The Imp (1981)

Children can be a real handful.  I neither have nor want any, myself, and I suppose, to some people, this makes me a bad person.  It’s not that I don’t like kids (some would say that I act like one).  Some of them I get along with like gangbusters.  But in the main, I prefer them in small doses.  Cinema has done nothing to disparage this perspective.  For every Gordie Lachance, there’s one or more Clifford Danielses.  I think the problem lies in the fact that most screenwriters simply don’t quite get writing child characters.  This is funny, because at one point or another in life, we’ve all been one.  These characters tend to be either tooth-achingly sweet or misanthropically self-centered.  Even giving them a reason for their bad behavior doesn’t discount their actions.  Further, children are more often than not written to be little adults, unreasonably wise beyond their years, because, you know, making mud pies is beneath them (or, at the very least, makes for bad movie watching).  When kids are given supernatural powers, they get even worse, most especially when they’re already dead.  This is a mainstay of Asian ghost stories, where children who died horrible deaths come back to take vengeance on adults who didn’t even have anything to do with their demises.  Such is the case with Dennis Yu’s The Imp (aka Xiong Bang).

Keung (Charlie Chin) can’t get hired for anything.  It’s not that he doesn’t put in the effort.  The whole universe just seems to be against him.  With a baby on the way, he finally lands a job as a security guard in a large building complex.  But the titular entity has plans for Keung, his friends, and his family, and none of them are very good.

The Imp takes its horror concept and posits it in everyday life.  Keung and his wife Lan (Dorothy Yu) are low-income people struggling to make ends meet.  The pressure of their impending bundle of joy crushes down on them.  They are normal folks with real-world issues.  This is compounded by Keung’s inability to find work.  His familial responsibilities weigh heavily on him, but he keeps trying.  Chin does a great job of encompassing both the sad sack and Everyman aspects of his character.  At work, Keung is surrounded by character types, all of them just grounded enough to be believable.  Han (Chan Shen) is the elder of the group, the leader.  He’s an old hand and accepting of Keung.  Fatty (Kent Cheng) is, no surprise, the fat guy, but the film doesn’t define him by his weight, ironically enough.  He’s not some slob constantly stuffing food into his face.  These two are the most important in Keung’s story, because they are the ones most eager to help Keung out (Fatty even transports Lan to her pre-natal appointments).  Yet, Han considers firing Keung when the fatalities start piling up.  He’s not above letting superstition guide his actions, though his decisions may be in the best interest of all involved, save Keung.  The other two that we are introduced to, Ting (Hui Bing-Sam) and Mr. Hong Kong (Wong Ching), are more peripheral.  Ting is a bookworm with very little interaction with Keung.  Mr. Hong Kong is a bit of a boorish dolt who doesn’t really care for dogs.  Yu gives all of the characters just enough personality to distinguish one from another, and they are compelling enough to get us involved in their fates.  Even when all Hell breaks loose, the film maintains a certain sense of grounding.  This is a world where the supernatural reigns, but the characters still have to get up and go to work every day.

The mystical elements of the film focus strongly on predestination, especially as it pertains to the concept of Yin and Yang.  Keung was born under the strongest possible Yin signage (being both sinister and feminine, this points to not only Keung’s fate but also a character weakness that makes him a bit of a pushover).  Under the tutelage of Master Chiu (Yueh Hua), a Taoist (?) priest, Keung attempts to defy his destiny.  They post amulets in places of power, they fix the Feng Shui in Keung’s apartment, and so on.  But the ghost always comes out on top.  There is a sense of desperation at play in the film, even when the characters are going through a ceremony that they believe has to work.  It’s this struggle to thwart fate which drives the horror of the film.  The characters believe in the use of magic to aid their cause, and the film accepts that these things exist.  Yet, it never goes so far as making them feel outlandish.  They’re simply another component of this world.  

Yu and company take their story very seriously.  There is little to no humor in the film, as might be expected in a Hong Kong film of this vintage.  Fatty, the clear, viable target for derision is treated like an ordinary guy who just happens to be overweight.  He doesn’t do pratfalls, he doesn’t make a pig of himself.  Keung is fighting for his life and soul as well as that of his family, and hope is threadbare.  It’s this grim earnestness that makes The Imp such an affecting experience and one worthy of praise.

MVT:  The film’s tone strikes just the right amount of dread.

Make or Break:  The finale is tense and serious, and it brings home the message.

