Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Fritz Lang was fascinated by evil, and all his most memorable characters are villains of some sort. In this movie from the start of Lang's American period, a young Henry Fonda proves once again that actors who are usually typecast as squeaky-clean good guys often give their best performances when they're allowed to play baddies. Fonda's performance here, as a man with a seriously dirty past who tries to go straight just a little bit too late, is excellent, making us care about him without actually liking him. Lang cleverly tweaks our perceptions of him so that for a surprisingly long time we're not sure how bad he really is, and we fully understand why many of the other characters react to him so negatively. We're also unsure for quite a while whether Sylvia Sidney, who does a fine job of conveying how passionately she loves this guy, is blinded by her feelings, or is right about the good man she perceives to exist under that rough exterior.

Of course, it all gets a bit more complicated as the story unfolds. Along the way, Lang makes a powerful if occasionally heavy-handed statement about the utter helplessness of individuals who for whatever reason are labeled "undesirables" by the establishment. Even the silly comic business about apples in the opening scene turns out to foreshadow the main plot, since it shows us how easily The Man can walk all over little people. Having seen firsthand the Nazi takeover of Germany, Fritz Lang knew all about that!

In the end, the only true villain in this film is the system, and it's noticeable that almost none of the characters, however minor, are entirely good or bad. Convicts guilty of terrible crimes exhibit more kindness and humanity than "good" people who refuse to admit that the rules they unquestioningly obey might be wrong, while genuinely good people end up having to break the law in order to do what they know is right. And in a pitch-black bit of subversion, the only 100% good man in the whole movie - a saintly stereotype obviously forced on Lang by the Hollywood system, along with the almost-copout in the closing moments - is so morally inflexible that he makes a decision which, if you think it, is spectacularly stupid, and ends up being disastrous for everyone.

As American films from its era go, it's surprisingly hard-hitting and cynical. Certain elements of this movie obviously influenced the even more uncompromising "Gun Crazy" (1950), with which it would make a fine double bill, so much that it's almost a semi-remake. By the way, apart from inspiring its title, this film has no connection whatsoever with "You Only Live Twice".

I like a good B-movie as much as anybody. Or even a bad one, so long as it's fun. But what I don't like are B-movies with absolutely nothing going for them other than sheer badness. Some people might describe this wretched little film as "so bad it's good" and claim to enjoy sniggering ironically at its utter lack of quality in any department at all, but in truth it's just plain bad, as well as being almost entirely boring, apart from the few moments when it briefly achieves genuine unpleasantness of a singularly sleazy kind.

It's not quite as formulaic as it might have been, but only because the subhuman bikers who pursue the one-dimensional hero and his even more cardboard girl across the desert behave so randomly that they forget all about their prey for large stretches of the film, or rather, the director does, as if even he realized how dull those characters were. There are plenty of other second-rate "bikesploitation" movies, notably "The Wild Angels", which portrayed its anti-heroes as such morons that the Hell's Angels sued Roger Corman for character defamation (yes, really!), but this dismal effort makes "The Wild Angels" look like "Mad Max: Fury Road". Slow and plodding, with abysmal fight choreography, the cheapest ever attempt to portray the effects of psychedelic drugs, and acting and scriptwriting so execrable that you realize Ed Wood was at least trying, the occasional accidentally funny lines are far outweighed by the ugly mean-spiritedness of the whole sorry mess.

Special mentions must go to the sound recording, which for large stretches of the movie is so inept that at one point we're shown a close-up of an air-conditioning unit in a desperate attempt to explain the constant background noise (which remains loudly audible for quite some time after the characters have left the air-conditioned building), and Regina Carrol's performance as a biker chick with hair resembling the love-child of the thing that lives on top of Donald Trump's head and Bigfoot. She may have been a chunky, bovine non-actress who couldn't dance either, but she had very large breasts, and just happened to be married to the director. This was Al Adamson's first attempt to make a star out of his painfully talentless spouse, and I guess he must have truly loved her, because it wasn't the last.

This truly is a bike-wreck of a film! If you want to see something along very similar lines but genuinely worthy of being described as a cult movie, watch "Faster, Pussycat - Kill! Kill!" instead. Or if you've seen that already, pretty much anything that wasn't directed by Al Adamson will probably pass the time more enjoyably than this waste of celluloid. By the way, I don't know what the person who assigns tags to films on this site thinks the word "classic" means, but judging by some of the movies he labels "classics", I presume he believes it applies to anything made with a camera that isn't a photograph.

