Are you fond of scatological humour? Do you find farts, faecal matter and good old fashioned anal action of interest? Do you seek solace in globs of blood and excrement splashing across the screen? Well, hang onto your ass-hats. This is the most preposterously priceless gross-out laugh-riot I've seen this year. Furthermore, what is simply inarguable is that this exhilarating, almost rapturous comedy is replete with juicy slabs of exquisitely marbled prime-cut horror, featuring the most odious, stench-ridden, bloodthirsty, flesh-slurping and downright disgusting monster in recent cinema history. That the big-eyed, razor-toothed rectal-cavity-dwelling title creature is also E.T.-Mogwai-cute, is the veritable pièce de résistance of this putridly satisfying vat of raw, untreated sewage. Bad Milo is a glorious non-stop barrage of celluloid wet farts aimed directly at your olfactory senses and leading straight to your funny bone.

On a level of pure visceral horror, The Banshee Chapter could be the most terrifying movie of the past decade. This relentlessly intense first feature by writer-director Blair Erickson creeps about with a slow burn, mounting steadily with each passing scene until it begins tossing the tried and true shock cuts when you least expect them. After each and every wham-bam of a cinematic sledge hammer to the face, I found myself literally clutching my chest, gasping for breath and croaking out, repeatedly: "Jesus Christ!" There's absolutely no denying the sheer force and directorial skill on display, however, the shocks are earned by an utterly horrific backdrop involving something so creepy you should just experience it without knowing what it is. Great lead performances from the gorgeous Katia Winter and Ted Levine as a boozing, drug-infused Hunter S. Thompson-styled writer.

A horror film is being shot in an ancient, dank and rotting Boston Lunatic Asylum that's been shuttered for years. The joint's full of gooey, black, viscous ectoplasm; built up from years of abusive weird-ass experiments upon the inmates by its psychotic head-doctor. Soon, our cast of characters will become possessed with the criminal madness of decades gone by. The impressive body-count in Dark Feed is matched only by the sickness that ratchets up to deliver a saturnalia of delectable barbarity. So seriously, Who in their right mind doesn't love asylums? Making their directorial debut here, the Rasmussen Brothers, having written the screenplay for John Carpenter's Looney-Bin-Scream-Fest The Ward, clearly understand this. And now, for their directorial debut, they've pulled out all the stops, the most important being PLENTY OF BABES. They also make sure the babes are a nice mix of looks and body types, but also, not all of the babes are victims. A couple of them are damn resourceful and kick-ass. This is a good thing. It proves the Rasmussens are feminists. As, it seems, am I. The movie is initially a slow burn, but the tension mounts steadily, giving us more than enough jolts and finally, the last half hour of the movie is so sick and scary it borders on the surreal.

A young woman is victimized and exists in a supernatural state of purgatory wherein vengeance and atonement hang before her as heavily as the mists of the leafy Pacific Northwest forest she's been left for dead in. Angels and Demons cascade through her in equal measure as only one thing awaits those who dare harm the innocent. Canadian independent filmmaker Karen Lam doesn't offer easy answers to the actions detailed in her chilling, original horror fantasia and though the low budget, but well-crafted picture serves up its fair share of push-button tropes of the genre, these exist as mere surface details that force you to face the real horror in the film - the victimization of women that continues to permeate every fabric of society - especially in places one might least expect the kind of attitudes and behaviour displayed. In spite of narrative elements involving a shy young college student who is duped and abused by a rich frat boy, the overall effect of the film borders on the surreal as we morph from the real world into a purgatorial dream world. Victims blend with other victims - abusers blend into other abusers and the bucolic backdrop of college town dorms and rain-forest-like woods amidst the landscape of British Columbia eventually yield a kind of nightmare that never ends.

Sometimes you see a movie, and no matter how much you enjoy it, no matter how good it is, no matter how much promise the filmmaker displays, you feel an overwhelming urge to draw a scalding hot bath and scrub yourself raw. Found is just such a film. Made for the princely sum of $8000, director Scott Schirmer's film adaptation of Todd Rigney's novel, dives into a septic tank of a truly rank viscous fluid that is as evocative of the societal blight plaguing its central characters as it is just plain, old stomach-churningly grotesque. Veering into territory that reminded me of the first time I ever saw the likes of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or, for that matter, Alan Ormsby's scum-bucket-o-rama Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile, Schirmer creates a coming of age movie unlike anything you could possibly imagine. Though aspects of the filmmaking are genuinely hampered by the lack of funds, it really doesn't matter - he accomplishes what ALL no-budget filmmakers need to do in order to stand out from the crowd of morons who think that, they too, have an inalienable right to make movies. He takes us to places that nobody in their right mind would want to ever visit. Visit, we do and visit, we must. Schirmer keeps us watching his jaw-droppingly relentless tale of brotherly love gone terribly wrong.

A family moves to a bucolic rural setting. The citizens of this leafy burgh seem to be the nicest, sweetest, friendliest folk one could ever imagine. That, of course, is because they aren't. We've seen a lot of horror films with this particular backdrop, but in recent years, none have been imbued with the good, old-fashioned, creepy-crawly chills that this one has. Produced by Slash of Guns n' Roses fame and intelligently directed by Anthony Leonardi III (one of Gore Verbinski's loyal go-to guys for first-rate storyboard art), this is one terrifying slow-burn that builds superbly to a horrifying conclusion. Blending 70s rural weirdness with the sort of atmosphere that the legendary Val Lewton brought to bear upon his groundbreaking 40s RKO horror classics, Nothing Left To Fear is one of this year's surprise horror delights.

When Roger Corman let Peter Bogdanovich direct his first feature Targets, the young former film critic was faced with the requirement that he make a horror picture, to stay on budget, to use Boris Karloff for two shooting days and employ as much footage from an early Corman horror picture as humanly possible. He looked at the world around him and realized that the real world was the scariest thing of all and he turned to creating a mass murderer bred by a gun culture. Val Lewton knew that the real horror was the stuff of the modern world also and often used subjects such as childhood loneliness, marital strife and religious cults as the horrific backdrops for his horror movies. Director Ti West follows suit with this edge-of-the-seat thriller involving a Jim Jones-style cult leader. It's one chilling, scary-ass movie that grabs you very early in the proceedings and doesn't let up - steadily mounting in its intensity until a climax that will have you begging for mercy. There are no cheap shocks and the violence is always muted, roiling just below the surface. Infused with paranoia and a great villain played by the astounding character Gene Jones, West, whose previous effort, the fun and scary paranormal thriller The Innkeepers, is proving to be a potential master of finding chills, thrills and evil in dark, yet unlikely corners.


Any movie that opens with a weepy babe (Nicole G. Leier) taking a severely punishing crap replete with dulcet echoes of spurting, plopping and gaseous expulsions whilst said babe alternates twixt the release of putrid faecal matter with cum-shot-like geysers of stringy rancid vomit launching from within her maw, splattering triumphantly upon the grotesque tiles of a dimly lit toilet adorned top to bottom in slime, sludge, blown chunks and excrement, should be enough to alert viewers they're in for one mother-pounder of a wild ride into the deepest pits of scatological horror hell. The talented young Canadian horror auteur Jesse Thomas Cook (Monster Brawl) and the visionary independent production company Foresight Features takes the cake (of the urinal variety) for serving up one heaping, horrific platter o' genre representation of the real-life deadly water contamination that occurred several years ago in the bustling Southern Ontario burgh of Walkerton - known around the world for its inbreeding and, of course, the famous E-coli contamination of its drinking water. Excrement IS super scary!!!

The patriarch of a small American family unit becomes unravelled when his wife dies. It now falls upon the eldest daughter to cook all the family meals, but she really has no stomach for the unconventional food and its strict ritualistic preparation. When the local doctor performs an autopsy on Mom, his findings suggest her death is consistent with that of those who also die from the steady consumption of human meat. It's only a matter of time before the family is discovered engaging in a centuries-old tradition rooted in abject generational poverty, superstition and Christian fundamentalism. Jim Mickle, director of Stake Land, is back with another intelligent, beautifully wrought and superbly acted shocker - this time, an American Gothic remake of Jorge Michel Grau's 2010 Mexican stomach churner of the same name. Mickle slowly, painstakingly builds both suspense and grotesque horror. He's a natural born filmmaker and there is seldom a frame or beat that's out of step. In fact there's something very peculiar at work here in just how rich his approach is since there's a genuine attempt to humanize its characters, allowing us to empathize with their situation even when they're engaging in utterly horrendous actions. UTTERLY horrendous!

Bobcat Goldthwait is the real thing! He's effectively and intelligently used the "found footage" conceit to generate an honest-to-goodness modern masterwork of horror that focuses upon the Bigfoot legend. The movie barrels along with a perfect pace to allow you to get to know and love the protagonists, laugh with them, laugh with the locals (not at them) and finally to plunge you into the film's shuddering, shocking and horrific final third. The movie both creeps you out and forces you to jump out of your seat more than once. And I reiterate - it's funny. Not tongue-in-cheek funny, but rooted firmly in the characters and action. A terrific, original and genuinely horrifying experience.

Oh, in case you were wondering…
WORLD WAR Z is the WORST zombie movie ever made.
THE CONJURING was dour, pretentious, overrated and kind of dull.
CARRIE (remake) sucks my sweaty, unwashed bag.
EVIL DEAD (remake) licks my anus after the runs.
INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 was as boring as Insidious, but not as good.
THE LAST EXORCISM PART II is soooo "Do you need to even ask?"
MAMA was, frankly, sickening in all the wrong ways.
THE PURGE is going to be a good movie when somebody does it properly.
TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D was better than The Butler.

Though SHARKNADO received my lowest rating (1 PUBIC HAIR), I was forced to devise an even lower rating (TURD Found Behind Harry's Charbroil and Dining Lounge) for Ridley Scott's The Counsellor so as not to tarnish the reputation of Sharknado by putting it in the same category. Besides, I kind of liked Sharknado in spite of itself (and myself).

What's sexier than a post-apocalyptic babe adorned in a painted-on jumpsuit that shows off a pair of succulent bobbling melons with a Grand Canyon cleavage? The answer is simple, dummy - a post-apocalyptic babe who smokes cigarillos, dispatches her quarry with Olympic-quality ass-kicking and in most scenes, grips a nice variety of deadly, smoking, phallically symbolic armament - whilst adorned in a painted-on jumpsuit that shows off a pair of succulent bobbling melons with a Grand Canyon cleavage. Okay, this isn't James Joyce, but we are served up a nicely directed Mad Max rip-off (call it Mad Maxine, if you must) - a movie overflowing with high kicking, boob-a-licious babes (and, for the ladies and loafer-light gents in the audience, plenty 0' ripped hunks) who, at every turn, dispatch their victims with sex-drenched and/or macho aplomb. The plot, such as it is, takes place in a world where governments have been usurped by corporate rulers and an army of killers target corporate pigs for assassination, becoming, of course, the new heroes of the "people". Inexplicably, the screenplay needed three writers. Where Bounty Killer rules - aside from the physical attributes of its stars - is the truly first-rate car chases, fight and gunplay choreography - beautifully staged, nicely shot, replete with careful, old-style adherence to spatial awareness and a goofy, near-Looney-Tunes-nutty sense of anarchic humour. The colour palate feels decidedly late 70s and early 80s, the sound a weirdly disconnected, hollow entity unto itself, whilst the special effects are a delightfully imaginative all-over-the-place grab bag allowing for a retro feel to the proceedings. It's too bad that the film seems destined for a life almost solely on home entertainment because in spite of its obvious no-budget, the movie manages to deliver far more joy and genre know-how than most of Hollywood's big budget action fare from the likes of Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams and Sam Mendes, et al - all of whom CANNOT DIRECT ACTION. They're sloppy dunderheads, but director Henry Saine's camera placement, movement and compositions continually puts his mega-budget colleagues (with no genuine visual talent) to shame. In another world, one I had the pleasure to experience for real, Bounty Killer would have been a huge staple in the halcyon days of drive-ins and grind houses. I miss those days and I especially pity movie lovers who never experienced them and, of course, let's lament terrific movies like this that would have been perfectly at home there.


I saw EEGA knowing nothing save for its inclusion in the 2013 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF). This afforded me the luxury of experiencing one of the most blissfully fantastical, joyful, endearing, romantic, hilarious and utterly heart-rending tales of vengeance I have ever experienced in my life. That the film is the ONLY endearing, romantic, hilarious and utterly heart-rending tales of vengeance I have ever experienced in my life is but the extra infusions of jaggery and ghee in my Poornalu. The stunningly gorgeous Samantha Prabhu plays the sweet, innocent, intelligent, good-humoured and committed Bindu. By day, she devotes herself to bringing educational supplies to the poor of India and by night, she is a highly skilled micro artist. She has been romantically pursued by the charming, goofy Nani for two whole years and she is on the cusp of finally accepting his professions of love. Sudeep is a powerful corporate chieftain who holds investors by the short and curly hairs with his brilliance and prowess at commercial real estate development. He is also a handsome, sexy Cocksman of the highest order and ALWAYS gets whatever woman he wants. Always. This trio comprises a love triangle that is about to turn deadly. When the unthinkable happens - all seems lost, but good Karma rears its happy head and soon we become embroiled in one of the most relentless (albeit endearing, romantic, hilarious and utterly heart-rending) tales of vengeance imaginable. Throughout the proceedings there is much danger, but there is also considerable tears, romance and hilarity. Oh yes, and there are grand musical numbers.


