Reviews

  • Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

    Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) I usually despise gore-centric horror — I’m not a fan of violence in the first place, and gore movies often put a nihilistic disregard for humans (bolstered by special effects and makeup tricks) well ahead of any traditional cinematic value. This goes double for gore-centric horror/comedies, which come across as psychopathic if they fail to build the delicate equilibrium of balancing the exposed innards with the self-aware comedy. In this context, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is almost remarkable for being almost likable despite featuring prostitutes gleefully dismembering their clients with chainsaws. Coming from B-movie authority Fred Olen Ray, it’s incredibly cheap and tasteless: the sets barely meet high school theatrical production standards and the actors were probably hired in seedy offices with entrances on Los Angeles’ back alleys. The plot is an absurdly lurid tale of an Egyptian-worshipping cult sacrificing victims to Anubis, with a Private Eye narrating his efforts to get to the bottom of a killing spree. Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers clearly doesn’t take itself seriously from its amusing opening disclaimer onward, as the over-the-top narration is contracted at every turn by the sequences we see, and the special “gore” effects are so terrible that they just add to the comedy. Blood sprays like red-coloured water, clunky one-liners pepper the narration and dialogue, and the women disrobe on a predictable basis… but then wield their chainsaws with a big grin. The gore component is almost completely defused by the broad comedy, and then the noir/cult plotting takes over and the film’s 75 minutes are over before we can even dare question what we’ve just seen. If you’re looking for interesting cheap low-budget films in the comedy/horror arena, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers should be somewhere on your list (albeit nearer the bottom): it’s far from respectable, and that’s probably the best thing about it.

  • The Doorman (2020)

    The Doorman (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) The spirit of Die Hard is strong in The Doorman, at least in the basics of the plot: A protagonist with action experience; an implausibly isolated building; villains out for a quick safe-cracking score and a family to protect. There’s clearly an effort here for this to be a Ruby Rose vehicle, especially given her well-regarded performances in other action films. Unfortunately, a vehicle is better when it’s based on a strong script and this isn’t it — sticking close to genre tropes, The Doorman goes from one non-surprise to another until the end but can’t manage any wit or originality. Director Ryuhei Kitamura does occasionally use a flashy trick or two, but little of those tricks actually amount to a cohesive vision for the film: they feel more like trick shots you do when you get bored more than in pursuing a specific artistic intention. Rose is not bad in the role — if the point of a star vehicle is to showcase the star, that’s more than met here. There’s some additional pleasure in seeing Jean Reno as the antagonist — once more renewing with Hollywood when it’s looking for a French heavy, even more so considering that Reno’s indeed getting heavier these days. The Doorman got stuck in the mad COVID-time rush to release everything to streaming platforms, but it’s doubtful that it would have earned anything more than a straight-to-digital release even in calmer times. It’s that generic, and it doesn’t really work even as a failed homage to better movies in the genre.

  • Two by Two: Overboard! (2020)

    Two by Two: Overboard! (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) I’m not usually one to maintain that you must have seen the previous film in a series to make sense of sequels, but Two by Two: Overboard sorely tests this conviction. As a kids’ animation film with the usual tone of comic action, it’s not meant to challenge the plotting brain cells of adult viewers. There are cute animals, they are in danger, they triumph over danger, the end. But as a sequel, it gets roaring on a foundation of unlikely concepts presumably introduced in the previous film, not the least of which being a fantastically unlikely fictional race of animals with extraordinary capabilities, taken as granted in Two by Two: Overboard even as first-time viewers aren’t too sure about the rules covering those characters. It doesn’t make the film incomprehensible — it’s aimed at kids, after all — but it makes it feel artificial, arbitrary and contrived. I won’t place all of the blame on this being a sequel, considering that the script and animation are clearly second-rate: the jokes are often lame, the structure is overly familiar, the dialogue is bland and there’s always a willingness to reach lower to get the kids to giggle. (Flatulence is a big, big thing in this film.)  But it’s the way Two by Two: Overboard preens about with those dumb ideas (introduced in the first film) that makes it surprisingly unapproachable if you’re not among the easily impressed target audience. Maybe watch the first film. Maybe watch neither of them.

