Film Rolls Season 2, Round 08: Jagko and Beggars of Life

Heh, whoops!

No mistakes for Dale, who rolls a 14 and makes it almost to the end of the first row, landing on another from the Korean Film Archive, Jagko. You know what's kind of cool? You can search the Harvard Film Archives's website to see if they've played a movie over the past 25 years or so, and I'm kind of mildly surprised this hasn't. They play a fair amount of Korean cinema and this seems up their alley. I'm also kind of surprised that the program I figured it would have played in was 20 years ago. Time flies!

The "whoops" came a couple days later when Centipede rolled a 4 and landed on Beggars of Life, which really shouldn't have been on the shelf full of movies I haven't seen before because I saw it back in 2017, at the Archive, coincidentally enough. It didn't exactly feel familiar while watching it so much as like the sort of thing I've absorbed through osmosis, so I'm keeping it in. Kind of envying those who can be asked if they've seen a movie and just remember their every thought about it, though.

Solid as heck couple days here:

Jagko (aka Pursuit of Death)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)

Yeah, I'm very glad I bought a bunch of Korean Film Archive discs sight unseen when they were on sale a couple years back. Jagko is a terrific little drama with just enough thriller in it to keep it interesting and probably a whole ton of extra layers for people in 1980 Korea.

It starts by introducing the audience to Song Gi-yeol (Choi Yun-Seok), once a cop but now an alcoholic vagrant, being picked up and sent to a "rehab center" that doesn't offer much in the way of services or chance to leave - if its residents had family they hadn't alienated, they wouldn't be there - only to discover with shock that one of the other residents (Kim Hui-ra) appears to be Baek Gong-san aka "Jagko", the communist guerilla whose capture soon after the war was going to seal Song's reputation as a fast-rising star, but whose embarrassing escape left Song looking incompetent at best and complicit at worst. He's been chasing this white whale for decades, and does not intend to stop just because the guy at the other end of the bunkhouse says he's never even heard of this Jagko guy.

Writer Song Kil-han and director Im Kwon-taek don't leave the audience in suspense very long; it's hard to have parallel flashbacks if Jagko is not around, somewhere, to do the flashing back. Happily, Im and company do good work revealing what is the case to the audience while still making Song's certainty be more the result of his obsession than any evidence that "Kim" is actually the man he is looking for. It sets up a tight game of cat-and-mouse, as both parties try to recruit their fellow inmates to help them thwart the other, the stakes objectively small and petty but also all that both of them have got. Heck, at times they're all that the other people in this dormitory have; none of them really have any investment in Song's obsession or special fondness for Kim beyond the anti-communist background noise the ROK has been putting out their entire lives (that the institution keeping them off the streets is pretty socialist barely even registers as irony), but it's a little exciting and something to do, although most would prefer not to rock the boat. This isn't a case where the feud is going to spill out and metastasize into some larger cancer, but where it might be remembered as a weird thing that happened this one time.

The flashbacks fill it out, establishing why the stakes are so high for the pair of them. Im jumps back and forth and from one to the other, building a sense of tragedy as it's not always clear whether either could have stepped back and lived a normal life: For all that Song is clearly making self-destructive decisions which wind up dooming both himself and his quarry, the suggested magnitude of Jagko's crimes and the stigma associated with communism during these years may have been worse, such that Jagko could never fully open up to any of his lovers and Song maybe never could live down even the suspicion that he let the other man escape on purpose. There's still a litany of lives ended or ruined in their wake, and each episode feels substantial as it asks the question of whether things would turn out different if Song just stopped here without taking the audience away from the present for too long.

Choi Yun-seok and Kim Hui-ra both impress as Song and Jagko, respectively; though the audience never gets to see either at their peak, but we do get a sense of their decay, and how, even in this state, Song's got this vestigial arrogance and Jagko a certain charisma that probably made him a successful revolutionary back in the day, whether never going long without a girlfriend, even living off the grid, or convincing folks that Song might pose a threat to them as well. The film is populated by a number of entertaining minor characters, and the filmmakers have a knack for giving each marginal environment they find themselves in have a distinct feel and be a notable step down.

It wavers a bit toward the end, when the pair must explicitly confront that they are, ultimately, the only constants in each other's lives, and that the world has in many ways moved on from their conflict. I gather Im was a workhorse director cranking out genre films, and even if he was playing with grander ideas here, there's still an odd directness in the last act and curtness at the very end that's not really unlike what came before at all, but isn't quite what it could be. Jagko is sort of a grindhouse film with ambitions, ones it lives up to more along the way versus at the conclusion.

Beggars of Life)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kino Lorber Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the DVD at Amazon (wait, is my BD really out of print?)

The bulk of Beggars of Life can't measure up to its opening scenes, which can shock a modern audience with just how frank and sophisticated a silent movie can be. When most of what one sees from the era is slapstick comedy or grand epics, the grim tableau an amiable train-hopper finds and the double-exposed flashback where he gets an explanation are a heck of an eye-opener.

That hobo is Jim (Richard Arlen) - "The Boy" - who pokes his head into a farmhouse and sees what initially seems to be an abandoned meal, although on closer examination, the farmer is at the table, dead. His stepdaughter Nancy (Louise Brooks) admits to killing him, but it's pretty clear that he had it coming after years of abuse. Though Jim is reluctant to get mixed up in this, he eventually lets her tag along, disguised as a boy, as he makes his way to Canada, where a relative supposedly has a job waiting for him. Eventually, though, the body will be discovered and a reward posted, word of which makes it to a hobo camp led by The Arkansaw Snake (Robert Perry), possibly leaving Nancy's fate in the hands of the eccentric Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery).

The billing of the stars is interesting, almost a hundred years later - most today will think of this as a Louise Brooks film, and she's pretty great; Brooks establishes Nancy as someone just strong enough to be able to move forward but still kind of reeling from what she's had to do to get to this point; Nancy's a haunted heroine who never quite comes off as a damsel in distress but also clearly can use the support Jim offers. Richard Arlen (second-billed) is pleasant enough as Jim, who is maybe more of a match for Brook's Nancy that a complement, someone who has seen his own sort of hard times but still has a good core, and as the film goes on one gets the impression that what's awaiting him in Canada is not nearly as sure as he claims, but he's trying to will it into being for Nancy's sake. Arlen is one of a large number of matinee idols who run together now, handsome and capable enough to have had notable roles in a number of films for decades, but never quite had the combination that made him an icon remembered the way his co-stars were. Both are billed below Wallace Beery, who makes hobo "Oklahoma Red" memorable but an oddity to a later audience, like we're supposed to enjoy the familiarity of his shtick as much as its content. He'd become an icon of sorts, and he's pretty good here, enough that one can see why he's positioned as the central character despite not showing up until relatively late; he grabs the audience's attention and there's at least a genuine arc and question about whether he will ultimately defend or betray the young pair.

The opening is the best part, though, direct and filled with genuine horror without much in the way of euphemism or equivocation on whether or not Nancy is in the right; director William A. Wellman jumps from Jim's stark discovery to Nancy's somewhat dazed telling without skipping a beat. It's a tough bar to clear, but if the film never has another sequence that good, it at least lets those scenes hang over the rest of the movie: What could have been a bit of ill-advised comedy becomes something more sinister, and every further threat of violence reflects what specific horrors might await Nancy. When the film attempts to impress in other ways - for instance, a runaway train that makes for a nifty climax without making this the sort of thrill picture one associates with Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton - it's generally done very well.

