reviews

Chunking Express (1994)

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I recently celebrated my birthday, and coincidentally, over the course of Chungking Express, so does the protagonist of the first half. And he’s a May baby, too! This was not an intentional viewing choice on my part, but it was a fun little accident, and since I, like all of Wong Kar-Wai’s protagonists, am a hardcore yearner, that wasn’t the only thing that aligned for me. 

Express is neatly divided into two halves, each narrative connected solely by the presence of the Mandarin Express fast-food bar located in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a seventeen-story building originally built as a residential complex but which ultimately mostly houses low-budget guest houses and shops. Our first protagonist, Chi-Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), is a police officer whose girlfriend, May, breaks up with him on April 1st, initially leading him to believe that she is joking. As the month wears on, he finds himself committing to a silly ritual of buying a can of pineapple from the local convenience store every day, each one with an expiration date of May 1st, his upcoming 25th birthday. When the month ends and May has yet to tell him that she was kidding, he eats all thirty cans in one night, then goes out drinking. While out, he meets a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin); unbeknownst to him, she is a professional criminal specializing in drug trafficking, whose most recent scheme has run aground as her newest recruits disappeared at the airport with her product and never appeared at their final destination. After he vomits up a prodigious amount of canned pineapple, the two retire to a hotel room where she finally sleeps after days on the run while he watches over her. 

They both disappear completely from the film after this as the narrative view shifts. Chi-Moo runs through his entire little black book on the payphone at the Mandarin Express, where the owner attempts to set him up with one of his employees, coincidentally also named May, with no success. Said proprietor also tries to make a date for another frequent visitor, a beat cop known only by his badge number, 663 (Tony Leung), with May, but when he walks by on his patrol after having been dumped by his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow), May has gone off on a vacation and relative Faye (Faye Wong) is covering for her in her absence. 663 is still too heartbroken about his recent relationship to notice that Faye is utterly smitten with him from the get-go. When his ex drops by with a letter for him along with his house keys, every employee of the Express reads the letter and gossips about its contents among themselves, with only Faye finding the deeper resonance in the words between two separated lovers. 663 initially refuses to take the letter, saying that he will simply get it another time, and this allows Faye the opportunity to, in true manic pixie dream girl fashion, start using his keys to let herself into his home and spruce up the place. Over time, the lovelorn 663 moves through his grief (in no small part because of her attempts to cheer him up) and becomes fascinated by this strange woman and her quirks: her forgetfulness, her attitude, and her eternal fascination with The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” which plays approximately one hundred times throughout the film. She has her own dreams that will take her away from him, however, but that doesn’t mean that the time that they walked a path together wasn’t the catalyst that led them both to pursue something meaningful in their lives, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll never walk the same path again. 

Wong’s filmography, at least the parts with which I’m familiar (mostly Happy Together and In the Mood for Love; I’ve seen 2046 but have no memory of it), is all about longing, almost entirely without any kind of physical intimacy. It’s love that exists in the brooding, in the shared looks, expressed in the lingering of presence and the acceptance of absence. Happy Together does open with a sex scene, which serves to express the once-easy intimacy of Po–Wing and Fai in comparison to the slow, backsliding dissolution of their relationship that plays out over the rest of the film. There’s nothing that explicit here, other than a brief scene of 663 and the stewardess in bed together before she takes off on one of her flights (possibly the last time they were together before a chance reunion at the same corner store where Chi-Moo buys all his pineapple, near the finale), and the director is once again exploring the yearn, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be headed in that direction. The film opens with a much more action-y style as we meet the Woman in the Wig and see her recruit several men to be her drug runners, then follows the process of them being outfitted by special tailors who create clothing designed with secret pockets and compartments as well as the creation of false documentation to allow them to travel. She takes the cadre to the airport and sees them off, then learns that she’s been double crossed and the drugs never reached their destination. She tries to extort the return of the drugs by kidnapping a child, ultimately giving up on this half-hearted attempt, which is where we leave her before we spend some time with Chi-Moo before their two stories collide. A lot of this opening action is shot using a sort of shutter effect that I assume was in vogue in action films of the time (I recently attempted to watch the 1999 Korean action flick Nowhere to Hide, which featured the same kind of photography to ramp up the action, although I couldn’t finish that one). 

This changes completely once the film pivots to its two leading yearners, Chi-Moo and (later) 663. Apparently, the script was not complete at the time that filming began, and the second segment about 663 was written in a single day, which might explain the abrupt bifurcation of the film into its two largely separate halves. As such, there’s not as much consistency throughout this one as there is in his other works that I’ve seen. They’re not unified narratively or even structurally and are instead linked solely by the emotions of Leung and Takeshi’s characters. This gives the film an effortless and breathless quality, one that wanders but does not meander. Where it most reminded me of this other work, however, was in its musical choices. As a period piece, In the Mood for Love featured a lot of classic jazz numbers, notably several performed by Nat King Cole (“You Belong To My Heart,” “Magic Is The Moonlight,” “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” and more), with the frequent presence of his album Cole Español serving to tell us something about the characters. Chow and Su are both Shanghainese expatriates living in the eighth decade of British rule of Hong Kong, and their blossoming (but unconsummated) romance being soundtracked by the American Cole’s album created for the Latin market creates a feeling of being untethered from any sense of place or identity but finding root in love, a language that transcends tongues. The use of “Happy Together” by The Turtles as the concluding track in the film that takes its name from the song is an ironic, or at least ambiguous, one. Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai are not happy together and have not been for a long time, and it’s apparent that they likely cannot be happy together, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t both fondly recall the (admittedly brief) times in which this was the case, and the clinging to the past is preventing either of them from moving on. 

Here, the omnipresence of “California Dreamin’” acts as Faye’s leitmotif, underlining her desire to get out and experience something more than working in her uncle’s food counter, while also expressing a melancholy about that kind of change. Notably, when she returns from her first year of being a flight attendant to visit the Mandarin Express, she finds 663 there performing renovations, as he has bought the place and is turning it into his own restaurant; while he works, he listens to The Mamas and the Papas just as she had when working the counter when he first met her. Her willingness to commit to something took her far from him, and the same temerity that she brought out in him has caused him to forge a new career and life that will anchor him to one spot. Maybe they were so different that it never could have worked. Maybe this reunion will have them find a way to compromise. We’ll never know; we can only imagine it, and I love Wong’s ongoing commitment to that kind of ambiguity. Also worth noting is that Faye Wong sings a cover of “Dreams” by The Cranberries in this one, and it’s simply beautiful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death on the Nile (1978)

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I really, really wanted to love Death on the Nile. I first acquired a copy of it shortly after the death of the late Angela Lansbury, my love for whom is widely advertised all over this site. Unfortunately, her role in this is one of the smaller ones from among the ensemble, and the overall tone and extended length of this one was a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad; I quite enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. 

As the film opens, we meet Jackie de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who practically begs her heiress friend Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles) to hire Jackie’s fiance Simon (Simon MacCorkindale) for a position at Ridgeway’s estate. She relents, and then we jump forward a year to find Simon on a honeymoon with his wife, except he hasn’t married Jackie, and is instead now wedded to Linnet. That doesn’t stop Jackie from being a thorn in their side, however, as she shows up at their most recent romantic rendezvous atop a Giza pyramid to recite facts about its dimensions, with Linnet and Simon both expressing frustration that she has appeared at every destination on their post-wedding trip. (As a side note, I loved this; if my best friend stole my betrothed, I would also be so petty that neither of them would know a moment’s peace for the rest of their lives, and there would be no corner of the earth in which I could not find a way to be a nuisance.) They attempt to give her the slip before the next leg of their trip, and appear to have been successful, as they board a steamboat travelling down, as the title would suggest, the Nile River. 

As it turns out, not only are they not alone on this journey, but many of the passengers, like Jackie, are in the vicinity because of their desire to cause trouble for the newlyweds. There’s Linnet’s maidservant, Louise (Jane Birkin), who was promised a dowry for her service to Linnet so that she could marry a man she loves, but which Linnet continues to delay paying, possibly with the intention of completely reneging on their deal. Miss Bowers (Maggie Smith)’s formerly noble family lost their fortune at the machinations of Linnet’s father, forcing her into taking a thankless job as the companion of Marie Van Schuyler (Bette Davis), whose own aristocratic status does not stop her from having kleptomaniacal inclinations, especially with regards to Linnet’s pearls. Linnet has also publicly denounced the practices of Dr. Bessner (Jack Warden), as her friend died under his “care,” which includes treating patients with intravenous armadillo urine, and his career is in the balance. Then there’s Andrew Pennington (George Kennedy), who manages Linnet’s stateside business and who is set on preventing her from finding out that he’s been skimming, while Colonel Race (David Niven) is there surreptitiously acting on behalf of her English lawyers, who want to bring this to her attention. Nebulously, there is a young communist aboard named James (Jon Finch), who bears hatred for Linnet as a representative of class striation, and, last but not least, the ship is also carrying Salome Otterbourne (Lansbury) and her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey); Salome is a romance novelist currently embroiled in a libel lawsuit over one of her recent books, which was partially based on Linnet’s real life and may have insufficiently differentiated the main character from the inspiration. And, of course, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is there, because someone has to use their little grey cells to figure out who did it when Linnet turns up dead, and the only ironclad alibi is Jackie’s. 

The oddest thing about this adaptation is that it decides to play the story for light comedy; that’s not that strange in and of itself (yours truly was in a Christie parody entitled And Then There Was One in high school—it’s a common way to present her work), but it’s curious how intermittently the comedy works. Where this least was least successful was when the humor went very broad, most notably in regards to Lansbury’s perpetually intoxicated (and horned up) Salome, who is possibly the most obnoxious character in the whole thing. You know that if I’m looking at Lady Angela and having a bad time, then we’re really in trouble. Shortly before a failed attempt on Linnet’s life at the Temple of Karnak, we’re treated to a scene of all of the passengers disembarking the ship and setting out to ride up to the site; I suppose we’re supposed to laugh at the sight gag of George Kennedy struggling to mount a donkey while the others get on camels, but it certainly failed to get a mirthless smile out of me, let alone a chuckle. There’s also an overlong gag when the group first boards the ship and I. S. Johar’s captain character does an extended bit about trying to guess which guest is which, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s possibly racist and at the very least undignified. On the other hand, the biggest laugh I did get was from one of Lansbury’s scenes, in which Salome is recounting how she managed to witness the killer flee from the stateroom, her voiceover explaining that a deckhand was showing her something on the shore, while the flashback itself reveals her buying several large liquor bottles from the man instead. At least I can say that the film got funnier for me as it went along, with more of the jokes landing in the back half than in the front. 

On a purely visual level, the film is much more notable. As a period piece, all of the clothing is gorgeous; the only Academy Award for which it was nominated was Best Costume Design, and it won that Oscar as well as the BAFTA in the same category. Special attention should be drawn to Smith’s outfitting as Miss Bowers. Throughout the film, she’s consistently dressed in tightly tailored men’s tuxedos and other formalwear, and she looks great in every one of them. Her silhouette is stunning, and she works the slightly transgressive look quite well. I was also struck by the various gowns in which Farrow is costumed. When most people think about her, I assume that they all have the same first mental image that I do, which is of her emaciated, shaven-headed prisoner in a nightgown in Rosemary’s Baby. Everything else I’ve ever seen her in was during (or after) her marriage to Woody Allen, during which time she was, to put it lightly, not doing well. I don’t think that I ever realized before that she’s a beautiful woman, and getting to see her slink about in dresses that won costuming awards on both sides of the Atlantic was a thrill. I loved her angry, vengeful energy, and she ended up being one of the movie’s highlights. 

