For the week of June 9th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service to Blu-ray. Ostensibly, Kingsman follows a teenage delinquent (Taron Egerton) after he is recruited to join the titular squad of British secret agents, but you'll have an even better sense of the movie if you watch Vaughn's previous two features - Kick-Ass and X-Men First Class - back-to-back. All three are comic-book-inspired actioners (Kick-Ass and Kingsman even take their broad cues from Mark Millar-penned comics) that hinge around teenaged protagonists, all three share a James Bond-esque love of gadgetry and large-scale action (although Kingsman is the most deliberately Bondian of the three, given its subject matter), and all three find their teenage leads handily upstaged by their adult costars (nobody comes out of these films talking about the likes of Egerton, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lucas Till, Caleb Landry Jones, and Zoë Kravitz, given the dynamism of Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, and especially Kingsman's show-stopping Colin Firth). Of the three, I'd give Kingsman the edge; it's a mostly successful blend of the previous two movies' most engaging elements (Kick-Ass' graphic content and X-Men sleek, marquee-friendly thrills), and it gets a big boost from Vaughn's clean, relentless action staging. If anything, Kingsman treats reality with a Looney Tunes level of elasticity - the bloody violence has the same outlandish pitch of Kill Bill's "House of Blue Leaves" setpiece - but what Vaughn lacks in physical verisimilitude, he gains in frenetic motion and spatially coherent carnage, the pièce de résistance being a grisly battle royale between Firth and the entire congregation of a fundamentalist Southern church that unfolds in long takes and is 2015's best pre-Mad Max: Fury Road action scene. The only downside of a movie like this is that it's so over-the-top that it can get a little much. I could have done without Samuel L. Jackson's lisping, wholly unthreatening Big Bad, and the film traffics in some vaguely offensive social and sexual politics (particularly the beyond-crass bit between Egerton and a kidnapped Swedish princess that concludes the final battle). On the whole, though, Kingsman roars by so fast that you barely have time to register the complaints, and it gets in some sly digs at the British patriarchy, especially in how it uses former Angry Young Man Michael Caine as the stuffy embodiment of Upper Class Privilege. That said, it's a little curious how Vaughn has now managed to make basically the same film three times. Now, considering how much fun Vaughn seems to be having (and how much money he's probably making), that's not such a bad thing, but I do wonder where the guy who made Layer Cake went. That dark, emotionally mature gangster film remains Vaughn's high-water mark as a director, and I'd like to see him work those muscles again. Regardless what the current Hollywood model prefers, you can't make films for kids (even hypercaffeinated, overgrown kids) forever.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "because Kingsman: The Secret Service tends to tread a kind of middle ground between homage and parody, it takes a while to find its tonal center, veering rather wildly in its early going between exciting if somewhat rote action sequences and more sly, winking references to spies who have gone before. Based on a graphic novel series (entitled merely The Secret Service) by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, Kingsman: The Secret Service is something of a scavenger hunt of references for those who either grew up with iconic spies like James Bond or Napoleon Solo, or who came to love them later on either home video or television rebroadcasts. Perhaps because the film begins with a rather disturbing sequence involving a black ops mission gone awry in the Middle East in 1997, one that is played straight and with no winking subtext, Kingsman: The Secret Service's more whimsical tendencies take a while to achieve their foothold...Despite a certain imbalance in expression, Kingsman: The Secret Service's breathless pace and often wry references to other spy franchises are typically more than enough to engage and even delight. Bond of course is referenced outright on more than one occasion in the film, but alert viewers will note slightly more subtle allusions to properties like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and even Get Smart dotting the proceedings. A fun interchange between [Michael Caine's] Arthur and [Egerton's] Eggsy brings to light the strange concatenation of 'JB's in spy lore: James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Jack Bauer. Another famous acronym, EU, may still tend to stand for the European Union (at least for a little while longer, anyway), but Eggsy Unwin may be the latest spy to come in from the cold and spark a craze."
