Blanche (1971)

Blanche, released in 1971, is one of Walerian Borowczyk’s earlier live-action films.

Borowczyk was a crazed visionary wild man of cinema but cinema needs crazed visionary wild men.

This is a mediæval story. It is not merely a story set in mediæval times. Borowczyk is trying to tell a truly mediæval story. He goes to great lengths to let us know that this is a society which is radically alien. This is a feudal society. All of the rules are different. Borowczyk’s wildly unconventional approach to filmmaking reinforces this feeling of alienness.

Blanche is the much younger wife of an old and ailing feudal lord. Also living in the castle is the lord’s son Nicolas. Perhaps Nicolas and his stepmother are a bit too close. In fact they’re in love.

Things come to a head when the King arrives for a brief stay, accompanied by his page Bartolomeo.

Bartolomeo is very much a ladies’ man and immediately sets to work on the project of seducing Blanche. The King has the same object in mind.

So three men want to get Blanche into bed. Maybe Nicolas has already done so, or maybe not. Blanche is certainly determined not to surrender her honour to either the King of Bartolomeo.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have done something or not. What matters is the suspicion. Blanche’s husband claims to have absolute confidence in her fidelity but he is soon insane with jealousy. He is convinced that she is being unfaithful, but with whom? The King cannot even entertain the idea that she might betray him with her son.

Of course it will all end badly. Nobody believes anyone else, whether they happen to be telling the truth lying.

It would be a mistake to try to view this story through the lens of today’s ideologies. It would be a particularly serious mistake to try to see it as a feminist film. This is the Middle Ages. These people have their own notions of honour and morality which are totally foreign to us. They often behave badly but it is the moral rules of their own time that they are breaking, not our modern moral rules.

What matters is not the story but the way Borowczyk tells it. He doesn’t want us to think that we have entered this alien world. We have not, because we cannot. We can only observe.

Borowczyk began his career making animated movies. My impression is that he didn’t have a clue how to make live-action films. So he just invented his own bizarre idiosyncratic approach. Which is why his movies are so interesting. They ignore all the accepted rules of movie-making.

In any movie of course the viewer is an outside observer. Borowczyk really makes this particularly obvious. But it’s not like we’re watching actors on a stage. It’s more like we’re watching a marionette theatre. Or a painting. But we never feel as if we’re entering the world of the painting. We are outside looking in. Everything is rather two-dimensional. Borowczyk based his visual scheme for the movie on mediæval paintings and architecture.

His shot compositions are odd. For want of a better word I’d describe them as architectural. Borowczyk loves doors. And windows. And cabinets and boxes. And little architectural nooks. Doors constantly opening and closing. Characters framed within doorways. Lots of frames within frames. Doors can reveal or they can conceal. They can open to us or they can enclose us. There are lots of enclosures here (including an obviously symbolic white dove enclosed in a cage). We see the King reading in bed, behind a screen. It’s as if he’s enclosed in a box.

There are touches of absurdism and even surrealism but the tone is always sombre. And the feel is always decidedly strange. There’s a strong sense of doom.

I don’t think Borowczyk ever wanted conventionally good acting performances from his casts and if the performances here are artificial that is undoubtedly what he wanted. His wife Ligia Branice plays Blanche. Her performance is odd but thats what Borowczyk wanted.

It’s perhaps slightly reminiscent of Pasolini’s Medea which also emphasis the alienness of the past and also has a distinctive visual style. For all its bizarreness (and it’s very bizarre) I was mesmerised by Blanche. Highly recommended, if you don’t mind very arty very odd movies.

The Arrow Academy Blu-Ray looks great (the colours were intended to be subdued) and there are plenty of extras. I've also reviewed Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (1973) and his truly bizarre The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981).

Girls (1980)

Girls, a Franco-German-Canadian co-production released in 1980, was Just Jaeckin’s fifth feature film. 

