01/30/11
http://www.ldnews.com/valleylife/ci_17229261
Cocoon
The Crazies
Drifter
Predator
Psychomania
Repo Men
Run, Robot, Run
Cocoon
1985 / 20th Century Fox / 107m / BluRay $29.99 [PG-13]
Even at the risk of opening myself to charges of being completely deficient in cool, I will admit that I absolutely adore Cocoon. Yes, I know, it has that old standby, the poignant senior citizens whose wisdom is sadly offset by their declining physical abilities – but it was great to see a superior collection of older actors (Don Ameche, Gwen Verdon, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Wilford Brimley, Maureen Stapelton, Jack Gilford) given a chance to own a movie again (and some saw their film careers catch fire again).
Cocoon concerns immortal beings (headed up by Brian Dennehy and Tawnee Welch) who return to Earth to rescue colleagues left behind when Atlantis unexpectedly sank and hibernating in what look like large, barnacle-encrusted coconut shells. They stash the cocoons in the swimming pool of a mansion they’ve rented, which gives the water a rejuvenating effect. When the senior citizens next door discover this fountain of youth, the mission is jeopardized.
There is nothing particularly deep about Cocoon (it is a Ron Howard film, after all) yet there are some wonderful moments – such as the dolphins greeting the arrival of the aliens – and some heartwrenching ones; I dare you to get through the sequence where Jack Gilford tries to resuscitate his departed wife in the pool without crying like a baby. Howard may get a little too precious at times – such as when Ameche takes Verdon disco dancing (a too conspicuous use of stunt doubles undercuts the effect) – but the film is almost brutally unsentimental about the effects of aging.
Fox’s BluRay is a digital upgrade of their DVD release – it even has the same, often quirky, chapter stops – but with better color. Extras include a commentary by Howard, featurettes and trailers.
The Crazies
1973 / Blue Underground / 103m / BluRay $29.98 [R]
The accidental release of a biological weapon causes the small town of Evans City to be the site of a series of violent, unmotivated murders followed soon thereafter by the arrival of government agents in hazmat suits, toting rifles and rounding up the townsfolk for their own safety… or so they claim – some residents aren’t so sure. And sure enough, a nuclear strike to wipe out the town is planned if an antidote can’t be found within a proscribed deadline.
The Crazies (aka Code Name Trixie) was George Romero’s attempt to replicate the success of Night of the Living Dead and it grafts aspects of that film onto an Andromeda Strain plot. It was an ambitious film for a small budget and the decision to film in color further strainrd the resources. The larger cast of characters also resulted in a few too many sub-par performances. There are wonderfully effective moments – such as the scene in which an elderly lady, knitting away in her rocking chair, unexpectedly rises and stabs a soldier with her needles, then goes calmly back about her business. Romero’s usual political commentary is in place – in fact, given that cover-ups about the secret use of Agent Orange in Viet Nam, which had caused cancer in troops and civilians was being reported at the time the film was made, the entire production could be seen as political commentary.
The BluRay release is quite similar to the 2003 DVD release, with many extras carried over, including a Romero commentary.
Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas
2009 / Lionsgate / 81m / $14.98 [R]
Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (Antonio Sabato, Jr.) confessed to more murders than he actually committed (something like 3000); in this he was abetted by a sheriff hungry for the attention he’d get from closing the books on a whole lotta murders. Both wanted celebrity and Lucas additionally hoped for special treatment denied most other prisoners as a result of being “cooperative.” Both got the publicity – in the days before serial killer playing cards, Lucas had almost daily newspaper coverage – and Lucas died in prison in 2001 (from heart failure), his death sentence having been commuted to a life sentence by then-governor George W. Bush.
Director Michael Feifer’s biopic (which curiously has one of those “The characters and events depicted in this motion picture are fictional…” notices appended to its end credits) is admittedly a very different approach than John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but it’s also less effective. Bobbing about in time doesn’t build to anything (though some individual sequences work quite well), it just moseys on… and really, is this the type of movie where there ought to be a music video (and a lame one at that) midway through?
Drifter is of interest because of a quintet of superior performances. Kostas Sommer as O’Toole projects a good-ole-boy charm that can turn psychotic on a dime and John Diehl scores as Sherriff Larabe, who may or may not be aware of Lucas’ prevarication but is willing to use him as much as he is being used. Caia Coley delivers a ferocious and uncompromising performance as Lucas’ monstrous mother. Former AMC host John Burke is earnest as the DA, but hasn’t enough screen time. Holding this mosaic together in a riveting performance is Antonio Sabato, Jr., previously known for TV soaps and direct to DVD guilty pleasures such as Princess of Mars. Sabato is like that accident on the highway as he goes unemotionally about his killings – you don’t want to watch, but you can’t look away. The most extreme carnage is kept offscreen, but be warned: there are some brief gruesome images.
Predator (Ultimate Hunting Edition)
1987 / 20th Century Fox / 107m / BluRay $29.99 [R]
It is a tad disconcerting to look back on this sci-fi update of “The Most Dangerous Game” (and more than a little indebted to a low-budget predecessor, Greydon Clark’s Without Warning – 1980) and realize its lead performers – one a former bodybuilder, the other a professional wrestler – were both destined to become Republican state governors. Once upon a time boarding houses put up signs notifying, “No actors or dogs.” And there you have a snapshot of progress – or change at any rate – in the United States.
This testosterone-fueled action fest is as leanly plotted as they come, leaving lots of time for lots of things to get blown up in spectacular fashion as an alien creature lands on earth and starts hunting humans. Said representatives of humanity are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Carl weathers as an elite squad on some vaguely defined rescue mission in some vaguely Central American country. John McTiernan, a pro at action sequences, keeps things moving; what entertainment value the film posses is almost entirely due to his skill. The alien – a creation of the late Stan Winston – is an amzing piece of work.
The film was successful enough to spawn several sequels and a re-boot this past year. Fox released a grainy, bare-bones DVD of Predator two years ago; this one has an improved image (too improved according to some) and restores some of the extras from the the 2-disc DVD set.
Psychomania
1971 / Severin / 90m / $19.98 [PG]
In what may have been intended as a comedy, a Brit biker gang makes a pact with the Devil and returns from the dead. Seems that if you are unafraid of death and off yourself you’ll come back. This leads to amusing (?) scenes such as the one where a bobby tells one of the gang to get off the top of a building and the lad responds, “Be right down!” Another tosses himself from a plane sans parachute. One poor chap has his misgivings and simply dies. The gang’s leader gets this idea from his mother’s butler (George Sanders), who may also be the Devil.
Psychomania was filmed under the title The Living Dead (the name of the gang) and is also known under the title of The Death Wheelers. You may have caught it on the tube (it’s even been screened on TCM) under one of those titles – and possibly others as well. The scene of a grave erupting to belch forth motorcycle and rider are not easily forgotten. It’s pure cheese (there are far better genre titles on director Don Sharp’s resume) but it’s also fun.
The original negative for the film is long gone; Severin has tracked down the best prints it could find and done an admirable restoration job considering the shape of the materials they could locate. The extras, all created for this release, include interviews with the surviving cast members (some of whom were performing Shakespeare at night while filming this opus during the day).
Repo Men
2009 / Universal / 112-120m / $29.98 [R]
Repo Men posits a future where replacement organs are manufactured, not harvested. In this dystopian vision, Big Business has become involved and the horrendously expensive procedure is not covered by insurance; it can thus only be afforded by any of the fabulously rich with installment payments. What happens when a luckless client falls behind on his payments is illustrated in the opening sequence where repo man Jude Law anaesthetizes a deadbeat, slices him open on the kitchen floor and removes the past-due merchandise.
In this time of record mortgage foreclosures, Repo Men might have been conceived as social satire (there are some indications that was the aim in details such as a theater marquee promoting The Fast and the Furious X) but it settles for being a Summer Blockbuster chase film… its futuristic setting allowing for lots of CGI effects. Law, in due course, has a coronary, receives a transplant and soon finds his mailbox filled with those pesky overdue notices and takes it on the lam, pursued by his former friend a fellow Repo Ma (Forrest Whitaker). Littering the trail in this confused narrative are allusions to cosmetic surgery, immigration and a credit-based economy, which no doubt allowed the film makers to clap themselves on that back, congratulating themselves for making a relevant film.
What they’ve actually made, however, is a film that it seems to have been cobbled together from multiple screenplays – all wildly divergent in tone. And it only makes the old Alex Cox film whose name it conjures look even better by comparison.
Run, Robot, Run
2009 / Pathfinder / 90m / $24.98 [not rated]
An office comedy dressed up with sci-fi trappings, this Canadian-lensed film presents Kent (Chris Gibbs) as an office worker who loses a promotion to a robot (Peter Mooney). Worse, when this android, programmed to be a “nice guy” starts quoting Sartre and weeping at opera, Kent is in danger of losing his girlfriend (Lara Kelly) to the clockwork employee as well. Well, actually she’s not his girlfriend because he’s never worked up the courage to court her. Kent is as anal as they come – wearing an identical outfit to work every day, always ordering the same latte and so forth – and congenitally wary of change – his standard response to the R&D guy (Christian Potenza) is negative – and yes, the movie is making the point that the machine is more human than the man (and by extension humanity), but the touch is deft and the attitude sweet.
Most of the satirical comments, in fact, are nigh-subliminal (signs on bulletin boards for seminars entitled “Hypnotize Your Staff” and “The Power of Ambiguity”) or just in the props that dress the set (a bucket-sized “small drink” and a “small fries” the size of a dish-basin). The subtle script and a quartet of dead-on performances make this light comedy of situations and character work beautifully. The Canadians have not lost the gift for making modest films whose goals may not be stratospheric but which hit the target every time. They don’t do overblown blockbusters or pretentious art films. They do make agreeable films that don’t insult your intelligence and entertain you without wasting your time.
The Shadow Within
2007 / MTI / 93m / $24.95 [R]
This uneven ghost story is frustrating because it contains so many wonderful ideas, but is marred by several wrongheaded decisions. The film opens with an image – of a nude woman plunging though water – that will only be explained at the end (a possible nod to Guillermo del Toro’s, Pan’s Labyrinth as is setting the film in 1931, the period in which The Devil’s Backbone and Labyrinth are set). It then introduces us to that woman, Marie (Hayley J Williams) and the son, Maurice (Laurence Belcher), whom she has isolated in a large, remote, sparsely appointed house. Maurice’s twin brother, Jacques, died at birth and his mother is too wrapped up in her grief and anger to love the child who lived. Jacques is anything but departed, however; he sometimes possesses Maurice and the boy is further plagued by a claw-fingered shadow that (the film is unclear on this) may or may not be the dead twin.
The village, too, is suffocating from grief; the men are off at war and children are perishing from a diphtheria epidemic. When several of the women become aware of Maurice’s “gift,” they insist on using him in seances in an attempt to communicate with their deceased children. But Jacques – and the other deceased children – has his own agenda and the seances instead release a terrifying power.
Director Silvana Zancolo has elicited wonderful performances from his cast (most of whom will be unknown to U.S. viewers) and physically realized the sense of desolation felt by the characters. The village – a marvelous location set on vertiginous hills with many steps and inclined pavements – look a tad shabby and its narrow streets are under-populated; its cemetery is grimly picturesque, its tight confines bespeaking of the thousands of dead beneath its crowded monuments. Offsetting this, unfortunately, is that danged CGI shadow that is too hard-edged and cartoony to be effective. And without giving too much away, the “shock” ending – where it turns out the evil may not have been defeated after all – has become a deadly cliché. What might have been an exceptional ghost story is seriously flawed.
