The Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971)

Someone is blackmailing the clients at a local health spa. Someone else is killing them.

It is up to jaded police officer Tellini (Giancarlo GIanini) to find the murderer before they can get their next victim.

Every year or so, I get back into giallo. These Italian thrillers were popular from the late sixties through to the late seventies. While not all of them included these features, the genre is based around a murder mystery plot, vivid colours and graphic violence. 

While they are associated with the later slasher genre, I always liked gailli. There is something about the clash between ugliness and beauty. I generally not a fan of style but this genre’s impact is so tied up in its aesthetic.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula has gained a latter-day recognition mostly down to its cast, which features a large number of James Bond alumnus.

Lead player Giancarlo GIanini later played Bond’s ally Rene Mathis in Casino Royale, while Claudine Auger (Thunderball), Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me) and Barbara Bouchet (Casino Royale ‘67) are potential victims.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula is not the worst gaillo I have seen but it might be the most generic. The most unique element is his killing method - he paralyses his victims with a needle to the back of the neck so that they are immobilised but conscious as he stabs them with a knife. There is probably some licence with the science but it is a creepy set up. While we get a few splashes of red paint, the violence is mostly conveyed through editing, contrasting  between the plunging blade and the victim’s frozen features.

There is a vague attempt to give the film some pathos by making Tellini disenchanted with his work, but it never quite pays off. The climax veers toward a Seven-style downer, but it does not quite fit.

Other than that, the movie is pretty familiar - there is a blackmail subplot involving the clients at a health club; a whiff of sexual hypocrisy as a theme; a downbeat ending. Despite his killing method, if you have seen any other giallo, the killer is familiar: kitted out in a dark coat and slouch hat.

If I have a gripe with the movie, it is the execution. I am not familiar with Cavara's other work, but there is a lack of directorial control to the suspense sequences that is detrimental. 

In one standout example, the film intercuts between a woman standing in the entrance to her apartment while the killer waits for her behind a closed door. Now according to the 180* rule, these two scenes would be shot in a way that would convey that the characters are on either side of the door (killer on the left, victim on the right). In this way, the viewer is able to put it together in their mind, which generates tension as she prepares to open the door. 

What ruins this scene is that both scenes are shot from the same angle, so your sense of geography is thrown and so is the build of suspense.

While the murder sequences are eerie, the suspense sequences before them are all fudged in similarly frustrating ways.

This undermines the movie because it is not that interested in being anything other than a murder mystery with scary murder sequences. 

If you want to watch it, The Black Belly of the Tarantula might work best as one half of a double bill with another Gallo, to give you taste of the genre.

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OUT NOW: Army of Thieves

Stuck in a dead-end job, amateur safecracker Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) gets a chance at the big time when he is approached by a group of high-end thieves (Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin and Guz Khan) for an operation to rob three safes which rumoured to be un-crackable.

I can barely remember what happened in Army of the Dead, which is not much of an issue for this prequel. 

Based around Matthias Schweighöfer’s oddball safecracker from Snyder’s film, Army of Thieves is a somewhat different beast from its predecessor. I was kind of excited by the idea of it, particularly since the movie would not be directed by Zack Snyder (Schweighöfer himself takes over those duties).

While the lure of Army was a heist during a zombie apocalypse, I think it lost focus on the potential excitement of that premise. With the focus on a heist, I was hoping that Army of Thieves would be a correction.

The first thing it gets right is aesthetically. Army of Thieves does not look like the previous instalment. Gone is the constant shallow focus. Gone also is the relentless grimness. 

Instead, you have more of a traditional heist movie, with a lighter tone and a more romantic focus. While the ‘army of theives’ (only four people) are not on the straight and narrow, they are not seeking redemption. Some want money, some want excitement and some want the reputation of breaking three of the toughest safes in the world.

If you are looking for zombies, you might be disappointed - they almost entirely absent. You get glimpses of the outbreak in a few TV broadcasts and our hero has a couple of nightmares about them, but those moments are so compartmentalised that you could remove them and be left with the same movie.

Thieves is over two hours long, but unlike Army it does not feel padded. 

I wish I liked it. 

The heist component is fairly straightforward, but these sequences lack the satisfaction of watching our heroes overcome obstacles to achieve their goals.

But the movie wants to be about our hero’s arc. Which would be fine if the characters were not drawn as archetypes. Or had anything resembling a motivation. Becoming good at something is not good enough by itself - this movie lacks any kind of real stakes which makes the whole experience feel flat.

