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.

You were this amazing occidental samurai.

Ricochet (1991) (SPOILERS) You have to wonder at Denzel Washington’s agent at this point in the actor’s career. He’d recently won his first Oscar for Glory , yet followed it with less-than-glorious heart-transplant ghost comedy Heart Condition (Bob Hoskins’ racist cop receives Washington’s dead lawyer’s ticker; a recipe for hijinks!) Not long after, he dipped his tentative toe in the action arena with this Joel Silver production; Denzel has made his share of action fare since, of course, most of it serviceable if unremarkable, but none of it comes near to delivering the schlocky excesses of Ricochet , a movie at once ingenious and risible in its plot permutations, performances and production profligacy.

He’ll regret it to his dying day, if ever he lives that long.

The Quiet Man (1952) (SPOILERS) The John Wayne & John Ford film for those who don’t like John Wayne & John Ford films? The Quiet Man takes its cues from Ford’s earlier How Green Was My Valley in terms of, well less Anglophile and Hibernophile and Cambrophile nostalgia respectively for past times, climes and heritage, as Wayne’s pugilist returns to his family seat and stirs up a hot bed of emotions, not least with Maureen O’Hara’s red-headed hothead. The result is a very likeable movie, for all its inculcated Oirishness and studied eccentricity.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Well, something’s broke on your daddy’s spaceship.

Apollo 13 (1995) (SPOILERS) The NASA propaganda movie to end all NASA propaganda movies. Their original conception of the perilous Apollo 13 mission deserves due credit in itself; what better way to bolster waning interest in slightly naff perambulations around a TV studio than to manufacture a crisis event, one emphasising the absurd fragility of the alleged non-terrestrial excursions and the indomitable force that is “science” in achieving them? Apollo 13 the lunar mission was tailor made for Apollo 13 the movie version – make believe the make-believe – and who could have been better to lead this fantasy ride than Guantanamo Hanks at his all-American popularity peak?

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989) (SPOILERS) There’s Jaws , there’s Star Wars , and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws ’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy , to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “ more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie ”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “ mainly boring ”. Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the

You think a monkey knows he’s sitting on top of a rocket that might explode?

The Right Stuff (1983) (SPOILERS) While it certainly more than fulfils the function of a NASA-propaganda picture – as in, it affirms the legitimacy of their activities – The Right Stuff escapes the designation of rote testament reserved for Ron Howard’s later Apollo 13 . Partly because it has such a distinctive personality and attitude. Partly too because of the way it has found its through line, which isn’t so much the “wow” of the Space Race and those picked to be a part of it as it is the personification of that titular quality in someone who wasn’t even in the Mercury programme: Chuck Yaeger (Sam Shephard). I was captivated by The Right Stuff when I first saw it, and even now, with the benefit of knowing-NASA-better – not that the movie is exactly extolling its virtues from the rooftops anyway – I consider it something of a masterpiece, an interrogation of legends that both builds them and tears them down. The latter aspect doubtless not NASA approved.

Drank the red. Good for you.

Morbius (2022) (SPOILERS) Generic isn’t necessarily a slur. Not if, by implication, it’s suggestive of the kind of movie made twenty years ago, when the alternative is the kind of super-woke content Disney currently prioritises. Unfortunately, after a reasonable first hour, Morbius descends so resignedly into such unmoderated formula that you’re left with a too-clear image of Sony’s Spider-Verse when it lacks a larger-than-life performer (Tom Hardy, for example) at the centre of any given vehicle.

He doesn’t want to lead you. He just wants you to follow.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) (SPOILERS) The general failing of the prequel concept is a fairly self-evident one; it’s spurred by the desire to cash in, rather than to tell a story. This is why so few prequels, in any form, are worth the viewer/reader/listener’s time, in and of themselves. At best, they tend to be something of a well-rehearsed fait accompli. In the movie medium, even when there is material that withstands closer inspection (the Star Wars prequels; The Hobbit , if you like), the execution ends up botched. With Fantastic Beasts , there was never a whiff of such lofty purpose, and each subsequent sequel to the first prequel has succeeded only in drawing attention to its prosaic function: keeping franchise flag flying, even at half-mast. Hence Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore , belatedly arriving after twice the envisaged gap between instalments and course-correcting none of the problems present in The Crimes of Grindelwald .

So, you’re telling me that NASA is going to kill the President of the United States with an earthquake?

Conspiracy Theory (1997) (SPOILERS) Mel Gibson’s official rehabilitation occurred with the announcement of 2016’s Oscar nominations, when Hacksaw Ridge garnered six nods, including Mel as director. Obviously, many refuse to be persuaded that there’s any legitimate atonement for the things someone says. They probably weren’t even convinced by Mel’s appearance in Daddy’s Home 2 , an act of abject obeisance if ever there was one. In other circles, though, Gibbo, or Mad Mel, is venerated as a saviour unsullied by the depraved Hollywood machine, one of the brave few who would not allow them to take his freedom. Or at least, his values. Of course, that’s frequently based on alleged comments he made, ones it’s highly likely he didn’t. But doesn’t that rather appeal to the premise of his 23-year-old star vehicle Conspiracy Theory , in which “ A good conspiracy theory is an unproveable one ”?

You’d be surprised how many intersectional planes of untethered consciousness exist.

Moon Knight (2022) (SPOILERS) Now, this is an interesting one. Not because it’s very good – Phase IV MCU? Hah! – but because it presents its angle on the “superhero” ethos in an almost entirely unexpurgated, unsoftened way. Here is a character explicitly formed through the procedures utilised by trauma-based mind control, who has developed alters – of which he has been, and some of which he remains, unaware – and undergone training/employment in the military and private mercenary sectors (common for MKUltra candidates, per Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill ). And then, he’s possessed by what he believes to be a god in order to carry out acts of extreme violence. So just the sort of thing that’s good, family, DisneyPlus+ viewing.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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