Month: September 2022

  • L’altro inferno [The Other Hell] (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) In theory, I’m a good sport for some giallo-era nunsploitation. Throw in direction from Bruno Mattei and a soundtrack from Goblin, and The Other Hell should be a lot more fun to watch than it is. I mean: how can it miss with supernatural nun-on-nun violence, a disfigured child with telekinetic powers, reanimated corpses and a Satanist going undercover as a nun? But it takes more than strong ideas to make a film worth watching, and so The Other Hell ends up far more boring than you’d expect—it takes a while for everything to get going, and the lower-budget aesthetics of the film (despite having been shot in a real convent) obscure and cheapen most of what should be effective. Little of this should come as a surprise if you’re aware of the production’s pedigree—Mattei and his producers weren’t just about exploitation, but derivative exploitation, and the result is rather terrible even with some intriguing keywords in its description. The Other Hell seems perfectly content to go for the dullest possible execution of its “ideas”—there’s no eroticism here, for instance, and far less outright horror than you’d suppose. It ends up being a frustrating film more than a boring one: you keep hoping that it will do justice to its ideas, and it ultimately doesn’t.

  • Black Rainbow (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) While Black Rainbow doesn’t work all that well at whatever it tries to be, there’s more to see here than the average 1980s supernatural horror film. Some of this added depth could be anticipated considering that the film is written and directed by noteworthy British director Mike Hodges, whose filmography is pleasantly eclectic and seldom dull. Here, he takes us to the Southern United States, where a medium (Rosanna Arquette) is the centrepiece of public shows in which she communicates with the dead and, perhaps more disturbingly, can anticipate violent deaths. Black Rainbow meddles with perceptions of time with a dual-timeline plot, examines the relation between violence and entertainment, and the predation of local industries on workers. This is all interesting to discuss—alas, the film itself isn’t quite as solid in its execution. It meanders during its opening hour, and can’t quite wrap up all of its plot thread into something that gives justice to its ambitions. Black Rainbow is certainly more intriguing than the standard slasher or monster stuff from the same era, but there’s a leap from that to enjoyment of the result that the film doesn’t take.

  • The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) If you ever wanted to learn everything about the making of Gone with the Wind, well, I guess you could pick up a book. But if you’re in a hurry and thirsty for audiovisual material, then The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind should do it. A largely chronological retelling of the film’s production from novel to casting to shooting to reception, it’s a documentary that only highlights how much of a colossal undertaking Gone with the Wind was to shoot, the numerous problems that popped up during production (including three directors themselves directed by producer David Selznick) and the impact it had on Hollywood. By the time the film ends, you’ll feel as if any film deserved a making-of, it’s Gone with the Wind—not only because it remains the all-time box-office champ (adjusted for inflation) never to be dethroned, but because it was such a dramatic production. Coming from late 1980s TV production pedigree, there’s no denying that The Making of a Legend looks rough around its standard-definition edges and classic production techniques. On the other hand, it benefits from a few first-hand recollections of the making of the film, something that would be impossible to get from a documentary made today. Tons of archival footage is wisely used here, including rare test footage, and it all helps make this feel like the definitive documentary about Gone with the Wind, never to be dethroned.

  • The Spiral Staircase (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Horror film historians are in for a treat (of sort) in The Spiral Staircase, considering how it was a relatively well-financed RKO studio production that happens to rely on slasher-like elements decades before the genre was codified. A blend of film noir cinematography and horror plotting, The Spiral Staircase goes for Gothic thrills, as it pits a mute girl against a killer preying on disabled victims inside a vast Vermont estate. Directed by Robert Siodmak (no stranger to horror), adapted from a gothic novel, it really goes for the elements of what we now know as slasher horror: multiple deaths, creepy surroundings, a mystery surrounding the killer, and so on in a mere 84 minutes. Some sub-tropes are unformed—there’s no “final girl” last stand, for instance, and that’s the kind of stuff that does make the film interesting to experience. Dorothy McGuire does well as the female lead, with plenty of thrills and chills along the way. The restrained nature of the film (considering its production during the heyday of the restrictive Production Code) largely means that the murdering is done stylistically rather than gorily, which may come as a relief and a further point of distinction for many viewers. It does make one imagine an alternate Hollywood history in which slashers would have taken a far different stylistic path…

  • The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) Classic Hollywood movies are exceptionally good at two things that are well illustrated in The Prizefighter and the Lady. For one thing, older movies can be instructive in illustrating the passing of fame: You can be famous enough one year that they make a movie about you, and then completely forgotten decades later (except by Hollywood nerds). And yet Hollywood will also teach you that there is nothing new under the sun—that the formulas that work now have been in use for generations. So it is that The Prizefighter and the Lady is a boxing film that happens to start a true-life boxing champion (Max Baer, much better as an actor than you’d expect, fighting other champion Primo Carnera in a climactic bout that prefigures their real-life fight the following year) and it goes for boxing movie clichés with the same gusto as Rocky would decades later. It’s quite standard, although the film does benefit from the great Myrna Loy as the titular lady, a gangster’s moll who makes things even more interesting. Some of the boxing sequences, under the successive tutelage of directors Howard Hawks (who left the production early on) and W. S. Van Dyke, still have some punch to them. It’s not much of a movie, but it still works and that, when you get down to it, is what still counts about Classic Hollywood.