Hamlet the Viking

The Northman (2022) is the heavy intense movie we didn't watch on Friday, preferring something silly. It was as expected.

Director Dave Eggers sets the scene in an old Viking town, with young Amleth running around. His father, Ethan Hawke, has come home to a happy reception from his wife, Nicole Kidman. There is a big feast where we also meet his uncle, Claes Bang, who seems to have a bad temper, threatening the king's fool, Willem Dafoe. Later that night, Dafoe leads father and son in a ritual where they bark like the dogs they are. The ritual will make them men - and Amleth vows the avenge his father if he is killed.

But the next day, Bang and his men ambush Hawke, killing him and taking Kidman captive. Amleth witnesses this, and runs off.

The adult Amleth, Alexander Skarsgard, is a berserker fighting in the land of the Rus. His band is attacking a village, killing the men, raping the women, taking slaves. They heard the weak and elderly into a long house and set it on fire - pretty brutal stuff. After the battle, he runs into a priestess, Bjork, who sees his sooth and reminds him of his oath. So he joins the slaves being sent back to - who would have guessed it? His uncle Claes. 

In the ship, he meets Rus girl Anya Taylor Joy. They form an alliance to get revenge, each for their own reasons, on Bang. I feel here that she is pretty forgiving in regard to Skarsgard's pillaging, etc. I think that is the point though - they just thought differently about violence, honor and vengeange in those days. 

In the last act, Skarsgard and Joy, of course, wreak that vengeance. Their plot involves a magic sword for Skarsgard, magic mushrooms from Joy. And of course, big violence. 

So, obviously a great movie. The feeling of great historical accuracy, the clothes, the villages, the lore, seems to be earned - lots of scholars helped out. You could also feel how alien the people's norms and manners were. The magic and rituals (three or four, I think) were also very realistic, although Eggers says that the first one was pretty much made up. But it was also a great costume adventure, like Conan the Barbarian or The Vikings. The violence (physical and emotional) were pretty intense, but not as offputting as I feared. And it was fun teasing out the Hamlet references (Eggers and Shakespeare shared the same sources). 

You May Say I'm a Screamer

As I've said, sometimes, especially on a Friday night. we just want something stupid. Screamers: The Hunting (2009) really fit that bill. Roughly speaking, it's an Alien/Aliens pastiche, based on a Philip K. Dick short story (very loosely, I'd guess).

It starts a small band of survivors getting massacred by robot buzzsaws with metal tails. Then we move on to our group of seven or eight good-looking young space men and women coming out of hibernation. Then we get the exposition dump. This planet used be overpopulated, so they invented some robots to kill everyone who didn't have the proper tab (or tag? I'm a little fuzzy on all this, because I was riffing over the start). But they killed off everyone, and went extinct when they had killed off all targets. Now, our team is responding to a distress call. That never ends badly...

On the planet, they discover that the tabs don't work so well anymore. They also get attacked by the survivors. You see, the screamers (who usually look like buzzsaws with metal tails) have evolved to look like humans, and the survivors don't trust the newcomers. These encounters manage to kill at least a couple of the space team, in very gory ways.

They get a look at a screamer factory, which has sort of Alien egg hatchery vibes. Then they finally get together with the survivors, although the crazy girl still doesn't trust them. And they meet Lance Henriksen (Bishop from Aliens) who invented screamers, along with dad of cute girl from space team. You see, she went on this mission because her father was on the last one (I think this movie is a sequel) and suicided when returning. Henriksen tells her not to worry, there was probably a screamer on board that he want to make sure didn't get to Earth.

Blah blah, everyone dies except cute girl and head survivor, and they fall in love and go back to Earth. Guess what? No, go ahead and guess.

Mostly this movie is just standard low-budget SF. The main expense was gore effects, and if you enjoy a good decapitation, this might be worth your while. The Dickian aspects are fairly muted: The paranoid concept of robots masquerading as human sort of holds off until the last act, and is barely visible. The crazy girl is a sort of Dick stock character - she calls cool or amazing things "unreal" as a hint to her character. The mad scientist who is both lethally irresponsible and somehow sympathetic is another - Dr. Bloodmoney, for ex. But if you are looking for a work of philosophical art, skip it. 

In conclusion, Lance Henrikson isn't the only name actor involved. Steve Amell from Arrow is one of the space crew. I couldn't tell you which one. Fortunately for him, he blends right in.  

Slow Hand Clap

Yeah, I know he's an asshole, but I saw a little of Eric Clapton: Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010 (2010) (or something like it) in a bar once, and thought I'd get it for background music. I only watched the first hour or so, but it was pretty good. 

