Reviews

  • Virus [Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies] (1980)

    Virus [Hell of the Living Dead aka Night of the Zombies] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2020) The bad news is that Hell of the Living Dead (or whatever you want to call it) is a Bruno Mattei 1980 zombie film. The good news is that… well, there is no good news. This is all you get: Splatter gore sequences loosely strung along an incomprehensible plot about medical experimentation in the Third World, cardboard characters being killed one after another, an ill-fitting Goblin soundtrack, substandard acting, astonishing low-budget filmmaking shortcuts, scenes that feel recycled and a nihilistic ending. Don’t tell me that, for better or for worse, this isn’t what you were expecting. To be fair, Hell of the Living Dead didn’t strike me as being as heave-inducing as some of the truly atrocious Italian horror movies of the era, but that’s a low, almost nonexistent bar. See it if you want—it’s your time. As for myself, I’m steering clear of that era of filmmaking as soon as I’m done checking them off my list.

  • Tulsa (1949)

    Tulsa (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) If ever you thought that Cimarron didn’t spend enough time in the oil fields, then Tulsa is for you. Bombastically announcing itself as the story of how Tulsa became the oil capital of the world (no less!), it takes us in the early days of the American oil industry by examining the life and loves of a daughter of a rancher who becomes an oil baroness through the years. Susan Hayward is quite good in the lead role, with no less than a young Robert Preston lending his presence and deep voice to one of her main relationships. I quite liked the result, but perhaps more for the procedural aspect of spending time drilling for oil than anything else. A spectacular blowout sequence caps the film (perhaps a bit too suddenly) and netted the film an Academy Award nomination for best special effects. Surprisingly or sadly enough, the TV broadcast I saw was grossly downscaled and presented in black-and-white, whereas Tulsa was originally shot and distributed in colour. But that’s what happens when TV stations start downloading public-domain movies to fill out their nighttime slots. I’m not complaining as much as I should—if nothing else, it will give me another excuse to watch the film later under better conditions. Tulsa is not a great movie, but it’s interesting, and it’s not the paean to big oil that we could have feared from the opening narration when its second half delves so deeply into the perils of excessive greed when measured against the environment. There’s even a half-sympathetic representation of indigenous characters!

  • Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019)

    Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) As a glimpse into a foundational but often forgotten piece of Hollywood history, Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers is exactly what it says in the title: a short documentary about the first defining cinematographers. Implementing a director’s vision is where the ideas hit reality, and as director Daniel Raim’s Image Makers delights to show, the early pioneers of the form had to put nearly everything together from scratch and jury-rigged equipment. Hand-cranked cameras, magnesium flares and specially-built carts were the tools of the trade, but Image Makers spends more time exploring the artistic meaning of the images created by those pioneers, from the sophistication of the late silent era (with quite a bit of time deservedly spent talking about Sunshine) and the early efforts to recapture the flexibility of cameras during the early sound era. Citizen Kane obviously gets a mention thanks to the efforts of Gregg Toland, who managed to synthesize and update a number of techniques in service to Orson Welles’ ambitious story. Also briefly discussed is the career of James Wong Howe, who battled prejudice in a Caucasian-dominated town to become a leading cinematographer of his era. Many movie clips illustrate the topic, along with interviews with various experts. While Image Makers does not attain the heights of other documentaries due to its scattered subject matter, it’s highly instructive and revelatory for cinephiles, as it can whet anyone’s appetite for further movies on the same topic. To tweak a saying, amateurs may talk about direction, but professionals talk about cinematography.

  • Jet Pilot (1957)

