KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Lady Kent was down with the same cold that took me out last week, so weirdly I watched more movies this week than when I was down and out last week. It's all international cinema cinema week: Finland! "Persia"! Australia! Italy!
This Week:
Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025, d. Jalmari Helander - crave)
Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975, d. Peter Weir - xumo)
Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out - 1973, d. Duccio Tessari - tubi)
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But Sisu also set itself in a time and place that it didn't really explain. If you're Finnish or familiar with it's history (particularly during World War II) there was no explanation needed. I on the other had had to do some digging. It was a complicated situation with Finland already engaged in conflict with Russia when other battles in Europe started. Sisu took place at the end of World War II, with the Germans set to return home, but attempting to take as much with them as they could before they left, including the gold grizzled veteran Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) had just found.
I don't fully understand the timelines, but Road to Revenge, takes place shortly after the end of World War II, so I assume not long after the first film, just enough time for Korpi to heal. A treaty with Russia saw the ceding of much of Karelia (on the southeastern side of the country) to the Russians, with its citizens of the area being forced to leave within ten days. Korpi's home, which he built himself, remains in the ceded terrain. He crosses the new Russian border with a massive, massive truck, where he deconstructs the home and loads the truck on his own.
His border crossing, however, raises awareness that Koschei ("The Immortal") is in the country. Korpi had infamously killed 300 Russians himself in a rageful tear following the murder of his wife an children. A KGB Officer (Richard Brake) frees the man responsible for killing Korpi's family -- the war criminal Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang) -- from his prison and gives him the resources to, quote "destroy the legend you created and you will go back home a rich man".
And so Korpi and his massive truck and big pile of wood have to travel the 120 kilometers from where his home once stood back to the border...chased by trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes. It's a scaled-down Fury Road but director Jalmari Helander continues to prove he's got the action goods. A lot of wild craziness happens along the way, beyond logic but gleefully entertaining.
The last act takes place on a train, and gets Koschei back into physical action, with some fun setpieces like traversing through the two sleeping quarters without awakening the soldiers (or taking care of them should they stir). The final duel between Korpi and Dragunov is maybe too slow and unrefined to be truely Wick-ian, but it's only one small moment in this 89-minute deluge of violence and survival.
Tommila doesn't speak a word the entire film, and this lack of dialogue really strips the film down to the barest of actions and emotions. Where Brake or Lang might have more to say, there's still likely no more than two or three pages of dialogue, max in the entire film. Whereas the first Sisu felt like a nuveau western, this one feels almost more like a samurai film...but with guns and vehicles and whatnot...but the same attitudes apply.
Helander's next film will see the director's first American production, being brought aboard to helm the John Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo in the title role. I have no idea what the story might possibly be like, but I'm excited to see what Helander can do with big hollywood franchise budget.
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The story is set largely in Basra, which the filmmakers seem to know as much about as I do, which is to say, nothing at all. All the characters here are played by white and/or Italian actors, nary a middle-eastern among them. If this seems like it could be offensive, it would be, if anyone, anyone at all were trying to convincingly portray this as an authentic tale. As it stands, it's one of the least egregious of its cinematic sins, afterall, Sinbad has been portrayed by white actors many times in the past (and will again...RIP Patrick Muldoon).
But Sinbad of the Seven Seas lies to its audience from the moment the film starts. Before its title card, a chunky block of text mentions how famed author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote an additional adventure for Sinbad titled "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" and that this is an adaptation of that story. It is not. Not in the slightest.
As legend on this film goes, writer-director Luigi Cozzi (who had directed Ferrigno in two Hercules films for Cannon in the mid-1980s) had written the screenplay for Sinbad and the Seven Seas, but was (for unclear reasons) dismissed from the project and it was handed to Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari would proceed to make substantial changes to the script and then proceed to produce an unreleaseable three-hour film. The film sat on the shelf for years before Cozzi was hired back to make some sense of it, to salvage something out of the whole production.
And so, the film's story does not begin with Sinbad and crew on his boat, or in the city of Basra, or in Baghdad or anywhere fantastical, it starts in a bedroom, with a child (Cozzi's daughter) being read a story by her mother, played by Daria Nicolodi. Nicolodi will proceed to narrato over a large portion of the film. The touchpoint might seem to be The Princess Bride for this framing sequence, but really, it's just a way of trimming down 3 hours of garbage footage into a barely, if you squint, serviceable 93 minute series of adventures.
The wicked vizier Jaffar (portrayed by English white guy John Steiner, it's a variation on Aladdin's Jafar both of which hearken back to The Thief of Baghdad films rather than One Thousand and One Nights) is fixated on the Caliph's daughter, Princess Alina [Alessandra Martines, a French-Italian white lady]. She is involved with Sinbad's ship-mate Prince Ali, but he's been away adventuring. The vizier steals the town's sacred gems of power, keeping one for himself and dispersing the rest across the seas. He then hypnotizes the Caliph into doing his bidding, including telling Alina to marry Jaffar. She refuses and thus is strapped to a fantastical chamber designed to (verrrry slooooowly) sap her of her will. She will marry him some day). When Hercules...I mean Sinbad and crew arrive in Basra, they beat up some bad guys, get captured, break free and then set out on a quest to find the four gems of power (but not before Sinbad escapes from a pit of cobras by *checks notes* making friends with the cobras and then tying them together to form a rope for him to climb out of. You know how you make friends with wild creatures [totally normal] and then twist their bodies together, with their consent of course [nothing unusual, at all] and then climb them [all checks out, do it all the time].
