THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS (Italy - 1973; US release 1975) Directed by Sergio Martino. Written by Ernesto Gastaldi. Cast: Luc Merenda, Richard Conte, Silvano Tranquilli, Carlo Alighiero, Martine Brochard, Chris Avram, Luciano Bartoli, Lia Tanzi, Steffen Zacharias, Bruno Corazzari, Luciano Rossi, Cyrille Spiga, Rosario Borelli, Antony Vernon (Antonio Casale), Bruno Boschetti, Sergio Smacchi, Tom Felleghy. (R, 99 mins) After the artistic triumphs of Dario Argento's gialli, the next most notable figure in the genre in the early 1970s was arguably the journeyman Sergio Martino. Frequently teamed with the stunning Edwige Fenech, Martino cranked out a series of verbosely-titled gialli like 1971's THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH and THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL, and 1972's ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK and YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, and his 1973 masterpiece TORSO. Though directors like Umberto Lenzi and Fernando Di Leo also dabbled in gialli, their strengths at that point in time were the violent, politically-charged poliziotteschi, a craze to which Martino inevitably contributed a handful of entries, beginning with 1973's THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS, which has just been released on Blu-ray from Code Red.
Though it works in the social and political implications of an early '70s Milan that these films frequently presented as a violent, crime-infested hellhole, there's a definite DIRTY HARRY influence to THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS in its central character, Giorgio Caneparo (Luc Merenda). A standard-issue plays-by-his-own-rules cop, hot-tempered Caneparo is read the riot act by his boss Del Buono (Chris Avram) after blowing away a pair of escapees from a locomotive prisoner transport when they were already cornered and ready to give up and he was more than capable of simply arresting them. Del Buono suggests Caneparo lay low and look into some robberies that he's been investigating, and no sooner than mentioning that does Del Buono get gunned down in the street by a trio of mystery assailants. Obsessed with avenging his boss and fed up with the useless lip service paid to his memory ("Pathetic!" he shouts, interrupting an official government tribute to his slain boss), Caneparo goes undercover to infiltrate the bank robbery operation, which is being coordinated by Milan mob boss Padulo (Richard Conte). Caneparo gets a job as a wheelman for Padulo's current crew, and his first job with them goes off the rails when a psycho Padulo flunky (Bruno Corazzari) opens fire on a pregnant woman for no reason. But the rationale for the robberies runs deeper, as Caneparo gradually figures out that Padulo isn't quite who he says he is, and that the supposedly powerful mobster is just a cog in the wheel, serving much more powerful masters with more ambitiously sinister plans.
Those plans are never completely clear given the muddled political subtext of THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS. There's a lot of talk in Ernesto Gastaldi's script about creating an aura of chaos around Milan and throughout Italy and "rebuilding this country all over again," which probably played better for Italian audiences living through the political tumult of that era. But even in the English-dubbed version released in the US by Scotia in 1975, the film is a solid second-tier polizia offering, with a memorable score by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, some not-quite-but-still-spirited FRENCH CONNECTION-style car chases and Merenda (dubbed by Michael Forest) a believably pissed-off lone wolf cop in the Dirty Harry vein (he even gets a final moment comparable to tossing his badge away in disgust). It's also worth noting for those with polizia experience that THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS is also the source of that oft-used shot of a car crashing through a stack of cardboard boxes engulfed in flames, which resurfaced in seemingly a dozen other polizias and even more trailers. Born in 1943, Merenda got his first big break as a doomed French racing driver in the 1971 Steve McQueen vanity project LE MANS. He would go on to work with Martino on several occasions, most notably in a supporting role in TORSO and in a pair of entertaining 1975 actioners, GAMBLING CITY and SILENT ACTION. Merenda was a regular presence in Italian action films throughout the '70s and he would shift to Italian TV in the '80s. He grew disenchanted with the entertainment industry and walked away, retiring from acting in 1992 to focus on his family and opening a successful antique shop in Paris, which he still runs to this day, taking a break only to make a one-off return to the screen when Merenda superfan Eli Roth talked him into accepting a small role in 2007's HOSTEL PART II.
Richard Conte (1910-1975)
After a memorable turn as the duplicitous Barzini in 1972's THE GODFATHER, veteran American actor Conte found himself in much demand in Italy. In 1973 alone, including THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS, he played mob figures in no less than seven Italian crime movies, including Fernando Di Leo's THE BOSS and the gangster spoof MY BROTHER ANASTASIA, which teamed him with beloved Italian comedian Alberto Sordi. Conte and Merenda reteamed in 1974 for Di Leo's SHOOT FIRST...DIE LATER, with Merenda as a corrupt cop and Conte as a subservient mob lawyer who jumps at the chance to throw his boss under the bus and take over as soon as he's feeling unappreciated. Thanks to the worldwide success of THE GODFATHER, Conte was such a sought-after export-value name for the Italian crime genre that he wound up spending the rest of his career in Europe and never appeared in another American film. Conte died in April 1975 from complications of a heart attack and a subsequent series of strokes (he's dubbed by someone else and looks noticeably frail and aged in SHOOT FIRST...DIE LATER compared to THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS just a year earlier), and by the end of his life, the jobs he was getting in Italy were on a marked decline compared to the exemplary polizia work and GODFATHER-associated star treatment he was receiving just two years earlier. Conte's final film found him as a glum, morose exorcist in 1975's tawdry and embarrassing NAKED EXORCISM, by far the worst Italian EXORCIST ripoff of them all, released in the US as THE POSSESSOR in 1977, two years after his death.