Having had massive hits in the 70s with Emmanuelle and The Story of O. Jaeckin’s problem was to persuade critics that he was more than just a maker of erotic movies. He followed those hits with two superb but under-appreciated movies, Madame Claude (1977) and The Last Romantic Lover (1978) but critics remained hostile.

Girls represents another change of pace. It’s a quirky coming-of-age story. It follows the assorted misadventures of four girls in Paris. 

We realise from the start that the girls might be slightly wild but they’re actually nice girls who are trying to make sense of the grown-up world which they’ve just entered.

Not much happens to the girls, except that everything that matters happens to them. They fall in love. They find out the difference between thinking a guy is cute and being in love with him. They have their hearts broken, and they break a few hearts. They find out what friendship really means.

One really interesting thing is that fatherhood is quite important and fathers are actually portrayed in a positive light.

While there is no thematic or stylistic similarity between the two films Saturday Night Fever’s influence is obvious. That film kicked off a whole genre of movies centred around dance culture. And Girls does have a dance competition and it is very much about nightclub culture.

And John Travolta’s influence is all-pervasive. In Girls all the guys want to be Travolta and all the girls want a boyfriend like Travolta.

Girls is unusual in being a movie about teenagers with an actual teenaged cast, or close to it. The four lead actresses were aged between eighteen and twenty. This helps a lot because it’s important that we don’t judge the girls for the mistakes they make and that’s easier when they actually look like teenagers.

The remarkable thing is that Jaeckin gets such uniformly excellent performances from such inexperienced actresses, but then he always had a knack for getting great performances from women. 

The most notable among the young actresses is Anne Parillaud who has gone on to a glittering career.

It’s obvious that Jaeckin (who co-wrote the screenplay) genuinely likes his characters. This is a very warmhearted movie, which won’t surprise anyone who has seen The Last Romantic Lover.

The soundtrack is by Eric Stewart of 10CC and includes their most famous song I’m Not in Love (used very effectively).

Girls doesn’t have the stylistic flamboyance of Jaeckin’s earlier films (a flamboyance which would reassert itself spectacularly in the wonderful Gwendoline in 1984) but it’s a different kind of film. It’s a more intimate film and was made on a very tight budget. What matters is that it captures the youth culture vibe very effectively, and the effervescent energy and craziness of being a teenager.

In the Blu-Ray audio commentary Jeremy Richey argues (convincingly I think) that Just Jaeckin to some extent laid the groundwork for the cinéma du look movement of the 80s. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) is usually seen as the beginning of that movement but you can see hints of that approach in all of Jaeckin’s 70s movies. This would also explain some of the critical hostility to his works. Critics complained that the cinéma du look was all style over substance and that’s a criticism often levelled at Jaeckin as well.

Girls is charming and quirky and warmhearted. Highly recommended.

The Cult Epics have released it on Blu-Ray and 4K.

I’ve reviewed most of Jaeckin’s movies including Madame Claude (1977) and The Last Romantic Lover (1978).

The Beast Within (1982)

The Beast Within is a 1982 horror film directed by Philippe Mora. 

This was one of the last movies released by United Artists before they went belly-up as a result of the Heaven’s Gate fiasco.

The 80s was the golden age of the werewolf movie. By the beginning of that decade old school special effects had become so good that, for the first time, convincing werewolves and convincing werewolf transformation scenes could be shown onscreen. A lot of people saw The Beast Within expecting it to be a werewolf movie. In fact it isn’t but it does have some affinities with that genre.

Director Philippe Mora describes The Beast Within as a teenage angst movie, which it is although there’s other stuff going on.

It begins with a prologue. It is 1964. Eli (Ronny Cox) and Caroline MacCleary (Bibi Besch) are newly married. Just outside the small town of Nioba Mississippi their car breaks down. Eli sets off on foot for the nearest gas station. While he’s away disaster strikes. Caroline is brutally assaulted.

