Avenue Kurtodrome

For more than a decade noone wanted to make a horror movie in Holland. All of a sudden two appeared out of nowhere. The first was Sl8n8, the second Dood Eind. Whereas the former took pride in a star-studded cast (read: four people you already knew from other movies), the latter went for the special effects. More about Dood Eind (Dead End) later in the year, tonight we focus on the movie with the crappy title. The Dutch word for Slaughter Night (the film’s international title) is “slachtnacht” and - wouldn’t you know 8 is spelled “acht” in Dutch. Hence the clever Sl8n8. It’s enough to make one skip the movie. Well, of course they thought it would draw the mobile phone generation to the theatres, being all wicked with its use of numbers.

Next up: the cast. This is led by Russian-Dutch icequeen Victoria Koblenko and Kurt Rogiers, who’s Belgian and excels in appearing in terminally hip Dutch shows and crappy movies. Now that’s promising! The rest of the cast are unknowns, which - combined with the knowledge that the movie includes the word ’slaughter’ in its title - enables you to guess just which two characters will survive the night.

Whereas Dood Eind has the advantage of my having seen an interview with the creators (where they expressed their love of horror movies), Sl8n8 has me puzzled: I’m still not sure whether this was an attempt to make a genuine horror movie (for the love of the genre) or an attempt to mix as many horror clichés together and make the mix look like a movie.

Bear with me as we’ll dissect the plot: Kris, a young girl (Koblenko), is in having a row with her father when their car is hit by a truck. As the trucker tries to get her dad out of the vehicle while Kris is calling the emergency line, the car explodes. After his death Kris imagines hearing her father’s footsteps and finds out about his work when the window suddenly blows open in the middle of the night. Also, the tv set suddenly starts playing, but this is apparently normal and the only electronic device to behave abnormal in the entire movie. Anyway, Kris volunteers to get her dad’s stuff from his office in Belgium. It turns out that dad was writing a book about an alleged devilish person. Anyway, Kris heads to Belgium with her bunch of annoying friends and, judging by everyone’s reactions, the Dutch mourn the dead for just about 38 hours. Her father’s boss sort of forces her to visit a tour down the mine shaft, claiming her dad couldn’t stay out of the mine himself, and so down Kris and her friends go, together with a Belgian guy (Rogiers) who’s taking a disfunctional brother and sister down the mine for therapeutic reasons. Therapy is apparently quite different in Belgium.

Anyway, despite the guided tour being there on regular hours, someone forgot about this tour group and closed off the electricity which helps the elevator go up. So what does one do while the tour guide is going to climb up an alternative way up (a ladder, conveniantly located somewhere completely different)… oh, why not a lovely session with the ouija board? Anyway, the ghost of the devilish person (who, after killing seven - sorry, se7en - people was forced to work down the mine) enters one of the Belgians in need of therapy, the possessed Belgian hits a Dutch girl on the head (massive head wound) and runs away from the group. Not really wicked, eh?

And that’s when the shit really hits the fan: both in the movie and for the viewers. In the movie the eight - sorry, 8 - find out that, according to the legend, it would take the devilish man exactly eight people to get out of hell. Oops! Eerily enough, whenever a person is possessed by the demon their teeth deteriorate. I kid you not, they suddenly have bad teeth. It is probably the first movie where demonic spirits are linked to tooth decay. And if you thought that still made sense… how about the elevator that seems to work only when the characters need to get up? Or the demonic entity also taking the elevator up to chase some victims, thus completely ignoring the demon was allegedly trapped in the mine?

But all this is not even as bad the most awful thing about the movie: in order to look cool the directors wanted to shake the image during the action scenes. To do this, they must’ve hired a cameraman suffering from the worst case of Parkinson’s disease, strapped in a wheelchair with uneven wheels. I swear, the only way you can sort of see what’s happening in Sl8n8 is by furiously headbanging in the opposite direction. After five minutes of this movie you’re exhausted!

Anyway, in case you become too tired to watch the climax of the movie: it’s quite predictable and you’re not missing much. To be fair, Victoria Koblenko is a good lead, but there’s nothing for her to lead: not the rest of the cast you can’t warm up to, not the cliché-ridden plot, not the awful camerawork. One can only hope Dood Eind will prove to be a bit more fulfilling. If you wait more than a decade for a homegrown horror movie (provided you’re Dutch) and are treated to a bag of clichés any Hollywood movie could’ve given you, you can only feel disappointed.

3.5/10

Hands up if you didn’t expect me to review this one. Well, to be honest, this movie was offered for free by my digital tv provider. It’s as good an excuse as any, really.

Anyway, it gave me a chance to see a recent Wayans brothers movie. I knew them from long ago (when they made In Living Color, which was responsible for the success of the Wayans family as well as a certain James Carrey). I also know their recent reputation (makers of unfunny comedies) and watched The Daily Show episode with one Wayans family member. A clip from their most recent movie Little Man was shown and - literally - three people in the audience had to laugh. Not the best of signs.

