Review #911: 'Roger & Me' (1989)

Over a decade before he was annoying the likes of Charlton Heston and George W. Bush, documentary film-maker Michael Moore was out of work and witnessing first-hand the devastating effects the closure of several General Motors plants had on his home town of Flint, Michigan. Roger & Me, his first feature film, documents Moore's attempts to get an interview with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors whose decision it was to move several plants - after recording record profits - to countries such as Mexico, where labour is cheaper, laying off thousand of Michigan workers in the process.

Moore's frequently rebuffed attempts to talk to the elusive figure provides much of the film's humour, with Moore's sardonic wit helping make light of what is a serious issue. With no film-making credentials so early in his career and with a membership card to Chunky Cheese his equivalent of a business card, he must rely of guerilla tactics to try and snatch a word with the man. He is kicked out of private clubs and a building where the fourteenth floor is strictly out-of-bounds, and the film is so low-budget that it's a wonder the boom mic doesn't creep into every other shot. But Moore has managed to craft a thought-provoking film despite the budget restrictions, holding a mirror up to Reagan-era America when corporations could simply pack up and move, leaving an entire town crumbling in its trail.

When Moore isn't on the hunt for Mr. Smith, he's interviewing residents hit hard by sudden unemployment, following Sheriff's Deputy Fred Ross as he evicts one family after another, and showing the various, often laughable, attempts by Flint to reinvigorate their economy through tourism. Moore has been criticised for playing with timelines and editing in his favour, manipulating the truth to back up his own liberal agenda. While I can certainly agree that this can be a dangerous approach (especially with his later film, Bowling for Columbine (2002)), the documentary medium is rarely as neutral as it lets on and a director always has a right to artistic license . Unlike his later films, Moore thankfully stays out of the picture for the bulk of the film and this allows Roger & Me to tell a more devastating story. Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) may have broken box-office records, but Roger & Me is Moore's best, and most honest, work.


Directed by: Michael Moore
Starring: Michael Moore, Roger B. Smith
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #910: 'Oedipus Rex' (1967)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is a relatively faithful adaptation of Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus the King. Beginning in 1920's Italy, a baby boy is born and is instantly envied by the displaced father. The setting then changes to ancient times, where a baby boy is being carried out into the desert by a servant to be left out to die from exposure. He is eventually picked up by a shepherd, who takes him back to the King and Queen of Corinth, who adopt the youngster and love him like one of their own. The child grows up to be Edipo (Pasolini's frequent collaborator Franco Citti), an arrogant youth who wishes to see the world for himself. And so he set out on the road to Thebes, the place of his birth.

Plagued by a prophecy that dictates he is destined to murder his father and marry his mother, Edipo is a tortured but intuitive soul. He murders a rich man and his guards after they demand he clear a path for them on the road, and later frees a town from the clutches of a Sphinx by solving its riddle. Staying true to his own recognisable style, Pasolini tells the story of Oedipus not with a sweeping narrative, but through a collection of comedic, violent and often surreal vignettes, the most bizarre and ultimately thrilling being the scene in which Edipo murders the guards. He runs away from them as they chase him, before charging at them one by one and cutting them down. It's a moment without any real motivational insight, offering but a glimpse into Edipo's damaged psyche.

Post-Freud, the story of Oedipus cannot be experienced without reading into the incestuous and patricidal undertones. But these themes are less explored by Pasolini than the idea of Edipo being ultimately responsible for his own downfall. Rather than the inevitability of fate, Edipo creates his own path, committing murder on a whim and marrying while blinded by ambition. For a bulk of the film, Pasolini keeps the audience at arm's length, favouring his own brushes of surrealism over a traditional narrative. While this may be occasionally frustrating - the pre-war scenes than book-end the film seem out of place and confusing - Citti's wide-eyed performance is a fantastic distraction, and the Moroccan scenery helps provide a ghostly, Biblical atmosphere as well as a beautiful backdrop.


Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starring: Franco Citti. Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene, Julian Beck
Country: Italy/Morocco

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #909: 'Mad Max 2' (1981)

In Mad Max (1979), director George Miller showed us a eerie Australia on the verge on some kind of apocalypse. Bikers gangs roamed the desert roads raping and pillaging as they pleased, while a small group of cops did what little they could to keep law and order. Small communities still existed, shops were operational, and institutions still had some sense of organisation, but when Mad Max 2 picks up the story, civilisation as we know it is gone, and thugs in fetish biker gear do as they like. Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), driven mad by seeing his wife and child slain, drives alone in his suped-up Pursuit Special hunting for what little petrol remains in the world.

It seems he has as little humanity remaining as the mohawked reavers he routinely smashes off the road and executes, until a man known as the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence) brings a nearby oil refinery to Max's attention. When he investigates, he finds a close-knit community desperately trying to protect what is rightly theirs from a huge gang under the command of a leather-masked brute known as Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) who are laying siege. Max enters the refinery carrying one of their injured, hoping to trade the man for fuel. When the mad dies, so does Max's hopes of getting out there any time soon, and soon the community is turning to Max for help in the hope that he can retrieve a gas tanker capable of carrying their valuable load and lead them to safety.

Mad Max 2's reputation as the one of the greatest action films ever made is not to be taken lightly. Good action should be clear, coherent and, of course, exciting, and the climax of the film, which takes up nearly of a third of the running time, is one of the greatest set-pieces ever committed to celluloid. It's basically one long chase scene, as a variety of cars and trucks converted to be bigger, faster and stronger try to take down the tanker. The stunts are performed so perfectly that it will make you wonder how certain shots were filmed without any fatalities. It works as a western too, with Max playing the role of the silent stranger who unwittingly becomes the hero. It may have the slimmest of plots, but Mad Max 2 is pure energy within a fantastically realised world; a world that has been replicated numerous times but never bettered.


Directed by: George Miller
Starring: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Vernon Wells
Country: Australia

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie

Review #908: 'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me' (1999)

It's surprising to think that the first Austin Powers movie underwhelmed at the box office back in 1997, only picking up a cult following after its VHS release, and soon enough you couldn't escape the sound of someone yelling "yeah, baby!" every 5 minutes. By the time it's sequel hit the cinema screens, the character, along with the super-spy's arch-nemesis Dr. Evil, had garnered a huge mainstream following, and the movie was a big hit. Yet the film, subtitled The Spy Who Shagged Me, suffers from the same problems as most comedy sequels, which is basically to re-tread the same successful jokes from the first movie, and forgetting what made the original so fresh and charming.

Powers (Mike Myers) is a randy, free-love type-of-guy from the 60's. When he was re-awoken from his cryogenic state in the 90's, his out-of-date attitudes put him at odds with a society that had grown more stiff-upper-lipped. Crowds of screaming girls would no longer chase him down the street a la A Hard Day's Night (1964) and sexy girls wouldn't be willing to bed him at the drop of a hat. When Dr. Evil (also Myers) arrives back to Earth with a plan to steal Powers' mojo, the characters find themselves time-travelling again back to the 60's, where gorgeous super-agent Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham) is ready and willing, but Powers lack the mojo to do anything about it. Most of what made the first movie so successful was that Powers was a man out of time, so by placing him back into his natural surroundings, the opportunity to create funny set-piece's are few and far between.

The dentally-challenged Brit is instead lumped with a dull romance with Shagwell, which is a carbon-copy of the relationship between Powers and Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), only with the roles reversed. In fact, Powers seems to play second-fiddle to Dr. Evil, whose ridiculously outlandish plots and newly-created sidekick Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) annoy his estranged son Scott Evil (Seth Green) and provide the majority of the film's laughs. An early scene where Evil appears on Jerry Springer with his son is hilarious, and the film is at its most inspired when the focus is on the bad guys. The Spy Who Shagged Me is also more gross-out than it's predecessor, continuing a trend set by There's Something About Mary (1998) and re-establishment of the teen sex comedy set by American Pie (1999), so Myers introduces a vile character called Fat Bastard who speaks with a Scottish accent and is permanently covered with chicken bits, whose scenes tend to induce more cringes than laughs. It's funny enough to justify its third instalment, but it lacks the satire, sweetness and freshness of the original.


