Reviews

  • The Paper Chase (1973)

    The Paper Chase (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s something almost mythical to the first year of a university degree that, frankly, very few movies seem to get beyond the frat-party surface. For many people, it’s a first year away from home, thrown into the pressure-cooker of a highly competitive environment. The Paper Chase goes for the big leagues in describing the first year of a student at the Harvard Law School, under the tutelage of difficult teachers. Now, the story gets a bit melodramatic once it follows a romantic relationship between the protagonist and a young woman who ends up being a feared teacher’s daughter—while this introduces many dramatic complications, it also distracts from the main strength of The Paper Chase: Students thrown in a sink-or-swim environment, trying to out-think the course material and dealing (not always gracefully) with the stress. The film is at its best when it deals with academic material, with harebrained schemes (such as breaking into a law school archives) that often turn out to be not especially useful—except as a way to realize that there isn’t much of a difference between students and the teachers at their age. Timothy Bottoms makes for a great audience stand-in as the protagonist, even if the characters surrounding him are nearly all more interesting—with that going double for John Houseman’s Oscar-winning performance as the exemplary teacher. (The big irony of the film is that he exerts a terrifying influence over his students… but can’t even recognize them in an elevator at the end of the year.) There are some great set-pieces along the way, including nothing less than a climactic study session in a hotel room. The 1970s setting shows, but much of the material still rungs true today: The Paper Chase is quite an enjoyable film for those of us who still have final-exam nightmares about our first year of university.

  • It’s a Wonderful World (1939)

    It’s a Wonderful World (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As far as 1930s screwball comedies go, It’s a Wonderful World is a competent but not particularly striking example of the form. The crime shenanigans propelling the plot have less to do with a rich businessman and a private eye being framed for murder than they do with getting James Stewart playing alongside Claudette Colbert for much of the film. The ever-cute Colbert is up to her usual standard here, a curly blonde haircut acting complementing some good banter back and forth. Stewart is a bit off-persona here, playing his PI character with a bit more roughness than usual, less drawling and with more cutting remarks. Still, it’s a decent-enough romantic caper, as both run from the law in order to establish the protagonists’ innocence. The comic convolutions get a bit overdone by the end—especially as Stewart goes undercover in an actor’s troupe, all to justify a third act with theatrical jokes. Still, there’s real fun to be had watching Colbert and Stewart play off each other, each of them bringing a different style to it. If you’re a fan of the form, It’s a Wonderful World should be fun enough.

  • Hua jia da ren zhuan nan hai [Back to the Good Times] (2018)

    Hua jia da ren zhuan nan hai [Back to the Good Times] (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) If I understand the film’s lineage correctly, Back to the Good Times is the feature-film follow-up to a seven-episode TV series that first introduced the characters, and that explains a lot about my mixed reaction to the film. In the grand tradition of romantic time-travel comic fantasies, this is a film in which the main character gets a chance to travel fifteen years in the past to correct history by… farting in a dresser. Yeah. We’ve probably reached another level in nonsensical time-travelling mechanisms here, but it’s the thought that counts. Singer-turned-actor Crowd Lu is a likable protagonist as the slightly awkward young man who, finding himself in 2003, sets out to correct his family’s biggest problems. While much of the story is simple enough to follow, there are times in which the film spends so much time on tangents and sub-lot far less interesting than the main plot that it becomes a bit of a chore to sit through those fragments. The multiplicity of characters is bewildering, and I gather that some of their built-in eccentricities were introduced more gradually in the TV show. Still, I enjoyed the trip across time and space into a very different context: it’s messy, but it ends with a big romantic finale, and I really had fun with the cute future fillip at the end. As a standalone film, Back to the Good Times could have benefited from a more even tone (what’s with the one-shot action scene at the beginning?), fewer characters (although Heaven Hai is very cute here) and a more focused narrative… but I’m not looking at this in the same way as most of its target audience did, with the added background of seven episodes to introduce the characters.

