House of Cards (1990)

Some or all of you are likely to be more familiar with the Netflix series of the same name, but this is the original mini-series adaptation of Michael Dobbs's novel.  I was a big fan of the show when I originally saw it back in the late 1990s, but does it still hold up nearly 25 years after it was made?

The answer is not entirely.  Not because the show is any worse now than then, though it is notably dated by political and technological developments that would render may of the main character's ploys impossible today, but because of the aforementioned Netflix series.  The newer version is a much more extensive and ambitious project, already running 26 episodes (this had 4).  I've only watched the first season of it so far, but the extra time allowed by the longer format allows for a more nuanced and complex narrative, and feels more 'real' because the protagonist has to work a lot harder to succeed in it.

But that's enough spruiking of the new series.  This is still a fine bit of TV.  It trades pretty heavily on the charisma of its two leads, but fortunately they're up to the task.  Ian Richardson is excellent as the ruthless Francis Urquhart, while Sussanah Harker manages the difficult task of making her character smart but still credulous enough to be drawn into his web.

Urquhart is chief whip of the Conservative Party, responsible for keeping the rank and file MPs in line and adhering to government policy.  The party has recently won a narrow election victory and Urquhart has been promised a senior role in the new administration.

Instead, the incoming Prime Minister reneges on his earlier promise, insisting that Urquhart is too valuable in his current role and that the government could not survive without him.  Urquhart is initially dismissive of this statement when he discusses it with his wife, but she suggests that there is more truth in it than he realises: that he could bring down the Prime Minister, and take the job for himself.

So begins Urquhart's Machiavellian plan to seize the most senior postion in UK politics.  As I said before, said plan simply would not work today.  Even in the context of the late 80s or early 90s, I think some elements are dubious.  For a group of supposedly sophisticated politicians, his rivals sure do leap eagerly into the traps he lays for them.  The story tries to justify that, but I'm not sure it wholly succeeds.

Those quibbles aside, however, this is an engaging if rather cynical show, with strong performances at its core.  Worth checking out if you don't mind the bastardry, especially if you want something that's less time-intensive than the Netflix adaptation.

Bloodrayne (2005)

Uwe Boll is the kind of film-maker who says 'actresses want too much money to appear nude - just hire some prostitutes for the scene instead'.  And this is the kind of movie where he says it (in the scene with Meatloaf - because a has-been rocker is someone Boll will pay for).

Based, as many of Boll's films have been, on a computer game, Bloodrayne has spawned two dull as dishwater sequels.  I'm not sure why, given that it made back less than 20% of its budget at the box office, but Boll's ways are mysterious.

So, full disclosure: this film is terrible, but I like it anyway.  It's not as terrible as Boll's House of the Dead was, nor do I have such an unreasoning affection for it as I do for that catastrophically ill-conceived zombie film, but it's pretty darn bad.  Kristanna Loken has her merits as an actor, but none of them (unless you count her figure) are show-cased in this film.  Michael Madsen appears on the verge of falling over drunk in almost every scene he's in.  Michelle Rodriguez seems to be trying to put on some kind of accent (or possibly just disguise her normal accent) with uneven degrees of success.  And then there's the script.

Oh my, the script.

I mean, I'll give the writing in Bloodrayne this much: it feels like something out of a computer game.  We have the characters receiving their quest in a tavern, not one but two expositionary conversations that don't even try to disguise the fact that they're nothing but info dump cut scenes, and a blatant 'mini boss fight' about halfway through.

It's also deeply stupid.  For starters, while there are incompetent minions in most forms of media, the minions in Bloodrayne take it to a new level.  "How do they dress themselves in the morning?" levels of dumb.  Then there are the character motivations which appear, whole cloth, out of nothing. "I will not harm you.  I desire to kill only vampires" says Rayne, two minutes after we saw her kill half a dozen humans, and ten minutes before she'll kill a bunch more.  I mean sure, the humans she kills are all bad people, but they're still not vampires, you know?

The actual plot?  It goes something like this: Rayne's the half-human, half-vampire child of Ben Kingsley's boss vamp, and she's got to go on a quest to recover some magical macguffins in order to be strong enough to take him on in a fight.  There will be large quantities of blood sprayed (it rarely just spills in this film) in the process.

