Detective, Drama, Imaginary German Cinema

#72 – Sadist, Der (Sadist, The)

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(1978, WGer, 120 min) Dir Hans Berg. Cast Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jürgen Prochnow.

Named after the non-fiction book by psychiatrist Karl Berg (no relation to the director) about the life and crimes of notorious serial killer Peter Kürten who had previously been immortalised on the screen as the inspiration for the killer played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M. The film begins as a two-hander between Kürten (Trintignant) and Berg (Prochnow) as the former details his life to that point. Trintignant is impeccable as Kürten, betraying no emotion on the surface, his excitement at recounting his terrible deeds manifest as nothing more than a dull glint in his eye. The only distraction to his performance is the imperfect dubbing which occasionally serves to flub the odd dramatic moment. The flashbacks are the model of restraint, with Kürten’s words painting the picture and not the camera which makes it all the more absurd that the film spent six months being banned in it’s home country before an outcry saw this decision overturned. This was the first film that showed the future promise of director Berg – he was previously known for two entires in the awful Dieter film series about a dictatorish child but would go on to have a distinguished career in the decade ahead.

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Black and White, Detective, Imaginary British Cinema

#71 – Hadley Close

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(1966, GB, 100 min, b/w) Dir Eric Conway Bryce. Cast Dirk Bogarde, Denholm Elliott, Billie Whitelaw.

Based on the infamous real life case of the so-called ‘Bloody Blonde’, Hadley Close comes second only to 10 Rillington Place in my mind in it’s portrayal of humdrum post-war Britain and in their depictions of squalid murder – both films seem to exist in a sooty pall. The more unsettling thing about Hadley Close however is the fact that the case remains to this day unsolved – the one 1952 murder in an abandoned house in, yes, Hadley Close yielded no convictions, no plausible motives and no likely suspects. Dirk Bogarde in convincingly haunted as Detective Samuel Gately who headed the investigations and never, it is said, let it go. Denholm Elliott and Billie Whitelaw are the victim’s parents whose grief runs through the film like the writing in a stick of rock, their undying faith in Gately battering him down more and more as the years go on. A grimly solid depiction of the times and of the terrible effect of murder on a people.

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Detective, Drama, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#70 – Dans le mur (In the Walls)

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(1990, Fr, 129 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Daniel Auteuil, Jean Rochefort, Emmanuelle Béart.

French thriller about famed neuroscientist Paul Mauchard (Auteuil) who has the unfortunate habit in his downtime of killing women and secreting their corpses in the space between the walls of his country house, all while his wife (Beart) and two children live there unknowing. Aging detective Fandeur (Rochefort), meanwhile, is trying to track down the missing Valerie Cassin who we have seen lured to Mauchard’s house and killed in the film’s extended opening. The two storylines play out side by side, converging and separating in nail-biting fashion as Fandeur picks up clues and finds the trail to his missing person, all the while not knowing that he’s on the trail of a serial killer. The whole thing is glacially paced and shot at the expected remove by Sacher, the camera coolly watching over the players without giving away a thing. This all means that when the expertly handled tension breaks out in the film’s latter half it will be an impossible watch for viewers without nerves of steel. An American remake has been mooted since the original was released but here’s hoping that if that comes to pass it’s not the slick, shallow interpretation that fans of the original have been dreading.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#69 – Boo Dat!

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(2008, US, 100 mins) Dir Keenen Ivory Wayans. Cast Tracy Morgan, Marlon Wayans, Kerry Washington, Vivica A Fox, Eugene Levy.

From the director of White Chicks and Little Guy and if that pedigree doesn’t scare the pants off you then settle down and prepare to be terrified by… No, wait – apparently this is a comedy! Who knew? Morgan and Wayans are typical bros sharing a flat in LA when a gas leak kills them in their sleep. The next morning they wake up to find firemen in the apartment who can’t see them and when they try to leave they find that they can’t. Fortunately an afterlife official (Levy) is at hand to ease them through their “post-life transition phase”, informing them that because of their unquiet death they are now doomed to haunt their former abode. Neither takes it well, both wishing that they could get on to the afterlife where the life is easy. Their initial funk wears off when their shady landlord rents out their apartment to attractive young lady friends Washington and Fox and hilarity ensues, with poltergeist gropings and flying ectoplasm jokes the order of the day. Oh, and a cruelly extended bout of obvious Exorcist riffing. Lots of fun for those with a high offense threshold and low comedy standards.

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Childrens, Horror, Imaginary Canadian Cinema, Science Fiction

#68 – Octember

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(1992, Can, 90 min) Dir Ben Roy. Cast Bobby Rusk, E. Emmett Benn, Alison Shaker.

Young Alex finds himself trapped in the missing month of Octember, a twilight month that slipped between October and November many years ago and was never found again. Octember manifests itself as an empty world – the rest of its residents having gone straight to November – though he’s not the only one there. A host of lost souls are adrift with him in this phantom month, some there so long that they have become unhinged. His initial wanderings around his depopulated neighbourhood after waking in his empty house are eerie in the extreme with whole streets rendered very Marie Celeste, the evidence of people littering yards and kitchens and driveways but nobody is there. The perfect kind of kids movie – by virtue of its small-scale made for TV production it occupies the kinds of spaces familiar to children like the house and the street and so on which is perhaps why it’s left such an impression on those, like myself, who saw it at an impressionable age.

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Documentary, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#67 – Phone

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(2012, US/Fr, 193 min) Dir Murray Grossman.

