4.-7. Two Hammer films and two more recent horror movies
The pandemic has put a bit of a hole in my movie-watching, mainly because I was doing so much of it with 
lady_lugosi1313 before it started, but also because my Lib Dem chairing duties make it very difficult to ring-fence the time to sit down and watch a movie on my own without the prompt of a friend wanting me to do it with them. There's almost always an email to write, an agenda to put together, a printing task to do or some other chore accompanied by a weight of obligation that I tell myself I should get that done this evening, and then maybe watch something nice tomorrow. Guess what has always happened by tomorrow, though.
The same problem rather applies to writing about them too. It's always postponable until I have just sorted out X, Y and Z - but in fact the alphabet never ends. Anyway, I feel physically pretty under par this weekend and just need to ignore the to-do list for a bit. Let's see if I'm up to briefly recording some films I've watched instead.
4. Twins of Evil (1971), dir. John Hough
This is a Hammer vampire film whose reputation as being more concerned to titillate its audiences than tell a good story precedes it. As such, I went in with rock-bottom expectations, and therefore quite enjoyed it when it turned out to have a reasonably coherent storyline after all. I won't rush to see it again, but I have seen worse Hammer films. Speaking of which...
5. Moon Zero Two (1969), dir. Roy Ward Baker
Yeah, this was extraordinarily bad. It's a futuristic sci-fi story about mining on the moon, presumably released to capitalise on moon-mania sparked by the landing that year. I watched it on 9 May 2021, because that is the day when the story begins, plus I knew it would be the day after the local election count finished, so I would be knackered and very much in need of a brainless story to watch. But despite that attempt to create a feel of special timeliness around my viewing, I just could not get into the story. There were a few fun retrofuturistic costumes, including some ladies with excellent purple curly hair, but the whole story was just too reliant on boring dialogue about mining delivered in static indoor settings by characters I didn't care about.
6. Ghost Stories (2017), dir. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman
This is a recent British ghost story anthology film which is overall good and delivers some nice scary thrills along the way. It's filmed in Yorkshire, which meant I recognised the locations, including scenes of a stage psychic shot in the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. Given that the one time in my life I have actually been there was not long before the pandemic to see a spoof psychic with
lady_lugosi1313, that was pretty cool. The individual stories are tied together by a connecting narrative in which each is told by a witness to a sceptic investigating reported ghost sightings and trying to discover the truth behind them. It seemed to be going a bit silly towards the end, but the silliness then turned into a quite effective deconstruction of the connecting character, who turns out to be lying in a coma in a hospital bed, constructing the 'ghost stories' out of the people and environment around him. It centres issues of discrimination by making the connecting character Jewish, showing how his childhood was marred by bullying and his father flying into a rage about his sister's Muslim boyfriend, and including a black priest in the first story. But it's also almost entirely male-centred, with women featuring only as monsters or distant, one-dimensional mothers / wives / daughters appearing only briefly to further the men's stories. A pity, because other than that it was pretty good.
7. Dracula Reborn (2015), dir. Attila Luca
I watched this one last night and it is extremely bad! The plot is supposed to be about a group of journalists from Vancouver and Paris who are trying to track down a vampire cult led by Dracula, and follow it to Transylvania. Unfortunately, the vampires themselves are styled in silly cheap cloaks and clown-white make-up which just makes them look like grotesque clichés. The editing is also often quite bad, and the logic of the plot set-up is ill thought-through. We hear news bulletins saying that the Dracula clan are like celebrities and the press are too scared to attack them. But we never see anything of this celebrity - how is it manifested? What hold does it give them over the press? Are they able to use it to draw in their victims? Instead, a string of bloodied corpses is left all over Paris, and we're shown individual killings being reported in the news. Shouldn't the press be collaborating in suppressing those reports if they're supposedly so in thrall to the vampires? Also, if the vampires are like celebrities, why is it particularly hard for the journalists to track them down? And what do the journalists think is going to happen when they do track them down? They keep saying they want to find and interview a missing girl who they believe has been turned into a vampire, and / or interview members of the vampire cult. But they also know that everyone who comes across the vampires in any way is brutally murdered, increasingly including their own contacts, and yet don't seem to try to do anything to find out how to protect themselves against the same fate. Literally none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, and it's only worth watching at all as an object lesson in the difference between a superficially cool-sounding concept and a genuinely well-developed story.