The first sections concentrated on slide guitar, which I tend to love. We got Robert Cray playing with Derek Trucks and Robert Randolph, with Hubert Sumlin setting the mood. Also, Sonny Landreth, Jimmy Vaughn, and Joe Bonamassa, in various combinations. As they moved out of slide, Keb, Mo, Stefan Grossman, Gary Clark Jr., and even John Mayer.

We also get Sheryl Crow doing a few. I have a joke, "I hate all the crow bands, you know, Counting Crows, Black Crows, Sheryl Crow" - I dined out on that one for years. And I don't like Sheryl Crow, but I heard her doing covers of Blind Faith and other classic rocker songs, and I have to admit, she's suited to it.

So around here I ran out of time and had to send the 2-disc set back to Netflix. So there's a lot here, and I like a lot of it. I didn't care about ZZ Top much, but have no complaints about them. Ans of course, Clapton has always been an asshole, but he's got pretty good taste in the blues. Worth watching. 

I Spy

Like I've said, I don't watch a lot of silent movies. I didn't even really notice that Spies (1928) was silent when I rented it. I just wanted to watch some Fritz Lang. As it turned out Ms. Spenser had a conference call, so I could watch this with the volume low, and she wouldn't have to leave the room. But it also turned put to be amazing. 

It starts out appropriately enough with some spy stuff. There's a stolen treaty, and a shady but good looking tramp. He gets taken to the commissioner, and, yep, he's a spy. Never mind that. What you want is the scene when a beautiful woman with a gun bursts into the room and faints in the tramp's arms.

The plot involves a Dr. Mabuse style criminal mastermind. No one who has seen his face lives to tell the tale. He's always scheming: He has suborned the woan with the gun - he threatens to tell society that she frequents opium dens. The visuals here are brief but baroque. The visuals all throughout, in fact, are striking, mad, and beautiful.

For example, the Japanese diplomat compromised by the loss of the treaty sees the ghosts of the operatives who died trying to deliver it and commits seppuku in an astounding sequence. Or look at the spy bureau set, criss-crossed with open stairways.

Or the final sequence, when a clown on stage does an act where he shoots at giant fleas with a revolver, before turning the gun on himself and dying before the whole audience. Is that a SPOILER?

Doesn't matter. I must admit I didn't follow the whole plot. It is over two hours long. But the visual inventiveness is just what they always say movies lost when sound came in. I'm not sure we've reached these levels yet.

I'm not sure I've mentioned the whole Netflix "ten last DVDs" plan. On the last day of DVD shipping, Sept. 29, they will take up to ten of the top DVDs from your queue, send them out, and not expect them back. I assume this will be based on what they have around, what they can get rid of otherwise, etc. But I'm putting this high on my queue. I would love to own it.

Train in Vain

Not sure why we queued up Last Train from Gun Hill (1959). Probably because it had Anthony Quinn in a lead role.

It starts horribly. An Indian woman (Ziva Rodann) and boy in a wagon pass two cowboys laying around drinking: Earl Holliman (last seen drinking in Forbidden Planet) and Brian Hutton. They grab Rodann and rip off her dress, but not before she gives Holliman a good lash on the face with a whip. The boy grabs on of the men's horses and rides for help.

He rides up to Marshall Kirk Douglas, and it turns out that he's his father. They ride back to find Rodann dead. But Douglas recognizes the saddle, and heads to Gun Hill. On his way, he meets a floozy, Carolyn Jones. She tries to make conversation, then tells him she knows whose saddle he's carrying. He says he knows too.

We meet Quinn, the big man in Gun Hill, running it with an iron fist. Holliman is his spoiled weak son, who claims that his horse and saddle were stolen outside a bar. When Douglas arrives, it turns out that he and Quinn are old friends - Quinn even saved his life once. Douglas plays it light. He returns the saddle, and when Quinn asks if he caught the horse thieves that took it, he just says he is working on it. When he mentions that one of the men should have a whip mark on his face, a look goes over Quinn's face. Douglas knows he's hiding something - and quickly determines that it's his son.

It all comes out - Douglas now knows that Holliman and a crony raped and killed his wife. Quinn begs Douglas not to take his boy, but Douglas says he'll take both back to stand trial - on the last train at 9:30.

How he'll do it, against Quinn and the whole town, is the rest of the movie. He only has Jones on his side, and even she is pretty ambivalent. She was Quinn's mistress, but doesn't like his selfish and bullying ways - or his devotion to his feckless son. 

Director John Sturges puts some real awesomeness into this movie. Aside from the operatic revenge plot and the iconic actors, there's some pretty cool scene setting. For instance, the last act is played out in front of a burning hotel at night. 

