Dracula AD 1972 (1972), Alan Gibson.

Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) holds a Black Mass.

Oh dear!  Fourteen years after The Horror of Dracula, and we've got Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee back - in a lame Scooby Doo Dracula.  Stephanie Beacham is Jessica Van Helsing, the swinging teen descendant of vampire killer Dr Van Helsing.  The bad apple in her kooky gang, Johnny Alucard, turns out to actually be a disciple of Dracula, whom he resurrects in a dark arts ceremony.  Dracula goes on a hippie chick biting spree all over Chelsea, puzzling local cops.  

Some of the dialogue is unbelievably bad, like this exchange which brings a whole action sequence to a complete halt:

Anna:         Professor Van Helsing!  I've been looking for you  everywhere!

Van Helsing:  Who are you?

Anna:         Anna. I'm a friend of Jessica's.

Van Helsing:  Jessica?

Anna:         I phoned you just now and your housekeeper said neither of you were there, and then she said something about the cavern.

Van Helsin:   Do you know where Jessica is?

Anna:         Your housekeeper said she's gone to the cavern.

Van Helsing:  No, she's not there.

OH MY GOD, people! While you are blabbering on THIS could be happening RIGHT NOW!

Christopher Lee, taking a bite out of the first hippie he lays eyes on.

This film is good for laffs but mostly awful and there's only a bit of cleavage to get excited about.  I would also like to complain to someone about the lack of muscle cars in this.  If you're going to show a bitching hot rod on the movie poster, there better be one in the movie! 

"Honest grandpa, I only do a little weed but it's nothing to get excited about."  Peter Cushing must have been visualizing the deposits into his chequing account to make it through these scenes.

I don't know how these cops are going to solve any mysteries - they have too many awesome 70s office gadgets to distract them! 

Saved the best for last.  Blinded by an amazing rack!

Horror of Dracula (1958), Terence Fisher.

John Van Eyssen as Jonathan Harker.

Horror of Dracula is a gorgeous little movie.  Jimmy Sangster took the very familiar Bram Stoker tale, swapped a few relationships and timelines, and made a neatly trimmed, spiritually faithful adaptation.  The Stoker novel is weighted down by the narrative of Jonathan Harker's diary.  In Horror of Dracula, the diary is still there:  boiled down to a gleaming red gem on the screen.  The characteristic Hammer technicolor is visually reminiscent of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which had occurred only five years prior to the making of the film.  

Queen Elizabeth's coronation, Westminster Abbey (1953).  A red palette and capes galore.

In Horror of Dracula, Jonathan Harker is already up on his vampire lore and out to get Dracula.  This injects some vigor into the character, who is typically depicted as an emasculated victim.  Unfortunately, Harker only succeeds in upsetting Dracula when he drives a stake through the heart of his longtime girlfriend. In retaliation, Dracula tears a photograph of Lucy, Harker's fiancee, out of its frame and hunts her down.  Cushing as Van Helsing (minus the tedious German accent) looks as though he drank a quart of vinegar before his entrances but solidly holds the story together.  And Christopher Lee was kind of a hunky dude back in the day.  I had no idea!

Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Janina Faye.

Face/Off (John Woo), 1997.

This would have been more impressive if they hadn't just used a sharpie.

MAN, this is a dumb movie.  And not nearly as fun as The Rock, an equally bombastic piece of insanity.  It's hard to believe this was from the late 90s.  One of the ridiculous climactic scenes looked exactly like the shooting location for for Madonna's Like A Prayer video -- from 1989.  I was just waiting for Jesus to come alive and make out with someone!  Kitschy effects like star bursts and slo-mo have not aged well, either.

Everything is over the top and yet still not wholly exciting, mostly because of the pretentious tone.  We have brothers named Castor and Pollux (you know, like the semi-divine twin brothers from Greek mythology, duh) and each scene is soaked in the bloated orchestral tootings and scrapings of John Powell.  

Nicolas Cage is decent (although we get "boring" Cage for most of the time, after he swaps faces with John Travolta).  Travolta just can't pull off the demanding role of Sean Archer, both the "toughest cop in the country," and a grieving father.  He also does a lousy job of imitating a wild Nic Cage.  (And what's with the Alien-like open-palm caress he does on his wife and daughter's faces?)  Yet Face/Off's 138 minutes were almost worth it just to hear Margaret Cho and John Travolta exchange this dialogue (if only because I thought she said "dick"):  

- Sir, did you just have a surgical procedure?
- What do you mean? 

- Well, was the stick...successfully removed from your ass?

Endhiran (2010), S. Shankar.

Aishwayra Rai Bachchan and Rajnikanth in Endhiran.

So, I hear this Tamil action star Rajnikanth is such a badass that he gets his own "Chuck Norris" type jokes.  As in:

Rajnikanth never wet his bed as a child.  The bed wet itself.