The movie wants to be more lighthearted, and tries to turn the film into a romance - but humour requires jokes, and romance requires chemistry.

The cast are not the problem. I am sure with a better script and creative vision they could work.  

I left Army of Thieves feeling like I had watched a 20 page treatment of a story. All the character and narrative beats are there, but everything needs to be fleshed out and given some specificity.

While the movie is more tactile than Snyder’s effort, Thieves never feels immersive. We go through multiple locations but you never feel a sense of place. The buildings all look the same and the exteriors could be anywhere.

That is my ultimate frustration with the movie. It feels like a generic version of a European heist caper. It’s never bad or great - it just exists in this middle way of banality, which makes it worse. 

Army of Thieves is better than its sequel. But that is about it.

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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The Forever Purge (Everardo Gout, 2021)

Eight years after they were thrown out of power, The New Founding Fathers have returned to power. And with their return the Purge is reinstated - the yearly slaughter is back.

Illegal immigrants Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta) have come to America to build new lives for themselves. They have prepared for the Purge.

What no one has prepared for is that Purgers are no longer satisfied with one night of mayhem. They never want it to end.

While the government struggles to battle the Purgers, our heroes will have to fight their way over the border.

Horror has always been a great vehicle for social commentary. The Purge franchise stands out for how unsubtle it has been. 

One of the selling points for me has been watching the convergence of the franchise’s messaging with the real-time collapse of the American project. And as real world events escalate, the films have leaned harder into the potential of its premise.

Somehow, despite their generic narratives and flashy aesthetic, there was a strange blunt power to these movies. They were obvious and unsubtle, verging on didactic - but there was something underneath it all - I think what I like about the Purge franchise is that it tears away all the pageantry and shines a light on the roots of American society and its institutions. There is no innuendo to The Purge - it is about what it is about. 

 There was always a sense that franchise creator James DeMonaco was using each installment to refine why the Purge could exist, who would benefit from it, and who would suffer. The scariest aspect of the Purge is that every movie operated on the idea that America was set up for something like the Purge to happen. 

Around the time of Purge: Anarchy, I thought the franchise was setting itself up for endless sequels. By focusing on the titular event rather than characters, The Purge could be a series of ‘What Ifs’: what if the Purge took place on a plane? A Highrise building? In the middle of the sea? Outer space? 

As the movies grew more ambitious and direct in drawing parallels with developments in American society (particularly during the 2016 election and presidency of Donald Trump), that path felt unnecessary. These movies were more unique than that - almost like reflections of contemporary reality. They were becoming… important?

The Forever Purge is the first of the installments where it felt like the series could benefit from focusing on those kinds of contrived premises - this movie lacks a strong dramatic structure. We get a ticking clock eventually, but the movie takes forever to get going.

This is also the first movie where the political messaging is so blatant and poorly integrated it is genuinely annoying. Obvious commentary is a mainstay of the series, but the previous entries always found a way to (at least) staple it to something dramatically interesting. Or they kept it brief.

Here, the dialogue is so leaden that it feels like a student film about the evils of US history. The characters never feel real, or like archetypes - de la Reguera and Huerta do their best, but they do not have a lot to work with. Josh Lucas is the racist white guy who learns the error of his ways after he and his pregnant wife are saved by the Mexican men who work on his ranch. It is so basic and obvious it comes across as insulting to the audience.

What makes it worse is that the movie also lacks interesting setpieces and the sheer weirdness of previous entries - there is nothing here to match the shock of the family shoot-out in Anarchy or the Candy Bar gang in Election Year. The movie ends up being  boring.

Aside from a poor script, it also lacks a sense of directorial control - the previous movies were not masterpieces, but the filmmakers had a working understanding of camera movement and using space within frame to draw the viewer’s attention. The most obvious example is a one-take scene in which our heroes sneak through El Paso. The scene is more concerned with an extended take with using that time and camera movement to build tension and reveal threats.

Throughout the movie, the filmmaking works against the suspense - the camerawork lacks any sense of dramatic intent, making it difficult to work up a sweat.

There is a genuinely terrifying idea at the heart of this movie, one that continues the series’ tradition of reflecting (or predicting?) where American society is going.

At the end of Election Year, an anti-Purge presidential candidate wins election and ends the Purge. But that movie ends on a montage of news reports of people re-starting the Purge on their own. It is the unsettling moment in the movie, and feels more so now, post-January 6. Election Year’s apocalyptic ending points out that even if they lose the election, Purge supporters are still out there.