In many ways, this is an interestingly complex film. The extremely flawed hero is played by Tetsurô Tanba very effectively, switching effortlessly from his usual stone-faced impassivity to the man behind the mask, chatting in a completely natural way in the rare moments when he finds himself among true friends, and in the privacy of his home showing how deeply it affects him to take a human life, which is the single most effective plot-device in the entire film, since his willingness to kill and the circumstances in which he does so take on a completely different meaning once we know how he really feels about it. We're also given several different possible motives for his actions, which for most of the movie seem to be a cynical betrayal of his former comrades, ranging from selfless idealism to Macbeth-like ambition triggered by the fact that he owns a supposedly magic sword, and although we eventually find out what he's really up to, we're never entirely sure why.

On the other hand, this is a very Japanese film indeed. Although the hero, a commoner who has risen by talent and determination to the unofficial status of a samurai, is to some extent committed to social reform, there's a constant sense that all these people are so obsessed with duty, honor, and tradition that they're either a bit simple-minded or have a bizarre death-wish ("The Seven Samurai" is infinitely more subversive in this respect). The cause our hero is fighting for is also peculiarly abstract, and may baffle anyone without an in-depth understanding of 19th. century Japanese politics. Nothing really seems to be achieved, apart from the prevention of a very small war (the number of potential combatants on one side is 234) between two equally misguided factions, neither of whom comes across as particularly pleasant.

And I have to say that Masahara Shinoda's directorial style has few standout moments. Compared to "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford", another slow-paced film which also shows us the lives of extremely violent men with surprisingly little violence, it's visually dull to look at; similarly-dressed upper-class Japanese men in stereotypical Japanese interiors appear in just about every scene. And Shinoda really can't do action (which is perhaps why there's so little of it); it was just plain amateurish, especially as late as 1964, to repeatedly use freeze-frames whenever something really bad happened. Perhaps it's best compared with something like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", where none of the protagonists are squeaky-clean, the goal is something that only really matters to people in their odd little world, and violence or other any literal action is infrequent. But I'm afraid it lacks the richness of detail and, apart from the hero, characterization that a story of this kind needs. At times I felt I was watching a film adaptation of a stage play which might even have started out as a one-man show. So, a mixed bag, and not as involving as it could have been.

Fritz Lang's best work was in the early part of his career, when his imagination was able to run wild, using the magic-realist and downright surrealist tropes of expressionism to create such extraordinary visual spectacles that we felt we were in a strange anything-goes world where it didn't matter that the plot sometimes made about as much sense as Scientology.

Of course, for that approach to work, Lang needed the kind of budgets that weren't easy to come by in the difficult year of 1944. He was also still trying to adjust to the fact that expressionism had died along with silent movies, so bizarrely unrealistic sets and impossible plots would just seem quaint. This film is minor, watered-down Lang. A few of the old flourishes are still there. A pretentious doorbell so elaborate that the hero has difficulty figuring out how to use it looks like a tiny fragment of Metropolis smuggled into this movie as a souvenir, and he makes a half-hearted attempt to recreate his earlier magical use of models in a brief shot of a factory being bombed.

Lang has more success with those elements of his style where the budget doesn't matter, so most of the people we meet are memorably odd, and even some very minor characters have enough personality to make an impression. But even here, you get the impression that Lang originally hoped to take this aspect of the film a lot farther than the budget allowed. Two different lunatic asylums are mentioned but we never see a single lunatic, and a subplot about fake séances and the nutters who frequent them doesn't get as weird as we hope it's going to. And ironically, although the fact that almost everybody is slightly sinister keeps both the hero and the audience guessing as to which of them are baddies, Lang can't include one of his trademark over-the-top supervillains because it would make the identity of the Nazi master spy too obvious.

