Reviews

  • Dragonslayer (1981)

    Dragonslayer (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2021) The state of fantasy film has advanced a lot since the mini-boom of the early 1980s — notably in special effects, but also in sheer pacing, accessibility and entertainment. A look at Dragonslayer, which should work far better than it does, it not without its lessons. The premise does have some interest to it — a familiar but not badly-intentioned story of a dragonslayer, with just enough refinements (including a king not happy at all that the dragon has been conquered) to keep it from being too stale. The film is notable for early practical special effects work by ILM, including a large-scale dragon and some surprisingly good stop-motion animation. There’s clearly a not-so-childish intention behind the film’s themes and execution, including a gritty execution and some jaundiced commentary on religious appropriation. Still, I had a truly difficult time getting swept along in writer-director Matthew Robbins’s creation — the pacing is deathly slow, the fog-shrouded landscapes overly trite, the screenwriting laborious and meandering. It does get better toward the end, especially as the special effects budget finally gets spent. Otherwise, Dragonslayer is a lot like other fantasy films of the period — perhaps ambitious, but stuck in this weirdly ponderous style and definitely held back by stiff special effects that couldn’t match the requirements of the story being told.

  • Cat Ballou (1965)

    Cat Ballou (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) While Cat Ballou isn’t quite as funny as it (maybe) wanted to be, there’s still a surprisingly funny western comedy at the heart of it call. Jane Fonda, looking rather terrific in long red hair, is the eponymous Catherine Ballou, a schoolteacher who turns to crime when her father is killed by a local tycoon. But the film’s most memorable Academy-Award-winning performance remains that of Lee Marvin in a dual role as a drunk sharpshooter and his no-good brother. Then there’s Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye, very likable as the troubadours occasionally stepping into the film to comment on the action and set up the next few scenes. The sense of humour here is occasionally quite odd — not really playing along familiar registers, but seemingly happy to be odd just for the fun of it. There’s definitely a consistent problem of tone, as some sequences are shot very conventionally for a western, but set alongside other sequences that are just weird for weirdness’s sake. The framing device works well, though, and the ending doesn’t disappoint. What does set Cat Ballou apart from other westerns is significant and unforgettable, though — it’s impossible to mistake it for any other film of the genre (well, maybe bits and pieces of the much-later The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and that’s quite an achievement in itself.

  • Another Thin Man (1939)

    Another Thin Man (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2021) Nick and Norah Charles are at it again in Another Thin Man, tracking down devious murderers with wit and class. This time, they’re joined not only by Asta the Dog, but baby Nick Jr. — a junior detective who doesn’t track down the culprit, but he definitely has a role to play. As usual, William Powell and Myrna Loy are terrific as the sarcastic married lead couple, even as the threat they face gets more overly violent than in previous films. (As Nick remarks, “during this quiet little weekend in the country, my family’s been threatened, I’ve had a knife thrown at me, I’ve been shot at, and I’ve been suspected of murder. From now on, this is your case. You can handle it. I’m going back to New York!”… and that’s before Nick Jr. gets kidnapped.)  As usual, three films into the series, the criminal whodunnit mechanics aren’t nearly as interesting as Nick and Norah’s dialogue as they multiply bon mots, quips and sarcastic put-down the likes of which only the most loving couples can appreciate. It’s quite a bit of fun (the baby party scene is one of the highlights) and works its way to an ingenious (if impossible) bit of jury-rigged engineering to explain the method of the murder, although the motive and perpetrator remain a case of Nick running down the usual suspects in a single-room climax. Even three films in, Powell and Loy are compelling and Another Thin Man manages to be a treat even when the plot machinations get more intense.

  • Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)

    Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On DVD, November 2021) I somehow remembered Police Academy 4 as one of the high points of the series — but then again, twelve-year old me thought the series was terrific, so I wasn’t the best movie reviewer at the time. Suffice to say that this fourth entry is, by now, comfortably stuck in the confines of its own style — the jokes are as obvious as the characters, and the ludicrous climax shows that the producers had money to burn in order to deliver a final spectacle even when it didn’t really fit the tone of the series. I remembered just enough of the gags to feel a general sense of familiarity with the jokes, and some recognition from the dialogue. Steve Guttenberg, in his last appearance in the series, remains the randy straight-man cornerstone while, at the other end of the spectrum, Bobcat Goldthwait turns in a remarkably weird performance as an ex-con turned policeman. Everyone else gets their one-joke character stretched thin — with even the other characters telling them to cut it out. There are a few surprises in the cast list — Sharon Stone as a bouncy journalist, David Spade in his film debut, and even Tony Hawk somewhere in there. The memorable title song is stupid but fun, which is roughly the same thing we can say about Police Academy 4 as a whole — although I can’t quite tell how much of this appreciation is a residual feeling of the twelve-year-old critic who’s still part of me.

