Kenneth George Godwin | Cagey Films

Clive Rees’ The Blockhouse (1973) and other recent Indicator releases

Posted on March 30, 2022March 29, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Father Roche (Donald Pleasence) confronts an ancient religion on a remote Greek island in Kostas Karagiannis’ The Devil’s Men (1976)

Recent releases from Indicator have seemed oddly random – from an unexceptional genre movie (Kostas Karagiorgis’ The Devil’s Men [1076]) to an arthouse war film (Clive Rees’ The Blockhouse [1973]), a ghost story that comes across like a television play (Kevin Billington’s Voices [1973]) to an interesting if unsuccessful literary adaptation (Anthony Friedmann’s Bartleby [1970]) and a revisionist detective story which plays with the tropes of the English country house mystery (Chris Petit’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman [1982]).

Updating Cagey Films

Posted on March 28, 2022March 27, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

CageyFilms new sister site FlickNotes provides additional tools for exploring our content

CageyFilms has added some new design features to aid visitors in exploring our large archive of content – a million-and-a-half words accumulated over eleven years – including a new sister site called FlickNotes which provides a searchable graphic index with metadata about the more than 2500 movies written about on the blog.

Harry Dean Stanton’s swansong: Lucky (2017)

Posted on March 26, 2022October 11, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Harry Dean Stanton contemplates the meaning and value of life in John Carroll Lynch's Lucky (2017)

John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky (2017) is a portrait of a man coming to terms with his own mortality, which is also a tribute to actor Harry Dean Stanton, on whose life much of the script was based. Generous and emotionally rich, the film surrounds Harry Dean with a flawless cast which forms a supportive community within which he comes to accept without fear or anger the idea of his own inevitable death.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge (1970): Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on March 23, 2022March 23, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Three unlikely partners come together to rob a Paris jewellery store in Jean-Pierre Melville's masterful Le cercle rouge (1970)

Criterion have re-released Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful heist movie Le cercle rouge (1970) in a new dual-format 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition based on a 4K restoration by StudioCanal. Although there are no new extras (supplements adding up to almost two hours date back to the company’s original 2003 DVD release), the film looks better than ever, its narrative stripped to essentials as a meditation on professionalism, fate and the moral ambiguity of characters on both sides of the law.

Tobe Hooper’s mangled career

Posted on March 16, 2022August 2, 2023 by Kenneth George Godwin

Bill Gartley (Robert Englund), consumed by evil, is now barely human in Tobe Hooper's The Mangler (1995)

As a filmmaker, Tobe Hooper’s creative interests were not always in sync with audiences and critics. His mixture of theatrical performance and constructed-in-studio settings are on full display in the generally disdained Stephen King adaptation The Mangler (1995), whose uneven dramatic execution undermines an often impressively menacing horror-fantasy about the bloody appetite of capitalism, an inhuman force which devours those doomed to serve it. Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion (1990), on the other hand, is a half-baked mess which mostly lacks any visual interest to make up for its many narrative inadequacies.

David Lynch’s Dune redux

Posted on March 9, 2022July 20, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The battle for Arrakeen in David Lynch's Dune (1984)

With a new 4K restoration of David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Arrow Films and Koch Media have given us pretty much the final word on this magnificent, yet almost fatally crippled, epic, surrounding it with hours of new and archival extras (including two commentaries on the Arrow, and Daniel Griffith’s feature-length making-of on the Koch). The Koch edition claims primacy, though, for including not only a soundtrack CD, but also the remarkable, unofficial fan-edit by the anonymous Spicediver, who has used all publicly available material to construct an intelligent, thoughtful three-hour version which reveals that so many of the theatrical cut’s acknowledged problems were the fault of Dino De Laurentis and Universal Studios, and not Lynch; there really is a coherent, comprehensible narrative in what was shot, yet it was ruined by idiots whose only concern was keeping the movie under 135 minutes.

Recent disks from England, part two: Arrow

Posted on March 2, 2022February 25, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

A young woman's psychic powers make her a target of nefarious forces in Nico Mastorakis' Death Has Blue Eyes (1976)

Arrow’s big pre-Christmas sale brought a wide range of titles, some old, some new: Juan Simon Piquer’s Spanish slasher Pieces (1982), Chelsea Stardust’s horror comedy Satanic Panic (2019), Giancarlo Santi’s spaghetti western The Grand Duel (1972), Lee Min-jae’s horror comedy Zombie for Sale (2019), Jill Gevargizian’s psycho horror The Stylist (2020),Nico Mastorakis incoherent first feature Death Has Blue Eyes (1976), a Japanese double bill of sci-fi crime movies, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears (1949) and Mitsuo Murayama’s The Invisible Man vs the Human Fly (1957), Riccardo Freda’s mix of melodrama and giallo Double Face (1969), Jacques Tourneur’s late film noir Nightfall (1956), and Giorgio Ferroni’s atmospheric Gothic horror Mill of the Stone Women (1960).

The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990):
Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on February 23, 2022February 22, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) becomes a dangerous doppelgänger for Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990)

With their new Blu-ray release, Criterion add the Coen Brothers’ third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), to the Collection. One of the darkest, most sombre films in the Coen canon, this moody gangster story updates hardboiled noir as a complex meditation on male fragility and violence. Sumptuously shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, it features a superb cast of great character actors.

Gerry O’Hara’s The Brute (1977)

Posted on February 19, 2022September 24, 2024 by Kenneth George Godwin

Filmmaker Gerry O’Hara tackled the difficult subject of marital violence in the mid-’70s, at a time when such things weren’t discussed in polite company. His use of exploitation tropes offended critics at the time for “trivializing” a serious subject which almost no one else was examining in popular media. Actually, O’Hara’s treatment is quite intelligent and well-crafted.

Recent disks from England, part one

Posted on February 16, 2022February 25, 2022 by Kenneth George Godwin

The climactic battle between Cyclops and Dragon in Nathan Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Recent disks from England include Franco Parolini’s late spaghetti western Sabata Trilogy (1969-71), the classic Ray Harryhausen Sinbad fantasies (1958-77), Carl Franklin’s revisionist neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Tsui Hark’s influential martial arts fantasy Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), and David Greene’s tense submarine disaster movie Gray Lady Down (1978).

Author: Kenneth George Godwin