Ray Milland does a good job as a protagonist who, like most of Lang's heroes, is more confused and vulnerable than two-fisted he-men in spy thrillers usually are, though the nice girl he falls in love with is one of the film's weak points; the not-so-nice girl he's tempted by is far more interesting, and there's obviously far better chemistry between the actors. So although it's a decent enough thriller with plenty of twists and turns, it's nowhere near the best that Lang could do. And it's hard to ignore the absurdity of Nazi spies passing information they could simply hand to one another in an insanely convoluted way because the plot requires our unsuspecting hero to be given the Macguffin by mistake.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece "North By Northwest" is so heavily influenced by this film that it's almost a remake, only with a vastly greater budget and a keen awareness of its own absurdity.

This is the kind of film that automatically gets rave reviews because nobody in their right mind disagrees with the point it's making, and it almost seems as if you're on the side of paedophile priests if you admit you don't like it. But unfortunately it isn't quite as good as many reviews claim. It's not bad, and there are some very committed performances, but it has to be said that Michael Keaton struggles to be anywhere near as interesting as he was in the superb "Birdman", probably because his character here gives him a lot less scope for characterization.

In fact, the whole movie is oddly flat. Priests commit crimes which we aren't shown, and the ghastly details of which, though we are told fairly graphically what they are, occupy as little screen-time as possible. Which is understandable; an explicit film about child abuse would be unwatchable, and possibly illegal. However, combined with the fact that we barely meet the guilty priests at all (since this is a film about real events and people who are still alive, they probably had to tread very carefully indeed around certain legal issues), this means that it's basically a movie in which some increasingly upset reporters hear second-hand about horrible misdeeds mostly done a long time ago and write a newspaper story about it, rather slowly.

Attempts at suspense are token, to put it mildly. Will Mark Ruffalo be able to photocopy the vital documents before the church gets another injunction put on them? Since we know in advance that the story did in fact run, yeah, I guess so. Will he be able to do this before a rival paper finds out about these documents and scoops the story? Frankly, who cares? With a movie like "Apollo 13", even though we know the astronauts will survive because it's a historical fact that they did, the situation they're in is so horrendously perilous that it's still a real nail-biter. But here, the guilt of the abusive priests is established from the outset, and the only real question is whether the exposé these journalists are eventually going to publish months later will be as damning as they want it to be, or not quite that bad because Vatican lawyers managed to legally restrict access to certain bits of paper.

Frankly, it's one-note, with none of the escalation of tension you need in any kind of dramatic story. And although the entire cast, especially Mark Ruffalo, are acting their socks off, the characters are so uninteresting that there are a couple of brief and very awkward scenes that obviously exist solely for the purpose of establishing that these people have some sort of life other than the very specific and limited thing they devote themselves to for 99% of the movie. The level of commitment the cast bring to the film makes it genuinely moving, but ultimately they needed a better script if they were going to make it truly great. The scriptwriters were obviously heavily influenced by "All The President's Men", perhaps a bit too much, but in the end this is one of those films which gets a couple of extra stars for really, really trying to do the right thing. I'm reviewing it purely as a movie, and I'm afraid it's not that great.

I don't know if this film was ever considered a "classic" as the synopsis claims, but I suspect it wasn't. Certainly by today's standards, even giving it the leeway you have to with movies over 40 years old, it hasn't aged well; "The French Connection" it ain't!

B-list action hero Barry Newman (you may remember him from "Vanishing Point", but as memorable starring rôles go, that's about it) is a convincing tough guy, but in a deeply uninteresting way, as befits a man motivated so entirely by revenge that he seems to have no life whatsoever outside his mission, even in the latter part of the film where his character is supposed to reveal hidden depths. Suzy Kendall, as you might have guessed from the DVD cover artwork, has very little to do except scream; the chemistry between her and the hero is so non-existent that the script doesn't bother to include the normally obligatory romance. It's true she warms to him slightly as the film progresses, but maybe that's because every other man in her life who isn't her father is a psychopath. Talking of which, Royale the Mafia hit-man is such a stereotype that I didn't notice until the closing credits that he was played by Ben Kingsley.

It's also oddly lacking in action. After an opening sequence consisting mainly of a lackluster car-chase that goes on far too long and has only one decent stunt (and which looks suspiciously like a mini-remake of "Vanishing Point" to remind us why the presence of Barry Newman is supposed to be a big deal), the "action" mostly consists of our hero sneaking around hiding from the baddies, apart from a couple of desultory fist-fights and a few deaths, only two of which we actually see. The climax, despite being genuinely nasty (it's definitely NOT recommended viewing for claustrophobics!) and featuring the best acting in the movie, is almost completely static, and basically consists of a few men having a bad time while waiting to see who cracks first.