But it is a little tough to start off with the rape and murder of a native woman, and then devolve into a struggle between two male friends. Is this "fridging"?

For the Trees

I queued up The Forest (2016) because it's about Aokigahara Forest, Japan's famous suicide forest. We have actually driven through there, with some work colleagues. One explained the forest to us in a little speech in English that sounded like a memorized monologue: "This is Aokigahara Forest. Many people come here every year to kill themselves..." She repeated it a few times word-for-word, as a joke or party trick. That's about how seriously we took the forest.

This movie stars Natalie Dormer. She discovers that her troubled twin sister has gone into the suicide forest and has not returned for two days. The Japanese she talks to on the phone seem to be respecting her assumed desire to die. Her fiance, on the other hand, thinks she's just acting out, doing it for a goof. But Dormer heads to Japan to investigate. 

She has a number of bad dreams (fake-out scares) and creepy encounters in Japan. When she goes to the school where her sister taught English, the students freak out, because she looks like the teacher they thought was dead. When she goes to the forest and stays at the same hotel her sister stayed at, she is attacked by/bumps into a screaming hag/disoriented elderly woman. She asks about her sister at a ranger station, and the smiling clerk takes her to the underground morgue to check out the latest batch of recovered dead. (Her sister is not among them.)

But she also meets another America (Taylor Kinney) in the hotel bar. He asks if her knows her, and she thinks he might have met her sister. But it was just a line, he tells her, to get talking with a cute girl. When she tells him the story, he offers to take her into the forest with a guide. He's a journalist and would like to use her experience for a story.

So they head out, with guide Yukiyoshi Ozawa, who warns them sternly about getting lost. They find many creepy things, like threads leading into the woods that people left to help locate their corpses. They also run into at least one corpse. They also find tents - Ozawa says that people who bring tents are still thinking it over. Finally they find her sisters tent - but not her sister. 

Since it's getting dark, Ozawa and Kinney want to head back, and return in the morning. But Dormer insists on staying. Kinney reluctantly stay as well. Now we get to the horror part.

The myth is that evil spirits live in the forest and try to deceive you into killing yourself. Dormer meets a smiling schoolgirl who tells her not to trust Kinney. And he hasn't been exactly forthcoming - although his deception seems to be in aid of him getting to know a cute girl. But what if he did know her sister? What if he had something to do with her disappearance? What if he is actually holding her somewhere! 

This actually sounds a bit better than it probably is. The movie starts with a lot of jumbled time, mixing the twins youth (in an actually funny scene of the death of their parents), Dormer with her fiance and Dormer getting to Japan. This approach fades out in the forest, and what you get is a lot of jump scares fading into full hallucinated freakouts. Dormer's character is sort of odd - monomaniac in her belief that her twin is alive and in trouble, but also enjoying a little flirty time with Kinney, without a thought to her fiance at home. I only really liked her when she stupidly insists on staying in the forest overnight against all common sense. Shows backbone.

I guess I saw enough reviews going in not to expect much. Ms. Spenser was pretty disappointed. 

Hot Hot Hot

I've been weeding out our VHS collection - once hundreds of tapes, now down to a dozen or so rare or sentimental items. One that we never thought we'd be able to replace is Firesign Theater's Hot Shorts (1985). Turns out it's streaming free with an Amazon Prime subscription!

The basic premise is similar to What's Up. Tiger Lily. The Firesign boys took several old Republic serials and replaced the dialog. Take for example, the first one: The Mountie Catch Herpes. The original is a Mountie serial, The Dangers of the Canadian Mounted. The Firesign version is set in "Alcana: A thin town on the dotted line between Mexico and Israel." The plot involves getting a working girl out of the woods (where she might get ticks) and into a whorehouse. 

Another sci-fi serial becomes the tale of Martians trying to get Nixon's sperm into the nation's artificial insemination stream. In another, a Nazi jungle concentration camp becomes a Beverly Hills fat farm. And so on.

The jokes are funny and raunchy, but the best part is how well the premise fits the film. In the Butt Busters short, the French Resistance becomes the Non-Smoking Underground. Since the Nazis are always smoking and blowing smoke in their captives' faces, it works perfectly. (If you see any of the Smoke Stoppers smoking, it's always emphasized that it's a dooby, not a cigarette.)

Now, maybe this is a little immature, and some of the references are dated (The richest man in the world, E. Hunter Bunk, for ex). But we're pretty immature, and pretty dated as well. We were pretty happy with the chance to re-watch it.

There's even a Crash Corrigan Undersea Kingdom short - Mystery Science Theater does another episode of the same series. Their technique is different: They keep the dialog but add quips. But the feel is pretty similar. We watched that episode right after to check.