AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A SCIENTIST!

The Man From Colorado (1948)

The brutalities of the Civil War trigger a psychosis in Colonel Owen Devereaux (Glenn Ford), who develops a lust for killing fed all too easily by the horrors of warfare, In the dying days of the conflict, Devereaux and his men corner a group of Confederates, who raise a flag of truce. Devereaux sees it – but orders his men to fire anyway. In the gruesome aftermath, the remnants of the white flag are discovered by Major Del Stewart (William Holden), Devereaux’s second-in-command and best friend, who makes the desperate decision to destroy the evidence, keeping the secret even when it is revealed that at the time of the massacre, the war was over. The two men return to their home town in Colorado to a hero’s reception – and, in Devereaux’s case, the offer of a judgeship, which he accepts. Stewart confides the truth to Devereaux’s uncle, Doc Merriam (Edgar Buchanan), who insists that it is the responsibility of Devereaux’s friends to help him recover from his “illness”. Stewart reluctantly accepts the post of Federal Marshall, trying to help Devereaux even when the new judge wins the hand of Caroline Emmet (Ellen Drew), the woman they both love. Conflict arises in the town between the returned soldiers and the mining company that has claimed their land in their absence; and as the violence escalates, Stewart is forced to take drastic action as Devereaux gives new meaning to the expression hanging judge.... The Man From Colorado is an unnerving psychological western that sits comfortably amongst the works of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, although it is finally even grimmer and more violent than most of those. The main problem is that we are never given any real sense of Owen Devereaux before the war; consequently, we never know whether the war “made” him this way, or whether it merely provided the circumstances under which Devereaux’s pre-existant psychosis could flourish. The friendship of Stewart and the love of Caroline do suggest the former, but given Devereaux’s success in concealing his illness even when it most has him in its grip, the issue remains uncertain. In any case, the film’s depiction of abuse of judicial power remains disturbing, while the plight of the disenfranchised soldiers, robbed of their land and their livelihood through a legal loophole that the legislators surely never intended, is affecting; the turning of these men to banditry is as tragic as it is inevitable. The film is relentless in its escalating horrors, at least until its ill-judged coda; ill-judged not in content, but in execution: with all that has happened, with all that is yet to happen, these people should not be smiling as they wave goodbye! Still, you can understand the film-makers wanting to relieve the misery just a little bit. Glenn Ford seems to have relished his against-type casting as Devereaux. William Holden has a tougher task as Stewart, again because of the lack of backstory, but he does well in conveying Stewart’s torn loyalties and his doomed attempts to serve justice and Devereaux at the same time. Ellen Drew is not particularly well treated by the script, but she has her moments when Caroline finally rebels against her husband. Ray Collins and James Millican score as, respectively, the head of the usurping mining company and the leader of the ex-military bandits.

The Mean Season (1985)

On the verge of quitting his job to become editor of a small-town newspaper, Miami Post journalist Malcolm Anderson (Kurt Russell) is sent to cover the murder of a young woman. Anderson’s reports draw the attention of the killer, who begins to contact him by phone, telling him, among other things, that there will be four more murders. As the killer makes good on his threats, public attention begins to shift to Anderson himself, who suddenly finds that his exclusive reports have made him a celebrity. The killer, furious at losing the public eye, contacts Anderson again and tells him he knows a way to get back all the attention he craves.... The Mean Season is half a very good film. Its set-up is fascinating, and about as morally convoluted as you could possibly desire, as Malcolm Anderson moves from writing the news to making the news to being the news. It is also bitterly critical of the tactics employed by certain sections of the media in pursuit of “the news”. The scene that lingers most when all is said and done is that in which Malcolm and his photographer contrive to be with the victim’s mother when the phone-call confirming her daughter’s fate comes: the photographer carefully times his shot to catch the woman at the height of her grief, while Malcolm takes advantage of the moment to steal snapshots of the girl from the family album. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen! But once the killer steps out of the shadows, the film deteriorates into just one more generic thriller, and one, moreover, that never bothers to tie up any of its loose ends. It is also far too dependent on the courageous – read, stupid – behaviour of its characters. Well, maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know. People in films always do that “If I change my routine, the killer has won!” thing, when in the same situation, I know I’d be barricaded behind about sixteen locked doors and demanding police protection. I guess I’m just a coward. Then again, the people who defiantly go about their normal business always seem to end up kidnapped and/or dead, so maybe there’s something to be said for cowardice, after all. Kurt Russell is very good as Malcolm Anderson, not afraid to be unsympathetic; but as his girlfriend, Christine, Mariel Hemingway is all too obviously just there to end up kidnapped and/or dead. A young Andy Garcia is one of the cops on the case. The film was shot in Florida, and uses its locations well.