Directed by: Jay Roach
Starring: Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Michael York, Robert Wagner, Rob Lowe, Seth Green
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #907: 'Milano Calibro 9' (1972)

Fernando Di Leo was a well-respected director who near-perfected the poliziotteschi genre during the 1970's, taking a genre spear-headed by the likes of Italian film-makers Umberto Lenzi and Carlo Lizzani and delivering tough-as-nails stories about brutish men in a brutish world. Milano Calibro 9, or simply Caliber 9, is one of Di Leo's most highly-regarded works, kicking off his Milieu trilogy (followed by Manhunt and concluded by The Boss) for which he is now best remembered for. And the film is terrific - inspiring future directors such as John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, Milano Calibro 9 begins with an explosion of violence that serves as a warning of what is to come.

After a heist that saw a wad of money go missing and the criminals behind it either dead or behind bars, shadowy mafia boss The Americano (Lionel Stander) is left fuming, turning his city upside down in search for his cash. Career criminal Ugo (Gastone Moschin), one of the participants in the robbery, is released from prison and is immediately reprimanded by his psychotic former boss Rocco (Mario Adorf), who fingers Ugo as the culprit. Denying any involvement and trying to go straight, Ugo finds himself pulled back into the criminal world he thought he had left behind by the mafia and the police, the latter trying to pressure him into turning informer. Hooking up with his friend Chino (Philippe Leroy) and girlfriend Nelly (the gorgeous Barbara Bouchet), Ugo plans to turn the tables on his former gang while he still has a fraction of leverage.

The film is not without it's problems - occasionally the narrative sags when the action is away from the city's violent underworld, and the sporadic political discussions between the veteran Commissioner (Frank Wolff) and his left-wing underling seem relevant but out of place - but Milano Calibro 9's quality lies within its tone and exhilarating brutality. The opening sees the manic Rocco beat up suspects, tie them together in a cave and blow them up with dynamite. Although the film doesn't maintain the excitement of this early scene, it truly comes alive when the characters - an ensemble of odd-looking barbarians - threaten each other with words, fists, knives or guns. Moschin proves to be a stoic anti-hero, but Adorf steals the show as the arrogant loud-mouth Rocco, resembling Super Mario in a tailored suit and a neater moustache. The twists and turns keep coming right until the end, and left me wanting to see more from a film-maker who has, up to now, completely evaded me.


Directed by: Fernando Di Leo
Starring: Gastone Moschin, Barbara Bouchet, Mario Adorf, Frank Wolff
Country: Italy

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #906: 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' (2013)

While 2012's The Hunger Games, based on the opener of Suzanne Collins' trilogy, was very much a collection of familiar genre tropes and felt like Battle Royale (2000) for the Harry Potter generation, its themes of class suppression by a ruling elite and the grumblings of a working-class revolution felt refreshing for a story primarily aimed at a younger audience, and also extremely relevant to our times when wealth is seemingly celebrated above all else. Following the first instalment is the awkward middle entry, always struggling to bridge the gap between a fresh new world and its inevitable final showdown. Catching Fire struggles where most other middle sections fail - it's essentially a re-hash of the first film, and fails to progress the story enough to warrant its 2 hour 20 minute running time.

The movie makes a few key mistakes. Above all, it makes the terrible assumption that you've already read the book, failing to explain various aspects of the story which, although it doesn't confuse the rather straightforward plot, it left certain questions niggling in my brain. If the ultimate goal is to kill everybody you're lumped with and be the lone survivor, then why are teams of 'allies' forged by the game maker? What's really going on in the slums that we only glimpse in scenes of dusty faced onlookers? And are The Hunger Games, an event in which young members of the poor are plucked at random to inevitably die, really the best way to control an increasingly disgruntled majority? These questions aside, Catching Fire is also plain boring.

