BOOTLEG REVIEW: Backtrack (Michael Petroni, 2015)

[A version of this review was published in 2016]

Ugh, I wish I could backtrack the 90 minutes of my life wasted watching this movie.

Adrien Brody stars as a psychiatrist dealing with the trauma of his daughter’s death. This trauma has in turn caused him to begin to hallucinate about a terrible event that took place during his childhood.

This movie is a collection of horror cliches wrapped in the over-saturated visual style of soap adverts and grunge music videos. 

It’s not scary, it’s not suspenseful, and it is not compelling in any way. 

Brody does his best (with a whiffy Aussie accent), Sam Neill pops his head in for a few scenes, and Robin Mcleavy of Loved Ones fame does a good job in a thankless role as a cop dragged into Brody’s troubles.

Although the filmmakers do their best to make everything look good (the photography is very sumptuous), their efforts at atmosphere amount the usual ‘strobe light and loud bangs’ approach of bad horror movies. 

Ultimately, the script is the root of the problems here. The protagonist’s story is hard to get involved with, and his predicament is never that scary.

While never actively terrible, Backtrack is aggressively un-involving.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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BOOTLEG REVIEW: The Monkees 50 (The Monkees, 2016)

[A version of this review was originally published in 2016]

Celebrating their 50th anniversary with a new album and a world tour, The Monkees have brought out a comprehensive compilation of their hits (and a bunch of their eighties and nineties reunion stuff).

While they were criticised for being a manufactured band, the so-called ‘pre-Fab Four’ worked with some amazing songwriters before they took the reins and became a ‘real’ band. At the height of their popularity, the Monkees showcased songs by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (‘Last Train to Clarksville’), Neil Diamond (‘I’m a Believer’) and Carole King (‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’). 

Arranged in vaguely chronological order, the track list offers few surprises but does not disappoint — you want the hits, you got ‘em. The need to fulfil the promise of the title does mean the track list loses steam about halfway through, but the strong selection from their heyday makes up the difference.

Thankfully, the set rounds out strong with two cuts from their latest release Good Times! The effervescent ‘You Bring The Summer’ and joyous ‘She Makes Me Laugh’ are the perfect finish to a strong set. 

If you are fan, it is probably not essential (check out Good Times! instead), but for the new listeners, this is a good starting place.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BOOTLEG REVIEW: Blonde (Frank Ocean, 2016)

[A version of this review was originally published in 2016]

Frank Ocean has taken his time coming up with a follow-up to his debut, Channel Orange. After four years of teases and missed release dates, he returns with Blonde.

At 17 tracks, the album is rather long,but the album demands patience — there are no easy hits and singles. And as with an ambitious record, there is some filler.

‘Nikes’ and ‘Ivy’ blur together. Ocean’s voice appears to be distended from the production — there’s an airless quality that I found difficult to hook into.

‘Pink + White’ kicks things up a gear — a sweet ballad with piano and cinematic strings, the sound is more expansive and less distanced than the preceding tracks.

A few tracks are stuck in the same synth-laden groove as ‘Nikes’, but then Ocean will throw in a funny skit or a track like ‘Skyline To’, which merges electronic textures with sounds of nature — the result is an album that deepens and expands in sound and meaning as it progresses.

For ‘Self Control’, the synthetic fog lifts briefly to allow space for some acoustic and electric guitar to fill the space. 

‘Siegfried’ is elegiac — more strings and bursts of electric guitar blend together with the samples, loops and electric doodling to create the RnB equivalent of post-Barrett Pink Floyd. 

If you are a fan of Ocean, you’ll like this. For newcomers like myself, I feel like I better listen to Channel Orange in order to tackle this new project. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BOOTLEG REVIEW: Clean Your Clock (Motorhead, 2016)

[A version of this review was originally published in 2016]

Motorhead’s final live album, Clean Your Clock chronicles two performances recorded a month before Lemmy’s death in December last year.

As a live show, it is a mixed bag. Though the band gives it their all, Lemmy is clearly beat. His voice nearly inaudible at times, and it just highlights how ill he was.

Listening to this album is a somewhat ghoulish experience. I was reminded at times of the infamous video of a dying Klaus Nomi straining through ‘Cold Song’.