  • Some Girls Do (1969)

    Some Girls Do (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) You would think that a late-1960s lighthearted spy movie comedy involving fembots, ultrasound destruction, a supersonic airliner prototype and a dapper secret agent would be a lot more fun than Some Girls Do. It certainly starts on a promising note, with a title credit sequence that mixes a bouncy pop tune, some comic mayhem, and more late-1960s cute girls than even Bond would find sufficient. (Most of them are killer robots in service of a madman, if that makes it any more acceptable.)  It’s after that opening that the film starts to erode, or perhaps never finds its cruising altitude. The film’s spy spoof is ludicrous but not always supported by an execution that doesn’t take advantage of its own opportunities. There’s a heaviness to the film (in its staging, dialogue, and editing) that extinguishes the jokes meant to be funny, leaving a tone that’s not quite deadpan nor overly comic. Richard Johnson is not bad as protagonist Bulldog Drummond, but he has what I’d call the Lazenby problem: He’s all right, but being merely all right in a role that demands extraordinary charisma is not enough. I’m not saying that Some Girls Do is terrible. After all, I’ll be enough of a cad to admit that the film’s unabashed male gaze and its gallery of beauties may be a thing of the past, but it’s an almost refreshing past. Occasionally, you can even see the elements that a far more successful film would have been able to exploit (and indeed, you’d see fembots pop up again in the Austin Powers series) and some of the sequences manage to score a chuckle or two. Heck — Some Girls Do is the sequel to Deadlier Than the Male, and I’ll eventually watch that. But there’s a sense of many missed opportunities, and a result that barely scratches what could have been.

  • The Rain People (1969)

    The Rain People (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) As an aging movie reviewer who’s accumulating what’s laughably called “maturity,” I’ve gotten much better at not calling movies “boring and dull and pretentious” — there’s usually something good about everything and it’s my job to find what it is (or which audience it would serve best). But the fact that it doesn’t happen as often is not a guarantee that it doesn’t still happen and so, well: The Rain People is boring and dull and pretentious. There’s a reason for that:  Coming from writer-director Francis Ford Coppola in the burgeoning years of the New Hollywood, it gets to play with things that Classic Hollywood would not have allowed: An unsympathetic character leaving her loving husband out of sheer wanderlust; a gritty filmmaking style aping realism and delivering drudgery; an inconclusive conclusion without much in terms of character development. These, obviously, are the tools of literary fiction but in the characteristic zeal that marks, well, much of American history, the New Hollywood filmmakers went far overboard and later generations can only suffer through those early releases. There’s clearly a footnote in film history for The Rain People — not only as an early work from a major American director, but also a film featuring both James Caan and Robert Duvall prior to The Godfather. There’s an audience for those non-formulaic films with closer ties to written character drama than genre pictures — but even aging movie reviewers have their preferences, and I’m throwing my lot with the genre-obsessed plot-dominant camp that does not settle for boring and dull and pretentious.

  • Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961)

    Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) Low-budget science fiction films are nothing new, and neither are far-fetched premises. Case in point: The very 1950s-style (shot in 1958, released three years later) Most Dangerous Man Alive, in which a semi-hoodlum wanders through an atomic testing field and gets the power of having his skin turn invulnerable, like metal. Obviously a quick and cheap exploitation film, it’s a shoddy production built on top of a nonsensical script that doesn’t really care about how to get there, as long as a wild premise is up on the screen. If you’re feeling generous, you can point at Most Dangerous Man Alive as a precursor to superhero films, to cyberpunk body modification, to more elaborate genre dramas in which the burden of extraordinary abilities is examined. But you have to be quite indulgent to see the thematic roots of a film in which a chaotic script (yeah, let’s have the hero murder someone in the first ten minutes…) is coupled with bare-bones execution. It is, trivially, the last of chameleonic director Alan Dwan’s filmography — not much of a capstone to a storied career but, on the other hand, it does lend a bit more interest to an otherwise fairly dull film that’s most charitably called an exemplar of Atomic Age filmed Science Fiction.

