Mubi Monday: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (2023)

Originally released in 1979, Caligula is not a film I would have seen back then. I know I seem old to many now, but I would have been three years old for most of 1979. It is a film I soon became aware of though, somehow. Pretty much damned by both the critics and those who acted in it, considering how displeased they were to see their performances surrounded by what was essentially a lavish and expensive bit if porn, I can only assume that it became something that people felt they had to see for themselves, in the comfort of their own home. And that is why they rented the VHS. Which is how I ended up seeing at least some of it at what was still a very young age. I don’t remember much, except a man being made to drink lots of wine before being killed and lots of bare breasts, but I remembered enough to keep interested in it over the intervening decades. I own a lovely multi-disc set, and now I have paid for a digital copy of “The Ultimate Cut”. But maybe it is telling that this is the first time I have watched any incarnation of the film since those VHS days.

Malcom McDowell plays Caligula, a Roman emperor who spends time coveting his sister (Ann Savoy) and his horse in equal measure. He is a dangerous manchild, made ruler by underhand means, and anyone he seems to have wronged him is often dealt with publicly and sadistically. This film shows his rise and fall, but it also shows a Rome far too easily swayed by the temperament of whoever is in the position of greatest power.

Written by Gore Vidal and directed by Tinto Brass, though who knows how much credit they want to take for it, even in this attempted restoration and repair job, Caligula is a messy and sprawling work, sometimes taking time with exploring Rome, and the ways in which the power moves through it, and sometimes determined just to wallow in the decadence and depravity of Caligula’s rule.

McDowell isn’t bad in the central role, although his performance feels wildly uneven (perhaps due to the chaos on the set), and Savoy works well as the sister happy in their incestuous coupling, but the real treats come from elsewhere. Despite his small amount of screentime, Peter O’Toole is a lot of fun, and a portent of everything to come. John Gielgud is wasted, but elevated one or two moments with his presence. And then there’s Helen Mirren, very believable as the woman who catches the eye of Caligula, and the one chosen to give him an heir to the throne. Everyone else is onscreen to bow, laugh, cry, and/or be mutilated and murdered, and their performances are often defined by their fates more than their actual acting talent.

It’s a shame that I cannot remember the original cut of this, because it would seem to be essential to compare and contrast this to it, but I can tell you that this doesn’t feel like the entirely new film it is being sold as. It may have more of a focus on the drama and acting, but that doesn’t make it much more interesting. In fact, dare I say, there’s a chance that a lavish and expensive porno is just as appropriate a way to present Caligula as this is. At least that feels like a bolder artistic choice, even if others would argue that artistry was the least of the concerns of those who delivered it to audiences back in 1979.

Occasional treats notwithstanding, this is a dull and rambling slog. But I won’t deny that I still want to revisit other edits to see how much more entertaining it might be with a greater sense of chaos and transgressiveness out front and centre.

4/10

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Thelma (2024)

I would usually be upset by an action movie that didn't have a decent amount of full-on action in it, but Thelma is an exception to the rule. It's a film that makes great use of some action movie tropes, delivering laughs and genuine tension throughout, and proves wholly satisfying, despite also making time and space for some moving commentary on the pros and cons of growing old.

June Squibb plays the title character, a 93-year-old woman who ends up giving thousands of dollars to a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger). Not only does this affect her finances, it starts a conversation about whether or not she is still able to live on her own. Determined to prove that she isn’t ready to be placed in a nursing home, Thelma embarks on a quest to retrieve her stolen money, reluctantly accepting the assistance of Ben (Richard Roundtree) on the way.

Written and directed by Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, this is a film full of unexpected delights. Whether it’s a chase sequence involving mobility scooters or a Mission: Impossible style mini-heist showing an elderly woman dealing with a carpeted set of stairs before trying to reach the top of a wardrobe, the juxtaposition of action movie elements with the advanced age of our main character makes for wonderful entertainment. The film manages to deliver much more than that one joke though (and it should be noted that the joke is about the genre standards, not about our main characters). What Margolin does with the messaging of the movie is intertwine it deftly in a way that makes it all very clear and obvious without it ever feeling unnecessary or unwelcome. The fun and the commentary are like two strands on a firmly bonded double helix.

