SAFETY LAST! (1923, Fred C Newmeyer, Sam Taylor)

 

* * * * 

A young man leaves his village to seek his fortune in the city, with hilarious consequences.  

Starring  Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke

Written by  H M Walker, Jean Havez, Harold Lloyd

Produced by  Hal Roach

Duration  73 minutes   

   

Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing from an air vent in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955). Elliot and his alien pal on a bike in front of the moon in ET (1982). Fred Astaire swinging from a lamp post in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952). Father Merrin arriving outside the house in THE EXORCIST (1973). Janet Leigh screaming in the shower in PSYCHO (1960).

So what is the most iconic image in motion pictures? And where does Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock face way above a busy street in 1923’s SAFETY LAST! figure? And furthermore, to what extent do people (like me) only know that shot because it was paid tribute to in BACK TO THE FUTURE?

I’d wager that most casual moviegoers have no idea from what movie the Monroe sequence is from, either, let alone the plot of SEVEN YEAR ITCH (which is a fairly amusing mid-level Billy Wilder comedy). And I myself certainly had no idea what SAFETY LAST! was all about, save for the hi-jinks promised by the counterintuitive title, and the fact that a bloke hanging on for dear life in such a precarious situation is unlikely to be taken from a study in neo-realism.

I was familiar with Charlie Chaplin; well, I’ve seen CITY LIGHTS (1931). And I knew Buster Keaton; that is to say, I caught THE GENERAL (1926) on TV one time. But I’d never heard of Harold Lloyd, so wasn’t sure if he was going to have as indelible a screen image as those two silent movie titans.

As it turns out, in SAFTEY LAST! Lloyd is playing a character named ... 'Harold Lloyd'. Just like James Spader plays 'James Ballard' in CRASH (1996) after the source novel’s author, except without the creepy implications of that far more twisted story (JG Ballard was never actually part of an underground cult that sexualised car crashes... as far as we are aware). Anyway, movie Lloyd is earnest, naïve and good-natured – not to mention physically dextrous. We like him.

The plot has Lloyd heading off to "the big city" (Los Angeles?) to find employment, so he can then send for his fiancé to join him when he is successful (she, incidentally, is played by Mildred Davis, who looks exactly like every other silent movie actress I’ve ever seen – or maybe I’ve only ever seen her, who knows.) And from there, it’s a sketch-like series of his farcical escapades in menial work, sprinkled with some mistaken identity, due to Lloyd wanting his visiting sweetheart to believe he has risen higher up the corporate ladder than he really has.

And the movie is pretty funny. There are lots of great sight gags: Harold running onto the back of a truck instead of his train; he and his flatmate jumping under their hung-up coats to hide from their rent-happy landlady. And the title cards are often amusing, too, as a substitute for witty spoken dialogue. Really, SAFETY LAST! is a relentless series of moments designed to make you chuckle. And it’s successful, as well as more than a little charming. It’s basically a live-action cartoon. Plus the clock sequence does not disappoint, managing to be a genuinely suspenseful set piece (although given the choice, I’d take Dr Emmett Brown any day of the week.)

So alright, answer me this: does the world need silent movies back? Was anything better before sound? I guess you didn’t get the mixing problems on movies like Chris Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR and TENET, or have to endure an actor’s voice that you find aurally annoying. There’s an efficiency to the storytelling, an unavoidable and welcome reliance on the ‘show, don't tell’ principle.

And it’s not like every technological advance makes the old thing redundant. Take practical effects vs CGI: it’s now a cliche that filmmakers will boast how much a scene is practical and not computer generated, especially a stunt. (This is a far cry from 1998’s LOST IN SPACE, where the marketing gushed so proudly about the project breaking the record for number of onscreen SFX shots with 750.)

But ultimately, let’s face facts: after THE ARTIST kicked up such a big fuss back in 2011, people didn’t suddenly fly out and start making more silent movies, did they? So what does that tell you?

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The entire backend of the film is Lloyd climbing up a building with nothing to stop him falling to his death, so they weren’t joking when they told us that being safe would not figure high on the agenda.

What would a movie SAFETY FIRST! be about?  It would be a lot duller.