A PISTOL FOR RINGO (Italy/Spain - 1965; US release 1966) Written and directed by Duccio Tessari. Cast: Montgomery Wood (Giuliano Gemma), Fernando Sancho, George Martin, Hally Hammond (Lorella De Luca), Nieves Navarro, Antonio Casas, Jose Manuel Martin, "Pajarito," Juan Casalilla, Pablito Alonso, Nazzareno Zamperla, Paco Sanz, Jose Halufi. (Unrated, 99 mins) Following the blockbuster success of Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS in Italy in 1964, countless spaghetti westerns followed at a relentless pace for the next decade. An early hit in the spaghetti cycle, 1965's A PISTOL FOR RINGO made it to American theaters courtesy of Embassy Pictures in 1966, a full year ahead of FISTFUL's belated US release. However, its influences lie more with the '50s style Hollywood B oater rather than the trailblazing work of Leone or Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO, right down to Ennio Morricone's uncharacteristically Dimitri Tiomkin/Elmer Bernstein-like score. Written and directed by Italian genre journeyman Duccio Tessari (who had already scripted several post-HERCULES peplum and would latter dabble in everything from 007 ripoffs to gialli to crime thrillers), A PISTOL FOR RINGO is part of that first wave of spaghetti westerns--along with Ferdinando Baldi's TEXAS, ADIOS and Sergio Corbucci two-fer of MINNESOTA CLAY and THE HELLBENDERS to name just three--that were still emulating the Hollywood style before Leone's more influential FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY set the genre template, along with the more politically-charged Zapata spaghettis like Corbucci's THE MERCENARY and COMPANEROS, and Damiano Damiani's A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. Corbucci would soon shift gears--the same year he made THE HELLBENDERS, he also cranked out the classic DJANGO--and it wouldn't take long for Tessari to make the change with PISTOL's much different sequel THE RETURN OF RINGO later in 1965.
A PISTOL FOR RINGO is an entertaining time-killer at best, the kind of Saturday matinee-type western with a wisecracking hero in Ringo, aka "Angel Face," played by Giuliano Gemma under the pseudonym "Montgomery Wood." He's an outlaw with a heart of gold who guns down four men in self-defense and is promptly thrown in jail by the sheriff (George Martin). At the same time, a band of outlaws led by Sancho (Fernando Sancho in his usual "Frito Bandito" persona that he embodied in seemingly dozens of these things) have robbed a bank and commandeered the outskirts-of-town home of wealthy landowner Major Clyde (Antonio Casas). They're holding his family hostage in exchange for the sheriff--who's engaged to Clyde's daughter Miss Ruby (Lorella De Luca, who would marry Tessari a few years later)--backing off and letting them go. Instead, the sheriff offers Ringo a get out of jail free card: pretend to be an outlaw just passing through and seeking refuge, and ingratiate himself into Sancho's gang, eliminate them all, save Miss Ruby and the hostages, and collect the reward money. Despite its vaguely DESPERATE HOURS scenario, A PISTOL FOR RINGO never takes itself too seriously. Gemma (dubbed by Marc Smith, who would later infamously revoice Franco Nero in ENTER THE NINJA) is loose and likable, but compared to where the genre would go under the leadership of Leone and Corbucci, Tessari displays all the technique, style, and pizazz of a random episode of GUNSMOKE or RAWHIDE. There is one underexplored subplot with Clyde almost being Stockholm Syndrome'd by falling for Sancho's woman (Nieves Navarro, the wife or producer Luciano Ercoli and frequently credited later as "Susan Scott"), and it's got a great theme song performed by Maurizio Graf, but it's so beholden to Hollywood westerns that it even borrows SHANE's ending with Ringo riding off alone. A PISTOL FOR RINGO was a huge hit in Italy in the summer of 1965, and by the end of the year, Tessari and most of the main cast would be back for THE RETURN OF RINGO.
Fernando Sancho as--wait for it---Sancho in A PISTOL FOR RINGO.
THE RETURN OF RINGO (Italy/Spain - 1965; US release 1966)
Directed by Duccio Tessari. Written by Duccio Tessari and Fernando Di Leo. Cast: Giuliano Gemma, Fernando Sancho, George Martin, Hally Hammond (Lorella De Luca), Nieves Navarro, Antonio Casas, "Pajarito," Monica Sugranes, Victor Bayo, Tunet Vila, Juan Torres, Jose Halufi. (Unrated, 97 mins) It's obvious that at some point between finishing A PISTOL FOR RINGO and starting the sequel THE RETURN OF RINGO, director/co-writer Duccio Tessari and writer Fernando Di Leo (an uncredited script contributor on PISTOL) saw A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. RETURN is an in-name-only sequel, bringing back much of the same cast (producer Luciano Ercoli even makes sure his wife Nieves Navarro gets a musical number) in different roles with Giuliano Gemma playing a character named Ringo, but clearly not the same Ringo from the previous film, much like Clint Eastwood's archetypal "Man with No Name" is similar in each installment of the Leone trilogy, but they aren't the same character. Here, Gemma's Ringo is a Union soldier returning to his home near the Mexican border two months after the end of the Civil War. He's devastated to find his entire family buried in the local cemetery after the town was taken over by a group of Mexican outlaws led by the evil Fuentes brothers, Esteban (Fernando Sancho, cast radically against type as "Fernando Sancho") and Paco (George Martin, who was the good-guy sheriff in the previous film). When Ringo learns that his wife Hally (Lorella De Luca) has been abducted, informed she's a widow, and is being forced into an arranged marriage with Paco and the useless sheriff (Antonio Casas) has no plans to do anything about it, he goes undercover as a Mexican peasant to wipe out the Fuentes gang and rescue his wife and the young daughter he never knew he had.
