THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE: shlock horror

Horror movies were a staple part of the output for many Hollywood studios in the 1930s and
40s. Hundreds were churned out during this period by everyone from MGM to Monogram. A few demonstrated genuine style and creativity but the vast majority were just average, produced quickly and cheaply and intended to do little more than prop up the bottom half of a double-bill at the local Roxy.
Even within this vast swathe of average horrors there were big differences in the levels of quality and originality, but few scraped so blatantly along the very bottom of these standards as 1944's THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE.
The only shocking aspect of this Columbia production is how little attention was paid to the script, acting and sets. The shoddiness shines through in every single scene, from the complete lack of emotion in the performers' delivery of their lines to the piling of horror movie cliches one a-top another, and the complete disregard for even a token attempt at plausibility in the storyline.
Set in a cramped studio-bound evocation of bomb-scarred wartime London that even Basil Rathbone's 1940s incarnation of Sherlock Holmes would struggle to recognise, the plot revolves around the return to life of a vampire intent on wreaking revenge on the scientists who drove a stake through his heart 25 years earlier.
A pasty, flabby faced Bela Lugosi, desperately in need of make-up, plays the suspiciously Dracula-like vampire Armand Tesla who masquerades as a German scientist recently rescued from a concentration camp to get close to his intended victim. She is an English lady scientist, Lady Jane Ainsley, who never lets anyone forget she's titled. In the hands of Frieda Inescort, Lady Jane appears to be the unsuspecting victim of a lobotomy which has rendered her completely unable to emote. Whether facing imminent death or consoling her upset daughter, Inescort delivers every line as if she were reading aloud a page from the telephone directory.
This total lack of emotion does, however, serve her well in her frustrating dealings with Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander). With his absolute refusal to even entertain the remote possibility that any of Lady Jane's concerns might just have some slim grounding in reality, Sir Frederick takes the character of the pigheaded policeman to new depths. Time and again he dismisses eyewitness reports and tangible evidence of supernatural goings-on with the mantra "there's a perfectly reasonable

explanation for this" without ever suggesting what that might be. He's so brazenly stupid he makes Dennis Hoey's Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes stories look like a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And don't even get me started on the short-sighted police commissioner cliches! Fleet makes copious use of every single one of them to delay the story's predictable conclusion.
If this mix were not already intoxicating enough, director Lew Landers also throws in a walking, talking werewolf able to morph from human to lycanthrope without so much as unbuttoning his jacket or loosening his tie. The effect is less scary and more an impressive piece of fancy dress.
The result of all this is a sloppy, lazy and distinctly unchilling drama that's implausible even by the already implausible standards of the vampire genre.

THE MONUMENTS MEN: a monumental disaster

THE MONUMENTS MEN is a disjointed, dull, superficial and monumentally unengaging piece of cinema.
Director, producer, co-screenwriter and star George Clooney has bitten off considerably more than he can get into his mouth, let alone chew, with this misguided attempt to tell the story of a small band of art experts operating on the frontline in post D-Day western Europe to recover some of the hundreds of thousands of art treasures looted by the Nazis.

The Allied invasion of Europe and subsequent advance across the continent towards Berlin was an enormous undertaking which doesn't easily lend itself to retelling within a 1 hour 56 minute time frame, and the film repeatedly highlights the folly of attempting to do so. The story hopscotches from the US to the UK to France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and who knows where-else in a series of disjointed stories within the story which are too short to offer anything more than a snapshot of a particular moment in a particular part of the war, and it's sometimes far from clear just which part of the war we're dropping in on.
Clooney and co-star Matt Damon breeze through the death and destruction all around them with the same nonchalance that they brought to the considerably more lightweight 'Ocean's 11/12/13' series, leaving it to a couple of their senior supporting cast (Jean Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville) to remind us that some people actually got killed in this particular escapade. The all-star cast (Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban),  the method of their recruitment into Clooney's team, and their underdeveloped characters only adds to the sensation of an 'Ocean's 11' retread with a CGI battle-devastated Europe taking the place of the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.
THE MONUMENTS MEN exudes the same kind of cinematic inauthenticity that pervades so many Hollywood studio-bound war films of the 1940s and 1950s but minus any of the style which served as those films' saving grace. Perhaps if Clooney had focused on just one of his responsibilities instead of trying to write, produce, direct and star in the thing, he might have created (or co-created) a more polished, coherent and engaging movie, but in trying to balance so many hats on his one (undeniably suave and charming) head he's given us a monumentally crashing snore-fest.