  • Here Comes the Navy (1934)

    Here Comes the Navy (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Clearly, Here Comes the Navy could not have been made at any other time than 1933-1934, for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. From a factual perspective, the film is about a young man enlisting to be a sailor, and serving both on the USS Arizona (destroyed in 1941 during the bomb attack on Pearl Harbor) and then on the dirigible USS Macon (destroyed in 1935 by an accident, bringing an end to the fleet of US Navy rigid dirigibles). For a thematic perspective, we also have a man enlisting for the wrong reasons (romantic revenge!), serving poorly, openly contemplating quitting, and maintaining a somewhat disrespectful attitude toward the service—that kind of script would not have flown during the Production Code years, or the moment the United States contemplated World War II, and especially not when Hollywood decided to become a pure propaganda effort for the American war machine. But since Here Comes the Navy was made just in time, we are left with this somewhat spirited comedy in which James Cagney plays a pugnacious suitor who gets in trouble with a navy officer and, out of spite, joins the service to annoy him and (later) date his sister. This eventually leads him to a court martial, and then two incidents in which his valour is rewarded. All of this was completed with the full cooperation of the Navy, meaning that we get some fanciful but still fascinating look at the operations of a now-sunk warship, and a now-equally sunk dirigible in their heyday. Beyond the historical documentation factor, Cagney is occasionally very amusing in the lead, while Gloria Stuart (yes, that Titanic Gloria Stuart) makes for a bland but effective female lead. Here Comes the Navy is not that funny, but it is amiable and navigates an interesting line between being cynical about the service and upbeat about it. It’s a Pre-Code film in non-obvious ways: not so much given to racy themes, but far more irreverent than you’d expect from something that, at times, does look like the propaganda films of the early 1940s.

  • The Racket (1951)

    The Racket (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Probably the best thing about The Racket is seeing bad-boy Robert Mitchum take on the role of a two-fisted police captain hellbent on taking down a major organized crime leader played by Robert Ryan. The film, a remake of one of the first movies ever nominated for the first Oscars, is essentially a grand strategy game between the two, as they vie for the affection of a cabaret singer (Lizbeth Scott), try to manipulate politicians in doing their bidding, and have proxy battles through surrogates. There’s some awareness here of the tricky intersection between justice, politics, the media and the personal emotions of the characters themselves. Mitchum may not be ideally cast as a square-jawed icon of law and order (his celebrated arrest and conviction for drug offences were still fresh in the public’s mind at the time), but I found that his screen persona actually worked in his favour here, as the character didn’t seem above a few horrible actions in order to fight his criminal counterpart. Having seen and rather enjoyed the 1928 original, I wasn’t bowled over by the remake—while Mitchum is remarkable, Scott is good and Ryan isn’t bad (switching roles may have been a better casting decision, but then again no one would have cheered for the police in that case), the rest of the film is merely solid, whereas the original had a few moments of innovative brilliance. (Although the remake keeps the spectacle factor: woo-hoo, a big car crash!) But it may be more fascinating for its behind-the scenes drama, as producer Howard Hugues kept tinkering with the film (as was often his habit) and brought in no less than five directors to complete it. The result can occasionally feel disconnected with too many subplots and plot turns underdeveloped. I still enjoyed The Racket—it’s compelling viewing as a film noir (which the first one wasn’t really, instead heralding the gangster movies of the 1930s) and it clicks in the same ways a competent crime story does.

  • The Leopard Man (1943)

    The Leopard Man (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I won’t try to pretend that Jacques Tourneur is a forgotten director, but he does seem consistently undervalued, especially given the strength of his filmography. The early-1940s horror films he made for producer Val Lewton seem particularly influential, bridging the atmosphere of gothic horror with the tricks that would soon end up in film noir (including Tourneur’s own classic Out for the Past). Compared to other horror movies of the era, Tourneur was more restrained, more thematically-minded and far less exploitative—qualities that have helped his work survive well into the twenty-first century. The Leopard Man initially seems to have strong ties to the previous year’s Cat People, but that ends up being clever misdirection, as the feline menace suggested by the title ends up being a masquerade for an unusually dark (for the time) thriller about what’s now known as a serial killer. There are plenty of chills and thrills, distasteful deaths (even when suggested), a New Mexico atmosphere and a great use of shadows and sounds in creating an atmosphere more disturbing than the images. It’s handled quite well, and manages to impress even today. The Leopard Man is clearly not of the same calibre as some of Tourneur’s most celebrated works, but it still works.

