Hazel Penwarden and the Man in Black

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, MoviesLeave a comment

The Man in Black (1950), Dir. Francis Searle, 70 mins, Amazon Prime

Yoga devotee Henry Clavering dies while demonstrating a near-death meditation technique. To the disgust of his second wife Bertha, Henry leaves the majority of his wealth to Joan, his only daughter from his first marriage. Bertha and her own daughter, Janice, embark on a cunning plan to drive the young Joan to madness in order to gain the inheritance in her stead.

Another early Hammer film based on a radio play, this one’s rather fun for the most part, enlivened no end by the performances of headliner Betty Ann Davies as Henry’s second wife, Queen Bitch Bertha, and her spoiled daughter Janice, played by Sheila Burrell. Both ladies chew up the scenery splendidly being genuinely horrible to poor Joan- so much so that its rather like watching a Pantomime, its so wildly over the top but its top-drawer Evil Acting and a great source of enjoyment throughout. I also thought Hazel Penwarden playing the innocent Joan was very good indeed; its possibly a trickier role than it looks, maintaining audience sympathy rather than apathy while Joan is portrayed as overly dumb and gullible in the face of her Evil Stepmother’s horrid gaslighting. I thought she seems a very pretty and capable actress here, especially considering it was her first film role, but looking at her filmography on IMDB she didn’t seem to have much of a career other than bit parts on television. I always find this so depressing, seeing an actor’s  fine performance in an old movie and seeing that their career didn’t succeed the way it perhaps should have; there’s a sense of unfairness to it.

This kind of thing plays on my mind more than it should- I wondered how she felt about her acting career, and what else she did outside of that, so I had a deeper dive into the Internet, and it appears she had more success on the stage, and was an accomplished artist. I found a photographic portrait of her in her home, in 2016, surrounded by countless canvas paintings. Isn’t that marvelous? After watching The Man in Black I initially wondered why she didn’t return in later Hammer films, particularly during the Studios more popular horror period, her stage work infers she would have thought that sort of thing beneath her, as she was an RSC actor of some apparent renown, so little wonder! She died in 2023 at the grand old age of 97, so she had a long and rewarding life, by the look of it. Well, that rather cheers me up.

But after that digression, back to the film itself: other casting has unintended consequences- Henry is played by Sidney James, later of Tony Hancock and Carry On… movies fame. Here he delivers a surprisingly earnest and serious portrayal early in his own career, but of course from our vantage point it feels  ridiculously arch casting, one keeps expecting him to break into his famous grin and cackle. James is actually cast in two roles, the one disguised by heavy make-up which surely fools nobody in the audience, although the scene in which the two characters are seen together is very well done. Perhaps the conceit worked better in 1950 when Sid’s voice was less well-known.

The story maintains some suspense although one wonders how many of the audience even of the day were fooled by all its twists; I think I sussed what was going to happen for much of the narrative just from the first reel. Unfortunately the film loses its way towards the end, with maybe one too many twists spoiling the broth, so to speak, and one too many of the bodies disappearing. There was an opportunity to derail audience expectations, maybe add a supernatural element considering what happens with regards Henry. Its a shame, because that ending doesn’t really satisfy and spoils the film, really, considering everything is leading up to the wicked pair’s deserved comeuppance and I’d have preferred the film to really twist the knife on them, so to speak. But, well, one has to admit, that’s really the stuff of later Hammer….

I’m not at all sure this film deserves the £35, 4K treatment that Hammer has given it, but I enjoyed watching it on Amazon Prime and might be swayed by a cheaper edition someday.

Space ain’t what it used to be

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Movies1 Comment

Spaceways (1953), Dir. Terence Fisher, 72 mins, Amazon Prime

Pioneering space engineer Stephen Mitchell is embroiled in a murder mystery when his adulterous wife and her lover disappear following an abortive test launch. Are there bodies trapped in space in a failed rocket turned orbiting coffin? 

Here’s a fortuitous (for me) chance discovery- Amazon Prime seems to have acquired much of the Hammer library lately released on 4K and Blu-Ray, releases that I’ve been curious about but have failed to seize upon mostly because of their ambitious scale and price (and shelf footprint, frankly). I’m a massive Hammer fan and have many of the studio’s releases on disc (at conservative estimate, 50+), but even I have limits.

Here’s one example- Spaceways, a rather obscure early entry from 1953 that has recently been released by Hammer in a luxury 4k/Blu-Ray boxset that costs £35. I’m not suggesting that these releases aren’t worth the £35: these releases from Hammer  are certainly gorgeously well-presented, lovingly restored with exhaustive on-disc extra features and supplemental books and packaging, but it does seem bizarre that such effort and care is being focused on films that in all honesty really don’t deserve it. Even in 1953 when this film came out, it was surely a shoot, release-and-forget proposition, an early film for Terence Fisher who, for all his professionalism, surely just considered it a job to be done and then moved on quickly to the next. Maybe its reassuring, even life-affirming, to consider that the people making these little b-pictures would never have dreamed of them getting a second life several decades later as luxury collectors editions in the finest home video format available, but hey, life is pretty bizarre at times.

I think Indicator had a better solution, presenting four Hammer films on Blu-Ray in each of its Columbia/Hammer boxsets several years ago. I think Hammer’s current efforts while admirable do seem a little misguided. Sure, Hammer’s classics like Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, Quatermass and the Pit… there’s several deserving of the luxury 4K treatment, but that’s surely not true for all of their pictures. A very good friend of mine who was a huge aficionado of the studio’s output, who went to many Hammer conventions often commented to me that even the Blu-Rays were too good, really, too easily revealing shortcomings in make-up, sets and effects of the day. Sadly passed now, I can only imagine what he would have thought of these 4K releases- would have given him a wry chuckle, I’m sure.