  • Hot Summer Nights (2017)

    Hot Summer Nights (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) Anyone hearing “coming of age film starring Timothée Chalamet” may be forgiven for recoiling in dread of another snoozefest along the lines of Call Me by Your Name, but it turns out that Hot Summer Nights is quite different. Also quite incoherent, which begins early on, as the film shows us our protagonist being sent to live for the summer of 1991 with his aunt in Cape Cod, MA. Neither townie nor part of the rich hordes descending upon their summer houses, our protagonist soon hooks up with a local drug-dealing celebrity hoodlum, and somehow gets close to the local dream-girl. That nagging voice you’re hearing is not so much the sound of multiple clichés crashing into each other (namely: coming of age meeting drug kingpin tragedy) than a narrator who has no business being in the movie. While our narrator is the link between the film’s fast-paced opening and the film’s epilogue (especially considering that nearly everyone described by the narrator ends up dead a few years later, portending nothing good about our lead characters), he also immediately and ultimately blurs the film’s narrative viewpoint — are we following the adventures of an aimless young man sent to Cape Cod for the summer, or are we following those of this outsider coming to town and becoming a legend to the locals? When the narrator gravely intones, at the end, that “we never saw [the protagonist] again,” you just want to slap him behind the ears and say HE WENT BACK HOME, YOU SMALL-TOWN YOKEL. But such fuzziness is endemic to Hot Summer Nights — our lead character is both a young troubled man and someone who picks up the local weed trade in a matter of days. He’s a shy outsider who somehow gets the attention of the local hottie. He’s coming of age, but also starring in a teenage version of all drug kingpin movies ending with the inevitable consequences of organized crime. The coming-of-age thing doesn’t work when they’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs on a weekly basis. The criminal narrative is squarely stolen from Scorsese and al, barely scaled down to fit in Cape Cod. The third act is an overly familiar blend of personal tragedies, climaxing just as a hurricane makes it to the town, destroying everything as everyone kill each other. The period soundtrack is similarly used as blunt instrument. If none of this sounds subtle, you have no idea — even the film’s hyperactive opening (in which local legends are discussed) seems poorly imitative of better movies. It does end up with a mildly crowd-pleasing film (well, as long as you have the capacity to cheer for juvenile drug dealers), but it’s a film that dies the moment it stops moving, because that’s when the questions emerge, and the longer you question Hot Summer Nights the faster it falls apart. I did like it better than Call Me by Your Name, but I’m not fooling myself: this is really far from being as good as the other coming-of-aged film featuring Timothée Chalamet.

  • Airport (1970)

    Airport (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, July 2021) The big irony about Airport is that even if it’s credited with launching the disaster movie boom of the 1970s, it’s not quite a disaster film through and through: Adapted from a thick procedural novel from the legendary Arthur Hailey, it spends more than an hour and a half detailing the professional and personal struggles of an airport manager during a particularly trying snowstorm. Launching an ensemble cast’s worth of subplots, Airport does gradually build the suspense of its impending disaster, but it remains quite an intimate affair compared to the excesses of its later imitators. For much of the first hour, it remains a remarkably sedate affair. Our airport manager (a solid turn by Burt Lancaster) struggles with a status-seeking wife, a bickering brother-in-law (Dean Martin, playing a playboy pilot), protesting homeowners and that’s all before the film starts, because in the opening moments a pilot error blocks the airport’s main runway even as the snow piles up. Plenty of other subplots are brewing as well — including a charming elderly stowaway (Helen Hayes in an Oscar-winning role), a cigar-chomping maintenance chief tasked with resolving the problem of the stuck plane (George Kennedy in a delightful role — no surprise that he reprised it in the three sequels), and, most crucially, a psychotic engineer with plans to bring down a plane over the Atlantic (Van Heflin in his last role, really not looking as trim as he was twenty years earlier). The all-star ensemble cast is something that other disaster films would reprise with gusto (indeed, watching all four entries in the Airport series is like getting a reunion of classic Hollywood celebrities) even if the formula would eventually be tweaked to bring the disaster earlier in the film. It’s amusing to see the hostile reviews that Airport got upon release, even as it topped the box office for weeks: By 1970, the New Hollywood was getting all of the critical attention, and holdovers like Airport were treated with disdain even as audiences lapped it up. Decades later, Airport’s filmmaking style has become the standard, meaning that it still plays rather well once you get past the slow opening. It’s clear that Airport often gets dinged for the excesses of its successors — the sequels are progressively wilder, cheaper and dumber and that’s not mentioning the other disaster films of the decade—but it’s best seen as a slow-burn suspense film with a still-realistic execution. It’s hardly perfect — the dialogue is often ordinary and there are scenes with as bad a case of “as you know, Bob,” as I can recall seeing—but it’s quite entertaining in its own way, and almost charming in its insistence on sticking to tried-and-true formulas.

  • Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

    Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, July 2021) I already knew from watching films like Samsara that I have to approach non-narrative documentaries differently. It’s best to be in a receptive mood, to minimize distractions, to stop trying to make it all make sense, and to essentially give yourself up to the film. While Koyaanisqatsi has given rise to a small number of similar films featuring strong imagery with non-existent narration, it does remain legendary for a number of reasons: A provocative juxtaposition of striking images teasing meaning even when there is none; an anthemic score by Philip Glass; and an increasingly striking time-capsule aspect to capturing American city life circa-1980. The effect remains just on this side of hypnotic, even if the formula has been reused many times since there. Working with technical means that would now be considered primitive at an age of 4K cameras with built-in time distortion effects, director Godfrey Reggio accumulated years of interesting footage into a generally coherent whole, moving from depictions of nature to that of life in Los Angeles and New York City in the early 1980s. There’s no narration, but in the tradition of Man with a Movie Camera, you do get some mileage out of juxtaposition of sequences. Some of the effects feel sophomoric — comparing city streets with circuit boards is not as clever as it once was, and the film’s end text suggesting “life out of balance” is similarly too blunt. I’m not sure I was following the script when the film created feelings of wonder and amusement at bustling city life, cars self-organizing into a flow of traffic, humans self-directing without collisions and industrial production processes all working to plan. Still, the film always has a striking image to offer, so it can be appreciated on a surface level without getting into the confused themes. One thing that’s hard not to notice is how the film becomes increasingly dated the closer it gets to the human. Scenes of nature are timeless; long shots of cities could have been filmed recently; medium-scale material suffers from car styling; close-ups are irremediably dated to 1980, although in a rather charming way — there’s a juxtaposition of a disco dance floor with a primitive videogame that almost says it all. Glass’ score is so well known at this point that it acts as a hype song: by the time the trumpets of “Pruit Igoe” come rolling by to sights of intentional explosions (which can be interpreted as renewal rather than simple destruction), it’s as close as the film comes to a fist-pumping action scene. In other words, Koyaanisqatsi still works really well, even if there are now TV and streaming channels dedicated to offshoots of this kind of filmmaking. It’s a compelling package, and something as different from classic filmmaking as can be.

  • Making Monsters (2019)

    Making Monsters (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s amazing how many horror films fail to answer even the one essential question — namely, “why would I care?” As Making Monsters begins, for instance, we’re stuck with a couple of obnoxious social media influencers — him as the star repeatedly pranking his fiancé (and somehow people watch that twice a week?), her as the muse and victim. When they head to a remote church and strange things start happening to them, we are apparently supposed to care… which really doesn’t work. By the time we head from one social-media-age cliché to another (which is to say that they are INFLUENCERS now unwilling subjects of a DARK WEB snuff reality series with subscriptions paid in BITCOIN and filmed via WEBCAMS,) we have lost our interest a long time ago. Truly ugly cinematography playing off the early-spring bleak coldness of a rural area certainly doesn’t help, and neither does limiting the cast to a handful of people — most of them fodder or killers. Even if the film does have to good sense of making the right character (that is, the least-objectionable one, no necessarily the most sympathetic one) the focus of the climax, it’s far too little too late. While Making Monsters does have its moments (you’ll be hard-pressed, I suspect, to find a reviewer that doesn’t mention “the pitchfork moment” because wow-bleurgh), they fail to be put together into something resembling anything other than horror movie fans making a gross movie — which can be guessed from how many of the scares are barely justified later on. From the title onward, it could have been a far more daring thematic examination of (indeed) how social media is making monsters of ourselves, but I don’t think that even occurred to writer-directors Justin Harding and Rob Brunner. There’s little wit or humanity in Making Monsters, and even fewer reasons to care.

  • Embryo (1976)

    Embryo (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Once, just once, I’d like to see a film about the artificial creation of humans that wouldn’t result in the creation turning homicidal. But Embryo is largely a blunt-force horror film and that’s what creatures do in horror films. Rock Hudson (!) stars as a grieving veterinarian who, through the first act, comes to manipulate a human embryo with a fast growth serum. Moments later, here grows a young woman played by Barbara Carrera, not only a beauty but also a genius-level intellect beating chess champions and a psychopath willing to kill in order to prevent her cellular decay. It predictably escalates from there. It’s all quite familiar, although there it has a 1970s atmosphere that almost makes it interesting. I could easily see a triple bill of this, Coma and Demon Seed for a 1970s medical science fiction/horror marathon. Hudson is not bad and neither is Carrera — with small roles for Diane Ladd and Roddy McDowall as a bonus. Embryo’s turn to horror is cheap and predictable, though, and the “don’t play God” moralism is as basic as it comes.

