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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Prepare the Heathen’s Stand! By order of purification!

Apostle (2018)
(SPOILERS) Another week, another undercooked Netflix flick from an undeniably talented director. What’s up with their quality control? Do they have any? Are they so set on attracting an embarrassment of creatives, they give them carte blanche, to hell with whether the results are any good or not? Apostle's an ungainly folk-horror mashup of The Wicker Man (most obviously, but without the remotest trace of that screenplay's finesse) and any cult-centric Brit horror movie you’d care to think of (including Ben Wheatley's, himself an exponent of similar influences-on-sleeve filmmaking with Kill List), taking in tropes from Hammer, torture porn, and pagan lore but revealing nothing much that's different or original beyond them.

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…

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Hold the Dark (2018)
(SPOILERS) Hold the Dark, an adaptation of William Giraldi's 2014 novel, is big on atmosphere, as you'd expect from director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) and actor-now-director (I Don’t Want to Live in This World Anymore) pal Macon Blair (furnishing the screenplay and appearing in one scene), but contrastingly low on satisfying resolutions. Being wilfully oblique can be a winner if you’re entirely sure what you're trying to achieve, but the effect here is rather that it’s "for the sake of it" than purposeful.

Outstanding. Now, let’s bite off all the heads and pile them up in the corner.

Venom (2018)
(SPOILERS) A 29% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes can't be wrong, can it? To go by the number of one-star reviews Sony’s attempt to kick-start their own shred of the Marvel-verse has received, you’d think it was the new Battlefield Earth, or Highlander II: The Quickening. Fortunately, it's far from that level of ignominy. And while it’s also a considerable distance from showing the polish and assuredness of the official Disney movies, it nevertheless manages to establish its own crudely winning sense of identity.

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Tully (2018)
(SPOILERS) A major twist is revealed in the last fifteen minutes of Tully, one I'll happily admit not to have seen coming, but it says something about the movie that it failed to affect my misgivings over the picture up to that point either way. About the worst thing you can say about a twist is that it leaves you shrugging.

Well, you did take advantage of a drunken sailor.

Tomb Raider (2018)
(SPOILERS) There's evidently an appetite out there for a decent Tomb Raider movie, given that the lousy 2001 incarnation was successful enough to spawn a (lousy) sequel, and that this lousier reboot, scarcely conceivably, may have attracted enough bums on seats to do likewise. If we're going to distinguish between order of demerits, we could characterise the Angelina Jolie movies as both pretty bad; Tomb Raider, in contrast, is unforgivably tedious.

If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.

Phantom Thread (2017)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps surprisingly not the lowest grossing of last year's Best Picture Oscar nominees (that was Call Me by Your Name) but certainly the one with the least buzz as a genuine contender, subjected as Phantom Thread was to a range of views from masterpiece (the critics) to drudge (a fair selection of general viewers). The mixed reaction wasn’t so very far from Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier The Master, and one suspects the nomination was more to do with the golden glow of Daniel Day-Lewis in his first role in half a decade (and last ever, if he's to be believed) than mass Academy rapture with the picture. Which is ironic, as the relatively unknown Vicky Krieps steals the film from under him.

The whole thing should just be your fucking nose!

A Star is Born (2018)
(SPOILERS) A shoe-in for Best Picture Oscar? Perhaps not, since it will have to beat at very least Roma and First Man to claim the prize, but this latest version of A Star is Born still comes laden with more acclaim than the previous three versions put together (and that's with a Best Picture nod for the 1937 original). While the film doesn't quite reach the consistent heights suggested by the majority of critics, who have evacuated their adjectival bowels lavishing it with superlatives, it's undoubtedly a remarkably well-made, stunningly acted piece, and perhaps even more notably, only rarely feels like its succumbing to just how familiar this tale of rise to, and parallel fall from, stardom has become.

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Hotel Artemis (2018)
(SPOILERS) Hotel Artemis is all set up. It's solid set up, undoubtedly – a heightened, John Wick-esque criminal world by way of John Carpenter – but once it has set out its wares, it proceeds to pulls its punches. One's left more impressed by the dependable performances and Drew Pearce's solid footing as a (debut feature) director than his ability to develop a satisfying screenplay.

I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, part to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Along with Pain & Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess; the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned. Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese film from which The Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a guy …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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