Picking up shortly after the climax of the first film, where the bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) won the Hunger Games with her close friend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) after choosing to die together rather than one surviving, the two champions are left pondering the aftermath. Finding herself a hero to the enslaved working class, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) insists that she play her role and help maintain social order. Following a few incidents of rebellion, Snow decides that Katniss is a threat and turns to new Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) for council. His idea is to throw all the past victors of the Hunger Games into the event together, bending the rules in his favour by introducing a natural disaster or event every hour, including poisonous mist and killer mandrills.

Despite Jennifer Lawrence's obvious star quality, Katniss comes across as one-dimensional and charisma-free, failing to justify her 'chosen one' status. Her budding romance with gruff district worker Gale (Liam Hemsworth), to whom she explains that her kiss with Peeta was merely a way to manipulate the audience into aiding her survival (although her feelings may be becoming real), feels like a discarded draft of Twilight. The characters are so robotic that I simply didn't care who lived and who died. Catching Fire ultimately feels like a way of stretching out a story that could have been told in two instalments, where, by the end, I felt like we were no further along than where we were at the start. The ending comes so abruptly that it's obvious the filmmakers are under the illusion that they're leaving us thirsty for more, but while that may be the case for its huge fanbase, it left me staring at the screen waiting for any kind of satisfaction that I knew would never come.


Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lenny Kravitz
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #905: 'Tenderness of the Wolves' (1973)

Surprisingly deemed too controversial a topic to direct himself, enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder handed the reins of Tenderness of the Wolves, a deeply unsettling portrayal of serial killer Fritz Haarmann, to his protege Ulli Lommel, the man later responsible for video nasty The Boogeyman (1980) and countless straight-to-video efforts that linger in the IMDb's Bottom 100 list. Despite this, the film looks and feels like a Fassbinder film. The characters inhabit the same sleazily-filmed world, many of Fassbinder's troupe of actors appear, and the great man himself has a small role as an ugly pimp.

Written by the great Kurt Raab, who also stars as Haarmann, Tenderness of the Wolves doesn't spend any time trying to understand the motivation of the man dubbed the Vampire of Hanover, but instead shows us a snippet of his debauched life. Moving the story from 1924 (when Haarmann was arrested in real-life) to post World War II, Germany is a country clearly feeling the economic strain of losing the war, where the black market is flourishing and con-man Haarmann is doing very well for himself. Along with his on-and-off lover and pimp Hans Grans (Jeff Roden), he swindles clothes from good Samaritans and sells them on for profit, as well as selling meat to bar owner Louise (Brigitte Mira) which may or may not be the bodies of his victims.

As a horror, it achieves it's disturbing atmosphere not through gratuitousness, but through the squalor of its setting, observant direction, and Raab's magnificent performance. Haartmann was a gay child molester who enjoyed throttling his victims, biting into their throats (often through the Adam's apple), before chopping them into pieces and throwing them into the Leine River. We don't see much of the murders, but when they do occur they are filmed without sensationalism, made all the more unsettling due to the full-frontal male nudity of some of the film's under-age actors, something extremely rare in horror even today.

Haartmann, shaven-headed and ghostly pale, manipulates his victims by posing as a police officer before drugging and overpowering them, often making little effort to cover his tracks or dispose of the bodies discretely. This arrogance, although it would eventually lead to his arrest, makes him even more of a monster, and Raab delivers a truly terrific performance. Without attempting to explain his actions or even offer a background of how Haarmann got into the criminal business and how he developed a taste for human blood, Tenderness of the Wolves becomes more about the world he inhabits and the creepy characters who surround him. It's hardly a film to discuss over breakfast, but it will no doubt stay with you for long after the credits have rolled.


Directed by: Ulli Lommel
Starring: Kurt Raab, Jeff Roden, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Wolfgang Schenck, Brigitte Mira
Country: West Germany

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #904: 'Two Days, One Night' (2014)

Two time Palme d'Or winners and brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had an almost overwhelming critical success with their back catalogue, scooping up enough awards to fill their living room and receiving enough nominations to make them major players in European cinema. Their films tend to focus on the everyday struggles of existence, telling low-key stories against the backdrop of their native Belgium, making some kind of sociological or political commentary at the same time. Yet despite their success, the Dardenne's have remained in the shadows without the seemingly inevitable emigration to Hollywood. Although they have finally bagged an A-lister in Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night is much of the same, a simple yet heart-wrenching tale that paints a picture of life in our economically unbalanced times.