Spotlight DVD of he Week:
Sherlock Holmes: The Archive Collection [UR]
Synergy Entertainment / $24.95
Not surprisingly last year’s release of a reimagined Sherlock Holmes had the Public Domain producers scrambling to come up with collections of copyright-unhindered titles featuring the Baker Street sleuth. Naturally the old Arthur Wontner titles got trotted out along with those four Basil Rathbone entries that somehow didn’t have their copyrights renewed. Didn’t I buy all those on a Millcreek collection years ago? (Yes, in fact I did.)
Synergy’s Archive Collection, however, is a wonderfully quirky aggregation of (mostly) rare Sherlockiana. No, not everything here is a gem of first-water quality – in all honesty little of it is – but the selection are so unusual, and in some cases downright bizarre, that the 3-disc set serves as a marker of what PD offerings ought to be, but so rarely are. An appreciation of older styles of movie-making and acting are decidedly required here, but for those capable of embracing creakier productions of early film and television (nothing here is less than 50 years old), this collection is a treasure trove.
Yes, we do get a Wontner title, but it’s the rarely seen (and sometimes erroneously described as lost) The Fatal Hour from 1931. As it dates from the early years of sound technology in Britain, it’s a pretty static affair. Still there’s a nifty opening, obviously influenced by German Expressionism where a bank robbery and the murder of a guard is rendered in total darkness save a patch of light thrown on the floor from a window; scuffling feet are all that can be seen.
Lost in Limehouse, or Lady Esmeralda’s Predicament is a 1933 short performed in the self-mocking style of old, moustache-twirling melodramas. A little of this goes a long way, but the cast is game and accomplished. Limejuice Mystery is a British short with a cast of marionettes. It’s also more than a little incomprehensible.
Things pick up considerably with the second disc. “The Sting of Death,” is a 1955 episode of The Elgin Hour based on H. F. Heard’s story A Taste for Honey, one of several Heard wrote about the elderly “Mr. Mycroft,” a bee-keeper who solved mysteries in Sussex. Boris Karloff stars in this live TV performance with cramped sets. “The Man who Disappeared” (from “The Man with the Twisted Lip”) is the pilot episode for a British TV series that didn’t come to be. Pity, as it’s very well done; a great deal of exterior shooting gives viewers some generous views of London at the time.
Things take a turn for the strange with A Case of Hypnosis, featuring a cast of chimpanzees. Nearly as odd is 1933’s Strange Case of Hennessy with Cliff Edwards as Silo Dance (a Philo Vance spoof doesn’t properly belong here). It is interesting for a good cast and the unusual approach of being a semi-musical. The print is a bit splicey but otherwise looks good.
The third disc begins with “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” adapted for Your Show Time and filmed on the leftover sets from Joan of Arc. Rarities surface with the silent entries The Copper Beeches and The Man with the Twisted Lip. The former is a 1912 film from the French Éclair company, “Produced under the personal supervision of the author.” Less than a decade later the British Stoll company would tackle a series of adaptations that have a reputation amongst film fans for being both cheap and stodgy. The two-part Twisted Lip confirms that.
Another oddity is a Columbia cartoon from 1944 titled The Case of the Screaming Bishop; you can well see why the Warner Bros. cartoons are remembered and Columbia’s aren’t. It only briefly manages the insane invention of the Looney Toons – and surprisingly for the time, it isn’t even in color. The set closes with a bit of a cheat: Basil Rathbone in an episode from the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, but not portraying Holmes.
As with any PD collection, the quality is variable. There is some excessive nitrate decomposition at the beginning of Copper Beeches, but otherwise Synergy has acquired and/or improved upon better than average, and sometimes damned good, materials. Even the kinescope of “Sting of Death” is one of the better such examples we’ve seen.
