hawklinemonster Reviews

The Happy Children (2011)

The Innocent Dead

[7/10 · 1 January 2022]

Even the shortest of Arthur Machen's stories often contain details worth investigating.

A journalist walking a village's streets late one night witnesses children playing in the dark. Many of the children display brutal wounds, and he wonders if he has stumbled upon a survival of some ancient passion play.

This short film succeeds in conjuring a chilly atmosphere. Very effective.

Villmark (2003)

An explanation (and thus a Spoiler). Watch carefully and the end is not a cop-out.

[7/10 · 31 August 2018]

I very much enjoyed this film, and found it a satisfying story. At first I found the two minute epilogue with the explanation by police, confusing, and wished those minutes had been omitted. Then I watched it again, and also re-watched the opening minutes. Everything is there on screen, but you need to be able to rewind and remind yourself.

The party is being stalked before they find the woman's body, not after. Pers goes off alone to get a phone signal and is surprised by a sinister masked man in the dark.

The ill-fated German honeymoon couple had camped in the wood just a month before - not 30 years, as one reviewer says. We don't know if the woman drowned in the icy water or was killed by the gatekeeper, but the suggestion is that the gatekeeper murdered her (the photo at the end reveals him as a stalker, after all). At the end, he's shown as Losse's attacker when Losse returns to the tent to get the abandoned cigarettes

The husband has been driven mad by his wife's death, is wearing her dress, and he certainly murders Gunnar. But we don't know if it was the husband or the gatekeeper who murders Pers. Personally, I thought this ambiguity added to the story rather than detracted from it. But as I said, a person seeing this film at a cinema might find the ending frustrating; really I needed to be able to rewind and review it to get the most from the story.

7/10

The Cocoanuts (1929)

Marvelous Marxes, Eaton and Dumont!

[8/10 · 10 May 2018]

Possibly my favourite Marx Bros. movie. I'd be in the minority, as Duck Soup (a favourite with many reviewers here) is one I always put off re-watching as I dislike Groucho's lengthy musical intro. The Cocoanuts has the usual stumbling block of romantic interludes, but with this film the interludes continue to move the plot forward.

Verbal comedy highlight for me is Groucho's increasing exasperation with Chico on the obscure subject of viaducts, while visually, Harpo's dismay at tedious after-dinner speakers had me creased up. Margaret Dumont as always is wonderful.

Archaic music? Some of it creaks a little, but Mary Eaton delivers a deliriously silly 'Monkey Doodle Doo', then breaks into a terrific little dance routine that might not have a great deal of subtlety but raises the temperature with its energy and left me wishing it had been longer.

The Orphanage (2007)

Ditch Your Preconceptions; a different Screw turns here...

[8/10 · 7 April 2018]

The first time I saw this, frankly I was disappointed. I came to it fresh from viewing Japanese horrors of skinny, long-haired girls walking upside-down on ceilings, vengeful victims of abuse and slaughter. I was looking for more of the same. Of course, I didn't find it. The Orphanage is a quieter kind of horror. It has more in common with Jack Clayton's 1961 film, The Innocents, than most contemporary horror. Both films show a woman fighting to save a child from what she believes to be maleficent supernatural entities. Jack Clayton's film leaves us wondering if the monster was in the woman's own mind (and the film is none the worse for that); J A Bayona leaves us with no such ambiguity. And The Orphanage is a wonderful film.

But when I first watched it, yes, I was disappointed. I did want the screaming horrors of contemporary cinema, and this quietly acted drama didn't scare me. Now, about a decade later, I was able to let myself be drawn in. The weird setting of house and lighthouse, the compelling story and completely convincing acting, all worked their spell, and I was seriously creeped-out as the film reached its final act. Along with The Innocents, The Babadook and (possibly) The Others, The Orphanage has now become one of my all time favourite films.

