Airport 1975 (1974)

Someone on another site was asking recently about movie guilty pleasures. One of my most shameful and embarrassing cinematic guilty pleasures is 1970s disaster movies. And they don’t come much more embarrassing than Airport 1975!

This is a movie that has everything you could ask for in a 70s disaster movie. It has a ludicrous plot. Cliché-ridden dialogue. Superannuated Hollywood stars. Overly dramatic music cues. Unbelievable characters. A cute little girl being rushed to LA for a life-saving operation. Nuns. And it has Chuck Heston! It’s like being in bad movie heaven.

It’s basically a much sillier but much more entertaining retread of Airport. This time the disaster threatening an airliner comes in the form of Dana Andrews in a small twin-engined Beechcraft Baron. He suffers a fatal heart attack and yes, you guessed it, his little airplane is now about to fly straight into the path of an oncoming 747 packed with Hollywood has-beens. The resulting collision leaves the entire flight crew of the 747 dead or unconscious. Surely nothing can save this doomed airliner now?

But chief stewardess Karen Black has other ideas. If everyone else is dead she’ll fly the damned plane herself. How hard can it be? I mean, it’s not rocket science, is it? And all those funny little dials must mean something. Luckily she just happens to be Charlton Heston’s girlfriend, and we know Chuck isn’t going to let anything bad happen to his gal. And he used to be a chief instructor on 747s, so all he has to do is tell her what to do over the radio.

Of course there are a few minor problems. Number 3 engine isn’t working, and most of the instrumentation was smashed in the collision. There’s a gaping hole in the cockpit. LA is fog-bound, so the 747 has had to be diverted to another airport, one that just happens to be completely surrounded by mountains with one of the most difficult and treacherous approaches of any US airport. So the obvious thing to do is to get another pilot aboard the aircraft. The fact that the aircraft is actually in flight is merely a minor inconvenience. And luckily the airliner now has a very large hole in the fuselage, a hole that could almost have been cunningly designed to allow another pilot to climb into the cockpit from outside. So it should be fairly easy really.

Among the many joys of this movie is the casting. The sick little girl is played by Linda Blair (yes that Linda Blair, the spawn of Satan from The Exorcist ). And sitting just a few seats away from her are two nuns! Maybe it’s just that I’m a bad person, but I kept wondering - do those nuns know who she is? And how much danger they’re in? When one of the nuns starts singing to her I was certain her head would start spinning at any moment. I know mine would have.

You can also play spot the has-been. There’s Myrna Loy, as a loveable drunk. There’s Dana Andrews as the poor sap who crashes into them (which pretty much sums up his career really). And there’s Gloria Swanson! Playing Gloria Swanson! After this movie Ms Swanson very wisely decided to retire permanently from acting. The bad acting is even more spectacular than the stunts. Chuck Heston is in full-on square-jawed hero mode. Karen Black (an actress I’ve always liked but who does have a tendency towards somewhat hysterical scenery-chewing in the wrong role) over-acts outrageously, although given the quality of the script she may have known exactly what she was doing and decided it was the only way to handle this movie. Or she may have been making an all-out attempt to avoid being cast in the next Airport sequel.

The Region 4 DVD is sadly lacking in extras. Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising - I can’t imagine anyone involved in this movie remembering it fondly as one of the highlights of their career and wanting to revisit what are undoubtedly painful memories.

Judged by any objective standards this has to be one of the worst movies ever made. It’s worse than Earthquake, and disaster movie aficionados will be aware that that’s saying a good deal. Every line of dialogue is a cliché. Every character is a stereotype. Every plot twist is clumsily telegraphed in advance. The plot is absurd. The acting is hammy to a degree that defies belief. And it’s enormous fun. I loved every minute of it.

Femme Fatale (2002)

My love affair with the movies of Brian De Palma continues. I was a little concerned that Femme Fatale, being a fairly recent effort (made in France in 2002), might have shown evidence of a decline in his brilliance. I needn;t have worried. This is De Palma at the top of his form. In fact it’s now my second favorite De Palma movie, after Body Double.

Like all his movies this is one that his critics will love to hate, and he gleefully provides them with ammunition! For a director who has so often been accused (quite wrongly) of stealing from the work of other great directors, what better way to open a movie than with a daring theft at the Cannes Film Festival? Although this is not quite the very first scene - the first thing we see is a woman in bed watching Double Imdemnity on TV. Right from the beginning he’s letting us know that this is a movie about movies, and he’s not going to let us forget that we’re watching a movie.