Young mother Sandra (Cotillard) is preparing to re-enter the workplace after battling with depression following an unspoken trauma, when she receives a phone call from her boss who informs her that her workmates have voted to receive their bonus, rather than Sandra being allowed to keep her job. Along with a friend, Sandra convinces her boss to have another vote when she suspects that her colleague may have been influenced, and along with her devoted husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), must spend the weekend trying to convince her sixteen co-workers that they should forgo their promised bonus so she can go on supporting her family.

This is undoubtedly Cotillard's film. Despite her superstar status and unworldly beauty, her portrayal of a depressive is entirely convincing. Constantly popping pills, she begins the film in bed, lacking the motivation to even answer her phone. Her most human moment comes in the scene where she turns up the car radio and sings along, much to Manu's surprise and delight as he savours this brief moment of elation. It's a scene that could have seemed like something from a Hollywood rom-com, but thanks to Cotillard's performance and the Dardennes unfussy direction, it manages to deliver an emotional wallop. As Sandra drags herself from one worker to the next, the film becomes slightly repetitive, but achieves feelings of discomfort and sadness in the viewer as we witness Sandra's dignity slipping away. Slightly depressing but oddly optimistic, Two Days, One Night packs an emotional punch and will leave you questioning how Cotillard didn't run away with the Oscar.


Directed by: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Starring; Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Catherine Salée, Batiste Sornin
Country: Belgium/France/Italy

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #903: 'Frogs' (1972)

Despite the poster depicting a frog with a human hand hanging out of its mouth, American International Picture's Frogs is not about giant frogs. Instead, this is a nature-gone-mad movie featuring about 500 bullfrogs, along with an assortment of other creepy critters (lizards, snakes, spiders, birds, alligators) who begin to terrorise a wealthy family and an ecologist who happens upon them. The frogs of the title are a merely an annoyance and a constant presence, driving the residents of the island mansion on which the film takes place insane with their constant croaking.

Photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) is taking pictures of the local wildlife in a swamp located near to the estate of the wealthy Crockett family. Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), the young and drunken heir to the family inheritance, accidentally knocks Pickett off his canoe and into the water with his speed-boat, and so takes him back to the mansion for a change of clothes. There, he meets the grumpy and wheelchair-bound patriarch Jason (Ray Milland), who voices his distaste for the slimy inhabitants of the surrounding fauna. Pickett discovers the body of a man sent by Jason to spray pesticide, and soon the Crockett's and their employees find themselves under threat from a variety of murderous beasties.

Although the promise is utterly ludicrous, Frogs is played with a straight-face for the most part, and is elevated by decent performances from Milland and Elliott - the former of which was a regular on the B-movie circuit at this point in his career and the latter showing us what he looks like without his trademark moustache. But the animal attacks are few and far between, clumsily edited and failing to generate anything in the way of jumps or scares. The majority of the film consists of the family complaining about the frogs while Jason groans and disapproves at everything, ignoring both the warnings of Pickett and the blatant unnatural occurrences happening all around them. For a film about killer frogs, it's better than it has any right to be, but this is tedious stuff for the majority of its running time.


Directed by: George McCowan
Starring: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #902: 'Fast & Furious 7' (2015)

Pieced back together in the wake of Paul Walker's tragic death in an automobile accident in 2013, the seventh instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise comes with a morbid sense of curiosity. Just how much of the original movie remains, and how will long-serving series advocate Vin Diesel and newcomer director James Wan deal with the fate of Walker's character Brian O'Connor? Thankfully, anyone trying to spot the CGI trickery and attempting to tell Walker from either of his stand-in real-life brothers will be disappointed (although there are some questionable camera angles), and the climactic send-off could not have been more moving.

