The Hunger (1983)

Directed by: Tony Scott
Run Time: 97 minutes

This isn't a vampire movie. Yes I used a vampire tag for this blog post, yes the book that this movie is based on is about vampires, and yes there is blood drinking. What this movie lacks is fangs, bursting into when the vampire come in contact with sunlight,  no fear of crosses or religious objects, no nonsense with mirrors, and they don't turn into fucking human disco balls when the sun hits them. Instead the creatures in this movie have more in common with Baobhan sith or Leanan sídhe, blood drinking fairies.  Which fits more with the mood of this film instead of vampires.  Rather than a supernatural menace that is on the verge of destroying humanity,  it's an ancient creature that is deal with the solitude due to being immortal.

The film opens with Miriam and John Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) in an early eighties goth club picking up a young couple.  This footage is interrupted with a monkey killing another monkey in it's cage. The monkeys are test subject's of Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) Sleep, Blood, and Longevity experiments. Which is great for John as he likes drinking blood, he can't sleep, and he is starting to rapidly age.

Alice, a young violin student that Miriam was grooming,  also notices John's rapid aging. This revelation motivates both John and Miriam to independently seek Doctor Roberts' help. They both fail in this task as Miriam becomes enraptured with Sarah and John comes off as a crazy old man. Sarah assuming that John really is a crazy old man and leaves him waiting for an hour in the hopes he gets the message and leave.  Sarah sees him as he is leaving and John has visibly aged ten years and is rightly pissed that she wasted a good chunk of his life. So with his youth slipping away from him, John tires and fails to feed on some kid in a tunnel.

John gets home to find he is starting to look almost two hundred years old. Alice shows up later and does not realize that the old man with John's eyes was in fact John. In a vain hope of regaining his lost youth John feeds on Alice but nothing happens and he ages into a walking mummy. Miriam finds him and carries him to the attic where she keeps all of her other lovers who have become mummies. After a tearful farewell and asking her other lovers to be kind to John tonight. The rest of the movie is Miriam seducing Sarah and turning her into a near immortal blood drinking lover.

The movie is beautiful and annoying at the same time. A good chunk of the film is spent building the atmosphere at the price of the plot. Yes Tony Scott manages to show the body horror of rapid aging and David Bowie is fairly good at showing this horror. However I spent most of the film going 'Hello, I'm the audience would throw me a bone and tell me a little of what the hell is going on and why'. I am glad they did not try to be smarter than the film was and use science babel to explain things. Instead things just happen without context or explanation and the cool visual is all that is given. The example that comes to mind is the monkey from the beginning of  the movie who was not sleeping  starts to rapidly age. After a few minutes in movie time the monkey dies and starts to rapidly decay. No reason given just sleep deprived monkeys turn into rage filled killers and then die due to rapid aging.

Aside from everyone casually smoking in every scene this movie has aged rather well. The effects are creepy but not genre shattering and aside of my petty complaints about the plot it is an ok movie. If you want to feel nostalgic for your goth days or this movie shows up on cable or steaming services it is worth a watch because you're bored.

Make or Break: The whole style over substance stance this movie takes pisses me off. There is a good horror movie in there but it is lost in the art.

MVP: Catherine Deneuve. In this film she is everything you would want in a vampire. Classy, sexy, and mysterious. As a point of disclosure I have been a fanboy of hers since I saw Belle du Jour.




Score: 5.9 out of 10


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Last Man Standing (1995)

Hardassed cop Kurt Bellmore (Jeff Wincott) is in hot pursuit of a violent gang of bank robbers lead by Snake Underwood (Jonathan Fuller), but the criminals’ organization may be more expansive than originally suspected.

There’s a scene in Joseph Merhi’s Last Man Standing where our stalwart hero is driving his banker wife Anabella (Jillian McWhirter) to work.  No great shakes, as the scene tells us nothing other than that Snake and his cohorts are highly likely to hit Anabella’s bank that day (they do).  What’s interesting about the scene is that the protagonists are listening to a radio program where two talk show hosts are debating the effects of violent television shows.  Their conversation isn’t all that engaging (basically “is too,” “is not”), but what piqued my interest is that this conversation plays such a prominent part in the scene.  It isn’t just background noise (and if it is, it’s better than the conversation between Anabella and Kurt), and it got me wondering what the filmmakers were trying to do with the scene.  Nothing is solved on the radio show, but I think that the idea was to plant the notion in the heads of this film’s viewers.  While I like to think that the intent was to stimulate debate on the subject (and it may very well have been), in the context of this film it plays more as an excuse for the level of violence in it.  By acknowledging this debate, there is a sort of self-knowledge that understands that violent television (and, by extension, films) is something people may contemplate philosophically, but there’s no real harm because it’s all make believe, and you want it, anyway.  

So, I’ll indulge them.  My personal take on the matter is that constant barrages of empty sex and gratuitous violence do desensitize viewers to a point (how many slasher films have we cheered at where the killer gruesomely dispatches his hyper-amorous victims?).  Yet, it’s one thing to take pleasure in these types of things on screen and quite another to translate them into violence in the real world.  I do believe that the key lies in the ability to separate fiction from reality, and I think that this applies not only to people with mental issues but also to people who are reared on these actions with no frame of reference to the negative consequences of them in the real world.  I think when violent behavior is encouraged (or simply not addressed at all) as the only way to be “on top” (and there actually are parents/guardians/et cetera who think this way and pass it on to their children) and it’s reinforced through violent fictional images, then you get violent, amoral members of society.  You can read this more as a condemnation of certain modern “parents” (and society in general) than of violent entertainment, and you’d be right.  Of course, you could also go into a whole tangent with this argument about the effects of video games in recent years as well, but I’m not knowledgeable enough on that end of it to get into it (and besides, this is intended to be my general opinion in short), but I do feel it ties into it somewhere.  Feel free to discuss.

Last Man Standing follows the textbook for low budget action.  You have the virile cop who latches onto a case and won’t let go.  Things get personal when a character he has a deep attachment to gets murdered.  You have Kurt’s fellow cops who play the role of contagonists, harassing him and making his life more difficult.  You have a scene set in a garish strip club.  You have colorful villains whose comeuppance can’t come soon enough.  Nonetheless, the film veers enough away from the standard template to distinguish itself a bit from the crowd.  Kurt is married to Anabella rather than merely being in a relationship with her, a point that suggests that he’s less of a loner than is usual.  Kurt’s partner Doc (the perennially hangdog Jonathan Banks) lives at home with his elderly mother who serves him odd meals (she puts mushrooms in his breakfast cereal) and packs his lunch in a child’s lunchbox.  Snake isn’t as cool a customer as he could be, and his constant frustration with people who dun him for money owed gives him an air of believability (but just an air).  

More than this, Merhi’s direction has a visual flair that falls in line with some of the best action films from Hong Kong at this time.  The camera sweeps across the sets, accentuating the build up to the action and stylizing the action itself as it plays out.  The filmmakers are also not afraid to open the frame up and choreograph the action within a geography the audience can follow.  There are a couple of POV shots from inside automobiles as they flip and roll over.  The editing does get a bit dodgy, especially in the last few action sequences, but overall, it still stands up with films made for much more money.

It stands to reason, then, that the action in an action film needs to work well, and here it really, really does.  The film has several car chase scenes that impress, not only because of the level of the effects and stuntwork (lots of cars explode and fly through the air, and lots of other cars become collateral damage as the chase moves onto the highways of Los Angeles [and I have to say that I was amazed the filmmakers got permission to do a lot of the things they did on the actual streets, because this is some A-level auto carnage]).  The interpersonal action scenes also work quite well, with Wincott delivering some nice kicks to the heads of the baddies, and the mix of hand-to-hand and gunplay action is nicely balanced.  Further, the stuntmen in Last Man Standing fly through a lot (and I mean A LOT) of mirrors and panes of glass.  It’s almost a fetish.  And all of this work is practical, which gives it a grounded realism, even as things get nuts.  In the current era, where action films have largely become cartoons dissociated from reality in their overuse/over-reliance on computer-generated effects, it’s always refreshing (and I’ll be the first to admit it; it plays to my unapologetic sense of nostalgia) to be able to get involved in a film’s action scenes through the sense of verisimilitude that practical effects/stunts offer.  As my first experience with the world of PM Entertainment, I can confidently state that it won’t be my last.

MVT:  The stunts and the direction of same are magnificent.

Make or Break:  The opening heist delivers in every way you could ask for from an action film.

Score:  7/10      

Invincible Space Streaker (1977)

I have never been skinny-dipping.  I never fully understood some people’s fascination with it, but different strokes and all that.  I have, however, streaked.  Let me set the scene for you.  I was young (I’m guessing less than ten years old), and I was taking my nightly bath.  If I remember correctly, my parents had some friends over, and my calls to my parents were going unheeded (why, I don’t recall).  For some inexplicable reason, I got it into my head that the best way to fix my parents’ wagon was to leap out of the tub and hustle my bare ass down the street.  Which I did.  At that time, we lived on 11^th Street.  I made it to 15^th Street before I was finally nabbed by a couple of my siblings.  I’m surprised I didn’t incur any injuries like slicing my foot open (even more surprising since I used to walk around barefooted a lot back then).  At any rate, I didn’t do it because of any sort of exhibitionism on my part, no desire to show off the goods, such as they were.  It was just an impulse borne of a child’s frustration (one that was repeated once more to much less fanfare a short time later).  But the boys in Chi-Lien Yu’s Invincible Space Streaker (aka Fei Tian Dun Di Jin Gang Ren) love to skinny-dip.  In fact, I could imagine these kids being perfectly at home in a Turkish bath house.  You could notch it up to simply being a cultural difference, but seeing a bunch of naked boys on film is a bit jarring to me and more than a little creepy, considering this film’s plot and despite its innocent attitude.

Dr. Mou appears from a frothing lake in his golden-helmeted, supervillain persona and quickly transforms into his human form, which comes with a snazzy black dressing gown.  He conjures up two red-shirted henchmen, one of whom I believe was supposed to be Scottish.  Why?  Why not?  Meanwhile, pre-teen Hsiao Po is almost singlehandedly losing his team’s soccer match by being the world’s worst, most distractible goalie (primarily centered on reining in his brother/cousin/something-or-other Hsiao Wen who has a penchant for pissing in public [seriously, this kid has one of the weakest and/or smallest bladders in the world]).  Post-game, the boys frolic in the aforementioned skinny-dipping hole, where Dr. Mou finds them and lures them to his secret lair with the promise of turning them into superheroes (but actually just turns them into monkeys, pigs, and more henchmen).  Nevertheless, the joke’s on Mou, because he does actually manage to change Po into his nemesis, the titular Streaker.  Fights and things ensue.

In the grand tradition of the Japanese Tokusatsu genre and the insanity of films like The Super Inframan, Invincible Space Streaker is aimed squarely at children and their desire to see shit blow up and monsters fight each other (who doesn’t?).  This, then, is why the film focuses so strongly on a threat from a child predator.  Dr. Mou is absolutely shudder-inducing in the way he entices these kids.  He’s the Pied Piper, but instead of a flute, he uses a poster of a superhero to lead the kids into danger.  Of course, there’s no actual sexual molestation involved (but, man, is it heavily suggested as a strong possibility), and I do believe that the filmmakers approached the story earnestly (plus, I’m sure there are culture gaps shading my impressions).  Instead, the children are tortured and transformed into animals.  The children all get along with each other, more or less.  It’s adults who are threats and/or just incompetent (including, but not limited to, Mrs. Lin, the school teacher who barely keeps track of her wards and gets a slingshot to the ass for her trouble [don’t worry, she returns the favor]).  In films like this, children are front and center, and what’s more worrisome to children than adults who intend them harm or can’t properly protect them?  

Naturally, since the kids are the focal point of the story, they are the ones who are empowered in this world.  Even while in the clutches of Dr. Mou, the children do just about as they please.  Wen even gets to take a whiz over Mou’s shoulder due to a breakdown in communication (a classic metaphor for the disparity between the ways adults and children view the world as well as another excuse to have a kid flash his bird at the camera).  The Space Streaker (I don’t recall if they ever call him anything other than “superman” in the film, and he never makes it into space, anyway) is the ultimate encapsulation of child empowerment.  That the superhero in this movie is actually a child is interesting, unlike in other shows and films of this ilk where they’re teens or young adults.  In costume, the Streaker is actually the height of a young boy (though for the more dangerous/experience-required stunts, he’s played quite obviously by an adult).  His costume most resembles one of the famous Kamen Rider characters from Japan, just much, much cheaper and less colorful.  Many a young boy dreams of being a superhero, and in this film, Po gets his wish without being matured into adulthood.  In this way, it’s somehow more satisfying from the perspective of youth, because the superhero is still a kid.  In other words, you don’t have to be a grownup to be powerful.

Why, then, is this film so incredibly dull?  Well, several reasons.  First and foremost is the fact that, even for all of the lunacy packed into this thing, it’s still extraordinarily incoherent.  Even if you view the film as a childhood fantasy/nightmare, it just makes no sense.  None of this is assisted in any way by the camerawork and editing.  The shots are always uncomfortably close to characters, jittery, and cut together like they were just thrown into a blender.  It’s what was once dubbed “MTV style” before MTV.  I’m a fan of camera zooms, something for which Asian cinema is known (and sometimes ridiculed). Nevertheless, not only are there simply way too many of them in Invincible Space Streaker (if you made a drinking game out of their frequency, you would be obliterated within five minutes), but they’re also almost completely unmotivated.  They’re zooms for the sake of zooms, and they make an already bizarre film into a muddled one.  Most egregious of all, the action scenes, the one thing we hope will actually gratify in a film like this, are boring.  They are one note repeated constantly, and like everything else in the movie, they leave the viewer scratching his head rather than grinning.  All things considered, I suppose that the final (recycled) shot of the boys skinny-dipping with the title “Thank you for coming” rather than “The End” just about says it all.

MVT:  The costumes are fun in a goofy, threadbare way (including a wolfman who looks like an escapee from a grade school production of Little Red Riding Hood), but they’re underutilized to the point of frustration.

Make or Break:  The opening soccer game outlines the tenor of the film, for better or worse.  Mostly worse.

Score:  4/10