Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.



Based on a novel by Koushun Takami, director Kinji Fukasaku's film presents a nightmarish future in which the country of Japan, fearing its own rebellious youths, has passed something called the Millennium Educational Act, also known as the BR Act. Under this act, a ninth grade class is drawn from a random lottery every year to compete in a Battle Royale, to fight to the death until only one student remains.

This year, the forty-two students of Class B have been chosen to battle. They are taken, without consent, by military forces to a deserted island and set loose on the 10 kilometers of land, each given a weapon of some sort, each fitted with a necklace that has an explosive charge within it. If they try to remove the necklace, the charge will go off and blow their throat open. If they do something that's against the rules of the game, the charge will go off. At different times, areas of the island will become Danger Zones, and if a student is in an area when it becomes a Danger Zone, their necklace explodes. The Battle Royale is to last no longer than three days, and if there's no winner when time runs out, all of the necklaces will explode.


And so the film consists of this group of ninth graders hunting and killing each other on this island. Some of them want to stick together, some commit suicide, some want to try to figure out how to beat the game, others just set out to kill everyone they come across so they can win and go home.

It's very disturbing subject matter, handled dead seriously with a dark tone, aided by dark cinematography. There's never a slasher movie sort of thrill from the kill scenes, they're all horrific, especially given that they're being done by young kids, who in between kills still talk about things like cliques and crushes. Some of the kills are so cruel and/or so brutal that they're hard to even watch.


My first viewing of the movie, I found it so troubling and intense that I had to take a break from watching it about halfway through, right after a kill committed by a character played by Chiaki Kuriyama, who would go on to play Gogo Yubari in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.

Battle Royale is not a fun movie to watch and it's not one I revisit very often, but it is a great movie.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, 1976's ¿Quién puede matar a un niño?/Who Can Kill a Child?, a.k.a. Island of the Damned, Death is Child's Play, Trapped, etc.




The couple in Serrador's film are Tom and Evelyn, married with a baby on the way, who are enjoying a vacation in Spain. Tom wants to visit the island of Almanzora, a place he had stayed at twelve years earlier, which lies four hours off the coast. He and Evelyn rent a boat and make the trip to the island, and when they arrive they find that there are no adults in sight, only children going around. When they finally do spot an adult, an old man with a cane, they are horrified to see a young girl come up and beat the old man to death with his walking stick. When Tom tries to get the girl to tell him why she did it, she just giggles... Then she and her friends string the old man's corpse up and treat it like a piñata, only they don't beat it with a stick, they go at it with a scythe, 'cause that's how you get the goodies to fall out.

Tom and Evelyn soon encounter another adult, who tells the story of how the island's children just picked up clubs and blades one night and started travelling in packs from house to house, killing the adults. As Tom and Evelyn try to find a way to make it back to the mainland, we also see that normal children become murderous when they look into the eyes of a killer kid, so there's an implication that this could be the start of an apocalyptic event of sorts - if these killer kids make it off the island, the murderous impulse could eventually be passed to every child on the planet.


Serrador took a very serious approach to his film, he felt he had a message to deliver, and partially does so when a character says that children suffer the most when there's war or famine, giving the idea that the children of the film have been overcome by some sort of supernatural, vengeful force. But lines like that aren't enough, Serrador also beats the audience over the head with his message by opening the film with 8 minutes of stock footage of atrocities, a short documentary about the suffering the previous forty years of wars have caused the children of the world. The message that the world should take better care of its children is certainly on the up and up, but I'm not sure that a movie people are going to check out to try to get some entertainment from the concept of kids killing adults and getting killed by adults in return really needed all that.

The main problem I had with Who Can Kill a Child? was its running time and exasperatingly slow pace. You couldn't make the four hour boat trip to Almanzora while watching it, but it sure feels like you could. Serrador, I know you're trying to make a statement, but could we pick up the pace? The 112 minute running time is just excessive. Things take too long to get going, and even when they do the movie drags its heels. By the 90 minute point, I didn't care who could kill who, just as long as it would get the end credits to start rolling.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the "true story" horrors of 2002's The Mothman Prophecies.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the 1972 Spanish film La noche del terror ciego/Tombs of the Blind Dead.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).


On Saturday, February 14, 1900, a group of students from the strict and stuffy Appleyard College boarding school in the Australian state of Victoria set out to have a picnic at the base of Hanging Rock, a five hundred foot tall mountain formed by magma millions of years ago.

Though situated in a beautiful countryside, Hanging Rock isn't the most pleasant place to picnic, crawling with lizards, venomous snakes and poisonous ants, but these romantic poetry-loving young girls seem to enjoy themselves there... for a while. As their time at Hanging Rock goes on, things begin to get a little strange. Watches stop ticking at noon, and something about being at the rock seems to affect the minds of some. The afternoon takes on a dreamy quality and some of the girls exhibit a sort of sleepiness mixed with odd behavior and existential observations.

At the end of the day, three students and a teacher have gone missing, vanished without a trace, and their disappearance is a mystery that is never solved.


Picnic at Hanging Rock is a mood piece, all about enveloping the viewer in an unnerving tone and atmosphere, a feat that is largely accomplished through the fantastic cinematography by Russell Boyd. There are moments at Hanging Rock reminiscent of someone having scattered thoughts while barely awake on a bright morning, and the cinematography, editing and music perfectly matches it. Director Peter Weir has said that he wanted audiences to be hypnotized by the film. There are no outright horrific moments in the movie, but it is considered by some to be horror just because the tone was so creepy to them. I don't know if I'd call it horror myself, but it is a good, artsy, mysterious drama.

While characters search for the missing girls and try to figure out what happened at Hanging Rock that Valentine's Day, there are no answers given in the end, which may frustrate some viewers, but it fits the movie. While the film, like the novel it's based on, claims to be the account of a true event, it's actually a fictional story created by author Joan Lindsay. When writing her novel, Lindsay did end it with a chapter in which the mystery was solved, but that chapter was removed at the suggestion of her editor.


Two young boys were also at Hanging Rock the day the girls disappeared, and as the story goes on they become involved in the search efforts. It took quite a while for me to realize that one of these boys, the one who most intensely ogles the young girls and makes crude comments about them to his pal, was played by a youthful John Jarratt, who would go on to play serial killer Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek thirty years later. The realization brought to mind similarities between this film and the more horrific Wolf Creek - both involve young people taking a trip out to an Australian landmark, in Wolf Creek's case a giant crater caused by a prehistoric meteoritie impact, and once at their destination bad things begin to happen. As in Picnic, watches stop ticking at the Wolf Creek crater, and a car stops working as well. People also go missing from the impact site, but in that movie it's quite clear that Jarratt's character is to blame. Though very different types of films overall, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wolf Creek might make for a good double feature.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the loopy 2009 thriller Triangle.


A group of friends and acquaintances head out for a fun afternoon sailing on a yacht called Triangle and run into trouble out on the sea. First, the wind dies down to a dead calm, then dark clouds of an electrical storm that doesn't show up on the Coast Guard's radar roll in overhead. The storm hits fast and hard, the sea gets so rough that the Triangle is overturned. The group is stranded at sea... Then a cruise ship comes along.

Our lead character is a newcomer to this group, a harried single mother named Jess, who's of a lower class than her companions. She was invited along on the boat trip by the Triangle's owner, who she got to know through his visits to the restaurant in which she works. Jess's main concern is getting home to pick her young son up from school, and she will do whatever it takes to get back to him. As the film progresses, that will call for some very desperate measures.

The group boards the cruise ship, which appears to be abandoned. The ship is called Aeolus, which is a name shared by three characters from Greek mythology who are difficult to tell apart. The one writer/director Christopher Smith had most in mind is the Greek god of wind and father of Sisyphus, the man who was punished by the gods by having to constantly try to roll a boulder uphill. The boulder would never make it to the top of the hill, it would always roll back down to the bottom, and Sisyphus would have to start all over, forever repeating his actions. Jess is about to live out something similar.

As the group walks the halls, Jess experiences deja vu. She's been here before. Her keys are found on the ground, having somehow gotten on board before she did. Messages have been left around the ship, there's blood on the floors. Someone is spotted stalking around, and the group soon starts getting killed one-by-one by a person wearing a sack as a mask. Soon everyone is dead except for Jess and as she looks out to sea, she sees herself and the rest of the Triangle group nearing the Aeolus on the overturned yacht. Jess quickly realizes that she has lived through this cycle countless times - the Triangle group boards the cruise ship, gets killed off, and it starts all over again. The time loop Jess is stuck in is much worse than anything Bill Murray ever had to deal with in Groundhog Day, but like him Jess will have to keep reliving this experience until things play out in just the right way to break the cycle.

How or why is this happening? Is Jess being punished for something like Sisyphus was?

Triangle is a cool, twisted little thriller that has some great moments and creepy sights. The film mainly works as a showcase for the talents of Melissa George in the role of Jess. There are multiple versions of Jess on board the Aeolus at any one time and George does some great work playing different versions of the same character. Over the course of the film, she has to run the gamut of emotions and demeanors from freaked out and terrified to tough and unnerving, depending on how many times each particular version has lived through the loop, and she handles it all quite well. Having multiple versions of the same character running around also makes for some neat scenes where versions witness themselves doing things at different points in each one's timeline, like Back to the Future II with a deadly twist.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the 2004 Belgian film Calvaire, a.k.a. The Ordeal.


A couple weeks ago, my viewing of the Belgian film Left Bank was one of the highlights of this month of Film Club movies. Now the schedule has brought up another Belgian horror offering, and this one I found to be one of the lowest points of the month.

The story follows Marc Stevens, a singer who makes a living travelling Belgium in his van to perform a solo act in rinky dink venues around the country. In the cinematic world that director/co-writer Fabrice Du Welz has crafted, it seems that Marc is the only semi-normal (although not very likeable) person in Belgium, everyone he encounters is rather weird, usually excessively horny and likely mentally unbalanced.

That is especially the case in the small village where Marc's van ends up breaking down. He's able to get a room in a rundown bed and breakfast owned by a kindly, quirky old man named Paul Bartel, an homage to an actor of the same name, a Corman regular who directed such films as Death Race 2000 and Eating Raoul, in addition to a very prolific acting career that included appearances in Piranha (1978), Rock 'n' Roll High School, Chopping Mall, Killer Party, Munchies, and Gremlins 2. As Calvaire went on, I began to wish that I was watching the real Paul Bartel in something else.

Calvaire's Bartel warns Marc to stay away from the village, the people who live there are odd ducks, and when Marc strays too far away from the bed and breakfast, he sees a sight that confirms the locals are an unusual bunch. Seems that trysts with barnyard animals are encouraged around this place, with interspecies copulations being a revered spectactor event. The locals seem especially fond of calves.

Soon, Bartel's friendly and good humored facade crumbles to reveal that he's quite mad himself. He becomes convinced that Marc is in fact his longlost wife Gloria, who was also a singer. Bartel isn't the only one who thinks this in the movie, when he tells the villagers that Marc is Gloria, they fully believe him. Bartel subdues Marc, cuts his hair, puts him in a dress, and treats him like an unwilling wife, warning that if "Gloria" tries to leave him again, he'll take an axe and split "her" in two like a log. From then, we get half of a movie dedicated to torture, crucifixion, and anal rape.

With characters sharing delusions and the forced gender reassignment, Calvaire does have elements that are reminiscent of the earlier Film Club entry The Tenant, but while it attempts to have a darkly humorous side like that movie did, it doesn't really work here. This movie was too twisted, nasty and dirty for me to enjoy in any way.

I'd call Calvaire nothing but a nonsensical exercise in filth, but that sounds too much like something from one of the dopey anti-horror rants Siskel and Ebert would go off on in the '80s.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, Roman Polanski delivers Rosemary's Baby.


The road to bringing Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby to the big screen began with legendary producer/director William Castle, who was interested in getting the film rights to the book before it was even published. Castle took the project to Robert Evans, who was on his way to becoming a Hollywood legend himself, then in the early days of his position as head of production at Paramount. During his days at Paramount, Evans would revive the company and get a lot of classic films made under the banner of the studio. Evans wanted to make the movie, but didn't want Castle to direct it. He felt that Castle's association with B movies might drag down the public perception of the film. Castle had made several great, gimmicky fright flicks over the years - House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, etc. - but Evans was thinking A picture on this one. There was a talented, up and coming Polish director who had caught Evans' attention, and he decided to offer this filmmaker a chance to make his first American movie.

With that filmmaker, Roman Polanski, at the helm and Castle and Evans backing him up, the resulting very faithful adaptation of Rosemary's Baby has gone on to be widely considered one of the best, and is certainly one of the most popular, horror movies ever made.


Mia Farrow, then best known as Frank Sinatra's wife, stars as Rosemary Woodhouse, who gets a chance to rent a newly vacated apartment in the Bramford building in New York City with her theatre actor husband Guy. The Bramford had a bad repuation around the turn of the century, its former tenants include a pair of cannibal sisters and a witchcraft practicioner who claimed he had conjured up the devil himself. But that was a long time ago, this is the swinging '60s, and Rosemary is able to put the building's past behind her and move in anyway. It's a decision that she'll soon come to regret, as very strange things begin to occur around and to her.

The first friend she makes in the building dies from an apparent suicide, and more people around her will die over the coming months. As her husband becomes close to their elderly neighbors the Castevets, his luck and demeanor begins to change. He's able to land an acting gig when a rival suddenly goes blind for no apparent reason. He changes his mind about having a child and becomes determined that they should have one as soon as possible, so into the idea that he even tells Rosemary he had sex with her while she was asleep on the prime night for conception.

Rosemary had passed out after eating some odd tasting chocolate mousse delivered by Minnie Castevet, and the intercourse session was much different from her unconscious perspective, even more disturbing than the idea that Guy had his way with her sleeping body - Rosemary dreamed that she was raped by a monstrous creature, perhaps Satan himself, while a cult of nude onlookers stood around the bed. Among the onlookers were Guy and the Castevets. During the event, Rosemary exclaims, "This is no dream, this is really happening!" And she may be right.


Rosemary becomes pregnant, with a June 1966 due date (6/66!), and this is when the most disturbing stretch of the film begins for me. It's not the implications of Satanism and witchcraft or the apocalyptic possibilities of the birth of the Antichrist that trouble me the most, it's the element of "body horror". Rather than gaining weight, Rosemary starts losing weight. Her doctor is a friend of the Castevets, who forgoes giving Rosemary vitamins and instead has her drink a herbal cocktail made by Minnie, a cocktail that contains Tannis root, the same stuff that's inside the charm necklace the Castevets give her. Tannis root has an unpleasant smell and looks like a mold or fungus, and Rosemary is consuming it daily. This may contribute to her sharp, severe abdominal pain, which lasts for months. She gets gaunt, pale and sickly looking, and as she clutches her stomach in pain, this hypochondriac viewer can't help but cringe in empathy and imagine what damage is being done to her insides.

The cast is great. Farrow comes off a bit awkwardly to me in the early section of the film, but when things go bad and her maternal and self preservational instincts kick in, she really rises the occasion, the character becoming stronger as the film goes along. The supporting cast includes indie filmmaker John Cassavetes, Sidney Blackmer, Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Grodin, and an Oscar-winning turn from Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet. The score by Christopher Komeda is memorable and haunting, particularly the lullaby that features vocals by Farrow.


Rosemary's Baby is one of many classics made under Robert Evans' watch, and one that has ranked highly in the horror genre for almost forty-five years now. What can I add that someone else hasn't already said about it? It's not one of my personal top favorites, and anyone who knows my taste would likely guess that I could do with it having a shorter running time than its 136 minutes, but I don't want to attempt to chip away at Rosemary's Baby.

The film earned over ten times its budget at the box office and had a huge cultural impact in several ways, from the media fascination with Mia Farrow's Vidal Sassoon haircut to the fact that its success kept drive-in projectors busy for the next decade showing Satanic-themed horror movies looking to replicate the movie's success. And its followers weren't all just throw away cash-ins, classics like The Exorcist and The Omen also came out of the devil movie trend.

So SHOCKtober has again found me wandering into Jay Burleson's territory to talk about a Roman Polanski movie. I'm sure this isn't the only time Rosemary's Baby will be covered on this blog, as Burleson has previously said that he intends to write an Appreciation article on the film someday.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, the 2009 French film The Horde.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi/horror blend Planet of the Vampires.


The IMDb trivia says that fifteen different titles were considered for this movie before Planet of the Vampires was settled on. It's an odd choice, having the title promise an entire planet of vampires, when it doesn't actually feature any vampires at all. Alternate titles include Planet of Blood, The Haunted Planet, The Planet of Terror, and The Planet of the Damned, all of which are more fitting, while its title in Spain is simply and appropriately Terror in Space.

The planet of the title is Aura, a world so thickly enshrouded in fog that some don't think there's even any land to it, betting that it's merely a cosmic cloud. But beneath the fog it is a proper planet, and when spaceship Argos and its sister ship Galliott pick up a signal emanating from Aura, they decide they have to land there to check and see whether this signal is a natural emission or a manmade transmission sent by someone in distress.

As the ships prepare to land they lose contact with each other, equipment short circuits, the automatic controls go haywire and the forced manual landings are rough ones. Once on the surface of the mysterious planet, the Argos crew members begin to behave strangely, some violently attacking each other, others driven to go outside without helmets or to sabotage equipment. The crew is able to regain their senses, after which they have no memory of the uncharacteristic things they were just doing.

