This Island Rod

Glen Ficcara and John Requa penned Bad Santa (2003) before debuting as directors with their energetic queer-romance-cum-criminal farce I Love You, Philip Morris (2009), and scored a hit with Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011). Focus, their latest, aims to be an elegantly tricky star vehicle for weathered pro Will Smith and up-and-comer Margot Robbie, annexing a style of movie that’s often proved perfect for showcasing headliner charm, the con artist caper flick, ever since The Sting (1973). Focus also echoes back to criminal-lover comedy-thrillers of days past from Trouble in Paradise (1933) to To Catch a Thief (1955) to How to Steal a Million (1966) and on. Ficcara and Requa start well, unfolding a leisurely sequence of flirtation in an upmarket hotel, the sort of place where Nicky (Smith) permanently resides: bounteous blonde Jess (Robbie) suddenly lands at his table, seeking respite from her drunk boyfriend. Thing is, Nicky recognises this old play from the extortionist playbook, because he’s a grifter of fearsome talent and reputation, and he playfully lets the incompetent duo act out their scene before rumbling their amateur-hour theatrics. Jess approaches Nicky later and appeals to him to help her step up to the flimflammer big leagues, and, once she trails him to New Orleans where he runs a massive operation of pickpockets and con artists working the Mardi Gras crowds, he takes her under his wing. Jess rapidly evolves under his tutelage whilst romance sparks, but Nicky’s wilfully solitary existence leads him to break off with her just after a triumphal score, skipping out of a taxi as she rolls on to the rest of her life as a teary mess. Three years later fate sees them cross paths again however, and a new game entwines them as Nicky is hired by racing team boss Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro) to con a rival Australian racer, McEwen (Robert Taylor), in competing for ownership of a new design: Jess appears, now a fully formed glamour queen, amidst the plush excitement of race season parties. Except that, yes, not all is as it seems.

Ficcara and Requa certainly glaze this fantasia in the loveliest of wrappings, via Xavier Grobet’s cinematography, providing images of crystalline sharpness infused with chic allure. Early sequences evoke Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998) as it delights in depicting sexual gamesmanship spiced with transgressive allure (and indeed, with all the pseudo-jazzy music and retro charm in celebrating cute criminals, the film owes a lot to Soderbergh’s Oceansfilms as well), and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), as it nails down the the simultaneously romantic and alienating feeling of a rootless life spent in classy hotels, like a glossy magazine ad sifted through shots that recall Edward Hopper’s Automat and Chop Suey joint, before a shift to the European scene proves a ripe environment to shoot the actors in places of romantic bustle that call to mind ‘50s jet-set dramas. Robbie’s vivid, old-fashioned movie star looks seem utterly at home behind sunglasses with kerchief over her hair a la Grace Kelly in some never-made Billy Wilder Euro-swank flick, or stalking poolside in bikini and stilettos, an acetylene torch of VIP sexuality. Smith has often mistaken assuming a glum attitude, compared to his ebulliently confident early persona, for maturation, but Focus thankfully lets his recent ill-advised attempts to make himself paterfamilias of the showbiz family Robinson fall by the wayside and cast him as a rakishly professional criminal armed with a glib tongue and a surplus of cool, albeit with some angst lurking deep beneath his surface composure.

Nicky’s mentorship of Jess takes her through the looking glass into a world of cheats and thieves that seems nonetheless cosy, and gives her – and the audience – the vicarious thrill of looking down the nose at the suckers of the world, couched mostly in sexual terms: Nicky explicitly defines the cultural anxiety people of their breed prey on, of guys with infidelity on their minds and money to spend. But of course, Nicky’s boding facet proves to be his moral side fighting its way out, and the film inevitably puts him and Jess through the wringer for their lifestyle, it never exactly forces them repudiate it either. The film’s central set-piece sees Nicky take Jess to a football game in the Superdome, ensconced in a private box with the superrich, and getting into a game of one-upmanship making pointless bets over the game's progressive turns with tycoon Liyuan (B.D. Wong), a famously enthusiastic gambler. Hints have been dropped that Nicky has a history of problem gambling, Jess is increasingly anxious, and the scene builds as a mesh of images and audio cues whilst keeping the exact nature of what we’re watching – is it another inspired sting or a harsh revelation of Nicky’s self-destructive side? – hidden until the end. Wong’s performance adds to the fun. Sadly, however, Focus starts to go off the rails after this sequence, as the interesting depiction of Nicky as a man willing to lay waste to his personal relationships for the sake of maintain his shark-like existence must give way to yearning and a weakly developed metaphor for the problems of relationship trust.

It also seems compulsory today that all film depicting con artists be structured like a con game, where the audience will eventually be blindsided by the ingenious method of the unfolding story. Here, the key moment of big revelation, in which Nicky explains his ingenious method proves, in a waggish touch from a couple of very knowing director-screenwriters, to be a total crock. But the film doesn't provide anything of real urgency or effective pizazz to make up for it, and Focus like a lot of modern films mistakes plot for story, too obsessed with its own sleight of hand when it should have settled for charting the blend of love and distrust that defines Nicky and Jess’s relationship. The attentiveness to building a mood at once romantic and sly that defines the film’s early scenes, worked with a slightly oblique sense of humour, falls victim to clichéd expectations and a narrative that pushes well past believability, whilst Ficcara and Requa fill in quite a bit of running time with musical montages. That plot is a big problem too, neither basic enough to create clear ground for Smith and Robbie to spar and dally, nor actually complicated and devious enough to enjoy as a display of genre mechanics. The finale is oddly static and the resolution proper, although Ficcara and Requa lay groundwork for it all through the movie, is still clumsy and anti-climactic. Focus is a missed opportunity to make a modern classic of breezy, happily unethical star-gazing: it’s like a cocktail with all the right ingredients but the bartender forgot to shake to achieve the proper taste and texture. Adrian Martinez offers naughty flippancy as Nicky’s occasional partner-in-crime and official comic relief chunky guy; Gerald McRaney evokes his Major Dad days as Garriga’s hard-ass majordomo with a secret.

Peter Strickland’s first two films, Katalin Varga (2009) and Berberian Sound Studio (2013), were arresting works from a distinctive and enormously gifted talent. The first film, produced on a tiny budget in rural Transylvania, was a largely straight-forward revenge drama that built to a cruelly ironic climax and provided, on the way, an enriching portrait of its heroine’s propensity for role-playing, a method of acting in life in order to correct the damage done to her and essentially revise her own narrative. The follow-up charted the mental collapse of a movie sound technician where that collapse was presented via the texture of cinema itself. The Duke of Burgundy to a certain extent melds these two disparate predecessors as it readily references the peculiar charms of ‘70s European trash cinema again whilst delving into David Lynchian headspace mystification, whilst returning to his first film’s fascination for woman with protean surfaces and powerful internal motives. Strickland’s calling card aesthetic apes the tone of a bygone genre of filmmaking whilst unmooring it from traditional generic storytelling’s demands for clear, essential cause-and-effect. The subject has an aspect of self-satire: the two women at the heart of The Duke of Burgundy, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), are, like Strickland, fetishists enthralled and inspired by a certain variety of backdated fantasia. Strickland introduces their world to initially bemuse the audience as to what they’re watching, as Evelyn, dressed as a maid, rides across the countryside to a large mansion, where Cynthia, the haughty lady of the house, sets her to exacting and humiliating labours. The old porn cliché of the wicked aristocrat subjecting her hapless underling to a strict regimen is enacted. When the fatal moment comes when Evelyn fails to wash one of Cynthia’s smalls, she’s dragged into the bathroom for her punishment. Except that, as it soon emerges, Cynthia and Evelyn are a couple, and what we’ve seen is the elaborate, oft-repeated routine of S&M-accented role-playing that defines and fires their relationship.

Strickland’s grasp on the specifics of this relationship, an odd, equally beguiling and perturbing blend of sheltered cherishing and transgressive impulses that subtly test the limits of that bond, confirms his talents for creating characters with unusual traits and instincts, who can be empathised with but who are not cheaply “relatable,” and scenes in the film’s first half are as good as anything Strickland has done to date. His pitch-black sense of humour emerges throughout, particularly in a droll sequence when the couple speak to a “Carpenter” (Fatma Mohamed) who specialises in building bondage equipment: disappointed that the elaborate bed/cage the Carpenter is most famed for making can’t be built and delivered in time for Evelyn’s birthday, Evelyn pricks her ears up hopefully when the Carpenter suggests a human toilet rig instead. Later, when Cynthia confronts Evelyn after she’s caught polishing the boots of a neighbour, the tone is at once deeply farcical and uncomfortably grave, as the roles of the characters the two are playing – reprehending mistress and doe-eyed, pitiable slave – blend with their actual characters – offended lover and her wayward partner – to a degree that’s impossible to extricate. Rather than be merely drawn to the potentially comic inferences of the game the ladies sustain, Strickland comprehends that such games can be defined by a smothering self-seriousness. Evelyn’s single-minded need to get her rocks off via specific acts tramples other considerations, and her swooningly grateful protestations to Cynthia – “This is all I ever dreamed of!” – are also overweening demands that suggest both an overgrown child’s neediness and a junkie’s pleading rapacity.

The title refers to a species of butterfly as well as suggesting old-world associations of cultured power. The couple’s safe-word, “pinastri” (it's a type of moth- yes, there's a theme developing here) has an odd and foreign ring that makes it sound like an invocation, particularly when its emerges from the coffin-like cabinet Evelyn insists on being locked in – only to start begging for release in the dead of night. Cynthia, the older of the two, is tiring of being forced to meet Evelyn’s overpowering needs and mediating their life together through the prisms of enacted surfaces. Cynthia injures her back whilst hauling a crate for Evelyn to be locked up in into the bedroom. Evelyn deals awkwardly, even ignorantly with such realities, being far too obsessed with getting her rocks off in her own peculiar way. In one scene, at once beguilingly intimate and excruciatingly awkward, Strickland depicts the couple in bed after a night of connubial bliss. Awake in the morning, Cynthia wants to lounge in tactile communion, but Evelyn instead encourages her to spit threats whilst she diddles herself. Knudsen’s register of emotions, veering from warmth to offence and irritation to resigned facility, is particularly noteworthy here. The tensions between age and youth, the demands of eros versus the yearnings of domestic coupling, are expertly charted. Strickland’s revisionism here is deeper than it first appears as he takes on an old and gaudy brand of pornographic provocation defined by a fascination with lesbianism at once awed and detached from its reality: he sarcastically has his real couple attempting to fit themselves into false moulds because, well, yes, fantasies have power, and yet uses the artifice to expose the somewhat hapless humanity of Cynthia and Evelyn.

The hermetic nature of both the existence of these characters and the overall aesthetic of Strickland’s film is insistently underlined: static, mathematical designs in wallpaper contrast more oblique and organic patterns, the pinned inmates of butterfly collections where forms repeat with small variations in size and array. Such patterns inform Strickland’s visual scheme, built around recurring shots, so of which quickly become so familiar that he can use one specifically, like a glimpse of Evelyn’s coiffed and cooing appearance against the blue-tiled walls of the mansion’s toilet, as an orientating point to tell us at any given time what point the latest edition of the fantasy is up to. The film might, or might not, actually be set in period sometime in the 1960s or ‘70s, as the ladies parade in retro fashions of haute-couture spectacle and bang away on typewriters. Evelyn’s need to play the game through over and over, perhaps hoping for some ultimate perfection that will annihilate the gap between performers and performance, sees instead inevitable breakdowns in the patterning, stray and random elements disturbing the texture, frustrating her desire but also delivering from suffocation. The only neighbour seen is Lorna (Monica Swinn), a grey hausfrau constantly beating her carpets, whilst Cynthia and Evelyn occasionally go to the local institution to attend lectures in their common passion, which is, the study of moths and butterflies—a touch that echoes a wealth of erotic and surrealist art, from Luis Bunuel to A.S. Byatt to Walerian Borowczyk and Dario Argento. The lectures are also entirely delivered and listened to by groups of perfectly coiffed women, evoking Clare Booth’s The Women, or perhaps the conventions of yurianime, which depicts worlds without males where lesbianism between slender young ladies is a casual convention.

In spite of Strickland’s nominal subject of unusual sexuality, he dances about the subject in a manner that might seem admirably un-exploitative to some or prissy to others. Very little sexual activity is actually seen: the repeated climax of Cynthia and Evelyn’s play-act always takes place behind a close door, although it’s made clear by audio that it involves water sports. The one overt glimpse of something that might be construed as mildly pornographic, of Evelyn eating out Cynthia ensconced in an armchair, is refracted via a mirror in a shot that recalls the piss-elegant carnality of Radley Metzger’s Therese and Isabelle (1967). Metzger is probable influence here alongside Jesus Franco, the epicurean sides of Lucio Fulci and Argento, as well as higher-class perviness like Something for Everyone(1970) and Mulholland Drive (2001). The essence of the structuring however points in a different direction, to the algorithmic behavioural studies of Hong Sang-soo (e.g. The Day He Arrives, 2012), visions of humankind’s half-cognisant fondness for and resentment of the patterns that enclose us. In the film’s second half the same slow dissolution of perceived reality that Strickland offered in Berberian Sound Studio begins to take grip, complete with languorously mesmeric zoom shots and droning, atonal scoring that suggest the constant presence of something dark and irrational clawing at the psyches of our heroines or haunting them in the dark corridors of their decaying home. Strickland zooms in on Knudsen’s black panty-clad crotch as he journeys deeper into a Jungian zone of proto-sexual flux, and Cynthia has visions of herself and Evelyn sinking into oblivion together in the midst of dark forests, like some lost snippet from Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1961) or perhaps even echoing back to Coleridge’s ‘Cristabel’ in contemplating the deep roots of metaphor behind the Gothic figurations of forbidden sexuality.

The trouble here is that where Strickland tethered his cinematic games to the disintegration and reintegration of his antihero’s psyche in Berberian Sound Studio, this time the same stunts feel somewhat aimless, an affectation that spares Strickland from having to develop his story. There is no reason Strickland’s fascination for the oneiric, and his undoubted ability to transmute it into cinematic texture, should be beholden to any expectation of sense beyond sensory appeal: lord knows I was certainly happy to defend this from the people who regarded Berberian Sound Studioas some kind of cheat for not eventually delivering genre thrills. Strickland’s work here can be defended as he studies a situation that is definably kinky but still essentially commonplace as opposed to more genuinely transgressive asocial behaviour: certainly the ironic gap between life’s mundanity and the yearning for the transformative power of grand fantasy is part of his theme as well as an ingrained aspect of his creative disposition. And yet his method accidentally retards his hopes for such irony to gain power, because he’s exiled everyday life from the picture. His moves beyond the confines of the Cynthia-Evelyn tryst are instead stylised to seem like only another aspect of it, making his joke arch rather than sly. Strickland isn’t yet as good at capturing the radical, ephemeral fluctuations of the dreamtime veldt as Lynch, or as bold as the horror filmmakers he references in creating dreamlike textures out of concrete stories: the journey here doesn’t seem to have much to say about the mindscapes of his heroines, and the imagery lacks value beyond superficial prettiness.

Strickland lets his film dissolve into visual white noise at one point, as Cynthia envisions herself smothered in a swarm of moths, in a moment has a similar quality to that wonderful adjunct in Berberian Sound Studio where the onscreen movie suddenly fractured and gave way to the protagonist’s rural documentary – but it’s not as clever or jarring a swerve. There’s something oddly fussy about Strickland’s filmmaking this time around as well as repetitious, an over-determined quality to his digressive phantasmagoria that means that it never quite catches afire and burns with pure inner life. Strickland has wound himself into his characters: they cannot operate without a myth, a way and mode of seeing and feeling to filter their desires and react against, and at this point in his creative evolution Strickland can’t either. Having watched Franco’s Eugenia (1971) not long before this, the contrast was striking, as Franco’s cruder yet equally hypnotic film took a similar folie-a-deux to far more interesting and visceral places. Strickland, by comparison, comes across as a prim bourgeois hiding behind a façade of art. I doubt he really is that, and yet the type of misbehaving anti-art Strickland clearly adores had courage on levels he’s not yet ready or willing to seize. I hope for his next film Strickland ventures back out into the forest and the primal facts as he did with Katalin Varga. The Duke of Burgundy is a fascinating piece of moviemaking, but also a quiet misfire from a potentially major filmmaker.

Heads up, folks; the For The Love Of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon starts in one week's time, and I hope you're all readier for it than I am. The still above comes from the movie that is the object of our efforts this year, Cupid in Quarantine, a one-reel comedy about a young couple so determined to stay together they fake a smallpox outbreak. Moving Picture Review said: “It is a good story, handled well by Miss Elinor Field… [whose] vivaciousness permeates the entire picture, filling it with life and action and a humor that is contagious.” Yes, folks, remember when comedies were actually funny and charming?