JOE: hell no I won't go! (for a ride on this particular bandwagon)

Seems Jesus Christ isn't the only one to have risen from the dead this month.
Nicholas Cage's career is also experiencing an equally miraculous resurrection if some of the hype surrounding the release of his latest film JOE is to be believed.
It's 'a re-birth', 'there's not an unfelt moment in Cage's performance' and 'Joe ... reminds us that Nicolas Cage can still be a great actor when he wants to be' is just a sampling of the

hysteria based solely, it seems to me, on the fact that Cage is doing something other than his standard bat-sh*t crazy ham-acting routine in one of those take-the-money-and-run pieces of junk that he's chosen to focus his talents on in recent years.
But just being not awful doesn't make it great or the dawning of a new, serious Nicholas Cage as actor.
Cut through the frenzied hyperbole and what we've got with JOE is a non-shouting or screaming Nicholas Cage with a beard playing a guy called Joe but not for a moment making us forget it's actually Nicholas Cage - even with the beard. I suppose one could argue that by not going way over the top Cage is stretching himself but that in itself is a stretch and still doesn't add up to a great performance.
I mean it's not even like Joe is a particularly interesting or original character. An ex-con whose tough, gruff exterior hides an inner loneliness and a soft spot in his heart, Joe is a type we've seen many times before in the cinema as is his story with its way too predictable ending.
The film's only real revelations are the two main supporting actors. Newcomer Tye Sheridan is superb as Gary, the 15 year old who adopts Joe as an unlikely role model and uncovers the chink in Joe's armour, while first-time actor Gary Poulter is a revelation as Gary's vicious, violent waster of a father, a broken-down alcoholic with no compunction about beating up his son and stealing from him. Poulter plays him as irredeemably mean, making no effort to win our sympathy or understanding, and succeeds without ever resorting to any of the cliches and stereotypes often associated with this type of role. Sadly we'll never get to find out whether Poulter had the talent to build on this initial success as he died a couple of months after filming was completed.
Whether JOE marks a turning point for Nicholas Cage remains to be seen. In terms of a career revival it's more akin to Burt Reynold's in 'Boogie Nights' than Matthew McConaughey's in 'Dallas Buyer's Club' despite those what many of those same critics I referred to earlier might insist.   

IMPACT: bowled over by Ella Raines

I came for the story and stayed for the star.
There's the makings of a tight little murder thriller in 1949's IMPACT but unfortunately it's overlong and let down by plot holes so large you could drive a fully-laden furniture truck through them with tailgate down, and the terrible miscasting of one of Hollywood's finest

character actors of the 1940s.
Charles Coburn was undeniably versatile but even his talents don't stretch to playing a plausible Irish-American police detective. Quite why this role wasn't given to one of the hundreds of supporting actors who earned their living playing this stock type is a mystery, but Coburn's obvious discomfort and inability to maintain a consistent accent are a definite hindrance to the willing suspension of disbelief.
This piece of miscasting, however, is but a minor footnote when placed in the context of the bigger story which even the the most willing of disbelief suspenders will find mighty hard to swallow.
Brian Donlevy plays tough-talking businessman Walter Williams who narrowly escapes with his life when his wife's boyfriend tries to murder him on a lonely mountain road somewhere between San Francisco and Denver. Moments later the boyfriend's killed in a firey crash and his body burnt beyond all recognition. The cops think the ashes are Williams' and put his wife on trial for murder, while Williams assumes a new identity and finds work as a garage mechanic in an idyllic Idaho town. He's so eaten up with bitterness at his wife's betrayal that he's prepared to see her jailed for a crime she didn't commit, until the burgeoning love of the garage owner (yes, she's a woman!) persuades him to go to the police and tell them the real story - at which point he finds himself on trial for the boyfriend's murder, and there's still 30 minutes of plot to go.
All these convolutions are fine as long as you don't think too deeply about them. Even shallow thoughts will root out the inconsistencies and implausibilities that'll have you shouting at Coburn and his fellow detectives "Why don't you ask the 2 guys driving the furniture truck what they saw?!"
Having established that the film's too long, the plot doesn't make sense and they've got the only actor who couldn't do a credible Irish accent playing an Irish-American cop, you making be wondering what exactly is the motivation for investing precious time in this movie?
Two words - Ella Raines.
My god this woman is beautiful!