Previously:  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME

Next time:  LAST NIGHT IN SOHO 

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (2020, Olivier Megaton)

 

* * 

The not-too-distant future is such a shitshow that the powers-that-be resort to broadcasting a signal that prevents people from engaging in unlawful acts.

Starring  Édgar Ramírez, Michael Pitt, Anna Brewster, Patrick Bergin, Sharlto Copley

Written by  Karl Gajdusek

Produced by  Jesse Berger, Jason Michael Berman, Barry Levine

Duration  149 minutes

  

JAWS is pretty much credited for establishing the summer blockbuster. But more than that, it’s one of the first of what can be classed as a ‘what if?’ movie. In the case of the 1976 hit, it’s a pretty innocuous one: What if a beachside tourist community was threatened by a man-eating shark during the 4th of July weekend?

It wasn’t until the more-is-more ’80s that big idea pictures reached their full potential. Mega producers like Joel Silver and the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer combo made a killing on high concepts that could be summed up in one sentence and had the potential for high stakes, sexy characters, tense culture clashes and enormous ticket sales:

– What if a racist white cop needed a black criminal to crack a case? 48 HRS (1982) (Silver)

– What if a sexy young woman worked as a welder by day and a stripper at night, with dreams of becoming a professional dancer? FLASHDANCE (1983) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a streetwise Detroit cop used his brash ways to investigate a crime in Los Angeles County's snootiest zip code? BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if two virginal nerds manufactured their dream woman and became the most popular guys in school? WEIRD SCIENCE (1985) (Silver)

– What if sexy young pilots flew around in a vaguely competitive tournament, between games of beach volleyball and hanging around the locker-room shirtless? TOP GUN (1986) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

– What if a black cop needed a white cop to crack a case, but couldn’t be sure that the white cop wasn’t an unstable suicidal liability? LETHAL WEAPON (1987) (Silver)

– What about one out-of-town New York cop versus 15 European terrorists in an LA skyscraper on Christmas Eve? DIE HARD (1988) (Silver)

– What if it was TOP GUN again, but this time with cars that keep turning left around a big circle while the spectators hope for a crash? DAYS OF THUNDER (1990) (Simpson/Bruckheimer)

Now, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is hardly a summer blockbuster; it’s a Netflix original that is unlikely to ever be projected onto a large screen or be subject to queues around the block.

But it does have a what-if scenario that would’ve fit right in during the '80s: What if the US Government made it physically impossible for anyone to commit a crime?

The first thing that comes to mind re: controlling people to lessen antisocial behaviour is Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, where Alex is a guinea pig for a new method that induces revulsion to counteract his naughty urges. Then there’s Brave New World, where Aldous Huxley went the nicey-nicey route for keeping the populace in check – as opposed to 1984, with George Orwell’s "boot stamping on a human face" focus on prevention through disenfranchisement: there can be no thoughtcrime if the state has removed the words to express dissent from your vocabulary. More recently, similar territory to THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME has been explored in THE PURGE movie series, where society is allowed to get all the crime out its system for one anarchic night per year.

Unfortunately, LAST DAYS wraps its intriguing premise up in an uninspired and generic crime thriller. It’s long, but not deep; violent, but unexciting; loud, but not clever. Disappointing, then, but perhaps not surprising, being that it comes to us from the director of TAKEN 2, TAKEN 3 and COLUMBIANA, the implausibly named Oliver Megaton, and that rather than the likes of Burgess, Huxley or Orwell, the source material is some comic book.

It’s the kind of movie where you’ve seen everything before: the plot points, the relationships, the attitudes, the tense interactions ... even the songs have all been used already in other, better movies: ‘Glory Box’ by Portishead (1996's STEALING BEAUTY); The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ (from LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELLS in 1998 – and also recycled from Megaton’s own TRANSPORTER 3!). LAST DAYS turns out to be a heist movie, and the heist, when it eventually comes, is good – but not good enough to make the previous 110 minutes worth enduring.

And by the end, I was left with my own 'what if?' question: what if they'd made THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME with more smarts, or more fun, or more originality – basically anything that could have stopped it becoming a bland, generic, overlong slog that’s worse than even the later PURGE sequels?

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  To paraphrase Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in JURASSIC PARK, crime will find a way.

What would a movie called THE FIRST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME be about?  Someone stealing George Washington’s wooden teeth or something like that.