  • I’m No Angel (1933)

    I’m No Angel (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) There are star vehicles, and then there’s I’m No Angel featuring Mae West — few other films have been shaped so thoroughly by the personality of their lead actress. Some context may be useful to understand why: Mae West got to Hollywood rather late at nearly 40, but with a fully formed stage persona from bawdy performances in New York City. She had the good fortune of making her entry in movies during the very brief period of time, the Pre-Code era, where Hollywood was testing the limits of what audiences were willing to embrace in terms of risqué content. Already an accomplished writer and an independent-minded performer, it made sense for West to make her own movies, especially as producers were courting her commercial potential. Hence I’m No Angel, a film in which Mae West, in full Mae West persona, is the centre of attraction as she dispenses her brand of saucy dialogue, has other characters fawn about her, and is unquestionably the one who’s always right. It’s a measure of her star power that you can add, “Oh, and Cary Grant is also in the film” as an honest afterthought. As a Pre-Code film, it’s probably the purest capture of Mae West’s stage persona, more so than She Done Him Wrong. (Indeed, I’m No Angel was one of the movies that was used as justification for the Production Code that started to infantilize American cinema the following year.)  It helps that West is indeed an intriguing character — she may not strike twenty-first century viewers as a remarkable beauty, but the attitude is still impressive in its own right. The truth about star vehicle is that some of them are amply justified.

  • Come Live with Me (1941)

    Come Live with Me (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The casting in Come Live with Me is enough to make any classic Hollywood cinephile perk up — Hedy Lamarr and James Stewart in a romantic comedy? Well, yes — she plays a refugee with citizenship issues, and he plays a single writer in search of inspiration. It’s a match made in citizenship application heaven, and he gets enough inspiration to write a book about their non-romance. It’s all complicated by some adultery (surprisingly enough for 1941), but the key driver of the last act is Stewart saying with his usual aw-shucks “Now, it’s perfectly all right for two strangers to get married; they’ve got to know each other before they get divorced!” Blending screwball comedy of remarriage with a far lower-octane style of romance, Come Live with Me is nowhere near any top tier of film — but it has Lamarr looking beautiful, Stewart ably playing a romantic lead at the height of this romantic-premier era, and that’s more than enough to check off the essential boxes of what the film must deliver.

  • The Killers (1964)

    The Killers (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) As far as remakes of classic movies go, this 1964 take on The Killers has the right idea — take an intriguing premise, develop it in a different direction and throw in a decent amount of talent behind and in front of the camera. The original is good in a classic noir mould, but this remake aptly adapts the story to the sixties: colour cinematography, far more permissive attitudes toward sex and violence, and a lingering amorality that is best exemplified in how the killers become the protagonists moving the story — resulting in what some call the first film of the neo-noir era. Directed by Don Siegel, a veteran filmmaker who would go on to become one of Clint Eastwood’s favourite directors, The Killers is capably handled throughout, especially during its rather overlong pit-stop in the world of professional racing. But it’s the casting that still gets some attention — Lee Marvin is quite impressive as the lead killer, but it’s Ronald Reagan who entertains the most in his last and only villainous role, slapping his moll and gleefully saying, “I approve of larceny” — unlike earlier performances, he here looks enough like his 1980s image that it’s even funnier. It all wraps up into an overlong but entertaining thriller with some great 1960s period detail. As far as remakes go, I approve of this take on The Killers: different enough to be entertaining even when you know where it’s going.

  • Growing the Big One (2010)

    Growing the Big One (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’ll admit it — Growing the Big One ground me down. It’s obvious even from the short TV Guide blurb that it’s a low-budget Hallmark movie, and I normally wouldn’t be interested. But it kept showing up on Cable TV channels — being an innocuous Canadian production, it’s a boon for channel programmers looking for some of those sweet CanCon credits, and that probably explains why it still regularly shows up on listings more than a decade after production. Upon seeing it show up once again, I sighed, recorded and watched knowing that I would finally be able to start ignoring it again. Predictably enough, there aren’t many surprises in the result: faithfully following the now-famous formula of Hallmark holiday movies, Growing the Big One follows a career woman (played by Shannen Doherty) as she heads back to a small town, gets her hands dirty in the community (in this case, growing a gigantic pumpkin) and finds the love of a bland but good man. It plays according to the usual beats, protecting sensitive audiences from being surprised at anything. The pumpkin-growing aspect could have been interesting, but it’s handled with twee romanticism that prevents any interesting details from being highlighted — I would love for an engineering-minded film to take on the same subject, just to see the difference. The narrative contrivances, stock characters and formula-driven plotting do lead to something mildly entertaining — by playing it safe all the way, the film ends up with something that few will deem bad… but this is really not a film meant to stick in mind as anything but “that pumpkin-growing movie.”  At least I’ve seen it, so Growing the Big One will release its hold on me.