The Forever Purge is even more pessimistic - after eight years, the Purge’s creators, the fascistic New Founding Fathers, were returned to power and brought the Purge back. However the Purge’s followers are impatient with the idea of a single controlled event, and take matters into their own hands. The movie ends with the New Found Fathers brought down by their own creation. It could almost be a metaphor for the Republican Party in 2021.

Stripped from the movie’s context, this idea is great. But a great idea is not a story. And that is the frustrating thing about The Forever Purge.

A great premise. Timely political themes. These are great ingredients if you know how to cook them right. The Forever Purge fails to create a story and characters that serves its themes.

I always liked The Purge’s willingness to be blunt and obvious in showing off America’s bloody underbelly - it is a rare quality in mainstream Hollywood, and I did find myself taken in by the films’ righteous fury.

But in The Forever Purge, the rage is missing. And so is the filmmaking.

Apparently, there is a sixth installment on the way. Hopefully, the filmmakers take the right lessons from this one. 

Related reviews

Anarchy

Election Year

The First Purge

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

OUT NOW: The Guilty (Antoine Fuqua, 2021)

Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a frontline officer who has been relegated to a desk job after an incident in his backstory. When he receives a call from a woman claiming to be kidnapped, he leaps into action.

As the case grows more complicated, Joe uses all of his skills (including a few dubious ones) that cause the situation to escalate even further.

A remake of the Danish thriller, The Guilty will be pretty engrossing if you have never seen the original. If you have seen the original, I am not so sure.

The film is a fairly close adaptation. 

I had rewatched the original again, a couple of weeks ago, so it is still pretty fresh in my mind. Initially I had no intention of watching the remake but lockdown has been long and I ran out of other things to watch.

There are some original touches - the film’s action takes place during a raging fire - but overall, I found it hard to separate this movie from the original. 

The acting throughout is solid (Gyllenhaal makes a good fist of highlighting Joe's bullheaded self-centredness), and Fuqua does a decent job of creating a sense of claustrophobia. He does include a couple of external shots but they are framed to obscure and maintain a sense of distance. While they technically break the film’s unity of place, they do not detract from the tension.

If I have any issue with the movie, it is the climax, which clarifies the central character’s redemption AND alters one of the film’s key revelations (which further feeds into that redemptive arc). While it is not egregious, it does feel like the original text has been softened for a more mainstream audience. 

I do not feel comfortable panning The Guilty. I think it is an effective thriller, but in my case it was too close to the original for me to be fully engrossed.

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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Night of the Running Man (Mark L. Lester, 1995)

Former gambler Jerry (Andrew McCarthy) is a cab driver sleepwalking through life. When a mysterious suitcase filled with money ends up in his taxi, Jerry sees it as his ticket out.

But the money belongs to the mob - and they want it back...

What a breath of fresh rancid air. I have a particular affinity for early nineties action thrillers, particularly when they are man-on-the-run riffs like this. A favourite of this type is the 1991 thriller Run starring future TV hunk Patrick Dempsey.

This movie is an airport thriller on celluloid - it is designed to move quickly from scene to scene so that you do not think about tiresome things like ‘reality’ and ‘logic’. I am not sure I would have enjoyed the movie as much if I was not watching it 2021. A movie like this would not be made now, and if it was it would be a Netflix movie that would be forgotten in five minutes.

While context does play a factor, there is blunt workmanship to Night of the Running Man that works in its favour. It almost plays like a downbeat version of Lester’s Commando (1985), in its pared-down narrative economy and sense of forward momentum.

Its pulp credentials are evident from the off - villain Scott Glenn is introduced in bed with a woman. They have been involved for awhile, but he likes to keep things distant. When she tries to learn more about him, he breaks her neck. Accompanied by a loud sound effect, it is a ridiculously graphic incident that betrays the crassness of the movie. There is a veneer of excess to the violence in the movie that pushes it into the realm of pulp. It is too broad to be taken seriously but not explicit enough to read as docudrama.

While the movie is overheated, it orbits around an ice-cold centre: Scott Glenn as the Terminator-like enforcer Eckhart. 

While Andrew McCarthy is the titular lead, it is Glenn who is the main reason to watch. A cold-blooded killer who is a born hunter, he is an almost-supernatural antagonist who will stop at nothing to kill whoever gets in his way. 

While the character could have been silly or a blank slate, Glenn’s minimalist performance is terrifying. In a movie that reads like a missing Mike Hammer, Glenn’s subtlety reads with more impact. There is something almost diabolical about Eckhart as he goes about his business - an inevitability conveyed in Glenn’s little smirk that only makes his sudden explosions of violence more terrifying. Glenn is one of cinema’s great underplayers, and having him play the equivalent of a human bomb gives the movie a tension I do not think would be there otherwise. 