The dull, predictable, badly written and clearly expensive space thriller Gravity, for all its endless awards and critical accolades, its phenomenal wide release in uselessly annoying 3-D and, not to mention, its through-the-roof box-office is ultimately a brain-dead picture wherein its most exciting feature is Sandra Bullock floating around in her undies. Luckily for one full house, Adam Lopez's Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 pre-festival Spotlight Screenings presented a one-time-only big-screen unveiling of director Sebastián Cordero's terrific science fiction space shocker called Europa Report. It's easily one of the best science fiction films I've seen in years and had me charged with excitement from beginning to end and in all honesty, anyone seeing Europa Report - especially on a big screen - really needn't have bothered with Gravity. Philip Gelatt's first-rate screenplay charts a myriad of characters and perspectives as a private corporation launches a historic manned flight to Jupiter's Moon of Europa, a huge orb covered completely with ice and most probably having one of the likelier possibilities of life in our solar system. The mechanical and practical details of the trip, the richness of characters and dialogue, a clutch of superb performances and visual effects that are nothing less than dazzling, all contribute to a corker of a space thriller with a genuine, as opposed to by-rote layer of humanity (the latter afflicting Gravity to annoying degrees) that is as moving as the movie is thrilling and suspenseful.


Solid screenwriting keeps this science fiction thriller afloat in spite of a few directorial missteps in the handling of the action/suspense sequences. Based upon "The Animators", a classic short story by Britain's late, great pulp writer Sydney J. Bounds, screenwriter Clive Dawson more than adequately fleshes out the terror and wonder of the proceedings. In spite of the fact that the film is a far cry from the brilliance of the other recent space travel thriller Europa Report, it manages to be a far more engaging picture than the bloated Ridley Scott abortion Prometheus (and, of course, Gravity) for a mere pubic hair of that picture's costs. Clearly and intentionally making excellent use of an actual desert as a filtered, stylized and CGI'd Mars is just what the doctor ordered to add production value and when director Robinson sticks to straightforward coverage, the fine writing and excellent ensemble playing rise, like cream, to the top. When a natural disaster on the Red Planet Mars loosens up a living entity that begins to wreak unexpected havoc, it grips the crew in a deliciously scary fashion. Whilst some might find elements of the tale derivative of Alien and/or The Thing (among others), the writing is generally infused with intelligence and strong attention to character. Besides, familiarity does not always breed contempt.


What a spectacular mess this movie is and that, ladies and gentlemen, is not always a bad thing. Watching the movie for the first time ON A BIG SCREEN gave me the sort of excitement I used to have in childhood when I'd plunge into a pal's messy bedroom and get to play with all his cool shit. (It also brought me back to how much I loved the long-running Lone Ranger television series with Clayton Moore.) As all-over-the-place as it might seem, Gore Verbinski's unfair reviled and ignored movie has held up magnificently to repeated viewings and, in fact, deepens with every helping. In spite of its over-length and meandering ways, this is one rip-snorting western epic crammed with dark satirical humour (and yeah, a few tiresome, but still mostly funny juvenile yucks), an extremely odd revisionist take on the treatment of the Native People in America (both historically and in terms of pop-cultural representation) that dangerously (and I'd say bravely) rides the line between sharp observation and stereotypes of the most objectionable variety and last, but not least, an extremely odd chemistry between Armie Hammer as the title hero and Johnny Depp as Tonto, the Native American sidekick who, as it turns out, is actually the lead character. If anything, the new take on Tonto places the character squarely in the tradition of such truly heroic figures like "Cyrano de Bergerac" (though in this case, he's a grudging Cyrano who eventually becomes the real thing as the friendship and symbiosis of their mutual strengths begin to mesh.) A number of idiot critics have, among MANY moronic things, crapped on the ridiculous cost of this film and have used the excuse that it's "a western" and should not have actually had such a steep price tag. Sorry boneheads, didn't you notice the huge cast, the period detail and several action set-pieces that I defy anyone to suggest are any less than, at worst, superbly directed and at best, heart-stoppingly brilliant. The climactic steam engine sequence - set gloriously to the (of course) William Tell Overture - is, without question, one of the most stunning directorial achievements of action helmsmanship in the history of cinema. And then there's Johnny Depp! Sorry, oh pole-up-the-butt high-and-mighty humourless critics, but he delivers some of the most grotesquely hilarious moments of humour he's ever barfed up on screen. Depp's conversations and endless muttering around the various horses - especially Silver - take some kind of award of meritorious achievement for goofiness-tinged drollery bordering on the surreal that few actors would even dare to try pulling off. (Think Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks.) Depp zings off one insane line after another and many of them encouraged me to soil myself. In particular, I doubt I will ever forget Depp sauntering up to a collapsed horse, kicking it a couple of times and then turning to Armie Hammer and saying: "Horse dead!" Horse dead, indeed. Depp might well be seen as commenting on the state of most film critics' brain health. It's a great picture!


Not since Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar has there been a motion picture endowed with such singular grace and power in pursuit of divining the spiritual and emotional depths of existence - a film that begins with the purest state of grace and ends in the great peace of eternal rest. Machete Kills is pure art - a masterwork of the highest order. Well, not really, but Machete Kills splatters blood, slices through bone and blows up real good. If you're expecting more than a laconic hero, a bevy of babes to rival the stables of every top-flight whorehouse known to humankind and utterly ridiculous chew-the-scenery villains, then look elsewhere. Add to this mixture one ludicrous line of dialogue after another ("Machete no Tweet!"), the aforementioned parade o' babes and oodles of superbly directed hand fights, gunplay and, of course, every conceivable way of slicing villains to shreds with a magnificent variety of blades and you've got another winner from Robert Rodriguez, the Guy Maddin of Grindhouse.


Two scientists. One's a babe. The other's a handsome single Dad. They're teamed up to develop artificial intelligence and become a formidable force. Alas, they're working for a corporate military scumbag who wants to use their research and development to create ultra-weapons to go to war with China. The Babe is gets too peace-nikky for the scum-wad's liking and is assassinated. Handsome Dad transforms her into a cyborg. And what a cyborg: she's deadly, she's Artificial Intelligence and has a moral centre. Watch the fuck out! Hell will break loose. And it indeed, does. And indeed, with The Machine, we get another intelligent, thrilling, well-written science fiction film on a shoestring that puts studio-generated product to shame and even provides a sort of unofficial prequel to Blade Runner with healthy dollops of Robocop and The Terminator for good measure. Writer-director Caradog James provides literate dialogue, fleshed-out characters (even within archetypal representations) and super-blistering sequences of action and suspense. He generates terrific performances from the whole cast, but none more inspired than that delivered by Caity Lotz. Damn, the camera loves this sumptuous morsel, but she also renders a cool and complex performance in what amounts to a dual role. Caity Lotz is one sexy cyborg. She love you good. She love you all night. She love you forever. You fuck her over, she kill you good, REAL good!


I've never understood why director Zack Snyder is looked upon as a hack. Yes, he's humourless, but so is Christopher Nolan who frankly, isn't one pubic hair the director Snyder is. Snyder, you see, can direct. Nolan can't. Snyder has a natural affinity for shooting action. Nolan has little affinity for anything - especially action where he's a total tin-eye with no sense of composition or spatial geography. Stylistically, Snyder has genuine flair, but Nolan is possessed with little more than obvious, ham-fisted fakery that bamboozles the Great Unwashed as well, and rather inexplicably, all the others who simply should know better. And now, here we be, at sea, with a new vessel containing yet another superhero franchise reboot. However, in spite of the clear divide between the two aforementioned men of the cinema, they're working as a team on it. Not a bad team, either. Nolan's got producing and co-writing duties whilst Snyder helms and results, happily, in Man of Steel, the best superhero comic book movie since the Sam Raimi Spider-Man series. Goyer, who wrote all of Nolan's lamentable Dark Knight pictures, here delivers an engaging structure rooted in flashback with an accent upon the science fiction elements of the old chestnut that have never been adequately plumbed. Add to this, the near film noir post-war sensibilities, so prevalent in the original first season of the 50s Superman series with George Reeves and Man of Steel grandly delivers the goods and then some. What sells the picture is Snyder's spectacular handling of the action pyrotechnics. It's everything one would want. He seldom stoops to the contemporary annoyance of too many close-ups and confusing machine-gunfire styled cutting. Great compositions, breathing room when necessary, plenty of wide, long and medium shots and a few terrific moments of nail-biting suspense all add up to "one helluva good show!" Yes, Snyder employs a lot of rapid-fire cutting, but it crisply employs genuine PICTURE cutting so that everything serves the forward motion of narrative (even if the narrative often involves extreme pummelling and shit that blows up real good). The big difference between Snyder and his untalented colleagues (Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, Sam Mendes, Justin Lin, Shane Black, Gary Ross, Joss Whedon and Marc Webb) is that his editors are never forced to resort to those awful cheats of using sound almost exclusively to propel a cut because the footage itself is so haphazard. Snyder's action moves furiously, yet seamlessly because we are responding to genuine visual cuts. Action - rooted in narrative and character, not just pyrotechnics - is what moves, so to speak, the action forward. And, you've got to love Michael Shannon as the dastardly General Zod and especially, the ludicrous amount of collateral damage Superman keeps causing. Now, that's entertainment!


Can you believe it? A genuinely terrific movie from Michael Bay? Hey, do the math, Sucka: BUFF HUNKY BOYS, HOT BABES, KIDNAPPING, TORTURE, MURDER, LAUGHS O' PLENTY and THE AMERICAN DREAM a la MICHAEL BAY. WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? It's a crazy, risky, unbelievably sleazy movie and one of the best acted and directed crime pictures I've seen in years. I loved it - to death. Pain and Gain has so many moments when your jaw will be hitting the floor with disbelief that I refuse to reveal any more of the story than I do in the following imagined pitch to studio executives: "So, we've got these three loser body builders seeking a better life, They do what anyone would - they kidnap and torture people to suck them dry of all their finances and worldly goods. Oh yeah, and the main character, the leader of the gang, the HERO - is a former scumbag who ripped off a whole bunch of seniors for their life savings." Do wonders never cease?


I thought Olympus Has Fallen was stupid and entertaining. Well, leave it to SF-Action-Disaster specialist Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) to serve up an entire stadium-sized trough of STUPID and deliver one of the best-directed and almost criminally entertaining action movies of the year. Emmerich directs several phenomenal action set pieces with the skill of a true master. In spite of knowing where every second of this movie was going, I found myself on the edge of my seat several times thanks to Emmerich's solid, old-fashioned helmsmanship of the breathtaking action scenes. It's basically a mismatched pair, Channing Tatum as a Secret Service dude, teaming up with President Jamie Foxx a la Lethal Weapon and battling terrorists who attack the White House. I will also admit to joining the audience in spontaneous applause during the following: (a) when the President hoists a rocket launcher and lets rip; (b) when the President unloads several rounds of automatic gunfire into a terrorist, (c) when Tatum commandeers the President's limo for a spectacular chase scene on the White House grounds;(d) when Tatum and Jason Clarke go mano a mano in one of the best directed hand-to-hand fights in many years; (e) when a character least likely to do so brutally bludgeons a terrorist to death with a very cool White House heritage relic and then brandishes high power firearms; (f) and last, but not least, when Tatum's plucky little daughter hoists a flag and - I kid you not - WAVES IT furiously and with pride - to try and stop an air strike - I kid you not - AN AIR STRIKE ON THE FUCKING WHITE HOUSE. Like I said, this movie is stupid beyond belief and it's absolutely not to be missed!!!

Oh, and in case you were wondering…

AFTER EARTH: This vanity project to showcase Will Smith's untalented son in a lead role is almost too awful to even bother mentioning, but mention it I must.

THE COLONY: Post apocalyptic thriller that appears to have a glimmer of interesting ideas buried deep beneath its surface, but never quite finds its footing due to a surfeit of laughably "bad science" that constantly takes one out of the story. dreadful direction veering from sloppy to barely competent, no genuine suspense and stars (Bill Paxton, Laurence Fishburne) who sleepwalk for easy paycheques.

ELYSIUM: Neill Blomkamp's follow-up effort to his exceptional SF thrill-fest District 9 is big, all right, but Elysium is so pulsatingly engorged and bombastically clumsy that its wads keep blowing before the money shots. They're blanks at that and the unhappy viewer will find themselves saddled with little more than a beached whale of a movie. For all its jangling urgency, Elysium is inert.

FAST & FURIOUS 6: Lots of wall-to-wall action, though none of it is well staged. Every set piece is a patchwork quilt of badly composed shots edited machine-gun style within an inch of their life, with no sense of geography. Especially heinous is that most of the cuts are driven by sound cues, not visual ones. Brain dead viewers might enjoy it, though.

GRAVITY: Some dazzling digital effects (though The Right Stuff and 2001: A Space Odyssey have much better "space" effects generated OPTICALLY) and some nice shots of Sandra Bullock floating around in her skin-tight astronaut undies seem to have captured the fancies of film critics who should know better and audiences, that clearly don't.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG: Less emphasis upon Hobbit clog-dancing, but just as deathly dull as Part I.

HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE: I had to nail my feet to the floor to sit through this. Though Francis Lawrence can direct (unlike Gary Ross), it's still a risible slog.

IRON MAN 3: The best thing about this lame sequel in an increasingly tedious franchise is SIR Ben Kingsley's first scene wherein he prances giddily into a bedroom equipped with two half-naked babes and crows with delight over his satisfying 20-minute bowel movement. This is the only genuine entertainment value one will derive from the sheer drudgery of having to get through all 130 minutes of this dull, bloated superhero picture.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL: Sam Raimi's worst film EVER!!! Nothing he's ever directed is remotely close to how bad this movie is. Bloated, humourless and pointless. Not even James Franco's presence could save it.

PACIFIC RIM: A mostly uncomfortable blend of Transformers and the best of the decades-old Japanese Godzilla franchise. Whilst far better than the former, it never reaches the levels achieved by the latter. At the end of a long, hard day of monster wrasslin', the film's state of the art, but lacks heart.

RIDDICK: Why do they keep making Riddick movies? Why do people still go see them? I guess my second question answers my first question for a sci-fi-action franchise that with no real reason for being.

