Meanwhile, 65 million years ago…

65, Dir. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods,  2023, 93 mins, HD

This was such a stupid movie. I so hate stupid films like this, they make my head hurt. If it had been based on some obscure, horribly dated 1930s pulp sci-fi story, I wouldn’t be surprised: if that had been the case, and had the film been shot with that 1930s art deco/retro sci-fi feel there might have been some fun to be had, but unfortunately it looks and sounds woefully generic. What DOES surprise me is that such a stupid, hackneyed script riddled with T-Rex sized plot holes was deemed worthy of a film with a $45 million budget (even if that does seem small change compared to the wild spending typical in Hollywood).

I suppose its some kind of an achievement- how dumb and boring it is, considering its plot-  I mean, an astronaut crashing onto a planet of dinosaurs? How could it fail? The pitch meeting must have been a doozy with the cash registers ringing in everyone’s heads, but then somebody (oh, wouldn’t you know it, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who just happen to be the directors, too) went and wrote the script and, oh boy, all the energy and fun and promise of the thing just bled out. The execution in no way matches the promise of that pitch (I expect the studio heads must have thought, “hang on, this isn’t what we greenlit”, when the finished film was screened). Maybe its something to do with having twelve producers.

The basic premise, well, I still can’t quite figure it out, why they went the way that they did. If they’d written about an astronaut in the near future returning  home but whose ship suffers from a dodgy Hyperdrive or happening to fall into a wormhole, hence being thrown back in time to Earth just prior  to the end of the dinosaurs (a sort-of reverse of the plot of Planet of the Apes) then maybe I wouldn’t have been rolling my eyes quite so much. We could accept the American accent, the use of English words like “shit” etc wouldn’t seem so anachronistic being spoken by an Ancient alien from a far-off world, the chance that the planet he lands on conveniently has breathable atmosphere and normal gravity….  if he’s a human from the future all of that is taken care of already.

I know, I know, I’m overthinking it, but this stuff troubled me all through the film. The astronaut’s arc is that he had to leave his family behind while he did this carrier job, his daughter was ill and died while he was away, and now he’s left stranded on an alien planet and quelle surpise a young girl is the only other survivor, and he has to deal with his loss and protect this surrogate daughter who has lost her parents and… well, its pretty woeful how the coincidences and arcs set themselves up. I mean, it just so happens that they’ve crashed on Earth on the eve of the asteroid crashing into the Earth that triggers the extinction event that wipes out the dinosaurs. You have to imagine the astronaut shaking his head at his bad luck… of all the days and all that planets to crash into, I have to crash into this one, on THIS day…

I know, I know, its only a movie. But I’ll be damned if I have to keep on excusing such nonsense as this just because, well, its only a movie. Can’t these guys making these films make them better, have an ounce more ambition or skill other than nailing a great pitch and then dropping the ball trying to make it into a movie? Adam Driver is a better actor than this film deserves, and the young actress playing the girl Koa, Ariana Greenblatt, is so good she nearly steals the movie from him, they aren’t phoning anything in here, but they have little to work with. Its a wonder there’s any drama at all as they stumble from one plot-hole/crisis to another. The fact they manage to eventually reach the escape ship, but before they can launch it falls down the mountain to land wrong way up, only to be put right side up by a T-Rex during a gunfight (!) so that they can launch barely seconds ahead of the asteroid impact… You. Cannot. Believe. Your. Eyes. Well, I guess I did so that you, dear reader, don’t have to.

