Ah-Ah-Argento #4: Door Into Darkness

 Door Into Darkness (aka La Porta Sul Buio) was a four episode anthology created and produced by Dario Argento for RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, nee Radio Audizioni Italiane - the national public broadcasting company of Italy) following his third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Originally airing in 1973, part of the intent of the series was to give friends of Argento some directing exposure, including Luigi Cozzi, one of his early assistants, and Roberto Pariante, an early assistant director. The series was modelled somewhat after Alfred Hitchcock Presents... wherein the director himself would introduce each episode, which Argento does here sporting a shaggy mop and stylish '70's clothes.  It turned Argento into an unlikely, but legitimate star in the country where he would become known as a media personality almost as prominently as a director.

The series originally aired in black and white (since RAI could only broadcast in black and white at the time) but Argento and company was asked to shoot it in colour for the eventual re-airings when they would appear in colour. The crew, however still shot the series optimized for presentation in black and white, so it's bizarre to me that the physical media collection this series is featured on ("Dario Argento's Deep Cuts" from Severin Films) does not have the episodes presented both ways (but from all signs, it seemed a difficult task to find even decent copies of these episodes...the transfers are exceptionally noisy and grainy with frequent haziness or film errors, so it almost feels lucky we even get them like this).

The episodes are:
1. "The Neighbor" (aka "Il vicino di casa") - written and directed by Luigi Cozzi
2. "The Tram" (aka "Il tram") - written and directed by Dario Argento (direction credited to a pseudonym)
3. "The Doll" (aka "La bambola") - written by Marcella Elsberger and Mario Foglietti, directed by Foglietti
4. "Eyewitness" (aka "Testimone oculare") - written by Argento and Cozzi, directed by Argento with Cozzi but credited to Roberto Pariante.

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For The Neighbor, prior to the story starting, Argento introduces the series as a concept before introducing the episode. He's a gentle, contemplative speaker, unassuming for someone considered a master of the macabre. This staged setting transitions sharply to Argento slamming the hood of a car on the side of the road on a highway where he continues to introduce the episode. He then flags down a car, and a young couple pick him up. He gets into the back seat and we see the resulting conversation from his POV. It's truly and odd sequence, lasting about 90 seconds or so before Argento asks to be dropped off and the car drives off. 

But the charm of the sequence reveals itself when it turns out we will be following this couple as our protagonists for the story. They've just bought a beach-front apartment that they're moving into. The truck is to arrive with all their stuff the next morning. However, their upstairs neighbour has just murdered his wife. They would have been none the wiser if not for the fact that he forgot to shut the tap off to the bathtub and it starts to leak downstairs. He's gone out to fetch a shovel and the couple allow themselves into his apartment to shut off the water only to find the body.

With their car stuck in the sand and neither their electricity nor phone hooked up they're trapped with nowhere to go. Their only hope is the murderous upstairs neighbour will be unaware that they found out about his crime... if only the didn't leave something inside his apartment.

The Neighbor has suitable tension, but it's only got about 30 minutes of story in an over 50 minute episode, so it feels every moment of its padding. Much of the padding is meant for ratcheting up the tension but it's more frustrating than intensifying.

Aldo Reggiani plays the husband, Luca, and has the lightest work to do, while his wife, Stefania, played by the beautiful Laura Belli is our primary POV character, and the one who has to interact with the titular neighbour (Mimmo Palmara) the most. Palmara sports a big 70's moustache and a high head of aged grey hair, and at first seems tired and unassuming, but when he needs to take an unconscious Luca to the beach, we see what a beast of a man Palmara is, throwing Reggiani over his shoulder with relative ease, and moving around with him with no difficulty. The threat level triples after we see this strength.

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Argento shines with The Tram, a really fun piece of detective/mystery fiction directed with Argento's usual assured hand and only a slightly tamped down version of his traditional flair. Shot on 16mm (as all the episodes were) there are a number of beautiful shots and impeccable use of his environments (the titular tram car as well as the tram depot), neither of which I've seen used anywhere near as well in TV or cinema in the 50+ years since. While Argento (and his cohorts on the other episodes) did not have nearly the time and definitely not the relative budget of his feature films for this production Argento makes a mini-Argento movie that feels as accomplished and as entertaining as anything he's done (Argento cites the lighting being the biggest sacrifice, but he still does well with what he has here).

In The Tram, a body is found under a streetcar seat when the car is being cleaned. The police arrive and investigate, what seems to be an impossible crime. How could someone be murdered AND stowed without anyone seeing it, including both the streetcar driver and ticket taker who were on the vehicles trip from start to finish.

Enzo Cerusico plays the Inspector on the case, Giordani. He has habits and ticks on display as he thinks through his problems, and Cerusico is not only a handsome lead but absolutely charming one as well. Giordani should have spun out into his own series of mysteries, either on TV or film. Having only one adventure with him was definitely not enough.

But part of it is the case, as well. It is a perplexing one, especially if we're to take all the eyewitness testimony (none of which provides any immediate clue to the killer's identity) as fact, then there seems to be only one or two answers that remain. 

The intelligence of the script is that Giordani follows the remaining threads, and it does point to the most obvious answer, through to completion of the accused being convicted but, his please of innocence haunt Giordani. So even though the case is close, justice has been served, Giordani can't shake that he's missed something. So off the books, with his partner Giulia (the beautiful Paola Tedesco), he takes another crack at it, and it leads to an exceptional climax.

The only weakness of this episode is the off-topic, preachy coda that feels like something Argento just wanted to get off his chest (he's not wrong, but it's just such an aside).

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For the third instalment of Door Into Darkness, Argento brought his friend, journalist Mario Foglietti, whom he collaborated with on Four Flies..., for his first directorial effort.

The story begins with an escape from a mental hospital completely shot from a first-person POV perspective. It's an effective sequence (apparently shot by Cozzi, who stepped in as second unit director when Foglietti fell behind).

From there, it's a confounding and yet kind of compelling puzzle. A police inspector meets with the head professor from the mental hospital. They agree to collaborate on finding the missing patient, whomever they may be, noting that they're a schizophrenic and potentially dangerous.

We follow a handsome, but slightly rumpled man (Robert Hoffmann) around a small town as he checks into a rooming house and looks out upon the street, clearly searching for someone. He finds her (the beautiful Erika Blanc), and follows her, but stops tailing her when she meets up with another man. Later in the evening she is killed in her fashion warehouse.

The inspector and the professor have a follow-up conversation, which only serves to obfuscate rather than illuminate what is actually happening. The man starts following another woman (the beautiful Mara Venier) who looks like the same woman he was following earlier, and he starts messing with her. She seems to let him mess with her. The dynamic is incredibly perplexing and uncomfortable. 

The climax is even more discomforting as the inspector leads a dragnet in the town and the man and second woman play out their psychodrama in hiding. It all comes to a head with the reveal of who these people are.

It's a challenging hour of television, and maybe the payoff doesn't reward the effort, but, as I noted I was pretty compelled the entire time trying to figure it out. Cozzi, in his second-unit direction, really seemed to reach for Argento's-style of first-person shooting, which finds some element of visual consistency across the episodes.

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The final episode, Eyewitness, turned out to be a bit of a mess. From what Cozzi said about what happened behind the scenes, Argento was not pleased with the quality of what Foglietti shot after the first few days of shooting (each episode shot for around 8 days) and he and Cozzi stepped in to take over production, reshooting what they could (Argento's take was that cast and crew were unhapping with Foglietti and asked Argento to take over... in both cases Argento seems hesitant to disparage anyone, and wished that Foglietti retain credit). That the episode is as engrossing as it is proves that the talent of the directors and the series crew.

The plot is an interesting gialli. Roberta (the beautiful Marilù Tolo...there's a lot of beautiful women in Italian cinema and more than a few of them in this series) is driving to her rural home after a day and evening in the city. On the familiar road home, she turns a bend and something jumps out in front of her. She screeches to a halt and sees a woman's body laying in the road. Roberta gets out, certain she hadn't hit anything. She checks the body. It is dead with a wound in the back. There's a rustle in the bushes and a man with a gun emerges. Roberta runs, knowing the local tavern is not far. She makes it without incident. The cops arrive. The chief inspector (Glauco Onorato) questions her, then takes her back to the scene where he explains that he believe she believes she saw something, but there was no body found.

There's one mistake Argento made with the rest of the story. Where we should be following Roberta and her husband as they're, maybe, terrorized by the perpetrator of the crime, or maybe it's all just a series of weird coincidences and Roberta really did "just see something" (the way it's shot largely allows for both possiblities) instead a transitional sequence does show us gloved hand disposing of the dead woman's bloody clothes, thereby eliminating the possibility, at least for the audience, that Roberta might have just been making the whole thing up.

But this "mistake" then does lead to the most surprising part of the story, the inspector, after another incident or four in Roberta's life, which could all be chalked up as random events or even fabrications, he believes her. He intuitively trusts his instincts on her character, and believes her. It's a surprising and wonderful scene when one expects tropes out of stories from this era. 

