Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching a bunch of movies about crazy ladies. Dangerous crazy ladies. Most of them fell into one of two categories: the brief-lived hagsploitation genre beginning with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and the sexual predator, probably most famously represented in Fatal Attraction. There are, however, outliers, and of course no two psychos are perfectly alike.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Pretty Poison (1968)
What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971)
Play Misty for Me (1971)
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Misery (1990)
Single White Female (1992)
Disclosure (1994)
To Die For (1995)
Gone Girl (2014)
The Babadook (2014)

Let the games begin.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been checking out a number of f not-quite classic films dealing with the spectacle of violent entertainment in a dystopian future. First up are a couple of titles from the mid-’70s: Death Race 2000 and Rollerball. Next there’s a trashy Italian flick from Lucio Fulci: Warriors of the Year 2072. Then we have the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man, and finally Battle Royale and Battle Royale II: Requiem. The first Battle Royale is considered a cult classic in some circles, but there’s a pretty strong consensus that Requiem is one of the worst sequels ever made.

An interesting question: With the ratings provided by sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes I wonder if it could be determined with some polling accuracy what the worst sequel ever made was. Would you judge based on the score of the sequel, or the gap in score between the first film and the second? Troll 2, for example, is often considered one of the worst films (or “best worst films”) ever made, and at IMDb it has a score of 2.7. However, Troll (I’m taking this as the first Troll film even though Troll 2 really isn’t a “sequel”) only has a score of 4.3, for a gap of 1.6. Battle Royale, meanwhile, has a score of 7.7 and Requiem a score of 4.7, for a gap of 3.0. So is Requiem a worse sequel?

In any event, it’s an interesting theme that’s often been dealt with in speculative fiction: taking sports competition to what seems the logical next level. If sports are a proxy for the struggle for survival, why not cut out all pretense and embrace blood sports as our new bread and circuses? Most of these films are clearly forms of satire, pushing recognizable games and events that extra bit over the top. What over-the-top means, in each case, is murder. Because really, that’s the only place there is left to go.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been checking out a couple of Douglas Sirk melodramas (read: soaps) from the 1950s: Magnificent Obsession and Written on the Wind. I’m not a big fan, but I can see why Sirk’s reputation, at least among film scholars, has grown so much in recent years. These are movies that make you scratch your head. How seriously are we meant to take them? What cultural impact did they have, particularly on the forging of our Technicolor vision of a mythic 1950s America? And finally how did Rock Hudson, a dreamboat to be sure, become such a romantic star when he doesn’t possess an iota of sexuality? Were women that afraid of sex in the 1950s?

Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching pirate movies. The pirate movie is a very conventional genre, quite limited in its necessary elements, and one that has only enjoyed a couple of Hollywood heydays. I think this is because a pirate movie is such an expensive proposition. You can’t do a pirate movie on the cheap. As for measuring up Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp, to each their own. I like the earlier films more, though I can appreciate the professionalism of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. It’s just that they seem so much.

The Black Pirate (1926)
Captain Blood (1935)
The Sea Hawk (1940)
The Black Swan (1942)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)

A typical hall monitor from the 1980s.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve added some notes on a few entries from the curious Prom Night franchise. Curious for two reasons: (1) all of these movies were terrible, and in no need of a sequel or re-set; and (2) they’re each terrible in their own way. I didn’t look at all of the Prom Night movies, but only the original Prom Night (1980), the first sequel, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night: Prom Night II (1987), and the re-set Prom Night (2008). The first is a derivative and poorly constructed slasher pic, the second (which has no relation to the first) is a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off, and the third is a surprisingly tame and totally uninspired re-set, the violence watered down so as to receive a PG-13 rating.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve added my notes on two adaptations of August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie. The first is the 1951 Swedish version directed by Alf Sjöberg, which takes greater liberties with the text but is a more satisfying film. The 2014 version directed by Liv Ullman and starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell is good, but finally seems to me to be less contemporary. Which is odd given that is was made over sixty years later. There’s an angry, nasty edge to Strindberg that both films miss. But it’s Strindberg’s Miss Julie who I still seem to run into the most.

Over at Alex on Film I’ve spent the last few months watching gangster movies. Or crime movies. Or tough-guy movies. Pick your label. I’ve included links below to my notes on all the ones I covered. The dates tell a story. The golden age was the 1930s, and for a couple of decades after that the genre virtually disappeared, only to be revived by the New Wave and the New Hollywood. In later years style would overwhelm substance, turning the gangster into a fashionable form of costume drama (The Untouchables, Public Enemies). I’ve included a lot of the greatest hits, as well as some less well-known gems that are worth searching out (Caliber 9 being perhaps the best of these). Other titles on the list include some that are, in my eyes, wildly overrated (Once Upon a Time in America) or just terrible (Savages). Enjoy!

The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
Little Caesar (1931)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Smart Money (1931)
Scarface (1932)
The Petrified Forest (1936)
A Slight Case of Murder (1938)
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938)
The Roaring Twenties (1939)
High Sierra (1941)
Dillinger (1945)
Key Largo (1948)
White Heat (1949)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Point Blank (1967)
Get Carter (1971)
Caliber 9 (1972)
The Italian Connection (1972)
The Boss (1973)
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
Mean Streets (1973)
Rulers of the City (1976)
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Scarface (1983)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
The Untouchables (1987)
The Killer (1989)
Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Bugsy (1991)
Reservoir Dogs) (1992)
Hard-Boiled (1992)
Killing Zoe (1993)
La Scorta (1993)
Casino (1995)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
The Limey (1999)
Sexy Beast (2000)
Get Carter (2000)
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Sin City (2005)
The Departed (2006)
Payback: Straight Up (2006)
American Gangster (2007)
In Bruges (2008)
Public Enemies (2009)
Savages (2012)
Parker (2013)
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)