On yer bike, Florence

A Good Person, Dir. Zach Braff, 2023, 126 mins, HD

Nah, didn’t believe it. Not really, not for a minute. Typical Hollywood version of how people deal with tragedy, and while I can appreciate Florence Pugh’s acting chops (and she tries here, she really tries) if this film’s idea of twelve months off the rails as a junkie means a bad haircut…

Allison (Florence Pugh) is a beautiful, talented young woman with a thriving career, and is soon to be married to handsome, loving fiancé Nathan (Chinaza Uche). Life is fine, with a lovely close-knit circle of well-dressed, perfect freinds and family all with wonderful careers, its all sickeningly idyllic. The heights established before the fall, eh? Unfortunately for Allison, she is involved in a road accident in which Nathan’s sister and husband are killed, leaving an orphaned daughter, Ryan (Celeste O’ Connor), and Allison carrying the blame. The guilt breaks Allison and Nathan’s relationship up, and a year later Allison is unemployed, living with her mother and addicted to pain-killers wearing a really bad haircut.

Its not the story or the sentiment that I had trouble with as we follow Allison on her journey of redemption; its the execution. Allison is always beautiful, hardly even bleary-eyed, or thin from  malnutrition/neglect, her skin is never less than perfect, and Pugh never sufficiently disguises her innate self-confidence or charisma as a performer.  She never BECOMES Allison, she’s always PLAYING Allison. Likewise, Nathans father Daniel, who blames Allison for the death of his daughter and is struggling raising his granddaughter Ryan, is played by none other than Morgan Freeman. Morgan bloody Freeman. He’s supposed to be playing an abusive father who is a recovering alcoholic, but this is the guy who played God and the President of the United States. He’s never less than perfect, no matter how hard he tries (albeit I don’t think he’s trying as hard as Pugh, but then again, he can coast this nonsense).  Can Allison and Daniel find some reconciliation? Can Daniel through his rehab experience help Allison get clean? Can Allison redeem herself by helping Rayne? Will Allison and Nathan ever get back together?

Its just… its just never feels real, you know? I think it tries to be a hardcore, gritty drama but feels so far short. The days of Hollywood making stuff like Taxi Driver etc are long gone. I’m sure there are many who buy into this nonsense but they are probably fans of Dirty Dancing or Pretty Woman. I mean, I love my science fiction and fantasy but even I have limits of my suspension of disbelief, and this film is it. Its fine, the acting is okay, its harmless, but no, this one really wasn’t for me.

Composite-horror madness

Scream and Scream Again, Dir. Gordon Hessler, 1970, 95 mins, Blu-ray

Quite utterly insane, this is a film absolutely all over the place, which is rather appropriate as it turns out. Dig deep enough into its confused plot, and it seems the film concerns a race of super-beings called Composites, who are assembled, Frankenstein-fashion, from the body parts of victims. So its fitting indeed, perhaps, that the film feels throughout like its the composite of four or more different films stitched together in the editing room. Seriously, I’ll include three shots from the film in this post, you’ll be forgiven for thinking they are from three different movies.

Firstly its a mad-scientist flick with blatant Frankenstein connotations, but its also a serial-killer movie with both sexual undertones and vampirism involved, and then its a political/spy thriller set in a foreign military state, and its also a police procedural. To add further confusion, the three horror stars so cynically top-billed on the films posters feature separately in those ‘films’ and in fairly minor roles.  Peter Cushing (and I’ll blame/thank dear old Peter, because its him that attracted me to this one, as I always seek out his films) features in a three-minute scene shot in one day, Christopher Lee in two or three short scenes largely superfluous to the plot, and Vincent Price, while taking what would usually be the central mad scientist role of the film, only features chiefly in scenes that bookend the film, bizarrely disappearing for the  main central stretch (imagine one of those Frankenstein Hammer films starring Peter Cushing with his Doctor Frankenstein largely absent from the entire film).

In some ways it just doesn’t work at all but it is utterly fascinating, like a celluloid car crash from which you cannot pull your eyes away. Its also thoroughly nasty, a surprisingly unpleasant and gory film that feels quite ahead of its time as far as horror films go, prefiguring where the increasingly graphic genre would proceed in successive decades. It also has a scene in a subway tunnel that is eerily similar to the iconic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which was made later -it is so similar in fact I dare wonder if Kubrick watched this film and took inspiration (the idea of the intellectual Kubrick actually watching a film as cheap and dirty as this one gives me a chuckle).