STAR TREK: INTO THE DARKNESS: Easily the worst film J.J. Abrams has made since Mission Impossible III and it's not like anything sandwiched between these two turgidly directed efforts is more than a pubic hair or two above them. What we get is a dopey revisionist retread of Nicholas Meyer's masterpiece Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the great "Space Seed" episode from the original TV series. It's not only dumb, but places far to much emphasis on action - which, as has been clearly determined - Abrams is not able to direct.

THE WIZARD OF OZ 3D: One of the great all-time classics unnecessarily ruined by 3D.

Burned at the stake, a witch casts a curse upon the family responsible that all the males will suffer horrendous marriages. Hundreds of years later, the witch returns to wreak some personal havoc, but instead falls in love with the man she's sworn to destroy.

I Married a Witch (1942) *****
Dir. René Clair
Starring: Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway, Fredric March, Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward, Robert Warwick

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There is no stronger aphrodisiac than the tresses of Veronica Lake spilling from her shapely cranium, cascading naturally like a waterfall of the sweetest dew over one eye, her other ocular orb working overtime to so intensely draw every man, woman and yes, even child, into her inescapable aura of libidinous magnetism, to be entrapped like a fly upon the golden honey caressing her supple flesh, to weave and bobble like a grape surrounded by gelatine and devoured by her insatiable need to ingest all who are tantalized by her almost supernatural charm.

Like a witch, Veronica Lake had powers that exceeded every movie star before, during or after her reign and there are none - NONE, I TELL YOU!!! - who can even approach from several country miles the magnificence of her womanhood, the utter perfection of her screen persona. Miss Lake truly defined the MGM notion of stars in Heaven, though she was no Louis B. Mayer gal, but a concubine of Zukor's domain at Paramount where she dazzled the likes of Joel McCrea in the great Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan's Travels and was so perfectly paired over four pictures with Alan Ladd.

There might, however, have only been two directors in Hollywood who knew precisely how to make the most of her ample gift of allure.

Sturges played up her gamine, waif-like powers - so tremblingly vulnerable on her milky skin, whilst resting just beneath the protective cover of inspiring manly protection was the rip-roaring, madly funny and unquestionably brilliant modern woman who understood the ways of the world with far more insight that the rigid pretend-dominance of the men around her. Ah, and while we will always have a special place for Lake alongside Sullivan in Sturges'Travels, it was the magical René Clair, the Frenchman who excelled in blending comedy and fantasy before conquering the world with his groundbreaking use of sound in À nous la liberté, Le Million and Under the Roofs of Paris who understood her real appeal.

Clair knew that Lake was a witch: at once alluring with hints of malevolence that could lead to only naughtiness of the most utter sexual abandon. As the vengeance-seeking witch who sinks her hooks into the society magnate rendered by Fredric March, Lake beguiles every mortal character with the magic that is, well, Veronica Lake. So pouty, so naughty, so sexy, so unrepentantly ribald and gee-whillikers-knee-slappingly hilarious AND demanding of love, attention, worship, kisses and caresses. And as we await the havoc we know she can wreak, we are equally delighted when she is madly smitten, due at first to magic gone wrong, with the man she means to destroy.

There are few rivals to the joy Clair yields from the material and this is a romantic comedy to end all romantic comedies. Though not a musical, it might as well have been. Clair uses his camera and actors as if they were alternately sprightly notes on sheet music and dancers of unparalleled deftness and lightness. With a supporting cast of perfection and generous injections of love, romance, trickery, sex appeal and laughs galore, Clair delivers a movie that's always funny and never lets us down. The picture holds up on one viewing after another, always yielding ever-new moments to send us into fits of laughter and to allow us the pleasure of experiencing lines and gags that never pale, and indeed, keeps us laughing and smiling every time we see them.

It's a great picture and, I daresay, quite perfect in every respect. I can also guarantee that for the rest of your life, you'll never hear "I Love You Truly" again without thinking and laughing to the song's perfect use during one of the funniest wedding sequences in motion picture history.

"I Married a Witch" is stunningly transferred onto beautiful Blu-Ray in this all-new gorgeous Criterion Collection release. It comes with a lovely audio interview with Clair, a deliciously uncompressed monaural soundtrack and the added value of a most delightful essay by the inimitable Guy Maddin. This one's a keeper, folks.

Fetishes Galore! Sex, Murder and Vinyl. Always, Vinyl.

A homicide detective on the eve of his promotion to head the department of domestic terrorism plays one final fetishistic sex-and-death-game with the sexy mistress who gets off on the morbid rituals as intensely as he does. Things go according to his perverse plan, but when part of the thrill is to commit a ghastly crime and load up as many clues as possible pointing in his own direction, nobody will presume he's guilty. Class will ALWAYS shield the sinful and he is, after all, a citizen of distinction and hence, above suspicion.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) ****
Dir. Elio Petri
Starring: Gian Maria Volonté, Florinda Bolkan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are no greater thrills than timing La petit mort to the precise moment of snuffing out the life of a willing sex partner, mais non? Ah, but how can it be truly, madly and deeply satisfying to a sociopathic killer when all the clues he leaves behind to point the finger in his direction will be wilfully ignored because he is, quite simply, a citizen above suspicion? This is the question facing Il Dottore (Gian Maria Volonté) after strangling Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan), his mistress and game participant in sex play involving reenactments of violent death. You see, she's been unfaithful to him with - gasp! - a hunky, young revolutionary and now, she must pay for her infidelity - albeit in the otherwise pleasurable act of coitus (which, admittedly, will be one mega-interuptus).

This is Italy, a country as brimming with corruption, crime and civil unrest NOW as it was in the late 60s/early 70s when Elio Petri's creepy black comedy thriller was made. In fact, one of the extraordinary things about the movie is that it feels as sophisticated, intelligent and lacking any sense of being dated, as if it were made just yesterday. If Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion feels vaguely antiquated at all, it's probably because genuinely dark, truthful and nastily funny black comedies blending sex and death are pretty much not made anymore. (If anything truly dates it, though, is that it astoundingly and deservedly won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. A film like this would never win an Oscar in this day and age.)


Driven by Ennio Morricone's immortal musical score, featuring a main theme so familiar that those who've never seen this film will remark, "Oh, so this is where that tune comes from." Its disturbing, albeit sprightly rancour captures the perverse flavour of the story, setting and most of all, the character Volonté so brilliantly renders. Morricone feels as playfully malicious a tunesmith as Petri is as a filmmaker.

And yes, this is a movie as mischievous as it is grotesquely malevolent as Petri delivers one sex-drenched flashback after another juxtaposed with Il Dottore's obsessive need to stack guilt in his favour, if only to prove to himself, that he could have been caught redhanded, on film, with several high officials watching from a decent perch and still not be properly investigated - never mind being charged, tried, found guilty and punished.

The game Petri plays is as much a game that we're allowed to participate in and though some might find his political ironies obvious in the same ways so many of Lina Wertmuller's work (Seven Beauties, Swept Away) proved to be (at least to some), there's simply no denying the power of both the creep-factor and the incredulity with which one is forced to guffaw at the proceedings.

Finally, though, so much of what occurs in this film - just a few years shy of being half a century old - has the kind of resonance so many cinematic post-9/11 indictments approach with mere kid gloves in comparison. Petri drags us though the absurdity of blatant human rights violations - including physical torture - all exercised under the pretence of protecting the world from extremist radicalism when in fact, not a thing happens in this film that's ultimately not directly related to the notion of protecting the rights of those granted immunity from suspicion of any kind due to their class, their lofty station in the world.

Again, we have a perfect example of popular cinema from the 70s facing hard truths that our own filmmakers dare not address honestly in contemporary cinema. In any age, this would have proven to be a deeply disturbing film, but now, somehow, it's beyond that which is merely unsettling. We could well be watching a movie set in the here and now and realize that what we're watching is not far at all from the terrible truth of the world we live in.

"Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" is currently available in a first-rate dual format (Blu-Ray and DVD) edition from the Criterion Collection. The film not only looks and sounds great, but the added value extra features are so bountiful and illuminating that this is definitely a must-own title for all true aficionados and collectors of fine cinema. The package is replete with all the bells and whistles including a 4K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural sound, a revealing archival interview with director Elio Petri, a tremendous feature length documentary entitled "Elio Petri: Notes About a Filmmaker", an interview with scholar Camilla Zamboni, a fifty-minute doc on the star of Petri's film "Investigation of a Citizen Named Volonté" and a superb interview with composer Ennio Morricone. Add to this the requisite trailers, new English subtitle translation, a lovely booklet packed with great written material and one Blu-ray and two DVDs all in attractive packaging.

ROCK HUDSON UNMASKED

An upper-middle-class businessman has his identity erased, then transformed via cutting edge plastic surgery. He starts life over with a fresh persona. Gradually, he longs for his old life, but trying to go back might reveal a sad truth he'd never imagined and ultimately, lead to a fate he never bargained for.

Seconds (1966) ***** 

Dir. John Frankenheimer
Starring: Rock Hudson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The myth of post-War prosperity in America created an endlessly compelling series of films within a variety of genres from the late 1940s and onwards, but for me, few are sadder, scarier and creepier than the great John Frankenheimer's chilling exploration of identity in a world seemingly bereft of genuine individuality. Based on John Ely's novel and superbly adapted by screenwriter Lewis John Carlino, we're introduced to a shell of a man, living in an upscale suburb with a wife he ignores, endless train rides to and from the city where he manages a bank and in spite of a very comfortable lifestyle, the surface trappings of his success merely mask a living death.

When he begins receiving telephone calls from a long-dead pal he is, at first, disturbed that someone would play this cruel practical joke on him until the voice on the other end of the line begins to reveal details that only his late pal would have known.

This is the middle-aged banker's chance to change his life.

You know, I've gotta say that if it were me, I'd be checking myself into a looney bin and/or visiting a priest or maybe, just maybe, I'd be looking for a better way to change my life. I, however, did not live in post-war America (though Gen-Xrs and beyond certainly suffered its influence in other ways) and given the after-effects of the horrors of World War II upon our fathers, the Korean War, the burgeoning Vietnam War, the Cold War and the horrendous assassination of JFK, maybe I too - like much of America then and now - would be looking for an easy way out.

Of course, what seems to come easy, always has strings attached. Though our banker friend falls for this macabre solicitation from the grave, he is plunged even deeper into a cruel and eerie existence that is as fraught with the surface trappings of prosperity as his previous existence yielded, but his inner life is also tinged with a surface gloss that eventually gives way to heartache and anxiety.

And believe me, the picture's been super-creepy and scary up to this point, but like any great thriller, things are going to get even more horrific than we'd ever imagined.


Seconds is a film that has so much going for it on every level. When scribes refer to "terse" direction, I'm not always sure they know precisely what they're on about, but I will say, from my standpoint that John Frankenheimer might well be the genuine grandfather of a directorial approach that's as concise and trenchant as one would hope for in genre pictures that are rooted in a boldly simple structure that allows for peeling back layers on thematic, narrative and stylistic levels that few have ever been able to genuinely master. Here, Frankenheimer seem to give almost free reign to the unparalleled cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) to create one shot after another that, taken on their own, seem like masterworks of lighting and composition. Movement is almost always subtle and crisp, though one's memory always comes back to dynamic activity bordering on the slightly jangling. Even more evocative the use of wide-angle lenses and, in particular, the consummately ghastly fish-eye shots which we never seem to forget.

In spite of these flourishes, they're used sparingly and so many of the compositions - whilst gorgeous - are simple and there to serve both the blocking, narrative and emotion. This was a style Frankenheimer developed in earlier features, most notably The Manchurian Candidate, but part of me thinks, that like so many great American directors of the 60s and 70s he cut his teeth with the kind of abandon afforded so many writers, directors and producers during the truly"Golden Age of American Television" where Frankenheimer directed oodles of "plays for television".

One of his great works during this period was the "Playhouse 90" production of Rod Serling's The Comedian starring a malevolent Mickey Rooney who was never, before or after, so downright brilliant. This "teleplay" (a magnificent amalgam of cinema, theatre and even radio drama that was most often broadcast live before millions on premiere broadcasts) is so original and compellingly grotesque, that it's extremely interesting to watch it within the context of Frankenheimer's best work for the big screen during the 60s.

Of course, there isn't a single performance in Seconds that seems false or out of place, but the movie really belongs to the late, great movie star Rock Hudson. His sensitivity and vulnerability (so often on display in the numerous Doris Day romantic comedies as well as some of his greatest triumphs during the 50s) is uncanny here. Though Frankenheimer initially had hoped for the likes of Laurence Olivier in the role, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than this bonafide movie star. The notion of a formerly dullish, slightly portly middle-aged cog in the upper levels of the post-war machine transformed into this gorgeous, hunky, Marlboro Man among Marlboro Men, is not only a brilliant stroke of casting in terms of an audience connecting to this character, but the film so expertly builds the empty frumpiness of this person's earlier life that when Hudson keeps looking in the mirror, he expertly yields a strange combination of disbelief, elation and yes, sadness. Rock Hudson, quite simply and movingly, breaks our hearts.

For all the creepiness and suspense Seconds delivers, what makes it resonate with such force and deliver several jabs to our collective solar-plexes is the heartbreak, the swirling sadness, the tragic search for a place in a world where identity has been stripped from those who thought it was all going to be better.

It doesn't get more real than that.

"Seconds" has been given the royal treatment on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, but I urge you, as great as the accompanying materials are, watch the movie not once, but maybe even twice before you dive in. I didn't watch any of it prior to even writing the aforementioned and I can assure you this allowed me to experience the film on subsequent viewings with even more appreciation than I'd ever imagined was possible. Here are the disc's highlights: A stunningly restored 4K digital film transfer, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a genuinely great commentary with Frankenheimer, a surpringly insightful interview withactor Alec Baldwin, excerpts from "Hollywood on the Hudson" TV show from 1965 that has on-set footage and a Hudson interview, a fine making-of with interviews from Frankenheimer’s widow and actor Salome Jens (who plays the film's "love interest"), a 1971 interview with Frankenheimer, a decent visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance and the de rigueur booklet that has the added value of a superb essay by movie critic David Sterritt.

Read my Review of John Frankenheimer's THE COMEDIAN, part of the Criterion Collection mega-box DVD set "The Golden Age of Television"HERE.

This 1957 Playhouse 90 production by John (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) Frankenheimer, establishes him as one of the most gifted American filmmakers of his time. He brilliantly drags us through the slop of showbiz nastiness in this harrowing tale of a brutal, mean-spirited comedian who destroys anyone who could possibly love him - anyone but his fans, whose adulation feeds his boundless self-love and the vigorous need to cut his friends, family and collaborators down to size, to ribbons, to shreds.

The Comedian (1957) *****
Dir. John Frankenheimer
Starring: Mickey Rooney, Edmond O'Brien, Kim Hunter, Mel Tormé

Review By Greg Klymkiw

From a novella by Ernest (North by Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success) Lehman and powerfully adapted by Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), The Comedian is, without question, one of the most harrowing dramatic show business exposes ever committed to film/tape/kinescope. It also happens to be a feature length television film broadcast on the immortal Playhouse 90 anthology series in 1957.

Using everything at his disposal, Frankenheimer pulls off some kind of miracle. Bouncing from location to location, utilizing montage, a crackling pace to match the impeccable dialogue and playing, for all it's worth, the horrendous visual anchor of an oversized photo of the leering monster of the film's title, Frankenheimer is indeed a director demonstrating his natural gifts that, even then, seemed like the pinnacle of his powers, but were, indeed only the beginning. Marvelling at his use of everything at a filmmaker's disposal to tell this wrenching tale is to have an opportunity to see the sowing of seeds that eventually blossomed into some of the greatest films of the 1960s.

The opening sequence alone would be enough to knock you on your butt. We follow the frenzied rehearsal of a live comedy broadcast wherein the action cuts between the performance itself, the master control booth and behind-the-scenes action on the floor and in the nearby production offices. The expert screenwriting establishes virtually everything that needs to be established and even provides a perfect spin-around to launch us from this highly charged first act into the next. Somehow, it's even more astounding that within a live TV drama, Frankenheimer grasps the challenges of Rod Serling's brilliant script and actually recreates the making of a live TV extravaganza within.

Now, seriously, ladies and gentlemen: How cool is that?


Mickey Rooney plays Sammy Hogarth, a hugely popular TV comic making the leap from a half-hour show to a full 90-minute special. Hogarth demands more than perfection from his collaborators, he demands worship. He is, without question, one of the most grotesque, repugnant characters in 20th-century drama. Much of this is due to Rooney. His performance is truly a revelation. While I always admired his work as a child actor in the numerous Rooney-Garland musicals and his moving portrait of the wartime telegram delivery boy in The Human Comedy, nothing could have ever prepared me for his performance in this mean-spirited drama. Rooney’s hurricane-like command of every scene he’s in is so powerful that even when he’s off-screen, his influence over all the supporting characters is not only felt, but it’s as if he’s in the same room with them: poking, prodding, cajoling, haranguing and tearing strips off everyone’s back.

The people most susceptible to his nastiness are his long-time gag writer with a bad case of writer’s block (Edmond O’Brien, the revenge-bent everyman from the great noir D.O.A.) and his brother, a weak, whining simpleton - originally promised the job of producer, but now reduced to being Sammy’s slave - bearing the biggest brunt of the comic’s ire.

Playing Sammy’s brother is the legendary crooner Mel Tormé, whose career in movies was mostly reserved for second banana roles in musicals. Tormé is downright snivelling, so pathetically subservient to his older brother that we initially feel sorry for him, but his subsequent actions are so appalling that he ultimately appears as little more than a cretin. It’s a great performance and one can only wonder why we never saw more of him on the big screen in roles to rival this one.

Kim Hunter (Stella in Elia Kazan’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire and, lest we forget, Zira, the cute female chimp in Planet of the Apes) plays Tormé’s long-suffering wife, who is fed up with how pathetic her husband is and demands he stand up to Sammy. Like everyone in this drama, though, she eventually puts herself in an utterly degrading position to get what she wants.

Oh yeah, speaking of degrading, did I mention that Edmond O’Brien’s character is so desperate to drag himself out of his writer’s block that he plagiarises the unused work of a comedy writer who went off to war and died in battle? You see, this is not just the story of a man bent on destruction, but ultimately the story of an utter monster who turns everything and everyone around him into bottom-feeding, soul-bereft plankton. Curiously, The Comedian is based on work by Ernest Lehman that bears more than a passing resemblance to the author's nasty novella and feature film Sweet Smell of Success. At least that story had Tony Curtis’s charming (albeit sleazy) press agent Sidney Falco. Nobody, but nobody, has anything resembling charm in The Comedian. Interestingly, veteran character actor Whit Bissell delivers a great performance here as the sleazy gossip columnist Otis Elwell, a character from Lehman's Sweet Smell of Success.

As deeply dark and depressing as it was, and frankly still is, The Comedian, like so many live dramatic television broadcasts of the period, sizzled in terms of audience and critical response. Even the darker HBO and Showtime dramas pale in comparison to the sort of ratings commanded by The Comedian and other Playhouse 90 works. It's similar to how today's bozoffice grosses for theatrical features mean virtually nothing when adjusted for inflation. The Comedian represents the TRUE Golden Age of Television and Frankenheimer went on to direct features when movies mattered more than anything. As for the current state of the Boob Tube, there's nothing on television today that can even remotely come close - artistically AND commercially to The Comedian. Now you can see why.

"The Comedian" is included on the superb Criterion Collection box set entitled "The Golden Age of Television". My full review of this box set including individual reviews of several great television dramas for live television (including Frankenheimer's brilliant rendering of "Days of Wine and Roses") is available in my Colonial Report From The Dominion of Canada column at the cool UK film magazine "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema". You can read the full piece HERE.

Rio Lobo (1970) **1/2
dir. Howard Hawks
Starring John Wayne, Jorge Rivero, Christopher Mitchum, Jennifer O’Neill, Sherry Lansing and Jack Elam

Review By Greg Klymkiw

While I have fond memories of Rio Lobo from when I first saw it on the big screen as a kid with Dad, I should have guessed something was wrong when my memories were little more than assuming I’d enjoyed the picture. No other details were seared into my brain save for the opening train robbery sequence. After seeing this movie 41 years later on Blu-ray release, I can definitely vouch for the train robbery – it’s a genuinely kick-ass set piece.

Having the distinction of being the last movie directed by the great Howard Hawks, this might perhaps be the only reason not to completely dismiss it. That said, Rio Lobo is a reasonably pleasant 114-minute duster. In spite of the familiar territory of the plot, the screenplay, co-written by Leigh Brackett, is a loose re-telling of Hawks’s classic Rio Bravo and the entertaining but not-so-classic El Dorado (both of which were also written by Brackett). And gosh-darn-it, the picture is not without merit.

Beginning during the civil war, the story involves a Union Colonel (played by John Wayne) whose pay train is robbed by a couple of Confederates (played by Jorge Rivero and Christopher Mitchum). Wayne realizes they’re the two responsible for the hard, dirty work, but the robbery itself has been ordered by someone inside the Union army. When the war is over, Wayne becomes pals with Mitchum and Rivero (he views their pre-war actions as just that – an “act of war”) and the three of them team up to track down the Union traitor (whose actions Wayne views as an “act of treason”). This all converges when the trio helps out the settlers in and around the nearby Rio Lobo, who are beleaguered and bullied by a corrupt land baron. (I’ll let you guess whom the Union Army traitor turns out to be.) At one point, like the aforementioned Hawks westerns, a motley assortment of good guys hole up in a jail whilst the bad guys lay siege.

So in terms of plot, it’s mostly a case of been there done that, but there are worse crimes a western can commit. It’s all in the delivery.

On the plus side, the action set pieces are extremely thrilling. Hawks was wise to hire ace action and stunt genius Yakima Canutt (the man solely responsible for the legendary chariot race in Wyler’s Ben-Hur, among other great cinematic rollercoaster rides), and his second unit direction includes some truly masterful carnage and derring-do.

Another good move on Hawks’s part was re-enlisting screenwriter Brackett to his cause. Not only is the plotting reasonably solid, the movie is peppered with some really crisp dialogue. The problem is that so many of the actors in the film are completely at a loss as to how to deliver their lines.

John Wayne seems up to the challenge, but having to play opposite the sad likes of Jennifer O’Neill (her line-thudding monotone is especially egregious) and the handsome but stilted Jorge Rivero appears to visibly drive the Duke to distraction onscreen. On the other hand, Wayne is such a great actor and true star that one is still glued to him throughout and happy enough to amble along the familiar trail his character is on. Our first introduction to Wayne is especially terrific and sets the tone of his character perfectly. When a young officer approaches Wayne and apologizes for disturbing him, Wayne responds in his deadpan drawl, “You were told to disturb me. You’d have been a lot sorrier if you hadn’t.” Gotta love the Duke!

One also assumes Brackett had a hand in the many funny jokes involving Wayne’s paunchy physique. As the story goes, when Hawks was running into trouble with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep he demanded the immediate assistance of “that guy Brackett” to punch things up. Having written primarily science fiction to that point, Brackett also wrote an amazing hard-boiled detective novel, “No Good for a Corpse,” and the writing endeared itself to Hawks as just what he needed. Throughout many pictures, including those of Hawks, “that guy Brackett” handled HERSELF with the craft and aplomb of an old pro – that she most definitely was. My favourite John-Wayne-directed joke in Rio Lobo is when some strapping young men lift his dead weight after knocking him out cold and one of them quips, “He’s heavier than a baby whale”.

The banter delivered via the screenplay to O’Neill and Rivero is exceptionally well written, but neither actor can attack it with the ping-pong ferocity that was such a hallmark of Hawks’s great comedies and most certainly not to the level displayed by Bogie and Bacall in Hawks’s first teaming with Brackett in The Big Sleep. As the film proceeds, one can almost feel the frustration Hawks must have been fraught with as scene after scene involving these two drags the movie down to some considerable depths.

Much better in the supporting cast is future producer and studio head Sherry Lansing who proves to be a gorgeous and terrific actress. If only she’d had O’Neill’s role. There’s also able support from Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher, who is a lightweight compared to Dad but attractive and affable enough. He’d have been great in Rivero’s role. Thankfully, there are some wonderful old hands like Jack Elam (chewing the scenery like only he could) and a nice bit from Hank (Ole Mose) Worden.

If you’re a fan of Hawks, westerns, good writing (albeit butchered by some awful actors) and The Duke, Rio Lobo will prove to be worth seeing. How memorable it will be is another question, but I can assure you that my second helping after four decades was not without merit.

"Rio Lobo" is available on Blu-ray from Paramount Home Video. It has no extra features, but the movie looks just fine in high-definition, and thankfully some over-zealous flunky in the transfer suite hasn’t seen fit to remove the grain and given the film some quality colour balance. Should you buy it? I would. But that’s me.

Desperately hoping to hit it big, a broke, down-on-his-luck, couch-surfing Greenwich Village folk singer during the early 60s embarks upon a very strange and telling odyssey to Chicago. He also loses a cat.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) ****
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund, Adam Driver, Max Casella, F. Murray Abraham

Review By Greg Klymkiw

First of all, let's get the most important thing about Inside Llewyn Davis out of the way. It's so key to genuine film lovers the world over, that it seems ludicrous not to mention it right off the bat.

Albert "Al" Milgrom is the immortal nonagenarian gentleman scholar and godfather of cinema in the Coen Brothers' hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota and they've paid a lovely tribute to one of the most beloved and important champions of film as art in America by having Adam Driver play a folk singer with the birth name of Al Milgrom, though the character has already chosen a far more goyische stage name Al Cody. My jaw dropped when this near-hidden tidbit is revealed. Anyone who knows or loves The Great Man of Minneapolis Movie Mania will, no doubt, be infused with a warmth for the Brothers remembering and honouring a guy whose inspired more cineastes per capita than anyone in the U.S. of A. Milgrom has long been a fixture on the international film festival circuits and in Toronto during TIFF, he can often be seen furiously riding between his preferred digs at the Downtown YMCA and various screening venues on a rented bicycle. Earlier this year, he nearly killed himself whilst taking a horrific tumble during the Berlinale and only this past summer was returned from Germany to his beloved Minneapolis to continue his recovery. Way to go, Al.


So, on to the matter at hand. This new film from Joel and Ethan Coen is one of the more genuinely entertaining movies of the year, in spite of a few oddities that somehow keep it from achieving a kind of greatness one wants it to have. Though the movie as a whole, never quite gets there, it certainly has individual moments of greatness and one extended sequence in the middle of the film that is as great as anything the Brothers have set to celluloid.

Shot in gorgeous monochrome by Bruno Delbonnel, vaguely inspired by the real-life late folk singer Dave Van Ronk and his posthumous biography "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" and replete with terrific musical numbers (mostly shot "live") created in collaboration with the great T-Bone Burnett, we're plunged into the world of Greenwich Village folksingers in that period just prior to Bob Dylan arriving on the scene and taking the world by storm.

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Davis) is a serious-minded folksinger (and ultimately nothing like the gruff Van Ronk) whose had to go solo since his partner in a performing duo took a dive off the (un-romantic, though oddly apt) George Washington Bridge and ended his already short life far too soon. Llewyn is broke and he hardly makes anything resembling a living as a folksinger. He hails from a working class background and is encouraged by his older sister to go back into the merchant navy. Llewyn will have none of this, though, and he continues to play whatever gigs he gets, surfs from couch to couch and borrows money left, right and centre.

He finds out his old girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant. Llewyn dallied with her behind the back of her current paramour Jim (Justin Timberlake) and now she wants an abortion since she's mortified that the baby growing in her belly might belong to the layabout itinerant she's come to despise.