Scary Movie is better than Little Man, though do not force me to watch Scary Movie 3. The first two scenes (incl. a parody of Scream - which used “Scary Movie” as a working title) I found genuinely funny. In fact, don’t believe the people who maintain In Living Color was highbrow. It wasn’t.
After a good start the movie continues with unfunny material. In the end I decided to keep a chart, carefully noting the scenes and jokes I loved vs. those I hated. The result? 21scenes and jokes made me laugh (or chuckle), 54 I truly hated. (That would’ve been 52, but the end credits feature two jokes, one even worse than the other.) Nevertheless, 21 good scenes or jokes isn’t that bad: it means that statistically Scary Movie is seven times as funny as Be Kind, Rewind (the horror, the horror).

Among the scenes I really didn’t like were the overused joke that one character may be gay and all the scenes with Marlon Wayans as a pot smoker. You’d almost be excused for thinking Marlon is a crappy actor (he’s also the unfunniest person in the joke-free Little Man) but don’t forget he was also in Requiem for a Dream. So, it isn’t that he isn’t a good actor, it’s just that he has a horrible taste for comedy.

All in all, for every excellent parody Scary Movie tends to serve you (i.e. Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer) you also get an unfunny parody (The Blair Witch Project’s parody is by far the worst) and own material which should’ve stayed on the drawing board. There’s also much too much emphasis on the meta-joke (”It’s as if we were in a movie.” - “We are, there is the director and the scriptgirl.”) even though this sometimes works (”You can’t do this to me!” - “Why not? Did you think I Know What You Did Last Summer made any sense?”).

The math genius in me decided that 21 in favour versus 54 against with a lot of undecided moments equals 28%. If we’re lenient, we’ll make that 3/10. But don’t expect me to find screenshots or posters for this post.

There’s a good occasion to review Messiah of Evil (a.k.a. Dead People) now: it became a public domain movie a couple of years ago, but now it’s become downloadable (legally!) at the Internet Archive.

The film’s plot is wacky enough: a young woman (Marianne Hill) goes to California to find out what has happened to her father, an eccentric artist. Once she arrives at the beach house, she finds out her father wasn’t the only peculiar guy around. What a strange town it appears to be!

The movie is decent and the scene in the movie theatre should be labelled as downright classic. Five years before Romero’s Dawn of the Dead this movie had an idea where zombies go when they’re roaming around. The supermall is fine, how about a ticket to the movies?
The theatre sequence builds up slowly (it lasts well over six minutes) but effectively: we (unlike the girl) know she’s the only human in the theatre and know trouble is brewing when the audience is filling up (ever so slowly) by dead people. While the character is awaiting the main attraction (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - surely a joke if you know the town is taken over by zombies) she and you are treated to some trailers. That’s always a sign of a love for cinema… genuine cult cinema likes to include clips from other movies, just remember how Django was incorporated into The Harder They Come (1972).
(If you can’t wait to watch this scene from Messiah of Evil, don’t despair: you can find it at the bottom of this article.)

The writer and director of Messiah of Evil is Willard Huyck. Huyck directed only four movies, with Messiah of Evil as his debut and Howard The Duck as his (erm) swan song. His penultimate directing job was Best Defense, a comedy with Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy. All this makes you wonder: how can it go so bad for a director?

But, rather than wondering about that, let’s look at what Huyck was able to pen: that list includes Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and American Graffiti. American Graffiti was released in the same year as Messiah of Evil, by the way: 1973 must’ve been Huyck’s creative peak. Let us also not forget the influence of Huyck’s wife, Gloria Katz. Huyck and Katz tended to write together. Messiah of Evil is the only movie where she also helped him direct (albeit uncredited).

As 70s cult movies come, Messiah of Evil was released under a shower of alternative titles. Apparently the official title is Dead People, but I must confess I never saw a print of the movie under that title. The quite generic The Second Coming is another title and of course there’s Revenge of the Screaming Dead, which makes you assume you’ll be treated to a gore movie. Messiah of Evil sounds more occult and is therefore the best title for this movie. It may not be the scariest movie you’ll ever see, but it packs loads of atmosphere and definitely deserves more recognition.

Occasionally the movie plays like a bad trip, especially in the scene where our heroine, in the artist’s peculiar house, sticks a needle into her leg and has a rather nasty hallucination:

Messiah of Evil is available (as Dead People) over at the Internet Archive. You can download it as MPEG1, MPEG2 or MPEG4 here. You can also download it from the equally legal Public Domain Torrents (link). It’s also available on DVD. It’s on a double bill with the Belgian horror The Devil’s Nightmare, courtesy of TGG Direct (link) or, courtesy of Alpha Video, on a disc together with Sisters of Death (link). Both fine movies, but let’s not forget today’s star attraction: Messiah of Evil.

And here it is, the doomed trip to the movies…

No war comes without a set of propaganda movies: some clearly intent to change your mind about how evil the other side is, some are merely exploitation.
Let’s face it, earlier on we already reviewed a Sherlock Holmes movie that was set in World War II, where Holmes (Basil Rathbone) tried to outwit the evil Nazis.