And yet, while I describe it as ‘cheap and dirty’, its true that it is also very ambitiously shot, with some very long single takes that are very accomplished indeed and mightily impressive with lengthy camera moves coordinating a large number of actors and extras. Its strange that the film seems so ambitious, even though at its heart its so exploitive. There is a car chase sequence that could have been routine and uninspired but instead really pushes it to the limit- while some continuity fails amid editing trickery  can be discerned, one has to applaud the evident attempt to raise the sequence to something more than films like this would generally get and possibly deserve.

So really, its a very odd film, a composite, if you will, of different films stapled together that almost works in spite of itself. Vincent Price would later comment that he had no idea what the film was about, and its little wonder.

Bless him, Peter Cushing was uncomfortable having his name associated so boldly on the film’s marketing which suggested that he’d got a bigger part in it than he did, for fear of misleading his fans (a sentiment I appreciate all these years later). But while, yes, it was Peter Cushing’s association that mislead me into buying this Radiance edition of a film I’d never even heard of, I find myself glad I did, even though I know I’ve been had (like many before me no doubt). I expected a horror film starring three of the genre’s old greats – Cushing, Price and Lee – and instead found myself watching a messy sci-fi/horror hybrid that doesn’t really star either of them;  Scream and Scream Again is a bizarre, fascinating curio indeed.  Four out of ten for the film, eight of ten for the weirdness value.

That all being said, its no doubt a surprise to many that not only did Radiance deem this film worthy of a UK Blu-ray premiere, but also afforded it some substantial extras and packaging.  I doubt anyone, a few years after the film was released theatrically, could have imagined in their wildest dreams something like this happening over fifty years later, but the world of physical media/ film collecting is very strange indeed. There are video interviews with surviving cast and crew, a very good commentary track, an excellent booklet with essays, as well other extras. As should be expected with such things, they increased my understanding and appreciation of the film so do their job superbly.  An unlikely winner for physical media then (albeit close to an own-goal considering how broken the film largely is, but then…)

Mind, on the subject of broken films, this brings me to how this one features a link with Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, my favourite bad horror movie.  Scream and Scream Again features Michael Gothard playing the “smooth mover” (the film’s description, not mine) serial killer/vampire Keith. Isn’t Keith a smashing name for a serial-killer vampire? Anyway, I digress…. years later Gothard would feature in Lifeforce as Dr. Leonard Bukovsky, part of the British space programme  that brings the space vampires to Earth. Gothard was a good actor who deserved more success than he had (appearances in Scream and Scream Again and Lifeforce notwithstanding), whose fairly successful career stalled in the mid-eighties, suffering from depression before finally committing suicide in 1992. A sad end to a promising talent.

Hanks’ not-so Wonderful Life

A Man Called Otto, Dir. Marc Forster, 2022, 126 mins, HD

It’s so easy to dismiss life-affirming comedy-dramas such as this as just being, well, inconsequential fluff, and it wouldn’t be far wrong either, but really, what’s wrong with that anyway? Don’t we sometimes need simple films with a positive message, and indeed, maybe need them now more than ever?

A Man Called Otto is based on a Swedish film and its likely very true that the original is far superior, these things usually are. American versions of European cinema invariably dumb things down, and it can often be because of Hollywood A-list talent (in this case Tom Hanks) hijacking a ‘sure thing’ and losing what made the original so special. I can’t comment on the original here because I haven’t seen it.

It’s  easy to think of Tom Hanks as being this generation’s James Stewart, which in this case suggests he is perfectly cast in a film that feels very much akin to Frank Capra’s classic Its a Wonderful Life. Largely, the casting works-  Hanks is very good here but I think he’s undone by his screen persona cultivated by so many films now, its like baggage he could do without. Its not something I’ve really thought about before, but maybe that’s  true for many actors as they become veterans of their craft with a big filmography behind them.  Like the chains of old Marley’s ghost or something., weighing them down.