Llewyn also loses a cat belonging to a middle-aged academic Jewish couple who kindly provide him with occasional meals and a couch. The search for this cat becomes easily as obsessive as his search for fame. In fact, Llewyn's tale becomes anchored when he hitches a ride with two musicians (John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund) to Chicago so he can audition with a famed folk impresario (F. Murray Abraham, who proves again what a great actor he is and how utterly misused he's been in so many films unworthy of his talents). It's this odyssey, involving a variety of bizarre conversations, strange goings-on and several sightings of the cat he's lost that, to date, is not only on a par with the very best work created by the Brothers, but serves as the true core of the film and as such, occasionally feels like a film unto itself.

The almost-everything-before-and-after to this sequence are, for me, the problematic aspects of Inside Llewyn Davis. The title character seems like a major league loser. He's an almost offensively self-absorbed asshole who treats women like shit, using them as receptacles for his imperfect spunk, a bitter, bullying dipsomaniac who hurls invectives at those who can't possibly defend themselves against the force of his bile, an egomaniacal asshole who fucks up every opportunity to actually make a living as a musician in pursuit of a fame he might not even deserve and as such, is continually broke and in debt because of his pathetic "I will not sell out, attitude".

Nothing goes right for this loser and it's all his own fault.

God knows, I'm the last person in the world to crap on a film's character for being an asshole. So much of the 70s cinema I love is bulging with such characters, but their stakes seem so much higher than Llewyn's, the darkness they're drawn to so much more flamboyantly seedy (think James Toback's central characters in Fingers and The Gambler), that I find it borderline intolerable that the Coen Boys are rubbing my nose in the shit of someone so dull, pretentious and inconsequential.

A loser folk singer? I'm supposed to not only give a shit, but derive something resembling entertainment value and food for both my heart and mind? Uh, I don't think so.

But here's the rub - I can't get Inside Llewyn Davis out of my head. The odyssey sequence I love would have no resonance without everything I detest about the film. The few moments of humanity in the film that stick out, almost like sore thumbs, wouldn't have the power they do. (A scene between Llewyn and his dementia-riddled father is not only worthy of the Coens' best work, but feels like a scene that could have been directed by John Ford if he'd been from their generation.)

Maybe, just maybe, this is a film that's really about the universal greatness inherent in those who've left their alternately rich and repressive hometowns, not unlike Bob Dylan, the Jew from Dinkytown in the land of Swedish milkmaids and stalwart car salesmen and Holiday Inn buffets, who appears briefly at the end of the movie, signalling the beginning of his fame and the eventual acceptance of folk music in the larger world. Maybe it's about having to know repression, real repression, to create great work that will resonate far beyond an insular community in a big city - one that Llewyn embraces more than he thinks he does. Maybe it's needing to understand - truly understand - what's both insular and heavenly in the same breath, hidden amongst those big open midwestern skies that look down upon the rolling prairies - a land that needed to be tilled by those without imagination, so that those with imagination could take what nurturing they needed before spilling out into the wider world.

Maybe, just maybe, Llewyn's illegitimate child who doesn't even know he exists will have the right stuff. The kid is, after all, being raised in the middle of BuckeyeFuck, Ohio.

Maybe, just maybe, Inside Llewyn Davis is the closest we'll come in this day and age to cinematically capturing the final words of Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio wherein he writes:

"The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood."

I suspect this is a great film and for all my aforementioned kvetching I can hardly wait to see it again.

And again. And yet, again.

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.

Feel Free to order the following music and literature tied to Inside Llewyn Davis and folk singer Dave Van Ronk directly from the Amazon.ca, Amazon.com and Amazon.Uk links below and, in so doing, assist with the ongoing maintenance of this website.

Aside from being a great science fiction picture, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is one of the most evocative tales of obsession ever to be etched on celluloid and as such, this is as much a review of the film as it is a reflection on my personal obsession with the picture that has not abated since I first saw it 36 years ago.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) *****
dir. Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Roberts Blossom
Review By Greg Klymkiw

On a crisp Winnipeg winter night in December of 1977, I floated in a daze from within the warm confines of an old 2000-seat downtown picture palace and my eyes looked immediately to the Heavens.

IMMEDIATELY.

A typically clear mid-western prairie sky presented a dazzling display of the cosmos – stars danced and twinkled above me and it was near impossible to shift my gaze from the limitless expanse of the universe and beyond. I kept watching the sky for some time in total bliss and ignorance of the sub-zero temperature that, as per usual, threatened to freeze exposed skin in less than a minute or two.

I had, of course, just seen an advance preview screening of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a motion picture of such staggering power that it seemed perfectly fitting that my first helping of its magnificence be within the cavernous expanse of this classic theatre built in 1907, its screen enveloped by a mighty proscenium, sitting in plush seats surrounded by an interior rich in ornate white Italian marble (it not only had a huge balcony, it had fucking LOGES) and bathed in a flickering light of utter magic that was, at this early stage of my life, a picture unlike anything I had ever seen before.

This one screening proved to be so epiphanous that once the picture officially opened two weeks later, I saw it on a big screen – in this same cinema– well over forty times.

I could not get enough of the picture. I needed to see it as one needs nourishment. A week could not go by that I did not feel the mysterious pull of this extraordinary movie. I was a man possessed - barely one, at that, being a mere 18-years-old.


By now, everyone knows that this classic motion picture charts the journey of everyman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who experiences the unexplained appearance of something other-worldly and abandons his life, his job, his family – everything he holds dear – to obsessively track down the meaning behind this occurrence. In a tale steeped in Judeo-Christian resonance – from Moses to Christ – Roy makes a perilous journey, climbs Devil’s Tower and comes face-to-face with the answer to his visions until he, along with twelve apostolic “pilgrims” ascends to the Heavens, arms outstretched in what is surely the most benign crucifixion-image imaginable.

It’s quite perfect, really. Aside from the obsessive quality of the central character, the picture itself is relentless in its adherence to the basic principles of UFO-ology and a system of extraterrestrial classification as posited by the late astronomer Dr. Josef Allen Hynek – the close encounter. According to Hynek, a close encounter of the first kind is seeing unexplained phenomena, while the second kind involves hard proof of some sort of physical manifestation from what was originally witnessed and, finally, the close encounter of the third kind, contact.


Using this classification system as the basis for his screenplay, Spielberg fills in his story with a sound and compelling three-act structure – one that is so exquisitely classical and presented with such flair, that the experience of seeing the film is not only entertaining, but frankly, borders on the spiritual. This sense of spirituality is almost divine in nature and makes perfect sense considering Hynek’s own belief in the notion that a technology must exist which blends both the physical and psychic. Furthermore, it's important to note that Paul Schrader wrote the first pass of the film and though he didn't take a story credit (something he regretted almost as quickly as he agreed to it and more so in the years to follow), it feels, deep-down like a Schrader narrative - especially the combination of obsession and spirituality.

Spielberg clearly believed in both Hynek and Schrader's concerns, but his approach was, as it always is and always must be, that of a master showman imbued with the innocence and wonder of a child. This, finally, is what makes Close Encounters such a supreme entertainment – we’re engaged and dazzled, finally, by the sheer physical beauty of what Neary sees, but also, we feel and perhaps even understand what this character feels (and by extension, Spielberg).


I really don't think Richard Dreyfuss has ever been better. He's the ultimate man-child here - a kind of hulking working class version of what Kubrick's "Star Child" in 2001 might have become. Teri Garr and Melinda Dillon acquit themselves nicely, but if any performances match Dreyfuss' here, it's legendary French filmmaker Francois Truffaut as the UFO expert who seems as much an obsessive man-child as Dreyfuss and, of course, lest we forget the late, great character actor Roberts Blossom as the crazed old man who opines on the aliens' prowess at manning their spaceships:

"They can fly rings around the moon, but we're years ahead of them on the highway."

The movie contains several great set-pieces of wonder, but nothing in the film, and frankly nothing in MOST films can compare to the pure joy of the final third of the picture - the close encounter of the third kind. For me, perhaps the most moving element is how the universal language that binds mankind with the aliens is light and music. Can their ever be a more universal duo? Thank God for John Williams' score, the simple, melodious, almost-Satie-like dissonance that brilliantly riffs on "When You Wish Upon A Star" from Disney's Pinocchio.

It's pathetic. Just THINKING about moments from the final third of the film in tandem with Williams' score STILL makes me tear up like, in the words of Brando in Apocalypse Now, "some old grandmother".

As for the special effects - they are GORGEOUS OPTICALS courtesy of Douglas Trumbull, an astounding hand-built set in an airplane hangar and animatronics courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi. There isn't a single digital effect that can hold a candle to any of these.

Over the years, Spielberg has tinkered with various cuts of the film. After the initial theatrical release, he issued a “special edition” in 1980, which trimmed a few bits he felt needed trimming, but moronically dumped several key moments that contributed to Neary’s humanity and his relationship with his family - as well as the physical manifestation of Neary's obsession in the form of the most insane act of tossing mud, plants and trees into his family's suburban dream home in order to sculpt the image lodged in his brain, the message that he and a few other special people receive from the aliens.

This was, frankly, a mistake, but an even more egregious error in this decidedly UN-special Edition, was taking us beyond Neary’s walk onto the Mother Ship, but inside as well. This version comes close to destroying what was almost perfect. Years later, Spielberg rectified the situation by restoring the film closer to the original release, dumping most of the new footage (and thankfully, ALL of the interior Mother Ship footage). All three versions are presented on Sony’s exquisite Blu-Ray and watching them back-to-back provides an extremely rewarding look at a great artist’s process at trying to “get it” right.

Whatever you do, though, watch the 1977 version on the disc first. It offers the purest state of grace.

You see, on one level, the third version from 1998, is probably the best version of the film, but for me, it’s hard to separate myself from the slight raggedness of the 1977 version. It’s the version that first obsessed me and I feel that ultimately, even its minor flaws weirdly contribute to the picture’s enduring, obsessive quality.

Steven Spielberg is unquestionably a born filmmaker. He’s delivered some of the finest entertainments we’ll ever see in this bigger-than-life medium, but ultimately, it’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind that will probably resonate with the greatest power and longevity in the decades to follow.

After all, it comes from a special place.

It comes from the heart – that mysterious, delicate muscle that pumps lifeblood and seems, more so than the mind itself, to harbor the soul. It’s what makes great pictures and Close Encounters of the Third Kind is nothing if not great.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is currently available on Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. If you are seeing it for the first time in years and/or if you are showing to kids who've never seen it properly on FILM, on a BIG screen before - do this: Turn all phones off, make sure all the curtains are drawn so nothing from the outside seeps in, make sure ALL the lights are off, make sure nobody has anything to eat or drink before or during the film, make sure your kids have unloaded every drop of urine and every ounce of heavier materials, make it clear that there will be no breaks and that nobody will be allowed to leave the room for ANY reason and then, CRANK THE SOUND. It's the only way to fly.

Milestone Films Cinematheque presents one of the year's finest DVD releases

Baby Peggy was 19 months old in 1920 and became one of the world's most beloved movie stars, headlining over 150 shorts. In 1924 she was signed to a $1,000,000 contract for starring in the feature Captain January. She was also huge in vaudeville, performing all day, everyday in continuous live performances. By the late 1930s, her fortune had been squandered by her father and she disappeared for decades. She's still alive. Now in her 90s, Baby Peggy's real name is Diana Serra Cary. She continues to lead a full life as an author and advocate devoted to making the world aware of the exploitation of children in show business. This is her story.

Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room (2013) ****
Dir. Vera Iwerebor
Starring: Baby Peggy (Diana Serra Cary)
RATING FOR ENTIRE DVD PACKAGE: *****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Imagine spending an entire childhood feeling like your career as a movie star (and sole breadwinner) was over before the age of ten. Even worse, though, would be feeling like an elephant in the room, the weight of your "failure" tied to your neck in a family life fraught with strict patriarchal discipline, domestic disputes, itinerancy and poverty.

This was Baby Peggy's story. To watch her in the few films of hers that still exist (3 shorts and her classic feature Captain January, lovingly restored and available on this DVD as - I kid you not - extras) is to see a kid with immense talent whom the camera loved with considerable passion.

It's no wonder she became so huge.


That's why, however, there's a considerable melancholy to this tale, so simply and beautifully told in Iwerebor's documentary. Effectively using film clips, archival materials and, of course, interviews with the still alive-and-kicking 90+ year-old Baby Peggy, we get a wonderful sense of the sweep of her tale, but also the deeply dark aspects of it. She eventually "became" Diana Serra Cary, and it's both fascinating and somewhat astounding that she's in her 90s. She's as fit and fiddle as someone three decades her junior and her recollections of those early days seem picture-perfect vivid. It's no surprise she's a writer - she paints with words.

Most poignant ARE her memories of childhood and tellingly, we get a sense of what a sharp cookie she was as a kid. She always looked upon her Baby Peggy persona as a screen character and played it as such. On her own, she felt like herself and always viewed her roles - which ultimately were not diverse, but basically "her(other)self" in film after film. The most harrowing experiences she recounts were the vaudeville days. Her father sold her on the basis of her stardom, to be sure, but he also sold her to theatre proprietors on the basis of being a child star who could play continuous shows from early in the day to late at night. This was not only abuse, but amounted to child slavery.

At the same time, her Dad was a rodeo cowboy and occasional stuntman and she shared his love of horses. When it looked like she was "washed up" as a child, he bought a ranch and for a time, she was happy.

Until, of course, her father mismanaged the finances (during the Great Depression no less) and she in watched in sorrow as every piece of the ranch was sold in an auction.

The family tried their fortunes in Hollywood again. Alas, Peggy and her Mom, got work as extras, but Peggy herself did not experience the same kind of adolescent/adult revival as some other stars experienced.