And of course there's the story. You know it's a bad thriller when there isn't enough happening to distract you from noticing gigantic plot-holes. The hero wants revenge, and the baddies want a Macguffin which, in today's money, is worth nearly half a billion dollars, but the cops seem to be doing everything in the wrong order, using methods so illegal that they're in more trouble than the criminals if it ever comes to court! And although the howlingly implausible string of coincidences which set up the plot later turn out to be part of something a lot more subtle than we at first thought, how stupid must those villains be not to notice that certain convenient turns of events are less likely than winning the lottery? Thrillers are, by definition, supposed to thrill. This one doesn't, and I'm not convinced it ever did.

I wonder how many people rented this film thinking it was the one with Daniel Craig, and had trouble getting their heads around what they were seeing? Because this is one of the all-time great cinematic disasters. And not a "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of disaster; more like "Exorcist 2 - The Heretic", where lots of people who were supposed to know what they were doing spent a vast amount of money making a sequel which somehow ended up being entirely the wrong film in every imaginable way.

Apparently it started out as a perfectly sensible attempt by another studio to muscle in on the highly lucrative official James Bond franchise, and to explain the absence of Sean Connery, the writers came up with the idea that "James Bond" is a code-name used by whoever Britain's top secret agent happens to be at any given time, so when Connery's 007 goes missing just when he's needed most, one of his predecessors has to be brought out of retirement (the official series very nearly went with that idea; in his sole outing, George Lazenby's Bond makes a reference to "the other fellow"). And somehow the "more than one Bond" concept spiraled out of control, until they ended up with a totally incoherent screwball comedy in which everybody is James Bond, including the women.

Knowing it was all going horribly wrong but not wanting to pull the plug because they'd already spent far too much money, the studio bosses panicked and fired the director in mid-shoot. It's usually a bad sign when a movie has two directors for that reason. This film has six, which I think is a record! The "difficult" (as in "borderline insane") Peter Sellers added to the fun by firing himself. Although top-billed, he's in less than a third of the film, and his final scenes are so confusingly edited that you can see there's a great deal missing, including an entire car-chase. Reportedly Sellers walked off the set because he believed Orson Welles' amateur conjuring tricks were evidence of real magical powers, and he thought Welles was in league with Satan and might put a curse on him. Maybe he had a point, because it's hard to imagine how any film could go quite this wrong without somebody putting a curse on it.

And yet, for that very reason, it's oddly lovable. Due to the multiple directors (and at least ten screenwriters), it lurches all over the place in totally unexpected directions, changing its look, mood, and cast at random intervals - David Niven and Peter Sellers manage to co-star as two men with the same name on the same mission without ever meeting each other. Nothing except the pivotal card-game in any way resembles the source-novel. Instead, we get broad parodies in assorted styles of various aspects of James Bond's popular image, alternating with pastiches of German Expressionist silent cinema, exotic Hindu dance routines, and anything else that seemed like a good idea at the time. The completely-out-of-control last few minutes have to be seen to be believed!

Still, the set designers obviously had a ball - that's the grooviest supervillain's headquarters ever! And since it's 1967, it really is groovy in a non-ironic way. It would make a fun double bill with "Head" starring the Monkees, which has an equally chaotic and surprisingly similar look and feel to it, except that the Monkees were doing it on purpose. Watch out for the cameos by actors from the official Bond franchise, including the late Burt Kwouk. And that's an uncredited Dave "Darth Vader" Prowse playing Frankenstein's Monster.

Firstly, I have to point out that, as with so many obscure movies from this era, the DVD version is a crude transfer from video, and this one's worse than most. In addition to being cropped to fit a TV screen, it's so grainy that the whole film's a little bit out of focus. It's watchable, but only just. If that's going to seriously bother you, read no further, and don't rent the movie!

Otherwise, it's a dreadful film, but in an enjoyably stupid way. As you may have guessed from the synopsis, it's a shameless rip-off of "The Terminator", only with a tenth of the budget (at most), none of those expensive robots, and instead of James Cameron, the guy who went on to direct "Evil Bong 3: The Wrath Of Bong!", amongst many other timeless classics. It also tries desperately to be "Blade Runner", and occasionally turns into a zombie film for a couple of minutes, because bad actors in zombie makeup are much cheaper than killer cyborgs. And talking of bad actors, some of the cast are practically at the Plan 9 level, and only veteran TV actress Anne Seymour in a minor supporting rôle really seems to be trying.