So anyway, back to Spaceways– based on a radio play, as many Hammer films were back then, its a pretty stiff, dialogue-focused affair betraying those radio roots. While sold as a science fiction film suggesting today some 1950’s-era retro pleasures, its really nothing of the sort, its more a (then) present-day murder mystery almost coincidentally slipped into a very basic science fiction setting typical of its nascent Atomic era. Its certainly no Quatermass.

I did enjoy some of the performances; while lead Howard Duff seems to be intent on out-card boarding the cheap sets, some of the other cast members are very good- Alan Wheatley seems to energise the film whenever he appears as Dr Smith, he’s really excellent, and Eva Bartok’s mathematician Dr Lisa Frank pre-channels Star Trek‘s Spock as a cold logician with emotions smouldering beneath the surface (if only Duff were really worth the focus of all her restrained desires). Cecile Chevreau as Mitchell’s shrew of a wife is great fun, a real harpy. I’m always alarmed at the relentless smoking in these old movies; clearly a prop used by actors to distract visually while speaking often interminable dialogue, it was not doing their health any good at all, I would imagine.

The film’s brevity fails to cure the dour pacing which really scuppers the show; maybe at sixty minutes or a little less, it would work better (cut down to the length of an episode of The Outer Limits it might even be a corker). Usually I’m a sucker for this kind of retro, pulp science fiction flick; when done well there’s an (originally unintended) charm to those 1950s/1960s efforts whose attempts at visualising the future may have aged but still has appeal, but as I’ve noted, the science fiction elements are really very minor- some of the posters showing orbital space stations were extremely misleading!

I did find interest in some of the outside location footage, glimpses of an England of some other age, really, but the majority of the film is limited to plain, functional sets: had to smile at the one scene with a window looking out at an incongruous wall and door scarcely a foot beyond, as if they’d forgotten/lost/failed to afford a painted landscape scene that should have been draped there to give the characters something to look at.

The March 2026 watched list

On By ghostof82In Blu-ray, Movies, Television, Amazon Prime/VOD, 4K UHD, Apple TV1 Comment

If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me
What’s the point of doing anything?

March was a strange month. Watched too much stuff, really; the remainder of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ third season, the entirety of Amazon’s new ‘hit’ series Young Sherlock (which was very good) and several ‘new’ films of mostly middling quality but some real surprises (I really didn’t expect A Quiet Place: Day One to be as genuinely great as it was; between this and 28 Years Later, horror flicks are on the up).

But it was rather like watching in silence, because I didn’t get chance to actually post here about much of anything due to, you know, the usual:  life, work, my cranky old laptop lurching towards retirement (really, I NEED to replace it asap, its older than the last decent Star Wars movie) and all sorts of other nonsense. It occurs to me that life here is little bit like that St Vincent song, Digital Witness; its one thing to watch a film or a TV show, but does it really count, does it even really matter, if it isn’t recorded and commented on in this blog? Its enough to make one’s head hurt. But hey, in other news, I just bought a new OLED TV (but the excellent, by all accounts, 4K disc of Ben-Hur which was planned to be the first film watched on it seems to have suffered a technical issue (i.e. its only got two discs, not the three the packaging claims- the folks at WB can’t seem to count) so its gotten delayed, darn it). Would you believe my previous OLED was two months shy of eight years old? Time flies indeed.

So here’s the list for what was the month of March, 2026:

Network (1976) – 2026.16

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – TV series (Season 3) Episodes 4 – 10

Hijack – TV series (Season 2) Episode 8

Shrinking – TV series (Season 4) Episodes 5 – 9

Kolchak: The Night Stalker – TV series Episode 4

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – TV series (Season 1) Episode 6

War Machine (2026) – 2026.17

Dracula (2025) – 2026.18

The Bluff (2026) – 2026.19

The Betrayal (1966)- 2026.20

Young Sherlock – TV series (Season 1) Episodes 1 – 8

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026) – 2026.21

96 Minutes (2025) – 2026.22

I.S.S. (2023) – 2026.23

Hard Boiled (1992)

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) – 2026.24

Well there’s quite a review backlog to get through (again) so if I can keep this laptop up and running a bit longer I’ll try get a few short reviews up. As far as ‘new’ (to me) films goes, I’ve now watched twenty-four within the first three months and I managed one rewatch, Arrow’s new 4K release of Hard Boiled, a film I hadn’t seen since the early DVD days. Its a strange thing, rewatching an old favourite years later with ‘new’ eyes, so to speak- and curious realising how much one forgets over time. I’d probably only watched the film two or three times, so many years ago, so an awful lot of it seemed new; mostly I recalled some of the iconic action set pieces but had forgotten most of the intricacies of the actual plot. What a fantastic action flick that is though.

Sales are the Devils work

I’ve tried to rein in my spending again (even ‘bargain’ OLED TVs are expensive investments) and nearly came unstuck by the Easter sales this month. I finally pressed the button on Radiance/Transmission’s 4K LE of The Stunt Man when it started to slip OOP at most retailers, and got quite undone by the Arrow sale when finally ordering the new Hard Boiled, seduced into buying reduced 4Ks of City on Fire, Narc and Outland.