I'm tempted to give this another watch relatively soon, rather than wait another decade for it to reclassify itself in my head as primarily one of Louise Brooks's iconic roles, just to see how it hits when expecting all three stars to have the same sort of weight.


Well, that's a push.

Dale Evans: 37¼ stars
Centipede: 37½ stars

Centipede still ahead by the same nose as before.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 07: Waterloo, The Girl from Rio, and The Last Battle

Okay, hopefully it gets a little less effort-intensive from now on!

Dale rolls an eleven, making her way to Waterloo, one of the first imports I ever got from Imprint in Australia.

Then, the next night, Centipede rolls a 20, making his way out of the Korean section and down to the next row to land on The Girl from Rio, one of many crowdfunded silence in this part of the board. The "rule", inasmuch as you can call them that considering how willing I am to make them up as I go along, is that a 20 gets one a bonus movie, usually something already seen, but I've decided that to keep things fair and random, those will involve stepping through a boxed set, in this case the fancy Luc Besson one put out by Sony last fall, and since the silent was short, I watched The Last Battle the same night.

Given that the difference at the end of the last round came down to Dale having one more movie than Centipede, this might even things up!

Waterloo

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Seen 13 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

Many epics end on a historic military battle; of those, many are clearly reverse-engineered to have a story that climaxes in or during that battle. And then there are the likes of Waterloo, which don't so much construct a story that will build to that finale so much as their makers figure out where you have to start so that the battle of Waterloo is the final 45 minutes of a movie long enough to be considered epic-length.

That, then, would be a couple years earlier, when Napoleon (Rod Steiger) is initially exiled to Elba after the French army was pushed all the way back to the suburbs of Paris, the nations of Europe having united to contain him. As we all know, it is not long before he has escaped, and while Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) sends Bonaparte's longtime lieutenant Marshal Ney (Dan O'Herlihy) to capture him, Ney soon rejoins the former Emperor as have many of the soldiers. Bonaparte then looks to pick up where he left off, with Europe once again having the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) lead the forces to counter him, with the armies eventually converging on Waterloo for a fateful battle.

I suspect that there have been an order of magnitude more books and movies made about Napoleon Bonaparte than Arthur Wellesley - the latter is not singular enough that you hear people described as having a "Wellington complex" - but this is a film about a battle, and a battle requires two people facing off, so we spend a fair time with Wellington. Christopher Plummer is, of course, thoroughly capable in the role, but that's the thing; Wellington is capable and professional and not terribly dramatic compared to his opponent, so Plummer has less to do; his scenes are basically waiting to be sent into battle against this foe, so the movie busies itself a bit with the people around him, notably a nice enough soldier who met a girl at a party they were both attending, more or less marking him as the way one will recognize the human cost of this carnage when he dies. Waterloo is often very dry getting to its title battle, and at times the cast doesn't actually seem to be performing their characters so much as standing in costume while famous words are read in voice-over.

Steiger, by contrast, at least gets to dive into playing this antihero and growl in rage at anyone who stands in his way. It's not really a biography of Napoleon beyond the lead-up to Waterloo, so aside from a few comments about not being able to see his son, there's not much that's personal. Steiger does at least give Bonaparte a sort of forceful charisma, which doesn't particularly contradict how he seems to be doing this campaign to spite the world and show Europe that it had no business resisting him as opposed to trying to achieve some sort of tactical or political victory. Maybe it was, historically, about more than revenge, but that's what animates Steiger's Napoleon and gives the film what emotional stakes it has.

It's striking just how static and dull the shots of the movie stars posing and reciting are when intercut with the massive movements of the Red Army who have been called upon the give the film a cast of thousands, but the scale is nevertheless astounding: Whenever the camera pulls back and up to reveal the armies forming up, shooting at each other's formations, and falling apart, one's jaw drops, and I cannot imagine what it must be like on the big screen. There's so much going on at such a scale that it's hard to conceive of how director Sergei Bondarchuk managed to actually shoot all this without the post-production tools available decades later.

It's not a particularly great movie, and even in the finale when it excels, Waterloo often gives the impression of just a lot going on rather than a sense of what's happening in the battle. But, boy, if one of our local movie theaters gets their hands on a 70mm print, I'll put down money for a ticket. The film does one thing very well and everything else just well enough to justify the time and expense to get there.

The Girl from Rio '27)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)
Seen 23 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Give a movie a hundred years to age, and the preservation and ability to restore the film will be all over the place: The opening of The Girl from Rio is in two-strip technicolor, and while it's seen some wear, it's enough to make one's eyes go wide at how the filmmakers have clearly done their best to make it so vibrant that the images will persist in one's memory through the film. Other scenes appear to come from a print so damaged and degraded as to be a pasty white mess covering half the frame, obliterating the facial expressions one might be trying to read. It's maybe an unfortunate reflection of the movie itself - you see what the filmmakers can do even though it's often not sharp.

The girl in question is Lola Rojas (Carmel Myers), a dancer in one of Rio de Janeiro's most popular nightclubs. Her regular partner Raul (Edouard Raquello) is clearly enamored of her, but so is Antonio Santos (Richard Tucker), one of the most prominent men in the city with his fingers in every business, legitimate and otherwise, who takes her home every night. Recently arrived in Brazil is Paul Sinclair (Walter Pidgeon), a young Brit representing a coffee concern, who initially talks to Lola to prove she doesn't make a fool of all men; after all, he's got the lovely Helen (Mildred Harris) waiting for him at home. And while he inevitably falls for Lola, she is surprised to find herself intrigued by his resistance.

It's not a terribly substantial movie, running just a bit over an hour and having a plot generic enough that there are likely several similar movies with a different "exotic" city pasted into the title and without one necessarily cribbing from the other, and I wouldn't even be surprised if the two player films with the same name had the same plot but no direct inspiration (they don't, for what it's worth). It's a very basic template, with what stands out being how amusingly oblivious Paul is to how Helen is clearly moving on, and how Lola's landlady is a busybody who will obviously rat them out to Santos. It's a simple template and the movie doesn't stray from it.

Maybe the filmmakers intended to, at some point, because there seem to be vestiges of interesting details left: When Santos strong-arms Paul's supplier into not selling him coffee beans, he goes to "the independents", and it feels like there's some tension there (though, perhaps, it's less unique to this particular story than the sort of dealing that 1920s audiences more familiar with agricultural business would recognize easily). One initially might think that's what Santos means when he tells Lola that Paul has made enemies without his help, but it turns out he mostly means Raul, who is not only attracted to Lola but relies on her as a performance partner. It's a bit frustrating, because one can see the shape of a story here, but Paul especially doesn't really do anything; the filmmakers apparently don't want the audience to think ill of him for cheating on Helen getting involved in other conflicts and so are content for there to be attraction with Lola but for things to otherwise happen around them. For a short movie, it can feel dragged out.