Hanks plays the titular Otto, a grumpy old bastard who’s had enough of life and the idiots that he perceives surround him.  As Otto reacts to a new family which moves into the building across the street from his home, he reflects on his life and we learn his back story (in flashbacks featuring Hank’s real-life son Truman playing the young Otto), and what made him the crusty old bugger he has become.  The trouble is, Otto’s ‘journey’ in this film might have worked better had Otto been, well,  more… piss and vinegar; less likeable. We know that Otto is decent, admirable, misunderstood by his neighbours, simply because, well, he’s Tom Hanks.  He might grumble a lot, but he’s really decent underneath and will do the right thing by everyone because, well, he’s Tom.  He always comes good.

Magnum P.I. and the Daughters of Satan

Daughters of Satan, Dir. Hollingsworth Morse. 1972, 90 mins, Talking Pictures TV

Another low-rent b-movie on Talking Pictures TV? I sense a pattern emerging here.

In some other, alternate universe, I’m possibly a millionaire and Tom Selleck is most famous for being Indiana Jones, but in our universe, I’m not a millionaire (bah!) and Selleck is instead most famous for his role in Magnum, P.I.  Some years before Selleck was/was not able to take the Indiana Jones role, he starred in Daughters of Satan, a film that very much feels like a television movie and not all that removed from his most popular role, sporting both detective/mystery elements and that iconic moustache.

Set in the Philippines, for all its ‘TV movie of the week’ feel so typical of network offerings during the 70s, the film certainly feels more substantial production-wise than, say, a Hammer film probably would, albeit any Hammer production with a title like Daughters of Satan would surely be more fun than this turned out to be.

The plot, such as it is, involves some kind of Satanist cult and James spotting an old oil painting in an antiques shop. The painting, which depicts a trio of witches being burned at the stake in the 16th century by Spanish Conquistadors, catches his eye chiefly because one of the witches is a dead ringer for his wife, Christina (Barra Grant). Eventually it transpires that this is one of as series of paintings of the event portraying it from different angles, and one showing the lead Conquistador’s face looks just like James, and we’re dealing with some kind of reincarnation plot and the witches’ vengeance over the Conquistador and his descendants. There’s a clever idea here, suggesting a terrible bloody curse that runs down through the centuries, that could have been the basis of a dark, disturbing horror, but this isn’t it. Unfortunately this film gets really confused, not sure if its a tale of possession or reincarnation, and so any internal logic tends to break down at several points. Indeed, the Satanist Cult seems largely irrelevant, except for allowing moments of nudity and torture to spice things up.

I suppose this film is… okay. Its terribly slow-paced and stretches ones disbelief to breaking point several times (you see figures spookily disappearing from an oil painting followed by creepy events, you better believe that canvas is quickly getting thrown into a fire and destroyed). It features an elaborate murder attempt involving melting blocks of ice holding back a car from plunging into a precipice until alibis can be arranged that feels more like something from an episode of Columbo or, indeed, Magnum, P.I. than your usual horror flick. Alas, Daughters of Satan, for all its great title suggests (hey, it got me watching it)  really isn’t as scary or horrific as it should be.

Hello and good riddance to The Caller

The Caller, Dir. Arthur Allan Seidelman, 1987, 97 mins, Talking Pictures TV

One of those films that proves a struggle after just twenty minutes- it feels wrong, like a faulty car engine sounds wrong, that’s how films sometimes feel; the pacing feels off, the acting ill-judged, maybe the tone and mood just isn’t working. Its a broken movie. By the end of the near-two hours (zipping through the ad-breaks) you just feel like its wasted time you’re not getting back.

I always wonder what premieres feel like for films like this, or certainly those cast and crew screenings usually held before release, when the film ends and there must be this uncomfortable silence. Actors thinking ‘get me out of here’ and maybe the producers half-heartedly patting the director on the back with some word of congratulations while thinking maybe there’s some hope to break even with some home video sales/foreign market deal.

