Miracle Mile

 

Miracle Mile

Director & writer ~ Steve De Jarnatt

1988, USA

Stars ~ Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar

 

On the mean, dayglo streets of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City”, a guy is just trying to get his Meet Cute when he answers the wrong public phone and stumbles onto the news that nuclear Armageddon is imminent. I mean, it’s the movies and the Eighties so he’ll still risk everything for a crush he barely knows, and things will turn explosive and criminal very quickly, however unlikely.

Having grown up in the Eighties, I can testify that the fear of Them dropping the bomb was very real, and all over the music hits of the era.  Films: ‘Damnation Alley’, ‘Escape From New York’, ‘The Quiet Earth’, ‘Dreamscape’, ‘Mad Max 2’, ‘Mad Max: Thunderdome’, ‘A Boy and His Dog’, ‘Zardoz’, ‘Silent Running’, ‘When the Wind Blows’, etc, and these are just the ones I was familiar with. The Cold War fears of the Sixties bled effortlessly into the Seventies and found their natural bleak-peak in 1984’s ‘Threads’. There was plenty of “Hey, what if the apocalypse was: monsters! Action! Aliens! Zombies! Old people!”, so why not a Meet Cute in Armageddon? John Hughes does the Holocaust?

And in that way, despite the insistence that there will be late night crime involved, ‘Miracle Mile’ takes a different tone, trying to reach for sadness over the era’s colour scheme and superficiality. And just when you think it cannot be anymore Eighties, ‘Miracle Mile’s striking, hypnotic score is by Tangerine Dream, whose soundtrack work of this era endows many a film with an irresistible dream-like veneer. There’s certainly a dreaminess to this romantic apocalyptic nightmare drama, with oddball side-characters, brick-size mobiles, and a race-against-time propelled by explosions and death long before the bomb is dropped. The angle is a male rescuing an imperilled girl he barely knows, whilst trying to keep her in the dark, which is a little on the condescending side. JB Spooky speaks of how the opening five minutes remind him of High School flirtations, but we’re dealing with a  thirtysomething protagonist here, but it goes on to feel like an adolescent obsession. Luckily, Anthony Edwards is appealing, and baffled enough as things escalate into unlikely “Vice City” territory. Mare Winningham, although saddled with the most dated mullet, is sweet but a slight presence.

The attempt to make this most fatalistic and downbeat of premises a most exciting experience makes for a fluctuating tone that gives it distinctive character, but wavers in credibility. Those that are convinced tag the thin romance idealism as its core. The Los Angeles nightlife proves a vibrant backdrop as the film careens to an inevitable conclusion, still clinging onto a last hope of fantasy of connection as humanity puts paid to itself.  

 

Dead of Winter

Dead of Winter

Director ~ Brian Kirk

Writers ~ Nicholas Jacobson-Larson, Dalton Leeb

2025 ~ Germany, Canada, United States

Stars ~ Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Marc Menchaca

A solid thriller with a generic title distinguished by its focus on old person heroism-by-pragmatism, and by Emma Thompson-with-an accent. All the performances are great, snowbound northern Minnesota provides magnificent white vistas, and the joy is in watching our well-seasoned heroine use her wits to evaluate and deal with the situation when she stumbles upon a kidnapping. There’s a refreshing turn in seeing the usual Action Machismo – self-sewing a bullet wound, dashing for cover, loading guns – being carried out by a smart, somewhat unassuming old woman motived by little more than the stubbornness of caring, of not knowing how to not get involved. Respected older actors turning into action stars in late career is a trend usually reserved for the guys, the industry trying to squeeze some last virility out of them, so it’s nice to see the ladies cash in. In fact, this one, the writing debut of Dalton Leeb and composer Nicholas Jacobson-Larson, is definitely for the girls.

There are the expected plot holes inherent in the genre (wipe the glass!), but there’s plenty to admire in a script that is essentially a back-and-forth between two locations. There is nothing original, but it’s pretty, suspenseful, well played and entertaining.

 

Killer's Kiss

 

Killer’s Kiss

Director ~ Stanley Kubrick

Writers ~ Stanley Kubrick, Howard Sackler

1955, b&w, USA

Stars ~ Frank Silvera, Irene Kane, Jamie Smith

 

Stanley Kubrick’s short film ‘Day of the Fight’ from 1951 flows into his second feature ‘Killer’s Kiss’ from 1955. The boxing scenario of ‘Day of the Fight’ leapfrogs Kubrick’s 1952 debut ‘Fear and Desire’, which he disowned, and informs the starting point for ‘Killer’s Kiss’. What the feature imports from the short is a slice-of-life sensibility and a great angle from under the stool in the boxing ring. (See how he prods his face in the mirror to see how he might look with a broken nose?) ‘Killer’s Kiss’ is not the slick and precise Kubrick that he is more renowned for, but more the smash-and-grab guerilla street style typical of first-time indie directors. 

 

If not quite as raw as Cassavetes, certainly as frayed as Edgar G. Ulmer’s ‘Detour’ and not far from Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’. Surely there’s even a touch of the French New Wave in its digressive, airy feel. You can tell that he’s just using whatever he can. For example, the diversion into the tale of the ballerina is surely because the ballerina is Kubrick’s second wife, Ruth Sabotka. Kubrick was on welfare when making this, and the glitter and grub is product of desperate, mercenary film-making. It also captures a time and place with an authenticity that more resources couldn’t manage. From his next film, 1956 ‘The Killing’, it is clear we have the far more deliberate Kubrick that his legend is based upon.