I've already told you about Blogathon, our format and our essential aims, but for those who missed it or just need a reminder:

The theme for this year is Science Fiction. You can also post on silent film, film preservation, and film history. Perhaps even, if you're some kind of super-genius, you can combine all of these.

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Ferdy on Films will host on Wednesday, May 13 to Thursday, May 14.
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Wonders in the Dark will host on Sunday, May 17.

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For the Love of Film

Put one of these ads on your blog's sidebar or any place it'll fit. Feel free to shamelessly shill for the Blogathon any place and in any manner you see fit, from linking on social media to BASE jumping from the Empire State Building with an NFPF banner trailing behind you in the free air. Just remember I will disavow all knowledge of the affair to the police.

This year, as always, we have a slew of great raffle prizes for donors, so if you want to win one, just give money (yes, fellow tightwads, there's a catch to every great thing, isn't there?)

This year we have...

...Mike Smith and Adam Selzer’s book Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry:

A set of 3-D rarities from Flicker Alley:

A deluxe two-disc set of In the Land of the Head Hunters from Milestone Films:

Farran Smith Nehme’s screwball novel Missing Reels:

The script of Jerry Lewis’ infamous unseen film The Day the Clown Cried:

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Let's see...links...donation...raffle prizes...have I forgotten anything?

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Right -- let's get funky now!

The new age starts today -- the Film Preservation Blogathon 2015 kicks off this morning. Our great project to raise money for the National Film Preservation/EYE Museum project to restore Cupid in Quarantine -- or is it our mad dream? Well, remember, they called Galileo and Einstein mad too!

The host site for the first two days is Ferdy on Films. If you are planning to post a piece on your blog and submit it for the blogathon today or tomorrow, then proceed to Ferdy on Films, and post a link and heads-up message there.

This blog will take over as host at midnight on Friday 15 (US CDT) and end at midnight on Saturday 16. On those two days, either post your link and comment here, or send it to me in email: wahe[at]dodo[dot]com[dot]au

Wonders in the Darkwill take over Sunday 17th, the last day of the blogathon.

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Welcome. You have come in search of the unknown, the unexplained, the answers to the teeming mysteries of the universe. This Island Rod will now be steering the Film Preservation Blogathon through the furthest reaches of internet space in an attempt to find these answers, to forge new paths in the darkest parts of the creative and analytical mind, and protect the vulnerable and decaying history of your species. Enter the stasis tube, connect your life support apparatus, and place yourself in the hands of our experienced astro-navigators.

Please join me a gracious thank-you for Marilyn Ferdinand for handling blogathon duties for the first two days at Ferdy on Films, and to all of those who have participated so far.

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Friday 15th of May:

The canny David Cairns of Shadowplay leaps back into the fray with a double bill study of thrifty sci-fi, Curt Siodmak's The Magnetic Monster and Montgomery Tully's Battle Beneath the Earth, the latter of which I will admit to loving for most of the reasons David castigates it for...

This essay is part of the For The Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon 2015.

The sea boils as figures swathed in futuristic swimwear lurch out of the black water. Masked men with scorching-hot skin kidnap hapless citizens in the middle of the Tokyo noir-ised so well by Sam Fuller. Bewigged Empresses of lost civilisations lord over spear-wielding submariners. Colossal war machines rise from the ocean and scourge the sky. Swarms of flying saucers rocket out of volcanoes to lay waste to cities. Pagoda dragon kajius menace the shadowy depths. Atragon is a veritable visual and thematic encyclopaedia of Japanese pop science fiction, marshalled by Ishiro Honda. Akira Kurosawa’s former assistant director had suddenly and irrevocably defined his national cinema’s sci-fi generics for the next sixty years with the monochrome iconography of Godzilla (1954), and followed it up with The Mysterians (1957). Those two films provided much of the bedrock for both the kaiju and mecha strains of Japanese sci-fi, the nightmare spectre of the A-bomb in the former begetting the rise of a new super-scientific age and its ingenious wares rising to defend against such existential terrors. Atragon follows on from The Mysterians in contemplating humanity warring with an invasive force in a clash where only know-how can counter aggression. This time the evil power is the sunken continent of Mu, buried beneath the ocean waves for millennia, and now resurging to bully the rest of the world into submission with their power over earthquakes and tides. The source material, a novel by Shunrō Oshikawa, mediated via an illustrated version by Honda’s regular design collaborator Shigeru Komatsuzaki, doesn’t make for a movie as authentically bonkers as Honda’s later Matango (1966), which would conflate nuclear paranoia with drug use and a proto-Cronenbergian sense of body distortion. But Atragon is one of the best-made and most sheerly entertaining works of ‘60s sci-fi cinema.

“This isn’t a thriller!” barks a photographer at his hapless model as she tries to model a leopard skin bikini with Kobe’s grungy docklands standing in for tropical paradise, only for her to ruin the desired effect pulchritude by pointing at the mysterious steaming being rising from the waves. A car carrying a kidnapped industrialist tears by them and crashes into the harbour, and the next day the car is hauled out without any bodies inside. In spite of the photographer's words, these early scenes strongly resemble the spy and urban thriller genres just taking off at the time, with a cold-open pre-credit sequence the same year as the James Bond team thought of the same thing, and more than a hint of burlesque aimed at the popular brand of superhero movies serials mushrooming on Japanese movie and TV screens at the time, the likes of Moonlight Mask and Prince of Space, with the same dashing blend of streetwise venturing and futuristic mystery, as well as Honda’s own more down-to-earth recent sci-fi thrillers The H-Man (1958) and The Human Vapour (1960). Something of the same spirit, too, of Feulliadian surrealism only slightly askance from Georges Franju’s Judex the same year. The photographers in the opening scene, Susumu (Takashima) and Yoshito (Yu Fujiki), are moonlighting reporters on the make, trying to please editors by providing sex appeal and pop thrills as Yoshito dresses up as a one-eyed gunman: is Honda’s tongue wiggling in his cheek in noting his own sturdy attempts to take his fantastic material seriously and mock producers interested in violence and sexploitation for a quick buck, whilst also managing to work both in?

The journalists gawk in daylight as the crashed car is hauled from the waters, but Yoshito is quickly distracted by a pretty girl, Makoto (Yōko Fujiyama), and leap to snare as a model. Makoto proves a player in the proliferating enigmas herself. Raised by shipping magnate and retired naval commander Kusumi (Ken Uehara, a stalwart actor and also father of Red Beard star Yûzô Kayama), Makoto is actually the daughter of his former subordinate, Captain Hachiro Jinguji (Kurosawa regular Jun Tazaki), who vanished along with an experimental Imperial submarine on the eve of surrender at the end of World War 2. Makoto proves popular with mysterious lurkers. A man calling himself “Agent 23” (Akihiko Hirata) tries to snatch Makoto and deliver her into the hands of more steaming frogmen. Another pursuer, Amano (Yoshifumi Tajima), is netted by the police and proves to be one of her father’s crewmen, sent to keep an eye on her. The kidnappings and incursions prove to have been early moves on behalf of the Mu people to clear away the one obstacle to their intended re-emergence and world conquest. Jinguji and his crew have been hiding out on a remote tropical island, building a new, ingenious and incredibly powerful war machine, the Gotengo (Atragon in the anglicised retitling), a submarine that can also fly, equipped with a drill nose that can cut through solid rock, and a freezing gun. Mu rocks the world with earthquakes and sends out its own submarines to attack shipping, whilst sending messages to the authorities demanding that the Atragon be destroyed. At the behest of the UN, Kusumi, with Makoto, Susumiu, Yoshito, and another journalist, Umino (Kenji Sahara) in tow, instead has Amano take him to Jinguji’s island: he intends to ask his old comrade to use the Atragon against Mu. Umino is another Mu agent lurks hiding behind a paste-on Beatnik beard and long junkie overcoat – like the other Mu-ites, he stores energy in his body that can be directed out and also makes him feel cold in normal conditions – and he attempts to sabotage the Atragon by blowing up its harbour. But the biggest impediment to sending Atragon into battle against Mu proves to be Jinguji himself: the Captain protests to Kusumi that he’s spent the last decade or so building the warship specifically to be used to fight a new war of Imperial conquest for Japan.

Taking on this fascinating, and perhaps then-touchy, theme marks Atragon as Honda’s most direct and forceful follow-up to Godzilla as a contemplation of the war’s impact on Japanese life and world-view. Honda references real-life cases of former Imperial soldiers refusing to surrender and contemplates the nation’s new, officially pacifistic stance. The age of “patriotism” as Kusumi and Jinguji understand it has given way to a conveniently internationalist struggle, whilst the young generation, embodied by Makoto and Susumu, is appalled by Jinguji’s chauvinism and the thought of meaningless further conflict. Makoto, initially injured by Jinguji’s refusal to acknowledge her when the party of strangers enters his jungle realm, storms out in tears as she realises how wedded her father is to his dream of restored militarist glory. Susumu berates the Captain for his rigidity, but the Captain reveals his human anguish suppressed under his hardened soldier’s exterior, having held on to his one keepsake of Makoto since the war and sent Amano to keep an eye on her. His dedication to duty is ultimately celebrated whilst he is stirred to think of the world in different terms. If Godzilla articulated the dread and victimisation felt by many ordinary citizens after the war via monstrous metaphor, Atragon is surprisingly overt in confronting related issues, even resembling a new manifesto for a nation moving out of an era of shame and tragedy. The Atragon itself encapsulates all of the technical virtuosity that would soon make Japan a superpower of technology, whilst the plot carefully reanimates a sense of proud invention and active gutsiness that can only be wielded after divesting the past and its illusions, whilst also repurposing some of the old militarist iconography for a new age (as would Space Battleship Yamato, almost certainly influenced by Atragon).

Equally easy to read Mu as a fantastically veiled but critical depiction of historical Japan, an autocracy with a nominally powerful monarch, the Empress (Tetsuko Kobayashi), but actually controlled by a Shogun-like High Priest (Hideyo Amamoto), emerging from isolation to make war with a mismatched blend of antiquated culture and super-technology, and then meeting its comeuppance in terrible annihilation. Of course, such readings, whilst all but unavoidable, do make for lopsided appreciation. Atragon is chiefly a straightforward, cheery adventure yarn, but with a scale, speed, and ambition to its storytelling that anticipates the modern SFX blockbuster school far more than any other movie of its time. There’s a swathe of influences in its genetic make-up, mixing Verne’s Nemo and Robur with dashes of She (1935) and any number of space operas, except resituated in inner space. Honda’s pictures, captured in the elegant expanse of Tohoscope, have just the right mixture of conceptual immediacy and fervent, comic book-like strangeness – the Mu aquanauts rising from the sea that steams around their heated bodies, the colourful rituals in the Mu city with its soaring Cyclopean vaults and idols, the death rays fixed on the bows of their submarine shaped like coiling serpents, or the blazing, fulsome hues of the wigs worn by the Mu Empress and her consorts,a touch that makes me wonder of Jacques Rivette saw this before making Duelle (Une Quarantaine) (1974). To sell the film to fans of the already well-defined Toho formula, the producers had Honda and screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa add a monster to the original storyline, and in doing so created one of the genre’s stalwarts, Manda: worshipped as a guardian god by Mu’s citizens, Manda, snake-like and spiny, resembles an intriguingly classical Asian idea of a dragon, and represents perhaps a deliberate attempt on the filmmakers’ parts to consciously meld more localised fantastic folklore with the storyline’s recycled tropes of Victorian scientifiction. Manda is glimpsed memorably first as a mass of giant scales through the window of a Mu cell, but the beast is dispatched of a tad easily, as indeed are the Mu-ites in general. Manda however would come back in later Toho extravaganzas as a member of the Godzilla troupe, whilst the idea of sending a super-weapon up against a kaiju was also about to become a genre staple, echoing through King Kong Escapes (1967), Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974), and on to Pacific Rim (2013).

Akira Ifukube’s score is also perhaps his finest moment, whilst, of course, a very big part of the film’s form and charm was provided the special effects, staged by Toho’s maestro Tsuburaya. The effects occasionally graze hokey, as with Manda’s assault on the Atragon where he’s rather too obviously a puppet, and some effects shots are recycled from other Toho films like Mothra (1962). But there’s still some impressive spectacle in the climactic scenes as the Atragon drills through into the heart of Mu’s power supply, drawn from geothermic energy, to sabotage colossal generators – sequences that must have been grand on a massive scope movie screen. The film’s second half sees Susumu and Makoto captured by Mu, but breaking out with the Empress as hostage, thanks to some conveniently mislaid explosives, whilst the Atragon buries Manda under ice. The apocalyptic final images turn unexpectedly poignant and bear out again the curiously insistent weight of Honda’s parable, as Mu disappears in an explosion that rises from the sea and swamps its ships like one of the Bikini tests, and the Empress, stricken by the sight of her homeland’s destruction, leaps from the Atragon’s deck and swims into the smoking maelstrom to die with her people, leaving off with the tragic final vision of the Empress’s red hair fading to a tiny dot as she heads into oblivion. It’s a vision that gives deeper meaning to usual “there but for the grace of God” note of many such final vistas of calamity that regularly came at the end of lost civilisation dramas, because it’s clear Honda has envisioned the awful alternative if the nuttier extremists in the Imperial cabinet had gained their way, and boiled his concept down to one powerful image, looking forward twenty-seven years to Honda’s return to collaborating with Kurosawa, for Dreams (1990), and its hauntingly similar refrains and invocations of guilt and extinction.

Day Four of the blogathon is here: the last day for This Island Rod’s host duties, before handing over to Wonders in the Dark where the blogathon will conclude on Sunday. So send me your links and we’ll make it an escape by the skin of our teeth to remember. And, PLEASE DONATE– we want your moolah! Or else Cupid in Quarantine will stay quarantined, and everyone will do this to all you cheapos in the street:

Oh, and please remember folks: I live in Australia, which means my hours are somewhat askew from those of many of you -- yes, even my Nosferatu-esque hours -- so please try and get your links in reasonably early (by which I mean 12-1pm CDT) or be prepared to wait until quite late (c. 8pm CDT) until they're posted.

Blogathon Participants Roll

Saturday May 16:

David Cairns strikes again at Shadowplay with a wry perusal of Jack Arnold’s Monster on the Campus…

… my own second entry for the blogathon, and the first piece I’ve ever offered under the banner of This Island Rod itself, is in praise of Ishiro Honda’s epic Atragon…

...meanwhile at 21 Essays, Lee Price's series celebrating Ray Harryhausen and First Men on the Moon now expands to appreciate the regular composers on Harryhausen's films, including the great Bernard Herrmann and under-appreciated First Men on the Moon scorer Laurie Johnson...

...unbeknownst to all, the ingenious Ivan G. Shreve of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear has been going to town on Edward L. Cahn's Creature with an Atom Brain, a film torn from the pages of the lurid pulp scifi mag of your dreams...

...fantabulous funabulist Betty Jo Tucker contributes by way of a review, of Nicholas Eliopoulis' class documentary on Mary Pickford and her vital place in the early history of movies, over at Memosaic. We also owe acclaim to Betty Jo for her breathlessly delivered donation of a copy of her book Confessions of a Move Addict. Way to go, Betty Jo...

...and that sinister scrivener Robert Hornak keeps his Watchlist ticking with a look at North Korea's most famous giant malevolent lizard not currently employed as a Minister of State, Pulgasari...

...whilst Krell Laboratory technician Christianne careens into the third part of her evaluation of Robert Heinlein's work as transposed into cinema, centring on this year's Predestination...

...and joltin'Jandy Hardesty jumps in at The Frame with a heady exploration of the mystique of the lost film and the Romanticism of cinephilia in all its multifarious glory.

…and I am done. This Island Rod yields the lightsaber to Wonders in the Dark for the last day of the blogathon. Anyone still hoping to participate should direct their posts over there, and the indefatigable Sam Juliano will induct you into his sleepless host of dread minions.

Once again, my heartiest thanks and congratulations to all contributors and donors. Excellent work, one and all. Be sure to check back here on Monday for news on donation totals and also raffle prizes.

-- Rod

PS: We also have some late entries for the blogathon still coming through here -- there's usually one or two -- from Shwyny at 365 Days 365 Classics, and it's a highly pertinent and worthwhile post too, an interview with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director of the Film Heritage Foundation, India...

...and a final (?!) post, tardy but not expelled, from the US Intellectual History site, with Andrew Hartman considering the time capsule of political and social perspectives depicted in the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who (I dig, sir, I dig)...

Tomorrowland exhibits a split personality rather common in contemporary "big" moviemaking. Based on a well-known attraction that was one of the core components of the original Disneyland, the film furthers a marketing technique that triumphed with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and much less so with The Haunted Mansion (2003), likewise inspired by popular attractions at the funfair, creating a self-perpetuating loop of brand awareness. Director and co-screenwriter Brad Bird seems entirely unconcerned by this, as you’d expect from a director who’s already made a fortune helming films for the studio and so has evidently made his peace with being a popular artist within a commercially urged bubble, as he repurposes his brief to make an ardent statement that somehow manages to be at once highly personal and blandly anonymous. Tomorrowland is the second feature film for Brad Bird, whose animated works The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles(2004), and Ratatouille (2007) are held in high esteem, whilst Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) transferred Bird’s reputation for blending action, humour, and cleverness, a magic recipe of contemporary multiplex cinema, into live-action movies. Bird seems fascinated by the problems of talent in itself – qualities that distinguish individuals and also how to fit them into working systems that make the best use of them. Even the grudging, back-handed compliments Bird afforded critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille scrabbled to appreciate the use of something otherwise held in contempt by most labourers at the coal face of mass culture: the discriminating mind. Systemology is Bird's other fascination, or perhaps rather the method by which he explores the first. He delights in the interplay of elements, both as directorial device and as a storyline precept – clockwork plans, time-and-motion studies, Murphy’s Law contingencies, and ethical contemplations of loose-cannon action abound in his work. Tomorrowland, which transmutes kiddie amusement park ride into a mythical utopian city of intellectual drop-outs who might have read Atlas Shrugged a few times too many, is officially a hymn to the binary power of optimism and creative spark: Bird argues essentially that one requires the other.

Bird kicks off with stars George Clooney and Britt Robertson in their roles as Frank Walker and Casey Newton bickering over the best way to frame the story they’re about to relate, in a painfully cute and slightly bullish manner that serves as warning about what’s coming. Casey’s high-power positivity insists on not giving any time to Frank’s attempts to confront and sensitise his audience (read, Bird’s audience) to real and daunting problems, which must instead be reduced to a mere listicle of rhetorical challenges to be faced down by unspecific can-do. Both Frank and Casey share a crucial experience: both were invitees to the eponymous commune in their time. Young Frank (Thomas Robinson) gained his invitation visiting the 1964 World’s Fair where he hoped to win a prize with a semi-functional jet pack, whilst Casey, a gal of tomorrow today, is ennobled for her relentless attempts to prevent the demolition of the old Space Shuttle launching pad. The common link is Athena (Raffey Cassidy), an apparently ageless girl with a posh English accent and a secret line in killer martial arts moves and other superhuman talents. Athena, actually an android, chose both Frank and Casey to join Tomorrowland by giving each a button marked with a T: the button is a passkey to various portals that give access to a city built in an alternative dimension by savants absconding from mundane Earth. Athena helped Frank reach the city against the wishes of her nominal boss Mr Nix (Hugh Laurie) via a secret door in the “It’s a Small World After All” exhibit (nice touch). Casey, on the other hand, gets her button along with her belongings when being released by the cops, following one of her attempts to sabotage the demolition. Whenever she touches the button, she plunges into a vision of Tomorrowland in all its splendour and ingenious flare. Only problem is, that vision is a now-dated relic of glory days, the Tomorrowland Frank entered in his day, for the city and the dream it represents have decayed for reasons that take an astonishingly long time to be drawn out, and even then are only partially clarified. Turns out at some point, in some way, Nix (subtle, guys) has taken over and depopulated Tomorrowland, and driven humankind close to catastrophe with his transmitter that broadcasts bad vibes.

Bird cowrote the script with former Lost scribe turned blockbuster screenwriter Damon Lindelof, and as with Lost Lindelof suggests comfort with some solid scifi and fantasy ideas, particularly multiple frames of reality, both alternate and simulated, and exploring the near-numinous zone that separates android and human. But for a monument to the power of invention, Tomorrowland reeks suspiciously of a multitude of well-proven models. A clash in a scifi memorabilia store tries to evoke the grand swathe of genre antecedents behind Bird’s vision, but with android assassins posing as nerds, only comes across like a rejected Men in Black scene. The alliance between crank inventor and plucky teen recalls Back to the Future (1985). Other touches suggest a conscious effort to recycle tropes from National Treasure (2004), as Casey and Frank delve into the roots of Tomorrowland (Eiffel, Verne, Tesla, and Edison were founders) and utilise a vaguely Steampunk rocket hidden in the Eiffel Tower. The mission to knock out the evil mind-control broadcast or something similar perched on top of a high building has become the laziest, most predictable climactic situation in modern genre cinema, including two variations by Joss Whedon. The gimmick of the buttons is apt – what child never hooked a collectable badge out of a Corn Flakes packet hoping it might transport them to a fantasy land? – but also bears an odd resemblance to the crucial sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) as devices of reorientating vision. Athena blends the dashing, age-inappropriate action moves of Hit Girl and Hanna whilst also evoking such stricken synthetic beings trapped between states of machine and humanity strewn across the history of the genre, such as Data or Kryten. In fact, compared to the dolorous exploration of the human impulses of AI in Alex Garland’s recently feted Ex Machina, Athena is by far the more entertaining and appealing creation, particularly as the film brushes risky territory (by Disney standards) in contemplating Frank’s lingering love turned to simmering infuriation with Athena. He fell for her as a boy only to learn of her cyborg nature, a moment that crystallised all his adult disillusionment, whilst Athena herself tries to prove her self-determination and sentient identity, the only way she can honour his all-too-human ardour.

If Tomorrowlandknew how to weave its best, most inspired aspects together and when to bring them to the boil, it could have been a triumph. Instead, it’s a fumbling, often joyless experience, except in brief flashes, like the sight of the Eiffel Tower splitting apart and revealing a hidden rocket, Athena battling giant robots, and the pivotal, appropriately grandiloquent moment of Casey’s first glimpse of Tomorrowland itself, a jutting citadel of silvery spires like the Emerald City rebuilt by Edsel Ford. The key sequence of Casey’s first proper tour of Tomorrowland is a fun, sprawling, lovingly crafted spectacle purveyed in one “shot.” Bird blends colourful futurist vision with retro fantasia, as it depicts wonders of times to come but envisioned through an aesthetic veil that evokes that tony, shiny-eyed, plastic feel of a 1950s advertisement. But Bird is in such a hurry to unwrap his present for the audience that he spoils the impact of this moment by already letting us see Tomorrowland from Frank’s perspective barely after the film has started. Elsewhere, the limitations of Bird's ingenuity are revealed. He stages a fight within Frank’s house, with its many rigged traps for intruders, a scene that should be a terrific, zesty display, but instead falls flat because of cramped, visually dull staging. Nix’s robot henchmen are supposed to menace through perpetually beaming, pleasant facades, but again Bird fumbles this, never finding the menace in perma-smiles. The finale sports a conceptual similarity to the climax of Thor: The Dark World, as a battlers fall through doors into different dimensions, but without any verve or sense of mechanistic interaction. Bird's conceptual and theatrical wit utterly desert him.

The film looks good in an increasingly common contemporary way that’s cumulatively onerous, with slick, metallic textures and muted colour palette. But the big failing here is the script, which recapitulates Lindelof’s incapacity to structure a feature film (after Prometheus, 2011, and Star Trek: Into Darkness, 2013, made it clear enough), and lays bare Bird’s lack of certainty in the non-animated realm when he can’t just build a film around set-pieces. Tomorrowland descends into a ham-fisted screed that only illustrates its themes in the most sententious of methods, and lots of expository dialogue delivered whilst driving cars that still, somehow, leaves much of the story fudged. Like last year’s Interstellar, Tomorrowland obviously yearns to establish its director as Steven Spielberg’s heir apparent. But whereas Spielberg, in his signal sci-fi and adventure films, elevated himself to the pinnacle of popular filmmaking by articulating his essential themes as drama (ET is the personification of youthful wonder, not a commentary on the notion), today the necessity of spelling things in essayistic fashion out permeates his successors’ efforts to a tedious degree. Tomorrowland makes the fatal mistake of telling you it’s about the battle between creation and nihilism when it should be depicting that clash. Anyway, Tomorrowland is actually closer to dumbed-down Joe Dante, particularly Explorers (1986), which similarly depicted adolescent resourcefulness via a melange of tropes that signified its director’s love of the pop culture cornucopia he grew up in during the ‘50s, with the important corollary that for Dante that melange, good and bad, was exhibited as the wares of his imagination and sensibility, whereas for Bird that cornucopia is mere background radiation, a style for him to annex. Moreover, Dante’s storytelling moved with supple propulsion over an hour and a half, where Tomorrowlandis sludgy at two hours and still can’t purvey its business properly. Tomorrowland is so incompetently expostulated that it takes an hour to introduce Clooney and properly arrives in the title world with about half an hour to go: one gets the feeling the framing device was concocted precisely to get some George in at the beginning.

Backstory about how Nix came to be alone and all-powerful in the city is elided, as too is the reason for Frank’s own eventual exile back to Earth. Casey and Frank arrive just in time for Laurie’s dull, vague villain to rant for a while about how he tried to save the world from itself by pushing it closer to the edge with negative messaging in the hope it would eventually create a backlash, only to find that appealing to a species obsessed with end times. So this twit is the best the great city of geniuses can throw up, eh? Little of the film makes sense even when it comes to smaller details. The Tomorrowland induction badges plunge their bearers into a hologram where they move about in the real world whilst seeing the alternative, as Casey finds the hard way after bumping into walls and falling down the stairs. At the end we see quite a few folks receiving the badges in the middle of cities – I wonder how many of them would end up under a bus that way? Okay, a quibble perhaps, but this kind of sloppiness in detailing adds up to create an empty, anechoic work. Clooney, usually such a grounded and graceful performer, is left up the creek playing a charmless, resentful character opposite Robertson’s tediously chipper Casey, who is like Lisa Simpson and Tracy Flick got mushed together in Seth Brundle’s matter machine. Whilst the film sets up Casey as the presumed saviour of Tomorrowland and Earth because of her abilities, in the end this adds up to nothing more than a give-‘em-hell attitude and a mission to blow something up. Hooray for smarts! Her essential dullness is emphasised as Bird gives the film over to the tragic, perverse romance of Frank and Athena for an iota of emotional investment, and Cassidy steals the film.

The real crime of Tomorrowlandhowever is that Bird and Lindelof murder the poetry of their essential ideas by refusing to trust them. Worse, they take a hectoring tone that's close to a form of moral bullying, accosting other artists for their refusal to get with the program. Hell, I agree with their basic proposition that the best answer to dark times is invention and determination, and in a Disney tent-pole flick there’s only so much space for contemplating the essence of pragmatic optimism. But Tomorrowland takes some lazy, second-hand swipes at the current popularity of dystopian dramas in YA books and their cinematic companions, most of which provoke awareness of eternal dangers, whilst Bird offers a “positive” vision that’s evasive and annoying and disconnected from any immediate purpose. Bird’s works have been critiqued as Ayn Rand-esque in their celebration of the enlightened and enabled few (not however a specifically Randian idea, but one that’s traversed several wings of the political spectrum in the past). And although as I already noted Tomorrowland has Randian aspects too, it’s actually just Bird’s fantasy transmutation of working for Disney itself, which in his eyes is the powerhouse of dreams that embraces the quixotic and lets them fly free of all concerns as long as they service key business parameters. Bird ends with a final montage that finally locates the kind of enthusiastic, man-on-a-mission feeling he’s been after, circling back to his killer key image (Michael Giacchino’s excellent if often vacuum-packed score flares triumphantly) as Frank and Casey reach out to the dreamers of the world and restart the great project, including scientists and artists. But would there be a place for William Burroughs in Tomorrowland? Lautreamont? Lou Reed? People who inspired, in other words, precisely by pulling apart the shiny official surfaces and depicting the black shrivelled root of so many hegemonies? The poptimism of Tomorrowland as it exists within the film has been destroyed by its lack of introspection, an irony Bird seems scarcely aware of, and this in turn destroys the metaphor entire. Bird and Lindelof steal that basic story of They Livewhilst revising its point: it’s not the big powers of the world holding us back, but the petty, too-cool-for-you naysayers. And whilst that’s no more childish a message than most of the fare Bird is decrying offer, it could well be more cynical. What use is a utopia without anyone to call bullshit?

A chronological list of my commentaries on films featuring Christopher Lee. Self-evidently, this is a conclave of haphazardly compiled pieces, some of which I partly disagree with now (I've grown to like To The Devil A Daughter in particular much more) or would write differently today. But the sheer sprawl of them testifies, I hope, to both the breadth of Lee's career and also his utterly vital place in my love of cinema:

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Beat Girl (1960)

The Gorgon (1964)

Circus of Fear (1966)

The Devil Rides Out (1967)

The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

The Wicker Man (1973)

The Three Musketeers (1973)& The Four Musketeers (1974)

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974)

To The Devil A Daughter (1976)

Dark Shadows (2012)

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

Knives of the Avenger begs a mythical origin story involving Mario Bava, a drinking game with Sergio Leone and/or Sergio Corbucci, and a bet he couldn’t make a gothic-tinged spaghetti western with Vikings. Reality is more prosaic: Bava was asked to take up the reins from another director sacked scant days before filming, quickly revised the script, and rattled off this Norse action flick, a seemingly strange excursion for the great Latin fantasist. Knives of the Avenger has more in common with the burgeoning strain of Italianate western than with Bava’s horror films, and bears the hallmarks of a quickie production which Bava was late boarding. But Bava has first broken into directing rescuing Riccardo Freda’s films under similar circumstances, and he knew the drill. Knives of the Avengerstraddles common visual territory with The Body and the Whip (1963), with the eerie coastal setting stricken by the wind and roiling sea, as if perched on the edge of all creation, and the lucidly mythological, bare-boned world of Hercules at the Centre of the Earth (1962). The theme of protagonist dogged by their past wrongs, both done to them and committed by them, is moreover all too apt for Bava’s oeuvre of guilt manifesting as possession, and moral putrefaction infesting organs human and natural. Bava expertly negotiates the low budget in regarding his stockades and model long ships, managing to make the proceedings seem all the more starkly historical and legendary. The setting is somewhere in Viking-age Scandinavia, in the nexus of stockaded town, blissful riparian cottage, and foreboding sea: the opening shot is quietly epic as Bava scans a Volva’s elaborate beachfront shrine, drawing the Fates as maps in sand ready to be washed away by the next tide.

Karin (Elissa Pichelli, billed as Lisa Wagner) lives with her son Moki (Luciano Pollentin) in a hut, on the advice of the Volva, to hide from marauder Hagen (Fausto Tozzi). A mysterious wandering stranger with incredible knife-throwing skills, Helmut (Cameron Mitchell) passes by Karin’s farm and begs a place to rest, and Karin lets him camp by the stream and catch fish. When a pair of Hagen’s henchmen discover Karin and Moki’s hut, they try to abduct mother and son, but Hagen intervenes, killing both men in a prolonged, violent hand-to-hand battle. Karin and Moki trust Helmut after this and rely on his protection. But things are not what they appear to be, in a film where Bava’s sleight of storytelling hand spins off a complex tale of human motivation and violence from a very simple precept, and all the strands on his loom tie back to one singular incident in the past. Karin is the wife of Arald (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, who starred in Bava’s Operazione Paurathe same year), king of a Viking town, but he’s been missing for years since going on a raid to Britain. Hagen, formerly a military leader under Arald’s father the former king (Amedeo Trilli, billed as Michael Moore), broke a peace treaty by attacking the city ruled by Rurik, a famously honourable and brave warrior, during which Hagen killed Rurik’s wife and children. Hagen was exiled for this, but Rurik launched a vengeful attack anyway, during which he wounded Arald, killed the king, and raped Karin. Rurik left Arald alive, who then vowed his own revenge in the smouldering ruins of his kingdom. Fate and Bava are memorably wicked however, because Helmut is actually Rurik, a tormented man of conscience in self-exile, hunting for Hagen and now charging himself with protecting Karin and Moki, who might well be his son.

Bava, characteristically, aims exactly at the point where most of the western plotlines Knives of the Avenger evokes tend to be evasive. His film has elements of Red River (1948), Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956) in its make-up, but where those films were vague about the possibly villainous pasts of their protagonists, Bava is explicit, and he turns the shadow-play of family roles in those films and other classic westerns into outright family perversity. Where Leone purposefully stripped psychology from his death-operas and held revenge as the one, honourable motive for violence, Bava is contemptuous of those propositions, and makes the fraught interior battle of his characters the essence of his drama. Hagen’s unrestrained psychopathy drives the plot, but Bava is most interested in the theme of good people driven by the circular nature of brutality to contemplate deeds that disgust them, both Rurik and Arald, who turns up at a suitably fraught moment in the storyline. The pseudo-historical setting allows Bava this leeway; Knives represents an exact mediation between the classic peplum movie and the western which was supplanting it in popularity in Italian genre cinema, both chronologically and thematically, and Bava, who had proven how well he understood the clear-cut nature of myth with the vividly illustrated Manichaeism of Hercules at the Centre of the Earth, depicts the corruption of the noble hero Bava’s Hercules exemplified through Rurik’s plight, remaking him as the modern antihero, a loner, wounded and purified by loss, unable in spite of his heartbreaking desires to regain a place in society. Bava’s love of Hitchcock may well have influenced the mid-film flashback that completely reorientates the story and reveals the truth about Rurik, a la Vertigo (1958), and he makes sure that Rurik becomes more, rather than less, empathetic once his shame is revealed, including his hope, at once pathetic and wistful, that one day Karin might forget Arald so he can take his place.

