Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Stacy Keach is one of those actors who, like Robert Shaw, is mainly remembered today as a cliché seventies tough guy, but was actually a pretty good actor with a wider range than people nowadays give him credit for. Here he gets to display quite a bit of that range as a cop who, being cleverer than most of his colleagues because initially he just takes the job to pay his way through law school, has far more insight than you might expect into the ethical grey areas he inevitably finds himself in, and sometimes struggles with the morality of what he does, and the emotional demands it makes on him. Though his soul-searching is never allowed to get in the way of the action, which is realistically small-scale and infrequent, with much more tension arising from the possibility that shooting may break out at any moment than actual shooting.

This film is at its best when it's at its most serious. Gun violence is never glorified in the slightest. When the bullets fly, innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time are just as likely to die as the bad guys. And when our hero's inexperience causes him to make a serious error of judgement, the near-fatal wound he receives, which fortunately we only glimpse, is one of the nastiest things you're ever likely to see in a movie made this long ago.

Where it falls down a bit is its bizarrely uneven tone, which obviously influenced the next generation of cop dramas, such as "Hill Street Blues". One moment it's "French Connection"-style grimness, and the next, we're rather patronizingly being offered a bit of light relief, sometimes involving characters too weird to be believable, especially in an otherwise extremely serious movie. In particular, a scene in which numerous vice squad detectives overpower and arrest a gay man for soliciting is meant to show us how conflicted the hero is about having to arrest harmless people for doing things that shouldn't be illegal. But we only understand this when he explains it afterwards to his wife. The scene itself plays out as comedy, revolving around the hero's embarrassment at having to pretend to be homosexual, and the fact that the gay man they're trying to arrest is, in contrast to the usual "fairy" stereotype, absolutely enormous, and takes so much arresting that everybody falls in a pond.

However, it's gripping, tense, and sometimes moving, except when it's unfortunately trying to be funny, and both George C. Scott and Stacy Keach give fine performances (except for Keach's drunk acting - very few actors can convincingly act drunk, and he isn't one of them). I would have liked to see some of the supporting cast developed a bit more, but apart from these flaws, it's overall a pretty good film in which plenty happens, even if it's a bit dated, and its embryonic 1972 version of political correctness still has a long way to go.

There are some movie genres of which it's said that if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. In the case of British blaxploitation werewolf whodunits, that's literally true. Which is a rare achievement. Offhand, I can think of two dinosaur westerns.

Of course, like so many other films labeled "classics" by this site, it's so much not a classic that they might as well have said it was a pepperoni pizza. But you know what? It definitely falls into the "so bad it's good" category in the best possible way! By which I mean that it's atrocious in just about every department, apart from having a decent B-movie budget and a cast some of whom are actually good at their jobs, and yet there's never a dull moment, and when it fails, it does so in ways that are bizarrely entertaining.

Fun fact: Calvin Lockhart was the first black actor to get top billing in a British horror movie. And for a very long time he remained the only one. Frankly, looking at his performance here, I can understand why they were disinclined to repeat the experiment. He's absolutely appalling! His choice of costumes doesn't help, since it gets progressively weirder until he ends up in what looks like full-on bondage. By the time things get that silly, he's blazing away at the poor old werewolf with a fully automatic weapon loaded with silver bullets from a helicopter, and if your sympathies aren't with the hapless lycanthrope who didn't want to be there in the first place, you haven't got a heart!

And what a cast! You've got Charles Gray, the original Blofeld, Anton Diffring, who played evil Nazis in just about everything (including Doctor Who), a pre-fame Michael "Dumbledore" Gambon before he was even the Singing Detective, and... well, I hate to say this, but the usually wonderful Peter Cushing gives one of his rare lousy performances as some nut with a ludicrous accent who is absent from so many scenes that I guess they could only afford to hire him for one day. Though when he does get to talk, the rubbish he talks is almost Ed Wood-level priceless! In its own daft way, this movie is tremendous unintentional fun. Watch out for the scene that was blatantly ripped off by "Alien". And don't forget to shout out the name of your chosen suspect during the 30-second "werewolf break". I wonder how many people did that utterly pointless thing during its cinematic run? Not many, I suspect. But now, in the privacy of your own home, you can finally do it without embarrassing yourself. Go on. You know you want to.

