Gymkata (1985)

Martial arts films are tough to do well, and the best ones usually have a charismatic star with a unique style, who can overcome any deficiencies in the script, direction or cast. Gymkata, an 80s oddity starring Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, does not have this, but fortunately it manages to compensate by being as deliciously silly and unhinged as it is incompetent.

Thomas plays Jonathan Cabot, a champion gymnast recruited by the US government to infiltrate the tiny but brutally primitive country of Parmistan. They need the permission of the King of Parmistan to build a missile defence site, and, for some reason, the only way they can get this is by having Cabot compete in a brutal “Most Dangerous Game” style contest, called where losers are hunted to their deaths - but if anyone were to win, they would be granted one wish.

Gymkata is directed by Robert Clouse, who, more than a decade earlier, had made the bona fide genre classic Enter the Dragon, and with a similar plot (athlete hired by government for secret mission), it feels like he is trying to recreate the same magic with Gymkata. However there are several elements that make the earlier film a classic, namely the star Bruce Lee and his unique fighting style, the excellent supporting cast (Jim Kelly, John Saxon, and the villainous Kien Shih and Bolo Yeung), as well as the superb brassy, funky soundtrack from Lalo Schifrin. Gymkata, unfortunately, has nothing to compete with any of these.

It is common for martial arts films to have a unique selling point about the star or their fighting style. In the case of Gymkata, it is the supposed mix of Cabot's gymnastics skills with more traditional eastern fighting styles. This is a mix that certainly has potential, and Thomas isn't a bad fighter, athletic and nimble on his feet, and let's not forget that Bruce Lee was an excellent dancer in his youth, something clearly evident in the graceful sometimes almost balletic look of his on-screen fighting.

But Lee also had bags of on-screen charisma and as well as a deep understanding of how to make fighting look good on screen, projected a real sense of danger, something completely lacking in Thomas. Thankfully, the dull lead actor is more than compensated for by the gloriously silly, albeit also slightly baffling, screenplay.

Right from the start, we get a training montage, a staple of films such as this, and this really sets the tone for the film : equal parts  unpredictable and inexplicable. In keeping with the blend of East and West used in the fighting style, one of his trainers is a huge muscular man who yells at our hero while seemingly trying to kill him. The other is an Asian guy with a hawk, who spouts sound-bites of wisdom and makes Cabot walk up the stairs on his hands, over and over again. This is not accompanied by any “Eye of the Tiger” type music, but simply lots of slightly incongruous cartoon sound effects

Quite why anyone would volunteer to play "The Game" is hard to tell, as nobody has come out of it alive in hundreds of years. However, the King of Parmistan is to be admired for his optimistic boast that he can grant any wish, given that he rules a country that seemingly lacks both electricity and indoor plumbing.

Still, the approach to mental health is something I haven't seen anywhere else. The mentally ill are all sealed up in their own walled city, complete with livestock and a huge array of sharp knives. Oh, and a courtyard containing nothing but a Pommel Horse, which our hero conveniently takes full advantage of to take on an army of attackers, who, conveniently, attack him one at a time.

Any film this relentlessly silly and botched is eventually going to amass a cult following, so it came as no surprise to read that in 2006 Gymkata won an online poll conducted by Amazon and consequently won a DVD release. While Gymkata may lack slickness and competence in front of and behind the camera, it has a cheerful silliness and energy that means things rarely get boring, and while it never reaches the truly unhinged heights of the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space or Troll 2, this is highly recommended for fans of entertainingly bad films.

Le Professionnel (1981)

Although probably best known outside of France for his lead role in Godard's groundbreaking Breathless, Jean Paul Belmondo has had a long career in cinema, largely in more mainstream fare, such as comedies, or action films like Le Professional. Some sloppy scripting, and unremarkable direction stops this from being a classic, but the effortless charisma of the star helps makes for compelling and enjoyable viewing.

Belmondo plays Josselin Beaumont, a French Secret Service Agent, who is sent to a fictional African country in order to kill the ruling dictator, Colonel Njala. However, before he can carry out his mission, Beaumont is betrayed by his government, who decide they would rather have Njala alive, and left to rot in a prison camp. Breaking free, Beaumont returns to Paris in time for a state visit by Njala and vows to complete his mission.

