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The Innocents

The Innocents
The Innocents

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 December 2013

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jack Clayton

Writers: Truman Capote, William Archibald, John Mortimer

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens, Megs Jenkins, Peter Wyngarde, Clytie Jessop

UK, USA 1961

100 mins

Adapted in 1961 from Henry James’s masterpiece of ambiguity The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is one of the finest ghost stories in British cinema. With an intelligent screenplay by Truman Capote, William Archibald and John Mortimer; radiant cinematography by Freddie Francis (who went on to direct films for Hammer and Amicus, as well as the brilliant 70s oddity Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly); an eerie score by Georges Auric; and an extraordinary performance by Deborah Kerr, the film is a superbly crafted, subtle gem that remains deeply disturbing.

Read Robert Barry’s feature on the score and Daphne Oram’s electronic sound effects for the film here.

Kerr plays Miss Giddens, a repressed minister’s daughter, who has left the shelter of her father’s parish to seek employment as a governess. She is hired by a wealthy bachelor (Michael Redgrave) to look after his orphaned niece and nephew on his country estate. On arrival at Bly House, she is charmed by the delightful Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), but a number of strange occurrences lead her to believe that the children are possessed by the spirits of the previous governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), and former disreputable servant Quint (Peter Wyngarde), who died violent, mysterious deaths after a scandalous love affair.

Whether Miss Giddens is right, or whether the ghosts are simply a manifestation of her growing derangement, is left carefully undecided in the perfectly poised original story. Clayton’s film, and Kerr’s performance, seem to lean more towards the thesis of the governess’s insanity, although both beautifully maintain enough layers of ambiguity. Flora and Miles’s angelic features and apparent sweet natures are marred by unexplained behaviour, suggestive silences and intimations of cruelty, which could corroborate Miss Giddens’s fears. As for Kerr, she is both heartbreaking and frightening in the intensity of her need for love and human attachment, and her passionate desire to ‘save’ the children may well cause their destruction instead.

At the heart of the film (and of the short story) lies a deep, dark, tortured anxiety about the innocence of children and the corruption of sex. Flora and Miles may know more than they should, and it is this terrible suspicion that so troubles the inexperienced, straight-laced Miss Giddens. Nature is the symbol of that corrupting force, of the carnal urges and predatory instincts that intrude upon the civilised, polite world of tea, corsets and lace at Bly House. The idyllic garden that surrounds the house is spoiled by defilement and savagery: a cockroach comes out of the mouth of a cherubic statue, a spider eats a butterfly on the terrace and the singing of birds sometimes sounds deafeningly menacing. The ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel are feral presences that lurk outside the domesticated house, waiting to ‘contaminate’ the children. When Miss Giddens demands that the kindly housekeeper, Mrs Grose (Megs Jenkins), reveal what she knows, the latter wonderfully obliquely explains that Quint and Jessel used the rooms on the upper floor of the house ‘as if they were woods’, confirming that the lovers belong to the world of the wild, of filthy, depraved sexuality – to Miss Giddens’s horror.

So much is suggested, and so little shown. An atmospheric tour de force, with a tremendous sense of restraint that gives the film its evocative power, The Innocents is all about hints of shameful secrets and intimations of improper desires, set among arches and vaults, dark wooden panels and spectral candle glow, with Deborah Kerr’s anguished, moving face so often the only spot of light in the darkness. And how haunting that face and its unresolved torments are.

Virginie Sélavy

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This Ain’t California

This Aint California
This Ain't California

Format: Cinema, VOD

Release date: 6 December 2013

Distributor: Luxin

Director: Marten Persiel

Writers: Marten Persiel, Ira Wedel

Cast: David Nathan, Kai Hillebrand, Anneke Schwabe

Germany 2013

90 mins

As one of the protagonists in Marten Persiel’s This Ain’t California points out at the beginning of the film, the story of Denis ‘Panik’ Paraceck starts with a legend concerning a talented yet troubled red-haired boy who then happened to become a rebellious skateboard hero in East Germany. Truth is, Denis didn’t actually exist but revealing the simple fact is giving nothing away as, strictly speaking, This Ain’t California depicts a much greater legend: the myth of a vibrant skateboarding subculture that flourished in the East during the late 1980s, created and celebrated by the ‘cool kids from Alexanderplatz’, a group of skate enthusiasts for whom riding ‘wheel-boards’ was more than just having fun. For them, it became a liberation, the ideal means of shaking off the overbearing pressure to perform, and to escape the daily grind of life under the Communist regime.