Score:  7/10      

Death Falls Lightly (1972)

People love anti-heroes (the archetype, not necessarily the band).  People love regular heroes.  People love superheroes.  But the antihero, at least from my perspective, seems to top most people’s lists.  Folks complain that these protagonists in cinema are often unlikable.  I believe this is a specious criticism.  I believe that what people actually mean when they say this is that they find the characters uncompelling, and since they do things which are immoral, illegal, whatever, they are therefore “unlikable.”  Thing is, anti-heroes are supposed to be unlikable.  Snake Plissken in Escape from New York is not a nice, personable guy.  Leon from The Professional is a hired killer.  Tony Montana in Scarface is a drug dealer and a murderer.  Nevertheless, audiences want to follow what happens to them and even (wrongheadedly) model their lifestyles after them.  In part, this is because the lives of anti-heroes are abnormal to our own experiences.  They are heightened beyond humanity, they are calm under pressure, they are (sometimes) more glamorous than our everyday mundanity.  They are fantasies of how cool we wish we were.  This is despite the very clear drawbacks of their lives (getting shot at, murdered, etcetera).  

The other part, and I think the more important part, is that there is something about them that we do connect to.  This may not be a redemptive value (like Leon’s rule of no women, no kids and his caring for a child in peril), but it has to be a human value.  We get the ultimate emptiness of Montana’s naked ambition, and we sympathize for this man because he got what he wanted but not what he needed.  The best anti-heroes are flawed (often deeply), but there is something of ourselves that we discern in them, an honesty, no matter how oblique.  This is why we want to follow Giorgio (Stelio Candelli) in Leopoldo Savona’s Death Falls Lightly (aka La Morte Scende Leggera).  He’s a drug trafficker, but he’s also unjustly persecuted (or thinks he will be, not unreasonably), and this is something most people have felt at one time or another (just maybe not for homicide).

Returning from Milan, our protagonist discovers his wife murdered.  Exploiting his political connections, he and his girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti, a beauty who died far too young) are whisked off to a purportedly empty hotel while his friends concoct an alibi for him.  Things take a turn for the weird when the couple’s isolation really kicks in.

Savona’s film depicts a cynical world.  Giorgio thinks nothing of the life he leads.  He thinks nothing of cheating on his wife (despite his later declaration that he was divorcing her), stating that, “Marriage is a mistake,” as if that applies to all marriages.  He drags Liz along with him, not because he craves her specific companionship (he does say he loves her, and maybe he even means it), but so that he has someone to fuck when he gets bored.  His friends aren’t friends at all.  In fact, they don’t even like each other when Giorgio isn’t around.  They are people using each other for their own ends.  This is illustrated at several points in the film with voiceovers of the various characters’ thoughts, and all of them are essentially the same (everyone else is a son of a bitch and a degenerate, but not me, and I’ll fix them).  The drugs that Giorgio traffics in are used to fuel political careers so power can be attained and maintained.  They are vampires, draining the life’s blood of the people they pretend to serve (something limited to Italian politicians, surely).  Liz is the audience perspective character, outside of Giorgio and company’s world, but still willing to go along with all of it, thus conflating her with the rest of these people.  In a particularly telling sequence, she and Giorgio watch a porn film as they have sex.  While their lovemaking is passionate, it also feels empty, because it’s fueled by the prurience reflected off the movie screen rather than any feelings they should have for each other.  Even the police are disenchanted (likely from seeing the worst in people every single day), and they are not above manipulation of (assumedly) innocent people, even to the point that putting their lives in peril is okay, so long as the case gets solved (this is nothing new in Italian genre cinema).

Death Falls Lightly is different from many gialli, while keeping some of the things that define the genre.  It has a mystery killer, represented by POV camera shots (alas, no black gloves).  It has a lurid quality to it, mostly delivered by Viotti and her willingness to get naked.  It has a few final twists which are both ridiculous and satisfying.  But, at its heart, the film is an Old Dark House story filled with bizarre scenarios.  The hotel is a large, empty space.  The dining room looks like it was abandoned mid-celebration rather than shut down.  The place houses the ghosts of better times sent crashing and burning down to Earth.  Giorgio and Liz are shut in, not allowed to even open a window and look outside.  Thus, they have to deal with each other in a more intimate way than they likely have before (see Giorgio’s distaste for marriage and its implications).  Rather than coming together spiritually, the vacuity of the hotel only exacerbates the couple’s frictions.  Enter the “spectres.”  It seems the hotel is not so empty as Giorgio was led to believe, as evidenced by the appearance of the Owner (Antonio Anelli).  He has killed his wife so he can be with his mistress Marisa (Rosella Bergamonti).  Sound familiar?  Immediately, the Owner enlists Giorgio in removing and burying her body, and this he does without putting up much fuss.  This leads to the appearance of the owner’s daughter Adele (Veronika Korosec) and some strange encounters, like when she takes a bubble bath while a monkey swings around a portable clothes rack, or when she stabs herself (or does she?) as a part of some arcane ceremony.  What happens after these folks show up is a swift descent into Hell and insanity for Giorgio.  This is also the point in the film where Savona ratchets up the psychedelic trappings, with all manner of odd angles, handheld shots, jump cuts, and so forth.  Giorgio is never certain of what he’s seeing or how to act in response, but he always finds himself going along (just like the viewer).  These scenarios are manifestations of his life and situation (directly and indirectly), and by forcing Giorgio to confront these things, he is forced to confront himself.  This isn’t to say that the resolution he comes to is positive, but it is, ironically, more honest than the world in which he had been living.

MVT:  The fever dream/experimental elements are macabre and intriguing.

Make or Break:   The arrival of the Owner takes a tense, freak out situation and spins it into surreality.

Score:  6.75/10

Chicago Overcoat (2009)

Directed by: Brian Caunter
Run Time: 94 minutes

This is an odd entry in organized crime drama genre. On one hand, it's a movie dripping with style and a few scenes over the top violence. On the other hand, it's a meandering story that cares more about style than exposition. Let's dive into the stylish insanity that is Chicago Overcoat.

The start of the movie confused the hell out of me at first because it looks like a cut scene from Sin City. A black and white flash back of a sleazy strip club in the late eighties with a sound track that was lifted from Sin City. The focus of the scene is the Sleazy Guy. A nameless sleazy creep that hangs around strip clubs and behaves in a sleazy manner. Unknown to Sleazy Guy, Lou Marazano (Frank Vincent) has orders to kill Sleazy Guy and does so in a graphic manner.

The movie cuts to the present (or 2009 which ever works) and we get an introduction of sorts to Lou Marazano. A career mobster who is caught between two family obligations and is wanting to retire to Las Vegas. His daughter divorced a deadbeat wiseguy from an affiliated mob crew so he is helping her and her son out. Then there is his mob obligations and his growing disenchantment with what the mafia has become. An opportunity for Lou to take care of his family and retire arises when imprisoned mob boss needs to eliminate three federal witnesses. The problem is no one wants to do the job for eighty thousand dollars so Lou is given the job.

After a few days of following the witness and setting an alibi for himself Lou takes out the first witness. With the body disposed of, Lou sends flowers to his victim's wife and gets ready for the next target. In the b plot, walking hangover and stereotypical burnt out cop Ralph Maloney (Danny Goldring) is going through the motions of investigating the disappearance of the first witness. That all stops when he discovers that flowers were sent to the first witness' wife. So Ralph and his partner, soon to be killed guy, look at past case files regarding the mob killer that leaves flowers as a calling card. However someone in the police department has tampered with the files and could be a mole. There is also a pointless cameo with Stacey Keach where Ralph and Keach's character talk about the investigation and getting older.

The third act is a mixed bag of both kinds of family drama, character development that doesn't go anywhere, and film padding. It goes from a story about man with two family loyalties to a story about an aging gangster who is going on a killing spree and looking dapper while doing it. The b plot has the Ralph becomes a massive dick and wants to arrest Lou by being a massive dick. Sprinkle in some impressive and violent action scenes and that is pretty much the movie.

It's not a bad movie, it just lacks a point to the story. The focus is more on showing the glory days of the 1920's Chicago mafia when none of the characters were alive during the 1920's. It's a gangster lite film. All violence and some light drama but none of the moral or emotional baggage of other crime and gangster films. It's a great rental movie if you're struggling to find something watchable but painful if you're a fan of the genre.

MVT: Dapper silver haired terminator in a three piece suit with a tommy gun firing on modernish gangsters.

Make or Break: A tie between plot lines that go nowhere and character development being used a run time padding. Both broke me out of the film a lot.

Score: 5.5 out of 10

Day of the Triffids (1962)

A meteor shower blankets the Earth, and with it comes a new plant, the Triffid.  While the plants are certainly ugly as sin, they also have the added benefit of being lumbering maneaters.  Bill Mason (Howard Keel) wakes after eye surgery to a world in chaos, as everyone who witnessed the celestial event is now blind.  Desperate to find a sanctuary, he crosses Europe, picking up travel mates like young Susan (Janina Faye) and French well-to-do Christine (Nicole Maurey).  Meanwhile, in a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall, marine Biologist Tom Goodwin (Kieron Moore) and his long-suffering wife Karen (Janette Scott) race to find a way to stop the vicious plants from destroying all life on the planet (seeing as they’re carnivorous, this wouldn’t really benefit them).

Steve Sekely’s (with an assist from an uncredited Freddie Francis, who directed the lighthouse scenes, making the film feel like two films but still working despite this) The Day of the Triffids is an adaptation of the John Wyndham novel of the same name.  Of the novels he wrote, I would suggest that this one is only edged out in popularity by The Midwich Cuckoos (which was adapted for films under the title Village of the Damned).  Wyndham dealt in a style he called “logical fantasy,” one in which the descriptions and functioning of the normal world are integral to how the fantastic elements play.  This certainly is the case in this film.  Bill is a sailor and all-around handy man.  He is the Common Man hero that was the norm for many decades in genre cinema.  These are people who work for a living.  They are resourceful and pragmatic, and they care about their fellow man as much as is humanly possible to do without getting themselves killed.  For example, Bill knows how to get a car moving when it’s bogged in the mud.  He knows how to get the generator working at Christine’s chateau.  He knows how to repair a radio.  He knows how to electrify a fence.  He knows how to turn a gas truck into a makeshift flamethrower.  But he knows these things because he has a working knowledge of the world.  Necessity insists that he be able to do these sorts of things, so they are second nature to him, even if he doesn’t necessarily know a transistor from a transformer (in other words, general knowledge, not specific).  Tom is a specialist, and he and his wife are cut off from society (but not from the threat).  Tom is also an alcoholic, a condition that gives tension to the situation they are in and humanizes him.  He is further normalized by his inability to find a weakness in the Triffids.  As a scientist, he cannot succeed in this turmoil, but as a Common Man, working with his hands and wits, he discovers the ultimate weapon against the plants totally by accident.  In the modern film world, where every protagonist is either super-powered or super-sophisticated to the point of ennui, I always return to characters like the ones here as a respite.

Society in the film breaks down literally overnight.  It goes from business as usual to complete disarray in a matter of hours.  This is heralded by a fantastic sequence in the Royal Botanic Gardens.  A night watchman (Ian Wilson) sits alone at his desk as a Triffid sneaks up on him.  The man knows that there’s something wrong but doesn’t act, and the tension builds until the creature is upon him.  He is a representative of the world, its inability to prepare, and its fate for its inaction.  This is reinforced by several sequences of mass transit systems (a ship, a plane, a train) as they traipse over the proverbial cliff, the people in charge of them lying to the passengers in their last moments, trying to salvage some normalcy in the face of death.  But it doesn’t avert the inevitable, salvation being a wish that shall never be granted.  As Bill explores the hospital the next morning, the place looks like it was ransacked by Cossacks, trays strewn, glass scattered all over, and the building is like a ghost town, bereft of souls.  Only Dr. Soames (Ewan Roberts) remains, now blind, and his prognosis for the world is grim.  Discovering that Bill’s surgery was successful, he states, “I don’t envy you.”  Soames knows what comes next, knows that it won’t be pretty, and knows that Bill’s options for survival are limited (but not as limited as his own).  Throughout the major cities like London and Paris, the streets are littered with cars and blind people stumbling and pawing around like zombies in search of some fresh brains.  Bill learns that sight has become not only an asset but also a weakness.  At a train station, people hear that Bill can see, and they swarm over him with pleas for assistance.  After a train derails coming into the station, young Susan is almost kidnapped for her eyesight (there is a slight pedophilic air to this moment, as well).  People have become pathetic, desperate, and callous, yet maybe they were always that way.  

The bleak tone of the film is perhaps best displayed in the sequence at Christine’s chateau.  She is taking care of her friends who have gone blind, including the young Bettina (Carole Ann Ford, likely best known as Susan on the first few seasons of Dr. Who).  Bettina takes to Susan, and in a scene that’s positively heartbreaking, she guesses multiple things about the younger girl (hair and eye color, etcetera), all of which are wrong, and all of which Susan lies about to keep up Bettina’s spirits.  Bill suggests that Christine and those who can see should abandon the manse, as it makes them sitting ducks, but Christine can’t bear to leave her friends to die (which is most certainly what it would be).  This decision is taken away from her when a gang of convicts overrun the chateau and force the blind women to “dance” with them.  Bettina, stumbling outside after escaping being raped, is surrounded by Triffids and killed.  There is no mercy here, if there ever was before, and even that was illusory.  It if isn’t plant monsters, it’s human monsters.

Nevertheless, The Day of the Triffids contains elements of birth and rebirth.  Bill is reborn with his eyesight.  Susan is a sighted youth that must be protected and allowed to carry on the human race.  Tom and Karen are surrounded by water, the giver of life, and Bill and his companions spend a lot of time racing to sea ports in search of rescue (it doesn’t hurt that he’s a seaman).  Tom is forced to give up booze, and he finds a new purpose in dissecting a Triffid, looking for flaws.  His marriage is renewed in a way by this.  Bill comes upon a blind pregnant woman, and Christine assists in the birth.  Life will go on, just drastically changed.  Though the world is in apocalypse mode, the human will to survive remains, bloodied but unbowed.  The film tacks on a quasi-happy ending that speaks a little too bluntly of hope, but it also acknowledges that the world has a long way to go before it recovers from this situation.  As End of the World fictions go, that’s pretty much the best we can hope for, right?

MVT:  The foreboding wasteland that the world has become is effectively presented both visually and attitudinally.

Make or Break:  The greenhouse sequence is a standout in the horror genre, in my opinion.

Score:  7/10