Midnight Lace (1960)

After an embassy party, American wife in London Kit Preston (Doris Day) is taking a shortcut home through a fog-shrouded park when a strange, high-pitched voice suddenly speaks to her from the darkness – and threatens her by name. The terrified Kit makes it home to her businessman husband, Tony Preston (Rex Harrison), who manages to convince her that it was probably just a sick practical joke. But then the obscene phone-calls start – and the death threats. The Prestons report the situation to Scotland Yard, but the investigation stalls when Kit is unable to prove her allegations. To her horror, she soon realises that not only are her husband and her Aunt Bea (Myrna Loy) beginning to doubt her word, they may be beginning to doubt her sanity.... Midnight Lace represents a fair entry in the “persecuted woman” school of thrillers, and Day, although occasionally over the top in Kit’s hysteria scenes, does a better job with her mingled fear, frustration and indignation upon realising that even her nearest and dearest are starting to suspect she’s making the whole story up. (Married to a workaholic and still waiting for her honeymoon, Kit “gets a phone-call” every time something interferes with her and her husband’s romantic plans.) Of course, it’s Doris, so we believe her – right? Midnight Lace does a fair job of setting up possible suspects – slimy Roddy McDowall, financially desperate Herbert Marshall, kind passer-by John Gavin, mysterious scarred stranger Anthony Dawson – but no-one experienced in this kind of film should have any difficulty picking the guilty party. John Williams lends good support as yet another easy-to-under-estimate Scotland Yard inspector. (Curiously, both he and Anthony Dawson play almost the same roles in this as they did in Dial M For Murder six years earlier.)

Midnight Shadow (1939)

Wow, my first “race film”.... Lord, what an appalling expression that is. It’s hard to know how to react to these ultra-low budget, all-black movies. On one hand, their absolute lack of any social reality and the knowledge that the majority of these productions emanated from white-run companies seeking to inculcate black audiences with the values that would make them “socially acceptable” gives these films a queasy undercurrent. On the other hand, given the utterly demeaning depiction of black people in most mainstream films of the time, seeing them portrayed as normal, intelligent, responsible human beings is very satisfying. Midnight Shadow is an odd little film that changes gears abruptly about halfway through. It starts out as a serious drama about a girl, Margaret Wilson (Frances Redd), who is being courted by a stage mentalist who calls himself “Prince Alihabad” (John Criner); he’s the kind who wears a turban off-stage as well as on. Dazzled by “the Prince”, Mr Wilson (Clinton Rosemond) foolishly reveals that he owns a very valuable piece of oil-bearing land in Texas, which he intends for Margaret’s dowry. This piece of information, and where the deed to the land is kept, reaches not just the Prince, but Margaret’s disgruntled ex-boyfriend, Buster (Edward Brandon), who is waiting for her in the next room, and a mysterious figure lurking in the bushes outside the house. So it is perhaps not surprising when, the next morning, Mr Wilson is dead, the deed is gone, and all three men are missing.... And here Midnight Shadow takes a sharp left-turn, as the “investigation” falls to the province of two bumbling private detectives, brothers Lightfoot (Buck Woods) and Junior Lingley (Richard Bates), the latter of whom favours a deerstalker and a Meerschaum pipe. Weirdly, the film treats these two almost with a straight face. Although they are – self-evidently – the Odious Comic Reliefs, the head of the Texas oil company they interview answers their questions seriously, not batting an eye at Junior’s get-up; and in the end, they do in fact catch the killer. From the film’s handling of these characters, and the lack of explanation or introduction for them, I’m inclined to assume that either Buck Woods and Richard Bates were an established act whose schtick the audience was expected to be familiar with, or that there was a series of films featuring their antics. Otherwise, the acting in Midnight Shadow is fairly awkward, although not terrible, with Ollie Ann Robinson taking the honours as the tart-tongued Mrs Wilson.