It helps that the script introduces Eckhart through his actions rather than dialogue - aside from his indifference to human life, he is also a terrifyingly accurate human lie detector. The film is at its best when focused on Eckhart interrogating some poor soul who is trying to cover for Jerry. Glenn does not betray any deeper emotions, letting the audience put together what is going on behind his Spinx-like visage. 

A good action movie is only as good as its villain, and Eckhart is a great bad guy. He felt like a missing Michael Mann character - a spiritual sibling to De Niro’s Neil McCauley (Heat) or Cruise’s Vincent (Collateral). That feels like too much praise but Glenn’s performance is definitely worthy, even if the movie cannot match it.

While narratively functional, the movie’s lack of meat is not purely economical - most of the women in the movie die, except for a helpful nurse (Janet Gunn) who comes to our hero’s aid. She gets a few moments of agency, but that goes away once she joins Jerry on the run. Her transformation into a love interest quickly turns her into a damsel in distress. 

This final cliche is slightly blunted by the characterisation of Jerry. He is never presented as a physically imposing or aggressive figure. While he is active in improvising his way out of trouble, these actions are mostly reactive, as he finds his attempts to flee Eckhart are foiled at every turn. McCarthy is fine in the role, but it feels like the script is expecting the performance to convey a sense of past bad luck and poor choices - but McCarthy is a little too clean-cut (even with the beard).

A solid little thriller, Night of the Running Man is worth checking out - especially for Scott Glenn’s terrifying performance.

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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BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978)

When technical flaws scupper their planned expedition to Mars, NASA's brain trust decide to engage in an elaborate deception: blackmailing a crew of astronauts, they will fake a landing on the red planet.

When the astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterson and OJ Simpson) escape the studio, their former employer is determined to eliminate them before they can get to the outside world.

Will they succeed?

A great premise that launched a thousand conspiracies, Capricorn One was an early credit for Peter Hyams, a filmmaker with a long career across a variety of genres: science fiction (Outland, 2010, TimeCop), action (Sudden Death, Enemies Closer), horror (The Relic) and comedy (Running Scared).

With his constant hopping between genres, Hyams is the kind of filmmaker I generally gravitate towards. 

But like the space expedition at the centre of this movie, there is something not quite right with Capricorn One.

There is something cold and aimless at the heart of this movie. There are plot movies that are designed to build tension but the pacing is off - every scene feels 20 seconds too long, and if the scene involves any kind of exposition, it feels even longer.

What makes it frustrating is that you can see the elements of the recipe for suspense. The film cuts between the astronauts and a disgraced journalist (Elliott Gould) on the outside who begins to unpeel the conspiracy. Gould is always good value, but his scenes never come off - the tension is just not there. 

Even the stuff which should be exciting - the astronaut’s escape across the desert, never quite builds steam. The final airplane chase is decent with some impressive stunt-work (and a scenery-chewing cameo from Telly Savalas), but it is too little too late.

The acting is generally okay, although the actors are hung out to dry by long-winded dialogue scenes that go on a few passages too long.

Despite being a paranoid thriller, Capricorn One is not that paranoid and only occasionally thrilling.

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.

Checked out the latest episodes of the James Bond Cocktail Hour?

  The third season of the James Bond Cocktail Hour continues!

The episodes are as follows:

No Time To Die Trailer 2 review

Nobody Lives For Ever (by John Gardner)

How to introduce James Bond

Casino Royale '06 Part One & Two

McClory v Fleming

Thunderball (novel)

Remembering Sean Connery

Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965)

A look at Kevin McClory's Warhead (1976)

Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, 1983)

Remixing Thunderball

The Hunt for Red October

The Man with the Golden Gun

Bond Tropes Discussion

Ranking the James Bond ski chases

Die Another Day (2 hour cut)

Patriot Games

Clear and Present Danger

The Man Who Almost Killed James Bond

A View To A Kill

Sum of All Fears

Jack Ryan - Shadow Recruit

Executive Decision

VARGR

State of the Franchise

Skyfall (Part One)

Happy & Glorious - Bond at the Olympics

Skyfall (Part Two)

This month's episodes are:

We saw Casino Royale on the big screen!

(Final) Trailer Talk

The Liquidator (John Gardner book)

The Liquidator (film)

You can listen to these and future episodes wherever you listen to podcasts!

Follow the podcast on IG @jbchpod and on Twitter @jbchpod007.