The Caller begins as some odd kind of thriller, as an obscured character in a trench coat takes an interest in a lone woman shopping in town and then follows her to her isolated cabin in the woods, walks around it spying her through the windows (in the shower, getting dressed, preparing some meal for a visitor who we think never arrives), then  finally knocking the door to ask to use her phone explaining his car has broken down a few miles back. He’s obviously up to no good but even early on there’s some weird tension going on, in how she reacts to him and he teases her. A half-hour Twilight Zone plot gradually gets painfully stretched out to ninety minutes via all sorts of peculiar detours of plot and behaviour, increasingly stretching any plausibility, until a final twist arrives so out of leftfield its like the last reel is from some other movie.

Its pretty horrible really, never shaking a straight-to-video, 1980s exploitation b-movie feel. Malcolm McDowell is dependable as ever in this kind of charming-menace role that one feels he could do in his sleep, and Madolyn Smith pretty enough (but really little else) who is done few favours playing a beautiful woman who acts increasingly unhinged with curious shifts in character. Its a film that feels intriguing enough at the start, but with films such as this there’s an unspoken contract with the viewer that the central mystery will eventually get paid-off satisfactorily. In cases such as this, with films that cheat that by throwing in an utterly ridiculous revelation, it all falls apart leaving a bitter taste of failure. Instead you just want that wasted time back: I wasted a Friday evening with THIS?

Its like a murder mystery which gives you four suspects, but then at the end of the duration of the film spent working out who the murderer might be, the film throws in a ‘surprise’ by naming a fifth character who the viewer hasn’t even seen onscreen. That’s what the ending of The Caller feels like, an utter cheat and a contemptible one at that, and worse, one that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I kid you not (and I’ll reveal the twist only because I’ve hopefully spared you the trouble of ever watching this rubbish) – one of the characters is a robot and its all some sort of game or trial at the end of the world. Or something. Utter insulting nonsense even for a schlock flick from the 1980s.

Returning to Neverwhere

Richard Corben’s Den Book 1, Dark Horse Books, Hardback

Reading this again after so many years took me right back to the 1970s- Chris Foss paintings adorning covers of sci-fi paperbacks, the Brothers Hildebrandt, early 2000 AD, Boris Vallejo paintings on the covers of Savage Sword of Conan,  the adult fantasies hidden within the covers of Heavy Metal…  the adverts for art portfolios in Fantastic Films magazine, tantalising glimpses of Richard Corben art, artbooks of Frank Frazetta. Those days aren’t ever coming back again.

I first experienced (and its certainly an experience)  Richard Corben’s 1970s fever-dream Den in its graphic novel collection Neverwhere, which I found in a remainder bookshop in the early 1980s. Its an astonishing piece of work, so inherently 1970s; airbrushed art, phantasmagorical florescent colours, naked bodies, crazy violence. Its nods to 1960s/1970s sci-fi fantasy fascinations like Lovecraft,  Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, Robert E Howard’s Almuric and Conan. Its maddeningly naïve but astonishingly bold and prescient (it predates Schwarzenegger’s turn as Conan in John Milius’ movie- Schwarzenegger in his prime surely the only man who could ever have played Den).

On the one hand, its a twisted but curiously fascinating amalgamation of all of its inspirations- reading it now I found it illuminating picking those out, like it was a weird time capsule to sift through.  On the other hand,  its the ultimate adolescent fantasy of nerds everywhere, thin bespectacled teens imagining themselves as muscle-bound supermen encountering voluptuous, sexually adventurous women, incredible monster-Gods and evil despots. Its queerly definitive and totally non-PC,  so you’re never sure whether to cheer or snort in disgust.