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lady_lugosi1313 before it started, but also because my Lib Dem chairing duties make it very difficult to ring-fence the time to sit down and watch a movie on my own without the prompt of a friend wanting me to do it with them. There's almost always an email to write, an agenda to put together, a printing task to do or some other chore accompanied by a weight of obligation that I tell myself I should get that done this evening, and then maybe watch something nice tomorrow. Guess what has always happened by tomorrow, though.
The same problem rather applies to writing about them too. It's always postponable until I have just sorted out X, Y and Z - but in fact the alphabet never ends. Anyway, I feel physically pretty under par this weekend and just need to ignore the to-do list for a bit. Let's see if I'm up to briefly recording some films I've watched instead.
4. Twins of Evil (1971), dir. John Hough
This is a Hammer vampire film whose reputation as being more concerned to titillate its audiences than tell a good story precedes it. As such, I went in with rock-bottom expectations, and therefore quite enjoyed it when it turned out to have a reasonably coherent storyline after all. I won't rush to see it again, but I have seen worse Hammer films. Speaking of which...
5. Moon Zero Two (1969), dir. Roy Ward Baker
Yeah, this was extraordinarily bad. It's a futuristic sci-fi story about mining on the moon, presumably released to capitalise on moon-mania sparked by the landing that year. I watched it on 9 May 2021, because that is the day when the story begins, plus I knew it would be the day after the local election count finished, so I would be knackered and very much in need of a brainless story to watch. But despite that attempt to create a feel of special timeliness around my viewing, I just could not get into the story. There were a few fun retrofuturistic costumes, including some ladies with excellent purple curly hair, but the whole story was just too reliant on boring dialogue about mining delivered in static indoor settings by characters I didn't care about.
6. Ghost Stories (2017), dir. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman
This is a recent British ghost story anthology film which is overall good and delivers some nice scary thrills along the way. It's filmed in Yorkshire, which meant I recognised the locations, including scenes of a stage psychic shot in the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. Given that the one time in my life I have actually been there was not long before the pandemic to see a spoof psychic with
lady_lugosi1313, that was pretty cool. The individual stories are tied together by a connecting narrative in which each is told by a witness to a sceptic investigating reported ghost sightings and trying to discover the truth behind them. It seemed to be going a bit silly towards the end, but the silliness then turned into a quite effective deconstruction of the connecting character, who turns out to be lying in a coma in a hospital bed, constructing the 'ghost stories' out of the people and environment around him. It centres issues of discrimination by making the connecting character Jewish, showing how his childhood was marred by bullying and his father flying into a rage about his sister's Muslim boyfriend, and including a black priest in the first story. But it's also almost entirely male-centred, with women featuring only as monsters or distant, one-dimensional mothers / wives / daughters appearing only briefly to further the men's stories. A pity, because other than that it was pretty good.
7. Dracula Reborn (2015), dir. Attila Luca
I watched this one last night and it is extremely bad! The plot is supposed to be about a group of journalists from Vancouver and Paris who are trying to track down a vampire cult led by Dracula, and follow it to Transylvania. Unfortunately, the vampires themselves are styled in silly cheap cloaks and clown-white make-up which just makes them look like grotesque clichés. The editing is also often quite bad, and the logic of the plot set-up is ill thought-through. We hear news bulletins saying that the Dracula clan are like celebrities and the press are too scared to attack them. But we never see anything of this celebrity - how is it manifested? What hold does it give them over the press? Are they able to use it to draw in their victims? Instead, a string of bloodied corpses is left all over Paris, and we're shown individual killings being reported in the news. Shouldn't the press be collaborating in suppressing those reports if they're supposedly so in thrall to the vampires? Also, if the vampires are like celebrities, why is it particularly hard for the journalists to track them down? And what do the journalists think is going to happen when they do track them down? They keep saying they want to find and interview a missing girl who they believe has been turned into a vampire, and / or interview members of the vampire cult. But they also know that everyone who comes across the vampires in any way is brutally murdered, increasingly including their own contacts, and yet don't seem to try to do anything to find out how to protect themselves against the same fate. Literally none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, and it's only worth watching at all as an object lesson in the difference between a superficially cool-sounding concept and a genuinely well-developed story.
Dreamwidth version |
comments | Leave a comment