Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Anthony Mann's westerns starring James Stewart have such a high reputation as classics that they're almost beyond criticism, but the fact is, they're not all equally good. In this very slow and mostly actionless movie, James Stewart's selfish, unlikeable anti-hero spends the entire film being gradually persuaded to care about other people by assorted overwritten stereotypes we're supposed to find wacky and lovable, including Walter Brennan, who must have been the allegedly funny but actually rather annoying sidekick in ten times as many westerns as any other one-note character actor. And even that relentless barrage of quirky niceness would have failed if, just as our thoroughly disinterested hero was about to ride out of a movie that was almost finished anyway, the bad guys hadn't shot his only friend in the back, giving him a very belated incentive to do what a man's gotta do in the last five minutes.

The inevitable romantic subplot is more complicated than usual, but so peculiar that in the absence of very much proper western action, I kept being distracted by the thought that maybe the entire film was a massive joke in which the cast and crew all knew the main character was gay but they never told the studio bosses. Almost everyone seems to be oddly asexual, apart from the two women who set their sites on James Stewart, both of whom struggle to get his attention because what he really wants to do is ride away from them both and settle down in a cosy little cottage with Walter Brennan - yes, really! By the way, one of those women spends the entire movie dressed as a boy. She's also one of the worst actresses you'll ever see in an A-movie, has a foreign accent that makes Inspector Clouseau sound authentic, and plays her part as if she's slightly retarded. The chemistry between her and James Stewart is so non-existent that they never kiss because it would just look creepy.

The idea of a totally self-centered protagonist who eventually has to admit he's a real hero after all would become a mainstay of spaghetti westerns when they were invented almost a decade later, but in 1954 it was well ahead of its time, and they were still tinkering with it. Here, the balance between the ingredients is badly wrong, and James Stewart frequently seems to be in the wrong movie. And they really could have done with a couple more gunfights. Strangely, the same director and the same star made a very similar film two years earlier called "Bend Of The River", and it worked far better. It looks as though everybody mistakenly thought that the formula would work better still with an even more reluctant borderline amoral hero, and didn't realize that once they'd gone too far over that line, they'd have to invent a whole new genre.

Although this is a sound movie, it's very much in the tradition of silent cinema. Perhaps due to synchronization problems in those early days, spoken dialogue is kept to a minimum, the more dramatic sound effects are unrelated to anything happening on screen, and plot exposition is done almost entirely through lengthy intertitles or shots of pages in an old book which conveniently explains everything. Which in its own way adds to the utterly bizarre atmosphere, since everybody wanders around observing extreme weirdness without saying very much. Like "The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari", "Vampyr" feels the need to explain to the audience that these irrational events don't necessarily represent any kind of reality, and may take place entirely in the mind of a young man who has become obsessed with vampire folklore. And it's certainly true that nothing supernatural occurs until after our hero has awoken in the middle of the night, so maybe it's all a dream. Which gives the film absolute freedom to be as Surreal as it wants to be.

And Surreal it most certainly is! A young man who coincidentally looks extraordinarily like H. P. Lovecraft is given a package containing the old book which conveniently explains everything by a complete stranger for no reason at all. Various aspects of the plot are then cryptically revealed to him by shadows cast by nobody, some of which show time running backwards, and quite a few of which are having a party just because they can. At one point he obtains a vital clue by falling asleep and having a dream within the dream (containing by far his best scene) which may actually be some sort of out-of-body time-travel, since a crucial part of it comes true.

Throughout all this strangeness, everybody appears to be seriously stoned. The oddly passive hero, almost all of whose job is done by the elderly servant who could be bothered to read that crucial book up to the page explaining how you kill vampires, wins the love of a girl with a thousand-yard stare who speaks in a flat baby-doll voice, and comes across as a lot less healthy than her semi-vampirized sister, who almost steals the whole film in a scene where she has to do absolutely nothing except look feral, but does it so magnificently that I wished the movie had been entirely about her - we're talking "Exorcist" levels of scariness here! She's certainly a lot scarier than the vampire behind it all, who fans of vintage sci-fi will instantly recognize as William Hartnell's Doctor Who in drag.

It's very old, it makes no sense whatsoever, and it's peculiarly fascinating because it's in a class of its own. And at only 72 minutes, it would make a great double bill with "Nosferatu".