A loose spaghetti western reworking of The Odyssey, THE RETURN OF RINGO is a huge improvement over the OK but unremarkable A PISTOL FOR RINGO. It's significantly more atmospheric with its bleak, dusty Almeria desert landscapes, and this incarnation of Ringo is much more serious and driven, with a wife and daughter to save and vengeance to exact as opposed to the blithe and carefree Ringo from the first time around, whose only concern was reward money. It's a grimmer, darker, and more violent film, with Ringo introduced blowing a guy away in a saloon and blood splattering against the wall behind him. Tessari directs RETURN in a more Leone-like fashion, with some tense action sequences, one incredible shot of a silhouetted Ringo (in a great resurrection motif) revealing his true self to the Fuentes gang just before ruthlessly massacring the lot of them, and with music by Ennio Morricone that's still a bit Hollywood (again with a bombastically overemphatic Maurizio Graf theme song) but leaning more toward the distinctive sounds of a spaghetti score. Despite the American success of A PISTOL FOR RINGO, THE RETURN OF RINGO only received a spotty release later in 1966, though the first film was popular enough in the States for MGM to rechristen Sergio Corbucci's 1966 western JOHNNY ORO (starring Mark Damon) as the unofficial sequel RINGO AND HIS GOLDEN PISTOL for its 1967 US release. A PISTOL FOR RINGO and THE RETURN OF RINGO have just been released in a double feature set from Arrow, with numerous extras, including archival interviews with Gemma (who died in 2013) and De Luca (who passed in 2014), who talks at length about the career of her late husband Tessari (1926-1994), and commentary tracks with spaghetti scholar Henry C. Parke and fan/cult screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner (CLASS OF 1999, DOCTOR MORDRID). When viewed in succession, both films serve to show the transition taking place in the spaghetti western genre in its infancy, from the mimicking of old-school Hollywood to the new standards being set by the Italians in the formation of their uniquely original style that would soon be influencing American westerns in just a few short years.
Gloria Grahame won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1952's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and while she was a big star from the late 1940s through the 1950s, she's been largely forgotten aside from well-schooled movie buffs and regular viewers of Turner Classic Movies. She lived a life ready-made for the tabloids, her most notable scandal being that her fourth husband Tony Ray was the son of her second husband, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE director Nicholas Ray. As the story goes, Nicholas Ray caught Grahame in bed with his 13-year-old son (from his first marriage) and promptly filed for divorce. Grahame's marriage to the younger Ray several years later in 1960 effectively got her blackballed from Hollywood, appearing in just one film that entire decade, a supporting role in the 1966 Chuck Connors western RIDE BEYOND VENGEANCE. She resurfaced in the early 1970s, paying the bills mostly in drive-in exploitation fare like 1971's BLOOD AND LACE, 1974's MAMA'S DIRTY GIRLS, 1976's MANSION OF THE DOOMED, and her final film, 1981's THE NESTING. Grahame and Tony Ray divorced in 1974 and Grahame split her time between Hollywood, NYC, and the UK, where she stayed busy doing theater work in her final years when she was terminally ill with cancer and refused to even acknowledge her condition until it was far too late. She died in 1981 at just 57.
Based on Peter Turner's 1986 memoir detailing his relationship with Grahame, FILM STARS DON'T DIE IN LIVERPOOL concentrates on the actress' final years from 1979 to 1981, and doesn't really address the more tawdry elements of her life and never even mentions the declining quality of her film work (though she did manage to land small roles in a few reputable films like 1980's MELVIN AND HOWARD). In 1981, Gloria (Annette Bening) is doing a play at a small theater in Liverpool and collapses in her dressing room just before going on stage. She calls Peter (Jamie Bell) and asks to stay with him at home of his parents Bella (Julie Walters) and Joe (Kenneth Cranham). FILM STARS then cuts back and forth between the present in 1981 and 1979, when Gloria and Peter, nearly 30 years her junior, meet and begin a torrid romance. Director Paul McGuigan (LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN) and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (CONTROL, NOWHERE BOY) generally hit all the biopic bullet points and standard-issue melodrama of a kind-hearted but sometimes mercurial, past-her-prime star and a younger man falling head over heels. FILM STARS gets its biggest benefit from a wonderful performance by Bening, who displays only a passing physical resemblance to Grahame but really captures her spirit, demeanor, and especially her voice. The filmmakers allow her to bring some complexity to a sincere but troubled person--she genuinely loves Peter and doesn't treat him as some kind of boy-toy, she generally doesn't behave like a diva and is at the point where she prefers a quieter, simpler life--and we also get to spend some time with Peter's family, who welcome Gloria into their lives with open arms. The film glosses over some details, though a dinner scene with Gloria's mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and her bitter sister (Frances Barber) serves to inform Peter about Tony Ray without going into too many lurid specifics (when Grahame leaves the room, her mother implores Peter, "Don't marry Gloria"). Gloria's and Peter's arguments grow a bit repetitive and tiresome in the second half, but the always-great Bening is just superb throughout, and she was getting a push for awards season recognition before Sony pretty much gave up on the film, stalling its release on just 107 screens at its widest. (R, 106 mins)
BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS (Denmark/Canada - 2018)
A24 replicates its bizarre LAST MOVIE STAR release strategy with BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS, which premiered on DirecTV a month before its Blu-ray/DVD release, followed by a limited theatrical rollout the Friday after. There's really no viable distribution option for this unbearably dull political thriller, which isn't helped at all by a title that sounds like a YA teen comedy or the kind of movie whose poster has the tag line "The con is on." It's based on the 2010 memoir of the same title by Michael Soussan, a UN diplomat and whistleblower who exposed rampant, systemic corruption in the UN's Oil for Food Program in 2003. When economic sanctions against Iraq led to the country's economy crashing and its people starving and dying under Saddam Hussein, the Oil for Food Program was developed to sell Iraqi oil vouchers in exchange for humanitarian aid. The scandal more or less got lost in the shuffle with the mainstream media amidst the extensive reporting on the Iraqi invasion in 2003, but as a film, the utterly lifeless BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS never even comes close to catching fire. Nothing works in its favor, especially the robotic, monotone Theo James (the DIVERGENT series) as Soussan surrogate "Michael Sullivan," here upgraded to the assistant to UN Under-Secretary-General Benon "Pasha" Sevan (Ben Kingsley). Pasha's palm-greasing, money-grubbing, and assorted wheelings-and-dealings are referenced and talked about but never really demonstrably shown. He spends a lot of time lecturing the idealistic "Sullivan" with sage advice like "We never lie, but we choose our facts or truths with utmost care," and "Information is currency...it's power!"
