The Woman in Black (1989)

NetFlix N/A
IMDB 7.5/10
My Rating: 8/10

A young lawyer is sent to an isolated village to settle the affairs of a recently deceased woman, and finds the area haunted by a mysterious woman in black.

First up, this movie is available on DVD from Amazon but sadly, is not for rent on Netflix, so interested viewers will have to track down a purchasable copy.  That said, it is worth the effort for anyone who loves a good ghost story, because it's one of the best.  Based on the novel by Susan Hill, this is easily among my favorite ghost story films ever.  I review it here specifically with the knowledge that it's about to be remade in 2012 by the newly-reconstituted Hammer Films and given the track record of most modern remakes, I want to promote the original version as much as possible.

I am a huge fan of a good haunting movie.  My all-time favorite is The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, but others include The Changeling, The Legend of Hell House, The Ring, Haunted, and the more recent The Eclipse (reviewed by me here).  As a longtime fan of the classic British horror story, this was made just for me.  It's a slow moving, slow burning, gothic nightmare that builds gradually and without hurry to its horrific conclusion.

A young lawyer on the way up is given his "big assignment" - Travel to a remote village to settle the affairs of a regular client of his firm.  On arrival, he finds that the deceased woman had no friends among the locals and was generally regarded as mad.  The entire first half of the movie is all foreboding, and despite the 80's date it is straight out of a 40's ghost story complete with wary villagers, suspicious innkeeper, and plenty of conversation-stopping mentions of the dead lady in question.  Something is clearly amiss and our hero is eventually forced to relocate to the dead woman's isolated home on the coast, which is accessible only by a daily-flooded causeway.  As he investigates her house and records, he uncovers a terrible tale of tragedy and hate that puts him in fear for his sanity.

 

The recreated early 20th century sets are beautiful and not overdone, as so many modern remakes tend to be (Compare the disturbing and believable Hill House in the original The Haunting with the insipidly overblown funhouse sets of the 90's version).  Overall, it's a low budget film with more of a TV movie look than a feature film, but that works in its favor because it keeps the situation grounded.  The Woman in Black does not appear in swirls of smoke or staticky stutter-cam, she's just... there...

The low budget means we don't have gobs of FX weighing everything down, and like the best ghost stories, more is accomplished with an eerie sound in the night or a creaking door than with CGI monsters.  I'm virtually certain the upcoming remake is going to CGI the WIB into some sort of stretchy-faced demon, probably with long wet hair over her face, which will be distracting and pointless compared to the original WIB's relentless stare.  As our hero declares to a confidant, "I could just feel the most relentless hate coming off of her in waves." 

This is not a film for the attention deficit crowd.  It moves slowly and quietly, and it takes half the running time before the first odd occurrences are experienced.  It's a bit of a period drama this way, and fans of Jane Austen books and Wuthering Heights will feel right at home.  The Masterpiece Theater style also works well because it sets you up like a tourist at a table of card sharks - When THE SCENE comes, it will knock you for a loop. Yes, this is one of those rare movies with a "THE SCENE".  I noted with amusement that on the IMDB boards, everyone refers to THE SCENE and everyone who's seen the movie knows exactly what they're referring to.  Not a lot of films out there like that (Though again, I'd say 2009's The Eclipse also has at least two THE SCENEs in it that qualify).  It isn't gross, graphic, or violent, yet when this movie's THE SCENE hits, you'll want to crawl into the back of your couch.  Overall, The Woman in Black is the perfect fog-shrouded period ghost story, and the perfect way to kick off an Autumn season of spooky films.

Fire and Ice

NetFlix 3.4/5
IMDB 6.5/10
My Rating: 5/10

The dark lord Nekron advances his glaciers over the warm lands of the south, while our hero Larn battles orcs and teams up with mysterious hero Darkwolf to repeatedly rescue Princess Teegra and save the world.


