THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Solid Kurosawa/Sturges Remake

Seven new samurai with six-shooters!!!

The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Dir. Antoine Fuqua
Scr. Nic Pizzolatto, Richard Wenk
Starring: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke,
Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo,
Martin Sensmeier, Haley Bennett, Peter Sarsgaard

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Akira Kurosawa's epic 1954 Seven Samurai weaves the stirring tale of a group of ronin defending a town of simple folk in 14th Century Japan from hordes of bandits. It is indeed a classic, a masterpiece and quite easily one of the greatest action movies of all time. When John Sturges remade the picture as a western in 1960 with Yul Brynner taking the role originally played by Toshiro Mifune, he didn't quite craft anything in the tour de force department, but he gave us an oater that's as iconic of the old west as it is a rip-snorter.




Antoine Fuqua's 2016 remake might not match the Sturges picture, but it's still a solid, kick-ass western and in its own way gains a bit on the delivery front by peppering us with an almost ludicrous body count, all very efficiently directed by the skillful Training Day helmer.

A bit of Lee-Byung-hun goes a long way.

Denzel Washington takes the sword/reins from Mifune and Brynner, acquitting himself ably as the bounty hunter who recruits a perfect cocktail of miscreants to rescue a small town from an evil land baron (delectably played by he of the perpetual sneer, Peter Sarsgaard). The fine all-star cast includes such robust recognizable talents as Chris Pratt (the smart-ass), Ethan Hawke (the sharpshooter) and Vincent D'Onofrio (the burly munitions expert), adds a nice bit of Asian martial arts/blade play from Lee Byung-hun and some very welcome guns-a-blazing from the babe-o-licious Haley Bennett. (If there's anything more boner-or-wet-crotch-inducing than babes with guns, I have yet to discover what that might be.)

A babe with a gun.
A babe hell-bent on vengeance.
Always win-win.

Speaking of boners and wet crotches, when Haley Bennet says, "I seek righteousness, but I'll take revenge," I cannot imagine anyone in the audience, neither boys nor girls, feeling anything less than glorious gooseflesh. It's to the credit of screenwriters Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk that some lovely revenge backstories come to the fore to provide added oomph, not just for the comely Bennett, but Washington's character also - he's got himself a humdinger of reason to wreak havoc.

Fuqua and his team definitely go the distance with the humdinger screenplay and serve up several truly spectacular action set pieces, not the least of which feature horses and their riders thundering across the plains of a big old American west.

There's really nothing new under the sun here, but goddamn, it's a lot of fun.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Magnificent Seven was a Gala Presentation at TIFF 2016 and will be released wide by Paramount Pictures.

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Predictable followup to alien thriller

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Dir. Dan Trachtenberg
Scr. Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, Damien Chazelle
Starring: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Cloverfield by Matt Reeves and from a script by Drew Goddard, was a surprisingly effective science fiction horror thriller in the found footage shaky-cam style. Why it needed a $25 million budget was somewhat beyond me, especially when pictures with equally terrific effects and production value have been generated for a fraction of the cost. No matter, the cam-corder-captured party, followed by an alien attack and harrowing rescue effort, was a genuinely terrifying roller coaster ride - nicely directed and with some sharp writing.

The same cannot be said for 10 Cloverfield Lane. Though not a direct sequel, it's set in the aftermath of the alien invasion from the aforementioned surprise hit. Though designed as an extremely low budget horror film with a tiny cast and claustrophobic setting, one of its meagre virtues is that it has far more gloss and polish than the first sojourn into the Cloverfield world. It's shot straight-up in a classical mode, eschewing the previous picture's camcorder look.

Happily, original director (and co-writer) Damien Chazelle dropped the property like a hot potato when he received the dough he need to make the terrific Whiplash. Producer J.J. Abrams brought Dan Trachtenberg, ace director of T.V. commercials to the helm. Though this results in a great look, a shocking car accident sequence and two superb montage sequences, the picture is pretty much a snore.

When babe Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes off into the country to chill after breaking up with her boyfriend Ben (the voice of Bradley Cooper via a couple of telephone calls), her car goes off the road in the middle of the night. She wakes up to find herself chained in a stark basement. Soon, she's visited by Howard (John Goodman) her rescuer and host.

She's in shackles for good reason. There's been a chemical warfare attack and Howard needs to gently break the news to her. He doesn't want her to do something stupid and try to leave his fallout shelter, bringing instant death to herself and potentially letting the poisonous atmosphere inside. She eventually meets hunky local good old boy Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) who is also a resident of the well-built shelter.

For most of the movie, Michelle is looking for ways to escape since she thinks Howard might be lying. He also creeps her out. Eventually, the tension twixt the two turns deadly and a (purportedly) scary truth indeed looms outside.

All of this can be seen from miles away.

Unlike Cloverfield's svelte 85-minute running time, this second in what Paramount Pictures hopes will be a new franchise, is a lugubrious 105 minutes. There's plenty of dialogue - some of it good enough, but most of it awful - plus a narrative so predictable that it would take a major mental deficiency to not see where the picture is headed.

Sadly, we're forced to sit through the by-rote advances in the ho-hum plot. All (and I do mean ALL) the "shocking" revelations come precisely when they should, offering little surprise.

Each beat feels like Syd Field and/or Robert McKee 101.

(By the way, I think both Field and McKee - McKee perhaps less so - have a lot to offer, but for some reason mainstream studio plot construction "geniuses" can't seem to realize that both of the aforementioned screenwriting gurus encourage the notion of breaking the rules, but ONLY once the rules have been thoroughly understood, tried, applied, then made better by spring-boarding away from them.)

The three central actors perform this dross admirably, but nothing can really save the film from being utterly, thoroughly dull. This might have not mattered so much if the ride had offered up some genuine thrills, but alas it does not. It spring-boards into tedious familiarity.

Though I'm always happy to watch the great John Goodman, it's a bit disheartening to see him get so much screen time with a role as run of the mill as this one. Howard is an ex-military survivalist nutcase and child rapist. Goodman does his best to play things straight, but the role is so poorly etched that Goodman can do little but waste screen time deflecting his character's predictability. As such, he works very hard to deliver as interesting and blessedly low-key a performance as possible.

Paramount is making much ado about nothing in their efforts to convince audiences not to "spoil" the proceedings. Sadly, the movie does a pretty good job of that, all by its lonesome. Given the running time and dullish pace, the movie also gives us plenty of time to spot all the gaping plot holes. Many of them are so Mack-truck sized, they're impossible to avoid.