The majority of the adventures of Sinbad and his crew (consisting of handsome Prince Ali [white guy], Cheropolis "the bald cook" [another white guy], Poochie the dwarf [not a rapping dog, but a white guy], Viking [played by an Italian actor, not a Scandanavian] and the Chinese mercenary Cantu [played by a Japanese-Italian actor]) are narrated over with the action or conversation or both happening silently under the narration from Nicolodi (yes, we see the characters have an exchange and our narrator explains what they are saying], all the while accompanied by the of shoddiest of synth scores.
In the first stop, he fights a rock monster that shoots lasers from its head. Sinbad must use feats of his notorious Sinbad strength to defeat it and retrieve the gem from its head. In the second, Sinbad and most of the crew (except Bald Cook and Poochie) head to the isle of the amazons where their notorious beauty finds them immediately under their sway (except Prince Ali who seems to be psychically connected to Princess Alina for some reason). If not for Bald Cook and Poochie coming to the rescue with an magical anti-hypnosis potion...I don't know what would have happened, actually. The Amazon queen Farida was played by the stunning actress Melonee Rodgers, a Black, possibly American actress (there's not much available detail on her and seeing as she had no speaking lines left in the film - which doesn't really matter since all lines were dubbed anyway by different actors, except Steiner and one or two others) and all the Amazons were black, which I thought was fantastic...except when Queen Farida has her gem of power taken from her and she turns into an old lady...well, it's just some old Italian lady in blackface. Yeah. Woof.
During the adventures, we constantly check back in with Jaffar, and how progress is going on sapping Princess Alina of her will. The movie makes it seem like Sinbad's voyages are only taking him the better part of an afternoon in total and not days or weeks of sailing the seas. He tries to interfere from afar, but seems to only be able to do anything sometimes for some reason and most of the time looks like a sweaty guy whose going to lose his kneecaps if the team he's watching doesn't lose the match. He's also joined, bafflingly, by the witch Soukra (played by American bodybuilder Teagan, the only other actor not to be dubbed, it seems) for seemingly no reason. Jaffar sort of acts like she's the one who will break his kneecaps if his bet doesn't pay off.
The third adventures finds Jafar sending a gust of wind to send Sinbad's ship ashore (but why send them to the very island that contains the gem they're looking for Jaffar? The guy is an idiot). There they face, ghosts or something...? I dunno, I fell asleep for a bit.
When I woke up Sinbad was having a conversation with Kira (another white lady), daughter of Nadir the wizard who speaks in gibberish. They landed on the Isle of the Dead in a balloon. They are jumped by a gang of ghouls, and while Kira puts up a good fight, which Hercules, I mean Sinbad immediately falls in love with her over, she gets kidnapped along with her father. Sinbad mounts his rescue but must face the Lord of Darkness, who is like a pot-bellied Swamp Thing who shoots lasers from his hands. Hercules uses his own gems of powers to shoot lasers and destroy the big gooey plant then head home with Kira and her goof-talkin' father in tow.
The big show-down is ...well, not so big. Hercules/Sinbad rescues Princess Alina and defeats Jaffar, but not before facing a Jaffar-controlled mirror version of himself in a match of strength and cunning. Ali and Alina are married, and so are not-Hercules and Kira, the end, go to sleep kid.
There were little glimmers that maybe the original production, under Castellari, was aiming for high camp, but the structure Cozzi rescues the picture with leaves a lot of the camp off to the side, sneaking in only occasionally. But it's obvious from the footage and dialogue left in why Castellari's first draft of this was considered unreleaseable: it's really really bad. I could never get past the idea of Ferrigno as Sinbad. As witnessed above, my brain kept defaulting to him as Hercules, and it would seem Castelli did too. Sinbad is not a legendary strongman, and yet so much of what Ferrigno does here is "feats of strength".
In the right setting, Sinbad of the Seven Seas might be a so-bad-it's-amazing cult classic, but as a tired adult just looking for a break from having to think about shit, this was just an awful 90 minutes. I had more fun recapping it above than watching it.
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At that time I went into watching Picnic... with a pre-conceived distaste for Peter Weir, having had a high-school art teacher who was a Weir fan and would play us Dead Poets Society, Green Book and Fearless in class at least once per semester...for inspiration? These were not really inspirational films to a 14-17 year old. They were grown-up films for parents.
At that time I found Picnic... a bit confounding. The film starts by letting you know that the titular picnic would end in some sort of tragedy, just as the film's poster does. "On St. Valentines Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock... some were never to return." It's an ominous, and it implies something sinister, something terrifying, something harrowing perhaps. The implication is there will be, at least, something to raise one's blood pressure in watching this film...and there is not. Not really.