Hypnotically bad.  This was the second time I've seen the film (though of course I'd not previously watched the actual DVD), and I had just as much fun as the first time.

Barbarossa: Siege Lord (2009)

This movie - which was also released under the title Sword of War - pretty clearly wants to be the new Braveheart almost as badly as that film wanted to be the new Spartacus.  There are lots of stirring speeches about 'Freedom!' (or at least, they're supposed to be stirring), lots of battle scenes, and skullduggery and treachery aplenty before the final climactic battle between good and evil.

Or actually, not between good and evil, but protagonist and antagonist.  Because one of the ways in which this film does vary from its obvious inspirations is in having a fairly sympathetic protrayal of both sides of the conflict.  It's apropos that this film is named for the antagonist of the piece, rather than the protagonist, as it nicely signals this more balanced approach.  I doubt that was actually the intent of the choice of name: that probably comes down to the fact that Barbarossa is a highly recognisable title in Europe.  But it makes a good 'after the fact' symbol.

So does this film measure up to either of its forebears?  Well, it's certainly no Spartacus.  The acting is decidedly uneven.  I suspect the dialogue was done entirely in post production, which probably contributes.  The script also has some howlingly silly stuff in it: the aforementioned speeches being one of them, but the 'secret weapon' of the 'heroes' takes the cake.  It's not a good plan to have your climactic battle scene reduce your audience to tears of laughter.

Despite all that, I quite enjoyed this highly fictionalised account of the war between Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) and the Italian cities of the Lombard League.  The relatively sympathetic portrayal of the Emperor helped, I think.  Sure, the Lombards are obviously intended to be the heroes, with all their shouts of 'Freedom!', but Barbarossa is at least shown to be an honorable - if implacable - foe.

I can't ultimately recommend this, because it's longer than it needs to be, and the final battle is an astonishingly ill-conceived piece of cinema.  But I didn't mind the experience as a whole.  You don't often see film-makers shooting (however inaccurately) for this kind of historical epic, these days.

Downfall (2004)

The list of victims of Hitler's regime is enormous.  Most people are probably aware of some of them: the six million Jews murdered in concentration camps, the progroms against homosexuals, the Allied soldiers, the families suffering through the Blitz, and so on.

This movie is about one group of victims who tend to be overlooked: the German people themselves.  Make no mistake, I don't mean that it attempts to put them on the same standing as the Jews (I'd be outraged if it did), and it does not attempt to deny their culpability in their own ... well, their own downfall.  There's a memorable scene in the film where Goebbels sneers 'The German people chose this.  They gave us the mandate, and now they're going to get their throats cut.'

But having accepted that the German people were culpable in the horrors that befell them, the film pulls no punches in depicting them.  Whether it be the 12 year old boys enlisting to fight, the old men executed for not taking up arms, or just the failure of anyone to do anything to stop Hitler's madness, the film does not shy away.  Nor does it flinch from showing the various ways in which the Fuhrer's entourage react to increasingly inevitable defeat.  Some respond with unflinching fanaticism, others with futile outrage at the impending disaster, and still others with bleak fatalism.  Importantly, these are all reactions to losing the war, not to waging it.  No-one gets ret-conned into a secret anti-war activist.  Like I said, there's no attempt to deny culpability.

This is a well made film on every front, albeit one that will not be to everyone's taste.  If nothing else, it's a 2.5 hour subtitled movie.  Honestly, I think it's a little too long at that run time: Hitler commits suicide around the 90 minute mark and without Bruno Ganz's mesmerising performance the film feels a little adrift.  So did the people in Hitler's circle, I am sure, but if your characters are bored you wouldn't illustrate that by boring the audience, would you?

And then of course there is the subject matter, which is pretty grim.  Lots of people prefer their films to be lighter than this one.  So it won't be for everyone.  But if you want some idea of what the last days in Berlin were like, based on the memories of someone who was there (one of Hitler's secretaries), then this is well worth your time.  It's a powerful if occasionally deeply uncomfortable movie to watch.

George of the Jungle (1997)

This is a very silly movie.

I mean very silly.  Massively over the top pratfalls, wrestling matches with lions, a talking ape, and characters who actively interact with the narrator.

It's also jolly good fun.

The original George of the Jungle was an animated series that ran for a mere 17 episodes (each episode containing three 10 minute shorts) in 1967.  How it got turned into a movie thirty years later I don't know, but I'm rather glad it did.

