I recently found this film on DVD, after many years of being curious to see it. It's not a lost masterpiece. Very low-budget, it's visually flat and plain. Even at just under an hour, it's overlong, and would probably have been more effective cut to half that. With no characterisation or plot development in the conventional sense, the story reaches no real resolution, but just stops. Yet individual scenes stick in the memory and I've found myself watching them again. Musically, the Pink Floyd soundtrack is minor stuff, but unmistakable Saucerful Of Secrets period Floyd, and Arthur Brown's appearance at the party scene is the film's most riveting sight. (For those who remember Joy Division, his stage moves are like a forerunner of Ian Curtis...)
Reviews
5 Reviews
Beautiful Creatures
(2000)
Vile, derivative and empty
19 April 2004
The trouble with commenting on a film like this is that if you say you found it offensive its makers might think they did something clever. They didn't. It's a thoroughly routine piece of Nineties film-making, a fourth-rate Tarantino swipe with side-grabs at Bound and Thelma & Louise. Its scenes of shooting up and gunning down and blood and sadism aren't shocking, merely disgusting and depressing: they don't challenge anyone's sense of moral order, just play to today's market. Not very well, however, since the film dropped dead at the box office - and no wonder. As a thriller it's inept from start to finish, with a storyline founded on coincidence and developed with extreme clumsiness.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
(1948)
TV showing
8 February 2004
I'd just like to point out that this film has been shown on British TV, on Channel 4 in the early Eighties - though that was its first showing, and I'm pretty certain the only one to date. I'd like to see it again, though as I recall it was hard to take seriously. (Sid James as a Chicago crook...??)
A favourite
26 July 2003
An adulterous couple turn to murder, only to discover that a petty crook and blackmailer has already had his eye upon them. Zena Walker is convincingly ruthless as the dominant partner, driving Basil Henson on to carry out her plans. Kenneth Cope does well as the chancer who thinks he's struck lucky (though it's evident he was wearing a hairpiece by the time he starred in Randall And Hopkirk Deceased...!) One slight mystery is why Pamela Ann Davy as his girlfriend is billed so far down in the cast, below the murdered spouses, since her part is a good deal more important to the story.
This is one of the later Edgar Wallace films, without the "statue in the mist" opening titles. The series was obviously running down commercially by this time, but those last few episodes include several of my favourites, full of low-budget atmosphere.
This is one of the later Edgar Wallace films, without the "statue in the mist" opening titles. The series was obviously running down commercially by this time, but those last few episodes include several of my favourites, full of low-budget atmosphere.
Lost Highway
(1997)
Serious case of lost touch
29 September 2001
Warning: Spoilers
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was largely incoherent and fell terribly flat at the end, but it had some memorable sequences and one brilliant one (the inaudible dialogue nightclub scene). Lost Highway is more of the same with less delivered.
(SPOILER: don't read on unless you've seen it.)
At bottom the film is a simple reworking of an old horror/fantasy concept: a hallucination of escape at the moment of death. Fred Madison is on death row for murdering his wife (presumably in a moment of insanity), and imagines himself turning into another person with another life, but in reality there's no escape. He changes back into himself and is electrocuted - in fact probably the whole thing has flashed through his mind in the moment the switch was pulled. It's a situation that has made for at least one classic horror movie (Carnival Of Souls), and there's no reason why it shouldn't be enjoyably revisited by film-makers who were willing to do an unpretentious genre piece. Here, however, it's tricked out with a mixture of long still shots, verbal pauses, arty compositions, fades to black, flashes of light and sudden cuts from noise to silence. The conventional stuff is quite shockingly lame. Vital plot points are barely introduced (for instance, the official inquiry when Madison is replaced in the death cell by his alternate self, Pete Dayton, who's then released: shouldn't we have seen some legal argument?) and some good players are given roles which leave them as little more than puppets. The only person who gets an actual character bit is the gang boss, Mr Eddy, in a scene where he and a couple of heavies commit some designer violence on a driver who's tailgated his Mercedes. Complete with overwritten profanity-laden dialogue, it feels embarrassingly like an imitation of Quentin Tarantino. Robert Blake has a sinister presence in old-queen makeup as the nameless 'mystery man' who acts as Madison's taunting guide along the road to destruction - but then you remember Dean Stockwell's sinister old queen in Blue Velvet. The whole thing feels like a student film, a feeling heightened by the presence (in sound and vision) of alternative-rock mediocrities like Henry Rollins, Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor.
I haven't seen The Straight Story, but Lynch was desperately in need of a change. The 'weirdness' of his earlier work has had a remarkable influence on the cultural mainstream, but in Lost Highway it just feels played out.
(SPOILER: don't read on unless you've seen it.)
At bottom the film is a simple reworking of an old horror/fantasy concept: a hallucination of escape at the moment of death. Fred Madison is on death row for murdering his wife (presumably in a moment of insanity), and imagines himself turning into another person with another life, but in reality there's no escape. He changes back into himself and is electrocuted - in fact probably the whole thing has flashed through his mind in the moment the switch was pulled. It's a situation that has made for at least one classic horror movie (Carnival Of Souls), and there's no reason why it shouldn't be enjoyably revisited by film-makers who were willing to do an unpretentious genre piece. Here, however, it's tricked out with a mixture of long still shots, verbal pauses, arty compositions, fades to black, flashes of light and sudden cuts from noise to silence. The conventional stuff is quite shockingly lame. Vital plot points are barely introduced (for instance, the official inquiry when Madison is replaced in the death cell by his alternate self, Pete Dayton, who's then released: shouldn't we have seen some legal argument?) and some good players are given roles which leave them as little more than puppets. The only person who gets an actual character bit is the gang boss, Mr Eddy, in a scene where he and a couple of heavies commit some designer violence on a driver who's tailgated his Mercedes. Complete with overwritten profanity-laden dialogue, it feels embarrassingly like an imitation of Quentin Tarantino. Robert Blake has a sinister presence in old-queen makeup as the nameless 'mystery man' who acts as Madison's taunting guide along the road to destruction - but then you remember Dean Stockwell's sinister old queen in Blue Velvet. The whole thing feels like a student film, a feeling heightened by the presence (in sound and vision) of alternative-rock mediocrities like Henry Rollins, Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor.
I haven't seen The Straight Story, but Lynch was desperately in need of a change. The 'weirdness' of his earlier work has had a remarkable influence on the cultural mainstream, but in Lost Highway it just feels played out.
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