Hitler Dead or Alive (1942) is a similar exploitation movie: it’s a propaganda piece that’s so inept it’ll make you smile.
You can download it for free (legally, I like to add) at the Internet Archive or buy it on DVD.

The plot is fabulous: a group of ex-convicts take up the challenge to kill Adolf Hitler for one million dollars. The idea is that, if Hitler is dead, the war will end. Erm… right… that makes sense.
The film is full of such interesting plotlines. Here’s another one: the convicts are arrested and manage to conceal their plans by pouring pudding all over the hidden microphones (the microphones are hidden behind the cardboard walls, by the way).

I generally don’t like spoiling movies, but this is the sort of Badmovie which is enjoyed even more because you know what’ll happen. But if you don’t want to know: don’t read on…

You’re reading on? Okay, let me spoil some more of the plot (”plot”, used in the lightest possible meaning of the word): our heroes manage to get so close to Hitler they can capture him (see photo). The fierce Nazis want to kill our heroes, but Hitler begs for mercy. That is why our heroes manage to escape, with Hitler as a prisoner.

Because they don’t want everyone to see they’ve kidnapped Hitler… they shave off his moustache. This makes him completely unrecognizable. Which isn’t that strange: after all the actor who has to portray Htiler (Bobby Watson) doesn’t really look that much like the Führer. That Watson played Hitler several times came as a gigantic surprise to me.

Anyway, this leads to a catastrophic ending: the heroes are captured, as is Hitler. Not a single Nazi manages to recognize their leader without his moustache (I’m telling you, this is truly the plot outline!) and Adolf Hitler is shot. Along with our heroes and - for good measure - a bunch of innocent children. You see, we were almost starting to forget how evil the Nazis were.

Sadly, the war didn’t stop there and Germany is being led by a lookalike of Adolf Hitler (hrmm, heard that before). Surely they can find four other volunteers to shave off his moustache??

I can only recommend you to watch Hitler Dead or Alive, if only because it’s good to know that this sort of propaganda movies existed. I couldn’t take it serious for one minute and truly nothing pleads in the movie’s favour, but sixty years later it has finally become what it should’ve been called all along: a badmovie.

The first movie that springs to mind is Girlfight.
But this is not Girlfight. Yes, this is a movie about a girl who wants to make it in the world of female boxing. But that’s where the parallels end.
This is Dans Les Cordes.

This is the movie debut of director Magaly Richard-Serrano. If her name is familiar, you’re probably interested in boxing. Magaly Richard-Serrano is a former junior boxing champion of France and the niece of a former world champion. Boxing isn’t just a part of the family tradition, the boxing blood is running through Magaly’s veins.
And Richard-Serrano was able to translate this love onto the screen, so that we, non-boxing moviegoers, could also understand what it feels like to be a boxer.

Richard Anconina (Joseph) is a former boxer. He has a daughter (Angie), who wants to claim the junior title one day, and a niece (Sandra), who’s also into boxing. Sandra has been raised as a daughter ever since her mother died. Sandra looks up to Angie, but when Angie is severely wounded during a fight and has to skip the next match, Sandra seizes the opportunity to claim her share of the limelight, wins the match and becomes the champion in her category.
Which is when things get worse… Sandra suddenly starts to lose weight, so she could end up in Angie’s weight category and claim the title Angie hadn’t been able to win. Angie is furious. With her cousin, who even tries to fit Angie’s clothes so she can see how much weight she’s already lost. With her dad, for abandoning all hope in her. And with her mother, who starts blaming Sandra for everything, claiming she is as much of a rotten apple as her late sister (Sandra’s mother). One big happy family!
Angie and Sandra fall out, one training becomes extremely vicious (ever wanted to see two girls beat each other to pulp?) and the family ends up completely shattered. And this with the ultimate fight only days away…

More than Girlfight, Dans Les Cordes manages to capture the feeling of what it’s like to be a boxing girl. On the other hand, if you compare Girlfight and Dans Les Cordes, you’ll have to confess that in the end Girlfight is the better of the two movies.
Ultimately, the tragical history of Angie’s family lacks the intrigue to keep you interested for the full 90 minutes. To overcome that, the film should’ve focused more on the boxing itself or have focused more the characters (as it is, the characters are 2.5 dimensional rather than 3D).

Which doesn’t mean that Dans Les Cordes is not a good movie: my ultimate verdict for this movie will be 6.5 out of 10. But this 6.5 movie shows so much passion (for both boxing and cinema) that you’re willing to overlook the unfinished bits.

Louise Szpindel is very good as Angie. You sometimes wonder if boxing isn’t one of her hobbies. (I hadn’t seen her before, but this was already her tenth role.) Richard Anconina is very famous in France (though not a lot of his movies have made it across the border), but probably the most famous person (globally) in this movie is Maria de Medeiros, who gets to play the labile mother.

