Moviedrome

Mad Max II is one of the last gasps of the once proud Australian cinema. Mad Max I, you may recall, was a low-budget, science-fiction action thriller which introduced Mel Gibson to the agog world. Mad Max II is that rare thing, a sequel that is actually better than the original. The only other instance I can think of is For a Few Dollars More, the sequel to A Fistful of Dollars. Interestingly in both cases the director remained the same. Leone of course went on to make an even better sequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

F for Fake is Orson Welles’s quasi-documentary about various forgers and fakers, made in 1973. It was the last Welles film to be released. He actually completed two other movies, The Deep and The Other Side of the Wind, which for obscure financial or legal reasons have never been distributed.

A Canadian biochemistry student who switched to English language and literature, David Cronenberg can legitimately be described as the most original director currently working on the North American continent. His films, which are always shot in Canada - Canadian cities doubling for New York or Marrakesh - fall generally within the horror genre. They deal with secret scientific experiments that go wrong, cannibalism, sexual mutation and epidemic disease. Depending on your point of view, Cronenberg is either a maker of sick exploitation movies or an ascetic prophet of the modern age.

Rabid is one of the finest cult films of all time. David Cronenberg is, of course, the director of The Fly (remake) and Shivers and The Naked Lunch and Scanners and The Dead Zone - an unsurpassed roster of cult horror movies. Not Wes Craven, nor Tod Browning, not Mario Bava, not Dario Argento, not John Carpenter, not even the ineffable James Whale, made as many genuinely weird and unsettling horror films.

Sam Peckinpah is an American director who came out of television in the fifties. He directed some memorable episodes of The Rifleman before embarking on a series of features which included some of the best westerns of all time: Guns in the Afternoon, Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch.There have been so many bloodthirsty adventure films made in the last 20 years that one tends to forget what a shock wave The Wild Bunch made when it came out in 1969. It was both condemned as violent pornography and lauded and at least one journalist - Alexander Cockburn - was so incensed that he got into a fist-fight in the cinema. In retrospect, The Wild Bunch - with its random cruelty, its senseless massacres, high-tech killing and gangsters dressed as US soldiers taking hostages and murdering old ladies - seems to be an early feature about Vietnam.

Wes Craven’s splendid The Serpent and the Rainbow is a story of voodoo and black magic filmed in mysterious Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Craven is the director of various successful low-budget and cultist horror movies, including The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and People Under the Stairs. Like George Romero and Dario Argento, Craven is an exponent of the modern horror genre: he also bears a striking resemblance to a tall Edgar Allan Poe.

Les Diaboliques is a horror film, it’s in French, with subtitles, but please don’t be put off! You will not be disappointed. This film is at least 15 times more frightening than Friday the Twelfth Part Fourteen or any of the other inane sequels you can rent down at the newsagents. This is a real film, directed by a real film director. And it is really frightening. If you watch Les Diaboliques all the way to the end, you will be scared. Guaranteed.

Bernardo Bertolucci is an Italian director, the son of a film critic, whose first job was as assistant to Pasolini. In 1964, he directed Before the Revolution, and published an emotional critical diatribe against the French New Wave director Godard, called ‘Versus Godard’. In 1968, he directed Partner and wrote one of the first drafts of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

This is one of the more disappointing John Carpenter films. Carpenter is the director of a series of horror and science fiction films, the most famous and commercially successful of which was Halloween. His first film, in some ways still his best, was a science-fiction comedy called Dark Star, about surfers in space. Dark Star was written by one Dan O'Bannon, who later wrote Alien, which, in spite of a much larger budget and the inimitable chocolate-box photography of Ridley Scott, is essentially the same story (mad alien aboard space ship, picking off the crew) minus the very funny humour of Carpenter’s original, super-low-budget film.

Alligator is a film based on a modern myth. Modern myths are a very popular cult species: there are films about flying saucers, about the Loch Ness monster, Bermuda Triangle, all that sort of thing, although as yet there hasn’t been a movie about ‘the poodle in the microwave’. Here, John Sayles and Lewis Teague offer us the oft-told story of the pet baby alligator flushed down the toilet, which takes up residence in the sewer and grows to be 100 feet long.

Q is one of those films with a confusing plethora of names. In the United States, it was first known as The Winged Serpent. Later it was retitled simply Q (short for Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god who was half reptile, half bird); in Britain, it was known more formally as Q - The Winged Serpent. The director Larry Cohen is a famed writer/director/producer of exploitation films, among them Demon, It’s Alive! and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Q was his most ambitious film, a combination of slasher movie and King Kong. In fact, Cohen goes one better and sets his monster’s roost, not in the Empire State Building, but in the attic of the Chrysler Building.

Wise Blood was John Huston’s first film after Fat City, and while likewise set in small-town America, it’s completely different in tone. Fat City was about boxers in Stockton, California: resolutely naturalistic with great performances by Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrell and Stacey Keach. Wise Blood is set in the South - it was filmed in Georgia, though the original novel is set in Tennessee, and it is anything but a slice of dramatic naturalism. Brad Dourif, a very fine actor who seems to appear exclusively in cult movies, plays one Hazel Motes, an atheist determined on setting up a Church Without Christ.

Matthew Hopkins was a British Joe McCarthy type who in the seventeenth century claimed to have the ‘Devil’s List’ of all the witches in England. Just as Tailgunner Joe’s list of 160,000 Communists, or homosexuals, or whatever it was, shaped the domestic policy of his nation, so Matthew Hopkins made a thriving living chasing down witches and to a lesser extent warlocks in East Anglia 300 years ago.

Lolita is the story of a lecturer in French literature and his amour fou for a pre-teenage nymphet. The film, of course, is based on Vladimir Nabokov’s book, which was generally considered unfilmable until a young American director called Stanley Kubrick took it up. The script is by Nabokov, and it’s very good - although, surprisingly, not overtly literary. Nabokov was born in Russia; English was his second, or maybe even his third or fourth language, and perhaps not surprisingly he became a master of the idiom what we speak. If you ever yearn for literary indulgence, I would urge you to check out his book Pale Fire, a brilliant parody of epic poetry with an insane sub-plot running through the footnotes.

Play Misty for Me is the first feature directed by Clint Eastwood. As has been more than once observed, Eastwood’s directorial style was greatly influenced by the directors of his most successful movies, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. Leone was a manic sadist, a misogynist, and one of the great film makers. Siegel was a former editor, and a successful director of action films like Riot in Cell Block 11 and Dirty Harry. Eastwood’s second feature as a director, High Plains Drifter, has often been mistaken for a Leone film. Play Misty for Me bears many of the hallmarks of Don Siegel - creative editing and use of sound, mixed with routine exchanges of close-ups and familiar dramatic tension in the Psycho mould.

Walker is an American film made in Nicaragua. It was written by Rudy Wurlitzer, the author of Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Candy Mountain. Wurlitzer has recently worked on a story about the Buddha for Bernardo Bertolucci. Walker is portrayed by Ed Harris, an outstanding American actor who specializes in half-charming, half-psychotic anti-heroes. Harris has also appeared in Under Fire, To Kill a Priest, Alamo Bay and The Abyss. He also played the astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff.

Henry Jaglom was one of the editors of Easy Rider. Today he is best known as a director of genteel, moderately bawdy comedies such as Eating and Sitting Ducks. These films tend to feature the talents of his brother, Michael Emil. For this reviewer, this type of movie is the equivalent of that French film where the two aesthetes sit around digesting a big meal and endlessly jawing: but there is no doubt that as a sub-genre, or genre, or whatever it is, the witty, sitting-around-talking kind of movie has its constituency. But…

For an industry as self-congratulatory as Hollywood, you would expect there to be a plethora of movies showing the film business in a glowing light. Strangely enough, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Of all the movies made about the film industry, the only one I can think of that treats the business well is Day for Night, in which the romantically-inclined French director François Truffaut did his best to convince us that making a film is a process full of sweetness and light.

Robert Aldrich is an old favourite; he has more films on Moviedrome than any other director. On this occasion we don’t see so many of his stock company since the cast is quite small and there is only one setting - the mansion of a narcissistic Hollywood movie star. As you might deduce from the above, The Big Knife is based on a stage play - fortunately a good one. It takes us deeper and deeper into the twisted history of its protagonist and the studio’s increasingly vicious machinations. Its author was Clifford Odets, who also wrote None but the Lonely and Sweet Smell of Success.