Re: Track the Films You Watch (2008)
01/05/08: ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (William Sterling, 1972)
This is the fourth film version I’ve watched of Lewis Carroll’s classic – the 1903 Silent, the 1951 Walt Disney animated version, and the 1966 British TV adaptation; there are at least three more adaptations I’m interested in – Paramount’s 1933 all-star feature, the 1949 Franco-British version mixing live-action with puppet figures, and Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 film. This musicalized version was made in a time when setting literary classics (everything from Miguel Cervantes to George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens to James Hilton) to music was quite fashionable. Still, despite the engagement of a tremendous cast – Michael Jayston, Hywel Bennett, Michael Crawford, Ralph Richardson, Peter Bull, Roy Kinnear, Robert Helpmann, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Spike Milligan, Michael Hordern – they are mostly ineffective and even unrecognizable under all the heavy make-up! Alice herself – Fiona Fullerton – isn’t very sympathetic either.
The highlight is perhaps the tea party sequence with Helpmann (as The Mad Hatter), Sellers (as The March Hare) and Moore (as The Dormouse) – after which the slow-moving film starts slipping into boredom. The music by John Barry and lyrics by Don Black are decent at best, but distinctly unmemorable. Writer-director William Sterling’s adaptation – whose only film in that capacity this was – is disappointingly uninspired, then, turning Carroll’s surrealistic original into a dullish kiddie film! Apart from the opportunity of star-spotting, the film’s main virtues, therefore, are Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography and Anthony Mendelsohn’s colorful costume designs – qualities which were also recognized by the BAFTA. Admittedly, I rewatched this via a budget DVD release of a public domain, panned-and-scanned and extremely hazy print – which certainly didn’t aid my appreciation of it in any way!
01/05/08:
THE BRONX EXECUTIONER (Vanio Amici and, uncredited, Romolo Guerrieri, 1989) BOMB
This is another film I happened upon at my local DVD rental outlet of which I had no prior knowledge; having watched a spate of belated Euro-Cult sci-fi outings over the last couple of years, I suspected I’d be in for a ‘so bad it’s good’ ride – but the end result, though certainly unintentionally hilarious, is a wretched piece of junk.
To begin with the plot doesn’t make a lick of sense: little wonder, since it lifted a good deal of footage – including Woody Strode’s entire performance – from THE FINAL EXECUTIONER (1983), a film directed by Romolo Guerrieri (hence his unofficial credit above)! Anyway, here we get a rookie sheriff in a futuristic New York – replacing Strode (dubbed, what else, “The Black Man”) – who has to quell an ongoing conflict between a colony of androids and one comprised of renegade humanoids (the script even makes some dumb comparisons between the latter’s fate and that endured by Native Americans over the years!); incidentally, don’t ask me to explain the difference between each faction of robots, because I sure as hell couldn’t tell them apart!!
As is usual for this kind of film, we’re treated to a crappy electronic score and characters who could best be described as scum; ironically, the would-be hero doesn’t do much of anything throughout (even if he’s relentlessly undermined by martinet Strode during his period of training). As a matter of fact, the lead is actually...er…the leader of the humanoids – a short-tempered beefcake wearing a ridiculously undersized sleeveless shirt and who’s supposedly fallen in love with a human; when she’s raped and murdered by rival androids, he sets out to infiltrate the latter’s castle base (having by this time befriended the cop). Margie Newton (from Bruno Mattei’s equally lamentable HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD [1980]) is the bimbo leader of the villainous robots – who, amusingly, gets an itch for lovemaking just as the final onslaught is about to begin!
While there are some undeniable howlers throughout – particularly the humanoid leader’s dumb monologues – the film is simply too poorly handled (in all departments) to be easily enjoyed; in fact, even if less than 90 minutes in length, I found it virtually unbearable…
01/06/08:
DIAL: HELP (Ruggero Deodato, 1988) 
This is only the fourth effort I’ve watched from this director (whom I met and found quite genial at the 2004 Venice Film Festival Italian B-movie retrospective) and also, possibly, the worst. As was the case with THE BRONX EXECUTIONER (1989), which preceded it, this is a prime example from the tail end of the Euro-Cult era – prime because it shows the depths to which the previously invigorating style had fallen by this time!
Here, in fact, we get a plot revolving around – I’m not kidding, folks – a killer phone! Pretty but bland Charlotte Lewis – in her third film after PIRATES (1986) and THE GOLDEN CHILD (1986) – is a model who, apparently, has just ended an affair; she keeps expecting her architect lover to call her back but, every time the phone rings, all she gets is static accompanied by voices from the beyond (or some such crap). She befriends a new tenant at her apartment block who, conveniently, knows of an authority on paranormal activity (William Berger) – who, hilariously, explains that the negative energy which is unleashed, say, during family arguments can manifest itself via home appliances into a deadly force (I
swear I ain’t making this up)!
Among the highlights…er…lowpoints of the film are: the grumpy bartender from whose dingy place the heroine calls a couple of times (it seems that the chain-of-events can only be broken by having Lewis go through her paces again, EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962)-style!), the sheer variety of preposterous-looking phones on display, the apparatus of the heroine’s photographer friend sneaking up on her before the kill, the sarcastic cop who greets Lewis on reporting the strange occurrences (“And what’s the toaster up to, I wonder?”), the would-be rapist killed by a barrage of coins shooting out from a telephone booth, and Berger’s own bloody demise (with the phone affecting the pacemaker he’s fitted with and causing the doctor’s heart to explode)!
The film’s climax is rather confusing and, apparently, finally sees all the ‘lost souls’ inhabiting a flock of doves and flying out the window of the ‘possessed’ office (a lonelyhearts service!). For what it’s worth, the score – by ex-Goblin Claudio Simonetti no less – is effective enough, despite the inclusion of dated heavy-metal numbers on the soundtrack.