    Jet Pilot (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Can a film be fascinating for all of the wrong reasons? Of course. Take Jet Pilot, for instance—starting with being far more interesting for its production than for what appeared on-screen. On its own, it’s a bad movie. The premise blends Cold War thrills with romance in what may be one of the worst ways to go about it—featuring John Wayne as a fighter pilot who is asked to seduce an attractive Russian pilot who has defected to the United States. While the film drapes itself in the nuts-and-bolts realism of circa-1950 American fighter jets in luscious colour cinematography, the spy-caper plot itself doesn’t make a shred of sense. The casting alone is ludicrous: I don’t like John Wayne, and he’s completely wrong here as an ace pilot lusting after twenty-year-his-junior Janet Leigh, who’s also badly miscast at the Russian defector. A badly written script leads to titters of amusement, as, in the words of a better film critic than I, “the planes enjoy a more active sex life than the human beings”. Jet Pilot becomes increasingly more ludicrous as it goes on, and the miscast pair ensures that we’re less charmed than relieved that it’s all over by the end. But things become far more interesting once you hit the film’s Wikipedia page and start reading about the incredible production and post-production odyssey of the film. The legendary Chuck Yeager was a stunt pilot for the film. Josef von Sternberg directed some of the film but not all of it. Producer Howard Hugues, clearly lusting after the success of his earlier aviation films, spent no ness than seven years editing the final film—By the time the film appeared on screens in 1957, some footage was seven years old, and the US Air Force had moved on to another generation of planes. Much of that is irrelevant to twenty-first century audiences, but it explains part of why the film was a commercial and critical dud upon release even with some really interesting colour footage of US fighter planes. I like aviation just a bit too much not to find the entire thing interesting, but I would have liked Jet Pilot a lot more with different actors and a script that actually tried to be halfway plausible.

  • Travels with my Aunt (1972)

    Travels with my Aunt (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’m a big fan of George Cukor and will make a good-faith attempt at watching most of his filmography, but Travels with my Aunt is clearly from the twilight of his career—still amusing, but a clear step down from his previous films. The somewhat convoluted plot has a young shy English gentleman discovering an eccentric aunt during his mother’s funeral, and being manipulated in extensive travels through Europe and eventually Africa in the pursuit of a ransom. Plenty of opportunities come along for him to grow up along the way. He may be the protagonist, but the dominant character of the story is the titular aunt, played with exuberant panache by none other than Maggie Smith. Considering that the story switches back and forth in time between the present-day travels and excerpts from the aunt’s younger wilder days, Smith ends up playing an old version of her character and a really good-looking younger self as well. The effect for modern viewers is delightfully strange, as “old” Smith looks like the one with which we’re most familiar, making the impact of the younger Smith all the more apparent. The complex plot takes us across the continent and to personal growth for the oddball characters, but the way to that point feels loose and indulgent. If you read about the film’s genesis, there’s quite a bit of material there about this being a picaresque episodic novel first, before being adapted for the screen by an uncredited Katherine Hepburn (!) Fortunately, Travels with my Aunt does hold up as a mildly entertaining comedy with a production that obviously travelled as much as its characters did. It’s colourful, light, twisty and fun. Perhaps not as much so as earlier Cukor movies, but you can put it against a lot of other early-1970s New Hollywood productions as an antidote to their dreariness.

  • A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941)

    A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) A very nice surprise opens A Yank in the R.A.F.: A recreation of a famous bit of US/Canadian history in which American-built planes were flown, driven and then pushed to the Canadian Border, at which point the Canadians pulled the planes onto British Allied territory and were able to legally fly the planes to the UK while breaking no neutrality law. Alas, the rest of the film is far less interesting: Featuring Tyrone Power as a far-too-cocky American pilot, the film takes us through the first two years of WW2 with Power’s character fighting the war as a sideshow to his insistent pursuit of another American working in London (played his frequent screen partner Betty Grable).  A Yank in the R.A.F. tries to do too many things at once while not quite changing gears fast enough to suit the project. Produced at breakneck speed as the Americans were still contemplating whether to get involved in the war, the project tried to take the Power/Grable dynamic and force it into a war movie, ending up making compromises on both sides. Grable’s character is also far too much of a cad to be likable—and the film’s insistence on his rule-breaking heroism rings false from the get-go, as he casually flies from the Manitoba/North Dakota border to Trenton, Ontario—a two-thousand-kilometre trip! Granted, this is probably the only film in history where confusing Trenton, ON with Trenton, PA becomes a minor plot point, but still—it sets the stage for even dumber stuff later on, perhaps reflecting the lack of polish of a production so closely following the events of the war. If nothing else, this pre-propaganda film was clearly meant to prepare the audience for the United States intervening in the war, and by proxy gets us thinking about the now-unbelievable and often-elided isolationist attitude of the United States during early WW2. Unfortunately, A Yank in the R.A.F. is not quite the vehicle fit to fully do justice to the topic—Much of what it does well has been done better in other movies.

  • Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

    Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Canada will have to apologize for a long time for what it did during the residential school era. To recap for anyone unfamiliar with our national shame: For a long time, Canada promoted a policy in which First Nation children were forcibly taken to boarding schools away from their families in order to pursue a policy of cultural assimilation. This policy produced horrifying results with widespread child abuse by adult staff—the stories emerging from that era are still stomach-churning and the schools have had an incredibly damaging impact on Canada’s First Nation population. Rhymes for Young Ghouls takes us deep into that horror, but be warned that the film’s treatment of the topic is not the one you expect. Focusing on a teenage girl growing up without parents in the early 1970s, it’s a film that takes us into the drug-fuelled underworld of the reserve, delves into a healthy dose of magical realism and provides some hard-hitting catharsis for the oppressed heroine, as played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs in a terrific performance. Writer-director Jeff Barnaby is writing from the heart with modern idioms—hearing the 1970s characters talk about zombies in the modern sense may not be historically correct, but it makes the film accessible and clearly prefigures his follow-up Blood Quantum (even sharing some character names, suggesting that it’s a sequel). The result is a surprisingly high-energy take on a famously depressing topic, and one that is surprisingly lively and up-to-the moment. I’m keeping an eye out for Barnaby’s next project, because in two feature films he has established himself as having one of the strongest voices in Canadian cinema at this time. Rhymes for Young Ghouls is not the film you’re expecting from its description—it’s significantly better.

  • The Video Dead (1987)

    The Video Dead (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) The 1980s were a wild time for horror movies, and you only have to make it through the barely controlled craziness of films such as The Video Dead to see how the genre was feeding upon itself at the time. A bizarre mixture of zombie movies with just enough complications to make it a bit more memorable than the norm, it starts with an unsuspecting writer receiving a cursed television that allows zombies to emerge from the screen. When the house’s new owners move in, they too have to contend with the rampaging zombie squad, especially when a kindly Texan shows up at their door to explain the rules of the game: treat these zombies nicely and they won’t realize they’re dead. Then kill them over the ground so that they can be reabsorbed by the Earth, or lock them in a place they can’t get out of. Or something like that. By the time The Video Dead ends, it’s really an excuse to get gory. While some sources describe the film as a horror comedy, there aren’t that many laughs here, as nearly the entire cast dies and the rotting undead seem unstoppable. As a horror film, I’ve seen worse even this week, but let’s not pretend that this is a hidden gem or an overlooked guilty pleasure: it’s about as good an example of what the 1980s made possible through VHS cassette distribution, and what fans of the genre could expect to rent on any given Friday. I remained amazed at how cheap CGI hasn’t led to a resurgence of the 1980s creature features equal to the special practical effects that were routinely achieved back then, but after watching The Video Dead, I’m not exactly complaining too loudly.

  • Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    Il fantasma dell’opera [The Phantom of the Opera] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but—with Dario Argento writing and directing an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera with Julian Sands and Asia Argento in the lead roles, I expected a lot more. This should be familiar material for Argento, who made the stage a centrepiece of his 1987 film Opera—alas, without much improvement. Argento-the-writer’s decision to change the Phantom from disfigured romantic to rat-friendly misanthrope is a crucial false note, while Argento-the-director to go full-gore on material that doesn’t necessarily call for it is another misfire. Julian Sands disappoints as the Phantom, although Asia Argento more or less performs at her level. Much of the same can be said about Dario Argento himself—if you were expecting much from 1998 Argento, then you hadn’t been paying attention for years at this point: the director was a shadow of his own self by that time in his career, and while fans could hope for 1970s Argento to handle the promising material, what they got instead was 1990s Argento and his substantial limitations. All of this to say that, unfortunately, Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera is closer to comedy than romantic horror: overly gory, not particularly attuned to the possibility of the material and decidedly showcasing the director near his worst, it’s perhaps most entertaining by being ridiculed.

  • The Razor’s Edge (1946)

    The Razor’s Edge (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Despite its sharp title, The Razor’s Edge is not a thriller, not a film noir, not a crime movie—it’s a soul-searching literary drama adapted from Somerset Maugham’s novel and whose contemporary impact may not be immediately understandable by twenty-first century audiences. What a bit of historical investigation reminds us is that the story was written during WW2 and, upon release in 1944, gradually found a public receptive to its themes of aimlessness after a great trauma, then-unusual transcendental themes and resistance to the increasing materiality of American culture. Even elements such as casting Tyrone Power (then more akin to a matinee idol) were playing into that zeitgeist. (Gene Tierney looks nice, though.) Those may not be readily apparent many decades later, but they certainly feed the film’s thematic concerns. Whether the result is successful is up for debate—one of the dangers in adapting a novel heavy in unconventional themes is the double-flattening effects of material being handled by people who didn’t come up with it, and tailored to an audience even further removed from what the original work was trying to say. Then there’s the real danger of ending up with a dull clunker incapable of properly conveying the point—and at 145 minutes, The Razor’s Edge is clearly vulnerable to that statement. All of this to say—sit down and prepare yourself for a long sit because this isn’t some genre piece with regular action beats to keep you awake.