  • Minari (2020)

    Minari (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, November 2021) It’s easy to see why Minari would get the attention of the Academy in selecting its Best Picture Awards nominations — it’s the kind of progressive character-driven picture that uses an intimate story to tackle a large-scale social issue. (It’s also one of those movies that further drives apart the public from the Academy, but let’s not rehash that again right now.)  The film takes us to 1980s heartland America, where a Korean family has purchased a farm with the intent of launching a produce-growing operation. But that only scratches at the cultural shock, family strife and business frustration that follows, as finding water is hard, the mother-in-law comes to stay, and there’s never anything to be taken for granted in agriculture. Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung draws upon his own experiences in creating Minari, but more importantly doesn’t miss on the small telling details that give life to it. It’s handled in a frequently funny fashion and avoids many of the obvious plot beats that viewers could have expected from the time and place. (Yes, some of the racism is there, but it doesn’t take as much space as you’d dread.)  The farming sequences are quite satisfying to see unfold over a year, and the actors do well — with specific acclaim for Youn Yuh-jung’s Oscar-winning performance. There’s some inherent interest in watching a rural American film being more than half in subtitled Korean, and the entire thing manages to be quite charming. Minari remains a small and subtle film, not overly spectacular but likable where it counts.

  • The Dam Busters (1955)

    The Dam Busters (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) As a kid in the mid-1980s, one of the games I played a lot on my Commodore 64 was The Dam Busters, a videogame in which you fly Lancaster bombers deep over German territory to drop a bomb meant to shatter a dam. That game was definitely inspired by the film of the same name, and that familiarity was probably why I was unusually looking forward to watching the film. It generally doesn’t disappoint: As the film begins, our protagonist is a WW2 British military engineer faced with an intractable problem that doubles as an opportunity: If he can figure out how to destroy a few dams in the German industrial heartland, he can cause significant damage to the Third Reich’s war effort. But figuring out how to execute this plan consumes much of the film’s first half, as conceptual approaches are developed, tested, refined and tested again. Initially more of a very entertaining engineering fiction than a wartime thriller, The Dam Busters takes us through the details of the preparation of the raid before going through the raid itself, and abruptly becoming a wartime action movie. The Oscar-nominated special effects are still remarkably immersive, giving up an unusually credible glimpse at what it must have been to be in the cockpit of those planes as they went bombing deep over the German heartland. (The film reportedly influenced the Star Wars climax, and that’s a plausible claim.)  I wouldn’t mind a remake, though: the pacing isn’t always as snappy as it could have been, and the naming of a dog the N-word (historically accurate, and sadly not unheard of even recently) is a jarring grating element in an otherwise amiable picture. (The closed-captioning subtitles call the dog “ninja,” which is hilariously anachronic but not quite as irritating.)  There’s also some faintly disturbing dissonance, as the closing moments of the film mourn the English flyers who didn’t come back, but say very little about the 1,500-some German civilians killed by the raid — a rather common lack of empathy back in the victorious mid-1950s that would no longer be tolerated in the more distant 2010s. Still, there’s some mesmerizing material in The Dam Busters that more than lives up to my memories of playing (and repeatedly losing) the videogame — it’s quite a wartime yarn, and it’s one that can talk engineering as much as it shows fighting.

  • Best Foot Forward (1943)

    Best Foot Forward (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Conventional wisdom has it that Lucille Ball was moderately famous throughout the 1940s, but truly became an icon with I Love Lucy in the 1950s. Best Foot Forward, considering Ball’s starring role as herself and its superb colour cinematography, may lead you to believe that it is a 1950s musical comedy looking back at the war years, but not so: Released in 1943, it was meant to highlight Ball’s status as one of MGM’s newest contract stars, with the red hair kept from the striking example set in her previous (and first MGM) film Du Barry Was a Lady. The plot revolves around her as she travels from Hollywood to a small northeastern military academy as a promotional stunt, answering the call of a starstruck cadet. Once there, the musical aspect of the film comes to the fore, as various musical numbers and interludes lead to small-scale romantic subplots for the other members of the cast. The result is fine without being particularly good (this being one of producer Arthur Freed’s earliest efforts, you can see the roots of his method that would lead to his first big success the following year with Meet Me in Saint-Louis and then to the streak of terrific musicals culminating in Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon), but few numbers stand out:  Harry James and his Orchestra do good supporting work, with a highlight being a spirited version of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” (immediately followed by the film’s standout number “The Three B’s”). While Ball is also good-but-not-great in the lead role, the film’s scene-stealer is Nancy Walker as a short and spirited “plain” young girl who gets some great lines and a very funny duet dance number in “Alive and Kickin’.”  The result is very much in the solid average of the WW2 military musicals and is perhaps best remembered as a stepping stone in the careers of Ball, Freed and future musical star June Allyson. Even if it’s in the lower tier of Freed musicals, Best Foot Forward is not a bad watch — and it feels like a later film.