Worse yet, though the movie is a mere fraction of the Cloverfield cost, there are still any number of films which have far more skill and imagination at a mere fraction of this picture's "modest" $5 million budget. Just take a gander at any film from Collingwood's Foresight Features (Ejecta, Hellmouth, The Hexecutioners, Septic Man) and you'll see superb production value for thrifty bucks and imagination galore as opposed to predictability galore. As well, the Foresight Features pictures are actually about something which 10 Cloverfield Lane ultimately, is not.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *½ One-and-a-half-stars

10 Cloverfield Lane is in wide release via Paramount Pictures.

UPTIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Blacklisted 40s Noir Director updates John Ford classic "The Informer" from the Irish "troubles" to post-Martin Luther King assassination Cleveland.

Uptight (1968)
Dir. Jules Dassin
Scr. Jules Dassin, Ruby Dee, Julian Mayfield
Nvl. Liam O'Flaherty
Starring: Julian Mayfield, Max Julien, Ji-Tu Cumbuka, Raymond St. Jacques, Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Browne, Frank Silvera, Juanita Moore, Robert DoQui

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Liam O'Flaherty's classic 1925 novel was the basis for his cousin John Ford's immortal 1935 film The Informer, the simple, powerful story about an alcoholic cellar-dwelling brute in the Rebel-cause who betrays his best-friend to the authorities during the Irish War of Independence. Uptight is a 1968 remake by blacklisted film noir director Jules Dassin (Brute Force, The Naked City, Night and the City) faithfully transplanting O'Flaherty's story to the civil rights revolutionary movement in America by replacing the burgeoning Irish Republican Army with a fictionalized rendering of the Black Panthers in Cleveland.

To say Uptight is a forgotten masterwork of 60s/70s American Cinema would not, in spite of its lower-budget pedigree and a few bits of roughness around the edges, be an exaggeration. It's an endlessly fascinating, evocative take on the tragic implications of Martin Luther King's assassination amongst African Americans who chose violence to meet the injustices of the "Ruling" class, diametrically opposing King's peaceful actions (which, of course, were met with violence).

Dassin, the American son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, had long-dreamed of setting the book in just this fashion and miraculously managed to successfully pitch the property to Paramount Pictures during the rich "Easy Riders Raging Bulls" period wherein the artist/inmates were briefly allowed to run the studio/asylums. Alas, the film appears to have been barely released and has indeed been largely forgotten.

Dassin's greatest successes as a filmmaker were to carefully blend legendary producer Mark Hellinger's heavy-duty combo of gritty location work with carefully matched studio art direction. Fleeing the House of Un-American Activities for his involvement in the Communist Party, he carried on this same tradition in Europe and made the heist film Rififi, inarguably one of the greatest crime pictures in the history of French Cinema.

With Uptight, Dassin assembled an absolute dream team with impeccable results.

In addition to a cast of America's greatest African American actors of the time (or any time), Dassin was blessed with a rich script he co-wrote with the film's Black stars Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield, stunningly gritty cinematography on the mean streets of Cleveland by Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront, 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker), first-rate production design by Alexandre Trauner (Children of Paradise, Port of Shadows, The Man Who Would Be King) that astonishingly matched studio sets with the locations, the expert cutting of editor Robert Lawrence (Spartacus, El Cid, Fiddler on the Roof), costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge (1974's The Great Gatsby, Network, The Rose) and last, but never, ever least, a GREAT musical score by Booker T. Jones, including his massive 1962 Stax Records hit "Green Onions". (If you don't know Jones, or at the very least, Booker T. and the MGs, then you know NOTHING.)

Eschewing the redemptive approach chosen by John Ford and his screenwriter Dudley Nichols in 1935, Dassin and team use O'Flaherty's underlying literary material to drag us through a dramatically tragic and stylistically (albeit borderline) example of neorealism which is shaken (not stirred) with dollops of expressionism. Other than a sentimental death for a traitor on the steps of a church and the updated setting, Uptight is strangely familiar to the Ford picture (at least on a simple narrative level).

After a gorgeously edited montage of the immediate Memphis aftermath to King's assassination (all in glorious, grainy colour) and expertly blended with scenes introducing the anger of the Cleveland Black-Panther-like revolutionaries, we plunge immediately into the familiar tale (which won Victor McLaglen his 1936 Best Acting Oscar as the doomed informer Gypo Nolan). His counterpart in Dassin's film is Tank (Julian Mayfield, making a phenomenal acting debut, ignored not only by the 1969 Oscars, but like the film, most everyone).

The burly booze-hound is drunkenly responsible for a major screw-up during an arms heist. His best friend Johnny Wells (Max Julien) is identified as the ringleader and murderer of a security guard. Johnny's parter Rick (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) and head revolutionary B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques, adorned stylishly in a Nehru jacket) are so disgusted with Tank's repeated incompetence that they kick him out of the organization.

Since Tank lost his job at a steel mill, Laurie (Ruby Dee), the love of his life is forced to prostitute herself. Cut loose by the revolutionaries, he's got little to live for and is especially susceptible to the influence of the silver-tongued gay police informant Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne). Seeing the reward money for Johnny Wells as a way out for himself and Laurie, Tank does the unthinkable and rats out his old friend.

Ah, but just one little drink is needed.

Instead of using the dough as a nest-egg for flight and a better life for Laurie, Tank is pumped up into thinking that for once in his life, he can be seen as a "big man", and he trolls from bar to bar, buying multiple rounds for himself and all his "friends". All he has left is $20 to put in a collection plate during Johnny's funeral (his old pal's been gunned down by the cops thanks to Tank's loose lips).

The inevitable demise awaits him - not on the steps of a church, but upon the slag heaps of a steel mill.

The picture is a heartbreaker, to be sure, but even though it's a period piece, Uptight is as resonant to race relations in America today as it was in the 60s/70s. A good part of this is thanks to Dassin's dazzling direction. The opening heist scene is tension-filled and reminiscent of the "silent" heist in Rififi, the dirty streets of Cleveland seem as foul as those in The Naked City and the violence as raw and unyielding as that seen in Brute Force. The locations and production design, so beautifully lit, pulsate with realism of the neo and expressionistic variety - everything from tenement back alleys to a shuttered old bowling alley (and, of course, the slag heaps of Cleveland). You'll also be treated to a horrifying distorted mirror sequence where Tank drunkenly stumbles amidst freakish bourgeois White folk - a thoroughly unforgettable series of shots.

Dassin's montages are also a thing of foul beauty. Not unlike Slavko Vorkapich's legendary montages, they're infused with the weight of social injustice and the sadness inherent in a world where slavery is still slavery, but with a different name - the status quo, a world in which one of the film's characters opines: "a nigger is still just a nigger".