  • I’ll Take Your Dead (2018)

    I’ll Take Your Dead (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I don’t often say this, but I really wish I’ll Take Your Dead would have focused more on its dramatic and thriller aspects and removed the supernatural subplots. I generally prefer movies with some imaginary components, but they have to fit, and there’s more than enough family drama and crime thriller in the film to power it to its conclusion without adding vengeful ghosts to it all. The setup is as simple as it is unusual: in an isolated farmhouse, a man with butchery skills is on the retainer of organized crime as someone who can make bodies disappear. His young teenage daughter is used to it, but the weight of his forced commitment to the local thugs is leading him to an escape plan. But before he can bolt, they dump a fresh batch of bodies on him—including a young woman who doesn’t turn out to be as dead as expected. So far so good—and once you add the absent mother (dead from leukemia years before), there’s the making of a family drama as well, as the survivor is restrained and takes on the role of a big sister to a teenager solely in need of female companionship. Alas, the young girl also sees dead people, and while the first few sightings may have been interpreted as flashes of fantasy, those ghosts take an increasingly active role in the proceedings as the situation spins out of control. By the time the ghosts are killing the thugs come to settle a score, we’re way beyond what should have been a tight intimate drama/thriller, and the way to the ending isn’t particularly uplifting either. It does make I’ll Take Your Dead disintegrate in the last stretch, though, as it muddles the story with additional elements that take away from its themes and initial intentions. Which is too bad, because otherwise the work of director Chad Archibald is pretty good—clean crisp images driving home this rural Canadian thriller, and good actors: I’ll watch Jess Salgueiro in just about anything (although she’s better with comic material à la Canadian Strain), while Ava Preston does well as the young teenager, and Aidan Devine is solid in a role meant to depend on pure strength. I’ll Take Your Dead is not a bad film, but it would have been considerably better if it had focused on something interesting.

  • For the Sake of Vicious (2020)

    For the Sake of Vicious (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Watching For the Sake of Vicious, I’m reminded of the old complaint against a certain kind of Canadian cinema—that most of it was “kitchen table drama,” in which the low budget and limited ambitions led to stories of low-stake family struggles revolving around the kitchen table. Well, For the Sake of Vicious does spend about half of its duration in the cramped kitchen of a small affordable house, but it’s anything but sedate: The first half has a nurse coming back home and finding two men, one of them clearly intent on torturing the other. As the story unspools, we understand that the torturer is seeking revenge for the rape of his daughter, and that the bound one is an influential real-estate mogul. Much of this first half is an unnerving game between three people, as the nurse wants to make sure that the bound man is guilty of what the other charges. But the film shifts in an entirely different gear once the bound man calls for help, and waves of intruders converge on the kitchen where everything is taking place, intent on leaving no survivors. But then our characters fight back… in a relentless half-hour of bone-crunching, knife-stabbing and head-blasting violence. Tightly directed by Reese Eveneshen and Gabriel Carrer, For the Sake of Vicious ends up being an exemplary piece of how thrilling a low budget can be. I could have used a few wider shots from time to time, but the bloody violence doesn’t let up for quite a while, and even I—who don’t usually like either home-invasion movies or that degree of gore—can’t help but be somewhat impressed by the results. Lora Burke is quite good as the audience stand-in, trying to mediate the violence around her even as it spins out of her control. The story gets thin once the second half begins, and I can’t help but see a Drive reference or two in the subsequent aesthetics, but For the Sake of Vicious ends up being a mean and effective piece of low-budget Canadian genre entertainment.

  • Hall (2020)

    Hall (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It’s unnerving to see Hall while in the middle of a global pandemic characterized by lockdowns and social distancing, as the film rests on the notion of a respiratory plague running rampant. Against a pandemic background, a woman stuck in an abusive relationship is mustering the courage to leave her no-good husband while they’re off at a hotel during a long road trip. Much of the story is thus clustered around a long hotel hall, with victims of the illness eventually wheezing on the floor as the drama plays out. This is, so far, solid material. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t focus on the essentials, or properly manages to expand beyond the hall itself. The central drama is quite interesting—even provocative in confronting the personal with the grander-scope epidemic given what we now know about domestic violence during lockdowns. I wouldn’t change anything about it. But then Hall tries to expand its material with the story of a Japanese woman in the next room that feels like a sideshow at best: if the idea was to get the film to feature length, it only half-works: a few more subplots featuring more characters in nearby rooms would have been more appropriate in transforming this in an ensemble story. Then the film takes a significant nosedive with a pair of scenes featuring the always-interesting Julian Richings as a plague spreader and then, during the credits, an unconvincing news report delving deep into conspiracy theories. These are steps taken too far, and they feel especially unnecessary for an audience with first-hand experience with a global pandemic. They also contradict other parts of the film, and make the entire thing feel more artificial than it would have been otherwise. (I’m watching Hall as part of the “Blood in the Snow” virtual film festival, and half of my issues with the low-budget horror films presented are “You should have stopped writing the bad parts,” with the other half being “you should have continued writing the good parts”) Hall’s ending simply… ends, with very little resolution other than the main issue of getting out of the hotel—maybe they’re infected; maybe they’re headed to someone already dead; maybe the conspiracy will succeed; maybe they’re all already dead. I do like the concept of a horror film using a hotel corridor as a central hub—but the haphazard way in which Hall develops is just unsatisfying despite a good performance from Carolina Bartczak and some clever ideas along the way. But then again, I’m scrutinizing this film with far more rigour than it expected during its production: as amazing as that sounds, we’ve all become experts at knowing how a scenario set against a global plague would play out.

  • Black Christmas (2019)

    Black Christmas (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Perhaps the best thing a remake can do is to stray from the original, especially if the original has a number of issues. I don’t particularly like the 1974 original Black Christmas, but that has a lot to do with it being a slasher (possibly the first slasher—a dubious Canadian contribution to film history) and me not liking slashers. I haven’t seen the similar 2006 remake, but this 2019 version strikes out on its own, barely holding on to the idea of a sorority under attack from a maniac. This version, written and directed by April Wolf and Sophia Takal, lives and breathes the #MeToo era to an often-caricatural degree, as our heroines are engaged in destroying patriarchy everywhere, from dead men’s busts to the English literature canon. It squarely leads to a feature-film-length denunciation of toxic masculinity that at least takes back some of the misogyny inherent in slasher movies. But the promise of flipping the genre on its head very quickly runs out of steam… if it has any steam to begin with: While Imogen Poots has some innate likability as the lead and Aleyse Shannon looks great, the writing often makes their characters come across as blunt mouthpieces for obvious sentiments. Worse yet is the film’s nosedive into outright supernatural elements in the third act, as if the entire patriarchy wasn’t enough of a formidable antagonist in the first place. Misogynists are clearly the new Nazis, as the film ends with an act of mass murder by the heroines that should at least make anyone pause at the disproportionate retribution of it—but then again those who were killed were eventually going to be nominated as right-wing judges, so the script clearly thinks they deserved it. It’s those excesses and quirks that bother me far more than they should—I should be on the film’s side (and the singing sequence is a great deal of empowering fun), but this Black Christmas overplays its cards in such a way that I’m not left with a lot of sympathy for the characters or the results. How weird is that? On the other hand, well, since I was expecting a straight-up remake of the 1974 original, I was certainly surprised at the twists and turns of the result, even if I can’t quite bring myself to like it.

  • Underwater (2020)

    Underwater (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m not the world’s biggest Kirsten Stewart fan (and even less, if you want to be superficial about it, of short-haired blonde Kirsten Stewart, although that’s briefly eclipsed here by bespectacled-in-sports-underwear Kirsten Stewart), but even I have to admit that she’s the linchpin of mean-lean-B-movie thrill machine Underwater. The premise takes us deep on the ocean floor, where a research and drilling facility is severely damaged by mysterious earthquakes and, later, many slimy creatures. As the characters try to escape to safety, the film clearly establishes what it wants to be: a no-nonsense monster movie set in the claustrophobic confines of a deep-sea station. Director William Eubank cleanly juggles the aspects of a special-effects-heavy production, and the script eventually has the heroine punching Cthulhu in the face, which is really all the justification you need to see this film. Steward does pretty well here, and having Vincent Cassel as a grizzled veteran doesn’t hurt. Some great production design subtly highlights the science-fictional nature of the film (wow, those suits!), and there are plenty of suspense sequences to make this one of the best underwater horror movies since The Abyss. It pleasantly reminded me of those almost-extinct 1980s B-movies that weren’t meant to be masterpieces or blockbusters, but were designed to be fun films for a very specific crowd of fans. I’m a bit surprised at how well Underwater works, but it does work.