From the first seconds of her first appearance, dressed in mechanic's overalls, her hair tucked under a hat and her face smudged with oil as she works on a car engine, I was smitten. Not only is she the sexiest car mechanic you are ever likely to encounter, but she's adorable too. She's so adorable she even manages to convince us she finds short, stocky Brian Donlevy desirable and, heck, if a man who's as wide as he is tall can set Miss Raines' heart a-flutter then surely there's hope for the rest of us guys!
It doesn't hurt either that she can act. Her belief in the plot remains total, even as it descends into the realm of nonsense, cliches and borderline racism in it's demeaning depiction of the character played by veteran Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.
Whatever else IMPACT is, it's not film noir, despite what some other film review websites would have you believe. It's not just that there's way too much daylight and sunshine, but Walter Williams is no existential anti-hero battling vain against a pre-ordained fate. He's a stock Hollywood crime drama/thriller character grappling with an increasingly unlikely set of circumstances of the kind unfortunately found in way too many B-movie dramas of the period. IMPACT would like to be a film noir but it doesn't meet the requirements.
It does, though, have the wonderful Miss Raines, and that'll do for me.

THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY: Just kill me

Leon Trotsky was lucky.
He got an icepick to the head and was gone a few hours later.

Contrast that with Joseph Losey's 1972 dramatisation of the assassination which inflicts a cinematic slow painful death on every single person in the audience. Rarely has such a famous and dramatic moment in history been reduced to such mind-numbing, turgid and lethargic boredom.
The story's ending is pre-ordained. Heck, the title even gives away the big finish, so all that's left is the build-up, the story behind the murder and a chance to shed a little light on Trotsky and the motives of his killer. We already know the what, but surely there's still some interesting angles to be explored with the who and why.
"Don't call me Shirley" is director Losey's curt response to that proposition.
His preference is to fill the screen with one hundred minutes of Alain Delon alternately running around various crumbling stone edifices in Mexico City, looking moody/blank in a cool pair of sunglasses, and wrestling girlfriend Romy Schneider on a bed whenever she asks awkward questions about his identity. Intersperse that with scenes of Richard Burton as Trotsky dictating his political thoughts to a secretary and then listening back to them on a primitive dictaphone (because hearing dense political theory once just isn't enough); mix in a jarring, screeching soundtrack and numerous pointless panning shots, and the result is an empty, bloated hulk of nothingness.
A complete and utter waste of time, money and talent.
Losey had almost a quarter century of film-making experience under his belt by the time he called action on this project (perhaps 'Inaction' would have been more apt) yet he gives the impression of having absolutely no idea what he's doing. Visually the film is bereft of vision, the story barely holds together, and the cast can hardly summon the energy to simply go through the motions. Delon is a cypher while Burton phones in his performance, presenting the great Russian revolutionary as a windbag with the charisma of a potted plant.
Whatever your personal opinion of Trotsky's politics he deserves better than this.

ANCHORMAN 2 - THE LEGEND CONTINUES: this anchor's too lightweight to hold down a story

Oh dear.
Oh dear, oh dear!
What was I thinking?
How could I have deluded myself into believing this film might be worth watching?
How could I have so easily forgotten the intense marketing campaign for ANCHORMAN 2 which saturated  tv, radio and the internet just a few months ago without raising one genuinely laugh-out-loud moment?

The film lives down to every expectation which I had chosen - in a moment of madness - to ignore in hopes of some undemanding and enjoyable Saturday night entertainment.
It's yet another lamestream, cynical Hollywood sequel designed to cruise and collect on the back of audiences' fond memories for the original which - in the cold light of day - wasn't that spectacular either.
There, I've said it.
2004's 'Anchorman' is not the classic that our faulty collective memory would have us believe, but it's practically 'Citizen Kane' next to this abysmal follow-up.
The big problem I have with this film is Ron Burgundy. He's not a consistent character but rather a vehicle for Will Ferrell to show off his 'incredible' improvisational comedy skills. For a character to be credible he or she needs to display certain reliable and recurring traits, and when in the interests of a quick laugh or a plot requirement, they act in a way that is not consistent with the way we've been lead to believe they are, it shatters the illusion of believability.
Burgundy is presented to us as an egotistical, misogynistic, dim-wit whose sole talents are great hair and the ability to read a teleprompter, except when Ferrell decides to have him do

something outside of this character to, as I say, grab a laugh or service a plot twist.
And my reaction is - that's not what Ron Burgundy would do or say. My disbelief is no longer suspended and the world within the film falls apart.
ANCHORMAN 2 has Burgundy inadvertently inventing the template for 24 hour cable news channels, with a collection of off-the-cuff comments and spur of the moment decisions that the channel's executives seize on as flashes of genius. Not only are these outside the realm of Ron's capabilities, but they're such obvious set-ups for a bunch of cheap and lazy jabs at what cable news has become that they fail even to raise a knowing smile.
As with almost every other Will Ferrell starrer it's clear that improvisation has taken precedence over the script, to the detriment of the story. Too many of the scenes feel like the product of numerous takes and many different lines, with the intention of finding the perfect bust-a-gut-guffawing routine. The result, unfortunately, is too often reminiscent of a 'Saturday Night Live' sketch where the germ of a funny idea shrivels and dies for lack genuinely creative development.
The net result of all this misfiring is that the film feels interminable and when it did eventually get to the end the only sensation was of being cheated out of two hours of my life.