Naturally, the script abounds in huge lapses of logic, plot holes you could fly the Death Star through, and random stuff they just made up as they went along, such as the bad guy's superpower of turning people into zombies by telepathy. But you know what? "Loopers" didn't too badly at the box office, and it's not noticeably less logical than this film. In fact, it's oddly similar in so many ways that I can't help feeling the writers of "Loopers" saw "Trancers" and took notes. And there are a few scenes that weirdly prefigure "The Matrix" too; maybe this absurd little film is more influential than anybody realizes?

All the same, you have to love how relentlessly eighties it is, especially that not very authentic looking punk nightclub in which a band called the Buttheads sing "Jingle Bells". It's kinda fun, but in an ironic sort of way, where the unintentional humor works better than the scripted gags, and I'd probably have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been constantly squinting at the screen. Oh, and about that 18 certificate? These days, if they cut several uses of the f-word, I'm not sure it would even be a 12.

Remember that bit in Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" where Ed and Bela Lugosi are watching one of Bela's old movies on TV? It was this one, and they made an excellent choice, because it's one of the weirdest and most atmospheric horror films of the thirties.

Every nation's pet monsters reflect its deepest fears, and in Haiti, they came up with zombies because the worst fate they could imagine was slavery that you couldn't escape even in death. Cinematic zombies have changed quite a bit since then, but here we see the original kind, menacing yet pathetic robots utterly devoid of will, but with just enough soul left to understand the horror of their situation. The sugar mill scene, where a black zombie workforce with utter despair etched on their faces work endlessly for a white master, is truly horrifying, and includes one very nasty moment which must have come as quite a shock to audiences in 1932. It's also surprisingly politically correct for its time. We're spared the usual "funny" black sidekick, the locals are shown from the beginning to have very good reasons to be superstitious and terrified, and we briefly meet an elderly black voodoo practitioner who even the white Christian priest admits is a good guy.

Essentially, this is a filmed nightmare. Almost every significant character is for at least part of the film helplessly trapped by terrifying and completely irrational forces they can't comprehend, let alone fight. People are literally paralyzed while terrible, inescapable doom approaches. And despite the location being Haiti, Bela Lugosi somehow lives in a surreal gothic mansion straight out of Edgar Allen Poe. Bela himself is both extraordinarily memorable and one of the film's weaknesses, because, even by his usual standards, he's hammier than a pork butchers' convention, and his character (whose name seems to be Murder) is almost literally a pantomime devil; all he's missing are the horns, tail and pitchfork. Sometimes he comes across as truly evil, but too often he's so far over the top that he's impossible to take seriously. And it does meander a bit at times, especially when the romantic elements of the plot predominate. But overall it's an extraordinary film owing far more to German Expressionism than the usual Hollywood conventions, and is in many ways better than the creaky old version of "Dracula" for which Lugosi is best known.

Unfortunately, the DVD I was sent was a cheap and lazy conversion of what was obviously a very old print, and the worn-out celluloid has been mended so often that the soundtrack skips oddly. But it's still a splendidly weird movie, and there may be better copies out there. Hammer kinda sorta remade this in 1966 as "The Plague of the Zombies".

It's often said that the test of whether an actor is suitable to play James Bond is whether you believe he'd kill you. If that's true, Alan Ladd would have been a great Bond, because he's totally believable as a killer, and, despite getting the dreaded "and introducing..." credit that usually means you'll never be heard of again, he almost completely steals the picture. It's a pity he was subsequently typecast as a hero and seldom got to play villains, because he's very good at being bad.