Controversially presented as a ‘hybrid documentary’, the film follows Denis from his childhood in Olvenstedt, a dismal pre-fab housing settlement near Magdeburg, in the late 1970s until the fall of the Wall in 1989. We are told that after his athletic potential was noticed at the age of six, Denis went through an intensive swimming training programme coached by his authoritarian, hard-ass father, who had himself been part of the Olympic squad. He was destined to join a specialist youth sports academy, but when his best friend Nico moved to Berlin in the mid-80s, Denis jumped at the chance and followed him. This is when things really kicked off for the two hobby skaters, who had built their first ‘board with wheels on it’ out of a pair of roller skates and the curved backrest of an old school chair made of laminated wood.

Cheekily charming, fast paced and well edited with a catchy retro soundtrack, Persiel’s film takes an invigorating look behind the ‘scene’ on the eastern side of the bricks and barbed wire to make his point: in contrast to the propaganda of East Germany’s rigorous education, sports and work ethic, skateboarding was not about being bigger, better and faster than everyone else in the world, but about people’s freedom to do as they liked and dreamed – at least as long as they felt the board accelerating rapidly beneath their feet on the cracked cement.

The film’s structure is based on conversations with Denis’s closest friends, who get together for his funeral in 2011 and exchange memories with the help of private (or at least seemingly private) home videos and family photographs, black and white animation and extensive TV archive footage. The mix of touching personal story, history and nostalgia works remarkably well throughout; if anything it makes you wonder at times how much material there was to draw from given that film stock was ‘rare as gold dust’ in the East. That said, while the protagonists deal fairly openly with any speculations (‘My dad supposedly got it free from “business trips”. Who knows?’), it would have been nice if Persiel had been equally transparent about his method of mixing fact and fiction. In particular, it is essential to know (and it becomes quite obvious during the film) that some of the archive footage had to be recreated, with the director casting German model and professional skater Kai Hillebrand to portray Denis, and that his life story, as recalled in the film, is a construct of three (or more) different people. At least, Persiel has recently admitted the fact that everything that is happening in the film did happen to somebody, in some way – just not to Denis.

Yet, whether faux found footage or not, This Ain’t California is a joy ride, and not only for skateboarders or anyone else who experienced life on either side of the Berlin Wall. And perhaps it is wrong to approach the film by questioning its authenticity rather than accepting the fact that memory is always blurred, flawed and rarely complete. In the end, Persiel has crafted a film that is riveting and moving and proves remarkably ‘genuine’ in the way it evokes a time and a certain attitude towards life. That the rest is more or less a myth only makes it all the more fascinating.

Pamela Jahn

This Ain’t California is released in the UK on DVD on 10 February 2014.

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Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Loosely based on the French graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude by Julie Maroh, Blue Is the Warmest Colour is an oddly seductive, three-hour lesbian love saga, featuring the coming-of-age of middle-class high school girl Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos (Carré blanc), who instantly and desperately falls for foxy art student Emma (Léa Seydoux), from the moment she spots her on the street in Lille until their painful and moving break-up as young adults. Below, Sally-Anne Hickman takes an illustrated look at the film, released in UK cinemas by Artificial Eye on 22 November 2013, and on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) on 17 March 2014.

Blue is the Warmest Colour_1 Blue is the Warmest Colour_2
Blue is the Warmest Colour_3
Comic Strip Review by Sally-Anne Hickman
More information on Sally-Anne Hickman can be found here.
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Computer Chess

Computer Chess
Computer Chess

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 November 2013

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Andrew Bujalski

Writer: Andrew Bujalski

Cast: Kriss Schludermann, Tom Fletcher, Wiley Wiggins

USA 2013

89 mins

Those of us who remember the early days of computers and an era before technology became the everyday fabric of our social and working existence can’t but have a soft spot for Computer Chess. The fourth feature from Andrew Bujalski, a US filmmaker whose films, including Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, ignited the relatively short-lived ‘mumblecore’ trend of low-budget American independent filmmaking, it is described by its producers as an ‘artificially intelligent’ comedy. Though a little too reductive and pleading for attention, the tag is not a million miles wide of the mark. The winner of the prestigious Arthur P. Sloan Award, an achievement recognising a film based around the theme of science and/or technology, Computer Chess is by some considerable margin the director’s most accomplished, accessible and prescient work.