It helps that Squibb is such a delight in the lead role. She may not completely convince as a badass, but she does enough to get by, and she absolutely convinces as someone unwilling to let her lifestyle be dictated by her advanced age. Her body may not always act in the way she wants it to, but her mind is almost as sharp as ever. Roundtree does very well alongside her, also struggling with his situation, albeit in a different way, and showing a vulnerability that is accompanied by his much less vulnerable essence of the macho man we've seen him play in films over many decades. Hechinger is very sweet and likeable as Daniel, Parker Posey and Clark Gregg are Thelma's daughter and son-in-law, respectively, and both spend a lot of the movie being very concerned about an old woman they seem to constantly underestimate, and there's a fantastic role for Malcolm McDowell by the time we get well into the third act.

As long as you know that this is going to be more Moderate & Agitated than Fast & Furious then you should find a lot to enjoy. It shouldn't really work as well as it does, I certainly didn't expect to sometimes be tensing up or to feel so satisfied as the final scenes played out, but Margolin shows that thrills and set-pieces don't need big budgets or global stakes. They just need to have the right character in the middle of everything, and that will guarantee that you will be seriously invested in how they navigate the perils around them.

8/10

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Mubi Monday: Antiviral (2012)

Directed by Brandon "son of David" Cronenberg, Antiviral is a debut feature that feels very much like something his father would have done back in his early years. There is, however, a lack of the wit and intelligence, and even frame composition, that Cronenberg Senior would have laced throughout, but it's not a bad first full-length film.

Caleb Landry Jones stars as Syd March, a young man who works in a strange, thriving, industry. He sells illnesses to people. Those illnesses are harvested from celebrities and the people wanting to buy them are obsessed fans. To make himself some extra money, Syd smuggles diseases out in his own body, making use of a work device that he has stashed in his home. It's an obviously flawed system, and nobody should be surprised when Syd starts to become more and more unwell.

Cronenberg is working with his own screenplay here, and you can also feel the clear influence from his father in the plotting and main ideas. The illnesses are commodities, but they can also be weaponised, and can lead to those infected with them having strange hallucinatory moments. With Syd a pawn who cannot see the big picture around him, there are many moments here that feel bastardised from Videodrome. It's just that instead of seeking out more extreme content, these people are warped by "celebrity culture" (pun intended).

Jones is very good in the main role, carrying most of the movie even as he grows weaker and looks ready to shuffle off the mortal coil at any moment. There are many other characters who pop up throughout the film but the focus stays on Syd, what he can do for them and how valuable he can be, which allows Jones to stay front and centre at all times, even when he's being given a lot of exposition by Malcolm McDowell. Joe Pingue and James Cade both do well, playing a creator of celebrity foods and a virus "pirate", respectively, and Sarah Gadon portrays one of the most sought-after celebrities on the market.

The look of the film is often, as you would expect, sleek and sterile. If you're going to see blood coughed up then it may as well spatter against a pure white surface, right? But the work environment is juxtaposed against some living conditions that are much less sleek and stylish. They're not exactly squalid but it's easy to see that employees certainly don't get to reap the rewards from the business that the management do.

Although it's a bit of a mess at times, losing focus and building towards an ending that doesn't feel worthy of everything we've gone through, Antiviral shows a lot of promise. Cronenberg can be forgiven, more than most, for being a bit too heavily influenced by his father. And, hey, there are far worse directors out there to be influenced by.

5/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.

Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012)

AKA Home Alone 5.

For anyone interested, here are my reviews of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, Home Alone 3 and Home Alone 4. You can buy them all in this handy 4-pack.

Yes, there have now been FIVE Home Alone films. Five. Let that fact sink in, bearing in mind how many fans are still clamouring for one sequel to Dredd.

Christian Martyn plays the young lad who is about to be left home alone, sort of, this time around. He plays Finn Baxter, a boy who quickly becomes convinced that the new home he has moved into is haunted. It's not. What it is, however, is home to a secret stash secreted away many years earlier by a famous bootlegger. That stash includes a painting that some robbers (Malcolm McDowell, Debi Mazar and Eddie Steeples) want to get their hands on. The robbers think that the house will be empty on the night that they plan to raid it, not knowing that the parents have gone off to a party, leaving Finn in the care of his older sister (Jodelle Ferland). And that sister has managed to get herself trapped in the very room that the robbers are most interested in gaining access to. It's up to Finn to deter them, with only household items and his own ingenuity to help.

I'm not sure if I really enjoyed this movie because it was actually a decent movie or simply because it was such a HUGE step up from the dire Home Alone 4, one of the worst viewing experiences I've had in my life (and I try never to exaggerate such things). I'm going to opt for the former option, but people should consider the latter while reading my review.

First off, this film benefits from a decent cast. McDowell, Mazar and Steeples are fairly decent names to get involved with this thing, and they all show a willingness to humiliate themselves for the sake of a few laughs. Everyone has at least one decent comedy moment, but it's Mazar who gets the worst of it, although one hairdo gag seems to make no sense (which doesn't make it any less amusing). Ferland will be recognised by horror fans who already saw her in a variety of movies, including Silent Hill, The Tall Man and The Cabin In The Woods, to name just a few of her impressive list of credits that she's already amassed. She does okay here, although everyone is orbiting around Martyn as he transforms from scared kid into defender of the home. While not overflowing with charm and charisma, and suffering slightly in a montage moment that veers into smug territory, young Martyn isn't too bad in the central role.

The booby traps are good fun, the script by Aaron Ginsburg and Wade McIntyre provides all of the information required to set up the shenanigans, and the direction from Peter Hewitt is perfectly serviceable. The biggest downside of the film is the fact that it seems to take almost an hour before we get to the fun finale. That's similar to every other film in the series, but you feel it more in the later sequels because the rest of the material just never manages to be as fresh or funny as it was the first time around, whereas watching criminals get their cartoon-inspired comeuppance is almost always good fun.

I hope that it's now time to end this franchise, although I'd be lying if I said that I wouldn't watch a sixth instalment.

5/10

http://www.amazon.com/Home-Alone-Holiday-Malcolm-Mcdowell/dp/B00ECGIL9K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418245060&sr=8-1&keywords=home+alone+5

Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

I enjoyed the movie version of Silent Hill. I have fond memories of playing the game many years ago and the movie recreated a lot of imagery that I'll always remember with fondness (fondness = paralysing fear as I played the game at night with the lights out and then started to panic whenever I heard a siren signalling the approach of "the darkness"). So when I started to hear the negative reaction towards this sequel I still held onto hope. Some people had, after all, hated the first movie.

Alas, the majority were right on this occasion. Silent Hill: Revelation is rubbish. It's a lot of cool imagery from the games created thanks to some varying CGI with nothing substantial to call an actual plot. Of course, the plot of the first movie wasn't exactly anything to write home about, but it did enough to get by while the atmosphere was heaped on in thick, thick spoonfuls.

Adelaide Clemens plays a young woman who lives a transient, anonymous life. This is all done because her dad (Sean Bean) has warned her that Silent Hill wants to claim her. He's right. But changing address and keeping a low profile isn't enough to stop Silent Hill reaching out and trying to get what it wants. The darkness starts to fall, bringing strange visions with it.

Written and directed by Michael J. Bassett (who, of course, had the mythology of the games - adapted into a movie idea by Laurent Hadida - to work from), this film just doesn't work as a film. There are individual moments that manage to impress, such as a sequence involving the famous, creepy, nurse characters, but these are few and far between. Any twists and turns can be predicted well ahead of time, the CGI varies wildly between great and godawful and there are exactly zero characters that viewers will care about.

Clemens is okay in the lead role, she's just stuck with bad material, and Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell don't have much time onscreen as her parents, but everyone else is wasted, with Martin Donovan almost managing to be the exception. When a film with so much potential manages to squander the talents of Deborah Kara Unger, Carrie-Anne Moss AND Malcolm McDowell then it deserves any critical lashing that it receives (and this did receive a fair bit already). As for Kit Harington, his role is such a bag of cliches and signposted moments that he's not really required to give any kind of performance, he just has to hit his marks and spout horrible dialogue. Okay, okay, he has to give SOME kind of performance, of course, but it's impossible to judge thanks to the treatment of his character, which seems to have been written by a particularly low-level Auto-scripting program.

There's enough here, on the surface, to almost make the movie worth a watch. It's below average, but some of the visuals are enjoyable and I, for one, like getting to revisit parts of Silent Hill. Your best option, however, is to simply rewatch the first movie. Or, if you're a gamer, replay the videogames.

4/10

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I Spy (2002)

An action comedy that puts laid back Owen Wilson alongside fast-talking Eddie Murphy should be fairly enjoyable, right? Well, I Spy IS fairly enjoyable. It's just, sadly, not much more than that. And be warned, fans of the old TV series will find very little connection to it beyond the title.

Wilson is a U.S. government agent named Alex, and his latest mission is to find a top secret jet that can be rendered practically invisible. It has been stolen and will be sold to the higthest bidder, which will probably be someone who wants to use it as a highly effective bomb delivery system. To get close to the man (Malcolm McDowell) most likely to have the jet, Alex has to work alongside a civilian, a cocky boxer named Kelly Robinson, who doesn't like to be told what to do. Can the pair manage to get along long enough to complete the mission?

Director Betty Thomas, who has at least three much better movies in her past filmography (Doctor Dolittle, Private Parts and The Brady Bunch Movie), does competent enough work, but the movie is really undermined by the writing. Four people worked together on this screenplay, so I guess it's a limited success that they at least managed to contribute one laugh each.

Murphy may not be on top form, but he doesn't do a bad job. Owen Wilson also doesn't do a bad job, necessarily. It's just a shame that Wilson has somehow overplayed his schtick more than Murphy, as hard to believe as that is. McDowell does fine in the standard bad guy role, Famke Janssen is always a welcome addition to any cast, in my view, and Gary Cole occasionally swoops in to steal the movie as Carlos, the agent who actually looks and acts like someone who could be entrusted with top secret missions full of danger.

There are better buddy action comedies (I could name a dozen off the top of my head), there are better spy comedies (Get Smart is one of the best) and there are better movies you could pick starring any of the leads or supporting players. That doesn't necessarily mean that I Spy is a BAD film. It creeps just above average, but it should never be your top priority.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/I-Spy-DVD-Eddie-Murphy/dp/B00009B0QA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1370935276&sr=1-1&keywords=I+spy

Silent Night (2012)

This is how you do a remake and this is how you do a Christmas slasher movie, oh yes. Silent Night is a remake of Silent Night, Deadly Night but, to be honest, it only takes loose inspiration from that movie. Both films are about killer Santas but there are some big differences. Fans, however, will be delighted to see a number of nods to the original film.

It's Christmas Eve and Officer Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King) is called in to help out while everyone prepares for the big day. The streets are full of men dressed as Santa, all getting ready for the annual Christmas parade. That makes things awfully difficult when the police find out that they have a killer on their hands, a killer meting out justice while dressed as Santa Claus.

A lot of people will find so many elements of Silent Night just wrong, wrong, wrong. Personally, I think that screenwriter Jayson Rothwell and director Steven C. Miller get everything just right. The film doesn't waste any time in setting up the nasty premise and then barely lets up until the end credits roll (approximately 94 minutes later).

The death scenes play a big part in the entertainment factor, of course, with a variety of methods used to get rid of various folk on the naughty list. Electrocution by a set-up that involves a lot of Christmas lights, some fun with a woodchipper and an absolutely classic case of axe head meeting human head, those are just a few of the many great kills in the movie.

However, as much as a few horror fans may debate the issue, great kills alone don't make for a great movie. Thankfully, Silent Night also has a great cast to add to the entertainment value. Jaime King is a lead you can really root for so there are no problems there but the supporting cast are where things really start to shine. Malcolm McDowell clearly has a blast as the Sheriff who keeps coming up with absurd sayings to apply to every situation and Donal Logue is great fun as a cynical Santa who falls under suspicion. Ellen Wong, Brendan Fehr, Lisa Marie, Courtney-Jane White, Ali Tataryn, Curtis Moore and Tom Anniko all do well in a variety of supporting roles, some more memorable than others for reasons that will become obvious once you watch the thing.

That's the main point I want to reiterate at the end of this review, DO watch the movie. If you're a horror fan then this is a fantastic, beautifully simple, bodycount slasher movie just like they used to make. If you're a comedy fan then you might just find yourself laughing at the sheer gusto of the whole thing. If you're a fan of all things nice and sweet then you . . . . . . . . well, you may just want to ignore this entire review and rewatch A Christmas Story instead.

9/10

http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Night-Blu-ray-Malcolm-McDowell/dp/B009IV2ZCI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354577220&sr=8-1&keywords=silent+night

Class Of 1999 (1990)

Director Mark L. Lester (who also wrote the story for this) was worried about kids in 1990. He had, of course, been worried about them ever since he gave us the enjoyably nasty Class Of 1984 but things had simply been declining since then. Which is obviously why he envisaged a future where military robots could be reprogrammed to be used as schoolteachers. Of course.

Lester uses Class Of 1999 to pose many questions. Just how far will kids go if the escalating teen violence is left unchecked? How many schlock-tastic stars can be crammed into one glorious b-movie? And just WHY would a robotic humanoid smoke a pipe?

The plot sees a particularly troubled school (run by Malcolm McDowell) used in a trial that involves three robo-teachers (Pam Grier, Patrick Kilpatrick and John P. Ryan) bringing the students into line and improving the entire education system through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . zero tolerance and the threat of major robo-violence. Death soon occurs and it becomes clear that the military programming is overtaking the educational programming but it’s hard to tell a deranged robo-teacher that it’s time for them to leave. That means that saving the day is up to bad boy Cody (Bradley Gregg), Christie the principal’s daughter (Traci Lind) and all of the other warring gang members, as long as they can stop fighting each other long enough to realise that they now have a common enemy.

Class Of 1999 is ridiculously implausible, slightly dated and hampered at times by it’s budgetary constraints. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun with an enjoyable tone and “message” that seems to veer from the conformist to the complete antiestablishmentism of the finale.

The acting is very much a mixed bag. Gregg and Lind make for a decent young couple that you want to see survive, Joshua John Miller has a character who is a lot more annoying here than the one he played in Near Dark, Malcolm McDowell is solid, Grier and Kilpatrick and Ryan have fun in their robo-roles and Stacy Keach plays an entertainingly demented scientist overseeing the trial.

Action sequences are lively enough and there’s plenty of destruction throughout but the movie really pulls out all of the stops in a final reel that pits the kids against the seemingly-indestructible teachers. It feels like a cross between The Faculty and Class Of Nuke ‘em High and I’m the kind of person who considers that no bad thing. Another “class act” from Lester. Yeah, sorry about that – couldn’t resist the pun.

7/10.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Class-1999-DVD-Bradley-Gregg/dp/B000HN31F6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390335292&sr=8-1&keywords=class+of+1999