Still, Carmel Myers and Walter Pidgeon are good-looking young leads with some actual chemistry. It being 1926, things aren't going to get too steamy and the film is built to not necessarily rely on sweet words, but the pair look drawn to each other and at ease, bristling meaningfully but not theatricality when folks say that they should maybe see less of each other and looking pained when they may separate for their own good. Richard Tucker (who, amusingly, would also appear in an unrelated film titled "The Girl from Rio" 13 years later) was in the midst of transitioning into silver-temple roles, and really nails the big shot who is handsome and charismatic enough to attract Lola in the first place but small and jealous enough to be a monster.

Drop the opening color sequence, and there's really not much to this bland but capable movie, although that does make it kind of a perfect example of this popular template.


Le dernier combat (The Last Battle)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Headcanon: Luc Besson's The Last Battle and E.L. Katz's Azrael take place in the same post-apocalyptic world, though obviously on different continents and at different times. Not that I think one necessarily inspired the other, because it's not exactly hard to to think "what if a genre movie had no words" independently, and if you're making your first feature on what is likely close to a shoestring budget (apparently expanding a short, "L'avant dernier", with much of the same cast and crew), I bet that not having to worry about dialogue frees up takes to use on action.

It opens on a man (co-writer Pierre Jolivet) constructing an ultralight airplane in an otherwise empty office building, which will allow him to fly above the marauders led by a sadistic "Captain" (Fritz Wepper) operating nearby - although, when it crashes, he's taken care of by an eccentric doctor (Jean Bouise) who has a young woman (Petra Müller) hidden on his property. The man assists the doctor, hoping to get close, but a man outside the gates (Jean Reno) decides that he's going to come for her more directly.

Besson was Besson right from the start, apparently: Jean Reno is in the cast, Eric Serra does the music, the script is a genre boiled down to its essence but with style and whimsy, and, boy, is he not doing well by the women in his cast. It's not like the men come off much better, since this is the sort of post-fall-of-civilization future where one grades the various loners on who is just a little bit less selfish than the others, but it's not exactly creative in the midst of a movie where the filmmaker is clearly trying to get notices for having some style so he'll get tapped to make bigger things. This is pretty much a demo reel with a basic story - some action, some jokes that don't stop it, a handle on the tone, and a finale of sorts.

And, sure, it demonstrates that well enough. Besson and cinematographer Carlo Varini get some great shots, taking decent advantage of their black-and-white stock to keep their desert and urban settings interesting to look at but not too pretty or self-consciously dour; the team also stages action well, even at this early stage; there's characterization in the way folks fight. Jean Reno's "brute" attacks with a determined mania while Pierre Jolivet's protagonist is trying to figure things out in a way that reflects that we're introduced to him as a builder. I don't know that anybody watching this in 1983 would look at Reno and figure on him eventually becoming an international star, but it's not exactly surprising looking at it 40 years later.

Like a lot of low-budget early works Le dernier combat is more interesting than great, worth watching for seeing the seeds of what would emerge as Besson earned bigger budgets and moved onto the international stage. It doesn't have the playful, understated energy of his better works; he has to stretch thin material more than he can chase odd impulses. It's good that Sony throws this into the boxed set, but, no, it's probably not worth using 4K replication capacity so it matches the rest.


That pulls the number of films watched even; who's doing better?

Dale Evans: 33¾ stars
Centipede: 34 stars

Centipede pulls ahead by a nose!

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 05: Rage and The Assassination Bureau

This round's discs are coincidentally from the same boutique house, as it turns out, though that's about all they've got in common. I'd love to order some more of these Imprint Blu-rays, even if they often get domestic versions pretty quick as if to taunt me (you're welcome). Real shame about shipping and tariffs going nuts over the past few years (out maybe the cheap shipping was just unsustainable).

Anyway, Dale rolled a 4 and landed on Rage, although, full discourse, that was her second roll. Her first had her hit The Stewardess 3D, and while I'm not above that, the active shutter glasses weren't charged. Maybe another day!

Centipede, then, rolled a 14 and reached The Assassination Bureau. Our, shall we say, The Assassination Bureau Limited, which a number of the film's special features remind us is the full title. Somehow I missed it being based on an incomplete novel by Jack London in the opening credits, which is probably not that strange, although one does really think of London as being defined by a specific group of his work. It also took me a little while to figure that it was set in London's time rather than the late 1960s when it was made. I figured it was just stylish.

The last round ended in a tie; how about this one?

Rage

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the disc at Amazon

Rage is kind of a weird film: It looks like the sort of grimy little movie that makes one grudgingly appreciate its nastiness, but its parts seem mismatched and its heart is a bit too close to the right place. I suspect that being removed from its original context hurts it a bit: Folks who are never truly out of communication range maybe don't understand just how screwed one can be between point A and point B, on the one hand; on the other, not only did Sorcerer come out ten years later, but the audience for this has probably had more chances to see The Wages of Fear as well. You know there's a better movie that involves driving trucks over dangerous bridges out there.

Which is not exactly what this movie is about; it starts by introducing the audience to Reuben (Glenn Ford), an alcoholic American doctor working in a Mexican mining company town who is just functional enough to know his limits, and Perla (Stella Stevens), one of a number of "entertainers" brought into town who decides he looks pretty good and stays to stake her claim when the rest leave. One of Dr. Reuben's patients is a pregnant woman (Maura Monti) who will likely need a Cesarian, which Reuben feels is beyond his current capacities, though her husband Antonio (Armando Silvestre) trusts him. As it turns out, he'll need Dr. Reuben to come to their house, but the thing is, another miner (David Reynoso) has contracted rabies and quickly passed the point of no return - and Reuben's dog has bitten him. The injection he needs within 48 hours is in the opposite direction of Antonio's house, but Antonio insists…

There's the outline of a nifty little thriller in there, but there's just one problem: It doesn't really need Perla, and the filmmakers not only spend a lot of the film's first half on her flirting and teasing after deciding she likes Reuben, but have to make a concerted effort to get her in the jeep with him and Antonio as they try to make it to the city where rabies medication can be found in time. There's maybe room for a third person in that vehicle, especially if she's going to realize that Reuben is more or less of a man than she previously thought, but this group doesn't result in any sort of three-way tension. All the dangers are external, and a lot of the time spent with Perla feels low-stakes compared to Reuben and Antonio.

Still, you can see where this would be pretty great with the right characters - the self-loathing Ford brings forth for Reuben casts the right sort of shadow but isn't so overwhelming that Perla looks like a fool, and Stevens lets herself be the worn kind of brassy despite still being in her bombshell era. Armando Silvestre's Antonio is being foolish but he hits a nice note here, dancing around being unreasonable but not quite looking the fool; there's a fair amount implied about he's less stupid than in over his head and ready to value his trust in Reuben over how another doctor might treat the wife of a poor mine worker.

The setting and suspense pieces are nice as well: The mining town feels cheap and temporary but functional, and the little details like characters' pets and the banter of the girls tend to ring true. Bits like driving a truck over a tiny bridge or crossing the desert through punishing heat have a good sense of desperation. The last bit - an attempted hijacking of a school bus - is trying for this but seems a step too far, an attempt to force imminent danger and how panicked the characters are of the need to beat the clock. It's not the right finale for this movie, highlighting how it's got the right bones but maybe not the right flesh.

