Feature - Quiz

Everyone loves a good puzzle at Christmas. Let's face it, if you got a Lord of the Rings jigsaw on Christmas Day you'd be well happy. So in my role as Santa, I will purvey my puzzle goods to you, dear reader.

Hidden below are five films. Each film has five pictures to represent it. Here's how I came across the pictures. I typed in the title of a film - reviewed this year in these very pages - into Google and searched for images. The five pictures all came from that search but none are from the actual film they represent. For example, search for The Sound of Music in Google images and this is your reward:

Some of the images are as obscure as this one but look closely and there are a few clues. If you get number 5, I'll be amazed.

So here we go. Enjoy your puzzling!

Film 1?

Film 2?

Film 3?

Film 4?

And the virtually impossible Film 5?

There you have it then. I'll post the answers next week. I bet you can't wait.

evlkeith

News: Coming Soon...

Review - They Wait (2007 - Dir. Ernie Barbarash)

This is another film that I got for a quid. So I wasn't expecting much. In fact, on recent form, I was expecting it to be dire (Dying Breed was pretty useless and I only got five minutes into Scarce before I turned it off). I was even preparing a witty They Wait... For Paint to Dry gag. I'd already hit gold with Shuttle, another pound shop wonder, so I couldn't see it happening again anytime soon. 

After living in Shanghai for some years, Sarah (Jaime King) goes back to America with her husband and son to attend a family funeral. It's a ghost story so ghostly stuff starts to occur very quickly. Not as creepy as The Ring, but vaguely similar. 

It's not another Shuttle but it's not too bad. This is a film that is definitely more than the sum of its parts. The acting isn't the greatest. Jaime King veers from acceptable to completely unconvincing and the rest of the cast are a mixed bunch. Easily my favourite is the wise Pharmacist (Henry O). Like the shopkeeper in Gremlins he brings a mysticism to the film that raises it above the average useless ghost story (The Entity is a prime example). Michael Biehn is in it too but only plays a (very) minor role and is instantly forgettable. What is he going to do though? He's only given about a minute of screen time.

The cinematography is pretty good and everything looks suitably filmic. The director allows the film to play out without any flashy editing or stylistic choices. Which is good. The special effects meanwhile, are not the greatest. Just the usual low quality CGI, perhaps a bit lower than normal. One of the best effects, involving a minor cleaver in head accident, is a practical effect funnily enough.

For a ghost story, it's not scary. Well, it could be scary if you've never seen one before but for seasoned ghost story professionals it's a walk in the park. Apart from one scare. Yep, one bit made me jump. There are not that many films that can claim to do that nowadays. Well done They Wait, go and get yourself a 10p mix.

The end sequence elevates the film from a low average to mildly interesting. Sarah has to take fairly extreme steps to save the day and there is some audience participation to be had as she nearly gets drawn into hell for eternity. Not brilliant but fun nonetheless.

That's pretty much the film in a nutshell: Not brilliant, but fun. 
5/10
evlkeith



If you like this you could also try:
The Haunting, The Ring, A Tale of Two Sisters.

Review - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960 - Dir. Karel Reisz

Arthur (Albert Finney) works in a Nottingham factory . He's not that happy in his job and he lives for the weekends, when he can drink heavily and frolic with the ladies. He's having with wicked way with Brenda (Rachel Roberts), a married woman. He's also got Doreen (Shirley Anne Field) on the go too. His life is complicated.

I'm not sure that films like this get made now, where the focus is on the lives of the working class. Maybe they still do and I'm too busy watching horror. The closest thing I can think of is All or Nothing by Mike Leigh but that's hardly mainstream. People lapped this up at the time. The comedy version of this would have to be Steptoe and Son. It's interesting to see that things haven't exactly changed that much in fifty odd years. After a hard week's work, Arthur gets so tanked that he falls down some stairs on his night out. Maybe they needed a minimum price for alcohol in the sixties too.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning falls into that delightful sub-genre of gritty films known as grime. I can't see that the dirt would be as palpably grimy if this had been shot in colour. Black and white suits it perfectly. The factory looks particularly grim and Health and Safety is non-existent. Despite the noise no-one wore ear protection and they probably didn't use step ladders properly either to get an item from a relatively low shelf. Little tinkers.

Arthur is amoral and anti-establishment. When he hears that one of his girlfriends is pregnant he kindly pays £40 for her to have a back street abortion. (He tries the free option first: his Aunt Ada, who pops the lady in a hot bath for three hours then gets her to drink a pint of gin. It doesn't work.) He also has a novel approach to dealing with nosy neighbours spreading lies (well, the truth really) about him. Some of his insults are pretty tasty too, most aimed at his rather rotund neighbour. Finney turns in a cracking performance, making a fairly unpleasant character likeable.

This isn't your typical Sunday afternoon black and white film. It was one of the first kitchen sink dramas. It got an X rating probably due to the way that it portrays the grubbier side of life. Still, it's only a PG now. Let's face facts, if Arthur was knocking about now, he'd be on Jeremy Kyle.
6/10
evlkeith



If you like this you could also try:
Vera Drake, All or Nothing, A Taste of Honey.

Review - Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971 - Dir. Dario Argento)

The third in Dario's "Animal Trilogy", (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o'Nine Tails being the other two entries) Four Flies on Grey Velvet still has Dario finding his directorial style. I hadn't seen this before, and to be honest it's not one of his best (that title surely has to go to Suspiria?) Let's see what it's got to offer...

A gentleman with big hair and a comedy moustache. Right, I'm sold. What else?

Michael Brandon (from TV series Demspey and Makepeace) stars as Roberto, a married man who is unfortunately involved in an accident that looks suspiciously like a murder. To his chagrin, a creepily masked photographer takes some snaps of the supposed crime. Then all of his friends start getting killed...

Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a strange one, because it sits somewhere between comedy and your usual Dario film. A private detective becomes involved in the plot, when Roberto starts getting a bit jumpy. Private detective: Rockford. That's the first thing that springs into my mind. Tough. Rugged. Lives in a caravan on a beach. Not so here. The detective is so completely camp, it's bordering on pantomime. I was waiting for some Larry Grayson catchphrases to appear, but sadly not. Another scene is set at a coffin exhibition. There are some cracking lines; one customer complains about a coffin being uncomfortable, the seller informs him that they've never had any complaints from their clients.

Then there is the flip side of the comedy coin: the deaths. They are nowhere near as gory as his later offerings but they are pretty stylish. I can't say that the sequences are scary but they are certainly tense, especially the death of Dalia. Where some films are 'Slashers', this is more in the 'Bump, Nick and Grazer' sub-genre. Dalia's death scene contains a pathetic 'dragging down stairs' shot that is almost as bad as the one in The House by the Cemetery, but Dario pulls the scene round with a brilliant use of reflections. The final death is pretty impressive with Dario getting to use an ultra high-speed camera. All set to beautiful music by Ennio Morricone. So good it made me raise my rating by at least one point.

As with most gialli the plot is a tad bonkers at times. The idea that an impression of the final image seen by a murder victim is left on the eyeball is mildly preposterous but I couldn't help but like the way the idea was used. Stupid yet fun.

There is a recurring shot that pops up at various points in the film, much like the guts scene in Catch 22. It involves a beheading that would have given me nightmares when I was younger. But, unlike Catch 22, the final version on the shot lacks any real power and the editing looks a bit dodgy to me. It's a shame, because I was imagining it was going to be so much better.

I wasn't very keen on this through the first half, although it had grown on me by the end. There are better Dario films to watch first, if you haven't seen any yet, but this is a film for more than just the completists. Oh, and God makes an appearance too.
6/10
evlkeith



If you like this you could also try:
Suspiria, Tenebrae, Deep Red, Lizard in a Woman's Skin.