A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: yes, this film is blatantly 'Yojimbo re-made as a western'.  So blatantly, in fact, that the makers of the Japanese film were able to successfully sue, delaying the release of this movie in the US for three years.  And even when it finally did hit American shores, it got pretty negative reviews.

None of which stopped it from becoming one of the most successful Italian films released to that date.  Probably because, whatever the critics might say, it's a darn fine film.

Whether it's Sergio Leone's visual flair as a director, Clint Eastwood's charisma (he might not do a lot of actual acting in the film, but he can be darn compelling at what he does do), or the iconic soundtrack from Ennio Morricone, there's plenty to like about this film, and it is easy to see why it launched the 'spaghetti western' as an international box office force.

Eastwood plays 'Joe' (likely an assumed name, and the character would later be dubbed The Man With No Name), a drifter who wanders into a miserable little town divided by two rival crime bosses.  Joe (which I am using because it's shorter than the alternative) quickly makes a name for himself by gunning down four men, and turns that notoriety to his own ends by playing off the two sides against each other and escalating the tensions in the town.  His motives for doing so are pretty murky: this is not the clean-cut hero of Eastwood's Rawhide days.

The film boasts lots of well-staged sequences, both of action and of black comedy.  It's by no means a terribly realistic film (though not anywhere near as gonzo as Sabata) but it is consistent to its own tone and conceits throughout, which makes it easy to accept the events on screen.

Quality film-making, and well worth a look.

Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965)

This is the sixth Godzilla film, which means the box set has again skipped an entry.  Between Mothra vs Godzilla and this film came Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.  That was the film in which Big G executed his face turn, moving from 'menace to mankind' to 'protector of the planet' when he helped drive off the three-headed dragon monster, King Ghidorah.

To this film then is left the dubious distinction of being the first in the franchise to be really light on the kaiju action.  "Too much time was spent on the humans and not enough on the monsters" is a common complaint about films in this genre.  It's not always a justified one, I think.  We need human characters to deliver exposition and be in peril, after all.  Also, they give a reason for cool spaceships, mecha and tanks to be in the film, and I'm OK with that.  But Astro-Monster gives us a pretty anemic pair of battles, which aren't helped by excessive 'cutesy' stuff with Godzilla.  No-one needs to see Big G start actually boxing mid-fight, nor do they need to see him doing weird celebratory jumping jacks after winning a skirmish.

Anyway, the plot of this film introduces aliens into the Godzilla-verse, when humanity makes contact with Planet X.  The Xians request the assistance of Earth in stopping the rampage of what they call "Monster Zero" (which is one of the film's alternate titles).  They want to bring Godzilla and Rodan (a giant pteranadon) to X to drive off Ghidorah (for that's who Monster Zero is).  In return, they offer the cure for cancer.

I bet you won't be surprised if I spoil the fact that the Xians aren't as friendly as they seem.  Even the characters in the film aren't entirely convinced of the Xians story, but they feel they can't ignore the possibility of a cure for cancer.

In a lot of ways, this film feels like a template for the much later Godzilla: Final Wars, as that too has apparently benevolent aliens with monster controlling powers and a name starting with X.  Final Wars is a lot more fun than this, though.  See it instead.

Best Friends Forever (2013)

This was the first movie project I ever backed on Kickstarter, way back in April 2012.  There were issues with getting DVD production, however, which means that I only recently got a copy of the film.  I bumped it up to the top of the viewing queue because I like to support independent films where I can, and I was hoping it would be good.

And it is pretty good, actually.  Certainly many levels above a film like The Sky Has Fallen.  Which proves a decent film for comparison purposes, since both pictures focus largely on two people, and their interaction as they travel together, with occasional interruptions where they encounter other characters.  They also share a post-apocalyptic edge, though it's much more backgrounded in this movie.

Harriet is a comic book artist who is leaving LA to begin post-graduate studies in Austin, Texas.  She's driving to her new home, and her best friend Reba is coming along for the ride.  Reba's less than thrilled that her BFF is leaving her, but she's loyally doing the best friend thing.

What throws a crimp in their plans (other than a secret Harriet is keeping) is the sudden detonation of nuclear weapons in multiple US cities.  It's some time before either of the women knows this has happened - they somehow miss the mushroom cloud that rises in the distance at one point - but they begin to experience the fallout pretty quickly.

The metaphorical fallout, that is.  If they were in the real fallout, they'd either be very dead or Bethesda would be suing them.

Increasingly perplexed as to the lack of functioning phones and the aberrant behaviour of the few people they meet on the road, the two women press on with the journey.  Sooner or later, however, they're going to discover what's happened, and it is then that their friendship will really be tested.

So it's very much a story about friendship.  Don't go into it expecting a punky action flick.  In this respect, I think the DVD cover is a mistake.  It's a nice picture, but I think it gives the impression of a different movie to the one they actually made.

The cast is all solid, as is the script: you can see this was made by people who understand how films work.  I do think they could have tightened it up in a few places (the gas station scene goes a little long, IMO), but it's funny when it means to be, and only when it means to be.  No unintentional comedy here.


If you're interested in seeing a sometimes darkly humorous story about the friendship between two women who are dealing with the end of the world, Best Friends Forever has you covered.

The Manipulator (1971)

Mickey Rooney is pretty much the main reason to watch this film.  He's on screen for almost all of the 80-some minute runtime.  He plays BJ Lang, a make-up artist from the studio era of Hollywood.  Old BJ isn't playing with a full deck.  He believes himself to be a film director, ordering around a host of underlings as he films his version of Cyrano de Bergerac.  Of course, the 'underlings' exist only in his mind: when they do answer, it's BJ himself providing their voices.

But BJ is not entirely alone in his fantasy world.  He has a leading lady for his film: an actress he's kidnapped and held for some time.  He keeps this young woman tied up in a wheelchair, and rolls her out for Roxanne's scenes.  With considerable reluctance, she indulges his manic demands.

The actress playing the actress (ooh, meta) is not given much chance to shine: her delivery of her lines as Roxanne are pretty bad, but then she has little reason to want to turn in a good performance; just one that keeps her alive.  When she is not being Roxanne, she merely gets to be petulant and whiny until she finally manages to escape the wheelchair (because c'mon, you knew she had to at some point).

Unfortunately, the plot of the film doesn't stretch to anywhere near the run time, and it sags pretty badly after about half an hour or so.  Not even Rooney's manic performance can hold your interest indefinitely when it has so little else to complement it.  If you watch the first ten minutes, you've pretty much seen everything the movie has to offer.

The movie does have pretty nice cinematography, and some suitably surreal scenes when we see what's happening in BJ's mind, but they're a case of style over substance, and substance is something the film is sadly lacking.

Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Sometimes you watch a movie, and it ends, and you're like "what the heck was that about?".  Occasionally that's not such a bad thing, because the film has other qualities: visual beauty, evocative atmosphere, or insane gonzo-ness.

Alas, this film offers none of those three qualities, though it is definitely a "what the heck?" experience.

Lucy is a college student who works multiple jobs and spends her spare time visiting a socially awkward friend who obviously has a thing for her, and picking up casual sex partners at an expensive bar.

The jobs she works are all pretty menial, and Lucy is struggling to make rent (and pay for the drinks at that club, probably).  So when she sees an ad in the student newspaper for a high-paying role in 'lingerie silver service', she calls the number.  $250 an hour is $250 an hour, after all.

Lucy's quite attractive in a porcelain way (as you can see above) and she gets the job.  It soon leads to a new job offer.  This one's a bit more outre though: she will be drugged and left naked in a bed.  Someone will pay to spend time with her while she's unconscious.  She's promised there will be no penetration.  How much she is being paid for this is never specified, but it must be quite a lot.

Anyway, that's the premise.  A variety of other stuff happens after that but frankly none of it seems to go anywhere.  The film is not without good qualities: it is nicely shot, and Emily Browning delivers a good performance as Lucy.  The scenes where is unconscious with her customers are generally as unsettling as such a situation ought to be, too.  But ultimately, we're not given much reason to like Lucy or care about her, and the film doesn't present any particularly compelling questions or plot threads, and the end ... well who knows what's going on there (I understand what happens, I just don't know what the heck it's trying to convey, in having those things happen).
 

Mothra vs Godzilla (1964)

After the success of the original Godzilla, the film-makers immediately spat out a sequel, in which a second creature (identical in abilities to the first) terrorises Japan.  At the end of that movie, the new Godzilla gets buried in an avalanche.  Seven years later, he emerged from under the rubble to battle King Kong, a fight that ended in the Pacific Ocean, with only Kong swimming away, and Big G's fate unknown (the urban legend that Godzilla wins in the Japanese version of the film is untrue, by the way).

Two years after that, the fourth Godzilla film - but the second in this box set - was released.  It begins with a hurricane sweeping the coast of Japan.  The clean-up effort involves a massive pumping rig that will clear away all the flooding.  Amidst the debris, however, a pair of reporters find a strange, scale-like object larger than a dinner plate.  They ponder what this might be, but are soon called away on other business: a giant egg has been seen floating in the sea!

The egg is brought ashore by fishermen, who sell it to an unscrupulous showman who plans to make an amusement park around it.  I'm not sure that an egg, even one 10 metres long, is really that much of an attraction, but perhaps people in 60s Japan were hard up for entertainment.

Two doll-sized women turn up to provide us with helpful exposition at this point.  It seems the egg belongs to their god, Mothra, and was accidentally washed away from its proper home during the recent hurricane.  The reporters try to help them get back the egg, but the showman isn't about to give up his star attraction so easily.  So the doll women return to their island empty-handed.

Meanwhile, the waters from the hurricane have been pumped away, exposing the mud flats below, and who should emerge but Big G himself, apparently recovered from his battle with Kong.  Soon, the giant lizard will be menacing not just all of Japan, but Mothra's egg.  Will we see a Kaiju showdown as the climax of the film?  I think we might!

This is one of the better-regarded Godzilla films, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it to most viewers.  The transition to colour hasn't been kind to the effects, which in my opinion worked better in black and white.  Also, there comes a point where you're like "oh, that's how Godzilla will be defeated but not killed this time, that's quite clever", but then the film drags the process on and on and on until I was seriously considering hitting the double speed button.

For fans of the giant monster genre only.

The Sky Has Fallen (2009)

I picked this film up through a kickstarter last year, where they were raising money to be able to enter the movie (which was made several years earlier) into festivals and the like.  I've had a fairly good experience with kickstarter movies on the whole, but alas, this does not continue that tradition.

The kickstarter listed two main selling points for the movie.  The first was that it uses purely physical effects, with no CGI.  That's very rare in low budget film these days, as (terrible) CGI has become much cheaper than doing things 'for real', which is attractive when you're on a microbudget, but leads to awfulness like the blood spatters in Killjoy.

The second selling point was the premise.  While it's basically a zombie film, it had a wrinkle or two that sounded like it might do something interesting.  So what were those wrinkles, and did the film deliver on the promise of 'something interesting'?  (spoiler: no it did not)

A sudden and violent plague has wiped out most of humanity.  Some people - what percentage is not said - are immune and thus survive.  Unfortunately for those who did not die, things are about to get worse.  Black-clad figures follow the plague, torturing and killing any living person they find and then reanimating their corpses as zombie killing machines that they use to hunt the next batch of survivors.

It was the second point, much more than the first, that made me decide to try the film.  The addition of a deliberate agency behind the zombies, one that could control the undead and was using them for some purpose, would eliminate one of the common weaknesses of the genre, which is that zombies are more of an environmental hazard or natural disaster than actual villains.

Who are these black figures?  Why are they doing what they do?  What is their goal?  Can they be stopped?  These are all obvious questions arising from the premise, and to be fair, they're all questions the film asks ... it just makes no effort to answer any of them.

What we get instead is two people wandering around a forest, having lots of introspective conversations (which tend to be filmed in a most unimaginative shot-reverse shot pattern), while occasionally being interrupted by clumps of zombies.  They then massacre the zombies in badly-staged fight scenes before going back to introspection.

Some of the make-up is good, and the two central performances are actually technically decent for the most part, but the cinematography and choreography are poor and the script is awful.

Stay away.