Years later, stardom and Hollywood well behind her, Cary/Peggy became an advocate for the rights of child stars, a historian and also wrote a number of books including "Hollywood's Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era" and "Jackie Coogan: The World's Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood's Legendary Child Star" about the lives and histories of similarly exploited kids in the business (as well as a memoir of her own experience "Whatever Happened To Baby Peggy").

No doubt, in homage to her own father, she also wrote a superb book that I've personally read and love entitled "The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History".

Now she lives quietly in semi-retirement, but as more and more of her films are discovered and restored, she is frequently honoured at screenings and gets scads of personally addressed fan mail from kids of "all ages". And now you can see this great film about her life and a nice sampling of her films. This is really a lovely little documentary and hats off once again to Milestone Films for adding to the history and heritage of cinema by making this whole package available on one of the finest DVD releases of this (or frankly, any recent year).

"Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room" is available on DVD from Milestone Films and distributed by Oscilloscope. Feel free to order directly from the links below and assist with the maintenance of this site.

A tireless supporter and promoter of genre film, his magnificent Toronto After Dark Cinema Film Festival just celebrated its 8th year and over the course of nine days over 10,000 fans filled the seats. Most importantly, Lopez has continued to showcase the work of Canada's best genre filmmakers by screening an insane number of Canadian shorts and features. And guess what, audiences go nuts over them - thanks to Lopez and an amazing team of collaborators. Lopez has, over the years, assembled a crew of brilliant, dedicated genre-freaks and festival professionals and while too numerous to name here, a few who make the whole event such a great one include such inimitable forces as Peter Kuplowsky, Christian Burgess and Stephen Landry. The list goes on, but an organization can only be as great as the captain of its ship and I can think of fewer people as obsessed with providing a classy event as Lopez. Greatness MUST flow from the top on down and that's certainly the case here.

He made two of the best feature length documentaries of the year - in Canada or anywhere. One took Hot Docs by storm, the other TIFF, where he won the Best Canadian Feature Award as well as being named to TIFF's Canada Top Ten. As a filmmaker, Zweig subverts all expectations and plunges you into the least expected territory in a style uniquely personal and finally very much his own – so much so I predict that we’ll eventually see new generations of filmmakers drawing from his approach and using it as a springboard for their own work. This, of course, is what all great art inspires. And Zweig is nothing if not inspirational. He's also a curmudgeon and a comedian. The best curmudgeons, of course, are lovable softies beneath the fleshy layers of malcontent grumbling and the best comedians NEVER try hard to make you laugh - they just DO. And hell, in one year he gave all of us 15 reasons to live and proved that when Jews were funny was that time in everyone's life when family and the cultural hearth that nurtured us is still alive IF we keep it alive and never forget who we are or where we came from.
Bonne is a veteran film publicist. I first met her in the 90s via the late, great and inimitable film distributor Jim Murphy where she oversaw the publicity and marketing of several important Canadian films at Malo. Her company StarPR, continues guiding our films and filmmakers into the maw of p.r. and she does so with cheer, aplomb and boundless energy. Recent offerings she's shepherded include Stories We Tell, Empire of Dirt and Ingrid Veninger's The Animal Project. She's a class act. One of only a few I can count in that profession on my two hands.

He is the "Oskar Schindler of Toronto Cinema" - at least according to his pal Matt Brown who coined the phrase to describe Colin's Herculean efforts to save and preserve all manner of film culture in the Centre of Canada's Universe. (I've seen but a fraction of the archives and experienced multiple orgasms over it.) As a programmer with TIFF, he's presented some of the finest Canadian films in his Midnight Madness and Vanguard series and he's now got his hands on The Royal Cinema and it looks like great news for Canadian independent filmmakers. Even more exciting are Colin's efforts as an executive producer - most notably, his incredible job bringing the brilliant Manborg to the world. More, I can assure you, will follow. Of course, there is a cliche that behind every great man is an even greater woman. Here, it is no mere cliche. With Colin, he is in cahoots on most matters professional and artistic with his brilliant wife Katarina Gligorijevic and they're a formidable duo. She has the edge, though. She is, you see, of the Serbian persuasion. (Like my old man once said to me after seeing Underground, "The Serbs are our ["our" = Ukrainians] brothers and sisters in the fight against the oppression of communism." This really has nothing to do with anything, but it sounded good at the time.)

Via his production company Viddywell Films, Glen Wood continues to display the sort of vision he's always applied to his trajectory in the Canadian film business (including a visionary stint as Mongrel Media's home entertainment division head honcho). He collaborated with an old partner in cinematic crime, the "I don't take no for an answer (but so politely and gently and with even Karma, if you please)" Jordana Aarons and together they brought "Stage To Screen" to life, a series of cool, short films celebrating the illustrious career and opulent architecture of Toronto's legendary, magical and still majestic Wintergarden Theatre. With a gala premiere, support from BravoFact and other notable cultural institutions, one of the six films, Wakening, from director Danis Goulet and writer Tony Elliot, historically took the honour of being the first Canadian short film to open the Toronto International Film Festival's Opening Night Gala. Glen and Jordana collaborated a few years ago on the TIFF Sprockets award winning Chris Trebilcock short Adam Avenger and while they have their own companies and slates (Aarons' company is Cedar Avenue Productions), one assumes this professional marriage made in Heaven will continue onwards and upwards.


JOHN GREYSON
He is a national treasure. He is one of the most important filmmakers Canada has ever unleashed. He is a great teacher and mentor and a fiercely committed human rights activist (as human being and filmmaker). On his way to Gaza with Canadian emergency room doctor Tarek Loubani (to explore the potential of making a new film), he and Loubani witnessed the savage, brutal slayings and assaults upon innocent civilians in the military-controlled dictatorship of Egypt. Loubani sprung into action with medical assistance as Greyson began to shoot the carnage, his camera and unflagging eye capturing the truth of events most mainstream media couldn't begin to imagine doing. He and Loubani were illegally arrested, tortured and incarcerated in a Cairo prison. They never gave up hope and conducted themselves as friends to and advocates of their innocent fellow prisoners. John and Tarek are free now. Loubani continues to offer healing in the emergency room in London, Ontario whilst Greyson, one of the sweetest, most intelligent and committed artists in our country continues to teach and make cinema. Greyson will even be making an appearance at the TIFF Bell Lightbox to discuss activist cinema. Don't miss that, folks. It'll be a rare opportunity to shout: Bravo Maestro!

She's ambitious, talented and the camera loves her. She's the host and engine driver (along with her mother, producer Joanne Uhlmann) of the Smithee TV web series "Katie Chats". I love her style, which is getting slicker with every interview. She genuinely, as the title of her show says, "CHATS". She asks the kind of questions that let film practitioners deal with all aspects of their work - everything from thematic issues to the basic nuts and bolts. She's logged and uploaded over 1200 interviews online and her importance to the Canadian film industry cannot, for even a second, be underestimated. Why? Her goal is to build the largest database of interviews with Canadian filmmakers - ever. And she's well on her way. What's great is that she not only interviews directors, but writers, producers, editors, sound recordists, the list goes on. Her interviews are painting a valuable portrait of Canada's film culture. Oh, she'll interview non-Canadians, too. :-) Jesus. Did I just use a smiley face? Well, that's what she inspires - smiles all round. She's friendly, good-humoured, spirited and genuinely interested in chatting with people about their important work so necessary to building our vibrant cultural heritage.

I met Mitch Davis online in the mid-90s (it was dialup access back then kiddies). Newsgroups were the rage amongst movie geeks and it made sense I'd be trading quips with someone like Mitch on alt.cult-movies. Mitch was in Montreal producing a feature film directed by his best pal and roommate Karim Hussain (one of the best cinematographers out there these days having spectacularly shot Richard Stanley's L'Autre Monde, Jason Eisener's Hobo With a Shotgun and Jovanka Vuckovic's The Captured Bird). The feature took several years to make and was fraught with all manner of difficulties (negative impounded, absconded with and general fucking over due to the film's delectably vile content). I was producing a film around the same time - not necessarily "vile", but extremely controversial - and I started having a whack of trouble getting my footage processed at the National Film Board of Canada lab in Montreal. It turned out the NFB were getting flack for processing footage for Mitch and Karim's film and when I strolled in there with a movie starring Nina Hartley, Annie Sprinkle and Daniel MacIvor (sporting the hugest life-like penile prosthetic known to man), the proverbial merde hit the fan in the dank hallways of NFB, the sounds of outraged bureaus' splattering resonating over the endless drone of flickering fluorescent light. Several email quips followed, along the lines of "Hey Mitch, thanks a fucking lot for getting the bureaucrats' hair standing up on end before I got the pleasure, bud. Thanks a fucking lot" and replies along the lines of, "No problem, anytime." Luckily, I was prepping the film for a screening at the World Film Festival (Festival des Films du Monde de Montréal) and a couple of telephone calls from fest toppers Daniele Cauchard and the formidable Serge Losique kept the bureaus at bay and I got what I needed. My path crossed with Mitch briefly in 1997 when he and Karim became co-directors of the magnificent FantAsia film festival, but as the years churned on, I found myself in Montreal less and less. Newsgroups are pretty much long-gone, but now there's Facebook and Twitter and I'm able to keep abreast of Mr. Davis' exploits. It's 2013 and Mitch is STILL the co-director of what's become a genre film festival as important to international buyers, critics and fans as Sitges, L'Etrange, TADFF and, of course Midnight Madness at TIFF. And here's the deal, Mitch, like his colleagues in Hogtown, Colin and Adam, has been a constant champion of Canadian Cinema - programming a myriad of shorts and features every year along with the tremendous foreign offerings. He's still rocking and Mitch has become one of the foremost finger-on-the-pulse guys in this business. And he proudly posed for a photograph with Mayor Rob Ford. It's enough to make anyone who trolled newsgroups in the 90s green with envy.


Okay, so this is the third year of this formidable list and for a third year in a row, I've simply decided - here and now - that this magnificent human being is probably going to keep doing endlessly heroic deeds to keep me doffing my hat in her estimable direction. Not that she wants it, needs it or asks for it. Sarah Polley is the real thing. She makes great movies and never stops working to make life better for other people. This year, she's being inducted into the Order of Canada and her extraordinary Stories We Tell has taken the world by storm. It's even a finalist leading up to the Oscar nominations for Best Feature Documentary. The thing, however, that filled my heart with a heavenly body worth of warmth, on an almost daily basis this year, was how she moved mountains to fight for the release of John Greyson and Tarek Loubani from their illegal incarceration in Egypt. She rallied the troops at TIFF, put the plights of the pair on the lips of movie stars and wags from all over the world, pinned "Free Tarek and John" buttons on everyone in her path, distributed buttons to an army of volunteers who, in turn, did likewise. She never stops. Ever. And on top of it all, she's still a Mom - a normal, loving, wonderful Mom who can be seen on the streets with her sweet little girl, getting sun, going for walks - being a Mom of Moms. She IS a national treasure and of anyone I know, she is probably the greatest ambassador to the world of what it means to be TRULY CANADIAN!!!

It's because of people like Silva Basmajian that the National Film Board of Canada continues to hold the high reputation that in recent years, it would NOT have if it wasn't for her warm, gracious, inviting filmmaker-friendly approach to her work. Silva Basmajian was with the NFB for 30 years. This year she retired. Sure, she probably wanted a change of view after three decades of service - NOT so much to the NFB (true bureaucrats serve their bureaucracy, not their clients) - but to the art of Canadian film culture and all the filmmakers who benefited from her wisdom, experience and kindness. Personally, my feeling is that no matter how insistent she might have been to retire is that it's to the NFB's utter shame that the whole organization didn't get down on its knees (something bureaucrats know how to do better than most) to do everything possible to keep her within the organization. It's typical of such bureaucracies - especially in Canadian government agencies - just how petty they are and how little they have by way of honour and commitment to those who MAKE THEM. For example, a recent visit to the NFB's institutional website yielded NOT ONE HIT when I plunked her name into a search engine. NOT ONE!!! I tried again and again and again. Put all other names of NFB types - past, present and, uh, soon to be leaving - and there were plenty of hits for THEM. I went there in search of a page that might have provided a nice summary of her career and service with the NFB - some small online tribute. Nothing. I will tell you, as someone who has benefitted from her wisdom and guidance and as someone who knows veritable bucket-loads of people who've garnered only the best of what someone like Madame Basmajian has offered, she has been one of the most important driving forces at the National Film Board in English Canada - ever. In recent years as the Executive Producer of the NFB's Ontario office, she led the way with numerous quality productions, cutting edge initiatives and, of course, Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell. I'm too lazy right now to find an equivalent to the word "mensch" to describe this truly great lady. Whatever it is, if it even exists, it wouldn't be good enough, anyway. Silva Basmajian IS a mensch of the highest order and I wish her the very best in the next phase of her brilliant career.

Confidence hustlers successfully pull off a credit scam until an FBI agent ropes them into conning several politicians and the mob into getting nailed in a big nab.

American Hustle (2013) Dir. David O. Russell *1/2
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper,
Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Loosely based upon the cowardly, racist activities of the FBI during the late 70s in the sting operation referred to as ABSCAM, American Hustle is yet another annoying quirky comedy by the risible, overrated David O. Russell. The best that can be said for the film is that it's a pubic hair (or two) more tolerable than the gastro-oesophageal reflux disease masquerading as a movie, Silver Linings Playbook. Russell reduces this period of shameful American activity of entrapment and sweeping vilification of Arabs to little more than a bargain basement Scorsese-influenced trifle overflowing with caricatures rather than characters.

Christian Bale and Amy Adams are madly-in-love con artists who dupe desperate people into forking over cash they can't afford to fork over in the hope they'll receive a humungous line of credit from a (fictional) Arab Sheik.

Are you laughing yet?

