Death on the Nile (1978)

 "Mon dieu, how she makes enemies of them all!"

I've read the novel, but it would have been around 1990-ish, so I wasn't expecting to remember much of the plot, and surely enough I didn't. So I was genuinely unspoiled for the big reveal. Nevertheless, I'll try and review this as a film rather than as Agatha Christie's original plot.

It's a very cinematic adaptation, shot on location at all the sights in Egypt as well as in rural England. The whole thing is exquisitely shot- particularly impressive is the first tracking shot of the dramatis personae all at dinner for the first time.

This isn't quite an all-star cast, but the star wattage is nevertheless relatively high, with no less a personage as Bette Davis in a middling sized role. David Niven is solid as the Watson figure, with Colonel Race giving some hilariously off colour views on those characters who deign to speak in a language other than English. Maggie Smith excels as a bitter woman in reduced circumstances, while Angela Lansbury is every bit as good as an amusingly sozzled romance novelist.

However... I'm not sure about Peter Ustinov as Poirot. It's not that there's anything wrong with his performance, he just feels miscast. He doesn't visually convince as Poirot, however well he may play the part. However, the overall performances are strong, and the film works superbly, helped by its awesome locations, in letting events play out dramatically, even if we do spend far too long on Poirot's explanation of how pretty much every character could have seen Jacqui shoot Simon through the window.

There are some fascinating moments here- a brief mention is made to a previous case involving a "decapitated clergyman". There's an unfortunate Indian stereotype. But overall this is a fine adaptation which plays the source material with a straight bat.

The Ice House

 "But there is only ice in the ice house..."

This is the last of the BBC's original run of A Ghost Story for Christmas, screened just before Christmas, 1978. Like the previous year's instalment, this is an original story, set in the present day, which may well be counted against it. Worse, this instalment departs even further from its predecessors in not being directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark. And there isn't even any suggestion of a ghost.  I understand it was rather panned at the time.

Personally, though, I rather like it.

Our protagonist is Paul, played by John Bowen who looks significently older than my forty-seven year old self does today, despite being five years younger- which is rather appropriate. Paul has separated from his wife (join the club...!), yet seems to have no spark for life, with no appetite for competition in playing croquet and seeing life as somnething to be "got through". He seems to have very little zest for ligfe to begin with.

And so he visits a very peculiar health farm, whose peculiarity is so very gradually revealed. The farm is run by a sinister, pansexual and incestuous brother and sister who seem to be symbolically (or literally) echoed by the flowers of a mysterious and sinister vine that covers a creeply ice house within the grounds... and holes appear in the windows of Paul's room which are the shape of the flowers of the vine... and rather phallic.

Paul's path to his inevitable doom, echoing those of the other zombified guests, is very well done. Yes, the performances are very mannered, but this works well in showing us a world where stultified middle class convention is a substitute for a life truly lived.

Definitely worth seeing.

Star Crash (1978)

 "Time for a little robot chauvinism!"

What's that you say?You suspect this hilariously low budget space opera, clearly based on the style of old movie serials, may not be entirely uninfluenced by a certain Hollywood blockbuster of the previous year? Really...?

In one sense the contrast between this film and Star Wars is hilarious. The star fields and models, while trying to evoke Star Wars, are rubbish. The script and acting are gfloriously cheesy, although Caroline Munro is genuinely charismatic and awesome. David Hasselhoff's hairstyle is not merely awful, but the most awful of all possible hairstyles.

I'll cut to the chase: this is a terrible film. But there are two types of terrible films- boringly terrible and hilariously terrible.This is a hilarious episode of the second kind, with absurd concepts, dialogue and plot twist. The emperor (played by a visibly embarrassed Christopher Plummer) at one point just stops time for plot convenience. Even better, at one point Akton seems to know things he wouldn't obviously know, and Stella immediately makes the leap of logic that he can see the future. But Akton then explains he can never tell her what's to come because she would try to change the future that's "against the law, so therefore I can tell you nothing"... all while he's merrily changing the future himself. Perhaps I ought not to be applying logic and reason here.

This is also a fascinating halfway house between Star Wars and the previous generation of space operas. This may be obviously influenced by movie serials, but there's none of the Joseph Campbell fairytale vibes. And we also have moments of stop motion animation right out of a Ray Harryhausen film. This film may be awful, but gloriously so.

The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny

So the Chronicles of Amber are over for me, at least for the time being. I realise there’s a later sequence of novels, but now I’ve started to blog novels I really ought to do some other authors.

This was, in some ways, more of the same, with the familiar prose style and the familiar extraordinarily detailed world and cosmology. Yet the narrative was different, far more of a quest, and the focus was less on the narrative itself but on metaphor and the philosophical musings of Corbin which, I highly suspect, mirror those of the author, who is clearly no solipsist and unlikely to be a practising Buddhist.