However, while as a musical document Clean Your Clock is underwhelming, there is something iadmirable about Lemmy’s performance. Even though he was not well, the fact that Lemmy persevered right up until the end is a testament to the man's dedication to his music.

Still as a send-off to the metal legend, fans and casual listeners alike are better off listening to last year's Bad Magic. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942)

Accused of an act of sabotage, aircraft factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) goes on the run after the man he suspects of being the real saboteur, Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd).

It has been a couple of years since I watched a Hitchcock movie. I was obsessed with them when I was growing up. I was able to binge a bunch of them when my mum bought me a discount boxset of several of Hitch's movies from his British period in the thirties (sorry no Lodger).

Most of the films were his 'man on the run' thrillers like The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. I caught more of his films on late night TV, so I have a been able to digest a decent portion of his filmography.

My local arthouse is in the middle of a Hitchcock festival - this film was playing on a double bill with North by Northwest and so I decided to check them both out and see how Hitch's style evolved. I had not seen either movie before, which made it more exciting. 

A Hollywood re-working of his British thrillers, Saboteur is a fun movie, but suffers from bland leads and a lumpy screenplay. There are some solid set pieces, but there is a sense of sameness to the proceedings.

It cannot help coming off as a carbon copy of films Hitchcock had already done, and done with more economy, humour and chemistry. 

Betraying its context, the film is bracketed by scenes in which characters get into barely veiled discourse about the importance of defending American values against fascism. One of the funniest scenes in the film involves our heroes getting involved with the members of a circus’s ‘freak show’ - a human skeleton, a bearded lady, the fat lady, a little person and Siamese twins.

In arguing over whether to let the fugitives stay in their truck, each character offers a different political perspective and then participate in a democratic vote to decide. The one dissenter, a supporter of authoritarianism, is literally silenced and bundled offscreen.

The heavy-handedness of the political messaging was a prime source of hilarity during my screening. 

There is also a sequence where a baby becomes a key part of the story mechanics, and literally hands our hero a key plot device. It is contrived, but it is so weird that it works.

Lead Robert Young is a bit colourless in the lead role. I found it hard to watch the movie without comparing him to Robert Donat or Michael Redgrave, who performed similar roles with greater sense of charm, befuddlement and humour. 

Once Priscilla Lane enters as his opponent-turned love interest, the movie gains a bit more spark - they have good chemistry, and Lane gets some good moments. While they work as a team, the shift from distrusting fugitives to lovers is contrived.

Overall, Saboteur is not vintage Hitchcock, but it is an interesting watch, particularly if you want to watch a movie where he does not have his team of collaborators. It makes a good case for the importance of strong collaborators, particularly at the script phase. I would reccomend reading Sleznick and Hitchcock, which gives a great analysis of Hitchcock's early struggles in Hollywood.

A fun watch, but if you want to watch a man-on-the-run thriller that really sizzles, check out The 39 Steps.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

NZIFF 2020 CATCH UP: Just 6.5 (Saeed Roustayi, 2019)

Keen for a promotion, policeman Samad (Payman Maadi) is intent on taking down drug dealer Naser (Navid Mohammadzadeh).

Once he has been arrested, both men are forced to confront the inhumanity of the drug war.

I went into this movie with the wrong expectations - for some reason the plot summary made me think that it was going to be an action movie. 

Instead, Just 6.5 is a more of a deep dive into the effects of a drug war. The movie  shifts between the perspectives of multiple characters, with multiple motivations and contexts for their behaviour.

Those distinctions are important because of the way the movie shows the inequalities of the justice system, and the ease with which it can be manipulated. The movie also boasts a really dark sense of humour - the filmmakers recognise the ridiculousness of the situations characters find themselves in, and riddle the movie with unexpected moments of levity. There is one sequence in particular that moves from terrifying to farcical in the space of one camera tilt. 

Epic in scope, yet intimate in focus, Just 6.5 would make a fine double bill with Traffic.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: Freaky

After being stabbed with a magical dagger, teenager Millie (Kathryn Newton) finds herself in the body of her attacker, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn). 

With the town on the lookout for her, Millie has to find the Butcher before he massacres the rest of her class.

A horror spin on Freaky Friday, Freaky was high on my very short list of new movies I was looking forward to. Leaving the movie, I was somewhat disappointed. 

The opening scene is a great parody of slasher tropes, from the stylised title card (‘Wednesday the 11th’), to the caricatured performances of horny teens. It was so OTT that I thought it was a scene from a movie-within-the-movie. 

It’s funny but in a one-joke kind of way - which winds top being a big problem because it throws the movie off in terms of tone.

The movie takes place in a heightened reality where people both confirm to types, while being aware of being those tropes. There is something shallow and ephemeral about this approach to the material, particularly when the movie wants us to believe in the emotional reality of our heroine’s dilemma.

Instead, it comes across as a another hackneyed convention to be trotted out when the story demands it. There is a clumsiness to the film’s balancing act between its comic and horror elements that cancels out both.

It does not help that it is most important component - the performances of the two leads - never sync.While Kathryn Newton manages to replicate the Butcher’s quiet menace, Vince Vaughn’s performance never convinces as being of a piece with Newton’s portrayal of Millie.

Vaughn’s broader affectations feel more attuned for a full-on comedy, and feel somewhat out of step with the movie’s tone.

Freaky was made by Christopher Landon, the director of Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2 U. It is clearly intended as a spiritual sequel to those movies, taking a familiar comic premise and turning it into a horror movie. Compared with Happy Death Day, Freaky comes off as a tad simple and too silly. 

Unlike the Happy Death Days, it also lacks a strongly defined lead character like Jessica Rothe's Tree. It might be an effect of the clash between the leads' performances, but I could not get a firm read on Millie's character. 

This movie might improve on re-watch, but on this initial viewing, Freaky feels like a skit extended to a feature runtime.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

IN THEATRES: Honest Thief

Professional bank robber Tom Dolan (Liam Neeson) wants to retire to spend the rest of his life with the woman he loves (Kate Walsh). 

He calls up the FBI to confess, but when the agents tasked with interrogating him turn out to be corrupt, he finds himself on the run to clear his name.

Over a decade after Taken, Liam Neeson's run as your dad's action hero has well and truly past the point of being enjoyable. The Commuter is enjoyable hokum, and last year's Cold Pursuit would have been a nice surprise, except for the bitter taste of Neeson's comments on the promotion circuit.

If you are looking for a movie where Neeson growls down a phone and punches people, Honest Thief does contain these things, but will still leave you disappointed.

While Neeson's previous movies in this vein have been modest in scope, Honest Thief feels like a big step down. The person I went with said the first half of the movie felt like a Netflix original. It does feel very televisual, with a clean digital look that negates any sense of atmosphere or environment.

There are only a few locations, and aside from the occasional arial shot, the movie feels small and low-budget. The poverty of resources is brutally laid bare in the film's one explosion, which looks like it was made by the same people behind the visual effects of London Has Fallen.

A small consolation are the cast, made up of fine actors like Kate Walsh, Jeffrey Donovan and Robert Patrick.

Walsh in particular makes for a great co-lead, with a warm, sparky performance that feels far more dimensional than the character on the page. It does help shore up Neeson. He is on auto-pilot for this one - his gruff voice and presence make him watchable as ever, but he plays his role as a distilled version of the archetype he inhabited in Taken - he is old, he is tough and he will do anything to defend his family. 

While he is good at delivering gravitas to the silliest lines, Neeson has never projected anything resembling a sense of humour. 

I used to compare him to the gruff elder statesmen of the action genre, actors like Chuck Bronson and Lee Marvin. But while those guys were taciturn, they had a sense of irony. 

Neeson's gift is earnest investment in the motivation and pain fo his characters - there are no chuckles in Neesonland. In this respect the action hero he resembles the most is Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Honest Thief is not awful, but it is epically banal. Stick with The Commuter.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

LAST BLAST OF HALLOWEEN: The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)

After he saves the life of a beautiful young woman, Jean (Irene Ware), Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) becomes obsessed with her. When her father, a local judge (Samuel Southey Hinds), bars him from pursuing her, the doctor concocts a scheme to remove him and her fiancé Jerry (Lester Matthews) from the picture.

