Peretti isn’t your typical giallo cop. He’s attentive to detail, intuitive, tenacious and definitely not there for comic relief. In fact, with the exception of the snivelling cop-hating rag-and-bone man Mattio Guardapelle (Dante Maggio), there are no characters who provide comic relief. ‘My Dear Killer’ is populated with as sleazy, cynical and black-hearted a group of characters as you could ever hope not to meet. At least two of them – moist-lipped sculptor Beniamino (Alfredo Mayo) and trucking company boss Giorgio Canavese (William Berger) – are paedophiles, while the various members of the Moroni family are dysfunctional plus VAT.
Elsewhere, however, it’s business as usual for this genre. ‘My Dear Killer’ emerges as something of a precursor to ‘Deep Red’, with a child’s drawing providing a crucial clue, while Peretti races from clue to clue, witness to witness, only to find, as the bodies pile up, that the killer is always one step ahead of him. (If Argento and his ‘Deep Red’ co-writer Bernardino Zapponi did rip off ‘My Dear Killer’, all I can say is power to them: they took some elements from a middling giallo and amalgamated them into one of the genre’s bona fide masterworks. Also, ‘Deep Red’ has an ending that functions like a blow to the solar plexus, while ‘My Dear Killer’ winds up in Agatha Christie fashion with Peretti arraying the suspects in a sitting room and delivering a five-minute monologue.)
Maybe that’s the essential problem with ‘My Dear Killer’: it goes for the gore as nastily as anything by Fulci with its power tool set-piece, and it baits controversy with the aforementioned imagery, but ultimately it’s slow-burn procedural with a yawn-fest denouement that, for all Peretti’s loquacity, leaves several plot points unanswered. I used the word “watchable” a couple of paragraphs ago: it’s a good epitaph for this film. ‘My Dear Killer’ is consistently watchable, and even delivers a couple of scenes that are genuinely gripping; but it’s memorable for the wrong reasons.
It was bad. Reeeeaaaaal bad. To call it a piece of shit would be an insult to excrement, a slur on the good name of steaming piles of turd.
So we should have known better when, doing a post-payday food shop at our local supermarket on Wednesday evening, we came across a DVD with this cover image:
Last night, having returned from a book launch at the University of Nottingham’s Archaeology Museum of a title on Roman Nottinghamshire, I sat down to watch ‘Sharktopus’ (a Roger Corman production). It was an evening of contrasts.
To be fair, ‘Sharktopus’ wasn’t as bad as ‘Army of the Dead’ (elements of it even suggest that – a few films down the line and with a better budget – there might be a possibility of director Declan O’Brien achieving basic filmmaking competence). But that’s kind of like saying the smelly old guy playing the spoons in the town square is demonstrating better musicianship than Justin Bieber. It’s an inarguable fact, but … y’know …
‘Sharktopus’ starts with Nathan Sands (Eric Roberts) – the head honcho of a marine-biology outfit called Blue Water – demonstrating for the benefit of hardnosed Navy dude Commander Cox (Calvin Persson) the operational capacity of their new development: the S-11. In other words, our titular and tentacled friend the Sharktopus. Outfitted with a gizmo type thing that controls it means of electrical impulses, with Sands’s brainy and standoffish yet still kinda cute bio-geneticist boffin daughter Nicole (Sara Malakul Lane) at the controls (it functions a bit like a radio-control boat … one bigger … and, uh, with teeth … and, y’know, tentacles), things go tits up when it gets walloped by a passing boat, the electro-pulsar-control device thingy malfunctions and the Sharktopus heads down Mexico way to terrorize, terrify and chow down on anyone and everyone.
For “anyone and everyone” read “nubile girls in bikinis”. For its first half hour ‘Sharktopus’ consists of little more than bits of incoherent exposition being partitioned out amongst endless shots of nubile girls in bikinis. There’s the nubile girl in a bikini who goes running into the ocean for the obligatory ‘Jaws’ homage at the start of the movie …
(Interrupting this Agitation of the Mind review, we go live to WWE for tonight’s Pout Bout. First round, Andy the shark-hunting dude versus sulky emo chick:
Round two: Andy the shark-hunting dude versus sulky vampire dude:
Eventually the endless montages of pretty people admiring the local colour at seaside resorts, where every establishing shot features the pert derriere of a nubile girl in a bikini sashaying into the frame, must end. And they end in blood. The Sharktopus, not content to keep it real in da water …
In short, it all ends the only way this kind of movie can: man and shark resolve their differences, become friends, and fight for the common goal of world peace and environmental concerns, revealing ‘Sharktopus’ in its closing scenes as a poignant and powerful work of cinema by a soon-to-be major talent.
