Film review: Long Weekend (1978)

The Criterion Channel has just added a collection of Australian New Wave films, of which this is one, and it seemed of a piece with The Birds, so I thought we'd give it a shot.  I regret it.  Not terribly, but it isn't as good as it's made out to be.  Mind you, if I'd seen it late on a Friday night on Channel 4 in the early '80s, it probably would've made a huge impression on me (like similarly dubious spooky films like She Waits or  The Shadow of Chikara did).  But as it is, I feel it wasted a good premise.  It could've easily been a one hour episode of something like Tales of the Unexpected or Hammer House of Horror with a title like "The Dugong".  Here's the basics: the main couple (who comprise the entire cast for more than 95% of the film) head off for a camping trip at his behest.  She'd much rather be going off with the neighbor couple, with whom, it emerges, they'd been engaging in some partner-swapping, initially (she says) at his suggestion because he fancied the wife, but he got jealous when she got it on with the husband.  There's also been a recent abortion, and their sex life has been floundering.  So this is his attempt to bring them together.  But, let's be honest, apart from the fact that they deserve each other, as neither is remotely likable, they should not be together, because they have nothing in common.  Well, except both of them seem to have a contempt for the outdoors, which she manifests by staying in the tent reading trashy novels, and he by going out and shooting things and spreading litter.  But let's backtrack: things get off to a bad start when he runs over a kangaroo (in very realistic and upsetting detail).  Then they stop off at the Aussie equivalent of the beaten up, shitkicker-staffed general store that is at the beginning of every backwoods horror film, where the locals surprise our hero by not having heard of the beach that he thinks is just 5 miles down the road.  They say nobody goes that way any more, and proceed to gawp at the couple's off-road vehicle as it drives off, as if to say that that's the last they'll see of them.  Then they struggle to find the beach - they drive down an overgrown track but it gets dark, there are strange animal cries all around, they get a puncture and they keep passing what looks like the same tree.  So they end up sleeping in their car.  It turns out the next day that they are just yards from the beach, and it is indeed a beauty, and for a brief moment, they stop bickering.  

But it doesn't last long, and things keep going wrong.  He goes surfing, she sees a black shape in the water near him.  He shoots it from the shore.  

Later it washes ashore, and it's a dugong, and he thinks some of the more chilling animal cries are its offspring calling for its mother.  Then he gets attacked by an eagle (in a moment that isn't any better realized than the bird attacks in The Birds) which she attributes to her having picked up its egg, so she breaks it (and it's all bloody).  

Bizarrely, given all the shooting he's been doing, he objects, and this leads back to the abortion. Later he notices that about a mile down the beach there's another camper van, and after they have bickered enough and been freaked out enough to decide to leave, he insists they visit their fellow campers first.  But when they get there, the van is gone, except there's something in the surf that looks like the top of a van.  He finds a dog in a tent in a strangely overgrown campsite then returns to find her walking into the surf, apparently driven crazy by strange animal cries.  

He pulls her back then swims out to the thing in the surf, and finds that, not only is it the van, but the driver's still in it.  Oh, and I've skipped over the strange mold that grows on their defrosted chicken (or "chuck") and a disfigured Barbie doll he finds on the beach.  

They return to their campsite to finish packing up but somehow manage to argue so much that she leave him behind and drives off.  Meanwhile the corpse of the dugong somehow manages to keep moving closer...  

Will they get out alive?  SPOILER: I'll tell you at the end.  Lots of animals certainly don't, although, perhaps surprisingly, his old dog Cricket (another thing about him she seems to hate) survives.  (This is very important, as evidenced by the existence of the website Does The Dog Die.)  What is the message of the film?  Well the message I took was that Australians can be really obnoxious, but there's clearly some kind of pro-ecology point, although it's not as if they do really serious polluting (despite her liberal use of the ant spray).  Don't shoot dugongs, I guess, which is a message I can certainly get behind.  As a film it certainly has some strengths, and as I said, if it had been an hour episode of a horror anthology (something it looks well-suited to, because it's seriously micro-budget) it would have impressed the hell out of adolescent me.  But the dialogue is clunky and I really did very quickly want both of them to die. Did they?  Well, here's the spoiler: yes.  He shoots her with a spear gun by accident, as she crashes the car trying to escape and mistakenly runs back to the campsite where he's sitting, terrified.  

Then he runs to the road and sees a truck, whose driver is attacked by a bird (the eagle again?) so he doesn't see him and squashes him flat.  This is, I regret to say, the point at which both Jami and I LOL'd in unison.  But Cricket, like the dog they found in the abandoned tent, should be fine. (Here are two good contrasting reviews of the film: positive, and correct.)

Film review: The Birds (1963)

 There are quite few Hitchcocks I've not yet seen, and it's usually by choice (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Family Plot, all but one of the silents) but this was an odd gap in my viewing - until now!  Verdict: effectively tense despite occasional unintentionally funny moments, not all of which are because of bad bird FX.  I expected to hate Tippi Hedren, but I actually thought she was very good and carries the movie well, despite being shoehorned into Hitchcock's usual blonde ice-vixen box.  Sure, she's an ice-vixen, but she makes it work.  And one good thing about her performance is that she never screams, despite ample opportunity.  Rod Taylor I'm not so sure about.  He's serviceable, but he looks distractingly as if someone took Robin Williams and shot a handsomizer ray at him.  (A quick Google reveals that I am not the only one to whom this occurred.)

But what's sort of interesting is that he's essentially only the major male role, surrounded by women.  (Even the best supporting character is this old, well, bird, who is an ornithology expert ready to poo-poo tales of bird attacks and present the birds as more sinned against by man than sinning [the basis for the "Eco-parable" interpretation of the film]) 

There are interpretations of this film that make him the central figure and the birds the allegory of the torrent of female feelings swirling around him, but he doesn't really do much to warrant being the Sun in this little solar system.  Indeed, the whole beginning premise of the film is Tippi Hedren's Melanie Daniels driving all the way up to Bodega Bay from her home in San Francisco just to "play a joke" on Taylor's Mitch Brenner.  This is putatively because she's angry at him for tricking her, but clearly she's got a crush on him, despite being a wild rich socialite to his humble lawyer.  They meet in the beginning scene of the film in a pet store - she's asked the owner to make a call in the back for her and he comes in asking for a pair of lovebirds for his (11-year-old - it's never explained why there's such an age difference, as he looks at least 30 ish) sister and appears to mistake her for the sales assistant.  She plays along, while clearly demonstrating her lack of knowledge about the birds for sale, until he replaces an escaped canary in its cage saying "Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels", thereby revealing that he knew who she was all along.  He claims he did so because he watched her use her influence (her father is part-owner of a major newspaper) to get out of something in court and was offended.  Anyway, he swears he really did want the lovebirds, but leaves without them.  So she orders a pair and intends to leave them outside his apartment (she finds his address through her connections at the paper) with a nasty note, but his neighbor reveals that he's gone home to Bodega Bay for the weekend, and the birds won't survive.  So off she goes in her fancy little sports car.  There's very little hint of the carnage to come until she is attacked by a seagull, getting out of the boat she's used to steal across the bay to deliver the birds to his house (which is across the bay from the town).  

He's seen her, though, and has driven to town to wait for her, so he sees the attack.  (We find out later that this is not the very first attack - seagulls attacked a fishing boat earlier in the week.)  Anyway, she's already met Suzanne Pleshette (most famous for being Bob Newhart's wife in his first eponymous sitcom), who is the town schoolteacher, and decides to stay with her after Mitch invites her to dinner that night (to the evident consternation of his mother, Jessica Tandy (looking very young and beautiful, well, compared to how I think of her).  Turns out Suzanne Pleshette's Ann moved to Bodega Bay following Mitch, but it didn't last, perhaps because of the mother, although they are now friends.  This is the basis for the psychosexual interpretation, a rare plausible suggestion by Camille Paglia, according to which the bird attacks happen when Melanie intrudes on Mitch's mother's control of her son.  Another advantage of this interpretation is that it makes sense of an otherwise infuriating episode where, after sheltering in their boarded-up house and surviving a concerted bird attack, Melanie wakes up to hear fluttering upstairs and, without waking anyone else up, goes upstairs and opens a door.  The room is of course full of birds and she is almost killed.  FOR NO REASON.  

But according to this interpretation, she "sacrifices herself" to break the curse that has begun when she arrived in town (except, of course, the fishing boat episode shows that it didn't).  Anyway, is it a good horror film?  Well, it does take a long time to get going with the attacks, but I'm okay with that.  Most good horror films take a long time establishing mood before they start the bloodbath.  And, while some of the bird FX are, frankly, laughable, I do find the idea of being attacked by gulls genuinely plausible and horrifying - they could obviously do real damage.  And the best scare in the film is when Jessica Tandy goes over to a neighbor's house (whose chickens, like hers, have been suspiciously off their feed) and, when he doesn't answer the door, goes into his house.  The first thing she notes is that every cup hanging on his kitchen dresser has been broken.  Tension mounts as she tiptoes down the hall until she finds him... dead - with his eyes plucked out.  

The camera zooms in on this grisly effect, which must have been about as gory as it gets for 1963.  And of course, there's the iconic scene where Melanie arrives to pick up the 11-year-old from the school and is sitting outside with her back to the climbing frame as, unseen by her, it fills up with birds. 

A moment that wasn't so effective is when everyone is sheltering in the downtown restaurant watching havoc unfold outside (a man is filling his car when he's attacked and the petrol runs to another car where a man drops his lit cigar and is enveloped in a fireball) and we see three quick stills of Hedren looking in three different directions with a variety of appalled expressions.  For some reason it looks ludicrous, which I'm sure was not the intended effect.  But you're not laughing any more when they find Suzanne Pleshette's body, brought down on her own doorstep.  That's what you get for flying too close to the Rod Taylor Sun.  I'm not sure how I feel about the ending.  In one way it's good because it doesn't try to tie up loose ends - it's like the original ending for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, before it was softened.  But on the other, it's unsatisfying.  Nowadays it would be a sign that a franchise was starting and there would be successively more disappointing sequels.

 

 

Film review: The Squeaker (1937)

AKA: Murder on Diamond Row:

Watching this made me appreciate Hitchcock more.  It's a British thriller, set in London, featuring Robert Newton 

(as a sort-of bad guy who we root for because he's trying to leave his life of crime and set up with the beautiful [at least, I think we're supposed to think so] Teutonic nightclub singer Tamara) 

and Alastair Sim (already looking old at 37, and chewing the scenery as a comic Scottish reporter), but neither is the lead good guy (a Canadian called Edmund Lowe) or bad guy.  The "Squeaker" is a mysterious figure who buys jewels off jewel thieves but will shop them to the police if they displease him (i.e., he "squeaks" - presumably the British pre-war equivalent of squealing).  Meanwhile he is mastermind of organized crime in London (allegedly).  The cops can't catch him, but in looking over a lineup of suspects in the latest jewel robbery, the chief inspector spies an ex-detective of his (Lowe), clearly down on his luck (much is made of his disreputable stubble).  Turns out alcohol has been his downfall since last he worked for the Yard.  The chief inspector gives him a chance to prove he can stay clean and recruits him to catch the squealer.  He quickly latches on to the idea that the Squeaker would be likely to employ ex-cons (on whom he has dirt and can thus squeal) and gets Sim's character to suggest a name.  This turns out to be Frank Sutton, a business big-shot whose girlfriend is the daughter of the founder of the company.  This daughter (Ann Todd, whose diction could cut glass - she's practically a caricature of a BBC announcer) quickly falls for our hero (once he's shaved off that stubble).  

Meanwhile, the Squeaker squeaks on Robert Newton's character and the cops get him, but he makes a daring escape from the Yard and, after visiting Tamara one last time, goes to take revenge on the Squeaker.  But he gets shot!  And Sutton blames our hero, not knowing that he's an undercover cop!  This all leads up to a denouement that is very melodramatic.  Not Korda productions' finest hour, I have to say.

Film review: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

As you can tell from the poster, this is an Italian film, and perhaps the most important thing about it is that it stars the actor who plays the villain in Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, who, let's be honest, sort of blows Clint off the screen in both.  He looks very different here because his hair is slicked down, but he's still got that face. 

But what to say about this film?  It's... strange.  It's not really a thriller, although it's pitched as one.  It's obviously a political commentary of sorts, but it also plays like psychodrama.  And in places it's very surreal.  The film begins with our "hero" showing up to what looks like his mistress's apartment: she greets him sultrily and asks "So, how are you going to kill me today?"  "I'm going to slit your throat," he says a leer.  Then they get into bed, she climbs on top of him and appears to be spasming in orgasm, but then falls over sideways and you see that she has, in fact, had his throat cut.  Then our man showers off but appears to be being sloppy (leaving obvious prints around) and then he takes a fibre from his tie and pushes it under her fingernail.  Then he gets dressed up in his flashy (cream colored) Italian suit and leaves.  But on the way out of the gate to the apartments, he meets a young man whom he clearly knows.  What's going on?  Does he want to get caught?  Then he drives to his office... and it turns out he's the Head of Homicide at the Police.  At least, he was - he's just been promoted to Head of the "Political" Department and is only there to congratulate his successor.  Of course, while he's there, news of the murder comes through and he goes along to view the crime scene.  On the way out (again) he is buttonholed by a reporter and tells him "it was the husband".  It looks like this is shaping up to be a film where an underling will doggedly track him down and he will be exposed for his arrogance and brought to justice - sort of Crime and Punishment crossed with Charade or something.  But him planting the tie fibres was already a hint that that is not going to happen.  In fact, his underlings do pick up plenty of evidence that it was him but instantly discount it because he is "above suspicion".  Meanwhile he quickly takes to his new job and gives fiery speeches about clamping down on the rot in Roman society, (statistics are cited of the rate of pro-Stalin, pro-Mao and pro-Ho Chi Min graffiti through the years) and we see the brutal police interrogation methods. 

(At one point someone being beaten up demands his lawyer, and the cops just snort and say "this isn't America".)  We also see a lot of flashbacks of the affair between him and his victim.  The explanation of her question at the beginning is that they've been acting out murder scenes as foreplay, and he has a ton of amateur photographs of her as corpse recreating crime scenes of his past investigative career. 

She is a real piece of work - she seeks him out to begin with, and when she first encounters him he dresses only in sober black - it is because of her that he becomes a flashy dresser, and perhaps because of her that he becomes ambitious.  But she also berates him and exposes the fact that he is a little boy underneath, which is what, in the end, seems to drive him to kill her (that and his jealousy: she was also having an affair with the young man he met on his way out, who is a well-known student revolutionary).  The message of the film is clearly that power corrupts and the system is rotten.  In the end he tries to get caught and even confesses, but nobody will arrest him because it would undermine the system.  Or is that what happens?  It's not clear - there are false endings and his victim appears again as if alive.  What's real?  Is any of this real?  I couldn't tell.  That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but a huge amount of its charm is the lead actor: he completely carries the film, and it's fortunate he is so incredibly charismatic.  But check it out and then explain it to me.

Film review: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

Jacques Demy's follow-up to Umbrellas, this one's a more traditional musical, in that there are definite separate numbers, lots of dancing, and actual speaking of lines in between the numbers.  It's also a lot sillier and bigger budget, even featuring Gene Kelly.  The candy colors remain, however, and it seems clear that it was an influence both on this and this.  Catherine Deneuve (whose hair is very silly - AKA super-60s in this one) and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac

(don't google what happened to her) play twin sisters, the latter, Solange, a composer, the former, Delphine, a dancer, who are tired of provincial life.  They are self-employed in a studio while their mother, Yvonne, who raised them on her own, runs a cafe in the central square of the town, that nonetheless never has more than a couple of people in it at one time, one of whom always seems to be her father, who busies himself building a model aeroplane.  Passing through the cafe at various points are Maxence, a blond soldier/sailor (we see him in different uniforms) who is really an artist, Etienne and Bill, "carnies" who travel the countryside putting on shows and trying to hawk Honda motorbikes (and who, despite being self-described ladies men, give off a very gay vibe and sport little white pixie boots) and Dutrouz, an old army buddy who has just recently reunited with Yvonne's father after decades.  The last key players are Simon Dame (yes, Monsieur Dame, a silly name that plays a large role in the proceedings), a music store proprietor and his friend from conservatory days, the successful American composer Andy Miller (Kelly). 

The whole thing is a series of coincidences and missed connections.  Turns out Yvonne has a young son (implausibly named "Bouboo") of ten by a different father from the girls, whom she abandoned shortly after conceiving him because she couldn't bear the thought of taking his name and becoming, you guessed it, Mme. Dame.  (Why haven't they met?  Well, Simon has only just relocated from Paris, and he's under the impression that Yvonne is living in Mexico with a millionaire, because that's what she told him.)  But Simon knows Solange, because of the music connection, and promises to write to his friend Andy to introduce them, as he knows Andy is visiting Paris, where Solange and Delphine plan to relocate to.  Meanwhile Maxence has drawn a picture of his "feminine ideal" which gets hung in the gallery owned by the sleazy Guillaume (I forgot to mention him) who pursues Delphine constantly.  She sees it and thinks it's her (because it looks just like her) and demands to meet the artist, and while Guillaume lets slip that he's a soldier, he lies that he's already gone to Paris.  Yvonne keeps getting Etienne and Bill to go to pick up Bouboo from school because she doesn't trust the girls to remember to do so, but they do, and consequently the carnies meet the daughters in suspicious circumstances.

Solange refuses to give Bouboo up to them on the second day, something that makes him throw a tantrum (they bought him sweets the previous time) and knock her music out of her hands.  While picking it up, she bumps into Andy, visiting town to see if he can surprise his old friend Simon, and is smitten (despite the fact that Kelly looks at least 50), without learning his name.  She also leaves without a page of her composition, which Kelly later plays and is impressed by.  MEANWHILE, two dancing girls who are part of Etienne and Bill's show quit suddenly, and they convince the sisters to replace them and put on a dance number.  MEANWHILE, in a completely out-of-left-field development, there's a psychotic axe-murderer in town, who chops up an older woman and puts her in a suitcase!  Do we know him?  Well, here's Yvonne reading who it is:

Will all of our connections be made or will people keep missing each other (usually by walking into Yvonne's cafe as the other is walking out the other entrance)?  Watch it and spend an enjoyable, very French, very '60s couple of hours, with lots of implausible prancing, badly faked musicianship and outrageous hair and makeup.   But don't expect it to linger in the mind like Umbrellas did - it's as fizzy and sweet (and brightly colored) as Orangina,

Film review: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Perhaps it was a bit premature to buy the Jacques Demy Box Set of Blu Rays sight unseen, but the Criterion Collection was having a sale!  And I'd been reading about this film for a while (and somehow getting it confused with Last Year in Marienbad) so, what the hell!  And it turns out not to have been an entirely foolish purchase, at least on the evidence of this one, which more-or-less made Catherine Deneuve a star.  

The story is (purposely) slight: boy and girl are in love, boy sleeps with girl once before going to war, while he's gone, girl realizes she's pregnant and is talked into marrying a nice, wealthy young man, boy comes back with a limp and is distraught until he finds a different nice girl.  What makes it unique, apart from the lush pop colors, is that the entire movie is sung.  It's billed as a musical (and what prompted us to watch it was a list of the best musicals for each year that picked it for 1964), but I'd say it's more like an opera, because, unlike most musicals, there aren't "musical numbers," featuring standalone songs, with regular speaking bits in between, the whole thing is seamless, with every line sung.  And it works - it's not intrusive at all, but is instead completely charming.  It helps, of course, that it has such beautiful people as Catherine Deneuve (Geneviève), Nino Castelnuovo (Guy) (who, for some reason, kept reminding me of the rather weasly Casey Affleck) 

and Anne Vernon (Geneviève's glamorous mother) sashaying through it.  Its title comes from the shop that Geneviève's mother owns, which, predictably enough, is always struggling to stay afloat.  

Guy, meanwhile, works as a mechanic at a garage, and dreams of owning his own "all white" gas station (and has a little model of one in the room he lives in in the apartment of the old lady, his Godmother, who raised him.  She is always dying by inches, and is nursed by a very nice young orphan, Madeleine who clearly worships Guy, a fact he appears oblivious to.  I must confess that I found the beginning section, where Guy and Geneviève swan around professing undying love to each other dragged a bit (although it was gorgeous to look at and very easy on the ear), but gradually the film got under my skin, and by the time Guy returns I was gripped.  It is, as I said, purposely low key.  Nothing very outrageous happens, and when characters die, or Guy gets injured, it happens off-screen (unlike Guy, shipped to Algeria (the film takes place between '57 and '63), we never leave Cherbourg.  And after the first third, the lovers are separated, so that we spend the second third entirely with Geneviève, and the final one with Guy.  Only at the very end do they meet again, 

and it is not the Hollywood reunion that it would have been in Hollywood.  Guy does get his white garage, and Madeleine gets her man. Only Geneviève seems unfulfilled, which is a bit sad for her thoroughly decent and well-meaning husband, surely the only decent diamond salesman in the world, Roland (a character who was unlucky in love in the earliest film in our box set that we'll get to eventually).  

He knows the daughter Geneviève bears (Francoise) is not his, but loves her so deeply he is entirely content to raise her as if she is.  So overall, a tale of first love and the compromises that adults have to make afterwards, with no villains and the only deaths being of natural causes.  Slight, but unforgettable.

Film review: Rubber (2010)

Continuing the run of cult movies, this arrived in the mail yesterday, I'm guessing from Matthew (as it reflects his sensibilities) and I remember being curious when it came out, so we sat down to watch it.  Verdict: something of a missed opportunity.  The skeleton of the movie is a killer (used) tire/tyre, which comes to life in the desert and, after taking a while to master rolling under its own steam, quickly discovers the joy of mayhem.  It starts slowly by crushing a plastic water bottle, and then a can, and a scorpion, but then finds that it is unable to crush a glass beer bottle.

Undaunted, it discovers another power: apparent telekinesis (that is, it vibrates increasingly violently), which, Scanners style, allows it to cause things (later, predominantly human heads) to explode.  After the bottle, its next victim is a rabbit, and then a crow...  In fact, that is one beef I have: this film is not imaginative enough as a horror film.  There's a repetitivity to the whole "making things explode" thing.  But the film seems to think you'll ignore that, because the horror film is encased within a fourth-wall-breaking, "it's all just pretend - or is it?" framework.  This begins before we ever encounter the tire, with a policeman giving a speech to the camera about how all great (or at least, successful) movies have a key element of "no reason": "Why is the alien in ET brown?  No reason!  Why do the couple in Love Story fall madly in love?  No reason!"  This justifies there being no motivation or explanation for the events we are about to watch.  Nice out, huh?  This speech is delivered to a crowd standing out in the desert who are then all presented with binoculars

by a strange skinny man in a white shirt who instructs them to look in a particular direction, whereupon they witness the tire's animation.  We keep coming back to these spectators, who have to sleep out in the desert and get increasingly hungry (how did they get there?  Why did they come?  Why didn't they bring food?  Why don't they just start walking?  NO REASON.) until the skinny man, on instructions from someone he calls "master" kills and cooks a turkey for them, which they descend on en masse and devour.  And it soon transpires that it was poisoned, and they all die.  This comes as a relief to the fourth-wall-busting cop, who, when a timer goes off informing him that the poison will have acted, tells his bemused comrades (who are investigating the tire's first human kill, a maid in an old motel) that they can stop acting and go home.  They didn't think they were acting, and the corpse is real.  But he insists, and has one of them shoot him twice, which, while it seems to make him bleed profusely, does not seem to affect him.

However, the skinny man informs him that one of the spectators did not eat the poisoned turkey, so the show must go on.  Meanwhile the tire, who appears to have a bit of a crush on a French woman driving a red Golf GTI convertible (after failing to make her its first kill) and imperiously ignores the son of the motel owner who is the first person to work out that it is the killer, and wants to communicate with it, rolls off and encounters a junk yard where piles of tires are being burnt.

This MAKES IT MAD, and we cut to three days later, where it has laid waste to an entire small town, leaving headless corpses littered everywhere.  MEANWHILE, the skinny man brings an entire cordon bleu meal to the stubborn remaining spectator (an army vet in a wheelchair), but when he refuses to eat it, eats it himself, apparently forgetting it is poisoned, and dies horribly (having recounted a tale of sibling violence that removes any pity one might have had for him).  Will the tire be stopped?  Well, certainly not by the cop's stupid plan of wiring a dummy with a dynamite and piping insulting words from the French woman over a radio attached to it, in the hope the tire will blow it up.

But maybe a shotgun will work?
All in all, a bit tiresome (and no, the pun wasn't planned when that adjective occurred to me).  Either do a horror film that works or go full art film.  But this is a poor example of either.  (Although this guy seems to disagree - although he might be being sarcastic.)  (Sidenote: it also continues a strange trend of being set in some indeterminate time, perhaps the eighties, currently beloved of all pop-culture producers (that certainly fits with the cars and the cathode-ray TVs with aerobics on them), but that seems to be just a way of avoiding having cellphones involved.  Cellphones, as has often been noted, destroy so many lazy plot devices that very few film makers seem to know how to incorporate them (off the top of my head I can only think of Zootopia as a successful example).  There's also the French director's clear love of Americana, especially the old motel with the huge beautiful 50's style sign, when in fact reality would've had an ugly Motel 6.)

In its favor, I will say that the cop and in particular the skinny man (Jack Plotnick - even the actors have fake-sounding names!) perform their roles with more commitment than they deserve (although the French woman, who has to endure an entirely gratuitous (you know - for NO REASON) naked shower scene, which involves the spectators offering their opinions of her anatomy, seems to be phoning it in).  And they do manage to get the tire to exude some menace, and for us to believe that it really does have telekinesis, largely by camera angles conveying its point of view.  And how they get the tire to roll under its own steam is a mystery of movie magic.  But in conclusion, despite what the tagline on the poster says, there has to be a better "killer tyre movie" waiting to be seen.  (Did make me want to visit the desert again, though - it was beautifully shot.)

Film review: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

(Unintentionally) continuing the Buckaroo theme, we have a "cult classic" from the eighties that we've somehow managed never to have seen up till now.  Like all good cult movies, this one was a flop at the time of its release, which isn't really surprising.  The title itself is probably offputting to most people, and the plot is pretty much un-summarizeable.  But here goes.  Back in the thirties, two scientists, a Japanese one called Professor Hikita, and an Italian called Dr. Emilio Lizardo (played appropriately outrageously by John Lithgow) experimented on a method to gain access to a parallel world, the 8th dimension.  In a manner reminiscent of Back to the Future, which also features Christopher Lloyd, this involves achieving a high land speed in an appropriately-powered vehicle.  Lizardo starts the vehicle (in his case, a kind of sled on a monorail) prematurely and, while he succeeds in getting his torso stuck in the 8th dimension, appears to have gone insane when he is pulled out.  We later learn this is because his body has become occupied by an evil alien supervillain who had been imprisoned in the 8th dimension by the aliens whose planet he had terrorized.  His name is Lord John Whorfin (it turns out that every alien on this planet, male or female, is called John).  But nobody knew that at the time, and just locked him up in an asylum for the criminally insane.  Flash forward to the eighties, and Professor Hikita is now being assisted by the brain-surgeon/rock musician/adventurer,

whose parents (one Japanese, the other American) were killed by The World Crime League (which was to set up a sequel, teased in the end credits, which has yet to come to pass), Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller, who would go on to star in another (more successful) cult classic, Robocop.  His vehicle of choice is some kind of souped-up rocket car, and he manages to drive through a mountain by jumping into the 8th dimension while inside it. His success is witnessed from the asylum by Dr. Lizardo/John Whorfin, who decides now is the time to escape (by killing a guard,

whom I knew I recognized, and finally realized was Mike Ermantrout from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, only young and with hair) and steal the device that Dr. Hikita has perfected.  Meanwhile, watching from in orbit, are the good aliens, who are determine to prevent Whorfin from using the device to return whence he was banished to wreak more havoc.  There are also two groups of competing aliens, bad (played by Christopher Lloyd and two other very familiar faces, Vincent Schiavelli and Dan "Cheers/Blood Simple" Hedaya)

and good (the surviving member of which is played by Carl Lumbly (whom I knew from Cagney and Lacey).  There's also a love story of sorts, as Buckaroo notices a crying woman ("Penny Priddy" - played by Ellen Barkin) at one of his shows and recognizes her as the twin of a woman he was in love with once.  Meanwhile, the "good" aliens communicate to all (including the President of the USA, who is immobilized in a back-stretching thingie, for some reason) that they will destroy a region of the USSR unless Whorfin is stopped, as this will cause thermonuclear war to break out (which will help them, somehow).  Buckaroo and friends (who include Jeff Goldblum, being very Goldblum-y in a setting that is entirely appropriate for full Goldblum-ing), discover a way that enables them to see through the alien disguises to expose the lizardy-faced aliens beneath.  (Did this idea influence John Carpenter's They Live?  I'm sure he took that secret to his grave.)  And the crew (The Hong Kong Cavaliers

- notably Perfect Tommy, who survives, and Rawhide, who perished by alien spider (but would go on to be the voice of Spongebob's Mr. Krabs) rush around chasing John Lithgow and his bad aliens as they try to launch the spaceship they've been building since they invaded the USA on the Halloween that Orson Welles transmitted War of the Worlds - which was actually a real report of a real invasion.  Confused?  Again, this was destined to be a cult movie, watched and re-watched on VHS.  But I've got to say that it is a lot better than most self-consciously cult movies, and despite making no sense whatsoever, has surprisingly good effects, enjoyably cheesy clothes and music, and genuinely funny lines delivered by a spectacular cast.  Don't make the mistake we made of not watching this movie for far too long!  Now to track down the extended cut which features Jamie Leigh Curtis in a flashback about Buckaroo's parents!