Everyone in BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS talks like this, whether it's one Baghdad-based UN office drone telling Sullivan "We're just pawns in a bigger game, you and me," or the UN's Baghdad field chief Christine Dupre (Jacqueline Bisset) yelling "Everyone is grifting! Corruption grows like a cancer!" There's a lot of talk about Sullivan's predecessor in his job being killed in a hit and run that probably wasn't an accident, and a time-consuming subplot about Pasha trying to throw a Kurdish interpreter and Sullivan love interest (Belcim Bilgin) under the bus with trumped-up espionage charges, but BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS is an oppressively boring "thriller" that might've been something worthwhile in the hands of, say, Costa-Gavras. But under the watch of director/co-writer Per Fly, it's terribly written and acted, even by a profane Kingsley, who hams mercilessly and sports an accent that has him almost constantly shouting "Fack!" This is the kind of movie that opens with a shot of the NYC skyline, the Empire State Building in plain view, accompanied by the caption "New York." This is the kind of movie that spells "Morocco" two different ways on the same closing credits page. How bad is BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS? It's so bad that it actually ends with Sullivan reflecting on the scandal and telling a reporter "The truth isn't about the lies we told each other...it's about the lies we tell ourselves." Get the fuck outta here with that shitty writing. (R, 108 mins)
Come on, BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS!
DEEP BLUE SEA 2 (US - 2018)
After 19 years, was anyone demanding a sequel to Renny Harlin's shark movie DEEP BLUE SEA? The original film, a moderate hit that's become a cable favorite to this day, has one of the all-time great shocks I've ever experienced in a crowded movie theater (if you've seen it, you know the scene) as well as one of the dumbest closing credits songs you'll ever hear, but the primitive CGI looked bad then and is utterly laughable now. It should come as no surprise that the CGI looks pretty much the same in this low-budget, DTV sequel that, for a while, throws some pretty crazy shit at the wall to see what sticks but eventually settles into being a by-the-numbers, de facto remake of its predecessor. The only reason this even exists is that it's a recognizable name that can belatedly hitch a ride on the SHARKNADO/ SHALLOWS/ 47 METERS DOWN bandwagon. Billionaire pharmaceutical CEO and standard-issue megalomaniac Carl Durant (Michael Beach as Samuel L. Jackson) is bankrolling an illegal, off-the-books research project at an underwater research facility off the coast of South Africa. He's pumped five aggressive bull sharks full of an experimental serum that's altered their genetic structure in an attempt to get to the core of creating a hyper-intelligence that he hopes to use on humans. He and his security chief Trent Slater (JOHN DIES AT THE END's Rob Mayes as Thomas Jane) can control the sharks via key fob, but a crew of scientists recruited by Durant, led by world-renowned marine conservationist Dr. Misty Calhoun (Danielle Savre as Saffron Burrows), are appalled at the lack of ethics. Of course, the sharks start to develop intelligence beyond anyone's control--first digging a tunnel under the electric fence at the perimeter of the base--and the main female shark (named "Ella") ends up having babies, which are born addicted to Durant's super-intelligent wonder drug that--wait for it--also increases their aggression and has them attacking as quickly and ferociously as small piranha. To make matters worse, Durant's gotten himself hooked on the drug himself and grows increasingly paranoid and as the situation gets worse, he has no problem sacrificing everyone else if it means preserving his research.
That's the set-up, and while it's no great shakes, it's surprisingly not terrible even if the actors are notch below what the 1999 film could corral (Savre has more than established her DTV bona fides after BRING IT ON: ALL OR NOTHING, BOOGEYMAN 2, and JARHEAD 2: FIELDS OF FIRE). It really makes no sense why this drug has to be tested on sharks, unless it's only because Durant had nothing else to do with a massive underwater research installation he owned as was just letting go to waste. But once Ella has her babies and the underwater facility starts flooding, it's strictly business as usual as the mostly non-descript cast is devoured one by one and the script seems to completely forget about Durant getting all fucked up on his superdrug. Director Darin Scott has been around for decades--he co-wrote 1987's THE OFFSPRING and 1995's TALES FROM THE HOOD, and in the '90s, produced Charles Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, the rap comedy FEAR OF A BLACK HAT, and the great MENACE II SOCIETY (man...DEEP BLUE SEA 2, dude? I guess a job's a job)--and brings some bizarre items to table in the early going, like opening credits that look like they belong in a 007 movie. But there is one moment in DEEP BLUE SEA 2 that's so inspired, so hilarious, so brilliantly, off-the-charts ridiculous that it makes the whole thing impossible to simply dismiss: Durant is yelling at his flunky attorney, who's concerned about the legality of that they're doing and what will become of the sharks after the research is complete. Durant says he just needs the sharks until he gets the information he needs and then he'll simply kill them off. "Not so fast," thinks the super-smart Ella, lingering outside the porthole in Durant's quarters, glaring at him and reading his lips. OK, fine, DEEP BLUE SEA 2. You win. (R, 94 mins)
Written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Cast: Ryo Seung-ryong, Shim Eun-kyung, Park Jung-Min, Jung Yu-mi, Kim Min-jae, Kim Yeong-seon, Tae Hang-ho, Yeon Hee-Hwang. (Unrated, 102 mins) South Korean filmmaker and animator Yeon Sang-ho scored an instant cult favorite with 2016's TRAIN TO BUSAN, his live-action debut which managed to stand out and carve its own niche in the overcrowded and overplayed zombie apocalypse subgenre. Yeon's latest is the Netflix acquisition PSYCHOKINESIS, and while it's nice that he didn't simply crank out a retread of BUSAN, you'd think he would've offered something other than a belated mash-up of HANCOCK and PUSH (quick--when's the last time you thought of either of those movies?). Irresponsible, borderline oafish security guard Seok-hyeon (Ryo Seung-ryong) unwittingly acquires superhuman abilities after drinking water from a mountain spring near a test rocket crash site. His powers manifest in his ability to move objects with his mind and direct them with his hands and body. As he gradually trains himself to manage his newfound gift, he gets reacquainted with his estranged daughter Ru-mi (Shim Eun-kyung, also in TRAIN TO BUSAN), with whom he hasn't spoken in the ten years since he divorced her mother (Kim Yeong-seon) and walked out on his family. Ru-mi's mother has died from a head injury sustained in an attempt to forcibly evict them from their small but popular fried chicken restaurant located in a declining area desired for gentrification and renewal by the powerful Taesun Corporation, who have hired local enforcer Mr. Min (Kim Min-jae) and his thuggish crew to force everyone out. As Seok-hyeon and Ru-mi tentatively rebuild their fractured relationship, he will of course use his powers of telekinesis to take on Min's goons and bring them to justice for the death of his ex-wife.