Such fascinating gymnastics of narrative and character allow Bava to explore the sort of dualism that in horror films was usually rendered more safely metaphoric, like the possession of Katia by Asa in La Maschera del Demonio (1960), as a common human condition. Westerns and peplums both concerned themselves with moments in time when anarchy and tyranny are replaced by justice and civility; Bava depicts rather a shift between modes of justice as well as concepts of the self. Drama is built around a series of severed relationships and doppelganger fill-ins, and the crucial moment that was Karin and Arald’s wedding – an interrupted ritual that recalls both John Ford’s westerns and ancient mythology at the same time – proves to have been the severing point for past hopes and future confusions. Bava recalls Anthony Mann’s gift for depicting violence as genuinely painful and distressing on screen (indeed, Knives has aspects of a miniature sequel to Mann’s massive but equally ethically concerned The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964, whilst the final moments recall El Cid, 1961), as the various battles scattered throughout sport moments of wince-inducing epiphany, like when Rurik finally fells one of Karin’s attackers with an axe, after a fight sequence that’s almost as tightly and intensely choreographed as a Jackie Chan tussle. The stringent budget, lack of time for preparation, and setting generally precludes Bava working up such heights of stylised visualisation as marks his best work. But even with such a straitened production, Bava works some camera magic: the opening scenes set a tone of raw, totemic drama with an ambience of fatalistic beauty, and a long single-take early shot (interrupted but not disguised by a jaggedly edited-in cutaway) is an elegant blend of stop-gap invention and aesthetic coup, recalling Sam Fuller’s similarly throwaway legerdemain, as a simple pan onto breaking waves and back gives a moment for the credits to roll whilst covering a passage of time. Karin and Moki are filmed from a low angle, their footprints in the beach sand erased as they move, as figures from dreamtime. Hagen is shot in huge close-up whilst his mounted men fill the background, making fullest expressive use of the widescreen ratio, conveying the nature of Hagen’s power and egotism, and tipping a hat to Leone’s framings all at once. Bava makes his nods to Leone even more literal as he depicts Hagen adopting improvised body-armour like Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars (1964),

Rurik is envisioned in flashback as a towering figure with face hidden by a steely mask that at once evokes the new face bashed onto Asa in La Maschera del Demonio and the implacable visage of Darth Vader, and also the sweeping, sepulchral force of the vampire paterfamilias in “The Wurdalak” episode of I Tre Volti Della Paura (1963). Rurik’s dehumanisation, and depersonalisation, in thrall to his irrational fury transforms him into one of Bava’s monsters, clasping at a prostrate, screaming Karin like Mitchell’s outright villain in Sei Donne per l’Assassino (1964): to twist the knife further and clearly signal Rurik and Helmut are the same man for the first time, Bava match-cuts from flashback to present with the same framing, only this time Rurik’s hand reaches out to comfort. The tavern in the Viking town is built like a bullfighting pen, with high circular walls and stalls, setting the scene for the repeated struggles that occur there, including a vicious confrontation between Rurik and Hagen, and Rurik facing Arald, who he tries not to fight, as the upright, gallant, unforgiving husband pushes the penitent defender to make it easier to kill him in clean conscience. But Bava swaps that setting for a plunge into the underworld, returning the film to a mythic frame, filming in what looks awfully like the same underground location where Bava shot much of the finale of his Hercules entry, as Rurik and Arald launch an uneasy partnership to rescue Moki from Hagen, who kills the Volva and claims the labyrinthine tunnels of her sacred cave. Rurik’s brilliant knife-throwing saves the day and underlines his redemption, but perhaps the most telling gesture is the absolving hand Rurik places on Arald’s shoulder as they part, and the lingering look Karin gives Rurik as he vanishes from the dark caverns into the light of day: these brief instants have more stirring, moral complexity in them than dozens of other films ever accumulate. Knives of the Avenger is one of those oddities that prove just how much a good filmmaker can pack into nominally brief, cheap, disposable product.

On the massive farming fiefdom called the Golden Empire, two ranch hands stalk prey amidst in the shadows and light patterns spread on the ground by a grand homestead. They strut into the shed where the estate’s populace of Mexican farm labourers, called braceros, live, in search of handsome young Juan Martin (Joe Schneider). In a single, electrifying framing, Arnold depicts Martin’s would-be lothario pretences as he’s glimpsed combing his Elvis-age hair into a sleek mass in the bathroom window, only for the prosecutors of white, moneyed, sexually repressed authority to barge in and take hold of him by that precious hair. He’s dragged out of the bathroom and into a shed, and beaten. When Juan fights back, he’s clubbed to death with a pick handle. Martin’s friend and fellow worker Jesus Cisneros (Martin Garralaga) witnesses his murder and travels into the nearby town at the heart of Bingham County to make an appeal for justice. New-minted sheriff Ben Sadler (Jeff Chandler) begins an ordinary day’s morning, dropped off at work by his wife Helen (Barbara Lawrence), only to find the trust and understandings that underpin his community and his job are about to unravel when Cisneros makes his statement. This is because the ranch Martin’s murder occurred on belongs to Virgil Renchler (Orson Welles), a power unto himself in the locale because of imperial breadth of his property and the wealth generated by his custom sustains the town. Cisneros fingers Renchler’s top hands Ed Yates (John Larch) and Chet Huneker (Leo Gordon) as the killers, but it soon emerges that Renchler ordered Martin to be beaten for his friendship with Renchler’s daughter Skippy (Colleen Miller). Renchler’s men try to pass off Martin’s death as a road accident, but when Cisneros refuses to retract his statement, Sadler begins investigating, however reluctantly and against the increasingly frantic and hysterical warnings of his fellow lawmen and city elders, scared that with provocation Renchler might start doing business with another town.

Directed by Jack Arnold, Man in the Shadow blends modern-dress western with noir-soaked attitudes, but also follows Arnold’s string of sci-fi epics with telling overlaps. The location photography of desolate settings recalls It Came From Outer Space (1953) and Tarantula (1955). The monstrosity grows out of the remote ranch house’s clandestine isolation, as with Leo G. Carroll’s experiments in the latter. The sense of paranoia and social exclusion is pervasive in Arnold’s oeuvre, whilst the emasculation of the everyman hero is crucially similar to The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956): Chandler’s Sadler, a dude everyone likes and respects at first, becomes the incredible shrinking lawman in their eyes, to the point where he’s rendered just as powerless and victimised as the suburbanite who flees his own hungry house cat. Where those films were metaphorical, Man in the Shadow is explicit in contemplating the dark side of Atom-age America with its shiny chrome-wreathed cars and post-war assurances coexisting uneasily with lingering realities of an age of conquest and settlement that helped spread imperial domain. Arnold clearly indicts the racist disinterest in the fate of small men expressed by many of his townsfolk as a by-product of their anxiety over facing down the same source of power, whilst comprehending how their status, colour, and citizenship accords them better treatment, but still leaves them in the same position as the lowly braceros as dependents on the teat of the big boss. Renchler’s shadow hangs as vast and pendulously menacing as a massive arachnid, whilst the landscape is just as prone as Arnold’s scifi films to mysterious disappearances, changed personalities in friends, attacks of devolved beast-men, and eruptions of primal instinct in once-peaceable heroes.

Arnold follows in Anthony Mann’s footsteps in cross-breeding noir and western, recalling Mann’s Border Incident (1949) in particular, which also dealt with the mistreatment of braceros. The influence of High Noon(1952) in contemplating the lawman’s abandonment by his citizenry in the face of threat is obvious, whilst also taking some courage from the Elia Kazan-Richard Brooks school of social justice melodrama. But Arnold, who got to make Man in the Shadow after his string of fantastical successes, is more outright in the post-McCarthy, early Civil Rights-era, in contemplating a fascistic presence in American life, a notion the town’s Italian immigrant barber Tony Santoro (Mario Siletti), makes explicit when he refuses to blackball Sadler like the other townsfolk and recalls the onset of Mussolini in the ‘20s. Arnold’s eye scans the stark surrounds and rolling hills of Renchler’s estate in daylight as antiseptically blasted and drab, following his desert-set monster movies in inverting the expanses into traps of space and menace, as if documenting the same fascination for the half-hidden blood libel written in the landscape as compels Cormac McCarthy. Come night and drenching shadows rule, as when Sadler, hoping against hope that a call to a remote locale might not be a trap, ventures into an abandoned house in out in the eerie boondocks, turning mere abandoned house into a trap of decayed ambitions and waiting fate in a manner that recalls the way John Ford rendered the usually romanticised American agrarian belt as Gothic land of blight and darkness in the early scenes of The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Man in the Shadow was produced by that strangest of ‘50s cinematic entrepreneurs, Albert Zugsmith, and his and Welles’ collaboration here led to Touch of Evil (1958), which deals with very similar matters, albeit it with Wellesian baroque substituting for Arnold’s aerodynamics. Welles is relatively restrained, even distracted, as Renchler, one of those neo-pharaohic characters that actor loved playing or depicting, presenting a superficially charming and equitable figure who is crippled by a suggestive weakness in the face of his daughter, and whose power has ironically left him perplexed by even the slightest shadow of conflict, quick to protect his own interests and swat at irritations like a bear stung by bees. Skippy is a flighty, nervy Ariel at the mercy of Welles' puffy Prospero and Larch’s drooling Caliban, but has enough emerging pith to escape her gilded cage with a blend of guile and skill to alert Sadler to the probable fate of her would-be lover, and may be evolving into one of Arnold's more usually competent, self-directing female heroes. The figuration of the titan with a perturbing soft spot for a daughter or sister was fascinatingly common in American cinema of the era, and Welles would play a more blustery and potent version of the same character in The Long Hot Summer a year later. Larch and Gordon give effectively bullish performances as the asshole agents whose psychopathic aggression shows up Renchler’s pretences and propel him towards distasteful ends.

But Arnold seems more interested in the social conflict, presenting an almost Ibsenish battle of community versus existential threat with a lone hero as victimised scapegoat-prophet. That overtone of existential threat motivated Arnold’s early sci-fi films in a manner for the most part more clear-cut and obvious: where the giant tarantula and gill-man presented threats to be combated, fear here infects his small-towners in the same way the mysterious fog of Shrinking Man starts its hero’s diminution, and they in turn try to cut down their appointed hero when he inconveniences them. Sadler's status as the hero who tries to awaken his fellow man's consciousness recalls Putnam in It Came From Outer Space, but the drama, as with that movie, casts a pernicious eye on humankind's capacity for aggression, xenophobia, and wilful ignorance. Cisneros is gunned down by masked goons before the eyes of his salt-of-the-earth white friend Aiken Clay (Royal Dano). Chandler’s effective performance emphasises Sadler’s growing resolve even as he’s faced with increasingly intense pressure and hysteria-tinged resentment from his peers: his eyes evasive and downcast, his body language hunkered and oppressed, when first confronted with Cisneros’ testimony, he gains stature and clarity of diction the more he’s faced with threats and the bloom of out-and-out hostility. Humiliation and abuse do finally defeat him, in the sense that he is reduced from upright civic leader to bristling, fury-stoked avenger who tosses away his badge and goes on the warpath.

It does take a lot to get him to that point, including Cisneros’ murder, and Huneker dragging him tied and helpless around behind his pick-up truck, a Hector luckless enough to be paraded as battle trophy while still alive. Man in the Shadowsdoesn’t achieve the stature its many parts promise, chiefly because Gene L. Coon’s screenplay fails to investigate its characters with much depth or specificity, and the shape of the plot develops in a manner already too familiar by that time, down to the people-power finale. The realisation of the themes remain a little too boldface in handling to quite achieve the sort of festering mood John Sturges achieved in the similar Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and Arnold achieved greater power and intensity with his metaphors, where his feel for the brutal extremes of the human place in the universe and eccentricity of behaviour vibrated with more originality. But the film remains exciting and, whilst vindicating Sadler’s struggle in a violent climax, leaves off with a striking final image of Skippy left alone on the ranch, a sliver of white in the gloom, at once a figure out of fairy tales and a new world citizen who, infantilised by her father, can now claim the mantle of power as his corrupted regime is deposed. As critic C. Jerry Kutner once persuasively argued, Arnold was the first truly modern post-war American filmmaker with an understanding of the new era’s psychic fabric. Man in the Shadow, although ultimately merely sturdy as a study of that fabric, feels fascinatingly prognosticative in a way that again accords and perhaps excels his actual science fiction. As well as looking forward to such septic-heartland dramas as Hud (1963) and The Chase (1966), the compulsion here to deal with conspiracy, racism, sex, murder, law, and power, the forces working to warp the American centrifuge, all look forward to an era oncoming with a swiftness no-one imagined.

Such was the topsy-turvy, wide-open, frontier-like condition of Hollywood in the early 1970s that even a humble author could winnow his way into directing a movie if it looked like they might conjure a money-spinning proposition. Michael Crichton did just that, after the film version of his book The Andromeda Strain (1970) and some work writing for television, with directing the telemovie Pursuit (1972) a crucial intermediary step. Chrichton sealed a deal to make Westworld with MGM just as that studio was passing through the throes of managerial upheaval, a period of turmoil that was to make the waning studio maligned by many creative talents whose work was caught in the crossfire. Crichton provided the studio with its biggest hit of the year, and his directing career continued with a handful of good movies before running out of steam in the late ‘80s. Later, Crichton essentially ripped himself off by recycling the core idea of Westworld, of a futuristic amusement park that offers the thrill of impossible dreams but goes haywire, and repackaged it with dinosaurs for his novel Jurassic Park. The stature of Steven Spielberg’s film of that book is hard to shake these days, but Westworld is the more interesting variation on the concept for many reasons. Whereas the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park invoked the fantasies of youth, Westworld proposed a more adult, overtly satirical, acutely aimed metaphor. Delos is a triptych of fantasy theme parks built in the middle of nowhere, with clientele flown in and out by hover-jet, run by white-coated savants overseeing a cast of lifelike robots. The three parks, West World itself, Medieval World, and Roman World, are specifically marketed to men in grey flannel suits as the place to live out desires frustrated by the modern world: in essence, the freedom to kill and fuck and indulge all fantasies of power and eroticism untrammelled. Crichton reveals the carnage wrought by the entirely normal men and women (mostly men) who have come to this pleasure dome as the park’s night crews pick up the mangled, bullet-riddled bodies of the robots slain in the course of the day's fun, and take them to be repaired in laboratories that become charnel houses of circuitry and wiring.

Crichton quickly reveals his gift of the non-diegetic gab by communicating the film’s premise with clarity and ease not through mere dialogue but by playing on the audience’s ready understanding of such phenomena as TV advertising and in-flight training films. He opens with a mock TV spot for Delos where various enthused schmucks testify to the joys of their experience and slogans flash on screen, before cutting to his audience avatars, Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin), already en route to the park: Peter is torn between excitement and anxiety, listening to the information movie for broad details but prodding John, who's made the trip before, for the subtler tips. Peter and John are clearly delineated as the divorced and depressed milquetoast and the confident swinger who’s done it all, anticipating the act Woody Allen and Tony Roberts would sustain in Play It Again, Sam (1972) and Annie Hall (1977). John coaxes Peter slowly and with increasing gusto into losing his cherry West World style, riddling the local Gunslinger (Yul Brynner) with bullets and bedding a cyborg prostitute (“She’s from France.”) Eventually Peter gives in with boyish delight to the charm of Westworld, even declaring it the most real-feeling thing he’s ever done. The door is thus opened to enquiries about what reality and experience would become in a world where such things were possible, and of course, we await the moment when the experience will become much more urgent and authentic, when the system will break down and the robots, carefully designed to yield to the fantasies of the humans, no longer yield, and the carefully preordained tests and trials become all too real. But Crichton doesn’t belabour the existential ideas percolating beneath the surface of his tale, keeping things on the same level of pop sci-fi fun leavened by the Planet of the Apes series.