The woman in the bed turns out to be a thief named Laure, and she’s a partner in a daring plan to steal a bra worth $10 million. The diamond-encrusted bra is part of the incredibly skimpy outfit being worn by the girlfriend of a famous film director. Laure lures her into the ladies’ room and seduces her, and as she removes the bra/top piece by piece and drops them to the floor her partner replaces the pieces with exact matches, but with glass in place of the diamonds. The plan doesn’t work out quite as expected, and Laure double-crosses her partners. The lengthy heist scene is another classic almost dialogue-free De Palma set-piece, beautifully filmed and intricately constructed.

Laure is now on the run from her partners, and they’re not well pleased with her at all. They’re also not very nice people. At this point fate steps in (as it will at several other crucial points during the film). A middle-aged couple are convinced she is their daughter Lily, and after she has been hurled over a balcony she wakes up in their apartment. While he’s having a bath Lily herself walks in. Her husband has died, she has decided to blow her brains out, and she just happens to not only look exactly like Laure but to have a passport and plane ticket to the US sitting on the table. This is Laure’s escape route. On the plane she meets a nice middle-aged businessman-turned-diplomat who falls instantly in love with her, and her new life is about to begin.

We cut to seven years later, and she’s back in France. Her diplomat husband is the new US ambassador to France, but being in France isn’t a healthy thing for Laure. Her erstwhile partners in crime still want to kill her. Her attempts to hide her identity come undone when paparazzi Nick (Antonio Banderas) snaps her photo. From this point on the plot becomes extraordinarily complicated and what seemed like a fairly straightforward thriller becomes anything but straightforward. We’re into classic De Palma playing games with the audience territory, in a big way, and nothing is as we thought it was.

De Palma uses lots of his favourite tricks. What’s interesting though is that they’re not used as tricks, but as ways of emphasising the points he’s trying to make. He uses the split-screen technique repeatedly, which reinforces the doubling effect of the two identical women, and most importantly it reminds us that we cannot entirely trust what we see. It’s all a matter of perspective, of selection, of viewpoint, of focus. The same scene does not always tell us the same truths, or even the same lies. And of course it reinforces the voyeurism that is important in this film, and in most of De Palma’s films. Everything is being seen through a lens. But a voyeur can only see what appears in his camera viewfinder, and cannot be sure he is seeing the thing that matters.

We’re also influenced in the way we look at the story through the title itself, and the use of the clip from Double Indemnity at the beginning. Like Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct the movie uses the conventions of film noir but as in that film we must be careful not to draw too many conclusions from the film noir trappings, or to draw the wrong conclusions. Just as we must be careful not to be taken in too much by De Palma’s homages to Hitchcock. De Palma doesn’t steal from either film noir or Hitchcock, he simply (like any great artist) takes the work of previous masters and uses it as a basis on which to build something new and distinctively his own. This is not Double Indemnity, just as Dressed To Kill is not Psycho and Body Double is not Vertigo. De Palma has his own agendas and his own obsessions.

Rebecca Romijn as Laure/Lily is clearly an Ice Blonde, but she’s a De Palma Ice Blonde not a Hitchcock Ice Blonde. She may not be the world’s greatest actress but her performance works, and she has the look and the presence that is needed. Antonio Banderas is, as always, extremely good. Again there are superficial similarities to the classic Hitchcock hero, caught up by fate in events he fails to understand and struggling desperately to understand both the situation and the woman with whom he has become accidentally involved.

Fate is a key element in this movie. There are many outrageous coincidences, which could be regarded as a flaw in a movie that was aiming at realism. But Femme Fatale has no such aims, and the coincidences and the ways in which fate operates strengthen rather than weaken the movie.

As you expect in a De Palma movie, there is plenty of sleaze and plenty of eroticism, done with immense style. He's one of the few modern directors who can do sleaze and somehow make it classy as well, and the sex never feels like it's just tacked on for the sake of the box-office. The entire movie is permeated with out-of-control eroticism. The whole movie is wonderfully stylish, a movie made by someone in complete control of their creative powers. It’s much more than an exercise in stye and technique however. It’s a provocative examination of the consequences of fate, of choices, of what we perceive as reality (which may or may not correspond with what may or may not be actual reality). There are moments of tremendous excitement and suspense but this is mostly certainly not a thriller. It is however always entertaining. Unquestionably one of the best movies of the past decade.

The Phantom (1943)

I’ve been slowly developing an appreciation for the old-time Hollywood movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s. So far the best I’ve across is a delightfully camp offering from 1935 called The Lost City but most of them are fun in their own way. The Phantom, dating from 1943, is one of several originally based on a comic.

In my opinion the best of the serials are the ones that combine adventure with some science fictional elements but The Phantom is basically straight adventure. Although the hero is also know as The Ghost Who Walks and the Man Who Cannot Die there are actually no supernatural elements. The Phantom is immortal purely in the sense that whenever he dies his place is taken by his son or another member of the next generation of the family but as far as his followers are concerned it’s always the same Phantom.

The Phantom rules over a huge jungle territory in Africa and is a kind of overlord to whom the various native chiefs and petty kings owe allegiance. You just have to try to ignore the fairly outrageous colonialist assumptions behind the idea that these African chiefs are pathetically grateful to have found a wise white man to rule over them! The Phantom is a benevolent despot who maintains peace throughout his domain through a mixture of awe, superstition and fear.

It goes without saying that at regular intervals some villain emerges to threaten the peace of the jungle. In this case it’s a nefarious Nazi agent with plans to find the fabulous lost city of Zoloz and turn it into a secret air base. Exactly why the Germans would want a secret air base in the middle of the African jungle isn’t entirely clear, but logic isn’t this serial’s strong point! This Nazi spy has decided that the Phantom must first be eliminated before his plans can be carried out, and the serial opens with the death of the Phantom at the hands of an assassin with a blowgun. His faithful native assistant conceal his death and sends a urgent message to the Phantom’s son informing him that the time has come for him to take up the mantle of his father and become the latest incarnation of The Ghost Who Walks. The son is Geoffrey Prescott, at present part of an archeological expedition searching for the very same lost city of Zoloz, a city rumoured to house a fabulous treasure.

Of course the kindly professor who leads the expedition isn’t interested in the treasure for its monetary value, his motivation being purely to further the cause of knowledge. To find the city the seven segments of an ivory map have to be found and assembled, and there are others also searching for his lost map, but their interests are purely selfish - they just want the treasure. Naturally the professor has a beautiful daughter (all scientists in those days had beautiful daughters) and her admiration for the Phantom knows no bounds.

By 1943 the conventions governing serials were well and truly established, and each installment ends with our hero making a miraculous escape from almost-certain death. And naturally it never occurs to the bad guys to kill the Phantom in an obvious way, like for example shooting him. No, they always come up with some ingenious indirect method like dynamiting a narrow mountain pass so the Phantom will get buried under the rubble, and of course every attempt fails.

The problem with these serials is often that there’s not quite enough plot to sustain anywhere from twelve to fifteen episodes. This one actually maintains the viewer’s interest reasonably well. It’s all very silly, but it’s fun. And of course there’s the joy of watching the Phantom confront the most feared beast of the African jungles - the tiger! There’s plenty of action, lots of double-crossing and the plot gets enjoyably convoluted. The diabolical criminal mastermind isn’t really quite diabolical enough - he’s sinister and sneaky but in a subdued way. There’s a complete lack of any romantic sub-plot which is a pity because it would have added a bit of variety to the overall plot, but the serials were aimed largely at kids which may explain the lack of romance.

Tom Tyler makes an acceptable hero as the Phantom. The acting is mainly standard B-movie stuff, and if you’re a fan of this sort of thing you wouldn’t have it any other way. The settings are also wonderfully wrong. We seem to be in Africa, but then suddenly we’re in a castle that looks like it belongs in central Europe with soldiers who look decidedly like they belong in medieval central Asia.

The Region 4 DVD release is very good as far as sound and image quality are concerned. The Phantom is fun lightweight entertainment.

Oasis of the Zombies (1981)

Oasis of the Zombies (L'abîme des morts vivants) was also released at one stage under the delightfully lurid title of Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies. And while this isn’t always the case, this title is in fact completely accurate. This 1981 Jess Franco film really is about bloodsucking Nazi zombies.

In 1943 somewhere in the North African desert a German convoy transporting a hoard of gold runs into an Allied ambush. The resulting battle (told in a flashback that features a surprising amount of action for a Franco movie) leaves only a single survivor on each side. Years later the German survivor sets out to retrieve the treasure, but he has a rival, the son of the Free French officer who led the Allied force. The young man’s mother was the daughter of an Arab sheikh who cared for his father after the battle.

Finding the gold doesn’t prove to be an easy task, the chief obstacle being that the oasis where the ambush was laid was cursed and the German soldiers killed there are now zombies guarding the gold. Unfortunately neither of the treasure-hunting parties knows about the zombies. Not yet anyway, but they’re about to find out. The young Frenchman is accompanied by several of his friends as well as a slight;y mysterious professor the picked up in a bazaar. The professor has as a companion an attractive young blonde woman, but she soon decides she’s more interested in one of our young French hero’s friends.