Roger Corman simply didn't care what he did so long as it resulted in a movie he could sell! Having completed "The Raven" under budget and ahead of schedule, since everybody had already been paid for the next two weeks, he thought he might as well use the available resources to bash out another film in that time ("Dementia 13", the earliest film Francis Ford Coppola will admit he directed because it's not porn, was made in exactly the same way for exactly the same reason, though somehow it's actually quite good).

A very young Jack Nicholson, who had a small part in "The Raven", got to be the male lead, and a very confused Boris Karloff was persuaded to co-star in a production which, as an old-school actor who liked to learn his lines perfectly, he reportedly found genuinely distressing because the scriptwriters were making it up as they went along and he didn't know what his motivation was. And dear old Dick Miller, that irrepressible B-movie character actor who eventually gained minor immortality as the guy who unwisely sold guns to the Terminator (but couldn't provide a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range), is the sniveling lackey who sort of ties it all together. A few other people are involved, but their characters make even less sense.

Nicholson's weary soldier, whilst wandering around 19th. century Spain trying to find the Napoleonic War (which must make him the most hopelessly lost character in the history of cinema), blunders into a love-affair with a mysterious girl who looks just like the portrait of angst-ridden nobleman Karloff's long-dead wife, but she won't say who she is, and claims not to remember. This is a film in which every character is deliberately lying, can't remember who they are, or both, apart from the understandably bewildered hero, who knows nothing about anything and doesn't have much luck finding out. The scene near the end where Nicholson grabs Miller and threatens him with extreme violence if he doesn't explain the entire plot right now was shot after everything else. Roger Corman edited the footage he had into some semblance of a story, then told the scriptwriters to write Dick Miller an exposition speech somehow justifying all the foregoing incoherence.

This movie has to be seen to be believed! Corman may have been shamelessly cynical, but his small cast give it everything they've got, especially Karloff, who, despite his advanced age and poor health, is as willing to thrash about in freezing water as Bela Lugosi was in Ed Wood's "Bride Of The Monster". But it's so muddled that it looks as though somebody tried to film one of those long, creepy anxiety nightmares exactly as it happened, with a sort-of-rational explanation tacked on at the end. For connoisseurs of really, really odd movies only. Fun fact: this is the film-within-the-film playing at the drive-in cinema in Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets".

Like all portmanteau horror films, this one suffers from some of its segments being far better than others. And since it has only three parts, the fact that one of them's a waste of celluloid is more of a problem than usual. "The Telephone" is a sleazy little thriller which isn't really horror, except that a woman is threatened by a killer. She also takes her clothes off quite a lot, and lesbianism is involved. Mario Bava's direction is as competent as always, but there's precious little material to work with here, and most of it is an excuse for gratuitous female nudity. By the way, since there are so few characters, the inevitable twist is even easier to guess than usual.

"A Drop Of Water" is properly atmospheric, and this time the woman in peril is more concerned with the trouble she's in than finding excuses to take off her clothes, but again, there's basically no story. A person tempted by greed steals a valuable ring from the corpse of somebody who obsessively believed in spiritualism. This happens in a horror movie. Can you possibly guess what happens next...? The manner in which the thief is haunted, though rather primitively realized in special effects terms by modern standards, is genuinely nightmarish, but it's all style and no substance: somebody does a bad thing, a ghost gets revenge, the end. It looks very much like an idea for a movie that they couldn't flesh out to full length so it ended up here.

What sets the film apart is "The Wurdalak". Nearing the end of his career (this was the last film in which he was able to hide the fact that his arthritis was so bad he was having trouble walking), Boris Karloff is simply magnificent in the only screen portrayal to date of a vampire straight from genuine Eastern European folklore, rather than the mangled version of it Bram Stoker cobbled together for "Dracula". Set in a strange, stylized Grimm's Fairy Tales environment, it explores the idea of vampirism as a plague which turns people into evil opposites of their former selves bent on infecting their loved ones. How hard must it be, even after the truth ought to be painfully obvious, for somebody to accept they must kill a spouse still sentient enough to claim there's nothing wrong with them, or mutilate the corpse of their child so that it won't rise again as a monster? The modern craze for zombies has sometimes addressed this dilemma, but here we have the purest treatment ever of it in a vampire story. And Karloff really is superb.