Mister Frost (1990)

Police inspector Felix Detweiler (Alan Bates) visits the country estate of Mister Frost (Jeff Goldblum), apologetically responding to an unlikely report of a dead body on the premises. Frost replies cheerfully that he just finished burying it.... The police investigation that follows discovers twenty-four mutilated bodies, men, women and children. Two years later, Frost is transferred to the experimental St Clare psychiatric hospital, having not spoken a single word through two years of incarceration and examination. However, as soon as he lays eyes upon Dr Sarah Day (Kathy Baker), he announces that he will speak to her, and to her alone. As their sessions begin, Frost announces to Sarah that he is no-one less than Satan himself, and that he intends to use her to remind the world of his existence – by making her believe in him to the point where she will kill him.... About halfway through Mister Frost, it struck me how much the film resembles The Medusa Touch: the co-co-co-country production, and the consequent bewildering mixture of accents and nationalities; the central cop-shrink-patient triangle; and the ever-increasing absurdities of its action. But Mister Frost isn’t nearly so much evil fun as The Medusa Touch. The film suffers fatally from its conviction that it’s saying something terribly important – and from the extent to which it has to stack the deck in order to say it. Satan has come to the world in person, we learn, to fight back against his real enemy: “science”; “science”, which has undermined belief in Good and Evil, with its cursed “explanation for everything”. The problem is that the “science” that Mr Frost is battling here is a paper tiger. The functioning of the hospital to which he is sent is frankly ludicrous; the doctors running it are a bunch of screw-ups and emotional cripples; and Sarah Day herself is not just atheistic, but so sceptical, so smug, so obviously riding for a fall that the film’s outcome is apparent from its opening scenes. (In the film’s blinkered pursuit of its “message”, the possibility that a belief in science and a belief in God might co-exist – which, just for the record, they often do – is never allowed an instant’s consideration.) And even then the ending doesn’t make much sense: it doesn’t seem to occur to Sarah that if Frost, as she comes to believe, is who he claims to be, then the last thing in the world she should be doing is what he says. Jeff Goldblum has a fine old time as Frost – has there ever been an actor that didn’t, in that role? – but Alan Bates is strangely lethargic as Detweiler, while the usually reliable Kathy Baker is actually pretty awful as Sarah, particularly during the first half of the film. Her performance improves later on, essentially from the point of the film’s best moment, when Sarah gets under Frost’s skin by telling him, “You’re like a washed-up actor trying to make a comeback – and nobody gives a damn.“

Mr Wong, Detective (1938)

The head of a chemical manufacturing firm is found murdered in his office. The suspects include the “foreigners” (most of whom aren’t) who were determined to stop the shipment of a poisoned gas to be used against their country; the dead man’s business partners, who profit substantially from his death; and the biochemist who accused the dead man of stealing his poison gas formula. Mr Wong, Detective features Boris Karloff’s first outing as “the Chinese detective”, James Lee Wong, and has the strongest story of any entry in the series: the who-dunnit and, in particular, the how-dunnit aspects are quite clever. Two sequences stand out: first, SCIENCE!! – as Wong and some physicist friends try to reconstruct the murder weapon, a glass bubble filled with poison gas (was this before or after Agatha Christie’s “The Face Of Helen”?); and later, when Wong saves his own life by (Agatha again) pulling a “Philomel Cottage”, and convincing the bad guys they’ve been exposed to the gas. This episode has certain differences from the later Wong films: Captain Street’s (Grant Withers) girlfriend is corporate secretary Myra Ross (Maxine Jennings) rather than cub reporter Bobbie Logan, and Wong himself is much more overtly “Chinese”. (The studio may have decided to tone this aspect down.) There is an unavoidable cringe-factor attached to Boris Karloff’s casting as "a Chinaman”, but if you can get past that, we’re left as usual with the fact that this “Chinaman” is smarter, nicer and more successful than any of the Caucasians on display. One of Monogram’s better moments.

My Dear Killer (1972)

While overseeing the dredging of a quarry, a man is decapitated by claw scoop of the excavator. Soon afterwards, the man who supposedly was in charge of the excavator is found hanging in a barn, but Inspector Luca Peretti (George Hilton) determines that the apparent suicide is really another murder. Peretti learns that the first victim, Paradisi, was an investigator for an insurance company, who suddenly quit his job some time before. As he pursues his investigation, Peretti stumbles over frequent references to “the Moroni case”, and realises that the death of Paradisi is somehow linked to the unsolved kidnapping-murder of a young girl and her industrialist father more than a year earlier.... My Dear Killer is an unwontedly straightforward giallo, following Inspector Peretti as he tracks down the person responsible for both the gruesome deaths of the young Stefania Moroni and her father and the recent rash of murders. While not amongst the top echelon of its genre, the film nevertheless offers gialli fans plenty of the standard tropes to be going on with: a black-gloved killer, a child’s drawings as clues, the case solved through some outrageous deductive leaps, an Agatha Christie-like suspect-gathering denouement and a couple of spectacularly over-the-top killings. (While the quarry decapitation is a lulu, the high point of the film comes when--- Well, let’s just say that if you’re a character in a giallo, you probably shouldn’t keep a circular saw in your apartment.) There’s also a smattering of some very black humour. As the bodies start to pile up, the Inspector’s talent for arriving on the scene just five minutes too late becomes increasingly gigglesome, but the best bit is his demonstration of why the second victim couldn’t have committed suicide....which uses the still-hanging dead body as a prop. On the other hand, there’s nothing remotely amusing about the fate of Stefania, and this aspect of the film may be too much for some. We are shown her, bound and struggling, at the beginning of her captivity, and the script is blunt about her lingering death by starvation. Most appalling of all, though, and all the more so for just being a minor plot detour, is when the Inspector’s questioning of an obviously unbalanced sculptor is interrupted by the entrance of a buck naked little girl. “She’s a model!” explains the sculptor hurriedly, shooing her away – and who knows? – he may even be telling the truth. All we know for sure is that Our Hero doesn’t bother to stick around and find out.... George Hilton and Salvo Randone as his tart-tongued colleague make a fairly sympathetic pair of protagonists, while the rest of the characters are the usual hateful giallo crowd. Lara Wendel, who plays Stefania (and is billed here as Daniala Rachele Barnes), would appear ten years later in Tenebre, while the saw victim is Patty Shepard of La Noche De Walpurgis and La Tumba De La Isla Maldita.