The Galliott crew were not so lucky, they didn't snap out of their violent trances. When Argos crew members traverse the rocky, barren Aura landscape to check on their nearby sister ship, they find that everyone on board the Galliott is dead. Soon after the bodies are discovered, the dead rise, their minds still controlled by whatever force caused their fatal impulses.

Surrounded by danger, the crew of Argos scrambles to get their controls fixed so they can escape from Aura before they too join the ranks of the alien-mind-controlled dead. But they're not the only ones who want to escape Aura.


Planet of the Vampires is often referred to as a sort of precursor to Ridley Scott's Alien, given that it deals with a spaceship landing on a strange planet in response to a signal of unknown origin, which turns out to be a deadly mistake for its crew. A sequence in which the Argos Captain and a cohort explore an ancient structure on Aura and find the remains of long dead, massive creatures has been cited as a clear inspiration for Alien's Space Jockey expedition, but Ridley Scott and Alien's writers denied having seen Planet of the Vampires before making their film.

POTV's greatest asset is the style director Mario Bava and his cinematographers bring to the visuals, the use of shadows and light, light that is usually shining through a colorful gel. The foggy locations of Aura are lit with a mixture of green, purple, red, yellow, and blue, and it looks awesome. Also impressive, and these days charming, are the film's effects. There were no opticals added, all of the effects were done on set and in camera, using mirror trickery, forced perspectives and models.

An AIP/Italian/Spanish co-production, the film also had an international cast, all of whom spoke their native languages on the set, their voices to be dubbed later, as was the case with most Italian movies. The script was the work of Bava and four Italian and Spanish co-writers, an adaptation of Renato Pestriniero's story entitled One Night of 21 Hours. AIP's Louis M. Heyward and writer Ib Melchior did another pass on the script for the American version. Melchior's filmography was largely made up of genre titles, a list that includes Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, The Angry Red Planet, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and the source material for Death Race 2000.

Planet of the Vampires is an enjoyable sci-fi/horror mix. I find that it drags a bit at times, but the overall story is interesting and the cinematography is always wonderful to look at.

Cody Hamman shows Film Appreciation for one of the better horror remakes, Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead (1990).


We've talked about George A. Romero's immortal classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) a good bit over the two years of this blog's existence. Jay Burleson wrote an Appreciation article on it, I called it my favorite horror film of all time, have mentioned a documentary on its ghouls and a fan commentary by Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank of American Movie, met a lot of people involved with the movie at Cinema Wasteland conventions and had viewings of the movie at the Wasteland, as well as discussing other movies by Romero and cemetery ghoul Bill Hinzman. But, aside from one quick reference, I don't think there has been any talk of the 1990 remake. Since Burleson and I focused on the original film and Hinzman's zombie movie FleshEater last October, I figured that the remake's time had come this year.

The story behind the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead begins with a mistake made on the original film, an error of oversight that left a copyright notice off of the movie and, under the rules of the time, immediately entered the property into the public domain. Some (like Wasteland's Ken Kish) would argue that this fact has helped the film over the years, its multiple unauthorized home video releases and compensation-free television airings enabling it to be viewed by many more people than might have seen it under stricter guidelines, allowing it to garner even more fans... But that is little consolation to the people who made the movie, and its producers have tried for years to get their creative copyright noticed. Since they weren't seeing any residuals from the money others were making off of their movie, Romero and his cohorts eventually decided that one way to capitalize on the popularity of the property and get some control over the rights was to remake it.


Romero himself reworked and modernized the original script he had written with John A. Russo, but neither Romero nor Russo (who had directed The Booby Hatch and Midnight in the years since NOTLD '68) opted to direct it. That honor went to Romero's frequent collaborator, special effects artist and horror icon Tom Savini. Savini had proven himself by directing episodes of the horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside and would be making his feature debut on NOTLD '90.


The remake, of course, retains the basic story of a group of people trapped in one farmhouse location by a seemingly endless stream of zombies, the recently dead who have returned to life for reasons unknown, driven by a hunger for human flesh. The characters are the same and, while it's not a scene-for-scene remake, they have pretty much the same dynamics and the story follows most of the same beats. But there are twists here and there, moments where the movie will nod at the expectations the audience has due to their familiarity with the original movie while it takes things in a slightly different direction.

A lot of the original players were involved with the remake and some make cameos in it. Russ Streiner, the original Johnny, appears as Sheriff McClelland, delivering the "They're dead, they're all messed up" line in an interview with reporter "Chilly" Billy Cardille, the same man who was doing the interviews in '68. Romero's voice is heard on a radio, keeping listeners updated on the situation. One notable absence is Bill Hinzman, who wasn't asked to be involved because at the time there was still some hard feelings over the fact that he had gone forward with making FleshEater, capitalizing on his cemetery ghoul character, despite Romero and Russo's objections to the idea.

One thing Romero did in his rewrite of the script was add answers to logic questions that might have come up during the '68 film - for example, in the original, the character Ben was able to easily find a good amount of lumber stored away in the house for him to use to board up the windows and doors. Here, the house has been undergoing remodeling, explaining why there's so much wood to go around, and even then the characters really have to search for things to block the entrances with. Romero also adds some dimensions to the characters, like giving the character Tom a personal connection to the farmhouse - it's his uncle's place. In '68, the house was just a random location that all of the characters seemingly just happened to stumble across. The biggest changes are made to Barbara, here played by Patricia Tallman of Romero's Knightriders. Over the years, Romero had become somewhat ashamed that Barbara had been so weak in the original film, sinking into a catatonic state for most of the running time after the cemetery attack that opens the movie. He attempted to make up for that in the new version by putting Barbara through a transformation; she starts off as mousy and weak, but by the end she's become hard-edged and strong, toting guns and wearing boots, reminiscent of the Sarah character in Day of the Dead.

Like in the original film, the biggest threat to the safety of the people gathered in the isolated farmhouse are the people themselves and their inability to get along or agree on any compromises or course of action. Instead of being rational, the characters - particularly Ben and family man Harry Cooper - butt heads and argue over everything, both considering themselves "boss" of the situation. As bad as the in-fighting got in the first version, here it's even worse, the characters are more volatile, angry, high-strung, and unreasonable, and Harry is even more unpleasant, fuelled by cowardice.


The zombies are nastier looking in this movie, usually seeping some kind of gross substance and almost all of them having some kind of wound appliance to their face. They're a bigger immediate threat in the remake as well. In the original, Ben was able to get the house boarded up by himself rather quickly, making the zombies largely a danger that was lurking outside a house that was pretty well fortified. Here, the boarding is a group effort that continues throughout the entire film, everything that happens in the house coinciding with the hammering of boards and doors into place. That keeps the pace up and keeps the zombies busting in through entrances that haven't been covered yet, but to spend much of the movie having the characters deal with an ultimately useless endeavor does sort of feel like a waste of time.

The original film moves at a speed much more preferable to me, and I wish the remake would've taken more chances to slow down for a while, because in the quieter moments it does achieve a very creepy tone and atmosphere. The quieter moments also really enable Tony Todd to shine in the role of Ben. Todd is given some great scenes to work with, delivering a teary-eyed monologue about his experience before he reached the farmhouse, and a moment where we see that killing zombies deeply disturbs him, after all, they are still people in some way despite their grotesqueries. After dispatching a couple of them, Ben - kneeling on the ground - screams to the heavens, damning the zombies for putting him through this, then crosses himself.


To this day, NOTLD '90 is the only feature film that Tom Savini has directed, and he didn't have the greatest time making it. While the original was made by a group of friends who were investing in the project themselves, this time the budget was bigger, and there were more fingers in the pie, more people giving opinions and striking down ideas. The movie ran into budgetary and scheduling limitations, and Savini has said that he was only able to do about 30% (I believe was the number) of what he wanted to do. He had much artier ideas than appear in the final film, scenes that would've toyed with perception, an idea for the beginning that would've had the film opening in black and white like the original, then transitioning through sepia before reaching color. Savini also had to drop special effects, and he was not happy with the film's score by composer Paul McCollough, who was brought on the project by John A. Russo.

I quite like McCollough's score myself, particularly the track that accompanies the opening drive into the cemetery. I also really like the cinematography by Frank Prinzi, I think the movie has a great look. Oddly, for a recent limited edition Blu-ray release, Prinzi oversaw the transfer and chose to lay a blue hue over the picture, making scenes that are clearly meant to take place in broad daylight appear to be happening at twilight. Even after the segue into full night at the 21 minute point, the blue hue remains. That change has disappointed a lot of fans who bought the Blu-ray expecting to see the movie as they knew it. I have a copy of that Blu-ray, but haven't watched it yet. The picture may not be ideal, but on the bright side we do have a collector's piece that sold out very quickly. Maybe someday there will be another Blu-ray release without the blue look.



One of the things I like the most about the movie are the locations. Savini found some great places for the story to play out in, the cemetery at the beginning is in a wonderfully picturesque location, and the farmhouse property is downright awesome. I love that house and property and hope to visit it one day. I know fellow fans regularly cruise by to take pictures, and it does seem kind of awkward to be so into a house in which people are still living out their regular lives, but it's so cool looking... The most ideal situation would be to attend an outdoor "rolling roadshow" screening of the movie there. The area is so hilly, the property even appears to have natural stadium seating.


The remake reached theatre screens on October 19, 1990, and despite the hope of those involved that they might make some money off of the title this time, I don't think the movie did all that well at first. I don't know how it was received at the time, but over the years it has gathered a solid following of its own. I was aware of it when it came out, but didn't see it, and for some reason never even rented it on VHS. I didn't see the movie until sometime in late '94 or '95, after I recorded it off The Movie Channel in the middle of the night. As soon as I got home from school the next day, I hit play on the VCR.

I thought the movie was alright, but even then I felt that there was too much time spent on boarding up the house, the nonstop action was not what I was looking for. But I kept watching it over the years, it was always in rotation with Romero's trilogy, in fact I had Night '68, Dawn, Day, and Night '90 all recorded on the same video tape. I think it was even an 8 hour tape with Return of the Living Dead on there too.

The film gradually won me over with its charms, I hold it in much higher esteem now than I did in the early years of my viewing it. I get an urge to watch it quite often, especially on particularly dark summer nights in the country, when its creepy tone goes perfectly with the real life atmosphere. Even more often than I watch the movie itself, I listen to the DVD commentary by Tom Savini. That commentary is one of my favorites, largely due to the way Savini shares the information in it, speaking in a voice so soft-toned that it's like he's telling stories around a campfire. That commentary has become like a familiar bedtime story to me now, I love putting it on and drifting off to sleep listening to it.


I've met some of the '90 actors over the years and gotten signatures from Savini and Tom Towles, this film's Harry Cooper, on the DVD cover. I've met Bill Moseley, the '90 Johnny, a couple times, but didn't think to have him sign the NOTLD DVD, I was entirely focused on Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 while in his presence. Meeting Towles was a pleasant surprise, he tends to play such unlikeable characters and yet in real life he's a really nice guy, very appreciative of his fans.

Twenty-two years on, it's kind of amazing to think that as much time has gone by since the release of NOTLD '90 as there had been between it and the release of the original film. The remake may not be all that Savini wanted to be, but even so, it is a fine film. NOTLD '68's public domain status has enabled a lot of people to take advantage of the property and put out inferior products with the title on it, but NOTLD '90 isn't one of those. It's definitely a worthy companion to the classic.

Throughout October, Cody will be participating in the Final Girl Film Club SHOCKtober event with articles posted on a different movie every day of the month.


Today, SHOCKtober comes to an end with the 2008 French film Martyrs.


As a child, Lucie was abducted and tortured, chained to a chair inside an abandoned building in a rundown industrial area. It's unknown how long she was in that building before she was finally able to escape, suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, and hypothermia. Lucie was taken to a children's hospital, where she made a friend of similar age named Anna, who cared for her and doted on her, the girls quickly becoming inseparable. Lucie's captors were never caught and she never gave details about them, never able to talk about her ordeal.

Fifteen years later, a pleasant, ordinary family's average Sunday morning is interrupted when an adult Lucie shows up at their door with a shotgun and opens fire on everyone she comes across - husband, wife, teenage son and daughter, all shot down.

Lucie then gives Anna a call. Lucie had seen this family's picture in the newspaper, accompanying an article about the daughter's swimming accomplishments, and became convinced that the parents were the same people who tortured her years earlier. As far as Anna knew, Lucie was just going to observe them to see whether or not she was right, then they would call the police. She took the situation farther than Anna ever imagined, and now she needs her friend's help.

Anna is very conflicted as she sets out to clean up the crime scene. What if Lucie killed the wrong people? What if her friend is insane? She knows that Lucie has hallucinations, often imagining that she's being attacked by a feral woman covered with scars, a woman who she believes is slicing her up with a razor when in fact Lucie is cutting herself.

The girls end up spending a long time at the house, Anna expending a lot of effort cleaning things up and disposing of the bodies in a pre-dug hole in the yard, all of which seems pointless to me. She's putting the bodies in an obvious place and there's no way she can remove all trace of her and Lucie's presence in the house, especially since Lucie keeps cutting herself. The bulk of the movie is set in 1986, but even though CSI might not have been at the level then that it is today, I still don't see how anything Anna does is going to help them get away with this.

When the sun rises on Monday morning and the third act arrives, the SHOCKtober schedule comes full circle. The month began with Sunshine, and like that film, this movie deals with characters who are obsessed with the afterlife. Lucie was one of many people who have been captured over the years by a cult that is searching to find answers to the question of what lies beyond death. They believe that if they push a victim to the limit through torture and neglect, keep them in a perpetual state of suffering, once they're at the edge of death they might be able to glimpse the other side and tell them what's there.

Anna spends so much time in the murder house that she's still there when the rest of the cult comes by to check on their fellow members, and she becomes their latest victim. Like Sunshine's third act, the end of Martyrs is a divisive one. Viewers tend to be either blown away or turned away by what happens after the cult element comes into the picture. The final 30 minutes of the film is all about Anna being tortured in horrible, disturbing, disgusting ways. Anna becomes witness to the beyond and gives the head of the cult an answer that isn't shared with the audience, but it's enough to bring the head of the cult to some sort of resolution. Was it all worth it? That's not quite clear. And whether or not the brutality of the movie is worth sitting through depends on the individual viewer.


I do think Martyrs is a good, well made movie, some questionable logic aside, and that it deserves a lot of the praise it gets, but it's definitely not an easy movie to watch, not exactly enjoyable, and those last 30 minutes are not something that I ever really need to see again. I've watched the movie a few times now, I give it kudos, but now I think I'm done with it.

Also done now is SHOCKtober 2012. Thanks to Final Girl for scheduling the month and giving me a reason to watch and write about a lot of interesting movies. There were ups and downs, there were times when it was a challenge, but I enjoyed participating. It's been a fun October, and now...

Happy Halloween!

The Looper the story follows is Joe, who has seen what happens to a Looper who doesn't fulfill their contract and has no intention of that happening to him. He's got money saved up and dreams of world travel, there's no way he's going to let his future self screw up his plans... But Future Joe has a different outlook on the situation. He manages to get sent back without being bound or hooded and arrives ready to fight, knocking out his younger self and escaping into the city, on a mission of revenge.
Joe's employer's goons set out in pursuit of both versions of him, and younger Joe tries to evade them while also hunting the older Joe so he can avoid the fate worse than death and fix the situation himself.


From the trailer, I was expecting Looper to become a nonstop, dubstep-fuelled, futuristic actionfest from that point on, the awesome moment when a woman's terrified "Oh my God!" is laid over the image of older Joe double fisting machine guns leading me to believe that it might even have a Terminator-esque edge of horror. Looper was not quite what I was expecting. The second half went in a direction that I didn't anticipate at all, playing out in a much more subdued way than I thought it would, in a country location rather than in the future city, and there is a very prominent character who is barely in the trailer at all, you really have to know who they are to notice them in there.

Over his three films, writer/director Rian Johnson has climbed up the budget ladder from his high school noir Brick and the quirky caper The Brothers Bloom to this sci-fi actioner, but he doesn't let the high concept and gunfire get in the way of character and drama. He tells the story in a way that keeps the viewer changing their mind about how much they like or trust particular people. We begin the film with younger Joe, he is our lead character, we're on his side. But then the older Joe shows up and gives an appeal that wins over our minds and younger Joe reacts like a douchebag. Now we like older Joe. Then older Joe sets out to do things so horrible that we can't side with him anymore. It's a very interesting and involving approach.

The cast Johnson assembled is great, from Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who was also his lead in Brick) as younger Joe, Emily Blunt as the most consistently good and likeable character, Jeff Daniels as Joe's boss, and Noah Segan as a screw-up on Joe's trail, to some very strong work by a five-year-old (I think) actor named Pierce Gagnon. I also enjoyed seeing Piper Perabo and Tracie Thoms in smaller roles. Even Bruce Willis as older Joe showed up on set to not just cruise along as himself, the smirking icon, as he does so often these days, but to actually deliver a performance that makes an emotional connection with the audience.

Some may be disappointed that Looper isn't just a shoot-em-up and more jaded members of the audience may find some elements dealing with the "hidden character" to be unintentionally funny - there were some chuckles when I saw the movie - but if you just follow the filmmaker where he wants to take you, it's a hell of a ride.



DREDD (2012)

A film that does satisfy as a nonstop futuristic actionfest is Dredd, the second attempt to bring the popular British comic strip character to the big screen, following 1995's widely panned Judge Dredd, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the title character. This time out, he's played by Karl Urban, and like in the comics the character never removes his helmet.

In the future of Dredd, the U.S. was wiped out by the Atomic Wars of 2070. The only inhabitable areas of the country are three Mega-Cities, everything between them is a "Cursed Earth" wasteland. The law of the land is enforced by Judges, heavily armored police officers who not only arrest criminals but also deal out their sentences on the spot. The death sentence doesn't appear to be rare. Judge Dredd serves in Mega-City One, which stretches the East coast from Boston to Washington, D.C.


The set-up for the film is very simple; Dredd is assigned to take rookie Judge Anderson out on patrol with him and make the call on whether or not she should be allowed to serve, given the fact that she failed the tests. The only reason she's being given this chance is because she has displayed powerful psychic abilities, which isn't enough reason to keep her around in Dredd's by-the-book opinion. If she failed the test, she failed, she's out.

Dredd and Anderson are called to investigate homicides at the Peach Trees Megablock, which is basically everything you get in a city block and apartment buildings contained within a two hundred story tower. Peach Trees is under the control of drug kingpin (queenpin?) Ma-Ma, and when Dredd and Anderson arrest a member of Ma-Ma's organization, a man who could give away all her secrets under interrogation, she has the building locked down. Blast shields slide down over all entrances and windows and Ma-Ma calls out a hit on the two Judges over the P.A. system.

Trapped in the tower with legions of criminals out for their blood, Dredd and Anderson have to fight for their lives as they try to make their way up the two hundred stories and take the fight to Ma-Ma herself.

Dredd is a pretty awesome action flick. Urban displays a great deal of badassery as Dredd, and Olivia Thirlby is reliably capable and adorable in the role of Anderson. If audiences had given the film a chance, they likely would've had a lot of fun with it, as it's almost entirely made up of violence, gunfire, and bloodshed, and it just gets more and more enjoyable as it goes along. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have done all that well at the box office, but it is the sort of movie that will definitely find a wider appreciative audience at some point. It also had the misfortune of coming out the same year as The Raid: Redemption, which has pretty much the exact same story, but there's room enough in the cinema world for both to entertain in their own way.

Orbis non sufficit, as far as Cody is concerned.


White dots move across the screen from left to right, then becoming a gun barrel that tracks a man - James Bond - as he walks past. Mid-screen, Bond turns, pulls a gun and fires at us. Optical blood dribbles down the screen, the gun barrel wavers before becoming a white dot again and finding a place on the screen to settle. This dot then becomes our portal into the pre-title sequence, and for the first time in the series' history the film proper opens on a shot of James Bond himself. And he's wearing glasses.

Pierce Brosnan is back for his third turn in the role of 007, and when we catch up with our hero he's hustling down a sidewalk in Bilbao, Spain, right down the street from the Guggenheim Museum.

Bond is in Bilbao to meet with a banker named Lachaise at La Banque Suisse de L'Industrie. In Lachaise's office, Bond and the banker are joined by three guards, who make sure to disarm Bond and place his gun on Lachaise's desk, and a female assistant who offers the men cigars before she takes her seat, earning her the credit Cigar Girl.

A case containing 3,030,303.03 in cash, pound sterling, is brought into the office for Bond to return to Sir Robert King, who paid that amount to buy a report that had been stolen from an MI6 agent who was killed during the theft. Bond isn't interested in the money, he just wants to know who killed his fellow agent, information that Lachaise is not forthcoming with.

Tensions rise, a guard pulls a gun, and with a push of a button on his glasses Bond detonates an explosive charge in his gun on the desk, causing enough distraction that he's able to get the upper hand in the quick fight that follows. Bond then demands the name of the killer from Lachaise at gun point. Lachaise is now more willing to answer him, but only if Bond can promise him protection. Lachaise hasn't even fully vocalized his terms when Cigar Girl throws a knife into the back of his neck and runs out of the room.

Bond has no time to give chase. With police speeding toward the building, he has to make his escape from Lachaise's office. He's briefly impeded when a guard regains consciousness and again points a gun at him. Bond is saved when the guard is killed by a sniper shot through a window. That's a surprise to him; he didn't come with any official backup, but somebody's watching out for him. He doesn't have time to wonder who. He grabs the case of money, busts the glass out of the window, ties one end of a super long cord off the curtains around his belt and the other end of it on one of the unconscious guards, then uses the cord to descend what is at least four stories to the ground below.

That simple office scuffle and descent from the window was going to be all there was for action in the pre-title sequence. The intention was that the film would cut away from the sight of Bond hurrying away from the building to a scene where Cigar Girl meets with her mysterious boss, the man who saved Bond with the sniper shot, and they would have a brief exchange during which it would be made clear that Bond getting away with the money was part of their plan and Cigar Girl wants to kill Bond after he makes the delivery because he could identify her. Cigar Girl's boss, who we'll come to know as Renard, would pour two glasses of wine and make a toast to Bond, "We're in his hands now", and that would be the very low-key lead-in to the title sequence, probably less than 5 minutes into the movie.

Test screening audiences were not satisfied with that being the pre-title sequence, though, and so it was lengthened to include what was meant to be a big post-titles setpiece, and The World Is Not Enough ended up having the longest pre-title sequence in the series.

The scene with Cigar Girl and Renard was cut, so the film goes straight from Bond going off down the sidewalk in Bilbao to him delivering the money to MI6 Headquarters in London. Making his way to his boss M's office, he stops to banter and flirt with M's secretary Miss Moneypenny, who is desperate for a souveneir from his trip. He offers her a phallic-shaped cigar tube, she says she knows "just where to put that" and tosses it in the trash. Ungrateful.

Bond then enters M's office to find her visiting with an old friend from her Oxford days, Sir Robert King. Bond and Sir Robert are introduced, then the rich industrialist makes his exit to go collect his money. M offers Bond a glass of scotch while they discuss what has gone on, the mystery of who Cigar Girl was working for and why they wanted him to escape the office. Sir Robert has brought the stolen report the MI6 agent was killed for back to M. It's a classified report from the Russian Atomic Energy Department, which Sir Robert was led to believe would contain the identity of the terrorist who attacked his new oil pipeline.

Bond drops some ice into his drink, and the ice and the moisture on his fingers begin to sizzle, interacting with something that rubbed off on his hands from the money. Bond instantly realizes that he has to stop Sir Robert from reaching the cash...

He's too late. Sir Robert enters the vault, walks up to his money, and a transmission from his lapel pin causes the cash to catch fire and then explode, blowing the vault up and blasting a hole in the side of the building.

Through the hole, Bond spots a heavily armed Cigar Girl on a speedboat on the River Thames. She speeds off and Bond follows in an unfinished, gadget-packed boat that he steals from the Q Branch lab. Bond and Cigar Girl cause a lot of damage over the course of the chase that ensues, during which Bond puts the prototype boat to the test. The Q boat has rocket boost, is armed with torpedoes, gets ramped through a boathouse and makes a shortcut across land, and can even be made to dive underwater for a short period of time.

One of the most iconic moments in GoldenEye was when Bond took the time to straighten his tie while causing mass destruction in St. Petersburg, Russia during the tank chase, and that moment gets a callback here during the boat chase - Bond straightens his tie underwater while the Q boat dives.

The first cut of the boat chase, when it was going to come after the titles, was 18 minutes, though it's unlikely it would've stayed that long anyway. The cut that made it into the final film is almost six minutes long. At the end of the chase, the boats are ditched and Bond catches up to Cigar Girl as she attempts to escape in a stolen hot air balloon. He catches onto a rope dangling from the basket as the balloon lifts off the ground and offers Cigar Girl a deal if she tells him who's behind all this. He promises her that he can protect her, but she disagrees. "Not from him." Rather than face the wrath of her employer, Cigar Girl chooses suicide, blowing herself up along with the hot air balloon and sending Bond plummeting through the air.

Bond lands hard on the Millennium Dome, then goes tumbling down the sloped roof, finally catching on to some wires. Bond dangles in the air, obviously in pain, and that's when, nearly fifteen minutes into the movie, we finally segue into the title sequence. Extending the pre-titles to include the boat chase was definitely the right choice, it gets things off to a very fun start.

The title sequence is again designed by Daniel Kleinman, returning from GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies. The title itself is a callback to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in which "The world is not enough" is revealed to be the translation of the Latin motto on the Bond family crest. The theme song is performed by Garbage, a band I was a fan of in the '90s, so I was quite happy when they were announced to be entering the Bond world, and I think they did a great job with the song. The lyrics were written by composer David Arnold and Don Black, who also wrote or co-wrote the title songs for Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Tomorrow Never Dies. Another returning Bond veteran is Peter Lamont, back as production designer after missing TND due to his work on Titanic.

In the search for a director, one contender was Joe Dante, the Piranha '78/The Howling/Gremlins/Innerspace director who was fresh off of making Small Soldiers at the time and if hired would've been the first American to direct a Bond. Also considered, on the strength of Heavenly Creatures, was Peter Jackson, but presumably producer Barbara Broccoli was unfamiliar with the type of films Jackson had made prior to that one and reportedly took him out of the running after a screening of The Frighteners.

The focus was intended to be more on character this time around, so in the end the director hired was a man who mostly worked on dramas: Michael Apted. Apted's filmography included Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, and Nell, and though he hadn't done anything nearly on the scale of Bondian action, he had worked in the thriller genre with films such as Gorky Park, Thunderheart, Blink, and Extreme Measures. He's most well known for his documentary work, being the filmmaker behind the wonderful 7 Up series, which has taken a look into the lives of the same group of people every seven years, starting when they were seven-year-old school children. The latest installment, 56 Up, just had its debut in 2012.

For his cinematographer, Apted chose Adrian Biddle, whose previous credits included Aliens, The Princess Bride, Willow, and Thelma & Louise. Biddle's final film before his death in 2005, at the age of just 53, was V for Vendetta.

The story originated from writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, beginning their long association with the series that has continued on up until this year's Skyfall. Purvis and Wade's script was given a rewrite by Apted's wife Dana Stevens to enhance the female roles, and when that rewrite was found to have made the women overshadow Bond, GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies writer Bruce Feirstein was brought on to punch up 007's material and add more humor. Purvis, Wade, and Feirstein share screenplay credit. This was the last Bond film Feirstein worked on, but he has remained involved with the character in the video game world, having written Everything or Nothing, the 2005 From Russia with Love game (for which Sean Connery returned to voice Bond), the 2010 version of GoldenEye, Blood Stone, and the most recent, 007 Legends.

When the title sequence ends, Bond, whose fall onto the Dome injured him enough to put his left arm in a sling, and his MI6 cohorts are in Scotland to attend the funeral of Sir Robert King. Among the mourners is Sir Robert's beautiful daughter Elektra (French actress Sophie Marceau, best known outside of Bond for Braveheart), who is the sole heir to his fortune and business.

MI6 have a local office set up in a castle, where M's Chief of Staff Bill Tanner, Michael Kitchen returning to his role from GoldenEye, shares the duty of briefing an assemblage of agents, including 007, with his Tomorrow Never Dies stand-in, Colin Salmon as Robinson. Tanner gives the details on the assassination of Sir Robert - the money was coated with urea, making it a sort of fertilizer bomb, an anti-counterfeiting strip in one note was replaced by magnesium, acting as a detonator that was set off by a radio transmission from Sir Robert's lapel pin, which had been switched out with a duplicate. Robinson adds that the person who set Sir Robert up had to be someone close to him, but they have no leads. M tells her agents that they are to bring Sir Robert's killers to justice no matter what it takes. Folders containing assignments are handed out to all of the agents... Except Bond, who is told he is off the active duty list until he gets cleared by medical.

And so Bond, even though his collarbone was dislocated and if any more tendons snap he'll be out of action for weeks, seduces Doctor Molly Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas) to get her to clear him for duty. Lucky for him the doctor is an attractive woman.

While waiting for Warmflash to make out his clean bill of health, Bond goes to the castle's makeshift Q Branch lab to visit his Quartermaster. Q has a bunch of gadgets waiting for him despite the fact that he's still on the inactive roster.

At the request of actor Desmond Llewelyn, this scene was written as a sort of farewell to his iteration of the Q character. Having joined the series with 1963's From Russia with Love, he went on to appear as Q in every Bond film over the next thirty-six years, with the exception of Live and Let Die. Llewelyn was in his 80s at this point and thought it was about time that his Q should retire. In fact, the boat Bond stole earlier was not intended for field use, it was part of Q's retirement plan, the boat that he was going to take on fishing trips. A bulletproof boat armed with torpedoes. Q obviously takes fishing very seriously.

Q introduces Bond to the man who's being groomed as his replacement, John Cleese as a character Bond jokingly refers to as R. R bumbles around, takes a quick disliking to Bond, and is the butt of jokes as he shows Bond his new, fully loaded BMW and demonstrates a winter coat that, with the pull of a tag, becomes enveloped within a protective ball of inflated material. Seems odd that Bond would be equipped with this before anyone knows where his next assignment will be, a winter coat wouldn't be of much use if M were to send him off to the Bahamas or somewhere like that, but of course it will come in handy later in the film.

The scene ends with a poignant moment between Bond and Q, men who deeply care for each other at this point. Q leaves Bond with two points of advice - never let them see you bleed, and always have an escape plan - then slowly descends through the floor on a lift. Q disappears from view, marking the exit of Desmond Llewelyn from the series. At the age of 85, Llewelyn was tragically killed in an auto accident just one month after the release of The World Is Not Enough.

Bond goes on to do some searching through MI6's computer archives, finding reports on Elektra King having been kidnapped and held for ransom for 5 million U.S. dollars. Converted to pounds, that's the same amount as the 3,030,303.03 that blew up Sir Robert. As he searches for further information on Elektra, he finds that access to her files has been restricted, Level One clearance is required. M is the only one who could've done that, so he goes directly to his boss for the information.

With holographic visual aid, Bond learns that Elektra's kidnapper was a terrorist named Victor Zokas, a.k.a. Renard, an anarchist out to create chaos in any way possible. Since his old school friend had become head of the British secret service, Sir Robert King came to M for help in dealing with the situation, and she advised him not to pay the ransom. She sent 009 to kill Renard, but before the agent could complete his mission Elektra had already escaped from her captor. 009 still tracked Renard down and put a bullet in his temple... but that didn't kill him. The bullet remains in Renard's head, slowly working its way through his brain, killing off his senses. The bullet will eventually kill Renard, but so far has only wiped out his senses of smell and touch, he's now incapable of feeling pain.

A version of this idea had been originally conceived for the henchman character Stamper in Tomorrow Never Dies, at one point he was going to be said to have a brain injury that caused him to register pain as pleasure, but that didn't make it into the final film.

Renard has managed to get revenge by killing Sir Robert and humiliating MI6, and Bond suspects that his next target will be Elektra. Warmflash has given Bond the all clear (Moneypenny has an idea why and she's not happy about it), so M assigns him to go to Elektra, who is overseeing the completion of her father's oil pipeline near the Caspian Sea, keep her safe from Renard, and find out who switched Sir Robert's lapel pin.

Bond catches up with Elektra in Azerbaijan, where King Industries crews are clearing out trees to make way for the eight hundred mile long pipeline, which will stretch clear across this country, the neighboring Georgia, and down through Turkey. Locals in the area of Azerbaijan they're currently in are rioting, attempting to sabotage the construction, unhappy that the plotted route will require the demolition of a church. Elektra negotiates peace by agreeing to change the course.

Bond introduces himself to Elektra ("Bond. James Bond.") and they discuss King Industries and the pipeline - she inherited the company from her father, but this all started when her mother's family discovered oil in the area - and the fact that she may be in danger. She's fully aware that she's in danger, this pipeline is dangerous business. Bond doesn't tell her that it's her former captor she should be afraid of.

During their conversation, Elektra asks Bond if he's ever lost a loved one, a question that he avoids answering. Though the Daniel Craig films taking Bond back to the beginning of his career was widely publicized as the first reboot of the series, the Brosnan movies did something similar, in a more subtle way, back before anyone would've even thought of calling it a reboot. The Brosnan era is very insular, at least until the references to the past really start flying in the next movie. He had the same Q as the other actors did and the rapport with Moneypenny, but a new M and his CIA buddy is Jack Wade instead of Felix Leiter. He was already a 00 in 1986, he's a Cold War veteran and probably lived through all of the previous movies, but at this point you have to accept that the continuity exists on a floating timeline, because Pierce Brosnan was only nine years old when Sean Connery was going up against Dr. No in 1962. Brosnan Bond would've had to have been foiling Dr. No in the '80s. Or maybe the Brosnan films exist alone in their own timeline. Given this film's title is a link to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a fan could take Bond avoiding Elektra's question as him not wanting to talk about the death of Tracy. Just within the Brosnan era, Tomorrow Never Dies' Paris Carver could be his great loss, even if he was having a good time in the parking garage sequence immediately after. Or he could be hiding away the pain from the loss of several loved ones, including his parents, since Bond was orphaned at a young age. One can read this moment however they want.

Elektra has no interest or faith in Bond's help, MI6 has already failed her family twice. Still, Bond is able to join her as she checks the survey lines, which requires them to ski along a snowy mountainside. Thanks for the winter coat, Q. As Bond and Elektra look down on the point where the two ends of the pipeline will meet, their day is disrupted by the arrival of armed assassins driving Parahawks, parachuted snowmobiles that are able to fly due to the large fans on their back ends. The Parahawks mainly focus on Bond, who uses his skiing abilities to avoid their machine gun fire and grenades and is eventually able to wipe them all out. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and A View to a Kill ski sequence guru Willy Boger did not come back to work on this one, but second unit director Vic Armstrong, returning from Tomorrow Never Dies, handles it well.

 

The explosion of the final Parahawks causes an avalanche that Bond and Elektra get caught in, but his coat's inflatable protective ball shield is able to save them. The Parahawks were added specifically for this film, but the idea of Bond and a thrill-loving girl skiing and getting caught in an avalanche also happened in The Lost Dalton Film. Then again, it could be another callback of sorts to On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Elektra is taken back to her home in Baku, where she, apparently won over by Bond's handling of the Parahawk situation, attempts to seduce him. Bond keeps in mind his duty and the order from M that he not get personally involved with this situation and declines.

Bond heads out to the L'Or Noir casino, where the sunglasses provided to him by Q Branch gives him x-ray views of all the patrons, showing him that all of them are armed. Somewhere in the casino is producer Michael G. Wilson, making his traditional cameo. Bond goes to the bar, orders a vodka martini, "Shaken, not stirred", and requests a meeting with the casino's owner, Valentin Zukovsky. A lackey called Bullion, played by British musician/DJ Goldie, leads Bond into a back room for a meeting with Zukovsky, Robbie Coltrane reprising his role from GoldenEye. The former arms dealer has reformed, or so he claims, into a legitimate business man. In addition to running the casino, he also owns a caviar company.

On the Parahawks was the emblem of the Russian Special Services, Atomic Energy Anti-Terrorist Unit and Bond had the hope that Zukovsky might have some insight into Renard and his Russian connections. Zukovsky isn't much help. Renard was cut from the KGB years earlier, works freelance now, and any number of people could have hired him to go after Elektra, including the owners of four competing pipelines. Bond knows all of this already.

Bond and Zukovsky's chat is interrupted when Elektra comes walking into the casino. Whoever wants her dead may be in the casino, and she tells Bond she wants them to see she's not afraid. She gets her father's seat at a private table and gambles the $1 million credit he left behind on one card high draw. As she says, "There's no point in living if you can't feel alive." Bond does his best to make sure Zukovsky's dealer doesn't cheat, but Elektra still loses when her Queen of Hearts is bested by the Ace of Clubs.

Bond accompanies Elektra back to her home, where he does go to bed with her this time. There, she confides in him that she escaped from Renard by seducing the guard, then grabbing a gun and shooting her way out.

Meanwhile, her head of security Davidov has the night off and is spending his free time meeting with Renard at a Hindu religious site called The Devil's Breath, an area spotted with natural flames that never die out. Davidov is punished for the unsuccesful Parahawk attack, while another man at the meeting, Doctor Arkov of the Russian Atomic Energy Department, is killed for suggesting they abandon their plans, worried about the trouble they'll be in for not being able to return the Parahawks. Davidov will need to take Arkov's place on the flight that's the next part of their plan.

Davidov doesn't make it onto the flight, either. Snooping around the security office with the aid of a skeleton key hidden within a credit card, Bond spies Davidov making himself a photo I.D., finds Arkov's corpse in the back of his vehicle, and eventually shoots the man and takes his place on a private flight aboard a plane loaded with Russian henchmen in jumpsuits. In the plane's restroom, Bond replaces Davidov's picture on the I.D. he made with his own picture, cut off of his Universal Exports cover I.D.

The plane lands in Kazakhstan and Bond has to impersonate Doctor Arkov at a decommissioned nuclear silo. He manages to Arkov his way past an IDA physicist named Christmas Jones, played by Denise Richards in short shorts and a tank top cut off at the midriff, puts on a radiation tag and enters the silo. On the surface, Christmas is dealing with hydrogen bombs leaking tritium, down below there is weapons grade plutonium.

Inside the silo, the Russian henchmen are removing the warhead from a missile, and their boss is there to supervise their work. One hour into the film, Bond finds himself face-to-face with Robert Carlyle as the villainous Renard. He pulls a gun on the terrorist, who proceeds to mock him, telling Bond that he's been working for him ever since Bilbao, he sealed Sir Robert's fate and now he's brought him a plane on which he'll get away with a nuclear bomb. He says that Elektra will be killed if he doesn't make a phone call in twenty minutes, and seems to know that she and Bond have slept together, as he tells Bond that he broke her in for him. Bond knocks Renard to his knees and prepares to put a silenced shot into the back of his head. Renard reacts to this with a great line, "A man tires of being executed." Then he kind of awkwardly fits in a repeat of Elektra's "There's no point in living if you can't feel alive" line.

Before Bond can kill Renard, Christmas comes hustling in with a group of soldiers, having checked the files and figured out that Bond isn't old enough to be Arkov. The guards hold their guns on Bond and let Renard get away from him, Renard grabbing Bond's hurt shoulder before he walks off. But the Bond-Arkov slip has made the head of security uncertain of all the new faces around the site, which includes Renard's, so Renard and his men have to shoot their way out of the silo.


Bond chases the baddies as they make their exit, at one point using a gadget - a grappling hook and retractable wire fired from his watch - to move from one level to another. Renard boards a glass-doored elevator with the warhead and Bond catches up to him before the lift can begin to rise. From the other side of the glass, he fires a bullet into Renard's forehead... but the glass is bulletproof.

Renard escapes and Bond and Christmas are trapped in the silo as a bomb goes off. Bond, hanging onto chains and riding along a pulley system, is chased down a tunnel by a fireball, a moment that comes off as lackluster because it takes too long, it seems to happen too slowly. A lot of action moments in the film have that problem; things are shot awkwardly and shots go on a bit long, slowing things down, making the action feel a little clunky.

That same slow fireball chases Bond and Christmas all the way up and out of the silo, and he introduces himself to her as they make their escape. "The name's Bond. James Bond." As they exit, they witness Renard's plane taking off. And they won't be able to track him down because he removed the warhead's locator card.

With Bond missing and Davidov's corpse having been discovered, Elektra puts a call in to MI6 requesting that M come to Baku personally to keep her company and watch over her. M agrees. Soon after that call has been made, Bond returns to Elektra's home, knocks out her bodyguard Gabor, and with thunder rumbling on the soundtrack confronts Elektra over his newfound suspicion that she and Renard are working together.

As Bond accuses Elektra of suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, of having fallen in love with her captor, I find moments of Pierce Brosnan's performance to be horrendous. He's got some awful delivery, intonation and hand gestures in this scene, particularly when he's saying that Renard "knew about my shoulder, knew exactly where to hurt me". In my view, that's the worst moment of acting anyone has ever done in the role of Bond. I don't think it fits the character.

The scene ends with Elektra receiving a phone call. Renard has struck at the pipeline, leaving ten men dead. Bond follows Elektra to the pipeline control center, where he meets up with M when she arrives. He hands the locator Renard moved from the bomb over to his boss while telling her that she should not be there, that Elektra might be working with Renard, but M isn't convinced.

An observation and repair rig is detected moving through the pipeline when it shouldn't be, speeding along toward a terminal at seventy miles per hour. Renard must've loaded the bomb onto it. Bond needs to enter the pipeline and defuse the bomb before it reaches the terminal. Luckily, nuclear physicist Christmas Jones is there to help him.

Bond and Christmas pilot a rig through the pipeline and catch up to the speeding bomb rig. Christmas finds that the bomb contains just half of the plutonium that would've been in the warhead, meaning the explosion wouldn't be nuclear. Once she has removed what plutonium is in there, Bond decides they should let the bomb detonate. They bail off their rig, the bomb continues down the pipeline and eventually explodes.

As far as the people back in the control room know, Bond and Christmas were killed. And that's when Elektra shows her hand, gifting M with her father's real lapel pin before having her men kill M's guards and take the head of MI6 captive. The World Is Not Enough is an original story overall, but the kidnapped M aspect is reminiscent of the first post-Fleming continuation novel, Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis/Robert Markham.

Bond believes that Elektra had part of her own pipeline blown up to make herself look innocent and to cover up the theft of the plutonium, making it appear to have been wasted on a dud. Now Bond and Christmas need to find out what she and Renard are going to do with the other half of the plutonium.

Renard delivers the second half to Elektra personally, meeting his lover at the Maiden's Tower in Istanbul, where she has now taken up residence. M is locked away in a cell in the tower and Renard pays her a visit, during which M blames him for turning Elektra bad, but he gives M all the credit. She's the reason Elektra was left in the presence of someone like him for too long, since she advised Sir Robert not to pay the ransom. Renard finds an old alarm clock in the room and sets it on a stool in front of M's cell so she can see it, telling her that she'll be dead when the clock reaches noon tomorrow. That gives her sixteen hours to live.


In bed that night, Renard displays jealousy over Elektra's time with Bond and laments that he can longer feel anything, not even her skin against his. When I first heard that TWINE would feature a bad guy who couldn't feel pain and could push himself harder than a normal man, I expected him to be a tough, unstoppable, rampaging beast. That's not Renard. Though he does receive some wounds that don't slow him down, his lack of sensation doesn't play into his confrontations with Bond as much as it's an emotional issue for the character.


Bond's investigation takes him back to Valentin Zukovsky. Zukovsky enters his office at his caviar fishery to find Christmas waiting for him in a purple dress and denim jacket, but his spirits drop when he realizes that Bond is also there with a gun. Bond has figured that Elektra's million dollar loss at Zukovsky's casino was some kind of payoff, but before he can get to the bottom of things the fishery is attacked.

This action sequence finds Bond having to fend off helicopters that have columns of buzzsaws suspended from them, a tree-trimming device that he saw in action back in Azerbaijan. A sequence featuring a buzzsaw column-equipped helicopter was originally written into an early draft of GoldenEye by Michael France, and had the helicopter chasing Bond and the heroine while they were on skis. In France's script, there was great moment where Bond ends up hanging onto the buzzsaw column, his feet and hands just inches away from the spinning saws. Unfortunately, that didn't make it into the caviar fishery version.


Buzzsaw helicopters are a cool concept and the sequence is fun overall, but again the action suffers from lackluster shooting and editing, like the moment when Bond very slowly climbs out of his BMW as the saws are ripping the vehicle in half. (Capped with a nice laugh line, "Q's not gonna like this.")

Once the helicopters are destroyed and the armed men who exit from them defeated, Zukovsky admits that Elektra's million dollars was payment for his nephew to smuggle machinery for her.

Zukovsky's nephew Nikoli is the captain of a nuclear submarine and though he thinks Renard is just going to load some cargo onto his sub during its unscheduled stop, Renard actually intends to steal the vessel - which he achieves by serving Nikoli and his crew poisoned refreshments. With a nuclear submarine now in his possession, Renard's next step will be to put the plutonium in the sub's reactor, setting off an instant catastophic meltdown that will wipe out Istanbul and all eight million people in it, contaminating the Bosphorus. After such an event, the only way to move oil through the area will be the King pipeline. Renard didn't turn Elektra, it was she who took complete control over him.

M puts struggle and effort into trying to get the alarm clock into her cell, and when she finally gets the clock she attaches its battery lines to the warhead locator card, sending out a signal on emergency frequencies. That signal is picked up by a worker at the Federal Security Bureau headquarters, where Bond, Christmas, and Zukovsky are trying to figure out where Nikoli's submarine might have been able to surface undetected. M's signal points them in the direction of Maiden's Tower... and then Goldie turns out to be a traitor, setting off a bomb in the headquarters. Most of the people in the room are killed, injured, or knocked unconscious, leaving Bond and Christmas to be taken captive by a group of henchmen that includes Goldie and Gabor.

As the plutonium is fashioned into a rod for insertion into the sub's reactor, Renard and Elektra say their goodbyes. He is hopelessly devoted to her, no matter how obvious it is that she's only using him for her personal gain.

Bond and Christmas are delivered to Maiden's Tower, and Elektra has Christmas put on board the submarine while she has some fun with Bond. Elektra tells Bond that she could have given him the world, to which he replies with the film's title. "Foolish sentiment." "Family motto."


Bond is clamped down to an antique torture device, a chair which has wheel on the back of it. With each turn of the wheel, a bolt is pushed further into the back of Bond's clamped neck. Six turns and his spine will be snapped. As Elektra slowly kills Bond, she admits to taking control of Renard when she realized her father wasn't going to pay the ransom, reveals the depths of her conniving ways, that she even went so far as to mutilate her own ear to keep up the appearance of the kidnapping, and looks forward to her post-meltdown future.

When Bond is "one last screw" away from death, Zukovsky and his men raid Maiden's Tower. Amidst the ensuing gunfire, Bond is freed to rescue M and get one last chance to foil the plans of Elektra and Renard and save Istanbul.

Bond's last interaction with Elektra is fantastic. She has always had a power over men and thinks she knows all that Bond is capable of. She's proven wrong, and the moment is only slightly weakened by what Bond does after delivering his final words to her. He should've gone straight from saying his line to continuing on with his mission instead of taking the pause that he does.

The climactic action takes place on the diving submarine, Bond and Christmas vs. Renard, and the meltdown comes very close to happening. But anyone reading this knows that Bond's not going to let eight million people get killed.

The film ends with a comedic scene of the exact same sort that the Roger Moore entries often ended with, M and Q (in this case the Cleese Q or R) in some way intruding on Bond's bedroom shenanigans. A reference is made to the "Millennium Bug", firmly placing this movie in 1999, there's a very naughty pun about Christmas, and then a cut to black. And a promise: James Bond will return.

For the first time since The Living Daylights, there isn't a second original song playing over the end credits. David Arnold and Don Black did write one together, a song called "Only Myself to Blame", performed by Scott Walker, but it didn't get used in the film. It was included on the soundtrack album.


Since Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli became the lead producers on the Bond films with GoldenEye, they've made it clear that they're interested in delving more deeply into the character of James Bond, as evidenced by the personal connection he had to the villain of GE and the psychological discussions in that film, as well as the Paris Carver element of TND. Wilson and Broccoli have also shown a tendency to be experimental with the formula in recent installments, and the early seeds of that are in The World Is Not Enough. An attempt was made to make this film more character-based than most of its predecessors, and they show that Bond is not the invincible superspy he has sometimes been portrayed as by injuring him in the pre-title sequence. He is still just a man, no matter how cool or capable he is at his job, and he can be hurt. All of the familiar formula elements are still in place around the drama and experimentation, but they'll become bolder with shaking that up eventually as well.

This attempt at doing something a little different is a mixed bag.

Bond does get injured, but his injury isn't played up all that much beyond the Scotland scenes, he'll only wince occasionally during an action scene and it's mainly just used as a reason for him to suspect Elektra after Renard gives his shoulder a squeeze. They could've done a bit more with it, taken it further, his shoulder could've taken even more damage over the course of the film. His tendons could've snapped like Warmflash warned and he could've ended the film with his left arm hanging useless at his side. He'd have the weeks required to recuperate once he finishes this job and the end credits roll.

Some viewers feel that TWINE features Brosnan's best performance as Bond. I might be in agreement, although it's a hard call for me to make because I find his delivery in the Stockholm Syndrome scene so appalling. He gets to do more dramatic acting in the role this time around and he handles most of it well, he has a couple good moments of being intense, while also pulling off the comedic beats that I deemed his strongest point in the TND write-up. I don't know, I'm really ambivalent about Brosnan overall, moreso than any other Bond actor. He's strong at times and cringeworthy at others.

As split as my personal opinion on Brosnan is, the fan opinion on The World Is Not Enough is just as split, although the lean is toward negative. The film has its supporters, while others think it's one of the worst in the series. Myself, when I first saw the movie on opening weekend in 1999, it immediately became my third favorite in the series. I can't remember what my top two were at that time, although Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service were firmly in those slots for many years, so I might have already come to that decision. TWINE has slipped from the #3 spot over time, but I certainly wouldn't rank it among the bottom of the bunch.

I appreciated the added character work, and though the focus on the relationships between Elektra, Renard, Bond, and M isn't greatly executed and the writing could be better, I do find it admirable and think Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle are both quite good in their villain roles. One thing that hinders the serious character work is the fact that it's still happening within a Pierce Brosnan Bond and the rest of the movie around it feels like a '90s version of the Roger Moore era, yearning to be over-the-top and silly. Thus, also in the mix are things like a less convincing character and performance, Denise Richards as a provocatively dressed nuclear physicist.

The action is another issue fans have, and I've pointed out my own issues with it in this write-up. The lifelessness of some of the sequences is often blamed on Apted's inexperience and that probably plays a part in it, but the editing could've picked up the pace at points as well. Editor Jim Clark's cutting doesn't deliver Peter Hunt levels of excitement here, and since this is the only 007 film he worked on, comparisons can't be made to see if he would've done Bondian action better with footage from a different director.

TWINE is definitely a flawed film, but I don't think it's anywhere close to being the disaster that it's often made out to be. It was a good try, and its success led to better tries.

Cody gives some preliminary thoughts on the new James Bond film, Skyfall.


I'm sort of in a tough spot with this week's Worth Mentioning article. My free time in the last week has been all about just two things.

The beginning of the week was entirely dedicated to the U.S. Presidential election, following poll results pre-election, fulfilling my civic duty and voting on election day, and then spending that evening following the results and hoping enough of my fellow Americans had voted for the same person as I did that my candidate of choice would be the winner.

Still, the article's opener is correct, I did watch several movies this week, and I will be writing about most of them on the blog at some point, but to write about them now would be sort of redundant. When I wasn't participating in selecting the leader of the United States of America, I was watching the adventures of a hero from another country, England's James Bond 007, in anticipation of this weekend's release of the latest film in the Bond series. And so, all the movies I watched this week that I want to write about were James Bond movies, which are already being covered in the in-depth 50 Years of 007 series.

But I can't just let the new film's opening weekend pass without acknowledging it in some way, so I decided to write down some thoughts following my first viewing(s) of the movie.



SKYFALL (2012)

Skyfall was set to open on theatrical screens of all sizes in the U.S. on Friday, but like last year's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the bigger screens in the country - IMAX, Cinemark XD, Rave Xtreme size screens - would get a one day headstart, with showings beginning on Thursday. In both cases, this release tactic has gotten me to travel a long distance just to see the movies one day early. For M:I 4, I travelled about 3 hours round trip to see the film on a Cinemark XD screen. But for Bond, I decided to go for the full IMAX experience, travelling in a different direction and adding about 10 minutes to the round trip total. I didn't regret it.


In the 23rd Bond film from Eon Productions, James Bond's pursuit of a MacGuffin in the form of a stolen computer drive containing state secrets soon gives way to a deeper, darker, more personal story. As the official synopsis says, this movie deals with Bond's boss M's past coming back to haunt her, and her past is back in the form of a deranged and flamboyant villain named Silva. Unlike some of his evil predecessors, Silva isn't out to destroy a country or dominate the world, this guy is obsessively focused on bringing about the ruination of M.


Every bit of news that comes out about a new Bond movie seems to cause some kind of internet kerfuffle, it's a series where even the most casual viewers seem to have an opinion to voice on how things are going, so something as simple as the title announcement can spark pages of debate. The title Skyfall stirred up its share of naysayers, but in the end it turns out to be a very apt title. Not only is Skyfall the name of something within the film, but it also accurately describes the situation that its British Secret Service employed characters find themselves in. For some of our leads, the sky is falling.


Daniel Craig's previous Bond films had taken the character back to the beginning of his career as a 00, in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace he was still learning the ropes, but this time around he's a seasoned veteran who's been in the spy business for years. Craig now gets to play the fully developed Bond, while bringing his own more flawed and real world approach to the character. This is such a return to the experienced Bond as we've always known him that, if not for a subplot involving one character, this could easily be slotted in as following Die Another Day in the timeline of the first twenty films preceding the 2006 "reboot". I hear some viewers are still counting it as coming after Die Another Day even with that character aspect.

The films of the Craig era have been more character focused and Skyfall follows suit. Given his previous work on films like American Beauty, Road to Perdition, and Revolutionary Road, it's no surprise that director Sam Mendes proves quite capable in handling the character work, but on this film he also gets to show off the fact that he can handle action as well.

Mendes brought on his regular cinematographer Roger Deakins, also a favorite of the Coen brothers and one of the best cinematographers working today, to shoot the movie. Shooting in HD, Deakins has delivered a picture that is absolutely gorgeous to look at.


Released at the time of the 50th anniversary of the film franchise, this is a movie that is very reverent of the series' history, giving nods to the past and reintroducing some traditional elements, while also staying on course to tell its own story in its own style. It wasn't originally meant to be a 50th anniversary film, though. If things had gone according to plan, it would've been in theatres last year, but MGM's bankruptcy caused pre-production to shut down for nine months. It was a pain to have to wait an extra year for another Bond fix, but that nine month shutdown did allow writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan a lot of added time to get the script into shape, and it turned out great.


I thought Daniel Craig was an inspired choice when he was cast as Bond and he's turned out to be fantastic in the role, I very much enjoyed seeing him play the character again after the too-long 4 year gap between movies. In her seventh film as M, Judi Dench does some very fine work, delivering perhaps her best performance yet in the series, in a film that gives her more to do than usual. Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw are notable in supporting roles, Berenice Marlohe is beautiful and delicate as the troubled Severine, Bond has some entertaining interactions with Naomie Harris as Eve, and in the role of Silva, a scenery-chewing Javier Bardem is a delight to watch.

Seeing the movie for the first time on a giant screen with a sound system that would at moments rattle my guts was a fun experience. I enjoyed the movie so much that, when it opened in a closer theatre today, I went and took in two more viewings. At every viewing I've attended, the reactions I've overheard from the audiences have proven to me that the movie is a real crowd pleaser. The film's humor has gotten a good response each time, laughter in all the right places, and I've enjoyed listening to fellow viewers' audible reactions to character beats and action moments throughout. It's also very amusing to see that some members of the audience at each showing jump at the explosions.

There's a lot of "best Bond movie ever" quotes going around about Skyfall. I won't go that far, it's too early to make the call on where I would personally rank it, but I do think it is a great entry in the series, beyond that a flat-out great film, period, and it's highly entertaining.

I will be talking more about Skyfall in a 50 Years of 007 article next month, and will do an even more detailed write-up on it when it's released on home video, something more like the nearly-scene-by-scene examination the other films have received in that series of articles.

Jay Burleson braves the streets of Haddonfield, Illinois for a three part, reverse order Film Appreciation look at the Halloween franchise.

Part II covers the Jamie Lloyd trilogy.

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

 

Cody relates to a Sylvester Stallone movie about trucking and arm wrestling.

OVER THE TOP (1987)

Legendary producer Menahem Golan took the director's chair for himself on this production, working from a story crafted by Gary Conway (Death Wish II) and David Engelbach (American Ninja 2 and 3) that was turned into a screenplay by prolific writer Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar twenty years earlier for his adaptation of In the Heat of the Night, and star Sylvester Stallone, also an Oscar-nominated writer himself for Rocky.

The resulting film wouldn't take Silliphant and Stallone back into Oscar territory (the movie actually earned several Razzie nominations), but it is a nice little father/son drama with a hearty dose of testosterone.
 

 

Stallone plays truck driver Lincoln Hawks (or Hawk, the movie can't seem to make up its mind), who was setting up a life with his wife Christina and son Michael twelve years ago when Christina's domineering, disapproving father Jason Cutler made it his mission to break up his daughter's marriage. Eventually unable to take his father-in-law anymore, Lincoln hit the road and now spends his life traversing the country, hauling loads varying from machinery to Brut cologne.

Now sick with a heart condition and facing surgery, Christina has decided that Lincoln and his son have got to get back together, so she has asked him to pick Michael up from his last day of school at a Colorado military academy and drive him back home to California.

Young Michael doesn't like this turn of events at all. He expects to be picked up by his grandfather, the man who has raised him his whole life and whose last name he has taken. Grandpa Cutler has spent ten years turning Michael against Lincoln, filling his head with lies about him and keeping all of the letters and birthday cards Lincoln has written to him out of his view. As far as Michael is concerned, he doesn't have a father. But, he's stuck in this situation, and even though Lincoln leads a much different lifestyle than Michael is used to and they're, as Michael says, "on a different social scale", the kid gradually comes to be more accepting of his father as he sees that his grandpa's stories were mostly untrue and that Lincoln does really care about the son he left behind. Lincoln's not the terrible person he's been made out to be, and leaving his family was the worst mistake he ever made.

As Lincoln and Michael bond, Grandpa Cutler - a very rich man who lives in the same mansion as the Clampetts did in The Beverly Hillbillies and has a group of goons to do dirty work for him - sets out to make sure they will never have a proper father/son relationship and Michael will stay with him.
 

 

That's the heart of the drama. Adding excitement and upping the manliness is the fact that everything is building up to Lincoln competing in a third act international arm wrestling championship being held at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he bets his $7000 life savings on himself, a twenty to one shot. ("Over the Top" is apparently what the final phase in an arm wrestling competition is called.)

 

 

In his matches, Lincoln goes up against guys like the pugnacious Smasher, Grizzly (who eats lit cigars and swills Valvoline), and most dangerous of all, Bull Hurley, a man who finds that the only pleasures in life come from driving truck and breaking arms. Bull Hurley is played by the hulking Rick Zumwalt, who was an arm wrestling champion in real life.

 

Over the Top is a very simple and quick movie and is quite entertaining to watch. It's one that I grew up with as part of my regular viewing rotation, as it's a movie that my older brother liked to watch over and over when he was a teenager. With the dramatic element, it's even a movie that my grandmother would leave on if it started playing on a movie channel.
 

 

I've written on the blog before, like in the Rolling Vengeance and Licence to Kill articles, about the fact that I have a soft spot for movies dealing with semi trucks because I come from a family of truck drivers. My father is a long haul truck driver, one of his brothers drove truck, their father was a trucker. So I've always enjoyed that angle of Over the Top. Revisiting the movie again this week, I could relate to it in an even more personal way than before, as the relationship between Lincoln and Michael reminded me of the way the one between my father and myself has turned out. I know what it's like to be the kid with a father who has a truck cab covered with pictures of the son he hardly ever sees. Like Michael and Lincoln, my own father has been mostly absent from my life over the last ten years, and I spent a large part of the past summer reconnecting with him. Some of the exchanges my father and I had this year were similar to ones the characters have in Over the Top. He and I are very different people with very different interests and lifestyles, but the one common ground we've always had is the enjoyment we get from watching movies. This movie isn't a great drama, but I can definitely connect with its story.

 

Unfortunately, the times when I have gone out on the road with my dad, I have never been witness to the world of underground trucker arm wrestling that OTT claims exists.

Cody watches as Pierce Brosnan goes out big.


When Die Another Day, the twentieth film in the Eon Productions Bond series, was released in 2002, it was a time of celebration for the cinematic 007. Like this year's Skyfall, it was an anniversary film, this one marking the 40th anniversary of the series that began with the 1962 release of Dr. No. The fact that it was the twentieth film was an added bonus, a nice round round number and it showed that even though the series had gone through a couple longer breaks than normal (mainly the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye), they had still managed to average out to a new movie every other year, the average helped out by the fact that the first few had been released annually. It hasn't lined up as well for Skyfall, the missed years in the decade since DAD making it so that the 50th anniversary film is not the 25th movie but the 23rd.

The 20th film, like every film in the series that came before it, begins with the gun barrel shot, but in the spirit of celebration director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Mulholland Falls, The Edge) decided to add a little bit of flair - when Pierce Brosnan as James Bond fires his gun in the direction of the camera/gun barrel, a CG bullet flies down the barrel, the projectile filling the screen and causing a quick blackout before the optical blood begins dribbling down over the gun barrel image.

That bullet sets the stage for the rest of the movie to confirm that Tamahori is a fan of digital manipulation, whether it be for special effects or simply color grading, something which is now standard in filmmaking. The CG moments that follow came as no surprise to me upon first viewing, I had already seen Tamahori's Along Came a Spider and the very CG car crash that it opens with, so I was expecting it.

The pre-title sequence finds James Bond on a mission in North Korea. With a couple Korean agents as backup, he infiltrates the country by surfing to the coastline. The waves in this surfing sequence are real, unlike some coming later in the film, and standing in for Bond and his partners are a trio of surfers that includes Laird Hamilton.

Die Another Day is packed with callbacks to Bond history and they begin within the first two minutes. Once Bond is on land, he unzips his wetsuit to reveal he's wearing stylish wardrobe beneath, though it's no Goldfinger white tux.

Bond slides open a panel on the bottom of his surfboard and we see that it contains gadgets and C4. A knife handle contains a navigational beacon that draws a passing helicopter off course. When the helicopter lands in a clearing, Bond and his cohorts hijack it at gunpoint. Bond's clothes exactly match those of the helicopter's passenger, a South African man named Van Bierk, who's carrying a Samsonite case full of diamonds. (Is it a coincidence that the actor's name is Mark Dymond?) Van Bierk is taken away while Bond keeps the case and replaces him on the helicopter.

Bond's assignment is to assassinate Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (the character name a nod to the post-Ian Fleming Bond novel Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis/Robert Markham), who has a dream of someday taking over the whole of Korea and has a base right on - and hides weapons within - the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the 160 mile long, 2.5 mile wide buffer between North and South Korea, which the U.S. helped fill with over a million landmines in the 1950s. Moon and his soldiers travel the zone freely in hovercrafts that float right over the mines. Lately, Moon has been trading his weaponry for African conflict diamonds, his reason unknown. So Bond has chosen as his method of assassination to complete the latest diamond exchange, but hide beneath the diamonds C4 that he will detonate once the case is in Moon's possession.

When we're first introduced to Will Yun Lee in the role of Colonel Moon, he's using some martial arts moves to vent his frustration on a punching bag... a bag which contains his anger therapist, being punished for lecturing the Colonel. His workout/punishment session ends when Bond's helicopter lands at the base. Moon goes out to meet with Bond and the trade is successfully made - the diamonds are handed over to Moon, who in turn presents "Van Bierk" with RPGs, flamethrowers, automatic weapons, and ammunition.

Then things go bad. Moon's right hand man Zao (Rick Yune) took Bond's picture as soon as he exited the helicopter and sent the image off to a mysterious contact. As an expert checks the diamonds, Zao receives a picture message on cell phone in reply - a message that gives confidential information on Bond straight from the MI6 Security Service, blowing his cover.


Told that "Van Bierk" is a British assassin named Bond, Moon blows up the helicopter, calls Bond by his real name, and has his men take Bond captive. Bond catches a break when Moon gets a call from his father, General Moon, who says he'll be arriving at the base in five minutes. The Colonel is hiding most of his operation from his father, so he scrambles to get things put away before he arrives, which causes a good deal of distraction that Bond is able to add to by detonating the diamonds. The explosion of the case blasts diamonds into Zao's face, embedding the rocks in his flesh, and Bond makes a run for a hovercraft. While filming this dash, Pierce Brosnan tore the meniscus in one of his knees and had to take a week off to have surgery to repair the injury. This happened early on in the shoot, but if Brosnan had any pain in his knee after that it's not noticable in the film.

Bond manages to cause substantial damage to Moon's operation and a hovercraft chase full of gunfire, flames and explosions ensues through the DMZ minefield, as Bond attempts to complete his mission and kill Moon. The chase ends with Bond boarding Moon's hovercraft and the two men fighting aboard the vehicle with a dead man at the wheel. Moon uses some of the same moves on Bond as he dealt out to his bagged therapist, but then Bond speeds the hovercraft up and sends it over the edge of a cliff above a waterfall. Moon and the hovercraft plummet into the rough waters far below, while Bond manages to grab onto a bell in a cliff-side temple.

"Saved by the bell," Bond quips, and for that groaner he's immediately imprisoned. Well, maybe the line isn't the specific reason why he gets locked up, but he is captured by General Moon and put away to live in a dark, dirty cell.


The film makes the segue into the Daniel Kleinman-designed title sequence, which in addition to featuring the usual sorts of images seen in the Bond title sequences is also used to tell the story of the time Bond spends in his private North Korean prison. His captors regularly torture him, beating him mercilessly, dunking his head in ice water, a female guard called Scorpion Girl making scorpions sting him repeatedly.

The World Is Not Enough story crafters and co-screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade returned to receive sole writing credit on Die Another Day. Longtime production designer Peter Lamont was also brought back, as was Tomorrow Never Dies and TWINE second unit director Vic Armstrong. DAD was composer David Arnold's third Bond score in a row, though he was not involved with the title song by Madonna. The orchestra-meets-dance-electronica song is unusual for the series and got a mixed reception, but it was very successful, spending 11 weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts.

TND and TWINE first assistant editor Andrew MacRitchie was promoted to editor on this one, a job he shares with regular Tony Scott collaborator Christian Wagner. Wagner brought to the film a very of-the-moment, adrenalized style and the use of tricks like speed ramping, overlapping images, and dramatic slo-mo.

For his cinematographer, director Lee Tamahori brought on David Tattersall, best known for the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Like Roger Spottiswoode's on Tomorrow Never Dies, Tamahori's credit does basically appear on a shot that is outside of the title sequence. Kleinman's images are done, Madonna's song ends, then Tamahori's name comes up over a shot of Scorpion Girl looking into Bond's cell. But since the credit doesn't appear after an obvious transition and images of the prison were used throughout the sequence anyway, this doesn't bother me like Spottiswoode's credit did.


When the title sequence is over, Bond has spent 18 months in captivity. He's filthy, his hair shoulder length, he's got a long, scraggly beard. But he hasn't lost his smartass sense of humor. General Moon has put him through a year and a half of torture not just because he killed his son, but also because he thinks Bond is witholding information on the identity of the Westerner who corrupted his son, someone he met while studying abroad at Oxford and Harvard. "Who made him betray his country and his name?" This is not information Bond has, but since whoever it is also blew his cover, he'd like to know who it was too.

One foggy day, General Moon takes Bond out of the prison, stands him in front of a line of arm soldiers, and tells him to start walking across a wooden bridge. Bond expects a hail of bullets to strike him in the back at any moment, but he soon realizes that he's not being executed, he's actually part of a prisoner trade between countries. Halfway across the bridge, he passes the man who's being brought in to North Korea in exchange for him - Zao, diamonds still embedded in the right side of his face. The two prisoners trade threats to each other, then continue on.

On the other side of the bridge, the group waiting for Bond is headed by NSA Chief Damian Falco and Robinson of MI6. As soon as he reaches the other side, Bond is sedated by a medical team and carted off on a gurney, taken to a hi-tech, secure medical evaluation and observation room on a ship in the Hong Kong harbor.

M visits Bond's room and catches him up on what's happening. After more than a year of MI6 denying Bond's existence, they had to pull him out of North Korea because a signal from the prison he was in revealed the name of the top American agent in the North Korean High Command, leading to the agent's execution. It was believed that Bond had cracked under interrogation and was giving information. Zao was captured after killing three Chinese agents in an attempt to blow up a summit between South Korea and China, and the trade was the only way to extract Bond. Bond and M both agree that his freedom came at too high a price, it would be better for him to die in prison than to let Zao go free. M suggests that he could've popped the cyanide pill that is issued to all agents, but Bond says he threw his out years ago. He is determined to get back to work, track Zao down and find out who the traitor who keeps revealing identities is, but M has different plans for him. He's to be taken to an evaluation center in the Falklands, where he'll be held indefinitely. His 00 status is rescinded, he's "no use to anyone now."

His licence revoked (again), Bond has to rogue, as he did in Licence to Kill. He escapes the ship with the use of a trick he employed during his torture sessions - through concentration, he lowers his heart rate. He takes it so low that he flat lines, and when medics rush in to revive him, he wills his heart to beat at a normal pace again, knocks the medics around and exits the room. He jumps off the ship and swims to the Hong Kong shore, arriving at a yacht club.

It's a great moment when the barefoot, long-haired, castaway-bearded, soaking wet Bond, wearing loose hospital clothes, his shirt completely unbuttoned, walks across the lobby of a high class hotel the same way he would if he was clean-cut and wearing a suit, going up to the front desk and asking for a room. The receptionist finds his appearance questionable, but the hotel's manager, a man named Chang, recognizes Bond and gives him a room. The Presidential Suite.

Bond gets back to normal - gets a nice wardrobe, cuts his hair, shaves, has a nice meal and a bottle of '61 Bollinger. Compliments of Chang, a lovely masseuse named Peaceful Fountains of Desire shows up at Bond's door. A masseuse who carries a gun in a thigh holster.

In earlier drafts of the script, Die Another Day was supposed to feature a cameo by Michelle Yeoh reprising her role as Chinese People's External Security Force agent Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies. A deal couldn't be reached with Yeoh, so Wai Lin was replaced by Chang, who is a Chinese Intelligence agent in addition to being a hotel manager, and it's doubtful that she would've done what Chang does - when Bond discovers Peaceful's piece, he tosses a heavy ashtray through a mirror, the mirror shattering to show that Chang and some sidekicks were filming Bond through the two-way glass, much like SPECTRE filmed him with Tatiana in From Russia with Love.

It's not quite clear what Chang was hoping to get out of filming Bond, it doesn't seem that he wanted to stir up a sex scandal like SPECTRE did because Peaceful says she's "not that kind of masseuse" when Bond gets touchy with her. If he was expecting Bond to spill national secrets to the gun-toting masseuse, he doesn't know him too well. Regardless, Bond assures Chang that he's not in Hong Kong to do anything to take back the city for England, then he asks the man for a favor. Chang can get payback for the deaths of the three agents Zao killed by helping Bond get into North Korea to go after the diamond-faced terrorist. Chang makes some calls and secures Bond a plane ticket, but not to Korea. Word is that Zao is now in Havana, Cuba.

In Havana, Bond awakens a sleeper agent contact named Raoul by walking into his cigar shop and telling an employee that he's there to pick up an order of Delectados for Universal Exports. When the employee says they haven't made Delectados in thirty years, Bond says "Check with your boss" and does a casual point at the man's telephone. Earlier, Bond pointed at M when asking her, "And what do you think?" I've nitpicked Brosnan's performance before in these articles, so here's another - I wish he wouldn't do this pointing business.


Raoul is played by Emilio Echevarria, who makes his character memorable and very enjoyable to watch during his brief screen time. Raoul is able to pinpoint Zao's location to an island called Los Organos, where there's a "strange clinic" run by a Doctor Alvarez, an expert in gene therapy. While in Raoul's office, Bond picks up a copy of the book Birds of the West Indies, written by an ornithologist named James Bond. Ian Fleming owned a copy of his book, and when trying to come up with the blandest name possible to give the literary spy he had created, he looked at the author's name on the bird book and found the perfect choice. Bond is also inspired by the book in this film, picking up a pair of binoculars and heading to Los Organos under the cover of being an ornithologist.

Bond drives the 1957 Ford Fairlane Raoul scores for him to the coast and gets a room at a beachside hotel. Enjoying a cigar and a mojito in the outdoor bar and dining area, Bond witnesses a busboy deliver admittance papers to the Alvarez Clinic to a very unpleasant man named Krug, who thanks the busboy by pointing a gun at his testicles and ordering him to round up some women to take to his hotel room.

Grabbing his binoculars and looking out to sea, Bond at first looks over Los Organos, but then his attention is caught by an attractive woman swimming toward the beach. In a shot meant to be an homage to the first appearance of Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr. No, the woman walks up onto the beach in her bikini, a knife holstered on her hip.


The woman and Bond introduce themselves to each other. Played by Halle Berry, who won her Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball during production, she is Giacinta Johnson, Jinx to her friends. She's bad luck, born on Friday the 13th. Bond has very good luck with her, it doesn't take much for him to talk her into his bed. We see much more of their coupling than we usually see of Bond's bedroom activities; passionate kissing, a bit of riding, moans and sighs, sweaty skin, fruit sharing. It's been at least 18 months since Bond was last with a woman, that's like a lifetime to him.

Jinx gets up before Bond the next morning and catches a boat over to Los Organos. Bond follows by knocking Krug out, putting him in a wheelchair, and rolling the man onto the boat's next trip, acting as his caretaker and getting a pass to the island with Krug's admittance papers. Once on the island, Bond ditches Krug and starts sneaking around the clinic. Passing through one room, he helps himself to a couple grapes from a bowl, a callback to Sean Connery doing the same in Thunderball.

Through a secret passageway, Bond discovers there are some strange doings going on at the Alvarez Clinic. Meanwhile, Jinx is learning all about it from Doctor Alvarez himself. In the hidden area of the clinic, Alvarez provides patients with DNA replacement therapy. First, the person's bone marrow is killed off, their DNA slate wiped clean. Then, new DNA harvested from healthy donors is introduced. These "donors" are actually murder victims: orphans, runaways, "people that won't be missed". Alvarez considers himself an artist, the new person created from this DNA replacement is his artwork. Jinx has come to Los Organos as a prospective patient, but she's actually there to shut Alvarez's operation down. And she does so by firing two shots into the doctor's chest.

Zao is in the clinic, undergoing DNA replacement therapy and about 50% along on the process of being changed from a Korean into a white man from Hamburg, Germany. At this point, Zao is completely hairless, his skin very pale and his eyes a light shade of blue. Even though he's going through with this change, the diamonds are still stuck in his face. It seems very odd that those wouldn't have been removed at this point, left to still be there even after he's totally made over with the German identity. But he's not going to make it that far anyway.

Bond and Zao have a scuffle in the therapy room, Bond tearing off the bullet-shaped necklace the henchman is wearing before Zao is able to escape. Zao, Bond, and (after destroying Alvarez's files) Jinx all make their ways out of the clinic. Sprinklers go off, rooms explode, walls are blasted through. Zao catches a ride on a helicopter, Jinx does an impressive backwards dive off a high cliff and into the ocean below, where she's picked up by a waiting boat. Bond is left alone with his gun in his hand... and Zao's necklace, the bullet pendant containing diamonds.

According to Raoul, the chemical composition of the diamonds Zao had points to them being conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone, but Bond spots something strange inside of them. A "G.G." lazer signature, meaning the diamonds came from the Graves Corporation in Iceland. A man named Gustav Graves discovered diamonds in Iceland about a year earlier and has since become a very rich, popular public figure in England.

News of Bond's escape in Hong Kong and adventure in Cuba has gotten back to NSA Chief Damian Falco, who chews M out in a video conference and accuses her of helping Bond get away. If she doesn't fix the situation, he threatens to do it himself.

Bond catches a British Airways flight back to London, on which Roger Moore's daughter Deborah Moore appears as an air hostess who serves him a martini on a wobbly tray. "Lucky I asked for it shaken." While enjoying his martini, Bond leafs through a magazine featuring an interview with Gustav Graves, giving us the first look at the character played by Toby Stephens. In the interview, a quote from Graves reads, "Diamonds are forever, but life isn't." and the interviewer's name is given as Gregg Wilson. The full name of producer Michael G. Wilson is Michael Gregg Wilson, but Die Another Day also marks the first Bond movie credit for another Gregg Wilson, Michael G. Wilson's son, who worked as a development executive on this film, joining the family business and starting to work his way up the ranks.  In a rare choice for the series, Bond's flight back home is accompanied by a needle drop song with no source within the scene, "London Calling" by The Clash filling the soundtrack.


Gustav Graves is also on a plane, but he bails from his while over London to make a showy entrance to his knighting ceremony, making a safe landing in front of the press with the aid of a Union Jack parachute (hello, The Spy Who Loved Me). Graves is considered a self-publicizing adrenaline junkie, but he prefers to be called an adventurer. He's a man who is said to never sleep, considering it a waste of life, and he's got a huge space project called Icarus in the works. It's top secret for now, but all will be revealed soon.

Bond is witness to Graves' chat with the press, and he follows the man to a club called Blades, which shares the name of a gentlemen's club in the Fleming novels. Graves is rumored to be trying out for the British Olympic fencing team, and at Blades he's fitting in a match. Madonna has a cameo in this scene as a fencing instructor named Verity, whose protégé Miranda Frost is "the finest blade in the club" and also Graves' publicist. Frost won a gold medal for fencing at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, a medal that defaulted to her after the opponent who beat her overdosed on steroids.

Verity shoots down the rumor that Graves has Olympic aspirations - he only plays for cash, and has won so much that nobody other than his publicist is willing to spar with him. Bond is. After introducing himself to Graves - "Bond. James Bond." - who momentarily seems to think they've met before, Bond agrees to play against the man with stakes of $1000 a point, first to deliver three hits wins.

The score is 2 - 0 in favor of Graves when Bond offers to up the stakes: forget the $1000 a point bet, they'll play for a Graves diamond that Bond picked up in Cuba. Graves comments that his diamonds get around, as "diamonds are for everyone." When Bond points out that it's chemically identical to a conflict diamond, Graves merely replies, "Then you're about to lose something very precious." And the fencing resumes, with heightened intensity.


When Bond slices Graves' wrist, Graves gets quite angry and decides to up the weapons along with the wager. The fencing weapons are tossed aside for heavier swords and to win they'll now have to draw blood from their opponent's torso. The swordfight that ensues, taking Bond and Graves throughout the club and its grounds and causing property damage, during which they switch sword types a couple times along the way, is my favorite bit of action in the film. There's something about a cinematic swordfight that I find highly entertaining to watch, whether the blades are wielded by swashbuckling pirates, or they're lazer weapons in the hands of space-travelling knights in a galaxy far far away, or the fight is between James Bond and a toff with a toothy grin and anger issues.

Though the fight includes punches and kicks and blood is drawn, when it ends Graves just laughs it all off, writes Bond a check, and invites him to attend his Icarus science demonstration in Iceland that weekend. When Graves departs, an envelope containing a large, old key is delivered to Bond.


That key unlocks a door on Westminster Bridge, right down the road from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Through the doorway, Bond goes down into a long abandoned subway station turned MI6 bunker, where he's met by his boss M. The recent tragedy of 9/11 gets a reference during their conversation, with M telling Bond that the world has changed while he's been away. He replies that it hasn't changed for him. They have no real info to trade on Gustav Graves, just the official bio of an orphan raised working in Argentinian mines learning engineering, finding diamonds in Iceland, and giving half of his riches to charity.


Bond catches M up on everything - chasing Zao, the destruction of the Cuban "beauty parlor" that M previously didn't believe actually existed, finding Graves diamonds in Zao's possession. Bond's suspicion is that Graves' company is a front for laundering conflict diamonds. M trusts Bond's instincts on Graves and authorizes him to continue his investigation, but they have to tread carefully because Graves has political connections.

His 00 status reinstated, Bond heads back to his office at MI6 headquarters, a room we've only seen before in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. While sitting at his desk, having a drink and cleaning his Walther, Bond hears odd noises from the hall and heads out to investigate. Black-clad, heavily armed terrorists have infiltrated the building and the bodies of employees are all over the place. At her desk, Moneypenny is dead with a gunshot wound in her forehead, a sight that made audience members gasp when I saw this film theatrically.

Bond moves through the halls, dispatching terrorists as he goes, and ends up in a standoff with one who is holding M hostage with a gun to her head. After a quick evaluation of the situation, Bond fires a shot into the hand the terrorist has on M's shoulder, wounding her as well but enabling her to get away from the man, allowing Bond to fire kill shots into the man's body.

Time slows down and then freezes as the dead man flies backwards from the shots, then the Quartermaster - played by John Cleese, who was introduced as the Desmond Llewelyn Q's replacement in The World Is Not Enough - appears out of nowhere and walks toward Bond, chastising him for wounding M. The Quartermaster takes a pair of glasses off of Bond and we realize that the MI6 invasion scenario was just a virtual reality exercise to make sure Bond's skills haven't gotten rusty during his time away, a hi-tech upgrade to the firing range. Bond is actually still down in the subway station, and gets led around the place by the Quartermaster, who equips him with some new gadgets.

The scene that plays out between Bond and the Quartermaster is all about Bond coming to accept this man as Llewelyn-Q's successor. Bond acts juvenile, makes quips, takes nothing seriously, while the Quartermaster gets annoyed and insults him. Bond called the character R in the previous film and at the beginning of this scene he refers to him as "Quartermaster", at the end of it he finally comes around to calling him Q.


One room the new Q takes Bond through is full of props from the earlier movies, from the Acrostar and alligator boat from Octopussy to the Thunderball jetpack and even Rosa Klebb's blade-tipped shoes from From Russia with Love. Brosnan goes so far as to sniff a shoe and put his fingers on the blade, not disturbed by the fact that the blade was dipped in poison back when Klebb was kicking it at his shins.

The gadgets Bond is given this time includes a ring that, with a twist, becomes a sonic agitator that emits a high frequency noise powerful enough to shatter bulletproof glass. He gets a new watch, which Q comments is his 20th. One for every movie. There was a line written in a draft of the TWINE script where Q would've given Bond a watch and commented that it was the 29th he had been issued. Perhaps a typo and it was supposed to be 19th? Either way, the DAD line is a version of a line that was dropped from TWINE.

Q saves the biggest gadget for last, and when the presentation begins Bond repeats a line he spoke to Q in Goldfinger, "You must be joking." Like his predecessor, this Q never jokes about his work. This gadget is Bond's latest car, an Aston Martin Vanquish that has been redubbed the Vanish by Q Branch. Loaded with all the weaponry we're used to seeing in a Bond vehicle, this car has a new feature that draws a line for some fans, going into territory where some viewers are not willing to follow. Adaptive camouflage. The car is covered with tiny cameras, cameras on each side projecting the images they see onto a light-emitting polymer skin on the opposite side. Basically, this makes the car invisible to the casual eye. That's too ridiculous for some to accept. I don't like when things stray too far into the silly and over-the-top, as this movie is about to, but I personally don't mind the "invisible car" so much. The adaptive camouflage technology is something that is being worked on in real life, Q Branch has just been able to successfully implement it here. This isn't a big deal to me here, but probably would be in other installments in the series. It would certainly seem wildly out of place in some of them, but it fits into DAD.

Miranda Frost is revealed to be an MI6 agent when she reports to M's office. Frost worked in Cryptography for three years, but has been undercover as Graves' publicist, a job she volunteered for, for three months and hasn't been able to dig up any dirt on him, he appears to her to be clean. Notifying Frost that Bond will be going to Iceland, M asks her what she knows of the 00. Uncomfortable with the idea, afraid that he could blow her cover, Frost describes Bond as, among other things, a danger to himself and others.

In the press, a lot has been made of the fact that M calls Bond a "blunt instrument" in Casino Royale '06, as if it describes a new idea of what the character it is. The description didn't get as much attention when it was used in Die Another Day, as Miranda Frost calls Bond "a blunt instrument whose primary method is to provoke and confront." The "blunt instrument" description of Bond actually originates from Ian Fleming, who said his character is a "blunt instrument wielded by a government department."

Despite Frost's uneasy feelings, M believes that Bond's methods are just right for this situation, and since Frost will be in Iceland as well, she'll be able to keep things from getting out of hand.


Die Another Day sort of feels like two movies in one, split almost exactly in half, and a lot of viewers - myself included - feel that it falls apart in the second half. Many cite Bond's arrival at Graves' ice palace in Iceland as the point when it starts going downhill and I agree that's the scene, but since the ice palace itself is a great location for a Bond movie, I like to narrow it down further to a certain exchange that happens outside the palace as Bond exits his Aston Martin. The head of security is a large man played by Kiwi actor Lawrence Makoare, best known for playing Uruk-Hai and Orcs in the Lord of the Rings movies. Makorare's character introduces himself to Bond as "Mister Kil" and Bond replies, "That's a name to die for." With that, emergency lights start flashing, alerts start going off, the movie is in freefall.

While guests gather at the palace and hit up the bar for drinks (Bond of course visits the bar and orders a vodka martini, "plenty of ice"), Graves spends time racing his rocket car around on the frozen lake and icy grounds surrounding the palace. He reaches 324 mph in the rocket car, then orders his Igor-like mechanic Vlad to fix the recurring mechanical issue with the car's second thruster. Graves is a man who keeps busy with thrilling hobbies, saying that living on the edge is the only way to know who you really are, "under the skin". And since the rumors are true that he never sleeps, he's forced to live his dreams.