  • The Mod Squad (1999)

    The Mod Squad (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) The biggest occupational hazard for TV shows move adaptations it getting over the inane high-premises often built into serial TV. In The Mod Squad’s case, the problem is magnified by its origin in a TV show thirty years earlier, down to the dated “Mod” in the title. (If you thought, “What, we some kinda… Suicide Squad?” was bad, wait until you hear its 17-year precedent “So you kids are, what? Some kind of mod squad or something?”) Here, Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi and Omar Epps do their best to convince them that they’re delinquent hoodlums while working undercover for the police. While the best-case scenario for The Mod Squad would have been a middle-of-the-road crime action thriller (or a 21 Jump Street-style parody), this reboot struggles under the dated nature of its inspiration, and can barely be bothered to deliver the essentials of the film it’s supposed to be. With twenty years’ hindsight, it’s also easy to see that the film is far too deliberate in its appeal to 1999 young adults (I was part of that cohort, so I can say that the film’s soundtrack feels like a nostalgic throwback to that time’s dance music) and simply feels like a fifty-year-old producer’s attempt to imagine what young people would like. There are some interesting names in the cast (notably Dennis Farina and Richard Jenkins as adult supervision), but The Mod Squad itself is too gimmicky, too badly handled, too unintentionally funny to be effective.

  • Plane Dead aka Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

    Plane Dead aka Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I am slightly, but pleasantly surprised: While I wasn’t expecting much more from Flight of the Living Dead than an average zombie film set aboard the claustrophobic confines of a plane, the result is sufficiently well-executed to be effective rather than perfunctory. This isn’t the first film to blend horror and commercial aviation, but its in-your-face title is likely to make it one of the most memorable. As a gigantic 747 takes off from Los Angeles to Paris with a near-empty passenger compartment and a dangerous cargo in the hold, it doesn’t take much time for the zombie to wake up and start wreaking havoc around the plane. The character work isn’t anything special, but it’s serviceable enough to take us to the end. The special effects are proportional to the film’s low budget, but they’re executed with enough energy that they manage to make us forgive their low quality. The script gets wild toward the end of the film with zombies being sucked outside the 747 and hitting a pursuing jet—and that’s exactly the kind of go-for-broke zaniness that more films of this type could use. By the end (somehow landing near Las Vegas despite nearing the Canadian border at some point), Flight of the Living Dead has completed its assignment: a decently entertaining take on fulfilling the titular zombie-on-a-plane premise, effective enough for fans of the genre. It’s not good enough to break out of its genre, but it’s decent enough to scratch an itch for horror fans.

  • Dracula 3000 (2004)

    Dracula 3000 (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) The notion of a bad movie is elastic—some will nominate big-budget Hollywood studio movies for “worst movie of the year” Razzies, even though there are several lower levels of hell on the way down to truly abominable movies. Dracula 3000 is fairly down on that ladder—wretched but not wretched enough to be completely unwatchable. Taking the Dracula story to set it aboard a spaceship in a premise clearly cribbed from Alien, it’s clearly from screenwriters who don’t understand science fiction, failed remedial physics and couldn’t be bothered writing more than a simplified third-generation copy of the Dracula story. Everything takes place in the year 3000, albeit with early-2000s movie clichés. The tin-eared dialogue seems almost parodic at times with its precise references to the 2950s, and I hope it was the French dub that introduced nonsense such as “Transylvania is a planet in the Carpathian Galaxy” (upon checking: no, that’s in the original) (Actually, looking over some quotes in their original version, it’s obvious that I missed much of the film’s charm by watching it in French—the dub may make a bit more sense, but it’s lacking the joyous inanity of the original). The writers use the same names as the public-domain Stoker novel, but other than having a character named van Helsing trace his genealogy all the way to 1800s Earth, don’t get your hopes up for anything as clever as even a remake of the original story. The villain is ridiculous, the story doesn’t make any sense and the staging is terrible—there’s really not much left to watch. The cast, however, is a surprising blend of C-grade celebrities, from Coolio to Casper Van Dien to Erika Eleniak and Tommy Tiny Lister. But as bad as the film is, there’s a specific kind of entertainment in watching it unfold. The raunchy dialogue (in a nudity-free film!) is in a class of its own, and the ending is essentially a big sex joke, certainly the most upbeat everybody-dies ending I’ve seen in a long while. Do I recommend Dracula 3000? Not to you, not in general, not to any unsuspecting soul—but I may share it with a few bad-movie enthusiasts and see what they think about it.

  • Spare Parts (2020)

    Spare Parts (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The spirit of grindhouse exploitation is alive and well in Spare Parts, a Canadian horror movie that feels like a fever dream of extreme gore horror components bolted together. Our protagonists are a punk grrl band stuck in the middle of nowhere after a bad show and a flat tire—their troubles get increasingly worse as they are kidnapped by a cult, mutilated so that their limbs are replaced by weapons, and forced to fight in an arena built inside a junkyard. One of their boyfriends eventually shows up to investigate, but don’t put too much hope on him: this is the kind of film where the final girl gets to win on her own, with an extra nihilistic twist that can be seen well in advance. Surprisingly not played for laughs, Spare Parts never misses an opportunity to spray blood and expose the innards of a human body. (And that’s not even getting into the even more disturbing sequences—this film doesn’t play nice.) While I usually don’t like that kind of extreme horror, Spare Parts at least has a consistent and appropriate tone throughout: this is a nightmare, and it doesn’t try to soften the blow through juvenile humour or a happy ending. Director Andrew Thomas Hunt uses his low budget effectively, and there’s an earnestness to the production that shows how clearly the film is made by gore fans for gore fans. As a result, I don’t exactly like Spare Parts, but I don’t hate it either—which is not bad for that kind of film. The target audience will get a lot more out of it than I did.

  • Blood Quantum (2019)

    Blood Quantum (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’ve been burnt out on so many zombie movies over the past few years that it takes a lot to get me interested in any new one, but Blood Quantum has just the right angle to grab my attention. A Canadian movie written and directed by Mi’kmaqi Jeff Barnaby, featuring a cast largely made up of indigenous actors, it’s a horror film that revisits a zombie apocalypse with a twist: indigenous people are immune to the “zed” virus, whereas white people aren’t. (This great idea is somewhat undermined by fish and dogs also being turned into zombies, but the rule of cool applies here, as it leads to an intriguing prologue.) Set during the zombie outbreak and then skipping forward six months later, Blood Quantum does master the basic elements of the zombie movie: it’s almost inconceivably gory, with chainsaws and snowblowers being put to good use. The cinematography is much better than average for low-budget horror films, and the film does get its dark zombie-killing gags right. The extra layer on top is the integral critique of white colonialism baked into the premise—there’s a clear sense of us-versus-them here, with all white people being time-bombs liable to explode into undead killing machines at any moment. There are clever touches all over the place, from post-mortem one-liners being delivered in subtitled Mi’kmaqi to the indigenous characters immediately burning a blanket brought in by a white refugee—there’s clearly a sociopolitical critique here that cuts deep for Canadian audiences. The action is brutal, and the ending doesn’t pull any punches in killing off most of its cast. Cast-wise, the standout performance here is from Stonehorse Lone Goeman as a grizzled old man who proves a terrific action hero. The result is probably my favourite zombie film in recent memory, even if I don’t quite think that it’s as good as it could be. For instance, I would have liked to hear a bit of French considering the location of the film in Québec. Burnaby has a good eye for images and composition, but his handling of the actors is a bit inconsistent—some lines of dialogue are delivered awkwardly, even as other line readings are quite good. The low budget of the film is most obvious in the frustrating time skip one third of the way in the film. Other elements of the script had me thinking that the film had picked the wrong genre: In sticking close to horror tropes, Blood Quantum steadily kills off its cast in a spiral of nihilism, whereas a more unsettling story could have been within reach if it had gone for more expansive science fiction—I’m specifically thinking about portraying white genocide through viral infection, and indigenous nations taking back Turtle Island. But I won’t fault Barnaby for delivering the film he wanted to produce—Blood Quantum is about as provocative a zombie film as has been released recently, its gore effects are top-notch and it has just enough political material to make it interesting. [September 2020: Also have a look at Barnaby’s previous Rhymes for Young Ghouls—the thematic and stylistic links between the two movies are profound, with Blood Quantum arguably being a sequel for some of the first film’s characters.]