The story is somewhat hokey and relies a little too much on coincidences (not least Beaumont breaking out of prison at the same time as his target is heading to Paris), as well as the repeated incompetence of the Secret Service, such as a surveillance team not recognising the man they are supposed to be watching, but the script moves along at a fast enough pace (after just 15 minutes of screen time, Beaumont is out of Africa, and that is pretty much all of the back story we get) that you do not dwell too much on these. There are a few other elements of the story that remain unexplained, such as how he gets back into France from Africa undetected, but these actually work to enhance the character of Beaumont. By leaving an air of ambiguity around some of his actions, it gives him an aura of mystery, unpredictability and danger, so that you never know what he is going to do next.

Beaumont is no clean cut goody-goody hero, but closer in spirit to the James Bond of the early Sean Connery era, someone for whom getting the job done is the first priority, regardless of the impact on the lives of other people, whether it is his wife, his mistress or his guilt-ridden former boss. In the hands of the wrong actor, this could lead to an audience turning against the lead character, but Belmondo has bags of charm and charisma, and can play him as unflappable and dangerous without ever coming across as smug or psychotic.

Standout amongst the supporting cast is veteran actor Robert Hossein as Inspector Rosen, the policeman locked in a cat-and-mouse game with Beaumont. Cooly sadistic, uninterested in the politics and history of the situation, he will go to any lengths to get his man, and proves to be the only serious threat to Beaumont.

Behind the camera, Georges Lautner does a competent if unremarkable job, with no particularly flashy directorial touches, apart from in one breath-taking scene of a car chase through the streets of Paris. The superb stunt work, combined with tight editing and shots from inside Beaumont's car make for an adrenaline packed experience, as well as leaving no doubt that Belmondo is doing most of his own driving.

Special mention should also go to the score, which largely revolves around an Ennio Morricone composition, "Chi Mai", actually written ten years previously for an obscure Italian film, Maddalena. Restrained and quite haunting, it is up there with the best of Morricone's other work. Brits of a certain age will also instantly recognise it as the theme from the 1981 BBC serial The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, off the back of which it got to number 2 in the UK Singles Chart.

The story revolves around French intervention in Africa. However, in this film, there is no real examination of the history or implications of any of this, and Africa serves merely as the catalyst for the events in the script, albeit a catalyst that would be familiar to the target audience, in the same way that Iraq or Afghanistan might be used nowadays in a British or American film. Le Professional is not a heavy political allegory or a deep demanding character study, but a solid enjoyable thriller, carried largely by the roguish appeal of it's star.

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982)

Reviewing sequels can pose a problem - should the film be looked at as a standalone piece, or as part of a series? Thankfully, Halloween 3 largely solves this particular problem by ignoring any of the Michael Myers mythology of the previous two (or subsequent seven) entries in the franchise, and what we are left with is a flawed but still interesting film. The delirious tone and subject matter make it feel at times like a modern day suburban fairy tale, and it mixes an X-Files/Kolchak type story with an uncompromisingly cruel streak that touches on an uncomfortable taboo.

When one of his patients is murdered in hospital, Dr Daniel Challis, played by Tom Atkins (Maniac Cop, Night of the Creeps) teams up with the dead man's daughter to investigate. Their search takes them to the mysterious Silver Shamrock toy factory in California, owned by Conal Cochran, played by Dan O'Herlihy (Robocop), a place that also has links to an incessant toy commercial, a sinister child-based pagan ritual, and a certain day of the year.

After Halloween 2, which followed on directly from the events of the first film, John Carpenter expressed an interest in turning the franchise into an annual event, releasing a different film every October 31st, each unrelated beyond the Halloween moniker. This is the first, and, thanks to disappointing box office results, only result of this experiment.

The main criticism that can be levelled at Halloween 3 is the script, which feels messy, and badly constructed. We get some intriguing situations and plot twists, such as a murderer calmly getting into a car and setting himself on fire, but because the main premise of the factory owner's evil scheme feels half thought through, the big revelation at the end is a baffling, and slightly silly let down.