We then jump forward to 1981. Eli and Caroline are happily married but their son Michael (Paul Clemens) is gravely ill. No-one knows what is wrong with him but his doctor suspects it may be genetic.

Which raises a problem. As a result of that assault 17 years earlier there is a very strong chance that Michael is not Eli’s son.

The three of them set out for Nioba Mississippi in hopes of discovering the identity of Michael’s father. Given the circumstances of Michael’s conception it’s likely to be difficult to persuade anyone to reveal the truth.

It’s immediately obvious that the townspeople are hiding something.

Oddly enough the townspeople are not hostile to the MacClearys. They just don’t want to talk about what was happening in 1964.

We, the audience members, know a great deal about what’s going on and more specifically we know a good deal about what is going on with Michael but none of the characters in the movie know anything of this.

We know why Michael makes a miraculous recovery.

Some bad things start to happen in Nioba, and some disturbing discoveries are made in the nearby swamp.

Philippe Mora freely admits that the original script was completely incoherent and that even after rewrites the plot makes very little sense. He gambled on being able to make the movie sufficiently entertaining that the audience wouldn’t care about the gigantic plot holes and the fact that all the important questions remain unanswered. Audiences don’t watch a horror movie for the plot.

His gamble came off and despite critical hostility and a chaotic theatrical release (due to the implosion of United Artists) The Beast Within was a financial success due to its popularity on home video.

It’s also alas true that gore can be utilised to distract an audience’s attention from a nonsensical plot and The Beast Within has plenty of gruesomeness. To be fair it also has a very creepy atmosphere.

This film ran into huge censorship problems in both the U.S. and Britain. It was cut to pieces by the British censors. For years the uncut version was impossible to see.

The monster effects can best be described as bizarre but they’re certainly done well.

I’m not totally sold on this movie but I’m not much of a gorehound. Worth a look.

The Arrow Blu-Ray looks good and there’s an enjoyable audio commentary.

Australian director Philippe Mora made some interesting films including my favourite werewolf movie, the utterly bonkers (in an inspired way) Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf.

Trauma (1978)

Trauma (Violación fatal) is a 1978 Spanish giallo directed by Argentinian-born León Klimovsky. Purists might insist that a true giallo has to be Italian but I think Trauma is most certainly a giallo.

A writer, Daniel (Heinrich Starhemberg), arrives at an inn in a remote location near a lake. The inn is run by Veronica (Ágata Lys). She cares for her bedridden invalid husband. Daniel is married but he has run out on his wife. 

Veronica and Daniel are both in unsatisfactory marriages, they’re both emotionally vulnerable and it’s obvious that an attachment is developing between them.

The arrival of a young couple disturbs Veronica. Another couple will arrive later. Veronica does seem to like having guests in her inn.

Things start to happen when these newcomers turn up.

There are grisly murders.

We know that something is being concealed from us because Klimovsky draws our attention to the concealment. We can’t be entirely sure what is being concealed or why.

We have our suspicions as to what is going on but we can’t be absolutely certain.

Veronica seems anxious and she obviously has a secret. We suspect that Daniel has a secret as well.

I don’t mind if a giallo has an incoherent plot. It can even be an advantage if the plot combines incoherence and weirdness. In this case the plot is perhaps too straightforward, with not enough weirdness.

Klimovsky doesn’t have a huge reputation as a director but I think that’s a bit unfair. Spanish gialli (and Spanish horror) were made on much tighter budgets than their Italian equivalents. The spectacular visual set-pieces favoured by Italian directors like Argento required a certain amount of time and money and directors in Spain just didn’t have those resources. Klimovsky does the best he can, and he does a pretty good job. Bringing in a movie on on time and on budget was the main priority and he could be relied upon to do that.

All the action takes place in the inn and Klimovsky uses the space effectively to keep things as visually interesting as possible. His camera is always restless which gives the film the right unsettling atmosphere.

Heinrich Starhemberg gives an odd distanced performance which works well. Daniel is a man alienated from his own life. For years he’s been just going through the motions.