Enter the increasingly sickening presence of Bradley Cooper as an FBI agent who entraps the couple and agrees not to prosecute if they help him nail greedy politicians in a graft scam. Using an FBI agent as the Arab Sheik, the couple dupes one politician after another into accepting bribes in order to facilitate Arab investment in revitalizing the Atlantic City casino business in New Jersey. The FBI captures all these exchanges on tape in order to eventually prosecute.

When this leads to Robert DeNiro as Meyer Lansky's right-hand man to get involved, the FBI is in Hog Heaven because NOW they can take the Mafia down too. Our loving couple realizes they need to do something to get out of this sticky wicket.

And, they do.

End of movie.

Loaded with a Greatest Hits of the 70s soundtrack, this pallid farce masquerading as a satirical vision of America flails along for 138 mind-draining minutes. The performers are all game and occasionally manage to get us to crack a smile or chuckle and the most astounding thing is a supporting performance by Jennifer Lawrence as Christian Bale's white trash wife that actually fulfills the promise she displayed in Winter's Bone as opposed to every other performance she's delivered that's made me want to punch her in the face.

One of the worst things about the movie is how it cavalierly treats a character played (beautifully, I might add) by Jeremy Renner - a politician who agrees to make all the meetings with higher-up politicians possible. Why? Because he genuinely cares about his constituency and is willing to go to considerable lengths in order to create a situation that could mean thousands of jobs for ordinary Americans.

So, not only do we have a movie that skirts the issues of racism against Arabs, makes light of blatant entrapment using con artists and craps all over a politician who just wants the best for the largely unemployed populace he serves, reducing the whole thing to a feel-good farce.

It's a horrendous, evil and ugly film. Those who've praised it should be ashamed of themselves.

"American Hustle" is in wide release with solid box-office and rave reviews via Sony Pictures.

South Pacific (1958) ****
dir. Joshua Logan
Starring: Mitzi Gaynor, Rossano Brazzi,
Ray Walston, Juanita Hall, John Kerr,
Tom Laughlin, France Nuyen

Review By Greg Klymkiw

South Pacific is a great movie musical. Its detractors will have you believe it’s clunky, theatrical to a fault, hampered by poor casting choices and a waste of actual locations on the Hawaiian island of Kauai because of the aforementioned. It is none of those things.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite and I daresay it might well be one of the great movie musicals of all time and as thrilling and stunning a MOVIE musical as the best work of Vincente Minnelli, Rouben Mamoulian, Rene Clair and Busby Berkeley.

Based upon the huge Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II Broadway success (first launched onstage in 1949 and recently afforded a highly acclaimed remount) and in turn taken from James Michener’s bestselling “Tales of the South Pacific” (recounting his own experiences in the Eden-like setting of the title), South Pacific charts the love lives of several characters who find themselves in a paradise on Earth. The main love story involves a vivacious female Navy Ensign and nurse, Nelly Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), who is stationed, along with hundreds of other military personnel on an American island during World War II in order to prepare for an offensive upon the Empire of the Rising Sun and to keep an eye on the nearby Japanese-controlled islands.

A local French landowner and man of mystery, Emile De Becque (Rossano Brazzi), is courted by the U.S. navy to assist them with gaining access to one of these islands, the enchanting Bali Ha’i. The island, bearing two volcanoes and a bevy of beauties (male and female) and fresh fruits (edible, I would argue, in more ways than one) acts as a magnet for all these sailors, but is, alas, off-limits to them.

When a Hawaiian Earth Mother named Bloody Mary (the brilliant Juanita Hall) beckoningly sings of the island’s virtues to the young Lt. Cable (John Kerr) he, not unlike the other American seamen and women, is drawn to the “special island [where] the sky meets the sea”. And of course, before you can sing “Cockeyed Optimist” (one of the immortal Rodgers-Hammerstein songs in this musical), love begins to blossom between Nelly and Emile as well as Lt. Cable and Bloody Mary’s gorgeous daughter Liat (France Nuyen).

Bring on the bare-chested hunks and grass-skirted babes, please.

Volcanoes were made for erupting, mais non?

And eruption of the most pleasurable kind is what happens to me whenever I see this musical. Aside from the fact that it’s a pretty agreeable narrative with great characters and terrific tunes, what really get my juices flowing are Joshua Logan’s stunning and brave visual choices as a director.

Logan gets a bad rap from most film critics. Originally a stage director (and yes, he mounted the original Broadway production of South Pacific), Logan is often criticized for not using the medium of film in a “cinematic” fashion and that his attempts to do so are mistakenly labeled as clunky.

Here’s where I really have to disagree with my colleagues on the matter. In fact, the knee-jerk negative reaction to utilizing a proscenium-styled frame in film adaptations always gets this fella’s yarbles in a wringer. I love the use of proscenium, the tableaux approach if you will, as much as I love the dipping, whirling shots of Mamoulian and Clair, the kaleidoscopic, only-in-a-film stylings of Berkeley, the stunning splashes of colour in Minnelli (and most of the pictures out of Arthur Freed’s unit at MGM). The proscenium is only wrong if it’s done without passion and imagination. That’s not Logan’s problem at all.

Using the stunning 65-millimeter TODD-AO widescreen process he manages to create one of the strangest and I daresay imaginative visual hybrids ever created for a motion picture. Perhaps it’s the hybrid effect that stymies critics, but for many viewers, myself obviously included, the effect is always a treat – more so because it is rooted in the emotion of the narrative, the characters and the truly magical settings.

First of all, you get the intense clarity of the huge 65mm negative that delivers a truly widescreen image without anamorphic compression. Shooting on location, one gets all the real-thing backdrops instead of theatrical backdrops or, for that matter, the studio-bound backdrops of other musicals. Then, utilizing a variety of coloured filters, Logan brings movie magic to the proceedings wherein we can feel the filmmaker’s hand applying a wash of colour to transport us to a realm of Never-Never-Land so that we ALWAYS feel we’re watching a movie, and most importantly, a world within the movie that feels like a world unto itself. Blending this with stationary chorus line compositions, we get to see the beauty of the choreography and enjoy the various bits of business without a barrage of cuts and cutaways that purportedly move us emotionally through the action using a variety of shots at different lengths.

We get to experience all the action in as pure a form as the dance numbers in the RKO Astaire-Rogers musicals. Logan lets the action occur WITHIN his frames. He uses theatrical convention as one piece of his extremely rich visual palette. Logan makes us feel like we’re watching something we’ve NEVER seen before. Ultimately though, we have. By distorting the reality of the on-location settings with both cinematic and theatrical techniques, Logan ventures boldly into the world of expressionism that, frankly, feels perfectly apt for a tale that examines love and magic against the backdrop of war.

This directorial decision is a stunner. Then again, for anyone who loves Logan, it makes perfect sense. His occasional forays into the world of movies almost always yielded strange, uncompromising work. Picnic, his film adaptation of William Inge’s play still has the power to move and provoke while Bus Stop, also from Inge, is as funny and heartbreaking as any of Marilyn Monroe’s great work and Sayonara, a straight-ahead examination of American-Japanese relations and racism taken from writing by James Michener is one of the great dramas on these themes. Even his tremendous flop, Paint Your Wagon, is not without the expressionistic qualities of his best work – the mere thought of juxtaposing Harve Presnell’s outstanding vocal rendition of “They Call The Wind Maria” and Clint (I kid you not!) Eastwood half-singing, half-whispering, semi-rasping out “I Talk To The Tress” delivers the kind of satisfying gooseflesh very few movies are capable of.

The Blu-Ray release of “South Pacific” is a mixed bag. It features both the theatrical and Roadshow versions of the picture. Alas, the Roadshow version is presented from a solid, but definitely standard definition transfer – which is a real shame, since it adds footage that is not in any way, shape or form extraneous. That said, the shorter theatrical version is still a mind-blower and to see it in a high definition transfer is to experience a lifetime of orgasmic pleasure in one huge dollop. Also, the extra-features – including a terrific feature length documentary – are magnificent supplementary materials to an already magnificent motion picture. “South Pacific” is available in a special Blu-Ray release on the 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment label.

With Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave getting critics and various awards panels in fits of ejaculatory bliss over what's little more than a dull, didactic sledgehammer look at slavery in America, it feels appropriate to bring attention - once again - to what still remains the most powerful depiction of slavery in American Cinema. After two disappointing viewings of McQueen's adaptation of the true life memoir by free-man-turned-slave Solomon Northrup, I re-watched Richard Fleischer's controversial 1975 adaptation of the bestselling Kyle Onstott novel Mandingo. As it is with every viewing of this great picture, it held up magnificently, but placed within the context of just having seen 12 Years..., I'm convinced even more how much better a film Mandingo is and that in spite of the pedigree and accolades foisted upon the McQueen picture, it's Fleischer's movie that secures its position as the least compromising and most aesthetically powerful depiction of America's most shameful period in a history of shameful periods. Here then, is an edited version of a piece I've published in two previous incarnations. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the film that popularized the phrase: "Your wife wants you should have wenches. Keeps her from havin' to submit."

MANDINGO (1975) *****
dir. Richard Fleischer

Starring: James Mason, Perry King,
Ken Norton, Susan George, Paul Benedict

Review By Greg Klymkiw


Receiving critical jeers upon its release in 1975, Richard Fleischer’s film version of Mandingo, adapted from Kyle Onstott's best-selling sex and slavery potboiler and produced by the oft-loathed-and-scorned producer Dino De Laurentiis, did, like its recent cinematic blood-brother Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven’s All About Eve in a Vegas strip club) achieve considerable cult status as a bright jewel in the crown of unintentional high camp and laughs. I recall a critic in the long-defunct Canadian-published film magazine Take One (the 70s version, not the 90s reincarnation) bestowing a Mandingo“Please Don’t Whup Me No Mo’, Massah” Award for the Worst Film of the Year.

Idiotic Golden-Turkey-styled attention was also lavished upon it when critic Stephen Rebello included Mandingo in his tome on “bad movies we love”. Furthermore, even Quentin Tarantino issued a laudatory misreading which placed it in the pantheon of stellar lower-drawer laugh riots like the abovementioned Showgirls. (In spite of Tarantino's critical gaffe, he pays splendid homage to it in his revisionist take on slavery Django Unchained.)

In spite of all these uncalled-for raspberries, I assert - wholeheartedly and with NO reservations - that Mandingo is a genuinely terrific picture. It has been the recipient of boneheaded derision for too long, now, and this is a wrong that needs to be made right.

The source material, like many other great pictures (The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws– to name just a few), is derived from a trashy, mega-potboiling novel. Mandingo was first published in the 50s and not only went through the roof on its initial release, but also continued through the 60s and 70s to be a huge seller – receiving countless reprints. Author Kyle Onstott also wrote sequels entitled Drum (which was eventually produced by De Laurentiis to an even greater scornful reception) and Master of Falconhurst– all three forming a sort of unofficial trilogy. The books were set against the historical backdrop of the slave trade and featured explicit sex and violence that was, to say the least, uncompromising by the standards of the time (and by today's strangely conservative and/or politically correct standards, the novels might well be considered abominations of the most sinful variety).

As a kid, I remember the bookshelves of my local Coles bookstore in a north Winnipeg mall filled to the brim with the Mandingo/Falconhurst sagas, and like most healthy young lads, I devoured them like a greedy baby hippo amongst a patch of delectable bull rushes. I still recall the lurid covers that featured bewitchingly bosomy dusky beauties and brutish slave traders brandishing whips and I delightedly ascended to the heights of Heaven's Gate itself by lapping up Onstott’s ripe prose style and wildly overripe dialogue. Most notably, I recall thinking - even back then - that either Onstott’s research was insanely meticulous in reflecting the horrendous, almost-surreal cruelty of the slave trade or he had one of the most depraved imaginations in 20th century literature.

I strongly suspect it was a bit of both.

Mandingo was, of course, the crowning glory of Onstott’s trilogy and when, in my 16th year on this Earth I discovered that a movie version would be opening in my favourite downtown Winnipeg picture palace, the Metropolitan Cinema, I was in such a state of anticipation that I experienced a genuine movie geek premature ejaculation. On the opening Friday, I joined a long line-up snaking around the block of the Metropolitan Cinema (a 2000-seat picture palace where I saw most of my favourite movies and where, interestingly enough, Guy Maddin shot Isabella Rossellini in the delightful short film “My Dad is 100 Years Old”). The first noon-hour showing of the day filled the orchestra seats and part of the balcony, which should give you an idea how big a hit the movie was and I loved the picture so much I sat through it four times that day and would see it again many more times during its initial run and subsequent re-releases and repertory showings throughout the 70s and 80s.

Let it be written in stone now: Mandingo, without question, is one of the most powerful, lurid, shocking and downright entertaining movies – not only of the 70s, but of all time.

Set against the crumbling ruins of the stale, stench-ridden Old South breeding plantation Falconhurst, the film opens to the strains of a mournful blues tune composed by the legendary Maurice Jarre and sung by Muddy Waters as a group of black slaves are led down a dusty road and presented to a sleazy trader by the patriarch of this pit of sorrow and depravity, Warren Maxwell (deliciously played by the late, great James Mason – with his trademark mellifluous voice handling both the Southern drawl and the rancid, racist dialogue with all the skill and panache one would expect from a star actor of his stature). We watch with open-mouthed horror and disbelief as the trader, played sleazily by the magnificent character actor Paul Benedict (yes, Bentley from The Jeffersons), puffs on a saliva-dripping, well-chewed and obviously smelly cigar as he inspects the teeth, testicles, hands and, among other body parts, anal cavities of the slaves who must remain stoic, with eyes averted as they are poked and prodded like animals at a county fair livestock auction.

In direct contrast to this, Mr. McQueen's supposedly shocking slave sale sequences in 12 Years a Slave are, to put it mildly, kid's stuff and their only resonance comes, not dramatically, but from the director's stylistic didacticism.