The first draft of the screenplay was written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, but, according to him, was heavily reworked. It certainly lacks the sharp internal logic of the Quatermass stories, where baffling and intriguing premises are set up but clearly explained by the end, and the whole thing feels a lot goofier than anything Kneale ever put his name to. For example, I can see a Stonehenge-type plot element being in the original (Kneale, in the final Quatermass TV serial three years earlier had explored similar themes) but the idea that one of the stones could be transported from Wiltshire to California without anyone noticing is just ridiculous. At the very least, a writer of the calibre of Kneale might have been able to exploit the potential in the storyline to satirise the commercialisation of the Halloween holiday or the small businessman being squeezed out by a big industrial corporation, opportunities overlooked here.

On the plus side, Atkins is great, and completely believable in his role as the macho, hard drinking Dr Challis. He pulls off the same trick he managed in Maniac Cop, that of keeping a straight face in bizarre situations, and bringing a bit of gravitas to some rather silly lines. The rest of the acting is a little more broad, especially the townsfolk and their "oirish" accents. This eventually starts to grate, but is in keeping with the over the top, EC Comics feel of the film. Aside from Challis, there is no real characterisation as such, with people existing largely as elements that provide us with some mystery or exposition before they are bumped off. There is the plenty of portentous dialogue and scenes, so of course, anyone as garrulous and well liked as Cochran MUST be evil.

The oft-repeated Silver Shamrock TV commercial is as catchy as it is irritating but its daily countdown to Halloween takes on more sinister significance as the movie progresses, and provides a deadline that helps crank up the tension. I also could not help but chuckle that a film that centres on an evil corporation using television to destroy the nation's youth was released in the same year that MTV went on the air.

There is no shortage of blood and gore, which puts it closer in tone to the second Halloween film than the original. However, instead of the grim but realistic violence of that first sequel, we get a slightly more fantastic over-the-top approach, with sights such as bugs and snakes pouring out of a skull that has cracked open, and the emphasis here is on the gruesome rather than the suspenseful.

There are some in-jokes for cinema buffs too, some of which work better than others. Repeated TV adverts in the film for the original Halloween, are jarring and distracting, if for no other reason than it reminds us how good the original is. I could do without the "Landis Pet Store" too, with Carpenter presumably following on from Escape from New York, where two minor characters were named Cronenberg and Romero. A more subtle gag is naming the town Santa Mira, the same as in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which also has a small town doctor trying to convince people of a deadly and fantastic threat, and which also has an ambiguous ending.

Not totally successful, mostly due to the script deficiencies, but carried mostly by another great turn by Atkins, and some imaginative twists and turns, and kudos to the filmmakers for at least trying something different.

Halloween 3 was not a smash at the box office, leading to the switch back to the Michael Myers storyline for part 4 onwards. One possible reason for the failure is the lack of Myers, but another thought occurs. The premise is half thought out, but the half that is thought out touches on something of a taboo, that of child murder, and mass child murder at that. Horror films often revolve around murder, and while there is room for debate on some of the issues, such as gender, that arise from this, the murders are usually of adults or, at the youngest, teenagers. If the films do involve children, the norm is for them to be Omen-style evil protagonists. Child murder, or at least the threat of it, is a theme that crops up in literature, particularly Fairy Tales, and even the Bible, but it is tough to think of a great number of films that deal with it, certainly not on the scale proposed by Cochran, almost as if child murder is a taboo that even the most "daring" filmmaker seems reluctant to break.

From StaticMass.net: Casablanca (1942)

After more than 70 years, Casablanca is still a firm part of popular culture, with the images, songs, and misquoted dialogue possibly known by more people than have actually seen the film. For me, after 20 years and countless viewings, it’s something that still intrigues and delights me as much as the first time. What on the surface may appear to be standard Hollywood melodrama, mixed with war-time propaganda, actually has some ambiguities in character and plot, and a far from happy ending.

Read the full article at Static Mass

All This and World War II (1976)

All This and World War 2 proves, as a famous man once said, that there is a fine line between clever and stupid. No matter how clever the idea of cutting newsreel and movie footage from the 30s and 40s with the music of the Beatles (not the originals, but covers by stars of the 70s such as The Bee Gees and Leo Sayer) may sound on paper, the end result is very, very stupid.