Ágata Lys always seems on the edge of emotional self-destruction, which was the right way to play the part.

Regular Jess Franco collaborator Antonio Mayans is very good as always as one of the unwanted guests.

There’s no real gore but there is a fair bit of blood. There’s a lot nudity. In a giallo the killer’s motivations are usually to a considerable extent sexual so sex and nudity in such a film are by no means gratuitous.

I think this is a movie that needed to get a bit weirder and a bit more excessive.

It has to be admitted that Trauma is a lesser giallo but it is well-crafted and it’s always interesting to see the Spanish approach to the genre. It’s at least moderately entertaining. Worth a look if you’re buying the boxed set anyway.

Trauma is included in Vinegar Syndrome’s three-movie Forgotten Gialli Blu-Ray boxed set. It gets a good transfer with a few extras including an audio commentary from Troy Howarth. All these Forgotten Gialli sets are worth getting hold of.

The Delta Force (1986)

The Delta Force, released in 1986, is believe it or not my first Chuck Norris movie. 

And it’s from the Cannon Group which is always reassuring!

It begins with the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran in 1980. Major Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) quits in disgust afterward. His commanding officer, Colonel Nick Alexander (Lee Marvin), is disappointed but understands.

Five years later an American airliner is hijacked. A rescue mission is on, and McCoy is back in Delta Force.

At least the rescue mission is on once the President gives the go-ahead but that means Delta Force cooling their heels while the danger to the hostages increases.

The initial stages of the movie are a bit slow and the emotional manipulation is laid on thick but it is necessary. The audience has to understand just how ruthless Abdul Rafai’s terrorists are. We have to understand that no matter how risky the rescue mission might be there is no choice.

Once the movie hits its stride the suspense builds relentlessly and the action is non-stop and the explosions are too numerous to count. Chuck’s tricked-out motorcycle is a treat.

The rescue is much more complicated than had been anticipated. These hijackers are well-organised and they’re suspicious and cautious. They have predicted the likely American moves. Delta Force will just have to come up with some moves they haven’t foreseen.

The airliner is flown to Beirut, then to Algiers, then back to Beirut. The fact that the hijackers are making these unexpected moves is a real problem.

There are lots of stars in this film although most of them (Shelley Winters, Martin Balsam, George Kennedy) are somewhat faded stars. But they are enthusiastic and it’s always great to see Robert Vaughn in any movie. He plays General Woodbridge, US Army Chief of Staff.

At 62 Lee Marvin was too old for this sort of thing but he’s Lee Marvin and he’s a legend so it doesn’t matter. This was, sadly, his final film appearance.

Chuck Norris is an action powerhouse. He doesn’t get to do much kung fu but he gets to inflict all manner of mayhem on the bad guys. As far as acting is concerned he doesn’t bother too much with that but he’s a totally convincing action hero.

The action scenes are complex and done on an epic scale and they really are very nicely mounted. There are plenty of them.

Critics mostly hated this film, which is always a good sign. It upset all the right people who were horrified by the idea of Americans being portrayed as heroes.

It is a movie about old-fashioned virtues - courage, sacrifice, overcoming fear, loyalty, determination.

If a movie has a political subtext I ignore it. If it’s so intrusive that I can’t ignore it I don’t watch the movie. I don’t watch movies in order to be subjected to political lectures. I had no problems in that regard with this movie.

The Delta Force was a huge hit and spawned a couple of sequels.

The Delta Force offers action, excitement and all-round entertainment. It might not be art but I had a lot of fun with it. Chuck Norris lives up to his reputation admirably. Highly recommended.

It’s available on Blu-Ray (and looks great in that format) individually and as part of a double-header release with the first of the sequels.

La Llorona (1933)

La Llorona (The Crying Woman), directed by Ramón Peón, has several claims to fame the chief of which is that it was the first Mexican horror movie. 

The great tradition of Mexican gothic horror begins here.