Fast & Furious 7's (or simply Furious 7 given its alternate title) problems lie elsewhere. Whether it be the cast, the running time, the plot, or the sheer amount of carnage played out on screen, the movie is as bloated as Dwayne Johnson's neck. We have finally caught up to the events of the third instalment, Tokyo Drift (2003), and the gang of loveable ex-cons, ex-cops and gear-heads are drawn out of retirement by the extremely pissed British special forces assassin Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who happens to be the older brother of the baddie from the sixth film Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) and is hell-bent on revenge. Sadly, as a straight-forward revenge story is no longer enough to satisfy the masses, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and his crew are also tasked by a shady government agent dubbed Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) to track down God's Eye, an omniscient piece of spy software.

The franchise is now so removed from its original premise of an undercover cop trying to bust a gang of hijackers, that the sight of Dwayne Johnson's oiled and impossibly ripped cop Hobbs firing a huge Gatling gun at a helicopter in the streets during the film's climax will come as no surprise. Characters have died and come back to life, and now display martial arts skills so refined that they can take down the likes of Rhonda Rousey and Tony Jaa in a fist-fight. They are now superheroes, capable of cracking their necks and shaking off a wrench-blow to the head. The preposterousness of it all means that the film-makers are now simply looking to make things bigger than they were last time rather than taking the time of building tension or making things coherent.

So, only two set-pieces really get the adrenaline going - one involving Brian escaping from a coach dangling over the edge of a cliff, and the face-off between the bald pit-bulls Diesel and Statham, as the two go at each other with bits of car wreckage. The film is at its best in it's quieter moments, where comedy-relief characters Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) squabble over the attentions of super-hacker Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Dom and his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), still suffering from amnesia, try to piece together their relationship (though Dom ramming the idea of family being the most important thing down our throats is getting a bit old). Despite it's gaping flaws, there's still something oddly addictive about this series and I'm eager to see if even more sequels will come. and the loving tribute to Walker at the end will bring a tear to the eye of even the most hardened petrol head.


Directed by: James Wan
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Dwayne Johnson, Kurt Russell, Nathalie Emmanuel
Country: USA/Japan

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #901: 'Mad Max' (1979)

Taking inspiration from the 1973 oil crisis, which saw an oil embargo set by the OAPEC - sky-rocketing oil prices and causing a public panic for fuel conservation in the process - George Miller's Mad Max, the most profitable film in history until The Blair Witch Project (1999) came along, mixes social commentary with exhilarating action, set in a near dystopian future where the last remnants of civilised society are terrorised by deadly motorcycle gangs seeking fuel and debauchery. This idea of dusty wastelands patrolled by leather-jacketed psycho's with crazy haircuts has now been copied and paid homage to so often that it has become almost cliché, but Mad Max is where it all started, and it still remains the greatest of its ilk 35 years on.

Although this is an origin movie, Max (Mel Gibson) himself is kept very much in the background for the first half of the film. After taking out notorious criminal Nightrider (Vincent Gil) in a violent opening sequence, Max, a member of MFP (Main Force Patrol) - a band of cops trying to maintain order in an increasingly hostile world - is relegated to the sidelines as Miller explores the world he inhabits. Seeking revenge for his friend, Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the leader of a gang who looks like a member of Kiss but rules with the iron fist of Hitler, arrives in town and immediately starts to kill, rape and rob every law-abiding citizen in sight. When Max's partner is maimed in particularly brutal fashion, he flees with his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and child, only to find that this bleak world is not quite done with him.

Through keeping Max's screen-time limited in the first half, we actually get a better understanding of him. Violence breeds violence - and every time Max finds himself facing down one of his foes, he finds that he's actually starting to enjoy it. By witnessing the exploits of Toecutter and his crew - one particularly disturbing scene sees a couple chased down, beaten and raped - and the growing futility of the efforts of the MFP (Captain 'Fifi' McAffee - Turkey Shoot's Roger Ward - longs to bring heroes back into society), we can sympathise with Max's growing disillusionment and impatience with the system that is failing them. This is, of course, how Max became 'mad', so it begins with him embodying the fresh-faced voice of reason, but by the end he is serving his own kind of justice.

