Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
You Only Live Twice
The James Bond project is going slowly. When I decided, back in October, to watch every Bond film in order I didn’t expect it to be a marathon of back-to-back viewings (not like Argento week!) but if I’d been asked I’d probably have predicted to be beyond Film #5 after 9 months! As it is, You Only Live Twice marks a milestone of sorts: it’s the last film with Sean Connery. Ok, well… it’s not. Because he came back after Lazenby. But it’s the last film where only one actor had played Bond.
And it’s a good one. You Only Live Twice has long been a favourite of mine. It’s hard to explain really but, in many ways, it feel like one of the most Bond-like of Bond films. It just ticks so many of the boxes. James Bond has, in my opinion, never really recovered from the end of the Cold War (Media barons just don’t have the same level of villainy…) and YOLT is a good demonstration of Cold War threat: even if it’s not actually the Russians who are the bad guys, the danger of M.A.D. looms over the space-race backdrop and spurs Bond into action. Because when the Yanks and the Ruskies are at loggerheads, it obviously falls the Britain to save the day!
In the process, we get some prime Bond action. Q turns up with a tiny fold-up plane in a box (one of the more perfect Bond gadgets that gently mocks his hyper-masculine reputation), the Japanese secret service supply NINJAS (with throwing stars!) and, Bond punches and fights his way through a series of Japanese paper walls. They even manage to create a clever, highly-trained and sympathetic female character and (even more surprisingly) resist giving her a name like ‘Pussy Galore’. As Bond in the 60s goes, that’s about as close to progressive or feminist as you’re going to get!
The plot is reassuringly bonkers: a Spectre spaceship keeps swallowing the US/Russian spaceships and vanishing before anyone can find it. Tasked with stopping it, Bond has to fight a handful of subservient Spectre drones, find the lair and put a stop to Blofeld’s sinister spaceship-swallowing plans. The lair in question, nestled in a Japanese volcano with a metal fake-lake hiding it from view is pretty spectacular and one of the more memorable of Bond Villain lairs (I’ve always considered the submerged satellite in GoldenEye to be in imitation/homage to this one, really). Add to that a handful of really memorable scenes (poison on a string!) and you have a pretty neat Bond film.
As might be expected, there are a few clumsy moments - the less said about Bond’s Asian disguise and the Japanese security-chief’s harem of subservient women, the better… - but all in all this is a Bond film that takes some beating. Great stuff.
And it’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service next. Now there’s something to look forward to…
Melancholia
I’ve never been a Lars von Trier completist but I’ve always enjoyed his films - particularly Dogville, The Idiots and Antichrist (Ok, enjoyed might not be the right word), so I’d been looking forward to Melancholia since Cannes last year. My excitement was only further stoked by Peter Bradshaw’s astonishingly negative review in the Guardian…
Bradshaw has never made a secret of how much he hates everything von Trier has done, is doing or will do (to the extent that it’s pretty much pointless him writing reviews) but this one clearly had him riled!
Once again, Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production. Even the spectacle is thin and supercilious.
Quite apart from the utterly nonsensical description of ‘spectacle’ as being ‘supercilious’, Dunst even won best actress for her “sleepwalked” performance! Luckily, Philip French was on hand to provide a second-opinion, half sneering and half simple plot retelling, that - as one commenter pointed out - got several of the significant details entirely wrong. Thankfully, other reviewers less-desperate to smugly condemn von Trier’s Cannes-Nazi-gaffe provided more …uh… balanced reviews.
Either way, I was keen to see it. Now that I have, I have no idea what to think. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a very long time but I’ve still no real idea what it was about. The failure of human relationships? Bipolar disorders? The futility of making plans for the future given that life is essentially fragile? Who knows?
I know that I’m going to be musing over it for some time though. A thoroughly thought-provoking film.
Mould
OK, so just few days ago I was wowed by the poster for Mould* and decided that I’d almost certainly have to watch it. I must admit I wasn’t actually expecting very much: once you’ve seen a number of 21st century B-movies you tend towards pessimism. Most recent films that aim for the schlocky, low-grade style of classic 70s and 80s films do so in such a self-conscious, post-Planet-Terror, we’re-so-very-hip-and-grindhouse way that they’re ultimately pretty disappointing. To my surprise, Mould* resisted all that and played it straight-faced and gorey and, as a result, was a whole lot of fun.