Veronica Lake is extremely engaging, and has infinitely more chemistry with Ladd than the charmless fellow she's supposed to be in love with - some of her declarations of affection are unintentionally funny, due to being delivered in a tone of voice more suited to "I've run out of hemorrhoid cream" - but the two of them sometimes appear to be in different movies. Ladd's ruthless but tortured hit-man isn't funny in the slightest, whereas Lake's wisecracking nightclub singer wouldn't be out of place in one of those films where a mad scientist commits murders while dressed as a gorilla. You can see her acting going up several notches every time she's on screen with Ladd, so I guess those two weren't exactly strangers, and almost everything good about this film involves either Ladd on his own or Ladd and Lake together, but by herself, she's sometimes downright odd. In particular, the fact that she sings extremely bad songs while performing conjuring tricks that are physically impossible unless she has superpowers is utterly bizarre, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot.

About that plot: it's derived from a Graham Greene novel, therefore sin and redemption must be laid on by the shovelful even if Catholicism isn't explicitly involved, and since it's 1942, patriotism must be shoehorned in somehow, but the way in which Ladd's anti-hero is betrayed very early in the film for pointlessly self-defeating reasons just so that the plot can proceed is bad script-writing, as is the baffling sub-plot where a great deal of effort goes into setting up a totally implausible scenario in which a company tests a lethal chemical weapon in its own corporate headquarters just so that there can be a scene where everybody's wearing a gas-mask!

What stops this film from being the classic it's supposed to be is this schizoid quality. A scene in which practical ways to kill Veronica Lake so that it'll look like suicide are casually discussed is chilling, yet also a bit peculiar because half the time, she's in the kind of movie where something as genuinely nasty as that wouldn't even be mentioned. So all in all, it's a flawed and somewhat muddled film worth watching because the good bits outweigh the bad bits, and there are one and a half great performances.

This movie, which is essentially a first draft of King Hu's masterpiece "A Touch Of Zen", has gained a cult reputation that, unfortunately, is only half-deserved. The action sequences are just fine. In fact, for the time (1967), they're frequently rather more than fine; that was always King Hu's strong suit. Characterization and plot aren't so good. One problem is that the film is trying so hard to be a Taiwanese spaghetti western that it concentrates more on ticking the generic boxes than making any sense whatsoever.

The action mostly occurs in and around what is basically a Mexican cantina, except it's in China, accompanied by a spectacularly bad soundtrack that frequently rips off Ennio Morricone note for note, when it isn't relentlessly sampling Mussorgsky, mostly one very short musical phrase repeated far, far too often. Even the ethnically authentic bits are sampled from traditional Chinese folk-songs, so the "composer" didn't write a note of it, except maybe the extremely annoying wood-block percussion riffs used to indicate that what we're seeing right now is exciting, in case the fact that everybody is hitting everybody else with swords hasn't given us a strong enough hint. I mention it because, as bad soundtracks go, this really is a howling clunker, and if that sort of thing offends you, you should know.

King Hu's trademark feisty young woman who only needs the hero's help because she has trouble fighting multiple armed men all at once when they start running into double figures is memorable without being interesting, because she has so few other character traits that even the hero only manages to notice that she's female for about two seconds before forgetting again. As for the hero, he's literally a hero who just happened to be in the room when he was needed, and that's all there is to him. Oddly, much more effort goes into giving minor characters personalities which are mostly irrelevant because they aren't on screen long enough for it to matter, though it's nice to see a couple of expendable henchmen get so much backstory that they change sides and become major characters after all. But when the bizarrely bleached blond villain suddenly displays ludicrous superpowers that would have allowed him to make this a very short movie if he'd remembered he had them an hour and a half previously, it's a Pythonesque moment just when we're supposed to be taking everything very seriously indeed.

Overall, this is an entertaining action movie, but there isn't one scene that comes within a light-year of the bamboo forest fight in "A Touch Of Zen", and the complete lack of any plot you care about enough to actually remember it ten minutes after it's been explained puts this epic bout of chop-socky firmly in the B-list. It's still fun though. This disk includes an unintentionally humorous featurette in which the ultimate geeky fanboy lists everything wrong with the film and breathlessly explains why it's actually a virtue, while repeatedly name-checking the person who in an ideal world he would be married to, Quentin Tarentino. Whatever some people may think, this doesn't make it a towering artistic triumph.

