Reviews: May 2008 Archives

As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what's apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission -- experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness -- his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl's throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert's wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.

Dawn (Jess Weixler), the protagonist of writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's playfully gynephobic black comedy Teeth, is a high-school abstinence advocate whose no-sex-before-marriage stance masks her deep discomfort with her own body. Because Teeth is also a horror movie, the root of her fear is physical, not psychological -- as Anne Carlisle put it in the druggy downtown classic Liquid Sky, "this pussy has teeth."

The gimmick of this energetic Brit-com is that the action switches, approximately halfway through, from comic crime drama to comic splatter movie. The main problem, then, is that The Cottage, against the odds, makes a better caper movie than gore flick. The first half-hour or so is an engaging and amusing farce about kidnappers David (Andy Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith), who drive to a secluded house with their hostage, Tracey (Jennifer Ellison) bound and gagged in the trunk. It's not the best plan -- the outrageously busty Tracey may be the daughter of a gangster, but she's a terrible hostage, strong-willed and foul-mouthed. She knows David on sight. And their inside man, Tracey's brother Andrew, is a dimwit who brings the whole scheme tumbling down on top of them. About the time the car pulls up outside with a couple of Chinese hit men out for blood, The Cottage has established itself as a credibly tense comedy.

After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.

Image nicked from Tim Lucas's excellent Video Watchblog entry on Night of the Werewolf.

It's surely convenience, or just coincidence--rather than any nods to quality or pent-up demand--that these are the first two Euro-horror titles to arrive in high definition on Blu-ray Disc. This double-feature package from BCI and Deimos entertainment pairs two films starring the well-loved (and prolific) Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy. Vengeance of the Zombies (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1972) is a potboiler from cult director Leon Klimovsky involving a charismatic Indian cult leader (Naschy), his less-attractive brother (also Naschy), and a beautiful redhead (Romy) from a cursed English family. And Night of the Werewolf (La Retorno del Hombre Lobo, 1980) is a genre mash-up directed by Naschy in which he stars as the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky and faces off against a bevy of vampire women led by Elizabeth Bathory herself. (Scroll way down to read about some problems with these discs.)

Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.

When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?