The Assassination Bureau

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the Arrow disc at Amazon

Jaws and Star Wars are often talked about as the beginning of the blockbuster era, and that's so from a release-patter and business sense, but the form seems to owe as much to James Bond as anything else, and The Assassination Bureau feels a bit like a crucial evolutionary step between them: It's got the same vibe as the Bond movies, but also the grandiose production values of the widescreen epics that preceded them. It's grand but has no belief that it's important, winking at the audience and finishing on a kind of bloated set-piece, the sort of fancy but lightweight thing that has taken the movies over fifty years later to many critics' chagrin.

It opens with Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg), a single woman of the early Twentieth Century who would be an investigative reporter were that avenue open to her in England. She has, however, discovered what she believes to be a shadowy organization behind a number of high-profile killings, pitching the story to Lord Bostwick (Telly Savalas) and continuing to research it. When she finds this Assassination Bureau headed by Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), she hires it to eliminate him, and he accepts, figuring that this will be a way for him to clean house, as his family founded it as targeting those whom the world would be better without as opposed to the purely mercenary agency it has become. Sonya continues to report on the story by trailing him, not realizing that Bostwick is part of the Bureau's board and eager to remove the too-idealistic Ivan.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, really, but it doesn't have to; the fact that London's version of the novel was little more than a sketch finished by Robert Fish means that the filmmakers have a lot of room to play, sending the pair on a merry chase through pre-World War I Europe full of colorful costumes, elaborate sets, and deadpan black humor. It's never very serious but never looks down on its own premise by treating it entirely as a joke, and the filmmakers find many ways to have a good time, whether it's killers and marks bouncing around a busy bordello full of scantily-clad women, Ivan trying to get his murder done outside of Sonya's disapproving eye, or a funeral where you know someone is going to escape from the coffin but the shell game and delight at letting the audience watch is on full display.

And, of course, there's Rigg & Reed as a perfectly complementary couple: Sonya starts out fussy and prudish despite her appetite for adventure and intrigue, while Ivan is rakish and amoral by Sonya's lights but has joie de vivre and a personal code without it being overbearing. They are of course going to fall in love and Sonya will probably loosen up more than Ivan becomes serious, but in the meantime they're going to banter and poke at each other and look great doing it. It works in large part because while these are both broadly-sketched characters, the actors are very earnest and relatable, and that makes a fine contrast to Savalas's sophisticated but smug villain. The cast is filled out by people playing often-silly caricatures that don't really have time to wear out their welcome because of the movie's episodic structure.

It climaxes with Reed's Ivan fighting a whole bunch of German goons on a zeppelin, and for better or worse, it's a surprisingly Marvel-feeling sequence for 1969, a crazy aerial environment with a larger than life hero slugging it out against mostly anonymous jobbers (whom the hero often tosses to their death a little more casually that one might like), the effects pretty good for their time but looking dated not long after. It's fun, make no mistake, but it's a little too big and chaotic in the way that more recent films of this sort often are.

I'm fine with this - more than fine, really, because I do take a sort of strange delight in finding that the things that people describe as "the problem with 21st Century Hollywood movies" have been present all along or everywhere. I think that it also makes The Assassination Bureau kind of ripe for rediscovery as a big adventure of a familiar sort with a pair of stars that people might mainly know from later works (Gladiator and Game of Thrones) at their peaks.


So where do these two discs from Australia leave us?

Dale Evans: 22½ stars
Centipede: 23 stars

Still very close, with lots more game to play!

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 04: Modesty Blaise and Maybe It's Love

These come quicker when there's no local baseball (and you're not picking up the Fox and/or ESPN services for just a week) and theatrical offerings are thin/the same old Halloween stuff!

So, just before Halloween, Dale rolled an 11 and jumps into a "western" block, landing on Modesty Blaise. Fun fact: This Blu-ray replaces a DVD that was never watched, whose age is pretty easily determined because it's one of several in brightly-colored cases that Fox released to capitalize on the popularity of Austin Powers!

Then two days later, Centipede rolls a 13 and gets to the very end of the first Chinese block and Maybe It's Love. I'm not going to lie, it threw me to see the Shaw Brothers logo before something that was not a genre film, whether it be martial-arts action or horror. These days, you probably only see a Shaw Brothers logo (updated and digitally animated for the twenty-first century) in front of movies made by their associated TV station (TVB, I think, although maybe it's ATV), ironically more likely to be this sort of movie than the kung fu and horror most folks know them for.

So, how did that work out?

Modesty Blaise

* * ¼ (out of four)

Seen 30 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

Where to stream it (when available), or buy the disc (used) at Amazon

One reason that I'm much more fond of the first Austin Powers movie than is sequels is that there's something more akin to a real movie under the silliness, and in fact it's probably got more going on than the movies it sends up, a list that includes Modesty Blaise. This is a thin little flick, which may or may not bear much resemblance to the adventure strip which inspired it - I've only occasionally flipped through collections at the comic shop - if only because it's full of Swinging Sixties color rather than the strip's strong black lines.

Its coolness may peak with its first scene, with Monica Zitti's Modesty at ease in her penthouse apartment, bantering idly with her Chinese butler. It's clearly her space rather than that of a mistress, as one might have assumed it to be at the time, and it says her flighty mien might be deceptive. Once she's out of that room and talking with various officials, accomplices, and villains, Vitti and the filmmakers are seldom able to imply or demonstrate that her breezy attitude comes from being so capable that she seldom has to break a sweat; people know who she is and prior adventures are name-checked, but she never feels formidable. Vitti is saying the lines but not adding subtext to them, and it's the sort of cliff-hanging adventure where escaping one scrape puts you in another as opposed to something where one sees Modesty's skills as a master thief even in "here's how the heist went down" retrospect.

Vitti's not bad, really, although it feels like the filmmakers are either reluctant to let her carry the movie or didn't have a completed script at filmmaking, because there is a whole mess of narration from older men explaining to each other what's going on. Dirk Bogarde doesn't quite land as arch-nemesis Gabriel; the take seems consciously unconventional, the super-villain who's kind of a pleasant guy without being an interesting villain. There's no spark between him and Rossella Falk as his dominatrix-adjacent lieutenant, and there seems to be some sort of friction over Bogarde's wig; in the same way Gene Hackman later wouldn't want to be bald throughout Superman: The Movie, Bogarde seemingly makes a point of showing that he hasn't gone gray by ripping it off. Terence Stamp could probably have absolutely walked off with the movie if he wanted to, but he politely hovers just below stealing scenes, like he recognizes that it would be unseemly to overshadow the title character.

It never quite comes together, though; the stakes seem oddly low-key for all this effort, and there's only one really nifty heist sequence. It's a gorgeous-looking movie, at least - you can't go very far wrong putting Monica Vitti in nice outfits, and for the most part, the colorful clothing, locations, and ambiance of the late 1960s looks fashionable - a fashion firmly in the past, but nice aesthetically - rather than garish, and there's much less "oh my, she's a woman but somehow competent!" than one might fear. It's just good enough to still get watched 60 years later, when a lot of things trying to ride the combined waves of James Bond and rock & roll have faded to justified obscurity, and not entirely because the folks in the cast stayed famous.