What? Outland? Yeah, I don’t know. Must have lost my head there. I quite like the film, and it certainly has some nostalgic value, but its not that great a film, really, is it- and I bought the darn thing on Blu-Ray only about a year or so ago. I’ve been trying so hard to avoid buying 4K upgrades of films I already have on Blu-Ray. I’m just too weak – seems inevitable I’ll be buying the 4K of 2010 when that gets announced. Buying Outland on 4K got me feeling guilty enough to swerve clear of the rest of the sales so maybe there was a positive point to it. At least there’s nothing further incoming until the end of April when 4Ks of  The Killer and the glorious Innerspace turn up. My wallet can breath a sigh of relief.

So anyway, its that time again:

The Top Three of the Month

  1. Network
  2. A Quiet Place: Day One
  3. War Machine

The Bottom Three of the Month

  1. 96 Minutes
  2. I.S.S.
  3. Dracula

 

 

Strange New Worlds Season Three

On By ghostof82In 4K UHD, Television1 Comment

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV Series 2022 – ?),  Season Three (2025), Ten Episodes, 4K UHD

A long time ago in a country not so far away….

Many moons ago, back in 1972, I first saw the TOS two-parter The Menagerie and it really messed me up- I was only five or six years old at the time, and familiar as I was, at that point, with Kirk, Spock and Bones, and the bright-coloured uniforms and the slick sets (dated as it all may seem today, for a young kid living in the dismal grey United Kingdom of the time, Star Trek was wondrous), these two episodes, and their glimpse of a strange Enterprise, and a very different crew, proved disorientating.  The Talosians simply scared me witless; even today I only have to hear the music from whenever they appeared onscreen (composed by Alexander Courage, using an electronic guitar to REALLY raise the goosebumps) makes the hairs on my neck raise up and a chill shiver through me.

The flashbacks to an earlier Enterprise were sequences cleverly utilised form the series’ original, unaired pilot that featured Jeffrey Hunter playing Captain Christopher Pike; it proved to be a rather too-cerebral sci-fi for the execs, who commissioned a more action-leaning, ‘Western-in-space’ second pilot with William Shatner playing a new Captain that led to the Star Trek that I knew and loved.

But the strangeness. How retro it looked, and sounded. How alien, this glimpse of another Enterprise that The Menagerie gave us.

47 Years Later….

Already hugely excited by seeing Pike’s Enterprise enliven a few episodes of the utterly horrible Star Trek: Discovery, the news that this updated depiction of Pike and his crew would get its own prequel series filled me with joy, and its title ‘Strange New Worlds’ – hell yeah. This was pre-TOS, when the strangeness that haunted me back as kid could be leaned into, and the ‘New Worlds’ suggested a sense of fresh excitement, adventure, exploring, that later Trek’s seemed to increasingly lack. This was a Trek that could be more retro, less technobabble, more a sense of finding new worlds, with all the benefits of modern film-making tech and massive production values.

Well.

Surprisingly… well, maybe not so surprisingly- I should have realised that the Strange New Worlds that I was envisioning in my head (maybe a bit more Forbidden Planet than anyone would ever get away with) was never going to happen, this being modern Trek, after all. But nonetheless, I still really enjoyed both season one and two of this show. Largely departing from the serial storylines and returning to the episodic television format of the original series roots, Strange New Worlds may not have been perfect, but it was fun, something that Trek hadn’t seemed to be for, well, ages. The characters were engaging, the production values as impressive as I’d hoped for. There just didn’t seem to be many, well, Strange, or New, worlds being discovered by Pike and his crew. This series seemed  focused on introducing and developing arcs for its characters, some new and original, and others being younger variants of the crew we’d love in TOS…. a younger Nurse Chapel, Uhura, Spock, even a younger, pre-Captain, Kirk…..

So Season Three….

Well, pretty much more of the same, for better or worse. With most of the characters established now and the actors fully at home with them, one would think we’d finally get on with that exploring corners of the galaxy where no human had ever been before. But…no. We’ve got that Nurse Chapel/Spock off/on/off relationship stumbling on, complicated by both Chapel’s engagement to (the ultimately ill-fated, if you’re familiar with TOS, Dr Korby) and Spock’s curious involvement with another crew member, La’an Noonien-Sing (really, for a Vulcan, Spock gets around the ladies somewhat). I don’t really mind that so much, they are better characters, frankly, than any from the last few Trek shows, but they do seem rather more, well, self-obsessed than being interested in, well, exploring strange new worlds or new civilizations.

There’s just a feeling that, well, the showrunners still haven’t got the balance quite right.  That the show doesn’t really quite now what it is, yet. Maybe its because they don’t get to write sufficient episodes in these ten-episode seasons. By the time 28 episodes of TOS season one were done, everyone surely knew what TOS was and who its characters were. This last point has been an issue with other shows; the sheer familiarity with characters and variety of storylines that we used to gain with 22-episode seasons, is just not there anymore. Babylon 5, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Battlestar Galactica reboot…they just had more time, more opportunity. This current trend for smaller, more expensive shows is turning into a creative cul-de-sac. Either its more plot, less character arcs, or more character arcs, less plot; less episodes means you have to make a choice.

