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Director William Friedkin followed up his box office smash The Exorcist with this comparatively little-seen remake of Clouzot’s great The Wages of Fear. A pity because this star-crossed production (including hellish shooting conditions in the Dominican Republic) has much to offer featuring a suitably world-weary performance by Roy Scheider, rain-drenched photography by John Stephens and Dick Bush and a memorably sinister score from Tangerine Dream.

The post Sorcerer appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Hammer Horror: Four Gothic Horror Films

Blu ray – All Region

Imprint

1971-72

Starring Ingrid Pitt, Peter Cushing, Eric Porter

Cinematography by Kenneth Talbot, Dick Bush

Directed by Peter Sasdy, John Hough, Robert Young

In December of 1959, Hammer Studios released a bit of Yuletide cheer called The Stranglers from Bombay, a censor-baiting melodrama highlighted by severed limbs and Marie Devereux’s cleavage. The studio would spend the next decade expanding upon those themes and wore the inevitable X Certificates like badges of honor. But as an ancient reprobate said, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough” and by the seventies the bad boys of Bray seemed positively sedate. Though the power to shock had waned, Hammer was still a thriving business—there were two Dracula films produced in 1970 alone. Still, no one could blame them for shaking things up—Anthony Hinds, the studio’s guiding light,...

A million American GIs are bivouacked in the English countryside, awaiting debarkation to France… and the green fields are loaded with young English women, whose own men have been off fighting for years. John Schlesinger puts together a good drama, with an excellent cast; he also avoids the expected ‘please wait for me!’ clichés attendant to this subgenre of war film.

Yanks

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1979 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 139 min. / Street Date , 2019 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Richard Gere, Lisa Eichhorn, Vanessa Redgrave, William Devane, Chick Vennera, Wendy Morgan, Rachel Roberts, Tony Melody, Derek Thompson.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Jim Clark

Original Music: Richard Rodney Bennett

Written by Colin Welland, Walter Bernstein

Produced by Joseph Janni, Lester Persky

Directed by John Schlesinger

Director John Boorman got to tell his personal wartime home front story in his warm and funny Hope and Glory, and eight years earlier the...

Dracula and Van Helsing seem more than a little confused, fighting the good fight of virtue against evil in a modern setting dominated by painful Mod fashions and flaky pop rock ‘n’ roll. Hammer’s desperation bid to make itself ‘relevant’ at least gives us Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who keep the show on the rails despite the disastrous concept. The two leading ladies are favorites as well.

Dracula A.D. 1972

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

11972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date October 16, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Michael Coles, Marsha A. Hunt, Caroline Munro

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Production Designer: Don Mingaye

Film Editor: James Needs

Original Music: Tim Barnes

Written by: Don Houghton

Produced by: Michael Carreras, Josephine Douglas

Directed by Alan Gibson

“But the movie is terrible.”

“Don’t worry about that. Caroline Munro looks great, that’s all you need to know.

It’s a Brit sex comedy that addresses the basic facts about boy-girl petting — and not much else. A noted ‘adult’ role for Hayley Mills, it pairs her with an unlikable Oliver Reed, trying his damnedest to affect natural charm. Was Reed the reason Hayley chose as her next picture a story about a lady studying penguins?

Take a Girl Like You

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 98 min. / Street Date June 19, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed, Noel Harrison, John Bird, Sheila Hancock, Ronald Lacey, Penelope Keith, Imogen Hassall, Pippa Steel, George Woodbridge.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Jack Harris, Rex Pyke

Original Music: Stanley Myers

Written by George Melly

Produced by Hal E. Chester

Directed by Jonathan Miller

Wait a minute — when exactly did they finally stop calling young women, ‘birds?’

When the Hollywood studios all but collapsed at the end of the 1960s,...

Last month, coverage of the 40th anniversary of Star Wars was understandably extensive, with pop-culture publications, daily newspapers, and TV media commemorating a film that by all rights changed the landscape of Hollywood, for better or worse. Conversely, there will likely be relatively little retrospective celebration for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer or Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, two terrific films released roughly one month later in the week of June 19-25. Though they weren’t the first examples of New Hollywood directors following huge successes with more difficult works that flopped (Peter Bogdanovich’s secretly lovely At Long Last Love comes to mind), they stood in 1977 as back-to-back examples of talented filmmakers – one Oscar-winning, the other well on his way to becoming the most-acclaimed director of his generation – overreaching and failing after becoming a bit too full of themselves.

That is, of course, an oversimplification, just as the other charge popularized by the likes of Peter Biskind – i.e. George Lucas’ grand space opera and Steven Spielberg’s personal blockbusters killed Hollywood’s interest in movies for adults – is an oversimplification. In all truth, it isn’t surprising that audiences didn’t go for Sorcerer or New York, New York, two especially challenging-for-the-mainstream features that pushed their creators’ aesthetics to greater extremes than before while tracking in subject matter that was pessimistic even for the time. But while both films and their troubled productions saw directors burned by their ambition, they are also exceptional works showcasing how exhilarating it can be when all commercial sense goes out the window.