So basically this movie is one-third a star and a half, one-third three-star scary, and one-third five-star in a class of its own. I know the average of those scores makes it a three-star film, but the Karloff bit is so good I'm bumping it up one.

Mickey Spillane's once-popular ultra-violent private eye Mike Hammer didn't make it onto the big screen anything like as often as the creations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, because he was simply too nasty to be acceptable as any kind of hero. Robert Aldrich, the man who gave the world "The Dirty Dozen" and helped invent the spaghetti western, always had a way with extremely violent and not very pleasant "heroes", plus a gift for intelligently subversive irony completely lacking in the the original Mike Hammer novels, so he was the ideal director to bring the character to life. And Ralph Meeker is absolutely perfect as a borderline psychopath whose finest quality is a crude loyalty to his few friends that would just about qualify as a redeeming feature in an alpha male chimpanzee. I guarantee you won't like this guy on any level for one second, but you'll still care what happens to him. That's good acting, good directing, and good movie-making all round.

In a crucial change from the source novel, Hammer is, for purely selfish reasons, on the trail of the ultimate McGuffin, a "great whatsit" he knows nothing about except that people are willing to kill lots of other people to get it, therefore it must be immensely valuable. In the book, it's a suitcase full of heroin, and Hammer knows that all along. In the movie, it's something altogether different (and much more interesting), and when Hammer finally figures out what it is, he's not so sure he wants it after all. But by then, everything's out of control. Another change from the source material is that the police, instead of being in awe of this man who can do their job so much better than they can (usually by slaughtering all the bad guys), despise him as a sleazy thug who treats the woman who loves him no better than a pimp, and literally ask for a window to be opened when they have to be around him.

Mike Hammer, as portrayed here, is the toughest tough guy of them all. No wisecracks, just relentless brutality; he metes out the same level of nastiness to a corrupt official who disgusts him by demanding a bribe, and an honest man who annoys him by refusing one. If you include everything that's implied but kept just off screen so the censor will let it pass, this is a staggeringly violent film, and none of it is the slightest bit glamorous. However, your attention never wanders, and almost everyone who's onscreen for more than a few seconds instantly springs to life as a fascinatingly twisted character in a dark, sleazy world you're constantly intrigued by (watch out for spaghetti western regular Jack Elam playing another kind of villain while waiting for spaghetti westerns to be invented). If you like film noir, this is probably the ultimate example of the genre. And you simply won't believe that ending!

Although it's billed as "Edgar Allen Poe's The Haunted Palace", this is in fact the very first screen adaptation of a story by H. P. Lovecraft (who gets only the most grudging of mentions in the credits), and has nothing to do with Poe other than the title, and a few lines of poetry randomly thrown in to justify the pretense that it's part of Roger Corman's massively lucrative Poe franchise. It's actually a rather loose adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", complete with references to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, a copy of the Necronomicon, and a few brief glimpses of cinema's first Great Old One.

Vincent Price, in the kind of dual rôle usually given in this type of movie to the female lead, is superb as a pleasant but ineffectual aristocrat and his evil undead ancestor, two stereotypes Price was particularly adept at playing, struggling for control of the same body. Unfortunately the rest of the cast are a mixed bag. Lon Chaney Jr. in particular is a puffy, bloated wreck, and shambles through his surprisingly substantial part like a man who knows his career is in meltdown but needs the money. The hostile, paranoid villagers are the usual crowd with the usual attitudes; they get to raise a mob with burning torches and storm the castle twice! Debra Paget has very little to do other than become increasingly worried about her husband's odd behaviour, along with just about everything else that's going on around her, and nearly get raped (twice). And the kindly, rational doctor who is a sort of hero is a waste of space, since most of what he does ought to be done by Vincent Price as he struggles against his evil twin. In the source novella things happen very differently, making this character far more important, but in the film he gives the impression of only existing because they forgot to write him out.

Other aspects of the movie are more troubling. The idea of a village where every family has at least one badly deformed member owing to an 18th. century warlock's experimental cross-breeding of bewitched girls and horrors from another dimension is clumsily handled, presenting anyone with a physical abnormality as scary and implicitly evil. And thought it briefly touches on the plight of parents whose once-beloved child has degenerated into something truly monstrous that they have to keep locked up, nothing interesting is done with this. Also I would have liked to see much more made of the fact that the villain's only redeeming feature is his love for a woman who has been dead a century or more, and whose shriveled corpse he still treats with affection during his obsessive attempts to magically resurrect her, a sub-plot which is utterly wasted.

