Queen Crab (2015)

 

Dr Miller is a scientist experimenting with grapes that he has genetically engineered with enhanced growth properties.  Unbeknown to the good Doctor, however, his daughter Melissa has been feeding these grapes to her 'best friend', a crab that lives in the local lake.

Unfortunately, Melissa and her buddy are soon separated: a laboratory explosion kills both her parents, and she is sent to live with relatives.

Twenty years later, Melissa returns to her childhood home, and something huge begins to stir beneath the waters of the lake ...

So yeah, what we have here is your basic 'girl meets crab, girl accidentally turns crab into giant monster' scenario.

Now, you might well look at this film's title and immediate write it off as yet another minimum effort Asylum creature feature, but it's not actually from the cinematic bottom-feeders.  Instead it comes from writer-director Brett Piper, who has been offering up low budget SF since the 1980s.

And let's be clear: this is definitely low budget SF.  You might expect this to be most obviously demonstrated by the film's effects, but these prove a surprisingly mixed bag.  There's definitely some cheap and unconvincing CGI on display, but the production team have used a mixture of other techniques, including real crabs, practical props, and even stop motion.  I love a bit of a well-executed stop motion, and the work here really isn't too bad at all.  Especially for the effort required.  While I wouldn't ever call the results "realistic", I do think it looks pretty good.

It is in fact the film's acting that is the most obvious symptom of the low budget.  It's a bad sign that the kid playing Melissa-as-a-child is one of the most convincing performers on your roster, but that's absolutely the case here.

Of course, even with dodgy effects and even dodgier acting, a film can still be fun - I do adore nonsense like Hawk the Slayer and Starcrash, after all - but does Queen Crab manage that achievement?

To some extent, yes.

Piper clearly had his tongue somewhat in his cheek as he wrote the script; the State Wildlife department has procedures for mutations, mad scientists and genetic bombs, for instance, and I really don't think people can get away with assaulting sheriff's deputies the way they all do in this movie. Even if the deputy does deserve it.  I also don't think that "this local guy has a fully functional World War 2 tank" is something the local sheriff would give a nod and wink to, the way we see here.

But really, this is all just part and parcel of everything in the film being over-the-top; each and every human character is apparently completely lacking in impulse control - and in many cases, also lacking in the ability to say anything that isn't unnecessarily hostile.  It's fair to say that you probably won't mourn too many of the crab's victims.

Importantly, the giant crab rampage that is the film's finale is actually rather good fun.  I especially liked the scene where it tears apart a shack to get at the person hiding inside.  It's pretty well conceived and executed.

Queen Crab is cheap schlock, but it's surprisingly well-done cheap schlock. I'd only recommend it to people for whom that's a selling point, but if you're in that cohort, maybe give it a try.

A Quiet Place (2018)

 

Aliens with highly sensitive hearing take over the Earth and kill most of the human population. The Abbott family, living on an isolated farm in the middle of the forest, are among the few survivors. They take special precautions in order to avoid making noise, such as making sand paths through the forest to avoid stepping on crunching leaves.  They also do almost all of their communication through sign language, which they know due to their eldest child being deaf. 

Despite all their precautions, however, the Abbotts' existence is a precarious one.  The aliens are big, strong, fast and tough, and there are still several of them prowling the area.  

The pressure of never making a sound is unrelenting, and the strain of their situation is wearing ever heavier on the family.  Sooner or later, something is going to go wrong ... will any of them survive when it does?

A Quiet Place was a huge critical and financial success, and I can see why.  It's very effectively structured and performed.  

The film establishes its scenario and mood from the offset, with an opening sequence that not only does an effective job of communicating the 'rules' of the aliens without extensive exposition, but also makes it clear that safety is most definitely not guaranteed.

Silence is integral to the film's concept, and it commits to this.  Not only do the characters only communicate verbally in very limited circumstances, but the film itself is very sparing in its use of background music.  The film doesn't completely eliminate its use, but it definitely keeps it very pared back and subtle.  I think this was a smart choice, given the movie's theme.

Key to the film's success of course is the cast, who are uniformly strong.  They all do a good job of (often mutely) convey their emotional connection and distress.  They also do an excellent job of selling the tension of moments where the (largely CGI) monsters are prowling around.

Plot-wise, the film is mostly good.  To give credit where credit is due, the major story element that was bugging me through the first half of the movie was given a decent explanation and answer.  Still, I did think there were a few minor gaps in the logic, and they occasionally dragged me a little out of the experience.  In particular, whatever the movie claims, the aliens aren't blind - they interact with their environment too much for that to be true, grabbing onto banisters, not walking into walls by accident, and so on.  I got distracted wondering how they actually 'saw', on a couple of occasions. 

But overall any complaints I have are frankly minor quibbles.  This is a tense and entertaining film, and - as long as monster movies aren't on your 'no go' list - well worth a watch.

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

After the death of her mother, nine-year-old Beth Harmon is sent to stay at the Methuen Home for Girls.  There she discovers two things that will define the next couple decades of her life.  The first is chess, which she learns from the Home's janitor and for which she has a prodigious natural ability.  The second, rather more problematically, are sedatives.  It being the 1950s, the Metheun Home uses these to keep its charges 'calm'.  Even once she finally gets adopted, Beth will struggle with a tendency toward substance abuse that both facilitates and undermines her meteoric career as a professional Chess player.

It may be hard to imagine today, but in the Cold War, Chess was a big deal, with the Soviet Union's domination of the game being a running sore spot for the West.  The fictitious story of young Beth Harmon feels in some respects like a version of the events in Bobby Fischer's life.  Fischer was a child chess prodigy and the only non-Soviet player to hold the world championship in the entire Cold War period.  Fischer was also volatile and unpredictable, much as Harmon is.  Fischer also and espoused violently anti-Semitic beliefs in the latter stages of his life, which thankfully is not something Harmon seems to share.

Queen's Gambit is a well-made, well-acted period piece about one woman's struggle to both win respect in her career and to grapple with her own weaknesses.  Chess is a useful narrative tool in this regard, since its relatively clean win-lose-or-draw outcomes make it easy to signal to the audience that Harmon is good at what she does.  The chess that's played is actually rather good, too, and it seems to have led to a revival of interest in the game, with grandmasters like Daniel Naroditsky racking up 100,000+ subscriber counts on Youtube.  My only caveat would be that Beth's proclivity for self-destructive behaviour may test the patience of some viewers.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

Some kind of menace is tearing the heads off high-rise window-cleaners and snatching sunbathing ladies from the roofs of their homes.  Simultaneously, small-time crook Jimmy Quinn is failing in a half-hearted attempt to go straight and instead finds himself taking part in robbing a jewelry store.  This robbery goes rather astray.  Quinn escapes, but he gets hurt in the process and loses the loot.  That's not going to sit well with the rest of the gang when they catch up to him, but ol' Jimmy has a more immediate problem: his choice of hiding places leads him straight to the nest of some giant avian monster.

Strangely enough, this last misstep might actually be good news for Quinn.  He's fortunate enough to not attract the beast's attention, so now he's the only one in New York who knows where it makes its nest.  Which is about to be the question on everyon'e lips, as even in movies, people will eventually notice an eighty-foot long dragon flapping around the Big Apple and snacking on folks.

Q: The Winged Serpent (which is sometimes known just by the first word, or by only the second through fourth) does try to explain people's apparent inability to see this monster - it's smart enough to attack from out of the sun.  Which I guess makes sense as to why its victims can't spot it, but it does kind of fail to justify how it evades the other ten million eyeballs in the city - particularly since that nest I mentioned is in the Chrysler Building, which has thousands of people going in and out of it every day.

Of course, this is a movie in which an 80 foot stop motion dragon, summoned to life by a crazed priest of the Aztec gods, menaces New York.  So coherent story-telling is not really its strong point.  Being gonzo, on the other hand, is something it's pretty good at.

While not in any technical sense a "good" film, I found Q to be a thoroughly enjoyable one.  If you're at all a fan of giant monster antics, it's worth your time.

The Avengers (2012)

When The Avengers was announced, there was still something of a question mark hanging over the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Yes, Marvel had made several solid films, but (1) only the two Iron Man entries could be considered bona fide hits, financially speaking and (2) they'd not previously tackled a team film, and there was a lot of scepticism about whether audiences would embrace the larger roster of characters.

Yeah, well we can consider that question mark well and truly blown away.  Audiences flocked to The Avengers: as of the time of writing, it is the 4th highest grossing film of all time, though I suspect a certain other Disney property will knock it down a spot (it it hasn't already).

I'm pleased to say that the success of the film is wholly deserved.  Marvel assembled a great cast over the course of the "phase one" films leading up to this one, then it gave them a smart, funny, action-packed script to work with.  Whether it be Black Widow's interrogation scenes, the banter between Iron Man and Captain America, or the city smashing climactic action sequence, there's almost certain to be something about the film that charms you.  For me, it's the way the film shows the central cast being heroes, not just soldiers.  Given the choice between saving lives and just punching bad guys, they invariably and instinctively choose the former.

The plot?  Rogue Asgardian Loki arrives on Earth and steals a very dangerous artefact.  Only an eclectic group of powerful but-not-exactly-easy-to-work-with individuals can stop him.  If they can get on the same page long enough to gel as a team, that is.

Great stuff: if you only see one Marvel film, it should probably be this one (though honestly it does work even better if you've seen the first Thor, Iron Man and Captain America films before sitting down to it).

Quest for Fire (1981)

It's a pretty gutsy move to make a film where none of the characters' dialogue is intended to be understood.  A huge amount of information must be conveyed by actions, body language and expressions.  Quest for Fire succeeds so well in this regard that I wanted to give it a Qualified Recommendation just for that.

Unfortunately, there are some pretty significant flaws with the film that ultimately made me come down on the 'not' side of recommendation.  Still, if you have an interest in the craft of film-making, especially acting or direction, then I think this is a movie that you should see.  It does a great job with the non-verbal communication.

The film begins with a text scrawl informing us that 80,000 years ago, humanity relied on fire for survival, but lacked the means to make it for themselves.  When they found a natural fire, they had to protect and nurture it, tending it and feeding it constantly to prevent it from being extinguished.

We then meet a primitive tribe who possess such a fire.  Alas for them, they're about to be attacked by another, even more primitive group of humanoids.  Despite being bestial, naked ape-men, the attackers launch an orchestrated and quite sophisticated attack.  In fact, for my money it feels rather more orchestrated and sophisticated than it ought to be.

In any case, the attack succeeds in driving the first tribe out of their cave, and the little 'starter fire' they keep in a skull goes out in the escape.  So they are left in the middle of a swamp without their source of warmth and main protection from wild animals.  The obvious thing then to do is send off several strong warriors to look for a new fire and bring it back for the tribe.

The rest of the film is dedicated to ... well, to the titular quest.  The trio of warriors journey across the land, crossing paths with dangerous animals and cannibalistic neanderthals, among other encounters.  And it's here that the movie really has its issues.  While many of the individual sequences are quite well-executed, it feels like some scenes are given much more time than they need while others - which are more plot-relevant - are brushed aside in seconds.  Then there is the fact that the events we see require a period of weeks - if not months - to have gone by before the group returns from their quest, but nothing in the film suggests that more than a few days have elapsed.  These two issues combined to make me disengage from the film well before the - blatantly obvious half an hour earlier - conclusion rolled around.

Queen Margot (1994)

This film opens with an opulent wedding and the revelry that follows it, then descends into a brutal orgy of killing.  This is the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre; an orchestrated wave of violence against French Huguenots (Protestants) by the Catholic majority.  It is also the grand set piece of the film, a shocking and unrelenting assault that remains with you well after the film has moved on.  Certainly, when I first saw this film over a decade ago, it was the part that I best remembered.

As fine (if unpleasant) a piece of film-making as it is though, the massacre also ties into the movie's biggest flaw: once it is done, two-thirds of the movie still remain, and they're simply not as memorable as that first act.

Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty going on, from the efforts of the King's mother to murder Henri of Navarre - the man she fears will take her son's throne - to the plans of Henri's followers to spirit him and his wife out of the King's clutches.

Henri's wife is the titular Margot, played by the luminescent Isabelle Adjani.  Margot is a Catholic, and her relationship with the Huguenot Henri is a reluctant one.  But having been forced to marry him, she works to preserve her husband's life.  This seems to come from a mixture of reluctant admiration for his comparatively ethical behaviour, and a belief that it would be a sin for her to do otherwise.

None of which stops her (or Henri) from taking lovers.

This is a well-staged costumed drama.  It's violence and sexuality will mean it is not to all tastes, and the lower-key plotting of the later parts of the film did not hold my interest so well on this second viewing as they did on the first, but if you've got an interest in one of the more turbulent periods of French history, it is worth seeing.

Queen of the Amazons (1947)

Proudly wearing its 1947 racism on its sleeve, Queen of the Amazons tracks the efforts of a young woman to find her missing fiance.

I bet you can guess who has him :)

Anyway, it's all very straightforward stuff, with the titular queen turning out to be white woman who was shipwrecked as a child. She and the missing fiance have fallen in love, but it all works out OK since the woman who was looking for him has fallen in love with the man she hired to lead the search. Two thirds of the movie's run time is taken up with this search, with the last third revolving around the two groups finally meeting up, and then battling an ivory smuggler who has been mentioned from time to time in the dialgue.

Racism aside, it's not a terrible B-movie, though quite what it was doing in a SciFi Classics box set, I'm not sure.