Noirvember: Get Carter (1971)

Written and directed by Mike Hodges, based on a book by Ted Lewis, Get Carter is a cool and gritty gangster movie that features arguably the most iconic performance of Michael Caine’s career, couched in a film that easily jostles for a top spot when discussing landmarks of British cinema.

Caine plays Jack Carter, a London gangster who heads up to Newcastle to investigate the sudden death of his brother. There are a number of people who don’t want him poking around in their business, including the menacing Eric (Ian Hendry), but that just makes Carter more determined to find out the truth about the death of his brother. His instincts are right, but more people start to try and send him back to London, at the very least, as he gets ever closer to something very unpleasant. There seems to be a reckoning on the way, but who will be left at the end of it?

Get Carter is one of those films that always impresses, however many times you watch it. If you have never seen it, please do so immediately. If you haven’t watched it in a while, please treat yourself to a revisit. It is just one of those classics that has everything mixed together perfectly in a way you could never replicate nowadays (just ask Sylvester Stallone, although I am sneerily dismissing his remake without having actually seen it yet). The atmosphere, the landscape of Newcastle at that time (dominating the narrative as much as any of the main characters), Caine being cool and ruthless, the supporting players, the Roy Budd score, every technical aspect, and the script and direction from Hodges. This is a perfect film, and even the scenes that aren’t necessarily needed to push the story along provide moments and images worthy of your time.

It’s also worth noting, although I am not entirely sure how to put this, that Get Carter wins a prize for being the most sustained selection of unsexiest sexy exchanges, whether it is a naughty phone conversation that creates a triangle of Caine, Britt Ekland, and Rosemarie Dunham, the aftershock of an encounter between Caine and Geraldine Moffat, or even the oft-depicted image of Caine striding nakedly out of a house while he keeps a shotgun pointed at some ill-prepared henchmen. Everything has a frisson to it, but also a layer of grime and nastiness, and it adds to an overall sense of the film being very much a one-off.  

Saying Caine is great in the lead role is like saying water is wet. It’s a given. This IS the role he feels born to play. Which is unlucky for Hendry, who was also in the running for the lead, but makes the bitterness between them all the more palpable. The aforementioned Dunham is excellent, Ekland and Moffat bring a touch of glamour to the whole thing, no matter how fleeting their screentime, and there are excellent performances from Alun Armstrong, Bryan Mosley, and John Osborne, to name just a few standouts.

This and The Long Good Friday remain the peak of British crime movies. They have moments that are cool, that are incredibly cinematic and memorable, but they also focus on the cruelty, showing how the main characters are shaped as much by the events and people around them as they are by their self-created position of power. These are the films that everyone should watch, that entertain even as they look at the morality of things from all angles. And it’s why many film fans become upset when something like Rise Of The Footsoldier 7: Footsoldiers Go Footballing In Ibiza becomes the latest British crime film that casual viewers rate as a great night in. I implore you not to check out any of those films until you have seen this.

10/10

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Moon In Scorpio (1987)

Having heard about this slasher movie from someone online (who shall remain nameless, and still someone with an opinion I value, but let's just say that they like this one a lot more than I did), I decided to blind buy Moon In Scorpio and add it to my list of scheduled horror viewings for this October. I'm easily pleased, a statement I know that I repeat far too often, and I was hoping for some standard horror movie thrills here. 

The very basic plot summary concerns a bunch of friends heading off on a boat trip. Allen (John Phillip Law) will be introducing his new wife, Linda (Britt Ekland), to his friends. Burt (William Smith) and Mark (Lewis Van Bergen) are fellow veterans, and all three men are bonded by their wartime and war crimes. Their partners, Claire (Jillian Kesner) and Isabel (April Wayne), are also on board. As is a killer. 

There is a germ of a good idea at the centre of this, a vengeful force attacking guilty parties who have spent a long time trying to repress memories of bad war times, both what they have gone through and what they did, while also being irrevocably changed by that experience. It could be argued that the most interesting parts of the script, written by Robert Aiken, don’t involve the supernatural/slasher element. There’s interesting fluctuating levels of tension as the group simply settle back into some kind of false friendship, perhaps having kept in touch with one another when some would have been better to just break away and move on.

Director Gary Graver tries, but fails, to make the most of his relatively small budget, some interference from an executive producer (apparently), and the problem of the setting and small core cast making it harder to line up a selection of likely suspects as the murders begin.

Ekland isn’t terrible in her role, but she is clearly picked to be the big name that could draw in viewers. Law and Van Bergen are both fine, even if they find themselves overpowered by the domineering presence of Smith, who is enjoyably unpleasant throughout. Kesner gets to act over the top as someone constantly drinking her way through the film, Wayne is a very pleasant addition to the visual aesthetics, and Robert Quarry is enjoyable enough in a couple of scenes that have him as a doctor interviewing Ekland about just what happened on the boat (no spoiler - the film begins with a hysterical Ekland being found).

While there’s enough here to help this stand out from the crowd of slashers that overwhelmed horror fans from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Moon In Scorpio is more interesting for what it hints at, rather than what it is. Nothing stands out, the visuals, score, effects, and production design are all competent (at best, some nice shots of the boat notwithstanding), and it’s only worth seeking out once you feel that you have exhausted the large selection of more enjoyable, or more interesting, films in this subgenre.

5/10

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Prime Time: The Monster Club (1981)

An Amicus anthology horror movie in almost every way, apart from the fact that it came along a few years after Amicus was no longer active, The Monster Club is a mixed experience for fans of these films, and fans of the stars involved.

John Carradine plays a horror writer who has some blood drawn from his system by a polite vampire (Vincent Price) before the grateful drinker invites him along to the titular club. There, in between a number of stage acts, he is told three spooky stories. The first is all about a creature known as a Shadmock (played by James Laurenson), the second is a comedic tale about a vampire (Richard Johnson), and the third is all about a village full of ghouls.

Carradine may be playing an onscreen version of R. Chetwynd Hayes (the author of the source material, even if the stories changed a fair bit from book to screenplay form, the latter written by Valerie and Edward Abraham), and there may be some obvious winks and gags for horror film fans (such as a character named Lintom Busotsky, a crude and simple play on the name of producer Milton Subotsky), but it's a great shame that the majority of the film avoids other opportunities for some meta humour. What we get, instead, are some moments that show director Roy Ward Baker doing his damnedest to prove that he could supply entertainment for modern horror audiences who had turned their backs on the comforting bloodshed supplied by the likes of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon, etc. I might find it amusing to watch a song performed by B. A. Robertson, and there's a great gag involving a stripper (although the film is a pretty tame affair with no nudity shown), but it's hard to imagine anyone viewing the film in 1981 leaving the cinema with anything other than a sense of disappointment. I have always had a soft spot for it, but that's because I first saw it as a pre-teen.

Price is as much fun as he usually is, Carradine spends most of his time looking around in mild bemusement (no surprise, considering the strange assortment of masks being worn by the people pretending to be monsters in the club), and the best performance in the three tales comes from Laurenson, playing a sweet and tragic, but also dangerous, creature. Barbara Kellerman and Simon Ward are also involved in his story, and both do well enough to make it the most consistently enjoyable one. The second tale, featuring Johnson, is a big step down, with Britt Ekland and Donald Pleasence wasted in their supporting roles, although it's at least fun to see Pleasence given much lighter material in the genre than he was usually given. Stuart Whitman, Lesley Dunlop, and Patrick Magee star in the third, and final, tale. They do well enough, but it's more about the atmosphere, with the main village feeling like a small British counterpart to the location features in The City Of The Dead.

The execution of the material is fairly clumsy, the humour is a lot more childish than viewers may expect (making this a surprisingly okay choice for a family viewing), and it's a far cry from the past glories of the British horror movie industry. Having said that, you get to spend time with some enjoyably familiar faces, the penny-pinching doesn't remove the sheer sense of fun, and there's actually a pretty good punchline to round it all off. It's not a good movie, but it has a charm to it that may lead to you occasionally thinking as fondly of it as I do.

5/10

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

Beverly Hills Vamp (1989)

Directed by (the infamous?) Fred Olen Ray, Beverly Hills Vamp is simultaneously awful and pretty great. The plot is as slim as it is ridiculous, and it's the least important aspect of the movie. This is just an excuse to see some pretty women being vamps, "enjoy" some awful gags, and look on in wide-eyed wonderment at the strangely brilliant Eddie Deezen. Imagine a gangly Jerry Lewis trying to impersonate Groucho Marx while fitted with a voice-altering device that makes him sound like a high-pitched Joe Pesci and you've got the general idea.

Deezen and two of his friends, Tim Conway Jr. and Tom Shell, want to make it in the movie business. After one meeting, they then decide to go out for an evening of fun. They end up at a house overseen by Madame Cassandra (Britt Ekland), unaware that all of the alluring women are actually vampires. Deezen resists any temptation, as he's faithful to his girlfriend, Molly (Brigitte Burdine), and that's what keeps him safe. But can he keep his friends from being bitten?

Written by Ernest D. Farino, this is a scattershot film that throws everything at viewers in an attempt to fill out the skimpy premise. There are gags, characters sometimes break the fourth wall and comment on the film that they're in, minor characters (such as the one played by Caryle Waldman) are given their own little skits, beautiful women act foolish, and Eddie Deezen overshadows the whole thing with his own inimitable, hand-waving style. There's also some fairly amusing lines delivered with great camp by Ralph Lucas, who also gets an unexpected "honour" with his last scene.

Director Fred Olen Ray is no fool, however, and he knows that people aren't going to sit down and watch this movie for the plot. Oh no. Most viewers, who will mostly be male, will watch this for the female stars. Ekland is the big name, but she's often sidelined in favour of the younger talent; Debra Lamb, Jillian Kesner, and Michelle Bauer.

Ahhhhhhhh Michelle Bauer. If Bauer wasn't in the movie then I don't mind admitting that I could easily take two points off the final rating given here. But she IS in the movie, and that's enough for me to rate the film as above average. Because she'll always be one of my favourite '80s scream queens.

Anyone who doesn't share my love for her (and if not, why not?) can always adjust the rating accordingly.

6/10

No DVD release seems to be available, unfortunately, so check out the movie here, for the time being - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyG5BZtPZIo

As I couldn't find a decent screenshot to use, this picture of the gorgeous Michelle Bauer will have to do.