Category: Film Review

La Casa (1976) The House

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 37 minutes, rated 5.2 by someone.

DNA: Spain.

Verdict: [Zzzzzzzz.]

Tagline: Inanity for one and all.  

Six of the shallowest characters ever filmed drink, eat, and copulate. Sounds better than it is. When not otherwise engaged, as above, they play Jeremy Bentham pinball machines.  Such glamour! Such luxury! Only the slot machines were absent from this Leagues Club tavern in the sky.

The millionaire host invited two other couples for a dinner that lasts forever, or so it seemed to this viewer, for his home is a space ship. Something the guests did not notice when they drove up and entered.  Nor did they notice its takeoff into orbit.  His plan is to wait out in orbit the radiation of a nuclear catastrophe. They run out of food but not cigarettes or whiskey or electricity.   

After reading this script, they begin committing suicide. 

It’s so bad only Stephen Seagal could have made it worse.  

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 18 minutes, rated 7.6 by 211,299 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA

Verdict: Superb!

Tagline: ‘They were invited!’  

It’s not often a big Hollywood picture features blue-collar leads but this one does and both actors rise to the occasion with compelling performances.  The inclusion of François Truffaut is a warm and welcome tribute to that magician of cinema.  The meshing of the storylines is good and it steers just clear of turning the army into buffoons. Though the use of dust is straight out of Rage (1972).   

I did find some of this version attenuated. Wasn’t sure about that Indian chanting.  Roy’s obsession with gardening went on too long.  The build-up to the final rendezvous is stretched and then the rendezvous is anti-climatic. No idea why it was so important to exclude those invited but to suit up those in red? Still I liked it that things were not over-explained in a Hollywood science way. It is just presented.

Memo: Returning the abductees is nice, but having taken them in the first place ruined not only their lives but those of their family, relatives, and friends.  Who do they sue for compensation?

Compared to Asteroid City (2023) this seems grown up with something to say about the mysterious of the universe that is said well.  

It is old news, I know but I came across it and watched it as a reminder that Hollywood can do more than produce bubble gum for and by prepubescent boys with arrested development. I know there is a re-released edited version which I will get to.

Phoenix (2014)

Runtime of 12 minutes 33 seconds. Not on IMDb.  

DNA: Deutschland

Genre: SciFi

Tagline: Fear the Books

Verdict: Big in Florida.  

An homage to Fahrenheit 451 (1966) which opens with the incineration of a tweenage reader. That should make it popular in Florida where capital punishment for reading soon will be enacted in the name of small government to go with the mandated gynaecological examinations for women travellers.     

A friends and family production that offers more, much more, than Asteroid City, despite, or perhaps, because of the latter’s multi-million dollar budget and genius director.   

6/45 (2022)

IMDb is runtime of 1 hour and 54 minutes, rated 6.9 by 1301 cinematizens. 

Genre: Comedy; Species: musical.

DNA: South Korean.

Verdict: Manse!  

Tagline: Winning isn’t everything.  

It takes nerve to make a comedy with K-Pop musical interludes set in the most heavily armed border in the world, the misnamed Demilitarized Zone, which has more than a million heavily-armed, highly-trained soldiers poised for action along its 250 kilometres length, separated by no more than four kilometres at any one place. The DMZ is itself extensively mined by the armies of both Koreas in disregard of the treaty and though it is forbidden by the terms of the treaty both sides patrol in it…at night and plant those mines. Meanwhile there are eyes in the sky overhead in geostationary low earth orbits and down below the ground are equally forbidden tunnels. There have been many shooting incidents in these environs only a few of which are ever reported. While there were escapes over, under, and through the Berlin Wall, there have never been any such breaches of the DMZ.

A winning lottery ticket brings together a microcosm of those million soldiers in that environment, four North Koreans and three South Koreans. To retrieve the ticket wind-born into the north, the ROKs (that is, Republic of Korea soldiers) plan a military operation: analyse the enemy, probe, assess, decide on tactics, prepare, train, equip for stealth, and engage.  But the KPAGFs (figure it out) have home court advantage.  

Twists, turns, irony, and so it goes.  Beneath the armies’ discipline, the suffocating propaganda, and cultural alienation of generations, they are all the same.  

It’s longer than my usual watch-time but it whizzed along with plenty of laughs, offering insight into the Koreas where I spent a few months once upon a time at Korea University. I made two visits to the DMZ, set foot in North Korea, and walked through one of those tunnels. The title above refers to the lottery ticket draw.

It echoes, deliberately it would seem, JSA (2000), a deadly serious study of the differences between the Koreas and the Koreans in the DMZ. Like this movie, JSA is entirely Korean, ignoring the elephantine US Eighth Army of occupation.

Simulacra (2018)

IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes runtime, rated – by -.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Israel.

Verdict: Compelling.

Tagline: Gone is gone.

A scientist tries to recreate her dead daughter in a cyborg with mixed results, assisted reluctantly by another, surviving daughter.  It is a slow process, and then it goes awry.  

It is a short story of love-loss-love-and-loss…again. Not rated on the IMDb by any of the usual trolls. I came across it on You Tube (but not on Dust).  

Ascension (2000) Death on Saturn’s Moon

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 4.5 by 98 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Noir.

DNA: Yankee.

Tagline: Here we go again.  

Verdict: By the numbers.

A burned out police officer arrives at an isolated mining dome on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2057 to investigate the disappearance of the manager. Since no one can survive outside the dome, the missing man is presumed dead. Neither of the remaining two miners seems much bothered by or interested in the disappearance. They are as indifferent to the fate of the manager as managers usually are to the fate of underlings.  

The pace is slow, the dialogue repetitive, but we all know the conventions. Officer has a backstory that emerges slowly and none too clearly.  However muddled that is, it is more than we ever find out about the missing manager, or the two surviving miners.  

Nothing is made of the locale. It could be in Alaska.  

It is better than some I have seen— e.g., Music of the Spheres (1984) — but…, well, that is a left-handed compliment.  However, it does not bristle with the ideas that Spheres had despite its amateurish execution.

Sial IV (1969)

IMDb meta-data is four episodes, each of 24 minutes, rated 5.4 by an unknown number of cinematizens.  

DNA: Swiss.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: post Apocalypse.

Verdict: Molasses.

Tagline: Do electric sheep dream of androids?

By chance an engineer survives a nuclear war in 1970 and when he is unearthed and revived it is 2145, he awakens to a brave new world deep underground where the few remaining humans have created androids to do all the lifting. He finds that he prefers the honesty of the ‘droids who cannot tell a lie rather than the dishonesty of the people who can.

That summary makes it sound more interesting than it is. The acting is stilted; the direction worse, and it goes downhill from there.The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) is the same sort of story told a little better. It is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  

This future society is Sial and the sector is IV, ruled by…Machiavelli. Yep. This Machiavelli is played by the old hand Marcel Dalio (the croupier from Rick’s in Casablanca [1942], and many other films including Catch-22 [1970]). With that name Machiavelli in it, I had to watch it.   

It is very high brow with quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Saint Just. Nothing is quoted from Machiavelli. 

Those who are bored by freedom from want and work are treated as though they are sick and cured by drawing their emotions off onto androids who are then destroyed. Maybe that explains the bad hair. Among the sick are those who want to be sick. Who resist leisure and happiness.  It is their right to be unhappy, to suffer, to fight, and to be killed! Yes, they are freedom fighters, who will fight freedom wherever they find it. Ayn Rand Libertarians all!  

The whole thing is as absurd as an episode of the Avengers of the period but without either the humour or Mrs Peel.  [Sigh]

It makes Australia’s own The Stranger (1964-1965) look snappy.  

Dalio’s own backstory story as a Jew escaping from defeated France is far more compelling than this program.  

Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1969)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 40 minutes of runtime, rated 7.2 by 3,000 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Je suis perdu. 

Tagline: Who cares.  

Claude Rich gives a superb performance but it just doesn’t add up or hold interest. It is a series of tableaux, some repeated too often, with little momentum or coherence.  

In sum, he is a rising man in a publishing house who marries a co-worker; she tells him that she likes him but doesn’t love him or care much about him or anything else.  She is and remains clinically indifferent about anything and everything. (She would make a perfect manager.) It just gets worse when they move to Glasgow.  Yep, just the cure for depression, a winter in damp, drizzly, dank, and dark Scotland. She dies. He feels responsible. He probably wasn’t responsible but it is ambiguous, and in any event that he feels responsible for her death makes it so.

He volunteers for a time-travel experiment, since he, too, is now clinically depressed (from reading the script). Seven scientists ensconce him sous vide in a bladder where he is to time travel to the past.  What is the past but memory. The result is a shuffled mixtape of his memories, some on a loop, many feature Olga. It is vaguely implied that reliving these memories changes them somehow but that is only a speculation, not developed in the film.  

Some of the memories are more likely to have been dreams with no basis in fact, like one where he is slaving away over copy late into the night when five of his superiors surround his desk and make disparaging  comments on his work as he toils away. It may have felt like that but I doubt five senior executives stood around his desk at midnight. But then does dreaming it was so make it so in a memory? What is the membrane between memory and dream?

By the way, he is like many other celluloid time travellers in that he wants to go back in time, not forward.  Wells’s eponymous time traveller went forward by mistake, I seem to recall.  

Rich is in nearly every scene and carries the film with his impressive range of emotion, thought, confusion, loss, depression, and more. His last credit was in 2015.

I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated 6.3 by 2,900 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: Better than the title.

Tagline: I didn’t wanna do it! 

The night before his wedding strapping Youth is body swapped with an alien (the monster of the title) who has come to Earth on a mission.  The females of his world, we learn later, are infertile, and the mission is to determine if his kind can mate with earthlings to renew their species. Now in a semi-zombie state Youth goes ahead with the wedding but … well, his anatomy is new to him and there were no sex education lessons on the 1950s flight to Earth and he doesn’t know what to do.

His newly wed wife, true to the 1950s, concludes his frigidity and confusion is her fault and tries her wiles to seduce him. No sale. Meanwhile, his fellow aliens are body swapping with other young men and soon they effectively seal off the town.  While most of the other aliens are as lost as Youth, one or two take out their frustrations with ray guns. A shoot out ensues.   

Wife figures out that the problem is Youth, not her, and he confesses his extraterrestrial identity to her.  She tries to tell others — a doctor, a police officer, a Republican — who, true to the 1950s, dismiss her reports as female hysteria. Cringe but true.

We never get to the mating, much to the disappointment of the Fraternity Brothers.

In hindsight much of it seems an unwitting commentary on the gender stereotypes and roles of the time and place. The condescending doctor was particularly irritating. It blends several Sy Fy tropes: alien invasion albeit low key, body snatching, isolated locale, disbelieving soon-to-be victims, and so on.  

True to the 1950s, Youth was himself driven out of Hollywood as a homosexual shortly after this film.  He took up a second career as a writer with success. Wife went into television with about a hundred credits. This seems to have been her only feature film leading role.