In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

38. Death Line (1972), dir. Gary Sherman

This is a firm favourite which I've written about in detail before (LJ / DW). I still very much stand by that previous review and indeed can only add minor points to it. One is a nice piece of narrative construction which I don't think I'd previously noticed. At the start of the film, the reason there is a policeman around in the underground station at all to approach for help when the young couple find James Manfred, OBE, unconscious on the platform is precisely because of his actions in the previous scene, as the copper is talking to the sex worker whom Manfred had propositioned before being attacked. Another is that the last surviving tunnel-dweller only says the words "mind the doors" to surface-dwellers, not for example his fellow tunnel-dweller who dies part-way through the story. So it's not just that that is the only English-language phrase he knows how to say, and which he uses in all situations - he specifically thinks of it as 'their' language, and is trying to use it in the appropriate context to communicate with them. It's another example of the very thoughtful and humanising characterisation used to create him.

The only small plot issue which niggles at me with this film is the question of when exactly the survivors of the original roof-fall broke back through the blockage, allowing the man we see in the present day to get through to the platforms and attack his victims. You would assume that if it had happened while any of the original generation of construction workers were still alive, they would have wanted to come out and return to normal life rather than stay underground, but it's also rather hard to believe that digging their way out would have taken that long, as it really doesn't appear to be a very large roof-fall in the film. The best explanation I can come up with is that they had been there long enough to have become so disillusioned with the society which had caused the fall and then abandoned them that they chose not to return to it. In that scenario, the main motivation for digging through the roof-fall would have been (or become if it wasn't initially) simply to reach a food source, rather than to escape.


39. Therapy for a Vampire (2014), dir. David Ruehm

I'd never heard of this film until Joel suggested watching it, but it's really lovely and was well worthwhile. It's a horror comedy about a vampire in 1930s Vienna who goes to Sigmund Freud for therapy. He's unhappy with his marriage, largely because his wife is driven mad by her inability to see her own face in the mirror and desperate for any kind of reassurance that she is still beautiful. Sigmund offers the services of a struggling young artist to paint her portrait, but the vampire is more interested in the painter's girlfriend. This is for a reason which I often find annoying, in that she is the reincarnation of his lost love, Nadilla, who died centuries earlier. However, in this context it's a trope which is knowingly undermined, so it was all part of the film's lightly-satirical approach to its subject matter. The story overall is quite touching, and it's very nicely shot, with a slightly fantastical style achieved via strong colours and contrasts and well designed sets. Some scenes even struck me as not just coincidentally being set in the same city, but deliberately designed to recall The Third Man, such as the cafe where the girlfriend works and a street fountain.


40. The Invitation (2022), dir. Jessica M. Thompson

Seen with Joel at The Light, using some free Vue cinema vouchers which are one of a choice of perks you can get with the bank account I have. Briefly, the heroine, Evie, is American, and working in temporary catering placements when the story begins. She discovers via a DNA test that she has English relatives, who prove to be an aristocratic family and invite her over to their mansion at their expense for a wedding. There, she meets the supposedly extremely attractive (but actually hugely skeevy) head of the household, Walter De Ville, but soon also begins having scary and unexplained experiences. It turns out he's a vampire, and she has been brought over to be converted into a vampire herself and complete his coven of three brides.

It's supposedly 'inspired by Dracula', which was why we went to see it, and in fairness there are plenty of references to Stoker's novel. One branch of the family is called the Billingtons and are lawyers from Whitby; the name De Ville is used by Dracula as a pseudonym; he also mentions that he was once known as Son of the Dragon; and lines from the novel (or close paraphrases of them) crop up periodically (e.g. "Tonight is mine, tomorrow is yours"). The basic set-up in which a mixed-race, working-class American woman gets to defeat a load of literally and metaphorically vampiric British aristocrats is obviously also good fun.

However, it spends rather too much time lingering over the rom-com it's initially supposed to appear to be rather than getting on to the vampirism. The plot set-up means it kind of has to, because if Evie really understood her true situation at any time before the wedding feast where it is finally revealed, she would obviously never have agreed to go into the room. So to preserve that big moment of revelation, as the producers obviously wanted to, she can only experience a few relatively minor doubts and concerns before that point - hence being stuck in boring rom-com mode for too long before going from zero to full blast on the horror. It's also just extremely unsubtle in almost every respect. The Dracula references are all repeated multiple times, Walter De Ville is blatantly villain-coded from his very first appearance, and it's full of jump scares rather than tension and atmosphere.

But what all that comes down to saying is that it was not produced for us, seasoned horror-viewers and massive Dracula geeks. It was made for the other people who were there in the cinema auditorium with us - c. twenty-year-olds with no particularly strong adherence to the horror genre. Whether it actually worked for them, I don't really know, but I guess for us it did at least assuage our curiosity about the latest entry in the ever-expanding universe of Dracula-inspired narratives. Lord knows, I have seen plenty of shitty films in my time in pursuit of that goal!

I'm woefully behind with both film and book blogging, and it's really weighing on me and stopping me from getting on with other things I want to do. So I'm determined today to get caught up, at least on the films. I'm sure at one point I could have said more on all which follow below, but since we are literally going back to July for these ones, I have inevitably forgotten much of my initial reaction - which for catch-up purposes is probably a good thing. The watch-words here are key points and light touch - not exhaustive detail.


17. Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? (2014), dir. Philippe de Chauveron

I saw this on DVD with my sister and Nicolas while I was in the Midlands for Christophe's first birthday. It's a French comedy about families, religion and racism - quite a cocktail of topics to take on, but it does work really well.

The basic set-up is that a traditional wealthy Catholic family in possession of a moderately-sized château has four daughters, three of whom have already married husbands of varied religious and ethnic backgrounds - specifically, a Muslim, a Jew and a Chinese man. The parents have stoically accepted their choices so far, but have pinned their hopes on their fourth and final daughter choosing a Catholic husband. Great news! She does. The only problem is that he's a black immigrant from the Ivory Coast. Inevitably, the rest of the film from the moment when they find this out follows their journey (and that of the husband-to-be's family too) from initial shock and horror, through a fragile attempt to behave reasonably about it, a dramatic blow-up and finally discovering that they all had more in common than they had ever realised and becoming bosom buddies.

While checking that I had remembered the title of the film correctly, I came across this article in the Telegraph, claiming that it didn't get a release here as distributors judged it was too racist for British viewers. But in my view this entirely misses the point of the film. All of the racism expressed in it is the butt of a joke, and very explicitly coded as a bad and problematic thing which needs to be dealt with so that everyone can be happier - which is exactly what happens at the end of the film. In fact, it seems to me that the judgement made by the distributors here is a sad reflection of a fear culture which we've managed to create around potentially-controversial material. Rather than attempt to distinguish between helpful and unhelpful portrayals of racism, cautious distributors just Won't Go There at all - which of course only leads to silence and erasure and lots of stories which act like racism doesn't exist. It does, and I think it's better to acknowledge that up-front than pretend otherwise. So well done France for that.

There is more of a case for saying that a film which shows, as this one does, that racism can easily be overcome by just getting drunk together and bonding trivialises the structural and pervasive nature of actual racism. But this is a comedy. Its treatment of racism is pretty far-reaching in spite of that, but the genre does ultimately depend on light-hearted simplicity. Besides, any film with a happy ending gives a rather false impression of how easily life's many complexities and problems can be solved. So I'm happy with this one as an enjoyable watch and a very human story, and am only sorry it won't be widely seen outside of France.


18. Scream Blacula, Scream! (1973), dir. Bob Kelljan

Watched with ms_siobhan in July, this is a sequel to Blacula, which was rushed out the following year to capitalise on its success after it proved so popular. It's very much what you would expect given those circumstances - definitely enjoyable in many of the same ways as the first one, but also feelings like a re-tread of the same ground with a lower budget and generally more limited horizons.

William Marshall returns as Mamuwalde, having been resurrected in a voodoo ritual, but while he puts in a strong performance, there's a sense that his characterisation hasn't entirely been thought through at script level. On the one hand, he wants to be freed of his vampire curse and asks a voodoo practitioner to conduct a ritual which will exorcise him - but on the other, he doesn't actually seem to show any real conflict or anguish about going round biting people the rest of the time. Elsewhere, we have some good characters, including plenty of strong and self-assured women, some excellent funky party scenes and some truly enormous shirt-collars. But the plot never achieves very much sense of momentum, and overall, it feels like a classic case of attempting to replicate a successful movie without quite understanding what it was that made the first one so good.

There's still a bit of conscious social commentary in this one - particularly when Mamuwalde encounters a black prostitute, and upbraids the also-black pimps who are controlling her for making a slave of their sister in that way. ms_siobhan also very rightly noted a careful coding in the characters' hair-styles - that the good guys (and gals) all had more 'natural' Afros, and could thus be read as at ease with their Afro-Caribbean heritage, whereas the power-hungry or selfish characters (again both male and female) generally had straightened hair or weaves, signalling a greater adherence to western ideals of beauty. So, like the first film, there is plenty in this too which boils down to black producers, writers, directors and actors articulating their own realities of being black in 1970s America, and that makes for interesting viewing. But it was all just embedded in a stronger drama the first time around.


19. The Third Man (1949), dir. Carol Reed

Still in July here - I watched this one late in that month with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Hyde Park Picture House. Obviously it is a massive classic, and with extremely good reason. I hadn't seen it before, but am glad now to understand at last the many iconic images and quotable lines from it which I have come across before without ever quite 'getting' them. It's well-plotted, beautifully shot, fantastically well-acted, and captures the fragile world of a Europe just starting to rebuild after the war very powerfully. And it is so very Grahame Greene, especially I think in the essentially isolated nature of the characters. Of course Anna Schmidt and Holly Martins don't get together at the end, because there are unsurmountable barriers between them and Greene has spend the whole film showing us that. No unthinking happy endings here.

I particularly appreciated the huge amounts of effort which had obviously been poured into getting the fine details of every scene just right in order to tell the story being conveyed - like the autumn leaves slowly falling in the last scene, which certainly weren't falling from the trees we can see as they are already bare, and must therefore have been dropped by an unseen stage-crew just above the camera's field of vision. Or the fact that Martins and Lime agree to meet in a cafe called the Marc Aurel, which acknowledges that Marcus Aurelius died in Vienna (then the frontier fortress of Vindobona), and I think actively adds to the story by evoking the wars which dogged Europe during his reign too, as well as perhaps a sense of tragedy around the passing of the last of the Five Good Emperors and the accession of Commodus.

It was nice, too, to see it relatively soon after my own trip to Vienna last September, especially since on the final day of that trip I walked up to the Danube from where we were staying, and as it happened my route took me right past the enormous ferris wheel, properly known as the Wiener Riesenrad in which Holly Martins and Harry Lime first confront one another. I had no idea what it was as I walked past it that day , and certainly no idea that it dates right back to 1897. But I do remember feeling (on what was anyway a rather overcast day with few people around) that the ferris wheel itself and the amusement park it stands in had an air of bleak desolation about them which has now transferred very nicely into my experience of this film.


Right - that's three done out of six which needed it. I'm having a break for dinner now, and hopefully will get the remaining three done this evening.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

And so, welcome to the 'all about my holiday' entry. I'm going to keep it pretty minimal, actually, as I have a lot of work I need to get on with now. But, in simple list form:

( This is what we did )

( And these are the pictures )

I have, incidentally, submitted both of the purple Sshhh bag pictures shown above to the library's bag travel map, along with the signpost one from Belfast, since that one seems to have been the eventual victor in my poll.

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