I read somewhere that the director worked six years on this film before it was finally finished. As is often the case with projects that take up such a long time, the result is not a complete success. I don’t know why: maybe because the people involved get so familiar with their work they lack the ability to cut into their beloved work with a severe critic’s mind. As is often the case with such projects, the viewer feels the love for the project so much (s)he doesn’t have the heart to be very critical about it.

Dans Les Cordes is far from the best movie you’ll see this year, but there’s enough love put into this picture you’ll be able to enjoy it, even if you won’t remember it for the rest of your life.

6.5/10

Welcome back for part two of our Kurtodrome Vault double bill of men being madly in love with women (oh, and not for the good of mankind). This time we move to Japan for a movie called:

PART 2. THE HUMAN VAPOR (Gasu Ningen Daiichigo)

“At first I could not understand the terror in Dr Sano’s eyes. Then I knew: I had been transformed into something terrifying. Something repellant….”
Maybe not necessarily repellant, but the sight of someone’s body vaporizing till he becomes invisible… well, I’ve seen prettier things.

First the good news
The second feature of this double bill isThe Human Vapor and was directed by Ishirô Honda, the man who also gave you Gojira (a.k.a. Godzilla) and countless sequels with the rubber-suited monster.
Honda worked for Toho Studios who, apart from Godzilla and Samurai films, made four movies about humans who could change the state of their bodies. The Human Vapor, released in 1960, was the last of these four films.
So no monster in Gasu Ningen Daiichigo (to call The Human Vapor by its original title) but a librarian who agrees to be a test subject for a scientific study. Little did librarian Mizuno know the other test subjects had died during the test. He discovers he can vaporize his body and kills the professor (by asphyxiation).
Mizuno might want to turn his back to humanity, but he’s also madly in love with a beautiful dancer who’s been saving for her comeback performance. He decides to help her by robbing the bank. Maybe not such a bad idea, but it’s a crime my friendly neighbourhood officer tells me.
The police pursue his trail (he might be invisible, but his car isn’t) to the place where Vapor-Man abandons his car. Smart move, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s only one house nearby. That’s where She lives and when She suddenly appears to have enough money for her comeback and can’t/won’t reveal any information on her maecenas, she’s arrested.
This makes Mizuno so angry he becomes even madder than he was before (it seems like the test affected both his visibility and his sanity) and he wants revenge for the imprisonment of his beloved dancer. More banks are robbed and more people get killed.
That’s as far as I’ll go because, who knows, you might want to check this movie out and as the saying goes, there’s no crying over spilt spoilers. The movie is very decent and a remarkable ending.

Okay, and now the bad news.
The bad news is The Human Vapor isn’t just the American title of the film, it’s also the American version and sadly a lot went lost in translation.
First and foremost, Gasu Ningen Daiichigo was a mystery wheras in The Human Vapor the anti-hero tells his story in a long flashback. This would’ve been only half so horrible if the narration had been more interesting and if it hadn’t replaced the dialogue in quite a lot of scenes (which leaves us with the “I told him and then he said” effect). The jerking effect of the re-edited version is also not really a plus side. Even the soundtrack was changed. And if you can’t remember why the soundtrack seems so familiar: you must have seen The Fly (1958).

Crappy editing, dialogue and Americanised dubbing (Japanese characters are less credible with sentences like “Ah, go peddle your papers!”) aside, nothing can keep us from knowing this is a terrific movie. Even if it falls from 10/10 to 8/10, an eight is still better than most things you’re subjected to. The Human Vapor still has enormous amounts of tragedy and pathos, an anti-hero who can’t control his limitless powers and an enchanting but painful love story. What it lacks as a crime story, it wins as a character study. It’s fascinating to see how Mizuno evolves from a friendly lab rat into a psychotic megalomaniac.

Mizuno and Fujichiyo
We also wonder about the role of the dancer Fujichiyo.
Does she know where the money came from? Does she also love Mizuno? Her personality is quite different from the other female character in the film, the reporter Kyoko. Traditional versus modern.
Mizuno’s acts are beyond redemption, but still you feel some sort of sympathy for the Human Vapor and most of that comes from his unconditional love for Fujichiyo.
True, the special effects are minimal, but who needs special effects in a sci-fi movie when you’ve got a story?

I leave you with the trailer for the film. And the good news: it’s the Japanese trailer.

Time now to enter the Kurtodrome Vault again. This time we’ve taken two films out, both movies on men madly in love with women. They’d do anything for her. Because they are… in love.

PART 1. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)

Introduction
The Phantom of the Opera is a classic and probably doesn’t need much introduction: even if you haven’t seen this version, you’ve probably seen another version, read the book by Gaston Leroux or just heard about it. The Phantom is so famous they even made an action doll of him, even though it’s good they were nice enough to tell us who the doll was supposed to represent. Note the stunning resemblance with Lon Chaney’s character.
Perfect twins, no?

Given that the story is so known, I won’t bother about the usual synopsis. (If you don’t know the story however, you can read it from scene 1 till The End here.)

Which leaves me with a few anecdotes on the film.
Now widely regarded as an all-time classic, the film was almost never released. The filming was painful, the assigned director Rupert Julian was an unbearable dictator who even bullied Lon Chaney, without a doubt the star of this production.

Yes, if even after a pack of remakes (not to forget the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical version) this version is seen as the best version, this is mostly because of Chaney’s fantastic performance. Chaney was an excellent actor, but still it’s this movie that he’s mostly remembered for. Like Lugosi will always be Dracula and Karloff always Frankenstein’s Monster (and, to a lesser extent, the Mummy), Chaney is most of all Erik, Phantom of the Opera.
Chaney liked the part (and the opportunity) so much he wanted to star in the film, even though he wasn’t too fond of Universal and producer Carl Laemmle.

The Laemle shuffle
Laemmle wasn’t happy with Julian’s work after seeing the preview and asked for additional shots (directed by comedy director Edward Sedgwick). The ending was altered - originally the mob found Erik lying dead on top of his organ -, Mary Philbin got more romantic scenes and intertitles were written for the new scenes.

In April 1925, three months after the first version was finished, this second version was previewed in San Francisco, where the audience’s reception was lukewarm at best and Laemmle demanded another version.
Most of the new scenes (except for the climax) were thrown out and in came scenes with comedian Chester Conklin and new intertitles. When shown to Laemmle, he luckily hated the comedy scenes. They were thrown out, but the rest of this new version was good enough and this is how the movie finally premiered on September 6, 1925. It became a tremendous success (which makes it all the weirder that Universal let the copyright lapse in 1953. The timeless classic became public domain and the studio lost a fortune in royalties.)

In 1929 Universal wanted to reissue the film, but decided talking sequences had to be added along with a new soundtrack and sound effects. Chaney was under contract at MGM by this time, so someone else dubbed him.
Thousands of feet of footage were cut out to get the new version, other scenes were compressed or combined with other scenes. Virginia Pearson, who played diva Carlotta in 1925, became Carlotta’s mother in 1929, thereby making her one of the fastest-aging women in the movie history.

Okay, so it’s a classic, but is it good?
Yes, it is (as I’ve mentioned before) even though Mary Philbin occasionally slips into overacting mode and Rupert Julian clearly isn’t a great director. One of the best scenes in the film wasn’t directed by him, but by Lon Chaney (while Julian was, alledgedly, venting his rage somewhere else). This scene, the Ball scene, was shot in colour. It’s not the only scene shot in colour, but the only one that made it to the final version.

Lon Chaney was also responsible for his own (fabulous) make-up. He never wanted to reveal how he did it, so we’ll just admire it.
The dramatic unmasking scene was so unusual for those days that distributors reported it had made people in the audience faint. (But that may just be promotional peptalk, one never knows.)

Judge for yourself. Here are six minutes of the film, all surrounding that mythical moment:

Please do not faint when Erik unmasks himself, that way we can meet again for the second part of our “Men Who’d Do Anything For The Woman They Love” double bill, where I’ll tell you more about The Human Vapor. Part two will go online in two days.

For now, why don’t you watch The Phantom of the Opera for yourself? Here are some links (all of them legal, of course):
1. Watch (or download) the 1925 version at the Archive: link
2. Watch (or download) the 1929 version at the Archive: link
3. Or if you prefer, you can also watch it on YouTube: link

Allow me to begin by saying that I’m currently watching a blank screen, furiously wondering how I could start my review of The X-Files: I Want To Believe. This cannot be a good sign. Not only have I seen every episode of the series, even those from the abomination called Season Nine, but I own them too. Most taped from when the episode ran on tv, some seasons were bought. On VHS. Hey, the show ran from 1993 to 2002.

So let me begin with the good news: the movie isn’t as awful as I had anticipated. Yes, it can’t have been nice for Chris Carter and c° when Fox told them in 2006 it would be “now or never”. If they’d waited any longer, the series would’ve lost all appeal. I find this bullshit: The Avengers was a 60s show and the movie - nay, abomination de luxe - was made in the late nineties. And yes, The X-Files were to the nineties what Miami Vice was to the 80s, but when did we see that movie? Sure, it was “now or never” for the cast to appear in the movie and still look credible enough for a movie that contained a bit more action than the average episode of Golden Girls, so it was a good thing that the movie was finished in 2008.
And it starred David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as well as the perennial favourite sidekick… yes, Walter Skinner (as played by Mitch Pileggi) has - what could best be described as - a long cameo. Funnily enough, my friend and co-Xphile had just whispered to me “What has happened to Skinner?” just before the man appears.

More about the cast of this film later. First though, what’s up with the story? Okay, Chris Carter made the smart decision (although Duchovny may have played a part in this too) to have the story set in this year. We’re six years after the series finale and the movie opens with Scully doing what she did best: being a doctor. She’s approached with the request to find Mulder for a case that has the FBI baffled. If so, the FBI might drop the charges against him. Right, so Mulder is still a fugitive? How come they never found him? In Scully’s words: maybe they were happier with him as far as possible. Sounds acceptable.
Does the worst decision of the series play a part? Yes, William (the son of Mulder and Scully) gets a mention, but that’s it. Actually, that’s more than enough. It helped the series go down the drain and to have the name William mentioned does the movie quite some damage. Especially if William is mentioned in a scene where Mulder and Scully are together in bed and have been a couple for quite some time now. Part of what was so brilliant about X-Files’ predecessor (The Avengers) was that the sexual tension between Steed and Peel was implied. In her very last episode Emma Peel drives off in a car with someone who looks like Steed while Steed waves her goodbye. That is brilliant. Mulder and Scully discussing in bed and Scully making a reference to Mulder’s penis size… not so brilliant.