If you watch movies the way you look at paintings, this one deserves its reputation as a classic. As noted in the synopsis, the cinematography is brilliant for its time, the sets are an excellent example of German Expressism intersecting with reality, and it all looks just splendid. The trouble is, if you watch movies the way almost everybody does, there's rather a lot wrong with it.

Firstly, this is a 90-minute film with maybe 30 minutes' worth of plot, so almost everything goes on for too long or happens very slowly, and the pace is mostly glacial. When the hero loses a coat-button, the camera draws our attention to this seemingly trivial detail. Will this be an important plot-point? No! It happens so that a later scene in which he puts on his coat can be stretched by having his wife notice the missing button, search in her sewing-basket until she finds one that matches, and sew it on in real time.

Then there's the tone. Tragicomedy is a difficult blend to get right, and here they get it very wrong indeed. The mood simply changes abruptly every so often, as if the script was written by a tag-team wearing happy and sad masks. One very sudden mood-swing is so extreme that it's preceded by an intertitle admitting that the following turn of events would be ludicrously implausible in real life, but the author of this story has taken pity on his fictional character and thrown in an outrageous coincidence.

And of course there's Emil Jannings. Actors in silent movies by definition couldn't talk, so of course they all overacted. But this isn't just hamming it up; this is an explosion in a bacon factory! See Emil Jannings pull funny faces and comical capers as a slightly absurd but lovable old man! (You may find him more lovable if you don't know he later became an enthusiastic Nazi - oops, I just told you.) Now see him reel in bug-eyed horror as his world collapses! And now we've found an excuse for him to do a lengthy and irrelevant bit of drunk acting! Uh-oh, it's time for his descent into complete and utter despair! See the multi-faceted Emil portray near-catatonic depths of misery by impersonating Quasimodo in slow motion for half an hour! Is there no end to the man's talents!? (Actually, there is. Eating anything larger than a grape without getting some of it caught in his extravagant facial hair is completely beyond his capabilities.)

This movie is technically very good indeed, but it's also very old-fashioned indeed, in the worst possible way. And for a film which is supposed to be about 50% comedy, it's distinctly lacking in actual humor.

This movie really was a game-changer. No previous western had been so unflinchingly gory, apart from "Django" and its even more outrageous quasi-sequel "Django Kill!", both of which were banned throughout the English-speaking world, and in most other places too. But this film has none of the bizarre stylistic flourishes and impossible gunplay that divorce spaghetti westerns from reality. In a tale based very loosely on the exploits of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, whose gang really was called the Wild Bunch, middle-aged outlaws living in the last days when the west was truly wild have to accept the fact that they're obsolete. Unfortunately, the final bank job that was meant to provide for their retirement doesn't go entirely according to plan, and we're very soon treated to our first sight of technology that truly shocked audiences in 1969 - the squib and blood-bag that allow bullet-wounds to spurt copious amounts of gore. In the course of the movie we shall see a great deal of this, often in slow motion.

If that's all there was to "The Wild Bunch", those critics who at the time dismissed it as cowboy torture porn would have been right. But that's not really the point of it at all. The violence has to be realistically ugly to remind us that killing other people isn't glamorous or fun, and is very seldom heroic; right from the start, innocent bystanders tend to get fatally caught up in shoot-outs. The "heroes" are selfish, ruthless villains who are all to some degree evil, or at least willing to do evil things. And some are more willing than others. Yet they have a strange kind of decency, and there are lines they won't cross. In particular, their sometimes fragile but in the end absolute loyalty to each other is, as William Holden at one point states explicitly, what separates them from animals.

