Hard to be a God

Trudno byt bogom

Aleksei German, 2013, Russia

‘Hard to be a God’ falls somewhere between Tarkovsky and ‘Zardoz’. By which I mean it contains leanings towards brilliance, campness, pretentiousness, indulgence, uniqueness, something genuinely bonkers. The comparison with Tarkovesky isn’t a stretch at all since since ‘Stalker’ was based on the book ‘Roadside Picnic’ by the same authors, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: ‘Hard to be a God’ is based upon their 1964 novel. And ‘Stalker’ provides a good example of the science fiction of  ‘Hard to be a God’ which is free of any visual clues that might obvious symbolise an otherworldly setting. There are no futuristic vistas, for example, no alien designs; just people saying and acting bizarre things(although you may note that the costume Don Rumata wears looks like the remains of a spacesuit). It was directed by Alexei German and completed by his son Alexei German Jnr upon his father’s death in 2013.

It’s a medieval science-fiction scenario, which you can’t say about too many films, in which a group of astronauts have landed on a planet that seems trapped in its Dark Ages, bent on killing anyone they deem intellectual. This is why people act like “The Fool” from a play, with added killing. These astronauts aren’t meant to interfere with the development of this society but, of course, they do and have. One, calling himself Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), is already bearing a “Godlike” status simply because he is more focused and alert in a land of violent idiots. This therefore makes him more successful in his violent outbursts even as he loses himself to the cacophony of squalor and craziness all around him as he tries to blend in. The fact that he has apparently gone so successfully native is another reason it may be hard to distinguish the sci-fi basis as he behaves much like those around him.

Disgust is one of its main attributes: every scene wallows in mud and liquids, people smearing themselves with gunk; a face can’t get a close-up without someone else touching it, or someone else picking its nose; it’s a wonder any skin appears clean in some way at all. And this is before the gore kicks in. Long takes nod towards not only to Tarkovsky but also Bela Tarr and Alexandr Sokoruv, but there is none of the stillness of Tsai Ming Liang. Each scene is bursting with people, filth and the surreal, through which the camera glides following a plot that almost comes to the surface. There is a war nbetween The Blacks and The Greys and Don Ramata is looking for someone…  Much dialogue bears non sequiturs and it quite likely that even as you are being dazzled by the madness onscreen you will moments where you will be thinking “What?”, “Why?”, “Who?”, “Really?” and “W.T.F.?”. It makes little concession to easy plotting, even if the story is simple when spelt out. But dazzling it is. The cast propel themselves into the muck with vigour in the manner of over-eager amateurs who think such wallowing is vibrant acting (and similarly, you can also say this of Di Caprio in ‘The Revenant’): but I don’t want to claim the acting is amateurish because that isn’t so. Merely that the gusto creates some of the aforementioned campness and indulgence, but it knows what it’s doing. Think then of the dense production design and affectations of Peter Greenaway mixed with the black-and-white austerity of ‘Embrace of the Serpent’.

But that is the meat of this, for the story takes secondary importance to the catalogue of grime and cruelty. It is a treatise on man’s penchant for stupidity and barbarism, even as it indulges in a feudal social structure. IMDB quotes a synopsis by Svetlana Karmalita for the Rome Film Festival that says,

This is not a film about cruelty, but about love. A love that was there, tangible, alive, and that resisted through the hardest of conditions.

But it is  about cruelty, surely, as to deny this is to ignore a central ingredient; and it is not so much about ‘love conquering in the worst of times’ as showing a context where affection doesn’t stand a chance. It is about bringing to life a crazed crowded scenario that you might find in classic, renowned paintings. It is about failure; it is about how religion and blind faith can facilitate malice and obstruct progress. It is about the failure of colonisation and where the native culture is too overbearing to be changed by one man, no matter a self-proclaimed God.

Embrace of the Serpent

El abrazo de la serpiente

Ciro Guerra, 2015, Columbia-Venezela-Argentina

Ciro Guella’s film is a mesmerising journey into a long dead world of an Amazon in the midst of colonialism, based upon diaries by scientists Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evan Schultes. Naturally ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the films of Werner Herzog will come to mind , but there is a formal elegance,  uncanniness and style here that has little to do with Herzog’s more neo-realist aesthetic. Gorgeous and haunting vistas of black and white cinematography by David Gallego segue into one another, occasionally crossing timeframes to tell the tale. 

An ailing explorer (Jan Bijvoet) goes into the Amazon jungle and enlists the help of a native, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Boliar) to find a legendary flower, supposedly capable of curing disease. Years later, another explorer with the same objective also enlists the older Karamakate’s assistance, sparking memories even though Karamakate has forgotten some of the rituals he used to know. 

It’s a stark but soulful excursion into a world where white men bring madness and death with little to counter that this is what they symbolise. The second visit to the Spanish Mission where a mad self-appointed messiah has taken over is the material of a horror film, for example, but ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ is only interested in this as part of the texture. In this world, the native fables where celestial animal spirits come to Earth (and where the title comes from) are a poetic tonic to the unforgiving nature of the white man’s religion. Karamakate is aware he is of a dying consciousness, one of the last of his kind and in the end it is all he can do to accept this with a few acts of defiance that will deprive the colonists of the jewels of his people.

Karamakate proves a fascinating character that easily quashes apparent “noble savage” archetypes, a character resistant to typical Western interpretations, always critical of other Amazonians that have befriended the white man. The importance of this film giving a rare voice to the Amazonian tribes-people has been officially recognised as it 

bears tragic witness to colonial atrocities that have ravaged natural resources, devastated indigenous populations, and broken a link between ancient wisdom and Western man's exploitive madness. Accordingly, the Governor of the Guainía Department, one of the locations used for the film, decorated Ciro Guerra with the Order of the Inrida Flower for “exalting the respect and value of the indigenous populations, likewise giving the Department recognition for tourism and culture.”

http://www.cineaste.com/spring2016/embrace-of-the-serpent-ciro-guerra/

A haunting and haunted world is evoked and alienation is a near tangible thing, not only in Karamakate’s isolation from the world as the last survivor of his tribe, but also in the Spanish mission’s decent into madness. Karamakate does not appear to have let loneliness and isolation bring on such madness: he is clear of thinking and opinion and radiates a natural pride. He goes on the white men’s excursions for his own reasons and makes little concession to them. 

Time is fluid as the narrative slides from past to present, via as much by the river as by memory. By putting the past foremost the film puts it on an equal level with its present rather than relegating it to “flashback”. Although the editing does not fracture time and find associations and symbolisms by juxtapositions in the style of Nicolas Roeg – ‘Walkabout’, say – Guerra exhibits a similar awareness of the bond between editing and time. By the time it seems to go a little ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (it’s only colour sequence), it has long been evident that ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ is also about film as a transcendent, hallucinogenic experience. It’s a film that evokes memories, dreams, the fluidity of time and a lost culture and refreshingly seems scornful of traditional white narrative norms. 

Beautiful, strange, tapping into the potential for film to give voice to everyone, even those long gone. An exceptional achievement.

The War

Jon Avnet, 1994, US

Elijah Wood gets top billing, even over Kevin Costner, as a boy who builds a tree-house. The tree-house and his long-running feud with the kids of another family are a metaphor for war, and Vietnam in particular. ‘The War’ starts promisingly, although loaded with rites-of-passage clichés, such as The Summer That Changed Everything... The all-wise nostalgic voice-over... children dancing to songs a’la 'Stand By Me'... It also bears the flashbacks, dead friends and guilt of Vietnam movies. Costner is the Vietnam veteran, back from hospital and a breakdown, full of war stories that have driven him into pacifist principles. Costner ends up too earnest; ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ still offers the best “good dad of (Southern) peace” archetype, but unlike Atticus, this dad can still be relied upon to use violence when his son is threatened. And so many conservative mythologies are tediously re-enforced, such as the dead that become guardian angels and wishes that come true, etc.

Mostly, despite some appealing moments, the film suffers from a lack of subtlety. A racist teacher is a caricature out of a Joe Dante satire and is treated to a long, unbelievably uninterrupted rebuke from the sassy black girl she picks upon. In fact, the underused black characters have the best personalities, where the adults are a bit too earnest and the kids don’t get to breath from under the contrived scenerios. The building of and the fight for the tree-house also promises more than is delivered, accompanied by an appealing seventies soundtrack left over from an ‘80s ‘Nam film. Slowly the film descends into predictability and, for the last half an hour, is almost unforgivably patronising and obvious: for example, there is no need for the sound of helicopters over the battle for the tree-house to make the point.

Although there is nothing truly disagreeable with Avnet’s film, its earnestness and self-importance work finally to undermine its strengths and to waste Costner at his most appealing and a cast of highly talented child actors (the wonderful Lucas Black – Caleb Temple from the TV series ‘American Gothic’ – has an all too brief showstopper when he beats up the bigger Wood with a devil’s shit-eating grin). almost unforgivably pat, and conservative in its resolution, the War unfortunately shoots itself in the foot, ending up neither a knowing children’s film with adult themes or an adult film with something new to say about childhood. 

Warcraft: the beginning

 Duncan Jones, 2016, USA-China

Of course, there was a lot of goodwill towards Duncan Jones after ‘Moon’ and ‘Source Code’, but I don’t think goodwill has a chance of elevating ‘Warcraft’ into some fantasy classic. There is a sense that supporters are desperately trying to make excuses.  My first doubts came instantaneously with the first shot of the orcs. You know how games have become almost like films? Here’s a film that looks like a game. There is something about the orcs, their design and execution, that means they generally remain unconvincing throughout. If this had been wholly animated, that would not have been a problem, would have been as aesthetic, but being placed in real locations against real actors does not enhance their credibility. But then again, the human actors fair no better and being placed aside orcs shows up how miscast and weak they are. Dominic Cooper as King Llane seems particularly unconvincing. It’s like the joint fantasy of a group of kids playing dress-up who just happen to look like competent actors in their imaginations. Yes, just like role-playing.