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Uptight is available on a bare-bones Blu-Ray from Olive Films, but the transfer gorgeously reproduces the film's glorious grain and dapples of saturated colour. Given that most people have not seen this important work about the African American revolutionary movement (rooted in Irish literature and remade from a great John Ford masterpiece), it's well worth buying - for those who care about cinema.


If you buy UPTIGHT or any of other related Jules Dassin/John Ford films directly from the Amazon links below, you'll be supporting the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Not since DePalma…...

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)
Dir. Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner,
Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Sean Harris, Simon McBurney, Jens Hultén

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I've got to hand it to producer Tom Cruise with this latest instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise. His savvy overseeing has delivered several key elements which manage to place Ethan Hunt well atop James Bond in the international super-spy sweepstakes.

Most importantly, by handing the directorial reins to Christopher McQuarrie (director of the solidly entertaining Jack Reacher and screenwriter of the superb Valkyrie), Cruise has nailed things down very nicely with this fine decision; Rogue Nation is easily the best-directed MI picture since Brian DePalma's dazzling inaugural entry in the series during the summer of 1996. McQuarrie (save, perhaps for DePalma himself) manages (like those "Ukraine girls" in The Beatles' "Back in the USSR") to knock you out and leave the "West"/rest behind, including John Woo's humourlessly overwrought MI:II, J.J. Abrams' non-directed MI:III and Brad Bird's close, but no cigar Ghost Protocol.

McQuarrie handles virtually every action set piece with the skill and bravura of a master. DePalma is sorely missed in one sequence involving multiple assassination attempts during an opera, not because McQuarrie handles it badly, but because one can only imagine how much better DePalma might have helmed it. Aside from this, though, McQuarrie's mise-en-scene is clean, kinetic and sprinkled with dashes of humour. In fact, Rogue Nation features a two-part car/motorcycle chase which had me twisting about in my seat like one of Lars Von Trier's spastics in The Idiots. I daresay that it might well be a contender for one of the ten best chases ever committed to film.

The plot in these roller coaster extravaganzas usually takes a back-seat to the pyrotechnics, but thankfully this one is simpler and easier to follow than most. Here, Ethan and his team raise the ire of CIA bureaucrat Alec Baldwin and he immediately disbands Ethan's team. Our plucky hero realizes how close he is to nailing a dangerous criminal mastermind, so, with stalwart assistance from regulars Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner, he goes rogue to take the scum down. That's it. End of story, really, and a fine coat hanger with which to drape one mega-thrilling action scene on top of another.

The added bonus here is one kick-ass babe played by Rebecca Ferguson. Aside from being mouth-wateringly gorgeous, she handles herself nicely in all manner of fisticuffs and, like all women, looks especially sexy brandishing firearms.

All the elements here are familiar, but McQuarrie's helmsmanship is seldom less than dazzling. If the Bond producers don't watch out as they keep hiring ham-fisted, tin-eyed losers like Marc Forster and Sam Mendes to keep ruining and wasting Daniel Craig in the horrendously dull and dour 007 films, MI is poised to be the go-to spy franchise.

NOTE: If you get a chance to see MI:RN in IMAX, please do so. I sat front row centre and enjoyed several instances of delightful upchucking.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation is a Paramount Pictures release.

HOUDINI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Fun Technicolor biopic of legendary escape artist

If you dare doubt Tony Curtis is one of the most gorgeous movie stars - ever - you're CLEARLY OUT OF YOUR MIND!!!

Yeah, OK, Janet Leigh is HOT, too.

Houdini (1953)
dir. George Marshall
Starring: Tony Curtis,
Janet Leigh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If you’re looking for a penetrating and even modestly accurate dramatic depiction of the life of Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist, this is probably not it. If, however, you’re looking for a tremendous performance from a great star in his peak years, you could do a whole lot worse than Houdini. The handsome, virile Tony Curtis commands the screen so voraciously that it feels almost like a one-man show. It isn’t, however, since he’s supported by the mouth watering Janet Leigh as Houdini’s long-suffering and only moderately supportive wife.

Directed by the sturdy prolific hack George Marshall, Houdini is a strangely enjoyable Hollywood biopic. With a script by Philip (Broken Lance, Detective Story) Yordan, the movie, surprisingly, doesn’t have one of the strongest narrative arcs in the world. In spite of this, the picture delights since Marshall cannily keeps his camera trained, like a bee to a flower petal upon the gorgeous, talented Tony Curtis that much of the story, such as it is, hovers within his glorious realm in a sort of crazed adulatory perpetuum. Though the movie plays fast and loose with many of the actual details of Houdini’s life, one gets a strong sense of the man's drive and charisma and, in so doing, captures his mythic essence -- the myth and the mystery.

Part of Houdini’s considerable entertainment value is also due to the attention to production value from powerhouse producer George Pal who crammed the picture with as much wonder and star-power as could only come from the man who produced and/or directed some of the finest entertainments of the 50s including The Time Machine, Tom Thumb, War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide and, among others, that great series of animated Puppetoons that included the likes of Tubby the Tuba. It was Pal, no doubt, who saw what a perfect Houdini Tony Curtis would make.

Curtis plays the title character as a driven man – driven to romancing the woman of his choosing, driven to success and driven to seeking greater and more dangerous challenges. While Marshall doesn’t have much in the way of a distinctive directorial voice, he spent much of his career capturing star performances and exploiting them to the hilt. Much of Marshall’s best work was in comedy and he trained his workmanlike eyes on such stars as Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis and Jackie Gleason. He also had one great movie in him – Destry Rides Again, a terrific western with Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, an oater that never fails to entertain.

Houdini begins with a typical Hollywood meet-cute wherein our title character catches a glimpse of the gorgeous Bess (Janet Leigh) from behind a circus sideshow cage where he is made-up grotesquely as a jungle wild man. He keeps wooing her in savage beast mode, but when she catches a glimpse of him without the makeup, she’s also smitten. How could she not be?They quickly marry and begin touring circuses and honky-tonk vaudeville houses as a husband and wife magic act. Soon, this life grows wearying for wifey and she begs her hunky hubbles to settle down and take a real job. He agrees, for a time, and toils, rather conveniently in a factory devoted to designing, building and selling locks and safes. Here he becomes obsessed with the notion of death-defying escapes, manages to convince the little lady wifey. Upon his re-entry into the world of show business, Houdini becomes bigger than he ever imagined was possible.