Made in 1933 it’s also a very early Mexican sound film.

Obviously the producers were encouraged to make this movie by the success of the early Universal horror films, especially Dracula which was shot simultaneously in English and Spanish language versions.

What makes La Llorona really interesting is that this is a genuinely Mexican horror movie, based on a very famous Mexican folk tale, the tale of the crying woman. It is a story of a family curse, a curse that involves the death of a succession of firstborn sons.

It’s also exceptionally interesting structurally. There is a framing story in a contemporary setting and two lengthy flashbacks which explain the origin of the curse. But the two origin stories are totally different and unconnected. This is a feature, not a bug. This movie is among other things an examination of the nature of folk tales and the belief in them.

It doesn’t matter which of the flashbacks is true (and in fact they might both be false). What matters in folklore is that people in the present day believe the stories to be true. In this case the origin of the curse is not that important. What matters is that people believe that there is a curse and that the curse is real. And also that the curse is inescapable.

The framing story concerns a little boy, Juanito, who is celebrating his fourth birthday. He is a firstborn son and the curse always strikes on a boy’s fourth birthday.

The family is well-to-do and they consider themselves to be modern people who do not believe in old legends although of course the servants do.

And when disturbing things start to happen even hardened sceptics will start to wonder if perhaps curses might be real. Maybe Juanito really is in danger?

This is one of those “is there anything actually supernatural going on” movies and you’ll have to watch the movie to find out. The uncertainty on this point is used quite skilfully.

One of those flashbacks takes us back to a romantic triangle in the 17th century and there are complications surrounding an illegitimate child.

The other flashback goes back even further, to the days of Cortez. Again it involves a woman and a child and the woman is an Aztec princess.

The actual legend is very old, possibly even with pre-Columbian origins. It is a tale of the ghost of a mother who murdered her child. There are variations on the legend throughout Latin America.

Most versions have a connection with water but this element is curiously absent from the 1933 movie.

The legend has been filmed many times and makes its appearance in various pop culture media.

The special effects employed in this film are very simple but they work.

The framing of shots is sometimes odd but I suspect that this is deliberate. It is slightly stagey and even operatic but that’s an approach that suits the material.

It is not trying to achieve a totally realistic look. And it has lots of secret passageways!

The slightly strange staging and the unusual narrative technique will put some people off. This movie is nothing like the Universal horror films of that era. It’s that edge of oddness and the movie’s historical importance that makes it worth seeing. I’d describe it as a gothic melodrama with touches of horror. Recommended, but it’s a strange one.

Only a battered 16mm print survives so bearing that in mind Indicator’s Blu-Ray transfer is quite watchable. The most notable extra is a typically excellent audio commentary by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones.

Another very early Mexican horror movie worth watching is very atmospheric The Phantom of the Monastery (1934) which in my view is a much better more successful movie than La Llorana.

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975)

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is a 1975 erotic horror movie from Japan’s Toei Studio.

This is a movie that straddles a whole bunch of different genres and sub-genres. 

It has some superficial affinities to the pinky violence genre (a Japanese exploitation genre that as its name suggests combined sex and violence) but the tone is very very different compared to movies of that type. It really doesn’t feel at all like a pinky violence movie. It’s a gothic horror movie but it belongs to a particular and extremely interesting Japanese sub-genre, the ghost cat story. 

It’s also very definitely an erotic horror movie.

It is set in 1958. Brothels have just been made illegal but before the legislation has even come into effect a way has been to evade the new laws. Brothels are closing down and re-opening as Turkish bathhouses. Technically the girls are not prostitutes. In practice of course that’s exactly what they still are. This story takes place in the bathhouse owned by Genzō Kakinuma (Taiji Tonoyama) and his wife Utae (Tomoko Mayama).

One of the girls, Yukino (Naomi Tani), has decided that this is the right moment to quit the business. She will live a respectable life with her husband. Her sister Mayumi (Misa Ohara) will live with them. What she doesn’t know is that he is a gangster, a gambler and a psycho.

Yukino is betrayed by her husband in several different ways.

He becomes the manager of the bathhouse. He has been having an affair with the wife of the owner. So he has betrayed both his wife and his boss. And he has also betrayed the trust of Yukino’s sister Mayumi. They will later betray Genzō Kakinuma’s daughter Natsuyo (Terumi Azuma).

Perhaps he should have been more careful to make sure that her cat Kuro wasn’t watching. Cats notice things. And they don’t forgive.

One thing does worry the treacherous couple. They are aware that a black cat has been watching them.

Much mayhem will ensue.

A ghost cat can be a supernatural creature or the ghost of someone who has been murdered.

You have to bear in mind that whereas cats in western folklore are often associated with witchcraft cats are not seen as sinister by the Japanese. In a ghost cat story the ghost cat will often act as an agent of just retribution or righteous revenge.

This is not one of those All Men Are Evil stories. In this movie women can be every bit as vicious, treacherous and evil as men. 

There’s some extreme violence and quite a bit of gore in this movie. There’s also a lot of nudity and sex.

The tone and the style are wildly different compared to European, British and American gothic horror films. The special effects are completely bonkers. The lighting and the use of colour give the film a very surreal otherworldly look. This is like a dark gothic horror fairy tale and the intention was clearly to make it look as artificial and stylised as possible.

One thing to keep in mind is that while this is an exploitation movie it’s also a major-studio picture with a reasonably generous budget made by experienced industry professionals.

Despite its links to the pinky violence genre A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse is essentially an erotic gothic horror movie, and a very good one. Highly recommended.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray presentation looks great. The imaginative use of lighting makes this a movie that really does need to be seen on Blu-Ray. There are some extras including an audio commentary.

I’ve also reviewed an earlier extremely good ghost cat movie, The Haunted Castle (1969). There are many other ghost cat movies and I’m keen to track down as many of them as I can.

Henry & June (1990)

Henry & June, directed by Philip Kaufman and released in 1990, is based loosely on Anaïs Nin’s autobiographical account of her affair with Henry Miller. So this is a biopic of sorts and I have never been able to see the point of biopics. If I have an interest in some historical personage I’ll read a book about him. I won’t watch a biopic.

Henry & June has the distinction of being the first movie to be hit with an NC-17 rating.

It is Paris in 1931 and aspiring writer Anaïs Nin (Maria de Medeiros) is married to successful banker Hugo (Richard E. Grant). She meets aspiring American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward). Henry and Hugo are close friends. His wife June (Uma Thurman) has been left behind in Brooklyn.

Henry aims to shock the literary world with his first novel, Tropic of Cancer. He tells anyone who will listen that it’s about liberation. We soon find out that for Henry liberation means betraying his own wife and screwing his best friend’s wife (Anaïs) and then lying shamelessly about it.

Anaïs is on a voyage of self-discovery. She is discovering herself as a woman. That means betraying her own husband and screwing another woman’s husband. And then lying shamelessly about it. This is such an inspiring movie.

June arrives in Paris and things get messier and messier but whatever their literary talents might be there is no question that Henry and Anaïs have true genius when it comes to lying.

Anaïs takes a deep dive into the most perverse depths of Parisian life. You have to do that when you’re on a voyage of self-discovery.

June starts to fall apart.

Hugo, the eternal cuckold, stays in the background like a loyal good-natured puppy dog.

Maria de Medeiros was cast because she resembles Anaïs Nin. She certainly looks striking but I don’t think she really manages to bring any depth to her characterisation. We don’t really come to understand Anaïs.

Fred Ward gives the best performance of the movie. We know right from the start that Henry is a louse and by the end we realise just how big a louse he is.

Uma Thurman seems to be all at sea. Perhaps she was miscast and perhaps the script just let her down.

Richard E. Grant seems like he’s wandered in from another movie entirely and he’s finding it to be a jolly old lark.

I don’t mind if the characters in a movie are unlikeable and unsympathetic but in this case they’re unlikeable and unsympathetic is such miserable squalid ways.

Visually the movie manages to create a very scuzzy ambience. Perhaps the intention was to make Paris in the early 30s seem like a world of decadence and sleazy glamour but to me it seemed like a descent into Hell.

The sex scenes are not as explicit as you might expect given the film’s NC-17 rating. I didn’t find them offensive (I just don’t find sex scenes offensive) but they are lacking in eroticism. These are people who seem to approach sex as an unpleasant duty. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

If the movie could convince the viewer that Henry and Anaïs really are geniuses pushing the frontiers of literature we might feel inclined to be more sympathetic to their antics. I’ve read both writers. Henry Miller I found to be unreadable. Anaïs Nin’s erotica is quite interesting. The problem is that the movie doesn’t offer any real insights into them as writers so we’re left with the story of two appalling people.

At 136 minutes the film is at least half an hour too long. I found it to be a chore to sit through but if you’re a Henry Miller or an Anaïs Nin fan you might get some enjoyment out of it.

The movie looks OK on Blu-Ray.

I’d suggesting avoiding Henry & June.

Hard Target (1993)

Hard Target is a 1993 action movie directed by John Woo and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. This is obviously yet another adaptation of the classic 1924 Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game (also published as The Hounds of Zaroff).

Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) is looking for her daddy. She hasn’t seen him for twenty years, since he walked out on her mother. Natasha discovers that he’s been living on the streets. We know from the opening sequence that something really bad has happened to him.

Natasha is an accident waiting to happen in the big city. It’s not that she’s dumb but she’s not a city girl and in this movie New Orleans is like a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the making. She’s way out of her depth and almost immediately she gets herself into big trouble with a gang of hoods who don’t just intend to rob her. She doesn’t know why this big tough guy rescues her but he does. We will soon find out that the big tough guy is Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme).

Natasha hires him to help her find her dad because she’s smart enough to realise she needs someone who knows the city and she needs a minder. Her woman’s instincts tell her she can trust this man. And she’s right.

Her father was tricked into playing a deadly game where he was the prey being stalked by bored psychos who like the idea of hunting men. And as a former Special Forces soldier they figured he’d make challenging prey.

Chance starts to work out what happened and soon he and Natasha are being stalked. Chance has been chosen as the latest prey.

The hunters, and there are lots of them, have motorcycles and helicopters and grenades and automatic weapons and Chance is just one guy. But he is Jean-Claude Van Damme so that makes the odds pretty even! And he is not likely to just sit back and allow himself to be hunted.

That’s basically all the plot there is but it’s enough.

Much mayhem ensues.

John Woo is obviously a guy who believes that nothing succeeds like excess and the more excess you have the better you’ll succeed. He gives us lots of excess in this movie. There are explosions. Millions of rounds of small arms ammunition are expended. There are more explosions. There’s martial arts action. Action on horseback. Action with motorcycles and helicopters. And bows and arrows, and venomous snakes. And more explosions.

All handled with incredible style and energy. The finale in the warehouse full of Mardi Gras floats is wild.

Once you accept the premise the movie makes sense. Chance isn’t just a regular Joe, he’s ex-Special Forces so it’s believable that he’s an awesome fighting machine. And it makes sense that he would take on a whole army of bad guys even though he doesn’t owe the girl anything and it wasn’t his fight to start with. Her father was a military veteran, and Chance is a vet as well. And we find out right at the start that he doesn’t like seeing powerful people picking on powerless people and he really doesn’t like seeing women being picked on. If a woman needs help that’s something a man can’t just walk away from. Not a man like Chance anyway.

The psychos hunting men as big game are trying to prove their manhood but Chance understands what real manhood entails.

Van Damme has the necessary charisma. He’s in fine form. And the bad guys are led by two totally evil totally crazy larger-than-life super-villains - Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo). Yancy Butler as Natasha is likeable enough and not at all irritating. She doesn’t have GirlPower fantasies - she’s happy to accept Chance’s help and protection.

This is like a fever dream post-apocalyptic western with dashes of Mad Max but set in a totally dysfunctional New Orleans. The action never lets up, which is as it should be. Hard Target is a very superior action movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The earliest adaptation of the Richard Connell famous story is The Most Dangerous Game (1932) which is excellent. Another notable version is Turkey Shoot (1982) and there have been some weird and crazy versions that are well worth seeing, such as Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968) and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987).

Bolero (1984)

OK, let’s talk about Bo Derek and Bolero (released in 1984). Critics at the time and almost all online reviewers today will tell you that it’s an awful movie and that she was a terrible actress.

In fact the critics were wrong as usual and sadly most online reviewers assume that this is a bad movie before seeing it. They had already decided that this was an opportunity to indulge in some cheap snark.

The fact is that Bolero is an erotic fantasy romance. This is a kind of movie that frightens mainstream audiences and by the 80s mainstream critics (who praised such movies to the skies in the 70s) had decided that they strongly disapproved of such movies. If you want to enjoy Bolero you have to accept that yes it is an erotic movie.

I shared most of these prejudices before deciding that perhaps I should take another look at the film. I also shared the disdain for Bo Derek until I saw her in Tarzan the Ape Man (1981). Watching her in that I found myself realising that she was actually pretty good. She was giving exactly the performance that was required. It was also the performance that her director, John Dekek (who was also her husband, something else that enraged critics), wanted. She was doing what actresses get paid to do.

Bo Derek is just one in the long line of actresses from the 70s to the 90s who were targeted for career destruction by critics.

Which brings us to Bolero. It is the 1920s. Ayre MacGillvary (Bo Derek) has just graduated from college and has inherited an immense fortune. Now she wants adventure. The first step is to lose her virginity. But she’s a romantic girl and she has seen all of Rudolph Valentino’s movies and she wants the experience to be special. She wants Valentino as the Sheikh to carry her off into the sands of the desert on his horse.

Reality doesn’t always match our dreams. She finds her sheikh and he is handsome and he is a real sheikh but he’s a poetry-writing Oxford graduate and carrying her off on his horse is a problem. He isn’t good with horses. He’s scared of them.

Next up she decides to go to Spain to find a handsome matador. Like Valentino in Blood and Sand.

She finds her matador, Angel Sacristan (Andrea Occhipinti), but he’s also not quite what one might expect. He’s the least popular matador in the country because he never kills the bull. So if you’re worried there’s going to be animal cruelty in this movie I can set your mind at rest. There isn’t any. No bulls are killed. No bulls are injured. For Angel bullfighting is simply a test of skill and courage.

Ayre may have found her dream but there’s Angel’s crazy gypsy girlfriend who vows to kill any woman who steals her man.

And then there’s an accident. Not a fatal one, but it’s a blow to poor Ayre’s dreams.

Among other things this is a movie about women’s sexual fantasies and being a woman Ayre’s fantasies are as much about love as they are about sex. This is a very very romantic movie.

It’s also an homage to silent cinema. Ayre doesn’t just want a man. She wants the kind of romantic hero she has seen in the movies.

It also features sex scenes that are quite explicit for a mainstream Hollywood movie, and a lot of nudity. This was reason enough for many critics to dismiss it out of hand.

It is an erotic movie but it’s an erotic romance movie and it’s a slightly offbeat movie as well.

Don’t worry about whether it gets any of the period details right. This is a total fantasy, inspired by the world of silent cinema rather than the actual world of the 1920s. For the same reason don’t fret too much about any implausibilities in the plot.

I enjoyed Bolero quite a bit and I highly recommend it as pure romantic fantasy.

I saw this movie on a very poor quality DVD years ago. Seeing it now on Blu-Ray is a revelation. It looks great.