Made during Australia's exploitation boom (dubbed 'ozploitation') for a meagre $400,000, Mad Max holds up phenomenally well. Miller demonstrated a real flair for action set-pieces as his career progressed, and the adrenaline-fuelled smashes and explosions here are edited with such precision that it makes you wonder how such carnage was staged without serious casualties to the actors (makers of the Taken and Fast and Furious franchises such take extensive notes on how to stage an exciting, coherent action scene). Mel Gibson says little but demonstrates the charisma that would later make him a world star, but the real star here is the world George Miller created. Civilisation would get even more sparse and brutal as the films progressed, but the original is what would inspire generations of film-makers. Despite a narrative dip in its third-quarter, Mad Max is pure action cinema, frequently imitated but never bettered.


Directed by: George Miller
Starring: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley, Roger Ward
Country: Australia

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #900: 'Christine' (1983)

Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) is a dorky high-school kid with only one friend in the world, jock Dennis (John Stockwell). Arnie is the type of kid who gets pushed around by bullies and has his glasses stamped on while teachers look the other way as they think it'll probably do him some good. Things change when Arnie stumbles upon a run-down Plymouth Fury and decides to buy it, against the wishes of his parents and Dennis himself, who feels an uneasy presence within the car. The car is named Christine, and as Christine's appearances improves, so does Arnie's - he slicks his hair, wears cooler clothes, and is generally more confidant and cocky. But when Arnie starts the date the school's hot newcomer, Leigh (Alxandra Paul), the car is thrown into a bloodthirsty fit of jealousy.

Made on the back of a hot streak that helped turn John Carpenter into a horror icon, Christine is a relatively minor work by his early standards, but is still infused with Carpenter's sense of style and atmosphere. Based on the novel by Stephen King, which went to lengths to explain Christine's psychopathic behaviour, the film instead establishes the red hunk of auto-porn as evil from the get-go as it kills someone before it's even off the assembly line. Perhaps trying to explain why a car was killing people in cold blood and how it possesses the ability to repair itself would somewhat remove the façade, choosing (or hoping) instead to let the audience simply enjoy the movie without the need for clunky exposition. And it works - Carpenter has it play out with a straight face and the film is very enjoyable for the majority of its 100 minute running-time.

The film takes time to develop its story and a supporting cast that includes Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Prosky and Roberts Blossom helps things move along nicely. When heads begin to roll, Carpenter delivers a couple of visually arresting set-pieces involving an attack on some bullies at a gas station and the chasing-down of a fat kid, both of which see Christine attack her sweetheart's aggressors with all the grace of a bull in a china shop. There's only so much you can do when your killer is a car, and it naturally takes a lot of bone-head's to let themselves be killed by it. No-one seems to move sideways, run up some stairs or enter a building (unless it's a flimsy gas station). But Christine does manage to somehow take on a personality of its own, and there's always something oddly satisfying about watching metal scrape, crash or burn on screen. It pales in comparison to the likes of Escape from New York and The Thing, which came the two years before, but Christine is a perfectly well-executed horror.


Directed by: John Carpenter
Starring: Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Robert Prosky, Harry Dean Stanton, Roberts Blossom
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #899: 'Slow West' (2015)

The filmmaker's obsession with the Old West never seem to cease, whether it be the rough-and-tumble tales of black vs. white of the 50's, the sweat-drenched stand-off's of the European low-budget efforts of the 60's and 70's, or the revisionist approaches that enjoyed a re-emergence in the mid-2000's, the harsh plains of America's darkest period seem to fascinate every new generation, all of which have a different take on a period that has taken on a mythic quality. Following a couple of successful shorts working with Michael Fassbender, Man on a Motorcycle (2009) and Pitch Black Heist (2011), director John Maclean from The Beta Band makes his feature-length debut with Slow West, a suitably slow-burning and simple tale of lost love, set to the backdrop of violence and a country in unrest.