Built next to the ice palace is a bio dome, which houses both Graves' living quarters and the entrance to the diamond mine, with a tropical atmosphere and even an artifically heated thermal pool cut into the surface of the frozen lake. Graves is relaxing in his living quarters, wearing some sort of electrical mask, when a hooded figure arrives at the palace and strides into the bio dome.


When the figure removes his hood, he's revealed to be Zao, still in his half-baked DNA limbo stage, diamonds still stuck in his face. Zao is no threat to Graves, the men are close friends who have known each other for many years. When Zao tells Graves that "General Moon still mourns your death", we realize the reason why Graves keeps making comments about knowing Bond from somewhere and being someone else under the skin - Graves is Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. He survived the hovercraft crash and spent Bond's 18 months of captivity getting his DNA changed to that of a British man and building the public persona of Gustav Graves. The diamond mine isn't even real, the Graves diamonds are the conflict diamonds that Moon collected.

As a side effect of his DNA makeover, Graves has permanent insomnia. The mask he wears is called "the dream machine" and he has to wear that for an hour at a time. He says it keeps him sane, I don't think it's working.

Waiting for the big demonstration, Bond interacts with Frost a bit and also discovers that Jinx is a fellow guest at the ice palace. Jinx - who now introduces herself to people as "Miss Swift" - and Bond trade some double entrendre-heavy banter, with Halle Berry delivering her lines as if she's performing directly to a laughing audience. With some of these lines, I think she'd like to be sitting next to every viewer to give them a nudge in the ribs as well.

After night fall, it's time for the demonstration, and everyone gathers outside to watch Graves unveil his Icarus project. Standing at a podium and working controls within a large case, Graves reveals that Icarus is a satellite in orbit around the Earth, able to catch rays from the sun around the edge of the planet and reflect them down directly onto the ice palace. In an instant, the dark night becomes a very bright day. Everyone puts on sunglasses except for Bond and Jinx. Graves passes off his light-focusing satellite as a sort of second sun, shining like a diamond in the sky, a way to enable certain areas to grow crops all year. He tells the crowd, "You have no idea how much Icarus is about to change your world." We and Bond know it's a threat.

The control case is packed up and taken by Kil and Vlad into the bio dome, and this is where Bond is first able to put his car's camouflage to use - he turns his car "invisible" and drives through the open gate in front of the bio dome. The camouflage wouldn't do any good if the people at the dome were really paying attention, since they'd still notice the tire tracks magically appearing in the snow. Luckily for Bond, the security is not that good.

Bond does some snooping around outside the dome, looking through windows, but the most knowledge he gains from this is finding out the thermal pool exists. Eventually, security guards do notice Bond's presence, intruder alert alarms go off, and Bond gets away from the dome by opening a pressure valve, steam blasting a couple guards to the ground and knocking a hole in the chain link fence.


Bond heads off through the parking lot as security guards look around the place, and Frost reveals to him that she's an MI6 agent when she pulls him aside and starts kissing him to deflect suspicion. Frost says she knows all about Bond, "Sex for dinner, death for breakfast", the second part of that quote being the title of a chapter in the novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond's charms quickly melt Frost's defenses and they decide to continue the charade of being lovers in his room.

While Bond and Frost go to bed, a leather-clad Jinx is infiltrating the bio dome, making her entrance from the top and sliding down to the ground on a retractable cable. Entering the living quarters, she gets captured by Graves and Zao, knocked out with a zap from the "self defense mechanism" Vlad made for Graves, an electrical glove with a 100,000 volt limit.

Luckily for Jinx, Bond and Frost have just made it a quickie, after which Bond gets out of bed and sets off to infiltrate the bio dome. He does so by a cutting a hole in the lake ice with his watch's lazer beam, something his GoldenEye watch would also be able to do, swimming beneath the ice with the aid of the same sort of rebreather he used in Thunderball, and surfacing inside the dome through the thermal pool.


By the time Bond catches up to the tied-down Jinx, Zao has unsuccessfully attempted to torture information out of her with the electric glove and has left her to be offed by Mister Kil with the fake mine's real lazer cutters, a callback to the lazer threat in Goldfinger. Bond and Kil have a fight with lazer beams slicing all around them, and it's Kil who ends up on the wrong end of one.

Kil killed, Bond gets Jinx loose of her restraints while she confides in him that she works for the NSA and is on the trail of Zao. Informed of the presence of Zao and a dream machine from Cuba, Bond connects the dots and figures out that Graves isn't who he appears to be. He gets Jinx out of the dome and goes to confront Graves in his living quarters.

Bond's confrontation of Graves is when the title of the film gets quoted - "So you live to die another day, Colonel." Like Tomorrow Never Dies, the title of this movie has nothing to do with the works of Ian Fleming, and while TND's was inspired by The Beatles, this one is a play on a saying that goes back to 338 B.C. and Athenian statesman Demosthenes, whose quote "The man who runs away may fight again" eventually became "He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day."

Graves admits that he is truly Colonel Moon, telling Bond that he's left him alive so long because he's enjoyed watching him flail around in ignorance, and says that the details of the Graves persona were somewhat based on Bond, specificially the "unjustifiable swagger" and "crass quips" that conceal inadequacy. Miranda Frost joins them mid-conversation and points a gun at Graves.

While the title isn't Fleming, the story is, in broad strokes, based on his novel Moonraker: an enemy of England is injured in a battle and forced to change their appearance, resurfacing with a false identity that they use to become a popular public figure in the UK. The Icarus satellite replaces the novel's Moonraker rocket as a scientific endeavor that's actually a weapon of mass destruction. In earlier drafts of the script, writers Purvis and Wade even went so far as to name the female MI6 agent played by Rosamund Pike after Bond's love interest in the novel, Gala Brand, whose name was left out of the Moonraker film in favor of the non-Fleming Holly Goodhead. Then, changes were made to the character that made it inappropriate for her to carry the name Gala Brand, and Brand was again put on the shelf while the character was renamed Miranda Frost.

The change was, the character is a traitor. Frost moves her gun away from Graves and turns it toward Bond. She's the person who betrayed Bond and blew his cover in North Korea. She has known Moon since they were on the fencing team together at Harvard, and he earned her undying loyalty by killing the opponent who beat her at the Olympics.

Now that everything's out in the open, Bond opens fire on Frost and Graves, shooting them down right there. Or, he would if the gun didn't just click empty. Bond kept his gun under his pillow while he was in bed with Frost, giving her opportunity to remove the bullets.

The bad quips go into overdrive in the second half of Die Another Day, with a prime example being the exchange between Zao and Bond with the diamond-faced henchman enters the room. Bond tells him, "I've missed your sparkling personality" and Zao responds by hitting him in the gut. "How's that for a punchline?" Painful in several ways.

Frost is about to execute Bond - "It really is death for breakfast" - when he uses the sonic ring to bust through the room's glass floor, then escapes from the dome with the retractable cable that Jinx left behind. With henchmen firing machine guns at him, Bond gets into Graves' rocket car and speeds away from the palace.

Bond's escape has only given Graves extra purpose in the private demonstration of the true power of Icarus that he has arranged for some visiting military allies from North Korea. As the Koreans watch, Graves manipulates the Icarus controls to lock the satellite onto the rocket car's heat signature and concentrate the sun's power into an intense, firey beam that blasts down to the ground, burning or melting everything in its path. The beam chases Bond across the ice until he's forced to drive the rocket car right off a cliff, catching onto the edge of the cliff by disengaging the car's speed anchor. As Bond and the car dangle on the side of the icy cliff, Graves doesn't just blast the beam down the edge, instead he cuts a huge chunk of ice off of the cliff.


The broken ice crashes down into water below, causing a huge wave, which Bond survives by performing some improvised kite surfing with the rocket car's parachute, using a panel door as his surfboard. Bond kite surfing to safety while surrounded by a massive CGI wall of water is the most harshly criticized moment of the film, and the CGI involved has not aged well at all.

When Bond is back on icy ground, we're presented with another problem the lengthy action sequence set around the ice palace has - Bond keeps leaving the palace just to go right back to it. This time he uses the parachute to clothesline a henchman off of a snowmobile, which he uses to drive back to the palace.

Graves, Frost, and the Koreans leave in a personal cargo plane, with Zao staying behind to make sure Bond is dead. Jinx is trapped in the ice palace while Icarus blasts some heat down onto it, causing the place to melt around her and fill her room with water. Bond gets into his still-invisible car to get a thermal imaging read on the palace to locate Jinx within it, but the adaptive camouflage is so convicing that another henchman drives his snowmobile right into the side of the car, giving away Bond's location to Zao.

Bond isn't the only one with a gadget-packed car, Zao has a Jaguar XKR that is also loaded with rockets and machine guns, among other things. A chase/battle between the equally matched hero and villain gadget cars ensues, something that was meant to happen in The Lost Dalton Film. The action takes Bond and Zao out across the frozen lake and then, of course, back to the palace.

Like the Aston Martin in The Living Daylights, Bond's Vanquish has spikes that come out of the tires for icy conditions, and the Goldfinger ejector seat gets a callback when the Aston Martin gets flipped over onto its top. As the car slides along the ice, Bond opens the sunroof, hits the passenger ejector seat button, and the force of the ejection flips the car back over onto its wheels, the flip also happening just in time for the car to avoid a rocket fired by Zao.

The car fight continues on, and ends, inside the palace, a suggestion director Lee Tamahori made because he didn't want to just use the location for dialogue scenes. It's one Tamahori addition that I think was a good idea.

Zao is defeated, Bond saves Jinx from a cold, watery death and revives her in the thermal pool, and the agents leave what remains of the ice palace, heading for a meeting with their superiors at a U.S. command bunker on the South Korea side of the DMZ, where they're at DEFCON 2 while they wait to see what Graves is up to, and where producer Michael G. Wilson has his cameo as a General. Wilson was also briefly in the background in Cuba.

M and Damian Falco have some words over Falco's approach to the situations that have played out. Falco was giving her a tough time about Bond's escape and blaming the destruction of the Cuban clinic on him to keep attention off of Jinx, because if Frost had gotten word of the NSA agent she would've passed it along to Graves. M says they would've figured out there was a mole at MI6 earlier if Falco had told her about Frost and Moon's Harvard fencing days... but M is the one Frost worked for, wouldn't she have better knowledge of her history than Falco?

Graves is currently at a North Korean air base, so while Icarus is taken out by an anti-satellite missile, Bond is going to go into the North to take out the villain personally. Falco doesn't want to leave this mission entirely in the hands of the British, so he tells Jinx she's going along with him... and when he gives her this order, he points at her hardcore, so maybe I was wrong to criticize Brosnan for the pointing he did earlier, maybe Tamahori requests it from his actors.

Bond and Jinx infiltrate the area of the North Korean base with the use of single person aircraft called Switchblades, invisible to radar, which they separate from at a certain point and parachute to the ground.

When the ASAT missile is fired at Icarus, the shot of the missile being launched from a Navy ship is actually manipulated stock footage from Tomorrow Never Dies. The missile does not hit its target. Icarus has automatic self defense capabilities and blasts the missile apart with a sun beam.

Bond's side of things was meant to be simple, too. He and Jinx get set up outside the air base fence and Bond is just going to assassinate Graves with a sniper shot as he gets back onto his cargo plane. But, Bond's perfect shot is blocked by a passing truck, so he and Jinx have to board the plane for the climactic action sequence.

The plane sequence was not in the script when the movie started filming, at which time there was thought given to having the movie end with an action sequence set at an indoor beach that might have been filmed in Japan. In previous drafts, there had been a sequence written for earlier in the movie where Bond and Jinx would be on a smaller aircraft that would fall apart while they were flying in it, but during production Tamahori decided to take that dropped idea, move it to the end and make it much bigger.


Aboard the cargo plane, Graves puts on a robotic suit that Vlad has made for him, along with his electric glove. The Icarus controls are part of the suit, replacing the large case they were in earlier. As the plane flies along, Graves has Icarus blast its concentrated beam of sun power down onto the DMZ, blowing up the minefield and clearing a path for hardliners in the North Korean military to begin an unauthorized invasion of the South. They won't need hovercrafts anymore. And when the South has been taken, Japan is next. They won't be stopped. If enemies fire nuclear missiles on them, Icarus will just blast them in the sky.

As the plane flies along, Graves has a disastrous reunion with his disapproving father before we get the final confrontations between villains and heroes - Jinx in a duel of blades with Frost and Bond vs. the robo-suited Graves - finishing with Lee Tamahori's modern, CGI-slathered version of the Icarus legend. (And it was he who named the satellite.)


I've always been ambivalent about Die Another Day, ever since I saw it on opening day. The theatre I went to that late November day in 2002 was, oddly, giving out samples of the new on the market Halls Fruit Breezers throat lozenges with every ticket sold. I was sort of in need of one, so that worked out. Even upon first viewing, DAD felt like two different movies to me. The first half was great, it was taking risks, putting Bond in new situations, the idea of the character being imprisoned and tortured for over a year was previously unthinkable. The stuff with him going rogue and heading off to Cuba, meeting up with a well-acted and likeable ally in the form of Raoul, driving a 1957 Ford Fairline and doing some good old investigating, I loved all that stuff. Then things went completely off the rails with bad dialogue and space lazers.

Despite being bothered by the second half, DAD was the first Bond movie that I went to see in the theatre twice. The first viewing I went to with my mother, the second I watched while she and a friend saw 8 Mile in a different auditorium in the same theatre, then her friend left and she and I made it a double feature day for both of us by seeing Steven Soderbergh's Solaris. After my first viewing of DAD, I had been left feeling like the movie had made a major tonal shift in the middle - the first half had been risky and down-to-earth, the second outlandish and goofy. On second viewing, the transition was smoother, and I began to see that even the more grounded half of the film still had a lighter tone and was presented in a rather candy coated way, and the outlandish elements were present early with the gene therapy.

I had issues with DAD, but at the time of its release I was mostly satisfied with it. Over time, my opinion on it has leaned further and further toward negative. The movie has its share of great moments, but it has more than its share of painful ones as well.

You can pick apart the elements of the movie, say it doesn't work because this is in it or that happens, but I think the source of its problems is the director. I don't think Lee Tamahori really understood Bond. People will often say that, at least until the recent hirings of directors like Marc Forster and Sam Mendes, the Bond series is a producer's franchise, that it doesn't matter who the director is, EON is always in control. While Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli are certainly guardians of the brand and the character, I think they give their directors more leeway than they are often given credit for. The directors of the Brosnan era films each had their own specific visions for their movies, and when you hear Tamahori saying things like he considered having Zao get attacked by a killer whale at the end of the ice palace sequence, it's pretty apparent that he saw Bond as being a live action cartoon, and that's what he set out to deliver.

Tamahori was the decision maker behind some big changes, the events of the second half of the film seem to be very much on his shoulders. Everyone was in a fun, celebratory mood going into this one, it being the 40th anniversary film, and I think that enabled Tamahori to go way over the top. The second half feels like he just threw the script out and got carried away playing with all the big toys he had been given. Screenwriters Purvis and Wade have expressed displeasure with how the movie turned out, saying what they had in mind for the tone of the film was more like a 3 or 4 on a scale of 10, but Tamahori turned it up to 11. And the invisible car was not in their script.

In the end, after Moneypenny is seen attempting to release twenty films of sexual tension with the aid of the virtual reality glasses, we leave Bond and Jinx in a small Buddhist temple, playing with diamonds and exchanging some appalling lines. This is the last we see of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, as Die Another Day marks the end of his era.

A period of uncertainty about the future of the series seemed to follow the release of DAD. While it was always a given that James Bond would return, exactly how he would return would take a while to figure out. For a year, instead of focusing their attention on developing Bond 21, EON tried to get a Jinx spin-off movie off the ground. Halle Berry was going to return, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade had a script written, and the project had a very interesting director signed - Stephen Frears, director of The Hit, The Grifters, High Fidelty, and Dirty Pretty Things. Then in late 2003, the project hit creative differences and was scuttled.

The idea was then to start filming Bond 21 in 2005, and at a point the decision was made that the movie would be an adaptation of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, which EON had gotten the rights to do in a trade between MGM and Sony in 1999.

At first, it looked like Pierce Brosnan would be returning to make Casino Royale his fifth movie in the role of Bond. He and EON were in negotiations, but they never could come to an agreement of terms and pay, so in early 2005 it became official that Brosnan would not be coming back. A lot of people were very upset by the news that Brosnan wouldn't be Bond again, and some of them somehow got the idea that he was a victim in this process, a view that some carry to this day. There's a misconception that he was dumped from the role, fired, but the fact is that he had fulfilled his contract. He was signed for three movies, which he fulfilled with GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough, with the option for a fourth, which was picked up with Die Another Day. A new contract would've had to have been negotiated for him to do another movie, an attempt was made, it didn't work out. Brosnan got grumpy in the press during the process, but he wasn't a victim, there was nothing unfair about it.

With no Bond actor signed on, development on Casino Royale continued, taking a different path...

Last month, the fourth annual Shock Around the Clock 24 hour horror marathon was held at the Grandview Theatre in Columbus, Ohio. Now that he has finally recuperated, Cody is ready to share an account of his experience.

www.horrormarathon.com

I've been going to the Columbus horror marathons since 2001. Over the past eleven years they've gone through fluctuations of length and changes of venues and names, and I've been there through it all. But as the fourth Shock Around the Clock iteration of the marathon neared, I was feeling conflicted. The marathon was being held at the Grandview Theatre from noon on Saturday, October 20th to noon on the 21st, and while I was at Cinema Wasteland over the first weekend of October, I had discovered that there was another horror marathon being held on the 20th - 21st, this one in Cleveland.