Marshall expertly handles the escape routines – so much so that even though WE know Houdini’s going to beat them hands-down, we still feel considerable suspense as each one is presented. A lot of the credit for the suspense generated in these scenes must go to Curtis and his performance – alternating as it does from boyish wonder to driven madman. Curtis plays Houdini as no mere entertainer, but someone who is not personally satisfied unless he is genuinely cheating death every step of the way.

Less successfully rendered is the annoying, obtrusive love story. It is a constant blessing that Janet Leigh is so easy on the eyes, for her character is not so easy on the ears. The character of Bess is almost harridan-like in her constant whining: “Harry, don’t do this. Harry, don’t do that. Harry, get a real job. Harry, I want a family. Harry, I want us to settle down. Harry, that’s too dangerous. Harry, you’re going to kill yourself. Harry, you love your stunts more than you love me.”

Nothing like a babe-o-licious harridan to keep a good man down.

Luckily, she doesn’t. The movie forges on with one daring stunt after another and luckily, one of Miss Leigh’s harridan-o-ramas is certainly not without entertainment value. The sequence involving Houdini’s preparations for his famous dip into the icy waters of the Detroit River are as hilarious as anything I’ve seen recently. Tony Curtis lying in a claw-footed bathtub covered in ice cubes whilst a team of men pour more bucket loads on top of him as wifey continues nagging at him, is not only funny, but chillingly (if you’ll forgive the pun) reminiscent of moments I and other men close to me (they know who they are) have experienced with their significant others at the most inopportune junctures.

Men who never grow up will always be boys.

Finally, I wish to divulge the weepy Hollywood ending which bears absolutely nothing close to the real Houdini’s death, but I won't - suffice it to say that Leigh removes the mask of the harridan long enough for Curtis to emote so expertly that it’s a tear-squirting corker of a finale.

And that is worthy of all the Technicolor glory lavished upon this lovely gem from a much simpler time.

The Film Corner Rating: *** 3 Stars

Houdini is available on DVD from Legend Films.

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INTERSTELLAR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Nolan finally achieves a smidgen of competence.

Interstellar (2014)
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There isn't one single Christopher Nolan movie I've ever liked. He's humourless, pretentious and worst of all, he's a veritable Blind Pew when it comes to directing action scenes (which is a bit of a problem since three of his pictures are superhero movies). However, Interstellar is cause for a thimble-sized celebratory quaff o' bubbly since I was able to actually sit through the movie and not hate it - too much. Basically what we're dealing with here is an almost 3-hour-long cerebral-style sci-fi soaper involving a dying Earth and a whack of astronauts searching for habitable planets beyond a black hole that opens up into a faraway galaxy.

First of all, the movie has no major action set-pieces for Nolan to screw-up. The handful there are genuinely have an accent on suspense and Nolan handles them reasonably well. Also, the picture is replete with low-key dialogue scenes in a claustrophobic spaceship which allows for some fine acting from Matthew McConaughey as the ship's captain, Anne Hathaway as the science officer (and daughter of Michael Caine, the back-on-Earth mastermind of the endeavour to save the human race) as well as the always astonishing Jessica Chastain as McConaughey's back-on-Earth scientist daughter.

For such a long, humourless picture, it almost never feels dull and offers a compelling-enough journey to keep us in our seats. There's one humungous problem, however. The ride provided is decent enough, but there isn't a moment when we don't know where the movie is headed. The predictability-factor is disappointingly up there.

I defy anyone to not figure out the big secret in the early going when McConaughey's daughter (as a little girl) begs him not to go on the journey. I annoyingly tried to explain to my wife where the movie was headed and she asked me politely to keep my mouth shut. "Oh come," I insisted, "It's going to have worm holes and time travel elements, so how can it not be . . . " At this point, my daughter sharply cut me off with an aggressive finger to her lips and a loud, "Ssssshhhhhhh!!!!!"

I also defy anyone to not figure out from the very moment we meet Matt Damon that he isn't all he's cracked up to . . . oh, I'll shut it!!!

The movie is perfectly watchable, though, and based upon its relative competence I'd suggest that maybe, just maybe, Nolan has figured out how to make movies. Interstellar still bears the Christopher "One Idea" Nolan imprimatur - he'll never shake that, but at least you'll not be checking what time it is every five-to-minutes.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:
**½ Two-and-a-half-stars.

Interstellar screens the world over via Paramount.

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GREASE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Iconic 70s Homage to the 50s from Hit Play an Exercise in Futility.

Do you detect the aroma of our love?

Grease (1978) dir. Randall Kleiser **
Starring: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing, Didi Conn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I hate this movie. I have always hated this movie. I will always hate this movie. In fact, the only reason I feel compelled to give it a two-star rating is that virtually everyone else in the world seems to think it’s worthy of slavish devotion. (I’m tempted to say “hopeless devotion”, but refuse, ultimately, to succumb for fear of morphing into Gene Shalit or worse, Peter Travers.)

So why, you might ask, is this innocuous tuft of powder puff worthy of my hatred? First and foremost, it paints a bone-headedly sun-dappled portrait of 50s America – a period so rich in contradiction and darkness just below the thin surface of light, that I find it impossible to stomach the pure nostalgic fakery. Call it curmudgeonly, but even upon its first release, I responded to the picture with the same kind of jaded contempt that (at the time) made me cringe when I first saw Star Wars a year earlier. In retrospect and with the benefit of several helpings since that time, including the new Blu-Ray release, Grease, like Star Wars, sits there in cinema history – a perfect Easter Island-like moai of how, by whom, where, when and why movies started to go seriously awry and led to a decade (the 80s) that was replete with some of the most mind-numbingly empty movies of all time. Even ace film critic Pauline Kael abandoned the lively sexually-charged titles of her book collections of reviews and collectively titled her pieces during the early 80s as “State of the Art” – reflecting the soul-bereft technical proficiency and machine-tooled quality of the work during that period.

In tandem with the aforementioned, the second most important piece of ammunition for my derision is the simple fact that Grease is not especially well made. It’s definitely machine-tooled, but not in any aesthetically pleasing way.

While many of the songs are not without the melodic qualities that popular music needs, the delivery of said pieces vocally and visually is either insipidly competent at best and at worst, downright dull. Olivia Newton-John, while suitably Sandra-Dee-like in her performance as the blonde goody-two-shoes who falls for the greasy bad-boy played by John Travolta, delivers all her vocals with the same lifeless range that vaulted her to the top of the A.M. charts during one of the most tunefully-challenged periods of mainstream music. Travolta’s singing is marginally better in that he attempts to infuse his clumsy warbling with something resembling pizzazz. The supporting cast is in better voice – notably Stockard Channing who delivers (in spite of her obvious over-age and flabby thighs), a musical performance that has EXACTLY what a musical needs in terms of vocal delivery – she has a great voice and lots of character.