It is a film that stuck with me though, left an impression. It's not just a totem but a representative point for a very specific, transitional moment of my life. My memory of the film is nothing to do with plot or characters, but images and tones.
This rewatch reaffirmed that it is a tranquil, vibes-based movie above all, loaded with melancholy (and the tranquil tones of Zamfir's pan flute)
The girls are aflutter not for their picnic trip but for a Valentines card someone received. Where most of the kids are privileged, some are sponsored, such as Sara, an orphan who is kept behind from the trip because...well, I'm not exactly sure. We don't spend much time with any of the other girl to really get to know them, but there is focus on Miranda, the pretty and independent-minded blonde, and Edith, the cliched fat girl who whines about physical effort and is seen eating. There at least doesn't seem to be any bullying, at least not in the traditional sense...not at this point.
At the picnic site is already a young Englishman, Michael, who is there with his parents (grandparents?), and their driver, Albert, who Michael makes friends with. The presence of the girls is instantly exciting to them, and though Albert makes some crude comments to Michael which he finds distasteful, the girls don't even notice they are there.
Miranda, Edith and two others decide to venture up the rock (more than 500 feet high it is!), and they push themselves up until they can seemingly go no further. But they find a crevasse and venture into it, except Edith, who freaks out. She runs down the hill, the others are gone... as if purposefully taken by the rock. A teacher stays behind as the rest of the girls are sent home, and she disappears as well. End of act one.
The rest of the film covers next few hours, days and weeks that follow. There is a manhunt and an investigation. Both Albert and Michael are looked at and then dismissed. Both young men are troubled by thoughts and dreams of the missing girls, with Michael seemingly haunted by Miranda specifically. Michael takes on a dangerous solo search which he nearly dies from, and when Albert picks up the trail, he finds Irma, near death.
The school is in disarray. The teachers are having breakdowns, some kids leave school altogether, and Sara falls ill. Irma remembers nothing and has no answers. She's harassed by the other girls when she returns to visit. Everything's collapsing because nobody can process the tragedy. It's not being swept under the rug, but it's also not being addressed either.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror movie, but it is a haunting picture. It's hard not to be affected by watching others unravel in the wake of tragedy, unable to make sense of it and not having the support knowledge or infrastructure to work through it. With years in between, and some further exploration of the film and story in the meantime, I respect the picture even if I still have a hard time with its storytelling decisions and the routes it does not take.
It took some additional contemplation to realize that this is not a film about the incident, despite the title. It's not about the disappearance, but a story about the school, and the impact the incident has on it and the people within it. That's a defined choice made by the storytellers (be it original novel author Joan Lindsay, or screenwriter Cliff Green, or director Weir) not to answer questions, not to give a resolution. It may be unsatisfying but it's most definitely intentional. It's a film that has, in a way, haunted me for 20 years now, and I think that will never go away.
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But then there's Tubi, always full of surprises. I don't love the streamer, primarily because it's owned by Fox, but also because it has ads (which used to be all Fox News-based ads, but now just seem to be targeted Canadian market ads for dish soap and such), and no standards. You can find a lot of great stuff on Tubi, but in terrible quality streaming speed, bad digital transfers, godawful audio and frequently without closed captioning (a terrible combo for a half-deaf guy like me).
I don't know how the Italian action-thriller Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out) wound up on my Letterboxd list but I'm sure glad it did, and I'm also so happy it was among Tubi's fairly decent selection (if not decent quality) of Italian 70's crime pictures.
This one stars Alain Delon, the handsome French actor who played one of the first notable on-screen hitmen in Le Samourai, back again playing another hitman, but this time also a family man, and he wants out. He's done. No more killing for him. Except the consortium of mobsters he works for aren't willing to let him go and they know there's no talking him out of it.
And so before John Wick, before The Punisher, before Death Wish here we have an anti-hero whose wife and child are killed (accidentally mind you) and the response is basically warfare in the streets, one against one hundred.
Tony's bloodlust takes him from from Milan to Copenhagen, murdering on the street and on trains, wherever the opportunity needs to occur. He's not alone, he's aided by his pal Domenico (Marc Porel) and Sandra (Carla Gravina), as well as an ex-dom now living life as a priest who looks out for Tony's parents.
The film isn't solely told from Tony's perspective and spends plenty of time with the various mafia dons as they start renegotiating territories as Tony picks them off one by one. But there's always one been one don, Nick Gusto (Richard Conte) who didn't want any of this and had tried numerous times to convince the consortium to push for piece. It's only when he's the last one left does he really have any sway, and it all leads to Tony's invitation to Don Gusto's daughter's wedding, and the tense, anything-can-happen environment.
Nothing about it is as straightforward. Tony seems to have ice in his veins, but family, friendships, these have meaning for him, it's where he's vulnerable and he knows it. The scenes where he brings Sandra to stay with his parents, and the awkward-yet-sweet encounters that occur there. There's no definition to what Tony and Sandra are to each other, except that they're family now.
I loved this movie. I'll be eagle eyed looking out for a physical media release. It deserves some special treatment.
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