These kinds of surreal and thoughtful passages, of which there are many, manage to succeed by dint of a strong prose style and some philosophical substance, but there’s a sense that the author is doing this to break out of the genre ghetto into the foothills of literary fiction in a rather self-conscious manner.

It’s not all philosophy, though: big things happen, and a satisfying ending is ultimately reached with, incredibly, no dangling plot threads. This is, perhaps, the weakest instalment, but that’s a relative statement. The Amber Chronicles are superb.

Drunken Master (1978)

 "Fart for the stick king..."th century

Today's film is brought to you, appropriately, with four pints of Bishop's Finger. Perhaps it should have been Chinese wine. 

By this point I've seen a few kung fu films, and this is my second Jackie Chan film after Snake in Eagle's Shadow last week. This film is, on reflection, my favourite. Better than any Bruce Lee film I've seen (follow the tags), or indeed The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

I've praised Jackie Chan before, and  shall praise him again, His martial arts skills are awe-inspiring even to a layman such as myself, yet his physical comedy skills ae extraordinary, beyond anyone else in the sound era and comparable to Buster Keaton.

Chan plays Wong Fei-Hung, a folk hero and historical figure, a mischievous kind of late 19th century Robin Hood archetype, while the wonderful Siu-Rin Yuen plays Beggar So, who apparently appears as a Yoda figure in a number of mainly '70s and '80s kung fu films. The film is, despite being a comedy (and rather a good one), a serious kung fu fulm as far as the various styles are concerned, although it perpetuates the myth that the drunken style lierally involves the consumption of significant quantities of booze. This is false; only blogging it does.

i enjoyed this film hugely, both as a comedy and a kung fu film. I'm also beginning to recognise individual actors, and Siu-Rin Yuen is magnificent. This is an unmissable masterpiece of the genre.

Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978)

 "I'll need new socks!"

Last week I watched and blogged The Mystery of Chess Boxing, a '70s Hong Kong kung fu film. It was, in a word, pants- just not very well made at all. This film, happily, is an example of the genre done well.

The plot is, broadly, similar, yet the direction is from another planet- stylish, crisp and, importantly, manages to clearly tell the story visually in a way the other film utterly fails to do.

Like The Mystery of Chess Boxing, this is a kung fu film full of lots of action but also a great deal of physical comedy, with the hero a bullied underdog- and, yes, both films have a touch of the old "bullying is character-building" nonsense- but the difference in quality is enormous. The kung fu, it's been pointed out to me, genuinely is in the various different styles this time. And here we have plenty of extended scenes of comical kung fu-themed slapstick, but this time done not ony with impressive skills but also real comic timing. Certain sequences in this film remind me of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd. The physical comedy is that good.

It helps, of course, that the film stars Jackie Chan, whom I've somehow contrived to avoid encountering before after blogging more than 700 films over the last ten years. He's awesome not only in terms of the acting and kung fu but also in terms of comic timing- you can see how this film launched him in a successful niche of kung fu films with a fair dollop of comedy. Yet the comic acting is strong throughout the whole cast, as is the kung fu.

I enjoyed this a lot. All as part of a balanced diet, of course, but I see more Jackie Chan and more Hong Kong kung fu in my none-too-distant future.

Halloween (1978)

 “You can't kill the Boogeyman!"

At last I find a subtitled version. Hooray. It's about time.

This is, as I kept saying about the early Friday the 13th fims, an absolutely textbook slasher movie, and one of those films which played a big part in setting up the tropes we all know- sex, saying "I'll be right back" and smoking weed (while driving, tut tut) are all hazardous for one's life expectancy although, if you're over twenty, you'll probably be all right.

What separates Halloween from these films is, quite simply, it's much better directed by the splendid John Carpenter and, indeed, much better made. What's different here, as shown in the superb camerawork, music and use of the pumpkin motif, is that this is the first slasher since Psycho that isn't a B movie.It may be a straight-down-the-line slasher, but it's done really well, with the dialogue and acting a cut above what we's expect from the genre. It's slow, and the killing doesn't start until fairly late on, but there's excellent use of suspense, with Michael Myers being glimpsed everywhere.

A very young Jamie Lee Curtis heads a very young cast, while Donald Pleasance is a rather astute piece of casting for Dr Loomis. It's rather jolting seeing him play an American, though, and his accent lapses on occasion. It's interesting, too, to see the use, and meta-commentart, of the 1951 version of The Thing from Another World (must see that at some point) on the telly, given what Carpenter would proceed to shoot a couple of films down the line.

It's a textbook slasher, but it's the textbook slasher, impressing even someone so jaded with the genre as myself.

The Five Venoms (1978)

"Once an evil deed is done, it never ends.”