The main problem is that the choice of songs is rarely either appropriate or very imaginative for the footage, and by limiting herself to Beatles tracks, director Susan Winslow has to shoehorn something in, regardless of relevance. Good taste does not really come into it, which is why in the first two minutes, we see scenes of Hitler visiting his forces, and soldiers marching around doing soldier things, all set to "Magical Mystery Tour" (complete with a Nazi brass band "playing" along). While I am sure there was uncertainty and trepidation around the world as to how the war would turn out, are they seriously comparing the outbreak of war with a "Magical Mystery Tour"?

Even a relatively downbeat pop song such as “Help”, seems crass compared to what we are shown of the individual heroism of soldiers or the wider struggle of the UK's attempts to get the USA involved. Sometimes the juxtapositions are not inappropriate, or silly, but crashingly obvious, with Hitler gazing wistfully from atop his Bavarian mountain retreat, while “The Fool on the Hill” plays in the background, or “Getting Better” while things are, well, getting better for the Allies. Most of the time though the musical choices are just pointless and inexplicable, such as “Polythene Pam” playing behind scenes of people trying on Gas Masks, “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” for scenes of men signing up for the Draft, and, most bafflingly of all, the bombing of Pearl Harbour set to “I am The Walrus”.

The simple fact is that much of this footage does not need any musical accompaniment, being dramatic, chilling or moving enough on its own. It certainly does not need these versions of the songs, none of which improve on the originals, and many of which manage to suck any life and emotion out of the original and replace it with dullness or phoney overwrought schmaltz, which jars terribly against real images of heartbreak and sacrifice.

Rather than just stringing together footage at random, director Susan Winslow does try to create a narrative arc, stretching from Chamberlain and his talk of appeasement, right up to the birth of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, World War 2 is just too complex a thing to boil down into 80 minutes, without skimming over or trivialising many of the aspects of it. A perfect example is the issue of race in the armed forces. We see footage of white troops training, followed shortly by footage of black troops training separately, implying that among the forces fighting a racist ideology there was an element of segregation and racism. However, later we see a montage of Allied troops (an African-American, an Irishman, a Sikh, a Pole, and a Frenchman), proudly announcing where they are from. So are they saying there was no racism? Alternatively, is it more complicated than that? This is a subject worthy of a documentary of its own, but here, it is shown and quickly discarded as the narrative marches remorselessly onwards to the next event, without giving any further explanation or context.

This leads me to wonder what the point of All This and World War II is. It is a documentary but it has no message or point of view, and a distinctive gimmick, but no substance. The skimming over or avoiding of themes and events means, unless anyone is unaware who won the war, it is useless as an educational tool. If the Beatles and World War 2 mix is meant as a joke, it is a five-minute joke stretched over 80. In addition, despite some occasional lapses in good taste, it stops short of being truly offensive, so does not even pass muster as a work of pure provocation.

Antiviral (2012)

The feature length debut from writer/director Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral is a cold, creepy mix of satire and body horror, set in a world where people do not just want to get under the skin of celebrities, they want to get the celebrities under their skin.
 
Caleb Landry Jones plays Syd March, a worker at a clinic that takes live viruses from ill celebrities and sells them to obsessed fans. He also has a lucrative sideline selling pirate samples, smuggling them out in his own body. When Syd becomes infected with a disease that kills super star Hannah Geist, he must solve the mystery surrounding her death before he succumbs next.

Brandon Cronenberg is the son of "body horror" pioneer David, so comparisons are inevitable and perhaps unavoidable, but given the subject matter and the execution, these would arise anyway, no matter who was behind the camera. Some of the tropes, such as the morally dubious corporation, body modification, and the lone man getting into a situation way out of his depth, will be familiar from earlier films of Cronenberg Sr., such as Videodrome and Shivers (as well as from the writings of William Burroughs, a big influence on David). In addition, like those films, the story moves at a slow, deliberate pace, with the emphasis is on the exploration of ideas rather than characters, or heavy handed moralising.
 