Called 12 Hours of Terror 2012, this "rival" marathon had a rather enticing line-up of films booked: Fright Night (1985), Slither (2006), Shaun of the Dead, Terror Train, Jaws 3D in 3D, a "surprise secret screening"... and a movie that almost tempted me to ditch eleven years of tradition and faithful support and go to Cleveland instead of Columbus. A movie that I've been hoping would screen at any one of the marathons that I've gone to over the years but never has (it was shown at a marathon a year or two before I found out about them.) The movie that is at the top of my "I must see this on the big screen with a horror-loving audience" list, one of my all-time favorite films: the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It hurt me to know that TCM was going to be showing in a theatre in Ohio within my usual travelling circles but I wouldn't be able to see it. I had my ticket for the Columbus marathon, I had a social situation set up in the area to bookend my marathon experience, I stuck with the marathon I had pledged my allegiance to, and some time late on the 20th or early on the 21st, Leatherface did his chainsaw dance on the big screen in front of an audience that did not include me.

I don't regret choosing Columbus, but still really need to see TCM '74 in a theatre or at a drive-in someday.

This year, I was able to go to Columbus the day before the marathon and stay at a friend's house near the theatre, saving myself from the usual 90 minute commute to the Grandview on the morning of the marathon. I arrived at my friend's house Friday evening, we went and saw Sinister, I got a good night's sleep and was able to sleep later than I would have if I was leaving from my own house, went out for breakfast, arrived at the Grandview and got in line around 11 o'clock.

As I joined the line, a marathon volunteer, the one who was dressed as Dr. Caligari last year, handed me a piece of paper with a trivia quiz on it. Fill out the quiz and the winner would get a prize later on. The theatre doors opened and the line began shuffling into the building about ten minutes after I got there. Some people show up at the theatre and get in line as early as 6am, but I much prefer sleeping in a bed for as long as possible over waiting in a line for any period of time. Entering the theatre, I got my ticket stamped by a volunteer and picked up a program/schedule with a ballot for the marathon Horror Hall of Fame tucked inside it. Marathoners would be able to order items from the nearby pizza place Cowtown through the concession stand, so a Cowtown menu was in the program as well. Making my way through the lobby, I stopped by the merchandise table to buy an event T-shirt.

As announced on the website and printed within the program, the marathon's schedule was:

NOON - THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES
1:50 - WHITE ZOMBIE
3:30 - SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
5:30 - The 4th Annual Costume Contest
5:45 - PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
7:40 - KILL LIST
9:30 - POSSESSION (1981)
11:45 - The 4th Annual Scream Contest
MIDNIGHT - THE DEVILS
2:15 - DEAD ALIVE
4:40 - VIDEODROME
6:30 - THE LAST CIRCUS
8:45 - WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS
10:30 - AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

Anyone who had gone to a marathon before would know, and the new attendees would soon find out, that trusting a schedule to remain accurate for very long is not a safe bet. The order of events is correct, but the times are just a hope.

Program in hand and Shock Around the Clock T-shirt thrown over my shoulder, I pushed through the doors and entered the room where I'd be spending most of the next twenty-six hours or so. The auditorium. There I found that the exact seat that I was hoping to get was still available, and so that's the one I took.

It wasn't long after noon when marathon hosts Joe Neff and Bruce Bartoo stood below the screen to welcome the crowd and start the show. When Joe and Bruce finished talking, there was a countdown from thirteen to a group scream, then the lights dimmed and the first movie began.



THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

Phibes was preceded by a twenty minute block of trailers, and I have to mention that I really enjoyed the fact that this year's selection of trailers tended to lean toward exploitation and schlock. The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, Eyeball, Hercules in the Haunted World, The Funhouse... A triple feature of The Corpse Grinders, The Undertaker and His Pals, and The Embalmer? Sounds like a hell of a night. Squirm? Love it.

Phibes is a great film itself, starring Vincent Price as a man who uses the Biblical plagues to wipe out the group of medical professionals he blames for his wife's death on the operating table. His late wife is played by The Spy Who Loved Me henchwoman Caroline Munro, so it's totally understandable that losing her would set a man off on a murderous rampage.

Late in the film, I took a trip out to the lobby, during which I bought a large drink with free unlimited refills, which would come in handy over the next day. When I returned to the auditorium, I found that my seat had been taken by a couple who had arrived late. The auditorium was so dark to their outside eyes that the man hadn't even realized that he was sitting on top of my Shock shirt and my coat. When I asked to get my stuff out from under him, the couple apologized for taking my seat and rose to go find somewhere else to sit, but the auditorium was pretty full, tickets for this marathon had sold better than several years previous, so I told them to come back if they couldn't find two seats together. They couldn't, and when they got back they had decided that the guy would take the seat beside me and the girl would sit beside the guy in the row behind. (There are only two seats in each side row.) Instead, I let them have the two seats together and I moved back a row. So I lost my perfect seat after an hour or so, but I couldn't let a couple sit apart.

That wasn't the only trouble during Phibes. The marathon got off to a rough start, as the projector broke twice during the movie. Not the film, the projector itself. If the issue couldn't be fixed, we would've been up a creek. Fortunately, the broken part was successfully replaced and things ran smoothly for the rest of the event, but by the end of Phibes we were already an hour and a half behind schedule.

During the brief break between movies, the guy who I moved back and sat beside relocated, so I ended up having a side row to myself again. Joe and Bruce soon introduced the second film, the movie whose title a musician named Robert Cummings built a career on:

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932)

A young American woman arrives in Haiti and is targeted by a voodoo-practicing, zombie-creating Bela Lugosi, playing the awesomely named character Murder Legendre and sporting bushy and styled eyebrows, to become the titular white zombie.

White Zombie is an atmospheric classic, but it's not one that has a lot of rewatchability for me, I'm not often in the mindset or mood necessary to be in to watch it, and I wasn't really excited about sitting through it on this day. So, to pass the time I cheated in the same way that was established at both last year's marathon and last fall's Cinema Wasteland - I hooked a single earbud to my phone and listened to the latest episode of the Tell 'Em Steve-Dave podcast in one ear while watching the screen. As I promised last year, no one notices when I do this, the podcast can only be heard in my ear.

The podcast and movie both came to an end, and then it was time for one of the movies I was most looking forward to:



SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1983)

When a carnival comes rolling into his small town, a young boy finds out that the supernatural carnies have evil intentions for the townspeople.

This may be a kid-friendly Disney production, but that doesn't stop it from being a great movie, and it features fantastic performances by Jason Robards as the main character's aging father and Jonathan Pryce as the carnival's proprietor. Pryce is much more menacing as this film's Mr. Dark than he was as the over-the-top villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. The awe-inspiring, standout moment of the film for me is a confrontation between Pryce and Robards in the library.

With its October setting, marathon day was the perfect time to be watching this movie, a viewing that was only my second time seeing it. I just watched it for the first time within the last year, and while it still totally works for me in my late twenties, it also makes me wish this had been a film I had grown up watching. If I ever have a kid of my own, this is definitely a movie that I'm going to include in their viewing rotation.

Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay, based on his own novel, and Joe introduced the film with a reading of Bradbury's last published work, Take Me Home, from the pages of The New Yorker.


Following Something Wicked, it was time for 

The 4th Annual Costume Contest

Overcoming competition from the likes of Mario, Vera Cosgrove, an out-of-shape Bane, and a man with an eyeball head, the winner was a kilt-wearing ape playing bagpipes.

Having witnessed the costume contest, I then went out to the lobby and put in a pizza order as the next movie began. I was told that the orders were backed up an hour and a half to two hours, so I would be able to watch the entire movie before I would have to check and see if my food had arrived. So I went back into the auditorium for another of the movies that I was most looking forward to:

 

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974)

Faust and Phantom of the Opera collide in Brian De Palma's wonderfully '70s oddball musical.

This movie is very strange and unique, and it's sort of amazing that this wasn't a dream project that De Palma was only able to get funded after the box office success of Carrie, it's something he made while he was working his way up, a couple years before Carrie. I don't know how this movie got made, but I'm very glad that it did. It was a lot of fun watching it with the crowd and it went over well with them, particularly Gerrit Graham's performance as glam rocker Beef. Beef even got a couple write-in votes for the Horror Hall of Fame.

The tunes provided by Paul Williams are fantastic and were stuck in my head for days afterward.


When Paradise ended, I went out to the lobby to check and see if my pepperoni stromboli had been delivered yet. It wasn't on the pizza order table, but I heard that marathon minions had been sent out to pick up another order, so I waited around in the lobby. After several minutes, the pizza order still hadn't arrived, so I headed back in the auditorium to be in the room for Joe and Bruce's talk before the next movie, intending to go back to the lobby as soon as they were done. Joe and Bruce took their spots below the screen not long after I returned to my seat, and they gave an intro for Kill List. Just as the intro was wrapping up, Caligari joined the hosts at the front of the auditorium and - I could hear him from where I was sitting - that Mike, Chris, and Cody had pizza orders that had been sitting in the lobby for ten minutes. My stromboli must have arrived just as I was going back into the auditorium. Joe then said into his microphone, "I guess we're shaming these people. Mike, Chris, and Cody have had pizza orders waiting for ten minutes."

What happened then was probably inconsequential and instantly forgettable for everyone else in the room, but it was a breakthrough for me in regards to my social anxiety. In previous years, I would've just remained in my seat and not reacted to Joe's announcement, especially given the fact that he just said I was being "shamed". I would've waited for the lights to go down and the movie to begin before I got up and went out to the lobby to retrieve my stromboli. But I am making progress in the fight against my social problems, so when my name was thrown out, I stood up and headed for the lobby. When I was halfway to the door, Joe stopped me by asking, "Are you Mike, Chris, or Cody?" I stopped, looked back at him, and with 300 people watching the scene, I said my name. And somehow my voice projected all the way to the front of the auditorium and he heard me, even though people often have trouble hearing me when they're just a few feet away and I often feel like I don't have control over the volume of my voice. He replied, "It's OK, Cody, we still like you." And I went out to the lobby, where Caligari soon joined me to give me my stromboli.



KILL LIST (2011)

Food in hand, I returned to the auditorium to stuff my face and watch this movie, which tells the story of a hitman whose latest job turns his life into a living hell.

I had seen this movie before and am not really a fan of it. In fact, the most enjoyment I got out of it came after I had finished my first viewing and read someone online suggest "A Bad Man Wins A Hat" as an alternate title. Fits perfectly.

I sat through most of the movie this time, though after I finished my stromboli I did loiter in the lobby for a little while after throwing the box away.

Kill List does feature some intense screaming matches between a husband and wife, making it a fitting companion to the next film in the line-up.



POSSESSION (1981)

The breakup of a marriage takes some strange turns and may lead to the end of the world in writer/director Andrzej Zulawski's arthouse horror film.

There was a lot of hype surrounding Possession in the build-up to the marathon, and I was very much looking forward to watching it with the crowd. I had seen the film before, I gave it a positive write-up for the SHOCKtober event last month, but I knew that it wasn't going to be for everyone. People would be frustrated, brains would be melted. And that's exactly how it turned out.

Thankfully, it was still early enough in the night that most of the audience would be awake for the movie and would be able to tolerate its slower pace. Showing an arty, slow movie too late can be disastrous, stirring up some very negative reactions to some great movies. For example, due to playing in an early morning time slot, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was one of the most hated movies shown during the marathon's Nightmare at Studio 35 days.

The crowd seemed to lean toward positive on Possession, but some members of the audience did absolutely hate it. I know because two of the haters were the couple sitting in front of me. The strange existential dialogue seemed to make the guy very angry, as he would make comments at the screen and root for the movie to end. When it did end, the girl told me she wanted those two hours of her life back. I just responded with a nod and smile. I like the movie and enjoyed seeing it on the big screen with the marathon crowd.


During the post-Possession break, it was time for

The 4th Annual Scream Contest

which came down to a girl with a movie-worthy shriek and a guy with a comedic approach and an impressively womanly scream. The guy won out, but I have to say that my favorite competitor was actually the girl who came in third place. The people further back in the auditorium probably couldn't see it, but she would get so into belting out her screams that her legs would shake.

After the screams, there was a brief guest appearance at the front of the auditorium by Eric Hayden, the writer/director of a science fiction movie that apparently went over very well at the 24 hour sci-fi marathon in May. Hayden hadn't been able to attend the sci-fi marathon, but was able to make it to the horror as an audience member. He thanked the members of the crowd who were at the sci-fi show for their support and was open to answering any questions anyone might have, but no questions were asked. I'm not totally sure, but I don't think the overlap in the sci-fi and horror marathon audiences is exceptionally large. I know I would find 24 hours of sci-fi very rough to sit through, I need to take my sci-fi in more moderate doses. I will be checking out Hayden's movie when it's available, it stars Lance Henriksen and is called The Last Push.



THE DEVILS (1971)

As The Devils began, the marathon was running way behind schedule, and I was thinking that a movie was going to get cut from the line-up. The bumpy start The Devils got off to made it seem even more likely. With no film prints available, The Devils was being projected from a disc provided by Warner Bros., and the first couple minutes played out three or four times as they had to keep restarting the disc to work out picture issues.

Set in France in the 1600s, The Devils is a story of madness, sexual repression, false accusations of witchcraft, strange exorcisms, and torture, kicked off when the hunky priest the nuns at a collapsing city's convent are obsessed with decides to get married.

Not really wanting to fully concentrate on the movie's weirdness and freak-outs, I decided it was time to put another podcast in one ear. Since I had seen Sinister the night before, I listened to the second half of Kevin Smith's SMovieMakers interview with Sinister's writer/director Scott Derrickson.
Even with my attention divided, the time of night was starting to wear on me, and I did end up nodding off for a while.


Post-Devils, it was time for the marathon, now about three hours behind schedule, to enter a "last push" phase itself. A decision had to be made whether or not to drop a full movie or barrel through, drop most of the trailers, and go a little past the noon deadline. The choice was made to try to fit in all of the movies that were booked.

The sleepiness that hit me during The Devils continued through the next two movies.



DEAD ALIVE (1992)

This is another movie I wrote about for SHOCKtober, but as awesome as Peter Jackson's take on the zombie genre is, it was no match for how tired I was at this point in the night. By the time Vera Cosgrove was having her encounter with the Sumatran Rat-Monkey, I was passing out. I slept through pretty much the entire movie from then on, my eyes just opening to catch random seconds here and there - the end of the funeral scene, "I kick ass for the Lord!", bits of zombie mayhem.

VIDEODROME (1983)

I had even worse luck staying awake during David Cronenberg's prescient "horrors of television" movie. I got to see almost nothing of this one.

I was awake for the breaks between the movies, and after Videodrome the winner of the Horror Hall of Fame was announced. The new inductee: Christopher Lee. I think it was during this break that Caligari also announced the winners of the trivia contest. Since only two people of the three hundred or so in attendance had turned in their trivia papers, and both scored highly, both of them got prizes.

THE LAST CIRCUS (2010)

I made an attempt to sit through The Last Circus, but it quickly became apparent that this story of the violent competition two clowns have over a beautiful trapeze artist, a film in Spanish with English subtitles, was not going to end my sleeping streak. I didn't want to just keep sleeping through movies, so I spent most of this one standing around out in the lobby.

My time in the lobby did successfully reinvigorate me for the last two movies, a werewolf double feature.



WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS (1971)

Werewolves on Wheels has been a presence at almost every Columbus marathon I've attended over the last eleven years, because its trailer has been shown at most of them. I see it as a tradition, at some point during the show we will be told about "the first horror motorcycle film ever made". It's an awesome trailer that always gets a good reaction from the crowd, and I was so blown away by it when I saw it at my first marathon in 2001 that one of the first things I did when I got back home was buy a copy of the movie on VHS off eBay. WOW actually being booked in line-up was a long time coming. This year, at a marathon that started off with the WOW trailer in the first trailer block, the crowd got to find out what I found out in 2001: the full movie does not live up to the greatness of its trailer.

Still, while the movie's slow pace and padding can be a letdown compared to the 96 second marketing piece that was cut together for it, this film about a group of bikers being torn apart by a curse of lycanthropy put on them by Satanic monks does have its own enjoyable, drive-in style charm.



AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

Following an obscure entry in the werewolf subgenre, the marathon was capped off with a true classic, possibly the most beloved werewolf movie ever made. And if it hasn't achieved that title, it's at least the most beloved werewolf movie that doesn't star Lon Chaney Jr.

AWIL isn't one of my personal top favorites, aside from the Nazi mutant nightmare I think the second act drags a bit, but it is a fun movie with some very funny moments and unquestionably the most impressive werewolf transformation ever put on film, thanks to special effects genius Rick Baker.

As the end credits of AWIL scrolled on the screen and the sound of "Blue Moon" filled the air, I made my way out of the auditorium for the last time at this Shock Around the Clock. Joe and Bruce were standing near the door as marathoners filed by, and I gave them an appreciative nod as I passed. When I pushed the doors and was smacked in the face by the light of the outside world, it was almost 1:30. The marathon had basically run an entire move overtime, but at least we were able to fit everything in somehow.

As always, I very much enjoyed my time in the marathon world, as I said in my write-up of the previous one, these events are always a highlight of my year.

Thanks to Joe and Bruce for organizing and hosting, thanks to the Grandview owners for continuing to give the marathon a home, to the staff for obliging us for 24+ hours straight, and thanks to the marathon crowds for being the best cinema audiences that I've ever been a part of.