Film review: Cold Storage (2026)

What's Vanessa Redgrave up to these days? you ask yourself.  Well, would you believe acting in a fun little B-movie about a fungus that zombifies everyone and everything it encounters?  No, I wouldn't've either, but there she is, looking decidedly frail (and not just because she's playing a little old lady on her last legs, either).  

But she's not alone in slumming it, because Liam Neeson (stretching himself in the role of gruffly competent military man) and Leslie Manville (perhaps tired of worthy work with Mike Leigh, and itching to play a soldier who hides a nuclear device in her son's basement).

Anyway, you might wonder what this had to offer that was different from, say, The Last of Us, which is also about fungus turning everybody into zombies.  Answer: this film is basically a light-hearted romp, albeit with lots of heads exploding.  All the people who die deserve to die (maybe not the animals) and, in a very 80s-style (maybe even 50s-style) plot, the Military (or at least a few rogue individuals within it) does the right thing (using a bomb!) and solves the problem.

I tell a lie: in the pre-credit sequence, set about 25 years ago (which is still in the 2000s, to my horror), a likeable character does die, but (a) this part of the film is meant to set up the stakes and is correspondingly not comedic, and (b) we don't really have time to get to know the character before she meets her messy end.  This part is set in some tiny outback community where a chunk of Skylab landed in 1979, specifically a tank that had a fungus sample in it, and over the years it degraded to the extent that something got out.  The film starts with a woman (some NASA-affiliated fungus expert) getting a phone call at a cafe in Rome from somebody on a payphone in said tiny town.  The man is clearly panicked and seems to be reporting some kind of attack, but has been shunted from person to person until arriving at our expert.  She quickly jets there and along the way picks up a "team" which, in a running joke, she is surprise to find consists of just two (Neeson and Manville), who have been brought in to assess the risk.  They arrive on the outskirts of town, and, spotting no signs of life, put on Hazmat suits and head in to check out what's happened.  

They quickly find that everyone in town (a) is up on a roof, and (b) has exploded.  The fungus expert examines a tiny hole in the tank fan finds it full of glowing green stuff, in the course of which she manages to step on some, and it turns out her wellies aren't as air-tight as the Hazmat suit.  Still she gets a sample, puts it in a sealed container, and they're heading out of town with her in the lead when she starts to act erratically.  We, the viewers, know what's happened because we get a "fungus-eye view" of matters, and we have watched it climb up from the welly into her brain, and told her to spread it.  So, after complaining of smelling toast and feeling hot (a key plot point later) she runs to the one vehicle and starts to drive it away. Liam (I refuse to learn his character's name, because he's just Liam Neeson) jumps in front of the car and is thrown back and temporarily paralyzed (another key plot point, as he has a dickey back thereafter), the doctor gets out and holds Leslie Manville at gunpoint and then turns the gun on herself.  The team then calls in fighter jets to bomb the town with white phosphorus, and the sample is put in Cold Storage in a facility in Kansas.

And then the real movie starts.  The military has sold off the storage facility (with the important lower levels sealed off) to a private storage company, at which the night shift is just starting, and the horrible greasy biker boss "Griffin" argues with our just-arriving-in-his-implausibly-classic car (listening to affirmation tapes on his drive in) hero, "Teacake," 

appealingly played by one of the older Stranger Things kids.  The storage facility will be our home for the rest of the movie (except for brief excursions involving Liam Neeson being informed and him forming a bond with a female soldier on the end of a phone at some Military HQ, as well as linking up with Manville to pick up "item 7" on a list he deems necessary to deal with the problem), and it operates a lot like the Mall in Dawn of the Dead.  Especially once Griffin returns with a bunch of bikers, who will all meet with grisly fates.  But before then, we have a meet-cute with the new employee of the night shift, Naomi, who despite being a smarty-pants, in comparison with Teacake's well-meaning ex-con (she teaches him the word "loquacious," because he is), because she's taken science classes with the aim of becoming a vet, and before that we have Teacake shepherding an old lady (just recognizable as Vanessa Redgrave) to her storage unit, where she plans to kill herself with the gun she has there (after kissing a picture of her presumably dead husband) but takes a nap first, setting up a late intervention that was entirely predictable).

Anyway, things are kicked into gear when Teacake hears a harsh beep coming from somewhere and asks Naomi to help him find it.  It's coming from behind a plasterboard wall, where they see a lot of dusty old military equipment and a map showing the lower levels.  

(This is the alert that means that Neeson, now retired, is woken up from his bed, and only he knows how serious this is.  In fact, he's had a couple of decades of nagging the military to take it more seriously - even writing a "White Paper" (a phrase that gets uttered implausibly many times for a B-movie horror-comedy) about why global warming will eventually cause problems.)  Anyway, Teacake and Naomi find nastiness, but it has also already escaped, and infects the dead cat in the trunk of Naomi's "man-child" ex-baby-daddy, who has come to ask her advice, because he accidentally shot the cat.  But, as a flashback later reveals, he runs over an infected cockroach, which sends a tendril up into the trunk, re-animating the cat, which promptly seeks higher ground and explodes.  This sends splatter over both the ex and a nearby deer, and we've got a full-on outbreak.  Then the bikers show up because Griffin has a bunch of stolen TVs he wants to offload...

Anyway, silly stuff, very much not part of the current trend of dreary highbrow horror-as-metaphor-for-grief, and a pleasant enough diversion from the real horrors around us.

Film review: Runaway Train (1985)

This is a film based on an unmade Kurosawa screenplay, which both makes sense and doesn't.  It doesn't because the dialogue is just god-awful, but it does seem as if it's been badly translated from another language altogether (and another sensibility).  However, on the other hand, the film is (in its exterior shots, at least) gorgeous to look at, and clearly filmed on location (it's set in Alaska) with real trains, no models or suspect special effects.  

And the beginning sequences in a prison really look more like one would imagine a prison in the USSR would look like (apparently they were shot in Old Montana State Prison), which is perhaps because its director, Andrei Konchalovsky, is Russian (he started out working with Tarkovsky on Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev.  I remarked while watching the film that it would work better if it was entirely in a foreign language, because one is more likely to forgive stilted dialogue when it's in subtitle form.  And overall one gets the impression that nobody making this film other than the actors spoke much English, so they couldn't really tell if the actors were delivering their lines naturalistically.  And, with a couple of exceptions (Jon Voight is very good, even when he has to deliver decidedly odd dialogue) the acting is bad, even from people who are good in other things.

Here's the plot: it begins inside a prison where the TV is showing the warden (Ranken- played as a sort of knock-off Dennis Hopper by an actor called John P. Ryan) being interviewed elsewhere because he's been required by a court to let a certain prisoner (Voight's Manny) out after having been literally welded into his cell for three years, for repeatedly escaping.  Hearing this over the TV (because Eric Roberts's Buck (a young doofus amateur boxer with some kind of Southern Accent, who is incredibly annoying - like a moronic version of Voight's Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy) has persuaded an old prison guard to turn up the volume - something he quickly regrets) everyone in the prison goes wild, throwing lit pieces of cloth or paper out of their cells, or milling about smashing things.  However, Ranken is completely unfazed when he returns and just strolls through the flames without looking left or right.  He has come to free Manny, but also to berate and scorn him.  Anyway, after some scenes in the prison (Buck fights another boxer, played, in his first role, by Danny (credited as "Daniel") Trejo, somebody (clearly put up to it by Ranken) stabs Manny through the hand, and a prison guard takes pot shots from on high at the resulting melee) Manny is ready to escape.  (Unfortunately, because of the stabbing, it is now Winter in Alaska.)  Buck has a job pushing the laundry cart and manages to smuggle Manny to a room that has a manhole leading to the sewers.  Buck demands to be taken along, and has to grease himself up and wade through shit (while complaining loudly the whole time) before being projected over a waterfall and into a freezing river.  Then they have to trudge through the snow until they get to a station, where Buck finds some shoes to put on his frozen feet in a locker, and Manny decides a train that consists of four engines coupled together with no train cars is the one for them.  

What they don't realize is that the driver, realizing he's having a heart attack, slams on the breaks, but without disengaging the throttle.  He then falls off the train a dies.  The train quickly burns through the brakes and speeds off.  All this (except the stowaways) is quickly discovered at train HQ, where a young hotshot who designed the multi-million dollar computer system that the trains run on (in Alaska? in the 80s?  Okay...) is not too bothered, because he figures he can make sure the train gets shunted off somewhere.  In fact, he asks an old guy to switch the points and ensure the train wrecks, when the geezer hears the train horn and tells them that there must be people on the train.  This is also news to our convicts, who have come to believe there's nobody up front, mainly because the train clipped the rear end of another train that was too slow getting on to a branch line without blowing any horn earlier.  Turns out the horn was blown by Sara, whom Wikipedia informs me is a "locomotive hostler" who was napping when the driver keeled over, and who is played by Rebecca de Mornay, 

looking nothing like the sexpot she'd played in Risky Business a couple of years earlier.  She makes her way back to where the convicts are (in the rear engine) because she's realized that the only way to stop the train is in the front engine, and the afore-mentioned collision has jammed the door in engine #2 that you need to go through to get there, so she was going to the rear to get as far away from the front as possible.  From there on it's bickering for our two men and one woman, worries about chemical plants and bridges back at HQ, and then Ranken figures out his men are on the train and tracks it down with a helicopter, 

after it's been sent down a dead end track to certain doom.  Our guys manage to slow it down a little (enough so they get across the bridge at about 70 instead of 90 and thus make it across) by cutting the cables between all but first and second engine, but they can't get through the stuck door, and, because of the second engine's plane-like nose, cannot clamber along the outside as they have for the others.  Until that is, a man hanging out of Ranken's helicopter, supposedly coming to get them, 

slips and crashes through the window of their engine.  Then Manny (who has previously tried to drive Buck to a suicidal mission along the outside of the second engine, and then erupted in a stabby fury when Sara let Buck back in) decides he's going to clamber through the broken window and jump.  (This despite his stabbed hand bleeding again.)  

He falls under the equipment joining the engines and crushes his hand (very convincingly) on the coupling while pulling himself up.  Meanwhile Ranken has taken his turn on the rope ladder and is coming, gun in hand.  However Manny beats him up with a fire extinguisher and cuffs him in the cabin of the front train.  Ranken tells him he has to push the emergency stop button, if not to save them, at least to save Buck and Sara.  This reminds Manny (who's going a little crazy - three years in solitary will do that) of their existence, but instead of pressing the button, he goes back and uncouples their train, waves, and clambers on top of the front engine to ride it to a fiery demise.  Fade to black, with a Richard III quote: ""No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast."

I skipped over a lot of philosophizing.  Manny gives a speech where he says you've got to grind grind grind at the grindstone, to which Buck says he'd rather be in jail, and Manny repeats wistfully that he wishes he could be like those who can live a normal life.  All of which would have made a lot of sense in a Japanese or Soviet film, but which is hard to take, especially with Eric Roberts involved.

Kurosawa wrote the original script in the 60s, but the film, despite being made in 1984 has a definite 70s vibe about it.  Everything looks shabby, for one thing, out of keeping with the glossy Reagan 80s.  (And nobody looks glamorous - they all have very realistically windburned cheeks.)  So, all in all, an oddity.  A very well-made trashy B-movie, which I guess makes sense given that it was a Cannon Films release, albeit with pretensions to something greater.  Watch it for the scenery, at least, or if you're a trainspotter. 

Film review: Our Man in Havana (1959)

Jami and I have a long-running battle in that she loves all things espionage, and I just don't.  I mean, I'll watch Slow Horses or The Bourne movies, but those are only really tangentially "espionage" - they're more action shows/movies that happen to feature spies.  (Ooh, I also really love the Melissa McCarthy film Spy, but that's because it's very funny.)  Real espionage, the Le Carre type, tends to the melancholic.  The life of a spy is unglamorous and lonely, from what I can gather.  (The truly excellent show Patriot does a good job of picking at this feature of it, which is why I don't think I want to re-watch it, but you absolutely should seek it out.)  She got to hankerin' again last night and suggested the Richard Burton Spy Who Came In From The Cold, so I countered with this one, in part because it's supposed to be a comedy.  And, although it definitely has a very sad death and a very tense scene where our hero seeks revenge, it is in general pretty light.  Which I found surprising given my limited Graham Greene experience (all of Brighton Rock and the first few chapters of The Power and the Glory until I couldn't take the bloody Catholicism any more) which tended to the miserable.

Jami swears she'd seen it before, and in fact that we'd both seen it before, and while the beginning, in a vacuum cleaner salesroom, did seem familiar, I'm almost certain I hadn't.  Perhaps it was because she'd read the book.  Anyway, you couldn't fault the pedigree of those involved: directed by Carol "Third Man" Reed!  Starring Alec Guinness!  Featuring Burl Ives and a slew of great British character actors - Noël Coward!  Ralph Richardson!  

Maurice Denham and Raymond Huntley (even if you don't recognize the names, you'd recognize the faces).  And throw in Maureen O'Hara and, in probably the most surprising role, the 50's TV comedian Ernie Kovacs as the rather sinister local (Cuban) police chief (nicknamed "The Red Vulture") Captain Segura.  (I'm ashamed to say I assumed the actor was Hispanic, but I thought the same of Eli Wallach in the Westerns he was in, so I'm easily fooled.)

Anyway, the basic plot is that Alec Guinness's Jim Wormold is a proprietor of said vacuum cleaner dealership in pre-revolution Havana, whose main troubles are that his wife left him and ran off leaving him to raise his daughter, Milly, who has grown up (to about 17?) to be a magnet for wolf-whistles and a spendthrift, and he's not selling many vacuum cleaners.  Into his life and his showroom walks Coward's (rather buffoonish - the British Secret Service does not come off well in this film) Hawthorne, 

who recruits him (with offers of untold $$ - just after Wormold's daughter has bought a horse and wants to join the local country club to ride it in) for the purpose of in turn recruiting agents under him and gathering intelligence.  He happily takes and spends the money, but quickly realizes he's hopeless at recruiting people (he just drives them away in alarm), so he tells all to his best friend, WWI-but-not-II veteran German ex-pat Dr. Hasselbacher (Ives, doing a not-too-cheesy German accent), 

who advises him just to make up stories.  This Wormold does prove adept in, but goes too far when he sends drawings supposedly of huge industrial buildings spotted by one of his recruits, a pilot, when flying over a hidden valley.  The problem is that he models them on his vacuum cleaner 

and when Hawthorne sees them he recognizes them (but not before they've been shown to all kinds of high muk-a-muks in the government and military, so that Hawthorne realizes exposing Wormold will count against him too).  Hawthorne's solution is to send Maureen O'Hara's Mrs. Beatrice Severn to keep an eye on him (without telling her his suspicions).  

She is Mrs. in name only, because, as with Wormold, her spouse ran off.  Wormold is forced into more contortions in preventing her from meeting his "recruits," and sadly his confabulations prove fatal because he invents a pilot called Morez, forgetting that there exists just such a pilot, and, because his messages are being intercepted by Cold War rivals (spoiler alert: Hasselbacher has been recruited (with threats and intimidation) to translate his code, and thinks it's harmless because he knows Wormold is making everything up) Morez gets killed.  This causes a crisis in conscience in Hasselbacher and he alerts Wormold that his life is in danger when Wormold is giving a speech at a meeting of vacuum cleaner salesmen.  (In fact Hawthorne had already told him that an attempt would be made to poison him (and it's first by John Le Mesurier, 

who isn't even credited) so it's especially tragic that (ANOTHER SPOILER) Hasselbacher is killed for giving the warning).  Meanwhile The Red Vulture has been hanging around, 

mainly because he wants to marry Milly, but also because he's basically a one-man Stasi - certainly much more competent than any of the actual spies) and he has played Wormold tape of Hasselbacher's handler talking to him on the phone, and he has a stutter, so Wormold recognizes his adversary when a fellow vacuum cleaner salesman has a stutter.  This person's attempt to poison him is thereby thwarted (alas, a little Dachshund gets it instead), and then Wormold decides he finally has to do something brave and spy-like and get revenge for his old friend.  This entails getting a gun, and this he achieves by using the many tiny bottles of whisky/bourbon he has been collecting (with help from Hasselbacher - the last one for his collection is found in his dead hand) to play a boozy game of checkers so that Segura passes out and his gun can be used.

Will Wormold survive?  Will Beatrice (who has grown very fond of Wormold (it's mutual)) forgive his lying?  Will he be put away in the Tower of London for treason?  Well, let's just say the ending is a bit happier than Brighton Rock.  Although the fact that Graham Greene wasn't bumped off by MI6 shows either that they can take being made fools of, or that they really are incompetent.

Small things

 The sultry weather has alternated with massive storms (it's been a miracle that we haven't lost power) with dams flooding all over Michigan (although not here).  This has stalled Jami's intended re-vamping of our garden(s), although she did get started on the front and bought some solar-powered-glow-in-the-dark mushrooms at Costco for some reason.  Oh, and the screen door we've had forever (i.e., since 1999 at least) fell off, so we took it to the magic disappearing place and it went away after a day or so.

Suddenly Sultry

 It hasn't been a week since the temps dipped below 20 degrees F, and today...

Good thing: I ordered new shorts and they arrived today.  Bad thing: we went for a walk and I caught them on a post and they ripped like wet tissue paper:

 

Cheeky bugger

 Somebody has found that (a) there's a bag of seeds in our porch, and (b) we can't easily get at him/her

 

Film review: La Tête d'un homme (1933)

This is supposed to be one of the better cinematic Maigret adaptations and, while interesting in parts, and no doubt well-directed (Julien Duvivier directed Pépé le Moko, the proto-Casablanca in our Criterion box set, and there are very German-expressionistic passages, including one where a tall lumbering man stalks through a landscape terrorizing children in a manner that I would be amazed if it was not a reference to Frankenstein), reminded me of why I always give up on Simenon.  He manages to do police procedurals that are entirely lacking in suspense.  This one was Columbo-esque, in that, while you didn't see the killer commit the crime, it was pretty much obvious who the killer was right from the early going, and no serious alternatives were ever offered.  And yet, while there were moments where Maigret circled the killer, if anything the killer had the upper hand throughout, and, as he was dying of tuberculosis, didn't really have much to lose.  In brief, the prodigal nephew ("Willy") 

of a rich American aunt is overheard in his favorite bar saying to his fiancée (not his girlfriend, who warns him (correctly) that his fiancée is soaking him) that he would pay $10K francs to bump off the aunt so he could inherit (and pay off his exorbitant bar tab).  Very shortly thereafter a person says "hey, you dropped this" and hands him a note that offers to take him up on the suggestion, which he reads and stuffs into his pocket guiltily.  But he has not escaped the beady eyes of his intended and she stealthily extracts the note and reads it too.  She then scans the bar to see if she can work out who wrote it, to no avail.

Next, we see a tall, rather simple-seeming man show up at a large house and sneak upstairs, into a bedroom, where he is startled to bump into a bloody (this film is not bound by the Hays code) corpse of the aunt.  He is horrified and, being a dumb klutz, smears bloody hand-and-foot-prints everywhere.  Then another man appears, 

who clearly hired the other (and who is wearing gloves and little cloth booties over his shoes) and says he found the aunt like this and the other (who had clearly been told simply to get money from the bedroom) should get going and he'll clean up the prints.  Well tall-and-stupid gets going but the other one just waits a beat, lights a Gaulois, leaves all the prints and saunters off.  The tall man heads off to a country town called Nancy to lie low hiding in his parents' barn, while the other (who is a rather Asian looking actor playing a Czech student called Radek, but is actually Russian - got all that?) goes back to the bar.  The tall man is soon caught and questioned by Maigret, 

who is alone in believing his protestations of innocence, and arranges a risky stunt where they pretend to break down when ferrying him to a prison and one of the cops slips a note to him to run while everyone's looking at the engine.  Then Maigret has him tailed, and he leads them to the bar where Radek hangs out.  From this point on Maigret has decided that Radek is the killer, but Radek knows he can't prove it and rubs Maigret's face in it.  

Meanwhile Maigret's boss is convinced that the tall guy is the killer, and when he gets away, threatens Maigret and takes him off the case.  Anyway, it all builds to a head and Radek alternates between smug arrogance, tortured pawing of first a prostitute and then Willy's fiancée, 

longing for an unseen Piaf-like singer in the apartment across the hall, and angry ranting about rich people having the life he deserves.  It's not that long of a film but it does drag rather, and is, as to be expected from Simenon, more a character study than a thriller.  Still, I was sad when one of Maigret's cheerful young assistants bites it, which seemed a bit uncalled for, although Radek certainly gets his just deserts 

(and redeems himself a bit by exonerating the big lug with his dying breath.  All in all, a well-made if not especially enjoyable film.  Still, not as extreme in either direction as another Simenon adaptation I regret watching called M. Hire, which may be the most depressing film I've ever seen.  Odd that Maigret is such a content, placid individual when his author has such a jaded view of the world.