With the help of scarred gangster Bateman (Boris Karloff), Dr Vollin invites Jean, her father and her fiancé to a party his having at his home, which is filled with all manner of dastardly torture devices inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Will the good doctor's plan succeed?

Released a year after The Black Cat, The Raven is the lesser of the double bill but it is still a lot of fun. 

Whereas the Poe influence was pretty minimal in The Black Cat, The Raven is filled with references within the text - Lugosi and his co-stars actually discuss Poe at one point, and Lugosi's method for killing one of his rivals is the famous execution method from Pit and the Pendulum.

In a reversal of The Black Cat, Lugosi plays the lead heavy with Karloff in more muted form as a scarred murderer who wants a new face. Without the moral ambiguity of The Black Cat, Lugosi is well-cast as the megalomaniacal doctor, spouting ridiculous lines and filling up any silence with cackling (it is an under-appreciated art).

Karloff's role weirdly repeats some of his mannerisms from Frankenstein, such as growled monosyllables. He is sympathetic to a degree, but the role is not big enough to give him room to make something interesting. 

While it is only 61 minutes long, The Raven takes a while to get going. But once all the players are assembled in Lugosi's murder house, the movie turns into a pulp thriller, complete with hidden trapdoors, rooms that descend through the floor, walls that flatten people like pancakes and plenty of cackling.

With distance, it is a pile of garbage, but it is a really fun piece of garbage. Plus it is too short to get mad at.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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LAST BLAST OF HALLOWEEN: The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

On Halloween night, I caught a double-bill of films pairing horror icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

The first film was The Black Cat, from 1934. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, who is most famous for the low-budget noir Detour (1945), the film was Universal's biggest hit of the year.

A doctor returns to the battlefield where he lost his freedom. He intends to confront the man who betrayed him, and save his wife and daughter.

His task becomes more complicated once he arrives at his opponents' home, accompanied by an innocent American couple...

A perverse revenge tale, The Black Cat is a strange beast (no pun intended): a contemporary gothic, haunted by the horrors of World War One.

Lugosi’s Dr Werdegast has returned to the site of his betrayal - the battlefield where his unit was betrayed and died at the hands of Karloff’s Poelzig. Karloff has built an Art Deco estate atop the old fortifications, where he has continued his descent into evil.

This includes killing and preserving the body of his wife (who was previously married to Lugosi), and then marrying her daughter - who he keeps in a deathlike trance.

With its themes of necrophilia and psychological trauma, The Black Cat is a fascinating meeting point between past and future modes of horror. Poelzig's home is the perfect metaphor for the film's unique position, with  stylised futuristic interiors above ground, over crumbling catacombs that look like missing sets from Lugosi's Dracula.

Speaking of the stars, The Black Cat makes for a great vehicle for their contest, evoking their past works while offering both performers a unique story that feels of a piece with itself. 

Lugosi’s range is monochromatic, but he is pretty effective as Werdegast - his charm comes across as too stagey, working well for the character's mental state. Werdegast has spent 15 years in prison, and Lugosi's overly-measured line readings come across as a character forcing himself to play host while he waits to enact his revenge. Once the character learns of the depth of Poelzig's depravity, Lugosi is on surer footing as Werdegast - stripped of everything that mattered to him - gloats over the tortures he intends to use on 

Poelzig. There is a strange meta-textual thrill to the finale as Lugosi breaks into the gleeful malignant smile that his Dracula so iconic. 

However of the two horror icons, it is Karloff who comes off best. His skeletal face and rigid bearing almost feel like part of the mise-en-scene, evoking how Poelzig's sterile home replicate the character's personality. With his voice, all purring malice, Karloff makes Poelzig a formidable, implacable antagonist who is complete control of his environment and his guests. 

Running a tight 69 minutes, The Black Cat moves at a deceptively languid pace as our protagonists slowly discover exactly what Poelzig intends for them. 

As the ignorant Americans who stumble into Poelzig's home after an accident, David Manners and Julie Bishop are fine but functionally they are solely present to provide an ordinary perspective to the proceedings. It is important to have them there, but the roles do not give the actors much to do.

A uniquely creepy showcase for its stars, The Black Cat is a terrific thriller that stands on its own in the Hollywood horrors of the Thirties.  

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.