This is somewhat condensed from the 1937 novel on which it was based, as usually must be done when making a Christie adaptation. Characters are removed, motives are swapped around or condensed, and you’re still likely to end up creating something that’s over two hours long, with this particular film clocking in at 134 minutes (Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 version was 127 minutes long, and I can’t imagine how the David Suchet adaptation manages to get the plot resolved in 97 minutes). That’s a decent time for a good mystery, but it errs quite long for a comedy, so it ends up succeeding more as one than the other. It’s not bad, but it almost feels like it would work better broken up into two parts for Masterpiece Theatre. And, frankly, I didn’t enjoy seeing Angela Lansbury take a bullet during these trying times. Embark (or don’t) with that in mind. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Fight or Flight (2025)

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Ironically, Fight or Flight seems to be flying under the radar. The new action comedy from first time feature director James Madigan is a lot of hyperactive, frenetic fun, even when some of the comedy thuds a bit. Some of that may fall on the writing duo of Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona. McLaren’s only previous writing credit is for the 2018 direct-to-Netflix Theo James vehicle How it Ends, while this is Cotrona’s first credit in that category after several years as an actor, most notably as the lead in the From Dusk till Dawn TV series. Despite some weak jokes that fail to land (no pun intended), this is still a pretty fun ride (no pun intended). And hey, stars of both of the turn of the millennium Halloween sequels (Josh Hartnett from 1998’s H20 and Katee Sackhoff from 2002’s Resurrection) appear in a movie together, even if they never share the screen at the same time. That’s something, right? 

Hartnett is Lucas Reyes, who’s drinking himself to death in exile in Bangkok. Stateside, Katherine Brunt (Sackhoff) is busy leading a shadowy quasi-government agency/surveillance network. Her subordinate, Hunter (White Lotus’s Julian Kostov), informs her of a failed unauthorized action that resulted in an explosion in Asia, and that it appears that the incident involved “The Ghost,” a “black hat hacker” and terrorist about which no agency has ever been able to get any information. An overzealous lackey manages to find nearby footage that has been edited to remove the Ghost, Dead Reckoning style, and they extrapolate that they are headed for the Bangkok airport, with the nearest action team too far away to get there in time. Reluctantly, Brunt calls on Reyes, promising to clear up his legal status and allow him to come home. All he has to do is get on the plane, discover the identity of the Ghost and safely take them into custody, and deliver them to the agency alive when the plane lands in San Francisco. Should be simple, except that once they’re airborne, Brunt learns that this whole thing is a trap for the Ghost; an all points bounty has been put out for them, meaning that the plane is full of potential assassins. 

That’s a concept that’s both high and a little broey, and it’s no surprise that when the jokes don’t work it’s because it leans into the latter rather than the former. After I had already groaned at the hyperactive stagey performance of the high-strung air steward Royce (Danny Ashok), what really thudded for me was one of the scenes that revealed more about the conspiracy. Brunt and Hunter take a walk outside of the agency’s headquarters as they discuss who knew what and when and whether or not one of them has any involvement in the leaking of the Ghost’s location, and there’s a lot of hay made (tediously) about how life is all about being top dog, full of machismo from both characters. When they end the discussion, they’ve reached a nearby waterfront, where a yoga class is being conducted by a long-haired hippie type; after they express their mutual disgust at this display, Brunt shakes her head and utters “Pussies.” It’s such a strange little cul-de-sac that exists for no reason other than to show Brunt and Hunter as adversaries vying for the position of alpha, with the oh-so-funny comical turn that it’s a woman calling people pussies. It’s these kinds of things that make this film feel weirdly out of touch in certain places, where ten percent edgelordiness seeps over and cheapens the whole thing. 

Of course, the film is kind of a throwback in other ways. The “X on a plane” format is probably best remembered for giving us Snakes on a Plane, but this is more reminiscent of nineties skybound thrillers like Con Air and Air Force One, with a little bit of Final Destination-esque plane depressurization thrown in for good measure (this is not a spoiler; it’s the first scene). It’s got the shady government agency staffed by former CIA and other operatives but which now operates under a banner that remains undisclosed until fairly late in the game, and the conspiratorial actions that they perpetrate have a distinctly pre-War on Terror feel — more Enemy of the State than The Bourne Identity, although when the film shifts into fight sequences it utilizes the shaky cam effects canonized in that series before becoming the default in virtually every action thriller today. There’s also the presence of an inexplicably powerful supercomputer that the Ghost has created and which represents a threat to certain intelligence infrastructure, and the fact that this asset may be the reason that the Ghost was herded onto an airplane with assassins in the first place. Maybe because I was already in that headspace, this element felt very 90s to me as well, as the writing felt intentionally designed to imitate that “computers can do anything” optimism/fearmongering of the era, from uploading a virus to an alien mothership in Independence Day to deleting your entire identity in The Net. More depressingly, the film acts as if exposing governments and corporations for their exploitation of third world labor and participation in human trafficking would somehow have a negative effect on those entities. The reality that we all inhabit here in 2025 is one where people are still in the highest offices of power despite damning evidence of their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and people still upgrade their phones every time there’s a new status symbol with full knowledge that they come from sweatshops that “employ” children. It’s cute that the film thinks that the Ghost’s wikileak might have some impact on anything at all; I wish I still had that kind of optimism. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Batman Ninja: Yakuza League (2025)

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Way back in the ancient pop culture landscape of 2018, there was some excitement & novelty to be found in a one-off experiment like Batman Ninja. Sure, every other major film in production was a superhero picture and, sure, the Caped Crusader was in roughly 30% of them, but it was still a welcome break in format to see the genre reimagined in a unique context – freed from the laborious narrative responsibilities of a “shared cinematic universe.” The first Batman Ninja film was an over-the-top indulgence in redesigning famous Batman villains within an alternate-universe anime aesthetic. Its newly released sequel does the same for members of The Justice League, but all the excitement & novelty has been dulled by a constant flood of multiversal storytelling over the years since. Every superhero picture is an alternate-dimension reimagining of familiar superhero archetypes now, and so Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League serves no real purpose beyond being an easy gateway into appreciating the visual delights of anime artistry for previously uninitiated 12-year-olds. Still, it’s cute.

Yakuza League‘s boldest creative gamble is in its assumption that its audience remembers any plot details or running jokes from the previous Batman Ninja outing. The story picks up at the exact moment when the last movie ended, with Batman & Robin returning to modern Gotham from their time-travel adventure in feudal Japan. It seems there are some lingering space-time anomalies resulting from that adventure, mainly that the island of Japan has disappeared from global maps and relocated to the sky above Gotham. The now sky-bound nation’s alternate history has been ruled by infinite yakuza gangs, leading to a “Yakuzageddon” event that threatens to tear Gotham down if the Bat Family cannot fix the corrupted “multiverse frequency” in time. The anomaly initially manifests in a “yakuza hurricane,” raining countless gangster intruders into Gotham like so many Agents Smith from Matrix sequels past. The situation escalates when Batman & Robin fly to the floating Japan in the sky to restore order in the now crime-ridden country, only to discover that the alternate-universe anime equivalents of fellow Justice League members are the biggest, cruelest gangsters of all. Many loud, silly fights ensue as they struggle to restore Justice League values into the Yakuza League variants, with only Wonder Woman working as their ally on the inside.

The major saving grace of Yakuza League is that DC has once again given Japanese animators free rein to reimagine their most iconic characters in an anime context (with Junpei Mizusaki & Shinji Takagi sharing directorial credit). They have as much fun with that freedom as possible, taking for-their-own-sake detours into 80s Saturday morning cartoon parody, Lady Snowblood-inspired karaoke video art, and pop-up book illustrations that help expand the artistic project beyond its most obvious boundaries. By the time Batman climbs into yet another mech suit to fight the Yakuza League equivalent of Superman, however, the “Batman, except it’s anime” aesthetic can’t help but feel a little rote. If you’ve already seen Batman Ninja, you’ve already seen everything Yakuza League has to offer – give or take scenes of The Flash sharing lightning powers & sartorial choices with Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden. If you’ve seen any superhero movie in the 2020s, you’ve also already seen the genre collapse in on itself with this style of “What if?” alternate-universe reimagining, which is starting to feel like an admission that there’s nothing exciting or novel left to mine from this material. It’s all just different flavor packets added to the same basic gruel.

-Brandon Ledet 

Vulcanizadora (2025)

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Are there still Godsmack fans in 2025? What kind of weirdo buries porno mags in the woods? Is it important to enjoy the company of the other person in your suicide pact? There’s lots to ponder in the latest feel-bad slacker comedy from director Joel Potrykus. Continuing his career-long collaboration with actor Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora is yet another aimless indulgence in stasis & rot along the same lines as their previous breakouts Buzzard & Relaxer. The deep well of sadness beneath that surface layer of rot has never been as complexly layered, though, and Potrykus is almost starting to give off the impression that he actually cares about what he’s saying with his proudly low-effort art. The message he’s communicating has not evolved beyond “Life sucks shit, dude,” but there’s no reason that it has to. It’s worth repeating, because it’s true.

The real evolution in Potrykus & Burge’s collaboration here is that it has moved from behind the camera to the screen. The actor-director duo star in Vulcanizadora as two nu-metal wastoids on a camping trip in the Michigan woods, seemingly working towards opposite purposes. For his part, Potrykus’s Derek is hell-bent on making lifelong bro-trip memories with his camcorder & a small arsenal of fireworks, filming an amateur video he models after Faces of Death (but registers more as a 12-year-old’s backyard homage to Jackass). Meanwhile, Burge’s Marty has brought along some homemade fireworks of his own, and he is visibly annoyed by every one of Derek’s stunts that delays their ultimate purpose: exploding the two dirtbags’ skulls in a beachside double suicide. As with all of their work together, however, it’s ultimately a trip to nowhere, and the second half of the film drops all plot momentum to instead sit in the personal & familial disappointments that inspired the suicide pact in the first place. The laughs gradually fade, and all that’s left is the depression, isolation, and impotent aggression.

If Potrykus’s darkly comic portrayals of leftover late-90s metalhead machismo have dulled over the years, it’s because he now has more competition in similar comedic voices like Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Kyle Mooney. Still, there’s an attention to detail here in the collected paraphernalia of the archetype that feels freshly observed: gas station snack piles, vintage porno mags, broken glow sticks, ditch weed, Audioslave karaoke, etc. Like the Freddy Krueger Power Glove prop in Buzzard, he also creates a uniquely upsetting object of his own design here: a piece of BDSM head gear designed to house the suicide-mission explosives in the wearers’ mouths. He also finds some novelty in airing his metalhead slacker routine out in the sunshine, leaving the Relaxer couch behind for a stroll in the woods. His creative dynamic with Burge otherwise hasn’t changed much, and that personal stasis is somewhat the point. Their pointlessly destructive pranks are even less becoming now that they’re the age when fatherhood & male pattern baldness have made their adult responsibilities more immediately apparent. Now their corrosive aimlessness has actual consequences, each remarkably bleak.

– Brandon Ledet 

Spies (1928)

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I am excited to watch what’s being marketed as the final chapter in the Mission: Impossible saga later this week, but I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to be able to clear an entire evening for it. Clocking in at 169 minutes of Hollywood action spectacle, The Final Reckoning is easily the longest Mission: Impossible sequel to date. Likewise, the most recent James Bond sequel, 2021’s No Time to Die, clocked in at 163 minutes as the longest of its own decades-spanning franchise. The Fast and Furious series is following the same trend, with both 2021’s F9 and 2023’s Fast X breaking the 140min barrier because two hours is no longer enough space to tell the epic story of black-market street-racers who found a second life as international superspies. I have no doubt that its own upcoming finale, Fast 11, will be even longer. It’s clear that these decades-running espionage thriller series have become bloated through the virtue of their success, racking up enough international box office to earn a blank-check approval for every imaginable indulgence, supercharged by the egos of Hollywood Elite freaks like Tom Cruise & Vin Diesel. In a roundabout way, though, their exponentially expanding runtimes do call back to the earliest days of spy-thriller cinema, both in the episodic “Until next time…” storytelling of pre-show serials and in the epic scale of Fritz Lang’s 1928 genre landmark Spies (aka Spione), which in its original exhibition ran for an impressive 178 minutes, putting all of its modern decedents to shame. Even its incomplete, surviving prints stretch past the 140 minute mark, trimmed down by half an hour but still meeting the modern Hollywood standard.

Despite its near-three-hour runtime, Spies is not an especially self-serious or prestigious work. Lang sets his espionage saga against the same kind of impossible, expressionist backdrops crafted for his sci-fi epic Metropolis the previous year, but it’s all in service of telling a low-brow, pulpy romance between undercover spies. If the film has earned any historical or artistic prestige outside the typically masterful imagery of Lang’s monocled eye, it’s all due to the fact that it is almost a century old. Co-written with his wife & collaborator Thea von Harbou, Spies pioneers a long list of genre tropes both big (referring to the protagonist only by his agent number, 326) and small (comically tiny cameras, disappearing ink, etc). As a result, it now plays heavily tropey, taking three hours to tell a fairly simple love story between two spies who work for opposing agencies. Our somewhat heroic Agent No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) is employed by the German Secret Service to thwart the criminal-mastermind plans of Haghi (Rudolf “Dr. Mabuse” Klien-Rogge) to intercept a top secret British-Japanese peace treaty. Not nearly as suave nor as talented as he thinks, No. 326 is already on the Russian enemy’s radar at the start of his mission, and he’s assigned to be taken down by the femme fatale counterspy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), who’s always two steps ahead of his plan. Only, Sonja is secretly a bit of a softie, blackmailed by Haghi to commit evil deeds. Naturally, she immediately falls in love with No. 326, constantly saving his ass in times of crisis and engineering a scheme to free them both from their professional obligations so they can spend the rest of their lives in each other’s arms.

This airport paperback plot doesn’t sound especially substantial in the abstract, at least not when compared to other, juicier Fritz Lang triumphs of its era like Metropolis, Destiny, and M. It’s illustrated with the same German Expressionist gloom & grandeur as those more infamous works, however, finding Lang at the height of his powers (long before he sleepwalked through late-career studio noirs like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). The opening prologue and explosive climax are especially stunning, kicking things off with a rapid-fire montage of espionage action and closing things out with a literal circus of violence. It’s at those bookends where Lang crafts isolated images in inserts that rival the beauty of any individual frame of classic cinema: a spy posing atop the rubble of an exploded bank wall, a low-angle close-up of an assassin on a motorcycle, a woman’s hands posed with gun & cigarette. There are a few other scenes sprinkled throughout the sprawling runtime that rival those images (namely, the makeup rituals of a creepy secret agent named Nemo the Clown and a boxing ring encircled by ballroom dancers), but much of the drama between those spectacular bookends takes on stage-play feel. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch would’ve turned No. 326 & Sonja’s ill-advised romance into a perverse romp (see: Trouble in Paradise), Lang & von Harbou craft a fairly somber story rife with blackmail, prostitution, opium addiction, and suicide. The old-fashioned sweetness of the central romance can’t help but be marred by the grim practicalities of spy work, which sometimes leads to bursts of violent visual poetry but often leads to conflicted players clawing their own faces in agony over who to be loyal to – lover or employer.

Even the relatively shortened Restored Cut of Spies was a little trying on my 21st Century attention span, which began to waver any time Lang strayed from grand German Expressionist spectacle to stage-bound melodrama. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, and Dom Toretto spy thrillers in recent years that are just as long but not half as cool. It would’ve taken the same time commitment for me to catch up with the most recent Fast & Furious film, which I never got around to because nothing from the previous, even-longer one lingered with me past the end credits; they even found a way to make a forgettably dull image out of the Fast Family finally launching a car into space. Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen individual frames from Spies that will be burned into the back of my skull forever, even if it’s telling an equally inconsequential story as most of its modern equivalents. All that these bloated spy-thriller sequels need to do to earn their ever-expanding runtimes is take a page from Fritz Lang’s book and craft some of the most fantastic, gorgeously composed images in the history of cinema. It’s that simple.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

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1956’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a late-career noir directed by Fritz Lang, his very last production for an American studio. It’s weirdly flat in style for Lang, whose early triumphs M & Metropolois helped establish foundational cinematic language that pushed the still-young artform to its furthest extremes. Here, he’s so bored with the form that he goes through the motions of a legal procedural as if he were making a televised Movie of the Week, give or take a few lateral camera maneuvers that attempt to liven up long scenes of men talking at desks & tables. Lang even calls attention to this TV-movie quality by speeding along witness testimony in montage as presented on a local news broadcast, shot in the same multi-camera style as the film proper. However, the longer you stick with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt‘s preposterous, only-in-the-movies courtroom drama the more complicated its moral & narrative implications become, until it spirals out into a big-picture indictment of the entire American justice system and then, ultimately, lands a few unexpected jabs as a twist-a-minute thriller. What I’m getting at here is that it’s Fritz Lang’s Juror #2.

Dana Andrews (of Laura fame) stars as a hotshot novelist who’s eager to score a big hit with his second book so he can afford a high-society marriage to his newspaper heiress fiancée (Joan Fontaine, of Rebecca fame). His best lead is a hairbrained idea cooked up by his father-in-law-to-be, a newspaper man who’s in constant public battle with the local DA over the ethics of capital punishment. Incensed that the DA is “trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men,” the father-in-law schemes to trick the aspiring politician into sentencing a provably innocent man to death based on planted, circumstantial evidence. Convinced that the scheme has the potential for national publicity, the novelist foolishly agrees to frame himself for the murder of a burlesque dancer, hoping to turn the experience into his next hit book (and, why not, make a political statement against capital punishment too, if it’s convenient enough). As anyone who’s ever seen a movie before would guess, things go awry when the evidence proving his innocence is destroyed, and his fated date with an electric chair becomes more inevitable than theoretical.

It’s how Douglas Morrow’s script disappears that exonerating evidence and what happens to the novelist once it’s gone that makes Beyond a Reasonable Doubt narratively tricky. The 80-minute potboiler doesn’t fully get cooking until the final quarter, when Morrow throws in at least one twist too many and the pot boils over. The first twist is a violent shock. The second is a disappointingly conventional cop-out that defuses the tension. Then, the third twist desperately attempts to add some traditional thriller tension back into the plot, calling the movie’s morals & politics into question in a way that can’t fully be reconciled because it happens at the very last moment. At the start, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a thought experiment cooked up by noble writers who aim to take down wicked politicians who use state-sanctioned murder to further their careers. Since the objectively evil practice of capital punishment is still alive & well today (with Louisiana & other states gassing prisoners and subjecting them to firing squads again), maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it ends as a cheap-thrills mystery plot instead. Lang & Morrow made no detectable impact on the American justice system, but they did pull a few gasps out of an unsuspecting audience, even if entirely out of incredulity. Like with Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, I doubt it would’ve been notable to anyone if it were filed under a workman director’s name instead of Lang’s, but there is something to its moral precarity that can’t be fully dismissed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Dark Mirror (1946)

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I was recently so impressed with The Spiral Staircase that I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole seeking out other films from director Robert Siodmak. Just a year after Staircase, he helmed another shockingly modern proto-slasher entitled The Dark Mirror. The film stars Olivia de Havilland in dual roles as twin sisters Ruth and Terry Collins, one of whom is concealing a dark secret. You see, Terry is a sweet girl working at a lobby newspaper stand and has fallen for the beguiling charms of one Dr. Frank Peralta, who has an office in the building. When she’s seen leaving his apartment the very night on which he was found stabbed to death, multiple eyewitnesses can account for her presence — except that her alibi is rock solid, as she was also seen at the exact same time in the park by her butcher and a patrolman. Befuddled police lieutenant Stevenson (Thomas Mitchell) can’t make heads or tails of it until he visits Terry one night and meets her twin sister, Ruth, learning that the two live together and even trade off the “Terry” identity in public so that they only have to have one job. When the district attorney admits that they can’t make a case against either woman as they’d each be covered by the proverbial shadow of a doubt, Stevenson enlists the help of Dr. Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres), who coincidentally has an office in the same building as the late Peralta and happens to be a specialist in the field of twin studies, to surreptitiously study the two and find out which of them is the killer. 

The duplication special effects in this one are fantastic, give or take a couple of dodgier scenes where the intercutting and blocking don’t quite measure up. As the title would suggest, there are numerous sequences in which mirrors are a focal point, including several in which both Ruth sits at a vanity mirror and has a conversation with Terry while the latter reclines in bed behind her, both of them visible in the reflection. It was a technical marvel, and I kept trying to figure out how it was done, getting a little lost in trying to tease out the details (I decided it must have been that the Terry segment was shot first and then projected on a screen behind de Havilland while she shot the Ruth portion). Regardless of how it was accomplished, it looks amazing, and when the two are in the same shot using split screen tech, it’s also very well done. Of course, all of that movie magic would be wasted were it not for de Havilland’s strong performances as each sister, as there’s never any real doubt about who’s who. The film often differentiates them through their monogrammed bathrobes, Ruth’s “R” brooch, and a pair of extremely tacky necklaces that bear their full first names, but de Havilland plays each woman so that these visual cues are largely unnecessary. Terry seems forthright and personable while also clearly being the steelier, stronger woman; Ruth appears to be extremely kind-hearted and verging on the naive, and clearly more troubled by the situation in which the twins find themselves than her sister. 

Contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, but one of the ones that stood out to me was from Variety, which stated that the film “runs the full gamut of themes currently in vogue at the box office — from psychiatry to romance back again to the double identity gimmick and murder mystery.” I was struck a bit by this reference to “psychiatry” as a common film topic, since I’ve not run across many films of this era in which this was a common element or theme. M certainly had an element of psychological detective work at play, and there was a series of films based on an earlier radio series that began with 1943’s Crime Doctor (all ten films in the series were released before 1949). If anything, I associate suspense thrillers of the 1960s with direct references to psychiatry: hitting the ground running in 1960 with Psycho devoting its closing moments to a psychologist explaining Norman’s particular maladies; the ongoing exploration of the psychological profiles of the dueling personalities at the center of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962; the journey to the heart of the mental health hospital system in 1963’s Shock Corridor. On further reflection, though, this one came very close on the heels of Gaslight in 1944 and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 feature Spellbound, the latter of which featured Ingrid Bergman as a psychoanalyst who falls for her amnesiac patient played by Gregory Peck (who wouldn’t?), so I suppose there is a possibility that this was, at the time, a gimmicky attempt to cash in on a recent craze (no pun intended). It even features a Rorschach test, although they refer to it only as an “inkblot test,” as perhaps the Swiss inventor’s name hit the post-war American ear as a little too Germanic. 

Where this one fell a little short of Staircase’s greatness was in its failure to live up to my expectations, which is hardly the film’s fault. I’m eighty years removed from when this was made, so it may be unfair of me to resent that the twists in this one didn’t go as far as I would have liked. I would have appreciated the film more had it spent some small amount of time on the possibility that neither sister was Peralta’s murderer, as it would have been fun to see de Havilland playing off of herself in scenes in which both sisters wonder if the other is a killer. I’ve also seen “Treehouse of Horror VII” (the one with Bart’s evil twin Hugo locked in the attic) more times than I could possibly recall, so there’s a part of my brain that kept waiting for the twist that the supposed “good” twin was the killer and that the “bad” twin was covering for them, or that one of the twins had some history of violence but not the one we think. Maybe the twins were both trolling Dr. Elliott all this time and occasionally impersonating one another in their sessions with him. Any one of those would have pushed my rating a little higher; instead, once Dr. Elliott establishes that one of the women is a one-in-a-kajillion sociopath, it’s clear which one is virtuous and which one is responsible for all their troubles, and it’s a little rote from there. What keeps it from falling off completely is that this revelation allows more insight into just how manipulative one sister is of the other, and the final scene is still a phenomenal showcase for de Havilland. This one has been slightly difficult to find at times, but is currently available on the Roku app. If you, like me, don’t have that, then maybe you can find it at your local library. I did!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

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In my review of The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers, and that I expected I would soon be getting to #61 on that list, Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It is the only film from Corman to make the list, and although I am reviewing it last in my Corman/Poe series of reviews, it’s notable that this was only the second of these adaptations, following House of Usher by about a year. It was itself followed by Premature Burial, and having viewed those out of order, I made a joke in my Usher review that it and Burial follow a fairly similar and specific sequence of events. I’m glad I didn’t watch them in release order, because I might have given up on Burial, given that Pendulum follows almost the exact same stations of the plot. 

As the film opens, a man approaches a seaside castle (different from Usher and Burial in that the character does not approach the lead’s home from across a foggy moor), knocks upon the door and demands to see the home’s owner, and is initially rebuffed by the servant who answers the door, but is then allowed in to the home by the sister of Vincent Price’s (and in the case of Burial, Ray Milland’s) character. It’s genuinely shocking that so little effort was made to differentiate this from its immediate predecessor, and that the film that immediately followed would adhere so closely to the same structure. Here, our hero is Francis Barnard (John Kerr), who has come to see the widower of his late sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). He is allowed entry by his sister-in-law, the Donna Catherine Medina (Luana Anders), who tells him that her brother Don Nicholas (Price) is resting, but allows him inside nonetheless. Barnard asks to see his sister’s grave, but Catherine tells him that she is not buried in some churchyard and is instead interred in the crypts beneath the castle; as she escorts him to Elizabeth’s resting place, the two pass another room in the catacombs from which a great racket emerges. Nicholas exits the door and tells Barnard that it conceals a contraption, the ceaseless operation of which he is responsible for. 

Although the Medinas are reticent to reveal every detail of Elizabeth’s death, the arrival of family friend Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) leads him to drop some information that prompts Barnard to demand explanation. As it turns out, although theirs was a good and loving marriage, Nicholas’s beloved bride was ultimately affected by the evil that is present in the Medina estate, as Nicholas and Catherine’s father, Sebastian (also Price) was a member of the Spanish Inquisition. An untold number of people were tortured and killed in the castle’s catacombs, where Sebastian’s implements of torture remain. Apparently, the sleepwalking Elizabeth made her way to this chamber and somehow got herself stuck in an iron maiden, and when she awoke there, she died of heart failure from the fright of it all. Of course, Nicholas himself fears that Elizabeth was not truly dead when she was buried (again, just as in Usher and Burial), despite Dr. Leon’s willingness to stake his reputation on his confirmation of her death, and that her spirit haunts the castle as a result. There are spooky things about, after all. Elizabeth would play the harpsichord nightly for her husband, and when the instrument is heard late at night and one of her rings found atop it despite the apparent absence of any people or even a way in or out of the room, it raises questions. A kind of explanation is found when Barnard discovers a series of secret passageways that connect locked rooms to Nicholas’s own chambers, with Nicholas himself fearing that he may be losing his mind and performing as Elizabeth. 

This one is pretty fun, and it probably is the best thriller of Corman’s Poe cycle. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers as much as I can for these but I don’t seem to be able to find a way to talk “around” another of the recurring elements here, so I’ll just have to come right out with it: it’s very strange how often the resolution to the apparent mystery is that Vincent Price’s character’s wife isn’t as in love with him as he was with her, and also that reports of her death are greatly exaggerated. As in The Raven, we’re never given any reason to think that Elizabeth here, Lenore there, or Emily in Burial are anything other than the loving, adoring spouses that they appear to be, until the sudden revelation that all of the gaslighting being performed against the lead is being done by his wife. And it’s Hazel Court two of those times! (She also appeared in Masque of the Red Death, but her villainous nature is on display from her first moment on screen therein.) It stands to reason that making eight of these movies in four years would be bound to lead to some recycling of plots, especially given that the specific Poe works being “adapted” also have large Venn diagram overlaps in their narratives, but viewing this one as the finale in an attempt to save the best for last ends up doing it a disservice. It’s not a bad movie, but it feels repetitive, which isn’t fair to hold against Pendulum because it was only the second one of these that Corman made and is thus responsible for setting the standard which was copied, not vice versa. But hey, at least the Medina castle doesn’t get burned to the ground at the end.

One of the recurring elements present here that really works is the use of the oversaturated nightmare sequence, although here it’s more of an oversaturated flashback. As Nicholas reveals the details of the halcyon days that he and Elizabeth had together, everything is bathed in greens and blues, which turn to purple when Elizabeth “takes ill.” There’s also a fun iris-in transition to this flashback, which happens again when Catherine reveals to Barnard that Nicholas actually bore witness to the murder of his mother and uncle Bartolome at the hands of their father, who discovered his wife and brother were adulterers. In this sequence, the saturation color turns to a bloody, angry red, and it works remarkably well. (For those like me whom I would lovingly refer to as “Belle & Sebastian-pilled,” think of it as going from the cover of The Boy With the Arab Strap to Write About Love to If You’re Feeling Sinister.) Of course, this all comes back around when it’s revealed just who’s behind everything, only for Nicholas to fall backward down some stairs in fright at the sudden reappearance of Elizabeth and, concussed (or more), descends into the belief that he is Sebastian and that Elizabeth and her lover are the late Mrs. Medina and Bartolome and exacts his revenge accordingly, not entirely unlike Dexter Ward being overtaken by the spirit of his ancestor in The Haunted Palace. 

Another notable element of these, now having seen all of them, is how variably effective they work as mystery thrillers. Other than Masque with its large ensemble, the cast of all of these films has been relatively small, in line with Corman’s notoriously spendthrift nature. As a result, the extremely limited number of characters can curtail the film’s ability to provide sufficient red herrings or otherwise conceal the identity of the film’s villain or villains. Pendulum certainly does the best job of keeping one guessing as to what’s really happening in the stately mansion in which all the events occur, playing things close enough to the vest that the reveal of Elizabeth’s co-conspirator feels satisfying but not obvious. That’s probably why Brode selected this one for inclusion in Edge of Your Seat, even though I wouldn’t call this the best of the Corman-Poe cycle overall. In his “also recommended” section, however, I found that he agreed with me overall, writing “Among the other Poe adaptations, by far the best two are The Masque of the Red Death […] and Tomb of Ligeia,” the latter of which he calls “an intelligent, restrained suspense tale.” 

You may be asking yourself where the pendulum is in all of this, or the pit, for that matter. For that, my friend, you will have to watch for yourself.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Raven (1963)

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Fair warning: The friend with whom I have been watching these Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work hated this one. I pointed out that the presence of Peter Lorre here should have been an early indication that this was going to be a more comedic outing, like Tales of Terror, but this was still a disappointment to him even with that qualification. During the viewing this was referred to as a “Scooby Doo ass movie” and the final verdict from my friend was “I like Looney Tunes; I don’t like Scooby-Doo.” Take from that what you will, and keep it in mind for your viewing decision. 

This movie is so much fun. From the film’s opening moments, in which Vincent Price’s dulcet tones recite Poe’s “The Raven” while we see him fiddling his fingers around in the air and drawing a neon bird in the room with magic, I was enraptured. Within moments, a raven appears at his window and taps at it; upon being let in, said bird begins talking with Peter Lorre’s voice, identifying himself as a fellow sorcerer and demanding assistance with being returned to human form. Once he’s back in his true body (after an interlude in which insufficient potion ingredients rendered him back into Lorre-form, but with bird wings), he introduces himself as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo, while Price’s character is revealed to be called Dr. Erasmus Craven. Bedlo recognizes the name and identifies Craven as the son of the late leader of the wizard order and asks him why he has never sought to take his father’s place, instead allowing the organization to be controlled by the late elder Craven’s lifelong enemy Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Craven demurs, saying that since he lost his wife, he’d really rather stay home near her body and do little magic tricks rather than any powerful sorcery. Upon viewing her portrait, Bedlo swears he has seen the late Lenore that very night at Scarabus’s castle. Craven’s daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess)—who is notably stated to have been the daughter of Craven’s unnamed first wife, not Lenore—demands that she be allowed to accompany them, although Craven only relents when his coachman becomes enchanted and must remain behind. This lack of someone to drive the coach is resolved by the sudden appearance of Bedlo’s son Rexford (Jack Nicholson!), who takes the quartet to Scarabus’s castle. What secrets lie there in wait? 

This is another Corman-Poe feature penned by Richard Matheson, and was apparently based on his desire to do a full comedy feature following how much fun it was to put Lorre and Price together in the “Black Cat” section of Tales of Terror. As you can tell from the preface above, my friend and viewing companion did not find this to be a successful endeavor, while I can say that it totally worked for me. Price and Lorre are once again a terrific double act, and they ham it up here for much of the first half. The audience that will enjoy watching Craven attempt to dress Bedlo in some of his clothes so that they can go and face off against Scarabus may be small, but I’m in it; Lorre’s clear smaller stature trying to pull up the sleeves and hem of clothes designed to fit Price (or even exaggerated from there) is very funny, and it doesn’t hurt that the two of them end the scene wearing the most ridiculous hats one could imagine. In fact, by the time that the quartet of Craven and daughter, Bedlo, and Rexford arrive at Scarabus’s castle, all four of them are wearing extremely stupid headgear, and I got a real kick out of that. 

Where most Poe heads may find greatest displeasure in this one is in just how far it strays from the source material. All of these do, really, but most of them at least maintain some kind of atmosphere and are relatively respectful to the intent of the stories from which they draw their origins; Raven is arguably disrespectful in how it treats Lenore. In a plot that recurs from Pit and the Pendulum, it turns out that Lenore isn’t dead; she simply faked her death in order to move in with Scarabus and learn “greater magic” from him. One can only assume that Lenore initially got together with Craven expecting that he would assume his place at the head of the wizard guild, and when he didn’t, she glommed onto his father’s successor instead, making her a philosopher’s stone-digger from the outset. This becomes more clear at the end when Scarabus’s apparent death leads her to immediately claim that she was with him because she was bewitched and that his death has released her from his thrall, but luckily no one buys it. “The Raven” is a poem that is so deeply about anguish, longing, and grief, one can’t help but find that this subversion of the lost Lenore, whose representation of this feeling is so foundational to western literature that there’s a whole TV Trope about it, to be moderately controversial. 

The nature of this film makes it one that provides little opportunity for criticism. We’ve said it before here, in both reviews and on the podcast, that sometimes a comedy film can be the hardest to review because one simply finds themself recapitulating and restating the jokes within the film that one found funny. With Tales of Terror, that comedy was in the prolonged middle segment and bracketed by more self-serious fare, so there was still much to discuss. Here, this one is a straight comedy all the way through. Where it fails is in its insistence on the insertion of the magician’s offspring. Estelle has little to do here, and although it makes sense that it would be established that Lenore was merely her stepmother so that she’s not as heartbroken as her father is, one could argue that making Lenore her mother might have given the film something more in the way of emotional stakes. Her presence is really only justified in the end so that a threat against her safety is used to attempt to extort Craven into giving up his magical secrets. In turn, Rexford is really only an appendage to her story, padding out the runtime with a sequence in which he’s driving the coach from Craven’s to Scarabus’s and becomes apparently possessed by some wild force before he regains his composure. 

I’d also say that Karloff is underused here. He doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, but when he does, he’s great. His feigned friendliness in his greeting of Craven and his waving away of Bedlo’s charges as being the result of a social visit that turned sour because of the latter’s excessive drinking are fun, but one wishes that he might have been present a bit earlier in the runtime. He is used to great comedic effect in the film’s finale, however, as Craven and Scarabus get into a wizard’s duel that presages wuxia wizard battles in the vein of Buddha’s Palm (in fact, there are some special effects that appear to have been used part and parcel in Buddha’s Palm). It’s magnificent, and even my friend who hated the movie couldn’t help but enjoy himself as Price and Karloff flit around on hovering chairs and turn magic missiles into harmless plastic bats, etc. If that’s all that you’re interested in, you can find that in isolation on YouTube, but I would recommend giving this one a full watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond