Quote:
Originally Posted by jackranderson
Any recommendations from the sale guys?
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Well, perhaps not exactly recommendations but a few more:
Yes, it's time to travel back to the dying days of Lew Grade's ITC Films, an age of darkness, of low-budgets and even lower-tech special effects, of bad acting and even worse writing: a world where clichés run rampant and
Hawk the Slayer and his mindsword set the cause of sword-and-sorcery back several years. Shot almost entirely on a single Abbey set in Pinewood and the woods surrounding the studios in the heart of Autumn, this demented no-budget British spaghetti sword-opera - a sort of would-be A Fistful of Swords - pits John Terry's virtuous hero against his evil one-eyed brother with a taste for Darth Vaderesque headgear Jack Palance after the latter kills their badly dubbed dad Ferdy Mayne in a squabble over
"The power that is rightly mmmmiiiiiiinnnnnnneee!" That power being a magical mindsword with a glowing green handle that can fall into your hand if you think about it (and run the film backwards).
Mind you, as flashbacks later reveal, the evil Darth Voltan (okay, he's not really called Darth) has already killed the love of Hawk's life, something which almost shocks one-time Felix Leiter (in The Living Daylights) John Terry into changing his expression, before moving on to underline what a bad egg he is by kidnapping guest star Annette Crosbie's Mother Superior, prompting Hawk into action. Well, not exactly action, more riding around the same stretch of woodlands while ineffectually ripping off The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars (you half expect John Terry to say "My pony don't like bein' laughed at.") as he assembles his A-Team - a giant played by Carry On veteran Bernard Bresslaw, an elfin bowman who talks like a constipated Dalek, a not particularly short dwarf and Patricia Quinn's witch with a particularly naff line in sorcery involving, er, smokey eggs. But then it's pretty obvious that the budget didn't really stretch to much in the way of even the cheapest special effects, with those there are largely of the stopping-the-camera-and-starting-it-again after-the-actors-have-left-the-frame variety, alongside a magic neon hula-hoop left over from some disco movie, a pair of Spock ears from a novelty shop and, in one memorable killing, silly string (or as the chapter stop calls it 'The silly string of death'). And my, didn't they get a good deal on the fog machine that week!
Long shots also seem a bit of an alien concept for director Terry Marcel, who cut his teeth as a third assistant director on Carry On Cleo and never seems to have scaled those lofty peaks again. Most of the film is played in medium shot to cut down on the number of actors required and to hide the fact the set isn't that big - or perhaps just out of the fear that if they move the camera too far back, the actors will take the opportunity to run away before they have to deliver lines like
"My son Drogo speaks true!" "The hunchback will have something to say about this!" "Even as we speak, the wizards gather in the south" or serial overactor Shane Briant's immortal
"I am no messenger. But I will give you a message. The message of DEATH!"
Jack Palance doesn't get much good dialogue either, but chews on what he gets for more than it's worth anyway - he's the only actor who could make the word
"Wiiiiizzzzzaaaaaahhhrrrrrrdddddd!!!!!" last almost as long as Hamlet's soliloquy, so it's a shock to see how relaxed and, well, normal he looks in the raw onset interviews in the extras (where he expresses far more admiration for Dinsdale Landen than Elia Kazan). Although even he might have balked at Bernard Bresslaw's defiant
"I'd sooner eat cowdung" (met with the inevitable response
"That can be arranged, and you can wash it down with your own blood if need be."). Indeed, when Hawk addresses Patricia Quinn as "Woman" - as in
"Woman, we need the use of your magic" - you half expect her to reply
"I'm a man. I'm not old, I'm 37. What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior. Oh, Slayer eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. Just because some dying character actor lobs a mindsword at you is no basis for a system of government."
Sadly parts of the film are more dull than unintentionally funny: writer-producers Marcel and Harry Robertson clearly intended this, you know, for kids, so it's a bloodless school panto affair for much of the running time, visually bland and lethargic even at a modest hour-and-a-half. How they expected to stretch it out to a series of five movies is anyone's guess (the film ended up as the supporting feature to Saturn Three). Still, on the plus side former pop star and Hammer and Children's' Film Foundation regular composer Harry Robertson (who wrote the superb Hammer Transylvanian Western score for Twins of Evil as Harry Robinson - it really is outstandingly good) turns in a score that's like a demented disco combination of an Ennio Morricone paella Western and Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, and the film is nowhere near as soul-destroyingly awful as Marcel and Robertson's subsequent collaboration seven years later, the almost unwatchable-even-at-gunpoint Jane and the Lost City.
Naturally for a naff movie this boasts a superb transfer (but then it's not as if the negative got much use) and an array of more on-set interviews than any sane individual could ever want to watch, including one great moment where Marcel is asked if it's true he turned down a $10m budget because he didn't want to cast big names: "That's a load of rubbish" he replies while trying not to burst out laughing.
Less than a decade after being founded with high hopes and superstar super-productions, Lew Grade’s ITC was on its knees by the time they released the all-too-visibly low budget
The Monster Club in 1981. The film’s more obvious natural home, Amicus Productions, had already shut its doors, though that didn’t stop producer Milton Subotsky having one last try at the anthology horror film that had been that company’s bread and butter throughout the 70s. But the British horror film was in the doldrums too, unable to adapt to the shift in modern horror films after the huge success of The Exorcist and The Omen took horror out of its cosy old gothic stamping grounds, and despite its attempt to hook a younger crowd with several forgotten bands filling in the gaps between stories with mediocre New Romantic numbers, The Monster Club is the kind of film that feels like it’s been made by old men who have lost touch with their audience. It’s the kind of thing that’s professionally, if not always enthusiastically made (only Price really seems to be enjoying himself) but you do have to wonder just who it was made for.
In roles originally intended for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, John Carradine and Vincent Price provide the linking material as the horror writer and vampire who admires both his fiction and the quality of his blood, the latter repaying Carradine for relieving him of some of it by taking him to a club full of disco dancing monsters in extremely naff masks and telling him three stories. The first, involving James Laurenson’s shadmock who falls in love with Barbara Kellerman’s conwoman, and the last, with Stuart Whitman’s horror director’s location scouting going horribly wrong when he finds himself trapped in a village of ghouls who like good eating out of the boxes they dig up from the ground, are the best, the former attaining some pathos thanks to Laurenson’s performance and the latter creating a genuinely unpleasant frisson despite the film’s family-friendly rating. The middle story is the most disposable, a tongue-in-cheek vampire story with Donald Pleasance’s bureaucratic vampire hunter using Richard Johnson’s bullied son to track down the ‘night worker’ father: Pleasance is good value, but it’s rather tiresome and overplayed in its nudge-you-in-the ribs way. Still, there’s a decent enough supporting cast including Simon Ward, Patrick Magee, Britt Ekland and, in a brief bit as vampire film producer (“Well, aren’t they all?”) Lintom Busotsky, a last big screen credit for Anthony Steel, a long way from his glory days as the biggest star in the British film industry but at least allowed a bit more dignity than in the soft porn films he'd previously been reduced to.
“It’s monstrously ambitious.”
“Is there any limit to Germany’s ambitions, Herr Minister?”
With a premise that Jack Higgins would make rather more of with The Eagle Has Landed, Lawrence Huntingdon’s comedy thriller
Warn That Man had something of an edge by shooting its Nazis-attempt-to-kidnap-Winston-Churchill-on-a-quiet-weekend-in-the-country yarn during the war but all too quickly blunts it as it makes its origins as a stage play increasingly apparent after it gets the preliminaries out of the way.
Gordon Harker, Finlay Currie and Philip Friend are three survivors of a torpedoed ship who decide to spend their survivor’s leave with Friend’s fiancée Jean Kent at her uncle’s country house – the same country house that a certain Very Important Person will, unbeknown to them, be spending the weekend. But it’s not unbeknown to the Germans, who, with the help of Raymond Lovell’s German actor who conveniently looks just like Churchill’s host (but has no idea if Kent is his girlfriend or a relative) and some Fifth Columnists, have a different weekend destination in mind for the esteemed guest. Luckily the villain is the kind of Nazi who’ll kill detectives, underlings and passers by but leaves the trio of gatecrashers alive and even when he does decide to do something about them doesn’t notice they make an awful lot of noise when playing possum. It all starts out cheerfully enough, but despite being adapted by popular Whitehall farceur Vernon Sylvaine from his own play it gets a bit sluggish and dull, perhaps because Huntingdon can’t make his mind up whether he’s going for laughs or mild suspense with all the comings and goings that were presumably played at a more breakneck pace on stage. More of a curiosity than a success, though for the curious
Network’s UK Blu-ray release offers a decent but unexceptional transfer considering the film's rarity.
Not to be confused with Disney’s theme park attraction, 1941’s
Tower of Terror is a solidly but unimaginatively made British wartime thriller that sees Michael Rennie’s British spy hiding out on bad-tempered hook-handed Wilfred Lawson’s lighthouse off the Heligoland Islands while waiting for a boat to take him and the secret plans he’s carrying back to England. Only things get complicated when Lawson fishes Movita out of the sea at exactly the spot where his wife drowned 16 years earlier and becomes fixated on her resemblance to his lost love. She’s on the run from the Nazis having escaped a concentration camp and afraid she’ll be given away and that Lawson will suffer from his kindness, but naturally Lawson’s the one she and Rennie should really be worried about as his jealousy and obsession makes him far more dangerous than the SS on their trail.
It’s a formulaic albeit for the most part surprisingly serious and sober affair, with enough incident for its 78 running time not to seem a chore but generating no real tension even when Lawson, who keeps his more colourful theatrical tendencies well in check with a surprisingly underplayed and controlled performance in the first two thirds of the film, finally loses it and goes medieval on them just as a conveniently passing battleship shells the lighthouse. Rennie already has his reliable and quietly resourceful man of integrity act that would serve him so well in Hollywood down pat but the film has less interest in Movita’s character, who’s barely developed enough to make much of an impression, and when she does it’s only the rather outrageous shoulder pads on her traditional dress that really stands out (in every way).
Network’s UK Blu-ray offers what is for the most part a good transfer with strong definition, though there are a couple of brief tramline scratches and a few of the exterior shots on the water show rather more wear and tear than the interiors. The only extra is a stills gallery.
Caspar Wrede's
Ransom (retitled The Terrorists in the USA) is an entertaining enough cat-and-mouse yarn from 1975 if you have an hour and a half to spare, helped immensely by a commanding performance by Sean Connery as the Scandinavian security chief having to deal with a hostage crisis and an airplane hijacking by Ian McShane's terrorist. There are some neat plot twists, Sven Nykvist's cinematography makes good use of the snowbound locations and there's a strong Jerry Goldsmith score that helps drive the film along nicely, although it is rather disconcerting to hear John Quentin speaking with Malcolm Terris' voice in a particularly noticeable bit of dubbing. An efficient Saturday night thriller, it doesn't aim high but does deliver.
Unlike Anchor Bay's US Region A-locked Blu-ray release, which had no extras - in fact, it's so barebones it doesn't even have a menu, simply playing the film on a loop with fewer chapter stops than the US DVD - and offered a mediocre widescreen transfer is no better than you'd get from an upscaled DVD,
Network's UK Region B-locked UK Blu-ray, however, is a much better bet, with a better widescreen transfer, trailer, teaser trailer and stills gallery - not to mention a proper menu and chapter stops!
Before E.L. James put sadomasochism on the popular bestseller list and at the top of the box-office charts there was Fifty Shades of Brando.
The Nightcomers might begin with Marlon Brando playing hide and seek with two children, but it’s not long before he’s playing very different games, and not just blowing up frogs to show what a callously earthy type he is. Michael Winner’s prequel to The Turn of the Screw (or more specifically its big screen adaptation as The Innocents) may initially aspire to a level of elegance with its period country house location and Jerry Fielding’s classically inspired score but it’s clear the never-knowingly-understated director saw it as more of an opportunity to offer prurient censor-baiting S&M involving ropes, Stephanie Beacham’s undeniably spectacularly impressive breasts and Brando’s less impressive Oirish accent while showing how their doomed and perverted relationship corrupted the orphaned children in their charge. Brando, his career still in the doldrums before The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris would turn it around the following year, is Quint, the valet-turned-gardener, and Beacham the children’s governess, the latter prim and formal in the daylight until she gets literally tied up with and by the former once the lights are out, both attracted to his baseness and equally enraptured and disgusted by her increasing dependency and submission as he treats her mean to keep her keen.
While it strips away some of the ambiguity that The Turn of the Screw was built upon by detailing the hold Quint had on the children that would live on after him, it’s not entirely an unpromising notion to imagine exactly what happened even if it’s heavily dependent on the viewer knowing the tragic and potentially supernatural events after the film has finished, but Michael Hastings’ script begins with governess and children already in thrall to Quint without really exploring the how and the why of it. It doesn’t help that Winner isn’t one for conjuring up much passion let alone an atmosphere of unease, opting for the direct approach rather than gnawing uncertainty and playing a potentially disturbing scene when the children re-enact Quint and the governess’ bondage session purely for laughs. Unfortunately most of the performances are too poor to flesh things out. Where Peter Wyngarde’s brief appearances in Jack Clayton’s film offered an unknowable Quint with a malignant intensity as demonic as it was Byronic, Brando’s interpretation is simply an all too familiar easygoing uncouth lout telling tall tales, Verna Harvey and an especially stilted Christopher Ellis in particular struggle with their unconvincingly naïve-for-their-age roles as the children while Thora Hird’s housekeeper favours emphatic clarity in her diction over any hint of naturalism as she recites her theatrical dialogue in almost robotic fashion even when recalling a lost love. Aside from Harry Andrews’ reluctant guardian who has the good sense to leave the film in the first reel and only very briefly reappear near the end, only Beacham really seems comfortable with the stylised speech and makes any real emotional impact as the self-loathing governess despite the thinness of her part. As for the ending, while it’s not as ridiculous as some claim even if it strains credulity that the children are quite that stupid, it’s neither shocking nor tragic, merely “So what?”, a verdict that could stand for the film as a whole.
Network’s UK Blu-ray is a mostly decent affair despite some mild edge enhancement and one disappointing night-time chapter that threatens to look like video without ever quite doing so, but sadly doesn’t carry over Winner’s anecdote-filled audio commentary from the US DVD, offering only a stills gallery and teaser and full trailers.
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