Hearing that his good friend D’Arnot (who found him in the jungles of Africa in the first place) is missing after a plane crash in Guatemala, Tarzan (Herman Brix) goes in search of him in company with a British expedition headed by Major Martling (Frank Baker), who is seeking the Green Goddess, a totem worshipped by the natives that (somehow) contains “the most powerful explosive known to mankind”. Also after the Goddess is Raglan (one of the serial’s producers, Ashton Dearholt aka Don Castello, wisely casting himself as the villain), who intends to sell the explosive to munitions manufacturers, while Ula Vale (Ula Holt), searching for her fiancé, who was in the plane with D’Arnot, joins forces with the Martling expedition in order to thwart Raglan. This Edgar Rice Burroughs-produced serial is a real mixed bag. On the plus side, Herman Brix (later Bruce Bennet) probably does the Tarzan/Lord Greystoke transition better than anyone else ever did, being equally at home in loin cloth and evening clothes, while his natural athleticism makes his Tarzan convincing (although his yell is, frankly, a bit of a worry). The serial’s other virtue is its location shooting in Guatemala, which makes a very welcome change from the Californian forests that usually stand in for the “jungle” in these things. As for the rest of it, well, if you’re familiar with 30s serials, you know what to expect. Cheating cliffhangers abound (Annie Wilkes would hate this), as do geographical absurdities (characters travel between Mombasa and Guatemala in a matter of days); and the writers show a distinct tendency to forget their own story as they go along. Heroine Ula Vale starts out searching for her missing fiancé, and ends up all over Tarzan; a blonde – and distinctly hatchet-faced – “jungle goddess” in sub-Flash Gordon outfits turns up for five minutes and is never seen again; and, best of all, when Tarzan leaves Guatemala, he forgets to take his chimp with him!! As for the rest of it, how much entertainment anyone will derive from this serial might depend upon the extent to which they are able to find its racial-imperialist assumptions ludicrous rather than offensive. Personally, I parted company with the story at the point where the Odious Comic Relief – the Odious, Odious Comic Relief – whips a machine-gun from his backpack and slaughters about two hundred natives for having the temerity to object to their temple being plundered.

Yet another of the seemingly endless stream of thirties sex comedy/dramas, and even more insufferable than most. Marcia Townsend (Joan Crawford) loves Sheridan Warren (Robert Montgomery), despite his lack of character. He loves her, but continues to chase after every pretty woman who comes near him. Eventually, Sheridan promises reformation, and the two marry. All goes well for several months, until instead of joining Marcia in the country for a house party, Sheridan dallies in town with an old flame, and ends up spending the night with her; his infidelity is revealed when the alibi he gives, old friend Edgar Holden (Charles Ruggles), turns out to be a guest at the house party. Bitterly hurt, Marcia begins to contemplate retaliating in kind, her schemes of revenge fostered by Jim Salston (Franchot Tone), whose own marriage fell apart some years before when Sheridan had an affair with his wife.... The sexual double standard, which dictates that male promises mean little and female promises everything, that an unfaithful husband is to be forgiven with a minimum of fuss while an unfaithful wife is to be cast off with a minimum of delay, has been with us ever since---well, ever since men starting making the rules, I guess; but it has rarely been illustrated as baldly as it is in No More Ladies, with the film’s utter determination to make Marcia to blame for everything. Inasmuch as Marcia was dumb enough to marry a complete skunk like Sheridan, knowing full well that he was a complete skunk, it has some justification, I suppose; but when it comes to an indignant Sheridan, unfaithful and a liar and exposed as both, being allowed to claim the moral high ground over Marcia for her contemplated infidelity, and that without a flicker of irony, it all gets pretty nauseating. A good cast, which apart from the stars features Gail Patrick, Reginald Gardiner, Joan Fontaine and a show-stealing (as usual) Edna May Oliver, can’t rescue this. Rachel Crothers, who adapted A.E. Thomas’s play, had her name removed from the credits; director Edward Griffith fell ill during the production and quit; George Cukor completed the film, but refused screen credit. I don’t blame any of them.

Also known as Two Against The World, this re-make of Edward G. Robinson’s 1931 film Five Star Final has Humphrey Bogart stepping into EGR’s shoes. Bogart stars as Sherry Scott, the manager of a radio station who, out of fear of losing his job, goes along with station owner Bertram Reynolds’ (Robert Middlemass) insistence on pitching their material at an ever-lower common denominator. (Accused of thinking too much “above” the station’s audience, Scott growls, “You could sit on a toadstool and be above ours.”) In pursuit of a sensationalist attraction, Reynolds has “Dr” Martin Leavenworth (Harry Hayden) dig up a twenty-year-old murder case and turn it into a, ahem, “morality play”. The woman tried for killing her husband, former chorus-girl Grace Pembroke, is now Mrs Carstairs (Helen McKellar), whose daughter, Edith (Linda Perry), unaware of her mother’s past, is on the eve of marriage to Malcolm Sims Jr (Carlyle Moore Jr), the son of a steel magnate. The announcement of the radio station’s plans lands like a bomb in the middle of the family’s wedding-plans, and Edith’s parents fight desperately to prevent the serial going ahead, all the while trying to keep their secret from their daughter. In doing so, they inadvertently reveal it instead to the man most eager to exploit it.... It would be nice to be able to say that One Fatal Hour has no relevance to modern audiences, but--- While this film isn’t up to the standard of the original version, it still manages, despite running under an hour, to get in any number of blows aimed at the ethics, or lack thereof, of those who control our major media outlets. The increasing desperation of the Carstairs, stone-walled by the utter refusal of anyone connected with the planned radio play to take ultimate responsibility for it and its consequences, builds finally to a shocking but inevitable tragedy; the distribution of blame, and the acceptance of responsibility, come, as usual, far too late. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this film, a plot point introduced most off-handedly about two-thirds of the way through, is that Grace Pembroke was actually acquitted....a fact that evidently means nothing to anybody. She is referred to as “the murderess” in the radio station’s advertising, and that is the word that Malcolm Sims’ parents use, too, when they barge in to announce that their son’s engagement is off. (That Malcolm Jr has his own ideas on that subject is the one tiny glimmer of hope anywhere in this grim tale.) Still finding his professional niche, Bogart is interesting here, although it isn’t one of his better performances, possibly because Scott is given too much room to move in, morally speaking; the film would be stronger if he were more actively culpable, rather than guilty-by-passivity. Nor is Beverly Roberts given enough to do as Alma, Scott’s secretary-cum-conscience. The film’s stand-out performance, however, comes from Harry Hayden as the radio station’s sanctimonious poison-pen; and the accompanying implication, that “Dr” Leavenworth is in fact a former man of the cloth, puts a seal of disgust on this whole sorry story.

(An extra point of interest for modern audiences comes in the mock-argument between Edith and Malcolm over whether the word “obey” should be included in the marriage ceremony. We never get an answer and, alas, before much longer that’s the least of their problems.)