The only man who ever outsmarted Rajnikanth was Stephen Hawking.  He got what he deserved. 

Rajnikanth can throw the Thackerays out of Mumbai. 

...OK, I don't understand the last one.

Rajnikanth is so tough, he can kick a mosquito's ass! 

Endhiran had some internet buzz in North America (one of the Youtube clips is titled "Best Action Scenes Ever!!!), for its over-the-top CGI effects.  The story is a boilerplate Pygmalion:  a scientist (played by Rajnikanth) creates a sophisticated robot (also Rajnikanth) but to provide it with a sense of morality, the robot is also equipped with emotions.  The robot gets a tingly sensation from the scientist's fiancee, but she doesn't want to honeymoon in Kashmir with a tin man.  Something else happens, blah, blah, blah (the movie is 3 hours long), humungous CGI ending.

I found Aishwayra Rai Bachchan's character Sana incredibly undersketched.  She's the heroine, with no other supporting evidence other than the fact that she's gorgeous.  Let's forget she seems about twenty years too young for Rajnikanth, is in her mid-30s but apparently still in university, and would have flunked all her courses if she hadn't cheated.  How can everyone be in love with Sana whens he is not much more than a manipulative twit?


Endhiran certainly throws a lot of magic tricks at us (and some are quite inventive) but the over-reliance on CGI creates a kind of visual monotony, especially the scenes where the robot has made infinite duplicates of himself.  There's just something less awe-inspiring about an action scene knowing that it was pieced together by a computer geeks in a dark room, instead of by real blood-and-guts guys busting each others' chops.  

RA.One (2011), Anubhav Sinha.

The magazine version:  guess what, most of my fans! You will never be able to afford this!

The first thing I saw in India was a massive, stories-high billboard:  Shah Rukh Khan advertising Tag Heuer.  I'd never seen a billboard of this size.  And there was not one, but endless billboards.  The entire route from the airport to the hotel was papered with ads:  I could see nothing but Shah Rukh Khan selling watches.  American movie stars will only shill for luxury products in countries most of their fans will never go to.  What are they protecting?  And what was it that makes Shah Rukh Khan able to do so, without compromising his image as movie star?

RA.One: a modern-day Ravana.

Well, part of it is that Shah Rukh Khan is kind of the Tom Cruise of Bollywood, not the Jack Nicholson or the Dennis Hopper.  He's never had much of a problem with "the system" or been particularly angry at authority.  "The Shah Rukh Khan persona was ceaselessly available for consumption on television and in print ads," writes Anumpama Chopra in her book King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema.  "The Shah Rukh Khan brand was innately urban.  Shah Rukh was a yuppie who loved and pined in Armani suits," Chopra says.  Khan is an unabashed capitalist, one whose happy confidence sells well abroad. Khan's film  Dil Se (From the Heart: 1998), an "unqualified flop" in India, was the first film to break into UK film charts.  

Shah Rukh Khan and co-star Kareena Kapoor in a booty-respecting dance sequence from RA.One.  Please Bollywood:  quit with the autotune!  It really blows chunks.

RA.One is a good example of the kind of film the world seems to be producing, in an effort to cash in globally.  It's partly set in London.  The storyline is relatively juvenile and totally implausible:  a nerdy dad designs a computer game to impress his son; the game's villain becomes real and must be stopped.  The film borrows touches from Terminator, Iron Man, The Matrix and other American sci-fi/superhero movies, is saturated in CGI effects, yet stays fairly Bollywoodesque in tone.  Shah Rukh attacks everything with gusto.  (Does he have the energy of a panther, sleeping in the sunlight for the other 23 hours of his day?)   He plays two characters:  buffoon father with a clownish mop of hair, and superslick videogame hero GA.One.   The overall effect, however, left me lukewarm.

What I really need to do is hunt down Endhiran, and this Chitti character...  this guy looks like he means business!

Rajnikanth makes an appearance in RA.One, as Chitti!

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Werner Herzog.

Doing the Nosferatu hunch.

Do you think Herzog just let Nicolas Cage loose to say whatever he wanted?  Cage plays a cop, addicted to painkillers and coke after an on-the-job injury, who's been tapped to lead a multiple murder investigation.  His chief asks if he thinks he's up to the task but after that, no other characters really question the hallucinogenic reality they're swimming in, Cage's own druggy perspective.  Nobody questions his actions, no matter how implausible they are.  Cage walks with a bent figure, oddly immobile face, his hair hanging on his scalp at an unnatural angle.  I know this isn't the hot punk from Valley Girl anymore, but dude doesn't even look like the age-denying, hair-dying Nicolas Cage we know and love.