Kwai Ching (Maybe It's Love)

* * ½ (out of four)

Seen 1 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kani Blu-ray)

Not currently streaming (buy the disc at Amazon)

I mention a little surprise at seeing the Shaw Brothers logo before this film in the introduction, while the credits had me raising my eyebrows because of few Hong Kong movies I've seen directed by women, especially in this period. Angie Chen On-Kei does not appear to have a particularly distinguished career as a writer-director during the 1980s, and there's a big hole in her career on IMDB and HKMDB that was apparently spent making commercials. Is she as unusual as she seems, or is this just an example of how there's good infrastructure for importing Hong Kong action, in part because there's not a whole lot else like it, but not so much romantic comedies or other pictures targeted at women? Kani's release of this film is one of the few of its ilk I've seen; is it among the best or just the most readily available?

It's a sort of screwball take on Rear Window, at least to start: 12-year-old "Marble" Shu Ker-Ying (Chui Hoh-Ying), handicapped at the hands of her ne'er-do-well father and now being raised by her grandmother (Mok Chui-Jan), keeps going to the police, claiming that she's seen a woman be murdered, although she proves to be mistaken. Not that there's not something going on, occasionally; what's a girl her age to think when she sees gwailo actor Martin (Ronnie) and his wife (Lau Siu-Pool) engaging in some kinky sex through her binoculars, for example? Up on the bluff, a rich man (Stuart Ong) has installed his mistress Rita (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) in a nice house (which Marble's grandmother occasionally cleans), although his wife (Chan Sze-Kai) occasionally comes poking around. Postman Yau Ju (Kent Tong Chun-Yip) also takes an interest, although he's generally a playboy, also carrying on with Lin (Elaine Jin), the young wife of shopkeeper Wang (Ku Feng), who often seems frustrated and ready to return to the mainland.

There's potential in the screenplay; writer Lillian Lee Pik-Wah is a noted novelist whose name might be familiar from Farewell, My Concubine and Dumplings, and one can see that she's doing something interesting most of the time. Marble and Rita are both outsiders, the one ostracized by the other kids for her handicap and the other for trading on her body. They don't exactly become a found family with Yao Ju (who dreams of being an actor or stuntman, showing his kung fu moves off to the neighborhood kids), but the audience can see how they're in opposite ends of the same boat anyway. There's something really solid in how Marble, who grew up in an abusive household and is permanently scarred from it, has even more difficulty telling sex from violence than the average adolescent and is determined to watch out for it and sound the alarm.

It's a solid foundation to build on, but Chen's first feature is a bit rough; it's got a few very nice scenes but has a bit of trouble establishing a rhythm at times, and the eventual hard turn when it turns out Marble may have seen something after all is wobbly as heck. That's the problem with a lot of takes on Rear Window - it looks very simple in how methodical it is but that's because Hitchcock was a genius and most of the rest of the folks who try to cover the same ground aren't - and Chen doesn't quite land how the last act combines real danger and farce as the violence and willingness to kill this kid bump up against how she is right about the what but wrong about the how in screwball fashion. It's a fun mystery when it's untangled but the audience isn't quite in a place to enjoy that.

Chen doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to work with; there's something about it that seems short on resources, even beyond how it's very much not taking place in an upper-class neighborhood. Young Chui Hoh-Ying proves a very solid center to the movie, despite it being one of just two rules in the databases, but the ensemble around her is shaky, mostly folks who wouldn't have notable careers or whose acting style seems more fit to the studio's period martial arts films. The exception is obviously Cherie Chung, and both she and Chen seem to kind of know it - a scene where she silently but angrily sunbathes to the adults' consternation and adolescent boys' delight doesn't work unless she has movie-star charisma to match her figure, and the way Rita initially toys with Yau Ju or gets frustrated at the locals looking down on her is enhanced by her having that extra bit going on.

Chung and Chen make Maybe It's Love as notable as it is; it's the first Shaw Brothers film directed by a woman and Chung would become a big star who burned bright before retiring relatively young. One wonders what it could have been with just a little more going for it.


Dead heat!

Dale Evans: 20 stars
Centipede: 20 stars

Next entry hopefully coming quick, because i was rolling dice again even before writing this.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 03: Prodigal Sons and Lau Kar-Leung x3 (+1)

Crap, there's an eight-month gap in here. How does that even happen? I really do want to get through this wall, but, nope, just adding to it while doing other stuff.

Way back in January, Dale rolled a 9 getting her to The Prodigal Son, one of Yuen Biao's most popular movies from the 1980s.

A couple days later, Centipede would roll a 4, which got him to Arrow's Lau Kar-Leung box set, but it would be March before I started in on it with Challenge of the Masters, then Executioners from Shaolin in April, Heroes of the East in September, and Dirty Ho in October. Which is crazy, even though there are three entire film festivals in there covering a whole month and attempts to catch up writing which led to me not hitting the shelf. Obviously, I have a problem with making movie-watching projects into writing projects .

So, how did all this time treat the players?

Baai ga jai (The Prodigal Son)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

This is kind of a weird one, especially the first time through, as the filmmakers make some abrupt transitions and tone shifts, like they've got a good outline that doesn't always work in detail, but you can see the ambition there. A second time through, it works a bit better, especially after watching some of the Shaw Brothers films this evolved from. The comedy's goofier, but the greater themes are closer to the surface.

The man of the title is Leung Chang (Yuen Biao), the son of a wealthy merchant whose father pays martial artists to lose to him in street brawls, lest he get injured; he doesn't find out he's really bad at kung fu until friends ask him to take on Leung Yee-Tai (Lam Ching-Ying), an opera singer in female roles who is actually a master. Chang finagles his way into the troupe to attempt to learn from him, but winds up revealing Tai to Ngai Fei (Frankie Chan Fan-Kei), another enthusiast looking for a fight, eventually requiring a retreat to heal and train with Tai old friend and rival Wong Wa-po (Sammo Hung Kam=Bo).

I spent a bit of time looking up what the "home video cut" on this disc was (apparently, the same thing except with actor credits up front rather than as they appear), which was how I learned that it was apparently a prequel to Warriors Two; I suspect may explain the big weird jump in the middle where Leung and Ngai flee the circus and wind up at the home of Wong Wah-bo without much in-film work to connect them at all. I thought it was cut for time, but apparently it just wouldn't have been necessary for the Hong Kong audience. It's an odd and unusual shift - the film had just finished ramping up from mostly-comic to deadly-serious, and then it's getting slapstick and goofy again.

Sammo Hung and company do an impressive job of balancing whimsy and cruel violence here, though, better than should be possible. It's an especially nice showcase for Yuen Biao, who gets to play comic and earnest to start and shift his fighting to match. Biao never became quite so famous in the West as schoolmates Jackie Chan and Sammo, but his physicality here is impressive - he doesn't pratfall as the inexperienced student who doesn't really know kung fu, but he's a bit sloppy, and one can see him tightening that up as the film proceeds to its final confrontation. The last act nicely underlines the parallels between Chang and Ngai, both scions of rich families whose patriarchs take pains to insulate them from defeat. There's maybe not a particular lesson in this, but it's something that gives a little extra heft to a situation where both the comedy and violence could be hollow.

Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong (Challenge of the Masters)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Every once in a while, I wonder what Wong Fei-Hung's defendants think of his status as a folk hero, his life being rewritten to fit a story's needs, perhaps because you can't tell a story in this era without referring to him. He's such a legend that every martial arts movie in the mid-1800s must be a Wong Fei-Hung movie, even if they're not really Wong Fei-Hung movies.