Possibly even worse: the rest of the cast. No bad word about Amanda Peet as Dakota Whitney (she who asks for Mulder’s help), she’s chosen quite well and her dribbling between belief in the paranormal and disbelief is one of the strengths of the series. She is backed by agent Mosley Drummy and if you think that’s a stupid name, just wait till you know who plays the part: rapper Xzibit (or Alvin ‘Xzibit’ Joiner - as he was credited in the movie). Right, are we attempting to get the idiotic youth vote? Because there’s no way Xzibit fits into this movie: he sticks out like a sore thumb, never looks credible and doesn’t give the least bit of proof he can act. Let me put it this way: unless it’s directed by David Cronenberg (who has proved to be good with actors I can’t otherwise stand), there’s no way I’ll ever watch a movie starring Xzibit again. Never. I don’t even feel like bothering to use my fingers to have his name appear in bold, that’s how awful he was. (Anyone want to watch an episode of Hannah Montana followed by a movie starring Lindsay Lohan? See, no problems with bold or italics there. Heck, I’ll even write the word asparagus in bold, but Xzibit? Nope. That’s how catastrophically bad the man is in this part.)

Speaking of actors, Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie plays one of the bad people in the movie. It was quite nice to see a good actor in the movie adaptation of one of your favourite series. Don’t really know why I felt like mentioning that, maybe to get rid of that rapper taste. Billy Connelly joins the crew too: he plays Father Joe, a paedophile priest with paranormal powers. A large part of the film depends on one question: is Father Joe paranormal or a fraud? No problem, many of the episodes of The X-Files were based on that sort of questions. The thing is: a normal episode of the series would last 42 minutes, not 104. Sure, most of the movie plays like a double episode, but twice the length of one episode would still give you 84 minutes. I’m willing to accept that we need to discuss extra things: 1) Where is Mulder now? 2) What’s Scully doing these days? 3) Mulder and Scully have to go back to the FBI (combined with the regular mocking of Mulder’s beliefs). All that doesn’t conceal that the movie is at least 15 minutes overlong (possibly even longer).
And yes, it wouldn’t be an X-Files without mentions of Mulder’s sister and Scully’s crises of faith. As you may remember, Scully didn’t want to believe all of Mulder’s theories, but was a catholic. And yes, Chris Carter has a thing for milking God. A lot of episodes of The X-Files, Millennium and even Harsh Realm (that’s right, we’re pretending The Lone Gunmen never existed) featured discussions about the existence and powers of God. This movie isn’t different and yes, the fact that Scully is now a doctor who’s taking care of a mortally sick boy in a Christian hospital doesn’t help that.

So is this just an extended episode? In a way, yes. Is that bad? Nope. Remember the episode which took place in the past and all they did was wear older clothes and make cell phones huge? Well, I Want To Believe is more credible: Mulder and Scully look six years older now and the world is doing okay without them. However, by using almost every cliché from the series (his porn collection may not be mentioned, but Mulder is still chewing sunflower seeds by the dozens) and using it a bit too often, the movie makes itself so cosy in the series’ house you may find this guest a bit obnoxious.

None of it’s bad, some of it is just way too much in the picture and shown overlong. The trick to make the movie meatier by adding the plot of the sick boy Scully is trying to help is not really working. Sure, you as a viewer already knew what the evil people were up to, but allow me to say that Mulder and Scully probably needed a hint to find out what was truly happening. So yes, the inclusion of the sick kid wasn’t bad, but did we really need all those scenes? None of them are annoying, but the film outstays its welcome (or was that just for us, who were watching it in a cinema without air-conditioning?) by not ditching a handful of scenes that didn’t make the movie stronger (just longer).

But truly, the sight of Mulder and Scully kissing… was that necessary? Yes, we could’ve guessed it, but that doesn’t mean you have to rub our noses in it. Especially not in an abhorringly long dialogue between Mulder and Scully that makes little sense apart from repeating what’s already been said a couple of times.

I want to believe (yes, that was rather weak) in a director’s cut that throws some of those unnecessary scenes in the bin. Until then, people who watched the series may want to view the movie to see what’s happened to Mulder and Scully in two episodes stitched back to back. New viewers should avoid it as this material won’t make them understand why The X-Files was hailed as an important series in the nineties. And fans of Xzibit’s movie career should seek medical care as soon as possible.

A fan’s verdict: 6 or 6.5
A non-fan’s verdict: ermm, probably less

P.S. Don’t mind all the people leaving once the credits roll. There’s a completely daft scene at the end of the credits. Who said The X-Files took itself too serious?

Fuori Orario’s sexually themed weekend was a bit strange. Not because of the subject, but because of its execution. On Friday night the transmission started with such a delay the programme was different from what had been promised in the tv guide. Still the two movies they’d planned to show (the homosexual drama Sex in Chains and Koji Wakamatsu’s Sex Jack) were shown, which cannot be said of day two. Completely unscheduled but perennially welcome, we got to see Hedy Lamarr again. If you need me to tell you the movie was Ekstase, you should be ashamed of yourself. And go and rent it now.

After Sex is Comedy by Breillat (which I skipped, as it was dubbed) it was time for another unscheduled event: Focus, the making of a porn movie. This documentary was filmed by Francis Leroi, also director of the porn movie Regarde-moi. Focus opens with Leroi admitting he’s financially forced to make the porn movie and really not looking forward to it. Leroi wrote, directed and produced saucy movies and porn movies from the 60s to the 80s. He is the producer of the cult porn Le Sexe Qui Parle (Pussy Talk - I’ll leave it to you to gather what the synopsis is) and some of his saucy movies have titles that make you expect the worse (Charlotte gets her panties wet, anyone?). If you want to look at his filmography, be my guest. In 1983 Leroi tried something different (just after the movie Ma Mère Se Prostitue - I wish I was making these up) and helmed the horror movie Le Démon dans l’Île. It’s still unwatched on my shelves, but apparently it’s quite a good horror movie. Sadly, Leroi couldn’t continue with his new found love and went back to directing movies about Emanuelle (chapters 4, 7 and the tv series) and Rêves de cuir. Finally the man cracked in 1995 and turned his back on cinema.

Fast forward to 2000 and his financial problems. Hardly motivated to direct another Film X (as porn movies are called in France), he decided to have a digital camera follow him and his actors. The result, Focus, was shown on Leroi’s website.

Hindsight is a nice thing. Now we know that Leroi died of cancer in 2002. This sheds an extra light on Focus and the unwillingness of the man to film another hardcore movie.

One of the key scenes is the fight Leroi has with his lead actress Ovidie. Ovidie acted in pornographic movies before directing porn movies herself and writing her Porno Manifesto. Right after Ovidie and Leroi are having words on a scene, the camera follows Ovidie. She tells the other people in the room she won’t allow being treated like this. By now she’s worked with Truffaut star Jean-Pierre Leaud (in the movie Le Pornographie, co-starring her and Jérémie Renier) and Diva director Jean-Jacques Beineix (in the movie Mortel Transfert) and claims she can tell when someone wants to abuse her. Leroi claims she’s an arrogant starlet. It’s hard to pick sides here, even though you tend to feel more sympathy for a dying man (but we don’t know if anyone at the time knew the man was in his final years). Basically, Leroi wanted to do another take of a sex scene. Ovidie claimed she’d already done all that was in her contract and that the director wanted to get her to do a sex scene for free. In the end a producer had to step in and tell both parties to leave each other alone.

Focus tells you what happens on the set of a glamourous pornographic movie. Material being stolen, sexual scenes being rehearsed (”So if he does this, you’ll do that…”) and egos clashing. I’m assuming there was also hardcore footage, but this being a national tv channel those scenes were not included (instead, they showed clips of Dreyer’s Gertrud, the movie they were going to show the following week). Allow me to speak for everyone when I remark: Ermm??!? (Quite odd to see a documentary about a porn movie mixed with arthouse cinema.) Focus also included interviews with people close to Leroi, most of them having worked with him on several movies.

One scene is completely different though: we see two people on a bench, sitting near the water. One is Leroi, the other is his mother. He asks her question, some of which she answers reluctantly. One is a vital question: how is it for a mother to realize her son is making his money by directing pornographic movies? The mother admits that wasn’t easy. Two people on a bench, saying true things as the water floats by.

The full title of the documentary is “Focus - Les Coulisses du Porno”. It’s no longer available on a website, you may find the film on DVD (but even that one seems to be out of stock).

It may be one of the best lines I’ve heard in a while. Picture yourself, a couple, bound to chairs and three masked figures standing near you, holding knives. Ask them: “Why are you doing this?” Hear the reply: “Because you were at home.”

The line belongs to the movie The Strangers and it’s out in cinemas now. The first releases (USA, Canada, Russia) were in the last week of May, lots of countries (incl. Belgium and Holland) got to see it in July, the UK crowds will have to wait till the end of August and the Germans will have to wait till November. All of this is in 2008 of course, which (as a sentence) mainly makes sense because the film was shelved for nearly a year. Why did it take so many months for this movie to become released? Were people frightened for parallels with the French movie Ils? Both movies are about a couple who’re being watched at home and then attacked. I hadn’t thought of the parallel at first and when I knew, The Strangers fell a couple of spots on my “To See” list. Not because I don’t like ripoffs, but because I didn’t like Ils. The couple there was no annoying that in the end I was rooting for the villains, just so the movie could finish earlier.

The Strangers makes similar mistakes. It takes an eternity and then some to get started. As the movie starts, we see Liv Tyler crying in the car. She and her boyfriend are driving home and apparently he has upset her. It takes the film half an hour to explain this, so allow me to be a bit more brief: he proposed to her, she didn’t feel ready for marriage yet and declined. To make matters worse, he and a friend had decorated the house and now they have to spend the night there. There, did that take me long? No, it didn’t and the director should’ve known that too. Because it’s spread out over such a long period, I lost a lot of sympathy for the couple, especially for the obnoxious Scott Speedman. But things change rapidly. Someone’s at the door. Who could that be? And how late is it anyway? James Hoyt (Speedman) “suspects it’s around 4am.” A look at the clock informs him he was only five minutes wrong. Obnoxious guy! At the door is a lovely girl, who looks a bit strange and very much in the dark (literally and figuratively). The girl asks if Tamara is home. Nope, no Tamara. The girl leaves a bit reluctantly, uttering eerily she’ll see them later. For me this was a key scene: I couldn’t help but wonder if all this would’ve happened if they’d been nicer to the girl (they could’ve invited her in, given her a phone etc.). We will never know.

Anyway, back to arguing. Kristen (Tyler) is out of cigarettes and James tells her he’ll go and get some. “That’s not what I meant,” she says. Not that it stops him. Annoying man. After he leaves, the girl and her companions become a bit more active. In fact, the viewer gets to see the masked figures before Kristen does. We see him looking through a window, we see him standing inside the house (without her knowing someone’s in the house). This is a lot creepier than what happens when Kristen phones James to come home immediately because she knows there are people in the house. Macho James goes looking through the house and the director decides to turn the sound up as James pulls away a curtain. Which is scary because it’s a sudden and loud noise, but in the long run that’s a bad idea: the viewer is aware the director wants to scare him/her with essentially unscary sounds. Movies work better when you stay unaware.

Had I already mentioned the masks were brilliant? Not in the least because the girls’ masks look a bit like their faces (well, judging by the girl who asked for Tamara). Incidently, these three individuals who enter a house to torture a couple both mentally and physically remain anonymous for most of the film. Even the credits list them as Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Man in the Mask. Well, ‘mask’ is a bit much for this guy: doesn’t it remind you of El Orfanato (reviewed earlier this year)? Good, we know who Dollface is (the girl looking for Tamara), but I wish the director had known his movie would’ve been better if he hadn’t decided to show their faces in the penultimate scene. This penultimate scene features the three people driving away in the morning (and no, that is not a spoiler: I’m doing my best to write a review and keep the spoilers and a couple of scares out) and meeting the two Mormon boys we’d already seen in the beginning of the film. Dollface (well, not anymore) asks for a flyer and one of the boys asks if they’re sinners. “Sometimes,” the girl replies. As they drive off, we hear an even more ominous line: “Next time it’ll be a lot easier.”

That is where the film should’ve stopped, but no, Bryan Bertino apparently wanted to do everything to make his movie longer and less good. There comes another scene and a scene that annoyed me so much the film lost a full point there and then. Good, The Strangers was his debut, but someone could’ve told him to chuck twenty minutes and the final scene out, no? (By the way, the original title of the film was The Faces, which would’ve made the three criminals even more creepier: now they’re just strangers, otherwise they would’ve been even more bodiless.)

At least the film does something with its title. Apparently James and Kristen like vinyl records more than cds and that’s why in this film all the music you’ll hear comes from vinyl records you’ll see playing. The crackling sounds are included. Excellent choice. One of the artists is Merle Haggard, whose band was called The Strangers. One of the other songs included in the movie is Sprout and the Bean by Joanna Newsom. I was quite happy to hear that one being used.

Allow me to go to what may seem like a conclusion: it’s a pity Bertino fell in the same trap as the makes of Ils: using a good idea and milking it. The masked figures are often quite scary, but sometimes overused. At one point (it’s the scene pictured on your left) Pin-up Girl follows Kristen, but Pin-up Girl doesn’t do anything and Kristen doesn’t notice her. And then Pin-up Girl just runs away. That’s just a poor attempt to scare the viewer and, as I mentioned earlier, viewers will eventually become sick of being scared without reason. If fewer scares had been better timed (lose five, that would’ve been enough), this film would be better. If the introduction wouldn’t be so long, you would’ve had more sympathy for Kristen and James (especially for James - had I already mentioned if found the guy quite obnoxious?). Oh, and that final scene. Out with it, no excuse for that. Right, so if all that advice had been followed, we would’ve ended up with a classic. Now, it’s a lenient 6/10 because it’s Bertino’s first movie and because the movie company shelved this for a year.

Never mind all this criticism. Go and watch the film: you’ll be guaranteed to jump out of your seat at least a couple of times. Yes, you may notice that the final scene doesn’t make any sense if you remember how the movie started (the text you’ll get to read) and that’s one of the scenes that’ll give the movie a nasty aftertaste, but it’s still worth a watch. If only just once.

Here’s the trailer: