Blade (1998)

“You may wake up one day and find yourself extinct."

 It's strange to think that this is such an early Marvel film. In fact, prior to this the only feature films had been the bizarrely underrated Howard the Duck, The Punisher and the low budget, no star straight-to-video '90s films Captain America and Fantastic Four, both rather obscure. And that was it. Until Blade came along, failed to wow the critics but was a huge success. Not long after came X-Men and Marvel films were everywhere, many of them sadly at Fox.

So how does it stand up, twenty years on? Pretty well, actually. Yes, wooden Wesley Snipes is phoning it in with a character that could have offered a lot of potential to a good actor, and has no charisma. Yet the script- by no less than David S. Goyer- is superb, and the film looks great, even if the cinematography has inevitably dated; from the perspective of 2018 there's more than a little of the late '90s music video vibe. It looks great, though, with impressive CGI.

We begin with a great set piece at a vampire rave that dates the film enormously, yes, but also shows us what Blade can do and his mission in a visually exciting way. N'Bushe Wright convinces as the doctor who is unwittingly drawn into this vampire fighting world, and Kris Kristofferson is superb as the grizzly and gnarled mentor figure.

This is not like the comics; Blade has been made into a kind of half-vampire for some reason, and the vampire mythos here is not quite the same, but it's nice to see Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan being credited.It's an entertaining two hours, though, and perhaps the real start of our current Marvel cinematic age.

The Story of O (1975)

"You're very lucky. They'll be more severe with you."

I've blogged a lot of geeky films lately: time for another subtitled foreign film, I think, and after blogging nearly 300 films it's about time I got round to a French one. So how about The Story of O? It's very continental, very controversial and banned in the UK for a decade and a half. So what's it like?

Well, er, very Seventies. I know it's sold as a French version of Fifty Shades of Grey, but this is 1975 and the source material is not, apparently, straightforwardly about what these days we would call BDSM but saying that women are naturally submissive to men, which is more than a little dodgy. Still, none of that is apparent from the film, and it's made explicit throughout everything that happens unambiguously consensual. More surprisingly, although a lot of fairly rough stuff happens, it happens largely off camera, and there's precious little sex either. This is soft porn to the extent that it's porn at all: indeed, the direction is somewhat arty, with a definite dreamlike effect which echoes the narration.

This being the Seventies, the clothes are bloody awful although, on the evidence of this film, the interior decor could be utterly gorgeous and not brown or orange at all, at least in Paris, while still being thoroughly if the decade. Bizarrely, though, all the cars seem to hail from about three decades earlier- was France going through a vintage motors phase at the time?

The film is utterly fascinating as, anchored by an appropriately impassive performance from Corinne Clery, it traces us into a world of submission, whippings, Seventies fashion photography, emotionally fraught polyamory, lesbianism and bad hair. From an opening reminiscent of the video to John Lennon's Imagine to its ambiguous ending its a compellingly weird feast for the senses. Still, one is left with the general question of why the more well-known films featuring bondage and submission always seem to show women in the submissive role and not vice versa.