  • Hail to the Deadites (2020)

    Hail to the Deadites (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) As some of you may guess from the title alone, Hail to the Deadites is a documentary celebration of Evil Dead fans, either in appreciating the film trilogy (the series wasn’t yet broadcast during the making of the film), weaving it into their lives or creating derivative works. It’s… either endearing or embarrassing. Part of the problem is that the documentary refuses to engage critically with the franchise—there’s not much discussion of what it means (perhaps because it’s fun enough that it doesn’t need to mean anything) and perilously little discussion of where the series may have done better (the tree sexual assault scene is mentioned, and then forgotten). Writer-director Steve Villeneuve focuses on fans instead and the result can be uneven: excessive fandom is more concerning than impressive (in my own cosmology, being an outspoken fan of a genre or medium is fine, but being an outspoken fan of a specific work is more troublesome) and the examples unearthed by the series often cross the endearing/embarrassing boundary. But what’s more frustrating is that, aside from having Bruce Campbell turn up for a typically charismatic interview, there isn’t a whole lot here that distinguishes Evil Dead fandom from just about any other horror franchise fandom: Any similar film about, say, the Nightmare on Elm Street series would have felt much like the same, with superfans obsessed by the series in mostly the same ways. I don’t really want to rain on those fans’ parade, though: they’re having fun, so let’s just embrace that fun. Hail to the Deadites, in that lens, feels like the kind of “extra DVD” documentary that you’d include in a series box set: Entertaining, but not essential.

  • Anything for Jackson (2020)

    Anything for Jackson (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Low-budget Canadian Horror is often a hard sell, but there’s enough going on in Anything for Jackson to rival higher-profile filmmaking. The premise does play with genre expectations a bit, as it features elderly villains trying to resurrect their dead grandson through a reverse exorcism. To do so, they kidnap a pregnant woman in order to put the soul of their grandson (the titular Jackson) into her soon-to-be-born child, but, being silly Satanists, they get it wrong and, well, what happens next is the third act of the film. For a prototypical suburban horror film shot in the screenwriter’s own house, there’s quite a lot of imagination and genre savvy on display here. It certainly helps to have the memorably lugubrious Julian Richings as a co-lead. Otherwise, the digital cinematography is crisp, the acting is decent and there’s enough plot in the narrative tank to get us coasting to the end despite a third act that doesn’t quite come up to the expectations left by the earlier sections of the film. Nonetheless, Anything for Jackson is pretty good, and not only by Canadian-horror standards.

  • A Stolen Life (1946)

    A Stolen Life (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) All Bette Davis fans get twice as much for their money in A Stolen Life, considering that Davis here plays twins—a shy quiet artist and a gold-digging firebrand. The sisters don’t get along in the first place, but things get even worse with the shy one falls for a man, and the gold-digger moves in to steal the new guy. The film’s title finds its meaning when a horrible accident kills one sister and allows the second one to step into the other one’s life. As a romantic melodrama, it’s not bad—mostly thanks to Davis acting up a storm for two. In comparison, Glenn Ford merely does fine as the third point in this love triangle. The special effects really aren’t bad at all for a mid-1940s film. The narrative is a bit less impressive, though: Some subplots don’t go anywhere, and the ending is a drawn-out affair. Still, if you’re willing to swallow a few implausibilities, then A Stolen Life is quite entertaining. Davis apparently liked playing herself twice because she did so again twenty years later in Dead Ringer.

  • Carry on Screaming! (1966)

    Carry on Screaming! (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) While Carry on Screaming! is the twelfth of the very silly British comedy film series, you don’t really need to have seen any of the preceding ones to make sense of this—just a passing acquaintance with Hammer-style horror films should be enough to get the low-brow gags that populate the film. The plot is a shrug-inducing bunch of nonsense about mad scientists transforming people into mannequins, but the bulk of the film’s appeal is in the sight gags, double entendres, physical comedy and actors mugging for the camera—this is really not meant to be sophisticated or subtle, even if there’s some canniness in the way the film is overloaded with comic material. It’s funny because of its relentlessness—even if you go into the film unamused, sooner or later a stupid joke will get to you. The Hammer recreation is low-budget, obviously, but Carry on Screaming! occasionally scores a point or two of atmosphere. The lead actors were, by this point of the series, attuned to the effect they were looking for, but there are highlights—if you’re a fan of vampish Morticia Adams (who isn’t?), then Fenella Fielding is nothing short of amazing here. Despite its broad nature, Carry on Screaming! is close to a double must see—for seeing what the Carry on series was all about, for one thing, and then as an affectionate parody of Hammer Horror. Plus, the jokes and Fielding—I mean, why wait any longer?