Most alarmingly, we’re now three seasons in with only two left, and even those two seasons only entail sixteen episodes remaining, as the fifth and final season only has six episodes. So we’re past the midway point of Strange New Worlds now, and I’m beginning to worry that it may be a case of ‘what might have been’. I didn’t mind the musical episode last season, thought it was a bit of fun, but now I’m beginning to think it was a diversion the series could ill afford- an observation that I think rings true of a few episodes this season:

S3.1: Hegemony Part Two. Concluding the storyline of the season two finale, this one… well, I’m actually beginning to feel bored when SNW goes serious and action-orientated. It seems to lose some of its heart, and the tension is inevitably diluted because we know who’s still around for TOS (its the bane of all prequel shows). I’m also not at all convinced the writers room hadn’t boxed themselves into a corner with that last season cliffhanger: I actually rewatched that episode immediately before watching this one, and it feels like it was written by someone else entirely (was it? I haven’t checked) and this goes wildly off track trying to get to a satisfactory solution. I  hugely disliked the return of that old Star Trek chestnut: technobabble being used to get out of that corner. Like Dr Who‘s sonic screwdriver, technobabble is the deus ex machina that ruins any Star Trek, mostly from the old TNG and DS:9 days, and putting all the Gorn into some kind of hibernation by turning the Enterprise into a star by doing some techno-sorcery nonsense with the ships defectors….Seriously, a bad start for season three for me.

S3.2: Wedding Bell Blues. I actually thought this was more what SNW does well: have a bit of fun and whimsy, and drop in some TOS lore into the bargain, with a wedding planner that turns out to be Trelane from TOS’  “The Squire of Gothos” (and also confirms he is one of the Q continuum) and of course, we have Dr. Roger Korby, who we saw back in the TOS episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” which I always thought was on of the shows strongest episodes, featuring plot points and themes that largely predicted Blade Runner. When Kirk is hanging on for dear life, about to fall to his death, and the giant Ruk suddenly saves him, lifting him up? Man, I choked on my crisps rewatching that episode after Blade Runner came out. I really had a lot of fun with this episode. Certainly cleansed the palate after that noisy senseless first episode. but its one of those episodes which, well, would be great in a 22-episode season, but might seem a bit of a waste when the season is limited to 10 episodes, but its actually one of my favourites this season.

S3.3: Shuttle to Kenfori. At this point I appreciated we were in for a bumpy ride this year. Space zombies? In Trek? There’s some bad writing here, presumably by writers who do not know Trek (allegedly this was written by staff from Star Trek: Discovery so largely confirms this). SNW still continues to waste Klingons, who were always the memorable bad-guys in TOS: here a female Klingon with a grudge/blood feud with M’Benga because the doctor killed a Klingon that er, SHE should have?  Bah. SNW surely had an opportunity over five seasons to set up some quality lead actor to play a Klingon regular who could prove a recurring nemesis for Pike in several episodes. This is one of the season three episodes the show could definitely have done without.

S3.4: A Space Adventure Hour. Well, SNW tries to do a Galaxy Quest and utterly bottles it, abandoning a fun send-up of TOS in favour of a Holodeck adventure that got plenty of fans crying foul over Trek continuity. Regards that TOS spoof: Paul Wesley returns but he’s not playing Kirk- instead he’s mocking Shatner; well, that’s what much of the fanbase reckons, who baulked at a deemed lack of respect. I didn’t mind so much, they were just poking fun at dear old Shatner, I think, and God knows, Shatner’s made a career sending himself up for mockery (did nobody hear those albums he made?) .As for the Holodeck, well, I suppose it at least answers why Kirk’s Enterprise never had a Holodeck. It ultimately proved a fun episode, and would have been a nice diversion, except that this season is already a bit crowded with diversions. Where’s those strange new worlds, exactly?

S3:5: Through the Lens of Time, Aha! A Strange New World at last- at least something close to one, with Dr. Roger Korby returning and the crew exploring buried ruins purported by Korby to be those of an ancient, dead race that were so advanced they may have been inter-galactic and masters of reincarnation.  I like that this hints at Korby’s fascination with immortality, something which proves to be his eventual undoing in TOS, there’s a neat call back there for attentive fans, and his apparent recklessness is clear foreshadowing. There’s a few twists, some interesting visuals and a nice concept of multi-dimensions of Space and Time that needs to be solved before the landing party can escape what is essentially actually a prison for a Great Ancient Evil. I really enjoyed this one, and even the dark tease at the end – at least until it transpired that the last episode of this season returns to this storyline and absolutely ruins it. Damn it.

S3.6: The Sehlat Who Ate its Tail. Yay, Kirk’s back- indeed this one is largely a Kirk-centric episode and really fun. Possibly the strongest episode of the season, albeit it takes a few liberties with established lore, showing a flawed Kirk not as confident or ready for command as he really should be, by this point (the youngest Captain of a starship and he’s apparently so out of his depth here when his Vulcan captain is injured and he has to take the centre chair of the USS Farragut to rescue the Enterprise). Imagine a season where we didn’t bother with space zombies or Holodecks and we had more like this, an episode that is very close indeed to classic Trek. There’s a nice twist near the end when the true nature of the alien menace threatening entire planets runs closer to home than anyone could guess.

S3.7: What is Starfleet? A documentary episode that reminded me of one… wasn’t it in Babylon 5? It was… okay, but surely another one of those largely pointless diversions that this season can ill afford. Its not helped by the fact that the documentarian is some kind of idiot asking inane questions.

S3.8: Four-and-a-Half Vulcans. This is the episode that the season three trailers had fans fearing the most, but I loved it. Its silly fun; TOS did this kind of stuff too so I hardly think its breaking Trek. There’s some great humour, the cast clearly has a blast playing it. Over indulgent, maybe? I just know I really enjoyed it- just like I did last season’s musical entry.