PSYCHOKINESIS tries to score a few points with its easy jabs corporate, profit-driven culture and the 24-hour cable news cycle, and it stays generally lighthearted, scoring a handful of legitimately good laughs, especially when a hapless Min tries to convince the cops via smartphone footage that Seok-hyeon managed to take on all of his men at once. But it's so slight and forgettable that it's easy to see why Netflix acquired it--it fits right in with the bulk of their instantly disposable movie offerings. It also doesn't seem to follow its own logic or use Seok-hyeon's powers wisely. When Taesun digs into his past and has him arrested for pilfering coffee packets and toilet paper from his employer's stock room, Seok-hyeon spends the entire afternoon handcuffed before deciding to use his powers to remove them and break out of his cell. Why wouldn't he do that right away? Because the plot mandates that he be somewhere else long enough for Taesun to send Min and his guys to go in and demolish the entire neighborhood while he's away and can't stop them. When Seok-hyeon finally escapes, he pinballs around the city, flying through the air and then hovering above and around like a greenscreen homage to Danny Glick.
The crummy effects also figure in when Yeon really bungles a major climactic moment where Seok-hyeon saves Ru-mi's life. It's difficult to tell who the target audience is for PSYCHOKINESIS. It's goofy enough that younger audiences might enjoy it but it's got enough F-bombs that it must be for adults. Granted, we're not talking KICK-ASS here, but it's enough to warrant an R rating if it was in theaters. Ultimately, the biggest impression left by PSYCHOKINESIS is a too-brief performance by a grinning, scene-stealing Jung Yu-mi (also in TRAIN TO BUSAN) as ruthless Taesun CEO Director Hong. She doesn't appear until an hour in and only has a couple of scenes, but she absolutely owns it from the moment she walks into a lunch meeting with Min and exclaims "Whoa! Fuck!" in English. Everything that comes out of Director Hong's mouth and her smirking, sarcastic, bitch-on-wheels demeanor are enough to conclude that PSYCHOKINESIS would've been significantly better if Jung was in it more.
CRUCIBLE OF HORROR (UK - 1971) Directed by Viktors Ritelis. Written by Olaf Pooley. Cast: Michael Gough, Yvonne Mitchell, Sharon Gurney, Olaf Pooley, Simon Gough, David Butler, Nicholas Jones, Mary Hignett. (R, 91 mins)
An early release from the pre-Golan & Globus incarnation of Cannon, and shown in theaters on a double bill in the fall of 1971 with CAULDRON OF BLOOD, a Spanish cheapie that was one of Boris Karloff's several posthumously released films after his death in 1969, the British shocker CRUCIBLE OF HORROR (not to be confused with the same year's CRUCIBLE OF TERROR) has a nostalgic following after being in regular rotation on late-night TV in the '70s and '80s. Nevertheless, it's a frustrating film because there's obviously some thought and ambition that went into it, but it's so leadenly-paced and indecisive over what it's doing--the first 40 minutes are incredibly slow--that it eventually becomes self-defeating. And it's got what might be the ultimate ambiguous ending that's just gonna piss everyone off. But there's something here, particularly its bleak and disturbing depiction of the cycle of abuse in a seriously dysfunctional family. The great Michael Gough is Walter Eastwood, the physically and psychologically abusive patriarch of an upper class family. He constantly berates his wife Edith (Yvonne Mitchell) and has not-very-subtle incestuous designs on his daughter Jane (Sharon Gurney), while his dutiful and sycophantic son Rupert (Gough's own son Simon) seems to be following in his father's footsteps. Edith and Jane decide they've had enough and plot to kill Walter, with unexpected complications ensuing, namely a corpse that won't stay put, and a nosy neighbor (actor and occasional screenwriter Olaf Pooley, who would also do some uncredited script work on Cannon's insane LIFEFORCE a decade and a half later) whose dog almost exposes the whole scheme.
Michael Gough, a regular presence in countless genre films like HORROR OF DRACULA, KONGA, and DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, but best known to mainstream audiences as Alfred in the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher BATMAN movies in the '90s, is so good here that you'll wish it was in service of a more satisfying film. His character is an absolute creep, whether he's taunting his wife over her favorite pastime of painting, beating his daughter with a riding crop, or sauntering up to her bicycle just after she gets home and feeling and squeezing its warm seat. His issues also manifest with obsessive-compulsive hand-washing, obviously meant to "cleanse" himself of his deranged, impure, self-loathing thoughts and behavior. Perhaps CRUCIBLE OF HORROR had a troubled production--assistant director Nicholas Granby is interviewed on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray, and while he goes off topic a bit, he does reveal one important tidbit in that credited director Viktors Ritelis (who had a long career in British TV; this was his only feature film) left late in production, with shooting completed by producer Gabrielle Beaumont, who would go on to make 1980's OMEN-inspired THE GODSEND, an early hit for Golan-Globus' Cannon that was also written by Pooley.
CRUCIBLE OF HORROR is confused enough that it could very well be two clashing visions haphazardly stitched together, which would certainly explain why it seems to fall flat on its face every time it looks like it's about to get its shit together. There's a lot here to chew on--Mitchell has some heartbreaking moments as Edith, trapped in a prison of Walter's making and almost at a point of resigned acceptance since it's what she's come to know, Jane promiscuously acting out with older men to get back at Walter, and Rupert practically brainwashed to look the other way and even smack his sister around because hey, Father does it--but ultimately, a film must be judged by what it is instead of it what it almost was or what it could've been. And in the end, despite the flashes of something substantive and serious, it's a crushing disappointment that feels like bottom-of-the-barrel Hammer or a really half-baked installment of Brian Clemens' anthology series THRILLER. As far as Scream Factory's Blu-ray is concerned, the image quality is fine but the audio is, to put it mildly, inconsistent, with the first 20 minutes sounding like a muffled mess before getting relatively clear from that point on. Even when you turn on the subtitles, almost every other word is "(mumbles)," which I'm going to assume wasn't in Pooley's script. One interesting trivia bit that made this an important film for the Gough family: while playing dysfunctional siblings, Gurney and Simon Gough fell in love and have been married since 1970. The younger Gough never achieved the cult notoriety of his father (who died in 2011 at the age of 94), and has only made fleeting appearances in movies and TV since the late 1970s, a few years after 24-year-old Gurney (soon to be in the cult classic RAW MEAT) retired from acting altogether in 1974 to focus on raising the couple's (eventually) four children.
SUBMERGENCE (France/Germany/Spain - 2018) Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Erin Dignam. Cast: James McAvoy, Alicia Vikander, Alexander Siddig, Celyn Jones, Reda Kateb, Jannick Schumann, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Julian Bouanich, Loic Corbery, Hakeemshady Mohamed, Hans Torgard, Jess Liaudin, Abdikjam Abdulllahi Aden. (Unrated, 112 mins) All careers have ups and downs, but for those with an intense passion for movies, there's few things more depressing than watching a great filmmaker lose their way and fall into a pattern of sustained collapse. Along with trailblazers like Werner Herzog, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders was one of the key figures in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. Important Wenders works from that era, like 1974's ALICE IN THE CITIES, 1976's KINGS OF THE ROAD and 1977's THE AMERICAN FRIEND, remain revered by cineastes and studied in film courses to this day. After his 1982 American debut HAMMETT flopped, Wenders returned to Europe and came back strong with 1984's PARIS, TEXAS, which gave Harry Dean Stanton the role of his career, and 1987's WINGS OF DESIRE, his masterpiece and an often breathtaking work of art that found Wenders at the peak of his powers. But over the last 25 years, something's gone wrong. Like Herzog, Wenders found himself more interested in documentaries, and he enjoyed the biggest commercial success of his career with 1999's BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, where he followed guitarist Ry Cooder to Havana to track down and pay tribute to an obscure collective of elderly Cuban musicians. In addition, he also directed several U2 music videos, and he helmed an episode of the PBS documentary series THE BLUES, among other short films and smaller, personal projects.
Throughout this period, following 1991's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, Wenders continued exploring non-fiction while his narrative features were proving to be one forgettable disappointment after another: 1993's FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! was a decidedly inferior sequel to WINGS OF DESIRE that nobody liked; 1997's THE END OF VIOLENCE had some interesting moments amidst a generally muddled story involving Hollywood movie producers, government surveillance, and illegal immigrants; 2001's THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL is aggressively unwatchable, co-written by U2's Bono and headlined by Jeremy Davies in possibly the most annoyingly mannered performance in the history of motion pictures. It remains Wenders' worst film by a country mile, one whose cause wasn't helped by co-star Mel Gibson, going for some arthouse cred as a bellowing detective in a back and neck brace, telling an interviewer that it was--and he wasn't wrong--"as boring as a dog's ass;" and 2005's middling DON'T COME KNOCKING reunited Wenders with PARIS, TEXAS writer Sam Shepard but with significantly lesser results. 2005's post-9/11 drama LAND OF PLENTY is really his only consistently good scripted film after 1991. It more fully develops his half-baked surveillance themes from THE END OF VIOLENCE, and it got a big boost from Michelle Williams and a career-best performance by John Diehl, a veteran TV actor (he was Zito on MIAMI VICE) who took the opportunity and ran with it, but it's one of Wenders' least-known and least-seen films. Wenders stays busy and still earns significant accolades when it comes to his documentaries, most notably 2011's PINA, 2014's Oscar-nominated THE SALT OF THE EARTH, and the upcoming POPE FRANCIS: A MAN OF HIS WORD. But of his four scripted features over the last decade, two--2008's PALERMO SHOOTING (one of Dennis Hopper's final films) and 2016's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ--remain unreleased in the US, while 2015's EVERY THING WILL BE FINE was a stilted, somnambulant Atom Egoyan knockoff with James Franco that was pointlessly shot in 3D, which hardly mattered since it went straight to VOD anyway.