Thus the first hour of Westworld is essentially a wry study in egotism offered a venue to play itself out and littered with light and breezy pastiche of well-worn genre fare. Peter and John’s adventures counterpoint some of their fellows from the hover-jet, like Dick Van Patten’s banker, a diminutive and unimpressive man who nonetheless gets himself cast as the Sheriff of West World after the robot one is shot dead by John, whilst Norman Bartold plays a would-be heroic, irresistible knight battling the evil Black Knight (Michael T. Mikler) for the affections of the Queen (Victoria Shaw) in Medieval World, and various lotharios settle for getting oiled up and rubbed down in Roman World. Threaded through this however are glimpses of the management of Delos, the labour put into repairing the robots and keeping the parks operating. Crichton coolly and even at time abstractly studies the nuts and bolts of the operation, with Fred Karlin’s excellent score providing an eerie, dissociated electronic drone, giving the sense that beneath the surface Delos is actually a kind of derelict vessel, inhabited by simulacra and scientific geniuses who have voluntarily made themselves mixtures of carnies and pimps. Asimov’s heralded Three Laws have no place here: Crichton presents these robots as brilliant feats of narcissistic engineering but which have no more moral sense than a dishwasher. The outbreak of all hell in Delos is announced with the first, effective shock of Bartold getting the Black Knight’s sword through his stomach.

Westworld takes up one of Crichton’s favourite themes of technology as a potential trap and insidious force, particularly the thread of The Andromeda Strain of the super-laboratory that becomes more of an enemy to the human inhabitants than the disease they study. Here the human staff of Delos are ensconced in control centres which they can’t escape from when something as simple as a power cut occurs: eventually they will be found, all suffocated to death. Crichton lands his best mockery as he depicts one operator ordering lunch whilst another carefully coordinates the fulfilment of some salesman’s life-long onanistic fantasy of debonair triumph. Like many a clever pop artefact, Westworld invokes a host of subtext, a lot of it not even that sub, particularly as a commentary on the state of the film industry circa 1972, still feeling its way out of the late ‘60s crisis, with Crichton using the infrastructure of MGM’s bygone blockbusters as playgrounds where the merciless future will take over and stalk: the way entertainment and its makers adapt to service our wants and secret hypocrisies is skewered with a deft hand. There is even, in the distant horizon, some understanding of the internet’s allure for those seeking alternate identities and connections through technology. Casting Brynner as an oblivious robot based on his wise hero from The Magnificent Seven (1960) is the central coup, a meta-fictional touch that relies on the audience recognising the association and having a good chuckle and then watching in dismay as he stalks our wiry, nervous, all too human hero with impassive relentlessness, as if some childhood fantasy pleasure has suddenly turned nightmare. Westworld even bears a faint but definite resemblance to Deliverance (1972) and Jaws (1975) in tackling a common theme of the era (also apparent in those aforementioned Woody Allen films, if handled in a much different manner), focusing on ordinary men forced to fight for their lives, with the quick, ironic discounting of the confident manly man that forces the man more insecure in his masculinity to prove himself.

As a writer, Crichton found success combining conceptual ingenuity with entrepreneurial guile rather than through great dramatic gifts, and although Westworld displays his real and perhaps superior talent as a director, at times Crichton can’t quite excuse a certain jokey thinness here and there in Westworld, like a jolly barroom fight copied from countless real horse operas. The story develops with the kind of obviousness one doesn’t mind if the hook is good enough, and it sure is good enough; as long as the story keeps heading where you know it’s headed it doesn’t need to do too much else. Crichton doesn’t indict his heroes too hard for looking for fulfilment in fantasy after real life has treated them badly, but their activities do have darker permutations with hints of sex tourism and other forms of exploitation. The sleazy, unnatural, post-human quality of these ideas which young David Cronenberg or a good cyberpunk author might have gone wild for, is mostly played for humour, except for one of the most memorable moments in the film: Peter sleeps with a robot prostitute and in the midst of throes of passion she goes glaze-eyed as the nightly tune-up signal goes out from the command centre: the falsity of the eroticism and the emptiness of the fulfilment is revealed for an excruciating moment, and Crichton can’t quite match it again. The film also lacks anyone as interesting as Jurassic Park’s squabbling brains Grant and Malcolm to seed exposition. Alan Oppenheimer’s role as the Chief Supervisor of the park, who tries to warn of potential disaster when he starts detecting signs of a virus-like instability in the machines, is purposefully flat and castrated, and the other staff indicted as foolish functionaries, only malevolent in their oblivious faith in their super-duper Potemkin village.

Nonetheless, Crichton handles Westworld with a steady, deadpan intelligence admirable for a first-time feature filmmaker, and the result now seems to have been as influential stylistically as it was thematically: a host of upcoming young filmmakers including Carpenter, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan and others surely drank at this well. Westworld feels like the birth of something, perhaps the modern science-fiction action film itself. Battles with blank-eyed, unstoppable monsters in such later stalwarts of this style, like The Terminator (1984) and Predator (1987), and even perhaps Halloween (1978), are strongly anticipated and probably directly influenced, particularly the digitally segmented cyborg’s-eye-view shots, daring to turn the theoretically neutral camera into the viewpoint of something beyond the human way of seeing. Crichton’s later team-up with Spielberg feels especially appropriate, as Benjamin’s nervous everyman who has to prove himself wily enough to survive a deadly situation clearly anticipates Spielberg’s fascination with that theme. Crichton tightens the screws until the comedy gives way suddenly but logically to horror and excitement. His eye for menace in echoic spaces of chilly modernity, and skill at generating tension in extended sequences of pursuit and eluding, later displayed in the techno-baroque slickness of his work on Coma (1978), is plain here. The last half-hour, depicting Peter’s desperate battle for survival against the Gunslinger in the midst of massacre and dashed fancies, passing through the various realms of Delos and then the blank, subterranean labyrinth beneath, is exceptionally well-staged. Benajmin is fine and effective as Peter as he walks the character through stages of fretful anticipation and unsteady self-concept, through to the crucial moment where, confronted with the possibility of his own annihilation, sees his chance and moves forward with the determination of the survivor. A weak sequel, Futureworld, followed in 1976.

Alpha and Omega are conjoined in one of the most memorable of Samuel Fuller’s headline-like cinematic declarations: Hell and High Water begins and ends with bookending shots of an atomic bomb erupting on a sub-Arctic island. Boiling infernal flame and the swelling mushroom cloud arise, a report from the fringes of the world beholding a new frontier in the Atom Age. Hell and High Water is an action-adventure film that straddles modes and attitudes with élan and a likeably distracted streak, as Fuller recast the original story given to him as a stylised piece of gallivanting he later compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Fuller made the film as a favour for Darryl F. Zanuck, who had gone to bat for him with the controversies of Pickup on South Street (1953), and dismissed it as the least of his films. But Hell and High Water represents a bridging point in Fuller’s career, perhaps the peak of that career in terms of budget and prestige afforded him, whilst it also marks the point where Fuller’s early oeuvre, with its emphasis on aberrant individuals lost within brutal events and worldly tumult, or characters like the news folk of Park Row (1952) whose passions transmit the events but operate independently of them, changed focus. The broad strokes of Hell and High Water’s geopolitical investigations seem to have facilitated Fuller’s interest in “hot topics” and characters who are more clearly avatars for such ructions, fighting forces within and without. A repeated epigram defines a moral scheme, “Each man has his own reason for living and his own price for dying,” whilst Richard Widmark returns to play another cynical hero, albeit one who, unlike his seedy thief in Pickup, has been left an angry and disillusioned wash-up after patriotic service during the war, but similarly rails against flag-wavers and professional do-gooders.

The plot has enough angles to sustain a hefty franchise in contemporary terms. Fuller depicts the efforts of an independent, apolitical group of statesmen, scientists, and other grandees who have formed a clandestine internationalist organisation to promote world peace and investigate potential threats to that peace. Famous French scientist Professor Montel (Victor Francen) vanishes briefly after being mobbed by reporters at Orly Airport. The media and law enforcers assume Montel has been kidnapped by the Soviets, but Montel reappears in Japan as a member of the secret group, along with his assistant, Professor Denise Gerard (Bella Darvi), who is actually his daughter, working under a pseudonym to assert her independent achievements. The organisation hires Widmark’s character, former US Navy submarine commander Adam Jones, to take charge of a salvaged Japanese submarine and ferry Montel into the remote, barren islands of the Bering Sea, where Montel believes Communists are building a secret missile base. Jones’ fight for his right to self-determination, down to harvesting members of his old sub crew, whilst working officially as a mercenary for hire, surely has the emotional immediacy to it of Fuller satising his own uneasy position as studio-sponsored auteur. Gene Evans, Fuller’s repeat star of his early, cheaper films, turns up as Jones’ cigar-chomping, sceptical subordinate. On the way, an encounter with a submarine that could be Red Chinese or North Korean leads to a violent clash as Jones, unable to match the enemy with torpedoes, has to reach back into his repertoire of tricks to elude the hunter. Much of Hell and High Water’s midsection is concerned with the same sort of submarine hide-and-seek stuff depicted in the likes of The Enemy Below (1957) or Torpedo Run (1963), and Fuller settles for staging the crash dives and underwater manoeuvring with almost throwaway proficiency.

Fuller is plainly much more interested in his motley crew dynamics and landscapes of primal-futurism than model work action, particularly as he follows up Park Row in offering a boldfaced feminist twist. Denise cuts an intimidating figure of multifarious accomplishment. Echoing the introduction of Joan Weldon’s similarly unexpected chick scientist in Them! the same year, Denise appears as a pair of silk-clad, heel-sporting legs on a ladder, but where Gordon Douglas took the route of dismissing the matter thereafter, Fuller sarcastically makes a Tex Avery cartoon under water. Denise enters the fold of the rude, crude sailors to be met with hostility as a potential Jonah, only for her to quickly calm and cajole them with pledges that she’s a scientist above all. Denise’s assurance gains the crew’s acquiescence but her mere presence sets hormones on the boil: lunkhead helmsman ‘Ski’ Brodski (Cameron Mitchell, alight with impish humour) tries to charm the anthropologically fascinated Denise by showing off his sweaty physique and tattoos real and fake, whilst another gets stewed and tries to force himself on her, forcing Ski to cream him. But it’s Jones who finally makes out with her in the blazing red glow of emergency lights for a moment of high pressure passion. Darvi is remembered as one of the most tragic of Hollywood starlets after being discovered and promoted by her lover Zanuck and his wife Virginia, and then destroyed first critically and then socially, with this and The Egyptian (1954) her only major roles. Her much-heralded hesitancies as an actress, a slow, slightly uncertain diction and thick accent, are apparent in playing Denise, but so are her strengths – an aura of cool intelligence and a physical insouciance that belies her character's effort to present a tight package. Her reaction to Mitchell's chest-baring is a comedic coup that's also a subtle deflation of the cliché of the brainy female iceberg, as Denise delights in his meaty sexuality whilst also finding it slightly hilarious. These traits suit the character and impressed Fuller, and she works well opposite Widmark’s trademark astringent, derisive pith.

Particularly cool is the scene where Denise is forced to kill a Chinese soldier, gunning him down when her life is in danger. For a moment the lab-grown savant is frozen in shock at having joined the game of soldiers, until Jones grabs her hand, and she immediately snaps back into action: like any good scientist, she knows it’s a case of evolve or die. Fuller’s intention to defang the political thriller side of the film did not remove all of the material’s vision, particularly as Fuller’s readiness to use an overtly anti-Communist gloss, as he had with The Steel Helmet and Pickup on South Street and would again with China Gate (1957), to ply his own agendas of interrogating social attitudes and clearing space for new dialogues about race and gender and sex and class, under the banner of unrepentant Free World prerogative. The submarine is Fuller’s United Nations of scruffy sea salts as Nicholas Ray’s European enclave of bureaucrats and soldiers would be in 55 Days in Peking (1965). Fuller levies this set-up via linguistic humour. Denise’s mastery of Asian languages helps the crew negotiate the workings of the sub. Former enemies of the last great war work with casual ease together only to be thrown into a tither by a pretty woman, who can pacify them because she speaks all their dialects. Chinese immigrant Chin Lee (Wong Artarne) entertains the crew with his witty blend of mangled syntax and pithy slang in a version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” whilst Ski learns to sing chanson Française for Denise’s benefit, and creates his own Bronx-Pigalle patois. Chin Lee eventually volunteers for the dangerous task of posing as a fellow captive to extract information from a captured, deeply indoctrinated Red, and becomes the film’s first or two tragic martyrs to dedication.

Making only the fourth film to be shot in Cinemascope, Fuller’s delight in unusual cinematic syntax – his creative long takes and radical ways of tackling budgetary lacks and spatial problems with his camerawork – was relatively muted here. But he worked with cameraman Joe McDonald to think up innovative, rule-bending ways to frame and light the submarine interior, and assaulted the tableaux vivant-like stasis of early Cinemascope effectively. Sometimes they cut frames up with clashing and layered geometries, and elsewhere compose shots with attention to lateral lines rather than the vertical, to further squeeze together the top and bottom of the Cinemascope frame, building a sense of claustrophobia. Once Jones and crew reach their destination, the evocation of a blasted, far-flung, jagged extremity littered with secret bases, feels practically neo-mythic, with visions of apocalyptic fires and mysterious, cyclopean installations at the Earth’s distant places, null zones where superpowers fashion doomsday devices. Moments of jagged corporeal assault recur with a customary sense of weight – Denise’s shooting of the soldier, Montel getting his thumb caught in the conning tower hatch requiring swift amputation, Chin Lee beaten to death with a monkey wrench. Tracer bullets and erupting oil drums, smoke-trailing bombers and the boiling ocean where an island was moments before: all exist on a continuum of humankind’s gift for creating ever more spectacular methods of destruction. But Fuller’s gift for visions of weird lyricism still emerge too, like Jones carrying Denise with tender care bathed in red light. The film’s official spirit might be pulp adventure but its visuals and thematic stresses scan stark vistas and wastelands, foreboding Kubrick’s Cold War horizons in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and James B. Harris’ The Bedford Incident (1965; also featuring Widmark). Here the diverse crewmen battle anonymous soldiers and uncover a dastardly plot to drop an atomic weapon on Japan and blame it on the good old US of A, a prospect that finally jolts Jones’ dormant patriotism into gear. Fuller may not have loved it, and it’s surely not one of his densest or strangest works, but Hell and High Water rocks regardless.

H. Rider Haggard, today a faded but still legible name on the scroll of beloved fantastical writers, was a hugely successful author in his day, a writer of no great style who nonetheless had such commercial and creative reach he can only be compared to a combination of Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Joss Whedon today. His works like King Solomon’s Mines are perennials that helped define the popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and She: A History of Adventure still rides high on the list of all-time biggest selling works of fiction. Movie impresario Merian C. Cooper, fresh off his own colossal, zeitgeist-defining hit King Kong (1933), chose Sheas a follow-up, whilst his partner in filmmaking and globetrotting Ernest B. Schoedsack branched off to make The Last Days of Pompeii (1935). The attraction of the material for Cooper is obvious, as She offers the same précis as Kong: adventure into unknown quarters, encounters with isolated barbarian cultures, and an ultimate confrontation with a bizarre and powerful force of super-nature that stands as metaphor for the simultaneous stature and fragility of the life force, whilst also invoking weird erotic dimensions. Shewas not another success for Cooper and RKO, and in fact lost a chunk of change on initial release, a failure blamed mostly on the casting of Helen Gahagan, stage actress and opera singer, in the vital title role, resulting in a one-time-only movie career. She was thought lost for a time, perhaps because Gahagan had tried to buy up all the copies when she made a run for Congress.

A print was eventually located in Buster Keaton’s movie collection, and since then has occasionally been celebrated as a camp-schlock classic in a manner similar to Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman (1944), which itself filches Haggard’s tales. Haggard wrote five novels about Ayesha, or “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” a woman blessed with immortality and mystical powers after bathing in a mysterious flame of life, including one where she meets up with Haggard’s other great character, Allan Quatermain. This adaptation, co-written like Kong by Schoedsack’s wife Ruth Rose, follows the first book closely but combined elements from some of the follow-ups, chiefly to create a solid romantic rivalry. She is not, as some would have it, a bad film; it’s an entertaining, occasionally striking, ungainly achievement, with problems that chiefly stem from an incapacity to translate the source material into effective cinema as well as casting. The film starts with Leo Vincey (Randolph Scott), an American offshoot of a well-heeled English clan, called over the pond to visit his dying grandfather John (Samuel S. Hinds). Leo is fascinated by his close resemblance to one of his ancestors, another John Vincey, whose portrait hangs above the fireplace. His grandfather explains this John’s special place in family history as a great explorer who, along with his wife, ventured into the frigid wastes of Siberia and did not return. His wife turned up years later in Poland, wretched and dying, clutching a golden relic depicting a woman standing in fire. Grandfather John, with his friend archaeologist Horace Holly, entrusts Leo with the mission of retracing his ancestor’s mission, to see if the myth the relic encodes, of a flame of eternal life-giving properties, really exists, in the hope the elderly man can stave off death.