Previously:  ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Next time:  SAFETY LAST!

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

ABOUT LAST NIGHT (1986, Edward Zwick)

 

* * * 

Two yuppies find romance in mid-’80s Chicago.

Starring  Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins

Written by  Tim Kazurinsky, Denise DeClue

Produced by  Jason Brett, Stuart Oken

Duration  113 minutes

I mean, honestly. Would you fancy trying to sell something called Sexual Perversity in Chicago to a mainstream cinema audience? No, I didn’t think so.

TriStar Pictures weren’t up to the task either, and they probably had Harvard graduates with master’s degrees in marketing and everything. Thus, David Mamet’s play joined a list of adapted works that were released with a different title. It’s a grand tradition that includes BABE (The Sheep-pig), FIELD OF DREAMS (Shoeless Joe), GOODFELLAS (Wise Guy), STAND BY ME (The Body) and BLADE RUNNER (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

Now, Mamet wasn’t involved in the production of ABOUT LAST NIGHT, although the frank, foul-mouthed pitter-patter dialogue certainly sounds like your man, especially the younger Belushi brother's explicit monologue about his own 'last night' that he unleashes towards a rapt Rob Lowe (who, as a notorious '80s sleaze hound, was probably taking notes).

I've never seen the play, but I'm sure it wasn’t totally discarded in the reimagining. So this gives me enough of an excuse to quote from Mamet’s excellent nonfiction book Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business, within which the Chicago-native gives the following writing advice:

The audience will undergo only the journey that the hero undergoes… Similarly, the audience will not suffer, wonder, discover, or rejoice to any extent greater than that to which the writer has been subjected. To suggest that the writer can, through exercise of craft, evade or avoid the struggle of creation is an error congruent with confounding the study of theology with prayer.

In other words, you have to have gone through what your characters go through, or at least your protagonist. Not necessarily literally, but definitely on an emotional level – clearly not everyone has to be Paul Schrader, depressed and living out of his car while scribbling down TAXI DRIVER.

In the case of ABOUT LAST NIGHT, however, there’s not much chance that Mamet, either of the two credited screenwriters or the viewer themselves haven't been through at least some of what our heroes face, even if only vicariously. It’s a pretty by-the-numbers account of well-worn romantic comedy/drama tropes, uncovering little that won’t be familiar from either one's own life or from other movies.

To wit: 

– An act one, getting-to-know-each-other montage, set to a song that seems to be called ‘So Far So Good’ and contains the lyrics "We've no way of knowing/How far this is going/If this isn't love/Then it's in the neighbourhood".

– The male and female pals separately discuss the politics of men telephoning women: frequency, proximity to how recently the lovers last saw each other, etc.

– Moore turns up at Lowe's door and then insists that she's not coming in; smash cut to them having sex in an empty bathtub with the built-in shower on full blast.

– A moving-in-together sequence that features much dropping of boxes and is set to another cheesy song that opines, "And it feels like a home/Though we've just begun/Ain’t it lucky/That we lucked into one another?"

– When Lowe's boss makes an unreasonable demand of him, he replies, "Fuck you!", to which his employer responds, "Fuck me? Fuck you!"

– "I love you" changes everything and is uttered at the exact halfway point, dividing the movie neatly into a ‘will this get serious?’ half followed by a ‘will they go the distance?’ one.

– That second half is full of suspicion and arguments and is waaaaay less fun.

There were few stars more attractive than post-BLAME IT ON RIO, pre-STRIPTEASE Demi Moore, and here her combustive mixture of endearing cuteness and gravel-voiced derision make up for Lowe's blandness – an actor who really only found his voice post-Brat Pack, a couple of seasons into TV's The West Wing. Belushi is billed as ‘James’ and not ‘Jim’, which usually indicates a dramatic role, but here he’s mostly slobbish comic relief and equips himself ably; ditto an hilarious Elizabeth Perkins, who really deserves to be known for more than playing Wilma Flintstone and for seducing a 12-year-old boy in BIG.

So all in all, ABOUT LAST NIGHT isn't terrible. But in terms of films based on David Mamet plays, it's certainly no GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS – which I'm surprised upon adapting no one wanted to rename REAL ESTATE WARS or FIVE ANGRY MEN.

