B-Movie
Terror on the 40th Floor
Sometimes, a review just doesn’t tell you whether you want to watch it. Sometimes, writing a review just isn’t appealing.
With these two things in mind, I present to you the ultimate im gimmick-y blog posting: the first 30 minutes of the film, blow by blow. There’s no spoilers (there’s hardly a plot), but hopefully it’ll give you an idea of whether you want to watch it (you don’t).
Here, then, is Terror on the 40th Floor. A disaster movie about a skyscraper. Die Hard, this ain’t.
29secs: Awesome synth tune kicks in. This has started well. And look! Father Christmas. It must be set at Christmas.
1min: The strings kick in. The music’s nice, but the credits are otherwise pretty dull.
2mins: There’s an office party going on and they’re all drunk.
3mins: Woman on the phone is arguing with her mum about whether she should be with her son,
rather than at the party. She probably should. This is all going to end badly.
5mins: A guy sneaks off with two girls and bursts in upon his morose father brooding in his office. They’re invited in for a drink.
6mins: It’s champagne. Wow.
7mins: Another guy burst in with two girls. Suddenly the party is relocating to the office.
8mins: Most of the drunken revellers are heading home, the security guard shepherds them out.
9mins: Kelly who should be locking up and checking the building is clear is encouraged out of the building by the boss.
10mins: Charley arrives and er… rather implausibly has been demanded to perform maintenance work on the building ON CHRISTMAS EVE.
11mins: Back to the remaining party group upstairs. Champagne flows as they begin to flirt…
12mins: Oh noes! Charley the maintenance man is drinking from a bottle of liquor! How terribly irresponsible. He just knocked something on the floor too.
13mins: More boring flirting. The dialogue is pretty crappy.
14mins: Charley is doing something strenuous in the dark. Not sure what. He takes another big swig of liquor.
15mins: Ahahaha, he just kicked over a tiny lantern, which set everything on fire. Including his legs. What a shame. The security guy is running around too.
16mins: Oh, the ambulance has arrived ever-so speedily. But one of them has already died. Hard luck, buddy. The other man, merely injured, was the security guard who has informed the emergency services that there’s no-one inside the building. BUT THERE IS!!!11!!!!
18mins: The fire has climbed seven floors in the last three minutes of film. What’s going to happen in the next 80 minutes?
20mins: There’s a little bit of boozy seduction going on here. And some comparison of notes between old flame and new.
20mins + 30secs: He has a wife! Eeek!
21mins: Guys are fighting fire. It’s not very clear what’s going on. Sirens wail. They’re cutting the power.
23mins: He seducing her by describing the boardroom. What a player…
24mins: The music’s gone really dramatic… not a lot’s happening though. Until…. Snogging!
25mins: Ah! But up comes the topic of his wife.
26mins: Hazy flash-back (or is it flash-forward) to games of badminton in the sunshine. And then she drops the bomb: “Jim.. I…I’m pregnant”
28mins: “So.. we can have an abortion or get married?”
29mins: He’s gotta think about it.
29mins: Back to the now, sirens wail. Not a lot else is happening.
In conclusion: unless you’re gripped by these details and care about the cheating businessman or any of the other boring, thin characters… I really wouldn’t bother with this one.
Thank you and goodnight.
Angel Blade
The last thing I posted here (see below) was a rant/argument about how the “b” in “b-movie” didn’t mean bad. Sadly, as is so often the way when you try to make an argument, the next thing to come along so totally undermined my point that I’d have quite happily pretended it didn’t exist. But I shan’t, if only because admitting that there are exceptions to any argument is a good thing to do.
That next thing that came along was Angel Blade.
[WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! THIS REVIEW REVEALS THE PLOT OF THE FILM]
Now, I’ll be straight about this from the begining; I bought Angel Blade on DVD for £0.99 at the nearest er… 99p shop. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t necessarily expecting a masterpiece (although I did pick up a couple of Dario Argento films there too… Wine some, lose some). And masterpiece it most certainly wasn’t.
I would have no hesitation in naming Angel Blade as one of the worst films I have watched in recent memory.
The creative ’team’ doesn’t exactly bode well. From the “Deavid Heavener Entertainment Group” comes a film that is written by David Heavener, produced by David Heavener, directed by David Heavener and starring David Heavener. The guy has taken the role of the auteur to a higher degree. You feel it was only really physical impossibility that stopped him giving himself all the other parts in the film. Oh yeah, and the fact that his (and only his) numerous sex-scenes wouldn’t have been as fun for him to write/direct/star in if there wasn’t anyone else around…
I’m getting ahead of myself though. I’ll go back to the premise of the film. A mysterious killer is murdering prostitutes in LA. So far so good. Anyone who’s seen Franco’s New York Ripper or indeed pretty much anything made in Italy between 1960 and 1980 can tell you that this is a fine starting point for a film. It guarrantees you a good dose of sleeze, gore, intrigue and action. Perfect. Who could mess this one up?
David Heavener, that’s who.
By null at 2010-03-30
The plot manages to be both confusing and dull, the sex scenes bear very little relation to the film - more like sexual interludes than actual scenes - and the ‘astonishing’ secret of the film is laughable. (Oh yes, here come the spoilers…) Not content with merely being writer/producer/director/lead policeman character, David Heavener’s character is also the psycho killer. His reasons? Just wait and see… (drumroll) The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because… his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died.
Yes.
I’ll write that again. The reason that David Heavener, once-good cop, has gone on a pregnant-prostitute killing rampage in LA is because… his pregnant girlfriend/wife walked off a roof and died. It wasn’t that she was killed in the line of duty. It wasn’t that she was even killed at all. She was looking through the viewfinder of her camera and, in perhaps the most implausible moment in cinema history, she walked. off. the. roof. of. a. building. Splat.
Oh dear.
If however, all this gives the impression that I didn’t enjoy this film, you’re very much mistaken. Cinematic genius apart, Angel Blade is a stunning example of just how badly you can tell a nonsense story and, as such, is totally worth a watch! I might leave it a while until a second viewing though…
The 'B' in B-Movie Doesn't Mean Bad: A Rant.
As you can probably tell from just the briefest glance at this blog, I watch a lot of what would commonly be called ‘bad films’. Before we go any further, it should be made clear that this is a misleading and unfair label for these films. Films today tend to break down into depressingly few categories. They are either Big Budget, Independent, ‘Art-house’ or Foreign. Anything else tends to get labelled as bad. What’s even more disappointing is that, in the vast majority of cases ‘independent’, ‘art-house’ and ‘foreign’ often run together. So we’re left with: Big-Budget-Small-Brain-Blockbusters (the kind you eat popcorn with), Arty/Weird/Intellectual/Foreign/Independent (the kind you sip red wine with) and ‘the rest’ (the kind you drink lots of beer with).
robot intersection dance; zombie attack-bird!
Originally uploaded by ٭betenoir٭
This ‘the rest’ category has a bad image nowadays. Once-upon-a-time, in the days of the b-movie, these films were important. They didn’t have the cash of the Hollywood hits, nor the intellectual/pretentious (delete as appropriate) element of the indie/arty/weird/foreign film. No. They were made on tight budgets, with tight time-limits and tight resources. They were made to be enjoyed. This is pulp cinema. Nowadays we associate the term ‘b-movie’ and perhaps even ‘pulp’ with ‘bad’. This is simply not (necessarily) the case.
Compare film to literature. Again, we find the blockbusters (your Dan Browns etc), an appreciation for ‘classics’, an appreciation for the experimental/philosophical/foreign/intellectual but you also find an considerable about (albeit way less than there used to be) of pulp literature. Whilst you might very well want to label Dan Brown as pulp (and are probably correct…), there is a difference. By pulp I’m talking about the books that are churned out at an astonishing rate. The detective stories and murder mysteries that fill shelves in bookshops and libraries and lie discarded on trains, benches and café tables.
These are not high-art. Nevertheless, they are also – to put it simply – not bad. The most essential thing whilst writing genre-fiction to be sold, read and forgotten about is obviously not to be inventive, challenging or weird – that’s not what your readers (or perhaps better, customers) want – but the author is required to at least write a cracking story. It’s got to be exciting. It’s got to be mysterious. It’s got to keep you turning the pages. They might not be books you’d recommend to a friend, see reviewed in the newspaper or ever want to read again, but they should be books that are gripping reads.
The same applies to film, or at least used to.
Most of the films I prefer to watch do not have brilliant special effects. They don’t have exquisite cinematography. They don’t have big name stars neither in front of nor behind the camera. They don’t have challenging dialogue, open-ended ambiguity, subtleties or philosophical concerns. They are simply good fun.
Sadly it seems that nowadays many people can’t help but sneer a little at the thought of watching Hammer Horror, Toho Godzilla films or anything that wasn’t made by James Cameron or Michael Bay. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are those that sit and smirk at everyone else, whilst claiming there is no such thing as cinema outside of the masterpieces of Michael Haneke, Kurosawa et al.
What confuses me still more is that we seem perfectly content to watch the same kind of material on TV. We watch hours of detective shows, crime dramas etc, many of which are feature length and produced with no greater budget nor skills than the films we have been content to ignore. Is it simply the element of laziness? Is it just because we can sit down on the sofa, sip our mug of coffee and let it all wash over us? The answer, sadly, is probably yes.
World Gone Wild
After wading through a lot of horror recently (especially Vampires!), I was begining to feel the need to turn my gaze to something a little different. At this point, I usually sit down to choose between my other two favourite genres; is it to be Spaghetti Western or camp 80s Dystopian thrills?
I chose the camp 80s dystopia and World Gone Wild certainly didn’t disappoint.
Made in the 80s? Check.
A desert world where water has become the most precious commodity? Check.
Adam Ant as a bad guy? Check.
Killer frisbees, motorbikes, gunfights and moonshine? Check, check, check, check.
It would be grossly unfair to call this a b-movie by numbers - it’s not, it’s exciting and original - but I think it’d be true to say that it does more or less some up my idea of what a b-movie is.
From the opening voice-over telling us just how ruined the world is (no rain in 50 years), the crappy camera effects in the opening credits and the entirely amazing theme song (AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE HERE) you just know what kind of movie this is going to be. The bad guys will sneer, the world will be full of wreckage and rubble, people will have regressed into a shouting, snarling, gambling, boozey mass, a dashing hero will save the day, everything will be fine. Needless to say, all of these things are true. The thrill of World Gone Wild is not that any part of it is unexpected, shocking or particularly innovative, just that it’s really good fun!
Disengage brain, open a beer, cook some popcorn; this is a film that is made to be enjoyed. From Adam Ant’s wonderful smirking bad-guy to the villagers with their 80s haircuts, defending their livelihood with a wall of abandoned cars, if you like dystopian films, 80s cheese or b-movies in general, you can’t fail to enjoy this.