I loved this and found a lot of it insanely funny.  Moments of absurdity are calmed by segments in which animals appear.  A fighting fish trapped in a cup, an alligator looking over an accident scene - all mesmerizing.  The movie begins and ends with people underwater, aquatic life sliding by unconcerned by the human story around them.  Do fish have dreams?

Iguana-cam.  Iguana's head is blocking Val Kilmer, another once-hot 80s casualty.

Multitasking.  I'm driving, I'm trying to locate my hooker girlfriend in Missouri, I'm protect a teen witness, I'm about do coke off the steering wheel and there's this happy go lucky golden retriever breathing on my neck!  

Bollywood Roundup!

Oh my God, what is this? Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap (2011), Puri Jagganath.
Aging Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan dresses like Don Cherry and all the gals fall head over heels for him!  This struck me as mostly just a loving tribute to "Big B" -- but it's completely preposterous!  Bachchan wears about 37 pairs of glasses and is a hitman (or not).  Sonu Sood, playing ACP Malhotra, is quite a nice looking fellow.  Watching him in his policeman's uniform certainly helped me to forget that nothing in this film made a lick of sense.

Chatur Singh Two Star (2011), Ajay Chandhok.
Abominable ripoff of the Inspector Clouseau character.  Atrocious crap!  As a fan of at least one of the decent Pink Panther movies, I was somewhat appalled.  (Although the original franchise did enough to embarrass itself)!

Mankatha (2011), Venkat Prabhu.
Slick Tamil heist movie.  A Mumbai gang plans to steal money from illegal cricket bets.  Lots of punched up colours make it all look a little "CSI Miami" visually but the action doesn't flag.  Charismatic actor Ajith Kumar is a cop on suspension, and "Action King" Arjun also appears.  These Tamils know how to kick out the action flix.

Koi...Mil Gaya (2003), Rakesh Roshan.

As a foreigner, this one just struck me like the Indian Forrest Gump.  Hrithik Roshan plays a developmentally-disabled man who wants to follow in his scientist father's footsteps.  Throw in some aliens...!  Didn't do anything for me, because I kept flashing to this:

As a footnote, also saw a couple American films and for the record Martha Marcy Mae Marlene (2011) scared the hell out of me, far more than (delightfully simple) Paranormal Activity (2007) did.  It's a Kickstarter project from hell, and has completely ruined all my pastoral fantasies about escaping city life to raise dairy goats!

Tamil Pulp! The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (2008), Chakravarthy and Khanna, eds. Kaattu Puli (2012), Tinu Verma.

Just returning from a month out of the country where I stumbled on the awesomeness of Tamil-language pulp films and fiction.  The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (2008) was a lucky find; as translator Pritham K Chakravarthy writes, not much of this kind of writing makes it into English.  The Tamil pulps have a similar timeline as American and British pulps, if a bit of a later start but flourished in the 60s when works were printed on cheap, recycled paper and again in the 80s when desktop publishing allowed even cheaper production.  They also share western pulp themes: crime, corruption, monsters, mad scientists and romance.  Other themes, like Tamil astrology, are more specific to South Indian culture.  Some of the covers have wildly creative, photoshopped covers like the one below, the cover for Best Novel issue featuring Rajesh Kimar's Matchstick Number One (which appears in the anthology) -- with the alluring face of Christina Aguilera as a vampire.  I wouldn't have minded a bit more context on the publishing industry in India as it seems cheap paper editions still abound (but seemed to have died off in the west) but overall The Blaft Anthology has a good range of stories, interviews with authors and (best of all) there's a second volume that came out in 2010.

Christina Aguilera as vampire!

Also got to sit in on a few Tamil pulp films, including Kaattu Puli which translates roughly into "Taken by Force".  This is a B-action movie starring "Action King" Arjun Sarja (below), which tells the tale of a large-boobed big city woman running an illegal trade in human organs.  Kaatu Puli opens with a nod to Quentin Tarantino, as Arjun's daughter goes into an epileptic seizure while watching a clip of Kill Bill (sweet)!  We heard a few "meows" while Sayali Bhagat poses sexily but mainly the action just keeps coming as a group of hikers lost in the jungle are pursued by a tribe of demonic murderers after their precious organs!  I was annoyed at the complete resemblance of one of the actresses to Snooki, but luckily she gets an arrow through the chest right away.  Arjun Sarja kicked ass - as an old fart I liked how they hand the important action scenes to a 45-year old.  The young pups throw a few punches but are too full of themselves to get anywhere!  This is B all the way, with great touches like how the mini van that gets smashed in an accident looks nothing at all like the one we saw them driving in just moments ago - but director Tinu Verma makes up for it by making it the biggest, most insane crash you've ever witnessed in cinema.  The van flies 45 feet in height, and makes an ear-piercing glass-shattering noise.  Then explodes.  And, admission to all this incredible awesomeness was 45 rupees, that is about $1.  

Get on the horn, ACTION KING!