Although it does show its age at times (it was made in 1954), this is a classic western which in many ways is a missing link in cinematic evolution (apart from not being missing), since it bridges the gap between earlier, more stately westerns in which we were very seldom in any doubt who the good and bad guys were, and the later, bloodier spaghetti westerns in which morality was much more of a grey area. Robert Aldrich, who directed this film, went on to co-write "A Fistful Of Dollars" and direct "The Dirty Dozen", so it's no great surprise to see him experimenting with morally dubious heroes and, for the time, considerable amounts of violence this early in his career. Other directors who are better remembered today, such as Sam Peckinpah, have cited this movie as a major influence - "The Wild Bunch" is basically a remake with the violence turned up to 11 (Ernest Borgnine plays much the same character in both films).

Burt Lancaster, always a better actor when he was allowed to play somebody who wasn't very nice instead of being typecast as beefcake, is a charming rogue who, as the story progresses, isn't quite so charming any more, and never leaves us in any doubt that he's totally amoral and will always look after number one, while Gary Cooper is a lot more subtle as a man doing something he knows is wrong because he needs the money. Obviously we know Gary Cooper will eventually do what's right because he's Gary Cooper, but if you pay attention, more than once there's room for doubt as to quite how pure his motives are.

Unfortunately, many of the supporting cast are badly underused. The rest of the ragtag band of mercenaries of whom the two leads are the principle members are a colorful rabble it would be fun to know more about, but they're so obviously in the film only to be whittled down that they might as well be wearing those Star Trek red shirts. Caesar Romero is built up throughout the movie as a fiendishly cunning and unpredictable adversary without ever really becoming interesting. And those German lancers who are obviously stand-ins for the Nazis, though they're certainly evil, are so ineffective against any foe who isn't helpless that they make unsatisfactory villains (note to self: don't bring a lance to a gunfight!). But despite these flaws, it's an excellent high-budget western with everything you'd expect, some things you wouldn't in a film made this early, and a great deal happening most of the time, with very watchable leads who make a great double act. Recommended.

I'm really starting to go off Guillermo Del Toro. Like Terry Gilliam, he's gotten the idea that if you put enough striking imagery on the screen, it doesn't matter if the story makes no sense whatsoever. It has to be said that this movie looks marvelous. Whenever somebody has a cup of tea (which, for clumsy subplot reasons, happens often), you just know that a property buyer spent days in antique shops looking for a teacup that perfectly matched every other beautifully lit slightly menacing object in the room. And the Old Dark House where most of the film is set is memorably surreal, if at times a wee bit silly.

But this is a movie, not a still life, so it would help if it had a good plot, and it doesn't. This film is obviously Del Toro's homage to Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, especially "The Black Cat". If you've seen the Corman films, you'll constantly be spotting little nods to them, while wishing you were watching them instead because they're a lot more fun, despite their much lower budgets and complete lack of CG ghosts. Also, Tom Hiddleston is no substitute for Vincent Price, even though he looks a lot more like Edgar Allen Poe. It's not entirely his fault, because he was obviously supposed to bring many of the same qualities to this character as he did to Loki. Unfortunately, Del Toro's clumsy idea of making the film "feminist" is to assume that if the the women are strong, the men must be weak. Remove Loki's arrogance (and superpowers) and he's just an insecure wimp, which is pretty much what we get here.

Even worse, since there are so few major characters, the "strong" heroine is obliged to be hopelessly stupid and useless for much of the film because it's a direct homage to movies which always involved a damsel in distress, then go all "Final Girl Versus Jason" at the end because she's also the hero. That's absolutely terrible scriptwriting (by the way, Del Toro co-wrote the script), so it's no surprise that almost every other aspect of the plot is either totally predictable or just plain nonsensical. He seems to think that a Hellboy-style supernatural action comedy turns into a tragic and moving drama if you leave out all the comedy and most of the action. It doesn't.

Oh, and about those CG ghosts? One thing Del Toro has managed to learn from Roger Corman is that if you include a couple of minutes of footage that don't really have anything to do with the rest of the movie but are sure to please the crowds, you can cut a trailer which implies the whole film is like that without actually lying. The few appearances by these spooks, which look too bizarre to be the least bit scary, serve no genuinely useful purpose, and sometimes make the heroine seem extraordinarily slow on the uptake. Let's face it, if you ignore the advice of a rotting blood-soaked zombie with a cleaver stuck in its head to leave the house right now, you deserve everything you get!

Once again, the synopsis writer for this site hasn't actually seen the film, makes a wild guess as to what it might be about, and totally misleads potential renters! This is in fact one of the tautest and most unusual examples of the film noir genre, with nary a joke in sight. Given the tiny ratio of female to male directors even today, it beggars belief that Hollywood glamorpuss Ida Lupino got to direct a gritty thriller about two men stuck in a car with a psychopath in 1953, but somehow she did, and she makes a pretty good job of it.

Undoubtedly because the director is a woman, the degree of political correctness is very surprising for the time. But what's even more surprising is how intelligently this is done, especially in comparison with today's clunking efforts in that direction, which often give a distinct sense of ticking the boxes. Rather than taking the easy option of giving us unbelievably strong women, Lupino leaves women out of the film almost entirely, and instead gives us believably weak men, cleverly allowing a heterosexual buddy relationship with one much stronger partner to stand in for the usual guy and his gal. Which, when you think about it, is pretty damn subversive for 1953.

And although the ethnic minority characters are very secondary, they're all decent people who are just as good at their jobs as whites. One very minor non-white character in particular is initially presented as thoroughly disreputable and willing to do anything for money, yet unhesitatingly changes his mind the second he catches onto what he's really agreed to. At the same time, the two heroes are shown from the very start to be not altogether saintly, in ways that are actually quite sleazy.

Where Lupino falls down a little is in taking her good intentions too far. Although Edmond O'Brien's title character is memorably vile in every respect, he's so one-dimensionally evil that, despite a performance that can't really be faulted, he's too flat, especially compared with his not completely perfect antagonists. Which also makes his decision not to kill them very early on a bit hard to swallow. Also, the totally believable unwillingness of two ordinary men to take on an armed psychopath ironically makes the movie a bit light on action.

However, it's still a very interesting and tense thriller. One thing which today's directors might do well to take note of is the way that Spanish-speaking characters are never given subtitles, even when conveying vital plot-points, because Lupino's direction makes it clear what they're saying even if you don't speak the language. That's using a visual medium properly while simultaneously refusing to dumb down. I think we could do with seeing more of it.

There have been a lot of Bond films over the years. Hardly surprising, given that it's the longest-running franchise in movie history. And I think we can all agree that some have been better than others. But this? What can I say? Well, let's start with an opening that fails to be even remotely exciting, during which Bond's extremely dull prolonged fistfight aboard a helicopter endangers a huge crowd of innocent people so blatantly that his superiors feebly complain later in the film, before forgetting all about it. This seems to be a rehash of the scene at the beginning of "Skyfall" where Bond is given a direct order to walk away from one person who needs his help right now because a lot more people might die later if he doesn't, written by people who aren't intelligent enough to understand what worked about it the first time round. Naturally, it's immediately followed by a forgettably formulaic Bond theme song performed by a whiny-voiced nonentity who was famous at the exact moment this film needed to be made.

James Bond is not a superhero, and even before CGI made superhero movies an affordable major movie genre, we all knew that Bond was at his weakest when he tried to be Superman. The previous entry in the series seemed to indicate that Hollywood knew this, and I think we were all looking forward to seeing a more human Bond coping with global problems in the manner of a normal person who is very good at his job, but is still capable of doubt, regret, and bleeding when he's shot. Instead, we get a more human Bond who triumphs because his foes are cardboard cutouts who lazily conform to the stereotypes laid down by every previous Bond movie. Which is just as well, because Bond himself is at times so inept that towards the end there are moments when he appears to win simply because the good guy always does.

This film has no interesting characters whatsoever. In the closing minutes, Bond drops so many hints that he's through with it, including literally throwing away his gun, that it's clear they don't expect Daniel Craig to do another one, and the franchise can go in any direction at all because nobody cares any more. Meanwhile, we're thrown endless meaningless nods to older, better Bond films, while the plot lumbers along in the most predictable direction imaginable. It looks very much as though they're deliberately dismantling the franchise to the point where they can introduce a Bond so different from all the previous ones that he's clearly a completely different person, and use that as an excuse to change everything except that lucrative trademarked name. Well, good luck with that. But this really is a desperately tired film, and they don't even have the excuse of a screenwriters' strike. By normal standards it would only be a little below average, but as an A-list mega-blockbuster continuing a franchise older than I am, this is a dismal effort, and unless the next one is a truly heroic return to form, I think this is the beginning of the end. Goodbye, mister Bond...