Nightmare in Wax (1969)

Please can we have the restored double-DVD of Nightmare in Wax and Island of the Doomed

[5/10 · 2 March 2018]

I enjoyed Nightmare in Wax, taking it on the pulpy level that it intends and achieves. It's fun. It's not mindlessly sadistic (so if you want that, look elsewhere). Not hopelessly incompetent, either (just a bit, maybe, but hope is there).

I admit that at first I confused it with a wax museum horror featuring a curator with a false hand, which is interchangeable with a hook or a cleaver. Were there two versions of this film? No; the man with the cleaver was Patrick O'Neal in Chamber of Horrors (1966). It gave me a restless night figuring that one out. These things worry horror fans.

The Patrick O'Neal film is a classier offering. The photography is much glossier, and Wilfred Hyde-White adds his own charm to the proceedings. But Cameron Mitchell in Nightmare in Wax adds his own special (if not too refined) touch of wickedness, pursuing Anne Helm through his Faustian workshop, hypodermic in hand. That chase between tottering dummies and bubbling vats doesn't quite elevate the film into the realms of horror achieved by Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray... but it's pretty good, all the same.

A couple of years before Nightmare in Wax, Cameron Mitchell starred in a Spanish/West German co-production of Island of the Doomed (1967) (a.k.a. The Bloodsuckers, The Maneater of Hydra, etc.) I was fortunate enough to see that sharing a double-bill with Slaughter of the Vampires. That was in my long-ago teens. Much more recently I bought it on DVD (with the widescreen sadly cropped). Now wouldn't it be great if someone had the discrimination (I shan't say the taste) to bring out a restored widescreen double-DVD of both Nightmare in Wax and Island of the Doomed. We can only hope!

American Gods (2017–2021)

Tedious First Episode

[3/10 · 21 June 2017]

OK, I've only watched the first episode so far, but I'll write another review if later episodes improve.

The opening scenes where the vikings attempt increasingly bloodier sacrifices in an attempt to get their gods' attentions, reminded me of a Monty Python sketch. Hilarious. I'm not sure if this was intentional--- actually, I hope so because I was quite enjoying things at that point.

Ian McShane is usually worth watching (I'm a long-term Lovejoy fan). The whole cast put in a respectable showing, but frankly the script needed cropping. I was yawning before most of these people finished talking.

At the end of the episode we still don't know enough about Shadow Moon or Mr Wednesday to really care whether either of them are around for episode two. I've read Neil Gaiman and like his writing, and one reviewer here has stated this show is true ("verbatim") to the novel, so I'll definitely watch further episodes, despite this lackluster opening.

The Adventures of Hiram Holliday: Gibraltar Road (1956) Season 1, Episode 6

A Fondly-remembered Childhood Teatime series

[6/10 · 24 October 2016]

If you asked any prepubescent British school kid about Paul Gallico in the 1960s, you'd probably be told that Gallico was the author of The Snow Goose: A Story of Dunkirk. Oddly, Gallico, the author of what we considered the most British of heroic wartime tales, was an American.

We weren't asked to read Gallico's other works for exams, among them The Adventures of Hiram Holliday. But we were able to follow those in a half-hour U.S. series shown at teatime, featuring Wally Cox as the bespectacled Hiram, a man who's "never done a wrong thing in his life" according to his much put-upon agent Joel Smith (Ainslie Pryor).

Gibralter Road has Hiram visiting the Rock in pursuit of a rare species of toad and being arrested under suspicion of attempting to blow the place up. In the course of the show he gets engaged to a beautiful girl (alas she is emotionally unstable, so the engagement falls through), dances a flamenco (every episode seemed to have a dance scene---the most fondly-remembered was a sizzling Parisian Apache dance which somehow got under the censors radar), and fights a duel with dagger and rapier (Hiram is a master of arms) as well as disarming a warhead and finding a Gibralter Fire Toad (so rare, apparently, that even Google can't find it!) I have tried to identify the lovely actress sharing a scene with Wally Cox in the still I've uploaded, but regretfully the cast list is missing from the film upload found at Jimbo Berkey's public domain film site.