A What in Where?

A Field in England (2013) is a Ben Wheatley movie, and therefore, pretty strange. It's a very stripped down historical psychedelic mystical horror movie - possibly the only one of its kind, and therefore, the best.

It's set in a field in England, of course, during a battle in the Civil War. Our protagonist, Reece Shearsmith, is running away. A commander is trying to kill him for deserting, but he is killed by Ryan Pope, a soldier. They join up with another deserter, Peter Ferdinando, who is seeing to his dead friend (named Friend, played by Richard Glover). When Cutler suggests they go to an inn he spotted for some beer, they all come along, including Friend, who has got better.

On the way we learn that Shearsmith is a servant to a powerful alchemist, while Friend is a fatalistic idiot. He is very Baldrick from Black Adder. He has figured out what God is punishing us for: Everything.

They stop in a field (in England) and Pope cooks up a meal of mushrooms. Everyone takes them except Shearsmith, who is fasting. Then the hallucinations start. The movie is in black and white, and the hallucinations are odd close-ups, fast cutting, whirling cameras and so forth. Simple and effective. Pope hands out shovels and orders everyone to dig - there is treasure buried somewhere. The inn with the beer - that was a lie!

There's a long scene with the whole crew pulling on a rope, and you finally find that there is a wizard on the other end, Michael Smiley. Possibly he was underground, looking for the treasure. They force Shearsmith to take the mushrooms, then torture him offscreen, to force him to use his skills to find the treasure. 

I'll skip to end, which has a free-for-all shootout similar to Free Fire. Friend is killed at least once more, and so is pretty much everyone else. 

It's an odd movie - black-and-white and very cheap (it looks like) with only five or six characters, no sets, no special effects. It has a mix of very historical feel (Shearsmith is like a slave to his master, but considers that a proper state of affairs) and modernity - shrooms, for example. It is also violent and horrible, yet also comical, with a long toilet joke (without the toilet, because it all takes place in a field) (in England). Not sure we exactly enjoyed it, but glad we saw it. 

The Only Way Out is Not to Play

We continue to watch streaming horror - this time we picked As Above, So Below (2014). Although it had some elements in common with the last batch (young persons researching the supernatural), it was mostly completely different. And perhaps not altogether successful.

It starts in Iraq with star Perdita Weeks clandestinely searching the underground tunnels for mystical artifacts - right before they blow them up. When she tragically survives (hah!), we segue to Paris, where she is being filmed by Edwin Hodge - so this becomes sort of found footage here. They meet up with her friend Ben Feldman, an eccentric researcher and guerilla clock repairman. The goal - to find the philosopher's stone hidden by alchemist Nicolas Flamel. This section here is sort of a combination Indiana Jones and Dan Brown.

The search will lead to the catacombs of Paris, so they hire a rogue spelunker guide, along with his girlfriend and friend. So this crew of 6 descends into the catacombs. It takes a while for the horror to take over from the adventure. There are tunnel collapses, squeezes through piles of human bones, and a meeting with a tunnel rat who was supposed to have died down there years ago. He is pretty much mad.

Then the cameraman dies, falling off a rope down a hole. Then a few more, and all along they have to keep heading down. It becomes a mantra - The only way out is down. By the third act, the horrors get more metaphysical: moving gargoyles, rivers of blood, a burning car. Then, shall I spoil it? OK, here goes.

They find the philosopher's stone. It actually heals one of their wounded. But an alchemical symbol reminds them it is not the real stone - they get that as well. (I won't spoil it, but it's pretty stupid). The survivors, now only Weeeks, Feldman, and the spelunker's friend, keep going down and down, through more and more claustrophobic and, I guess, symbolic and mystical passages. Finally - big reveal - they find a manhole in the floor of the cavern. They climb down it and come up in a street in Paris. Upside down of course. The end.

I sort of like the whole idea of the catacombs - we recently saw the Lupin episode that went down there. I also love alchemical mysticism, but not when done no better than Dan Brown. Also, the wait to get to the horror was interminable. Then the horror was weak, So I guess I'm saying this one didn't work out.

Jump into the Fire

Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) (2006) is another movie that sort of floated to the top of the queue. I'm glad we watched it, but maybe we didn't need to right on that night.

If you don't know Harry Nilsson, he sang (but didn't write) Everybody's Talking at Me, wrote and sang The Lime and the Coconut, Jump Into the Fire, I Can't Live (If Living is Without You) and a lot of other, but less popular songs. He had a bit of a rough childhood - his dad didn't come back from the war. Many years later he found out that he didn't die, he just didn't married another woman and raised another family. Harry got into music, went to LA, and eventually sold a song to the Monkees. He made an album that got him some fame. In particular, the Beatles loved it. So he was hanging out with Micky Dolenz, Ringo, and John Lennon among many others. 

And that's sort of the message of the movie. He was a massive partier - a drinker and drugger. As Dolenz says, you go out with him on Friday in LA and wake up on Wednesday in a massage parlor in Las Vegas, wondering how you got there. That part is fun, but also sad, since he was killing himself slowly.

He also repeated his father's story - left a wife and son, then met a teenaged Irish girl (while drunk), and when she was old enough, married her. They had five kids, all lovely, and I'm sure he loved them. His son from the first marriage didn't seem too broken up by it, but it must have been hard. The movie doesn't seem to think this is a problem, but again, sad.

He never seemed to reform his hard-living ways, but when they finally killed him, he had a loving family, so I suppose there's that.

Interesting guy, but this seemed a bit surfacey. It holds back, which I don't think Nilsson did. Maybe just as well - that kind of living isn't good for you.

Anyway, I put this on the queue because I was looking for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, which wasn't available. It's a Dustin Hoffman movie about a rock star who's cracking up. I feel like it's largely forgotten except for the title. Anyway, I actually bought a copy. I'll review when I watch it.

Island of Misfit Movie

The Misfits (2021) just sort of jumped off of the Short Wait section of my queue. Not one I was waiting and hoping for.

Nick Cannon narrates - it's about a group of ethical thieves and grifters who steal to right injustices. They recruit master thief Pierce Brosnan for a big job - a vault full of gold under a Spanish prison. There is some international travel (Dubhai for some reason) and of course, a lot of suavitude from Brosnan, but the whole heist thing is ridiculoous.

I won't insult you by discussing it, and also I don't remember much of it. But there is a Maltese Falcon involved, and in fact they do melt the gold down and mold it into the falcon, and get it out that way. Which was supposed to have been improvised by the gang, although they had brought smelting equipment and mold making gear. So, more Lavender Hill Mob.

I don't actually hold it against Rennie Harlan that he directed this mess. Some of the direction was quite good, in an action-blockbuster kind of way. Brosnan seemed to be sort of phoning it in, and the rest of the cast weren't doing great work either. But most of the problem was with the story - it wasn't clever on any scale. The basic scheme was lousy, the good-guy criminals is overdone (even in Leverage), and there weren't any cool scenes or clever quips. 

This wasn't a made-for-Netflix production, or anything like that, but it had that feel. Here are some names, and what is technically a script. Take a pile of money and film it. People will watch anything. Well, I did.

Horror-ween Kick-Off

Ms. Spenser has declared an early start to the Halloween scary movies season. So we watched a bunch of recent (ish) streamers.

Demonic (2015) takes place in two time frames. Frank Grillo is a cop heading to his girlfriend's place when he gets a call. There was a disturbance in an old mansion, and he finds several dead kids, and one live but traumatized one. He calls his girlfriend (Maria Bello), a psychologist, to talk to the kid while he searches the scene. 

Then there's the "how they got there" time frame. A bunch of college kids want to investigate a house where a mass murder occurred. They include Dustin Milligan (the survivor), his girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, and the usual cameraman, gadget guy, etc. Turns out Milligan's mother was the lone survivor of the murder, and there's a demon involved.

Malevolent (2018) also has a bunch of kids investigating haunted houses, but in this case, they are charlatans. Working in Scotland, they pretend to investigate, make some spooky noises, tell the "ghosts" to go in peace and collect a fee. Florence Pugh wants to quit this scheme, because she's getting too many real ghost vibes. But her brother. Ben Lloyd-Hughes has to keep going because he owes a lot of money. So they take a job investigating a house where several children were killed - ostensibly by the now dead son of the woman who hired them. They died with their mouths sewn shut. Hope this doesn't happen to any of the ghost busters... 

Temple (2017) takes place in Japan. A young woman wants to research and photgraph Japanese country temples. She convinces her boyfriend to come along, along with her longtime platonic male friend. He has been a little depressed lately, and speaks a little Japanese. They find an old book with some info about an old temple, but the shopkeeper won't sell it to them. They buy it from a little boy who just kind of appears.

They go to the temple (against everyone's advice, and of course, bad things happen - including platonic boyfriend stepping through the floorboards and breaking his leg. So they are stuck for the night - until they freak out and leave Platonic on his own. Bad decision.

It's odd that these movies shared so many elements. Of course, there's the young-people-doing-research/making-a-documentary angle. That's a pretty common setup, I guess. But two of these have a real boyfriend/ex- or non-boyfriend dynamic, and Malevolent has a brother/wannabe boyfriend thing that is somewhat similar. And both Malevolent and Temple have someone fall through a floor and break a leg, so the group can't run away. Maybe everyone is working from the same template somewhere. 

Yul Love It

Ms. Spenser is a big fan of Yul Brenner - especially in Westerns. So we didn't mind that only the second Sabata film, Adios Sabata (1971) was available on Netflix. This one has Brenner in the title role, the other two have Lee Van Cleef (who she kind of likes as well, so we'll watch those if they show up). 

This is a spaghetti Western, filmed at Cinecitta and directed by Gianfranco Parolini. It takes place in Mexico under the Austrian Emperor Maximillian, and starts with someone looking for Sabata to do a job (Ignazio Spalla). When Brenner comes out and wins a quick duel, he figures he's come to the right place. Spalla wants Sabata to help steal a wagonload of gold from the Austrians for the revolution. Dean Reed shows up a little later, looking possibly to latch onto this caper. He seems pretty shady.

Spalla has two colorful henchman: One dances a flamenco of death before killing someone. The other has shoes with a little socket on the top. He drops a round stone into the socket, gives a kick, and propels the stone into whatever target he wants. Silent and deadly.

I'll skip over the rest of the movie until the end, when they need to infiltrate a fort to get to the gold. This is a longish set piece which starts out silently. The rock kicker's skills come in handy, knocking off sentries before they know what's happening, 

Other than this, this is a pretty ordinary spaghetti Western, with a faux Morricone soundtrack. It had the cool henchmen, the shady outsider, and Brenner had a cool weapon - a Winchester with a magazine for twelve bullets - but he keeps a cigarillo in the last slot. The flamenco boy and rock kicker were cool, and the attack on the fort was nicely done. But it was mainly Yul Brenner, looking ultimately cool that we were there for. 

Not that we won't watch Lee Van Cleef's Sabata if we get a chance. 

The Man Who Wasn't There

Ms. Spenser wasn't too thrilled by the start of Nobody (2021). She figured it just another decent-man-pushed-beyond-his-limits movie like Straw Dogs. Once she realized what it was really about, she started to love it.

It stars Bob Odenkirk, a put-upon everyman. He always misses garbage pick up, his teen son ignores him, his wife barricades herself in bed behind a wall of pillows. Only his little daughter seems to do more than tolerate him. Then one night, he heats a noise downstairs. It's a robbery - two people in ski masks, one with a gun. He tells them to take the money in the bowl in the kitchen - then his son tackles one of the bandits. But he doesn't want any heroics - he makes his son let go, and the bandits run. 

Word gets around, and everyone is pretty scornful - why didn't he put up a fight. A cop tells him he did the right thing, but that isn't what he's thinking. He takes this philosophically. going to work, missing garbage pickup, etc. He even talks about it to a friend over ham radio (a friend who is supposed to be dead), and mentions that he could tell the gun had no bullets. 

Then his little girl can't find her kitty bracelet - it was in the bowl with the money. So Odenkirk goes hunting. The first stop is a tattoo parlor to get some info. They laugh at him, except for one guy, a vet, who prudently slinks out. Odenkirk demolishes a roomful of bikers and seems to enjoy it. When he finds the bandits, they're a family with a baby, so he leaves them scared but whole. 

On the bus home, a gang of Russian hooligans get on and start messing with a rider, a young woman. The bus stops and the driver gets out her phone to call the police. Odenkirk gently takes away her phone, puts her off the bus, and then starts hurting people. He pretty much kills one of them, crushing his larynx and then giving him a trache with a dirty straw.

SPOILER - Odenkirk isn't just everyman. He's a very skilled trained assassin, who decided to settle down and live a boring, non-lethal life. But he misses the mayhem and has been looking for an excuse to lash out. The robbery wasn't enough, but they didn't have to kill his dog. His daughter's bracelet was enough excuse, but if that didn't work out, there's always someone who needs a beating.

For the rest of the movie, you get Odenkirk kicking butt, along with his brother and ham radio pal, RZA, and their geriatric dad, Christopher Lloyd. Which is a lot of fun, including the sort of silly mousetrap gadgets (including actual mousetraps) they use to take down the Russian mob. 

But that's not what this is really about. It's about how men may try to give up their passion and settle down to family life, but they've got to find balance. Some time for family, some time for killing bad guys. So true. 

Battle Royale

 As the COVID quarantine threatens to extend endlessly, one thing I am beginning to miss is big new action movies. So many have been scheduled into the misty future or put on Yet Another Streaming Service that I don't want to pay for. Thank goodness, Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) came around.

It starts in the jungle with a pretty little Asian girl (Kaylee Hottle) meeting with an angry Kong. It seems she can communicate with it by sign language (the character and actor are deaf). I felt like she was going to be a replacement for Millie Bobby Brown, but wait.

Brown has been listening to a lot of podcasts by investigative caster and nutcase Brian Tyree Henry. He has infiltrated the Apex company because he suspects they are up to something with the monsters. And then Godzilla, who has been quiet up to now, attacks their facility, letting Henry get a look at some kind of machine. 

It turns out that they are investigating the Hollow Earth as the home of the monsters. They hire Alexander Skarsgard to investigate, although he is considered a mad scientist. His plan is to let Kong lead them to the Hollow Earth. For this, he needs to work with Kong-Whisperer Rebecca Hall, Hottle mother. Together, they will dope up Kong and put him on a ship for the Antarctic.

Meanwhile, Brown and her buddy Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) are helping Henry infiltrate the Apex plant, and accidentally get shipped to the Hong Kong office. There, they discover Apex's secret: MechaGodzilla! (Oh, sorry if that's a spoiler.)

There's a GvK fight on the high-seas, with Godzilla the champion. There is some Kong v misc. monsters in the Hollow Earth. Then Godzilla and MechaGodzilla mess up Hong Kong for a while, and Kong joins in to defeat MechaG. So, Godzilla wins, but lets Kong rule Hollow Earth, while he (she? I forget if this version lays eggs) rules the world above. And so there is peace in the monsterverse - for now.

But when it was all over, I was kind of nonplussed. Sure the fights and explosions were mostly fun. The fight in Hong Kong looked a little miniaturish - they kept knocking down skyscrapers trimmed in neon. But I assume that was an homage to the original movies. My big problem was that it was overstuffed with stuff - the Apex had at least two major villains with backstories that I only got from reading Wikipedia after the fact. The Skarsgard/Hallsections were kind of interesting, because they were reasonably realistic scientists, not action heroes. Although it was pretty funny to find out that the crackpot Hollow Earth theorists had a major military base and some futuristic Tron cars. 

The Henry/Brown/Dennison parts were the most fun - Henry buys into every imaginable conspiracy theory and gets one right more or less by accident. Brown is smart, warm and fearless, and Dennison does the standard wacky, reluctant friend thing very well. But my favorite part may have been Hottle, a solemn, wise, silent presence. I wanted to see more of her. Maybe she could meet up with the tiny girls who summon Mothra. 

Fugit

Paul Scheer was opining that The Fugitive (1993) is a better movie than, for example, Speed. Well, I couldn't argue one way or the other, so we watched The Fugitive.

It starts with some confusing scenes of violence - a woman being murdered. Ms. Spenser immediately checked out here, although she has seen worse. Maybe it was the stylization. Anyway, Dr. Harrispn Ford comes home to the scene, and fights off the attacker (a one-armed man, we learn later), who runs off. When the police get there, it looks like an open and shut case - Ford did it. He is swiftly tried and convicted. On his way to the Big House, the adventure starts. 

First, another prisoner tires to escape and the guard blows him away. There's a struggle and the driver is killed. So the prison bus is now out of control. It comes to a stop on the railroad tracks, and a train smucks it to high heaven - after Ford gets out. This is a pretty wild set piece to open with.

The US Marshalls show up, lead by Tommy Lee Jones, a hard-ass who immediately sets up a perimeter to catch the escapees, especially Ford. Everyone figures he was killed in the crash, but not Jones. 

Ford sneaks into a hospital to treat his wounds, and takes off in an ambulance. Jones is hot on his trail in a copter. Ford winds up at a dam, and when manages to get hold of Jones' gun. When he pleads that he didn't kill his wife, Jones has the bad-ass line: "I. Don't. Care." So Ford jumps off of the mile-high dam. Once again, everyone assumes he's dead, but not Jones.

Unfortunately after these two big set pieces, things slow down a little. Ford sneaks back to Chicago to look for the one-armed man. He gets some help from old friends, but trusts no one - good plan. There's a good scene where they pass each other on opposite stairwells, and Ford almost slips by. But Jones recognizes him and chases him down a long stairwell - but loses him in Chicago's iconic St. Patrick's Day parade. 

The ending is a bit anticlimactic - It's pretty paranoid, but the stakes seemed to be ridiculously low. I think the TV series had the same problem.

I didn't actually watch The Fugitive on TV, but I think Ford does a pretty good job playing David Janssen's character - the same intensity, paranoia, and intelligence. But Tommy Lee Jones' bad-ass marshall steals the show. He has a quirky group of assistants (Joey Pants as "Cosmo") and snaps out orders with the occasional quirk tossed in ("And don't let them tease you about your ponytail"). It makes sense that the sequel is just about him.