Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers my introduction to the great Greek filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos, who addresses the fraught political history of 20th Century Greece in four thematically rich and visually stunning features made between 1972 and 1980.
Yet more notes on recent viewing, featuring horror – both high and low end – some documentaries and action movies, gritty realism and slick fantasy … eclectic and somewhat random.
In this, the longest section of my notes from the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, I cover the English-language films from Britain, Australia and the U.S., which include documentaries, mainstream movies, films about sexuality and toxic chauvinism, class conflict and ennui.
A few more of the movies I’ve been watching this Fall – the feature-length versions of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse homages; David Fincher’s breakthrough thriller Se7en; David Wickes’ two-part TV movie about history’s most famous serial killer Jack the Ripper; Chuck Norris tackling an army of terrorists single-handed in Joseph Zito’s Invasion U.S.A.: John Carpenter’s disappointing remake of Village of the Damned; William Malone’s stylishly confused on-line thriller fear dot come; and Maurice Devereaux’s effective low-budget horror about the Biblical apocalypse End of the Line.
Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers German films groaning under the weight of history and the pressing need to construct an identity free of the past.
Recent viewing includes a mix of horror, sci-fi and social commentary, from George A. Romero’s Bruiser (2000), about an office drone whose social invisibility enables him to exact revenge on his abusers, to a pair of Mexican Gothic fantasies about a vampire count; from an Aussie Indiana Jones rip-off to late effects artist David Allen’s passion project The Primevals, left unfinished at his death in 1999 but now completed by his friends.
Part seven of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers Western European films charged with doses of Romanticism and existential despair.
A pair of Jonathan Demme features and several box sets are among my Fall movie watching, featuring various genre titles ranging from the Hollywood prestige of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to the cheap regional horror of Doug Robertson’s HauntedWeen (1991), early ’70s Brit exploitation including Jack Palance sacrificing women to an African idol in Freddie Francis’ Craze (1974) and four Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi made-for-television ghost stories in Cauldron’s Houses of Doom collection.
Part six of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers a handful of Eastern European films which range across history and politics and into fantasy.
Indicator’s new Columbia Horror box set collects six B-movies from the ’30s and ’40s, only half of which can honestly be called horror – the other three are adventure/crime movies. But all of them provide breezy, atmospheric entertainment, with strong casts (including Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Edward Van Sloan, Ralph Bellamy, Rose Hobart, Nina Foch and Fay Wray) and noirish cinematography.