Friedkin’s Sorcerer can lay more claim to having been actively harmed by the arrival of Lucas’ megahit, arriving exactly one month later, on June 25, and competing for a thrill-seeking crowd. (One theater reportedly pulled Star Wars for Sorcerer for a week, only to replace it when Friedkin’s film failed to lure an audience.) The film, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear, was also hurt by its confusing title — named after one of the trucks transporting dynamite through a dangerous jungle to put out an oil fire — and a budget that ballooned from an initially planned $15 million to $22 million following a difficult production.

Friedkin, hot off the Oscar-winning The French Connection and hugely successful The Exorcist, already had a reputation for his temperament and arrogance. They were in full force on Sorcerer: he clashed with cinematographer Dick Bush, who left halfway through filming, as well as producer David Salven, whom Friedkin fired after fights over the expensive location shoots. Friedkin extensively clashed with Paramount brass, sometimes reasonably (kicking executives off set after perceived interference), sometimes amusingly but questionably (the evil oil execs pictured in the film are actually Gulf & Western’s executive board, and they repaid him by not promoting the film). The jungle shoot itself was hell, with about 50 people quitting following injury or illness while Friedkin himself contracted malaria and lost 50 pounds.

But it’s only appropriate that the making of Sorcerer was so desperate, given the story it tells. Friedkin’s worldview has always been bleak and cynical, and Sorcerer may be the purest expression of that. Its heroes are a hard-bitten New Jersey hood (a spectacularly testy Roy Scheider) hiding out after shooting a mobster’s brother, a crooked French banker (Bruno Cremer) on the run following fraud accusations, a Palestinian terrorist (Amidou) behind a Jerusalem bombing, and a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal) who gets in on the job after murdering the fourth driver (Karl John), apparently a fugitive Nazi. The film presents their crimes as facts and without real judgment, their rottenness just another bad part of a burned-out, brutal world.

Where The French Connection and The Exorcist gave viewers visceral thrills early on and some sense of right and wrong (even if it’s fatally compromised), the early action in Sorcerer is more painful, with suicide, terrorism, and the loss of friends and partners forming the four prologues introducing the men at this film’s center. Friedkin then drops us into squalor and despair in a small South American town where the heat and rain are nearly as oppressive as the police state, the work is dangerous and pays little, and the mud seems to soak up any sense of hope. It’s little wonder that they might take up the dangerous assignment of driving through an arduous jungle landscape with unstable explosives that could set off at any moment. When you’ve been driven into no man’s land by your sins, any way out is worth it — no matter how unlikely it is that you’ll survive.

The actual drive up to the oil well doesn’t begin until about halfway through and takes on the tone of an unusually fraught funeral march for the protagonists. Friedkin’s immediate, docurealistic style helps ground the proceedings as set-pieces grow more heightened, most memorably when the drivers guide their trucks over a deteriorating bridge as the river beneath it overflows — the most expensive sequence in the film, as well as the most difficult-to-shoot of Friedkin’s career. As Popeye Doyle’s car chase in The French Connection and Regan & Chris MacNeil getting jerked around in The Exorcist evince, Friedkin always had a gift for making scenes that were already dangerous in conception even more tactile and nerve-wracking. Here, his emphasis on the mechanics of the crossing – the snapping rope and wood – as well as the fragility of the bodies attempting to cross (particularly as one rider steps outside to guide the truck and risks getting thrown off or crushed in the process) make the danger of their situation all the more palpable.

Yet there’s a more existential doom permeating the film compared with the nihilism of his earlier efforts, a more complete melding of his hard-bitten style with expressionistic touches that peppered The Exorcist. Part of that comes from Tangerine Dream’s ethereal score, which accentuates a sense that the elements are set against the drivers. But Friedkin also lends the film’s grungy look a sort of otherworldly menace, whether the camera soars through gorgeous greenery while a fire burns in the background or Scheider envisions a stream of blood soaking the dirt. Even the small moments of beauty (e.g. a butterfly hiding from the rain or a woman briefly dancing with Scheider) seem to tease the protagonists and underline their utter hopelessness. By the time we reach a grim conclusion, Friedkin has taken us through a world without mercy or decency, in which fate mocks even the most resilient of us.

Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, released just a few days earlier on June 21, was less plausibly affected by the release of Star Wars, and more likely the victim of critics and audiences being put off by its mix of glossy, Vincente Minnelli-esque musicality and aggressive, John Cassavetes-influenced verisimilitude. Scorsese, with the story of a creative and personal relationship collapsing under the weight of jealousy in a postwar environment, sought to bring to the forefront the unhappiness lurking under the surface of films such as Meet Me in St. Louis and My Dream is Yours.

It, like Sorcerer, had a difficult production, with the director battling a severe cocaine addiction while breaking up with then-wife Julia Cameron and carrying out an affair with lead actress Liza Minnelli. The film’s herky-jerky rhythms and circular intensity seem to take cues from that tension, the big-band musical numbers clashing with deliberately repetitive improvisations and screaming matches. Scorsese had mixed realism with melodrama (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and grit with florid formalism (Taxi Driver) previously, and would go on to marry his classic and New Hollywood interests more palatably in Raging Bull. But New York, New York isn’t a marriage so much as it’s a push-pull war, one that’s sometimes exhausting.

Acknowledging the unattainability of Hollywood fantasies makes it no less vital a love letter. Scorsese opens with an astonishing crane shot on V-j Day as Robert De Niro’s Jimmy gets lost in the excitement of a crowd, only to appear under an arrow that both pinpoints and isolates him. De Niro’s first interactions with Minnelli’s Francine, meanwhile, are less a meet-cute, more an ongoing, insistent harassment that eventually wears down her defenses. The entire opening sequence communicates a sense of spiritual and personal emptiness amid celebration, an early warning that not all is well in the postwar era.

De Niro continues playing Jimmy as a halfway point between his insecure, jealous bruiser in Raging Bull and his relentless, obnoxious pest in The King of Comedy, but Scorsese finds some truth in his and Francine’s romance (even as it’s rotting from the inside out) in their musical performances, with the two finding a better balance and greater chemistry as they perform “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.” Their partnership flourishes out of a mutual recognition of talent — or, in his case, recognition of greater possible success together. Still, that balance begins to tip whenever Francine asserts herself, as in a scene where she tries to pep up the band following one of Jimmy’s criticisms, only for him to tear her down. And the film’s most gorgeous images undermine any possibility of happiness between the two, with De Niro proposing (badly: “I love you… I mean, I don’t love you. I dig you; I like you a lot”) in front of a fake forest.

Purposefully, the film’s first two hours give more emphasis to Scorsese’s more discursive side, major arguments between Jimmy and Francine getting interrupted by Jimmy’s ability to get into a minor argument with anyone he encounters. It’s in the final third that focus shifts to the director’s inner formalist and New York, New York turns into a proper musical with the remarkably bittersweet “Happy Endings” sequence. Francine’s finally given a chance to flourish as a performer, unhindered by Jimmy’s jealousy, and Scorsese jumps into an unabashedly stagey finale not unlike that of The Band Wagon or An American in Paris.

Yet the climax still reflects the inherent unhappiness in Francine’s life, telling a story of a relationship ended by success, only to double back and conclude with a wish-fulfillment coda that only makes it more painful. We’ve already seen the truth in the lives of Francine and Jimmy, and no rousing performance of “Theme from ‘New York, New York’” is going to change that. Their final encounter twists the knife further, giving one last tease of possible reconciliation before recognizing that it’s impossible, leaving Jimmy with a final, lonely shot echoing that V-j Day opening.

Audiences and critics largely rejected New York, New York and Sorcerer, with neither film making its budget back or earning the raves their makers had come to expect, but time has been kind to both. They haven’t exactly seen widespread reevaluation as their makers’ best works — Sorcerer wouldn’t be too far off for this writer, and Scorsese’s film has its passionate advocates — but they’ve developed cult followings and at least partly shaken off their previous distinctions as merely ambitious follies. Perhaps it’s appropriate that they’re not as widely cited as Taxi Driver and The Exorcist – they’re pricklier than their more popular predecessors, better suited as advanced viewing than introductory works. They may not generate thousands upon thousands of appreciations 40 years later, but they’re there, waiting for curious viewers to make a discovery.

Read even just a couple of interviews with him and you’ll realize that James Gray — in his humor, candor, self-effacement, knowledge, and general kindness — is better at the process than almost anybody else. So I’d experienced twice over, and now a third time on the occasion of his latest picture, The Lost City of Z. Although I liked the film a whole lot upon seeing it at last year’s Nyff and found it a rich source of questions, our conversation proved too casual and genial to be intruded about with a query about sound mixing — which I, of course, just knew I’d ask before entering a hotel room and sitting at a tiny table, complementary chocolate cake between us, and realizing that my muse then and there was instead a question about Steven Soderbergh’s Twitter account.

It’s not every day you can bring it up,...

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 100 96 min. / Street Date February 28, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Victoria Vetri, Robin Hawdon, Patrick Allen, Drewe Henley, Sean Caffrey, Magda Konopka, Imogen Hassall, Patrick Holt, Jan Rossini, Carol Hawkins, Maria O’Brien.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Peter Curran

Visual Effects: Jim Danforth

Original Music: Mario Nascimbene, Philip Martell

Written by: Val Guest, J.G. Ballard

Produced by: Aida Young

Directed by Val Guest

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth didn’t get much attention when released here early in March of 1971. Only film fanatics obsessed with special effects had much to say about it. Cinefantastique magazine showed a still photo or two of dinosaurs on the rampage, and told us that stop-motion effects notable Jim Danforth, who we knew from mentions in Famous Monsters, was attached. We also learned that an animator named David Allen had worked on one sequence.

The Lair of the White Worm

Blu-ray

Lionsgate / Vestron

1988 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date January 31, 2017 / 34.97

Starring Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, Peter Capaldi, Sammi Davis, Stratford Johns, Paul Brooke, Imogen Claire, Chris Pitt, Gina McKee, Christopher Gable, Lloyd Peters.

Cinematography: Dick Bush

Film Editor: Peter Davies

Special Effects makeup: Stuart Conran, Paul Jones

Original Music: Stanislaus Syerewicz

Written by: Ken Russell from the novel by Bram Stoker

Produced and Directed by Ken Russell

Wild man director Ken Russell struck back against commercial indifference with this alternately elegant and outrageous horror offering, that excepting a few hard- ‘R’ moments, comes off as a real (snake) charmer. Few horror movies have a real sense of wit, and fewer still can laugh at themselves without crumbling into sad parody. As if reclaiming horror as a British-made product, Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm shows us what a next-generation Hammer...

Flamboyant artist Ken Russell was eventually sidelined for what the industry calls 'excess,' but he was a genuine artist, as indicated by this, his last American film. Absolutely beyond the pale in terms of polite viewing, it's by turns awkward and insightful, profane... and more profane. Crimes of Passion Blu-ray + DVD Arrow Video (UK) 1984 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 112, 107 min. / Street Date July 12, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK 39.95 Starring Kathleen Turner, Anthony Perkins, Annie Potts, Bruce Davidson, John Laughlin. Cinematography Dick Bush China Blue's dress Ruth Myers Original Music Rick Wakeman Written and Produced by Barry Sandler Directed by Ken Russell

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

What separates exploitation trash from progressive film art? They say it's an artist's vision, and Ken Russell certainly has plenty of that. I can admire Russell's house brand of outrageousness but I also find much of his work just too fussy, too indulgent. He's excellent when trying...

I have the full rundown on the notorious spacey alternate ending to this sci-fi winner by design specialist Saul Bass. The ants are taking over, and they mean business. World conquest begins at a research lab in Arizona, where Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy and Lynne Frederick try to hold out against super-intelligent hormigas that cut them off, build sophisticated weapons and instantly adapt to any chemical attempt to stop them. Phase IV Blu-ray Olive Films 1974 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 84 min. / Street Date October 27, 2015 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98 Starring Michael Murphy, Nigel Davenport, Lynne Frederick, Alan Gifford Cinematography Dick Bush Insect sequences Ken Middleham Art Direction John Barry Film Editor Willy Kemplen Original Music Brian Gascoigne Written by Mayo Simon Produced by Paul B. Radin Directed by Saul Bass

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Olive Films Blu-ray of the intriguing Sci-Fi curiosity Phase IV appears to be a newer, cleaner transfer than the older DVD.

You may not directly recall the name of director Richard Marquand, though in many ways he’s a notable director from the 1980s thanks to items like the pulpy Glenn Close courtroom drama Jagged Edge (1985), and a Ken Follett adaptation Eye of the Needle (1981). Oh, and he happened to helm Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi in 1983. The British director died of a stroke at the age of forty nine, which explains the abrupt end of a flourishing filmography. He made the jump from documentary and television series to feature with the forgotten 1978 British horror film The Legacy, which starred notable American stars (and real life couple) Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott. Based on a story by Jimmy Sangster, a writer of many Hammer Studio films, the screenplay was also co-written by Patrick Tilley (his last credit) and Paul Wheeler (who would exclusively work in television afterwards). The...

Sometimes you come across word of a movie for which the only logical reaction is "What the hell?" Such a movie is Bravetart vs. the Loch Ness Monster. Seriously. What the hell?

Remember Ken Russell? He's the filmmaker behind Altered States, Lair of the White Worm, The Devils, Tommy, Gothic, Whore, etc. Always one known for mixing the artsy with the offbeat, he's usually a "love him or hate him" kind of filmmaker. In this case, however, he's more of a "what is he smoking?" kind of filmmaker.

Bravetart vs. the Loch Ness Monster is, according to the London Times, the next bit of cinematic lunacy to spring forth from Ken Russell's mind with an assist from his current wife, Elise.

"Bravetart MacDonald, our matter-of-fact hooker with a heart of gold and a brogue as thick as her boot soles, comes from a family of entrepreneurs - all in the flesh trade.