What was done, was done for our salvation.

Nothing But the Night

(1973)

(SPOILERS) A non-Hammer pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Nothing But the Night’s neglected status is a fair reflection that it is, mostly, a quite dull affair. Peter Sasdy’s film has been compared to same year’s The Wicker Man, with its mysterious goings-on on a remote Scottish island and particularly for its shocking sacrificial climax, but really it’s only that shocking (and wholly bizarre) climax that marks it out for attention at all (probably spoiled if you watched it under the alternative title The Resurrection Syndicate, but at least not confounding expectations they way The Caste of the Living Dead would).

Indeed, for the most part Nothing But the Night is studiously procedural in tone, as if following the banal minutiae of the investigation of Colonel Charles Bingham (Lee), a semi-retired plod, and pathologist Sir Mark Ashley (Cushing) will somehow make the last ten minutes easier to swallow when it comes. I’d have gladly sacrificed such presumed reverence for a bit more action and drama.

After a coach driver seems to have set himself alight, resulting in an accident that leaves the children of an orphanage run by The Van Traylen Fellowship unscathed, Bingham is keen to get to the bottom of matters. Three trustees of the Van Traylen Trust have died in the previous six months, making the trust £5m richer. Dr Haynes (Keith Barron) attempts to get answers through hypnosis from Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong, who ignominiously, went on to play Cassandra in Only Fools and Horses; she’s pretty good here), one of the children closest to the accident. Mary keeps talking about a consuming fire, “a nightmare where she feels she is being burned alive”.

On top of this, Mary’s mum Anna Harb (Diana Dors), a former prostitute who has just done ten years in Broadmoor for a triple killing, wants her daughter back, and journalist Joan Foster (Georgia Brown) is keen to stir things up in the name of a good story.

There are more than enough distinctive elements here to provide a hook then, and it isn’t clear just what is going on at any point; are the trustees up to no good? Is Anna, an occultist given to splenetic pronouncements such as “If you’re lying to me, if this is some kind of trick, I’ll kill you!” responsible? Or is something else going on? If it weren’t for the leftfield ending, you’d swear this was a tale of reincarnation. Although, it does turn out to be a (kind of) case of metempsychosis, just not in any expected manner.

Unfortunately, Sasdy, mostly a TV director who was also responsible for Hammers Taste the Blood of Dracula and Countess Dracula, the big screen Doomwatch adaptation and the rather good BBC Nigel Kneale The Stone Tape diligently fails to inject any life into the proceedings.

There’s the occasional moment (the murder of Keith Barron’s doctor isn’t exactly a Vera Miles in Psycho shock, but we’re pretty sure by this point he’s the young lead who will guide us through the picture), but endless scenes of Lee and Cushing debating the next move, or of Diana Dors wandering through scrubland as probably the most laborious red herring ever, has a good go at inducing a soporific response.

The ending, though. Dors has been set up so blatantly that few will believe she’s actually up to no good, but anyone expecting the Bingham trustees to be responsible is simultaneously undercut and validated as Mary revels herself to be one of their number. As Cushing explains, “They have used their power and their wealth to try and achieve immortality”, by “transplanting the nucleus of their adult knowledge, experience and personality into the minds of those children”. How? Well, employ a first class biochemist and a brain surgeon and it can only be a matter of time before bob’s your uncle.

As explanations go, it’s risible, but the sight of Mary exclaiming to Bingham “You could have been one of us, you silly man. Now you’ll burn” is quite chilling in Legend of Hell House possession by way of Village of the Damned kind of way. This after the reveal she put her not-so-dear mama on the bonfire. Any possibility that Lee will make amends for his indulgence of pagan rites in The Wicker Man is staved off, as Joan gets set alight by the convenient gust of Ashley’s incoming helicopter. The obliging remaining kids then go and jump off a cliff, which ties up any loose ends.

At one point a couple of drunks discover a ritually murdered child’s body, and it’s curious the number of British pictures around this time presenting an environment where children are no longer safe; this, The Wicker Man (even merely as a lure for Edward Woodward), The Offence. Perhaps they’re tapping into a post-Moors Murders mood, one more recently further embedded with the Red Riding Trilogy and post-Savile ongoing revelations.

I’d be very surprised if Ben Wheatley hadn’t seen Nothing But the Night, as it feels like the kind of fare he’d lap up. Brian Hayles, a frequent contributor to Doctor Who who also wrote for Doomwatch and gave us the screenplay for the seminal Warlords of Atlantis, adapted the screenplay from John Blackburn’s novel of the same name.

Cushing and Lee are reliable but don’t really have anything to dig their teeth into. Ironically, perhaps, as Lee conceived this as the first of a Bingham trilogy (he optioned two other Blackburn novels); his role in The Wicker Man, the same year, represents just the kind of anti-typecasting part you’d expect him to be aiming for, but I guess anything non-Dracula was a win at that point in his career.

Aside from Strong, it’s Brown who really impresses as the cynical journo in search of a story. Also featured are Fulton Mackay, a young(ish) Michael Gambon and Kathleen Byron (best known as loony Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus). Nothing But the Night really needs the viewer to endure 75 minutes of near nodding off to the ‘70s scenery for its ending to have full effect, but I couldn’t really blame anyone skipping through it on YouTube for the (actual) fireworks.

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I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.

Welcome to the future. Life is good. But it can be better.

20 to See in 2020
Not all of these movies may find a release date in 2020, given Hollywood’s propensity for shunting around in the schedules along with the vagaries of post-production. Of my 21 to See in 2019, there’s still Fonzo, Benedetta, You Should Have Left, Boss Level and the scared-from-its-alloted-date The Hunt yet to see the light of day. I’ve re-included The French Dispatch here, however. I've yet to see Serenity and The Dead Don’t Die. Of the rest, none were wholly rewarding. Netflix gave us some disappointments, both low profile (Velvet Buzzsaw, In the Shadow of the Moon) and high (The Irishman), and a number of blockbusters underwhelmed to a greater or lesser extent (Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker). Others (Knives Out, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) were interesting but flawed. Even the more potentially out there (Joker, Us, Glass, Rocketman) couldn…

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

How many galoshes died to make that little number?

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
(SPOILERS) Looney Tunes: Back in Action proved a far from joyful experience for director Joe Dante, who referred to the production as the longest year-and-a-half of his life. He had to deal with a studio that – insanely – didn’t know their most beloved characters and didn’t know what they wanted, except that they didn’t like what they saw. Nevertheless, despite Dante’s personal dissatisfaction with the finished picture, there’s much to enjoy in his “anti-Space Jam”. Undoubtedly, at times his criticism that it’s “the kind of movie that I don’t like” is valid, moving as it does so hyperactively that its already gone on to the next thing by the time you’ve realised you don’t like what you’re seeing at any given moment. But the flipside of this downside is, there’s more than enough of the movie Dante was trying to make, where you do like what you’re seeing.

Dante commented of Larry Doyle’s screenplay (as interviewed in Joe Dante, edited by Nil Baskar and G…

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

You’re a slut with a snake in your mouth. Die!

Mickey One (1965)
(SPOILERS) Apparently this early – as in, two years before the one that made them both highly sought-after trailblazers of “New Hollywood” – teaming between Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn has undergone a re-evaluation since its initial commercial and critical drubbing. I’m not sure about all that. Mickey One still seems fatally half-cocked to me, with Penn making a meal of imitating the stylistic qualities that came relatively naturally – or at least, Gallically – to the New Wave.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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