LAST VEGAS: The Hangover on Viagra fails to rise to the occasion

LAST VEGAS is as shiny, glitzy, shallow and fake as its namesake city.
Both dangle tantalizing promises of fun and excitement that neither are able to deliver on.
Las Vegas can be a wonderful place if your idea of a great time is blowing your life savings in a matter of minutes, but for those of us searching for something less costly and more stimulating its welcome soon wears thin.

Utilising the strapline 'It's Going to be Legendary', LAST VEGAS baits its trap with similar blandishments. Who can resist the opportunity to watch an all-star cast of Hollywood heavyweights cutting loose in that sun-soaked high temple to hedonism with their own viagra-fuelled  take on 'The Hangover'?
The reality is considerably less legendary and infinitely more 'feet of clay.'
Without maligning in any way the professionalism of Messrs Robert  De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, there's very little sense of any of them making more than the most token of efforts to create a plausible character for themselves. The overwhelming perception is of four big-name actors half-heartedly participating in a very generously all-expenses-paid lark which doesn't ask much more of them than to turn up, remember their lines and not walk into the furniture.
Playing lifelong buddies, now in their late 60s, re-uniting in Vegas to throw a bachelor-party for Douglas ahead of his wedding to a woman half his age, the cast goes through the motions with a minimum of commitment or enthusiasm. If it's not quite as lazy as Freeman's abysmal 2007 senior citizen romp 'The Bucket List' it comes pretty close. Where that film barely ventured outside the sound stage, preferring to stand its stars in front of a green screen, LAST VEGAS does at least have the decency to actually shoot in Las Vegas but the end result is not much different.
The story's unimaginative, the characters half-formed and predictable, and the humor mostly non-existent. While by the end of it all De Niro, Douglas, Freeman and Kline have unsurprisingly discovered a new lease on life, I was left feeling much like one of those suckers Las Vegas depends on who put their retirement fund on red and came up empty. 

PHILOMENA: no histrionics, just compelling storytelling

PHILOMENA is the true story of a young Irish woman forced to give up her baby by nuns who goes searching for him 50 years later and makes the horrendous discovery that he's grown up into a Republican.
Best Actress Oscar nominated Judi Dench stars as Philomena Lee, playing her as a beguiling mix of naivety, street-smarts, and determination a woman who finds strength and solace in her religious beliefs even though it's the same Catholic church that is responsible for her lifetime of sadness and longing.

Dench is magnificent, holding the screen with an effortless grace and authority that makes it possible to simultaneously enjoy another great performance by Britain's greatest living actress and believe in Philomena as a real life character. Her presence also brings out the best in co-star Steve Coogan, inspiring him to dig deeper than he's done before in an effort to shake-off the Alan Partridge persona that's coloured every non-Alan Partridge part he's ever played on film and tv. He doesn't entirely escape from the shadow of the Norfolk local radio personality but by mid-film the vocal tics and inflections were definitely less distracting.
Even more of a revelation than his acting is Coogan's Academy Award nominated screenplay. Low-key and devoid of unnecessary and manipulative sentimentality, it reflects Philomena's own non-nonsense approach to life, and is as deserving of its Oscar nod as Dench's and the film's for Best Motion Picture of the Year.
Whether PHILOMENA goes home tonight with any of the coveted golden statuettes is almost impossible to predict. It faces very tough competition in every category from films that are so different that it seems unfair to try and rank them against one another. But win or lose, PHILOMENA is most definitely worthy of your time and attention.

HOLLYWOOD PARTY: while Mayer's away the employees will play

This 1934 feature from MGM is really bizarre. It's part Busby Berkeley-style musical, part

Marx Brothers-wannabe comedy and 100% a shambles.
If HOLLYWOOD PARTY had been made 30 years later I would have assumed it was the product of a bad acid trip but as this pre-dates LSD by a good couple of decades and was produced by MGM, a studio not given to committing hallucinations to celluloid, I'm at a loss to understand how the film ever came to be made.
Given the studio's emphasis on class, style and family entertainment I have to imagine that studio head Louis B. Mayer and production chief Irving Thalberg were out of town and unreachable by phone, telegram or carrier pigeon while shooting took place because I can't conceive of the circumstances in which they would have given their approval.   
In what starts out as a spoof on MGM's 'Tarzan' movies, Jimmy Durante stars as Schnarzan the Conqueror, looking to revitalise his flagging jungle man franchise by purchasing a pride of genuinely wild lions to wrestle in his next movie. To persuade their owner to do the deal Durante throws a lavish party in his honour inviting everyone who's anyone in Hollywood although, with the exception of cameos by Robert Young and The Three Stooges in the days before they were the Three Stooges, no actual film stars turn up.
Instead we're forced to make do with a motley bunch of charisma-free C and D list entertainers now mercifully forgotten by history who are lavished by more screen time than they could ever possibly deserve.
Eddie Quillan (a man in desperate need of some serious orthodentistry) and the impressively plain June Clyde fail to strike a single plausible spark as a young couple trilling their new love to each other, while Durante goes all Groucho Marx in some leaden routines with Polly Moran as an ersatz Margaret Dumont. The 'humour' is punctuated by some sub-Busby Berkeley dance numbers which earn a little credit for creativity if not style, and a Walt Disney cartoon, introduced by Mickey Mouse, which seems to exists for no other reason than MGM had a distribution deal with Disney.

Then, just when you think it can't get anymore weird Laurel and Hardy show up, playing themselves and go rather listlessly through some of their more well-worn routines at what feels like half speed. I'm an L & H fan from way back, and their appearance was my sole motivation for watching the film, but I can't pretend I enjoyed it. It's not that they're bad but they're out of their element and their comedy just doesn't mesh with the semi-surrealism of the surroundings. Their sequence with Lupe Velez lacks any of the life which makes their 1930s shorts for Hal Roach such a joy to watch regardless of how many times I've seen them.
Tellingly, the end credits fail to identify a director for this farrago, although according to IMDb no less than 8 directors made a contribution including some of the biggest names of the era. Presumably their agents were more effective in keeping their names off the finished product than Mayer and Thalberg were in preventing its release.

PICK A STAR: just not one from the A-list or B-list

PICK A STAR was independent producer Hal Roach's brave but ill-advised 1937 effort to take on the big studios at their own game.
MGM, Warner Brothers and Paramount had the stars, the production talent and the money

to turn out lavish musicals even when the subject was the Great Depression. Roach had Patsy Kelly, Jack Haley and whatever change he could find down the back of the sofa.
It's understandable that he'd want to set his sights on bigger things than the two reel Laurel and Hardy comedies that had made him famous. Shorts are alright, and the Laurel and Hardy shorts were more than alright, but if he wanted to be taken seriously as a film producer he needed to step up to the big time, and that meant full length features. That also meant bigger production costs and while Hal Roach was certainly not a member of the Poverty Row group of studios he wasn't anywhere near the top tier either.
The paucity of funds is only too evident in every frame of PICK A STAR. It's not just the unimpressive sets but it's the uninspiring cast of C-list actors none of whom have the star-power to carry a film. Patsy Kelly carved out a very respectable career for herself as the loud and unladylike comic-relief in a long string of mostly low budget movies, but even she must have been surprised to find herself top billed in a musical, while Jack Haley was a fine song and dance man (and was to achieve immortality 2 years later as the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz') but he's definitely not romantic leading man material. Roach further hampered his own ambitions by casting Rosina Lawrence (who? - exactly) as the nominal leading lady despite her glaring lack of charisma, charm or appeal.  If that's not already enough to turn off audiences, the character she plays is so shallow and self-centred that there's really no incentive to root for the Cinderella ending the story's setting her up for. If plausibility were a pre-requisite (and of course it's not because this is a Hollywood musical) she'd walk off into the sunset with the equally shallow and narcissistic Rinaldo Lopez, the patently inauthentic Latin lover movie star played by Mischa Auer. But in that scenario, Jack

Haley would discover true love in the arms of Patsy Kelly and that's something no audience would buy!
Combined with an unimaginative and well-worn (even in 1937) story about a small-town midwestern girl dreaming of stardom in Hollywood, and some clumsily staged musical numbers which serve only to further highlight Busby Berkeley's genius as a choreographer, PICK A STAR boasts all the ingredients of a solid gold bomb. The film's saving grace is the cameo by Roach's biggest stars, Laurel and Hardy. The boys appearance has nothing to do with the story's forward motion but everything to do with giving moviegoers a reason to fork over ticket money to see the film. Their two scenes, while not classic L & H, are a very welcome distraction from the increasingly dull proceedings and the only real reason for watching the film in the first place.