Coming Attractions

As per the usual for the Badger Box Office, other projects have caused a backlog of films to develop.
For those folks who want a preview of what's been on the screen here's a list of films for which commentaries are forthcoming:

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1997)
Art School Confidential (2006)
Brick (2005)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Black Widow (1954)
The Thin Man (1934)
Why We Fight (2005)

Also coming up in Badger-vision (http://willyvision.blogspot.com/) an episodic review of HBO's 1980's series
Philip Marlowe, Private Eye
as well as The Guild Seasons 1 & 2 and Weeds Seasons 1-3.

And in the Badgervision Annex (http://badgertvannex.blogspot.com/) several projects forthcoming:
Why We Fight (1942-45)
Betty Boop
and Atomic Testing films.

In addition, as part of my research for playing a horror film director in the Attic Rep Theatre's production of Allison Moore's Slasher, I will be examining a whole host of slasher films (and works that critique the genre) of which the following are already on the docket:

American Psycho (2000)
Hostel (2005)
Hostel: Part II (2007)
Turistas (2006)
Make a Wish (2002)

Have Stakes, Will Travel

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974) written & directed by Brian Clemens

I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much from Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, but I was drawn to this late Hammer outing by the title alone. (It's the kind of title which somehow implies cheap science fiction and more than a little embarassment.) I braced myself for some sort of wretched excess, so when this film turned out to be a unique and classy film I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) is a Napoleonic officer who rides around Europe with his hunchback sidekick Professor Hieronymous Grost (John Cater) with a cart filled with wooden stakes and prepared to do battle with the minions of darkness. He’s like a cross between Zorro, Yojimbo and Van Helsing. The only thing he's missing is a boomstick. He even has his own logo and I swear that was a cheroot he was smoking there.
Kronos is called in by his old friend Dr. Marcus (John Carson, who played Secker in Taste the Blood of Dracula) to investigate a curious case of vampirism. (It's like Bones, only with vampires instead of David Boreanaz.)
The world of this film posseses a very rich understanding of vampirism. The idea here is that there is no single way to kill a vampire because vampires are understood to be a collection of many different species/types/variations, each with its own attributes and methods of destruction. For instance, the vampires going on a tear at the top of the film don’t drain people of blood, but instead steal their youth and vitality, so that the victims instantly age and die leaving behind bodies that look like old crones. Something is going terribly wrong here and that calls for the services of a professional vampire hunter.

Meanwhile, Kronos, on his way into town picks up a hot gypsy girl Carla (Caroline Munro) who is put into the stocks by some concerned citizens because she was dancing on a Sunday. Frankly, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be okay to see her dance any day of the week, but hey every community has standards and practices. Kronos, though, has the right idea and rescues her for which he will be adequately rewarded later.

The vampire (or vampires) continue on a tear while Kronos investigates the situation and we are introduced to the suspects.
An especially novel method of finding a vampire is Toad in the Hole, where you bury dead toads in boxes in an area and for whatever reason if one comes back to life it means an undead person has passed over it. This method leads to the discovery of carriage tracks that lead to the home of the Durwards. Apparently the 9th Lord of Durward, a friend of Dr. Marcus, died some time ago and his widow (Wanda Ventham), who doesn't want to be seen, hasn’t forgiven Marcus for not saving him and thus leaving her to take care of the two beautiful (and oddly attached to each other) Durward children Paul (Shane Briant) and Sara (Lois Dane).
Kronos, meanwhile has to deal with some toffs led by a man named Kerro (Ian Hendry) who are hired to get rid of him. Kronos (one part Zorro, after all) dispatches the hired swordsmen with aplomb and goes back to his main work of hunting vampires.
But not before having an extremely tasteful love scene in the stables with Carla while Grost and Marcus play chess in the house.
Marcus (Kronos calls him “you old leech-lover”) is eventually turned into a vampire unwittingly, but this gives him a chance to sacrifice his life so that Kronos and company can discover what will finally kill this variety of vampire. What follows is a hilarious series of bits I call 100 ways to kill your vampire friend. The experimentation is hilarious as Kronos tries everything and it looks like he’s torturing poor Markus. (Which causes the townsfolk to form a posse to go after Kronos because they don’t know what’s going on.) Finally, serendipity strikes. It turns out only a cross made of steel can kill this kind of vampire. Fortunately for Kronos, there is a cross made of steel in the town cemetery and he and Grost fashion the cross into a sword for Kronos to wield.
There are a couple of red herrings involved in the conclusion as Kronos heads up to Durward castle and has to figure out if the real vampires are the Durward children or the Lady of the house. He uses Carla as bait, very fetching bait.
It turns out that Lord Durward (William Hobbs) is alive and kicking (or, actually undead and biting) and going around doing some form of hunting in the night, but what they didn’t really know is that it was their mother all along. Lady Durward is a Karnstein by birth (whatever that means), member of an illustrious vampire family (with their own set of Hammer films). She mesmerizes her children and tries to take Carla's vitality but Kronos uses his shiny mirrored cross/sword to freeze her in place while he duels Lord Durward to death (or re-death) Lady Durward is then finished off too, leaving.
It’s unclear what the Durward/Karnstein kids will do in the aftermath now that they've found woken up from their spells and have seen the instantly decayed bodies of their evil parents. (Are the kids evil too?)
But Kronos rides off into the sunset leaving behind the girl (though he promises that he will think of her on his journeys). He'll think about her a lot, I'd think.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is a great vampire film and should be a classic, not least for some of the most imaginative thoughts about vampirism and its varieties. It’s refreshing to have a vampire film that doesn’t try to create a unified field theory of the origin of vampirism but is just about the adventuring involved in tracking down and destroying the many evolutionarily variegated species of vampires that are running around. Captain Kronos imagines a big rich world full of vampires and gives us an awesome hero to take them on. It’s a shame this film didn’t pan out into a lengthy set of sequels, because I could have done with 3 or 4 more Captain Kronos films to watch. As it is, we have to settle for just the one, but it’s a good one.

Special Features
Commentary with Brian Clemens and Caroline Munro
“Violence and sex should be taken off the screen and put back where they belong in the mind of the viewer.”
It’s great to listen to a commentary on one of these 1970s pieces that includes a woman’s perspective and isn’t just a pair of horn-dog old men.
Caroline Munro is a classy woman and one of the greatest of the scream queens and frankly not a bad actress all told.
We learn that Horst Janson was dubbed throughout the film, that there were 1300 storyboard drawings prepared for the film which was influenced by John Ford westerns.
Also, Caroline Munro had to spend so much of the shooting period barefoot that she was in pain for a lot of the time.
The commentary here is good and reveals the filmmakers to have been thoughtful and rather classy compared to the exploitation racketeers that are rampant in the horror biz.

Taste the Clams of Dracula!

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) directed by Peter Sasdy, screenplay by Anthony Hinds

Taste the Blood of Dracula is a mixed bag of a film. It edges toward exploitation, but of course it’s not Vampyres by a long shot. It hints at incomprehensibility, but for a script that wasn’t originally going to include Dracula at all, it actually works out alright. (Christopher Lee was reluctant to play Dracula again and the story was supposed to revolve around young Lord Courtley’s revenge, but the American distributors wanted Dracula in there somewhere because they judged, rightly, that they could sell anything better with a Dracula name attached than without.)
The opening of the film features a fat salesman named Weller (Roy Kinnear) in a carriage who manages to piss his fellow travelers off so badly that they toss him right out into the (presumably Eastern European) forest. He hears screaming and discovers Dracula (Christopher Lee) impaled with a stake and dying. (This is apparently taken from the end of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.)
Dracula’s eyes are creepily blood red (allergies again) and after a bit of writhing he finally turns to dust and his blood (do vampires bleed?) turns into a powder. Dracula then disappears from the film for a while.

Meanwhile back in England (at last, we’re out of Ingolstadt) we get a little scene in a churchyard straight out of Trollope or George Eliot with the young lovers of the community paired off and making arrangements for their assignations. Jeremy Secker (Martin Jarvis) is in love with Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) and Lucy's brother Paul (Antony Corlan) is in love with Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden). But Alice’s father forbids her from seeing young Paul despite the fact that he himself is friends with the boy’s father as we soon learn.

In fact the fathers of the kids here form a little trio that gets together the last Sunday of every month to do “Charity work in the East End.” I don’t know who Charity is, but she must work pretty hard. It’s a shame these guys don’t have a name for their little trio. (The Ambulators, The Victorian Dads Thrill-Seeking Hooker & Blackjack Club, The T-Birds, Cougars, Hawks, Jerkoffs, whatever…) or for that matter t-shirts and nicknames.
Apparently, they are bored, or at least Hargood (Geoffrey Keen) is bored, Secker (John Carson) and Paxton (Peter Sallis) seem to be enjoying themselves. (Hookers and cigars and cocaine, what else could a Victorian gentleman need?) Hargood, though, needs something to keep him interested since abusing his wife and daughter and heading to the bordello once a month don’t seem to do the trick anymore.

The bordello in the East End is the exploitation element that provides the titillation factor and a bit of nudity as we tour the place with Felix (Russell Hunter) the ridiculously made-up mostly bald pimp. (When I say ridiculous, please understand that this is something of an understated. Hugo Weaving in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert looked more classy.) We get a really atrocious bit of exotic dancing by an uninteresting lady (Malaika Martin) with a snake (I can see why Hargood is bored) though, again, Paxton and Secker seem to be quite enjoying themselves with their own ladies.
But even this bit of Sunday night fun is interrupted by the appearance of young Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates) (whose character was originally intended to be the main evil of the film in place of Dracula). Courtley is a proto-Aleister Crowley/post-Byronic character who has gone whole-hog into devilry and evil. He is the real deal compared to the T-Birds and their attempts to stave off boredom. Despite not having a penny, Courtley walks into the brothel like he owns the place, walks in on every room in the place and in each one the prostitutes swoon over him because he’s just that damned charismatic. He’s like a Victorian devil-worshipping Fonzie. Courtley is so cool that he walks right in on the old guys and their snake dancer takes Hargood’s whore away from him with a snap of the fingers and walks out to the great embarrassment (as if he wasn’t a walking embarrassment already) of Felix the Pimp.
Hargood is now bored and angry but also kind of curious and breaks up the whole party and (perhaps mesmerized by the clammy excitement of Courtley’s evil) goes looking for the young man to see if he can provide the gang with better entertainment.
Courtley is excited by the prospect of people with money and suggests they follow him to a shop where he can get them something really exciting. It is, of course, the fat merchant Weller who has the relics of Dracula including the powdered blood of Dracula amidst his other knicknacks.
It costs a freaking fortune but Hargood bullies everyone into pitching in (or he'll disband the club altogether) and they meet up with Courtley at an abandoned church where he sets up a low-budget black mass and proceeds to brew up 4 goblets of Dracula blood smoothies. Courtley orders the old men to drink the blood (without actually using the phrase “Taste the Blood of Dracula” fortunately) and they refuse because A) it looks (and maybe smells?) disgusting and B) it turns out they were bored but not THAT bored. Hargood tells Courtley to drink it himself, so the young man obliges and takes a big gulp of Dracula which then causes him to collapse. (There is a particularly annoying heartbeat camera effect here.) And then, for no discernible reason the older men beat Courtley to death and then, horrified (and a little thrilled?) by what they’ve done they go their separate ways and (in order to avoid suspicion) disband their club or at least suspend their activities. (Which isn't suspicious at all.)
After the chorus of old men leave the church Dracula finally appears (a little late to give the old folks a little thrill) and declares “They have destroyed my servant. They will be destroyed.” (If he had shown up a minute earlier he could have destroyed them in less than a minute and put an end to this movie right then and there.)
So, the rest of the film turns into a revenge film as Dracula takes out his vengeance on the fathers by using their children.

Hargood begins to drink more than usual and act ever more abusively with Alice. The look on the father’s eyes when he goes after Alice to hit her is not just menacing but portends even more disgusting possibilities. (I mean, he did kill a man, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still bored enough to do something far worse.)
Alice runs away from her father and stumbles into the arms of Dracula, who turns her into a minion (though not full-fledged). Her father chases after her, and under the spell of Dracula she takes a shovel and stoves in her father’s head.

This brings the police into the game as they begin to suspect everyone of everything without much luck. Alice lures her friend Lucy into Dracula’s arms (and teeth). Secker figures out what’s going on and tries to fix the problem (he suddenly becomes a stand-up guy here) and with Paxton in tow goes to the church where they discover Lucy’s body. Secker tries to convince Paxton what must be done but Paxton shoots Secker and then, refusing to kill his own daughter is instead killed by Lucy and Alice in a bacchic frenzy.
The innocent children as the instrument of their guilty fathers’ demise is a great device, though once Secker is stabbed by his own son it becomes less clear what Dracula’s problem is with the children other than pure mayhem.
Paul, armed with information from the now-deceased Secker who managed to take the time to research vampires before being killed (“You must arm yourself with knowledge.”) embarks on an ad hoc hero quest to rescue Alice from Dracula. Alice ends up being too needy a minion for Dracula who doesn’t want to be pestered by her. (Why don’t you turn me into a vampire too? Did you think Lucy was prettier than me? Do I look fat in this yellow dress?)
But Dracula’s rejection of Alice is costly as she joins up with Paul at the end to trap Dracula in an ambush of crosses, liturgy and light (including an especially amazing glowing cross) that finally does the vampire in. (I don’t know why Dracula takes to hurling objects at people, but he does.) Paul and Alice (no longer bothered by the sins of the older generation) survive to do what young folks do. Too bad their friends are dead, but that happens.

So, Taste the Blood of Dracula, while not rising to the level of a classic, does have some interesting angles to it. I can see how the story was at once convoluted and enriched by the presence of Dracula. It’s hard to imagine Courtley as having the same dark mesmerizing capability of Christopher Lee’s Dracula and while there is much that is incomprehensible here and it’s not a must see, there are some decent elements of interest. So, if you’re as bored as the old guys here, watching this movie would be a better choice than going to a Victorian whorehouse or drinking Dracula’s frothing blood.


Extras
Theatrical Trailer
The trailer actually says: “Sense the clammy excitement of his evil.”
Sense the WHAT? Sense the CLAMMY WHAT?
How far off the deep end does a slogan writer have to go to write the words “Sense the clammy…” and go on from there to finish the sentence? And how coked up do producers have to be to say “That’s brilliant. It really captures the essence of the film.”
Clammy. Excitement. Evil. This is not a combination known to nature.
When I think of excitement I don’t think of the word clammy? I don’t even think of clams when I think of excitement. (Well, I suppose it does depend on the type of clam we’re talking about, but still…)
I don’t know whether it’s insulting or liberating that someone got away with this ridiculously bad line.
I don't know, because I'm still a little bit deranged from being hit in the head with the line "Sense the clammy excitement of his evil!" No. I will not sense his clammy excitement. I don't want to sense his clammy anything. I won't do it.
Perhaps instead of the imperative, they could at least make it an offer: Sample the clammy excitement of his evil! Sip the Blood of Dracula!

Frankenstein Must Be Retired

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Bert Batt

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was the fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and it shows in both the maturity as well as in a little bit of Frankenstein fatigue.
I am hard pressed to think of a less sympathetic version of Frankenstein than this one. Grand Moff Tarkin is a sane gentleman compared to the sadistic bastard baron here.
The film opens with Frankenstein stalking and killing geniuses so that he can lop off their heads and experiment on transplanting their brains. (That old gag.) He’s like some bizarre Jack the Ripper. And if it wasn't for a petty criminal who attempts to burgle him (I love that verb) he would have gotten away with it too. But Frankenstein has to dispense with his lab and head out on the lam. With the police on his trail he cheeses it and finds another German burg to haunt. Then he takes up lodging and proceeds to blackmail his landlady Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson) and her fiancé Karl (Simon Ward) into helping him recreate his lab and begin experimentation again.
His goal? To extricate a certain Dr. Frederick Brandt (George Pravda) who had been in correspondence with Dr. Frankenstein and who separately arrived at the secret of life. Frankenstein’s experiment went awry (as we all know) and Brandt’s discovery drove him mad. Fortunately for Frankenstein Dr. Brandt is incarcerated in the same asylum that Karl works at (The Ingolstadt Institute for the Mentally Dishevelled.) Also, Karl is stealing cocaine from the hospital to sell on the black market to use the money to take care of Anna’s severely ill mother, which is the dirt that Frankenstein uses to blackmail the young couple.

Frankenstein takes Karl on his expeditions to steal medical supplies and Karl is forced to kill a hapless security guard, thus enmeshing Karl (and, by implication, Anna) further into Frankenstein’s evil crimes. Blackmail, murder, unethical science—as if these weren’t enough, Baron Frankenstein actually rapes Anna in a brutal and disturbing scene made more so by his request for 2 basted eggs for breakfast later. It really leaves me with a lack of desire to ever order basted eggs, that’s for sure. Apparently the scene itself was a late addition to the film and Peter Cushing objected to it strenuously, but the fact of the matter is that it’s really not a far cry from anything else this incarnation of Frankenstein does. Frankenstein really MUST be destroyed.

But while the completely irredeemable nature of Frankenstein here is somewhat off-putting there are several reasons why this film is actually quite worth the time.
1. Peter Cushing as an evil bastard. You keep expecting him to ask Anna where the location of the rebel base is.
2. Karl’s hair. I think Karl’s hair escaped from Mick Jagger’s head and made its way to Hammer productions. It makes his already goofy looking face look even more like that of a 12 year old schoolboy escaped from a road-show production of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
3. Veronica Carlson. She is quite pretty as a damsel in almost constant distress. The best part is when they’ve buried Brandt’s body in the garden and a water main breaks exposing the body forcing Anna to pull the body out and hide it elsewhere while keeping the municipal workmen from seeing what she’s got hidden.
4. The world’s funniest undertaker. There’s a scene with the befuddled inspector interviewing the darkly humorous fellow and it's worth a couple of good chuckles.
5. Funny cop, funnier cop. The scene with the undertaker is really great because of the hilarious duo of Inspector Frisch (Thorley Walters) and The Police Doctor (Geoffrey Bayldon). Walters is a puffed up inspector who refuses to listen to anyone and then comes to the same conclusions and the long-suffering gestures from Bayldon make the film. I only wish that this duo had been teamed up for their own film at some point. It would have been like Without a Clue only years earlier.
6. Freddie Jones. He plays Dr. Richter, who is killed for his body and Frankenstein puts Brandt’s brain in his head. Which now, as an acting challenge, means that he’s playing Dr. Brandt in the body of Dr. Richter. It’s not just that he brings a real humanity to a complex role, especially in the scene near the end where Brandt goes to see his wife Ella (Maxine Audley) and tries to explain the situation to her—as if that wasn’t enough, it’s that he’s Freddie Jones, which means that forever in my mind he will be the mentat Thufir Hawat from David Lynch’s Dune which just adds a whole level of sympathy for him. And it’s thus gratifying when Brandt/Richter gets the drop on Frankenstein at the end.
"I fancy that I am the spider and you are the fly, Frankenstein."
It's a line that could have come from Dune, frankly.
Freddie Jones' captures real human anguish. His own experiments have led to this moment when his brain has been put into someone else's body, so that his own wife rejects him--not even because he is ugly, but because of the invisible monstrosity of the crime. Frankenstein really must be destroyed, and it is Brandt/Richter who takes him down and chooses to perish with him rather than allow the perversion of nature to continue.
“You must choose between the flames and the police, Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein chooses the flames (lured by the desire to find Brandt’s papers) and the “monster” dies in the flames, having been revenged upon the Baron for his unnatural creation.

The ethical dilemma posed by Frankenstein here is especially convoluted, because he keeps talking about finding the secret of life and keeping geniuses at the height of their abilities alive forever, but functionally his whole project consists of merely transplanting one living brain into another perfectly good body. He isn’t even really reanimating anyone here so much as keeping the animated going by switching vessels or by piecing together new vessels. Maybe I’ve seen too many Frankenstein films, but by Frankensteinian standards this isn’t a very groundbreaking line of inquiry.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was better than I expected even if the ending still felt abrupt. Karl survives (if you want to call it that) but Anna is stabbed and killed by Frankenstein when he discovers she has not only let Brandt/Richter escape but stabbed him out of fright. (I won’t even go into the misogyny inherent in killing off the “stained” woman but letting the sullied man live.) There’s no denouement to speak of as the film just ends with the sound of crackling flames and the credits rolling over the fire.

Again, a Frankenstein film with some flaws, but in many ways a rich experience.

Pharoah Got Your Tongue?

The Mummy (1959) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Jimmy Sangster

I don’t even remember the first time I saw The Mummy. It must have been in color, because I distinctly remember the second time I saw it, which was on a tiny black and white television set in a van during a road trip. I was probably no more than 9 years old and I can remember thinking at that moment about how the scene looked in color.
I must have seen this movie dozens of times because it seemed to be on every other weekend or so for years. And I know exactly why this movie made such an impact on me—it was because of the scene where Christopher Lee gets his tongue cut off. (I would flash “Spoiler Alert” here but, folks, the film has been around for 50 years.)
It wasn’t even the most gruesome thing I’d seen by then. (That would be watching Christopher Walken blow his brains out playing Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter when I was around 7years old.)
But something so viscerally struck me about the whole tongue bit that it was remained with me in the back of my mind. Perhaps because it was, in the story, a punishment for forbidden love, so that it became in my mind associated with the lengths some people will go to keep people apart, though a mute man might be just the right thing for some women. (But a tongueless man? Only a woman with a peculiar fetish could want that.)

I think the key to it all was the setting, though. Even in ancient times other cultures thought Egypt was exotic and sexy. Maybe it was because everyone shaved off all their hair and wore candles on their head. Maybe it was the eyeliner. Maybe the hot climate and diaphanous clothing.
The thing is, what I now love even more about The Mummy is how the entire flashback scene (which seems very lengthy) violates several rules of modern storytelling by interrupting the action of the here and now and by revealing backstory through pure narration. But, it is so effective that the Stephen Sommers Mummy films use the same trick at some point.
Why? In part, because what’s the point of telling a story that has ancient Egypt in it if you can’t use it as en excuse to dress people up like King Tut? Bubba Ho-Tep has a flashback sequence. Even lesser entries in the mummy genre get this. (Bram Stoker’s The Mummy has a flashback sequence). The brilliance of The Mummy is that it’s in color and, it’s combined with something that can make anyone squirm. I think it’s the look on Christopher Lee’s face that does it. It’s not like we see what happens. But Lee’s expression makes the fear palpable.

Now, allow me to backtrack a little to set the film itself in better perspective. Long before we see Christopher Lee, we begin with an 1895 British archaeological expedition in Egypt which includes…wait for it…Peter Cushing as John Banning, driven seeker of antiquity, Grand Moff Tarkin as Indiana Jones. His father Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) and uncle Joseph (Raymond Huntley) have spent 20 years looking for the Tomb of Ananka, Lady of the Two Kingdoms and Easy Upon The Eyes of Horus. They find it, and they are warned by a sketchy Egyptian fellow named Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) that evil will befall them for robbing the graves of Egypt, and he should know because he’s going to follow them home and do evil to them.
But the archaeologists didn't come all this way to play tiddly-winks and then go home. They go in to see what is to be seen and they find The Scroll of Life, which, as we know, is always a paradoxically dangerous magical item. They should just call it the Scroll That Will Make You Wish You Hadn't Learned Hieroglyphics. John can't make it to the tomb because of an injured leg so Uncle Joe goes to tell him about the news.
The elder Banning reads the scroll of life and then sees something that horrifies him into catatonia.
Fast forward to 6 months later when the remaining team dynamite the entrance to the tomb to seal it. John and Joseph can't find the Scroll of Life (it's always the last place you look for it) but they don't dwell on it. (It's not like it was the Scroll of Endless Porridge.)
Next thing you know, it’s 1898 and Mehemet Bey has rented a manor house right next to the Banning estate. There’s a great scene with some low comic characters in a pub who are transporting things for the Egyptian. (The characters are named Pat and Mike so it's really old-school low humor.)
Meanwhile the Mummy heads over to the Engerfield Nursing Home for the Mentally Disordered (a great name for an institution, like The Sunnydale Academy for the Psychologically Disarrayed.) and kills the elder Banning and from here on out the whole thing plays out (both narratively and visually) as a drawing room mystery with the twist of supernatural provided by the Mummy of Kharis.
This is where the flashback comes in. It is 2000 BC and Kharis the priest (Christopher Lee without bandages and with blue eyeliner) is in love with the princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). When she dies the priests do their business and we get an interesting reconstruction of Egyptian funeral rites and mummy wrapping. (The nude body of the princess is tastefully shown with a pair of columns covering the R-rated parts). The priests even kill a bunch of servants as a human sacrifice. Later Kharis sneaks into Ananka’s tomb to resurrect her (because she is quite attractive, even dead), but he is caught and for defiling the tomb of the princess he is punished by having his tongue cut off in the aforementioned scene of awesomeness and then he is mummified alive. (Actually, neither alive, nor dead, just eternally vigilant—though, it doesn’t make sense as a punishment for his forbidden love to leave him forever guarding the dead woman he was in love with, but the Egyptians weren’t exactly the most consistent of people anyhow.)

But now there’s a case of murder and this brings out Police Inspector Mulrooney (Eddie Byrne) (because even in England, they trot out an Irish cop) who believes in “cold, hard facts” which will soon enough include the cold hard fact of a living dead mummy. When the mummy shows up at the Banning house and kills Uncle Joseph, John manages to shoot Kharis twice to no effect.

Banning intuits that the Egyptian (who has transformed his rental into a veritable Egyptian temple) is behind the killings and may be controlling the mummy so he heads over and when his suspicions seem confirmed he goads the Egyptian (by referring to his chosen deity as a third-rate god) into making a move.
This leads to a discussion about archaeology and colonial exploitation.
Mehemet Bey: It has often puzzled me about archaeologists. Has it never occurred to them that by opening the tombs of beings that are sacred they commit an act of desecration?
Banning: If we didn’t, the history of your country, indeed of a great part of civilization would still be unknown.
The Egyptian adopts the language of post-colonial resistance which is instantly discredited for our audience by virtue of the fact that we already know that he is a vicious murderer and a fanatic cultist. Is it coincidental that a proto-nationalist Egyptian would be presented as an occultist murderer a mere 3 years after the debacle at Suez? I think not.

In the end, Banning is saved by the remarkable resemblance of his wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux again) with Ananka, so that Kharis will do anything for her, including burying himself down into the murk of a bogside and taking the Egyptian with him. (In the end, Kharis acted completely out of love. Mehemet Bey could only control him as long as he could convince Kharis that his actions were for Ananka, but when he overreaches and tries to make Kharis kill the person he believes is Ananka, then Kharis turns on him with all his supernatural might.)
It is this angle which gives The Mummy its humanity, because Kharis is allowed an inherent goodness that Frankenstein’s monster in Curse of Frankenstein is completely denuded of. Kharis is never the villain, just the unwitting tool of one. The “monster” is just a lover, cursed by fate. It’s an actual human-scale tragedy. Kharis isn’t a world-devouring apocalyptic super-villain. He’s just the remnants of a human.

I know it’s really easy to compare this film with modern filmmaking and laugh at how cheap it is and how much more awesome the effects are today. But I have a question: what the hell is wrong with us that we can’t tell simple stories on a human scale anymore? Why do all the supernatural stories now have to be about the end of the world? Why can’t we scale things down a notch to a more human level? How inflated do our heroes have to be? How heroic do they have to be? Why do we even need heroes?
Think about this, is there even a hero in this film? John Banning is a protagonist, but he’s no hero. There’s a villain. There are victims. But the closest thing to a hero is Kharis, who suffers for love, and even makes the ultimate sacrifice not even for his love but for an approximation of love (unless you believe Isobel is the reincarnation of Ananka). It’s a far cry from that level of complication to the shoot-‘em-up good-guy heroes we’re used to.

I like the fact that the climax of this film plays out like an Agatha Christie mystery with a Mummy. It's approachable. Don't get me completely wrong, watching a sandstorm nearly devour Brendan Fraser is awesome too, but there should be a place for something less apocalyptic too.

So, The Mummy is, for all its simplicity more complicated underneath than you would expect and while Christopher Lee is buried under gauze for most of the film, the flashback sequence alone makes this another Hammer classic.


Extras
as per the other releases
Cast & Crew
Theatrical Trailer

Curse of the Return of the Horror of Dracula

Horror of Dracula(1958) directed by Terence Fisher

Hammer followed up Curse of Frankenstein with this revival of Dracula featuring Christopher Lee as the ur-vampire. Dracula was now in color and he had fangs and the brooding eyes of Christopher Lee.

Lee is a cool customer as you would expect, even if he doesn’t have quite as good writing backing him up as he did later (and I don’t believe I’m saying this) in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula. This is a gentlemanly Dracula we have here.

As with all Dracula adaptations the details of Stoker’s novel are twisted out of all recognition. In this case, Jonathan Harker is the fiancé of Lucy Holmwood (like I said, twisted beyond recognition), and Lucy's brother Arthur Holmwood (Michael Gough) is married to Mina. And the worst part is that we don't even get a Renfield, which just leaves you feeling a bit cheated.
But the plot here makes up for it in one huge way because....
Dracula has hired Harker (John Van Eyssen) as a librarian.
“There are a large number of volumes to be indexed.” Dracula actually says this...in a menacing way.
The idea of Dracula needing someone to rearrange his card-catalog is just charming.
“I’ve been having a devil of a time finding my copy of Martin Chuzzlewit and I think it’s time for a reorganization of the stacks. What do you think, Harker?” "I suppose so, Count Dracula..."

But all is not as it appears to be, and it turns out Harker is perfectly aware that Dracula is a vampire and is there to hunt him down. Harker is able to take out Dracula’s bride/minion (the gothically named Valerie Gaunt) but he’s too late to get Dracula and is himself bitten. Should have stuck to sorting books, Harker.
I like how this is a Dracula film where the Vampire starts out on the defensive. He’s just a man with a cataloguing problem and Harker is out to get him. This is a great reversal of other versions where the non-vampire world is essentially passive and quite unaware of the danger facing it and people stumble about blindly into Dracula’s lures. However, lest anyone think this film is an endorsement of preemptive war, please note that Harker’s preemptive strike on Dracula is more or less a failure. (Sure, he takes out Dracula’s bride, but he doesn’t succeed in taking out Dracula and he’s manages to piss off the Count.) Also, after Harker is killed off the rest of his friends and family are caught as ignorant of the danger as any of the victims in other versions of the tail. So much for fighting the vampires there so we don't have to fight them here.

Cue the entrance for Van Helsing, who is played by none other than Peter Cushing who can now turn the same clinical scientific coldness that served him so well as Victor Frankenstein to the white hat side as Van Helsing. In a way, Frankenstein and Van Helsing are of a piece.
Now we get to line up behind the good doctor as he sets out to bring down Dracula.
First, he has to take out Harker, but Dracula is on the loose in…where are we again? It does take a while to remember that despite all the British actors the action never goes to London or Carfax Abbey, but stays on the continent here in lovely Karlstadt on the Main. (Dracula, meanwhile is from Klausenburg, which is the German name for the Romanian city of Cluj which was, in a rare bit of historical/geographical accuracy for a horror film, one of the important centers of Transylvania. (Stephen Bathory founded a Jesuit academy there and Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, whose cousin was Vlad the Impaler’s second wife, was born there.)

Anyhow, now we get Van Helsing bringing everyone up to speed on vampires.
Vampire lore here includes:
Vampires are allergic to light
They can’t change themselves to bats or wolves
They are repelled by the odor of garlic
During the day they must sleep in their native soil
The crucifix, symbolizing the triumph of good over evil, protects the normal human but reveals the victims of vampires as well as puts a hurt on the vampires themselves.

I like the idea that Vampires are allergic to light because instead of it being a fatal problem this implies a kind of chronic issue that is more annoying than deadly. "My eyes are itchy and my sinuses are all stuffed up because I peeked at the sun today. Damn these allergies!"

Meanwhile, Dracula has gotten the bite on Lucy (Carol Marsh) who must be killed because she’s been going out and murdering children.
This prompts a bit of theology from Van Helsing regarding the separation of body and soul:
“It’s only a shell. Liberate the soul and destroy the shell.”
Lucy is liberated, but Mina (Melissa Stribling) is still in danger. (Because Dracula is quick on the rebound.) They have to destroy Dracula in order to free Mina before she loses so much blood that she also becomes undead.
Van Helsing and the Von Scooby Gang track down (thanks to a funny customs officer played by George Benson) a shipment that has been sent to 49 Friedrichstrasse, which is an undertaker's place. The undertaker (Miles Malleson) is, by the way, the second funniest part of this film. Dracula's coffin isn't at Friedrichstrasse and the gang tracks it back to Mina's basement. (Why didn't we check there first?) The coffin is there, but Dracula has taken off with Mina and has to get back to his native soil before the sun comes up over Transylvania. So, the chase now begins, and it takes us through the frontiers of Ingolstadt, because everything happens in Ingolstadt. (Welcome again to Ingolstadt, where we expect to be hosting a werewolf and a mummy soon.)
The funniest part of this film is the chase scene from Karlstadt to Klausenburg which includes the awesome gag of having a toll station operator befuddled by people running through his barrier. If you think this gag ever gets old, just watch Stripes again. It never gets old.

Also, keep an eye out for Geoffrey Bayldon, (who would go on to turn down a role as Dr. Who and then play an 11th century time travelling wizard named Catweazle) in a bit role here as a porter. He would later feature in an amusing role in Hammer's Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.

The ensuing mayhem in Castle Dracula (which is quite a pretty set) in the tradition of old-school horror films is way too short and ends rather abruptly, but suffice it to say that Christopher Lee’s Dracula meets his ultimate fate in a reasonably interesting fashion. (He's is held off with a pair of crossed candlesticks until a curtain is pulled showering him with sunlight that makes him crumble into dust--a pretty good fx sequence for 1958.)

In the end, Horror of Dracula is a pretty decent Dracula outing. It makes no pretense of being “faithful” to Bram Stoker or anything else. It just tries to tell a decent vampire story with the characters from Dracula and, with the help of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, it does a good job of that. Horror of Dracula would be a solid vampire film even if it wasn’t marked by the first pairing of Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Dracula. But then, it is and, because it represents the second phase of the revival of classic horror, this film is a classic of cinematic history as well as a must see for students of cinematic horror. Christopher Lee’s Dracula is a much better character in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula, but that came a decade after this outing and with many reprises in the interim. This was his first, and it launched a Hammer vampire avalanche (for those who like horribly absurd metaphors). Seriously, though, think about what you think of as iconic vampire/Dracula imagery and you have Bela Lugosi, John Carradine and Christopher Lee who form the real basis for everything we think of when we think of Dracula. Everything else is just commentary.

Special Features
Cast & Crew
It is easy to dismiss the importance of director Terence Fisher in crafting these eminently watchable films. It is easy, and it is wrong.
Brief bio essays, here.

Dracula Lives Again!
Hammer made a pile of vampire pictures, and 7 of them featured Christopher Lee as Dracula.