 

There is a sense that the characters are all under the malaise of their lives: a seemingly bored boxer, a wannabe femme fatale, even a gangster that didn’t mean for things to get so out of hand. Although the ending tries to neatly tie things up, this is a real shrug to the film, even despite the escalating action.

This was the only original story Kubrick wrote himself, all his other films being adaptations of novels. Film critic Geoffrey O’Brien says that the images of ‘Killer’s Kiss’ are the foreground and the story just the backdrop for them. As a tone poem, it has a lot to offer in the visuals, the framing and the capturing of a threadbare everyday existence. Highlights are the excellent mirror shots, rooftop action and the showdown in a mannequin factory. There is even the shock of a brief dream sequence that foreshadows ‘2001: a space odyssey’ trippiness. If it lacks in story and acting, it has an urban dreaminess and enough film noir to make it memorable and fascinating.

FrightFest Day 5

 

FrightFest Day 5

ODYSSEY

Director: Gerard Johnson

Cast: Polly Maberly, Rebecca Calder, Tom Davis, Mikael Persbrandt, Peter Ferdinando

UK

 

If ever a film felt like a workday, this is it. Polly Maberly commits an excellent performance as an arrogant Estate Agent storming through her financial downfall and cognitive dissonance into dilemmas with the underworld, but belabours its point and takes too long. The filler is good but there are times when spotting locations for Londoners (Dublin Castle!) becomes the focus. It’s a fine character study of a reprehensible character and the unlikeable mob around her, until Mikael Persbrandt turns up to provide some gravelly control, but not much else is proven except the protagonist’s steamrolling ego until a crowd-pleaser massacre to finish up. 

 

And the pentagram belongs to an0ther film. 

 

MOTHER OF FLIES

Director: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

Cast: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams

US, 2025

 

A young woman facing terminal cancer turns to folk horror for a cure. Or rather the film, being a horror, posits how close New Age healing is to witchcraft; and further to that, in the Q&A afterwards John Adams aligned magic to the science that treated his own and his wife’s cancer. Mostly, this is a triumph of fairy-tale visuals and atmosphere on a tiny budget. This is apparently the Adams’ family back yard. Houses made of trees (more than a treehouse), snakes and rocks imagery, a corpse reciting poetry… The dreamy aesthetic, judicious use of effects (helped some canny editing so that any weakness doesn’t register), a simple mission to outflank impending death and grief and a seamless blend of grunge rock and folk horror make this another fascinating minor gem from this filmmaking family.  

 

BAMBOO REVENGE

Director: Edgar Marie

Cast: Audrey Pirault, Paul Deby, Constantin Vidal, Jimony Ekila.

France, 2025

 

Slick enough but confused revenge drama where the convolutions that allow for the title could surely have been resolved at the time (‘Moso’ on the title card). It never truly addresses the psychosis of revenge (see ‘Redux Redux’) and never truly comes to a tangible conclusion, just payback based on the wrong assumptions.

 

 

THE ROWS

Director: Seth Daly

Cast: Brindisi Dupree, Lara Pictet, Marcus Woods, Hans Heilmann

USA

 

With every moment belaboured to flatness, even with the score trying to insist on thrills sporadically. Beautifully shot with a deux ex dog and a Moon Man (?) to interject when things get impossible.

 

 

 

INFLUENCERS

Director: Kurtis David Harder

Cast: Cassandra Naud, Lisa Delamar, Georgina Campbell, Jonathan Whitesell, Veronica Long, Dylan Playfair.

USA, 2025

 

Polished sun-soaked sequel. “How did you get off the island?” is asked many, many times, to which the film answers, “Yeah, but we don’t care.” Rather, we get more shading to CW, who it seems has properly fallen in love, but she can’t give up her old ways and she has a boatload of psychotic past to cover up. With gorgeous locations – France; Thailand – cat-and-mouse games and a focus on social media and character manipulations, it all goes down smoothly. Cassandra Naud is great, Lisa Delamar beguiling, and a little moral murkiness is presented in an attempt for substance: Jonathan Whitesell is the influencer selling toxic masculinity but he doesn’t cheat and it seems like his girlfriend is actually the one in the driving seat. It romps home with a gleeful showdown that both does and doesn’t offer a conclusion, just leaves us with the excess of a serial killer slaughtering social media types that we don’t care for and irritate us anyway.  

 

 

 

SUMMARY

 

The theme that struck me this year is that genre is really starting to get to grips with incorporating social media, AI, deep fakes and its manipulations, from ‘Cognaitive’ where it just wants to get online to save humanity from itself, to the deep fakes that spiral into blodbaths in ‘Approfraniacs’, to someone else taking over your public persona in ‘Influencers’. If horror is how we identify social fears, it’s getting scary out there, and it’s not the sentience of the digital world we should worry about but – as ever – the people using it.

 

 

My picks:

 

The ones where I really wasn’t expecting much but was pleasantly surprised were ‘Bone Lake’ and especially ‘Flush’. ‘A Serbian Documentary’ was excellent in its argument for a very difficult film, and there seemed to be many converts.

 

Approfreniacs

Flush

Crushed

Redux Redux

A Serbian Documentary

 

And for extra fun:

 

Bone Lake

Hold the Fort