  • Curtains (1983)

    Curtains (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) By 1983, the first wave of slasher horror movies was already on the decline — overexposed and repetitive, the genre was clearly going through all sorts of permutations in a feeble attempt to freshen an already stale and limited genre. So, it’s not that much of a surprise to find something like Curtains coming out at that time — an attempt to set a slasher in the world of acting, and blend in some ironic comedy based on the theatrical world. The plot, so to speak, has six actresses competing for a role at a director’s mansion and, obviously, being killed one by one. Conceptually, Curtains is slightly more ambitious than an average slasher — it’s aimed at slightly older audiences, thematically tries to make parallels between the auditioning process and the accumulating deaths, and even tweaks the usual lone-killer formula. But it’s still a slasher, and the film’s higher ambitions tripped on a famously troubled production that led to the film being shot months apart in two halves (referred to as “Acts” in the closing credits) by two directors: Richard Ciupka and then producer Peter R. Simpson. Still, even if all of this weirdness behind and in front of the camera may be more intriguing than the average slasher, it still fails to deliver a better result — Curtains is still about women being graphically killed in a nonsensical plot, and there’s a hard limit to how enjoyable variations on the same tripe can be.

  • The Caller (1987)

    The Caller (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The life of an avid cinephile is not always fun — watch too many bad movies in a row, and you’ll start wondering why this is the hobby you’ve chosen. As you make your way out of the list of classics and start working on the rest, you’ll start fearing that you’ve seen all there is to see — that the future is going to be a parade of similar plots, clichés, undistinguishable characters and few surprises. But then there are movies like The Caller to give us hope all over again. To be clear, The Caller is not a big or perfect movie: It’s very nearly a theatrical piece, chiefly concerned with an elaborate cat-and-mouse verbal joust between a woman living alone in a house and a mysterious stranger who intrudes upon her life during one evening. It doesn’t take all that much time for a mysterious fog to permeate the film — the way the two speak to each other is not normal, and there’s clearly more than we’re seeing to their relationship. They overtly speak of murder and give each other points for seeing through their deception. The following day, their intricate dance continues with even more unexplainable exchanges and abnormal behaviour. It’s all compelling stuff, and the repartee here is quite good. The cast is minimal, but Malcolm McDowell brings his usual menace to the role, while Madolyn Smith looks beautiful and gives as good as she gets in the dialogue. You can keep guessing throughout the entire film (I still like my theory of this being extreme role-playing between a kinky couple), but I almost guarantee that when the finale hits, you’ll be still be amazed at it all. Now, I don’t think that the film makes a whole lot of sense when you factor in the conclusion, but there’s a lot more to it than the twist, and even knowing the twist is not enough to distract from the enjoyable moment-by-moment acting joust. The Caller may not even be a particularly good movie but it’s something rarer: a surprise, an original and a reassurance that the world of film is vast and will always contain something new.

  • Born to Kill (1947)

    Born to Kill (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) As Eddie Muller pointed out in his TCM Noir Alley introduction to Born to Kill, there’s a fantastic gender-flip at the heart of the film—Lawrence Tierney playing a cold-blooded killer corrupting two good (?) women on his way to more power, and mercilessly eliminating the obstacles in his way. Even by the standards of film noir, Born to Kill plays rough — the body count accumulates, no one gets what they wanted and there’s a clear air of moral decrepitude over the entire thing. (Contemporary accounts of the film reveal negative aghast reviews, successful efforts to ban the film from further distribution, and the film being used in the defence of a young man accused of murder —further evidence that nothing is new under the sun.)  While Tierney gets the lead role and Claire Trevor does her best to follow him into crime, my favourite character is probably the Private Investigator played by Walter Slezak as a jovial but amoral force of chaos with an impact on nearly everyone. Director Robert Wise ended up with a chameleonic career following his debut here — but I don’t think any of his later films were as gleefully dark as this one. For jaded twenty-first century viewers, Born to Kill amounts to a nice period piece that narratively goes from Reno to San Francisco, but thematically delves deeper and deeper into darkness with the stylish flair of classic noir.