I must confess re-reading it decades after last doing so (my copy of Neverwhere lost in the attic somewhere, this new reprint a godsend) I gained a new appreciation of how clever it is, what Corben was doing. Yes the book’s astonishing and often provocative imagery is its main selling point and appeal, certainly for my teenage self, but the story and its fantasy tropes, how Corben absolutely nailed all that teenage wish-fulfilment and wild hormone-fuelled daydreams into an adult comicbook like nothing ever seen before.  Well, time has been kinder to this than I would have expected, and I think I love it more now than I ever did.

Spider-verse boggles

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos,  Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, 2023, 140 mins, 4K UHD

After watching this last night, I went to bed with a headache, feeling exhausted, and while I think it may have been a long day taking its toll, it might also be something to do with how utterly tiring this film is. Its such an assault on the senses- I guess this is how some folks felt in 1981 after watching The Heavy  Metal Movie (crikey, imagine these guys making THAT film now).  This film is so noisy visually, so dense,  that you feel like if you blink you might miss several somethings, and its just as noisy with regards the audio, I’m sure I missed some important lines of dialogue. Maybe its a generational thing, but I’m pretty certain that if this film was put into a time machine and screened for cinema audiences back in 1966 or 1976, a lot of folks would stagger out mid-way through reeling from the experience.  Its like another cinematic language here, and these film-makers aren’t hanging around for some of us to catch up (I had a similar, albeit more critical notion, regards last year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once).

Its such a beautiful-looking film, its aesthetic is quite extraordinary visually; I would imagine any single frame would work as a piece of art or as the richest comicbook panel. The achievement of what has been done here cannot be underestimated, I was gobsmacked throughout and was sure my jaw was left hanging numerous times at the sheer audacity of what was going on, but sometimes it felt as if someone was peeling back my eyeballs, there is just so much to take in. In some ways it makes most other animated films look like b&w silent movies, there seems such a generational leap. Its absolutely extraordinary, albeit perhaps the crowning example of over-indulgence too. Its genuinely exhausting.

And there’s 140 minutes of this (well, minus the credits, and even they are darn pretty most of the time). and even then, yes even then, after over two hours of this modern-day Fantasia, it drops a sudden Empire Strikes Back-level cliff-hanger that leaves the story unfinished, various arcs left hanging, waiting for a third spider-verse film to finish the lightshow. Its so cheeky you almost have to applaud the sheer nerve, especially when the originally-intended ploy of making both films together fell apart leaving us waiting until 2025 at the earliest (my money is on 2026). As if the ending of MI7: Dead Reckoning Part One wasn’t bad enough. Movies just can’t end anymore, it seems, and I don’t really understand how they can be so long and yet still manage to be incomplete.

So anyway, I’m cautious regards actually reviewing this film because I feel like I haven’t seen all of it yet- partially because a lot of this film’s success really depends upon the next film serving a proper pay-off for what this one sets up, but also because, really, I think I need to see it again to make proper sense of it. Indeed, not just watch it again once, maybe watch it again twice. That’s not Kubrick-level complexity or subtlety I’m talking about either, or some Nolan-level puzzle to try unravel over multiple viewings, this film isn’t that complicated, its just so busy there must be so much that went right over my numbed head, jokes and Easter-Eggs and references to pop culture, comicbook mythology…

Its good. It may even be great. These spider-verse films may shape up into the best comicbook trilogy ever made. I just don’t know. Possibly a masterpiece. I just don’t know. I find myself wishing they could just spend a similar fortune making an animated film like this entirely in the style of the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko-era Spider-Man comicbooks, that 1960’s visual style and with a pace in which I could just relax and enjoy, you know, a typical sensical plot without feeling like my retina is being scorched and my ears deafened and my synapses evidently just too slowed by age to keep up.

Who wants a M3gan for Christmas?