That brings us to Wenders' latest, SUBMERGENCE, which again spotlights the esteemed filmmaker's ongoing inability to function outside of the documentary genre. It's based on a 2011 novel by J.M. Ledgard, but not helping matters is that the screenplay adaptation was entrusted to Erin Dignam, the same writer behind Sean Penn's 2017 embarrassment THE LAST FACE. As in that film, we have a blossoming romance between two driven but lost souls being intruded upon by career dedication, Third World strife, geopolitical concerns, godawful writing, and a director with a message that gets mired in lugubrious self-indulgence. To his credit, Wenders doesn't come close to approaching the smugness of Sean Penn, but make no mistake, this could very easily be titled THE LAST FACE II: SUBMERGENCE. The film chronicles the whirlwind romance between James More (James McAvoy) and Danny Flinders (Alicia Vikander) after they meet at a Normandy bed-and-breakfast resort. He's a Scottish-born MI-6 counterterrorism agent undercover as a water engineer and awaiting instructions for his next assignment in Somalia. She's a biomathematician prepping for a deep sea dive in a high-tech submersible off the coast of Greenland to study the origins of life. They court in vague riddles, usually with clunky nautical references. Lunch dates don't get much hotter than a monotone Danny droning "The ocean has five layers...the first one is epipelagic..." or James making his move when responding to her question "What's your favorite water body?" with a come hither "The human body."
He's eventually sent on his mission and is promptly abducted and held prisoner by Somali jihadists, who attempt to brainwash him into believing in their cause as he all the while insists he's just a water engineer. This leads to a real attention-grabbing conversation with a Somali doctor (Alexander Siddig) about well construction and water filtration systems. Danny, meanwhile, gets ready for her dive but is troubled by James' sudden disappearance and his unanswered texts. She tries to focus on her work, as evidenced by one breathlessly thrilling scene that's almost as riveting as Donald Sutherland's clandestine, 15-minute conspiratorial park bench exposition dump on Kevin Costner in JFK, where Danny's examining some large rock formations near the shore and tells a fellow researcher "If you come closer, they're like tiny trees...this one here is a marriage between a fungus and a cyanobacteria," adding "It dissolves from life into non-life." At this point, Vikander could very well be referring to the pages of Dignam's script.
If SUBMERGENCE has one thing working in its favor, it's that it certainly looks good, thanks to the contributions of regular Gaspar Noe cinematographer Benoit Debie, who's also worked on films as varied as Dario Argento's THE CARD PLAYER, Harmony Korine's SPRING BREAKERS, and Ryan Gosling's LOST RIVER. But for as utterly inert and lethargically lifeless as the dramatic elements are, Wenders would've been better served by making a documentary about either a biomathematician deep-sea diving off the coast of Greenland or a water engineer working with locals to construct a water filtration system in Somalia. Much like what's happened with Terrence Malick's recent string of duds, SUBMERGENCE comes across like Wim Wenders directing a parody of a Wim Wenders film. And like Malick, he's still attracting A-list stars who want to work with him, even though they must realize they aren't quite getting the same guy who made WINGS OF DESIRE. There's still enough cache in his legend that you can't blame McAvoy and Vikander for wanting to say "I was in a Wim Wenders film." At this point, the 72-year-old filmmaker has nothing to prove to anyone. His classic films are eternal and no amount of MILLION DOLLAR HOTELs, EVERY THING WILL BE FINEs, and SUBMERGENCEs will diminish their impact. Sure, it's not a so-bad-it-makes-you-question-your-will-to-live fiasco like THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL, a film that moved at the pace of plate tectonics and was so inconceivably awful that it took four sittings over a two-day period to get through because I could only endure it in 30-minute increments and I refused to let it defeat me. No, SUBMERGENCE is not on that level of bad, but it's a chore to sit through. It's not completely fair to say Wenders has lost his mojo, but this and almost all of his "commercial" features of the last quarter century don't play to his current strengths. Concerns and priorities evolve over a long career, and it's obvious that his passion lies with documentary filmmaking and not with ponderous drivel like SUBMERGENCE.
RED RINGS OF FEAR aka ENIGMA ROSSO aka RINGS OF FEAR aka TRAUMA aka VIRGIN KILLER (Italy/West Germany/Spain - 1978) Directed by Alberto Negrin. Written by Marcello Coccia, Massimo Dallamano, Franco Ferrini, Stefano Ubezio, Alberto Negrin and Peter Berling. Cast: Fabio Testi, Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor, Fausta Avelli, Bruno Alessandro, Tony Isbert, Helga Line, Brigitte Wagner, Caroline Ohrner, Silvia Aguilar, Taida Urruzola, Maria Asquerino, Cecilia Roth. (Unrated, 84 mins)
The final installment of a loosely-connected "Schoolgirls in Peril" trilogy that began with 1972's WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and 1974's WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, the giallo RED RINGS OF FEAR was a troubled production even before filming began. Massimo Dallamano, a career journeyman (A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA, DORIAN GRAY, THE NIGHT CHILD) who established himself as a top cinematographer in the 1960s with Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, directed SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS and was set to helm the third installment, but was killed in a car accident in Rome in November 1976, not long after the release of his final film, the polizia COLT 38 SPECIAL SQUAD. He was still in the process of completing the RED RINGS script, which was then cycled through an additional five credited writers--including future Dario Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini--over the next year and a half before shooting finally began. In Dallamano's stead, directing duties were assigned to Alberto Negrin, who's spent his entire career in Italian television as a go-to guy for prestigious RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana TV-movies and miniseries that would occasionally make it onto American networks, such as the 1985 miniseries MUSSOLINI AND I with Susan Sarandon, Anthony Hopkins, and Bob Hoskins as Il Duce, and 1990's VOYAGE OF TERROR: THE ACHILLE LAURO AFFAIR with Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint. RED RINGS OF FEAR remains Negrin's only theatrical feature to date in a career going back to 1971, and he took the opportunity to cut loose and run with it. Typical of the sleazy direction gialli would take in the latter half of the 1970s beginning with the likes of the subtly-titled STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, RED RINGS OF FEAR doesn't go as far as the 1979 giallo/porno crossovers GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL, but it doesn't avoid embracing the trashier side of things, with a twisty and perverse story involving murders, corruption, cover-ups, abortion, and Catholic schoolgirls forced to take part in a prostitution ring being run by one of their own teachers.
Fabio Testi starred in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? as a lecherous teacher at a posh girls school who, as per giallo rules, becomes an amateur sleuth in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mystery in which he's briefly the main suspect. Here, dubbed by the velvet tones of Ted Rusoff, he plays the actual detective in charge of the case, Insp. Gianni Di Salvo, assigned to investigate the death of a teenage girl whose genitally-mutilated corpse was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in a river near a dam. The girl was a student a nearby Catholic girls school and, from a tip by the victim's little sister Emily (Fausta Avelli), learns that she was part of a clique known as "The Inseparables." He immediately suspects the other girls are hiding something, and since it's a giallo, he's right. The investigation leads to numerous red herrings, mostly involving the teaching staff who all act like they're hiding something, including an uptight headmistress and another who pointlessly sleeps with one black glove on his bedside table. The dead girl's diary also has recurring drawings of a designer jeans logo, which eventually leads to the involvement of uncooperative clothing store owner Parravicini (Jack Taylor with a perm). Anger management case Di Salvo begins losing his patience, especially after an attempt on his life as well as an escalating body count when a teacher (Tony Isbert) is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident and the remaining Inseparables become targets themselves.
Unlike SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS, RED RINGS OF FEAR was never released theatrically in the US, instead going straight to video in 1985 as TRAUMA (one of its many retitlings, another being the grindhouse-ready VIRGIN KILLER), in one of those Wizard Video big boxes that also erroneously included five-time Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy in the credits on the packaging (he was in his share of Eurotrash movies in the mid-to-late '70s, but this wasn't one of them). It's just out now on Blu-ray from Scorpion in a restored transfer, properly framed at 2.35:1, and looking better than it ever has after decades of barely watchable VHS prints that were ported over to numerous public domain DVD sets. From the time of Dallamano's tragic death, the film was plagued with problems, from script changes to, as Nathaniel Thompson points out on the Blu-ray's commentary track, co-star Jack Taylor even claiming the film was never completely finished. At the very least, things seem to be missing and possibly never shot, which may explain the unusually brief running time of just 84 minutes. Second-billed Christine Kaufmann, an Austrian actress and former Hollywood ingenue who was married to Tony Curtis for five years after co-starring with him in 1962's TARAS BULBA, is barely in the movie as Di Salvo's kleptomaniac friend-with-benefits. It's not really clear if they already know each other when he catches her stealing cat food at the supermarket early on (some of the dialogue even hints at the possibility that she's a prostitute) and nothing results from a later revelation after they have a fight and she's next seen sleeping with Di Salvo's boss, Chief Insp. Roccaglio (Ivan Desny, dubbed by Ed Mannix). She's never seen again after that--it's unknown whether she had scenes cut or never filmed and her appearances are sporadic and pointless enough that it's not out of the question to wonder if she simply quit the movie. For a prominently-billed actress of established repute in both Europe and Hollywood (she won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer Female for 1961's TOWN WITHOUT PITY and went on to appear in several Rainer Werner Fassbinder films before and after RED RINGS OF FEAR), it's a strangely minor and insignificant role. Spanish cult actress Helga Line (HORROR EXPRESS) also has a brief bit part as the first victim's mother and future Pedro Almodovar regular Cecilia Roth (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) has a small early role as a Parravicini employee sleeping with her boss. In keeping with the choppy, seemingly rushed nature of the film's assembly, Riz Ortolani's main theme sounds like it belongs more to a 1970s cop show than a giallo murder mystery (Thompson points out that it was recycled in full from Ortolani's score for Dallmano's 1973 crime film SUPERBITCH).
But RED RINGS OF FEAR holds your attention: you've got Testi's rageaholic detective barging into a school meeting and bellowing "Somebody with a cock THIS BIG raped and killed her!"; you've got a bizarre sequence where, following the designer jeans lead, Di Salvo's partner (Bruno Alessandro) goes jeans shopping and struts around in skin-tight denim; you've got Di Salvo sarcastically calling the same partner "Starsky," something obviously ad-libbed by Rusoff in the dubbing studio; you've got one victim being stabbed in the neck with a flaming hot curling iron; bullying Di Salvo interrogating and threatening a scared-shitless Parravicini on a speeding rollercoaster; there's an ominous, unsettling vibe in the dimly-lit hallways of the school, filled with intimidatingly-placed religious iconography and a statue of a scowling, finger-pointing nun at the top of the main staircase, seemingly silently and pre-emptively judging everyone who walks in the building; an Argento-like sequence where an absurd amount of marbles are poured down a staircase being ascended by one of The Inseparables; a memorable performance by young Avelli, the other little red-haired girl in 1970s Italian horror movies who was called upon when the far creepier Nicoletta Elmi was busy (Avelli is probably best known to mainstream audiences as "Sweets," the little girl O.J. Simpson is killed trying to rescue in the 1977 plague-on-a-train disaster movie THE CASSANDRA CROSSING); and, in what has to be the film's most notorious bit, a cross-cutting juxtaposition of Inseparables member Virginia (Silvia Aguilar) going to a clinic for an abortion, intercut with flashback footage of the Inseparables at the orgy where the first victim was killed, bleeding out after her vagina was penetrated and torn apart by an oversized dildo. It has to rank as one of the tackiest sequences in any giallo up to that point, made even more retroactively surreal since one of the actresses playing The Inseparables is a dead ringer for Jennifer Lawrence. It had to be hard to fathom the giallo getting any more tasteless, but fear not, the 1979 double shot of GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL saw ENIGMA ROSSO's abortion/orgy jawdropper, said "Hold our beers," and introduced hardcore porn into the genre, pretty much taking things as far as they could go and effectively ending the giallo at least until it was given a post-slasher film resurrection with a return to relatively traditional, classier fare in the 1980s. RED RINGS OF FEAR is a mess, but it's got its share of unusual, inventive, and audacious moments that make it hard to outright dismiss, especially with a quality Blu-ray presentation that helps it make a credible case for itself.
The back of the Wizard Video big box from 1985,
with Arthur Kennedy mistakenly credited.
