John Saxon 1936-2020

John Saxon as martial arts expert Roper in Robert Clouse's Enter the Dragon (1973)

Actor John Saxon died last week. With almost two-hundred roles over six decades, he was a distinctive presence on screen though never a star. In the 1970s and “80s, he worked regularly in Italian genre movies, doing much of the work that his fans most appreciated.

Shameless exploitation

Family retainer Isidro (Giuseppe Carbone) plays with the contents of the crypt in Mario Bianchi's Satan's Baby Doll (1982)

Shameless is a British label dedicated to exploitation movies (with a mission statement emphasizing sleaze and outrage) which has been issuing mostly Italian genre titles for more than a decade with mixed results in terms of quality; thanks to a recent on-line sale, I just binged some of their releases which cover the spectrum in terms of quality (both technical and creative).

A frustrating evening

Michael (Hywel Bennett) can't avoid the distrust, even contempt, of Ellie (Hayley Mills)'s relatives in Sidney Gilliat's Endless Night (1972)

When my friend Howard came over for an evening of movie-watching recently, we ended up with a highly idiosyncratic double-bill of problematic features, one representing self-conscious art, the other polished commercial craft – neither entirely satisfying: Josej Von Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan (1953) and Sidney Gilliat’s Endless Night (1972).

Another mixed bag …

Emily (Mariclare Costello) haunts a Connecticut idyll in John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Another seemingly random collection of movies, this time including some cheap exploitation, cheesy fantasy, horror and noir. I revisit an old favourite, re-evaluate a low-budget Canadian film from the ’70s, and finally catch up with a couple of movies I’ve wanted to see for decades.

A post-Covid 3D evening

One of the few eye-poking moments in Owen Crump's 3D Korean war movie Cease Fire (1953)

To mark our emergence from the Covid lockdown, my friend Steve and I ate barbecued bratwurst and watched a couple of movies which emerged from his big 3D TV screen: Owen Crump’s Korean war docudrama Cease Fire (1953) and John Brahm’s B-movie horror The Mad Magician (1954), Vincent Price’s threadbare follow-up to the hit House of Wax.

New features by two favourites

Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) being absorbed by the Color in Richard Stanley's Color Out Of Space (2019)

The label “visionary” gets tossed around far too easily, but it does apply to two filmmakers whose work begins in genre conventions yet rises to explore themes of horror and human fallibility in complex and original way: too long absent from the screen, Richard Stanley and Larry Fessenden have returned with some of the best work they’ve ever done – the former with the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out Of Space and the latter with Depraved, a modern meditation on the narrative and themes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Bleak Britain

Mrs Ross (Edith Evans) lives in a world beset by forces beyond her control in Bryan Forbes' The Whisperers (1967)

The British have a tendency to indulge in miserablism, a characteristic that filmmakers have been turning into powerful dramatic art for decades. Bryan Forbes’ The Whisperers (1967) and Ray Davies’ Return to Waterloo (1984) approach it from very different directions, but both create powerful portraits of people living depressing lives.

Blasts from the past

A zombie romance, Nazis vs vampire, and sex and death in a Manhattan highrise from Vinegar Syndrome

Acting Up a Storm

The 5th Hong Kong International Film Festival, part eight

Late Fall viewing: Oh, the horror!

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