Computer Chess is set in and around an isolated roadside motel over the course of a 1980s weekend conference, where a group of obsessive software programmers have convened to pit their latest refinements in machine chess and the still-developing field of artificial intelligence against a somewhat circumspect chess master. One of the junior programmers attending the conference, a singularly unappetising banquet of cheap plaid suits, bad coffee and bland interiors, begins to suspect that the computer for which he is responsible has developed the ability to detect the difference between a human and an artificial opponent. The computer begins to display elements of self-consciousness, rather like a benign HAL from Kubrick’s 2001. Meanwhile, the junior programmer’s own attempts to engage with the sole female attendee at the conference, about whom a great deal of fuss is made, is punctured by social awkwardness and a preference for interaction with keyboards and motherboards over humans.

Computer Chess is released in the UK in a Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray) edition on 20 January 2014.

Gesturing towards the semi-virtual, hyper-social and dehumanised landscape that is now our everyday reality, Computer Chess effectively anticipates how insecurity and a lack of self-confidence would come to be rendered of little consequence in a brave new digital era, an environment dominated by the iPad, the iPhone and the age of the app. Perfectly capturing a period in which technology seemed within easy reach – although it still had to be accessed by middle-aged men with terrible haircuts, synthetic suits and spectacles the size of sofas – the film’s most genuinely astonishing aspect is its beautifully articulated visual aesthetic. Like Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s recent No, which was filmed on Umatic VHS cameras to capture the visual tone of 1980s Chile, Computer Chess uses period equipment to incredible effect.

Sourcing archival, analogue vacuum tube-based video cameras, Bujalski and cinematographer Matthias Grunsky deliver a work that really looks and sounds as if it belongs to another time. There is an innocence to the look of the film that we know now to be utterly at odds with the seismic social and technological changes that it anticipates. That innocence is accentuated by the film’s aesthetic and it is interesting to imagine how younger viewers will react to the film’s abstract wonder for clunky screens and dot-matrix monitors that would soon completely reconfigure and change our lives. As filmmaking becomes more and more reliant on effects and artificially generated images, it is encouraging to see directors like Bujalski reflecting on shifts in film and technology in general. That he does so in a film as witty and engaging as Computer Chess is all the more invigorating.

Jason Wood

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The Counsellor

The Counsellor
The Counsellor

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 November 2013

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Director: Ridley Scott

Writer: Cormac McCarthy

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penélope Cruz

USA 2013

117 mins

The strange saga of Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor is one of this year’s most perplexing. Shielded from the critics by its studio until the eleventh hour, The Counsellor is an authentic film maudit – a cursed film, spluttering on the fumes of its own demise.

Looking at the pedigree of the talent involved, and the oddly subdued damp squib that they eventually turned out, it’s a weirdly gratifying task figuring out exactly how it all went wrong. Let’s start with the script: it’s the first screenplay by the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy, whose pitiless desert landscapes and gallows humour are intensely cinematic. The film came together quickly, with the most bankable A-list names attached, and the unflappable, prolific Scott to direct (although it seems like a more natural project for his late brother Tony, to whom the film is dedicated). And as for the finished project? Well, it’s a confused, violent clusterfuck, profoundly strange in a way that can only be made by very talented, but very distracted people.

The Chinese finger trap of a plot plays out on the Tex-Mex border, juxtaposing the high-flying magnates profiting off the illegal drug trade against the squalor and the aggression of the cartels. Michael Fassbender is the Counsellor, unnamed like a classic existentialist anti-hero, yet in a surely not-so-classic film. For some obscure reason, given his obvious success as a crooked lawyer, he gets involved in a high-stakes drug deal with almost unlimited financial potential, aided by debonair criminals Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Westray (Brad Pitt). Lurking hawk-like on the sidelines is Malkina (Cameron Diaz), Reiner’s scheming girlfriend. Needless to say, there’s a sting in the tail, and the whole transaction goes to hell, with devastating consequences for everyone. Yet despite Malkina’s interference, the real source of the menace behind the deal’s unravelling hovers mostly ambient and depersonalised, bearing down on its sorry victims with God-against-Job mercilessness.