Much dialogue rumbles so fierce on the bass frequencies it’s like the orcs each come with their own Dolby speech broadcasters. Bad dialogue with motifs that are so old stock you are constantly thinking of other fantasy trailblazers that managed to inject these clichés with life (‘Lord of the Rings’, of course, ‘Game of Thrones’, I’m thinking ‘Dragonslayer’… even ‘The Hobbit’ films possessed more flair). Of course, this is all based on a game that trades in those story benchmarks – a threatened king; ‘good’ magic and ‘bad’ magic (helpfully colour-coded) and a wizard-figure that succumbs to the nefarious – and all this must be fun if you are directly interacting and navigating these narrative tropes yourself, but a film needs its own way of bringing these to life as an entity in itself. And this script isn’t it. Oh, it tries the usual tricks – humour supposedly elicited by a young wizard clearly out of his depth; the father/son theme – but nothing really comes to life. You may be thinking By the way, what is happening here? But it’s all standard stuff despite all the names and references trying to enliven it and which will fly over the heads of non-fans (I, for example, have never played ‘Warcraft’).

Where it wins is in a sturdy vision of its female characters – they may be fewer but they are every bit as useful and formidable as the males – and, even better, in giving the orcs characters nuance instead of just letting them be faceless villainous hoards. It starts with an orc couple worrying about their offspring after all, which is surely refreshing. This is why they are more interesting than the wet side dishes of human characters. It goes some way to humanising the inhuman “other”. Even so, the orcs come dangerously close to turning into ‘Shrek’. And there isn’t much to the special effects when they all appear to be CGI without much ingenuity in individual moments. It’s all *smash & angst* without really being engaging.

The vibe from the packed audience I saw it with was one of mild amusement and scoffing in equal measure. They openly laughed when the baby snarls at the end… and I wasn’t sure if we were meant to.

Suddenly

Lewis Allen, 1954, USA

In a little, sleepy, Republican town of Suddenly, a officer pauses to share a joke with someone passing through that “things happen so slow now, the town councilor’s figuring to change the town’s name to Gradually.” But it’s name comes from a time when it was a wilder place of gamblers, road agents, gunfighters, probably prostitutes, that kind of thing; the kind of people that make things happen ‘suddenly’. It shouldn’t be forgotten what kind of wildness built the town.

 It’s a regular ol’ day in Suddenly. The most conflict seems to be when Sheriff Tod Shaw has a little tiff with the female that he is after, Ellen Benson, because he buys her son “Pidge” a cap gun when she has expressly forbid it. She is still grieving for the loss of her husband in the war, you see, and abhors symbols of violence. Oh, he explains that it’s not the weapon and it’s the man, et cetera, et cetera, but she isn’t having any of it. The Sheriff’s affinity with violence seems also to be one of the reasons she is playing hard to get. Her father-in-law is also tired of Ellen’s anti-violence moaning. She is, after all, just a woman and doesn’t understand that there is horror and Evil in the world that can only be resolved and fended off with counter-violence. But not to worry: her silly, womanly anxieties and philosophies will soon be shown up for the bunk they are when three hoodlums take over the family house for a plot to assassinate the President of the United States who is apparently - or suddenly as it may be - passing through. What follows is a little chamber piece in which decent people and hoodlums argue it all out whilst they wait for the assassination attempt.

Conversely, Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates) would be better off without Sheriff Shaw because he’s an asshole, and as performed by Sterling Hayden, a wooden chunk of an asshole. Maybe that’s masculinity. He is belligerent and bolshy with the life-long ease of a born bully; juvenile in his responses to Ellen, swaggering with the unintentional humour that posturing machismo always brings. On the other hand, if she wasn’t such weak tea, she ought to notice that assassin John Baron is played by Frank Sinatra and is a far more interesting man. Sure, he’s a murderer, but so is her beau and her father-in-law because they were all soldiers: Baron brings with him an interesting questioning of what it means when a Nation trains its men to kill. This grey area is quickly resolved by the Sheriff distinguishing between good and bad soldiers, those that come home to take on authoritian roles such as cops and secret agents and those that liked it too much: Baron was born a killer, even if, as he says, “They” taught him how to kill. His mental health is probably more a result of this innate psychotic nature, the fact that he was left in an orphanage, that kind of thing, rather than a result of war trauma, of course. He’s a bad seed, see?

We are a long way from the home invasion scenarios of “Funny Games” and the like, but nevertheless there is a fair hard edge to the proceedings. The film implies Baron’s sadism and instability as much as possible, whilst never losing his hoodlum hat, and it’s fairly zesty with the expendable cast. Thanks to Sinatra’s performance, both mean and vulnerable with eyes full of uncertainty and a gutted sense of his own emotions, we have no doubt that he is capable of carrying out his threats against “Pidge” and the President. Sinatra brings the whole set-up alive in a community of otherwise stock types and rote performances. The film may try to side-step the issue of what turning men into killers might do to a generation, but he is far from a whiner about his lot and he does help to puncture the posturing of the ex-servicemen around him just by being there. He is also living the American dream of Capitalism and firearms: he doesn’t have any feelings about his job, he is just doing it for the money and marking his place in the world by killing when told and paid to. It’s just business. Baron may be wrong, but that doesn’t make the little conservative enclave he invades right just because of their pretences at patriotism and overall recourse to violence which is just as quick as his, although arguably justified as self-defence. Writer Richard Sale also can’t help but give Baron the best dialogue either. The irony is simple: the bad guy brings with him the dark edges of noir and is the only point of fascination in the film, the near only thing in context with blood running through its veins. Sinatra is good casting: he is tiny compared to the hulking Hayden, but Sinatra holds his own by doing and not swaggering. Only with the TV repairman - who may as well wear a target on his chest when he turns up late in the proceedings - played by James Lilburn do we get another actor actually awake and complex, simultaneously confused, outraged, bemused and shocked.

As a drama centred around sofas and windows it has the feel of an expanded play, although there is nothing wrong with that, with competent if uninventive direction by Lewis Allen, a director of the era’s stalwart TV series. The play with the cap gun and the television set is quite neatly handled, right under the assassins’ noses, and the ending - and we’re never in doubt as to the how things will turn out - gives both “Pidge” and Ellen a chance to resolve issues with a firearm. That’ll learn’em. And later, it will be the Sheriff playing hard to get and Ellen doing the chasing. That’ll teach her. 

  

The Haunting in Connecticut

Peter Cornwell, 2009, USA-Canada

The opening credits of Peter Cornwell’s haunted/possessed house film are an example of the problem of Twenty-First Century supernatural horrors. It starts with a gallery of old black-and-white photographs, pictures of families posing with their dead loved ones in the style of old mementoes. However, this is broken up by flashes of running blood, all red and here-and-now. It is as if the film is anxious about holding the attention without the promise of contemporary gore. Tales of hauntings subsist on atmosphere and build-up, on the slow seeping in, of an unsettling ambience and the character of a troubled building and, usually, correspondingly troubled characters. It seems to be that the tempo of contemporary film-making and modern editing trends is all wrong for a successful supernatural horror. This tempo is so hungry for and anxious about holding audience attention, the audience attention-span being taken as uniformly and shockingly short, that it is oblivious to build-up and ambience. We are barely ten minutes in before we have our first fake-shock courtesy of a dream. This is unnecessary: the film does not know that simply having big, locked, imposing doors in the basement are enough to generate the creeps once our unfortunate protagonist decides to use the basement for a bedroom (!). Perhaps I am being unfair: a film like Fulci’s “The House by the Cemetery” has little rhythm, but it does somehow generate atmosphere and is redeemed by a couple of key set pieces, mainly the cellar denouement. Perhaps then “The Haunting in Connecticut” will pull a similar stunt.

The family has moved into this old big house to be closer to the hospital so that their son can be nearer his cancer treatment. Again, we don’t need scares so early when the pathos of a cancer victim engages our sympathy straight away: decent character involvement around this would hold our attention. Merging the son’s cancer with the haunting pays off dividends, but not as much as it ought: there is no ambiguity as to whether his hallucinations and visions are the product of his illness, for example. The ghosts pop up all over the place, all the time. And then there’s a nasty eye-lid clipping. It’s all too much too soon and counteracts the development of the uncanny that the best ghost stories ask for. The flashbacks should be far spookier than they are, but spooky flashbacks in the modern mainstream are frequently sabotaged by the snappy editing and film effects that refuse to let them breathe. Every supernatural occurrence is edited with jump-cuts, flares, black-outs and juddering effects so that they verge on the incomprehensible and certainly resemble music videos rather than visions of terror. The most hilarious sequence of sped-up editing and exposition is the cliché visit to the library where, seemingly in an hour or two, our characters unearth The Truth. Libraries are often the undoing of supernatural terrors.

There is family interaction winningly modelled on examples such as “Poltergeist” and the performances are all fine, considering the material given. Such schlock often benefits from seasoned actors, but what Virginia Madsen, Martin Donovan and Elias Koteas are doing here other than picking up a pay check is the film’s real mystery. Well, that and why after experiencing terrifying supernatural phenomenon, the family doesn’t just leave. Koteas’ character - a minister also suffering from cancer - is especially silly, reeking more of deux ex machina than genuine character.

The film exhibits ickiness concerning death: a funeral home is obviously an undesirable building and host to all manner of angry spirits; the good family tries to keep bad things away with prayers. Surely this is a product of the side of American culture that has such difficulty dealing with death. It is ironic that so often with horrors that are so softly religious in a Judeo-Christian manner that prayers are inevitably all part of the creepiness, even as they are calling on the supernatural to provide solace and justice in life. Ghost stories often distrust the past, presenting it as a dangerous place, but ghost stories are also about grief and loss. But “The Haunting in Connecticut” is having no truck with death. Indeed, our cancer-ridden hero survives, returns from the dead even, fully recovered from terminal illness. All you need are God’s mysterious ways, which apparently involve a violent haunting, grave robbing and necromancy and a heavy dose of sentimentality. Yes, a haunting cures cancer. It’s an insultingly juvenile vision of mortality and one heavily mired in a denial that I am not even sure the film-makers care about.

To call this muddled, ridiculous and most of all grotesquely offensive is an understatement. If the Horror genre is chiefly concerned with death in all its guises and our fantasies for it, rarely has a religious horror film gone about so nakedly denying its omnipotence.  And not for one minute would I entertain this as a “true story”.    

Accident

Joseph Losey, 1967, UK

A droll dark comedy of manners and coolly detached condemnation of the infidelities, arrogance, indifference and debauchery of the academia. Director Joseph Losey’s fascination with and attention to the English class systems reaps great rewards, combining with “The Servant” and “The Go-Between” to produce a fascinating exploration of status, repression, cricket greens and beige rooms. 

Misogyny, patriarchy and classism saturate everything, right up to the heady heights of the Oxford University Philosophy faculty. Here, Dirk Bogarde completes another brilliant portrayal of studied mannerisms, slowly giving way to something far more primal and despairing. The longing that he and his immediate male social circle has for a particular student, seemingly a princess, undoes everyone. Male desire is a fragile thing and they aren’t very mature about it, for all their careful affectations of decorum, aloofness and intelligence. How so very clever they are in their suppressed jealousies, in how they talk openly about their infidelities and their little love triangle. The professors do not think the young stud Michael York has a chance in the winning, but not one of them is really getting to the heart of the princess. She is a catalyst, an intangible object of desire, a gorgeous young woman, but barely a personality. This is rather the effect of her status in a patriarchal society rather than a failing of the source novel “Accident” by Nicholas Losey or Harold Pinter’s typically excellent and slightly abstract screenplay.

The novel veers into what the dust jacket likes to call “a prose poem”, one of those very phrases that probably doesn’t entice readers who balk at the pretences of academic literary study. It achieves a remarkable amount of mileage from a rather airless affair, delving into how minor and tawdry human melodrama can segue into artistic expression. The novel’s erratic and long flashback centre-piece that hangs between the bookends of the accident and the aftermath ~ the cover-up, as it were ~ is perfectly matched by Losey’s excellent formal cinematic approach of cross-cutting chronology, exemplary editing and the jumps from moment-to-moment. The colour scheme is cricket green and bored beige ~ almost a variation on black-and-white as cinematographer Gerry Fisher says ~ and, like “The Go-Between”, captures an a delicious tone of privileged rural England. Relax at the gorgeous jazzy, dreamy boat ride down the river, for example. Occasionally the camera is less casual in its capturing of natural and banal beauty and the shot holds a moment too long so that we notice this. 

Otherwise, a lot of the loose-limbed feel, the naturalism matched by precise editing feels decidedly French New Wave… But the acting is particularly English in its approach, its stately cadence. Bogarde, York and Stanley Baker are all excellent, exploring this slightly odd world. As with the New Wave, the pure sensation is probably greater than the story, which in truth is a slight thing. As with the other Losey-Pinter films of this period, part of the achievement is in feeling that a mystery of English behaviour has been both confronted and found essentially impenetrable and repellent. This remains a haunting and compelling quality and evidence of much of the brilliance of a film like “Accident”. 

An American Werewolf in London

John Landis, 1981, UK/USA

I first saw ‘An American Werewolf in London' in 1983 in the film marquee of what was then known as the C.N.D. Glastonbury festival. I was just about a teenager and far more interested in the mysteries of film than music at that age and spent most of my time alone, sitting on the grass (no seating), watching most of the films in the film marquee. There was ‘Zardoz’, which I already knew and really liked (I was quite baffled why the audience burst out laughing at the big reveal concerning a famous novel). ‘Woodstock’ was shown (it was a C.N.D. festival, after all), and I remember being piqued that the guy in front of me intended to play his bongos throughout the entire screening. There was ‘The Blues Brothers’ too, but I was not so interested in that.

I had met up with some other kid at some point and we had one of those friendships that lasted just one evening. I think I was the one who said we should watch ‘An American Werewolf in London’; I was certainly aware of it and its frightening reputation, as it was only a year or two old. We were immediately terrified and traumatised by the early moors scene and proceeded to experience the whole thing with our backs to the screen, taking turns to check out whether the scary scenes had finished yet. So in the end, we really didn’t get to see the whole thing. The next day, free to wander at my leisure, I tried to find the caravan where my ‘werewolf’ friend said he was, but his directions had been vague and I was too shy to knock on doors to see if he was staying behind any of them. So we never met again, and I wonder if he remembers that first experience of “American Werewolf” too. It must surely have been my initiation into a more extreme form of horror. This, and ‘Eraserhead’ at a little while later (but that’s another story). And ‘American Werewolf’ was the very first VHS tape I owned, though I am not sure how I got hold of it as I hadn’t reach its ‘18’ demands at that time.