Leo and Holly travel together up to the Arctic fringes, and, unable to find anyone willing to cart their gear north, cut a deal with frontier supplier and guide Dugmore (Lumsden Hare) to let him come along if he arranges for porters, as he assumes, on seeing the relic, that they’re after gold. Dugmore drags his naïve, convent-edcuated daughter Tania (Helen Mack) along to perform servile duties. After weeks trekking through frozen wastes, the party reaches a huge glacial barrier, and find preserved in the ice both of one John Vincey’s men and the huge beast – a sabre-tooth tiger – that attacked him, confirming one vital aspect of John’s wife’s account. But Dugmore starts an avalanche with his blundering that destroys the passage down from the glacier, and kills Dugmore and most of the party, leaving Leo, Tania, and Holly to survive alone. They penetrate a cave system under the ice and encounter a primitive people who propose to make them part of a sacrificial rite, but the intervention of seemingly more civilised people under the command of chamberlain Billali (Gustav von Seyffertitz) saves their hides.

All of this is good fun, whilst building a sense of impending mysteries and exploits with impeccable pacing and good special effects and photography, surpassing Kong’s early scenes. The intended sacrifice of the interlopers by the gruesome tribe sees the savages proposing to lower a red-hot helmet on their heads, a memorably nasty notion that looks forward to the transference-rich Sadean fantasies of The Naked Prey (1966) but also working an anthropological idea, that the oppressed gatekeepers of Kor mimic the religion of the higher civilisation but without its pretences. The novel’s imperialist-era, racially suspect understanding of what civilisation can be defined as permeates, so the revision of Haggard’s novel from an African setting might have been worked for the sake of slightly more credulity with the Siberian setting still a largely mysterious place to the average American audience of the time, and also to make this stuff less specific and irksome, in a similar manner to what Cooper did with King Kong in deliberately creating an artificial culture to libel. Cooper and Schoedsack, as documentary filmmakers, had made cinema and sold their work by offering through it a spirit of adventure they readily embodied. Rose’s status as the secret auteur of their films suggested by King Kong as a burlesque on her relationship with the two huckster-swashbucklers, is apparent here too, as Tania, like Mack’s previous character in Son of Kong (1933), is the plucky waif who’s unfazed by following her love into killing zones of climate and refuses to back down morally in the face of omnipresent power. The surviving trio are brought before Ayesha, the all-powerful god-queen of Kor, who, as a believer in reincarnation, has been waiting for centuries for the return of her singular love, John Vincey, in whatever form he might come in. Leo’s resemblance signals to her that her demi-millennial dream is fulfilled. But Ayesha correctly senses that Tania, like John’s wife, represents an attachment she must strike down or be foiled by.

Once She reaches the inner sanctums of Ayesha, the film stalls, however. She was codirected by actor-director Irving Pichel, who had also split helming duties with Schoedsack on The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and here worked with Lansing C. Holden, an air force buddy of Cooper’s who probably contributed to the film mostly in a design capacity, with his touch apparent in the film's many dramatic, frieze-like vistas. The duo created a memorable fantasy city in Kor, with its towering statues, guttering pyres, drenching shadows, and monstrous blend of cyclopean antiquity with art-deco apparent in the outsized architecture, accomplished on a scale that would have made Cecil B. DeMille envious. Ayesha’s first appearance is well-staged, glimpsed at the top of a giant flight of stairs, speaking from behind a vaporous curtain with stentorian yet ethereal authority, and then bursting out into the open as she realises that her singular fixation has come true. Gahagan’s chilly presence actually suits Ayesha to a certain extent, as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is defined by a blend of imperious entitlement and anguished neediness, with a fatal tunnel vision that craves her lover but can only use the apparatus of power to answer her needs: she appeals to Leo to awaken the dormant spirit she imagines in him, but ultimately can only bully, not attract. She interestingly represents a partial inversion of the compelling theme of satyr sexuality glimpsed in both King Kong and The Most Dangerous Game, as it deals with the monstrous side of the feminine rather than masculine. Leo is briefly awestruck by Ayesha’s zealous romanticism and aura of holy power, reducing him to masculine fetish object, leaving it to Tania to resist her regime, scuttling through the halls of Kor’s palace and defying guards human and numinous to reach Leo and give Ayesha what-for. But Tania, through the jealous Billial’s connivance with Ayesha, is trussed up in S&M-accented fashion complete with silk gag and draped veil, to be sacrificed at a Kor religious ceremony, and the film lurches closer to John Willie territory.

The trouble is that all of this makes for rather static drama, like some mutant version of one of those Women’s Pictures where Joan Crawford can’t get a man because she likes wielding an iron hand in the boardroom too much, but without the gloss of by-play one of those would have. The fantasy plays on that universal wish for immortality, and the more specific, presumed feminine fear of loss of the power of desirability: diva wilfulness unbound by time and scruple. Gahagan, although often fetchingly attired to become an icon of stylised female power (to the extent that Disney modelled the evil queen of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1938, on her), lacks charisma and erotic presence. Her version of regal hauteur and pagan sadism is a breathy American patrician brand, like Margaret Dumont in a trimmer package. Scott is a bit of a cold fish here too, although his familiar ability to inhabit upright masculinity without seeming pompous is apparent. The dance of sensual enticement and abhorrence that is supposed to define their relationship therefore just never lights up, whilst Mack isn’t much of a romantic alternative either, all chirpy lines deliveries and girlish eyes. Tellingly, Ursula Andress’ presence in the 1965 Hammer version helped make that film a hit for its studio: Andress perfectly embodied the kind of warrior-queen image that had inspired a close artistic relative to Haggard’s creation, Klimt’s painting of Pallas-Athena, all haughty domme chic and classical Teutonic features. Like many films embraced as camp (e.g. Devil Girl from Mars, 1954), She beholds the notion of gynocracy, the rule of women, with a mixture fetishism and weak-kneed, ultimately punitive uncertainty.

The film also cuts much of Haggard’s mythology, which grew ever-denser and weirder in his sequels, presenting the possibility of a pseudo-science fiction explanation for the flame of life as well as a supernatural one. Revelation of Ayesha’s epoch-spanning memory is limited to a wistful recollection of an encounter with an early Christian – possible Jesus himself – who preached a pacific creed She doesn’t ascribe to, overseeing as she does pagan sacrifices and brutal executions because, it's suggested, they satisfy her unchecked egotism as the holder of the power of life and death. Holding back on the richness of Haggard’s creation whilst failing to capture the obsessive, mythical romanticism that’s supposed to drive the tale means that She leaves itself without much to do in its middle third. A further hunk of the film’s running time is devoted to the entirely extraneous yet mesmerically staged ritual preceding Tania’s intended execution, the ultimate suggestion of which seems to be that Kor was actually founded by a lost troupe of the Ballet Russes. Rectilinear framings of dancers attired in costumes and settings recall Fritz Lang’s cubist-medievalism in Die Spinnen (1919) and Die Nibelungen (1924), and also DeMille’s similarly shot dances in Madam Satan (1930), another film that wrestled with the spectre of female independence. Indeed, I suspect that between this and The Last Days of Pompeii, Cooper and Schoedsack were making an overt play to capture DeMille's crown as king of spectacle. But there's an interesting quality of cultural smudging recorded in such imagery, blending modernism's refined sense of form and function with the tropes of a host of classical cultures from Greek to Balinese, silently asking questions about the nature of power and gender in a world quickly losing its traditions in regard to both.

She remains visually impressive all the way through, from the vision of the frozen smilodon to the colossi in Kor's temple described by guttering firelight, mere humans dwarfed at their carved toes. When finally action does break out again, as Leo realises Tania is veiled victim under a priest’s knife, Shekicks back to life for a strong finale, as extras skip out of the way of spilling, burning oil and Nigel Bruce springs in the fray to sock the high priest, a sight any movie fan must surely savour. She badly lacks such derring-do, but there’s one great sequence as the escaping trio leap over a chasm onto a balanced rock on the far side, and then push the rock off its perch along with several pursuing guards, all depicted in deadpan long shot with a clever blend of FX elements. At its best She does capture the fervent strangeness of Haggard’s world-creating and mysticism, particularly in the very climax when Leo, Tania, and Holly finally enter the abode of the flame of life, viewed as a spuming vortex of white amidst strangely geometric stonework. Ayesha ventures again into the flame of life to assure Leo of its safety, only to be steadily transformed into a withered crone, whether because she overexposed herself to the flame’s life-giving properties or tempted fate too often with her hubris, recounting her mantra of triumph over the pettiness of Tania’s mortal beauty even as hers disintegrates. Unlikely to be endorsed by L’Oreal.

The trailers for Terminator: Genisys suggested it might prove emblematic of much that’s wrong with contemporary “big” cinema, offering little more than a procession of recreated beats and call-backs to James Cameron’s beloved 1984 film The Terminator, laced with shots of ageing Arnold Schwarzenegger and a CGI simulacrum of his younger self, and replete with revelations that all but spoilt what surprises the new edition had in store. The cumulative result looked like a hermetically sealed blend of cynical special effects action and nostalgic references for a middle-aged audience to a model film that was defined by a bristling confidence in it very own self. Cameron’s film was the B-movie that could, a triumph for craftsmanship and invention on a limited budget that gave Cameron a singularly successful career. It kicked off a wayward film franchise that Cameron himself continued first with the prototypical CGI-era blockbuster, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), but then was driven into the ground by hacky continuations Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and the god-awful Terminator: Salvation (2009). Terminator: Genisysfollows a now-familiar pattern, also plied by this year’s Jurassic World but first worked with deliberation by Hollywood cinema with Halloween H20 (1998), of not exactly retconning a pile-up of haphazard sequels out of existence, but effectively ignoring them in an attempt to get back to basics. To my surprise, however, Terminator: Genisys proves rather more resourceful and unpretentiously enthusiastic in its errant attempts to wring some new life out of this material than I expected. For its first half, at least, Genisys fiddles entertainingly with the settled continuity and conceptual basis of Cameron’s model, with director Alan Taylor condensing and inverting series tropes. After all, Cameron’s original suggested a complex approach to time and consequence, with the future of Skynet only “one possible future,” opening up the possibilities for a more complex zone of interacting realities.

Thus Taylor kicks off with futuristic action as John Connor (who, having gone through incarnations of Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, and Christian Bale, has now settled on the form of Justin Clarke) and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) triumphing over the forces of Skynet and penetrating one of the evil AI’s inner sanctums. John, knowing thanks to his mother Sarah’s accounts what to expect, zeroes in on Skynet’s time machine, and calls for volunteers to chase down the terminator that’s just been sent back in time to kill Sarah. But as Kyle is swept up in the time portal, he glimpses John being attacked by a secreted terminator, and is wracked by ghost-memories as he plunges into the past. That past soon proves both familiar and strange: the original T-800 model terminator, whilst encountering the punks outside Griffith Observatory(sadly, no Bill Paxton in their midst this time), is confronted by another T-800, this one older and in the company of Sarah (Emilia Clarke, no relation to Justin), who guns the malevolent cyborg down with an armour-piercing round. When Kyle arrives, he in turn is attacked by a T-1000 terminator disguised as a policeman (played mostly by Byung-hun Lee). Two real cops try to arrest Kyle but the T-1000 kills one and forces Kyle to hide along with rookie cop O’Brien (Wayne Bastrup). The fun of these scenes lies in how Taylor fastidiously recreates the visuals of Cameron’s original whilst also subverting them. Sarah sweeps into action, already a hardened warrior in her still-babyfaced years, whilst Kyle is confused by both being rescued by his nominal charge and the spectacle of a good terminator, whom Sarah refers to as ‘Pops’. The unstoppable forces of the first two films stalk our heroes, but prove vulnerable to well-laid traps.

Taylor, who once upon a time made the likeable, low-key comedies Palookaville (1995) and The Emperor's New Clothes (2001), came to this project from TV’s Game of Thrones, which stars Clarke, by way of Thor: The Dark World (2013), his first blockbuster-scaled work. Taylor doesn’t yet show any great distinctiveness as a filmmaker in this realm, and he’s only a competent orchestrator of action. His established working relationship with Emilia Clarke perhaps helped make her Sarah one of the film’s best qualities however. Aiming for the mid-ground between Linda Hamilton’s milquetoast first performance and brutalised, raw-nerved Judgment Daycharacterisation (which has been canonised in the action heroine pantheon but I’ll admit I always found a bit hard to take), Emilia’s Sarah is gritty but still has an immature, vulnerable streak, whose powerful attachment to her cyborg patriarch has partly rescued her from the darkest dimensions of her fated identity. Through some strange crossover of timelines, an attempt by Skynet to kill Sarah as a child saw the good terminator who is now ‘Pops’ sent to save her, but he was too late to save her parents, and so ‘Pops’ became her surrogate father. Here screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier remember that theme from Judgment Day where the T-800 became something like that for young John, and amplify it. I recall how strong that note was in Judgment Day: a friend I saw it with as a kid, who had a less than agreeable home life, wept bitter tears by the fiery conclusion because his own father wasn’t as upright as Schwarzenegger’s fiercely protective robot. I appreciate that Taylor and his writers understood this element. As with the swivel of the Tyrannosaurus from villain to hero in the original Jurassic Park (1992), a touch Jurassic Worldhonoured effectively, there’s something emotionally punchy about the idea of a monster reprogrammed as guardian, our id-beasts turned into paternal spirits. Sarah also, like her son in the future, knows her life as ordained prophecy, and thus occupies an amusingly similar space to the viewer as someone who knows the plot and thinks she’s past spoilers. Meanwhile both she and Kyle wrestle with the notion of their supposedly fated romance which will result in John’s birth – as well as perhaps cause Kyle’s death. That they’re now much more similar people than the pair who met in the first film is exposed as the two hard-headed warriors bicker and clash over tactics and purposes.

The film’s strongest image reminded me a little of the techno-mystical-sexual finale of Star Trek - The Motion Picture (1979), as Kyle and Sarah step naked together to ride a home-made time machine into the future, a moment laced with a sense of wispy eroticism that again expands on a note sounded by Cameron, in his concept of such travel as a form of birth bringing beings naked and defencless into the world with “white light (and) pain” as Kyle described. Kyle and Sarah step into the machine as individuals and emerge remade as a unit. The plot involves sarcastically diegetic rebooting – Sarah wants to stop off in 1997, canonical start of Judgment Day, whilst Kyle, left with a set of dual memories by possibly moving through a branching point in two different dimensions, insists they go to 2017 instead. This proves the right call, as all the timeline tinkering has seen Skynet’s inception pushed back to that date, when the delayed project is being pushed ahead by the son of Miles Dyson (Courtney B. Vance, wasted), Danny (Dayo Okeniyi), with the new name of Genisys, a new multi-platform AI operating system for the world’s computers (making this the second film of the year, after Kingsmen: The Secret Service, to tie the end of the world to a software download). But there are more players in this game than just our scrappy anarcho-futurists: Skynet, who has embodied itself in the lanky shape of former Doctor Who Matt Smith (who is now getting airs and styling himself as Matthew Smith), in the future, has stepped up its game with an ability to turn humans into terminators via nanobots. Skynet has assimilated John in this fashion, and sent him back as emissary and facilitator of his birth.

John-bot reaches out to his perverse family, his mother and father who are younger than him and constructed brother/son/grandfather, with a desire to unite all of them, albeit in realms digital-molecular rather than some Society (1989)-esque flesh massing. Possibilities lie in such motifs, particularly the mean but ingenious notion of John Connor, the great enemy of Skynet, joining it however unwillingly in a way that changes Skynet’s own motivation and sense of purpose. Frustratingly, Genisys backs away from its better ideas, and retreats into a very ordinary second half of bland, familiar action fare, like a set-piece in a school bus dangling off the Golden Gate Bridge that owes a lot to the RV sequence in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and the race-against-time attempt to blow up Skynet interchangeable with five dozen other race-against-time attempts to blow something up in action flicks over the years. Taylor suggests a good touch with performers developed in years of TV work, and he tries hard to give the film body through the by-play of the actors, but he doesn't have anything like Cameron's feel for crowd-pleasing. It goes without saying, too, that Genisys, like all of the previous sequels, can’t touch the original’s specific mood of blasted, grimy, bleary survivalism, in which Kyle was an ill-shaven, perma-sweaty future-hobo improvising his defence against an evil that, although animated with less sophistication, was far more threatening than just about anything CGI cinema has offered so far. Reese was a worn and tattered knight, afflicted with PTSD and a definably post-Vietnam variety of haunted grace and guilt (a definite part of Cameron's world-view that would later inflect Aliens, 1986, and Avatar, 2009). Now, Reese is just a slightly uptight straight-arrow, quickly making pals with fellow marines across the ages: warrior protagonists have become the flat dullards they were in ‘50s B-movies after 15 years of the War on Terror. Courtney, who had previously seemed best employed playing squarehead assholes as in the Divergent films and contributed to the worst revival by far of beloved ‘80s fare, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), does better by the role than I expected (by which I mean, compared to nothing), but still seems callow and lumpen compared to Michael Biehn’s wiry intensity and pathos.

Genisys also dangles interesting plot elements – the mysterious origin of ‘Pops’ and his programming, and O’Brien, who turns up in 2017 played now by J.K. Simmons, now an elder detective raving about time-travelling robots and happy to be vindicated by the sudden reappearance of Sarah and Kyle – but does very little with them. I’m not sure if such loose ends and extraneous flourishes are left for the sake of further proposed instalments, or represent haphazard development and scriptwriting. Moreover, although obviously intended as a revival for Schwarzenegger as well as a victory lap in returning to his most familiar role following a handful of underperforming post-gubernatorial vehicles, he’s actually given very little to do. ‘Pops’ is more often than not serving as comic relief rather than unstoppable romper-stomper. Perhaps that's inevitable: Schwarzenegger is no spring chicken any more, and he was never the nimblest of action stars. Sabotage (2014) suggested a way for him to age with gravitas as well as stature, but he can’t really do that here: it’s telling that the CGI-decorated “young” Ahnuld often looks more convincing than the actual man. Although Schwarzenegger’s peculiar cachet as a movie star is still worth a hundred FX shots, part of me wondered if the film wouldn’t have been far sleeker and more functional if the action had just been left to Sarah and Kyle, particularly as Emilia Clarke has a winning way with a rocket launcher. Many commentaries on Genisys have knifed it with aplomb, and to a certain extent that’s understandable, as it remains true that it exemplifies much that’s wrong with current Hollywood. But there are qualities to it I can’t entirely dismiss, and which add up to a passable day at the movies. Although it’s certainly a product of the current obsession with branded, recycled franchise cinema, Genisys actually feels more like the kind of sequel that used to be made back in the ‘80s, a loose, odd assemblage of ideas and recurring elements the filmmakers threw together half out of mercenary desire and half out of what-the-hell affection for the material.

This unusually classy Republic Pictures production, adapted from a book by Garland Roark, is loaded with all the gaudy trinkets of an exotic adventure tale – windjammers, shipwrecks, pearl diving, tiki gods, hula dancers, murder, intrigue, hints of the supernatural, and deadly cephalopods. But Wake of the Red Witchhas a peculiar atmosphere that distinguishes it from the sprawl of such tales made in Hollywood back in the day, including obvious precursor Reap the Wild Wind (1942). Loaded with literary ideas, it also fits rather neatly into the late ‘40s noir zone it was released amidst, with an emphasis lies on antiheroes, psychological fixations and manias, and fascist power expressed through capitalist will, as well unusual structuring that emphasises a densely layered sequence of motives. Director William Ludwig had been making films since the silent era: he handled several films starring Wayne, including WW2 actioner The Fighting Seabees (1944) and the much clunkier anti-commie thriller Big Jim McLain (1952), whilst his last feature work was The Black Scorpion(1957), an occasionally overripe monster movie that nonetheless has an inky, effectively nightmarish texture. The first half-hour of this film is particularly odd, as borderline-Sadean ship captain Rall (Wayne) supervises a punishment devised to chastise anyone who fights on board his vessel: the two quarrellers are forced to pound each-other to bloody pulps.

When mate Rosen (Gig Young), a hastily signed-on crewman unfamiliar with Rall’s methods, speaks up to end the bout, Rall tests his mettle by threatening to have him locked in the brig. Rall draws him instead into his plot to wreck their ship, the Red Witch, a vessel belonging to the ubiquitous shipping line Batjack. The Red Witch carries a load of gold belonging to the line and its shareholders, and Rall ostensibly plans to return the wreck later and retrieve the treasure. To pull off this crime, Rall and Rosen conspire to fool another senior member of the crew, solid company man Mr. Loring (Jeff Corey), about their position. As intended, the Red Witch crashes onto a reef and sinks beneath the waves. Rosen soon finds that he’s signed up for a far more tangled melodrama than he thought. Rall’s conspiracy brings down the shadow of Batjack’s wrath upon them. The company’s sinister owner Mayrant Sidneye, has a reputed penchant for malevolent and relentless payback against enemies, and when, at a court of enquiry, Batjack declines to have Rall and Rosen prosecuted for their actions, they’re left to suspect they’re being saved for a more personal and exacting lesson. Rall and Rosen subsist as pearlers and fishermen for months whilst waiting for a chance to return to the wreck, all the while sensing Sidneye’s manifold spies across the South Pacific. Finally, following a chart sold to them purporting to reveal a pearling bed at a remote island, the men find they’ve stepped directly into a well-laid trap arranged by Sidneye (Luther Adler) himself.

The paranoid, cryptic atmosphere of the first third is distinctive, as Batjack is described as an organisation of grand power and menace that can deceive men even within the vast reaches of the Pacific, like some distant precursor to the monolithic organisations of The Parallax View (1974) or Alien(1979), whilst Sidneye is made to seem, in abstract, a figure of Mabuse-like spidery control. This movement resolves with images loaded with lingering, eerie power – the Red Witch sinking silently under the water, a wall of spikes rising from the sea to entrap Rall’s lugger, and Sidneye being carried out of the jungle as a crippled potentate by his native minions, to cluck over Rall’s position with satisfied largesse. Rosen is tantalised by Sidneye’s niece Teleia Van Schreeven (Adele Mara), who warns Rosen about the danger he’s in lest Sidneye’s mood spoil. Sidneye makes a ploy to win Rosen’s loyalty instead, and launches into a lengthy explanation by way of flashbacks as to how he and Rall first met, revealing the deeper purposes behind Rall’s attempt to wound Sidneye and his associates financially. Wake of the Red Witch becomes more conventional here on, but only relatively, as it depicts Rall and Sidneye’s relationship as a kind of lethal romance. Each man embodies qualities the other prizes. Rall has the masculine swagger and rakish gutsiness, Sidneye the readiness to treat anyone and anything as a function of his will and remake the world to suit himself. Of course, a woman was the fulcrum for their love-hate relationship.

In Sidneye’s account, he came across Rall set adrift by annoyed Pacific islanders, a crucified he-man with sharks circling to gnaw the meat from his bones. Rall seduced Sidneye with the promise of riches as he would Rosen, drawing the shipping magnate to another island with the lure of pearls. Angelique (Gail Russell), the daughter of the island’s French governor Desaix (Henry Daniell), became the object of both men’s affections. Rall, believed holy by the islanders but loathed by Desaix, battled the giant octopus that lorded over the pearling bed and killed it, winning a fortune in pearls which he gave to Sidneye in exchange for mastery of the Red Witch. But when Desaix tried to denounce and shoot Rall, Rall socked him and accidentally knocked him into the natives’ ritual pyre, killing him. Unsurprisingly, this destroyed his romance with Angelique, who married Sidneye instead. Teleia later fills Rosen in on some of the details Sidneye judiciously excluded, including that later Rall and Angelique met again and found their love still potent, and finally she withered away under Sidneye’s thumb, dying like Cathy Earnshaw in her interloping lover’s arms. But the men’s resumed warfare still retains a weird exaltation of mutual jealousy and adversarial challenge. A bomb planted to disable the lugger by one of Sidneye’s underlings proves more powerful than Sidneye’s desired end of crippling the boat required: the device destroys the boat, almost killing Rall and the rest of the crew just after Rall has convinced Rosen to stay behind with Teleia. But the crew survive and Rall returns to taunt the almost delighted Sidneye, leading to a climax in which Rall agrees to retrieve the sunken gold from the precariously perched wreck of the Red Witch.

Overtones of Bronte-esque eternal love and morbid passion blend with the more intellectualised approach to the same themes that so compelled D. H. Lawrence, his interest in the complex intersection of primal urge, psychology, and social structure – Sidneye is finally entrapped like Lord Chatterley in a wheelchair as metaphor for impotence before Angelique and Rall’s continuing ardour, wrestling with the same schism between instinct and control, naturalness and artificiality. Rall and Sidneye’s mutual fixation is explicated complete with Teleia’s suggestion that Sidneye remade Rall as an apt pupil in the school of harsh masterdom, echoed in the same way Rall tries to court Rosen for the same ends. Sidneye is less an overtly destructive villain than a man with great gifts for accumulating life’s successes and slowly throttling them, finally reducing himself to crippled husk, whilst Rall achieves veritable demigod status amongst the islanders for conquering the octopus god, and like many a demigod of classical literature has a fatal flaw. Rall’s neurotic propensity for violence, best stoked to a fine pitch when sodden in alcohol, gains him legendary status but also continually sabotages his best gifts and intentions: he cannot operate cool just as Sidneye cannot operate hot. The unexpected complexity of these major characters as individuals contrasts their sharp relief as products of different cultural viewpoints. Rall is natural man, Sidneye a by-product of civilisation, each masters of their own world and bound in conflict and envy to duel in remote places where neither has immediate advantage. Interestingly, Teleia embodies the alternative as product of two worlds. Ludwig casually undercuts a well-worn cliché when Rosen stumbles upon Teleia bathing nude in a tropical lagoon: she emerges totally unconcerned that he copped an eyeful, and later dons full Victoriana ensemble for dining without a blink of dissonance, a female equivalent of Burroughs original concept of Tarzan. She ultimately becomes not prize and pawn of their duel like Angelique but catalyst for understanding them both as strong but failed experiments in human evolution.

The problem with Wake of the Red Witch is closely related to the qualities that make it unusual. The odd structure and the complexities of the drama conflict with basic generic niceties of suspense and thrills. Much of the story unfolds in recounted scenes, which means that the narrative lacks urgency, never quite boiling over with the kind of psychodrama it promises, and there’s a lack of action before a finale that lacks a strong stake. Rall risks his life thanks to his own brinkmanship, in a sequence that filches the last reel of Reap the Wild Wind without the elements which made that conclusion exciting. Wake of the Red Witch is too rich to be a merely diverting piece of cine-exotica, but on the other hand, it's too busy to become a truly effective psychological narrative on the level of Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship (1943), to which it does feel spiritually connected. The result is left perched between two poles, of paperback novel romantic adventure and genuinely Conradian saga of interior drama revealed through exterior travails, whilst Ludwig’s evident gifts for striking vision-mongering is only present in fits and spurts. But the film builds to another haunting shot, of Wayne’s face distorting through registers of death-terror and dreamy acceptance as his diving helmet fills with water, an almost Kenneth Anger-like moment of perfervidly numinous imagery. Sidneye rises to his feet Strangelove-like in his shock at losing his spurring antagonist/devotee, whilst one sea salt murmurs “She finally got him!”, meaning the ruined ship claimed her betraying master. The last moments aim for Wagnerian horizons as Rall and Angelique are glimpsed riding the wispy spirit of the Red Witch for the setting sun. Wayne gives a good performance, working up something of the same irate, gnarled intensity that would later serve him so well on The Searchers (1956) when Rall is gripped by his irrational side. The project must have left a mark on the actor, who went on to name his production company Batjac. Meanwhile, according to legend, the giant octopus Wayne fights here was the same one Edward D. Wood Jr stole for use in Bride of the Monster(1953)…

aka Blackfoot Trail

Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) are a handsome couple heading out for a backwoods adventure. Alex, who has moved disinterestedly between professions and is currently working as a landscape gardener, has experience as a woodsman. He’s not so quietly happy to have Jenn, an articulate and confident lawyer, depending on him for a change. He intends to take her to a remote, beautiful lake deep in a national park along the so-called Blackfoot Trail. A park ranger (Nicholas Campbell) warns Alex that the trail has been closed, but Alex presses ahead without telling Jenn. At their first campsite at the edge of the high country, Alex gets talking with an Irish trekker, Brad, (Eric Balfour) who claims to be a trail guide in the park, and shares the fish he’s caught with the couple. Charged masculine bullishness and paranoia arcs between Alex and Brad, leading to a confrontation, but Brad eventually backs off when Alex responds to his prods with grim-faced honesty, and departs. Alex leads Jenn on to the wilderness, and when he saws the paw print of a bear on the trail, takes her on a detour along a cruder trail. Alex’s certainty about the lie of the land begins to falter in the face of strange landscapes and gnawed deer carcasses left by the trail, as well as an injured toe that makes his progress doggedly painful. Finally, when he thinks they’ve reached their destination, the couple are instead confronted by a vista of wilderness, and the lingering tensions between them erupt, as Jenn, infuriated, accosts Alex as a loser who’s endangered them through his attempts to show off, until he sheepishly reveals the reason he was so intent on making the journey against all obstacles, as he hoped to propose to her at the lake. The couple soon realise however that being lost and hungry count amongst their lesser worries, as a large, cautious but formidable black bear is tracking them through the forest.

I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu watching Backcountry, the debut feature directing work of actor Adam MacDonald, who stars alongside Peregrym in the TV series Rookie Blue. The feeling of familiarity is not entirely MacDonald’s fault. Along with Into the Grizzly Maze (aka Red Machine, 2014), Backcountry is the second killer bear movie released lately amongst a recent spate of man-vs-nature dramas. Such works hark back to the days of backwoods horror flicks like Grizzly (1976), Claws (1977), and Prophecy (1979), as well as unavoidable precursors The Birds (1963) and Jaws (1975). Here there’s also the influence of more starkly serious, allegorical takes on the dangers of venturing off the beaten track, exemplified by Deliverance (1972). In terms of dramatic method and focus, Backcountry closely resembles Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek and also recalls Jeremy Lovering's In Fear (both 2014). As with those films, MacDonald takes a young couple on a cross-country adventure that segues into violent ordeal, as a means of exploring both the narrow line between civilised mores and primal instability, and also the points of fracture in contemporary male-female relationships, as opposed to the homosocial focus of Deliverance and most other, earlier survivalist tales. Like Goldthwait, MacDonald signals something slapdash under the male member of the couple’s self-assumed aura of prowess early on by showing him acting goofy behind the wheel of a car, and acerbically describes the ritual back-to-nature skinny-dipping, supposedly an expression of free-spirit bravado, as a challenge laced with wordlessly acknowledged implications. Doubtless, this is an interesting coincidence of intention, revealing something consistent going on in the minds of directors dabbling in low-budget horror at the moment. Where Goldthwait’s film was droll and eccentric in leading up to its cruel punch-lines and Into the Grizzly Maze a fun-cheesy throwback to a ‘80s style monster movie, Backcountry is rather intensely serious and determined in its desire to articulate its ideas to the point of being overdrawn in places, in spite of its minimalist storytelling and cast.

MacDonald was apparently inspired by a real-life event, but he doesn’t settle for mere docu-drama effect, and goes beyond making the characters blank avatars for normality faced with the unknown, attempting instead to study the way situational and character dynamics fuse and combust. MacDonald amplifies the background strains on Alex and Jenn by making them disparate avatars of class as well as woodland experience and gender norms, and privileges the viewer in noting Alex’s various decisions to ignore or tactically avoid signs of threat. Alex’s uneasy square-off against interloping Brad, whose blend of aggressive bonhomie and fishy traits – his Oyrish brogue contradicts his claims to have grown up in these here parts – strains too much to achieve a note of tense “ambiguity” whilst underlining the readiness of these men-folk to snap into time-honoured stances of competition before the worthy mate. MacDonald offers up Alex as exemplar of macho arrogance still subsisting under the veneer of fun-loving hipster, grazing against the outer edges of schematic issue-mongering: the mansplainer as villain. MacDonald undercuts and complicates this to a certain extent when the object of Alex’s emphatic focus is revealed, comprehending if not absolving his mistakes. Alex is allowed a certain luckless pathos once his hopes are dashed and the gaps in his relationship cruelly exposed, and also given him a least a glint of nobility in his hopes of expanding Jenn’s game but constricted experience and granting their union a reference point to something outside the usual proclivities of urbanite coupling and its place within the flux of modern life. Alex’s attempts to improvise prove his undoing, however, in the face of the dark side of the commune-with-nature fantasy and the reality of inimical forces lurking in the woods, the very thing civilisation has been created to hold at bay.

Backcountry is exceptionally well-made, with MacDonald making use of hand-held camerawork and spacy audio-visual effects that could have become laboured clichés but instead prove judiciously handled. MacDonald backs up his sometimes over-determined themes with solidly-crafted storytelling, with plotting that functions effectively on the level of real-world logic as well as illustrated nightmare: from the warning that the trail is closed, to the tell-tail stains of blood on Alex’s socks from his mangled toe that attract the bear, and the various ill-fated moves he makes to avoid trouble instead exacerbating the predicament, MacDonald deploys detail with sparing but cumulative effect. A gruelling physical challenge in climbing down a teetering waterfall met late in the film is cleverly anticipated in earlier dialogue, teasing out another notion the film is fascinated by, the moment where rhetorical knowledge crashes headlong into practical application. MacDonald offers a mirroring scene to the moment in Jurassic World (2015) where the heroine led on a monster with a flare, swapping that film’s comedic approach for the sight of Jenn stumbling in the night, her flare the only barrier between her and the teeth in the dark, but both films are tellingly fascinated by the spectacle of simultaneous exterior exposure and emerging interior armament in ill-starred women, far out of their depth but eventually proving hardy and capable.

Most importantly, when it comes to the crunch (so to speak), Backcountry swerves from charting the ephemeral play of human relationships to outright horror with a sense of sudden, blunt, unstoppable calamity. Here, Backcountry, although not always so delicate in getting to the point, suddenly achieves a powerful effect, one more contemporary horror films ought to emulate, in not simply offering suspense or gore pyrotechnics but a sense of the disorientating brutality of utterly inimical situations, and confronting the audience with a truly awful proposition: what is it like to watch (and hear) your lover being consumed by a wild animal? In this regard Backcountry does deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the classic films it evokes, whilst also in some ways daring to go past them. Backcountry distils the essence of the genre, a singular, hideous pivot of fate that comes and goes, perhaps with a test passed, perhaps not, but with the only assurance being that assurance is lost.

Josh Trank’s follow-up to his interesting, well-crafted debut Chronicle (2012) was supposed to be a big event. 20th Century Fox’s last attempt to build a cash cow from the venerable Marvel Comics Fantastic Four property was generally dismissed as lightweight and excessively goofy. Personally I found the two Tim Story-directed entries to be the closest of any recent superhero movies to the broad, innocent, zippy tone of Saturday morning cartoons, and likeable enough for that. But it was dictated by the hive mind of the internet that the franchise should move in the same pseudo-serious direction as Batman and Superman. Trank seemed a good choice to accomplish this, as a young, talented maverick who had displayed the right conceptual imagination to bring vaguely realistic emotions and youth audience concerns to fantastic material. As it turns out, his Fantastic Four has been generally deplored and declared a flop following a gruelling and fractious shoot: critics have obviously been waiting for a stray member of the superhero herd to slaughter without fear of fanboy reprisals, and Trank himself fuelled the fire by trash-talking the final, compromised product released into theatres. Fantastic Four does clearly bear the usual warning signs of behind-the-scenes struggles. The finale is rushed and tacked-on in a manner that resembles B-movies from the ‘40s when plots needed to be suddenly resolved in the last ten minutes, and gaps in the story development do beg the question whether anything like the originally intended film was fully shot. And yet I have to say it: Trank’s misshapen, ungainly shambles is still the most interesting of the big superhero films released this year, surpassing Marvel’s enjoyably adequate entries Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant Man by possessing actual dashes of originality and depth of purpose.

Reed Richards (Owen Judge) is introduced as chubby-cheeked schoolkid whose precocious genius and home-made teleporter design are met with adult disdain, but he finds a pal in mechanically-minded Ben Grimm (Evan Hannemann), whose family junkyard Reed pilfers parts from. Their first attempt to make Reed’s design work blacks out the neighbourhood and pulps the first object to be transported, but still sort-of works, and years later, when Reed and Ben have grown into the forms of Miles Teller and Jamie Bell, they exhibit a more refined version at their school science fair. Still dismissed as charlatans by their science teacher (Dan Castellaneta!), they do attract the attention and admiration of Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), a noted scientist working on a similar project. He also has a habit of bringing bright young things under his wing, including his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara), whilst his son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) indulges a taste for speed and reckless behaviour as a means of acting out. Franklin employs Reed to help improve upon the teleporter his company has built, designed by scruffy, paranoid tech nerd Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). This brains trust allies well for the most part, although Victor resents Reed and Sue’s evident connection. Soon they have the teleporter working so well that Reed invites Ben to go with him, Victor, and Johnny on a drunken excursion to a different dimension to ensure their names are forever inscribed as the first pan-dimensional explorers. But on the primal, protean alien world they discover, they encounter strange sentient lava and set off an eruption that seems to kill Victor and leaves all of them, even Sue who stayed behind but still catches the wave of radiation transported back with their capsule, affected in strange and terrifying ways.

Trank’s models are obvious, with dashes of Alien (1979) apparent in the visualisation of the alternate Earth and the motif of gross transformation after such a venture, and David Cronenberg, in the attempt to contemplate just how powers like the foursome’s might work in the real life and how such perversions would impact on their psyches, and a visual palate reminiscent of The Fly (1986). These ideas are, of course, blended with the familiar comic’s template of a gang of young, bright, difficult personalities forced to mesh as a team after being dubiously endowed with traits far beyond the ordinary. Reed is glimpsed gruesomely splayed out like a butterfly specimen with his newly rubbery limbs, whilst Ben, now a hulking rock thing becomes a sullen, shadow-seeking depressive, Sue has difficulty remaining present in reality, and Johnny blazes from toe to crown. This is obviously the part of this tale that most interested Trank, and most clearly recalls the focal points of Chronicle. He posits Ben as the product of an abusive childhood like Chronicle’s tragically unbalanced antihero: The Thing’s famous catchphrase “It’s clobberin’ time” is revealed, with sour humour, to be what his brother used to say to him before beating him up. Reed becomes Ben’s preferred brother figure, but when Reed flees and goes underground, leaving the others to become caged experiments and puppets of government creeps, Ben turns resentful and accusatory. Franklin’s business partner Dr. Allen (Tim Blake Nelson) sells the idea to the military of making these freakish by-products into human weapons. They use Ben as a super-soldier on covert ops, keeping him obedient with promises of curing his condition, and dangle the same offer in front of Johnny. Hopes of rebuilding the totalled teleporter are foiled without Reed’s input, and finally Franklin begs Sue to track him down with her pattern-recognition talents. Reed is cornered and captured in Latin America, but when he does concede to rebuild the transporter, finds something truly terrifying waiting in the other dimension.

I like that Trank and company spend quite a bit of time setting up their story and characters, yearning to turn origin story, usually dismissed as dramatic nicety or lumpen McGuffin, into a full-blown tale of sci-fi daring and Faustian self-sabotage. The accident that befalls the young heroes is the direct result of their own brilliance and callow folly. This allows Trank to partly escape the air of suffocating expedience that sabotaged Marc Webb’s similarly mercenary The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) reboots, although he grazes the edges of some other franchise influences. Johnny and Ben’s fascination for mechanics and hot-rods suggesting a limp attempt to net some of the Fast and Furious fans. The long process by which the titular quartet are gathered and remade may have been intended as the first act of a real epic, but the relatively chamber drama-like scenes and conceptually restricted settings suggest perhaps not, and therein probably lies a greater part of the cause for studio panic. The idea of turning Fantastic Four into a 1950s-style sci-fi think-piece has a lot of appeal for me: at a time when superhero flicks are levitating whole cities, a bunch of eggheads arguing scientific morality in a dimly lit room feels near-revolutionary. The tweaks employed here to make the characters seem edgy and with it trend close to corny – Sue has a penchant for Portishead, which would have made her seem really cool in 1995 (I say that as another fan) – but are also occasionally smart: Von Doom, rather than a snooty tycoon, is made a particularly scruffy, cynical tech nerd, one whose isolate misanthropy meshes perfectly with otherworldly powers to make him the world’s most dangerous Gamergater.

One aspect of this film that was never going to work was casting Teller as Reed: however effective he is playing the class creep in the Divergent films and getting slapped about in Whiplash (2014), Teller lacks anything resembling leading man value or even nerdy charm. Bell, Mara, and Jordan are all very talented actors and indeed ones I’ve been hoping would get a ticket to the big leagues for a while now. They fare better than Teller, but still don’t get as much space to strut their stuff as they deserve. Bell’s Ben is superfluous to the story in the first half and Jordan’s Johnny is poorly served in the second. Cathey’s intense, stern but caring Storm is a stand-out performance, whilst Nelson injects some sleazy verve as the regulation corporate villain. The elephant in the room with this Fantastic Four is that exactly when it reaches the point of truly taking off, it falls apart, and it’s all too obvious why: I don’t think I’ve seen a film with a more obvious lurch into a studio-mandated patch job since the last reel of The Exorcist III (1990). Victor returns to the narrative about the same distance into the story that Lex Luthor appears in Superman (1978), but instead of gearing up for a grand battle of wills like that work (one that believed in storytelling), we get unleashed chaos in the Storm labs by a psycho superman that more resembles the hocus-pocus in The Lazarus Effect (2015), and then a special effects finale where the effects seem to have been borrowed from some mid-‘90s SyFy Channel show. This premature climax truly blows its wad over all the work that has come before it, without any satisfaction or sense in seeing the Four unite to defeat their enemy. It’s very clear that what we were delivered here is the discarded rump of a potentially fine film. But of course, the narratives of Hollywood success dominate how everyone talks about these things: no matter how dumb and lazy the Marvel films can get, they’re still popular so they must be good, and Fantastic Four, no matter its qualities, must be bad.

The biggest hit in South Korean cinema history, Kim Han-min’s The Admiral: Roaring Currentsrecounts a chapter of national history in terms movie fans worldwide can understand: the blockbuster action flick. And by any standard, history gave the filmmakers a doozy of a story here. Kim recounts the true story of Admiral Yi Sun-Shin, a military commander for the old Korean kingdom of Joseon whose achievements have led many to rank him as the greatest naval fighter of all time, and his attempt to hold off a massive Japanese invasion force during an attempted conquest in the late 1500s. Yi (Choi Min-sik, best known for starring in Oldboy, 2003) was already a proven leader feared by his Japanese opposites, but had recently been arrested and brutally tortured by the Joseon emperor for a perceived disloyalty, and then reinstated after a series of military disasters climaxed with the destruction of the nearly the entire Joseon fleet. Yi is released to find he has 12 ships to face off an armada of several hundred, plus one of the large, armoured warships that are the backbone of Joseon naval defence, called “turtle ships,” still under construction.

The invaders execute many of their captives and sail in boats filled with their severed heads to scare the remaining sailors witless, whilst harvesting slaves and collaborators from captured territory. Yi’s men are, understandably, badly demoralised, a situation made even direr when the turtle ship is destroyed by sabotage arranged, by a traitorous subordinate, who tries to escape in a rowing boat but is felled by a loyalist commander with a grimly aimed, well-flung arrow. Still concerned that the Japanese naval commanders are too wary of Yi’s tactical chops, the Japanese daimyo appoints an experienced and ruthless naval leader, Michifusa Kurushima (Seung-ryong Ryu), to galvanise them and lead a final attack on Yi’s force, although he’s regarded by his fellows as little more than a pirate. Yi, still coughing up blood from his torture sessions and momentarily distraught after the destruction of the turtle ship, resists an order to give up the sea and join the army, and instead looks to nature for an advantage. He determines to use a narrow strait where rapid currents and a maelstrom might just give him the chance to make the enemy’s numbers a hindrance. But to fight the battle, he knows he need more than a tactical advantage, and has to transmute his force’s quaking fear into unparalleled gallantry.

It’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) or Zulu (1964) on the waves, with lashings of modern CGI-augmented spectacle a la John Woo’s The Battle of Red Cliff(2008), whilst stopping well short of the stylised hyperbole of Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006), to which The Admiral can inevitably be compared as a depiction of a fight against staggeringly long odds. Where Eisenstein was deceptively becalmed whilst spiralling his rhythm towards crescendo, and Woo was fascinated with the coming together of human elements as a blend of intellectual and physical muscle to fight a battle, Kim is broader and quicker to the point in offering patriotic hero-worship – literally, as when the peasant audience of Yi’s battle kneels and gives thanks for his prowess. Kim doesn’t truck much with delicacy, cranking up the melodrama early on. Kurushima enters proceedings as a black armour-clad proto-Darth Vader, trailing his coterie of heavies, including Haru (Min-woo No), a weirdly pretty punk assassin given to hiding his face behind a mask, eyes mascara-daubed as they laser in on their targets and crown of bleached hair jutting. The smirking, haughty pride of the Japanese bad guys sees them constantly threatening each-other for slights of protocol with the posturing showiness of Kabuki actors. Yi’s war council sees concussive arguments between sneeringly sceptical, ultimately disloyal subordinates and stalwart defenders. Yi hallucinates dead comrades visiting him in bed and has a Lear-like moment of frantic, haggard panic in his pyjamas when confronted by the blazing turtle ship.

Subplots and minor characters give brief recourse from the epochal drama. The son of a fallen comrade of Yi’s who begs a place on his ship and happily mans an oar at Yi's request, the commander knowing the least glorious job on his ship needs as much heart and determination as the best-armed knight. Joseon scout Lim Jun-young (Ku Jin) leaves his mute wife and tries to gather intelligence on the invaders and make contact with collaborating double agent Junsa (Ryohei Otani), sneaking through a landscape riddled with corpses dangling from nooses on trees. He eludes being captured as a spy by joining a gang of prisoners, but Junsa is unable to free him, so Lim is condemned with other slaves to row a ship carrying an explosive charge intended to blow up the remnants of Yi’s navy. For the most part, though, the focus is squarely on the quandary of Yi, who has to approach a seemingly impossible task with cool and invidious contemplation in the face of such chaotic and conflicting impulses, and see the patterns both within natural phenomena and also human behaviour on order to meld a strategy. Kim depicts Yi on a clifftop, listening to accounts of the strange forces in the maelstrom and the weird tone arising from the currents that sounds like the moans of the dead crying for vengeance, and begins to forge a method that becomes clear as battle is joined. Choi manages a tricky balancing act in making Yi seem both a man of mortal vulnerability and everyday feeling, but also capable of remaking himself as the unshakeable rock required to buttress human clay. The familiarity of this story to Korean audiences (it’s been told many times on screen there, including in a long TV series about Yi’s life) perhaps explains why Kim seems to be almost falling over himself to get to the good stuff, and he paints in big, broad strokes.

But this kind of material begs for just the kind of urgent, impassioned, cheer-along power Kim invests in it, and The Admiral: Roaring Currents gives the gist of history with sufficient concision so the thud and blunder can land like a spiked mace when the time comes. Of course, Kim leads into a long, spectacular, unabashedly crowd-pleasing climax. South Korea’s recent historical action films have generally met much less interest in the West than its brutal, angular thrillers, but generally they’ve had a gritty vigour that makes them distinct from a lot of contemporary wu xiaand jidai geki cinema. The spectacle of carnage in the battle sequence combines williwaw élan of staging reminiscent of Tsui Hark with the mano-a-mano grit of something like Jonathan English’s Ironclad(2011). Battle movies are a distinct subgenre of the war film, and tricky beasts to do properly: the grand sprawl of set-piece violence must be composed in itself of many smaller set-pieces rolling one into the next, each with its own dramatic logic and arc that works both in itself and within the larger texture, or else the action simply devolves into landscapes of anonymous extras waving swords at each-other. Kim proves expert at this, offering a flow of vignettes depicting larger-than-life heroism piling up with breathless verve. The spectacle of Buddhist monks joining the fight. A long-range duel between Haru and Joseon men determined to raise their battle standard. The attempt to blow the flagship free of encircling enemy craft by tying a dozen cannons together, a sequence touched with both a dash of slapstick humour and steampunk invention. A flotilla of peasant fishermen lending a hand to try and save Yi from a whirlpool. The near-operatic sequence in which Lim manages to break free and signals to his wife on the shore, begging her to capture the fleet’s attention to make them destroy the ship even at the cost of killing him. The digital effects are occasionally distractingly weak without quite matching the flagrantly theatrical delight Hark’s recent work has found in CGI, but Kim pulls off at least one remarkable technical feat as his camera surveys and circles the length of Yi’s flagship as its crew engages in close-quarter, bloody combat with attackers, every body blow and sword stroke recorded with a mix of swooning drama and fastidious, unblinking realism. At its best, The Admiral: Roaring Currents is as rousing as any old-school swashbuckler, and it’s certainly superior in entertainment value to most of this year’s Hollywood blockbusters.

Focus (2015)

The Duke of Burgundy (2014)

Wake Up, Time To Blog

Attention People of Earth...it's the Film Preservation Blogathon 2015!

This is your space captain speaking…

Atragon (Kaitei Gunkan, 1963)

Let’s end this with a bang!

My Hawkmen salute you...

Tomorrowland (2015)

Christopher Lee 1922-2015

Knives of the Avenger (I Coltelli del Vendicatore, 1966)

Man in the Shadow (1957)

Westworld (1973)

Hell and High Water (1954)

She (1935)

Terminator: Genisys (2015)

Wake of the Red Witch (1948)

Backcountry (2014)

Fantastic Four (2015)

The Admiral: Roaring Currents (Myeong-ryang, 2014)