S3.9: Terrarium. Somebody in the writers room must have watched Enemy Mine the night before. Also, it suffers from the plague of modern writing: dialogue that verbalises a characters thinking process, and repeats what’s happening and why its happening. Ortega, still suffering PTSD from the events of Hegemony 1 & 2 is marooned on an alien planetoid with, wouldn’t you know it, only a Gorn for company (the wtf coincidences that have to come together to set this up ruin the episode, really, but are explained by a revelation at the end). Sadly predictable because of course we’ve all seen (the superior) Enemy Mine, which is a shame because its not a bad episode, really- it just needed some better writing to shake things up a bit and be less slavish to the writers DVD collection.

S3.10: New Life and New Civilizations. At this point this episode’s title is taking the pee, isn’t it? Terrible episode, probably the worst this season. I’m definitely getting the idea that SNW simply cannot do ‘event’ episodes and I worry for the eventual series finale. The lack of originality demonstrated in the previous episode manifests again here, as they rip-off “The Inner Light”  from ST:TNG and completely fail to carry any emotional weight with it, despatching Pike’s series love interest Captain Batel in as lazy a way as possible. She ‘sacrifices’ herself to satisfy some obscure destiny in order to save the galaxy from the all-powerful all-stupid Space Gods from episode 5. It betrays this seasons nonsensical bad writing (somehow her being infected by a Gorn leads to THIS? Er, how, exactly?) that there is no emotional depth to any of it, any sense of loss or meaning. Get her starship destroyed by Gorn, or Klingons, set up some kind of loss/revenge storyline to grow Pikes character in ensuing episodes. Technobabble returns, somehow explaining away Ley Lines in Space, and Spock and Kirk mind-melding in order for two starships to do a silly space manoeuvre and both shoot a door open?  I could not believe my eyes or ears. This level of stupidity turned me off Star Trek: Discovery. And this season finale ruins one of the better season three episodes to boot. Agh!

So whatever next….

 

Oh dear. Be afraid. But maybe it won’t be so bad.

Drugs = bad, ‘fifties style

On By ghostof82In Blu-ray, Film noir, Movies, RadianceLeave a comment

Chnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), Dir. Henri Decoin, 105 mins, Blu-Ray (Radiance World Noir Vol.4)

Henri comes back to his France following a successful stay in the United States, where he was tasked with operating the Italian drug trade. He is tasked with now heading up the French operations and making it more efficient and profitable. Given the cover of being the new manager of a nightclub, he sets upon learning the local operation and who runs it. But the police have marked his arrival and seem to be watching his every move… 

I’ve noted before that one has to make allowances when viewing old movies- in this case, while it does seem dated, its very true that this film’s almost docudrama approach regards the importation, cutting and delivery of drugs possibly makes it The French Connection of the 1950s and I’m confident it was likely quite shocking to cinema audiences. Its glimpse of the dark underbelly of society, with even decent-looking, honest people seen falling foul of addiction to hard drugs like heroin, even if it was limited to what censors back then could permit shown onscreen, still packs a punch, even today.  Indeed, its also a reminder that suggestion can often be more powerful than simply graphic depiction. There is, for instance, a sequence in a jazz-club frequented by black men in which a heroin-addicted white woman on a high flirts with a half-naked black dancer and they slip down to the floor for a sexual encounter masked by the attendant crowd that closes in, surrounding them and barring our camera-view, that seems to imply an ensuing drug-fueled orgy involving all the punters. Leave your imagination at the door, I think… but there’s a few moments like this, such as when a chemist who is hired to cut the drugs is ‘corrected’ for his errors by having to watch his wife being raped before his eyes… the rape is offscreen of course, but its all the more effective because of that. What is implied carries weight.

So its a pretty tough film in many ways. Unfortunately the film is totally undermined by a twist towards the end that comes from out of nowhere. Now, I suppose I should possibly applaud a film that doesn’t telegraph a big twist like so many, certainly modern, films would (these days there seem to be a habit of the audience being ‘in the know’ when the in-film characters aren’t, as if modern audiences take some pleasure from it). But in this case its so out of leftfield it breaks the film. It absolutely makes no sense and results in a clearly manufactured and not at all convincing happy ending and positive outcome for the forces of justice and honest joes everywhere (the ending is no The French Connection, for sure). Its nonsense, basically. Maybe the film-makers decided it was expected of them, or it was the only way to get other sections of the film past the censors.

There is also the matter of a decidedly unlikely romance between Jean Gabin and a young woman more than half his age- Gabin was looking every one of his fifty-one years by this point, and the beautiful Magali Noel only twenty-four. In a film that purports to be gritty and realistic, it smacks rather of Hollywood wish-fulfillment for the male audience and is something of a credibility-stretch. Gabin’s certainly no Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart (I remarked on such uncomfortable liaisons in my recent review of To Catch a Thief, and here we are again with another ‘fifties movie suffering the same).

You’ll believe a lass can take out an entire Pirate ship….

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Movies2 Comments

The Bluff (2026), Dir. Frank E. Flowers, 103 mins, Amazon Prime

Sticking with Amazon Prime perhaps longer than is wise, we watched The Bluff, the latest (but surely not last) Amazon Original, this one a pirate movie starring Citadel‘s Priyanka Chopra Jones and The Boy‘s Karl Urban (he’ll always be OUR Dredd, bless him). Well, I’ll always find it hard to avoid watching a pirate movie, they are so rare these days- although I suspect we may be seeing a few more tales of Bloody Mary after this, whether it be a prequel (bonus-we can get Karl Urban back, too) or a sequel documenting her further adventures (I’m sure they’ll think of something) or maybe even a spin-off (once her children grow up to be badass swashbucklers like their mum).