Another epic and encyclopaedic documentary from Grossman, this one following the construction of a mobile phone from the mines in Mongolia and Sierra Leone where the rare earth minerals are dug up to the engineers in South Korea and the United States who construct the various parts like the gyroscope, liquid crystal display and internal processors and then to the enormous plants in China where all these elements are put together, assembled into the finished product. More than that each part is subject to a brief biography, like a short film within the film, telling you who invented it, who designed it, what the elements are used for in the finished products and the people involved at every juncture, from the designers to the assembly line workers, are heard from and their lives illuminated. Despite what it sounds like it’s not a polemical film either, simply addressing the facts as they are. Over two years in the making Phone is more like spending three hours on Wikipedia following links than the standard documentary but it does what Wikipedia can’t – it puts a face on the modern world and realises fantastically how much modern industry straddles the globe. It may well sound like the most boringest documentary of all time but you’ll come out of the cinema gobsmacked, believe me.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary French Cinema

#66 – Homme du sous-terre, Les (Underground Men, The)

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(1988, Fr, 100 min) Dir Jack Vitesse. Cast Denis Lavant, Richard Bohringer, Dominique Pinon.

Night. As the people leave the metro and the lights go off, the Underground Men (led by Lavant) can emerge from the shadows. The premise might sound like the beginning of a horror film but Vitesse is a man enamoured by the cinéma du look of the time and the Underground Men are street punks more like Christopher Lambert in Subway (an obvious influence) than Hugh Armstrong in Death Line. The film follows this half-dozen strong crew operating in silence, raiding stores, stealing cars and generally wreaking havoc. Soon enough le flics (led by Bohringer) are giving chase and the film goes underground for a prolonged subterranean chase on motorbike, skateboard and foot that takes up the film’s final forty minutes through service tunnels, train lines, the sewers and the catacombs into skyscrapers and monuments but always back down again, coming off like a Mad Max 2 beneath the streets instead of in the desert. While it doesn’t all add up (Why are they stealing the cars? How have they not been noticed before?) and the characters personalities are non-existent, it’s slick and stylish enough to hook the viewer into leaving these questions for later.

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Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema, Silent

#65 – Vélo du diable (Devil’s Bicycle, The)

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(1920, Fr, 27 min, b/w) Dir Patrice Vasqueaux.

Friendly postman Alain kisses his wife good day and makes to leave for his rounds on his bicycle but upon leaving his house finds, in dismay, that it has been stolen. Thankfully a passing bicycle selling gypsy offers him an astonishing discount for a new one which Alain can’t help but take. The salesman – it is revealed to us once Alain is gone – is none other than Beelzebub himself and the bicycle he sold Alain is demonically possessed. Poor Alain soon finds himself flying through the countryside at a terrifying speed, flinging his letters left and right as he vainly tries to do his job regardless and setting into motion all kinds of catastrophes. Due to a Rube Goldbergian confluence of events spurred by a flying parcel the devil gets his comeuppance by the end. The ingenuity of the filmmakers in realising the hilarious accidents caused by the careering postman is to be applauded. Though never mentioned by the man, this was undoubtedly an influence on a young Jacques Tati (in particular, of course, on his short film L’École des facteurs) and it’s a miracle to have survived in the pristine condition in which I saw it.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary US Cinema, Science Fiction

#64 – Beyond the Stars

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(1954, US, 123 min) Dir Hal Douglas. Cast Jim Thorn, Alice Patrick, Ed Dietrich.

The best that can be said about Beyond the Stars is that it’s right. If you wanted to go into space yourself then you could watch it and take notes and construct the same rockets and use the same methods that are used in the movie and it would work. The problem with that is that the film will be super exciting to rocket scientists but to your average Joe and Sally on a Saturday afternoon it may as well be filmed in Snooze-A-Rama. And that’s just the plot – you can have the dullest script sold to you by the magnetism of a bona fide star but Thorn, Patrick and Dietrich seem to have been cast on the size of their jaws rather than on their ability to react before a camera better than a slab of aged steak. Add that all together and you’ve got a film that plays at two hours plus but feels like a year. The title’s a con too by the way – they get to Mars by the halfway point and waste precious celluloid standing around in the dirt for the rest of the film. Avoid like a holiday in a vacuum.

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Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema, Science Fiction

#63 – Coffin Orbit

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(1982, It, 115 min) Dir Paolo Andreotti. Cast Kirk Douglas, Carl Weathers, Candy Brown.

It’s 1982. Star Wars busted all the blocks five years ago and then Alien did the same two years after that. The studios are tarting up the schlock in trade of the likes of White Star Films so White Star Films, in turn, have to start pumping in the cash to compete. Trouble is they’ve only got so much to go around. Easy – bet it all on one, a sure-fire winner, and with the profits you make two and with the profits from that… Next stop, success! It’s a sure-fire recipe for sure but a meal’s only as good as it’s ingredients, right? So what have we got here? Andreotti knows how to direct a film, sure, but the man’s getting old and he’s coming off Vendetta di Zombie, a film that doesn’t display the kind of common touch a blockbuster needs. Who’s starring too? Kirk Douglas? Didn’t he learn anything from Saturn 3? What about plot? An previously unnoticed object is detected in orbit around our sun and NASA send Captain Dale (Douglas) and his crew to investigate. Turns out this thing is a colossal coffin for some humongous space creature and something else is in there too. Something deadly. Okay, so Coffin Orbit is no Star Wars. Yes, it’s plot is basically Alien and no, it didn’t get the blockbuster market either, but every once in a while someone spends a ton of money on something mad like this and that should be cherished, even if it sunk White Star Films in the process. Just watch it for all the money up there on-screen behind the awful acting and you’ll be fine.

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