The climax plays out as it should, and it's satisfying (if the final note a bit weird), but this is a story that really could have been filled out nicely into a full-length movie, really the only one of these stories that has that in it.

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I enjoyed all of these entries, with The Neighbor thrilling me the least, and The Tram exciting me the most. In all, as much as these were made for TV, they are all put together with cinematic professionalism. Argento had to cut costs, but I don't think he knows how to cut corners when he directs. Even when he's not successful, he's always intentional and it shows in the work. He was on set for most of the productions, so his guiding hand is there over the whole procession even if he wasn't writer or director on everything.

The Hitchcock/Rod Serling-esque episode introductions are an anthology convention, and Argento serves the role well. Unfortunately the clever way in which Argento's introduction was incorporated into the story set-up of The Neighbor did not happen in the remaining episode. It was an exceptionally interesting way to get an episode started. 

The series ran into trouble with the censors even before the first episode aired, and then ran into more trouble after the first episode aired. All the censorship issues displeased Argento that he abstained from producing another series or even working in television again for years. But what we got is an absolute treat.

KWIF: The Housemaid (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. More than a few sick days for ol' Kent this week, and usually that means curling up on the couch and just gorging on a diet of cold & flu Tylenols and, of course, movies. But the pain on my brain from sinus pressure was so debilitating for one of those days that I could barely leave my bed and just could *not* look at a screen. Here's what little I got up to...

This Week:
The Housemaid (2025, d. Paul Feig - Crave)
Universal Language (2024, d. Matthew Rankin - Crave)

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The Housemaid is not a film meant for me, a nearly 50-year-old man-boy still obsessed with toys, comic books, superheroes and scifi.  Based off the novel by Freida McFadden, it seemed to me to be right in line with all the other chik-lit adaptations in recent years (Where The Crawdads Sing, It Ends With Us etc), which, again, I am not the target audience for. All this is not intended as disparagement...I mean, I spend two months of the year writing about Hallmark movies, which, again, I am not the target audience for. But where I've found an admiration for the cliches and tropes of the Hallmark formulae (and how they are broken), I've never quite grokked the women-in-peril-stories-for-women subgenre. I've never seen Single White Female or Sleeping With The Enemy for example.

I was warned in advance that The Housemaid was trash cinema, but a couple of reviewers had deemed it highest quality of trash cinema and it's hit some early best-of-2026-so-far lists, and, hey I *generally* like Paul Feig's movies, including A Simple Favor (not enough to review it, or watch the sequel, apparently...that link is to Toasty's review) so I thought, I'm trapped in bed with nothing else to do ...why not.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives as the Winchester estate on Long Island for an interview to be their new live-in housemaid (and occasional nanny). The place is pristine. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) greets her, shows her around the house, including the attic bedroom she would stay in, details the job, and both seem to feel pretty good about the exchange. And then we see Millie back in her car, where she lives, taking hobo-baths in gas station washrooms. We eventually learn she is out on parole and she needs a steady job and place to live, or back in the slammer she goes for another five years.

After a couple days, just when she thinks she isn't getting the job, Nina calls and needs her immediately. In the days since, the pristine abode Millie first saw is now a fucking calamity. So disastrous that it seems kind of impossible. Millie gets to work. She has the place restored to near perfection when Nina's husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and her daughter Cece come home. Cece, in a near Damien-from-The-Omen deadpan tells her shoes are not allowed on the furniture. 

The next morning Millie, having slept in a bed for the first time in ages, wakes up late, and rushes downstairs to find Nina in the midst of a complete meltdown. The place is trashed and Nina accuses Millie of tossing out a speech she had written. Andrew steps in and, like he's had to do this many times before, calms Nina down, kisses her passionately and carries her away, but not without looking at Millie apologetically first. It's just the first of Nina's micro- and macro-aggressions towards her, including canceling her Saturday off to run chores, then calling and asking Millie to pick up Cece from dance class, only not telling her where dance class is before hanging up, and when Millie arrives, another mom notes to Millie that Cece is sleeping over at her house and she calls Nina to confirm and disses Millie to. her. face.

Millie doesn't understand why Nina is fucking with her until a peek in her medicine cabinet reveals prescription drugs for treating psychosis. Later she overhears other mothers, at tea, talking about what a saint Andrew is (not to mention so sexy with a million-dollar-smile) for taking Nina and her daughter in, and learns from another nanny about how Nina tried to drown Cece and kill herself with sleeping pills. As Nina continues to harass Millie, Andrew needs to come to Millie's defence more and more... and Millie starts having nighttime fantasies about Andrew.

All of this is just the literal set-up. If it feels like Millie's being set-up, she is. But why. Why is Nina fucking with her so badly? It seems so...intentional, not just erratic thinking of a mentally unstable person. 

And that's the twist of the movie.

Where it seemed so obvious where this movie was going to start - Millie would have an affair with Andrew and Nina would make her life hell for it - the timing was wrong. This is a 131-minute film. From the moment Millie arrived on her first day of work, everything was awry and Nina started fucking with her immediately. A movie would usually build to such events and give us some explanation as to why they were happening. But here, we're left to wonder throughout the prolonged first act, is Millie's criminal past part of it? What about Nina's past?

And then there's Cece, whose need for control and perfection are downright creepy. But then we meet Andrew's mother (Elizabeth Perkins), whose every comment is something disparaging, nothing living up to her standards. The hints are there...is Andrew the problem?

The first act spans the first hour, and then it takes off when Millie and Andrew fuuuck. She's been in prison for 10 years and he's a big, handsome beefcake with a white knight complex...it was bound to happen. Nina finds out, like, immediately, and goes after Millie, but Andrew comes to her defence and tosses Nina out. And soon all the secrets start to unfurl, all the clues come together and the whole thing comes into focus.

Without spoiling too much other than what I've already spoiled, it gets dark, abusive and demented. Then there's a pivot where the abuse is still demented but not so dark. And the finale which ties things up in a nice little bow.

Except the bow is made of horseshit, such that spending more than 30 seconds thinking about not just the ending, (or worse, the franchise set-up) and the whole thing makes less and less sense. It's a trashy story that's barely held together with popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. 

What Feig brings to the trash is a steady hand and a lens for wish fulfillment. There aren't many male directors who understand the feminine gaze like Feig. If this were an 1980's thriller, the sex scenes would be luridly all about Sydney Sweeney's naked body, but Feig knows that what's important to this film's audience is the setting, the mood, the touching, the contact. In the non-sex scenes he lovingly captures the idyllic Winchester house, he get's Millie's POV that even amidst all the hardship she faces from Nina, there's still something she desires about this place. He gets that as much as a naked Brandan Sklenar is of interest to his audience, Sklenar wearing a white tank-top and showing his muscles put to use picking a weeping Amanda Seyfried up off the floor is even sexier. Feig makes a good-looking picture, and makes good-looking people look good in his good-looking picture.

I am not on the Sidney Sweeney train. She's not a bad actor, but she's not a tremendously versatile one either. I've never been wowed. Sure, she has curves (paging Dr. Wenowdis) but her dead eyes counteract the allure.  Maybe in time she will develop from it-girl to prestige performer like a certain K-Stew I really used to dislike and now have tremendous respect for. That Sweeney is taking ownership of her films, nailing those executive producer credits, and no doubt having full control over how much of herself she wants to show and how she wants to show it does relay that she has some idea of what she's doing, at least on a business end. 

Seyfried is quite good here, but only as good as the script will allow her to be. It's within her ability to put Nina into performance mode, and relay to the audience that that is what she is doing, but it would betray the twist of the story for her to do so, and so she's stuck playing Nina as, basically, two different characters. The Nina of the first half who we have to hate, and the Nina of the second half who we need to sympathize with.

The Housemaid is not a bad time, if it's your sort of thing, but it's not really my thing and I was left just kind of annoyed with it.

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When I think of filmmaking and Winnipeg, I think of Guy Maddin, the surrealist Canadian filmmaker obsessed with the silent era and with a penchant for stories that revolve around a fictionalized version of himself (I also think of Hallmark movies, but that's besides the point here). It's an impossibility that Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin wasn't influenced by Maddin's films, as there are touchstones too hard to ignore in Universal Language, Rankin's second full-length feature.

I am by no means a Maddin expert, so comparing this work against Maddin's filmography is a bit beyond my grasp, but just to point out that Universal Language does feature a character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) who is returning to his hometown of Winnipeg to visit his mother. The story, toying with ideas of identity, community, and reality, also presents itself in a non-linear narrative, and the world in which it takes place is not unfamiliar, but is definitely an alternate reality to our own. Rankin does not share Maddin's fixation with early cinema, he does, like Maddin, have a fascination with branding and advertising and the way in which products penetrate our lives. 