Scot Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is an opportunistic young dreamer who arrives in America in the hope of claiming his lost love. We first meet him at night aiming his gun at the stars, pondering the possibilities of this new land. He then witnesses the execution of Native American's for sport by a gruff Union leader, who is then killed by a skilled bounty hunter named Silas Selleck (Fassbender). Silas agrees to take Jay under his wing, and as their story develops, we soon learn that they are hunting for the same thing for very different reasons. Through flashbacks, we learn that back in Scotland, Jay fell in love with a beautiful girl below his social class, Rose (Caren Pistorius), who could only return platonic love. Along with her father (Rory McCann), Rose fled her homeland after a bounty is placed on their head.

Slow West depicts an America that is simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar. It is the dusty west of the revisionist westerns of recent years where violence comes as second-nature to its inhabitants, and the mountains and woods are filmed with the same sense of wonder and impending danger that has become synonymous with the genre. Yet, the landscape is also alive with colour and natural beauty, as if the flowers were blooming with as much fruitless optimism as Jay's quest to rescue his love, which is frequently placed in peril by the likes of Swedish bandits or the ever-looming Payne (Ben Mendelsohn), a fellow bounty-hunter in a ludicrous fur coat who clearly shares a history with Silas. The decision to film in New Zealand adds to the sense of displacement, as if Jay imagined the world he read about in stories only to discover that it's only half-true.

Although the film is as slow-moving as the title may suggest, the relatively short running time means that scenes are brisk and the narrative is never boring. It often feels surreal, like Jodorowsky on a mild day, producing some moments of oddball comedy juxtaposed with the spattering of bloodshed. It's also ludicrous at times - though not always in a bad way - and Maclean frequently explores the themes of man at their most primitive done many times before. But the climax is the work of a director with promise, as the bullets fly and walls become smeared in blood, it's a shoot-out that manages to retain control of the drama happening in between, as well as delivering a truly exciting set-piece. Fassbender says little but has the presence of an old soul, and Smit-McPhee, similar to his role in John Hillcoat's The Road (2009), is effective as the sad-eyed child caught up in a world he doesn't fully understand. Perpetually odd and surprising, Slow West is the melancholic work of a director to keep an eye on.


Directed by: John Maclean
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Caren Pistorius, Ben Mendelsohn, Rory McCann
Country: UK/New Zealand

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #898: 'The Raven' (1935)

After the phenomenal success of 1931's Dracula and Frankenstein, the names of Hungarian Bela Lugosi and Englishman Boris Karloff adorned nearly every poster Universal released in their horror range for the few years that followed. Despite Lugosi playing the central figure in many of these films, he always found his name overshadowed by that of Karloff, who was enjoying roles outside of the horror genre while Lugosi found himself typecast to his utter dismay. 1935's miniature The Raven (it runs at just an hour and 1 minute) is a prime example of this, despite Lugosi appearing in nearly every scene and delivering one of his best performances as a raving-mad doctor.

When Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is seriously injured in a car crash, her father Judge (Samuel S. Hinds) and fiancé Jerry Halden (Lester Matthews) call upon the services of highly-skilled surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin (Lugosi). Vollin successfully nurses Jean back to health and becomes enamoured by her, though his advances are discouraged by her father. Vollin is approached by fugitive criminal Bateman (Karloff), who wants the doctor to perform plastic surgery on him to hide his identity. Still enraged at Judge for denying him the woman he loves, Vollin disfigures Bateman and promises to fix his face, but only if he assists in a plan to exact vengeance using various torture devices inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe.

Like Roger Corman's 1963 film of the same name, The Raven bears little resemblance to the work of Poe. Lugosi's deranged doctor is a fan of his work, pondering whether Poe's work was a reflection of the man himself, and keeps the bust of a raven as his talisman. Lew Landers' The Raven instead is a rather suggestively grisly horror, with characters being trapped in famous Poe devices such as the shrinking room and the pendulum, and was so extreme for its day that it flopped at the box-office and led to a ban on horror in the UK. By today's standards, it's wonderfully daft and incredibly fun, never feeling rushed despite it's slim running time. Outside of Dracula, this may also be Lugosi's best performances, although it came just before Universal's change of management and the start of Lugosi's tragic mainstream career decline.


Directed by: Lew Landers
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lester Matthews, Irene Ware, Samuel S. Hinds
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie