Late Night Watch

Ms. Spenser wanted to get a jump on the Halloween season early, or at least wanted to watch Ghostwatch (1992). In fact, she got a Shudder (trial) subscription to see it. It was originally broadcast in 1992 on British TV, as if it was an unscripted look at the supernatural, War of the World style. It was presented by the usual crew of British presenters, Michael Parkinson in the studio, Mike Smith taking phone-ins, and his wife in the field at a haunted house. Also, presenting outside the house was Craig Charles (Red Dwarf) who says inappropriate things, because that's why you hire Craig Charles. 

The haunted house in question is inhabited by a single mother, and two girls, The younger has named the poltergeist Pipes, because her mother told that's where the noises are coming from. She doesn't seem very bothered, but her older sister isn't so calm. Back in the studio, a psychic, Gillian Bevin, assures skeptical host Parkinson that this is a very serious and spooky house. 

We hear some noises and maybe a few things fall over, but it looks pretty tame. But viewers keep phoning in to say they see someone in the shadows of the house - which the host can't find when looking over the tape. They even catch on off the girls making noises by pounding on the walls, and start thinking it is actually a hoax (over Bevin's objections). Then things start to get crazy.

Does this sort of sound familiar? One of the quiet hits from last year was David Dastmalchian's Late Night with the Devil (2023). Dastmalchian plays a late night TV host in the 70s whose show can't catch up to Carson. In desperation, he decides to invite the Devil on as a guest. Or not really - he invites Laura Gordon, an author on psychic phenomena and her subject, a cute little girl who is sometimes possessed by a demon named Mr. Wiggles. Also invited are Fayssal Bazzi, who plays a psychic named Christou, and ex-stage magician, skeptic and blowhard Ian Bliss. 

Christou does a cold reading of the audience, then contacts the spirit of Dastmalchian's late wife. When Bliss debunks this, Christou starts vomitting black bile and collapses. We find out in a commercial break that he died in the ambulance. 

Like in Ghostwatch, things get creepy, then are debunked, then get much creepier. 

The directors, Cameron and Colin Cairnes, needed an idea for a low-budget, high-impact movie, and they got it. 

I'm not going to say either of these is a better movie. Ghostwatch was written by one of Ms. Spenser's favorite horror writers, Stephen Volk, which is how she discovered it. It plays it a little straighter, without going too deep into the character and psychologies of the presenters and poltergeist victims. I guess audiences could fill those in themselves, knowing these personalities. Late Night explores Dastmalchian's character at length, his dabbling with the esoteric rich men's club, the Grove, the loss of his wife, his desperation to stay on the air. There is also a hint of a forbidden romance between him and Gordon, as well as a deep antagonism between him and the skeptic. Of course, Late Night is a period piece (beautifully executed), while Ghostwatch has only become one with the passage of time. 

I recommend watching as a double bill, in chronological order. 

Courier Poison

The Courier (2019) is the sort of standard-looking action film that is always being suggested to me by various automated systems. Since it stars Olga Kurylenko, who I've kind of been binging, I decided to give it a go.

Right off, in a credits montage, we learn that the Courier is a sort of masked vigilante, a female motorcycle courier that is always anonymously delivering evidence of crimes, etc. Then we proceed to the next crime. Gary Oldman is rich and influential criminal, now under house arrest in his New York mansion. He can only be brought down by a single witness, Amit Shah. Shah is in London under heavy guard. He is taken to a fortified safe room, where he will testify by video link.

The trial is taking place, and the judge gives the prosecution an hour to set up the link and deliver the testimony. A courier - yep, Olga Kurylenko - arrives with a case containing the encryption and masking device necessary. But it turns out to contain cyanide gas, killing everyone in the room - except the bad guys in the police detail, who put on gas masks. Also, Kurylenko, because she thinks fast and grabs a mask off a bad guy, then another for Shah. And so they take off.

They get as far as the parking garage, which has been put on lock down by William Moseley, Oldman's man in London. He keeps assuring Oldman by phone that the "package" has almost been eliminated. He sends a team into the garage.

This takes up the first, say, 20 minutes of this 1-1/2 hour movie. The rest takes place entirely in the garage, with Shah hiding, and Kurylenko committing mayhem on the baddies, as the clock ticks down. This timer is not only the court requiring testimony in an hour, but also Oldman demanding that Moseley just kill the witness and the stupid courier. 

I'm surprised this wasn't advertised as a "bottle show", a single location extravaganza, like, for ex, Free Fire. But I have to say, that movie was pretty good. This one, much less so. It's pretty much an action exercise, done well enough, but with nothing extra. I wouldn't have given it the 10% Tomatometer rating that I found out it has, but I wouldn't go much higher. 

Surreal Sunday

I was listening to a podcast the just mentioned Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and, since I hadn't seen it in a while, I thought I'd review.

To sum up, it was funny, clever, and well executed, especially by Bob Hoskins. It was fun to see the Disney and Warner Bros. legacy characters, and even more so, to see them interacting. But once you've seen that, that's about it. I didn't find it funny enough or clever enough to really thrill me the second time. Oh well. 

I still felt like watching something surreal, so I turned to Jodorowski's Santa Sangre (1989). This is very different, although still pretty out there. It starts with Axel Jodorowski as Fenix, naked in an insane asylum, sitting in a tree in a cell. The only way to get him down is to offer him a raw fish.

In his childhood, Fenix is played by Adan Jodorowski. He is part of a circus - the Boy Magician. His father is burly knife thrower, and his mother, an aerialist. But his father (Guy Stockwell, Dean's brother) is pretty interested in his knife-throwing partner, the sexy tattooed lady, Thelma Tixou. Tixou's daughter (adopted) is a mute girl named Alma who she bullies. Her and Fenix bond very sweetly. 

Fenix's mother is also active in a church for Santa Sangre. They worship a young woman who fought against her rapists and had both arms cut off. The small church they attend has a pool of crimson water set in the floor. But a business man wants to build on the site, and the bishop considers the Santa Sangre cult to be blasphemous, and so the church is destroyed. 

Then, Fenix's mother catches her husband with the tattooed lady, and attacks them. But her husband, the knife thrower, cuts off both of her arms, like Santa Sangre. Presumably this is why we find Fenix in an asylum.

When he sees this armless mother on the street, he escapes. Tixou is now a prostitute in the same city, and when she sends a customer in to rape Alma, she also escapes. Then, in a giallo-inspired scene, we see Tixou stabbed by an unseen attacker.

Now, Fenix has a vaudeville act, where he stands behind his mother and acts as her arms, gesturing while she sings. But she also uses his arms to kill women who he is attracted to - so many women, buried in his yard. When Alma finds him, she tries to take him away, but his mother kill her with his arms. 

SPOILER: of course, his mother died when her arms were cut off. Fenix has been using an armless mannequin in his act. Alma breaks the illusion, and leads him outdoors where the police are waiting. She puts up her hands, and so does he - now his own hands. They no longer belong to his dead mother.

I've left out a lot of surrealistic scenes: The clowns and the little person who accompany Fenix everywhere, the funeral of an elephant, the eage/phoenix tattoo and how Fenix got it and so forth. The inmates of the asylum, mostly played by people with Down's, going on a field trip, and sneaking off to do coke and find a whore. This is a beautiful, disturbing movie, from a script by Dario Argento's brother Claudio and a librarian at an asylum, who based it on his experiences. 

It was an interesting mix of Fellini and giallo. It was a bracing contrast to Roger Rabbit.

Oh God 2

Just picking up Chinese wuxia movies at random, I watched God of War 2 (2020). I might or might not have already watched God of War 1. I might have even already watched this one. It's pretty off the wall.

It stars Charles Lin, a glorious general with a mysterious background. We find out that he was a street kid captured by wizards who made him into a magical guinea pig. They fed and soaked him in all manner of poisons and medicine, to see if he could survive. The final poison did not kill him, but made him strong enough to escape. 

He wandered until he found a beautiful Yuxi Liu, an apothecary assistant. She finds the signs of experimentation on his body and helps him heal, but can't heal his mind. They fall in love, but are attacked by the wizards' army, and she goes over a cliff, letting go to prevent him for being pulled over too.

He is then brainwashed and turned over the the army, becoming a great general. But Liu survived the fall and joined the resistance to the military. Her plan is to infuse her body with poison that will be activated by sexual intercourse, killing her partner as well as herself. Then she goes to seduce the head of the army. 

But she meets Lin, and manages to restore some of his memory. To save her from the poison, he has sex with her, and absorbs the poison - he's immune due to the wizards' treatments. But I think they are all going to die anyway, because the poison treatment gives great strength but a short life. 

It's kind of hard to tell. What with the hero's multiple names and personas, the mystical poisons and the shifting allegiances, I was often pretty lost. But the movie looked good and had a ton of costumed action. Also, Lin was very sweet and lovely, if a bit of an airhead. 

So, all in all, a fine way to pass a sleepy Friday night.

Barbarian Weekend

Ms. Spenser felt like rewatching The Northman, and I liked the idea. I mentioned Centurion, which she didn't remember watching. So we had the start of a barbarian weekend. 

I decided we should finish up with Boudica (2023), which would be a new one for us. It fits, in that we watched these three movies in descending order of quality. 

Olga Kurylenko is Boudica, wife of a small-time king (Clive Standen) in Roman-occupied England. They live under the heel of the Romans, but pay tribute and keep their heads down, and life is fine. Boudica and her two daughters enjoy going to the Roman town for hairdos, makeup and shopping. They go into the shady market outside the walls, for a bargain on blue cloth, and she discovers that the peasantry regard her as a mythical queen. This embarrasses her and also endangers her - the people might even worship her above the emperor, Nero.

When she explains this to her husband, he mentions a few legends and gives her a legendary bronze sword. But the new Roman governor has orders from Nero to crack down on the English, and in particular, women in roles of power. As a result, the Romans kill the king and have her and her daughters flogged.

She wakes up in the care of her fellow Britons, in great pain. She begs to see her daughters, and they are finally brought to her safe and sound. And so she goes from Romanized trophy queen to painted up warrior queen. Her subjects treat her like a goddess, and she brings her daughters with her into battle. because she figures out that they are actually dead, and she is only seeing ghosts. They actually use them for mystical battle advice.

Now, this isn't a great movie. I like Olga Kurylenko, and she does a fine job here. But the script isn't great, and the production values aren't either (without being terrible). It suffers in comparison to Centurion, which had amazing action, and also Kurylenko as the evil native tracker. It also seemed to do a lot more with a low budget. Of course, The Northman is a fantastic movie, and I liked it even more the second time. I hadn't really clocked Eggers use of long tracking shots and the amount of music and dance rituals in it. But I guess Boudica wasn't really trying to be either of those. Director Jesse V. Johnsom seems to specialize in direct-to-streaming action, and as such, it was perfectly adequate.

But, since it comes from the same Tacitus histories as Centurion, I was sorry that they didn't use the old "roll flaming stuff onto the Romans when they are stuck in a narrow ravine" trick. It should show up in more movies. 

Beaver Trap

Can't believe I forgot to blog Hundreds of Beavers (2022), which I saw a few weeks ago. Or maybe I can. In addition to being one of the funniest and most unusual movies of the ... century?, it's also a light-weight piece of fluff.

First of all, understand that this is a low-budget, black-and-white, near silent (no dialog, SFX only) movie. It is set in the snowy woods of Canada. The protagonist, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, is the happy proprietor of an apple jack distillery and bar, until it burns to the ground, leaving him alone in the wilderness. 

After many desperate attempts, taunted by local wildlife, he manages to catch a fish. Seeing distant smoke, he takes the fish to a trading post, where he trades it for a knife. There, he notices two things: the trader has a lovely daughter, and a burly trapper is earning more than him with beaver pelts. In fact, the trader has a computer-game-like menu of pelt to goods exchange rates. 

And so he goes off to earn pelts for the love of his life, the trader's daughter. His early attempts leave him naked and freezing, but undaunted. He meets a First Nation native, fights off rabbits, raccoons and wolves, and is hunted as a serial killer by a pair of beaver detective. But he prevails.

Note that the beavers and other wild life are played by people in athletic mascot costumes. I suppose it's pretty easy to find beaver costumes in Canada. The winter wilderness scenes were achieved, as far as I can tell, by filming in the wilderness in the winter. Considering that Tews was often naked, this is impressive. But the scenes are often augmented by simple effects, like cut out hills in the background. 

The jokes are dopey and slapstick, with Tews falling in holes, getting stuck in his own traps, and so on. So there is a real silent-era feel. But there are also gamer touches, like the trading system. So a mix of Chaplin/Keaton/Three Stooges and modern video games. 

As well as making us laugh a lot, we were often amazed at the cheap yet clever effects. Director Mike Cheslik and his buddy Tews made something wonderful and fun. But it was also feather light, so it didn't really stick in my mind. But, since everyone is raving about it, at least I don't feel too bad about failing to promote it myself.

A Few Yen More

Sakra (2024) is another one of those Hi-Yah movies we saw in a Coming Attractions preview. But this one stars Donnie Yen.

First off, I should mention that I watched this last weekend, and I have only the sketchiest of memories of how it all went. Basically, the Song dynasty of China has been conquered by the Liao of Khitan. Donnie Yen was born Khitan but raised Song. He grows up to be the head of the Beggars, a band of martial arts experts and bandits who fight the Liao. An early scene has Yen getting into a slanging match with a Buddhist monk in a restaurant, which turns into an all-out wire-fu fight. 

Yen then finds out that he has been framed for the murder of a fellow Beggar and is stripped of his title. He will framed again and again, as well as condemned for being Khitanese by birth, He even has to fight the Shaolin temple. There is also a nobleman with three daughters skilled in the martial arts. 

The fighting style is, as I've said, wire-fu, with lots of jumping over roofs, punching people through walls and Vajra Palm Punches. It's very old-school, based on a novel from 1966, "Demi-Gods and Semi-Demons". This is just the kind of thing that I like. It might not be the best of the best, but with Donnie Yen, it should satisfy.