Worse yet are the dance numbers. Newton-John simply can’t dance and Travolta, who can, never really gets a chance to cut loose as in Saturday Night Fever and, in later years, Pulp Fiction. This is not necessarily ALWAYS the fault of the performers. Patricia Birch’s choreography is pretty run of the mill, but worse yet, Kleiser simply has no idea where to put his camera during these scenes. I normally have no problem with proscenium-styled theatrical choreography where the camera lets the performers do most of the work, however with Grease, many of the shots are really uninspiring and/or just plain slapdash and while the idiotic over-cutting that pastes them sloppily together is not quite as awful as in most contemporary musicals, it does signal the shape of things to come such as cutting to the beat and/or constantly punching in for unnecessary close-ups. (An excellent example of proscenium styled choreography that’s handled deliciously can be experienced in the Blu-ray release of Joshua Logan’s gorgeous and stunning South Pacific.)

At the end of the day, I have no problem with fluff if it’s first-rate, but Grease – after several viewings over the years – seems (at least to my eyes) lacking the kind of style and oomph one normally equates with great movie musicals. There’s also something vaguely detestable about the “Happy Days” quality to the nostalgia. George Lucas went back to 1962 with the brilliant American Graffiti, but the movie captures a time of change so that the fun and frolics have a true bittersweet quality to them. Grease captures not much of anything, save for some poorly shot, cut and choreographed musicals numbers purporting to capture a period that doesn’t seem to exist in any world save for the one belched up by Kleiser and his factory workers.

The Blu-Ray release of Grease is also a bit of a disappointment, too. Part of the problem is the source material since the movie is not especially well shot, but there also seems to be something not quite right about the transfer. After my considerable disappointment with the look of this Blu-Ray release, I compared the virtually identical DVD version. Surprisingly, the Blu-Ray disc doesn’t look much better than the up-rez that occurs when I play the DVD on the Blu-Ray player itself.

The extra features are the usual grab bag of fan-aimed nonsense. The “documentary” elements of the extras are not much more than publicity-styled puff pieces, the deleted scenes are only of use to die-hard fans and the sing-a-long feature feels oddly out of synch. (My little girl, who loves the movie and the music, switched off the sing-a-long feature and did her thing without it because the karaoke effect was just confusing.)

The real surprise and best thing about the Blu-Ray release is the excellent commentary track by Kleiser and Birch. For a bad movie, a dreadful director and an unexciting choreographer, they actually sound like intelligent people and some of the insights into the production are informative and entertaining – not enough, alas, to change my mind about the picture itself, though. Ah, the hell with it. Call me a wet blanket and enjoy!

Grease is available via Paramount Home Entertainment on Blu-Ray & DVD in a package titled “The Rockin’ Rydell Edition”.

NOAH - Review By Greg Klymkiw - In search of berries in the land of theSmurfs and Vikings

You'll see green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
You're never gonna see no unicorns - The Irish Rovers, The Unicorn Song

"Oh shit, it's black fly season and I've got lockjaw."

"I need BERRIES. Got any?

Noah (2014) *
Dir. Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone, Nick Nolte

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Four words.

Anthony Hopkins IS Methuselah.

Phew! Who cut the fuckin' cheese? Man, oh man, when great directors fail, it's nice to see them crap-out as spectacularly as Darren (Pi, Requiem For a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler) Aronofsky has done with the swirling sea of salt water pickle brine that is Noah. Yes, the movie is dreadful, but it's at least a rip-snorting hoot for most of its running time and if you've a hankering for a multi-million dollar Sun Classic International-styled Ed Wood-directed biblical epic, have I got a picture for you.

"I plan to skewer chipmunks upon my 'stache."

In case you don't already know the plot, we're talking Noah of the Ark fame here, the fairytale Old Testament servant of God. To quote from the angel Gabriel in Green Pastures: "Gangway! Gangway fo' de Lawd." And I've gotta tell ya', de Lawd sho' do be right royally pissed off with Man for all his sinning ways - so much so that he entrusts his loyal earthly servant Noah to build an Ark to house the "innocent" during the Great Flood. The innocents He wishes to save are God's non-human animals - excepting of course, the unicorn. God just wants to bless the beasts with life and start all over again. Can we blame him? (Oh, and Aronofsky, an avowed atheist refuses to use the word "God" in the film. He substitutes it with "Creator", but hey, that's his sick shit, not mine.)

God declares, not unlike Travis Bickle: "Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." Though He doesn't come right out and say it, de Lawd be thinkin', "All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal."

And I feel for Aronofsky on this. It's not much of a story. God tells Noah to build an ark and fill it with animals while everything and everyone else will die in a flood. Noah builds the Ark, the animals board the Ark, the rains comes, the rains go. End of story.

So one of our great directors decides to add a revisionist twist to the piece and couch it as a tale of man's environmental assaults upon the Earth and how drastic measures must be taken to achieve a new beginning. The same, said director decides there's also an interesting way to tell a tale of religious zealotry through Noah who feels charged with the desire to fulfil God's Word even if it means murdering the children of his eldest son. Aronofsky also dabbles in presenting a rivalry twixt Noah and Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), the former being someone who blindly accepts a potential misinterpretation of God's Word and the latter who believes God created in His own image to place a species at the top of the food chain and to control his own destiny.

These very interesting elements are there, but the movie is just so Good-Godawful in pretty much every other respect. Noah and his wife are portrayed as some manner of eco-hippies, but they're equally presented as positively insufferable cliches. Anthony Hopkins munches ham to portray the 900-year-old Methuselah as a doddering idiot who's mostly obsessed with being able to find and eat berries before he dies. I kid you not. There's even a scene with Hopkins on all fours whilst maniacally trolling the ground for fucking berries.

And, of course, I shit myself laughing when a little girl asks Noah to sing. I was gobsmacked, actually. Crowe sings!

As if this weren't enough, Aronofsky even goes all Ray Harryhausen on us when we're introduced to humungous stone creatures called "The Watchers" who rise up out of the ground to offer assistance to Noah to both build the Ark AND do battle - yes BATTLE! - with the armies of Tubal-cain. Worse yet, The Watchers are essentially identical to Transformers - yes, rock-hewn Michael-Bay-style Transformers.

This might be one of the biggest follies of all - CG Transformers made of rock aside, the most ludicrous element is just how much of the film is generated via CG. Using real animals would have lent a sense of "humanity" to the proceedings, but no matter which way you slice it, God's non-human animals have about as much warmth as a witch's tit.

The levels of idiocy in this movie know no bounds, frankly. They are all, however, knee-slappingly funny. Yeah, the laughs are unintentional, but they are as pure as those achieved by Edward D. Wood Jr. in his straight-faced Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. I mean that with absolutely no condescension towards the late Mr. Wood. I genuinely love the guy. Just, as I genuinely love Aronofsky. They're both filmmakers with a voice, and that ain't something to be sneezed at.

Uh, did I just compare Aronofsky to Ed Wood?

Noah is in massive worldwide release via Paramount Pictures

PHASE IV - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 70s Sci-Fi shocker is only feature directed by Saul Bass

Phase IV (1974) ***
dir. Saul Bass
Starring Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy and Lynne Frederick

Review by Greg Klymkiw

Phase IV is a nifty, creepy ecological sci-fi thriller that keeps one engrossed from beginning to end. Some occasional, though rather glaring flaws, could have dragged the film down quite a few notches if it had been directed by anyone other than Saul Bass.

In fact, the movie is almost overshadowed by one single question.

Why the hell did Saul Bass direct only ONE feature film?

Well, in spite of winning an Oscar for his very cool and supremely unconventional short film Why Man Creates, Bass's Phase IV was, and still is, a criminally neglected and forgotten picture. Misunderstood and mishandled by Paramount Pictures upon its theatrical release it has also been conspicuously absent on DVD until a few years ago when Legend Films released numerous titles that Paramount seemed curiously ambivalent about releasing themselves. Thankfully, though, Legend has picked up a clutch of interesting titles. In particular, Phase IV can now be seen and enjoyed by the few of us who enjoyed it upon its original release. Hopefully a hell of a lot more will discover it also.

A variation on the “big bug” creature features of the 50s, one might call it a “small bug” creature-feature in that the villains are not oversized tarantulas and preying mantises, but rather – ants – yes, I kid you not, ants.

Real ants.

Small ants.

Billions of ants.

Billions upon billions of ants.

And together, they are supremely intelligent.

In a remote corner of an Arizona desert and due to a strange interplanetary phenomenon, the world's ants have all merged into a central force of thought and destruction, bent on ascending to the very top of Earth’s food chain. But in spite of this seeming doom and gloom creature-feature premise, Phase IV is a quiet, deliberately paced and, at times cerebral picture – reminiscent of Robert Wise’s strangely clinical adaptation of The Andromeda Strain and the 1971 release of The Hellstrom Chronicle (Walon Green and Ed Spiegel’s riveting mock documentary about insects taking over the Earth).

The delightfully named principal character, one Dr. Ernest D. Hubbs (zealously brought to life by Nigel Davenport) teams up with James Lesko (Michael Murphy), a young statistician and computer scientist. Together they set up a small research base in the desert to keep a watchful eye on the rather odd behaviour of several colonies of ants. A series of experiments quickly suggest that the ants not only have rational thought but communicate via the universal language of mathematics.

As ridiculous as the aforementioned theory might sound, the visually sumptuous attention to detail through macro-photography, stop-motion and some really cool optical effects allows us to suspend disbelief and, for most of the picture’s running time engage in (or ignore) the mechanics of screenwriter Mayo (Marooned) Simon’s oddball plot. Where the picture really falters is in some of the more stilted dialogue shoved into the mouths of the characters and the weird presence and performance of the stunningly gorgeous, but mind-numbingly inept Lynne Frederick (the real-life squeeze of Peter Sellers).

But when Saul Bass trains his eye on either the ants or the scientific gymnastics of the two men, Phase IV is a real treat. He builds an atmosphere of dread from beginning to end; dread that raises hackles, gooseflesh and heart rates with slow, creepy-crawly mounting force.

Bass, of course, is best known – not as a film director, but as the graphic designer responsible for such memorable title sequences as Psycho, The Man With The Golden Arm, Vertigo and, among numerous others, Casino. His frame compositions in this picture are nothing less than masterful and at times, come close to being worthy of the best of Kubrick. Alas, the ideas under the surface of the narrative become such a cerebral jumble that not only do they come close to making the more obtuse moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey seem clear as day, but the film occasionally veers from brilliant to borderline moronic.

No matter. The movie is oozing with style.

And what style!

The uneven elements of the picture are more than obscured by Bass’s visual panache and once in awhile, Phase IV is blessed with images so horrifying and creepy that one realizes just how important Bass must have been to Hitchcock during Psycho. Many of the key set pieces in Hitchcock’s masterpiece were storyboarded by Bass and Phase IV has some visuals that evoke similar feelings of revulsion. I will never forget, for example, a horse’s whinnying - sounding like shrieks of pain coming from an inquisition torture chamber, as its body, covered with millions of swarming, munching ants soon give way to and the look of pain and horror on the face of the young owner of the horse when it's shot to death to end the suffering. Nor will I forget the creepy sight of an outstretched hand of a dead man as thousands of ants pour out of a gaping hole in the palm. Nor will the sight of several towering monolith-like anthills surrounding the remote research base ever leave my memory.

Phase IV is replete with so many strange and horrific images that finally, it's not only a picture worth seeing, but one that instills feelings of regret that Bass never made more films as a director. If he had, he might have not been able to create some of the most astounding title sequences in motion picture history, but motion picture history might have been blessed with a few more masterworks to have come from Bass. As it is, Phase IV is a work that stands more as a testament to the promise of Saul Bass as a director, but sometimes just imagining what might have been is a worthy substitute for what actually is or was or could have been.

Until another life, or at least until the ants take over, dreaming will have to do.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

Phase IV is available on DVD from Legend Films.

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THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Flawed 70s shocker offers far more effective chills and thrills than the new Hispanic-tinged "Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones" - thanks to Santeria!

After I slice and dice these kids,
I'll go on to star in MANDINGO.

The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972) **1/2
dir. Waris Hussein
Starring: Shirley MacLaine, Perry King, Edmundo Rivera Alvarez
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Santeria is some scary shit and has largely been ignored by horror films. This might have something to do with the fact that it’s a religion and therefore politically incorrect to drag it into the realm of such a “lowly” genre. That said, political correctness has never reared its ugly head when Catholicism or other religions are delightfully exploited for similar purposes, so one can only gather that either Liberal-minded creators are happy to exploit the dominant European religions, but unable to bring themselves to do so for the saintly Third World blend of Jesus-worship and voodoo or it might be that they just haven’t had their thinking caps skewed in the direction of Santeria. That said, this 70s thriller goes whole hog on the Santeria front and includes one freaky exorcism sequence that blends very cool Latin musical stylings with all the shrieking, convulsing and chanting you can handle.

The Possession of Joel Delaney is seriously flawed, but still manages to effectively raise the hackles on a number of fronts – not the least of which is its creepy, deliberate pace as we’re treated to the tale of a wealthy, fur-laden New York housewife (Shirley MacLaine) who slowly comes to realize that her messed-up lay-about brother (our title character – marvelously played by Perry King in his first feature film role) is possessed by the spirit of a now-dead serial killer who delights in severing the heads of his female (‘natch) victims with one Mother of a switchblade.

It’s a movie rife with all sorts of interesting shadings – undertones of incest, the wide gap between rich and poor, the dichotomous cultures of WASPS and Puerto Ricans and, most fascinating of all, the backdrop of Santeria. Unfortunately, the movie is marred by some really clunky direction and a clutch of dreadful performances.

Director Waris Hussein seemed an unlikely choice for this film adaptation of Ramona Stewart’s very cool novel which kept this feller up for several late nights as a kid – clutching a flashlight under the blankets to keep reading, but to also ward off fear of the dark. Hussein’s previous directorial attempts included the extremely entertaining counter-culture kiddie sleeper hit Melody (replete with a classic BeeGees score and that double-infusion of Oliver star wattage Mark Lester and Jack Wild) and the whimsical, delightful Gene Wilder comedy Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx. He clearly seems out of his element with this material and it’s certainly one of the oddest studio pictures I’ve seen from this period since it equally balances some really effective sequences with moments that raise Ed Wood to the heights of Bergman.

He ain't Warren Beatty
He's My Brother

Even Shirley MacLaine (the reincarnation-believing estranged sister of Warren Beatty) seems weirdly unsuited to the requirements of the picture. She handles the rich-bitchiness of the role with considerable assuredness, but many of her other emotions feel forced and even annoyingly shrill. The latter performance flaw is especially odd when she’s called upon to be vaguely caring and/or maternal. It’s so insanely uneven that one can only think she felt she was slumming and wrong-headedly thought she needed to mix things up to keep it interesting for her. MacLaine isn’t, however, the only one rendering a bad performance. Many of the American and British actors in the film feel like foreigners dubbed into English, though are clearly WASP-ish thesps recorded mostly with synch sound. Only Perry King is dubbed with regularity, but at least that makes sense for the character since his voice is only replaced when he's speaking Spanish in the serial killer’s demon spirit. In fact, King delivers solid work and it’s clear why he went on to become a popular leading man in the 70s.

Aside from King, the only performances of note come from the Puerto Rican actors Hussein cast in supporting roles. One of the most memorable and stirring appearances in the picture comes from Edmundo Rivera Álvarez as the Santerian exorcist Don Pedro. He’s only on-screen in two scenes, but he is so riveting – blending compassion with religious fervor – that one almost wished he had more scenes. In fact, it might have been far more interesting to expand his role to the size of that of Max Von Sydow’s in The Exorcist (that little 70s possession picture that has definitely outshone this one). Interestingly, Álvarez was a prominent actor, director and playwright in Puerto Rico who, in spite of his prolific work in his home country never found a place in mainstream Hollywood cinema and died in relative poverty and obscurity.

For all its problems, though, The Possession of Joel Delaney is still a picture worth seeing – especially for fans of the horror genre. It has enough creepy moments to keep one glued to the screen. It’s also yet another bold DVD release from Legend Films – taking an obscure picture from the Paramount catalogue and getting it out in the world for all to see. And for a glimpse at a small, but dynamic performance by Edmundo Rivera Álvarez and the Santeria action, it’s worth catching up with.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Dreaded Hispanic Fifth Wheel

More of the same found footage activities of the paranormal kind come our way in this fifth instalment of the ghostly horror series about witchcraft and demonic possession captured by people who seem to do nothing else but shoot every second of their lives through home video cameras.

Come join me at
Satan's Tupperware Party!

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) *
Dir. Christopher Landon
Starring: Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, Gabrielle Walsh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

After seeing the first Paranormal Activity, I hoped there'd never be a sequel. I knew this was wishful thinking, but when I see a picture that feels perfect, I don't want its existence besmirched by an endless barrage of substandard instalments that deliver more of the same, but go out of their way to generate useless backstory and fleshing-out. After seeing the first film, I felt delectably walloped, but was also left with enough questions about what had occurred that they enriched the experience by lending an air of mystery to the proceedings. I didn't want to know that Katie was the target of an ages-old conspiracy of witches carrying out demonic possession, nor did I want to know the reasons why. What happened in the first film was enough.

Even still, I'd gird my loins appropriately and then faithfully see each and every new instalment. Parts II and III of the followups, though bereft of the power of the first, were surprisingly fun, creepy and offering enough jolts to satisfy me on visceral levels. Part IV, though, seemed like the beginning of the end and the latest instalment comes close to tarring and feathering Oren Peli's original offering.

I might be possessed, but I still
brush my teeth twixt hauntings.

The Marked Ones is set against the backdrop of California's Hispanic community. Given how scary Santeria is - at least for this fella - I thought that maybe we'd go into somewhat different territory. Alas, this is something that's never exploited for what it could have been worth.

What it barfs up instead is a Hispanic kid with a video camera discovering weird stuff in an apartment below his own family's abode.

A well-known witch in the community boasts a series of odd comings and goings including a pal from school. The pal is always distant and in a hurry. Lucky, for all concerned, we're treated to a ritual involving the naked old witch and a gorgeous young lovely displaying full frontal nudity. However, what follows is pure tedium until the last 20-or-so minutes when the filmmakers deliver a close-but-no-cigar fright-fest.

This, of course, is hardly enough to save the picture.

A clutch of Hispanic kids break into the apartment after it's been sealed with police tape after a grisly murder and then, more of the same - weird noises, odd images and the ever-mounting dread that a kick-ass climax will ensue. The movie briefly skirts with Hispanic gang involvement, but this is never properly fleshed out. Like all the sequels, we never get a sense of the characters and hence, don't really care what's going to happen.

This is all more retreading on a well worn series and the only new element is that the filmmakers have ensured a whole new marketplace amongst Hispanic audiences. Replete with vaguely ethnocentric trappings, one expects appearances from either Topo Gigio and/or The Frito Bandito.

How the mighty continue to fall - this time to the strains of La Cucaracha.

"Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones" is in wide theatrical release worldwide via Paramount.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #1 still packs a wallop on the eve of a 5th sequel

A 5th Paranormal Activity is now out there in the world. Though the sequels to the original have had a few decent frissons, nothing held up to the first serving of the found footage ghost story. For fun, I'm looking back at the very first Paranormal Activity and after a few years of not watching it, I can happily say it holds up magnificently.

Paranormal Activity (2009)****
dir. Oren Peli
Starring: Katie Featherston,
Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Any and all clichés one could utilize to describe the overall effect of this magnificently directed, utterly extraordinary and near-perfect no-budget horror movie would be apt – it’s heart-stopping, nerve-jangling and pulse-pounding.

More than suitable, albeit hackneyed descriptions, one and all, but in some ways a disservice to use because Paranormal Activity is such an exquisitely rendered creep-fest that any superlatives it deserves (clichéd or not), will ultimately pale in comparison to the experience of bearing witness to what unfolds. There is also the fear that as much as one wants people to see it, any overwrought praise has the ability to set up the sort of high expectations that no picture could ever live up to.

Well, let it be said that I had absolutely NO expectations.

As per usual, I managed, in advance of seeing the picture for the first time, to avoid reading all reviews. No puff pieces for this fella, either, since I can’t stomach reading them anyway. I partook of no trailers, nor any of the usual hype used to hawk movies. All I knew going in was the title. Knowing even that, I assumed it would be a horror movie, and, being a rabid fan of late-night radio stars Art Bell and George Noory of “Coast-to-Coast” fame, I furthermore suspected the picture would be dealing with one of my favourite subjects in horror movies – paranormal activities, of course; those forces in the universe that are received with as much scepticism as profound belief.

With no expectations or knowledge, I sat back and let it happen.

And happen, it most certainly did.

On the surface, the picture falls into the shaky-video-cam thriller mockumentary tradition of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Quarantine. It blows all of them into near oblivion – not because there’s anything profoundly original about Paranormal Activity (well. there is, actually - more on this later), but because it’s endowed with the sort of relentless, obsessive quality one might find in the very best horror thrillers and feels less machine-tooled than the aforementioned.

It’s also just plain scary - something that I never really felt about the mock thrills within the trio cited above; due, I suspect, to the feeling that I could feel the hands of the filmmakers at work just a little too obviously.

Paranormal Activity elicits the sort of unexpected explosions of fear-induced fecal matter into my undies that all great horror films wrench out of you because writer-director Oren Peli creates mounting dread by avoiding so many of the trademarks of the shaky-cam genre.

Number one, it is not overwrought – at least not all the way through and ONLY when it needs to be.

Secondly, the performances are fresh and naturalistic. The attractive leads seem like any normal young couple flung into a situation that is clearly out of their realm of experience.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the shaky-cam is actually not all that shaky. In fact, it’s mostly very, very still. Locked off in tableau for a good portion of the picture, the camera is a silent witness to some of the most horrifying images I have yet to experience (which takes some doing since about 1/3 of the over 30,000 titles I've seen in my life are affiliated with genres devoted to terror). There’s no blood – not too much, anyway: there’s no elaborate, over-the-top digital effects and there are no cheap shocks (well…maybe just a few, but – Goddamn! – if they aren’t effective).

While we are presented with the terror in the familiar stillness and darkness of night, the manner in which many of the scares are delivered are rooted in an approach that is less common in this age of torture pornography masquerading as horror. And it is the stillnes that resonates most profoundly in the picture. This is the stuff of most of the nightmares that haunt us.

It is a terror of the creepiest kind and as such, comes far closer to the work of Val Lewton and/or William Friedkin by way of Jim McBride’s legendary mockumentary David Holzman’s Diary.

Lewton was the legendary producer and head of the RKO horror unit in the 40s where he created a series of brilliant works like The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie and a handful of other creepy pictures that not only revolutionized how horror films were made, but still work in a current context - mainly for their adherence to finding terror in ordinary, (and mostly) contemporary situations touched by some form of psychic or psychological malevolence. As well, Lewton's pictures discovered utter horror in what is NOT seen – stillness, quiet, shadow, darkness and obsession. These are the real monsters in Lewton’s work. Paranormal Activity is replete with these attributes.

Friedkin’s The Exorcist battered us with the most horrendous, extreme images that still shock to this very day – yet the reason they shock is that they are framed in the clinical detail of how Regan, the devil-possessed child, is run through a battery of painful and intrusive tests and, most importantly, how the horror is rooted in the lives and locale of normal people. Paranormal Activity has a clinical precision in the obsessive detailing of every moment of the lives of the central figures in addition to the added delightful detailing of paranormal phenomena via a supernatural expert who's brought in to assess the odd goings-on.

And yes, because of such attention to details prior to the super-explosions of creepiness, the movie is all the more terrifying.

If the abovementioned were then filtered through the birthplace of the mockumentary, Jim McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary, an obsessively grainy vérité look at the psychological disintegration of a man who uses a camera to chart his descent into madness, one would come very close to experiencing the brilliant, visceral terror of Paranormal Activity.

Following 20 days in the lives of a seemingly normal man and woman trying to videotape and live with the horrible entities threatening the woman’s sanity and eventually, both their lives, Paranormal Activity draws from well-honoured cinematic traditions and manages to go its own unique way. In fact, it is the normal people and locales in this picture that make us squirm whenever night falls and the camera just sits there – a quiet observer of the mounting horror. These are normal people in an extraordinary situation who are recording the strange events in their lives.

Paranormal Activity is a clever variation on pinching oneself to confirm that either there is nothing to worry about or, in the worst case, that it’s not a dream. And if it’s not a dream, the only solace our characters (and we, the audience) can take is that the central figures (and by extension, us) are not completely out of our minds. Unfortunately, what befalls the two main characters is so blood-curdling that insanity, or death would be better than having to live yet another night – face to face with evil incarnate.

This is a movie that demands being experienced on a big screen. It takes the home movie aesthetic and swallows us whole. The very essence of a big-screen experience is what envelopes and virtually consumes us. Every small, subtle and horrific detail explodes in our faces with the kind of power and force that big-screen features are meant to do. Subsequent small screen viewings will also prove interesting, especially when the alternate “first version” (without the reworked and decidedly kick-ass “theatrical” conclusion) is also watched – but only AFTER seeing it theatrically.

Paranormal Activity is a corker of a horror film. Another cliché for your edification, but one that is perfectly appropriate. One leaves the theatre drained, solemnly quiet, and alternately contemplative and stunned.

It’s the magic of movies, and for that, I am most grateful.

Paranormal Activity is available on Paramount Blu-Ray along with sequels II, III and IV. Part V, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is in extremely wide release world wide.