Posts Tagged ‘ Euro ’

The Blind Dead Collection (1971)

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...

I used to have a well-earned contempt for French cinema, the only exceptions being the films of Claude Chabrol. However in the last few years, I’ve either been getting old or it seems that French film-makers have been attempting to make movies for audiences outside their usual target. It’s hard to imagine Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension or the TV series Spiral as anything other than a reaction to the earlier cultural isolationism. Even more unlikely was the recent French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s typically American novel Tell No One. Hard on its heels comes a similar edgy thriller, Pour...

Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is visiting the Uffizi Gallery when she faints while staring at a a painting. She is befriended by a stranger and makes it home. Soon after she becomes involved in a vicious rape, and it transpires that she’s a policewoman on the trailer of a serial rapist/killer. She’s also afflicted by ‘The Stendhal Syndrome’, whose victims become overcome by works of art. As the plot thickens and the corpses pile up, it becomes apparent that no-one can be trusted. I had a bit of a problem writing the plot summary, as this movie contains very...

The Nest (2002)

An uncredited French remake from 2002 of John Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13. The Nest (the original title is Nid de Guêpes) features a cast who are unfamiliar to me but are convincingly stubbly and Gallic, and the plot is noticeably different from Carpenter’s but ends up in pretty much the same place, with a diverse bunch of heroes and villains uniting to fight off an unseen force. There’s a sequence involving freight containers in a huge warehouse that’s bound to be copied by Hollywood at some point and it’s all good fun for any fans of the...

Presumably this was supposed to be Tykwer’s breakthrough into the mainstream, filmed in English and with international stars in Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. It has a screenplay written by Polish director Krystof Kieslowski shortly before he died, although it shares a lot of the things that made Tykwer famous – dream sequences, characters apparently driven by fate, and an inability (or lack of desire) to tell the story in a linear way. The story, as far as I can tell, is about an English teacher played by Blanchett who becomes a terrorist on the run, and who is...

The Princess and the Warrior (2000)

Armed with the success of Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer surprisingly stayed in Germany with a slightly larger budget, and made The Princess and the Warrior in 2000. Again Franka Potente plays the central character, this time a nurse in a mental hospital who becomes involved with an escaping bank robber posing as an amnesiac, and again it’s a meditation on fate, madness and coincidence. This time it plays out as a slower-moving tragedy, but Tykwer repeats his mastery of composition and editing. Like John Carpenter, Tykwer writes his own music and like Carpenter, you can always admire the...

Insomnia (1997)

This is a 1997 Norwegian subtitled movie on the Criterion label… hey, what am I doing? Well, there’s method in this madness, as this movie has just been remade by Christopher Nolan starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams, as a follow-up to Memento. Here you get Stellan Skarsgard (probably best known to mainstream audiences as the unfortunate scientist in Deep Blue Sea) as a cop sent to a town above the Arctic Circle where it never goes dark, making a few mistakes and generally not behaving as we expect our heroes to do. It will be interesting to see...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest is A Very Long Engagement. Jeunet will be most familiar here as the director of Alien 4, but has had bigger non-genre hits with Delicatessen and Amelie. This tells the story of a girl played by Amelie’s Audrey Tautou who refuses to believe that her boyfriend has died in the WWI trenches, and sets out to find the full story. Like Jeunet’s previous movies, it’s a strange mix of Gallic humour and sentiment with big visuals and offbeat violence. The battle scenes are harrowing and unusual, and the post-war scenes are whimsical and poetic, leaving you...

Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension (released in the UK as Switchblade Romance for some reason) is an intense and striking horror thriller, reminding me of the old Robert Fuest movie And Soon The Darkness. Aja ratchets up the tension as two young girls wander about the French countryside, and it soon becomes painfully clear that what he’s doing is not remaking a cosy old Hammer thriller, but relocating ’70s US rural backwoods horror to an equivalent Gallic setting. Several viewers have noted a similarity between Haute Tension and Dean Koontz's novel Intensity, filmed for TV with John C. ReillyIn particular,...

Posts Tagged ‘ Euro ’

The Blind Dead Collection (1971)

Anything For Her (2008)

The Stendhal Syndrome (1997)

The Nest (2002)

Heaven (2002)

The Princess and the Warrior (2000)

Insomnia (1997)

A Very Long Engagement (2004)

Haute Tension (2003)

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