Final thought: the title of this movie is uttered out loud by the characters several times, should you be after a new drinking game.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Not really, as we’re talking about a love affair and not a one-night stand. But I guess it’s catchier than ABOUT ALL THOSE PREVIOUS NIGHTS WE’VE SPENT TOGETHER DURING WHICH SOME THINGS HAPPENED …

What would a movie called ABOUT FIRST NIGHT be about?  That would be the ideal title for a behind-the-scenes DVD feature on the Sean Connery/Richard Gere 1995 Arthurian romp FIRST KNIGHT.

Previously:  THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Next time:  THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964, Sidney Salkow, Ubaldo B Ragona)

 

* * * 

The sole survivor of a global plague fights the undead in a post-apocalyptic world. 

   

Starring  Vincent Price, Franca Bettoia, Emma Danieli, Giacomo Rossi Stuart  

Written by  Richard Matheson, William F Leicester   

Produced by  Robert L Lippert  

Duration  86 minutes   

Remakes. Multiple adaptations of the same novel. General lack of new ideas. All in all, it’s not rare for a movie viewer to find themselves watching something that is a version of something else they have already seen. 

And I’m not just talking about newer versions – often it's an earlier release that they've ended up seeing after the modern one.

Such a thing happened with me and 1964’s THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, based on the same novel I Am Legend as the 2007 Will Smith film and Charlton Heston’s THE OMEGA MAN (1971) – both of which I’d seen before this maiden viewing of LAST MAN. But while there were definitely familiar plot points from those later movies, this first stab at putting the story on film had enough of an identity to stand on its own creepy terms – despite novelist Richard Matheson disowning his own screenplay adaptation and asking to be credited under a pseudonym.

The movie kicks off in medias res with gloomy shots of deserted city locations. It’s a powerful start, with a cinematic use of empty space – what you don’t show; what's lurking beyond the frame. John Carpenter (aged 16 at the time) must have been taking notes. A church sign declares "The End Has Come!" – our first hint of just what the hell has happened here.

Our protagonist, Vincent Price, wakes up to an alarm clock. "Better get up," he grumbles in voiceover. "Time to make it through another day." I found it pretty amusing that he’s presented like a regular office drone who hates his job, but has to drag himself out of bed for it anyway. Then, checking his calendar: "Has it only been three years since I inherited the Earth? Seems like a million." The movie is a bit voiceover-heavy in the early stretch, but I guess the alternative would be him talking to himself out loud. Which, hey, after three years alone, you probably would be, just to hear a human voice.

Our man’s first morning duty? Round up the dead bodies outside his house to throw in ‘the pit’, an enormous quarry out of town. That and a perfunctory, lacklustre call out on the CB radio, on the off chance that today is the day that someone actually answers.

His day-to-day involves hunting down the undead creatures that roam the streets (who I guess were just outside of those empty opening shots). And for a while, the movie is merely Price's routine which, for the viewer, starts to risk being a bit overly … routine. He’s mostly just finding the undead in their beds (they sleep?) and giving them a right good stabbing. No stalking or real danger, so not much by way of tension.

And in the casting of oddball Price, our hero isn’t really what you'd call an everyman. Famous for things like HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971), but known to modern audiences for playing the mad scientist who makes sure Johnny Depp can craft hedge animals but not scratch his nose in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (Price is a hero to Tim Burton) and for providing the cackling coda in Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, the actor is sort of reminiscent of a demon himself. So, there's a risk in that early stretch of our sympathies actually lying with the ostensible antagonists.

Then Price starts to spend time missing his wife and daughter and having intermittent flashbacks to when they were still alive, so we kind of come round to him again, just in time for the sun to go down, at which point the outside world starts to resemble Croydon town centre on a Saturday night circa 1999, with stumbling and aggressive creatures crawling all over each other in an unsteady rage.

This is one of those horror movies where the creatures are called vampires, but they’re really more like zombies – see also FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996). Vince puts up mirrors and garlic to deter them, and they seek out his blood, but for all intents and purposes they’re the lumbering ghouls of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which wouldn’t come along for another four years.

"There he is, get him!" one of them shouts. Holy shit, they talk? Seems like Price could have tried to reason with them in that case, I mean if they can express cognitive thought? Well, at this point, the rules for zombies (as these definitely are) were not yet fixed – George Romero admitted as much even by the time his NIGHT was released.

One problem with LAST MAN is that the flashing back to how this all happened (caused by a pandemic – eek!) starts to consume the narrative, and we’re over half way through before the story in Price’s present situation moves ahead at all. (It's the same problem that would later manifest itself in fellow 'last movie' THE LAST SEVEN.)

So in the end, the viewing experience turns out to be similar to what the coincidently named (or, rather, nicknamed) Rob Zombie gave us in his (risible) 2007 HALLOWEEN remake. It's like someone did a new version of I AM LEGEND and added far too much unasked-for backstory, leaving themselves with only about 25 minutes at the end to cram in a rushed version of the original. But LAST MAN still works, just about, and I was happy with the direction they went for the ending, which harks back to the source novel’s title and makes those suspicions about whether we are supposed to actually like Price rise right up again.

My biggest disappointment with the film was not in any way THE LAST MAN ON EARTH’s fault. When I saw it had an Italian director and a lot of Italian names in the cast and crew, and found out that it was filmed in Rome standing in for the US, I got rather excited – prematurely, it turned out.

You see, Italy has a great tradition of horror, ranging from the classy Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA, OPERA) and Mario Bava (BLACK SUNDAY, TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE), to gorehounds like Lucio Fulci (ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, THE BEYOND), Ruggero Deodato (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK) and Umberto Lenzi (MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, NIGHTMARE CITY).

Unfortunately, co-director of LAST MAN Ubaldo Ragono doesn’t have similar credentials, the only other feature on his CV being something unpromisingly titled SWEET SMELL OF LOVE. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised when there was no eyeball implement, or maggots crawling out of stab wounds, or girls vomiting up their intestines (alright, those are all from Fulci movies, but he is my favourite Italian horror maniac).

So, I guess the lesson from I can take from this experience is … know what you’re going into any don’t get your hopes up that it will resemble something else? 

Hmm. When has anyone every truly learned from that?

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  We don’t see any other men in the movie. That’s all I’m saying.

What would a movie about THE FIRST MAN ON EARTH be about?  Too easy to go with another Biblical reference. Maybe instead, the first man to cultivate the soil for growing crops, and so really get ‘on’ that there earth?

Previously:  LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL

Next time:  ABOUT LAST NIGHT

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL (1959, John Sturges)

 

* * * * 

The death of his wife at the hands of his old friend’s son puts a lawman on a collision course with the man with whom he once rode.

Starring  Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman, Brad Dexter

Written by  James Poe

Produced by  Hal B Wallis  

Duration  90 minutes

Here we go! John Sturges. One of the great western directors, up there with John Ford, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah and Howard Hawks. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, anyone? GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL? Not to mention that Bank Holiday perennial, all-star WWII epic THE GREAT ESCAPE. Stephen King even named the town in The Dark Tower: Part 5 ‘Calla Bryn Sturgis’ after Sturges, acknowledging his book’s similarities to MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

Now, I’d never heard of Sturge’s LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL, which is nestled somewhere in the middle of the great man’s career. But I was certainly familiar with its leads.

Kirk Douglas has one of those iconic cinema faces, seemingly carved out of marble. SPARTACUS is, for me, Stanley Kubrick's weakest post-THE KILLING film, but man that's a legendary role for Kirk. (Side note: PATHS OF GLORY, the pair’s other team-up, is one of Kubrick’s best.) My favourite Douglas performance is in Billy Wilder’s black-as-coal media satire ACE IN THE HOLE, and he has no trouble being convincing in locales as diverse as ships on the sea (VIKINGS) and ships in space (SATURN 3). And he lived until 103, the bloody trooper.

Then you’ve got Anthony Quinn. I’ll always think of him as a comedy mobster in LAST ACTION HERO and for portraying a much more menacing villain as the cuckolded husband in Tony Scott’s REVENGE, but he too had a storied and celebrated decades-long career, winning two Oscars and popping up in the likes of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE and LA STRADA.

Here, the two titans play former friends who are now on opposite sides of the law. It’s a solid dramatic setup, also used for William Holden and Robert Ryan in Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, and again with Nick Nolte and Powers Booth in EXTREME PREJUDICE from another westernphile, Walter Hill.

In LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL, Douglas is the good guy US Marshall, first seen joking around with the local kids outside his cop shop. His mood worsens considerably when his own son turns up, distraught, to tearfully lead pop into the woods, where his mother/Douglas’s wife has been raped and murdered by a couple of whisky-swigging cowboys. 

Not only that, but one of the rapist-murderers turns out to be the son of Tony Quinn’s wealthy-but-dodgy cattle baron. So Douglas jumps on a train to Quinn’s ends, Gun Hill, and arrests the boy – but when Tony stands in his way, he has to pivot into a local hotel and wait it out with his hostage until the next train arrives, putting the two old buddies into a tense standoff. Douglas’s only ally in this hostile town is Carolyn Jones's feisty dame, a bitter ex-lover of Quinn and the only Gun Hillian willing to stand up to the man who effectively runs the whole place.

Douglas’s granite determination to see justice done in the face of passive local authorities is well-matched by Quinn, who has the more complex role. He retains a fondness for Kirk from all the years they’ve known each other and actually views his own son with distain – in general, for a lack of character, and specifically for his recent abhorrent actions. And yet family is family, so the crooked rancher is driven by loyalty to protect his offspring from what he knows the boy deserves morally; added to this, Tony can’t lose face in the town that shudders before his name.

The story is elegantly simple and doesn’t mess about, all taking place in less than 24 hours and with Douglas’s determination to get his prisoner onto the final train of the day providing a ticking clock. There’s a thrill in seeing this man commit to his task with laser focus and steely resolve, like the Terminator with a badge. "You, you're breaking the law!" one cowardly citizen splutters at our hero. "I am the law!" the Marshall spits back. (The creators of 2000 AD's ‘Judge Dredd’ strip must have been taking notes.)

All in all, while LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL may not be one of Sturges’s better known efforts, it’s a compelling tale with suspense to spare that can hold its head up high among its more celebrated peers.

Four stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Absolutely: the film literally ends with the train pulling away.

What would a movie called FIRST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL be about?  A lot more on what Douglas got up to on the journey into the town than what he does after arriving there. The newspaper crossword puzzle, maybe? Did they have them back then?

Previously:  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

Next time:  THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1997, Jim Gillespie)

 

* * 

Four young friends are stalked by a hook-wielding maniac a year after killing a man in a road accident (or at least they thought he was dead …)

Starring  Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr, Bridgette Wilson

Written by  Kevin Williamson

Produced by  Neal H Moritz, Erik Feig, Stokely Chaffin

Duration  101 minutes

I have a soft spot for slasher movies. I would call them a guilty pleasure, if I'd ever felt guilty about watching one.

Although the first genuine slasher was BLACK CHRISTMAS four years prior, the genre’s golden period began in 1978 when HALLOWEEN became the highest-grossing independent movie of all time. The imitators came thick and fast; some holiday-season-based, some not. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET birthed a worthwhile franchise; FRIDAY THE 13TH’s results were more mixed. Various standalones clambered above the pack: let me direct you towards HELL NIGHT, THE BURNING, BLOOD RAGE, SLEEPAWAY CAMP, MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE.

Now, here's the thing. These are the years those six films I just listed were released: 1981, 1981, 1987, 1983, 1981 (again!) and 1982.

Notice a pattern? Sheer unabashed '80-ness is big factor in slasher success. More than a couple of years back into the previous decade, you get '70s grittiness – good in its own way, but a different proposition. And stepping forward lands you slap bang in the mire of '90s blandness, where something that would have been a delicious cheesefest 10 years before ends up being completely tasteless (but not in the good way). 

Yes, by the mid ’90s, the slasher was well and truly on its last mutilated legs, clogged up with inferior HALLOWEEN and HELLRAISER sequels and dire straight-to-video efforts. Then along came SCREAM in 1996 and a brief second-coming for the genre, with 1997’s I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER one of the next out the traps.

LAST SUMMER has a screenplay by SCREAM’s Kevin Williamson, this time with the irony left out – unless you think it's ironic to be killed by someone who you thought you yourself had killed. (More like poetic justice – it’s a thin line.)

The movie does not inspire optimism by opening with a bombastic cliffside wave-crashing panorama set to a nu-metal cover of Seals & Crofts ‘Summer Breeze’. And things don’t improve any upon meeting the four leads. As soon as they open their mouths, out comes the tedious self-awareness and unrealistic verbosity Williamson’s teenagers were known for, an overwritten cadence that integrated itself into America’s film and TV landscape and can still be found today synthetically lengthening any number of Netflix original series. The ‘Williamson-ese’ here doesn't reach the painfully twee nadir of his show Dawson's Creek, but without something clever and substantial like SCREAM surrounding them, the characters sound empty and narcissistic. It's not uncommon to be hoping that the people you’re supposed to be rooting for in a slasher will be swiftly offed, but usually the viewer doesn't start praying for their deaths minutes into their introductory scene.

The worst offender is Ryan Phillippe, who spends the whole film either shouting or pouting. Does he feel left out as the only one of the central foursome who doesn't use their middle name? Or was he bitter from jealously watching FPJ chatting up SMG between takes while JLH was proving immune to his own charms? (Not to worry: he was about to meet Reese Witherspoon.)

To be fair, there are a couple of satisfying deaths, including Johnny Galecki taking a hook to the face in a scene that will elicit cheers from anyone who's ever accidently turned over to his perma-repeated TV hit The Big Bang Theory and been involuntarily exposed to that annoying squeaky voice. And Love Hewitt is a decent ‘final girl’, with her notorious ‘What are you waiting for?!’ scene giving us at least one pleasingly bonkers moment – but that just serves to emphasise how bang-average everything is around it.

The slasher renaissance briefly promised by LAST SUMMER barely lasted out the decade, and as the 20th Century lurched towards its close like Jason Voorhees with an arrow in his leg, horror veered instead towards found footage, thanks to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT channelling (the infinitely superior) CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, before the grim likes of SAW and HOSTEL briefly popularised so-called ‘torture porn’.

So, in the end, the late ‘90s didn’t usher in a new wave of slasher classics after all. People only really remember this film because of how well it’s parodied in SCARY MOVIE.

It was probably for the best; some things are so much a product of their time that to attempt them again in a different era just leads to disaster. Or worse, a dullness that feels worse than death – by meat hook or otherwise.

But I will leave you on a more positive note: Christopher Landon's nu-slashers HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017), HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U (2019) and FREAKY (2020) are well worth your time.

Two stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  There were two sequels (coming soon, to a blog near you!), so clearly not.

What would a movie called I KNOW WHAT YOU DID FIRST SUMMER be about?  Most people’s first summers were spent lolling about in nappies and it’s hard to imagine what could possibly be worth knowing about that.

Previously:  THE LAST HORROR MOVIE 

Next time:  LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HORROR MOVIE (2003, Julian Richards)

 

* * * 

A wedding videographer who has a sideline in brutal killings starts filming his murderous exploits as a documentary.

Starring  Kevin Howarth, Mark Stevenson, Antonia Beamish, Christabel Muir  

Written by  James Handel, Julian Richards

Produced by  Zorana Piggott, Julian Richards   

Duration  79 minutes 

   

Found footage. The V/H/S franchise is keeping the fire of this sub-genre burning, to mostly successful effect, but by and large it feels like a style of filmmaking whose time has passed.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT popularised found footage in the modern era, of course, back in 1999, but few were able to recapture that magic. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and CLOVERFIELD did well in 2007 and 2008, but while the former birthed a franchise, the peak was brief and (with some exceptions) the decline swift.

Found footage actually draws its origins back to the epistolary novel: your Draculas (good) and your Frankensteins (didn’t like it) that were structured around characters' correspondence or diary entries, or from newspaper clippings. The desired effect is to make everything seem ‘real’ and thus more involving. 

But there is a danger that the reverse will happen. Any time we enter the world of a movie, we know we are being asked to suspend our disbelief – to enter a dream-like state where we take things as they come. In removing the sense of artifice, the found footage approach can in fact create more artifice; be a distancing effect rather than an engrossing one.

Because without any of the traditional manipulative cinematic techniques (precise use of editing, lighting, staging, scripting, etc.), there's the risk that we never reach that suggestable state. And so, what looks like an amateur pointing his camera at random things happening in front of him may only ever end up feeling like an amateur pointing his camera at random things happening in front of him, an experience as incapable of engrossing us as a relative's boring video of their two weeks in Camber Sands.