Whatever happened to Citadel, by the way? I thought there was going to be some kind of Citadel Universe on Amazon…

Well, maybe they’ll find a Bloody Mary franchise more appetizing, Priyanka Chopra Jones is very beautiful and certainly has the physicality for action roles like this one – something rather undeservedly taken for granted these days, not everyone is cut out for it.  So its a bit of a shame that this is a little lightweight, but maybe that works to this film’s success, there’s a one-note primacy to it and its all the better for that. Its a simple affair of a ruthless pirate (that’ll be Urban’s Captain Connor) chasing down his haul of gold stolen from him years ago by his old partner-in-piracy Bloody Mary (that’ll be Priyanka Chopra Jones) aka Ercell ,stay-at-home-mom-with-a-secret-past, who has long since settled down on an idyllic Carribean island with a family.

Possibly for budgetary reasons, the film is pretty much landlocked, with the crew of the pirate ship disembarking to be stabbed, decapitated, disembowelled, blown up, impaled, burned… I guess Bloody Mary is an open-minded kind of gal, regards how she despatches these desperados. Whatever gets the job done, and she DOES get the job done. Its a little The Long Kiss Goodnight/Jason Bourne in how it plays the whole secret past/ badass killing machine thing, but the pace rarely ever falters and the period details/art direction are very good.

I suppose how much one can stomach of such frivolity depends upon how one can stifle groans of derision seeing a pretty small and slim girl going about her slaughtering business while also ensuring her kids are safe (hey, mums multi-tasking). Her husband, having been captured by Captain Connor in the film’s lone ocean-set scene that opens the film, and having led him to the island will naturally have to be rescued…

There’s a tendency for the film to overly telegraph things, and the dialogue occasionally sum up what’s going on for inattentive viewers, but on the whole its perfectly fine. Some things grated, particularly Elizabeth, Ercell’s teenage daughter (or step-daughter? I think I may have missed that detail amidst all the explosions and bloodletting) played by Safia Oakley-Green; an actress who is very good here but totally undone by her horribly annoying character. I was actually rooting for the pirates to shoot her dead by the end which er, probably wasn’t what the writers intended. Karl Urban does his best as the films big baddie, chewing up the scenery with a suspiciously questionable accent and being as caddish as pirates come; one has the feeling he can play these roles in his sleep, frowning and grunting and snarling as he does. He’s great, as always.

So on the whole, a reasonable effort. A prequel afforded a bigger budget could expand upon Bloody Mary’s hinted-at backstory and REALLY get into the piracy-on-the-high-seas thing that is the one thing this film is decidedly missing. As a proof-of-concept film, I guess The Bluff gets the job done. It just depends on Amazon’s streaming numbers, I suppose, and like box-office, one never really knows how how the public reacts to stuff. As strictly average as it is, I haven’t seen many Amazon Originals any better of late, so I just wonder what the word of mouth is like. So many things are thrown onto streaming, its hard to tell what sticks the landing, so to speak. You could tell easily enough back in the old days, when it was bums on cinema seats (or not).

Yet another Dracula?

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Horror, Movies1 Comment

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025), Dir. Luc Besson, 129 mins, Amazon Prime

Less Bram Stoker’s Dracula and more Bram Stoker’s Dracula, i.e. the Francis Ford Coppola film from 1992, which Luc Besson clearly seems to have been utterly infatuated by, so much so that this film often feels like an unauthorised remake, albeit one with a decidedly French twist. The early sequence set in 1489 almost feels like outtakes from the Coppola film- so much so there is a shadow of redundancy that hangs over it which never relents, albeit it the film does shine frustratingly in moments of distinct originality suggesting a film that it might have been, had it been less enamoured with Coppola’s.

The film only really comes alive when its narrative moves to its ‘present day’ of 1889 and the incarceration of Maria (Matilda De Angelis) in a Parisian asylum, with the confirmation that she is a vampire (complete with a bit of convenient reworking of vampire lore regards the role of sunlight affecting them etc). Its like the film suddenly shifts up a gear whenever Maria appears onscreen, De Angelis’ fiery performance just energising the film so much that I’m tempted to suggest that the film would have been better had it been titled Maria and focused entirely upon her character and less on Vlad/Dracula and the ‘love tale’ between him and Elizabeta/Nina that borrows so heavily on the 1992 film.

I think the film would have been far better starting with this sequence in 1889 Paris, and leaving all the 1489 section that starts the film to flashbacks later on, and even then only in moderation – perhaps as Nina gradually recalls her past life as Elizabeta.

Tonally the film is all over the place, Besson unable to decide whether he’s making a romance, a horror, or a fantasy fairytale. So inexplicably daft is this film that many times during it I had to ask myself, what the hell was Besson thinking? So we have CGI gargoyles/imps roaming Dracula’s castle (no, really), the Count moving objects around telekinetically like he’s some Marvel superhero, raunchy scenes in Vlad’s boudoir, a bizarre dance routine that jumps between historical periods, moments of sensitive melancholy… Some of it is quite arresting, for instance a sequence when Dracula worms his way into a nunnery and seduces/ promptly feasts upon all the nuns within, during which there’s a brilliantly OTT shot as he stands atop a veritable mountain of writhing intoxicated nuns. Moments like that, and that aforementioned dance sequence, makes one wonder how great, or at least different,  this film might have been, had Besson fully divorced himself from his fascination with THAT Coppola film. At least the film might then have had a purpose?

