Wake In Fright (1971) AKA Outback

This lost classic feels very much a companion piece with Nic Roeg's Walkabout (1971), the flip-side of the coin of the outback experience. Both films explore the same environment and general concerns of surviving in such an inhospitable environment. But where Walkabout use the children's innocence as a way of fending off the horrors, the characters in director Ted Kotcheff's film do not have that luxury. The world-weary inhabitants only have drinking as a way of escape, and the baron landscape creates a pervasive feeling of dread.

John-Paul Sartre said hell is other people, and Wake in Fright (1971) might make a good illustration of that. Gary Bond (Zulu) play John Grant, a school teacher in the Australian Outback. He hates his job, but can't leave due to a government scheme which holds their money in a bond to make sure they see out their contract, where-ever they're placed.

It's Christmas, and he has planned his escape back to Sydney and civilization for the holidays. All he has to do is spend one night in the biggest town in the area, Bundanyabba to catch a plane out in the morning. As the taxi driver says, its a friendly place, but this seems at odds with the desperate feeling in the air.

(Spoiler from here on down)

It soon turns out that the taxi driver was right. The People of Bundanyabba are friendly, and this is where the film throws a real curve-ball. Throughout the film you expect the locals to turn on John at any moment. He is an outsider, a school teacher, and has an aloofness which betrays his feelings of superiority. But when he accepts the hospitality of the local policeman Jock (Chips Rafferty), it leads to a downfall that could be considered his own making.

After copious amounts of beer, a sloshed John discovers the locals main past-time. A simple betting game called Two-Up. Intrigued by how popular a two coin guessing game could be, he tentatively places a bet and immediately wins. A few more wins, and he's on top of the world. Rushing back to his hotel room, he start to dream of leaving his job. Maybe one more win will do it...

Donald Pleasence is on top form as Doc Tydon, an alcoholic vagrant John bumps into. As John's plight plummets, the more hospitality he receives, the more drink he's plied with. One boozy night becomes many, and John's humanity comes to breaking point after a night-time kangaroo hunt which is the most controversial part of the film. This might be a good time to warn any animal lovers that the hunting scenes are quite hard to stomach. There aren't any "no animals were hurt" credits on this movie.

When John wakes up the next day with his clothes stained with blood and a hazy memory of a sexual encounter with Doc, his disgust eventually motivates him to escape. But its easier said then done.

Wake in Fright has a way of lingering in the memory. A fully restored version of the film came out in 2009, and is fully recommended.

The Visitor (1979) AKA Stridulum

As soon as I saw the bat-shit trailer, I had to see this film. It looked like Dune mixed with Exorcist II The Heretic. That would certainly qualify it mad enough to check out.

With such a great cast & terrible reviews, I was expecting an incoherent mess, but its actually pretty cool. Its much better than other Italian horror knock-offs which were being made at the time.

It basically boils down to two-parts The Omen, one-part The Exorcist, a healthy dose of Rosemary's Baby, and a splash of Hitchcock's The Birds for good measure. The real difference is that instead of demonic possession, its an evil space-traveler who has impregnated a group of humans and blessed their children with supernatural powers. If this all seems a little too much like L Ron Hubbard for your taste, don't worry. All this is explained at the start to some bald-headed children in a greenhouse, by a Jesus-like Franco Nero!

After this disjointed opening, the film settles down to tell the story of Katy, a young girl who has powers of telekinesis. Paige Conner plays Katy as playful rather than sinister, which makes the film more fun when she starts going off the rails.

Katy wants her mother to settle down with Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen) a rich businessman who has just brought the Atlanta Basketball team! He wants to get married and have children too, but Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail) doesn't feel comfortable settling down, probably due to all the pestering!

It seem that Henriksen is being funded by a shadowy organization who are pushing him to create a heir. To top this off, a mysterious visitor played by John Huston keeps popping up, who seems just as keen to stop this happening.

The film continues very much in the vein of The Omen (1976), with an elaborate death for anyone who gets too nosy in their affairs. Damien's devil dogs are substituted in this by a hawk, and Billie Whitelaw's nanny character is replaced by house-maid Shelly Winters.

John Huston is not the only director acting in this. Sam Peckingpah plays Dr Sam, who is apparently Barbara's Ex-husband. You wouldn't know that from watching the film however, as due to his drug problem, he kept flubbing his lines. His brief appearance is mainly shots of the back of his head, with his voice dubbed by an actor.

There is no getting away from the fact that this movie is preposterous, but apart from Peckingpah, the cast are pretty game. Especially Glenn Ford, who plays a police detective who gets an expletive-filled ear bashing from the young Katy.

There is some good work behind the camera too. The Cinematography is classy, with angular lines which accentuate the late seventies décor and architecture. The director Giulio Paradisi was assistant director on Fellini's 8 1/2.

Questions I asked myself whilst watching:

Is that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Yes it is!

Should you have left Katy with that strange elderly babysitter you've just met?

Why are they trying to kill her now? never-mind.

Is that supposed to be a Swiss-Army Bird? whaah?

Where is my old Pong game console?

Who is the funky score by? Franco Micalizzi

So where did that gun come from anyway?

Of Cooks and Kung Fu (1979) Tao Tie Gong

A mysterious stranger with a Raiden style hat, is killing off the chefs in the area, and it's not because of the cooking.

Master Glutton (Chai Kai) was once the Emperor's cook, The King of Chefs. But after a bizarre scallop incident, he was chucked out in disgrace. Over 20 years, he's developed a series of kung fu styles based on Chinese dishes. That's the odd premise, and also what he's teaching his wayward grandson Tan Tan (Chan Siu Lung AKA Jackie Chen). Yes, its basically Drunken Master, with an even more obscure fighting style. The two plot lines of chefs and killers carry on till they inevitable meet.

As part of my remit to review obscure films, I could make the whole blog on Hong Kong movies from the 70's. Having said that, if you've seen a few kung-fu movies, you can pretty much guess how this one will pan out.

So why am i writing about it? Well 3 reasons.

1. Its not actually that bad. There is plenty of action, the training sections tie into the plot as you see our young hero learn from his previous mistakes. Jackie Chen has great acrobatic ability.

2. This film has spadefuls of  gratuitous camera zooms. It may be a cliché of Hong Kong movies, but for me, this is a real plus.

3. The version I've seen has a weird effect which I'm going to call Wobble-Cam. Sometimes the action seems to bob up and down like a boat. Sometimes it feels like the camera is trying to avoid being punched. At first I thought it was some in-camera effect, but it looks like someone has blown up the print and has manually moved the film around, in a similar way they used to do pan-and-scan, only more violently. Its a really weird effect, that's hard to explain, but I quite liked.  On YouTube there is a clip of the film from a German release which doesn't have it, so I think this effect was added when it was released in America in the mid 80's. If any one can shed some light on this, please drop us a comment!

To be honest the film could of done with a few more locations. 90% of the fights seem to occur on the same dirt path.

Things to look out for:

Like Magnificent Bodyguards, There's another blast of a John Williams score on the soundtrack. This time Jaws!

If your daughter's life is being threatened by a hoodlum to make you reveal a secret, this film has a ingenious way out of it.

"As it's well known, Chinese cooking is the best in the world!"

This movie also goes under the name Duel of the Dragon, and is presently on YouTube and DVD rental at LoveFilm UK.

Shoot (1976)

A hunting trip goes very wrong in this intriguing Canadian movie starring Cliff Robertson and Ernest Borgnine.

A group of middle-aged buddies go on a deer hunt in the woods. With nothing to shoot but the breeze, the  party are about to call it a day, when they come across another set of hunters. After some major eye-balling, the other group takes a pot-shot at them, and a spontaneous shoot-out breaks out. When Zeke, played by perennial bad guy Henry Silva, kills one of their party, the groups scarper.

With its similarities to Deliverance, the movie becomes an exploration of the consequence of this violence. Should they report it to the police? will the others? What importance would they place on who started it? Lou (Borgnine) is the group's conscience, and as they decide their next steps, its clear that he is a lone voice.

Rex (Robertson) plays the most troubled member of the party. A man who seems to have a better relationship to his gun collection, than to his family. As he investigates who the other shooting party were, he begins to believe that what happened was only an opening skirmish in a full-on war.

The film has plenty of earthy dialogue. When one of the group is being treated by a veterinarian friend, Borgnine quips "You know that needle was previously in a horse's ass?". There's a nice down-to-earth quality to the movie, and the direction by Harvey Hart is solid and unshowy (he directed several 70's Columbo TV movies).

The film doesn't quite live up to the opening scenes, as Rex is pretty unlikeable, and we don't get to know the other characters that well. This gives a too narrow perspective on the events that follow. It would have been better if Rex's paranoia hadn't been so obviously valid, and the ending would seem to undermine the point the films seem to raising. I think this maybe due to simplifying the source material, a novel by Douglas Fairbairn.

Still, its worth a look as an examination of machismo and gun control.

(Presently on YouTube)

Magnificent Bodyguards - Fei du juan yun shan (1978)

Dipping into the world of Martial Arts can be a confusing adventure. Films tend to go under more names than a career criminal (not including original Cantonese or Mandarin titles). Prints can have laughable dubbing, or hard to read subtitles. The print-quality tends to vary between passable and atrocious, and the stories often assume a passing knowledge of Chinese myths and history which makes them hard to follow.

However, if the movie is as mad as a box of frogs, and the action puts Hollywood to shame, none of this really matters in my opinion. Jackie Chan movies make a pretty good gate-way into martial arts. Even if you don't like it, you've always got the insane outtakes at the end as consolation.

Magnificent Bodyguards is an early film in his career which he not only stars, but co-choreographs. Its got plenty of action, and a relatively straightforward plot (until the end). Jackie plays Lord Ting Chung, whose hired by Lady Nan (Ping Wang) to protect her and her sick brother as they cross the Stormy Mountains, a wild bandit-filled zone. With four bad-ass deputies running the territory, and evil Lord Chu controlling them, Jackie needs the help of his two brothers for the journey. Chang (Leung Siu-Lung) is a deaf Leather maker, and Tsung (James Tin Jun) is a fighter with a protection racket known as the Skinning Swordsman. (one skins humans, the other doesn't!)

Did I say the plot was simple?  The film is littered with hard-nuts and deadly assassins, that make the crossing more complex. After a while, the odds begin to look bad.

This was the first Hong Kong movie to be shot in 3D, and consequently there are plenty of shots of poles, knives and sharp sticks coming straight at the camera. In most films thats pretty annoying, but it makes sense in this. However, similar to Amityville 3D and others of the era, the picture can get a little blurry.

This flick doesn't have as good a reputation as Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagles Shadow, which he also made in 1978, but I think its a gem. Its got great footwork and plenty of different weapons. There's no stupid sub-plots, or characters only there for light relief. It doesn't have Jackie's trademark use of environment in the fight scenes, but all in all, it would make a great 3D Bluray release (fingers crossed!)

Stray notes:

There's something fishy about that Sedan...

If you've ever wondered what would of happened in Raiders of the Lost Ark if Indiana Jones wasn't afraid of snakes, I think this film covers it.

In the version I watched, one scene builds up the tension with a good blast of the Star Wars music!

There is an inverse law in Hong Kong movies that the more disabled or elderly you seem, the better the fighter.

Did they run out of film at the end?