The Winnipeg and Canada of Universal Language finds Persian and French as the national languages (no English words are spoken or seen). The Riel is the currency of this version of Canada (with Louis Riel's image stamped upon it), and the Quebecois of the film seem to have real difficult understanding the landscape of Canada outside their own borders... sovereignty is still a fixation.

The patient pacing of Rankin's film is immediate from the first frame, a frame which holds for over three full minutes. It is of the exterior of a school. The entrance in the middle left of frame, the window into as classroom in the upper right. The bricks and windows and eaves create width across the frame and make for their own frames. The class, as viewed through the window, is fully chaotic, unruly. A man carries his luggage in a hurried gait across the frame, up the stairs, into the entrance in the middle left, appearing again as a he enters a doorway visible through the window in the upper right. He scolds his class mercilessly. He's not a fan of their behaviour. And as he berates them, a child enters the lower left of the frame, up the stairs and into the entrance before it cuts to the interior.

Rankin uses this minimalist technique throughout the film, a static shot, precisely framed, often using brick or cement architecture to create depth and space within the scene. The camera doesn't move, instead it becomes all about the movement within the camera. It's spectacular to watch, to marvel at the precision of the movement and the eye that understands what to keep in and what to leave out of the shot. 

The story, as it were, not only finds Matthew returning to Winnipeg to visit his mother, but two young sisters, Negin and Nazgol, who discover a 500 Riel note frozen in ice on the sidewalk and seek a means to retrieve it, as well as Massoud (Pirouz Nemati, also the film's co-screenwriter alongside Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) who leads a dubious tourist group through mundane highlights of the city.

There are sub-plots (well, "plots" might be a bit much) about turkeys of the wild and pageant-winning variety, Kleenex bingo, and birthday cakes, and in the end everything is connected, which is the whole point. As Massoud says to Matthew, "Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha". The beauty of the film, beyond the visual aesthetics, is the discovery of the connectedness. The details of this alternate reality are so unique that they stand out, so once the pieces start coming together, it's easy to see how they all fit, but it's possible a second viewing would unveil even more.

I wondered what the purpose of the character being named after the director (and played by the director) was, as it's hard to know when something plays with the surreal in this way what of this film is personal. Has Rankin found himself deeply ingrained in the Iranian-Canadian community, and this is his message to his country and the world of how warm and kind the community is, or is this simply an absurdist conceit that he really committed to? I have not delved into the works of Jafar Panahi yet, but my understanding of the Iranian filmmaker is he often works blurring the lines between what's real and personal and what is fiction. So as much as Rankin is tapping into Winnipeg's most notable filmmaker, he's also reaching outward to much broader cinematic influences (he also cites Iranian cinema legends Abbas Kiastroiami and Sohrab Shahid-Saless as influences as well as other Winnipeg directors John Paizs and John Paskievich, among others. I am, of course, unfamiliar with any of these).

The climax of the film finds Matthew finally reaching his mother, only to learn a stranger has been taking care of her in the years since he's been away. There's an unspoken element, that there was distance between Matthew and his parents, and that in that distance someone else has filled the gap. Though not presented as "big drama" in the moment, there is something nakedly raw and emotional about this idea, that we can find ourselves more connected to strangers than our own family, and also in that disconnect we can lose ourselves.  

It seems 2026 is the year I invest more of my time in Canadian film. I really need to see Rankin's debut The Twentieth Century, and I need to do a filmography walk through of Maddin as well. 

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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Omni Loop

2024, Bernardo Britto (Jacqueline Argentine) -- download

I had every intention and expectation of doing this write-up as a Loopty Loo post, as the movie is, as the title suggests, about loops. But in watching, it is less about looping than it is about time travel, and it is less about time travel, as it is about living a life. And yet it does begin with the trope -- "Careful, " Zoya Lowe (Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds) says to the elderly lady about to sit on a bench at the rest home where Zoya's mother stays, just before a bird leaves a big plop of poo. "How did you know?" And you know what her answer is -- that she has lived this before, many times before. She's in a loop.

How did she get into the loop? When Zoya was 12 years old, she found a bottle of pills in a field. That bottle had her name on it. When she takes a pill, it sends her back five days. The pill bottle never empties. But now, decades later, it has had its consequences. Zoya has a black hole growing in her chest. These are her last five days, which she is living over and over. She wakes up in the hospital, she gets the news from her distraught but supportive family, and then they live, with her, for the next five days, until she has a nose bleed while blowing out candles on her 55th birthday cake, goes into the bathroom and takes the pill.

So, in some ways, its most definitely not a time loop movie. She isn't stuck, she doesn't have to find her way out. The way out is either living onward, or death. And yet we get to play with the tropes a wee bit. Zoya decides she doesn't want to die with regrets, nor just keep looping these same sad five days. And as fate would have it, she bumps into a young woman named Paula (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear) who is carrying a book on quantum mechanics that Zoya wrote. You see, Zoya is not just a woman going through time, but also a woman who spent a good part of her life studying time. That is, until she decided she would settle on living a life with a husband and child, and gave it all up. But bumping into Paula, literally, she finds a new path during those five days, and recruits Paula into unraveling the mystery of the pills, and their time travel abilities.

Except that's not what the movie is about, either. This movie is about the life Zoya chose over unraveling the mysteries of the universe. You see, Zoya has built a life on being brilliant, but is she? She admits she did so well on university tests because she knew the answers; time looping allows for that, quite easily. A professor accuses her of being lazy and unfocused and entitled. That's because she comes to knowledge by way of the answers, not the hard study, at first, I imagine. But eventually, given enough five day loops, she learned enough to write text books on the topic. But it seems she tired of that, and gave it up to become a mother and a wife. But now, in her final five days, she wonders if she regrets it.

This is a weird movie in a weird universe. When she is diagnosed, there is no, "How the fuck do you exist with a black hole growing in your chest?!?!?" The world isn't panicking, its not going to suck in everything in our solar system. It will just kill Zoya and doctors, despite saying they have never encountered it before, are calm. "Take her home, make her comfortable," they say. There is also a dying "last one-horned rhino in the world" and a plastic box containing The Nanoscopic Man, a man who was the subject of an experiment and is now shrinking, forever -- he is already molecular. His box is stored away in an aging, forgotten, professor's drawer. 

Zoya and Paul do end up spending many many MANY loops trying to figure out the power of the pills, but to no avail. The movie just breezes right past the challenges Zoya must be presented with in having to bring Paula up to speed on every previous iteration's experiments. Zoya hopes to break the five day timeframe, perhaps to go back far enough to choose a different life, but the more and more she loops, away from her family, focused only on the work with Paula, the more she comes to value the family time more than the expected benefits to cracking the code. Finally, she sees what she really wanted most out of life, and she had it.

Complete spoilers hereafter.

Zoya has always blown out those candles, seen the drops of the beginning nose bleed, but never opened the birthday presents her family have brought. Until that last "day", when she presents all her studies on time, and on the pills, to another new iteration of Paula, telling her to "proceed" with the work without her, for she knows Paula has her own very personal reasons to go back further than five days. And Zoya she goes home, opens the present, sees that she is going to be a grandmother, and they will name the little girl Zoya. She finally sees she has had a completely full life, and her regrets were silly. And the black hole sucks her in with a pop, and she's gone. No more loops, no more Zoya.

This is why I watch movies. Stories that make me think, touch on emotions, touch on ideas, leave me thinking long afterward. In some ways this was why this blog was created; to record those thoughts, and find rebuttal and/or furtherance. 

Finally, there is a toss away scene, one which makes a small comment on Loopty Loo's in that, each time Zoya pops a pill, she disappears, but the time loop continues. It is a reality, a time line, from which she has escaped but it doesn't go away. So in a way they are not loops at all, but a generation of new time lines in their multitude. I love that idea, something new for the sub-genre I love so.

Enter the Lexxicon: Super Nova

aka Lexx: 2.0
aka Tales From a Parallel Universe

1996, d. Ron Oliver - Tubi

There's a brilliant gag in the Father Ted Christmas special ("A Christmassy Ted") where Ted opines to the other inhabitants of the parochial house that he's looking forward to a nice, normal, uneventful Christmas with no big surprises... then the doorbell rings. Ted answers the door to find a bassinet with a swaddled baby stirring. Just as he's about to pick up the baby, a woman appears from out of frame and asks if she has the right address. Turns out no, and off she goes with the baby. The "Three Men and a Baby" plotline is teed up and then quickly snatched away.  It's a great subversion of expectations, especially in how sitcoms often will borrow plot lines from popular films just to fill the schedule and as a cheap shorthand to jokes.