That’s pretty much it as far as plot is concerned. There is the expected mayhem when the zombies appear, and there’s a rather enigmatic ending.

Many online reviews will tell you this is the worst zombie movie ever made. These people have clearly seen very few zombie movies. I must admit to a personal bias here - I generally dislike zombie movies quite a bit. This may be the reason I found myself enjoying this one more than I’d expected to - at least Jess Franco can be relied upon not to make a stock-standard zombie movie. The budget was minuscule and the special effects are basic to say the least, but the rotting zombie makeup looks reasonably good given the fact that this is not a movie that anyone is expected to take all that seriously. If you take it as a slightly campy romp then it’s fun.

It’s difficult to recall another Jess Franco movie with so little in the way of sex and nudity. Unless it existed, like so many other Franco films, in alternate cuts than my presumption would be that the director or the producers felt that the audience for a zombie movie would probably not be interested in anything other than gore. An assumption that sadly probably contains a certain amount of truth. A Jess Franco movie without eroticism is a bit like a Hitchcock movie without suspense. It could be done, but it just isn’t the same. Thankfully this appears to have been Uncle Jess’s only foray into the world of zombie movies.

The scenes of the zombies appearing from under the desert sands are quite well done and are really the highlight of the movie. There are a couple of moments with ghostly hands groping their way out of the sand that are moderately creepy.

The acting doesn’t reach any great heights but it’s adequate for the sort of film this is. I don’t think Franco’s heart was really in this one and it lacks his usual touch. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nowhere near as bad as you may have been led to expect. It’s not a movie I’d recommend anyone to buy on its own but if like me you got it as part of a boxed set then it’s worth a look as an oddity. The Image Entertainment DVD contains no extras at all.

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

A lot of film-makers have has the “worst director of all time” label affixed to them. In many cases quite unjustly. After watching The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! I’m prepared to believe that Andy Milligan on the other hand thoroughly deserves the title.

It’s not that the premise is bad. In fact it’d the kind of idea that could have given birth to an extremely good horror movie. This is a period piece, set in England in 1899 (and Milligan apparently designed the costumes himself). The Mooneys are a very ancient family, so naturally there is a family curse. In this case it’s lycanthropy, but lycanthropy of a hereditary variety. The problem is so bad that the family has more or less stopped breeding. They still exist because the elderly patriarch of the clan has invented an elixir that can prolong life almost indefinitely. Their long-term survival though depends on being able to reproduce. Of this patriarch’s progeny the only one with a realistic chance of producing viable offspring is the youngest daughter, Diana. Her mother’s blood was still untainted at the time of Diana’s birth.

Diana has selected a suitable husband, but the rest of the family are not convinced of the wisdom of her decision to marry. There is also the question of where she will live. Her father sent her to medical school to acquire the skills needed to help him in his experiments, experiments that may hold the key to the family’s future. When she brings her new husband home tensions start to rise, and Monica (the most spectacularly unhinged of the Mooney females) is particularly hostile.

There’s plenty of potential in this plot. All it needed was a competent scriptwriter to turn it into a coherent story, a skilled director and a good cinematographer to add the necessary atmosphere. Unfortunately in this case all these roles are filled by the same person, that person being Andy Milligan, and he’s equally inept in every department of film-making. Chaotic is the word to describe this movie. Not chaotic in an inspired way, or chaotic in a fun way, but chaotic in a tedious and confusing way.

He’s also managed to assemble a cast of extraordinarily awful actors. The combination of atrocious acting with a poor script would be bad enough, but this is also an unbelievably wordy script. These are actors who should be give as little dialogue as possible, and they’re required to talk incessantly. This is necessary as Milligan seems to have no notion whatsoever of using visual means to advance the story, so every plot point has to be explained by means of lengthy stretches of excruciating dialogue. There are also sub-plots that go nowhere at all.

The rats in the title are only there to justify some totally gratuitous animal cruelty, and as a desperate attempt to cash in on the success of Willard the previous year.

There’s very little gore and no sex, but since the print I saw was a downloaded public domain print I have no way of knowing if it had been cut or not. The running time seemed a little short so I suspect it had been cut.

Truly awful movies can have a certain charm, and there are moments of such utter insanity in this film that at times it almost becomes entertaining, and it’s certainly an experience. It’s not an experience that I personally would care to repeat, but it is an experience.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Yes, more Brian de Palma. This time it’s Dressed to Kill, from 1980. Another de Palma movie that seems to have enraged almost everybody, and again it’s a movie I see as being essentially a black comedy.