However, Antiviral is by no means a slavish copy of any of these, with a style and contemporary look of its own, which contrasts with the grungy feel and slightly lurid, exploitation movie trappings of a film like Shivers. The sleek white offices of the Lucas Clinic, with smiling receptionists and plasma screen TVs pumping out a constant information dense stream of news, feel like the headquarters of any large corporation anywhere in the world today, while the recognisable contemporary urban landscapes help root the more outrageous ideas in reality.

There are also some recurring motifs in the camerawork, especially the handheld, over the shoulder shot, which crops up repeatedly, and made me think of a paparazzi stalking it’s prey.

The piracy storyline gives the film a very contemporary feel, but also with an outrageous twist, that sees the pirated cells used by a delicatessen to create the ultimate in celebrity tie-in merchandise. Special mention must also go to the soundtrack by E.C. Woodley, a mix of glacial cold glacial strings and throbbing synths.
 
The lack of sympathetic, fully rounded characters and the detached, intellectual approach to the subject matter will mean Antiviral is not for everyone, but it is a fascinating debut, and leaves me intrigued as to where Cronenberg will go next with his career.

Cinema Komunisto (2010)

When he wasn't busy oppressing the people and leading North Korea into starvation and ruin, Kim Jong Il loved to relax with a movie, either from Hollywood or from his own subsidised state dream factory. However, he was by no means the first Communist dictator to do so. Over in 1940s Yugoslavia, Marshal Josip Broz, better known by his nickname, Tito had similar ideas, lapping up Westerns starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, and planning to harness the power of cinema to promote and build his authoritarian Communist regime. Cinema Komunisto tells the fascinating and poignant story of the Avala Studio and the Yugoslav film boom of that era, an industry that at its height attracted the likes of Orson Welles, Richard Burton and Yul Brynner.

What is obvious from the beginning is how much pride so many of the people involved in the industry still have in the work they did, some of which revolves around the opportunities to rub shoulders with the big Western stars of the day, and show them that their work was just as good as anything from America. Where their Hollywood counterparts might have had to use model work to show a bridge being blown up, in Yugoslavia, they would simply ring up their beloved leader Tito, who would grant them permission to blow up the real thing.

What is not so obvious is what to make of the films themselves. The clips provided are too fragmented and diverse to be able to judge the style or quality, and most seem overly derivative of Hollywood war films and Westerns of the 1940s to 1960s, with their easily definable good and bad guys, and bloodless shootings. The propaganda is pretty blatant and unsophisticated at times, with songs about how breaking rocks is fun, and endlessly quotable dialogue such as "Tell the Communist party we have exceeded our quota by 70%"

The figure towering behind all of this is Tito, with his love of film and understanding of its use as a tool to invent the story of the revolution. This understanding would sometimes see him getting involved in the production side of things, personally annotating scripts with handwritten suggestions, or corrections to things he felt were factually incorrect. Tito is still held in genuinely high regard by many of the interviewees, perhaps not surprisingly, given how well they did professionally out of their leader’s cinematic obsession. Some of the Hollywood types seem a little star-struck themselves, with Brynner singing Tito's praises in a French TV interview and, in a particularly unedifying clip, Welles proclaims that “…it is a self-evident fact that Tito is the greatest leader on earth”. To his credit, Richard Burton, who ended up playing Tito in The Battle of Sutjeska, seems, from the footage shown, more reserved and detached, with the real life Tito fawning over him like a breathless fan. Only towards the end of the documentary do we get an admission of a darker side to the Utopia, with hints at the repression, and purging of dissidents and enemies of the state, all too familiar in totalitarian regimes.

Nothing lasts forever though, and with the death of Tito, the once mighty Yugoslav film industry began to disintegrate. More chillingly, as we are shown, without his presence to unify and bind the country together, so did Yugoslavia itself, descending into barbaric conflict that led eventually to NATO intervention (including bombing the very mansion where Tito sat watching films nearly every night). The studio now lies rotting and abandoned, the films lie rotting and unwatched, and the communist revolution that powered them has been consigned to history. Cinema Komunisto does an excellent job of shining a light on a previously neglected side of World Cinema, and by charting the rise and fall of Avala Studio, presents a perfect metaphor for the rise and fall of the country of Yugoslavia.