Lockdown

I forget who it was who suggested that STRONGROOM would make a good double bill with CASH ON DEMAND. Duly noted, and though we didn’t pair them up (this time), we did finally get around to Vernon Sewell’s claustrophobic thriller.

Sewell, a former associate of Michael Powell, seems to have had a natural inclination towards restrictive environments. True, it’s a natural way of controlling costs, but there are other ways to do that — filming on location to avoid the need to hire studios and build sets, for instance. Sewell made several films on his boat, and a decent haunted house film, but STRONGROOM may well be his best.

The concept is simple: three bank robbers are compelled to lock two staff members in the vault where their plan goes awry. Realising that the prisoners will suffocate over the long weekend, they resolve to alert the authorities, but circumstances conspire against them. Weirdly, the tension relating to whether the poor bank employees will asphyxiate is less than that concerning whether the bastards who caused it will face a murder rap.

The double-bill we went for was this and SPLIT SECOND, the Dick Powell-directed nuclear thriller, which has an interesting cast and a high concept — criminals take a bunch of hostages at a nuclear test site — but weirdly is far less tense, until the very impressive final blast. Nobody in SS seems to be taking the nuke seriously enough. Every single moment in S is about the threat of death, of finding yourself a murderer.

Sewell’s direction isn’t so much — logic says the shots ought to build in intensity, but they barely do — but the script knows what to concentrate on. It’s shameless but effective in its constant amping up of anxiety. Writer Max Marquis wrote mainly TV drivel (Crossroads!) but Richard Harris (not that one) concentrated on thrillers, including great stuff like I START COUNTING, THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN (English dialogue), and a bunch of obscurities like THE MAIN CHANCE which I now feel eager to try. It’s a perfect low-budget movie, exploiting not only small, cheap sets, but slow pace. Watching oblivious minor characters padding about while death is on the line is extremely suspenseful.

While the imprisoned (Colin Gordon & Ann Lynn) are rather drab characterisations which the actors can only do so much with, the thieves include the great Derren Nesbitt, who has a strange plastic Auton quality that always makes him uncanny and watchable (he’s magnificent as the oily blackmailer in VICTIM). Sewell would cast him again in BURKE AND HARE (NOT a distinguished film — but one I kind of want to watch properly).

Nesbitt, tragicomically, blew his savings on his dream project, sex comedy THE AMOROUS MILKMAN, a contender for worst British film ever, and also appears in two more of the worst British sex farces you could ever hope to unsee, NOT NOW DARLING and OOH, YOU ARE AWFUL. He even cameos in RUN FOR YOUR WIFE, for old times’ sake. But he should never have been put in a comedy. His thick-lipped wax mask of a face stifles the laugh response. (Producer Art Linson, mulling over a casting idea with his wife: “Do you think Willem Dafoe could make you laugh?” Mrs. L: “I don’t know, but I saw him smile once and I had nightmares for a week.”)

When Nesbitt puts a stocking over his head for the robbery, it’s too much — he already looks like he has a stocking over his head, somehow.

The ending is a magnificently timed kick in the teeth for both characters and audience.

So, yes: a double bill of STRONGROOM and CASH ON DEMAND would be an excellent idea. Run them near Christmas, ideally, and have this one first: it isn’t remotely Christmassy.

Mixed Emotions

I wanted to like Brian DePalma’s DOMINO, like a lot of people I think (some DID like it), but I couldn’t. It is NOT a good movie, imho. And I don’t even know why I wanted to like it, since I don’t think of BDP as a particularly nice character who deserves more success. But, since I’d bought a cheap secondhand copy and was watching it, I would have liked it to be entertaining. And he’s made some good movies — we can all disagree about which ones, which in a way is even better — so one would like to see a modern film with the vibe of (for me) SISTERS, OBSESSION, THE UNTOUCHABLES or even one of the really unpleasant ones, just for a change.

This Euro-pudding, which BDP did not write, may occupy the sort of place in the DePalma oeuvre that BURKE & HARE does for John Landis. “Want to come to some drab country and film this crappy script?” “Sure, I’m free this week!”

I exaggerate. Denmark is probably much nicer than Scotland, where I live. And they made REPTILICUS, which Scotland SHOULD have made.

What you get is the mannerisms of the director without any of the pleasure. BURKE & HARE has director cameos by Costa-Gavras and Michael Winner, and virtually no laughs (Paul Whitehouse squeezed a reluctant guffaw from us by main force). DOMINO has would-be Hitchcockian set-pieces and Pino Donaggio aping Bernard Herrmann on the soundtrack and a creepy interest in hi-tech voyeurism (ISIS execution videos, this time).

Fiona: “Thanks a lot, Brian, I’ve spent the last few years AVOIDING that kind of imagery.”

I point out that it’s an incredibly lame reenactment since the movie doesn’t show the head coming off. The whole point of snuff movies is presumably the “frenzy of the visible,” showing the moment of death in horrible close-up. Everything to do with tech in the film is unconvincing, including the heroine’s phone photos of her holidays with boyfriend “Lars Hansen”:

The movie ends with YouTube exploding. Extremely poor.

Someone on Twitter did point out that the subplot, in which a vengeful Arab character is recruited by Guy Pearce’s dastardly CIA man to bring down a terror cell, and he kills his way through the organisation, driven by rage, would make a much better movie than the main plot. Possibly, but not the way it’s done here. What’s certain is that the two storylines don’t help each other, they just diffuse focus.

Oh, and it begins with two cops, and one of them is older and has a nice, disabled wife. He’s going to get killed, I thought. And then I thought, a reasonably good twist would be to kill the young leading-man type guy, the guy whose girl sleeps in a modesty pouch for some reason. It might not make up for the crushing sense of predictability being experienced in the first place, but it would be a good surprise.

Also, the hero goes on duty and forgets his gun. And then his partner is killed and the bad guy escapes for reasons that actually have nothing to do with the forgotten gun.

Mostly this looks like a TV cop show. But they make some better TV cop shows in Europe.

I’ll say this, it’s a movie that’s ineffective and bad at least in surprising, incomprehensible ways. Why is it called DOMINO when there was a movie of that title fourteen years ago which did not do well and is usually remembered unfavourably? (I genuinely don’t know why this one is called DOMINO, in the sense of, what does it have to do with dominoes? It would only resemble dominoes if you had to knock over each piece with lethal force and they never, ever set off a chain reaction.)

 

Bride of the American Werewolf

We’re going to see BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN at Filmhouse today, introduced by John Landis.

Landis has a nice ongoing relationship with Edinburgh — he was retrospected by Edinburgh International Film Festival, he shot parts of BURKE AND HARE here (here hare here) and now he’s a guest of Dead By Dawn, our long-running horror fest.

My connection to the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, always intense (though I never saw it as a little kid — took me years), is even more meaningful now, since I recently completed an epic video essay for the forthcoming Masters of Cinema release of THE OLD DARK HOUSE. So I can call myself a Whaler with the best of them.

The confluence of Landis and BRIDE makes me want to pitch a sequel to his maybe-best film — Anthony Waller’s AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS is best forgotten, which is fine, because it has been. BRIDE OF AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON would star Jenny Agutter, who provided the romantic interest in the first film. It would turn out that lycanthropy is also a sexually transmitted condition. I mean, who’s to say she didn’t get bitten by her boyfriend during their sexytimefun in the original movie? There’s definitely something oral going on.

(Big cunnilingus scene in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE too. Obviously a Landis favourite. Maybe that’s why he wears a beard, so he always feels like he’s… Should I ask him? Probably best not.)

Anyway, werewolf Agutter, that’s the pitch. We can work the details out later.

This prospective encounter feels very timely, since my friend Stephen Murphy, a brilliant make-up artist, just met Rick Baker, creator of Landis’s werewolf (and so much more) at the Monsterpalooza convention (yes, this a thing). Stephen was made up as a zombie Rick Baker at the time. I can’t compete with that.