The cast is fine- he may be no Gary Oldman, but Caleb Landry Jones is nonetheless a better Vlad/Dracula than this film really deserves, he seems unfairly wasted, really. Christoph Waltz is as precisely tonally adrift as the film is, unable to decide whether he should just stroll around totally aloof or be genuinely involved in the tension as if he were, say, Peter Cushing in a Hammer flick. Zoë Bleu is perfectly fine as Elizabeta/ Nina, she’s certainly got chemistry with Jones’ Dracula, and one can easily appreciate why Dracula is so obsessed with her across the centuries. But as I have noted, its Matilda De Angelis’ Maria who shines brightest. Her high-energy performance really fires scenes up.

I didn’t care for the film’s cinematography at all- the film looks like a TV movie most of the time. Maybe it was due to Amazon Prime’s streaming quality proving problematic, especially with lousy compression in dark scenes (if this is the future of movie-watching then we’ll be lamenting the loss of physical media) or maybe it was a deliberate choice of the film-makers, but it didn’t impress at all. Danny Elfman’s score, however, is exquisite, a real return to form for him and a very good score indeed, elements of his finest past work like his Edward Scissorhands score often coming to mind- Elfman blesses the film with a really fine love theme that lifts the film no end. Indeed, if this film succeeds at all, I think its due to some heavy lifting by Elfman, and a welcome reminder of  how important film music can be regards a film’s success.

And yet this morning when I’ve looked on the Internet, I have noted public comments online such as “This is the best movie I have ever seen in my life. I will never get over this film” (when I read that one, I wondered if it was sarcasm or written by Besson incognito) or “What a movie. It is setting the bar higher, actually” or “!Never been so invested [in] Dracula movies as this one” or “I cried my eyes out'” I’m not demeaning these comments, every film has its fans, and this film has clearly struck a chord with some, but I wondered if they’d seen the same film as I did.

If it leaks oil, we can kill it

On By ghostof82In Movies, Netflix5 Comments

War Machine (2026), Dir. Patrick Hughes, 106 mins, Netflix

Ranger recruit 81, must overcome present and past demons to survive an Army Rangers training mission gone horribly wrong when his squad are caught in the wilderness hunted by a deadly alien robot. 

High-concept this definitely isn’t – this unabashedly obvious Predator clone is a perfectly fine Friday or Saturday night beer movie; mostly harmless, as Doug Adams would say. But I think there’s just too much content being made, these days, and the overall quality of everything is sinking. Which is ironic, considering that technically films are getting so sophisticated now, regards what they can put on screen, but the writing is relentlessly uninspiring and generic. It’s all so disposable, watch-once-and-forget now, whereas I could thoroughly enjoy another rewatch of the Arnie Predator any night of the week. Few films are like that now, who will care about them in a year or two? Or even next week?

Also, this film can’t help but fall foul of the disease infecting most everything: teasing a further instalment by not actually offering a proper ending. Films seldom seem to actually end, anymore. No sooner has our hero 81 (man-mountain Alan Ritchson) saved the day by vanquishing the robot menace than the film adds an unnecessary coda, in which we learn that the mechanical monster was but one in an army of countless machines that have fallen out of the sky, laying waste to cities all over the world. I suppose the Predator equivalent would have been Arniie leaving the jungle to discover that there’s thousands of Predators hunting down humans all over the planet, but Predator was made in a time when most movies had proper endings and weren’t immediately focused on being episodic sagas. Progress, eh?

I’m mad as hell…. that I’d never seen ‘Network’ before!

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Movies3 Comments

Network (1976), Dir. Sidney Lumet, 121 mins, Amazon Prime

Longtime TV news anchor Howard Beale has been fired due to falling ratings and while presenting one of his last shows has a breakdown live on-air, threatening to shoot himself, which curiously results in a rise in ratings- he is offered his job back and his fracturing psyche results in more crazy outbursts raging at the state of the country, which for his bosses results in ever- improving ratings. Galvanising a public sick to death of the mess the world is in, Beale turns on his corporate masters and their greed, who decide they must destroy the monster messiah they have created. Live. On-air. 

1976 seems to have been a pretty good year for films- there was Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Rocky, The Omen, Obsession,  Logan’s Run, Assault on Precinct 13…. I’ve seen all those before, over the years, but Network? Like All the President’s Men, also released in 1976, Network escaped me, I never got around to it until last night (All the President’s Men is still waiting, but I’m sure I will finally catch up with it this year). But I’m mad as hell that Network quite slipped past me for so long, because its bloody brilliant and I’ve quite missed out on a classic.

Unfortunately the years have likely dimmed its impact somewhat, it’s a film that has inevitably dated somewhat over the decades – cable, streaming, the Internet, things undreamed of back in 1976 have radically changed the media landscape so much but the film remains as relevant as it ever did, as important as it ever was. Maybe even more so. What writer Paddy Chayefsky was predicting was pretty much an inevitable outcome from what he was witnessing in the 1970s, in which ratings and ad revenue were the most important thing for corporate television, resulting in a  rush to the bottom as far as integrity was concerned.  As Beale preaches to his viewers  “..You’re never going to get any truth from us (television) you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch, at the end of the hour he’s gonna win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here! ”  

Its probably very true that the film itself is preaching to us viewers just as much as Beale preaches to his CRT followers. Some of the cast slip into scenery-chewing excess, like Faye Dunaway does sometimes, but her character is, after all, a radicalised convert to the religion of corporate greed and ratings at any cost, so I’ll cut her a little slack. I think the romance between herself and William Holden’s executive producer fails to convince; there’s chemistry there but it never feels real.  I’d forgotten what an amazing-looking actress she was. Holden looks like an actor nearing the end of the line playing a character whos nearing the end of the line, so he’s kind of perfect. But would a grounded, married, old-school career man like Holden is playing really allow himself to be seduced by a beautiful ambitious woman like her? Well, maybe that’s a stupid question.