At the start of Lexx's second tv movie/episode, we see a pod containing a single humanoid life form floating in space. It's emanating a message, on repeat, advising of this life-form's mission. His people are dying, their children are dying, and they need help from outside to help save them. He's floating in space in cryosleep hoping to encounter someone, anyone who might receive the message and be able to help him and his people in their most desperate hour. Then, enters the frame the giant dragonfly spaceship,the Lexx. We know this set up from countless Space Journey shows... he is rescued and the next course of adventure for our cast of characters is chosen. Except the message is not heard, and the life pod smashes into the Lexx and explodes leaving nary a scratch and no one inside the ship is even remotely aware of what might have been. For Lexx's second episode, it's the creators yelling at the audience "we are not that".

Instead inside the Lexx, 790 rhymes off love poems about his dear "Zev Zev" while scanning the star charts for Kai's home planet of Brunnis. Zev wants Kai, but he is dead, so he does not want. She hopes his home planet can somehow return him to full life. Stan meanwhile propositions Zev while she's showering (while nudity in TV has become exceptionally normal in a post-Game of Thrones world, in the 90's it was still a bit sensational for any TV to have breasts or butts or whatnots), intoning that she's a love slave and he has needs... but he is resoundingly rebuffed. "Realistically Stan, there's not much to like about you. You're old, unattractive...self-centered, vain, weak-willed, treacherous...." Zev may have been programmed for love, but she still has standards.

Kai is awakened by the insatiable cannibal Giggerata who they rescued last episode. She has designs to eat his cold meat but he gets the best of her. He directs Stan and crew on where to find Brunnis. Landing on the planet they discover the planet is deserted, and Kai directs them to the archive, the reservoir of the planet's knowledge. Only the AI that operates the reserve has been hijacked by Poet Man (Tim Curry), the one left behind when the Brunnen-G all left Brunnis.

Inside Zev, Stan and Kai each are transported into a memory machine that manipulates them based on their memories and desires. Zev sees snippets of her history - her parents abandoning her and the matron of the holocare home guiding her through wifely lesson - before Kai emerges, alive and they perform a romantic duet. Stanley, meanwhile, is tempted by lust, only to find him a prisoner of an impregnation scheme (that mistakenly identifies him as female). Poet Man has turned the archive into a house of torture.

While the crew is on the planet, Giggerata has free reign on the Lexx where she meets the Divine Order (the collection of all the telepathic brains that had once inhabited His Divine Shadow) and, after she attempts to eat one or two of them ("Too salty!") they lure her to their side by promising her the location of the planet of milk-fed boys. She needs Stan to pilot the ship to her new feeding grounds. The storylines thus intersect as the Divine Order advise Giggerata on how to destroy Brunnis and Kai -their greatest threat- in the process.

Once again this Lexx installment feels exceptionally random, as if constructed by free association. While "I Worship His Shadow" was off-beat and took a lot of strange detours, it was still propulsive, and its ability to link the disparate characters it introduced together happens rather organically. "Super Nova", on the other hand, seems a bit lost for purpose. The intent of the episode is the get more into the characters and their motivations, but they're so thin (or non-existant) that it doesn't have enough to really explore. 

It's the problem with Kai being undead, and not having and wants or desires or really any feelings at all...the return trip to Brunnis is at best observational. He has no attachments. It's only Zev's very limited want to find a way to restore life to Kai (something he repeatedly intones is impossible) that moves them to explore the planet. 

All this leads to a largely tedious and repetitive episode with almost no stakes that doesn't demand the 90-minute runtime it has. Giggerata is the episode's highlight throughout, just a delightfully weird, angry, vengeful and hungry character (played by Ellen Dubin). 

While the previous instalment hinted at the idea of cycles of existence, and prophets who can see the past cycles in order to predict the future, there's a short sequence here that touches on it again, although rather than imparting anything new into the operatic elements of the story, it's restricted to the threats immediately at hand. And it doesn't help anything that the episode's climax, what saves our waylaid crew from an otherwise hopeless situation, is a complete deus ex machina.

Where "I Worship His Shadow" was bristling with ideas and energy, "Super Nova" seems largely devoid of them. As far as the creators knew, they had an order for four 90-minute episodes, so it's entirely too early for this kind of filler. 

I was wrong twice with my review of that first installment of Lexx. First I said that Stanley Tweedle will never show any growth in this series, and immediately, in this second episode Stan rejects Giggerata's proposition to turn the Lexx into a love-ship if he abandons Zev and Kai, and instead stands by his friends instead of fulfilling his own needs. But maybe that's all the growth we ever get out of him. Second, I said I was as sucked in as I was 30 years ago. This episode kinda put the 'suck' into 'sucked in'. It has its moments, but they're few and far between.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): American Sweatshop

2025, Uta Briesewitz (TV shows including Stranger Things, The Pitt) -- download

The Internet is full of vile, vitriolic, horrible shit. It always has been. It just seems that more, of late, is being thrown in our face. Part of the reason for that is that the platforms that dominate the Internet now, primarily Social Media, are shying away from proper content moderation. What is "proper" you ask? Valuing humans over dollars, if you ask me.

At the time of writing this, social media is buzzing with the latest example of how horrible people, and in particular, men can be. A porn website exists, upon it was a chat forum where men discussed the topic of drugging and raping their partners. CNN did a story investigating the site and its content. Social Media has gone wild and is more focused on the hyperbole of both sides of the conversation, rather than just addressing exactly how horrible the activity is. The conversation on the actual topic is derailed by hype & outrage because the latter gets clicks, views and impressions. 

Daisy (Lili Reinhart, Riverdale) works at Paladin, a YouTube analog, in the role of content moderation. Its a shit job, but someone has to do it. She's an aimless soul that abandoned becoming a nurse. She works with other similarly aimless souls, some more unhinged than others. Then she sees a video of a woman being nailed to a board. "Fake! Special Effects! Kink!" everyone decries. But Daisy believes it is real and she becomes obsessed with it, and begins to spiral.

I expected this to be a standard thriller, one where she sleuths her way to the truth of the video and its even more horrible than she could conceive. It would end in her confronting the maker, probably in a violent climax. Or a twist. So, it does end with her confronting someone connected to the video, but not in the way I expected.

The movie more so focuses on the effect it has on Daisy, and all of it is negative. Her company wants her to move on. Her friends don't believe it can be real. But she cannot get it out of her head. She tries alcohol & sex to escape, but only finds more anger & violence -- this time, from her. She tries researching the video and its creators, and is sent down a misleading rabbit hole. Nothing is working out, nothing is dismissing it from her mind. Again, another movie would have this as a brief act, and eventually leading to her gearing-up and doing something about it. But we get more a character study and a commentary on the impact not only this "content" has on its victims but also the way our generally apathetic approach to its existence makes us complicit.

That said, I guess I have to lump myself into the complicit because I just see it, frown and turn away, but don't do anything. And I wonder, what is there to do.

Daisy does something. The final bit of the final act does kind of turn things around, ending with Daisy's fourth-wall breaking stare at us, a challenge to follow her path.

Enter the Lexxicon: I Worship His Shadow

aka Lexx: 1.0
aka Lexx: The Dark Zone Stories Part 1

1996, d. Paul Donovan - tubi

I love the Series 1 VHS boxes
that look like sf paperback
novel covers

It's hard to believe that Lexx turns 30 this year. I didn't realize it had hit this anniversary when I was cruising Tubi and saw that the series was available there (I have DVDs of the entire run, I was just being lazy in not retrieving them). It's been at least 20 years since I last watched it. 

I was a big fan of the series, but I always felt a bit ashamed about this fact. If you've ever seen it, you will understand why. If you've never seen it, if you've never even heard of it, well, let me give you a brief description.

Lexx is a series about horny space travelers who have hijacked the most powerful weapon in the galaxy and have absconded with it into the Dark Zone:  an unruly, ugly place of violence and depravity, and possibly some kindness...but unlikely. It's a show that wears its modest budget proudly on its sleeve, revels in being just a bit too gross and a bit too kinky for mainstream acceptance. 

A Canadian/German co-production, Lexx is a lower-budget space-faring action-adventure series that finds the coward Stanley Tweedle become the living key to operating the Lexx, an experimental dragonfly-shaped spaceship that has the ability to destroy entire planets (it's an organic Death Star, in bug form). He is accompanied by Zev whose transition into a love slave whose DNA accidentally got mixed with a cluster lizard, so she's weirdly strong and fierce. And then there's 790, a robot head whose mixed-up programming has him obsessed with Zev. Kai is an undead assassin who is also the last member of his race, fabled to bring about the destruction of His Divine Shadow, the leader of the Divine Order that rules of the League of 20,000 Planets.

"I Worship His Shadow" is effectively the Lexx origin story. It's where it all starts, beginning with Kai and his brethren's last battle against the Divine Order thousands of years earlier, and losing. We get a sense of how the hierarchy of the divine order works when a new His Divine Shadow is chosen. Only this time, the transference of the divine shadow into its new host body still has some of the murderous psychopath impulses remaining and this totalitarian ruler is about to get a lot more nasty.

