Dipping another toe into the online stream, part one

Following the example of a friend, I recently started using streaming as a way of sampling movies I might otherwise be inclined to impulse-buy when I come across them during one on-line sale or another. These are usually exploitation movies. Recent examples are Tanya Rosenberg’s Blood Games (1990) – female baseball team pisses off rednecks by beating them and have to fight for their lives to get out of town; Michael Keene’s The Head (2019) – a note-perfect direct-to-video pastiche, shot on VHS, about an incel and his relationship with a blood-drinking mannequin head; Joel Bender’s The Immortalizer (1989) – an actual direct-to-video horror movie (with comedic elements) about yet another mad scientist implanting rich people’s brains into healthy young bodies, much better than expected; James Makichuk’s Ghostkeeper (1981) – a low-budget Canadian slasher-adjacent effort, atmospheric but dull, about three annoying people stranded at a seemingly abandoned mountain lodge in the depths of winter, where they run into a cannibal mutant suggestive of the wendigo; Jenn Wexler’s The Sacrifice Game (2023) – Satanic goings-on at a boarding school closed for the Christmas holidays, with a murderous gang breaking in and trying to raise the Devil only to fall afoul of an unexpected twist; Caye Casas’ The Coffee Table (2022) – a deeply unsettling Spanish mix of horror and pitch black comedy in which a shocking domestic accident escalates into increasingly tense situations leading to inescapable madness.

While I would have been fine if most of these had ended up in my collection, it was nonetheless a relief to discover that I didn’t need to own any of them. I might re-watch a couple of them at some point, but ironically I don’t think I’ll ever want to sit through the best of them again – that would be The Coffee Table, which is remarkably well-made but almost literally unbearable.

Last in this category are two movies just announced as the next releases from Cauldron, whose entire catalogue I own except for one release. Chances are, I would have ordered the new pair, but used Plex to check them out. Paul Grau’s Spanish Mad Foxes (1981) seemed promising as an ’80s vigilante action movie about a wealthy guy who runs afoul of a biker gang, triggering escalating violence, but the execution is clumsy, missing all the opportunities to ramp up the vigilante thrills. As for Angelo Pannacciò and Luca Damiano’s Cries and Shadows: The Return of the Exorcist (1975), I didn’t even last ten minutes with what appears to be the worst Italian Exorcist rip-off I’ve ever come across. So Plex here helped me dodge a couple of costly bullets.

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Although I have no patience with the Marvel ECU, I have perversely enjoyed a few of their peripheral movies – the generally derided Jessica Alba Fantastic Four movies, the first two Venom movies – so I found myself checking out some of the more recent movies which had been largely trashed by critics and audiences. Since a couple of these had raised fan-boy ire by centring on female characters, I had a slight hope that they’d offer something more interesting than the mainstream Avengers movies, but alas they couldn’t escape the constraints of the corporate demand for product placeholders. Cate Shortland’s Black Widow (2021) is like an imitation of Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow (2018), about a super-skilled Russian assassin who turns against her trainers/handlers, while S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web (2024) gives a New York paramedic mystical powers related to rare Amazonian spiders, which she has to use to protect three teenage girls from a wealthy man who’s also been transformed by the spiders’ venom, in the process forming a new superhero team. Black Widow goes through the standard big-budget action motions, but Madame Web’s action is often incoherent, frantic editing further complicated by its need to keep flashing forward and backwards to reflect the character’s clairvoyance.

Like Black Widow, J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter (2024) is also rooted in Russia, though rather than a rogue government agency here the character comes from the criminal oligarchy. As a young man, driven by his relentlessly demanding gangster father, the hero is saved from a deadly lion mauling by a magic potion from Wakanda, giving him super-powers which he uses to fight back against the evil he grew up in. The script piles on multiple magical characters which serve only to dilute the narrative, making it increasingly silly. The most entertaining part of the movie is Russell Crowe’s bloated, bloviating oligarch, who adds a note of (inadvertent?) comedy. (Hard to believe this comes from the same director as the remarkable All Is Lost [2013].)

After watching Kraven, Plex recommended Michael Giacchino’s short feature (or long short) Werewolf by Night (2022), a stand-alone story which tries to evoke the classic Universal horrors of the ’30s with its atmospheric black-and-white imagery and traditional monsters. It almost works, but can’t escape feeling like a gimmicky pastiche rather than a movie in its own right. The monster-hunting Bloodstone family gathers to choose a new patriarch only to find a werewolf in their midst, who turns out to be the most sympathetic character. There’s some humour, some CG-enhanced action, but not much in the way of personality despite a good cast.

I also watched Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance (2024), third in the series and showing the strain of keeping the franchise going. Ironically, the problem is that co-writer/director Marcel attempts to enlarge the canvas by expanding the backstory – a lab beneath Area 51 where experiments are being conducted on the alien parasites; but even worse, there’s a menacing alien trapped somewhere in the cosmos who’s created the parasites to help him find the magical key which will free him – the key naturally being hidden in Venom, who becomes a target for both the villain’s intergalactic minions and the cold-blooded military types who want to develop the parasites as a new weapon. There’s way too little of what made the first two movies fun – the mismatched-buddy team of Tom Hardy’s host and his brain-eating symbiote.

Since I’d watched all these, I thought I might as well see James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) at last, since everyone seemed to love it. I’d found Gunn’s Slither (2004) and Super (2010) entertaining, but hadn’t bothered with Guardians because of my aversion to Marvel and as it became clearer that this movie actually tied into the larger MCU (we’re on the trail of Thanatos and those Infinity Stones), and that it consisted of annoying banter and interminably busy action scenes, it became clear that my original avoidance had been justified.

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When I want a dose of adrenaline without much need to think, there’s nothing I like more than a pumped-up action movie – my three go-tos, which I’ve watched numerous times, are Gary Fleder’s Homefront (2013), my favourite Jason Statham movie; Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher (2012), my favourite Tom Cruise movie; and Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer (2014), you guessed it, my favourite Denzel Washington movie. So Plex has been very handy for catching up on ones I missed on their theatrical release or didn’t even know about until they showed up in my recommendations.

As in Homefront, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper (2024) has Jason Statham as a former agent with deadly skills who’s trying to live a quiet life. Here, he raises bees on the land of a nice Black lady who, after she’s targeted by on-line scammers, commits suicide. Our hero tracks the shady corporation which has industrialized digital theft and works his way up to the criminal organization behind it, wreaking all kinds of havoc. The biggest surprise is that the trailer’s money shot in which he blows up a corporate office building actually comes about twenty minutes in, but there’s still plenty of mayhem to follow. There’s an undeniable strain of dumbness as the title turns out to be an overwrought metaphor about a lone agent tasked with protecting “the hive”, a role Statham once had but retired from – which comes back into play when the trail leads right to the Oval Office.

On a Statham kick, I also watched Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man (2021), though I don’t particularly like Ritchie’s hyperactive style. In this remake of a French thriller, a man takes a job with an armoured car company in Los Angeles and becomes involved in a big robbery, but his true motives remain hidden for a long time as he manipulates the gang into a bloodbath. I followed this with the original, Nicolas Boukhrief’s Le convoyeur (2004), which is a shorter, leaner version of the same story.

Following what may be a mini-trend, Renny Harlin’s The Bricklayer (2023) takes its title from the protagonist’s post-retirement occupation which also somehow serves as a metaphor for his previous career in espionage. Aaron Eckhardt has to come out of that retirement when a former foe launches a plan to make the U.S. look bad by framing the CIA for a series of journalist assassinations … guess the poor guy doesn’t read newspapers or watch cable news because nothing he does can match the sheer awfulness of the U.S.’s actual global reputation and is unlikely to inspire the collapse of the States. While Harlin stages the action efficiently, this is the dumbest of the recent action movies I’ve watched.

The most overblown is probably Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves (2018), a well-plotted heist movie which takes itself awfully seriously and stretches towards two-and-half hours. An elite squad of the LAPD led by Gerard Butler is essentially a lawless gang which breaks the rules, kidnaps and tortures suspects, and is generally as reprehensible as the trigger-happy gang planning to rob the Federal Reserve. As in any good heist story, the chief interest is in the detailed depiction of the planning and execution of the robbery, with the aftermath rife with double-crosses and twists which reveal plans within the big plan.

Less self-serious are a trilogy of Korean cop movies called The Roundup starring the imposing Ma Dong-seok as an inspector built like a tank who has a tendency to crash into situations and flatten bag guys with a single sledgehammer punch. As is always the case, his methods get him into trouble with his superiors, but he’s implacable in his quest to sort out the bad guys and help the innocent. In The Roundup (2022), he’s sent to Vietnam to bring back an extradited criminal, only to run afoul of the local police when he uncovers an expat Korean gang which preys viciously on tourists. In The Roundup: No Way Out (2023), the inspector is faced with a gang war between locals and Japanese yakuza who are fighting for control of the market for a deadly new designer drug. And in The Roundup: Punishment (2024), the inspector has to learn new skills to tackle the criminals behind an on-line gambling racket. All three movies, the first two directed by Lee Sang-yong and the third by Heo Myeong-haeng, mix brutal violence with unsettling moments of comedy, but they’re all held together by the distinctive on-screen persona of Ma Dong-seok.

Despite my appreciation of The Equalizer, I was disappointed by The Equalizer 2 (2018) because it got away from the original film’s strengths – in that movie, a former agent with “very particular skills” is drawn into conflict with the Russian mob in Boston because they prey on his neighbours; but in the sequel, it’s all about the character’s past while his role as helpful neighbour is sidelined. So when the third movie came out to poor reviews and the trailer showed McCall relocating to Italy, I lost interest altogether. But while scrolling through Plex one evening, there it was so I figured I might as well get it over with. To my surprise, The Equalizer 3 (2023), again written by Richard Wenk and directed by Antoine Fuqua, was not only much better than number two; it’s almost as good as the first movie. Once again, the script is a tightly woven set of narrative elements which eventually all come together, each thread locking into place – unlike the loose, disconnected vignettes of the second movie – and once again our reluctant hero is driven to use his skills in service of the decent people in a community which has adopted him and who are being preyed on by vicious criminals, in this case the cammora in southern Italy who are using drug-dealer profits to finance real estate deals which require them to terrorize ordinary people into selling their property. The violence, when it erupts, is graphic and nasty, but the underlying narrative is engaging.

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I’ve also been using Plex to track down copies (unfortunately in some cases poor quality, taken from old VHS releases) of movies I haven’t seen in a long time.

I saw Guy Hamilton’s A Touch of Larceny (1960) two or three times on television in the ’70s and enjoyed it, so was happy to find a reasonably good copy on Plex. Hamilton wasn’t noted for comedy – he’s best known for his James Bond and Harry Palmer movies, as well as a few war movies – and A Touch of Larceny is certainly pretty low-key, but it has some charm … though James Mason’s “charm offensive” to get Vera Miles away from stuffy George Sanders is more problematic now than it appeared six decades ago.

J. Lee Thompson’s Eye of the Devil (1966) was one of three horror movies in the eclectic director’s long career, and definitely the best. Shot in elegant black-and-white by Erwin Hillier, the film plays down the horror element in favour of a drama about a family trapped by its long-held traditions, which are rooted in the landscape they’ve occupied for generations. In a precursor to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), scion of a French noble family David Niven is called home when the grape harvest fails, but unlike Lord Summerisle’s quest for a suitable sacrificial subject, he has to come to terms with the fate faced by many of his ancestors: in order to bring on renewal, he himself must be sacrificed. His wife, Deborah Kerr, struggles to overcome his fatalistic resignation while everyone around him works to bring about an occult resolution to the practical problems they face.

Coming from a very different tradition, Ishiro Honda’s Gorath (1962) is an attempt at a more straightforward sci-fi movie by Japan’s greatest kaiju director. Made between Mothra and King Kong vs Godzilla, Gorath is a mostly sombre story about people facing the destruction of Earth – an almost-forgotten link between Rudolph Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951) and Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998). There are some jarring “comic” elements and, at the producers’ insistence, a brief appearance towards the end of a completely extraneous kaiju, but for the most part it’s a no-nonsense story about scientists, politicians and the military setting aside national conflicts to come up with a solution to the threat of a rogue star on a collision course with Earth. While that solution is absurd (building giant thrusters in Antarctica to move the planet out of the way), Honda handles it with gravity.

Scientific nonsense it might be, but Gorath is more entertaining than a pair of relatively prestigious ’70s sci-fi/horror movies I re-watched for the first time in years. Ralph Nelson was a journeyman who could do a good job with a good script but would slip into mediocrity when the material was lacking. That’s the case with Embryo (1976), in which Rock Hudson is a dour scientist grieving for his dead wife, who develops a technique for accelerating foetal growth and produces a hot, superintelligent woman who, as tradition dictates, has to become dangerous. Dull and formulaic, it’s hard to see why anyone bothered.

John Frankenheimer was more talented than Nelson, but he too could stumble when he worked with material which held little interest for him. After the mid-’70s high of French Connection II (1975) and Black Sunday (1977), he entered a long stretch of mediocrity beginning with Prophecy (1979), a more topical horror movie than Embryo, but executed with dull disinterest. Native lands are being polluted by corporate callousness, causing sickness and mutations among the indigenous population, who are also being repressed by a white legal system which disregards native rights. An environmental scientist is tasked with making a study of the situation and flies in with his pregnant wife, very quickly discovering that the rivers are full of mercury. Not only are the people slowly dying from the contamination; a giant mutated bear is rampaging around tearing people apart. The company men behind the pollution are finally brought face to face with the horror of what they’ve caused, but that’s hardly going to put a dent in their greed.

The ’70s were the heyday of made-for-television genre movies and I watched a lot of them back in the day, but I’m not sure whether I saw John Llewellyn Moxey’s Where Have All the People Gone (1974). Apocalypse on a budget, it effectively evokes a global catastrophe with only a handful of characters. A geologist vacationing with his family in the mountains is in a cave with his two kids when a freak solar flare wipes out most of the world’s population. Trying to make their way back to Los Angeles in hopes of finding his wife still alive, they encounter a variety of people, some dangerous, some helpful, some in need of help. With no way to restore the pre-disaster world, they have to come to terms with their despair and face a very different future.

There’s never been a decent disk release of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles (1989), which seems strange considering his status … or perhaps it’s not so surprising; maybe he’d rather not have this filthy, scatological affront to the cherished wholesomeness of The Muppets out in the world. Made between his debut feature, the gloriously offensive Bad Taste (1987) and the much more polished but equally offensive Dead Alive (1992), Feebles is a hugely elaborate puppet show depicting the grotesque depravity rampant behind the scenes of a TV variety show as Heidi the Hippo is used and abused when all she wants is to be loved. Shit, vomit, and puppet sex are ubiquitous between musical numbers. The script is funny and the puppets really well handled; it’s obvious that an enormous amount of work went into this, and that’s part of the joke. Jackson quickly lost his commitment to transgressive iconoclasm after Hollywood came calling in the mid-’90s.

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Although I didn’t see them at the time, I was certainly aware of the Trinity spaghetti westerns, which ironically received wider North American distribution than a lot of the more serious Italian westerns which preceded them, and which they obviously parodied. That may be why I avoided them, the impression that they were comedies. A few years later, I did see – and loved – Tonino Valerii’s My Name Is Nobody (1973), but by then the Trinity movies were long gone. I’ve finally watched them both, They Call Me Trinity (1970) and Trinity Is Still My Name (1971), and while they are parodic, with Terence Hill establishing his anachronistic slacker persona which he perfected in Valerii’s masterpiece, they’re also fine examples of the mature spaghetti western style. Both directed by Enzo Barboni, who had previously photographed numerous genre films, including some key spaghetti westerns, and photographed by Aldo Giordani, they make excellent use of landscape and play on familiar tropes – bounty hunters, wealthy businessmen stealing land from settlers, saloon fights – which are undercut by Hill and co-star Bud Spencer as mismatched brothers who try hard to be outlaws but keep finding themselves on the right side of conflicts, defending peaceful communities against the forces preying on them.

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With a long way still to go, I’ll take a break here and get back to this streaming survey later…