It's also what separates them from their less honorable counterparts, the barely human bounty hunters who pursue them throughout the film. This ugly mob are the movie's biggest flaw; comical grotesques like these belong in a far less serious and realistic western. But otherwise, the acting is almost universally excellent, as is the characterization. Even the repulsive megalomaniac "General" Mapache is given a scene where we see him at his best, and understand why hundreds of men are willing to fight and perhaps die for this alcoholic buffoon. What matters is that the film passes the acid test of good fiction about bad people; you don't like them, but you care what happens to them. That's not an easy thing for either a writer or an actor to achieve. Neither is making Django look like a wimp, but the apocalyptic final showdown manages that too. It's ultra-violent and extremely macho, so it isn't for everybody, but it's one of the most important westerns ever made, and in any genre a truly great film.

I assume from the previous review that this rental company has a number of different versions of this movie, and it's pure potluck which one you get. In the interests of better customer service, I'm giving this film one star, not because of Buster Keaton's performance, but because the DVD I was sent was literally painful to watch, and consequently I didn't watch it for very long.

I refer to the 2004 DVD produced by Elstree Hill Entertainment, which I presume has absolutely nothing to do with the illustrious Elstree Film Studios, but would like people to think it does. Obviously I don't expect perfection from a movie this old, but there's more than the odd scratch wrong with this! It looks like a tenth-generation video copy, it's incredibly grainy, it wobbles, it's most certainly not in fullscreen format despite the info give here, and worst of all, the entire film is out of focus.

I'm not reviewing the film, I'm reviewing the unwatchable version of it you may and up attempting to watch. Infinitely better digitally restored prints of silent movies far more obscure than this starring people a lot less famous than Buster Keaton exist, so presumably I've just given up on a DVD transfer of it that's far worse than most. If I may quote Amazon...?

For region 2 PAL viewers, avoid the Elstree Hill Entertainment release version - ASIN # B0001U0HHA . This version has poor audio. Lots of negative reviews. Try the E1 Entertainment colorized version which has positive reviews. There are also two other black and white region 2 PAL releases by Whe Europe Limited and Simply Media (no reviews posted).

And...

I have several Elstree Hill dvds and the quality is deplorable on all of them. Unfortunatly they were presents making it difficult to return. I shall make sure that this Companys products are not purchased in future. D. Newson.

Seriously, CinemaParadiso, you're making yourselves look cheap here! And for everybody else, this film is in the public domain, so a free legal download of it would probably be no worse than the DVD this company may charge you to rent.

This extraordinarily intense melodrama, which plays with the idea of personal identity in an unsubtle way by having just about everybody in it running away from something or other, but gets rather more subtle as it progresses, isn't that far off being some sort of masterpiece. Since this is a French rather than an American film, thoroughly disreputable people, especially women, are treated far more sympathetically than they would have been in English-language cinema from that era. This is a film with one villain who's pathetic rather than genuinely evil (also, he bears a distinct resemblance to Mr. Creosote from "The Meaning Of LIfe"), and absolutely no true heroes. In the end, everyone's out for themselves, and they can't let that personal agenda go. The best of them try harder than the rest, but in the end, they're all just flawed, selfish human beings. And very few of us could claim to be anything else.

Compared to Hollywood cinema of the time, it's extraordinarily frank in its depiction of what exactly it is men want from women, and other aspects of the lives of both sexes, and it doesn't really attempt to excuse any of it. It also manages the rare trick of being technically a war movie, but never once showing any actual warfare, presumably for budget reasons. Essentially it's about the tedium of those very long periods most soldiers experience between wars, and the things they get up to in order to make life interesting, focusing on one particularly intense soldier and what he does to relieve his boredom, and resolve certain issues he already has.

On the plus side, it does this very well, and there's never a dull moment. Unfortunately, certain typical features of this type of film are over-emphasized, notably the peculiar trope that anyone who believes they can tell fortunes is automatically 100% correct, and certain overly convenient aspects of Fate that exist to neatly tie up the plot. And despite its very honest depiction of human nature, our hero isn't a very good actor, especially when it comes to his numerous drunk scenes, and his leading lady is frequently borderline catatonic. Some of the supporting cast were so much better, and played much more intriguing characters, that I sometimes wished the film was about them instead. So I'd sum it up as flawed but interesting.