Nah, only kidding.
Cracking new poster for the Alan Sillitoe Statue Fund event Friday next week (kudos to James K Walker): a screening of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' starring the incomparable Albert Finney. It's showing at Antenna, Beck Street, Nottingham; event starts at 7.30pm. The film will be introduced by David Sillitoe, in conversation with award-winning novelist Nicola Monaghan ('The Killing Jar'), there'll be live music from local band Blue Yonder, and - oh yes - there's a bar.
In descending order of both recency and annoyance, I present three examples:
3) Twenty years ago, my aunt was watching ‘Dances With Wolves’ when some stumbling inebriate came lurching into the cinema, a good hour and a half into the film, and stood swaying in the aisle, blinking myopically as he focussed on the screen. “Oh yeah,” he slurred, “seen this. Wolf gets shot.” And blundered back out.
2) Ten years ago, a mate of mine was driving to the cinema to see ‘The Sixth Sense’ – actually frickin’ en route – and listening to the car radio when a blabbermouth DJ gave the ending away.
1) Last year, the day before I was planning to go and see ‘Shutter Island’, I read an online review whose author didn’t have the common decency to throw up a spoiler alert. Moreover, the way this doofus painted the ending, it sounded like the kind of movie I’d feel conned by and get annoyed at. So I stayed away. There’s something downright fucking unholy about being made to feel that you need to stay away from a Martin Scorsese film.
A few weeks ago, I felt that enough time had passed and added it to my rental list. The DVD turned up over the weekend. On Monday evening, fortified by half a bottle of wine, I sat down to watch it.
Damn, I wish I’d seen it at the cinema!
In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about –
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is as good a place as any to ensure I don’t do unto others as was done unto me. In other words: SPOILER ALERT. I say again: SPOILER ALERT. And for a third time, just to make sure nobody holds anything against me: SPOILER ALERT.
In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about himself. About his past. About why his dreams are rendered into nightmare by memories of his dead wife Dolores (Michelle Williams). He learns why he doesn’t really know anything about his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) prior to their assignation to track down an escaped mental patient on the Alcatraz-like clinical facility of the title. He learns why his painful memories of the liberation of Auschwitz and inextricably bound up with the present, why he is so fixated on the whereabouts of deranged arsonist Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), and what the cryptic note left by the enigmatic Rachel Solando (played in two incarnations by Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson) truly means.
Having seen the film only in the context of knowing its ending, I’d like to hazard a guess that like, say, Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, it’s a work that becomes infinitely more rewarding – certainly a film that reveals itself as subversively multi-faceted – once you know what to look for. The opening scene, depicting Teddy and Chuck’s ferry crossing to the island, initially comes across as shoddily edited, all weird cuts, spatial dislocations and shots that clearly don’t match. In hindsight, it’s cinematic sleight of hand, a woozy syncopation that throws the viewer out of normalcy and into a state of mind.
Scorsese perpetuates the tactic right up until the final act: gothic imagery abounds, apocalyptic storms lash the island, the agonies of Mahler are seared into the soundtrack, paranoia bleeds into the fabric of the film, conspiracies ooze out of the woodwork and the stone walls, identities are incrementally challenged, reality and madness dance a dizzying pas de deux around each other, and the lunatics – in more than one chillingly effective set-piece – seem ready to take over the asylum.
To the doofus whose review I mentioned earlier, thank you for giving me the tools by which to fully appreciate ‘Shutter Island’ on first viewing. And screw you that I didn’t go see it on the big screen.
I've been paid, the money-grubbing bastards who provide my internet connection have had their pound of flesh, I'm back online, and there's a slew of reviews in the pipeline, including a trashy Roger Corman cheapie, something dark and nasty from one of Korea's leading lights, another Giallo Sunday offering, and a double helping of Asia Argento.
Who are your favourite big screen tough guys? Bogart? Cagney? Eastwood? Maybe the muscle men action hero types: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, van Damme? The martial arts brigade, perhaps: Lee, Li, Chan? How about heroic bloodshed poster boy Chow Yuen Fat? Takeshi Kitano?
No doubt all of them would stake their claim to the title. So let’s leave them queuing up outside the Movie Tough Guy Club while Liam Neeson strolls right in with a VIP pass, a fucking big gun, a thousand-yard stare and a palpable disinclination to put up with anybody’s shit.
On the basis of ‘Taken’ alone – although there are plentiful indicators in his back catalogue, from ‘Darkman’ to ‘Batman Begins’ – Liam Neeson is the big screen tough guy I’d want in my corner if the chips were down and the bullets were flying.
‘Taken’ – directed by Pierre Morel from a script by co-written by Gaellic genre factory Luc Besson – gives us Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former secret service operative estranged from his high-maintenance wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doing his best to be there for his seventeen year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and resenting the pull on her affections exerted by millionaire step-father Stuart (Xander Berkeley).
When Kim decides she wants to travel to Paris with her school friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) – a trip devoid of adult supervision – Stuart and Lenore blithely okay it. Mills, however, is dubious. Lenore and Kim pressure him and reluctantly he consents to the trip. His worst fears are confirmed during Kim’s first night on French soil when she and Amanda are abducted by Albanian gangster types who supply brothels with doped up American girls and auction off the better looking abductees to Arab sheikhs. (And, yes, the depiction of said foreign nationals is every bit as stereotyped as that last sentence implies.)
Mills is on the phone to Kim when the Albanians come calling and the connection remains unbroken long enough for him to deliver this little homily: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
‘Taken’ unfolds with all the grim determination of its protagonist. Such criticisms as can be levelled – twenty-somethings Grace and Cassidy don’t quite convince as naïve teenagers; Holly Valance is bland in a supporting role; the bad guys are one-dimensional – are hardly valid when ‘Taken’ not only achieves exactly what it sets out to do (ie. serve as a delivery system for action scenes), but does so with such honesty, immediacy and lack of pretentiousness that its plethora of chases (vehicular and pedestrian), shoot-outs and hand-to-hand smack-downs add up to a full-throttle action/revenge movie that make most examples of its ilk look tired and anaemic by comparison. ‘Taken’ is about as good as this kind of movie gets.
Post credits, Christian (Robert Hoffmann) and his on-off artist girlfriend Xenia (Maria Pia Conte) are walking along a beach when they spot a body lying face down. Xenia is horrified and hangs back; Christian goes to investigate. The body turns out to be very much alive; a victim of sunstroke who had momentarily passed out. She introduces herself as Barbara (Suzy Kendall) and Christian offers to fetch a flask of whisky from his car to help revive her. Barbara disappears, however, leaving behind an item by which Christian tracks her to a yacht owned by Barbara’s moneyed and much older boyfriend Alex (Mario Erpichini).
These sequences bookend two minutes of credits interspersed with rapid, disorientating cuts to a series of mannequins in macabre and sexualized tableaux. Their relevance is something that Lenzi doesn’t reveal until the very last scene; a nasty, morbid coda to an hour and a half of not-what-it-seems plotting.
Returning to the motel after a heated discussion with Barbara and Alex back at the yacht, Christian is disturbed to find the body missing. Meanwhile, more mannequins in death poses are turning up. Barbara flees Alex’s possessive influence and holes up with Christian in a holiday home she claims belongs to a friend of hers but is being occupied by the saturnine Malcolm (Guido Alberti) and his much younger consort Clorinda (Monica Monet). Christian comes to believe that he’s met Clorinda before and that she has something to do with his brother. As a plethora of unsettling events play out, Christian tries to hang on to his sanity while dealing with Alex’s benign influence and the possibility that the psychotic Tatum might not be dead after all.
Things start clicking into place after an assassination attempt that plays out unexpectedly, sending Christian on a desperate chase to piece the remaining clues together. Everything is explained by the end credits, but Lenzi seems hellbent – right up to the end – to monkey with audience expectations. His determinism in this respect is entirely commendable, although it does make ‘Spasmo’ something of a hard slog in places, certainly in the middle section where the accretion of elliptical and seemingly uncontextualized incidents threaten to become infuriating.
The final third of the film more than compensates, however. The performances are uniformly good, with Kendall in particular taking a character who could have been unbearably histrionic and instead honing the characterization beyond what the often utilitarian script gives her to work with. It’s stylishly shot by Guglielmo Mancori, who makes excellent use of locations varying from swanky yachts and beach houses to abandoned quarries and industrial works. And those mannequins – carrying on a giallo tradition established by Mario Bava’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’ – bring a creepy visual element that’s all their own.