The host planet of the League of 20,000 Planets is The Cluster, which is underpinned by the a monotonous drudgery of bureaucracy. A heavy debt is usually owed to Terry Gilliam's Brazil any time sci-fi shows the tediousness of ruling bureaucracy. The story of "I Worship His Shadow" largely lives within the bureaucracy, though the larger operatic swoops in starts slapping the bureaucracy around. 

We meet Zev as part of prisoner processing. She is a fat, snaggletoothed, pimply woman who failed to perform her wifely duties (she slugged her juvenile betrothed smack in the face on her wedding day). Her punishment is to be transformed into a love slave and sent to a brothel planet as penance where she's to serve the rest of her days.

Stanley Tweedle is a "class 4" security guard whose surly, selfish, lazy behaviour leads to nearly a thousand demerit and his latest infraction may see him put to death if he doesn't report for corrections, where he hears may lose a limb or some organs.

As the new His Divine Shadow starts to establish his new way of rule, a prisoner, Thodin, leader of the resistance, has sprung free from his confines and wreaking havoc on The Cluster. Zev's love-slave transformation is disrupted when a cluster lizard gets caught in the transformation process, decapitated robot 790 takes some of the love slave programming in a feedback surge, and Stanley's desperate, cowardly last-minute race to corrections is interrupted by Zev and Thodin. (It turns out Thodin knows Stanley and he is deemed an epic traitor to the cause). His Divine Shadow awakens Kai to put a stop to Thodin's insurgent activity, and in the process the key to the Divine Order's latest, greatest weapon, the Lexx, is transferred to Stanley. Kai manages to awaken some long-dead memories and turn on the Divine Order, and they all escape in the Lexx into the rift towards the Dark Zone. Kai, however, only has a limited amount of "protoblood" left to keep him animated (about 10 hours worth they say) so he enters cryosleep and advises Zev and Stan to only awaken him in case of emergency.

By no standard is Lexx "good", but at the same time, it's kind of great. Its digita effects, even for the time, were a bit clumsy, but the special effects as a whole have a cobbled together, kitchen sink approach, with a plucky charm that still remains. The sets are like Geiger by way of Cronenberg, alternatively organic and suggestive, or industrial and grimy, and are meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Even when there's no sex or violence on screen, there's an inference of one or the other in the set design.

The storytelling of Lexx, as witnessed by this first 90-minute movie-length premier (the first season is actually four 90-minute movies, although I first watched them on Canadian television as 8 hour-long episode, with commercials) doesn't like or want a clean narrative. There's a lot of erratic happenstance even in this first episode, and it's already clear that the show's creators (Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield) delight in the asides and mundanity of this reality they created.

Lexx is a space opera, but one that dwells in the basest of levels. It's like if Star Trek Voyager was about a quartet of weirdos who wanted nothing to do with the Star Trek universe, and yet kept stumbling their way through it. The operatic elements keep finding their way into the characters lives, despite their best efforts to avoid it. The fun the creators have is starting the series off in a realm ruled by an evil overlord (ala Star Wars) and then instead of building up its characters as the freedom fighters who will save the galaxy, they instead turn tail and flee to an even more dismal plane of existence.

Marty Simon's score to Lexx was a particular favourite of mine back in the late 90's. Full of synths and jangly guitars, it feels suitably grimy, while the infusion of real and electronic sounds meshes so well with the show's biotechnology aesthetic. The way Simon's score often pulsates, it accentuates the horny overtones of the production, as if it's the composition for some other-dimentional adult video.

Brian Downey's Stanley Tweedle is a very unlikeable character because, as mentioned multiple times now, he is an utter coward only ever concerned with his own self preservation. Even the pilot episode offers him no hope of redemption down the road (and, from what I can recall, none ever comes, he's a character who stubbornly refuses to learn or grow from the experiences he has).  

Zev is the heart of the show, the one character audiences are meant both sympathize with and lust over. Eva Habermann is a very attractive actress, and the show is keen to remind us as if we couldn't tell. Habermann has a wry glee to her performance in this first movie, and one little tip-off (her "See ya, loverboy" kiss-off to 790) tells me there's some Lori Petti's Tank Girl influence on the character.  There's a bounciness to Habermann's portrayal of Zev in this inaugural episode that emanates positive energy, and makes her the bright center of the Dark Zone.

Michael McManus plays Kai, and his performance was always the one I brushed up against during the original run. The character is literally dead inside, and McManus plays him as such. He has the weirdest facial ticks and physicality which always struck me as too odd and uncool for what was supposed to be the bad-ass killing machine archetype.  With the eyes of a more seasoned viewer I can see that McManus is trying to make Kai interesting and unique, not cool, and I guess as I re-watch I'll see if he succeeded. Also, Kai is designed to be pretty, rather than handsome or scruffy-looking, and that probably made me uncomfortable once upon a time.

Barry Bostwick turns in a cameo appearance as Thodin, the leader of the resistance, running around the sets of The Cluster in a Zardoz-esque loincloth that is so undignified that I don't think I appreciated how much Bostwick must have delighted in wearing such an absurd and revealing costume and being presented as the great and studly hero.

There's a lot of joy to be found in "I Worship His Shadow". It's silly, it's fun, it's sexy and off-putting, alluring and disgusting, and it refuses to play by there rules. I'm as sucked in as I was 30 years ago.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Americana

2023, Tony Tost (feature debut) -- download

I used to reference "cleaning out the cupboards" or similar idioms in reference to finally getting around to writing about movies I had recently seen. But since I now see fewer movies, and generally stub them & write about them quicker, it doesn't apply. BUT maybe it applies to those downloaded movies that I grabbed quickly, but also quickly forgot about for newer, shinier movies. This is one of those. I have many more.

[Soooo many more. I usually start at "latest" and push back, which means I eventually find something and start watching. Today, I reversed the order and I have SO MANY 'unwatched' movies downloaded, I could start my own streaming service.]

Tost is primarily a writer, of shows like Damnation, which he was creator, and Longmire, and showrunner for Poker Face. He writes about "the American experience" which is a rather sweeping comment to make, by anyone. But outsiders (including us) have a view of what "American" means and it often involves cowboys, violence and the downtrodden rising up. Too bad the current viewpoint will only leave them seen as the often violent abusers. America used to be a fictional heroic figure, and I am not sure if its pop culture image will ever recover from what we are going through now, even if that past vision was mostly through rose coloured glasses.

This is the kind of movie I would lumped into a Tarantino-wannabe bucket about twenty years ago. It has a decently large cast, a plot with lots of moving pieces and ends with a great amount of violence. 

It begins with a death. Mandy (Halsey, Sing 2) is escaping her abusive boyfriend Dillon (Eric Dane, The Last Ship). She is forced to leave her "little brother" behind,  who claims to be "the reincarnation of Sitting Bull" come back to save his people. She drives off with a priceless "Indian artifact" in the trunk and Dillon comes out to find the kid with an arrow nocked -- a few fly into the trailer, but the last catches him in the neck. Dillon and I both let out a "huh" before he falls down dead.

Air quote much?

It should be said that the movie, shot widescreen, highlights the vast empty barren landscape of the American Midwest. I would think it was somewhere Texas or Arizona, but it claims to be South Dakota.I guess I am not truly caught up on my geographical Americana, but yeah, peeking at a map confirms South Dakota is definitely "cowboy land".

The next pieces in the puzzle, and its really not a huge puzzle, are Lefty Ledbetter (right handed; Paul Walter Hauser, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) who keeps proposing to women he has been on three dates with, and Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney, Madame Web), a stuttering waitress with a dream of becoming  a country & western singer. Penny has overheard Dillon, days before his death, plotting with a "antiquities dealer" to steal a Ghost Shirt from its owner. She conspires with the sweet but naive Lefty to steal it from Dillon and sell it herself, so she can fund herself moving to Nashville. Not long after, we see Dillon and Fun Dave (Joe Adler, Damnation) break into the house of a pompous wealthy man, brutally murder everyone at a party and steal the shirt. Dillon immediately kills Fun Dave for having feelings over the murders. And then, not long after that, Mandy steals the Shirt.

Mandy flees back to the relative safety of her family home, with Penny Jo and Lefty following. Mandy's family is a protected compound of backwater hick manosphere types where her father is the patriarch.  She just needs a place to lie low until she figures out how to sell the Shirt. Meanwhile, her little brother Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman, Spirited), who we learn is her son (duh...), has found his way onto the rez and is not endearing himself with the local militant Native American group, considering his whole Sitting Bull schtick. 

And thus begins the convergence on Mandy's father's compound. Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon, Lomgmire) and his militant group, Penny Jo & Lefty, and the original dealer in antiquities who paid Dillon to steal the Shirt. And this is where the "Tarantino" comes in, i.e. lots of violence. Lefty is shot, Mandy is shot, most of Ghost Eye's crew are killed, the male members of Mandy's "family" are killed, and the antiquities dealer is killed, leaving behind the money he was going to pay for the Shirt. The Shirt itself goes to the surviving Ghost Eye, who rejects Cal at the door to the res; he's not having any of this next-level cultural appropriation from a ten year old. The movie ends with Penny Jo driving off into the sunrise, leaving behind the corpse of Lefty, with a bag of money and proving, wow, she can actually sing.