So jump forward decades later (2012 or thereabouts) and I get to see ‘An American Werewolf in London’ for a second time on the big screen, courtesy of one of those welcome aberrations in mainstream chain cinema schedules where they actually screen an old film. Firstly, the new digital restoration really does justice to the soft tones and colours of the opening moors scenes. The tongue-in-cheek soundtrack is still a joy with its retro moon-related songs. It is still quite nasty and extreme in its gore. The initially violent mauling on the moors and Jack’s (Griffin Dunne) ghoulish deterioration are still capable of inducing squeamishness. I had seen ‘American Werewolf’ many, many times - happily into double digits - but it had been a while since I last viewed it. It is one of those films I know back-to-front; yes it is a favourite. But what struck me this time was just how many iconic scenes the film has – or maybe I just felt that way because I knew it so well. There’s the hapless New York backpackers’ visit to “The Slaughtered Lamb” and the moors werewolf attack; the still absolutely terrifying and upsetting Nazi-monster family massacre dream sequence (which takes place whilst ‘The Muppets’  plays on the TV, keeping up with the mismatched elements that run throughout the film); the infamous transformation, which gleefully renders the agony of the metamorphosis; then there’s the hilarious porn cinema sequence and the brutal, shocking Piccadilly Circus vehicle smash-up that closes the film.

Although Landis’ direction is deceptively unfussy, closer inspection reveals some excellent choices in pacing, execution and framing. For example: the soft fade into 'The Muppets' that sneakily seems to signal the passing of time to somewhere safe to reassure the audience when it is instead a segue into a nightmare.  The balance between casual and slightly more goofy humour (the incompetent police investigator, for example) and straight-up horror alone is wonderful and assured. Rarely does a horror-comedy hold together humour and horror so well; there is no sense of self-referential parody here, and the tongue-in-check elements are kept to the details rather than the core of the drama. The romance is light and, thanks to the immediate affable charms of David Naughton and the gorgeous Jenny Agutter, more endearing and convincingthan it probably has the right to be.

The film’s dedication to a sequence in which David is in hospital is notably longer and more relaxed than usual; typically horror narratives speed over hospital periods quickly. But this extended time allows Landis to set up a tour-de-force of unnerving nightmare sequences and it’s-all-a-dream shocks. A simple dream of panning through a forest creates dread and tension. Landis knows that we know what is going on and doesn’t waste much time with tedious sequences of denial or ambiguity. The Nazi-monster family massacre remains one of my favourite ever horror moments, and it has lost none of its terrifying and upsetting power. This hospitalised period also allows time for warmth and romance between David and his nurse, and it is to Agutter’s and Naughton’s credit that they make this very brief fling credible for the final tears to matter. There is also space made for a handful of side characters to flesh things out.

The transformation was, and remains, quite a breakthrough: Dick Smith has spoken of how it was practically unheard of to film such an effects sequence in full light. Landis was right in this choice. The film has a look that seems mostly akin to television: slightly flat; no particular showcases for lighting effects. But his only helps to frame the werewolf in a realistic environment and for some of that realism to rub off on him. Seeing all the gore and metamorphosis lit like a daily soap opera pays great rewards, and what were are left with is perhaps the greatest werewolf of cinema. “The Howling”, “Ginger Snaps” and “Dog Soldiers” all have great work in them, and even something like “Underworld” (love the first two films; less taken with the others) is a fine example of the move to CGI lycanthropes (not to be encouraged, necessarily, but inevitably here to stay), but very little can compare to the visceral power and fear that this American Werewolf provides. And the transformation scene is an exemplary example of incongruity between the visuals and soundtrack as David’s pain and screams are accompanied by that classic 'Blue Moon'.

The first true reveal of the beast rampage is brilliantly framed: from the top of an escalator in a London underground station, we look down as the werewolf slowly wanders in from the top of the frame. It is revealed in the clear, slightly sickly, cold glare of a very public space; convincing in its movements, unnerving in size. This remains one of my favourite shots in the whole film. Landis manages to offer plenty of excellent views of the thing - chowing down in the cinema and running through Piccadilly Circus - without giving away too much for too long so that the viewer’s imagination still gets the opportunity to expand and imagine for themselves. There is the sense that, because Landis holds back so often, each viewing of the monster is a real treat. It’s a great creation and rarely bettered. One of the best ever put to screen. (Even the cover lose-up can still unsettle me.)

After the tension of the werewolf rampage, Landis drops into the film’s sequence of broadest humour, involving David waking naked in a wolf pen at the zoo and his search for clothes and getting home. The film unapologetically and assuredly juggles tones and genres, and often delivering surprising or clever transitions. We see a lion when we think we shall see the werewolf; the dream-within-the-dream; etc. Next, there is the wonderful stupidity of the porn film ‘See You Next Tuesday’ and finally the end rampage. This involves that pile-up in Piccadilly Circus which is so thoroughly brutal and edited brilliantly so that the viewer will always flinch at the massacre. It is a remarkably canny move on Landis’ part to rely upon the carnage that the fleeing werewolf causes by proxy, generating action and bloodshed on a grander scale than possible in the more intimate option of focusing on the werewolf itself.

It probably shouldn’t work, as it ought to be an imbalanced patchwork, but ‘An American Werewolf in London’ pitches itself and moves freely amongst horror-drama-gore-parody-comedy without barely missing a beat. It is still funny, scary and charming. A seminal horror, scruffy round the collar but all the more endearing for that.

Jumanji

Joe Johnston, 1995, US

Based on Chris Van Allsburg's book, like all the best children’s fantasies ‘Jumanji’ threatens to turn very nasty at any moment once the children are called by the eponymous boardgame. Rolling the dice, they have to confront its malevolent jungle forces that break out into the real world. First up in 1969, bullied rich kid Alan (Adam Hann-Byrd), having argued with his somewhat wealthily conservative parents, hears the drums of the game calling him and promptly disappears for the next twenty six years. He turns up then when orphaned Peter (Bradley Pierce) and Judy (Kirsten Dunst) move into the house with their aunt and discover the game, only to start up Alan’s game again. This time, though, Alan has turned into Robin Williams, in another of his Peter Pan guises. Luckily, Williams is never allowed to overwhelm the proceedings and pretty soon there are ‘Gremlins’-like monkeys and stampedes of animals tearing up the surrounding town.

Relatively modest and character-based, ‘Jumanji’ is noisy and brisk entertainment whose only real failing is a Disney-sentimental infrastructure based on family – but that’s to be expected. The game itself is, quite rightly, given no explanation, but appears to be concerned mostly with bringing a little danger and character-building confrontation to alienated and lonely kids. The kids themselves are engaging enough, if somewhat indistinguishable; Jumanji itself manifests their inner turmoil and sense of a chaotic, destructive world. Of course, how Alan survived trapped in the game for twenty-six years is never explained, but all the unanswered possibilities about the game only serve to fuel its mystery ~ and to wonder how it avoided the seemingly inevitable sequels.* Built upon ideas of lost time, the film manages to avoid the nostalgia it might have wrought in jumping from the sixties to the nineties. The sixties are semi-idealised and the nineties are grey and depressed; it is Alan himself who delays this transition by inadvertently destroying the symbol of impending consumerism and capitalism, a sports sneaker. It is Alan who symbolises something old-fashioned and traditional, whose final guise just happens to be Father Christmas. Darkest of all has Alan’s father (Jonathan Hyde) turn up in the manifestation of a relentless manhunting Victorian, hunting down his son like an animal in order to force his offspring to confront his fears

But more than all this, ‘Jumanji’ is a special effects film and they are impressive – by Industrial Light and Magic’s and Amalgamated Dynamics - although of course they are of the time. They stay just the right side of neo-realism, they are just a touch cartoony, so that all the animals remain the conjuring of the game, of an alternative reality. Best of all is the stampede and Williams sinking into floorboards like quicksand whilst beset by giant spiders. And although it’s played as a punishment, little Peter surely lives out a boy’s fantasy when turning into a monkey. 

Reasonably scary and spectacular, ‘Jumanji’ is decent, slightly alternative family entertainment.

• Of course, there was  ‘Zathura’ in 2015 which was seen as a kind-of sequel, being of the same idea, and at time of writing a remake/reboot of ‘Jumanji’ is pending.  

Alamar (To The Sea)

Pedro González-Rubio, 2009, Mexico

Films are often criticised for not having enough plot: for example would be ‘The Revenant’ and ‘The Raid’, as if cinema is only at the mercy of drama. But these films are about other things upon which a familiar premise is but a coat-hanger (execution and acting in the former; fighting in the latter); you could even say it about ‘Victoria’ (execution and acting). Sometimes a film might feel improved if it had more plot, or rather more originality in the writing – say, ‘Hardcore Henry’. But sometimes the visuals can be enough.

Pedro González-Rubio’s ‘Alamar’ barely has a narrative at all: the child of a holiday romance, Natan (Natan Machado Palombini), goes to spend some time with his father Roberta (Roberta Palombini) who lives off the Mexican coast on the Caribbean reef of Banco Chinchorro. The film is composed of the men’s daily routine in fishing: there are no women, although they do call a bird that seems to temporarily adopt them by the feminine. Once the mother sets up the background story, she merely bookends this portrayal of father-son bonding. This separation may raise the probability of some kind of disharmony, but there is very little friction here, perhaps even less than dialogue. What we do have are gorgeous visuals of the reef, of a sea-based community. Highlights are the feeding of birds and crocodiles. 