Although not in the found footage style, for me the same principle applies to those one-take gimmick movies. They take me out of the story, forcing me to step back and admire the filmmaking rather than the film. The odd sequence can work out OK, but I was left deeply unimpressed with the feature-length ‘oners’ BIRDMAN (2014) and 1917 (2019) – both of which actually had several disguised cuts. The latter was especially misguided – rather than an immersive experience of the horrors of war, it turned the protagonists’ odyssey into a tedious trek, without the breaks and rhythms that good editing and pacing provide. Hitchcock’s ROPE is an example of the gimmick that actually does work – and the big man had fewer ways to cheat back in 1948.

(I’m similarly unimpressed with all the lauded one-take action scenes which litter the genre nowadays, such as in the overrated JOHN WICK films. All I see is how well Keanu has rehearsed for something the ends up looking like a video game cutscene, with none of the grace, tension or beauty of an expertly edited Peckinpah, Cameron or Woo.)

But back to found footage. Some of those films are actually very good. BLAIR WITCH didn’t do much for me, but I’ve been meaning to revisit it. The aforementioned CLOVERFIELD does a great job of combining high-quality SFX within a lo-fi aesthetic, and CHRONICLE works, if you’re into that sort of thing. And I can’t neglect to mention CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980), one of the best ever horror films, period. REC (2007) and TROLLHUNTER (2010) also deserve your attention.

And, I’d say, so does THE LAST HORROR MOVIE – just about.

At first, the viewer is made to feel that they’re watching the wrong movie. An opening sequence takes place in a distinctly American diner, with a stereotypical slasher setup: a waitress closing up on her own is stalked and attacked by a maniac. It’s clearly not found footage, as was advertised.

Then we cut via a fuzzy screen to a British man addressing the camera from his grubby West London flat, admitting to taping over the diner slasher – which was the ‘real’ movie that we the viewer rented. He goes on to promise that what he’s about to show us will be much more horrific.

This is Max Parry, a serial killer, and he’s going to tell us about his exploits – he estimates he ‘does’ eight to ten people per year, between stints as a wedding videographer. More than that, he’s going to show us.

So, it’s basically as if after Henry and Otis from HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1986) filmed their home invasion they decided to carry on bringing the camera along and started to enjoy the documenting as much as the killing. It’s also like the Belgian MAN BITES DOG (1992), but without the accompanying film crew (Max just has a protégé ‘assistant’ to film him).

THE LAST HORROR MOVIE isn't as good as those two, lacking their power and insight. Max is far too smug and cocky and doesn’t really convince as a homicidal maniac – the idea persists that he’s doing his whole video project as one big prank. The film tries for some thematic depth by calling out the viewer for their bloodlust and complicity, but is not nearly as incisive or witty as Austrian director Michael Haneke was with the same message in his FUNNY GAMES in 1997.

Nevertheless, it does have its moments.

There’s a queasily suspenseful sequence where we're led to believe that Max is luring a young boy away to be his latest victim, but it turns out the lad is his nephew and he’s only bringing him home to his mum/Max’s sister. A montage of bludgeoning kills cuts comically to Max tenderising some steaks with a mallet. Max runs up to a woman while she’s doing the laundry and stabs her repeatedly, and then while she sits there bleeding out he passionately explains to her, "We're trying to make an intelligent movie about murdering while doing the murders... we’re trying to do something interesting!"

That last example is more thematically rich than chastising the viewer with "so why are you still watching all this unpleasantness, eh?", presenting as it does an artist whose frustration to create something meaningful has driven him to murder – similar territory to Abel Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER (1979).

If THE LAST HORROR MOVIE had had more of that kind of thing, and less oily smugness delivered straight to camera in extreme close-up, then Max's exploits might have been compelling and disturbing enough to put him up there with HENRY’s Henry and DOG's Ben in the pantheon of narcissistic killers with a camera. Pity.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Max actually explains this towards the end, in a nice meta twist that I won't spoil here, all the while pondering whether his over-analysis makes him "sound like a wanker". Cough-cough.

What would a movie called THE FIRST HORROR MOVIE be about?  Universally, that would be THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (1920). For me personally, it was probably ALIENS – not strictly horror, I know, but pretty scary when you're eight years old.

Previously:  THE LAST THING HE WANTED

Next time:  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com