[Yes, the film is actually called ‘Mold’ but the word looks silly without a ‘u’ in the middle. Sorry America. You might be right about ‘color’ but oyu’re wrong about ‘mold’]
The plot is about as complex as you’d expect from a low-budget film about mould. A group of basically good but apparently conscience-free scientists (oh scientists, why are you always evil?) have been funded to create a new form of super-evil life-destroying hyper-contagious mould. Y’know, so America can remain a superpower or something. And kill people. It’s pretty vague, but let’s be honest, who cares? The important point is that this mould is in their lab and it is very, very bad for you.
And it’s demonstration day. So as well as 4 scientists (Old scientist, lady scientist, two young scientists who both fancy the pants off lady scientist) we have a coke-snorting congressman, his effeminate aide, a cigar-toting army general and his dumb, macho soldier aide. So now we have cowards, scientists, bullies and a woman. All locked in together in a building with some mould. AND GUESS WHAT!? Despite all the precautions taken, the mould contaminates one of them and, from that point on, the worry of containment and contamination takes over the film.
Budget-wise, of course, this is very efficient. Most of the action takes place in one room, with a few shots set in the neighbouring corridors. This, thankfully, means they were able to save all the rest of their cash to spend on splattering green goo and blood across… well… everything. Mould is one of those that you can imagine was an awful lot of fun to make and the enthusiasm carries across onto the screen. I don’t want to spoil the surprise(s) but we have splattering heads, exploding internal organs, facial bleeding. And then later, some guns.
There really isn’t very much more to tell: Mould is an awful lot of fun. It does perhaps start a little slowly but the slow-moving first half hour is definitely worth it for the oozing, gooey, mouldy pay-off that follows. This is modern low budget trash made with old-fashioned enthusiasm. Highly recommended.
**Available right now at www.moldthemovie.com **
Poster Hunt #12 - Mold
It’s been an absolute age since the last Poster Hunt blogpost - there hasn’t been one since July 2010! But today I stumbled upon a picture that was just too good not to revive the long-forgotten series. A pedant might well point out that this appears to a cover rather than an actual poster but… pfft! Who listens to pedants anyway?
So here is the beautiful artwork for MOLD! It looks a pretty fabulous film, so I might have to give a watch some time soon.
See previous Poster Hunt’s here!
Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity
Oh they don’t make ’em like this anymore. Armed with an invincible title like that, a budget the size of a shoebox and ambitions the size of an alien planet, how could you go wrong? SGFBI is a masterclass in campy sci-fi film that could teach modern snoozefests a thing or two…
Firstly, it’s not nearly as sexual as its title would suggest. Nowadays, a film with the words “Slave Girls” in the title would almost certainly be pretty unpleasant. Instead, this fast-paced little flick just throws a couple of prison-escapees into a foreign jungle planet and follows their adventures. There’s hardly anything by way of gratuitously sleazy scenes and it’s all the better for it. The two women, Daria and Tisa, on a bid for galactic freedom, crash land on a strange and (at first) apparently deserted jungle planet.
Soon enough, they meet the outrageously camp ‘Zed’, who is master of this private planet and lives in a stone fortress with his two robotic henchmen (I’m not making a word of this up…). Invited to slip into something more comfortable and join him for dinner (which includes a bizarre son-et-lumiere theremin interlude…) Daria and Tisa meet two other crash-victims who are stuck on Zed’s planet. Before long, they realise that the sinister hunting-enthusiast Zed has been taking his unwilling ‘guests’ out and hunting them in his jungle gardens.
SGFBI clocks in at a tiny 75 mins. In that time we get space travel, intrigue (!), horror (!), theremins (!), robots and jungle. A good third of the film is taken up by Zed’s attempt to hunt the three girls through the jungle. The other guest in Zed’s personal playground is sadly not so lucky and is crossbowed (is that a verb?) early on.
I need to say a quick word about the robot guards who, apart from being fabulously designed, are apparently also tempted by curvaceous ladies and have a pretty hilarious argument. Read the following in Dalek voices:
Robot 1: The Maaaaaster will not be pleased with your aaabscence!
Robot 2: You displease MEEEE! Aaaand I ignorrrre YOOOOUUU!
R1: I’m going to inform the maaaaaasteeeerrrrr!
R2: Tattle-t_aaaaaaaaaaa_lle!
They’re awesome, this is awesome, the sets look like they’re made of sponge and carboard and Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is more fun than it surely has any right to be!