Some very old films age better than others. I'm afraid this is one that hasn't aged too well. Possibly because the screenplay was written by Thea von Harbou (Mrs. Fritz Lang), who was never all that bothered about narrative logic, it doesn't make much sense. The hero's financial woes appear to be conveniently sorted when, early in the film, a beautiful and incredibly rich Russian princess he's never even met suddenly informs him that, for vague reasons involving events we don't see, she wants to marry him, which really ought to be the deus ex machina in the last reel, but instead drives the entire very confusing plot, in which by a series of amazing coincidences the main characters all run into each other while wandering around Europe, but mostly don't know it because they're pretending to be other people, and some of them go to a lot of trouble to do things which will be important later, although they don't know that yet so have no reason to do them.

Even more of a problem is the humor. There's very little in this comedy that's actually funny, and what there is tends to be bizarrely random, as if the production team weren't quite sure what a joke was. For instance, one character, for no discernible reason, has a large pack of dogs which he's trained to run races through his house. And the most memorably weird scene involves one of the baddies encountering two strange men who somehow make a living by pretending to be zoo animals, which they apparently do all the time, even when there's nobody watching. None of this has the slightest relevance to the plot. Our heroes don't ultimately save the day by using trained dogs and men disguised as ferocious African wildlife. These oddities simply pop up for no reason at all whenever there hasn't been anything to laugh at for a while.

Alfred Abel, usually typecast as a doomed neurotic, is obviously having a lot of fun playing a gleefully amoral but ultimately good-hearted gentleman rogue, and he does at least know he's in a comedy. He even tells a joke or two. But some of the other casting is peculiar to say the least. Watch out for Max Schreck of "Nosferatu" fame as one of the quartet of ragged idiots who make up the entire revolutionary guerrilla army of the Grand Duke's wicked rival. This fearsome foursome look so weird that they're more like trolls than human beings, and one of them has a hunchback and capers about in a desperate attempt to be funny, so I think we're supposed to find them comical. But in fact they're genuinely menacing, and the things they're given to do, such as attempting to hang someone, don't include any actual humor. Nine years later, the Marx Brothers made "Duck Soup", some themes of which are so similar that I think this movie may have been an influence on it. Only the Marx Brothers remembered that comedies ought to have jokes.

There doesn't seem to much love for this lesser-known Steve Coogan project. Even the lukewarm "Saxondale" was somehow deemed worthy of a second series, but not poor old Dr. Terrible. Which is a shame, because it's not at all bad. As in "Coogan's Run", Steve plays a different character in each episode (as well as our host Dr. Terrible, who pops up at the beginning and end of every story), and as with "Coogan's Run", they don't all work equally well. But the best of them really are splendid one-off creations; the cheerfully hypocritical, lecherous, and utterly depraved Tobias Slater, Witch Locator almost deserves a series of his own. He certainly deserves one more than boring old Saxondale, who got two.

Perhaps the problem was that the series lovingly pastiched films so specific and so out-of-date that the younger members of the target audience simply didn't get the references. Hammer went out of business in the mid-seventies, and by 2001 they were regarded by youngsters as defunct purveyors of crummy old horror movies that dad or granddad thought were good. You have to have a genuine affection for those films to appreciate what this series is trying to do. If you don't, you'll probably laugh more at the films themselves than you will at these parodies of them.

How many viewers in 2001 (or indeed now) would understand that the lesbian vampire episode rips off a trilogy of not exactly immortal films the last of which was made in 1971, and Steve's character is based on the hero of the extremely obscure and not terribly good "Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter" (1974)? "Doctor Who" got away with a surprisingly similar season consisting entirely of Hammer horror pastiches, but that was in 1977. (And its most famous and/or notorious story, "The Talons of Weng Chiang", is directly parodied here, right down to casting a caucasian as a fiendish chinaman - Mark Gatiss, of all people! It seems there were times when he didn't think Political Correctness was more important than breathing.)

On the plus side, the better episodes - "Voodoo Feet of Death" is undoubtedly the worst - contain lots of the kind of verbal humour you expect from Steve Coogan, and visually it looks extraordinarily like the kind of film it's ripping off, right down to some surprisingly nasty gore. And Dr. Terrible himself is such a monstrously bizarre creation that it's hard to believe he's Steve Coogan. BUt you really do have to understand what the joke is in order to get it.

Oh my God!!! Here we have the ultimate evidence that whoever writes the synopses for this website really needs to consult a dictionary regarding the meaning of the word "classic". Seriously, if you just want a word that often applies to movies because something has to go in that box, you might as well type "visible". Or "inedible". Because if this is a classic, "Battlefield Earth" is a masterpiece, and "Reefer Madness" is a documentary.

Once the Golden Boy of British cinema, the visibly decrepit Ken Russell directs numerous friends and relatives, none of whom can act, plus the Mediaeval Baebes, who can't act either, and himself, attempting to act with a ludicrous German accent and more visible nasal hair than I've ever seen in any other movie, in the grounds of his palatial residence. Hey, the guy really was good once - he deserved a palatial residence more than some! But not for this.

Mark Kermode likes this film because he's a pretentious half-smart fool who thinks he ought to. I hate it because it's obviously terrible. Even the video quality is poor, and if the camera we see about 50 minutes in is one of the two they were using to shoot the whole thing, it would explain a lot. Referencing everything from "The Magical Mystery Tour" to Kenneth Anger's "The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome", by way of "Shock Treatment", the deservedly obscure sequel to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", this abomination completely misunderstands the concepts of both parody and "so bad it's good" in the worst possible way. More discerning viewers wanting that kind of thing would be far better advised to rent the films of Larry Blamire.

Less discerning viewers may fall about in stitches at the not necessarily deliberately awful acting from people with terrible teeth and skin (which are weirdly often shown in extreme close-up), the white woman giving a hilariously retro darkie blackface performance, and the general air of Z-movie incoherence which was in 2002 at least 40 years out of date, but personally I didn't. There's not enough genuinely funny material in this entire movie for a half-hour episode of a second-rate TV sitcom, and even that would have involved people who could genuinely act, as opposed to the director's talentless buddies. This is just horrible. Don't bother.

This minor masterpiece of German Expressionism isn't quite up there with the same director's "Nosferatu", but it's still an exceptionally good example of cinema from that era. It's surprisingly similar to the early work of Fritz Lang, probably because Lang's wife wrote the screenplay. Also, it shares some cast members with Lang's "Dr. Mabuse The Gambler". What it doesn't have is any supernatural content whatsoever; it appears that many of Murnau's films have been misleadingly retitled to imply that they're along the same lines as his greatest hit "Nosferatu". Though the main character does hallucinate a bit, and at one point he tries to run after a figment of his imagination, so I suppose it does technically have a phantom in it after all. Not to mention an extraordinary moment when our hero seems to be under attack from that twisty building spell in "Dr. Strange" 94 years before it was invented!

The plot concerns a very nice, hopelessly naïve, and extremely fantasy-prone man who, after being bowled over by a woman in the most literal way possible, falls madly in love with her. And in this case, "madly" means exactly what it says on the tin. This is the outrageously melodramatic tale of a man's obsessive love for a complete stranger who doesn't have the slightest interest in him, and how it shatters his cosy little world. By the way, if you hate spoilers, you might like to know that the prologue is full of them, so if you don't want to know how the story ends before it's even begun, start at Chapter 3 and rewind to 4:45.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this film is its honesty about human nature. In stark contrast to Hollywood movies made 30 years later, there's no black-and-white morality. With one exception, nobody in the film is truly evil, and if they do bad things it's because they're weak, selfish, stupid, or in the hero's case, deranged. Almost everyone's a lot more highly-sexed than the Hays Code would later permit, promiscuous women aren't automatically punished for not being virgins, and the extremely physical nature of the hero's obsession with his "phantom" is expressed in a surprisingly frank way. Of course, Germany in the years before the Nazis ruined absolutely everyone's fun was a gleefully decadent playground for those who could afford it, and they were pretty relaxed about that sort of thing, and most other things too. If you pay attention during the first nightclub scene, there's a black man dancing with a white woman. In the USA in 1922, that would have been at best scandalous, and at worst suicidal! Hitler wouldn't have liked it much either.

It's not exactly subtle, and, as with all silent movies, there's some dreadful overacting. But Alfred Abel, who has to carry the entire film, gives an excellent performance as the gentle, innocent daydreamer who suddenly falls victim to raging passions he didn't know he had in him, and spends most of the movie doing things he knows are a very bad idea indeed because he simply can't stop himself. It's also, as silent films that aren't comedies go, surprisingly fast-paced, presumably to mirror the state of mind of its increasingly mad hero. And in the restored and tinted DVD release, despite a few scenes where the ancient print shows its age, it looks absolutely gorgeous. Definitely worth watching if you want to see a silent film that isn't one of the select few everybody's heard of.

A disproportionate amount of Japanese folklore concerns abused women returning from the grave as empowered she-devils to wreak bloody revenge on men. One might almost think that Japanese men collectively knew they were wrong to treat the opposite sex as something between pets and furniture, and feared that maybe the karmic imbalance might have consequences. This creepily passionate tale is a perfect example of that theme. It's also a perfect example of how fairy tales the world over started out a lot more Grimm than they are now, and frequently had to be heavily edited for adult content before they were suitable for the kiddies.

It also illustrates another interesting aspect of Japanese folklore. By the sixties, monsters in western cinema had become clichés. Vampires were soulless, utterly evil predators that existed purely as antagonists, werewolves were reluctant monsters who suffered from a dreadful curse and were thus to be pitied as much as their victims, and ghosts were merciless seekers of a very specific vengeance. Here we see monsters derived from a less obsolete and thus richer supernatural tradition who are a complex blend of all of the above: avenging ghosts who can get very physical in all sorts of ways, who are also vampiric werecats, and, like vampires, are inescapably bound to their fate because they're dead, but, like werewolves, have enough humanity left to loathe what they've become and struggle against it. Though as it turns out, some struggle harder than others.

The special effects are crude and minimal, but the stylized dreamlike quality of large parts of the film means this doesn't matter. And unlike Chinese movies of this type, there's none of that sub-Three Stooges "funny" business that so often ruins Asian horror. The nearest it gets to joking is a "heroic" warrior's very carefully worded recounting of a fight we've just seen, so we know he was terrified out of his wits and won pretty much by mistake (this is surely a nod to a similar scene in Kurosawa's "Rashomon"). Ultimately this film is about love versus duty; all three major characters are given a terrible task by superiors they cannot defy without dire consequences to themselves, but which clashes disastrously with their everything in them that's truly good.

What prevents this eerily atmospheric and sometimes genuinely moving film from being a true classic is that the simple story isn't really adequate to fill an hour and a half. "Kwaidan" (1964), the breakout movie that put Asian horror on the international map, dealt with similar material, but it was an anthology film containing several stories. "Kuroneko" stretches one such tale to breaking point, and I'm afraid that it does sometimes drag. Not only is it slow-paced, but every event that could possibly be repeated is shown more often than is strictly necessary. If ever a movie cried out for subplots it's this one! Its companion-piece "Onibaba" is better-known because although it deals with a similar situation, the supernatural elements are minimal, so the characters aren't locked into the rigid structure of a fairy-tale, making it a story about humans into whose lives weirdness intrudes. This is basically a story about ghosts into whose extremely limited un-lives humanity intrudes, and I'm afraid it doesn't work quite so well.

Oh dear. This is one of those films movie critics who want to sound clever and Media Studies students love (or pretend to), and everybody else is bored and baffled by. "Legendary" sometimes means "this extraordinary film will completely knock your socks off, and even if you don't like it, you'll have to admit you were impressed", but all too often it means "this incomprehensible film will completely bewilder you, and even if you sit through the whole thing and manage to stay awake, you'll have to admit you still don't know what the point of it was supposed to be."

I'm giving it more than one star because of its ambition, its originality (this is basically a found footage movie that predates "The Blair Witch Project" by 32 years), and because to start with I was actually quite interested to see what would happen. Herein lies the big problem. Normally I wouldn't dream of revealing the ending of a film in a review, because I hate spoilers myself. But in this case it's not so much a spoiler as a warning. Nothing happens. There's no ending. The vanished man never turns up either alive or dead, the reason for his disappearance is never discovered, and not a single one of the many questions that arise is answered. The film literally ends with the director admitting they've achieved nothing and anyway the movie's about to end so they might as well all go home!

Making the central character somebody who is only shown as a still photograph was a bold move, but unfortunately he's neither interesting nor likable. In fact, he's such a schmuck that it's hard to see why anyone who wasn't his mother would particularly care about his disappearance. There's no hint of foul play (except, late in the film, a bizarre accusation from a ludicrously unreliable source), and it's established early on that it would have been perfectly in character for him to vanish simply to avoid the responsibilities of being an adult, none of which he was ever much good at coping with, so as mysteries go, it's not all that thrilling.

The most important character who actually appears in the movie is the missing man's fiancée, who has been obsessively looking for him for two years, but "The Vanishing" this ain't - not even the lousy Hollywood remake! She turns out to be such an unpleasant person that it was very likely her that he was running away from, and anyway, her quest is never concluded, because the only possible extremely vague lead they ever get quickly turns into an argument of the "Oh yes it is!" - "Oh no it isn't!" variety that chases its tail in very small circles for an incredibly repetitive and dull half an hour, at the end of which the cast and crew get as sick of it as the viewer, realize they'll never get anywhere, and give up.

If you want to see random Japanese people, nearly all of whom obviously aren't actors, improvising random stuff while pretending to recognize a photo of some bloke they're supposed to have seen a couple of years ago, shot on film whose graininess ranges from moderate to horrendous, with sound which is sometimes so poorly synchronized that a notice appears at the start informing you this not a fault on the DVD, you'll love all two hours plus of this movie! If, on the other hand, you think plotless, poorly shot films with amateur actors, and several scenes in which the director tells the cast, crew and audience that what's occurring on screen doesn't matter because it's fiction, but on the other hand, lots of Japanese people really do vanish every year and he's trying to make some sort of vague point about that while exploring the subjective nature of truth are pretentious tosh, you might not enjoy it quite so much.

This lesser-known film by one of the masters of German Expressionism is obscure for a reason: it isn't very good. In fact, it's downright dull. A German aristocrat is accused of murdering his brother, an event which we never see because it happened before the film begins, as did the trial and acquittal of his alleged murderer. Since we're told from the start that the Count presumably committed the evil deed because everybody thinks so, it's clear he's such an excessively obvious suspect that the real murderer must have been somebody else. Eventually we find out who, and it doesn't come as much of a surprise. In the meantime, guests at a country house party that isn't any fun at all scowl at each other and become vaguely paranoid because their host murdered his brother. Allegedly.

If you're expecting supernatural happenings along the lines of "Nosferatu", you'll be disappointed. The English-language title is completely misleading, since absolutely no ghostly activity takes place. There aren't any castles either. At one point a minor character has a bad dream lasting less than a minute which has nothing to do with anything, and that's as creepy as it gets. And the twist ending will take very few people by surprise. Oh, it's shot fairly well, there's a certain amount of atmosphere, and this print has been lovingly restored. But we're still looking at 82 minutes of almost nothing happening.

It's hard to believe that Roger Corman thought he would be the ideal director to take on Shakespeare, but the evidence is right here! Guess what - Corman was wrong. This bizarre mash-up of "Richard III" and "Macbeth", not to mention a weird attempt to tie it in with his ongoing Poe series, is a half-hearted floundering mess.

The usually reliable Vincent Price is absolutely dreadful as Richard III. He's occasionally quite good, but mostly he's strangely muted and awkward, as if he's taking it far too seriously because it's Shakespeare. Which of course it isn't, though I think there are little bits of actual Shakespeare dropped in here and there, meaning that the dialogue randomly lurches in and out of Elizabethan English. But mainly it's the work of some hack who should have stuck to second-rate horror movies. Vincent's much, much better when he quotes genuine Shakespeare in "Theatre of Blood" (including a scene from "Richard III"), undoubtedly because it's a black comedy so he allows himself to go gloriously over the top. Here, he pulls peculiar faces, does a silly walk, and somehow manages to play a raving mad deformed medieval serial killing monarch without being interesting. And that wig doesn't help. Or that hat. Above all, nobody who wants to be taken seriously should do a silly walk while wearing tights, especially if they're male.