George himself is a blatant Tarzan parody, possessing all the strength, stamina and animal controlling tricks of the original, but coupled with dim-witted good humour and a habit of accidentally swinging into trees.  Fortunately, he's aided by his much smarter ape 'brother', Ape, and by his 'big grey peanut-lovin' poochie' Shep (an elephant).

In the movie, George happens to save an American tourist - Ursula - from a lion.  She is knocked out in the fracas, so he takes her back to his tree-house to recover.  Alas, her jerk of a fiance follows her, and in that fracas, George ends up being shot.  But only slightly.  Still, it gets the fiance sent to jail and motivates Ursula to bring him back to the US for medical treatment.

You can probably guess what follows: comedic spots about George's unfamiliarity with the modern world, a growing attraction between the two leads, an an overbearing mother who has no intention of seeing her daughter marry some 'jungle man'.  Why is it always the mother in these things, I wonder?

This movie skates by on its self-aware, irreverent script and the affable charm of its leads, but frankly, that's the smart call with a premise like this.  George of the Jungle delivers a hour and a half of light entertainment that should leave you smiling at the end.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

Godzilla's seventh screen outing pits Big G against a giant lobster.  Not a giant lobster with laser vision, or a giant lobster with rocket-powered claws ... just a very large shellfish.  I'd accuse the studio of becoming lazy with their monster ideas, but his previous enemies were a dragon and a giant moth, so it's a little late for 'becoming'.

So Ebirah isn't exactly the most innovative or exciting concept for an enemy.  And he's honestly not very imposing in combat, either.  He gets in a few licks against Godzilla, but everyone's favourite atomic dinosaur never really looks all that troubled by his new foe.

Despite the above, I quite liked this.  The human cast are a step or too more entertaining than they usually are, and Astro Monster's excessively gonzo characterisation of Godzilla has been toned back considerably (though not entirely).  So hurray for both those factors.  Big G gets to rampage a bit more aggressively in this one, too.  Some pretty fun model smashing sequences.

The plot?  Oh yeah ... a fishing boat goes missing, but a psychic assures the family of one of the missing fishermen that he isn't in the land of the dead.  So his brother steals a yacht to go looking for him, as you do.  He brings along several other guys (without their consent).  They get shipwrecked on an island, and discover an Evil Conspiracy, which is protected by the eponymous Horror of the Deep.

Fortunately, Godzilla happens to be taking a nap under a mountain on that very island.  What are the chances?  So all out heroes need to do is avoid being caught by the evil conspiracy, wake up Godzilla so he can beat up Ebirah, and somehow avoid becoming collateral damage in the process.  Piece of cake, right?

If you're a kaiju fan, this is a pretty fair offering.  Otherwise, you can skip it.

Throw Out The Anchor! (1974)

Ahh, the 70s.  When racial stereotypes, cracks about women's lib, and drunk people falling over were enough to make you a comedy.

This film introduces us to the Porterfield family, widower Jonathon, his son who doesn't matter to the movie's events at all, and his daughter who has one plot-relevant moment and gives us some exposition but is otherwise almost as extraneous as the son.  They're in Florida because dad's booked a holiday on a houseboat.

Unfortunately, he booked it eight months earlier and the lush who owned the boat has drunk the money rather than using it to get the house boat ready.  The Porterfields aren't easily dissuaded though and and squat in some of the boats in the area until the locals agree to fix up a vessel for them.

Naturally, repairing said junkheap leads to bonding between the newcomers and their hosts, and when Evil Businessmen attempt to drive out the locals in order to build a road to nowhere (which they want to do for reasons that are never made clear), the Porterfields and their new-found friends band together to indulge in a bit of larceny, stealing the machinery that is required to build the road.

For reasons to do with the movie needing a happy ending, the bad guys don't just call the cops on these criminals and instead cave to their demands, calling off the whole ill-defined nefarious plot.

With more focus on the younger characters and more energy overall, this might have passed for a cheap knock-off of an Apple Dumpling Gang-esque nature (which it couldn't be since it came out a year earlier).  As is, it kinda uncomfortably tries to fit a lot of fairly sleazy humour into a G-rated film.

It's not awful, but you're not missing anything by not seeing it.