M3gan, Dir. Gerard Johnstone, 2022, 102 mins, HD

Easy enough to think of this as Ex Machina for the children of the Chucky generation, but its hardly even that. Its one of those low-ambition, never mind the plot contrivances,  simple horror flicks minus the, er, actual horror, curiously enough. Its woefully adequate, I guess, for what it is, which really isn’t much, clearly aimed at the teen market who aren’t inclined to think their way through films or remember any film made pre-2010, certainly not the Child’s Play movies that started back in 1988.

Its one of those films utterly divorced from reality- Cady (Violet McGraw) is a young girl orphaned when her parents are killed in a car crash, and her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) takes her in. Wouldn’t you know it, Gemma is a brilliant, beautiful roboticist making child’s toys under pressure to come up with the next Big Thing.  She’s designed M3gan, a prototype life-size doll with advanced AI and she pairs the doll with Cady to test it out and shirk her own new parenting duties. Cady becomes intensely attached to her new robot friend and carer but unfortunately Gemma may be brilliant, but she seems to have ignored Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

“(1) a robot may not injure a human being   or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” 

Well okay, maybe she didn’t forget them, she just forgot to install them. Apparently. So M3gan starts to take her duties (caring for Cady at the expense of all else) to predictable extremes- woe anyone who pisses Cady off. Imagine a Terminator posing as that little girl down the street. I guess that must have been the pitch, anyway.

Its anaemic, its dull. It really isn’t very good. You know how they bring back the same old toys every year wrapped in fancy new packaging? Well of course they do the same with films too.

I’m too old for this —-, Marlowe

Marlowe, Dir. Neil Jordan, 2022, 109 mins, HD

Diane Kruger and Fringe brought me here, damnit, and I’m not likely to forgive, but its how these things happen.  I’d written yesterday about Kruger turning up in a second season episode of Fringe, and when I looked up on the Internet what she’d been acting in lately, I noticed Marlowe in her filmography, and remembered I’d still got that film lurking on my Tivo hard drive.  Coincidence is a harsh mistress for film lovers, it seems, and Kruger rising to my attention now feels like Marlowe watching  a mysterious dame walking through his office door: trouble finds you.

The story, such as it is, find us in late-thirties Bay City, and has beautiful heiress Clare Cavendish entering Marlowe’s office, flirting in full-on femme fatale mode while hiring him to find her lover Nico Peterson (Francis Arnaud), a prop master at Pacific Film Studios who has gone missing. Marlowe’s investigation quickly hits a dead-end,  as Peterson is believed to be dead, having drunkenly departed an exclusive club, fallen down in the road and then run over by a car, destroying his face.  About the only people who believe the body is Peterson are the cops, who prefer anything that conveniently rules out a homicide, while an unconvinced Marlowe gets quickly mixed up in the machinations of various criminals still hunting  Peterson’s trail and something  that was in his possession, all of which seemingly connected to drug-smuggling.

Marlowe isn’t all bad. Its very much style over substance; it looks lovely with fine period atmosphere and rich cinematography, but its over-complicated screenplay(based on a novel)  is clumsy and the film way overlong. In its favour it does have superb casting in two of its leads, namely Jessica Lange as ageing ex-starlet Dorothy Quincannon and Diane Kruger as her frustrated daughter Clare Cavendish. These two are perfectly cast, they really look like mother and daughter and sell it perfectly in their scenes together, such great scene-chewing friction, but really they deserve a much better movie.

Other casting reverts to predictable type: Danny Huston plays Floyd Hanson, the owner of the club that Peterson was leaving, a sure-fire red flag that Hanson is no good and that there’s more to the club than meets the eye. Its that kind of casting that I despair at- I like Huston, he’s a very good actor but he’s really typecast in such roles now, a victim of his aptitude for playing bastards. The casting is really lazy but also typifies how the script telegraphs his role in the film as soon as he appears.

That’s the saddest thing regards Marlowe– the lack of surprises and genuine twists. In that respect, its really quite lazy, leaving the suspicion that the film-makers believed the atmosphere and style of the film  would be enough: I almost wonder if they were tempted to shoot/ release this film in black and white, maybe they should have.