Sherlock Holmes: the Archive Collection
The Shadow Within
http://www.ldnews.com/valleylife/ci_17229261
Cocoon
The Crazies
Drifter
Predator
Psychomania
Repo Men
Run, Robot, Run
Cocoon
1985 / 20th Century Fox / 107m / BluRay $29.99 [PG-13]
Even at the risk of opening myself to charges of being completely deficient in cool, I will admit that I absolutely adore Cocoon. Yes, I know, it has that old standby, the poignant senior citizens whose wisdom is sadly offset by their declining physical abilities – but it was great to see a superior collection of older actors (Don Ameche, Gwen Verdon, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Wilford Brimley, Maureen Stapelton, Jack Gilford) given a chance to own a movie again (and some saw their film careers catch fire again).
Cocoon concerns immortal beings (headed up by Brian Dennehy and Tawnee Welch) who return to Earth to rescue colleagues left behind when Atlantis unexpectedly sank and hibernating in what look like large, barnacle-encrusted coconut shells. They stash the cocoons in the swimming pool of a mansion they’ve rented, which gives the water a rejuvenating effect. When the senior citizens next door discover this fountain of youth, the mission is jeopardized.
There is nothing particularly deep about Cocoon (it is a Ron Howard film, after all) yet there are some wonderful moments – such as the dolphins greeting the arrival of the aliens – and some heartwrenching ones; I dare you to get through the sequence where Jack Gilford tries to resuscitate his departed wife in the pool without crying like a baby. Howard may get a little too precious at times – such as when Ameche takes Verdon disco dancing (a too conspicuous use of stunt doubles undercuts the effect) – but the film is almost brutally unsentimental about the effects of aging.
Fox’s BluRay is a digital upgrade of their DVD release – it even has the same, often quirky, chapter stops – but with better color. Extras include a commentary by Howard, featurettes and trailers.
The Crazies
1973 / Blue Underground / 103m / BluRay $29.98 [R]
The accidental release of a biological weapon causes the small town of Evans City to be the site of a series of violent, unmotivated murders followed soon thereafter by the arrival of government agents in hazmat suits, toting rifles and rounding up the townsfolk for their own safety… or so they claim – some residents aren’t so sure. And sure enough, a nuclear strike to wipe out the town is planned if an antidote can’t be found within a proscribed deadline.
The Crazies (aka Code Name Trixie) was George Romero’s attempt to replicate the success of Night of the Living Dead and it grafts aspects of that film onto an Andromeda Strain plot. It was an ambitious film for a small budget and the decision to film in color further strainrd the resources. The larger cast of characters also resulted in a few too many sub-par performances. There are wonderfully effective moments – such as the scene in which an elderly lady, knitting away in her rocking chair, unexpectedly rises and stabs a soldier with her needles, then goes calmly back about her business. Romero’s usual political commentary is in place – in fact, given that cover-ups about the secret use of Agent Orange in Viet Nam, which had caused cancer in troops and civilians was being reported at the time the film was made, the entire production could be seen as political commentary.
The BluRay release is quite similar to the 2003 DVD release, with many extras carried over, including a Romero commentary.
Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas
2009 / Lionsgate / 81m / $14.98 [R]
Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (Antonio Sabato, Jr.) confessed to more murders than he actually committed (something like 3000); in this he was abetted by a sheriff hungry for the attention he’d get from closing the books on a whole lotta murders. Both wanted celebrity and Lucas additionally hoped for special treatment denied most other prisoners as a result of being “cooperative.” Both got the publicity – in the days before serial killer playing cards, Lucas had almost daily newspaper coverage – and Lucas died in prison in 2001 (from heart failure), his death sentence having been commuted to a life sentence by then-governor George W. Bush.
Director Michael Feifer’s biopic (which curiously has one of those “The characters and events depicted in this motion picture are fictional…” notices appended to its end credits) is admittedly a very different approach than John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but it’s also less effective. Bobbing about in time doesn’t build to anything (though some individual sequences work quite well), it just moseys on… and really, is this the type of movie where there ought to be a music video (and a lame one at that) midway through?
Drifter is of interest because of a quintet of superior performances. Kostas Sommer as O’Toole projects a good-ole-boy charm that can turn psychotic on a dime and John Diehl scores as Sherriff Larabe, who may or may not be aware of Lucas’ prevarication but is willing to use him as much as he is being used. Caia Coley delivers a ferocious and uncompromising performance as Lucas’ monstrous mother. Former AMC host John Burke is earnest as the DA, but hasn’t enough screen time. Holding this mosaic together in a riveting performance is Antonio Sabato, Jr., previously known for TV soaps and direct to DVD guilty pleasures such as Princess of Mars. Sabato is like that accident on the highway as he goes unemotionally about his killings – you don’t want to watch, but you can’t look away. The most extreme carnage is kept offscreen, but be warned: there are some brief gruesome images.
Predator (Ultimate Hunting Edition)
1987 / 20th Century Fox / 107m / BluRay $29.99 [R]
It is a tad disconcerting to look back on this sci-fi update of “The Most Dangerous Game” (and more than a little indebted to a low-budget predecessor, Greydon Clark’s Without Warning – 1980) and realize its lead performers – one a former bodybuilder, the other a professional wrestler – were both destined to become Republican state governors. Once upon a time boarding houses put up signs notifying, “No actors or dogs.” And there you have a snapshot of progress – or change at any rate – in the United States.
This testosterone-fueled action fest is as leanly plotted as they come, leaving lots of time for lots of things to get blown up in spectacular fashion as an alien creature lands on earth and starts hunting humans. Said representatives of humanity are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Carl weathers as an elite squad on some vaguely defined rescue mission in some vaguely Central American country. John McTiernan, a pro at action sequences, keeps things moving; what entertainment value the film posses is almost entirely due to his skill. The alien – a creation of the late Stan Winston – is an amzing piece of work.
The film was successful enough to spawn several sequels and a re-boot this past year. Fox released a grainy, bare-bones DVD of Predator two years ago; this one has an improved image (too improved according to some) and restores some of the extras from the the 2-disc DVD set.
Psychomania
1971 / Severin / 90m / $19.98 [PG]
In what may have been intended as a comedy, a Brit biker gang makes a pact with the Devil and returns from the dead. Seems that if you are unafraid of death and off yourself you’ll come back. This leads to amusing (?) scenes such as the one where a bobby tells one of the gang to get off the top of a building and the lad responds, “Be right down!” Another tosses himself from a plane sans parachute. One poor chap has his misgivings and simply dies. The gang’s leader gets this idea from his mother’s butler (George Sanders), who may also be the Devil.
Psychomania was filmed under the title The Living Dead (the name of the gang) and is also known under the title of The Death Wheelers. You may have caught it on the tube (it’s even been screened on TCM) under one of those titles – and possibly others as well. The scene of a grave erupting to belch forth motorcycle and rider are not easily forgotten. It’s pure cheese (there are far better genre titles on director Don Sharp’s resume) but it’s also fun.
The original negative for the film is long gone; Severin has tracked down the best prints it could find and done an admirable restoration job considering the shape of the materials they could locate. The extras, all created for this release, include interviews with the surviving cast members (some of whom were performing Shakespeare at night while filming this opus during the day).
Repo Men
2009 / Universal / 112-120m / $29.98 [R]
Repo Men posits a future where replacement organs are manufactured, not harvested. In this dystopian vision, Big Business has become involved and the horrendously expensive procedure is not covered by insurance; it can thus only be afforded by any of the fabulously rich with installment payments. What happens when a luckless client falls behind on his payments is illustrated in the opening sequence where repo man Jude Law anaesthetizes a deadbeat, slices him open on the kitchen floor and removes the past-due merchandise.
In this time of record mortgage foreclosures, Repo Men might have been conceived as social satire (there are some indications that was the aim in details such as a theater marquee promoting The Fast and the Furious X) but it settles for being a Summer Blockbuster chase film… its futuristic setting allowing for lots of CGI effects. Law, in due course, has a coronary, receives a transplant and soon finds his mailbox filled with those pesky overdue notices and takes it on the lam, pursued by his former friend a fellow Repo Ma (Forrest Whitaker). Littering the trail in this confused narrative are allusions to cosmetic surgery, immigration and a credit-based economy, which no doubt allowed the film makers to clap themselves on that back, congratulating themselves for making a relevant film.
What they’ve actually made, however, is a film that it seems to have been cobbled together from multiple screenplays – all wildly divergent in tone. And it only makes the old Alex Cox film whose name it conjures look even better by comparison.
Run, Robot, Run
2009 / Pathfinder / 90m / $24.98 [not rated]
An office comedy dressed up with sci-fi trappings, this Canadian-lensed film presents Kent (Chris Gibbs) as an office worker who loses a promotion to a robot (Peter Mooney). Worse, when this android, programmed to be a “nice guy” starts quoting Sartre and weeping at opera, Kent is in danger of losing his girlfriend (Lara Kelly) to the clockwork employee as well. Well, actually she’s not his girlfriend because he’s never worked up the courage to court her. Kent is as anal as they come – wearing an identical outfit to work every day, always ordering the same latte and so forth – and congenitally wary of change – his standard response to the R&D guy (Christian Potenza) is negative – and yes, the movie is making the point that the machine is more human than the man (and by extension humanity), but the touch is deft and the attitude sweet.
Most of the satirical comments, in fact, are nigh-subliminal (signs on bulletin boards for seminars entitled “Hypnotize Your Staff” and “The Power of Ambiguity”) or just in the props that dress the set (a bucket-sized “small drink” and a “small fries” the size of a dish-basin). The subtle script and a quartet of dead-on performances make this light comedy of situations and character work beautifully. The Canadians have not lost the gift for making modest films whose goals may not be stratospheric but which hit the target every time. They don’t do overblown blockbusters or pretentious art films. They do make agreeable films that don’t insult your intelligence and entertain you without wasting your time.
The Shadow Within
2007 / MTI / 93m / $24.95 [R]
This uneven ghost story is frustrating because it contains so many wonderful ideas, but is marred by several wrongheaded decisions. The film opens with an image – of a nude woman plunging though water – that will only be explained at the end (a possible nod to Guillermo del Toro’s, Pan’s Labyrinth as is setting the film in 1931, the period in which The Devil’s Backbone and Labyrinth are set). It then introduces us to that woman, Marie (Hayley J Williams) and the son, Maurice (Laurence Belcher), whom she has isolated in a large, remote, sparsely appointed house. Maurice’s twin brother, Jacques, died at birth and his mother is too wrapped up in her grief and anger to love the child who lived. Jacques is anything but departed, however; he sometimes possesses Maurice and the boy is further plagued by a claw-fingered shadow that (the film is unclear on this) may or may not be the dead twin.
The village, too, is suffocating from grief; the men are off at war and children are perishing from a diphtheria epidemic. When several of the women become aware of Maurice’s “gift,” they insist on using him in seances in an attempt to communicate with their deceased children. But Jacques – and the other deceased children – has his own agenda and the seances instead release a terrifying power.
Director Silvana Zancolo has elicited wonderful performances from his cast (most of whom will be unknown to U.S. viewers) and physically realized the sense of desolation felt by the characters. The village – a marvelous location set on vertiginous hills with many steps and inclined pavements – look a tad shabby and its narrow streets are under-populated; its cemetery is grimly picturesque, its tight confines bespeaking of the thousands of dead beneath its crowded monuments. Offsetting this, unfortunately, is that danged CGI shadow that is too hard-edged and cartoony to be effective. And without giving too much away, the “shock” ending – where it turns out the evil may not have been defeated after all – has become a deadly cliché. What might have been an exceptional ghost story is seriously flawed.
Spotlight DVD of he Week:
Sherlock Holmes: The Archive Collection [UR]
Synergy Entertainment / $24.95
Not surprisingly last year’s release of a reimagined Sherlock Holmes had the Public Domain producers scrambling to come up with collections of copyright-unhindered titles featuring the Baker Street sleuth. Naturally the old Arthur Wontner titles got trotted out along with those four Basil Rathbone entries that somehow didn’t have their copyrights renewed. Didn’t I buy all those on a Millcreek collection years ago? (Yes, in fact I did.)
Synergy’s Archive Collection, however, is a wonderfully quirky aggregation of (mostly) rare Sherlockiana. No, not everything here is a gem of first-water quality – in all honesty little of it is – but the selection are so unusual, and in some cases downright bizarre, that the 3-disc set serves as a marker of what PD offerings ought to be, but so rarely are. An appreciation of older styles of movie-making and acting are decidedly required here, but for those capable of embracing creakier productions of early film and television (nothing here is less than 50 years old), this collection is a treasure trove.
Yes, we do get a Wontner title, but it’s the rarely seen (and sometimes erroneously described as lost) The Fatal Hour from 1931. As it dates from the early years of sound technology in Britain, it’s a pretty static affair. Still there’s a nifty opening, obviously influenced by German Expressionism where a bank robbery and the murder of a guard is rendered in total darkness save a patch of light thrown on the floor from a window; scuffling feet are all that can be seen.
Lost in Limehouse, or Lady Esmeralda’s Predicament is a 1933 short performed in the self-mocking style of old, moustache-twirling melodramas. A little of this goes a long way, but the cast is game and accomplished. Limejuice Mystery is a British short with a cast of marionettes. It’s also more than a little incomprehensible.
Things pick up considerably with the second disc. “The Sting of Death,” is a 1955 episode of The Elgin Hour based on H. F. Heard’s story A Taste for Honey, one of several Heard wrote about the elderly “Mr. Mycroft,” a bee-keeper who solved mysteries in Sussex. Boris Karloff stars in this live TV performance with cramped sets. “The Man who Disappeared” (from “The Man with the Twisted Lip”) is the pilot episode for a British TV series that didn’t come to be. Pity, as it’s very well done; a great deal of exterior shooting gives viewers some generous views of London at the time.
Things take a turn for the strange with A Case of Hypnosis, featuring a cast of chimpanzees. Nearly as odd is 1933’s Strange Case of Hennessy with Cliff Edwards as Silo Dance (a Philo Vance spoof doesn’t properly belong here). It is interesting for a good cast and the unusual approach of being a semi-musical. The print is a bit splicey but otherwise looks good.
The third disc begins with “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” adapted for Your Show Time and filmed on the leftover sets from Joan of Arc. Rarities surface with the silent entries The Copper Beeches and The Man with the Twisted Lip. The former is a 1912 film from the French Éclair company, “Produced under the personal supervision of the author.” Less than a decade later the British Stoll company would tackle a series of adaptations that have a reputation amongst film fans for being both cheap and stodgy. The two-part Twisted Lip confirms that.
Another oddity is a Columbia cartoon from 1944 titled The Case of the Screaming Bishop; you can well see why the Warner Bros. cartoons are remembered and Columbia’s aren’t. It only briefly manages the insane invention of the Looney Toons – and surprisingly for the time, it isn’t even in color. The set closes with a bit of a cheat: Basil Rathbone in an episode from the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, but not portraying Holmes.
As with any PD collection, the quality is variable. There is some excessive nitrate decomposition at the beginning of Copper Beeches, but otherwise Synergy has acquired and/or improved upon better than average, and sometimes damned good, materials. Even the kinescope of “Sting of Death” is one of the better such examples we’ve seen.
Sherlock Holmes: the Archive Collection
The Shadow Within