  • Algiers (1938)

    Algiers (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) Having seen French classic Pepe le Moko a few weeks ago, I was unaccountably happy to see its Hollywood remake, Algiers, show up on the TV schedule, even if it was the battered public domain version complete with low-contrast audio, washed-out video and frequent scratches. The remake sticks so closely to the original that it’s not as if I had to pay attention to follow along: Almost a scene-for-scene remake with a few accommodations for language and American censors (the biggest one being at the end of the film, although it doesn’t affect the result all that much), it very much feels like the same film. Considering how similar it is, it’s tempting to directly compare each actor in their roles:  Charles Boyer is no Jean Gabin, but the outsider’s spin he puts on Pepe Le Moko’s character was striking enough to inspire Looney Tunes lothario Pepe Le Pew. Hedy Lamarr, in her Hollywood movie debut, is a clear upgrade over the original actress in sheer sex-appeal, and matches far better with Sigrid Gurie as her romantic rival than in the original. (In Pepe le Moko, the two women are so different that it’s a dull-blonde-versus-exotic brunette scenario, whereas the American remake has them looking very similar, significantly changing the meaning of the triangle to its thematic essence.)  Then there’s Joseph Calleia, who does surprisingly well as the slimy inspector Slimane, something I would not have expected given the very specific appeal of the actor playing the character in the original film. But then again — legend has it that Algiers’ director John Cromwell showed scenes of the original film to the remake’s actors and instructed them to hit the same marks. Amazingly enough, and cinematographer James Wong Howe gets all the credit for it, the film was entirely shot in Hollywood, with a few inserts very cleverly used to give some sense of place to the studio production. The result, though, is distinctive enough in the details. Made for mass appeal rather than poetic realism, Algiers is almost as good as Pepe le Moko, but focused more on straightforward entertainment than cinematic art. The differences are slight, but they’re fascinating to study in their cumulative impact. If forced to choose one for a second viewing, I’d probably go for Algiers… but only for Lamarr and Gurie.

  • Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

    Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu-Ray, November 2021) By this sixth instalment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, the flaws of the movies are as annoying as its strengths are well practised. Effectively the end of the first cycle of the series (the follow-up 1994 New Nightmare instalment was meta-commentary, while the 2010 reboot operated in its own continuity), Freddy’s Dead does have the decency to end on an unusually decisive tone — New Line Cinema having decided to put their resources in other franchises. Unfortunately, even being definitive about Freddy Krueger’s death doesn’t lift the film out of the series’ doldrums — as usual by this point, the effective, disturbing dream imagery is sabotaged by the even more deliberate intention to turn Krueger into an inveterate jokester, with puns replacing coherent dialogue and going to the extent of throwing in cartoonish moments of pure comedy. Plot-wise, the film is slightly better than many previous instalments, foregoing the tired “new crop of high schoolers getting slaughtered” premise for a more interesting battle between psychiatric patients (echoes of the third instalment) and a cornered Krueger. The surrealism is often pushed and occasionally better-executed than many previous instalments, but it’s the series worship of its antagonist that grates as much as the way he was transformed into a comedy prop. In that regard, the much-maligned 2010 remake did have the right idea: no jokes, just terror. Freddy’s Dead is definitely at its best when it’s unsettling, but it frequently undercuts its own strengths by shifting to a tone it has no business having. At least it ends on a conclusive note, which is quite infrequent when it comes to long-running horror series.

  • Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943)

    Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu-Ray, November 2021) By the mid-1940s, the eldest members of the Universal Monsters series were clearly running out of steam — the monsters having been introduced in the early 1930s, the series was past the origin stories and their first few sequels, leading to the idea of combining two monsters in the same film. (The Abbott and Costello parodies were only five years away.)  Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man dares to combine Lou Chaney Jr.’s then-new Wolfman (introduced in 1941) with the almost-teenaged Frankenstein’s monster (introduced in 1931). It takes a while to get there — much of the first hour is spent getting the Wolf Man back up to speed (considering that he died in the previous film) and then send him on a quest to find the monster for reasons. It takes until the last five minutes of the film for them to fight, and even then, you’ll be wondering such questions as “who builds a dam above a castle, really?”  Still, the point of Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, perhaps clumsily made, is to start playing around with the monsters, wringing out a bit of fun and profit from established franchises — a reminder that commercial exploitation has always been part of Hollywood’s DNA. Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man is not that good, but it does have some of the same fun as other films in the cycle, and does get the titular monsters interacting. Good enough!

  • Twice Bitten (2021)

    Twice Bitten (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2021) Aw yeah — pandemic lockdown oblige, I’ve become a bit of a BET romantic comedy addict in the last few months and now I’m turning into something of a BET thriller addict as well. To be clear, they are not very good movies: bluntly written and perfunctorily directed, they’re low-budget films that use big plot strings and even bigger emotional levers in the hope of thrilling their viewers. But they can amount to right-sized trash in the right circumstances, and Twice Bitten is adequate in its chosen niche. The plot revolves around an irresistible conman (Kevin A. Walton, with swagger to match the part) who targets rich women for substantial payouts, pretending to be a real-estate mogul and getting them to invest (via check) before disappearing. But he’s not a particularly good conman, as demonstrated by relying on a single source for marks, operating in a too-small area, calling his next target from the current woman’s bathroom, and getting stabby in a hurry whenever things don’t turn his way. Meanwhile, we’ve got our heroine (LisaRaye McCoy) slowly getting suspicious that something is not right, and teaming up with his past victim to trap him. There are complications, many of them ludicrous: a common acquaintance (whom I initially took as a family member) linking the victims, a supporting character just happening to live next to the conman, and a murder to abruptly raise the stakes. Shot in Los Angeles, Twice Bitten moves from one implausibly high-end location to another, but that’s part of the fantasy being shown here: Attractive people, murder, danger and suspense. That the script doesn’t sustain scrutiny in its thriller mechanics isn’t all that much of a slam because Twice Bitten delivers on what viewers can expect: a simple, slightly trashy suspense film scratching at the audience’s anxieties and delivering an upbeat finale. (Well, except for that character who died, may her sacrifice not have been in vain.)  Director Patricia Cuffie-Jones could have used a better script and a larger budget, but she delivers what BET was expecting here — undemanding but satisfying low-end thrills.

  • We Belong Together (2018)

    We Belong Together (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2014) As far as trashy psycho-woman thrillers go, BET-broadcast We Belong Together manages to put together the essentials, but doesn’t go beyond them. The plot couldn’t be more familiar, as a divorced man is seduced by a dangerous young woman who then goes on a rampage to ensure that he remains hers and only hers. There’s a poor Teaching Assistant who has to die in order to establish how psychotic our antagonist truly is, but otherwise much of the film is spent steadily moving toward its climax, in which the protagonist’s ex-wife becomes the final target. Even a low-budget thriller, We Belong Together never punches above its weight: writer-director Chris Stokes is, as in other films of his, not particularly ambitious nor skilled. His script is clunky and only occasionally reaches the heights of straightforwardness (“I am your serpent in the tree” is a real piece of dialogue from the antagonist trying to be sexy while pouring liquor down a chained recovering alcoholic’s throat) while his directing feels lazy most of the time — as clearly shown by an underwhelming climax that fades to black before anything too expensive is shown. Charles Malik Whitfield is merely adequate as the protagonist, but if the film has one single asset, it’s clearly Draya Michele in the antagonist’s role: She’s perfectly sexy evil as the femme fatale, mesmerizing for her looks (amply underscored by the camera) as much as her screen presence. She brings a lot to an underwritten character that relies too much on easy clichés (she’s a psycho — we’re done here) than anything like credible characterization. There’s nothing in We Belong Together — no plot development, no individual story beat — that can’t be predicted, but that’s almost to be expected considering the film’s straight-to-TV pedigree. It’s still not too terrible, especially as background material. Michele is worth a look, though.