Everything about the production is a bit off. The star is lousy, and nobody else is the least bit memorable. The inevitable romantic subplot has nothing to do with anything. Sometimes it seems to be trying in a desultory way to be a horror film, presumably so that those scenes could be included in the trailer and people would get the idea the whole movie was like that, when mainly it's just Vincent Price going a bit mental. Even his insanity is oddly botched; the ghosts that torment him are mostly portrayed as if they're hallucinations created by his guilty conscience, yet they correctly predict the future and sometimes try to kill him with poltergeist phenomena, so they must be real after all. The horror elements are tame and limited to a few scenes, as is anything you could honestly call action. Inevitably, a movie called "Tower of London" has to show us that building at regular intervals, and every time it does, Monty Python fans will be unable to prevent themselves from muttering "it's only a model". Worst of all, what ought to be an extremely colorful film is shot in black and white, as if Roger Corman knew it was a dud and couldn't be bothered wasting any more money on it than he had to.

You'll probably enjoy the 1939 movie of the same name a lot more than this sort-of remake. A not-yet-famous Vincent Price is briefly in that one too, as the doomed Duke of Clarence, but Basil Rathbone's Richard III is far better than Vincent's would be 23 years later, and Boris Karloff is superbly menacing as Mord the club-footed executioner. Sometimes newer doesn't mean better.

Firstly, I should point out that although this film for all practical purposes a western, the action takes in the Austrian Alps, and the dialogue is in German. I didn't mind, but I know some people hate subtitles. You have been warned.

If you're as keen on westerns as I am, you'll notice a lot of nods to classics of the genre, ranging from "Shane" to "High Plains Drifter" (and some not-so-classics, such as "Death Hunt" starring Charles Bronson - remember that?), and taking in quite a few early Clint Eastwood films; the nastiest of the baddies' resemblance to Lee Van Cleef is presumably no accident. Inevitably, the plot is an amalgam of various classic western tropes: the mysterious stranger who rides into town, the tyrannical patriarch with a brood of very nasty sons, and so on.

What makes it different is its sheer darkness. Hey, it's even got "dark" in its title! The Very Bad Thing motivating the hero, which we get a glimpse of in the prologue, turns out to be almost impossibly horrible in literally medieval ways. The hero, if he can be called that, is willing to even the odds in what initially looks like a six-against-one showdown by committing sneaky murders that, oddly, the movie at first tries to pass off as accidents, though there's never any real doubt who was responsible. And the violence is brutal. Gunshot wounds, along with other even nastier injuries, are portrayed realistically. There's a lot of blood, and non-fatal wounds from high-calibre bullets reduce people to screaming helplessness ("Full Metal Jacket" was clearly an influence). It's almost a horror western.

What lets it down is that same relentless grimness. Everyone, especially the central character, seems to be allergic to smiling, and no valid reason is ever given for why these people put up with living in a tinpot dictatorship in a freezing valley where survival is marginal at best when normality exists a few miles away. The overwhelming unhappiness, alleviated only by what is literally the last line spoken in the film, is rather depressing for the viewer. Also, I'm not sure that horror-movie jump-scares are entirely appropriate for a western, but I'm absolutely certain that accompanying the climactic gunfight with a crappy modern pop song called "How Dare You" performed by Screaming Satellites (an extremely generic and mediocre band who appear to be famous only for contributing this song to this movie - I assume that at least one of them must have been sleeping with the director) was not a good idea.

It's not altogether bad, but it's trying for a higher concept than it's capable of achieving, and it ends up being nowhere near as deep as it wants to be, and no fun either. Also, the direction is somewhat flat, so there's no real tension other than the artificial kind produced by heavily telegraphed jump-scares. I'd give this two and a half stars if I could, but I'll go the extra half because it's nearly a good movie. But it's just a bit too formulaic and weirdly leaden in its pacing to really make the grade.