The film has a documentary style in its matter-of-factness, but the visuals are gorgeous because what it is looking at is abundant natural beauty. It’s a home-movie of a gorgeous holiday or perhaps a ‘National Geographic’ article come to life. It captures a mood, a fleeting happiness and beauty. It leaves many questions unanswered but this is not a film of answers. Rather, it implies the continuous nature of emotional response in that it does not bestow Natan immediately with reflective sadness for a lost paradise when he returns home to his mother in Rome –after all, he is only five – but perhaps the value of this time with his father will reveal such reflections as he grows up. It is perhaps nice, for once, just to wallow in a mood of a moment without the demands and tensions of drama.

Captain America: Civil War

Anthony & John Russo, USA, 2016

The morning when I thought I might go see ‘Captain America: Civil War’, I popped into my local comic shop where they are naturally and expectedly talking about such things. The comic shop guy was telling someone, “It's the best ‘Avengers’ movie without ‘Avengers’ in the title.” Then Spider-Man was mentioned and someone across the shop called out “Spider-Man is in it for seventeen minutes. Sorry, my Autism just kicked in.” Anyway, the comic shop guy is usually reliable (he’s introduced me to ‘American Vampire’ and ‘Outcast’ and we’ve bonded over ‘Teen Titans Go!’, so that’s all good) and I am sure this moment encouraged me to check out the latest Marvel Universe offering. No, I hadn’t seen the previous Captain America films, but ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ had left me cold and, although I have heard it is the best film ever, the first ‘The Avengers’ film had only mildly entertained me. So I doubt I was expecting much from ‘Civil War’.

The plot is set going by the same troubling question of what happens about all the people who die in a typical urban super-battle that triggered ‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’, and likewise this argument sets super-friends against one another.* Whereas ‘Batman vs Superman’ simply ignored the moral questions it had initially set up, ‘Civil War’ sidesteps them by having the subsequent super-battles in desolate locations (an evacuated airport and Siberia). It will be interesting to see whether they address this in sequels or if it’s just there to fuel soap opera. There may be a large selection of characters to juggle but the underlying storyline is streamline and the whole enterprise feels more focused and less cluttered than the previous ‘Avengers’ films. Not that ‘Civil War’ isn’t just as eager to please, but it just seems to be actually having fun without making up for any deficiencies by joking around.

The screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is nimble enough to layer on just enough plot, humour and angst to keep the action sequences propped up. It’s not confrontational but it does touch upon one of the main questions of the zeitgeist: how far will we go to stay ‘safe’? The colour-scheme is washed out for seriousness but not so shadowy that things can’t be seen (which can’t be said for ‘Batman vs Superman’). The initial street fight in Nigeria seems as much influenced by, say, the Bourne films as superhero films. The action scenes are often inventive, occasionally edited incomprehensibly, but aware of how powers and skills can be used quickly in a battle. The airport fight is good, fast and inventive even if we don’t believe a fatality is at stake (we don’t really believe they’ll kill each other).

Just as the tone has settled, the Spider-Man sequence pops up and it’s funny; then he’s somewhat unceremoniously dumped with a “You’re done”; but it’s a promising introduction to his reboot. The humour surrounding Spider-Man goes to show how self-conscious the one-liners are in ‘The Avengers’ films, however welcome: here, the humour is not about quips but centred in Peter Parker’s naivety and others reactions to him; the jokes are more organic, highlighted all the more because the rest of the film doesn’t try hard to be comedic. Even wise-ass Tony Stark seems subdued here.     

The ending doesn’t rely upon a super-fight between the team and a powerful villain but rather two heroes on the verge of killing one another. If anything, the whole plot rests upon how close heroism is to murder and carnage and ego, etc.; just how close they are to being super-villains. For the ending, you would have to suspend belief that, despite their experiences – which is far and beyond those of your average person – these super-beings don’t have the skills to overcome themselves and their knee-jerk reactions to engage with negotiation and diplomacy. As Bucky at one point says, everything ends in a fight. And being able to physically overcome adversary, whether by superpowers or skills, is what this genre is all about. These entries that pit heroes against each other, as if they are foes, are all about squabbling with friends: they’ll work it out eventually, or at least reach a truce, but meanwhile let’s ask Who would win if? So it’s not so much their mortality at stake but more about watching and seeing what these characters using their abilities going at one another.

No, there is nothing at all original here, but Anthony and Joe Russo direct something that is fun, despite its faux-seriousness, without quite feeling desperate and forced. It doesn’t quite answer the questions it raises (for example, what about the damage they do to the airport? Millions of dollars worth, surely??) but it delivers on the genre demands of emotional super-beings in entertaining punch-ups with dashes of humour and lashings of special effects.

 *          Yeah yeah, I know Batman and Superman aren’t friends – not in that film – but you get my gist.