Trailer
Another old school trailer. Dracula is back, and this time he’s in color. Have library card, will drink your blood.

Frankenstein Lives!

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) directed by Terence Fisher

Turning to horror again for a bit here as we explore a series of films from Hammer Films. Hammer became synonymous with horror after they resurrected the classic Universal monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Werewolf, The Mummy) with the added bonus of color. A whole new generation of folks was introduced to the classic horror characters in their new interpretations and as the Hammer renaissance continued special effects reflected an increased tolerance for blood and gore as well as an arms race of racy activities and nudity that would take the inevitable coupling of sex and horror to ever more extreme areas. But all of that was in the future when Hammer got the ball rolling with The Curse of Frankenstein.

So, that’s the pre-history of these films. The question you may have is: why should I bother watching these films? Because if the original Universal films have Karloff, Chaney, Rains and Lugosi, then Hammer has…Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and that’s nothing to sneeze at. (Go ahead, just try and sneeze and I'll show you what's what.)

Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the monster. That should be enough for some of you. It's Grand Moff Tarkin and Saruman folks, this should be awesome, right? Well, it should be more awesome than it is, but that's the way these things go most of the time.

The key to any version of Frankenstein is handling the prehistory of the character of Dr. Frankenstein. The Baron is a man of science who is looking for the key to life, sure, but why? The wonderful thing about Frankenstein is that even a terrible adaptation of Mary Shelley’s work will have to (in some way) deal with the deeper philosophical, ethical and moral implications of the story.

The Curse of Frankenstein begins with a title placing the story “more than a hundred years ago” in a village in Switzerland. Baron Frankenstein is in a dungeon and is visited by a priest who is immediately told to “keep your spiritual comfort for those that think they need it. I sent for you because I could think of nobody else. People trust you. They listen to what you tell them.” (Geez, why so snippy?) Thus, the rest of the film is a flashback.

This takes us back to the young Frankenstein who is a wealthy orphan. The young Baron is an imperious Little Moff Tarkin who hires a tutor named Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) to help him learn all about the ways of science. Fast forward to Peter Cushing now as the Baron, so that it seems like somehow he's gotten older than the tutor who has stayed the same age. (Could Paul be a vampire? No, maybe all this science just ages Victor unnaturally.)
And now, Victor Frankenstein is on the search for “the source of life,” which apparently his tutor neglected to tell him was in his pants the whole time.
But of course good old fashioned creation (which some of us think works just fine, thank you) isn’t good enough for Victor Frankenstein. Oh, no. He wants to cobble together the perfect person, “a man with perfect physique, the hands of an artist with the matured brain of a genius.” He wants an übermensch. (You can tell he's a man of science and not necessarily a man of good sense, who might at least put all that effort into cobbling together an überfrau.) His one good deed is he brings a dead dog back to life. Should have stuck to that, Baron.
But first, he must experiment, and this is always where the story gets caught up because where does our good doctor find a decent corpse to reanimate? At the gallows in Ingolstadt, of course. Where else? (Welcome to Ingolstadt! We hang 'em, you take 'em away!) Surely there will be no problems bringing a convict with a broken neck back to life? Perhaps in Ingolstadt they hang the occasional eccentric genius.
Now, the mechanics of Frankenstein’s work are always a little hazy, for instance here he discards the convict’s head and dumps it in acid, using only the body. (You can tell that this is early Hammer horror because the decapitation occurs out of frame.)

Meanwhile to emphasize Victor’s immorality (which stands in sharp contrast to his high-minded scientific search for immortality) we find out that he has been diddling his maid, Justine (Valerie Gaunt). (Yes, I just called it "diddling." The word seems appropriate for the period.)

Victor: What makes you so sure I’ll marry you?
Justine: Because you promised.
Oh, okay, if I promised…

Well, at least Victor isn't completely unaware of the other means of creating life.
This scene proves for us that Victor sees science as a means to an end, which is actually personal power. It’s not that he wants to discover the power to create life as a gift to mankind (which, as I mentioned earlier, we already sort of have in a quite enjoyable if haphazard and slow-paced fashion) but because he wants that power for himself.
Meanwhile, Victor’s friends and family think he’s just some sort of workaholic idealist.

“She may be right, Baron. One can spend too much of one’s life locked in stuffy rooms seeking out obscure truths, searching research until one is too old to enjoy life.”

Victor has a castle, he's got a good friend, a beautiful fiancee Elizabeth (Hazel Court) and he's got a little action on the side. What else could he really ask for? A brain.
So Victor holds auditions for a brain (it has to be genius level) that he can bring back to life. His method? He kills a living genius to take his brain and reanimate it in another body. It seems like such a logical paradox that it should be our biggest clue that despite all the talk about science this Victor Frankenstein is actually a madman.
He murders his guest Dr. Bernstein (immoral and inhospitable, to boot) and proceeds with his work.
Ironically enough, the spark that gets the body reanimated happens on its own. How do you like them apples, Victor?
And the first thing the risen creature does is to try to kill Victor.
The rest of the film happens almost too quickly compared to the leisurely pacing that led up to the creation of the monster.
Unlike James Whale’s monster from the Universal films (or the creature from Shelley’s book) Christopher Lee’s mute monster is a vicious killer with a nasty pasty face. (Universal had a trademark on the classic look of the original monster so Hammer had to get creative and they could never really get a monster that fit the bill.) The brain was apparently damaged in the process, thus explaining the killer instinct. No undamaged person would be a vicious killer...unless of course it's someone who is killing people to see if he can bring them back to life through the miracle of arcane pseudo-science.

The classic monster/blind man and monster/small child interactions get combined into one when the monster runs into a kid and his blind grandfather. The little boy picks mushrooms by a lake and the monster kills the blind man for no reason and then he kills the boy too. This is not Karloff’s gentle beast, this is Christopher Lee, mute killer.
In the ensuing chase scene Paul shoots the monster in the eye and they bury him, but Victor digs him up again in order to continue his experiments. Victor then uses the monster to dispatch his maid, Justine who happens to be pregnant, thus once again showing his disregard for good old-fashioned forms of creation as well as his particularly European classism.
(He really is a bastard.)
Victor: You stupid buffoon! Did you really think I’d marry you?
Well, you did promise.

There are some great visuals in the culminating sequence especially with shadows on the wall showing offscreen action. (Very stylish.) The monster goes after Elizabeth and is finally dispatched when a lamp is tossed at it and it catches on fire (Fire! Bad!) and falls into an acid bath, thus eliminating all evidence of the existence of the creature. And of course, this means that there are several dead people to account for and no monster to pin it on.

Then we go back to the prison and we get a Dr. Caligari moment when we begin to doubt whether any of the preceding story was true or if they were just the mad mutterings of a crazy man about to be guillotined for Justine's murder. Paul refuses to corroborate the story and Victor is marched off to his death. Was it all just a bad dream? Or is Paul letting Victor get his just desserts?

I’ll have to admit, that the monster here was disappointing, but Cushing’s petulant power-mad scientist is an appealing character and Paul is quite sympathetic as the moral center of the story. While the philosophical conflict feels occasionally forced, well, that’s the nature of the Frankenstein story itself. The color scenery is really attractive and has all the charm of an Alpine postcard from 1957.

In the end, this is a pretty decent Frankenstein story that engages the ethical and moral crux of the story and is also visually appealing with some good acting. It's not stunning, but it's worth watching and while it doesn't have quite the same repeat watching enjoyment of the 1931 Frankenstein, it is still a fun one to come back to every so often.

Special Features
Special features are sparse on most of these releases. Don't expect to get anything as cool as Christopher Lee reading all of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Peter Cushing doing an interpretive dance version of Lord Byron's "Childe Harold."

Cast & Crew
Brief cast & crew biographies.

Hammer Creates a Monster
A brief essay history of Hammer Films and the renaissance of horror films in the late 1950s the studio helped spawn. In the end there were a total of 7 Hammer Frankenstein films and this was the first of them.

Theatrical Trailer
An old school sensationalist trailer that emphasizes the excitement of living color.

Pie Love You

Waitress (2007) directed by Adrienne Shelly

I find myself thinking about pie. People get cake on special occasions, but people live with pie. I guess that’s why we can imagine stories where pie-makers bring people back to life and solve mysteries. It doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to go from pie to magic. Cake is fine, but pie is divine. Pie is full of possibility.
I’m sure that pie, like baseball, doesn’t guarantee a film’s quality, but I’ll be damned if Waitress isn’t a fine film, and the pie doesn’t hurt the case.
Sometimes a film means enough to you that it becomes a litmus test for a relationship of any kind. You might like a person well enough but if they don’t like Serenity, then they’re out the door. On the other hand, maybe you get kicked out the door because someone else feels the same way about Miss Congeniality 2. Everybody’s got something. A while back I was in a conversation with someone and when I mentioned Waitress as one my recent favorites they wholeheartily agreed and proceeded to mention how awesome Ryan Reynolds is and while I have enjoyed Ryan Reynolds ever since Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place, I realized that this person was a huge fan of Waiting and had never seen Waitress. Game over. For the record, Nathan Fillion, who is in Waitress, was also on Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place with the aforementioned Ryan Reynolds, who is in Waiting. Do we have that straight now? Waitress is a great film, Waiting is (presumably) a moderately amusing movie made (one would hope) better thanks to the charm of Ryan Reynolds.
So what is it about Waitress that makes it so great? Let’s take a look at the ingredients.
1 part Nathan Fillion doing that Nathan Fillion thing.
(Jenna: You’re doing it again.
Dr. Pomatter: What?
Jenna: I don’t know, that nice guy talky thing.
Exactly.)
He was so good as an OB/GYN in this film that the highly ingenious casting directors who supply cannon fodder for Desperate Housewives put their hands into their unimagination barrel and cast him as…an OB/GYN. (Kudos, though, for casting Nathan Fillion as Dana Delany’s husband. Really. And the Halloween Frankenstein delivering a baby scene? Brilliant.)
Fillion’s delivery here is nothing short of brilliant. He has some of the best reactions ever.
Consider the scene at the bus stop where he describes where he lives. Nobody else could deliver this line like Fillion: “Yeah, it’s nice if you like trees…and who doesn’t like trees?” It’s classic Fillion and that would make even a bad movie fun and here it makes a good film great.
2 parts Adrienne Shelly. Insofar as you can angry about a stranger’s death watching Waitress makes me angry that Adrienne Shelly was murdered just before Waitress was released. Waitress is a sweet wonderful film and if every thing she wrote or directed after that had been a low budget Godzilla film her reputation would have been secure. As it stands, this is her directorial legacy and it is a fine one. There are other “great” directors whose entire body of work cannot match this film.
The second part of Adrienne Shelly is her absolutely hilarious performance as Dawn. Shelly navigates between sweet innocent realism and a more deadpan humorous delivery that make the style of the film hard to pin down.
1 part Eddie Jemison as Ogie. He creates spontaneous poetry that for all its silliness can be really profound. (“Could I hold you a minute and it turns into forever?”) His role could easily have been a real annoying stalker, but in a way you can understand that he and Dawn belong together, that it makes sense for them to get together.
1 part Cheryl Hines. She has some of the best lines and really brings a crusty charm to the diner. Who else could say “Dawn! You’re beautiful! Your skin looks like a normal person’s.” and not have it come off as intentionally mean. And, of course, the continual insistence of her character that her boobs are uneven is a hilarious touch.
1 part Jeremy Sisto as an asshole. Surprise, surprise, Jeremy Sisto is playing an asshole. (Thanks to Law & Order, I finally know what it looks like when Jeremy Sisto is likable. I understand Sisto played Jesus in a movie and I have always imagined that Jesus comes off as a bit of an asshole in that movie. Just an educated guess.) But uniquely in a film like this his character actually has some depth. His somewhat abusive husband character would normally be written as a brute ogre. Instead, here we see his needy core. We even get an explanation from Jenna about how he changed when they got married. Finally, an explanation of why the nice sympathetic girl ended up with an asshole. He was at some point a needy guy (with really good hair, woo-hoo) no doubt with borderline assholish tendencies (of the kind that girls seem to love) who stepped over the border after marriage into a controlling needy abusive asshole. But one who does still have a line. He does take a couple of swipes at Jenna, but he’s no Stanley Kowalski and in the scene in the bed where he’s begging for sex, I’ll admit that the first time through I held my breath for the inevitable rape scene to occur, but it didn’t. Because Earl may be an asshole, but he’s not that much of an asshole. He may call his pregnant wife “Porky” but somewhere in there he does love her, just not as much as he loves himself. This is one of the things that makes this film, despite its broad stylized elements ultimately more realistic than any romantic comedy or romantic tragedy, for that matter.
3 parts Andy Griffith. Why 3 parts? Because he’s just that awesome. Andy Griffith will always be justly famous for other reasons (Mayberry, Matlock, what have you), his role in A Face in the Crowd long ago proved he was a serious actor, but his legacy will be enshrined in his role as Joe. He steals this film from everyone and considering how awesome everyone else is in this film, that’s saying something. But then again, he’s Andy Griffith. You should already expect the level of awesomeness. And the writing doesn’t hurt either. Joe gets some zingers like the monologue about almost marrying a girl named Annette who he knocked up back in 1948. Joe is also the philosophical core of the film. “Pie Lady, listen to me! This life’ll kill you. I’m saying make the right choice. Start fresh. It’s never too late. Start fresh.” And if you don’t well up even a little or feel a tightening in the chest or something when he says “I was just dreaming a little for you, ‘cause all my dreams is gone,” then you are actually a wretched human being. Maybe you’ll start watching this film for some other reason, but Andy Griffith will put the finishing touch on making you glad you did.
1 part Cal (Lew Temple). Cal shouldn’t be an important role. A bad writer wouldn’t have bothered to do anything with it. A different director would have perhaps done something stupid like saying that giving this character even a couple of moments would be too distracting for the mindless drones expected to pony up the dough to see this film. But the fact that he gets to be another well-rounded character, that shows a depth of story-telling that we don’t get to see in the drivel that normally floats to the surface. Jenna asks Cal if he’s happy and he says “Well, if you’re asking me a serious question, I’ll tell you. I’m happy enough. I don’t expect much, give much, I don’t get much. I generally enjoy whatever comes up. That’s my truth, summed up for your feminine judgment. I’m happy enough. Why do you ask?”
That’s one you can spend your whole life chewing on. That’s a powerful thought packed in a cute package. That’s the power of pie.
1 part Keri Russell. Sure, she will always be Felicity to me, but if I needed to know what she was really capable of, this film proved it. Keri Russell is an outstanding actress. There, I’ve said it. We can stop talking about whether her haircut ruined a tv show for us.
2 parts art direction and cinematography. (Jason Baldwin & Matthew Irving respectively.) This is quite simply a visually beautiful film. The colors alone are worth the price of admission. Sure, some of those pies look like they’re made with ingredients that don’t occur in nature, but those colors are so beautiful that it’s like seeing a big box of crayons for the first time. Overwhelming.
And then there’s the pie. So much pie. As the weather here cools off, I intend to embark on the project of making each of the 24 varieties of pie (and maybe some others) that appear in the film. You can follow the process here: http://houstongastros.blogspot.com/
I suppose there might be some reasonable people who don’t like pie and there might be some folks who will like Waiting better than Waitress but as for me, I like pie…I love pie and Waitress is a film I find myself coming back to again and again and thinking about.
You might want to think about it, too. I’ll save a slice of pie for you and we can discuss it later.

Special Features
Commentary with producer Michael Roiff & Keri Russell
For obvious reasons Adrienne Shelly couldn’t do the commentary so the producer and star had to fill in. Here are some things you learn:
Nathan Fillion’s character was named for a contraction of Posada, Mattingly and Jeter, because Adrienne Shelly was a serious Yankees fan.
“Broke is temporary.” “Being poor is having no options.” That’s something for us all to think about.
And for you aspiring filmmakers, chew on this thought: only one scene didn’t make it into the movie.

This is How We Made Waitress Pie
This is a generally enjoyable little featurette that gives you a few more insights (including from Adrienne Shelly) into the philosophy of the film.
“It’s just about people”
“We all deserve our life to be what we want it to be.”
And you get more gems like this--Nathan Fillion: My ingredient was cinnamon.

Written & Directed by Adrienne Shelly: A memorial
Another short about the bittersweet personal nature of this film for those who made it.
It’s hard to think about the film’s ending (which features Adrienne Shelly’s real daughter as Lulu) without thinking about the real life tragedy behind it. It really makes the ending of the film more bittersweet than it might otherwise have been.

Hi! I’m Keri, I’ll be your waitress.
Alternate title: Keri Russell: More than the sum of her hair.

The Pies Have It
A short bit about the pies. Really deserved a whole second disc full length feature.
Adrienne Shelly: I have never met a pie that I didn’t like.
Sisto says he likes cobbler. I’m beginning to like this Sisto.

Fox Movie Channel – In Character segments
These things remind me of the kind of little things you see in airport waiting areas and in between programs in the in-flight entertainment.
So we have In Character with Keri Russell, Cheryl Hines, Nathan Fillion. Pretty much just little promos. Nothing really exciting and there’s no baking there.

A message from Keri Russell about the Adrienne Shelly Foundation
I sincerely hope there is one day another filmmaker as good as Adrienne Shelly, so I wish this foundation well in its support of women filmmakers. For more information see the Adrienne Shelly Foundation website.

Christmas in the Trenches...with George

Joyeux Noël (2005)directed by Christian Carion

Taking a break from flawed vampire films, here’s a film about real death and, more importantly, real life.
Joyeux Noël is a film about the Christmas Truce of 1914, a historical oddity of the First World War that has become the stuff of legend, recounted in many a song and story. As the last few veterans of the War to End All Wars finally pass from this earth, it’s a good time to think about that war and Christian Carion has made a beautiful gem of a film that is filled with humanity—the good kind of humanity, not that faux pap that gets passed off as a “message” or some uplifting movie about a budding sociopath who finds meaning in life by putting his hand in bears’ mouths. This is a film about peace on earth and good will to all mankind. (Things that are worth believing in.) It’s the kind of film that reminds you there’s something good left in people and a reminder that despite the worst inclinations of some religious people, religion has long given us the language to do good in this world. In other words, it’s a true Christmas film.
The credits open with a series of prewar postcards, paintings and pictures from the summer of 1914. The peace and tranquility, the enjoyment of life represented in those pictures, are rendered more poignant because we know what comes at the end of that summer, the ghosts of which continue to haunt us all a century later. One of the last pictures is of some French boys in uniform. Make no mistake here, I’m not saying that they’re young, I mean they are literally children in uniform and it’s a kind of picture that’s always cute until you can look back and think about how many of those boys in uniform never grew up to become men out of uniform.

And we go from charming kids in uniform to a series of poems being read in classrooms by patriotic youth.
If children are our future, then think about what your future is like when you spit out the following:

Child upon these maps do heed
This black stain to be effaced
Omitting it, you would proceed
Yet better it in red to trace
Later whatever may come to pass
Promise there to go you must
To fetch the Children of Alsace
Reaching out their arms to us
May in our fondest France
Hope’s green saplings branch
And in you, dear child, flower
Grow, grow, France awaits its hour.

Well, there’s nothing more patriotic than teaching your kids to long for a land that is occupied by your neighbors, after all. Change the places and the flags and you can tell the story of mankind in that poem.
Meanwhile, here’s what the juth of Germany has to say:

We have one and only enemy
Who digs the grave of Germany
Its heart replete with hatred, gall and envy
We have one and only enemy
The villain raises its murderous hand
Its race, you know, is England

Hmmm. Not as good in translation as the tadpole poem that preceded it, and I like how it completely dismisses France or Russia or any other rival. That certainly says a lot about the real rivalries that led to WWI. Finally, we transition to the Brit kid’s classroom and he’s not singing Pink Floyd:

To rid the map of every trace
of Germany and of the Hun
We must exterminate that race
We must not leave a single one
Heed not their children’s cries
Best slay them now, the women, too
Or else someday again they’ll rise
Which, if they’re dead, they cannot do.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom, indeed. On board for the hatemobile yet? Don’t even try to pretend that it’s just Ann Coulter who would say something like this. Plenty of normal folks have said something like it at some point or another in recent years. Plenty of folks on all sides of every conflict have taken things to this level. And, of course, I suppose if the British had exterminated the Germans in World War I there never would have been a World War II, at least not one with Germany. Of course, the trouble with that kind of logic is that it really does work both ways. Nobody has a monopoly on extermination, just like nobody’s got a monopoly on justice or truth or hate or viciousness or ruthlessness.

Finally we get a sweeping vista of Scotland that leads us to a church where Father Palmer (Gary Lewis) is doing some remodeling work with his young parishioners who are eager to get some excitement that will get them out of their dead end lives. (Well, there’s nothing like dying in Flanders to get you out of living in the middle of nowhere, Scotland.) So, William (Robin Laing) and his little brother (Steven Robertson) and their priest all go to war together just like everybody else in Europe. That’s some piss-poor peer pressure. To be fair, Carion stacks the deck against the idea of adventure by using some really brilliant cinematography to make the hills and mountains look as beautiful as they can ever be. You might understand the desire to get the hell out of Dodge if you filmed it for twenty rainy days in a row and showed the wee village where these kids lived, most likely in a life that only we, in retrospect, can describe as idyllic. Besides, they figured, like we always do, that they’d be home by Christmas.

Meanwhile back in Germany the renowned tenor Nikolaus Sprink (Benno Fürmann) and his Danish wife Anna Sörensen (Diane Kruger) are interrupted by the Kaiser’s declaration of war which is read out to the audience immediately because the punctual Prussians just couldn’t he wait ‘til intermission.

These are grave times for Germany. Our country is under siege. The sword is being forced into our hand. I hope…that with the help of God we will wield the sword in a manner that we can put it back in the scabbard with honor.

Yeah, good luck with that Kaiser Willy. Seriously, though. At least the sentiment expressed in the Kaiser’s statement is civilized, even if the reality is harder to square with the high-minded language. That’s a damned sight better than saying right at the outset that honor is for losers and the only thing that counts is winning no matter what you have to do to get there. But hey, as long as you win no one’s going to care about a few villages in the middle of nowhere with no one in them, right?
So the great Sprink is called up to fight the Kaiser’s war like everybody else. (You know, there’s something democratizing about a war where opera singers and chemists have to be riflemen.)

Finally, we get to see our main French character, a young officer named Audebert (Guillaume Canet) who is about to lead a charge into the German line. It’s the early part of the war, so the fighting is practically out in the open. This is the only combat sequence in the film and it’s mercifully shorter than the war itself and brutal enough to get the point across. The French don’t get far. The Scots on their wing don’t get far either and William, with his dying breath, tells his brother to get the hell out of the war so that their mother will have a son left. (And then his body is left behind in no-man’s land.) Audebert loses a pile of his men and when he finally calls off the attack he has to face his General (Bernard Le Coq) who upbraids him for not pressing the attack. And, of course, to push the poignancy further, the Major General is his dad and his pregnant wife is in German occupied Lens. That’s a lot of issues, and it takes into some territory that in the wrong hands would be cheap melodrama. It is to the credit of Carion that he can make that story work.

Meanwhile, Diane Kruger is busy going over the heads of several generals and getting permission for her husband to get one night away from the trenches to give a command performance duet with her for the Crown Prince (Thomas Schmauser) and a different kind of command performance duet with her as a Christmas bonus. (Fun in a chateau ensues. The disgruntled French owners of the chateau are brilliantly portrayed by Michel Serrault and Suzanne Flon. )

General: You’ll only see him one night. What’s the point of that?
Anna: It’ll be much more than one night. Our minutes are longer than yours.

So, it all starts when the Kaiser decides to bring a little Christmas cheer to the troops in the form of 100,000 Christmas trees for the trenches. (One tree every 5 metres, according to the German officers’ calculations.)
With all those trees on the trenches who could fail to get filled with all kinds of Christmas cheer? If only the Kaiser had filled the trenches with a hundred million gallons of eggnog maybe the war would have ended by New Year’s Day.

In mediocre hands the film that follows would be a sugary sequence of clichés and sentimentalities like some sort of Hallmark Armistice Day Greeting Card Special. Fortunately, Carion is a better director than that and his actors are better than that—much better than that.

To some extent all period films are exercises in some form of nostalgia, but Joyeux Noël is an exercise in nostalgia for several specific things. It represents a nostalgia for a time when it was conceivable for something like the Christmas Truce to occur, nostalgia for a war fought for purely national interests that seemed to become ridiculous once men were locked in a stalemated front in trenches filled with Christmas trees and men who just stopped caring about gaining an inch or two of territory. By the end of the film the world that made the Christmas Truce possible is already on its way out as the reasons for wars become more ideological, and thus more irreconcilable. The Second World War and most of the wars since across the world (outside of some charming rarities like The Falklands War) have included irreconcilable elements of religion, ideology, racism and extermination that don’t allow for the kind of fellowship across the lines that would lead to mass fraternization. Sure, we sometimes remember that our enemies are, in fact, human beings, but more often than not we march into battle with some version of the children’s poetry from the top of this film going through our heads.

It’s also a nostalgia for an enemy like the Kaiser’s Germany, one where you can have a German Jewish officer such as our Horstmayer (Daniel Brühl) with a French wife. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s the kind of thing that is only remarkable in retrospect with the gulf of Nazi Germany lying between the present and the mythic (more innocent) past. You really don’t know how good you’ve got it until you get something far worse. All the talk about exterminating the “murderous Huns” may have become a self-fulfilling nightmare. Call your enemy murderous sociopaths long enough (without cause) and maybe they’ll become the monsters you invented in your propaganda posters.

For my part, I have to admit a certain nostalgia for the leveling effect of the trenches that were filled with universally mobilized conscripts, including German tenors. And is it nostalgia or just a form of wish-fulfillment when the phrase “I have lice” is followed by Diane Kruger making love with you? Maybe it’s the war and the imminent possibility of death, or maybe it’s true love.

The larger case of wish-fulfillment is how once the soldiers have fraternized they become increasingly reluctant to kill their new friends from the other side. Granted, the soldiers involved do insist that they wouldn’t have extended that courtesy to a different unit (strangers, as it were) but you get the feeling some of them have lost all taste for war and killing.

Of course, it’s easy enough to look through rose-colored gas mask lenses at a simpler time. In hindsight, we look at the terrible result of the 20th century wars of ideology (fascism, communism, post-modernism) and look forward to the 21st centuries wars of religion and then we look back at an innocent time when people only fought for silly things like flags and countries and languages and empires and we have a nostalgia for it, in part, because we think those things are silly now, in retrospect. But then, we should remember that Europe, having worn itself out with its own wars of religion decided to put aside silly things like that in favor of nations and empires and languages and races and they must have laughed about anyone who would kill each other over something as dumb as religion while killing each other over their giant games of capture the pretty flag. See, people were quite willing to kill and die over nations and empires before and after the Christmas Truce and while all the different reasons for war are mostly behavior that is learned (and can thus be unlearned, or abandoned by jaded veterans) it doesn’t make it any less serious in its own time.

That doesn’t make it any easier when we have to watch the fraternizing soldiers meet their reckonings. The Scot officer Gordon (Alex Ferns) is given a serious upbraiding by his uptight commander and his men are ordered to shoot at some poor German bastard running through no-man’s land. (They all refuse except for our young Scot with the dead brother, who finally takes the shot, because his brother’s death has turned him into a cold psychopathic killer.) The tragic irony, of course, is that the German wasn’t a German but the hapless feline-loving coffee addict Ponchel (Dany Boon) the French soldier who just wanted to have coffee on the other side of the lines with his mother one more time like he used to.

The priest Palmer, meanwhile, is given a chilling lesson in religion by his Bishop (the brilliant Ian Richardson) as he indoctrinates the newer (younger) soldiers that are replacing the fraternizers. The following speech is apparently paraphrased from an actual sermon by an English Archbishop.

Christ our Lord said ‘Think not that I come to bring peace on earth. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.’ The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Well, my brethren, the Sword of the Lord is in your hands. You are the very defenders of civilization itself. The forces of good against the forces of evil; for this war is indeed a crusade! A holy war to save the freedom of the world. In truth, I tell you the Germans do not act like us, neither do they think like us, for they are not like us Children of God. Are those who shell cities populated only by civilians the Children of God? Are those who advance armed hiding behind women and children the Children of God? With God’s help, you must kill the German, good or bad, young or old. Kill every one of them so that it won’t have to be done again. The Lord be with you.

To be fair, it did have to be done again, so maybe the Bishop is right. But I don’t think so. Because, see, when you call for the extermination of a people they tend to close ranks, and even if it doesn’t happen, they remember it. And maybe they prepare. And maybe they get paranoid. And maybe they rally behind someone who promises to exterminate them, before they exterminate us. You really have to mind your language. You can call World War One a lot of things, but a moral crusade against evil it was not. But then, maybe that’s just the retrospective talking again.
So, anyhow, Christianity is a religion of peace, right? That's what I'm seeing in the passage above, right?
Religion of peace? Maybe. Sometimes. When it’s in the hands of the priest in the trenches, sure. But in the hands of Bishop Bloodthirsty?
I wonder why Pope Benedict didn’t quote this little gem at Regensburg? Huh, Benny? You packing peace, or are you packing the sword?


So, about now you’re thinking this is the most depressing Christmas movie since It’s a Wonderful Life, right? Well, it does get better.

Audebert has the climactic showdown with his father with all the angst of a father/son “why don’t you love me, daddy?”/”I always loved you, son” drama. The father is sending the son to Verdun and he and his men will be sworn to secrecy because nobody would believe or understand what the heck happened at Christmas.

Son: The country? What does it know of what we suffer here? Of what we do without complaint? Let me tell you, I felt closer to the Germans than to those who cry “Kill the Krauts!” before their stuffed turkey!
Father: You’re talking nonsense.
Son: No, you’re just not living the same war as me or as those on the other side.
Father: Today I’m fighting a war where the shovel outweighs the rifle, in which people swap addresses with the enemy to meet when it’s all over. Plus the cat we found with the note from the Germans, “Good luck, comrades.” I was ordered to arrest the cat for high treason.

See, it’s got jokes. And the son has found out during all this fraternizing that his wife gave birth and the old general is a grandfather. The old man says “Let’s try and survive this war for him.” Survival. That’s what it’s all about. It’s what gets George Bailey through the rough patches. We do what we can to survive the troubles so that we can (maybe) leave something better for the next generation. See, a hopeful Christmas message.

And if that’s not enough for you, then maybe this is: The Crown Prince tells the German fraternizers that their punishment is to ride a sealed train across Germany to the Eastern front where they can freeze their asses off fighting Russians and to drive his point home he takes a harmonica from one of the soldiers and crushes it. (What a waste.) So, the train (with graffiti on it reading ‘Tannenberg’, for you fans of Grand Illusion) rolls away into the distance, but the Germans start singing the song that the Scots were singing on Christmas. Let them sing.
See, another hopeful Christmas message.

Okay, I can see this is a hard sell for a Christmas movie and a bit too uplifting and peaceful for a war movie. But maybe something about that sermon in no-man’s land got to me. See, what’s so damn funny about peace, love and understanding? Isn’t that what Christmas is all about? And maybe it’s not so bad to be reminded of that every so often. Isn’t that what art was supposed to be about? Maybe you’d rather bury your head in the sand, maybe you’d rather not deal with war or discomfort during Christmas (or any other time of the year). But maybe it’s worth a little discomfort to be reminded of what’s important in life (isn’t it, Mr. Scrooge?) and it doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas or July, a little bit of humanity can make your life better.

Joyeux Noël, y’all.

Commentary with Director Christian Carion
“We don’t have to give a lesson to Islam because in 1914 we did the same thing.”

Sure, his French accent is sometimes thick and sometimes all the peace talk gets a bit preachy, but he does have some good anecdotes.

For instance, of note to cinephiles will be the fact that some of the pictures in the opening montage were by the Lumiere Brothers. (Yes, those Lumieres.)
If you’re planning a vacation to the Scottish highlands go in August and it might look like it did when they filmed there.
Diane Kruger’s singing was done by Natalie Dessay. If you liked it, you should check out Dessay’s other works. She is wonderful.
“I decided to put a woman into the film because I didn’t want to spend three month shooting only men in uniform.” Hey, if Wolfgang Petersen had thought of that Das Boot would have been hilarious.
For sports fans, the Germans beat the Scots 3-2 in the football match in no-man’s land.
The cat story and the General in the latrine story are based on real stories.

Joyeux Noël is part of a small movement to commemorate the Christmas Truce and keep the memory of it alive in some way.

Interview with Christian Carion

It’s an interesting interview but I’ll have to admit it took me a good couple of minutes of listening to it en Français before I realized that I could go back and turn on the subtitles for it.

Worst revelation of this interview: The French shot a cat in 1915 for espionage and treason.
The Bishop’s speech at the end is from 1915 in Westminster Abbey. In the words of Christian Carion: ‘There is nothing that justifies this kind of language from a man of God.’


Trailers

One thing I love about Independent films is that they often come bundled with giant collections of trailers

1. Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
A great trailer. Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li in a costume action epic. The trailer itself makes a great short film. Wish I had been able to see this on a big screen.
2. Driving Lessons (2006)
Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), Mrs. Weasley (Julie Walters) and Laura Linney all together in a coming of age comedy together. How grand.
3. The Italian (2005)
A sad Russian kid trying to find his mother after being put up for adoption. Get the handkerchiefs and a bottle of Stoli ready for this one.
4. Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
I can only imagine this will now be followed with a sequel titled Who Killed GM? At least this film looks better than an episode of 60 minutes. (Star studded cast includes Ed Begley, Jr. and it’s narrated by Martin Sheen.)
5. Why We Fight? (2005)
An important documentary by Eugene Jarecki about the idea of American Empire. Looks sure to get some good arguments started. If Noam Chomsky’s not in it, we can take it seriously. (A different kind of star-studded cast.)
6. The Passenger (1975)
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider. If only the creepy voiceover guy would stop talking about Last Tango in Paris.
7. The White Countess (2005)
Natasha Richardson, Ralph Fiennes. In China. Directed by James Ivory, written by Kazuo Ishiguro. Lush.
8. The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
How did they make even the trailer seem a little bit creepy? Love the animation and music.
9. Bon Voyage (2003)
An action comedy period piece—in French. Isabelle Adjani, Gerard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Peter Coyote. Must-see.
10. Look at Me (2004)
Quirky father/daughter relationship comedy…in French, if you can believe it. Looks like it might have some potential.
11. The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)
Even the trailer for this film about a musical prodigy with psychological problems is melancholy.
12. The Best of World War II Movies
(Sahara, Bridge on the River Kwai, Hellcats of the Navy, Anzio, The Caine Mutiny, King Rat, The Guns of Navarone, From Here to Eternity, Hope & Glory, Bitter Victory, The Odessa File)
It’s like watching one of those Academy Award montage sequences. Great for a really brief game of spot your favorite movie moments or a good idea for a home film festival.
13. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
I guess this is in the general spirit of uplift of this DVD.
14. The Holiday (2006)
Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet are unlucky in love so they switch houses to get some new scenery and so Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law and Kate Winslet meets Jack Black. Yeah, that seems fair.