I am not entirely sure of the proper commentary on the American experience, beyond being wrapped up in violence, but it is mostly definitely a very American indie film. Tost is adept at characters and dialogue so all of that rings true and while most in the movie are character actors, the few faces we know (and are on the poster) are doing a proper job. I wonder where Sweeney is going with her career, as she takes on more and more roles that divest her her from a just being a blonde with boobs. Halsey, who I only know as a pop star, does really well in this role, this being her second dramatic piece, outside of voice work. Apparently Paul Walter Hauser is the indie guy of the moment, or so the movie blogs say, and while this role doesn't give him much, there is something there. 

Final note. This is one of Eric Dane's final movies, before passing away from ALS this year, only a year after he announced his diagnosis. He went downhill fast. I knew him mostly for a few thriller TV shows, but he always had a very American Guy presence about him. I don't have the courage to watch his episode of Netflix's Famous Last Words but I can imagine they were powerful words.

Ah-Ah-Argento #3: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

I started my watch/rewatch of Italian suspense/horror maestro Dario Argento in January 2025, and I got all of two films in before I hit a wall. That wall was the wildly unavailable Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Argento's third film. It too disappeared for a long time between its North American theatrical release in the early 70's and when it finally became available on home video in the late 2000s. I ordered a Blu-Ray copy of the film from my local physical media purveyor, never to arrive, and attempts to find it elsewhere from Canadian sites came up empty. Beyond scouring the local used stores in town, I regularly watched a stub entry for the DVD version on a website for a Southern Ontario used music and video retail chain, and after many, many months it finally was available and delivered to me last month. And so now we resume with Ah-Ah-Argento....

(aka "4 mosche di velluto grigio") 1971, d. Dario Argento - dvd

Argento's third film shows the director not yet at the height of his powers, but certainly coming into them. His stylistic flourishes here aren't all consuming but when they're utilized one sits up and takes notice of them, and it starts from the first frame.

Our lead character in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Roberto (Michael Brandon) is in a music store wailing on the drums, and Argento shoots it like a music video, before music videos were a thing. First we're in a series of close-ups of the kit from an overhead shot, which pulls out to reveal Roberto, and it pans around him reveal that he's in a store, and it continues to pan until we're looking out the store window to see a man in a hat and sunglasses looking in and we see Roberto sense the man's glare, before a hard cut to a black screen and left of center a vibrant red heart, heavily pounding. Then a seemingly seamless cut to Roberto in studio, jamming out with his post-hippie psych-rock band, still wailing on those drums (at one point we cut to a shot from the inside of an acoustic guitar, a hand eventually interrupting the shot as it strums). Close up of Roberto is being pestered by a fly, trying not to lose his concentration. We cut to the exterior of the studio, as Roberto walks through the parkette out front. In the distance, the same man with hat and sunglasses. Once more, hard cut to the black screen and pounding heart, before cutting back to Roberto driving his car. In his rear-view mirror he spies, in the car immediately behind him, that same man. Same hard cut. Black screen. Pounding heart. And then back to the studio, Roberto wailing on the drums, but that fly (looks like a mosquito) still buzzes around him, even causing him to lose his timing for a moment, before it lands in the middle of his hi-hat. This whole sequence, the band's wailing psych-rock has been playing, interrupted only by the black-screen/pounding heart, and as the song hits its crescendo, we view Roberto through the top and bottom of the hi-hat, his gaze fixed on the mosquito, until *CRASH*, the song ends, the bug is dead, the slyest of smirks crosses Roberto's face.

The psych-rock tune is just derivative nonsense (not sure if this film's composer, the legendary Ennio Morricone was involved in the creation of that tune, but if he was I would suspect the derivativeness of that nonsense was the point) but it's somehow essential to get across Roberto's profession and juxtapose the jubilant wail of the tune against the anxiety of seemingly being followed. The camera, whether moving or still, is superb, Argento's framing is exciting. The edits are a bit jumpy but effective in adding to Roberto's anxiety. And that pulsating red heart on the black screen, a chef's kiss to the whole process that feels like the influence of Mario Bava.

The plot kicks off immediately following this opening sequence, with Roberto seeing the hat-and-sunglasses man and chasing him down into an abandoned theatre. The man refuses to answer any questions and pulls out a switchblade. He lunges at Roberto, who grabs his wrist and as the man twists he's stabbed in the side and falls off the stairs into the orchestra pit. A noise from above reveals a figure on the balcony, a large mascot-sized cartoon head with a big grin looking down on the scene. A camera in hand, photos continue to be taken. Roberto runs, returns home and is bitter towards his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer). 

His dreams haunt him, then a phone call harassing him. In the paper the next day, the story of a body dumped in the river, the victim unidentified. The next night someone is in his house. It's dark, the lights won't turn on. He's grabbed from behind, a cord around his throat, and he's told he can be killed at any time, but not now. First he needs to suffer. Then, in the mail, comes the passport of the man he killed. And that night, at the party, someone there slipped one of the photos taken at the murder scene between Roberto's records. He eventually comes clean with Nina, and the maid overhears (Roberto and Nina only seem to call her "the maid", despite the fact that she lives with them...fucking rude man). The maid knows who it was who put the photo there, and she tries to blackmail the harasser, only to get herself killed.

It all sort of escalates from there. Roberto attempts to get help from his outsider friend God (Bud Spencer), and God has his transient friend, The Professor (Oreste Lionello) watch Roberto's house for the next few nights. In my recollection of Argento's films (it's been years since I watched most of his later films and over a year now since I watched his first two) but I don't recall Argento having a lot of humour in his films. But characters like God and especially the Professor bring a lot of unusual energy, taking this outside of the typical Giallo I've experienced. Lionello especially has a incredible knack for physical humour with the  subtle, fluid grace of a Chaplin or Lloyd. Far more broad is the thick-glasses performance of Gildo Di Marco as the postman who Roberto mistakes as his stalker and beats on him. Not all the comedy fits into the production, in fact most of it feels like it's from another picture entirely. It doesn't suit the mood of the piece.

By far the best favourite aspect of the film was the inclusion of Gianni Arrosio (Jean-Pierre Marielle), the private investigator Roberto hires to help find out who is harassing him. Gianni is an effeminate gay, not coded in the slightest. He's right out there. But he's not comic relief. He is witty, but he's not the butt of any jokes. Marielle brings this character to life and he's the most richly drawn character in a production that otherwise feels cast full of one-note, one-dimensional figures. Marielle gets his own slice of the picture, starting with an investigation montage that leads him on full journey through Rome and beyond. I could have watched a whole film, hell, a whole series of Marielle's gay detective... just a remarkably lively performance. Of course he gets murdered, but it's because he's figured out who it is, only they catch on to him first.

Four Flies... is a mystery, but it's kind of a ramshackle one that doesn't fully hold together, especially once the reveal happens. I mean, it doesn't fall apart, but it's not satisfying in the slightest, and is kind of a corny, of-the-era take on mental illess. I don't really expect better of films from that time, but I'm certain even then it wasn't a satisfying reveal. It seems so cliche. This film's climax involves the concept of optography, that the last thing someone sees before their death is captured on their retina like a photograph. It's utter bullshit, and even science of the '70's should have known better, yet it's the turning point of the film. Writers like Kipling, Lovecraft and Verne have had stories with optography as a plot point, and even modern movies and TV shows like Fringe toy with the idea.

Morricone delivers a magnificent theme for the film, a lyrical, haunting string humming over a pulsating heartbeat that feels like it's either going to break into a love song or something terrifying and it never leaves that tension. I can hear hints of what would become the theme to Twin Peaks percolating within its tones. The rest of the soundtrack doesn't have anything so immediate or attention getting, but it's one of Morricone's great compositions that probably isn't cited much (it would be Argento and Morricone's last collaboration for 25 years, due to a falling out).

For Argento viewing Four Flies... seems a transitional movie. The director's first two films were incredibly solid entries in the suspense realm, and this one, with it's cast performing in English (despite still being dubbed) seemed to be a grasp at something that seemed more American in style. I don't think Argento would strain much to operate in that style again. But then again, I've never seen his next film, The Five Days which is the only film of his that truly operates outside his expected genres.

KWIF: The Martian (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new this week, just some scienced fiction and a modern classic.

This Week:
The Martian (2015, d. Ridley Scott - disney+)
Solar Crisis (aka "Crisis 2050" - 1990, d. Allan Smithee - tubi)
Ocean's Eleven (2002, d. Steven Soderbergh - hollywood suite)

---

I love the idea of this poster, but 
why not red sand?