Although The Counsellor is not an unqualified success by any stretch of the imagination, if you squint ever so slightly, and consider the very accomplished and playful elements that make up the film, it just about looks like a good one. No Country for Old Men, the most successful McCarthy film thus far, was a searing thriller with a dark heart – an exhilarating downer. The Counsellor, in contrast, plays its most disturbing elements for an almost-camp shock value, inflating the film to the level of cruel, crude black comedy (a bit like the Coens at their worst). The characterisations are ridiculous and acted to the absolute hilt, with Javier Bardem looking like a flail-spiked pop-punk front man in a Hawaiian shirt, and Cameron Diaz (oh so terrible) in full Cheetah regalia with two-tone black-blonde hair and leopard spot tattoos. Brad Pitt, decked out in a Southern-gentleman cowboy hat and tails, fares a little better; he’s the only one that seems to fully get the jazziness of McCarthy’s dialogue, and is thus able to inject some genuine menace and charisma, as he has done so brilliantly in his more serious recent roles, such as his parts for director Andrew Dominik.

The trajectory of the story is most obviously a cautionary tale, a modern and drug-flecked variation on the tale of the ‘forbidden fruit’: ‘Don’t err, or be prepared to suffer’. But the film is too in love with its depraved sensibility, and too eager to push the audience’s buttons, to make that nostrum fully convincing. We’ve paid our money to see carnage, and that is what we get, with no sense of real redemption, apart from those willing to recognise that the game has always been rigged. Maybe the unwillingness to provide any respite for the audience’s sympathies makes The Counsellor quite radical for an expensive, mainstream-oriented thriller. Ultimately though, after a strong initial build-up, with plenty of terse exchanges and foreshadowing, everything detonates, moral standards crumble, the Counsellor weeps, and my, it is not pretty.

David Katz

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In Fear

In Fear
In Fear

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 November 2013

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Jeremy Lovering

Writer: Jeremy Lovering

Cast: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech

UK 2013

85 mins

TV veteran Jeremy Lovering’s feature film debut In Fear effectively draws on moody British landscapes to construct a flawed, but chilling study of primal terror. On their way to a music festival, new young couple Lucy (Alice Englert) and Tom (Iain De Caestecker) plan to spend a romantic night at a countryside hotel. But misleading signs pointing in contradictory directions lead them in circles, and as night falls they seem unable to find their way back to the main road. Lost in an infernal maze in pitch-black darkness, they begin to believe that there is someone out there threatening them. Unbalanced by frustration, fear and paranoia, Tom and Lucy are pushed to their limits by the taunts of their invisible tormentor, and what they believe is their fight for survival.

In Fear is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) on 10 March 2014.

Lovering revealed as little of the script as he could to his two leads during shooting, which results in intense, raw performances, especially from Englert, who seems genuinely terrified. The minimal set-up explores the way in which the characters are manipulated into extreme behaviour by an enigmatic figure playing cruel games – interestingly, it is fear that is the trigger for violence here, rather than the other way around. Lovering skilfully creates a potent atmosphere of surreal dread, brilliantly supported by Roly Porter and Daniel Pemberton‘s excellent soundtrack. All in all, however, the film feels a little slight, requiring a fair amount of the audience’s good will in order to work, and the conclusion is an unsatisfactory unravelling of the tension that had been so tightly wound up.

This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.

Virginie Sélavy

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Gravity

Gravity
Gravity

Format: Cinema

Release date: 8 November 2013

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Writers: Alfonso Cuarón, Joná Cuarón

Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

USA, UK 2013

90 mins

Remember Alien‘s classic poster tag line ‘In space no one can hear you scream’? It would have also been the perfect fit for Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity which, arguably, is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful and mesmerising films out in cinemas this year. That is, if you are willing to suspend your disbelief at the door and take the film at face value. And most likely, you will. Because from the moment you’ve put your 3D glasses on, Gravity embraces you with its awe-aspiring CGI heart and soul. ’Life in space is impossible’, we are told, along with a summary of plain facts: 372 miles above Earth’s surface, there is no air pressure, no oxygen, and no atmosphere to carry sound. And it’s that very sense of fatal, lonely isolation that Gravity radiates, with an instantly disarming charm and cinematic virtuosity.

Though essentially a two-hander, with George Clooney as the well-versed astronaut Matt Kowalsky (Clooney being his usual smart, irresistibly charming self) and Sandra Bullock as the overly committed, new-to-space scientist Dr. Ryan Stone, who are caught in an accident while they are out in space repairing a satellite, this is really Bullock’s film. With their shuttle destroyed and all connection to Houston and soon to each other lost, she drifts through the scary, silent darkness of the universe, fighting her way from one space station to the next in the slowly dying hope that she might be able to return to Earth, all alone with her troubled soul on her mission to survive.

Gravity1

Taking the power of long, unbroken takes and seemingly limitless CGI imagery to a new dimension, Cuarón wisely alternates the settings between claustrophobic ship interiors and the boundless expanse of the cosmos, while never losing sight of the incredible beauty of Earth as seen from space, unashamedly putting it all in, from strikingly rendered scenes of sunrises to the northern lights from orbit. But while there is no denying that the film clearly underestimates audiences’ intelligence in terms of plot and character depth, everyone in for a unique cinematic ride against the backdrop of the abyss of outer space will have a fantastic time.

This review was first published as part of our LFF 2013 coverage.

Pamela Jahn

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Daughters of Darkness

Daughters of Darkness
Daughters of Darkness

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of the BFI’s ‘Gothic’ season. For more information visit the BFI website

Date: 16 + 19 November 2013

Director: Harry Kümel

Writers: Pierre Drouot, Harry Kümel, Jean Ferry

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Danielle Ouimet, Andrea Rau

Original Title: Les lèvres rouges

Belgium/France/West Germany 1971

96 mins

Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet), a good-looking young couple who have eloped, stay in an out-of-season hotel in rain-swept, depopulated Ostend. They are not exactly on honeymoon, just pausing in this luxurious yet faded interzone before the supposedly British Stefan, who has neither an English name or an English accent, takes his new bride home to his aristocratic mother – who, as we see in a cutaway shot, is a man in a dress (Fons Rademakers). Stefan also takes his belt to his wife during lovemaking, and shows signs of other kinks unusual in the clean-cut leading man of a horror movie – compare young bridegrooms in everything from The Black Cat (1934) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) for exemplars of straight values. The only other guests in the hotel are the Countess Elisabeth Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) and her pouting, tempting secretary Ilona (Andrea Rau). The aged clerk (Paul Esser) and a retired policeman (Georges Jamin) are certain that the Countess was here before, too many years ago for her apparent age, and is mixed up with unsolved murders that have left blood-drained corpses behind…

Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness is an unusual horror film, depicting vampirism (and lesbianism) as a reasonable alternative to stifling or perverse male desires. It’s cine-literate, casting Seyrig for her association with art cinema from Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière &#224 Marienbad, set in another hotel in limbo) and dressing and coiffing her like 1930s Marlene Dietrich. But it’s also creepily, delicately sophisticated, with a witty, evocative score by Francois de Roubaix and an interesting, unusual set of monstrous mannerisms. The Countess shimmers in a silver sheath dress and shows white, white teeth in her red, red mouth and waves a feather boa like the fronds of a poison anemone to attract the young couple into her coils in a distant echo of Dracula’s victim-enveloping cloak. Bathory is named for the Hungarian mass murderess (who may have been framed) and recurrent film character, and Seyrig seethes sexually as she recounts the atrocities committed by her supposed ancestress, which excites the sneakily sadistic Stefan.

There are moments of unsettling physical horror – Ilona’s death, bleeding out in a shower after a blunder with a straight razor, foreshadows the death by running water of Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) in Hammer’s Dracula AD 1972 (1972) – but also of black farce and high-end erotica. For some unknown reason, a clutch of seemingly unrelated films told very similar stories in the early 1970s: Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971), Vicente Aranda’s The Blood-Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada, 1972), Richard Blackburn’s Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) and José Larraz’s Vampyres (1974) all likewise revolve around vampire matriarchs seducing innocent girls away from lumpen men. These are films which exercise a vampire-like power of fascination. Far more steadily paced than the vigorous Hammer Gothics, likely to get distracted by some apparently minor element of art direction or costuming, and alert to the erotic potential of teeth against skin in a self-aware manner, they show the vampire genre had evolved to the point when films were being made by artists who knew what they were doing rather than directors perhaps unconsciously channelling the dreams and desires of their audiences.

Kim Newman

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Nosferatu the Vampyre

Nosferatu the Vampyre
Nosferatu the Vampyre

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 November 2013

Distributor: BFI

Director: Werner Herzog

Writer: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

Original Title: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht

Germany 1979

83 mins

The earliest extant film version of Dracula, F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens), starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, ironically mirrors the Count’s own struggle to survive death. The adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel was successfully sued by the copyright holders, and every copy but one of the film was destroyed. It would be nice to think stakes were driven through the cans of celluloid. Once the copyright had expired, that one copy rose from the dead, and Murnau’s Nosferatu firmly established itself as an early classic of German Expressionism, and would haunt horror cinema everywhere.

Werner Herzog’s decision to remake the film was a typically bold, even foolhardy, one, but it is also one of the best post-war retellings of the Dracula story. Eschewing the camp and cheaply Freudian reiterations, Herzog took a grimly sympathetic approach. First of all, he firmly establishes his innocents. An uncannily beautiful Isabella Adjani plays Lucy (not Mina as in the novel) and Bruno Ganz is Jonathan Harker. They live a weirdly colourless and blurry existence of mutual adoration in Wismar. Their watery love is depicted with a walk along a mud-coloured beach in a scene that anticipates the sopping romantics of Terrence Malick’s bathetic To the Wonder. Given the job of finalising a property deal, Harker journeys to the remote mountains of Transylvania. Here, using the thrusting theme from Wagner’s Rheingold (which Malick would also borrow for The New World), Harker becomes a Caspar David Friedrich romantic who – the sea-level dweller having gained some altitude – begins to pose heroic. The sublime is almost a cleansing ceremony, a man alone in the racing clouds, but it is at exactly this point that the romantic tourist meets the resident of the mountains, and discovers the true meaning of loneliness. As Goethe would have reminded Harker, unhappy people are dangerous.

Nosferatu the Vampyre will be released in the UK as a limited edition Blu-ray SteelBook on 19 May 2014.

In his second collaboration with Herzog, Klaus Kinski gives a compellingly haunted performance. His Dracula is a creature who is as much a victim of his own condition as anyone else: a vampyre who thinks with his fingernails, while his big frightened eyes look on helpless at the damage he is compelled to commit. His remarkable ugliness, his determinedly unsexy creepiness, and his famished need make a mockery of the teenage rip ‘em up fantasies that now parade as nightmares. Kinski’s creation invades Jonathan and Lucy’s hometown, bringing with him disease, rats and death, a Pied Piper in reverse. As with many Kinski/Herzog films, the latter half slides towards disaster with the unstoppable force of a bad dream, but, as like with other great horror films (and I’d include The Shining in this category), the film is not really frightening as such. Nothing goes bang in the night. Rather there is a continuous unsettling drone screech of everything going wrong all the way through.

John Bleasdale

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Milius

Milius
Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Milius on the set of Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 November 2013

Distributor: Studiocanal

Directors: Joey Figueroa, Zak Knutson

Cast: John Milius, Peter Bart, Bill Cody

USA 2013

95 mins

Everybody in Hollywood, or at least everybody of a certain vintage, has a story to tell about John Milius. Denied the possibility of a glorious death in Vietnam because of his asthma, he seems to have turned to filmmaking as another way to play with big toys and live large. Graduating from the same school that gave us Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and Coppola, he found distinction first as a much-in-demand screenwriter, responsible for many of the key lines of 1970s’ dialogue, from Dirty Harry’s ‘Do you feel lucky?’ bit, through Quint’s Indianapolis speech in Jaws, to the ‘smell of napalm in the morning’ in Apocalypse Now, but also proved his worth as a director with Dillinger, The Wind and the Lion and Big Wednesday.

All of this is quite a legacy, but his main project all the while seems to have been the cultivation of a legend. A big bear of a man, and a born contrarian, he seems to have never left the house without a gun or two, and was prone to produce them during negotiations, or, on one occasion, to get the desired vocal performance out of Martin Sheen. He seems to have had no fear in speaking truth to power, no matter what the consequences, all the while dressed like a combination biker, gunslinger and Mexican revolutionary.

Milius is released on DVD in the UK on 18 Nov 2013 by Studiocanal.

But the 1970s turned into the 1980s and something changed, despite sizable hits with Conan the Barbarian and the ludicrous Reaganite fantasy Red Dawn. The directorial credits tailed off, and Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa’s highly entertaining documentary spends a good portion of its running time investigating why. Being a libertarian right winger (he describes himself as a ‘zen anarchist’) in Hollywood’s Democrat country can’t have helped, nor his propensity for saying things like ’my fantasy is to fly across rooftops and drop fire on children’. But the most dramatically ironic possibility raised by the film, for a man artistically obsessed with hubris, is that that wildman legend that preceded him began to close doors in the increasingly safe corporate world that Hollywood became.

Milius has a twisty, frequently hilarious, and ultimately moving tale to tell, and it rounds up an impressive roster of talking heads to tell it with. Harrison Ford is there, as are all the ‘move brats,’ telling story after story: ‘He created cage fighting!’ ’He’s Walter from the Big Lebowski!’ So many that they spill out over the closing credits, every one adding to the legend.

Mark Stafford

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