In this one, Wong Fei-Hung (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) is presented as a teenager who loves martial arts despite his father's refusal to teach him, especially the annual "Pau Battle", an annual free-for-all where the various schools compete to collect tokens launched from fireworks. But there's more going on, as Yuan Ching (Lau Kar-Leung), who studied under the same master as Fei-Hung's father Kay-Ying (Chiang Yang), Lu Ah Tsai (Che Kuan-Tai), has arrived in pursuit of a fugitive (Lau Kar-Leung) who has embedded himself in a rival school. He sees Fei-Hung's natural aptitude, but may not be prepared for how desperate and deadly his quarry is.

At its best, Challenge of the Masters contemplates the question of what martial arts is for and the journey to understanding it; Gordon Liu plays Won Fei-Hung as a shallow kid who only sees the respect and action, and his attempts to force himself into the Pau battles without the requisite training are immature and dangerous, though maybe not arrogantly so, but is later forged into a righteous weapon of justice and vengeance. If Liu is a bit stiffer at this point, it's fine; it plays like he's mastered his rage, an exclamation point to how his performance evolves over the long stretch of training.

Director Lau Kar-Leung's action is on point throughout; there's an edge to the violence, with the way that the Pau battles get out of control a warning about how dangerous undisciplined martial arts can be, and he imbues his villain with a nastiness that is both confident and cowardly. It's what makes the final duel between him and Liu's Wong Fei-Hung so satisfying; it's a fast-paced fight where we've see that both can do damage, but we can see the earnest purpose to what Wong has become. Lau's He Fu is too skilled to be afraid, but his vibe is different.

The story is thin as heck; the Pau contest feels a bit like stuffing, a great spectacle tied to the more substantive story, but it reinforces things well enough. Like a lot of Lau's output (and that of writer I Kuang), it's a movie built to show the action with other stuff going on, but it runs smoothly in doing so.


Hong Xi Guan (Executioners from Shaolin)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 19 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with Chang Cheh's Shaw Brothers Extended Shaolin Temple Universe, though it doesn't really matter that much, other than how one can't necessarily help but think of the timeline and history throughout.

It picks up as the Temple burns, and Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) sends the governor's forces to ideally capture the fleeing monks, hoping they can be tortured into revealing the locations of others. After Tong Qianjin (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) buys them some time to escape, Hong Xiguan (Chen Kuan-Tai) and his friend Xiaohu (Cheng Kang-Yeh) are among those taking refuge on the red boats, disguised as opera troupes. In one village, street performer Fang Yung Chun ("Lily" Li Li-Li) objects to their arrogance, but soon she and Hong are spending all their time together. But while they travel and perform, Pai Mei is consolidating his power, and it's not long after the couple marry that soldiers mount an attack on the red boats, sending them further into hiding.

Executioners has the feel of something that is based around history and/or legends and has been sort of messily cobbled together and then pushed to be irreverent, and I sometimes wonder if the legends retold in these martial-arts epics need an environment where both they and the creators can breathe. It's one thing to say someone trains for years in anticipation of a decisive fight in a serialized novel, but another when two or ten years occur between shots but only one character is being recast and the visual changes are too minor to really feel like time has passed. Often, "he trained for years" is used as a shorthand for it being very important but the other impact isn't felt on screen. Warrior monks seemingly only get more powerful and skilled, as opposed to a trade-off between one's technique improving but the body starting to turn.

So against this background, the romance between Xiguan and Yung-Chun is just kind of there, necessary but not passionate, the "comedy" is mostly abrasive, and the preparations for/fights against Pai Mei tend to be about hitting specific weak spots rather than strategy: The finale could be about the value of knowing multiple styles versus attempting to hone one to perfection, but that's mostly mentioned in passing. The big fights are, of course, good stuff, even if Pai Mei's signature move is apparently to let people kick him in the nuts so that he can grasp their foot with his groin and drag them around. The fights are good, of course, although the early ones with their desperation top the later ones with their silly rules


Zhong hua zhang fu (Heroes of the East)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 September2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

This and the other Lau Kar-Leung movie on the second disc of the box set are kung fu comedies that feel like they were completely dispensing with any pretense that the kung fu was just part of these movies' appeal or a way of telling the story. Here are guys who know how to fight, this story says, some wacky situations, and then let's go.

In this case, the wacky situation has Ho Tao (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) objecting to an arranged marriage with a childhood friend - the daughter of one of his father's Japanese business associates - until he sees that Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno) is gorgeous. It turns out she shares his interest in martial arts, though her studies have naturally tended toward Japanese forms, and she quickly moves to monopolize the estate's training grounds. Eventually, Yumiko returns to Japan, where she reacquaints herself with old friend (and ninjutsu expert) Takeno (Yasuaki Kurata), who brings an entire brace of Japanese martial artists to challenge Tao.

The back half especially is one duel after another, more or less completely arbitrary, without much in the way of dramatic stakes once one sees that Tao and Yumiko have more or less put their issues behind them. But, hey, it works; the movie's a ton of fun. I wish that I knew a bit more about Hong Kong/Japan relations in the late 1970s, because in some ways this movie has a weird tension underneath: The arranged marriage eventually becomes reasonably warm, but while Ho Tao is initially described as just being pretty good at martial arts, he defeats a whole bunch of masters of various Japanese disciplines. Lots of movies and other bits of pop culture will try and walk a line where one is earnestly interested in and admiring of a foreign culture but with the unspoken assumption that one's own is better, although, hey, some of these folks are old enough to be WWII vets (and I've seen a lot of recent Chinese movies very focused on Japan as a sadistic occupying army), and one can't help but wonder what the thinking is here.

The long string of duels kind of overwhelms anything going on between Tao and Kumiko, which is a bit of a shame; one can see how the couple can be fun once they're a bit less at odds, and Cheng Kang-Yeh is kind of obnoxious fun as the servant who enjoys stirring the pot. The various Japanese martial-arts masters are kind of one-note aside from Yasuaki Kurata's Takeno, but they're generally entertaining notes. I'm a bit surprised that Yuka Mizuno seems to have had quite a short career - only two other films after this one - and while she's sort of rough as an actress, one can see potential enough to make one wonder what her story is.

Heroes of the East could be a really fun kung fu romantic comedy, but it's just focused on the fights. It's a very entertaining fight movie, and that's enough.


Lan tou He (Dirty Ho)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Treating this as a bonus, since I have seen the film before, though it's been nearly 20 years since it played on film at Fantasia. I reviewed it at the time, although, yikes, is my writing and general familiarity with Asian genre film rough. Can't claim to be too much of a kid, either, at 32.

Ah, well. It was still a real kick to revisit . For all that "Dirty Ho" probably didn't have the same meaning at the time, it's full of winking innuendo to start, and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui is a real delight as the jewel merchant who is eventually revealed as more, cool and confident but eventually revealing the burden of his position - too decent, really, to want to be king, which ultimately makes him the only acceptable choice. He's a fun pairing with Wong Yu's title character - it's not quite a buddy movie, as it winds up too much a master-student situation - but Wong really finds a nice comic groove as someone half scammer, half put-upon, and manages to keep it even as the stakes get higher.

Good fun.


Not counting Dirty Ho because it's a re-watch, that gets both our players up to six movies, and nearly tied:

Dale Evans: 17 ¾ stars
Centipede: 17 ½ stars

Now, let's hope the next rolls don't get bogged down!

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 01: The Enchanted Cottage and Lights Out

Let's get 2025 on the blog started right, with me trying to make this thing from a couple years ago happen again, with the goal of leaving my shelves less full than when I started.

After Mookie and Bruce basically tied in Season 1, the competitors this time around are the Atari Centipede, who looks much cuter than I expected for a creature that bedeviled me in various arcades and home machines starting in the 1980s, and Dale Arden, the constant companion and true love of Flash Gordon. Look, I'm just going to say it right at the top: I don't particularly care for the movie. Deliberate camp is not my thing, even if it has Timothy Dalton in it. This series isn't going to go there.

And here is this year's "game board", which is taller than the makers of these shelving units recommend at six levels. That's twenty cubes in all, which the competitors will dash across, wrapping around to the next row at the whims of the big d20, and as films get landed on, they get pulled and watched, with the gap filled from below as much as possible. Indeed, the pile to the right of the board is what wouldn't fit into the third column, but will enter the board as space develops at the bottom. The films I haven't seen by Jean-Pierre Melville will probably enter as well, should three or four slots open at the end of a row.

The zones are:

• Column One: Western films from Kidnapped (1917) to The Stewardesses (1969)
• Column Two: Hong Kong/China/Taiwan from Lady Whirlwind & Hapkido (1972) to Streetwise (2023), with the first two of Arrow's ShawScope sets lurking at the bottom waiting to rocket someone ahead
• Column Three: Western films from Zeta One (1969) to Summer of Sam (1999)
• Column Four, Rows One to Three: Korean films from The Flower in Hell (1958) to The Moon (2023), plus directors' sections for Ringo Lam, Jon Woo, and Tsui Hark
• Column Four, Rows Four and Five: Japanese films from Warning from Space (1956) to Last Letter (2020)
Column Four, Row Six: Johnnie To, Wong Jing, and Pang Ho-Cheung

This isn't my entire collection, but just the discs I have bought in the past few years (roughly since the pandemic) of films I haven't seen before. It was out of hand when Season One started and I've only been crowdfunding silent releases, grabbing at things in Kino Lorber, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome sales, and just otherwise grabbing physical media that might not be around tomorrow at a faster clip since. That Korean Film Archive sale one foreign store had ballooned the K-film section!

(Also, I highly encourage anyone else who has trouble choosing to buy a blind box and a die and play along on their own board and use the hashtag #FilmRolls on Blluesky or, ugh, X to share your progress.)

So, let's go!

Dale rolls first, and gets a 17, which lands her on The Enchanted Cottage, preceded by short "Where the Road Divided" (which will not count toward the scoring).

Centipede rolls next, and gets a 16, catching him (or her; no need to assume gender) to Lights Out. Because we remove discs as they're watched, that leaves them at exactly the same spot!

So, how is that start?

"Where the Road Divided"

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


The description on IMDB seems to be of a much more interesting movie, a sort of Sliding Doors narrative where what happens at a fork in the road, but that's not the actual short in question, which is a pretty conventional morality play about a pretty young teenager (Louise Huff) who is seduced by a City Slicker (earl Metcalfe) looking to exploit the local mineral rights; her father being a moonshine-swilling wastrel, it's up to her schoolmaster (director Edgar Jones) and a longtime admirer (George Gowan) to stop her being taken advantage of.

The thing about this "morality play" is that the teacher is pretty clearly infatuated with her, at the very least, with early scenes talking about her not getting special treatment because of that and, ick. Like, you could probably make this a movie about a businessman saving a bright young girl from the groomers around her by removing a couple more lascivious looks and changing some intertitles. It's not that movie, to be clear, but its moral authority is undercut more than a bit, and not just because it was made 110 years ago. It leads to a finale that wants to have tragic gravitas but kind of comes out of nowhere.

Nice looking, though, and even if the details are often bad, the story feels right. The cast sketches their characters well, even if I sort of run into issues with how Louise Huff's Rose is probably supposed to be about fifteen or so, but that's mostly be - the actress was about 20 at the time, and the idea of the "teenager" was a few decades away. Anyway, it's not really good, but it's and shows its age, but it's decent enough to pl.ay before something else without sending one to the concession stand.


The Enchanted Cottage '24

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Available on DVD on Amazon (not the crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Pretty dead-simple in its intent but likably earnest, The Enchanted Cottage tells the story of an injured war veteran (Richard Barthelmess) who, after discovering that his fiancée loves another man, runs off and isolates himself in a honeymoon "cottage" where he meets a poor, plain girl (May McAvoy) to whom he semi-cynically proposes marriage to get his own family off his back and give her some stability. The spirits of the centuries of honeymooners watch over them, and one morning they wake up transformed!

At a mere 80 minutes, this still manages to feel dragged out at times - to the point where, in the end, the now-attractive Oliver and Laura themselves are wondering what is taking so long! - but that and an ending that doesn't just underline it's moral but is like someone moving their pen back and forth to really emphasize it (kind of the same thing) are the only real knock against it. There's a sincerity to both the fairy-tale elements and the more grounded issues that impresses: I love Oliver's pained decency at seeing his intended Beatrice run to the side of her true love, and how the pair's blinded neighbor privately reveals his despair toward the end after putting on a brave face for the rest of the film.

Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy don't really look like folks who would be shunned - even a hundred years ago, you didn't want to remove too much glamor from your movie stars - but it kind of works for the film that you can see their inner beauty before Oliver straightens up and Laura gets a magic makeover; it's show-don't-tell in a way that's particularly suited to silents. Barthelmess in particular does some nice physical acting here, capturing Oliver's infirmity by the way he holds one leg and bends his neck without hamming it up, suggesting he's learned how to live with it a bit.

The visual effects look surprisingly good - the transparent spirits don't quite interact with the living, but seem to exist in the same space in the same lighting in a way that later silents an early talkies don't quite manage. It's a simple movie but works well enough.

Lights Out '23

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


I'm kind of interested to see the 1938 remake/re-adaptation Crashing Hollywood, or see the original play staged somewhere, because Lights Out seems almost there in so many places. Star Theodore von Eitz's glasses make me wonder what it would be like if you dropped Harold Lloyd in and built a big slapstick climax into the finale, while on the other hand, the first act seems like it would be much improved by having rapid-fire dialog to bring out characterization rather than big exposition dumps in the intertitles and characters trying to emote while sitting.

(I'm also not sure whether the train porters and servants are blackface or "just" Steppin Fetchit-style mugging, but that's obviously not great.)

That bit on the train from Austin to Los Angeles takes a long time to set things up: A bank in Austin has been robbed, and the police and private security detectives have their eye on Egbert Winslow (von Eltz), who insured his black valise for $50,000 before boarding the train. He hits it off with the banker's daughter Barbara (Marie Astaire), and while they sit in the observation deck, "Hairpin Annie" (Ruth Stonehouse), who picked the bank's lock but was denied her share of the loot, and her fresh-out-of-stir partner in crime "Sea Bass" (Walter McGrail) try to get at his case. He's surprisingly not upset; he's always wanted to meet real crooks and pick their brains because he's a screenwriter for Hollywood serials. Which suits Sea Bass and Annie fine; the convince him to make one that paints the real robber, "High-Shine" Joe (Ben Deeley), in an unflattering light, figuring that will bring him back from Brazil and lead them to where he's hidden the rest of the take. Of course, Barbara's father and the law note that this production seems to know details about the robbery that weren't given to the press, and figure Winslow must be in on it.

It's a genuinely terrific scenario that is great fun to watch play out once it starts moving ahead in earnest; the filmmakers do a very nice job of shuffling folks around various locations so that they just miss each other or are only privy to enough of a conversation to misunderstand. It's the sort of farce that doesn't always benefit from the way moving from stage to screen opens it up as editing can sometimes blunt the illusion of near misses and the subconscious knowledge that someone is waiting in the wings, but works well here. It helps a lot that the farce seems to be driven forward by the characters' motivations as opposed to having them twisted to move the pieces to a new spot: One can see Barbara becoming fonder of Winslow than the detective she's engaged to (Ben Hewlett), and the time jump from the train to the production of the serial's final episode lets the audience believe that Annie and Sea Bass would not only get closer but start to view Winslow as a friend instead of just a resource to exploit. Ben Deeley, meanwhile, adds spice to how good-natured all this is with a criminal mastermind whose ego is funny but also dangerous enough to feel like a threat; and he also does nice work pulling double duty as the actor playing High-Shine in the serial.

That opening segment is almost a killer, though, devoting a long stretch at the start to honeymooners looking for a bit of privacy to make out who we won't see later, like the movie needs to spend ten minutes to justify pulling a shade. It's got some strained physical comedy around Winslow either keeping the bag close or forgetting it as he flirts with Barbara and too many people circling it, including some of the tackier bits of racial humor and a person mostly seen as a hand reaching out from behind a chair that I lost track of at various points. It's a segment that could use a real slapstick pro rather than van Eltz, who just never sells the physical comedy casually or as someone believably frazzled, which is something of an issue through the movie.

Lights Out is genuinely fun once it gets going, and since the play must be in the public domain by now, it might be fun to see someone take a run at it today. For a century-old farce, it doesn't seem like it would be particularly broken by air travel, cell phones, or other bits of modern tech, which may be a part of why it still works fairly well.

So, two crowdfunded silent movie releases that maybe weren't great - there is, after all, a reason why so many of these lesser-known movies didn't stay in the public consciousness and have Kickstarter goals that would be met if 100 of us bought them - but are worth watching once. And, yes, I've already backed one new campaign in the new year. Which gives us a score of:

Dale Evans: 2 ½ stars
Centipede: 2 ½ stars

Dale may lead by a nose in points, but they're at the same position on the board, with at least one likely to move into the Hong Kong section with the next roll!

Film Rolls, Round 24: Piraha and … oh, never mind

I'm in a sort of ashamed awe at this post, which was nearly a year in the making - the first of the 9 movies intended to be included came off the shelf on 24 February 2023, the last on 19 November 2023, and while there's reasons, I'm certainly going to find ways to tighten this up on the next pass through.

But, it's the final round of the game! How does it play out?

Well, it starts with Mookie rolling a 9, which gets him to Piranha in 4K. As nutty as the choices for what gets put on 4K and what is let to languish on VHS/DVD can be, Joe Dante's first feature that caused people to sit up and take notice certainly seems like one that demands some attention.

Things got a little busy after that - March is Boston Underground Film Festival time, for instance - so it was April before get got back to this, excited about being close to the end. Bruce rolled a 12, and I honestly can't remember whether that got him to the first in the line of Kino Lorber's "Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema" box sets exactly, or if I just decided that the appropriate amount or over stopped you there. At any rate, it's a five-film box, and it seemed unfair to skew the results at the end, so, when I picked this back up in November (hey, there's Fantasia and other stuff in there!)...

Holy cats, Mookie rolled a six and ended up exactly where he needed to be! What are the odds? Okay, obviously 5%, but this picture was definitely staged.

It's been a whole year since then, during which I figured on re-watching the eight films noirs in order to write decent reviews but it just never worked out that way, so I'm going to treat those movies as bonuses and wrap this up. So I figured on not starting Season Two until I got this wrapped up, which means my shelf has been bloating all year, and isn't the idea to use this as a way to watch movies without hemming and hawing so much?

So, yeah, here's a quick wrap-up and a clean slate, mostly posted because I've wanted to take the photo at the bottom for at least a couple years.

Piranha '78

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Seen 7 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Available for stream/digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; 4K Blu-ray on Amazon

There's a moment or two during Piranha when some random old B-movie appears on a TV screen, and 45 years later, you can kind of laugh, saying it's just Joe Dante being Joe Dante, but I found myself kind of wondering if someone seeing it 45 years ago would wonder why Dante was reminding us that there were monster movies out there that were, if not necessarily better, at least more imaginative. I'm not sure what the term folks at the time would use the way we sort of dismissively say "content" in 2024, but that's kind of what Piranha is - producer Roger Corman cranking out a new movie to fill spaces on drive-in and grindhouse screens, or maybe play some late nights where a regular theater had a hole, but not really anything meant to last. It's got a fancy 4K disc not because it's particularly good or noteworthy, but because director Joe Dante and writer John Sayles went on to bigger and better things.

Which, it should be made clear, does not make Piranha bad; it does what it says on the box and does it in pretty capable fashion. Sayles gives Dante a script that includes everything a movie like this needs with the occasional fun variation or bit of dialog; Dante-the-director gets Dante-the-editor good material to cut together, and the cast could often maybe dial it down a bit - you can see a fun dynamic in Heather Menzies's headstrong skip-tracer and Bradford Dillman's grumpy local guide, except that they're too close to shouting when they should maybe be closer to bantering - but more often than not, it's the right people in the right roles and you can see them existing outside the movie. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's never great but solidly competent throughout - it's often very rought! - but Dante generally seems to get enough that's decent to put together.

The thing is, it's a Corman-produced movie from after he'd peaked, and there are times even a B-movie-lover like Dante seems frustrated with the spots he's got to hit, making sure that Menzies' Maggie is all "really?" about the nature of the distraction Dillman's Grogan suggests before flashing her [body double's] breasts, and there's an obvious need to hang a lantern on how cheap the fancy resort looks. There's a Phil Tippet stop-motion creature that they ran out of money for, but it's in the film because it cost money even if it doesn't go anywhere. Corman's clearly chasing a trend on a tight budget, rather than doing something that anybody involved finds particularly interesting or inspired by. Unlike a lot of those movies, it lucked into having just enough up-and-coming talent to remain watchable.


Okay! That makes the finale score before the Film Noir Box sets

Mookie: 81 ¼ stars
Bruce: 79 ¼ stars

Bruce was ahead until Mookie got that last film, but he would have had five movies compared to Mookie's three, so let's say it's too close to call!

Of course, if you do feel like calling it, here's how the pair stood up… literally!

Okay, that was fun! I'm going to try it again starting next week (next year!), once again trying to find a good balance between "it is a fun thing to do with a movie blog" and "you're not getting paid and have other hobbies, stop making everything a massive writing project!"" Which, if I specifically enumerated resolutions, would absolutely be my New Year's Resolution.