Overall, this is a highly atmospheric gothic horror story held together by an excellent central performance, but somewhat let down by an overly formulaic script riddled with all the usual clichés, and so much reliance on Vincent Price wandering around a creepy old castle being menacing, mostly to Debra Paget, that for much of the film surprisingly little actually happens. I wish it had been directed by someone slightly less cynical than Roger Corman. And I really could have done without Lon Chaney Jr,. whose performance as a man who should have died a long time ago is convincing for all the wrong reasons.

"Dracula" is, if you count all the very loose adaptations, by far the most-filmed novel ever written, so it's not surprising that movie studios sometimes get it into their heads to film something else by Bram Stoker, only to find he wrote exactly one book that makes a good movie (though Ken Russell came closest when he turned "The Lair of the White Worm" into a completely bonkers parody which still manages to make more sense than its source novel). "The Jewel of Seven Stars" hovers on the edge of filmworthiness, so once in a while somebody has a crack at it. You may have seen a big-budget slab of tedium starring Charlton Heston called "The Awakening". This, believe it or not, is the previous attempt to film the same book. And it's a whole lot more fun!

An archaeologist excavates the tomb of Ancient Egyptian witch-queen Tera, discovering her body to be so well-preserved that it could almost be a scantily-clad actress trying not to breathe or twitch her eyelids, apart from that unfortunately missing right hand (don't worry, it'll turn up). At the exact moment that he opens Tera's sarcophagus, thousands of miles away in London, his daughter is born, dies, and immediately returns to life. Can you guess who she grows up to precisely resemble...?

With a plot that obvious from the get-go, no real suspense is possible, so most of the cast have to spend the whole film darkly hinting at things almost everybody else already knows, before getting the gorily torn-out throat that the Mummy's Curse inflicts on just about everyone, whether the actual cause of death logically ought to tear their throat out or not. In a blatant nod to Renfield from "Dracula", one character is shut up in a mental hospital that makes the one in "Terminator II" look humane. Another does fraudulent psychic card-readings just to add color to the proceedings. Many characters are oddly camp, including a screamingly gay man who appears briefly for no discernible reason before literally running out of the movie never to return.

And at the heart of it all, Valerie Leon, in yet another example of Hammer's splendid tradition of casting women in difficult twin rôles as naïve innocents and monstrous avatars of undying evil because they have large breasts and taking it on trust that they can act, displays so much cleavage she has to make an in-character joke about it, along with all the acting talent she brought to bit-parts in several "Carry On" films and a series of adverts for Hai Karate aftershave (which was basically bottled essence of Alan Partridge). Of course, it didn't help the overall coherence of the movie that Peter Cushing had to be replaced on the second day of shooting because his wife was dying, and then 47-year-old director Seth Holt unexpectedly dropped dead in mid-production.

This is one of Hammer's strangest films, with nightmare logic trapping all the protagonists in easily escapable peril which eventually gets them anyway, such as the woman who is somehow mauled to death by a small and totally immobile statue she has kept in her home for over 20 years despite knowing it was incredibly evil and dangerous. On almost every conventional level it fails completely, yet it's so odd it sort of works as an unintentionally surreal semi-spoof. And if there was one, it would definitely win the Oscar for Most Scantily Wrapped Mummy.

This is another of those films with a high concept that reviewers fall over themselves to like because it's politically correct, even if the film itself isn't really all that good. A Spanish film-maker is granted "unprecedented" access to North Korea, so long as he is accompanied at all times by government minders. Gee, I wonder if he's going to somehow burrow under the skin of the regime and uncover the whole truth, despite being constantly watched by the secret police? Spoiler: he doesn't.

The most surprising thing about this movie is how nice the majority of ordinary North Koreans obviously are. But this shouldn't really surprise anybody intelligent enough not to assume that everything said about a repressive government also applies to the normal human beings they happen to rule. And it's not really all that interesting. There is a very interesting moment involving a Catholic church that threatens to reveal something profound. But it's a mere moment, and it comes over three-quarters of the way through the movie. Almost nothing we couldn't gather from pre-existing sources is presented to us, other than the sense of a failed state like North Korea having many millions of citizens who, being ordinary people with no other information about the world than what the state tells them, assume they're living normal lives and just get on with them.

An exceptionally annoying aspect of this documentary is that just about everybody is subtitled, whether they're speaking Korean or almost perfect English with any accent other than American. This includes the Spanish director, whose English is very good, and who supplies a great deal of the narration. So we're constantly forced to switch between trying to ignore intrusive text we don't need that appears annoyingly at the bottom of the screen, and suddenly paying attention to it after all because we genuinely don't understand the language being spoken. It would be a minor detail if you could turn it off when you didn't need it, but, alas, you can't.

Another unfortunate thing about the film is that a massive amount of the North Korean government's official position is spouted by literally the only foreigner they could recruit to their cause, a dim-witted and extremely boring fanatic who happens to be Spanish, just like the director they approved for this project. Not one single word is said about the possibility that some kind of mind-game might be going on here. Or indeed the fact that North Korea's pet foreigner, despite his constant rhetoric about Socialist equality, is as chubby as Dear Leader Kim Jong-Un, in stark contrast to the conspicuously skinny general public.

My impression of this documentary was of a rather stupid man trying to be fair, and being shamelessly manipulated by people much smarter than him. It's the nearest thing the current North Korean government could hope to get to a fairly plausible whitewash. It's trying to make a very good point, but it makes it very badly. I have serious reservations about Michael Moore, but a far more interesting film would have resulted if they'd let him into the country. But then, they wouldn't, would they?

Spoiler: this is NOT the worst film ever made! Yes, it's absolutely dreadful in every technical sense, yet it does, in its own way, provide entertainment. And a film which entertains is doing what films are supposed to do. The key to its success is that, unlike those horrible Troma spoofs where they know they can't make a good film so they cynically make a bad one and hope you'll laugh at it ironically, everyone here is genuinely doing their best, and it's woefully inadequate. The nearest modern equivalent is probably the infamous "Troll 2", which in some respects is actually worse, since at least Ed Wood spoke the same language as his cast.

Though apparently he spoke it in a unique way. One of the glories of "Plan 9" is that, whenever the action grinds to a halt for somebody to give a long speech that either provides plot exposition or just pads the running time, which is inevitably going to happen a lot in a sci-fi movie this cheap, Ed Wood's dialogue is so clumsy it often borders on Surreal, especially the word-salad spouted by shamelessly fake TV psychic The Amazing Criswell at the beginning in a doomed attempt to persuade you that the film you're about to see portrays events that actually happened.

Other highlights include those gleeful little flying saucers bobbing on clearly visible strings as the US Army unleashes its ultimate weapon: grainy World War II stock footage. Or the way that star Gregory Walcott, who had a long and successful career in TV and film (he was later to appear in 4 Clint Eastwood movies), sometimes looks as though he can't quite believe this isn't all a bad dream, especially while attempting to convince us he's really flying a plane in a hilariously minimalist cockpit set. Or just about anything else in the movie. Though a special mention must go to the most infamous aspect of the film: Ed Wood's attempt to integrate a few minutes of unrelated footage featuring the late Bela Lugosi into the rest of the movie by using a "double" (his wife's chiropractor) who looked absolutely nothing like him.

It's a disastrous, embarrassing mess, but it really is a lot of fun, and weirdly lovable in what it sets out to achieve, and how badly it fails on every level. Since it's quite short, it would make an excellent double bill with Tim Burton's "Ed Wood".

Fritz Lang was unquestionably one of the all-time great directors, and some of his early work in particular is absolutely extraordinary. Unfortunately, after he made what is nowadays regarded as his masterpiece, "Metropolis", he had the same problem as Terry Gilliam did in the wake of "Baron Munchausen"; if you spend a fortune on a massively ambitious film which isn't a commercial hit, no matter how good you are, the studio is going to give you a lot less money next time. Lang, whose budgets had been getting steadily bigger, suddenly had to compromise his grand visions because the accountants were shaking their heads, and it took him a while to adjust.

"Spies" attempts to create another supervillain just like Dr. Mabuse (and played by the same actor, Lang's favorite bad guy Rudolf Klein-Rogge), only even more terrifying, since instead of Mabuse's handful of sleazy minions, Haghi, whose hairstyle is as odd as his name, is in charge of a vast and ruthlessly efficient criminal organization, controlled from a secret underground headquarters several levels deep and with at least a hundred full-time staff, including proper henchmen in sinister leather uniforms. So basically he's a Bond villain 34 years before the first Bond movie.

It's a fantastic concept, but unfortunately Lang can't afford to show us any of it properly. Haghi's HQ amounts to little more than one small, bare control room containing what passed for hi-tech information technology in 1928 (you can see how tiny and low-budget it is in the stills above), and his gang is effectively no bigger than Mabuse's, since the existence of everyone and everything else is almost entirely established by a couple of shots of extras milling about in a stair-well. Apart from a fairly convincing train crash and some rather muddled action towards the end, Haghi's nefarious schemes are very low-key, and the magnificently decadent night-life that so enlivened "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler" isn't shown here, other than a token scene in a peculiar night-club for people equally keen on ballroom dancing and boxing.

It's still pretty good, other than the slowness of the first half, which gives us romantic and moral dilemmas instead of action in an obvious attempt to save money for the big finish, but you can sense Lang's frustration with the low budget. Even his trademark weird visuals barely feature at all (the second-last of the stills above, which seems to show a medieval army, isn't from this film), apart from a bit of total bizarreness involving a clown with a gun and some giant insects, but that's literally the last three minutes of the movie. Overall this is one of a very talented director's lesser works. And apart from the much more prominent romantic elements, there's nothing in it that Lang didn't do better 6 years earlier in "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler".

Firstly, the synopsis given here is, as is so often the case, gibberish. Based very loosely indeed on the historical facts concerning the disastrous final robbery by the James-Younger Gang, this very odd western opens with a horribly clumsy bit of voice-over plot exposition, cuts to an unnecessarily prolonged scene of Robert Duvall on the toilet, and then spends its entire running-time lurching all over the place as it tries unsuccessfully to figure out whether or not it's supposed to be a comedy.

Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger, the nearest thing the movie has to a hero, is a huge, bearded lump of wood (offhand, I can't think of anything else Cliff Robertson was in), whose character development consists of being obsessively interested in state-of-the-art technology, mainly so that his technical expertise can get him into trouble in ironic, heavily signposted ways, and saying "Ain't that a wonderment!" far too often. Robert Duvall is an absolute swine as Jesse James, to the point where he's basically a cartoon bad guy who actually gets to kill people, and he gives his default over-the-top performance. Every other character is literally one-dimensional. Frank James is a nonentity who reads or quotes the Bible incessantly. Another gang-member is obsessively superstitious. And so on.

Much worse is the peculiar plot, which, after one reasonably well-staged gunfight near the start, ambles along setting up an over-elaborate series of absurdly contrived plot-points, while stopping for strange comedy interludes, such as a way-too-long slapstick baseball game that has nothing to do with anything. Even what ought to be the climactic shootout is badly mishandled, pausing repeatedly to remind us that almost everybody in the film who isn't an outlaw is a totally unsympathetic hypocrite, and give us a bit more of that "humor" which keeps popping up in the wrong places and isn't the slightest bit funny. And a lot of the overacting that occurs throughout is downright painful.

B-movie fans may enjoy spotting plenty of familiar faces (near the beginning, watch out for Valda Hansen, who was in Ed Wood's "Night of the Ghouls", in the very small rôle of "nude girl"), but this is a muddled misfire of a movie that never figures out which genre it's supposed to be in, and has no genuinely interesting characters. Also, it's a bit short on action. Walter Hill's "The Long Riders" (1980) shows us exactly the same events from exactly the same perspective, but it's so different that you couldn't possibly call it a remake. Which is probably why it's a much better film.

Although it's sometimes listed among the greatest masterpieces of the film noir genre, I'd call this an almost-classic let down by some major flaws. The noir elements are perfect. Framed by the nastiest gang of criminal degenerates you could ever wish to see, the worst of whom is played by a very young Lee Van Cleef, then brutally beaten by a sadistic, moronic cop whose idea of an "investigation" is to hit people until they confess, our hero sets out to clear his name by catching the real culprits. And although the on-screen violence is fairly low-key and almost bloodless because it's 1952, what we do see is surprisingly vicious. These are tough guys living in a tough world, and most of them are horrible.

What lets it down is a bloated, overlong second half set in a pleasant holiday resort run by annoying Mexicans who are meant to be funny, where the surviving noir characters from the first half uneasily hang about trying to behave themselves whenever there's anybody watching as if they suspect they may have strayed into the wrong genre. I got the distinct impression that the first draft of the script was for a tightly plotted B-movie which was expanded to main feature length by padding this bit considerably. There's also an awkward romance involving a young lady who definitely belongs in a different genre, and has no chemistry with John Payne, who for a leading man has extraordinarily little charisma (not to mention a distracting resemblance to Tony Hancock).

Another serious failing is the way the identity of the crooked ex-cop who organizes the robbery is unknown to the other characters because they've never seen him without a mask, yet the viewers know what he looks like right from the start. So the very long section of the movie in which he pretends to be totally respectable, and therefore doesn't do anything interesting, seems to have been written as a whodunit leading up to a surprise last-minute revelation of who "Mr. Big" really is, from which the element of mystery was inexplicably removed. Overall this is half a superb film tacked onto half an OK one. It's not bad, but it's nowhere near as good as some critics will tell you.

This is a well-made film. The actors give it all they've got. The period atmosphere is as authentic as it possibly could be without the use of a time machine. It's exactly the kind of movie critics fall over themselves to praise because it's a horror film that makes a serious point. But I didn't actually enjoy it in the slightest. And as for that serious point, there must be one, otherwise everybody involved wouldn't be taking the film so seriously, but I was completely unable to figure out what it was.

Obviously inspired by "The Crucible", this bleak tale of a New England family so fundamentalist that even the other Puritans kick them out for being too religious is utterly dismal from beginning to end. Their efforts to hack a farm out of the wilderness result in diseased crops, dead livestock, and, as the film progresses, more and more dead humans, all of which the grim patriarch (Ralph Ineson, who is very good as a horribly misguided man genuinely trying to do his best) and his increasingly deranged wife start to suspect may be caused by witchcraft. And in the absence of anyone else to blame, they turn their inquisitorial attention on their children.

Everybody is miserable all the time, constantly begging God not to condemn them to Hell for whatever trivial sins they fear they might have committed. And when the children start dying (there's no point in avoiding spoilers after that four-star review above has already given away the entire plot), their joyless fanaticism degenerates into ranting insanity. It's as much fun as it sounds.

And ultimately it's weirdly pointless. We're given repeated hints, and eventually absolute proof that, although the adolescent girl at the heart of the story is wrongly suspected by her parents of being a witch, actual witches in the most literal, medieval sense of the word are for some reason lurking in the woods (the only one we get a good look at seems to have escaped from a particularly dark adaptation of "Snow White"). So these religious fanatics are right to fear that servants of the devil who can fly on brooms and turn into animals may steal their babies, blight their crops, and murder them by magic, but they're doomed anyway.

In the end, this is just a well-crafted and well-acted but extremely depressing and very slow horror film with an agenda no more profound than that of a great many other cynically nihilistic horror films: almost everyone dies in nasty ways, and the devil wins. Though I did smile momentarily when the clearly underage leading lady takes her clothes off and is miraculously replaced by that dimly-lit woman on the poster who must be about 10 years older than she is.

Remember the first Avengers movie? This is basically the same film re-imagined by a whiny goth emo teen who turned into a middle-aged Hollywood director without ever growing up. Batman, by far the most important character, spends a huge proportion of the movie not really doing all that much except worrying about Superman, who has been set up as a bad guy for various reasons, including a complex but absurd scam which requires us to believe that if a bunch of terrorists in a foreign country were shot dead while Superman happened to be present, the American public would a) care deeply about the dead terrorists, and b) assume Superman was responsible because obviously an alien who can cremate somebody just by looking at him would need to use a gun.

For over half the film, much of what action there is occurs in multiple dream-sequences which we know are dreams from the start because of the obvious incongruity of what's suddenly happening (for instance, that picture at the top of the page). There are so many verbal and visual quotes from "The Dark Knight Returns" that it's obvious that's the movie Zack Snyder really wanted to make, but most of them are in different contexts where they make no sense. The grudge-match mentioned in the title happens because the world's greatest detective is completely fooled by anti-Superman propaganda (though Lois Lane isn't), gets very nasty indeed because both parties are genuinely trying to kill each other, and only ends non-disastrously because of a very contrived coincidence revolving around an extremely basic bit of information which the world's greatest detective somehow didn't know. And then they're suddenly best buddies so they can team up to fight a boring monster from another story who popped up to give them something to do.

Gal Gadot is quite effective as Wonder Woman, but she's hardly in the film until the big fight at the end, and every single time she's on screen in costume as Wonder Woman, an irritating "hey kids, Wonder Woman is badass!" generic heavy metal theme pops up on the soundtrack. Talking of irritating, Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor is obviously trying to channel Heath Ledger's Joker, but let's just say there won't be any Oscars coming his way for this performance. And despite Batman's concern that Superman is causing too many casualties, the "Batman never kills" rule has been quietly forgotten because Zack Snyder thinks that not murdering villains (or being fully prepared to murder Superman for illogical reasons that in the comic were Lex Luthor's motive) might make him look like a wimp. Though he does have a peculiar inhibition against killing anyone who'll probably be in the sequel.

It's not completely terrible. The action scenes, when we finally get to them, are efficient. The new Batman is a potentially complex character who isn't properly developed (though he's definitely not the same guy as he was in the previous three films). And Wonder Woman may or may not be capable of carrying her own movie. On the strength of this one, Gal Gadot can snarl just like Xena, Warrior Princess while looking much prettier, and she's quite good at hitting CGI monsters with a sword in slow motion, but I've no idea whether or not she can act, or whether her character is interesting. But overall it's far too long, far too slow, and not really very enjoyable.

If DC have the sense to put their cinematic franchise in the hands of somebody who knows comics are meant to be fun, they might still catch up with Marvel (heavy hints that Darkseid is going to show up soon suggest that they're going for exactly the same long-term multi-movie story-arc). But they'll have to hurry. Every movie like this loses them more ground.

Although he's remembered as the ultimate Surrealist film-maker, Luis Buñuel only made three films under the official Surrealist banner, and this set includes two of them (the third is the seldom-shown "Land Without Bread", a dreary documentary about poverty in rural Spain). Salvador Dalí is mentioned in the synopsis as his creative collaborator on both films, but Buñuel later said that Dalí contributed very little to "Un Chien Andalou" apart from some basic ideas, though he does have a cameo as a priest tied to a piano stuffed with rotting donkeys (Dalí, not yet sporting his trademark mustache, is the priest on the right). Dalí had nothing at all to do with "L'Age d'Or".

Of the two films, "Un Chien Andalou" is far more successful. Its 16-minute running-time allows it to be a non-stop barrage of incredibly strange imagery that makes no sense whatsoever, yet seems to matter a great deal to the central characters, a man and woman whose relationship is troubled to say the least. It manages to swerve between weirdness, comedy, and visceral horror - a certain shot was by far the most horrific image ever to appear in a movie at the time, and is still hard to watch today. You'll definitely know it when you see it! By the way, that's Luis Buñuel wielding the razor. The ultimate Surrealist movie, except perhaps "Eraserhead", which could easily be set in the same world. Unfortunately, its short running-time means that Disc 1 contains 16 minutes you want to see, and two hours of dull extras you probably aren't all that interested in.

"L'Age d'Or" is much more ambitious, and has quite well-known character actors in the two leading rôles instead of amateurs, but this tale of an oversexed couple experiencing bizarre relationship problems (again) dilutes the strangeness to the point where it sometimes becomes almost Pythonesque, mainly due to its feature-length running-time. Though it does have its moments, notably a shocking murder committed for the most trivial reason imaginable, and the two leads give it everything, especially Gaston Modot as a man permanently teetering on the brink of uncontrollable public displays of sex or violence, and frequently giving in to his impulses. Watch out for the great Surrealist painter Max Ernst as the leader of a band of embarrassingly useless guerrillas. Although it's nowhere near as fearlessly intense as "Un Chien Andalou" and contains much less extreme imagery, this film managed to be banned in many countries for decades, owing to the scene in which someone who is apparently Jesus Christ is shown emerging from a recently concluded orgy.