After watching Project Hail Mary (twice) I felt the urge to watch The Martian again. It was a movie I liked well enough the first time but it didn't really stick with me, beyond the "going to science the shit out of it" quote that lives rent free in my brain.

Both Project Hail Mary and The Martian are adaptations of Andy Weir novels, with screenplays by Drew Goddard, and as such there's a definite consistency in tone between the two of them. While both feature space men finding themselves alone and effectively stranded, these are not harrowing films of survival that Hollywood normally likes to present. 

Instead these are stories about men of science, men of competency, men of versatility, capable of adapting and, yes, science-ing the shit out of a problem. That makes them compelling figures to watch (there's a reason MacGyver was a big enough hit to run for 7 seasons in the '80's and a remake ran for 5 seasons in the 2010s) and with Drew Goddard, schooled in the Buffy/Angel writers den, he's got a knack for writing intelligent characters both pithiness and humility, which makes them enjoyable and somewhat down-to-Earth despite clearly advanced intellect and skills.

The key difference between Project Hail Mary and The Martian has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the directors involved. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are not Ridley Scott and Ridley Scott is not  Lord and Miller.  Lord and Miller are particularly gifted at comedy as well as exploring ideas in a big, conceptual way that subverts expectations, Scott has in current stage of his career (starting with Prometheus), leaned almost exclusively into the grandiose. It's not spectacle he's after but big moments, big ideas, big pressures on the characters.  Where with PHM Lord & Miller no doubt heightened the wit of Goddard's script with their own instincts and timing, Scott at times steps on the levity, not to quash it but so as not to diminish the emotional reality of the film.

As much as these two films have a consistency between them, I can't picture Ridley Scott's Project Hail Mary being nearly as entertaining, while I could picture a Lord & Miller The Martian being the "Best Musical or Comedy" of 2015 that the Golden Globes proclaimed it to be, but it wouldn't feel as prestigious as it does. 

I'm not going to review the story here in any great depth (Toasty did a good job of that already), because it's a very successful, 10-year-old (!) film with a very simple premise... a man gets stranded on Mars and has to rely on his wits, intellect and science to survive long enough to be rescued. 

Toasty is probably right that Mark Watney would have been left to die on Mars because the billions it would cost to rescue him would not have been approved, and most likely when they discovered Watney was alive, that info would have been classified and probably subject to conspiracy theories, but as we see with Weir's Project Hail Mary he prefers to find optimism in his crises situations.  Here not only does NASA and the US government do everything can to keep Watney alive and to rescue him, but they even wind up collaborating with foreign agencies who stretch out their hands (and money and technology) in a sign of goodwill and harmony.

I had forgotten how stacked the cast of The Martian is. Of course Matt Damon is the face of the picture, the central figure and titular martian, but the crew that leaves him behind has the likes of Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan, while among the ground crew there's Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Benedict Wong and Mackenzie Davis. At the time many of these actors were known primarily or only as comedic performers so it was a bit odd how reigned in their performances were (as if the script called for broader comedy and it was cast in such a way but Scott reined it in).

It's a captivating film through and through, even at almost two hours and twenty minutes. It looks great, with amazing sets, effects, and wardrobes, and the sound design (I really need to see it in the theatre some time) is incredible (it lost the Academy Award in both sound categories to Mad Max:Fury Road, which hard to argue with). It grossed over six hundred million at the box office internationally, and was nominated for many, many, many awards (winning a few), and has since become a big-time "dad movie", which maybe has diminished its prestige a little. The massive success of Project Hail Mary has put this other Weir adaptation back into the spotlight and, no doubt, has fast tracked adaptations of Weir's other novel and short stories, and I'm sure execs are champing at the bit to acquire the rights to whatever he's working on next.

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I have been, for pretty much most of my life, pretty piped into what mainstream science fiction movies were out there. One of my favourite childhood books was one about science fiction movies, most of them grown-up films that I wouldn't get to see until a decade (or two) later. I was pretty aware of any new scifi movies that were released in theatre pretty much since adolescence.  So for there to be a sizable-budgeted science fiction movie from 1990 that I know nothing about is shocking to me.

Based off the novel "Crisis: Year 2050" ("Kuraishisu niju-goju nen" written by Takeshi Kawata), Solar Crisis was not a trifle of a film. With a budget of at least 30 million dollars (in 1990 money), with recognizable (if no longer A-list) stars like Tim Matheson, Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle and Jack Palance, there was some ambition behind this production. The investors were so hot on the idea a theme park was planned to accompany it.

Financed by a consortium of Japanese investors, Solar Crisis was an attempt to make a very American-style blockbuster sci-fi disaster epic. Instead its a very American-style epic disaster of a sci-fi blockbuster.

Japanese actor Tetsuya Bessho is the only real Japanese presence in the film in a tertiary role, and the film seems pointedly made in such a way as to not elicit anything...unAmerican, although it also seems somewhat filtered through a an outside lens despite being made at a Los Angeles (the way a lot of Euro-investor, made-in-Baltic-states-style sci-fi/fantasy productions would feel in the 2000s) .  What little details there are on the making of this film (I only learned what Grokipedia was after I had read it's surprisingly detailed AI generated article on the film, and I feel slimy all over now), word has it that the film was extensively re-edited with some re-shoots to make it more appealing to an American distributor, and one has to wonder what "unAmerican" elements had to be left on the cutting room floor. (And by all accounts, the film had a middling performance at the Japanese box office, so it's not like there's a secret masterpiece that was lost in this process.)

Solar Crisis would prove to be director Richard C. Sarafian (Vanishing Point). The intervention in editing and reshooting his film caused him to remove his name from the domestic release and, I guess, quit directing after that. He had a fairly prolific (if not quite esteemed) career directing in both film and television prior to that, and following Solar Crisis he seemed to focus instead on his acting career.

The film is somewhat a throwback to the "what if" scifi movies of the 1950's (for example The Day The Earth Caught Fire) where a specific threat or event loomed and it was up to a team of astronauts and military men and scientists to try and stop/fix it. In this case, it's a solar flare that could eradicate Earth entirely. The plan then is to sent off the largest, most powerful warhead ever produced to trigger the flare while the Earth is on the other side of the sun.

In charge of this mission is Commander Steve Kelso (Matheson). He's a military nepo-baby, as his father, Admiral "Skeet" Kelso (Heston) seems to be pulling strings a bit.  Steve has an enlisted kid, Mike Kelso (Corin Nemic), whom he declined to have strings pulled to bring him to the orbital base where Steve's mission is taking off from. Mike, however, decided to go AWOL and find his way there on his own...only things didn't go as planned and now he's stranded in the desert.

New to Steve's crew is the test-tube grown, genetically reprogrammed scientist Alex Noffe (Annabel Schofeld). She's an outcast among all the military on the satellite, but she's meant to be made to feel welcome by a lot of disrespecting of her boundaries. She finds herself drawn to Steve (like some unseen force, the script perhaps, demanded it) and Steve likewise finds Alex alluring.

What nobody knows is that the evil billionaire (is there any other kind) Arnold Teague (Boyle), head of the IXL Corporation, is a solar flare denier. He doesn't believe it exists and if it does it's not a threat, and even if it is it's not a threat to business, and if anything money can be made if it does destroy half the Earth. It's better for him if it does, actually. The one thing this film gets right, billionaires are psychopaths disconnected from their own humanity. It's a weirdly timely story, how billionaires are trying to control the narrative of a climate crisis for their own gain and everyone else's expense.

Teague is hedging his bets highly, but he's also not taking chances. Through espionage, Alex is kidnapped and reprogrammed to sabotage the mission. Young Mike, meanwhile, finds help in the desert in the form of the cracked ex-general Travis (Palance, just making a meal out of every scene), who agrees to help the kid find his way to the satellite transport site. Along the way the run afoul of Teague's men and learn of his sabotage plans with Admiral Skeet, searching for his grandson, always two steps behind them.

This isn't a unique story. There is a whole history of sci-fi save-the-Earth tales that predate this film, and many that follow (Armageddon, Sunshine, Project Hail Mary, to name just three). What makes this one pretty bland and generic is the military angle. Though not lacking in ideas, there is a lack of science, and a lack of psychological intrigue. The political and social intrigue, of world building, is hinted but needs more presence, and one has to wonder if some of it's on the cutting room floor. Boyle's evil corporate overlord is so bog standard for the time, seen in so many sci-fi and action films of the 80's and 90's. It doesn't help that it seems like Boyle's barely awake when delivering his lines.

Similarly Matheson seems utterly bored in the role as commander Steve, and lacks commanding presence. As stated, Palance seems to be having a blast in his role, and Heston is not lacking in gusto, as if this were his big break for a return to prominence. Young Nemic, meanwhile, is definitely trying to find his footing and do something good with a bad role, but he can't keep up with Palanace. Schofeld as Alex... well, you hate to say it, but sometimes you're watching a film and you see an actress in a prominent role that you've never seen before and you just know the main reason she's there is because she agreed to take her top off. She's not a terrible actress, but she's not up to the standards of the other main cast here, and Alex is perhaps the most prominent character in the story with the most emotional arc. Schofeld isn't up to the task.