Some of the dialogue feels stilted, too on the nose with messaging, but its nonetheless powerful. I was so surprised and impressed by Ned Beatty -the guy who would be such a buffoon a few years after Network  in Superman: The Movie, playing Lex Luthor’s idiot sidekick Otis- who here plays a terrifyingly banal corporate monster, Arthur Jenson, who preaches back to Beale the mantra of “there are no nations, only currency!” and that  “the world is a business, Mr. Beale. You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America! There is no democracy!”

Its all pretty heady stuff. I haven’t even mentioned Robert Duvall’s utter corporate bastard Frank Hackett. The film is so blessed with great casting. Wasn’t 1970s American Cinema great?

The February 2026 watched list

On By ghostof82In Movies, Television, Netflix, 4K UHD, Apple TVLeave a comment

…so here we are with all the stuff I watched in February…

Charley Varrick (1973)

Fallout – TV series (Season 2) Episodes 2 – 8

Hijack – TV series (Season 2) Episodes 4 – 7

Shrinking – TV series (Season 3) Episodes 1 – 4?

Dogma (1999)

Prometheus (2012)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Minority Report (2002)

Cry of the Banshee (1970) – 2026.11

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – TV series (Season 1) Episodes 2-5

Alien: Covenant (2017)

The Greatest Showman (2017)

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast – TV series (Season 1) Episode 1

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Kolchak: The Night Stalker – TV series (Season 1) Episodes 1 – 3

To Catch a Thief (1955) – 2026.12

Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025) – 2026.13

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – TV series (Season 3) Episodes 1 -3

Back to the Wall/ Le dos au mur (1958) – 2026.14

Chnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf (1955) – 2026.15

Here’s the catch regards trying to rewatch discs I have in my collection in order to er, better justify actually having bought them as opposed to watching them just once: a truthfully poor month for watching ‘new’ films (I spent most of my free time watching TV shows and dipping into my disc collection)  Considering I’d watched ten ‘new’ films in January, February’s four (that’s what, one a week?) is pretty poor and the quality here is clearly inferior to Januarys top three.  It will also be noted that of what I did watch in February, I didn’t really post anything about much of it, the TV shows in particular. I must try harder next month, and maybe do some catching up.

Or maybe that’s the point of these monthly round ups?  In which case, the second season of Fallout was great (really must try post a review to delve into all that), Hijack‘s second season started great but seems to be faltering off somewhat as it nears its end, stretching things out over too many episodes, a frequent issue for TV shows these days. That said, if this show was on good old-fashioned  terrestrial/network television, it’d be one of the biggest, most talked-about shows of the year, but as its on Apple TV its likely many have never even heard of it.

Another Apple show that has returned is Shrinking with its third season- irritating in the extreme, and nauseating the rest of the time,  I watch it only out of misguided loyalty/appreciation of Harrison Ford, who is genuinely on some other level to the third rate jokers otherwise cast in this, or the well-intentioned (?) writers who raise social issues which are utterly irrelevant to the oddball characters. Its certainly professional; never has anything so vacuous been so… unfortunately watchable. I cannot fathom why I watch it other than the Ford factor.  It does remind me of another show from several years back, The Big C, which starred the great Laura Linney who played a suburban housewife with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I do think I’m watching two different shows in Shrinking– the interesting one in which Harrison Ford nears the end of his lifelong psychiatric  career due to the onset of Parkinson’s disease (and this season featuring cameos from Michael J Fox, poignant for obvious reasons), and this other show about affluent idiots in that bizarre bubble universe where every problem turns out ecstatically, reassuringly and absolutely Right and Perfect and Wholesome. One of the neighbours has a troublesome, lazy son: he’ll probably end the season discovering the cure for cancer. Every episode is guaranteed to test my gag reflex.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms– brilliant. I’m waiting to watch the sixth and final episode of this first season before I get to write a post about it.

I’m seriously on the fence regards Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and I will explore this further once I’ve watched all of its third season. I had such high hopes for it and on the whole really enjoyed seasons one and two, with some caveats- its not really the show I hoped it would be, but I stick with it because I quite like its positivity and it at least in some small, slim way FEELS like ‘proper’ Trek and not the crap we’ve been fed for the past decade or two.

So anyway, now that quick summary is out of the way, we’ll now look at the best/worst films that were new to me in February, if not new to everyone else (basically, my first-time views, whether it be a genuinely new film or one made sixty years ago) with-

The Top Three of the Month

  1. Back to the Wall / Le dos au mur
  2. To Catch a Thief
  3. Chnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf

The 1958 French noir Back to the Wall shined brightest of, er, just four ‘new’ films, which means that-

The Bottom Three of the Month

  1. Cry of the Banshee

So yeah, what was a bottom three last month inevitably becomes a lone bottom one, because that’s all that’s left. Cry of the Banshee is a pretty lousy movie scuppered by a very poor script and saved only by a few notable members of its cast. On the bright side, of the four ‘new’ films I watched, only one was deemed worthy of hitting the bottom pile, so that’s…. something?