselves.  (I'm a bit confused about this part, the first 30 odd minutes of the film, because we watched it on the Criterion Channel a couple of days ago and it froze totally, so we took up again last night at that point.)  We then watch another, particularly squirrelly little man (Wada) trudging up the side of what looks like a volcano, trying to steel himself to throw himself over the edge.  Suddenly, from nowhere, it seems, Mifune is there, and we get introduced to the real plot of the film.  He gives Wada a stern lecture about how the system is corrupt and does he really want to be sacrificing himself for the good of those above him?  Cut to a scene of the higher-ups discussing how Wada has in fact committed suicide.  But it turns out, Mifune (who goes by the name of Nishi, even though it emerges that that is not his real name), has got him in hiding, watched by a friend (who, we find out later, is the real Nishi).  Mifune is in fact the illegitimate son of the man who jumped from the window.  He hated his father while he was alive, because his father dumped his mother and him on the orders of The Company to marry a "more suitable" wife.  But after his death he found out that his father had set up a savings account for him and had put huge chunks of his salary in there.  So, with new-found affection for his father, he concocted a scheme for revenge, which involved first becoming the trusted secretary of Vice President Iwabuchi, and then his son-in-law.  However, in what will prove to be his undoing, "Nichi" is too soft at his core and he has really fallen in love with the daughter.  In one of the most visually satisfying sections of the film, he torments one of Iwabuchi's key henchmen by having Wada emerge from the shadows as he (the henchman) is walking home in the dark.  This happens enough that the henchman starts to lose it, to the extent that Iwabuchi hires a hitman to get rid of him.  But "Nichi" intercedes, only to take the henchman to the very room his father committed suicide from.  He even dangles him out of the window, but doesn't have the heart in the end to kill him.  (The man goes crazy instead.)  Unfortunately, another assistant to Iwabuchi investigates and finds out who Mifune is, and the bride's brother, overhearing the conversation between this assistant (played by the other famous Kurosawa actor, Takashi Shimura) and Iwabuchi, angrily chases Mifune out of the house with a shotgun.  However, the two Nishis then kidnap the Shimura character and are getting him to crack about all the secrets of the company when Wada runs away and comes back with Mifune's bride because he wants true love to blossom.  BUT, just when everything's going right, she reveals to her father where the Nishis are (because the scheming bastard convinces her he's guilt-stricken, and gets her to believe that her brother is hunting for her husband with a gun (turns out he's just hunting).  And... cue very bleak ending.
What can I say?  Whaddya expect when it's influenced by Hamlet?  But it's definitely a very good Kurosawa - not quite High and Low, but I liked it better than, say, Drunken Angel or even Stray Dog.  It is indeed a film noir, and a very good one.

Film review: Bicycle Thieves (1948)

This film is, supposedly, "much-loved."  It is also a "classic" and "a masterpiece of neo-realism."  Well, I'll grant the second two, but I'm not going to say I loved it.  Mainly because I'm a softy and (spoiler alert) the ending is an all-time downer.  Okay, so nobody dies, but unless something changes, they well might.  The basic plot is that the father of a family (two kids, one of whom is a baby and the other of whom is the most adorable little boy in any movie ever) miraculously gets a job in war-ravaged Rome, where the throngs of the unemployed are everywhere.  Unfortunately, the job, which is pasting up posters around the city, requires a bicycle, which the father has only just pawned.  His wife gathers up all their bedsheets and they raise enough to get the bike back.  But then, on his first day on the job, the bike is stolen by a gang in front of his eyes.  And the rest of the film is him trying (and, spoiler alert, failing) to get the bike back.  Apparently a Hollywood producer wanted to make the film in the US and have Cary Grant as the lead.  This would not have worked.  For one thing, Rome itself is a major player in the film (apparently that's part of the "realism" of neo-realism - actually filming on location, rather than on a set), for another, the actual main actor is perfect - and looks suitably cadaverous for someone on the verge of starvation, and for a third, no producer would have allowed the realistic plot, where nobody is really a villain, even the thieves (they find the one who pedaled off on it, but he lives with his mother and sister in a tiny apartment, and he has seizures, or is a very good faker), because everybody's just trying to survive, and things just don't turn out fine in the end.
The film starts relatively slowly, but at some point in the film you become completely gripped (at several points it really looks like they're going to get the bike back!), and, despite its apparent picaresque plotlessness, on looking back you realize you were exposed to a very realistic vision of the injustice of poverty.  Don't get me wrong: it's very far from being unrelenting misery - there are funny moments, and definitely hearwarming moments between the father and his pint-sized companion, but that just makes the final wretchedness, when the father resorts to trying to steal somebody else's bicycle and almost gets dragged off to jail, all the more wrenching.  The ending is a punch in the gut.  Again I ask, why are there so few great films that make you feel better?

Repainting the kitchen

"Bumblefoot" false alarm

Yesterday was almost the Saturday Night Massacre for about half our chickens.  Backstory: that morning when transferring the chickens from their sleeping quarters to their daytime enclosure, I noticed one of them hobbling behind.  She seemed in sad shape: thin on top (well, I can identify there), generally disheveled (ditto) and limping badly.  I think she'd been picked on.  I'm not sure if she's the one who got head-pecked as a young thing, that we call Sinead (because she was a "bald chick" - which is how Frank Sinatra notoriously referred to Sinead O'Connor) because there are currently several with the tonsure look (we're not sure if it's from pecking or from singeing their heads on the heat lamps we set up over the Winter) but she didn't look good.  So I thought I'd leave her outside of the enclosure today just to make sure she didn't get bullied.  Anyway, I told Jami about it and she checked her out and then went away to the Internet (never a good idea) and announced later that she had some bad news.  She had noticed that several of the chickens (including one of the remaining original two and also Dot, our finest-looking and fattest black speckled one) had "lumpy growths" on their feet that, according to the internet, are something called "bumblefoot" that is an incredibly contagious staph infection, and basically they should be culled instantly before the whole flock went down.  As neither of us can stomach actually killing the chickens, this would mean abandoning them in a remote rural area and letting them take their chances.  I was understandably upset.  "What will we tell Thomas?" I said, as I knew severe recriminations would be coming our way if and when he ever found out.  Anyway, I went to have a look at this "bumblefoot" phenomenon.  After squinting intently at the ones Jami pointed out, I was convinced that it was in fact just balls of shit clinging to their feet.  (I know - disgusting creatures.  The Ducks are ashamed to be in the same genus as these fleabags.)  Jami said "no - that's just what it looks like."  Well, I insisted that we actually have a close look.  Jami in turn insisted that it be me that did it, and that I should wear rubber gloves, because of the risk of infection.  Anyway, I caught the older one who seemed to have a worse case (she's the one who has always plucked her own feathers, so she has bald little shoulders - looks disgusting, but a great layer) and tugged at the large "growth".  It did indeed seem hard as a rock and part of the foot.  "You see?" said Jami.  Uncharacteristically, I insisted we soak it in hot soapy water to see if it would come off.  Well, "Shoulders" really seemed to like that, and eventually, it softened to the extent that it came off.  So it was indeed a ball of shit.  But what a ball!  Hard as a rock!  Any dung beetle would've been proud of that creation.  But essentially this bird was walking around with a giant ball of rock-hard shit glued to every other toe.  Ugh.  So panic over, and we still have too many chickens (which is probably why Sinead got pecked in the first place).  Talking of Sinead, we also got around to soaking her foot in salt water and bandaging it:

Film review: The Howling (1981)

I honestly think that An American Werewolf in London is a masterpiece.  It manages the almost impossible feat of being genuinely funny, legitimately scary and honestly romantic all in one package. It has very good acting (including by British stalwarts John Woodvine and Brian Glover), still unrivaled special effects and... Jenny Agutter in her prime.  Why do I mention this?  Because when people are talking about "great werewolf movies" The Howling very often gets listed alongside AWiL as a comparably great one that came out around the same time (and also has a great British character actor in it in the person of Patrick "Steed" Macnee (and such luminaries as Slim Pickens and John Carradine in minor roles)).  I am here to tell you that the comparison is tantamount to blasphemy.  Because The Howling is embarrassingly crappy.  I mean embarrassingly so.  We watched it hoping to match the success of Body Snatchers (to add to the parallels this film also has Kevin McCarthy in it) and it just made me realize how history can see a chasm between two films that at the time might have been judged equivalent.  The Howling also has special effects that at the time were highly praised.  They are laughably bad.  It had a plot that was seen as "ironic" and "satirical" and (like Body Snatchers) had snide things to say about psychiatry.  But it's just cheesy.  So I won't waste too much time on this one.  Our protagonist (played by the mother from ET) is an anchorwoman/reporter on a local LA news channel who begins the movie on assignment out meeting a suspected serial-killer who has struck up a correspondence with her.  This part isn't too bad.  It ends with her saved by the police (in a sex shop - because The Howling is also tawdry in a rather creepy way) as they "kill" the killer who is about to assault her.  After a series of flashback nightmares that make her unable to do her job, she goes to see pop-psychiatrist Patrick Macnee who recommends she go up and stay at "The Colony" - a place he runs "up North" (looks like near Mendocino, or possibly the Oregon coast) to recuperate.  Long story short, this place turns out to be full of werewolves, a female one of which seduces our protagonist's husband into incredibly gagworthy werewolf sex.  Differences between this and AWiL (other than quality): the werewolves in this one are bipedal, although it looks difficult as their legs are dog legs (unlike the human legs in the far-superior Dog Soldiers); they can change any time they want (they're not controlled by the full moon, as in AWiL) and they need silver bullets (or, conveniently, fire) to kill them.  But it doesn't matter, because there really is no good reason to watch this.  I am frankly astonished at the number of positive reviews of it that bounce around the internet (at least The Howling III: The Marsupials gets panned).  I can only assume that whomever wrote them is misled by the fact that it was written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante.  Or more likely, they're going by memories they had of watching it at the time as tweens, when its heady mixture of nudity and gore would have been awe-inspiring.  Watch AWiL again instead.

Film review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

I thought I'd seen this version (the first remake of the excellent 50's Don Siegel movie) before but I must've just caught bits of it late night on Channel 4 or something, because most of the first half was new to me.  Donald Sutherland, in a horrible perm and disgusting porn mustache, is Matthew Bennell, a health inspector in San Francisco, first seen pulling a rat turd (his term, not mine) out of a pot of sauce at a fancy French restaurant (for which he gets his windscreen cracked, a nice effect that means everything looks distorted when he drives around the city, mimicking the slightly-off-ness of the population).  Meanwhile some kind of plant from outer space is forming "grexes" with plants all round the city, and Matthew's assistant Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) has collected one and put it in a jar of water on her husband's side of the bed.  Thus it is that he is the first character that we see transformed, as he is fully dressed before she wakes and she watches him carry something in a bin to a waiting garbage truck around back.  This is a running theme throughout the movie - we keep seeing grey fibrous matter being dumped into garbage trucks or sticking out of dumpsters, and it's only later that we learn the awful secret of what it is.  Elizabeth very quickly realizes that her husband is no longer her husband (even though he looks just like him and knows everything he would know) and on following him, her suspicions are heightened because he's not in his office (he's a dentist) but is instead out meeting with total strangers as they swap strange plants.  Matthew doesn't fully believe her, but his dry cleaner tells him the same thing about his wife.  He convinces Elizabeth to come with him and talk to his celebrity psychiatrist friend Dr. David Kibner (distractingly played by LEONARD NIMOY!) and while at the book signing party we also meet the self-styled poet Jack Bellicec (a young Jeff Goldblum, odd as always) who is also friends with Matthew.  A woman at the party is telling Kibner that her husband is not her husband, but he convinces her to go home with him anyway.  As he and Matthew and Elizabeth go off together to talk, he admits that he has had many patients that week say the same thing.
Things really ratchet up a gear when Jack goes back to the steam baths he runs with his wife and he falls asleep in the steam room, and his wife discovers a weird plant-like humanoid copy of him lying a couple of booths over.  Pretty soon it's Jack and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright, who was the other woman besides Ripley in Alien the following year) and Matthew and Elizabeth against the world.  (At one point Matthew and Elizabeth are driving though San Francisco when a terrified man runs up to their car and shouts "they're after me!  You're next" and runs around the corner, chased by a crowd, and is killed in a car accident.  I thought I recognized his face, and only later did I discover it was the actor Kevin McCarthy, who starred as Bennell in the original Body Snatchers.  Nice touch.)  It was in the second half that I saw the scenes I was familiar with - "Kibner" injecting Matthew and Elizabeth to get them to go to sleep so that the pods will take them over, a scene where Matthew slices up 4 fully-formed replicas of our four protagonists with a spade (blood splatters) and most horrifically, a dog with a man's face, caused by damaging a pod next to a homeless man and his dog as they are absorbed.  The effects are very good - not Alien good, but definitely not cheesy.  And all in all this film is still very effective.  And very bleak - much more so than the original story and even more than the 50's film version.  And we get to see Elizabeth crumble into the grey husk material that we've been seeing sticking out of dumpsters throughout.  The last scene is iconic - and features an innovation that sets this version above the original in the creepiness department: when a pod person recognizes a human in their midst, they point at it and scream a hideous scream.  This remake is up there with The Thing and The Fly (where, of course, Jeff Goldblum is promoted to the lead).  It's not surprising that the film has been remade 4 times, because it's a perfect parable (originally either for McCarthyism or Communism, depending on your particular paranoia), although, as a reviewer pointed out, there really wasn't a particular threat in the late 70's (unless the director Philip Kaufman saw Reaganism coming).  I think it deserves a TV series now - you could chart the progress of the pod peoples' conquest of the world, a la The Walking Dead or the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy.  I just hope I get a cut when that inevitably happens.

April makes all the difference