The effects, mostly, are pretty good from former Star Wars visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. There are some wonky scenes (the very first shot of a shuttle in space was hot garbage) but they're few and far between, and I'm wondering if they were reshoots. The style of the film - the ships, wardrobe, hair and makeup - can best be described as uninspired.

I didn't hate Solar Crisis but it's not a great watch by any stretch. While it had aspirations of being a big screen blockbuster, it winds up being a levelled-up version of a Full Moon Video production.

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I dunno about this poster...
I only count 5

Speaking of "dad movies", Ocean's Eleven is another modern classic of the "dad movie" oeuvre. It's so weird to me that anything by Steven Soderbergh could fit so explicitly in that classification.  Sure, the director's repertoire is so vast and varied that of course it should present the opportunity for a "dad movie" to find its way into his filmography, but generally Soderbergh's sensibilities skew outside the general tastes of the "dad movie" consumer. I mean just look at Haywire, which should seem like a total braindead "dad movie" actioner, but Soderbergh just can't help himself and bring something outre to it that just doesn't quite blend.

And yet, the glossy remake of the old Rat Pack non-classic is just sooo slick that Soderbergh subverted his own impulses and made a movie for pretty much everyone (aside from some cussing) that's devoid of sex, drugs, or any real violence. 

If anything, Ocean's Eleven was an exercise in shooting for the edit for Soderbergh. This film lives and dies by its hyperactive editing, and it really lives large. Soderbergh edits a lot of his own films, but for this (and for others) he called in Stephen Mirrione (who would later become a favourite of George Clooney's as well as Joseph Kosinski). All the pieces that need to be woven into this narrative means that scenes have to be tight as hell. There's no room to take more than a breath or two. 

The whole production is helped along by the bounciest film score in the history of film from David Holmes. That upright bass player's fingers must've been bleeding. I used to listen to the score just for fun, and I'd forgotten just how damn propulsive it was, but also just how damn essential it was to the film. There's a concert happening in Ocean's Eleven and Holmes provides the music while Mirrione choreographs the dance. It feels like if Mirrione edited any film like this and you laid Holmes' soundtrack over it, it would work, regardless of content. 

This is the heist film that reinvigorated heist films in modern cinema, but also kind of ruined heist films for modern cinema. It set the temperature for just how complex and convoluted a heist has to be to appease the audience, and anything less seems boring by comparison. Not even the subsequent Ocean's films (which I need to revisit) come close to being half as successful as this one (the next closest standout is Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, but that came out the year before...).

Of course, what takes the Mirrione-edits and Holmes-score to "dad movie" level is the star-studded, audience-baiting cast of Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle (but that accent tho...woof), Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, and Andy Garcia. That's just wall-to-wall talent carpet right there. As good as everyone is (barring Cheadle's bad cockney accent), I found Reiner delivered the standout performance of the film with Mac really popping as well. Clooney and Roberts need to ground the film in something a little more than just a heist (and it's truly a little more), which brings Garcia in, as the villain getting in between them. Garcia's performance is wonderfully understated and controlled, to the point that he seems both non-threatening and utterly dangerous.

It's been a couple decades since I last watched this, and, despite the Rick and Morty take down of all the heist cliches that Ocean's Eleven set-up, it still works almost completely.  

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Avatar: Fire and Ash

2025, James Cameron (True Lies) -- download

James Cameron hasn't really been in the director's chair all that much considering the lauded place he has in Hollywood. I mean, Titanic was 1997 and the Avatar movies (insert joke from the Peanut Gallery about the Fire Nation) have been his only fiction-based films since. Obviously he has money to throw around and I guess I am glad he does, because these movies would not be made without his bank. I am a fan of the franchise, but even I see the diminishing returns in the spectacle. Except that doesn't show on the books -- let's say it cost $500 million to make, it has already made $1.4 billion... billion. And the digital release just came out. The story isn't over, not even close.

Well, kind of close -- two more?

Also, you opened the last movie's post with pretty much the same thought.... I guess we will never get over the idea that Cameron still exists.

This movie is just so so so pretty. I waited until a decent 4K copy came out [to pirate], as there was no way I was sitting for 3+ hours in a cinema chair. Sure, I would likely be enraptured the entire way through, but my butt would not be; I would end up a fidgeting, twisting mess at the two hour mark. Thus, I generally watch these movies at home, in 4K and even then, pace them over a few days. But to repeat, so very pretty !! The colours are lush, the melding of CG and human is almost seamless and the scale is epic.

I am not going to uber-recap a 3+ hour movie. 

It picks up almost immediately after the last one, where The Family Sully had fought off the evil RDF Corporation's whaling ships, but at the cost of one of their sons. They are still in the same quandary -- they had supposedly hidden away from the humans with the green-skinned, seafaring Metkayina. The Sullys are a danger to their people, so they decide to join with some floating traders, to get even further away. That idea is quickly dashed in an attack by Mangkwan Raiders, fire-using Na'vi that have no compunction against killing others for their own gain. The Sullys are separated from each other, Spider (Jack Champion, Scream VI) almost dies, but is miraculously saved by Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, Alien) who calls upon "nature" to alter his lungs, allowing him to breathe Pandora air. Quaritch (Stephen Lang, VFW) is still trying to catch the Sullys, RDF still wants whale-gunk but now they also want Spider and his ability to breathe air. The Mangkwan graduate from scary ashen skinned raiders to an entire clan of "evil" Na'vi who abandoned the ways of Eywa after she "allowed" a volcano to erupt and destroy their forest homes. Lots of conflict, back n forth, rescues, hatred and grief is explored and we are back to a climax with another whaling convoy with even bigger boats, but now supported by attacks from the Mangkwan. But the Sullys convinced the whales to break their sacred oaths and fight alongside the Na'vi and eventually Kiri convinces Eywa's nature to help... which IIRC was also a component of the first movie, which makes it confusing as to why its a Big Thing here.

And no, a long drawn out paragraph is not an uber-recap as there would be much much much more from a three hour movie.

In a lot of ways, this movie was just a re-hash of the last movie. Given its only been three years since the last, and not fifteen, there was no great need to devote time to vast amounts of exposition. Oh, its there alright, but just enough to fill in "new viewers" as all franchises are wont to do. But it doesn't dominate.

The dramatic weight at the centre of this movie is their son's death, and the change it makes in them all. Sure, he died heroically, but in the end, it wasn't for much. And it destroys Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, Amsterdam), more than the destruction of her homeland and most of her people did not. Through her mourning period, Jake (Sam Worthington, Terminator Salvation) deals with his own grief in the only way he knows how -- be angry. She takes her own anger out on their adopted son Spider, Quaritch's actual son, rejecting him from what has been his family for sixteen years. The problem is that the weight is not as heavy as Cameron would hope. 

There are just too many characters in this movie, and he tries to give them each some emotional journey, which ends up making all of them feel rushed. Quaritch is torn between "being a Marine", his connection to his son and his connection to his own body; the movie flip-flops constantly between "oh, he's gonna help" to "such a bastard!". Kiri is still dealing with her own origins, given that was born of an avatar body and has no definable "father", and yet Eywa keeps on rejecting her. Neytiri is viciously angry at the pink skins, even Jake. The remaining kids have their own side story with the whales. Spider is torn between the Sullys and Quaritch, his human origins and his new closer connection to the Na'vi, and Kiri. And Jake is just Jake-ing along, still spouting Marine nonsense, still convinced he's the centre of everything, and ... well, in this movie, he isn't. He's a tertiary character at best. As a person he's not floundering anymore than he ever was, but as a character, I just didn't see any of his points of being. There are just far too many damn characters in this franchise now, and Cameron is desperate to give them all something to do.

Cameron wants his Lord of the Rings, an ensemble cast, an epic story with Big Ideas, but he doesn't have a tight destination in mind. Or at least it doesn't feel that way. The Sullys cannot just keep running away from the humans, as they have already learned the greedy colonizers will keep coming back, keep destroying Pandora culture and ecology and never stop hunting Jake down. What's the end goal? Utter destruction of all human life seems pointless (there are always more corporate colonizers), and at least the humans aren't bent on full planet-wide genocide -- its just not cost effective; yet. So, either Cameron skips right past the Epic and finds smaller stories to tell, or he does the most realistic thing -- find a way for Everyone to Just Get Along. And the latter will have my eyes rolling back until they hurt, given how unrealistic it is.

Afterthought. Despite having top billing in the movie title and poster, the Mangkwan (raiders) are such a non-entity in the overall arch of the story. They are just more flavouring for the cultures of Pandora, a not so creative attempt to say that not all Na'vi are indigenous, one-with-nature flower children of different colours. Their leader Varang (Oona Chaplin, Game of Thrones) is given so much promotional material screen time, but... yawn.