It’s another Brian does Hitchcock movie, but for these who haven’t seen it I can’t say which which Hitchcock movie it’s inspired by because to do so would give away much of the plot. Although I suspect de Palma expected us to see the surprise twist ending coming a mile away, and that seeing it coming was intended as part of the fun.

This movie starts with Kate (Angie Dickinson) pleasuring herself in the shower while watching her husband shave and then getting attacked by a stranger, but in fact this is just a fantasy she’s having while she and her husband are having their usual very unsatisfactory (for her) sex. Right away de Palma established that he’s playing games with us. Kate then has her usual session with her psychiatrist Dr Elliott (Michael Caine), and she makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. By now she’s feeling pretty negative about herself, but a chance encounter in the museum that afternoon leads to some very steamy and confidence-restoring sex.

The museum pick-up is the most celebrated scene in the movie, 22 minutes of dialogue-free pure visual film-making brilliance that is enough on its own to justify seeing this movie. It’s very Hitchcockian, but this is no mere homage, this is de Palma showing us he can do Hitchcock just as well as Hitchcock could, and it’s sufficiently well done to justify the extraordinary conceit required to make such an attempt. If de Palma sometimes puts style ahead of substance then as long as the style is as good as this I’m not complaining.

Kate’s little sexual adventure has unexpected consequences, and to reveal any more concrete plot details would entail too great a risk of spoilers. Suffice to say that the story ends up with a teenage boy technical wizard and a high-class hooker (played by Nancy Allen) playing amateur detective.

Michael Caine was perhaps an odd casting choice as the psychiatrist, for reasons I can’t go into, but he does a reasonable job. Angie Dickinson (an underrated actress who deserved to be offered more good roles) is extremely good, and Nancy Allen is excellent as the hooker with not quite a heart of gold but with plenty of substance to her character. The movie was much criticised by some feminist critics but I think Nancy Allen’s strong, smart, complex, resourceful and courageous hooker is one of the more interesting female characters you’ll find in 1970s American movies. And Dennis Franz plays a tough New York cop. Yes I know Dennis Franz always plays a tough New York cop, but he has nobody to blame but himself - he just does it so well.

Being a de Palma movie there is of course a certain amount (OK, quite a bit) of sleaze and voyeurism, but again I’d say that if you can do sleaze and voyeurism with this much style then let’s have more sleaze and voyeurism.

Dressed to Kill shows a breath-taking mastery of technique and it’s highly entertaining as long as you don’t make the mistake of treating it as a serious thriller. I don’t think it’s as good as Body Double but it’s still a terrific movie.

Dominique (1978)

Dominique (aka Dominique Is Dead) is a rather old-fashioned sort of movie to have been made in 1978. It appears to be a traditional kind of ghost story, but really it’s a psychological thriller very much in the style of the movies Hammer were doing in the early 60s, movies like Paranoiac and Nightmare.

Unfortunately Hammer not only did this kind of thing first, they also did it much better. Once you figure out the kind of movie that Dominique is then the plot becomes all too predictable, and the plot twists more or less announce themselves. It features a fairly strong cast but they don’t really get to extend themselves to any great degree.

Dominique (Jean Simmons) is a very wealthy woman married to moderately successful stock-broker David Ballard (Cliff Robertson). David has a beautiful and much younger half-sister named Ann (Jenny Agutter). Dominique had an accident some time earlier and has never been quite the same since. She seems forgetful and confused, and even a bit mad. This madness, or perhaps the fear of madness, drives her to suicide. But after her funeral it seems she is reluctant to stay dead, and David finds himself haunted. He hears strange voices, and a piano playing when there is no-one there, and keeps seeing a figure dressed like his late wife. Is this the ghost of Dominique?

David persuades the family chauffeur Tony (Simon Ward) to join him in a midnight foray to the cemetery to check on Dominique’s coffin. And then a mysterious headstone appears, next to Dominique’s, with David’s name on it.

Cliff Robertson is adequate in the role of David, and Simon Ward is shifty and obsequious as the chauffeur. Jean Simmons and Jenny Agutter are both talented actresses but they have little to do in this movie. Flora Robson and Judy Geeson also make appearances but their parts are sadly underwritten. In fact most of the characters are underwritten.

There’s some reasonably effective moody cinematography. Michael Anderson’s direction isn’t especially inspired. The pacing is a little slow but the main problem is that the plot just isn’t clever enough to maintain much interest.

This is a harmless enough time-killer but it’s not really worth the effort of seeking it out. Get hold of some of Hammer’s early 60s black-and-white horror thrillers instead to see how this type of movie should be done.