American Bob Warde (William Desmond), at work in

China

, is left at a loose end when the outbreak of a revolution puts paid to his engineering job. As the city is evacuated, Bob encounters Professor Hargraves (James Durkin) and his daughter, Pauline (Evalyn Knapp), who are searching for a sacred disc that has inscribed upon it the formula for a poison gas that, in the wrong hands, could destroy humanity. They are opposed by Dr Bashan (John Davidson), a Eurasian who wants the gas for evil purposes. Almost at the cost of their lives, the Professor and Pauline locate their object in a local temple, but learn that the sacred disc was divided into pieces and hidden all over the world, to reduce its danger. Joining forces, the Professor, Pauline and Bob embark upon a world-wide search, dogged every step of the way by the deadly and obsessed Dr Bashan.... In one sense, The Perils Of Pauline is the definitive serial. Its story takes us all over the world, from China to Borneo – a detour highlighted by stock footage of hippos and zebras – to Singapore to India to southern Africa to Egypt to New York City; during this journey, the serial makes use of newsreel footage of the promotional around-the-world flight of the German flying boat, the Do X, at the time the largest and most luxurious plane in the world. Inevitably, however, the story suffers from all the usual assumptions of the time, chief amongst them being that white people have a God-given right to wander into temples all over the world and help themselves to whatever they like – and if the locals get in the way, well, we know how to deal with them, right? And then there’s the fact that Pauline’s perils are, for the most part, her own damn fault: for some reason, her father keeps intrusting her with valuable artefacts, and she keeps responding by standing near opens doors and windows and reassuring him that, “IT’S QUITE SAFE, FATHER. I’VE HIDDEN IT IN MY LUGGAGE. NO, NOT THE SUITCASE, THE LITTLE CARRY-CASE. THE ONE WITH THE KEY THAT I KEEP IN THE TOP LEFT-HAND DRAWER OF MY DRESSER”....and then looking surprised when she’s robbed. And, also inevitably, there is – sigh – the Odious Comic Relief, in the shape of Professor Hargraves’ shrieking cowardly secretary, Willie Dodge (Sonny Ray). The way this character [sic.] is used is truly odd. In most cases, no matter how unbearable we find the OCR, the other characters find him funny; here, everyone else is as tortured by Dodge’s behaviour as we are....and yet they keep him around!? However, the demerits of The Perils Of Pauline are compensated by its deliciously over-the-top Bad Guy, Dr Bashan: we know what to think of him as soon as he’s described in the first episode as “the Eurasian”. It’s just as well we do, too, because the script never bothers to explain just who or what he is. He’s referred to a few times as “a religious fanatic”, and it is implied that he’s some kind of high priest, but who exactly he’s representing is left to our imaginations. All we know is, he has limitless resources, and some pretty impressive connections, for a Bad Guy. (Entering the US, Bashan briefly falls foul of Immigration. Not to worry. He simply phones a local big-wig and gets himself released!!!!) Bashan’s ability instantly to summon up crews of henchmen no matter where he is in the world is remarkable, too – although best of all is his Number One Henchman, Fang (Frank Lackteen), who is one of those beyond-all-reason guys who for some reason stay loyal no matter how badly they’re treated. In one hilarious sequence, as Fang is trying to steal the MacGuffin, he is menaced by a python, mauled by a leopard, and captured by the good guys. To avoid being made to talk, he throws himself into a crocodile-infested river and outswims the crocs, then staggers about ten miles through the jungle to reach Bashan. Bashan’s greeting? “YOU HAVE FAILED!!” For the rest, two sequences stand out. First, near the beginning, the Professor and Pauline attempt to locate the first piece of the disc inside a temple while it is being shelled. This episode includes a shot of a statue outside the temple, with a shell exploding right next to it....at shot that is repeated about twenty times. <Steve Martin> "They hate that statue! </Steve Martin> The other, my absolute favourite, naturally, comes when the story reaches Singapore, and our characters find themselves in a hotel that features an unfenced shark pool out in the garden: you can’t help wondering how many inebriated guests never actually found their way back to their rooms over the years. And of course, this episode culminates in a fist-fight staged on the astonishingly flimsy balcony of our heroine’s room, which just happens to be directly over the pool....

Girdler! Nielsen! Lockwood! Kwan! Diaz! My friends, I do believe I have reached the point where I can say without irony, Don’t you miss the seventies? This first collaboration between long-time buddies William Girdler and Leslie Nielsen sees the latter cast as John Trevor, the head of a covert government operation that, between training and drugs, churns out robotic killers, ostensibly as body-guards, but in fact, as Trevor belatedly accepts, as assassins. Unable to take any more, Trevor threatens to blow the lid on the operation and then flees to Manila, hoping that some old friends, also government operation casualties, will be able to help him avoid his manifest destiny. Meanwhile, Trevor’s second-in-command, Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood), is ordered to stop him – one way or the other. Project: Kill is a painfully uneven effort that never quite reaches the heights of hilarity that we might have expected, given its premise and its Leslie-Nielsen-dead-straight component. Still, it has its moments, and in that inimitable seventies way, it reeks of paranoia and cynicism. The combined clumsiness of the screenplay and some of the performances is both the film’s nemesis and its saving grace. Flubbed lines abound, most deliriously, Leslie Nielsen’s early film declaration that his students will learn to make a deadly weapon out of anything, “from toenail-clippings to a briefcase”. No, really: I listened twice, and he definitely says –ings, not –ers. Co-star Gary Lockwood does in fact beat somebody up with a briefcase later on but, alas, the film never makes good on the other half of that implicit promise. (Cue mental images of Monty Python's "Self-Defence Against Fresh Fruit" sketch.) Flanked by the Filipino police, who are fed a line of bull about stolen treasury plates to secure their co-operation, and some supposedly Chinese mobsters, who want the secret of the drugs that the