What makes Fleischer's approach so shocking (remember, this was pre-Roots and post-Gone With The Wind) is how matter-of-fact everything is staged and presented. The lip smacking and eye rolling – long attributed to the film are nowhere to be found in this opening, nor frankly, in much of the picture (except when genuinely warranted). It is played very straight. The actions of the characters are often crude, tasteless and over-the-top, but the cinematic treatment is most certainly not. In fact, the picture’s stylistic restraint on most fronts is what makes Mandingo so effective – as drama, as entertainment and as an expose of a dark period of 19th century history.

This is not to say there aren’t melodramatic aspects to the narrative borrowed by veteran screenwriter Norman Wexler from Onstott’s novel, but like any great drama they’re used to perfection. Besides, the notion that there’s something inherently wrong with melodrama is ridiculous anyway – there’s only good melodrama and bad melodrama, and director Richard Fleischer handles the melodramatic aspects of Mandingo’s story expertly. Besides, how can there not be aspects of melodrama in a movie aimed at the masses? Especially a movie set against a backdrop like this one.

And what a backdrop!

What a story!

Everything in this film is driven by the two simple needs of a father and how their fulfillment has tragic consequences. Warren Maxwell’s craving for a pure Mandingo slave for breeding and prizefighting is rewarded when his son Hammond (Perry King) returns from a business trip with the sleek, beautiful, powerful, caramel-skinned Mede (heavyweight champ Ken Norton). The New Orleans slave auction sequence where the purchase takes place is again another example of McQueen's picture being trumped by a movie that's almost 40-years-old. The savagery on the part of the buyers is diametrically opposite the gentility presented in 12 Years a Slave. The most aggressive bidder for Mede turns out to be a middle-aged roly-poly Dutch woman whose physical examination of Mede includes shoving her hand into his shorts to feel the girth and length of his penis. When she's outbid by Hammond, she crudely laments: "What kind of man steals the nigger from the poor widow woman?"

Again, I must rest my case against McQueen's movie.

As per usual, things keep heating up in Fleischer's film. While Hammond trains Mede in the art of bare-knuckle fighting, Maxwell frets that his son is not married and that there will be no heir to Falconhurst. Again, Hammond fulfills his father’s wishes and, like so much chattel, adds Blanche (Susan George) to the Falconhurst stables, a blonde and beautiful Southern bell bride. Much to Blanche’s consternation, Hammond also returns to Falconhurst with a new slave acquisition. Ellen (Brenda Sykes) is a stunningly sultry bed wench that Hammond favours because he believes Maxwell's fatherly advice that white women do not want to be “pestered” sexually (other than for basic purposes of procreation). He's wrong about Blanche, though. She "craves to be pleasured" and when she notices Hammond displaying tenderness to the "common bed wench", wifey retaliates. Blanche blackmails Mede into servicing her needs sexually. Falconhurst becomes a miscegenation fetishist’s wet dream with all the white-black couplings inevitably leading to all holy hell breaking loose.

So what’s the problem? We have an unsparing look at the world of slavery adorned with dollops of melodrama. Why did critics hate this film and why did it earn the reputation as a howlingly bad (but entertaining) camp classic? Could it simply be that Mandingo retained many of the more salacious elements of its pulp literature source and, in fact accentuated them? Does this mean Onstott's narrative featured poorly researched flights of fancy?

I doubt it.

What I do known, though, is that there is nothing Mandingo spares us.

Its graphic depiction of slavery, includes the following:

- Incest.
- Infanticide.
- Whoring.
- Wenching.
- Graphic bare-buttocked floggings with belts, paddles and whips.
- Graphic lynching.
- A character being pitch forked into a vat of boiling brine water.
- No holds barred and to the death bare-knuckle fist fighting (replete with biting and scratching).
- Oodles of nudity and sex (including some magnificent buttock shots of Ken Norton and a truly delightful full frontal view of Perry King’s majestic genitals). Oh yeah, we get to see many of the ladies nude also.
- More whoring.
- More wenching.
- Have I mentioned the incest yet?

While the aforementioned is an extensive grocery list of depravity would this really have been enough to raise the lily pure ire of critics? This was, after all the 70s, a decade of movies replete with mean-spiritedness, nastiness, violence and all manner of permissiveness. This was a time of unparalleled frankness in cinema. Could this really have been seen as the nadir of excess or was it something else?

Did Mandingo cut too deep for critics to embrace its excess?

Was director Richard Fleischer’s uncompromising eye too much for them?

Fleischer was, after all, one of the most gifted major American directors who, like Howard Hawks before him, worked in a variety of genres (and often for “hire”) on over 50 pictures. This, of course, made it difficult for a lot of the myopic auteurist critics to pinpoint Flesicher’s “thing” and perhaps they needed to use “moral outrage” to equate Mandingo with some of Fleischer’s more obvious gun-for-hire forays into filmic folly such as the execrable Dr. Dolittle (with Rex Harrison, NOT Eddie Murphy) or the impersonal Pearl Harbor epic Tora Tora Tora (which still manages to put Michael Bay’s rendering of those events to shame). And of course, the critics of 1975 had yet to experience Fleischer’s 80s remake of The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond. If that had preceded Mandingo in the Fleischer canon, it’s conceivable those critics might have gone to the extent of forming an actual, literal lynch mob. If truth be told, though, I've recently re-discovered the joys of Fleischer's Jazz Singer - especially Laurence Olivier's insane performance as Neil Diamond's father. (!!!)

As to the notion of "moral outrage" I must admit to having an intellectual knowledge of it and certainly have applied said knowledge emotionally to genuine atrocities, but I cannot say I have ever truly felt it towards any cultural artifact.

But in spite of all this, how could critics miss the boat on Mandingo? Fleischer, after all, won his only Oscar for a documentary and for most of his career he approached his subjects with the eye of a documentarian. From his noir classics at RKO (including The Narrow Margin) through to his stunning examinations of real-life serial killers in 10 Rillington Place (Christie), The Boston Strangler (DeSalvo) and Compulsion (Leopold and Loeb), Fleischer trained his camera on the dramatics by focusing, in an almost straightforward fashion on the mechanics of his subjects – he editorialized by non-editorializing. He even did this in his forays in action epics (The Vikings), fantasy (Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) and science fiction (Soylent Green). This straightforward approach almost always yielded thrilling work.

Scene after scene in Mandingo includes numerous instances of Fleischer's superb direction. The first public prizefight involving Mede is staggering in its brutal detail; not just the fight itself, but the slavering crowd of decadent white southerners assembled within the courtyard of a brothel to witness two human beings (though to the racist whiteys, animals) pummel, scratch, slash, bite, flip, kick, eye-gouge and hammer away at every part of their bodies, including their genitals, until one of them dies. Fleischer begins the scene with a terrific God's eye wide shot and eventually moves in to cover the fight itself - using a fine array of shots - many effective wide or medium framings to capture some excellent fight choreography. Unlike moron contemporary directors, Fleischer only moves in for closeups when it's absolutely necessary.

Edited by the superb craftsman Frank (Hud, Funny Face, The Molly Maguires) Bracht, there are no shots or cuts in this relentless sequence that are used for anything other than dramatic emphasis. Bracht, by the way, moved easily between romantic comedies, musicals, westerns and the occasional lurid melodrama (The Carpetbaggers - WOOT! WOOT!), so he was easily a good man for the job, handling Fleischer's superb coverage with both efficiency and, when needed, verve. I only wish more contemporary films used directors like Fleischer and editors like Bracht - who were able to shift from straight-up dramatic dialogue scenes to blistering action and back again. Just suffer through any J.J. Abrams and/or Christopher Nolan abomination to get my point. (If it wasn't for McQueen's lack of humour and annoying didacticism, he'd be a perfect director as he shares a solid eye with many great veterans.)

In Mandingo, actors deliver their lines with straight faces. When Paul Benedict’s slave trader admiringly refers to Warren’s son Hammond as a “right vigorous young stud”, it’s funny, but not because it’s campy, but because it’s true and rendered in a parlance that appears to be genuine - both to the period and the character. Benedict plays his role perfectly - that of a pretentious, flowery country gentleman who, most ironically, makes his fortune as a BREEDER of slaves.

As the attractive, blond, blue-eyed Hammond, Perry King swaggers into his first scene as the epitome of young manhood, especially since the film matter-of-factly informs us that on a breeding plantation, it is the master (or in this case, the “young master") who has the “duty” to break in the virgin wenches on the plantation. When Hammond protests that the latest subject of deflowering, the Mandingo slave wench Big Pearl “be powerful musky”, he does it with such a straight face that it’s not only darkly funny, but all the more powerful in the delineation between owners and slaves. Why wouldn't Big Pearl be "powerful musky"? The slaves live in abominable conditions in shacks surrounding the mansion. Hammond has no eyes for the horror he and his father are responsible for. This is also a perfect plot point in terms of character that is eventually challenged when Hammond begins to have genuine "human" feelings of love for his bed wench Ellen. The tragic implications of this eventually become very clear when Hammond, up against emotions that collide with what has been NURTURED into him, take various turns for the worst.

When Warren complains about his rheumatism, Paul Benedict, recommends that the old patriarch place his bare feet onto the belly of a “nekkid Mexican dog” to drain the “rheumatiz” right out of the soles of his feet into the belly of the dog. This conversation, over dinner no less, is presented so unflinchingly and straight-facedly that we laugh – ALMOST good-naturedly at the period ignorance of the characters. However, during the same conversation, when the Maxwells' family doctor elaborates, with an equally straight face, that a slave boy would do just as well as a “nekkid Mexican dog”, the laughs continue, but much more nervously, and finally, not at all when it's explained - in detail - how a human being can be substituted for an animal. Several scenes follow in which Warren sits in a rocker sipping hot toddies whilst resting his bare feet on the belly of a slave boy. Then, to offer a brilliant juxtaposition to Warren's stupidity and cruelty, the slave boy, hoping to get out of this demeaning activity and outwit his knot-headed owner, holds his hand to his belly and moans, “Ooooohhhh, Massah’s misery drain right into me.”

This is just downright creepy, as finally, the whole movie is.

It is the film’s unflinching presentation of insane dialogue from Onstott and Wexler’s respective pens that has, I think, contributed to Mandingo’s reputation as a camp classic. When Warren explains to Hammond that wives want their husbands to have wenches because it keeps them from “having to submit”, it IS funny. When the babies of slaves are referred to as “suckers”, it’s at first darkly funny because it’s so shocking, but as it’s bandied about so frequently, it becomes sickening. When a slave’s miscarriage is straight-facedly referred to as “she done slip her sucker”, it’s especially NOT funny. It’s horrific, particularly as it follows a scene when a character threatens to “whup that sucker right outta” her belly.

If anything, Mandingo’s reputation might ultimately be getting mixed in a bit with its notorious sequel Drum which was not only critically reviled, but even upon the eve of its theatrical release, was disowned by the studio. Drum is pure B-movie – no two ways about it, but it’s also, in its own way, marvelous entertainment, crisply directed by Corman protégé Steve Carver and featuring the brilliant Warren Oates taking over the role of Perry King’s Hammond and Ken Norton making a return appearance as yet another character altogether. The film also features the legendary Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith (Lemora) as Hammond’s slattern daughter Sophie who favours being serviced by her Daddy’s Mandingo slaves and lying about them to Daddy when they do not submit to her. At one point, Hammond asks if stud slave Blaze (Yaphet Kotto), "be fiddlin'" with her. Sophie replies that Blaze tricked her into playing a game with him wherein he tells her to close her eyes, hold out her hands and await a surprise treat. "And Pappy," she says in utter horror, "when I opens mah eyes, I looks down, and there, Pappy, there in my hands is is his . . . THANG!"

I remember first seeing Drum on a double bill with Mandingo in a Winnipeg Main Street grindhouse called the Epic. When I was a kid, the Epic was called the Colonial and was next door to two other grindhouses, the Regent and the Starland. Here in the stench of cum and urine, sitting on stained, tattered seats, my feet stuck almost permanently to the sticky floors and occasionally having to listen to old men getting fellated by toothless glue-sniffing hookers, I delighted, week after week to Hammer horror films, biker flicks and Corman extravaganzas. By the 80s, this grindhouse was the sole purveyor of cinematic sleaze in Winnipeg – alternating between standard action exploitation fare and soft-core pornography. Since I had missed Drum on its initial release, I was rather excited to catch up with it on a double bill at the Epic/Colonial. I even recall that the double bill was advertised thusly: “And now . . . the BARE ‘Roots’”. I was accompanied to this screening by two esteemed members of the faculty of English and Film at the University of Manitoba, Professors Stephen Snyder and George Toles (screenwriter of such Guy Maddin films as Archangel, Careful, Keyhole and Saddest Music in the World). It was a glorious afternoon and it was certainly a coin toss to determine what was louder, the sounds of our laughter or the sounds of toothless hookers fellating old men.

Finally though, there is no denying that Mandingo is a genuinely great picture. In fact, I would argue that it is both a serious dramatic expose of slavery AND an exploitation film. Not that this means the picture is a mess and has no idea what it’s trying to do, but frankly, this notion that there even exists such a thing as “exploitation” films is something I find just a little bit idiotic. Film by its very nature as a visual AND commercial art form IS exploitative – it ultimately has to be in order to be successful. Like melodrama, it’s either good or bad. It works or it doesn’t. And Mandingo works – it communicates a truth as hard and blistering as we’ve seen on this subject. Frankly, not even the legendary television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots and most certainly not McQueen's 12 Years a Slave come close to matching the sheer creepy, jaw-dropping horror of Mandingo.

Mandingo's original poster, a vivid take on the famous Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh pose from Gone With The Wind (but with a double dose of flame enshrouded miscegenation) was not only great marketing, but a more-than-apt visual encapsulation of the movie. I reject the notion of Mandingo as camp. It's as definitive a film on slavery and as fine a motion picture to grace the canon of a truly great American director, the much-maligned and oft-forgotten Richard Fleischer.

To read my full review of Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" click HERE.