If the above sounds slightly snarky, my apologies, but this film is so straightforward with its fantasy conventions that it could literally personify fantasy fiction as a genre.  Despite this, I'm giving it a lower rating than both IMDB and Netflix because I had a hard time getting past its flaws, much as I appreciated the amazing animation and artwork.  Before I start the review proper, though, let's do a little rewind to the year this came out, 1983...

Back then, animated anything was considered kids' stuff.  Trying to present an animated film for adults was fighting an uphill battle against a public determined to view cartoons as made for children.  Those of us "in the know", however, were drawn to all sorts of secret delights within the growing world of comics-for-adults, and probably the best single distillation of this was graphic magazine Heavy Metal.  Today's kids will look back and laugh, and know where to get far more extreme media online, but in the late 70's and early 80's, Heavy Metal came cloaked in exotic mystery and wild fantasy - Imagine if you will a world before the internet when seeing an illustrated novella of a naked woman fighting aliens was a BIG THING.  You probably had to be there.  And 10-14, and male.  Anyway, unlike all those modern films shot in 5 million quick cuts and tinted dull green, Heavy Metal and its ilk were genuinely "edgy" in their time.  The first big film I remember that really exploded this attitude into the public's face with a, "Take no prisoners and damn the torpedoes" attitude was the Heavy Metal movie, a personal favorite that I can still watch at any time, anywhere.

Two years after Heavy Metal debuted, this co-creation of Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta appeared.  Bakshi was a renowned animator determined to make animated movies for adults, and Frazetta is of course a living legend in fantasy artwork.  When these two got together, they created what is in effect a moving Frazetta painting - A gorgeous, colorful world of handpainted backgrounds and dynamic action. Visually, it's stunning in a way that single stills can't convey.

It's the sort of film where you just want to sit back and marvel at the fluid movement of the characters, and not just because Princess Teegra spends most of the film bouncing across the landscape in a nightie or less.  Bakshi's rotoscoped animation brings realism to the animated action in a way that's still impressive almost 30 years later, and he did it without computers.  So having said all that, why the middling rating?  

The problem is that for me, this is a 2/3 movie - Fantastic designs and fantastic animation missing a quality story to hold it all together.  It was written by a pair of comicbook writers but struggles to really grab the viewer, or at least this one.  I could look at it all day but more often than not, the story just fell flat to me.  "Young hero teams up with experienced character to save the damsel and defeat the evil dark lord" is the plot of nearly every fantasy novel ever written, and it doesn't get any fleshing out here.  The running time is part of the problem, because even at a short 81 minutes, I was suffering from some serious attention drift as long, dialog-free scenes of our hero running, climbing trees, sleeping in trees, hunting for food, running from wolves and re-rescuing the hapless heroine ambled by...again and again.  Teegra, alas, is not exactly a feminist icon - Her role in the film is to be captured and recaptured, and captured all over again any time anyone leaves her alone for half a minute.  Send this woman to the mailbox and you'll never see her again.  It doesn't help that our hero is continually overshadowed by the movie's real star, Darkwolf (Who came up with these names, seriously?):

Darkwolf is the fantasy equivalent of having Superman in the Justice League - With him around, there really isn't much for anyone else to do because by the time Batman's Batarang hits the bad guy, Superman will have flown him to the moon and back.  Darkwolf looks great whenever he appears and his action scenes are a treat, but they're too few and far between and when he's not around, we're left with the hopelessly ineffective Larn.  I can't help but feel this movie would have left a stunning impact in the psyche of my generation if only it had been edited down to a 20 minute short and inserted into a Heavy Metal-like omnibus movie.  Hey, it worked for Taarna...

So, sadly, that's my overall take - It's amazing to behold but not very involving to be drawn into.  If only the writing had been as excellent as the artwork, this could have been a resounding classic.

Hero at Large

NetFlix 3/5
IMDB 6/10
My Rating: 6.5/10

A struggling actor with a good heart lands a role promoting the superhero film "Captain Avenger".  When he finds himself foiling a late night stickup at a corner grocery, he is drawn by the idea of being a real world costumed hero but quickly discovers it's more dangerous than imagined, and that comicbook morality doesn't mesh well with real world politics.   

This is a mostly-forgotten film starring the late John Ritter, fresh off his Three's Company years at the time.  In many ways, it's the forerunner of today's stream of gritty "real life" superhero movies like Kick Ass and Watchmen, movies founded on the idea of, "What would it REALLY be like to put on a costume and go out to fight bad guys?"  While Kick Ass answered this question with lots of gory, OTT violence, Hero at Large was a much gentler film even though our hero's antics nearly get him into as much lethal trouble.

It's a simple formula pic and it didn't do very well when it was released - I recall watching it back in 1980 and being disappointed because it was a "John Ritter movie" and we expected it to be a wacky comedy full of sitcom slapstick instead of the largely serious adventure/romance/vigilante film it is.  Approached with the right expectations, it's a surprisingly enjoyable and heartening flick.  Eternally-struggling New York actor Steve Nichols lands a job dressing up in costume as "Captain Avenger", a popular comicbook star getting his own big-screen movie.  Steve's job is to turn up at theaters, sign autographs, talk to fans, etc.  While the rest of his busload of fellow "Captain Avengers" loathe the job and feel ridiculous, Steve embraces it with enthusiasm and enjoys the chance to personify the hero of lots of children.



One evening after a long day of appearances, he finds himself in a corner grocer that's being robbed.  He overpowers the crooks while wearing his costume and the story becomes a media sensation, with the whole city stoked up to hear more about the mysterious masked hero who saved the kindly old shopkeepers.

Instead of being a comedy, the movie follows a fairly dramatic path from here, alternating between Steve's attempts to romance his beautiful next door neighbor and his internal debate over what to do with his sudden Captain Avenger fame.  Viewers looking to see loads of KickAss-style ultraviolence will be disappointed, since the bulk of the film is about the choices Steve makes instead of his outings in costume.  He does make further attempts to live the role of the hero and is promptly shot by real bullets, discovering quickly that armed criminals are a lot more dangerous than they seem on the comic page.  Meanwhile, genre conventions are further undermined by how easily city officials are able to discover the real identity of their new superhero and start working to make his popularity work for them.  Eventually Steve is conned into a faked crimebusting encounter that's dismantled easily by an investigative reporter (Remember when we used to have those, before they just started reading out the White House press briefings?).  Things go bad, leading to a tense climax where Steve and the city have to decide what constitutes a real world hero.

It's a good film.  I enjoyed it much, much more in my 40's than I did at 14 - It's a surprisingly mature film for its subject matter and I personally thought it was far better than current flicks like Kick Ass in how it handled the whole "real life superhero" concept.  One element that made me sadly nostalgic was the basic premise - Modern films treat the idea of people putting on superhero costumes as being dangerously insane.  The Kick Ass kid is an idiot who reads too many comicbooks and thinks he'll be cool by becoming a superhero.  The characters in Watchmen dress up by turns because they are amoral thugs, psychopaths, or sexual fetishists.  The closest modern film to Hero at Large is Defendor, which operates on the concept that only a mentally-retarded person would try this.  Hero at Large, by contrast, gives us one of the few cases where a normal guy decides to put on a costume and be a hero out of the goodness of his nature.  John Ritter plays this so well it's completely believable - Steve Nichols is naive, sure, but his fumbling attempts to be a real world superhero stem from a desire to help and inspire others, not out of mental imbalance or just plain crazy.  It's a bit sad to think that this theme would never fly today...  It would almost certainly be seen as "too wholesome" in this age of grim and gritty comicbook movies.  This is ironic because when it was released, it was too serious - People wanted Jack Tripper falling down the steps, not a thoughtful examination of the pitfalls of a costumed hero.

It's a corny film when all is said and dine, but that's not a bad thing.  You'll end up rooting for Steve in a way that I never did for Dave Lizewski, and unlike KA, Steve actually manages to make the world a tiny bit better without leaving a trail of wholesale bloody slaughter in his wake.  Worth seeing!