The Glass Tomb (1954)

Aka The Glass Cage. London. Why run away when you know running away doesn’t help? Struggling showman Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is contacted by an old friend Tony Lewis (Sid James) who has received a blackmail letter signed Delores. Pel agrees to check her out as she lives near a friend of his. Reaching her apartment he discovers she is an old pal, Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern) who has fallen on hard times and got mixed up with someone she regrets. She agrees to withdraw her blackmail attempt as it wasn’t her idea. In the flat downstairs Pel offers to set up his Russian friend, Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) in a ‘starvation act’ to break the world record. A party is hastily arranged there for that night for their carnival pals. In the evening while popping out to buy olives Sapolio sees a man going upstairs to Rena’s flat. During the party Rena is found murdered. The chief suspect is Tony because the blackmail letter was discovered near the body. An unsavoury character called Rorke (Sidney Tafler) first attempts to blackmail Stanton (Geoffrey Keen) the big man in London showbiz who he knows had motive, then also Tony – but he pulls a gun and in a struggle it’s Tony who is killed. Rorke tries to put frighteners on Pel by briefly kidnapping his wife Jenny (Honor Blackman) but she escapes and the police move in to arrest Rorke. Pel tries to get Sapolio to remember who he saw on the night of Rena’s murder while he is supposedly starving in the glass cage which attracts steady crowds. But someone passes strychnine-laced food inside the cage and Sapolio, suffering from the poisoning breaks the glass and accidentally kills himself … We are starving again – and with dignity. American actor Ireland is transplanted like so many second-string stars of the era, with Sid James essaying (not for the first time) an American accent and a canny police inspector with an Irish accent. It may only run to 59 minutes but this programmer has some visual ambition – not least the murder that takes place opposite a neon sign flashing Play through the fogged-up window. At your age the rates for life insurance go up. A cast of otherwise familiar faces (with the exception of Bern) decorates a slightly under-plotted screenplay by Richard H. Landau adapting A.E. Martin’s The Outsiders which benefits from the carny setting amid the rubble of post-war London. Despite second billing we barely see Blackman but Keen has a great role (Harry Stanton – greatest heart in showbusiness!)and there’s a particularly good scene between him and Tafler in the Trafalgar Square Tube station; while Liam Redmond scores as the canny policeman who deploys Ireland on his behalf. I’m curious – could he really have starved for seventy days? Stylishly directed by Montgomery Tully, a British-Irish director who was among the many workhorses of British Bs through the Forties to the Sixties. Produced by Anthony Hinds for Hammer. You go places I don’t – you hear things I can’t

Mama’s Boy: A Story From Our Americas (2022)

I raised you to know that a promise is a sacred thing. So what are you going to do?

Family is forever and eternal

You want to know the recipe for treating people like shit? Hate yourself

It was either, run away, jump off a bridge or come out

He has a unique sense of humour and an ability to structure things in an interesting and interesting way

We live in at least two Americas

There’s only one way to be gay – the way Lance is gay

Share space. It does take courage. And it does create change

The way we create change is through love

That’s how powerful story in a shared space is

Courage. Curiosity. Bridge-building. That was my mom

The story of screenwriter and activist Dustin Lance Black, from his beginnings in the Mormon Church as the son of a woman crippled by childhood polio; through a violent stepfather; finding himself in cinema after watching The 400 Blows; difficulties in publicly acknowledging his sexual orientation; to the Academy Award-winning change activist and happily married father with British diver Tom Daley that he is today; this thoroughly engrossing documentary directed by Laurent Bouzereau and adapted from Black’s 2019 titular memoir, takes a leaf out of Black’s own writing style and detonates some tragic bombs in the last third. Wonderful.

Scream (1996)

You should never say Who’s There?! Don’t you watch scary movies? It’s a death wish! High school student Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is home alone when she takes a phone call from an unknown person (voice of Roger L. Jackson) during which they discuss horror films. The caller turns sadistic, refusing to leave Casey alone and threatening her life. He reveals that her boyfriend Steve (Kevin Patrick Walls) is bound and gagged outside on her patio and demands she answer questions about horror films if she wants him to live. After Casey gets a question about Friday the 13th wrong, Steve is murdered in front of her. Casey attempts to escape, but is cornered by someone in a ‘Ghostface’ costume and he kills her before her parents (David Booth and Carla Hatley) arrive home to find her disembowelled corpse hanging from a tree. The media descend on the town in the wake of the murders and a police investigation begins. As Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) struggles with the first anniversary of her mother Maureen’s rape and murder, news reporter Gale Weathers (Couretney Cox) – who Sidney vehemently despises – arrives on the scene. Gale had spread rumours and conspiracy theories about Maureen’s death, insinuating that the jailed Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) who was tried and convicted of Maureen’s rape and murder, was not in fact responsible for her assault and death. While waiting at home for best friend Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan) to arrive, Sidney gets a taunting phone call and is attacked by Ghostface. Sidney’s boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) arrives immediately after. When he drops his cell phone, Sidney suspects him of making the call and runs away. Billy is arrested and questioned but Sidney receives another ominous call later at Tatum’s house. The next day, Billy is released and suspicion shifts to Sidney’s father Neil Prescott (Lawrence Hecht) as the ominous phone calls were traced to his phone. When school is suspended in wake of the murders, Ghostface ambushes Principal Arthur Himbry (an uncredited Henry Winkler) and stabs him to death. Tatum’s boyfriend and Billy’s best friend, Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) throws a party to celebrate the school’s closure. Gale attends uninvited because she expects the killer to strike again. Tatum’s older brother, Deputy Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette) also looks out for the murderer at the party. Tatum is cornered in the garage by Ghostface and he crushes her neck with the garage door when she tries to escape through the pet flap. Several partygoers are drawn away after hearing of Himbry’s death, leaving only Sidney, Billy, their friend Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), Stu and Gale’s cameraman Kenny Brown (W. Earl Brown ). After they have sex, Sidney and Billy are confronted by Ghostface … Now Sid, don’t you blame the movies. Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative! An instant classic, this subversive slasher satire is as meta as they get and remains the highest grossing entry in the genre. Kevin Williamson’s clever screenplay is as much about other films (especially Halloween) as it is about the Gainesville Ripper murders which allegedly inspired the material. There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex.  Big No No! Big No No! Sex equals death, okay? Number two: you can never drink or do drugs.The sin factor! It’s a sin. It’s an extension of number one. And number three: never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ Because you won’t be back.The A treatment by director Wes Craven extends to the canny mix of big names and newcomers while the wit about the components of slasher flicks including Craven’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street is a slick thread bringing everything together. Ingenious, fun and wickedly entertaining. No, please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!

Happy Halloween 2022 from Mondo Movies!

The saga of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers (and Jamie Lloyd) has been through sequels, spin-offs, diversions, reboots, reimaginings and a final conflict. It’s the mother of all seasonal movie franchises. Happy Halloween!

Column South (1953)

Causes may start wars but they don’t win ’em! 1861, before the Civil War. Junior Union officer Lt Jed Sayre (Audie Murphy) tries to prove local Navajo Indians are innocent of killing a prospector. The situation puts Jed’s friendship with Chief Menguito (Dennis Weaver) under strain. He has to fight the anti-Indian attitudes of his superior Southern officer Captain Lee Whitlock (Robert Sterling) and north-south tensions within the soldiers. He discovers warmongering Confederate sympathisers are planning to cause the Indians to go on the warpath for their own benefit as they plan on seizing territory and his struggle is being steadily undermined … Listen carefully. I don’t care if your friend is the most chief in the entire West. To me, he’s just a redskin savage, and I can’t stand the stench long enough to stay in the same room with him. The story and screenplay by William Sackheim are fairly by the numbers but this has a lot of life and is distinguished as the first film – in an era of a lot of firsts for representation – in which Indians are under siege in a fort surrounded by the US Cavalry. Audie gets to be on the side of the righteous yet again, pointing out some home truths in his pursuit of justice on behalf of Indian Weaver (the actor had Cherokee and Osage ancestry) and his tribe: Proving this: an Indian may scalp a man, but he’ll always stick an arrow in the body. It’s superstition. It’s supposed to pin the spirit to the corpse so it won’t go rising up and haunting the guilty Indian or his friends.With this ripened dialogue, the thesis about Native Americans is deftly dispatched. Joan Evans is cast as the spiky gal. She was the daughter of Hollywood screenwriters Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert and was named for her godmother, Joan Crawford. The couple’s screenplay The Star (with Bette Davis, Crawford’s arch enemy) was reportedly based on her. When Joan Evans was seventeen she announced she was getting married and her parents appealed to Crawford to stop her – instead she hosted the teenager’s wedding ceremony at her home and they never spoke again. Obviously the Eunsons knew precocious teenage girls and later wrote Gidget Goes to Rome. Evans is as striking here as she’d been in her debut, the first of three films opposite Farley Granger, Roseanna McCoy, at the tender age of fourteen. She made a number of TV shows and reunited with Audie in 1959 for No Name on the Bullet. She retired from acting in 1961 and became editor of Hollywood Studio Magazine in 1966. It’s good to see Weaver in his eighth screen role, a couple of years before he would play TV’s favourite sidekick Chester B. Goode in Gunsmoke. Other familiar faces in the cast include Ray Collins and James Best. This gets the typical Universal treatment with Technicolor cinematography by Charles P. Boyle and production design credited to Alexander Golitzen. Directed by Frederick de Cordova who would move into TV becoming the renowned producer of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, immortalised by Rip Torn as Artie on classic satire The Larry Sanders Show and playing the TV producer himself in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Shot in Apple Valley, California. Relax. Dyin’ ain’t so bad. You’ve been doing it since the day you were born

Made in Italy (2020)

I’ll give you a month. London art exhibitor Jack Foster (Micheal Richardson) is getting divorced from his wife Ruth (Yolanda Kettle) . Her family is selling the art gallery where he works as a manager, which devastates him. He decides to buy the gallery by selling the old Italian home he owns with his estranged father Robert (Liam Neeson), a famous artist. The house belonged to Jack’s mother and Robert’s wife, an Italian woman who died in a car accident when he was small. Jack takes Robert with him to Italy and tells him he needs the money to buy the gallery from Ruth’s parents. When they arrive, they find it is completely rundown. Kate (Lindsay Duncan) an estate agent, comes to survey the home. She tells them the house is in a bad condition, but if they fix it up, it could be worth more. Jack tries to clean but then decides to sell the house as is. Jack meets Natalia (Valeria Bilello) at her restaurant. Robert looks at photos of his dead wife and the whole place reminds him of her. He decides to help Jack restore the home. They hire locals to help renovate it. Robert and Jack befriend some of the locals including Natalia and invite them to a party at the house. She tells Jack that she has an eight-year-old daughter and is divorced. As her husband lied about her, she only gets partial custody. A buyer comes to look at the house but is not satisfied. Kate tells Robert that the house needs more work, so he asks Natalia to help. After Natalia and her daughter help with the renovations. Robert tells her that after his wife died, he sent Jack away to boarding school to keep him away from all the reminders of his mother. Ever since she died, he has not been able to drive or paint. Kate comes over and sees the house almost fully done. An obnoxious English couple arrives to look at the house, and decide they want to buy it. Meanwhile, Jack tells Natalia about his impending divorce and how Ruth has taken everything from him, which she can relate to. He tells her he could never paint like his father but thought he could make the gallery a success, but his father never supported him. Later, he enters his father’s workspace and sees painting after painting of his mother, and of himself. When Robert finds him, Jack wants to know why he locked away all his memories and his childhood. Robert says he thought it was the fastest way to get him out of pain, and Jack screams at him that he never let him in and never talked to him … You can’t remember and I can’t forget. The writing and directing debut of actor James D’Arcy (how amazing was he as Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock?! to name but one sterling performance) you can’t say he doesn’t know how to do locations (tip to self, etc) with this beautiful film. The ‘stunt’ casting of Neeson with real-life son Micheal (by the late Natasha Richardson who died tragically young) brings together real life tragedy with fiction as we sense a meta-catharsis must be taking place through the power of drama. You know who else only had twelve followers? A kind of mash up of A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, a foreign renovation project proving a lever for grappling with delayed emotions, the construction – a blocked artist, a divorcing adult son, a mother who died years before, consequent issues dealing with unacknowledged grief – is very sympathetically handled. You never really can start again. When Richardson says, Half of me is from here, it feels like some kind of declaration of his acting self – and we see he is far more Richardson than Neeson in his bearing, with a strong resemblance to his late grandfather Tony, that astounding British director. Undemanding if pretty fare it may be with a rather pedestrian plot yet its interest exists for so many reasons extraneous to the immediate text. Filmed around Montalcino and Monticchiello. Disappointment is an absolute certainty. Everyone lets everyone down at some point

The Lady Vanishes (1979)

There are more English people on this train than there are in Piccadilly Circus. On the eve of World War II, much-married madcap American heiress Amanda Kelly Metcalfe Madvani von … (Cybill Shepherd) travels by train to Switzerland. While passing through Germany, she meets a sweet elderly lady, Miss Froy (Angela Lansbury) who suddenly vanishes. Distraught, Amanda questions her fellow passengers who all claim that the woman was never there. Unsure if it’s all in her mind or if there’s a more sinister plot afoot, Amanda teams up with photographer Robert Condon (Elliott Gould) to discover the truth. He’s just returned from assignment in the Spanish Civil War and is not persuaded by her at first especially when Dr Hartz (Herbert Lom) ventures a professional opinion … Good heavens, this is an important moment for history – the social conscience meets the social register. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s screenplay adapted from Ethel Lina White’s novel As the Wheel Spins was tailored for the talents of Irish-American director Roy William Neill: well, we all know who directed the 1938 version of The Lady Vanishes and it wasn’t him. It seems Hitchcock’s authorial signature was spread among talents other than those of Charles Bennett and Eliot Stannard given that this was his huge success prior to American exile. George Axelrod’s version differs slightly inasmuch as it is explicitly set in pre-Nazi Germany unlike the original’s fictitious location; it’s summertime; and our socially mismatched protagonists (formerly Iris and Gilbert) are now American, nodding to its screwball inclinations. Cricket-loving Charters and Caldicott are played by Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael and the remaining characters line out as in the first film with the plot more or less otherwise intact. Obviously Miss Froy is played by a musical theatre star who had a strong cinematic if not prolific profile in standout roles, with Lansbury given a couple of opportunities to sing. It’s all handled in brisk fashion (albeit there are a couple of odd cuts) and Shepherd is well cast in a lightweight role in a plot that is barely suspenseful. And, unlike the original, this was made on location in Austria, at Feistritz im Rosental, between Klagenfurt and Rosenbach and there are some nice wide shots as well as an impressive action scene to bring things to a conclusion. Directed by Anthony Page. In spite of your ridiculous hair I find you strangely attractive

It’s the 30th Anniversary of Madonna’s book Sex!

Unleashed into book stores 21 October 1992, Madonna’s book of suggestive and explicit nude photography created as a hymn to Dita Parlo and S&M was deemed so controversial it was wrapped in cellophane to protect it from the touch of prying hands (and to remind the purchaser of buying condoms, the shape of which Madonna had originally wanted the publication to replicate). Around 80,000 images were shot, of which only a handful were included. It was very expensive to produce with its aluminium cover (inspired by PiL’s Metal Box) and despite a recognisable group of participants the only straight sex scenes were between Madonna and Vanilla Ice. It became the fastest selling coffee table book of all time with the largest print run (a million) of any illustrated book. Today it remains out of print. It cost $50 back in the day (if you could find it!) and now if you can track down a copy it will set you back, oh, $700. Maybe it’s time to put it back out there? It was released simultaneously with her legendary album Erotica. The video for the titular single was directed on Super 8 by art director Fabien Baron while the book he designed and photographed with Steven Meisel was being made. Happy anniversary to this provocative cultural phenomenon!

The Other Guys (2010)

I am a peacock. You gotta let me fly! Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell) and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) are both detectives of the New York City Police Department. Allen is a mild-mannered accountant while Terry is a hot-tempered detective who has been partnered with Allen ever since he mistakenly shot baseball star Derek Jeter during the World Series, earning him the nickname Yankee Clipper. They receive no respect from the other officers, particularly detectives Evan Martin (Rob Riggle) and Fosse (Damon Wayans Jr). All but Terry idolise cocky detectives Chris Danson (Dwayne Johnson) and P. K. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) considered the city’s best policemen even though they frequently cause millions of dollars in property damage catching petty criminals. During a pursuit, they leap to their deaths after attempting to aim for the bushes onto the concrete below which causes the precinct to wonder why they did it and who will take their place. Allen and Terry investigate a scaffolding permit violation by multi-billionaire Sir David Ershon (Steve Coogan) but wind up uncovering a much bigger plot by Ershon to cover the losses incurred by his client Lendl Global which somehow involves the Lotto. Lendl CEO Pamela Boardman (Anne Heche, uncredited) has hired a team of mercenaries led by Roger Wesley (Ray Stevenson) to make sure Ershon pays her back. Terry and Allen go to Allen’s house to talk through the case and have dinner. Terry develops a slight crush on Allen’s stunning wife Sheila (Eva Mendes) while not believing she is true with Allen because of her beauty. When they visit Allen’s ex-girlfriend, Christinith (Natalie Zea) to gain their police evidence, she and her husband want him to have sex with her. Meanwhile, Terry unsuccessfully attempts to reconnect with his ex-fiancée Francine (Lindsay Sloane) who had walked out on him due to his anger issues but he impresses her with his new ballet moves. During their investigation, Allen confides in Terry about how he ran a college dating service in his past, though he insists that he was never a pimp. He stopped the service because he was deep into his dark alternative personality – Gator – and wound up in the hospital with a rectal problem, which is how he met Sheila who was an intern. When Sheila tells Allen she is pregnant, he reverts to the dark side of his personality and asks her who’s the daddy, which leads her to kick him out. Their investigation comes to a halt when Ershon’s attorney Don Beaman (Andy Buckley) learns of Ershon’s plan to cover his losses, leading Wesley to kill him and make it look like suicide. Angered at their lack of progress, Captain Gene Mauch (Michael Keaton) splits up the partners, sending Terry to traffic duty and Allen to beat patrol. Despite Terry’s anger, Allen still works the case on his own … When you hear hooves you think donkeys not zebras. From the ridiculously funny bravura opening sequence when The Rock and Jackson hurl themselves heroically to their deaths; to the incongruous attraction of fabulously beautiful women to seemingly oblivious pen pusher Ferrell; and hothead Wahlberg’s penchant for strangely insidious nonsensical aphorisms, the screenplay by director Adam McKay and writer Chris Henchy sets a pace that never lets up. The Federal Reserve is a … prison? Wahlberg and Ferrell have undeniable chemistry making this buddy movie as much a bromance as an action comedy police procedural; while the nods to Ferrell’s penchant for sentiment are expressed in his ludicrous faux-Oirish songs performed down the local and the Little River Band rotating on his Prius CD deck. I feel like we’re literally riding around in a vagina. The fourth of McKay and Ferrell’s big screen collaborations, this cleaves to genre parameters – even if the penultimate action sequence involves a driving range – while also working in their customary forcefield of farce and parody. I need a priest and a bullhorn. Amid the hilarity there is a subtextual thread of serious commentary about corporate corruption and Ponzi schemes, writ large in the credits sequence in a series of terrifying infographics to the tuneful Pimps Don’t Cry. This essay in policing is narrated by an uncredited Ice-T. McKay would of course go on to make a series of political comedies starting with 2015’s The Big Short (his first outing without Ferrell) making him the most acute cinematic commentator in the US today.  Whoda thunk it? This is non-stop fun. Who’s left to be a hero?

Umma (2022)

You can never really hide who you are. Korean immigrant Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her homeschooled daughter Chrissy Amani (Fivel Stewart) live on a rural farm in California, raising bees, selling honey, raising chickens, and living without modern technology as Amanda has an alleged allergic reaction to electronics and electricity so they are entirely off-grid. She’s upset to find that Chrissy wants to leave the farm in order to pursue college with the help of local shopkeeper Danny (Dermot Mulroney) whose niece River (Odeya Rush) befriends her. When Amanda receives the cremated ashes of her recently deceased estranged mother (MeeWha Alana Lee), or Umma, in a suitcase from her uncle (Tom Yi) visiting her from Korea, she is confronted with memories of her abusive childhood. Umma had been left to raise Amanda alone in the United States, unable to speak English and surrounded by those who did not understand or practise her culture and so left isolated and unassimilated. Amanda fabricated her allergy to electronics after being electrically shocked multiple times by Umma as punishment. When Amanda cut ties with her mother she also cut ties with her Korean heritage as a whole, including giving up her family name. As her uncle leaves, he chides Amanda for abandoning her own mother and heritage and for not teaching Chrissy Korean language and culture. He tells her to inter Umma’s ashes to allow her spirit to move to the next world. Amanda opens the suitcase containing them and a vicious spirit appears, intent on claiming Amanda’s body for itself. A mask turns up and old Korean costumes which seem to move by themselves. She is tortured by visions of tormented Korean spirits (including Umma’s) to an encounter with a kumiho that’s been eating her chickens. Amanda suddenly becomes more paranoid and fearful that she’s slowly becoming her own mother a fear that is realised when Umma successfully possesses her daughter when Amanda tries to bury the ashes … Your mother always gets what she wants. You know what she’s capable of. Iris K. Shim’s debut as writer/director is very promising indeed – a finely hewn matriarchal horror story about a Korean immigrant woman in denial about a lot of her past which rises up to confront her unbidden. I remember so much screaming. It feels like this mother and daughter are in a witness protection programme at first. Images of an abusive childhood mixed with strange sightings and screams coupled with the isolated setting proves a potent situation for this quietly impressive film. The donning of masks of course carries more than just a maternal metaphor in these pandemic times but we understand the social and personal function. Umma is using Chrissy’s decision to finally leave home (after many failed attempts) to drive a wedge between her daughter and granddaughter, a pair whose outsider status is already creating issues. Disobedient little girl. Amanda’s horror is real – she is actually turning into her mother and Umma’s unhappiness viciously transmits itself through her to Chrissy too. I am done taking on your pain. This doesn’t outstay its welcome: while we would expect an elongated series of jump-scare violent action setpieces to conclude this in the usual generic fashion, this is instead swiftly managed, perhaps squandering further dramatic potential of psychological horror, applying a rational solution to that unhappy soul busy plunging the living into an unwanted living purgatory. Meshing character and folklore neatly into something approaching myth, this is stylish stuff. Produced by Sam Raimi. You need me. She needs you. We can be a good mother together