From Arrow Video comes two very cool horror entries making their U.S. Blu-ray debuts: Jack Hill's Spider Baby and Brian Yuzna's Society. For many viewers, these two pictures occupy the upper echelons of cult cinema for one compelling reason - they are both deeply, profoundly deranged, albeit in different ways. Spider Baby is a family story about the Merrye children (Sid Haig, Jill Banner, and Beverly Washburn), who wrestle with all the trials and tribulations specific to any American family: being raised by their family's dim-but-protective chauffeur (Lon Chaney Jr.), having a degenerative neurological disease that causes mental regression the older they get and spurs them to incidents of bizarre violence...you know, that old story. The plot, as it were, kicks in when the Merryes push back against some relatives looking to horn in on their inheritance, but Hill is less interested in narrative than he is in compiling all manners of unsettling antisocial behavior. If Rob Zombie directed Carnival of Souls, the result would look a lot like Spider Baby, even though Hill's work is less overtly disgusting and much funnier than either of those two films would suggest. Since Spider Baby's release in 1968, director Jack Hill hasn't shied away from this kind of lurid, exploitation fare (see below for a few more examples), but Spider Baby remains his most singular, idiosyncratic release. Of course, it's a paragon of normalcy compared to Society. During the 1980s, horror filmmakers used the genre to lambast the decade's worst excesses, but other than John Carpenter's masterful They Live, no genre chiller ever delivered as savage a piece of cultural commentary as Society did. At the center of filmmaker Brian Yuzna's picture is teen socialite Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock). As well-heeled and successful as his family is, Bill doesn't feel comfortable living a life of easy privilege: in fact, the more he learns about the idiosyncrasies of his Beverly Hills community, the more he begins to suspect something very wrong indeed, and...well, perhaps I'd better not say more, except that his journey culminates in one of the most revolting finales in all of horror-movie history. At times, you wonder how deliberate all this is, or if Yuzna is lucking into his horror movie effects. The acting often borders on the amateurish (Billy Warlock, I'm looking at you), and as gut-churningly effective as the last thirty minutes are, the first hour is often stilted in ways that recall bad daytime soaps. Yet whatever the case, the cumulative effect is often striking, with the flatness of some of the acting and direction working to create a strange disconnect not dissimilar from the films of David Lynch. And again, that ending! Regardless of how many times people have imitated it (James Gunn's underrated Slither being the best example), it provides the main endgame for horror buffs: something you can't unsee.
Of Spider Baby, Svet Atanasov wrote that "If you like strange films don't miss Jack Hill's Spider Baby. Once also titled Cannibal Orgy, or the Maddest Story Ever Told, this truly is a film in a category of its own. It is a little bit of everything, done with surprisingly good sense of style. While watching Spider Baby, I kept thinking of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's horror film Livid. In this recent French film, the overwhelming majority of the action takes place in a large house somewhere on the outskirts of a city. Inside the house, there is an old lady in a cerebral coma that is visited daily by an experienced caregiver who changes her diapers and makes sure that her oxygen bottle works properly. Early into the film, the caregiver is joined by a young girl who needs some practical training before she begins working alone. The girl is so impressed by the house and the caregiver's story about a treasure the old lady apparently hid somewhere in it years ago that she decides to return with a few of her best friends later that night. The friends enter the house hoping to discover the treasure, but instead find and unlock a door to Hell. The plot is fairly straightforward, but the visuals and especially the atmosphere are quite remarkable...There are times when it shows that Spider Baby had a limited budget, but the atmosphere throughout the film is quite good. There are some truly creepy moments that are guaranteed to impress fans of trashy horror." Then, he wrote thatSociety"is divided into two uneven parts with contrasting identities. In the first, the handsome Bill looks lost in glamorous Beverly Hills where beautiful girls are just dying to be picked up. Bill occasionally notices them, but his mind is too busy trying to figure out why the bizarre events he sees do not bother the people around him. It does not take a genius to figure out what is happening, but Bill's frequent intense facial expressions suggest exactly the opposite. The second part is where the film shifts gears and begins producing various observations about the world Bill exists in. After a couple of slalsher style murders, Bill finally gets to the bottom of the mystery that has been torturing his mind and begins to understand everything. At this point the film switches gears yet again and evolves into a surrealistic horror tale boasting some very original special effects. The concept...is quite good, but it feels like Yuzna was going in two completely different directions with it. On one hand this is a film that clearly tries very hard to appeal to viewers with a soft spot for horror and excess. The second part delivers the goods, but the rest of the film does not match its intensity. The horror and excess are also linked to a social commentary that is meant to give the film some weight. Unfortunately, it is too cliched - is it really a revelation that wealthy white families residing in big white mansions in Beverly Hills not only have different needs but also see us mortals differently? - and when it is all said and done it basically feels like a cheap excuse to justify some button-pushing (see the incest and orgy sequences)."
The Jack Hill connection continues with some new releases from Olive Films - the distributor is giving a platform for the Pam Grier blaxploitation classics Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Friday Foster, the first two of which Hill also directed. Full disclosure: if we're talking aesthetics/scripting and technical prowess, than none of these three are very good. More often than not, this kind of grindhouse fare always works better in abbreviated forms or in the abstract (for better or worse, Quentin Tarantino's many homages to the grindhouse world are far more exciting and engaging than the real thing) - for every cheer-worthy bit of sex or violence, you need to slog through long stretches of amateurish filmmaking and even worse acting. Yet the Coffy-Foxy Brown-Friday Foster triumvirate retains a special charge for grindhouse fans, thanks to the presence of star Pam Grier. Even as she toiled in the sexploitation market of producer Roger Corman, she was nothing less than 100% a movie star, and these three latter pictures pulled her from the supporting cast and gave her a much deserved spotlight. She's magnetic - a fearsome, statuesque mix of beauty, guts, and wry humor - and no matter how stupid the proceedings get, you can't take your eyes off her. Case in point: Coffy is a profoundly silly movie, with Grier's title character going after some bad dudes from the pimp world (her chief opponents: RoboCop's Robert DoQui and Sid Haig, who was to Jack Hill what Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese) get most of her immediate family strung out on street drugs, and if that sounds familiar, then pat yourself on the back. Coffy is the chief inspiration for Scott Sanders and Michael Jai White's brilliant parody Black Dynamite, but you can't help but watch Coffy's flailing, histrionics incompetence and wonder if it's already unintentionally parodying itself. Yet Grier is so cool and tough and sexy that Coffy remains a landmark of the genre. The less said about the other two, the better. Foxy Brown is Grier and Hill's barely altered Coffy redo that AIP rushed into production - the action is great, grisly fun, and Antonio Fargas does fun work as Brown's duplicitous brother, but it takes far longer to get going than Coffy - and Friday Foster is more of a genial mystery-thriller that finds Grier in Snooping instead of in Shooting mode (Alien and Homicide star Yaphet Kotto gets to play action hero here). Still, a bonafide star can paper over a bad movie's many faults, and that quality is exactly what Grier brings to these ventures.
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is streeting its five-film Golden Year Collection - 1939 this week. True cinephiles give 1939 the same reverence as 1975, 1999, or 2007; the creative labors released that year advanced the medium exponentially, and if you think I'm kidding, here's a brief list of the movies that debuted in '39: The Rules of the Game, Gunga Din, The Wizard of Oz, The Roaring Twenties, The Four Feathers, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, Stagecoach (yeah, John Ford had a very good year), Destry Rides Again, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (and so did Jimmy Stewart), and Howard Hawks' masterful Only Angels Have Wings. And that's not counting Dark Victory, Dodge City, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ninotchka, and
Gone with the Wind, the five of which Warner has included in this set. Now, in fairness, only one of those ranks as a stone classic, and if you need helping guessing which, then clearly you've never gone hungry again. For all its problematic racial and gender concerns, Gone with the Wind remains one of the four or five greatest epics ever made, a sweeping, panoramic look at life in and around the Civil War that still has the power to astound audiences. Part of that success comes from its sheer size. This is a long movie, to be sure (238 minutes, or just two minutes shy of four hours), but its length matches its physical scope, with massive sets and expanses of Civil War atrocities (if nothing else, Gone with the Wind feels like a concentrated effort to pick up the gauntlet that D.W. Griffith threw down with Birth of a Nation). Still, the smartest move that directors Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Sam Wood (and, let's face it: producer David O. Selznick, who had a still unprecedented level of authorial control over the film) made was to focus the spectacle through the painfully intimate story of haughty Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) and her various personal and professional obstacles. That prismatic approach - revealing the very big through the very small - is an epic strategy that informs even the likes of contemporary spectacles like Titanic or The Lord of the Rings.
After that picture, the other films in the set are more of a mixed bag. As far as pure entertainments go, Ninotchka and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are probably the best. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch (and featuring a script co-written by Billy Wilder!), Ninotchka applies the director's gliding-but-merciless touch - the same one he brought to To Be or Not to Be - to pre-WWII Paris and the relationship that unfolds between humorless Soviet emissary Nina Ivanovna Yakushova (Greta Garbo) and Melvyn Douglas' dashing Count. For its first hour, Ninotchka operates on a peerless level of witty repartee (and the relationship between Nina and the Count is strikingly reminiscent of the Terminator/John Connor partnership in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, oddly enough), so much so that the film manages to survive its preachier (and much less funny) second half. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, on the other hand, is a great melodrama, plain and simple, and while it is nowhere near as complex as Victor Hugo's classic novel, director William Dieterle gives the film a gothic, menacing air that acts as a nice counterpoint to Charles Laughton's sensitive work in the title role. As for Dark Victory and Dodge City...well, they were popular at the time, right? They must have been to justify their inclusion here - both are fairly rote genre entries. Bette Davis is phenomenal as Dark Victory's dying protagonist, but the movie surrounding her is one of those Love Story-esque terminal-illness stories where the tragic heroine gets more beautiful the sicker she gets. Dodge City, on the other hand, isn't a bad movie; The Adventures of Robin Hood director Michael Curtiz has a great flair for shooting action, and he paints his Western landscapes in bold, brilliant Technicolors. The problem, and it's a big one, is the miscasting of Errol Flynn. As Dodge City's hero, a noble cowboy tasked with cleaning up the titular hotbed of villainy and crime, Flynn never seems comfortable (the film makes some half-assed justifications to explain his particularly European demeanor), and you can't help but imagine a version of this movie that stars Gary Cooper or John Wayne. Still, it's fun enough, and in its broad strokes, Dodge City was the inspiration for Mel Brooks' classic Blazing Saddles.
Of Ninotchka, Michael Reuben wrote that "the famous advertising tag, 'Garbo laughs!' was created even before the script was written, but the great star's funniest moments in Ninotchka are those where her celebrated face remains sternly impassive. In her first comedy and next-to-last film, Greta Garbo proved a mistress of deadpan, playing a Stalinist apparatchik who is plunked down in the middle of pre-war Paris like a visitor from outer space sent to study alien customs...Making fun of the Soviet Union was a ticklish business in 1939, as the storm gathered and broke in Europe. By the time Ninotchka appeared in October, Nazi Germany had signed a treaty with Stalin and invaded Poland, and Britain and France had declared war. Those who favored America's involvement knew that it would eventually need Russia as an ally, despite the countries' ideological divide. But director Ernst Lubitsch, working from a witty script by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett[,] and Walter Reisch, spun the satire of communism with the famous 'Lubitsch Touch' that, three years later, would allow him to pull off a comedy about Nazis while America was in the thick of the conflict, To Be or Not to Be. Even so, Ninotchka was banned in the U.S.S.R. and its satellites for many years. In Europe and America, it was a hit and probably would have won multiple Oscars, if it hadn't been up against the juggernaut of Gone with the Wind. The film is now part of the Library of Congress' National Film Registry." Then, he wrote of Dodge City that the film "has everything you could want in a Western: runaway horses, a cattle stampede, shootouts in the street (and elsewhere), a chase and battle on a steam locomotive, a lynch mob confronting a steely sheriff, one of the biggest barroom brawls ever filmed, even the classic confrontation in a barbershop between one man in the chair and an assassin who hopes to surprise him. Of course, there's also romance, as Abby Irving, now a columnist for the local newspaper, gradually recognizes in Hatton the man of integrity beneath the dusty plainsman. De Havilland and Flynn were paired in a total of eight films, most famously as Maid Marian and the thief of Sherwood Forest in The Adventures of Robin Hood, but they are just as well-matched on horseback in Dodge City. Near the film's end, when Colonel Dodge returns to the town that now bears his name, he finds his old acquaintance Hatton much changed and in better circumstances." Reuben also commented thatDark Victory "was one of those rare films where a single star performance overwhelms the many objections that the material raises at almost every moment. The story is manipulative, the sentiments frequently maudlin, the behavior of many characters questionable and the medical science ridiculous - and no one cared. Davis' turbulent portrayal of a young and formerly carefree woman suddenly confronted with a terminal illness is so complex and involving that it sweeps aside the many objections raised by the film's plot."