Reunited with director Tony Scott for the third time, Denzel Washington plays a New Orleans ATF agent brought in to investigate the bombing of a car ferry. A shadowy FBI agent  played by Val Kilmer introduces him to the latest surveillance technology, which can look in detail at the events of exactly four and a half days ago (no, don’t ask me).

The movie then becomes a combination of romance, police procedural and time/space paradox story, all filmed with Scott’s usual over-cranked style. As with Man On Fire, there’s a terrific score by Harry Gregson-Williams and inventive visuals courtesy of Scott and DP Paul Cameron, and Washington, Kilmer and Jim Caveziel do their best to give it some roots in reality. It’s the sort of movie that works well on  second viewing (there must be a joke here somewhere), even if you don’t fall for the ‘science’ involved.

The DVD is well presented but only contains some short extra features. Otherwise, it’s a very entertaining movie.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars

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It’s the cautionary tale of a group of young and under-dressed backpackers who end up marooned in the Brazilian jungle. After a bit of wandering around in nice scenery, it all gets nasty  enough to make you cancel that trip to Rio and go to Skegness instead, as it turns into a cross between Wish You Were Here and a ‘70s Philippino mad doctor slasher movie (come on, I know you’ve seen a few). I suspect that some scenes, and one in particular, have been added in to up the ante and compete with the recent ‘torture porn’ trend.

Surprisingly, director John Stockwell is the same guy who starred in Christine all those years ago – he seemed like such a pleasant bloke. To sum up, it’s well made, the girls and scenery look great, and one scene will put you right off your spaghetti Bolognese.

Available now in R1 in both rated and unrated versions; I watched the latter, I hope you appreciate the sacrifice.

Mild Peril Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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Ouch

Just after the release of Man On Fire, I dug out an old Tony Scott movie called Revenge. It makes a very interesting companion piece to the later movie, treating a similar story as one of revenge rather than redemption.

Kevin Costner stars as a fighter pilot who has an affair with Madeleine Stowe (unfortunately married to rich Mexican gangster Anthony Quinn), setting up a series of violent incidents. Although the movie is coated in Scott’s trademark style of the time (this was just after Top Gun), and the first half is more or less a standard romantic melodrama, it’s notable for an amazingly downbeat and serious second half which demonstrates the pointlessness and emptiness of revenge as a motive. Fine performances from the leads and from a great supporting cast, including Miguel Ferrer, Tomas Milian and John Leguizamo.

Update:

I reviewed Revenge a while ago, and now it’s returned in a director’s cut which is unusually 20 minutes SHORTER than the original.  A memorable bit of violence has been removed, the sex scenes are more explicit, a lot of the secondary characters have gone and it all feels more like a straightforward action movie. The end is still a real downer, in a positive way, but one dialogue scene has been removed which is badly missed. Scott is obviously trying to bring some attention to an unjustly-neglected part of his back catalogue, which is good, but it also seems he’s updating his movie to cater for a modern audience with a shorter attention span. Which isn’t good.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.6 out of 5 stars

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Three women are  forced to go on the run after their husbands are hanged, and they are pursued by assorted character actors, including Patrick Bergin, James Gammon and John Diehl, who believe they’ve got some  money hidden away.  Some of the dialogue is muffled and the terrain is never clearly mapped out, leaving me with the impression that the chase ended up where it started, but I might be  wrong. The New Mexico scenery looks great and the cast keep an admirably straight face throughout. (That is until the closing credits, where Bergin sings a ludicrous theme song in the  style of Frankie Laine, complete with vocal impressions of twangy guitars. Bonkers)

Not bad but not ambitious enough.

Mild Peril Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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As a bit of light relief, I watched The Jacket, which is a sort of SF movie directed by obscure English film-maker John Maybury. The good news is that it’s a thought-provoking and surprisingly moving story which is well worth putting the effort in for.

Adrien Brody stars as a veteran of the first Gulf War who is treated for his mental problems by wacky doctor Kris Kristofferson and his sensory-deprivation tank. Then it all gets a bit weird, involving flashbacks, flashes forward in time to 2007, Keira Knightley, or maybe none of the above.

There are a couple of fine performances among the supporting cast: a pre-Bond Daniel Craig plays well against type as a fellow patient (or is he?) and the late Brad Renfro puts in one of his final appearances.

As the websites say, ‘if you liked Memento or The Butterfly Effect you will like this’, although it’s more like Frequency and it suffered a similar mysterious box-office disappearance.

The extra features on the DVD are for once honest and worth watching.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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The Blind Dead at the drive-in

For less than fifteen quid, I picked up Anchor Bay’s R2 box set, The Blind Dead Collection, which covers Amando de Ossorio’s 4-film series made in Spain in the early 70s. These must have been inspired initially by the success of Night of the Living Dead, and are not without their attractions: the blurb claims ‘a relentless onslaught of creepy atmosphere, shocking violence, forbidden sexuality, and the still-chilling icons of Euro Horror: the eyeless undead who hunt by sound in their quest for human flesh’. For once the blurb isn’t far off, though it fails to mention the terrible acting, dubbing and increasingly stupid plotting.

Anyway, the titular bad guys are heretic Knights Templar, who seem to get an overall bad deal in movies. The idea that you can keep quiet and avoid them is initially neat but becomes more comic with overuse.

Tomb Of The Blind Dead (1971) is the first and works very well in parts, though I’m not sure about zombies riding horses and trains. The confusingly-titled Return Of The Evil Dead (1973) starts to smell a bit like a cash-in, and the suspicion is confirmed in number 3, imaginatively titled Blind Dead 3 (1974). By this time, de Ossorio is tiring of the gore and adds a load of naked ‘models’ to the cast as well as turning the Blind Dead into seafaring zombies (maybe this would be a good idea if you did it as a comedy…) Blind Dead 4 (1975) was actually titled Night Of The Seagulls when I first saw it, and is for completists only. De Ossorio’s talent for creepiness is still apparent but he doesn’t seem bothered by plot, continuity or anything else you might take for granted.

The box set contains a fifth disk with documentaries about and by de Ossorio. The whole thing is very interesting if viewed in a historical context (Spanish film-makers seemed to go a bit nuts after Franco died, shovelling on the sex and violence for no good reason except they had it saved up; see also Josef Grau’s bizarre Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue from 1974) and if you’ve got a strong stomach and an endless supply of alcohol then this is highly recommended at the price.

The American R1 box set is a lot fancier, being coffin-shaped, and has a few extra uncut seconds but costs four times as much.

Mild Peril Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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I expected a lot from Bruiser, a new movie from my old pal George A. Romero, which arrived on Belgian (?) DVD with very little fanfare.  It’s a nice concept, about a man who is ignored to the point where he wakes up with a blank white mask for a face. The cast includes several strange choices:  Jason Flemyng plays the lead without ever really earning our sympathy, or explaining why a Cockney is working in Toronto, and Peter Stormare plays the ‘villain’ with more charm than the part deserves.

There’s the political subtext and the deliberate pacing and clever visuals you expect from George, and there’s some neat acting from a host of semi-familiar faces in the supporting cast, but you get the impression that he doesn’t really know where to go with the idea.

The later release of the movie on DVD in more accessible markets, with a commentary by Romero, meant I had to buy it again. I’m no wiser now, but George is as genial as always and the movie works better second time around. It’s no more disturbing, apart from finding out that the teenage girl dancing in a bikini is George’s little daughter. The first time he’s ever seemed embarrassed.

File this under ‘interesting failures’ and wait for Dead 4.

Mild Peril Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express, and I'm talkin' to whoever's listenin' out there.

As late as the ‘eighties, before the studios knocked any genuine individuality out of their ‘product’,  and before Tarantino made it hip to drop lots of cultural references for no good reason,  it wan’t unusual to sit there surrounded by a largely baffled audience, most of them wondering if confusion was a good enough reason to ask for your money back.  A case in point was Big Trouble in Little China, John Carpenter’s affectionate tribute to Oriental action movies.

On the plus side – Carpenter’s usual visual panache (assisted by the great Dean Cundey) and thumping synth score, some great dialogue and pace that never lets up. The cast all seem to be in on the joke and throw themselves into it enthusiastically. On the minus side,  the UK audience at least had no context into which they could place the movie, apart from occasional glimpses of Bruce Lee movies. Another problem was that the hero, perfectly played by Kurt Russell, is an idiot, and I say that in a positive way.

All this flouting of convention is fine if your audience has the slightest clue what the conventions are. Looking back now, it all makes more sense, the jokes are very funny and even the cheesy effects add to the mix.  The humour is a lot broader than Carpenter’s early movies;  it’s the point where I started to suspect that he might be giving up on making serious movies, and it turned out that way.

Still, it’s got a lot of great quotes and you won’t have much more fun with any movie if you get into the right spirit.

The 2-disc DVD set is very well put together. The Carpenter/Russell commentary is almost as good as that for The Thing, and the other extras are fun without adding much. Crank up the volume for the terrific score but watch out for the dire music video on disc 2.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.4 out of 5 stars

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Electra Glide in Blue has finally been released in Region 1, unfortunately it’s the American release with a second of violence missing (which only partly explains the astonishing PG certificate). Even better, it’s less than a tenner and has a director’s commentary.

For the uneducated, this is a story of a traffic cop in Arizona with aspirations to become a detective, hampered by his corrupt bosses and the fact that he’s only five feet four inches tall. It’s the only movie directed by music producer James William Guercio and is stunningly photographed by the great Conrad Hall, and the story is slow and unpredictable but never boring.

Incidentally, the vinyl LP version of the soundtrack for this movie (see above) contains more stuff than any album I ever bought – a six foot poster of Blake and his bike in Monument Valley, stills, an Electra Guide blueprint and more. I suspect Guercio was involved in the album presentation, as well as getting several members of his most famous band Chicago to appear in the movie – fans of The Karate Kid should keep their eyes peeled for Peter Cetera…

Commercially, Electra Glide in Blue never really recovered from being labelled as ‘fascist’ at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival – another indicator of how much times have changed – but it’s slowly picked up a cult following over the years, and is now seen as more of a companion piece to Easy Rider than a direct attack on its politics. For my money it’s much better and has certainly stood the test of time better. It’s the sort of movie that doesn’t get made any more, and to be honest wasn’t made that often back then. Presumably it’s only being released due to star Robert Blake being in the news after being acquitted of murdering his wife, but either way it’s a fascinating snapshot of a very different time.

Mild Peril Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Will Patton in The Mothman Prophecies

Another true story (said with tongue firmly in cheek) inspired The Mothman Prophecies. What we’ve got here is an X-Files-type story with a bigger budget, wrapped around the actual event of a bridge falling into a river in Ohio in the late ‘60s. This is connected to several appearances in the weeks before the disaster of a winged creature with red eyes. (In fact, wasn’t there an episode of the X-Files based around the mothman, or did I dream it?)

Anyway, this version is relocated to recent years, and has Richard Gere as a bereaved reporter drawn to a small town where he encounters lots of spooky events leading up to the disaster. Gere displays the complete range of emotions from confused to puzzled, but he’s helped out by some fine supporting actors including Alan Bates and the great Will Patton. Mark Pellington, who previously made another oddball thriller with Arlington Road, directs it extremely well and adds lots of stylish touches, although the concentration on atmospherics and lack of a concrete villain (or even a rubber monster) may well irritate most viewers. But given the title and the star, the whole thing is much better than anyone had a right to expect. Just don’t expect a man in a giant moth costume.

Mild Peril Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

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