I haven't seen many films in this genre at all; I blogged another Shaw Brothers film a while ago but am still not familiar with the tropes. Still, although there’s a lot of kung fu here, and a similarly historical setting, it feels very different to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

The plot structure is extremely simple and info-dumped on us in the very first scene as a dying teacher of martial arts tells his half-trainer young student that he has trained five others and wants him to see whether they have ended up good or evil. We then get s montage of the five and their styles- the centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard and toad. And then the student spends the whole film just observing things until the very end. It’s certainly convenient that all five still live in the same town, but the fun is that, although we soon find the identities of the centipede and snake, we have to work out which characters in the film are the other three.

It’s not the most difficult whodunit in the world, and I guessed them all, but this way of doing things adds fun. It has a very odd but interesting feel of being a police procedural throughout, too, although the justice system is horrifyingly brutal, corrupt and atrocious, based on torturing suspects until they confess, and where judges can whip police officers to solve a crime quickly, inevitably resulting in wrongful convictions and judicial killings. I disagree with the sentiments of the last scene; that judge deserves a good kicking. But the film itself is a fun little way of passing some time.

Damien: Omen II (1978)

"Damien Thorn is the Antichrist!"

It's been quite a while since I saw The Omen, but it lingers in the mind somewhat, mainly because of the set piece deaths. This sequel follows a similar pattern; Damien is now thirteen, adopted by his aunt and uncle, and forced to attend one of those awful military schools to which the more abusive type of American parents send their children. There are the same types of people protecting him, the same types of people discovering what he is and trying to stop him, and of course the same types of grisly deaths for the latter.

Except... while still a pretty good film, it doesn't compare remotely to its predecessor. Partly this is because, although some of the set piece deaths are rather good, they don't begin to approach the spectacle of the first film. And the cast, while solid character actors all, lacks the charismatic star presence of a Gregory Peck.

That isn't to say that the story doesn't grab the attention, that the central conceit doesn't work as well as before or, indeed, that there's much wrong with the script; I suspect that a better director could have improved the gory set pieces which, while a decent enough spectacle, don't anchor this film as they did its predecessor. But it certainly has its moment- I enjoyed the reporter's death my raven and lorry, and the film has a bi of fun with the fact we all know where it's going. It's a solid but fairly by-the-numbers early example of the type of Holywood horror sequel that would become so fashionable over the following decade.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978)

"The tomatoes are coming!"

Oh my. That's... quite a cultural experience. What have I just watched?

So very low budget; totally devoid of stars (the most "famous" person in the film seems to be Gregg Berger, who would provide the voice for Grimlock in the Transformers cartoon the following decade), and many of the big roles are played by people with no other screen credits. And yet... this is absolutely wonderful.

There isn't so much a plot here, or at least no more so than there is in the first two Monty Python films; instead we get a series of linked sketches, all showing us some very Pythonesqye humour; indeed, the whole thing reminds me of the tennis-playing blancmange sketch. The film is chick full of brilliant sketches, including an interesting precursor of the Two Ronnies' famous "crossed lines" sketch. And it's all so splendidly '70s, with a superb skewering of the advertising agency, although with a very jarring bit of anti-Japanese racism near the start. And the tomatoes themselves... words fail me.

The conclusion is, of course, both random and inspired, imparting the important moral message that chart pop is evil, and the final scene with the carrot promises, or threatens, a sequel. I'm, well, defeated by this film...

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

"Even Buddha has to conquer evil."

'70s Hong Kong martial arts films are a genre which I freely admit I know nothing about; I'm only even aware that the Shaw Brothers are a thing because of a bit of Googling. But I'm aware it has a cult appeal as a genre, and it has influenced Quentin Tarantino, so this is me watching what seems to be the most well-known of the genre. It's dated, yes, but I rather enjoyed the experience.

I'd need to see a few more films in this genre but I found it well made, entertaining and visually stylish, and the highly stylised acting style works. It's all very "boy's own" with barely any women characters and the emphasis on years of tough ordeals to learn kung-fu skills, but the historical setting- early 18th century China, and everybody hates the Manchu "Tartars"- is fascinating.

Also excellent are the fight arrangements, as you'd expect, and the pacing of the film, There are attempts at communicating Buddhist ideas but the film doesn't really pretend to be philosophical and, probably wisely, sticks to the boys' own stuff. It's a hugely entertaining film, which even manages to give us a satisfactory ending where the baddie gets his comeuppance and we almost forget that the Manchu will remain in charge for another 200 years.

I won't pretend I'm suddenly a massive fan of the genre, but this is probably not the last '70s martial arts film to appear in this blog.

Superman (1978)

"I have sent them you, my only son."

This is, perhaps, the first of the current era of superhero films. The 1966 Batman film was a TV tie-in, while all the others were either movie serials or of that world. This film sets a precedent, and at first it looks like being a good one; Superman is, after all, bloody good.

It isn't a good precedent, though, for the simple reason that the film is an origin story. It happens to work here, yes, but it doesn't in general. Origin stories just mean that you spend most of the film without the title character being able to do any of their usual cool stuff. It works here because Superman's origin story is epic and cool, but generally speaking origin stories are to be avoided.

Still, it works here, and the film is superb. Oh, there are flaws- Gene Hackman is miscast, playing Lex Luthor for broad humour rather than the more camp performance the character needed. Luthor six written like a villain from the Batman TV series; he should have been played as such. Also, there's a glaring continuity error. Jor-El tells Kal-El in the Fortress of Solitude that he's been dead for thousands of years. Yet Kal-El took twelve years to reach Earth and he crashed into Kansas, we're told, in 1948. (So Superman is thirty years old.)  Oops. Also, I'm not sure there's any real logic to the way Luthor infers the existence of Kryptonite. Still, it's necessary to the X plot. Oh, and why is Superman so stupid as to tell Lois one of his weaknesses, namely that he can't see through lead, knowing full well that she's going to write a full page article about it?

All that said, though, the film is epic, huge, looks awesome and Christopher Reeve is perfect casting. It's a triumph, and here are some particular nice touches. The film commemorates thirty years of Superman, so the tribute to Action Comics #1 at the start is an extremely nice touch. Also a nice touch is that all the Elders of Krypton have  different symbol on their chests, and Jor-El's just happens to look like an "S" in the Roman alphabet. Also, well, Marlon Brando. Sadly, though, I must confess to my fellow Doctor Who fans that I failed to spot William Russell in these scenes.

Also s nice touch is the young Clark Kent running faster, literally, than a speeding train. These little touches keep us entertained as the film whisks is through Superman's origins and, this being pre- Crisis on Infinite Earths and the film being moderately faithful to the comics, his takes a good long while. 

Interestingly, though, Jor-El says the line "I have sent them you, my only son". This is a blindingly obvious Christ allegory and I'm not sure that's appropriate; Superman was created in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, by a couple of Jewish nebbishes. The character is, in spirit, Jewish. He's also essentially a liberal wish fulfilment figure: Superman in his early years would go after wife beaters or put Hitler and Stalin on trial. Here, though, he's a resolutely conservative and all-American figure, his liberal, Jewish origins forgotten.

Nothing dates the film so much as the scenes at the Daily Planet, with typewriters everywhere and not a single PC. Metropolis is very obviously New York here: there are trains to Buffalo and Syracuse.

Sadly, the climax to the film is a bit of a letdown; if Superman can just turn back time so that Lois doesn't die then all future dramatic tension is gone. But this is a film that rises above its flaws by dint of simply being awesome. 

There. After loads of Marvel stuff I've finally blogged something by DC!

Grease (1978)

"Rock Hudson lost his heart to Doris Day."

Yeah, right. Suuure he did.

I'm sure I'm not the only man to have been forced to watch this film by my better half but, cliched though it may be, that is how I came to see this, a film I wouldn't normally watch. You can thank Mrs Llamastrangler for this post.

First impressions are that this is a fairly straight-up romantic musical. There's a lot of humour, but none of it is metatextual; its a fairly straight take on the tropes of high school romance with songs. And there's nothing wrong with that; it works, although the ending, in which our lovers finally get together, feels somewhat rushed.

Second impression is that this may be set in the 1950's but, like Happy Days, it's giving us a very '70s version of the '50s, something not quite like the '50s as they were or, indeed, the '50s as shown in popular culture today. But for Grease, of course, the '50s were only as long ago as the '90s are to us, with the gap in social mores not looming so large.

Oh, and there's a certain obvious debt to Romeo and Juliet, although perhaps in this case more through the medium of West Side Story.

I won't say much about the songs; they do what they're supposed to do, but they're not really my think, and don't really evoke '50s rock 'n' roll, not even Greased Lightning. They're show tunes mixed with s little disco, which fits just a little oddly with the setting. But I'll make a load of observations...

1. So that's why Lauren Laverne called her band "Kenickie" back in the '99s. The penny drops. This is why all films that have permeated popular culture to this extent need to be watched, or pop culture references will go unrecognised.

2. I'm surprised they let Olivia Newton-John use her natural Aussie accent, especially as the script and characterisation make no real reference to her Antipodean origins.

3. American high schools seem to be conformist hells anyway. '50s American high schools are seemingly much worse.

4. The Blob is on at the drive-in. Nice!

5. Fanny Flagg!!! Titter. Chortle. Etc.

6. It's refreshing to see a PE teacher- Sud Caesar's Coach Calhoun- not being portrayed as a thug for once.

Musicals are not my thing, unless there a quirkiness to them, and this is a straight-aged musical. Still, it's well enough made, and at least I've finally ticked this film off. Just never make me watch it again.