government uses to produce its killers, Trevor and Lassiter close in on one another, each leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. The film’s climax is their inevitable showdown. One can only gaze in awe at a film that dares to cast a couple of pudgy white guys as the world’s deadliest hands-on killers; but when those pudgy white guys, clad in the height of seventies anti-fashion, face off in the slowest, most awkwardly staged kung fu fight imaginable, well, it’s a sight to make the heart soar. For what it’s worth, Nielsen was in better shape than Lockwood, although both men have prominent love-handles. Lockwood also comes accessorised by what looks like history’s worst toupee, but given that he punctuates any dramatic declaration or action by violently flipping his hair back, I guess it can’t have been. Nancy Kwan, one of this film’s pre-production selling points, is pretty much wasted as the woman who embarks on a doomed love affair with Trevor. The head of the, ahem, Chinese mob is played by Vic Diaz – obviously. There was a statute on the books at that time making it illegal to produce any film in the

Philippines

without casting Vic Diaz, wasn’t there? Intended for an international cinema release, Project: Kill went missing-in-action for many years after its intended distributor became the victim of a mob-style hit.

One of the inadvertent consequences of the current noxious trend of PG-rated slasher movies is that films like Prom Night, which twenty years ago was an irredeemable piece of trash, now looks like a perfectly respectable piece of film-making. As slasher movies go, though, this one is pretty weak tea. It starts well enough with the traditional trauma scene, in which Robin Hammond (Tammy Bourne) is accidentally killed during a children’s game turned nasty. The other parties involved swear eternal silence – and we know how well that always turns out, right? Six years later, as Alexander Hamilton High School prepares for its prom – an event that happens to coincide with the anniversary of Robin’s death – the guilty parties begin to receive threatening phone-calls.... After that opening sequence, it is a full hour until the film’s first kill – chiefly because its bare plot bones are swiped from Halloween, as well as its leading lady, and the pairing-up of a cop and a shrink, which here amounts to very little. Amusingly, however, Prom Night’s most egregious thieving is from Carrie: the prom (duh!), the high school bitch-princess plotting against the King and Queen, the involvement of the gym teacher.... Most of this is ultimately irrelevant, except as a setting. The film is overly discreet, one must say, in respect to both its violence and its nudity; and despite its hilariously matter-of-fact roll-out of a list of suspects – escaped maniac? check; creepy groundskeeper with power tool? check; suspicious hangers-on suffering various degrees of disgruntlement? check – the killer’s identity is never in much doubt. The film’s main pleasures are chiefly incidental to the action. Leslie Nielsen, top-billed as Principal Hammond, really has no more than a glorified cameo (and we know what that usually means in films like this....mwoo-ha-ha!); but we do get to see him tuxedo-ed and getting down on the dance-floor; and if that doesn’t float your boat, how about Jamie Lee Curtis in a hideously unflattering dress proving that She Is The Dancing Queen, opposite a partner in a prom suit with lapels to rival Homer Simpson’s? (Prom Night was released one month after Can’t Stop The Music; and if that monstrosity hadn’t dealt disco its death-blow, this certainly would have done. “Disco Madness”, indeed.) The film’s killings, with one exception, are neither explicit nor particularly memorable – although, granted, that one exception is a very big exception – and the the killer’s identity, while not unexpected, carries with it a genuine emotional resonance, particularly given the circumstances surrounding its revelation. Actually, Prom Night is more interesting on a dramatic level than it is as a slasher – how often can you say that? – and the most interesting thing about it is its approach to sex, particularly as the representative of a sub-genre often condemned, and sometimes justly, for a reactionary “have sex and die” attitude. What Prom Night delivers is something more realistic, and considerably more level-headed; something that, in this context, is probably deserving of a closer examination....and one day, might just get one.