Détective (1985)

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Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Even with a more commercial effort, as this was made to help fund his personal project Hail Mary (1985), with known stars and a pulp crime script, the films of Jean-Luc Godard are as multi-textual and layered as you could see. The reason why I once hated Godard films, only to keep viewing them until he became one of my favourite directors, is that you don't get films like Détective. Few people are this experimental, which makes encountering them exhilarating or alienating compared to films with more common cinematic tropes. Détective is a fully formed narrative of various characters set within the Hotel Concorde at Saint Lazare in Paris. A disgraced hotel detective William Prospero (Laurent Terzieff), his nephew Inspector Neveu (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Neveu's girlfriend Arielle (Aurelle Doazan) attempt to answer the mysterious murder of two years earlier of a man called the Prince, while still being entangled with the relationships between them and those of individuals around the hotel. A couple, Emile Chenal (Claude Brasseur) and Françoise Chenal (Nathalie Baye), in a fraught relationship and his business failing, attempt to get money back from boxing promoter and trainer Jim Fox Warner (Johnny Hallyday). Fox Warner has a dept to pay to an elder mafia leader also called the Prince, his boxer Tiger Jones (Stéphane Ferrara) and his relationship with his love, known as the Princess of the Bahamas (Emmanuelle Seigner), causing further issue. And Fox Warner and Françoise Chenal have a relationship from the past that conflicts their interests. Almost completely set in the Hotel Concorde, Godard's take on the familiar tropes of crime cinema guts out all the extraneous exposition, making a series of fragments that interlock into one full story, and also continue his experiments with what cinema is alongside tangents on media, society and life.

From http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/GodardnewAdd4.png

The digressions and narrative co-exist in a film methodically put together. The first quarter of the film has the opening credits split across introductory scenes introducing the characters and situations. Narrative wise, it's tremendous, and despite the circumstances of its green lighting, it's treated as a full story with great performances and a novel take on the stories, willing to mix crime narrative, drama, even slapstick intercut into other scenes within its various plot strands. What differentiate it from the sixties films of Godard's its evoking is that it also shows the transition from Godard's final cinematic period of the 80s to staying within experimental filmmaking fully to the present day, with Historie(s) du Cinema (1988-1998), Film socialisme (2010) and various short films after, the seeds of them clearly visible in this pulp detective work. Sound and the use of it is the first thing you notice, the first film of Godard's which was in stereo. Dialogue continues while the image onscreen cuts to something or someone else, an almost-cut-and-paste collage of speech and music, all classical, taking place when exposition and character building conversations are fragmented, making one conscious of the structure of audio in cinema. It works to add to the narrative, while other moments have music intentionally jarring to the content of the scene on purpose. The film is as much about communication and disruption of it as it is a crime story. The multi-plotted story itself is as much about miscommunication, where barring a final series of shootings, most of the conflicts are through words. It's surprising how this film reminds one of American indie films, especially Jim Jarmusch, a genre narrative broken of its conventional plotting structure with additional allusions to philosophy and especially cultural items. Characters are pulp figures but still have time to be built up, fleshed out, through Godard's musings on life, able to use such thoughts, like the reason pornography is called 'x-rated', as part of the metaphors and thoughts of the characters as much as his outpouring of his thoughts outside of cinema.

From http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/253/218/56061/format_web/detective.jpg

Books populate a lot of the film, piled on mass on Prospero's makeshift desk in his hotel, his and Neveu and Arielle's names directly referencing The Tempest. Characters read a lot generally. Quotations are countless, spoken and in narration, and is even part of Fox Warner's character, a copy of Lord Jim he keeps with him, opened randomly to any page in a time of crisis, giving him advice in whatever passage he reads. It's impossible not to think, as communication is part of the narrative, how Godard is also directly commentating of how the way to communicate has changed in the period the film was made in. Cutaways to a media store, the neon of Cassette Audio and Video Cassette, in the colours of the French flag, tangential to the narrative, but in a film that plays with audio and visuals, a comment of how film and culture in general has changed from the Sixties crime films of his and cinema in general. Discussions on pornography in an era of video tape and porn theatres, to classical films on televisions, the black-and-white celluloid images fuzzy on the screens, evoking tropes repeated here in the story or, as characters watch Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) in each other's arms, how its part of their lives as pulp characters as they are for the viewers. Arielle, with Prospero's interest, films directly out of their hotel room window with a film camera prominently, the grainy images from it the first of the entire film around it; it cannot be ignored, as Godard's shows, that the images are distorted even in these narratives as they will be for cinema as the technology did indeed change over the next few decades or so.

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/e/e0/Detective_Godard.jpg

Détective has a very unconventional, tangential style to it compared to other Godard films in general. Still a Godard crime film, in what one would expect, but aspects stand out differently with this one to the others. Prospero is trying to figure out a crime, the random murder of a man known as the Prince, that is far too simple to be explained, confounded further by the Mafia boss also being known as the Prince existing at the same time, Godard's habit of dissecting genre and cinema taking a metaphysical tone here alongside with a meta one. Mostly within the main hotel location, barring one or two scenes outside, the setting is an unmapped series of corridors, stairs and rooms, beautifully filmed in static shots, but out-of-reach from reality. Where characters are hidden away in blackened billiard rooms, or squashed up together in hotel rooms, and each other's hotel rooms for that matter. In an almost sci-fi touch, with Fox Warner's extended circus of entourage, including a young girl unexplained in her prescience playing an instrument at times, he has access to a computer, part of the issue of technology being addressed by the director, but one, when asked questions in outputs, able to keep answers from the users on its own digression. It tips into legitimately freakish horror in one moment with a dead mouse and blood coming from the least expected place, asking what Godard would've brought to the horror genre if he tried it.  Characters populate and intrude on each other's spaces, to comedic effect at points especially with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a sleuth keeping his eye on the situations around him or running through those he has no connection to. Entangled romance takes place, adultery and cheating one's lover, the follies of the heart, alongside misguided views and the deluded belief money is easy to come by, all spoken through Godard's quotations, experiments and reflections of the period. The result is sewn and weaved together without issue, a delicately balanced mix that works more so on a second viewing and shows its masterful constuction.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - Medium

Altogether, Détective works both as a Godard experiment and as a genre film, but it is definitely an unconventional work as crime narratives go. It works as a great take on the tropes of a b-movie thrillers, in that it gets to the point in its fragmented tone, while still fleshed out, and letting the experiments work for the story and for the director's intellectual concerns. The experiments themselves do not detract from the full narrative, but they would be disarming to anyone encountering Godard for the first time, and take these well worn tropes into unexpected areas. On a second viewing, it still causes one to sit back and take in the level of experimentation you do not get in most cinema, marvelling at them, fascinating in its moments where it steps into separate observations. The advantage that makes the film more abstract is that is still works as a film, and it is immensely entertaining in that area. Gripping as a very talkative, cool toned crime story, each character subplot of interest when one puts together the pieces of each, and taking on a very different take on them for original results. It is a funny movie at times and despite the events of the end - beautifully set up with a use of a clip from an older film for one of the meta references - it finishes with high spirits which contrasts fully from the cerebral content and the seriousness of points. The hybrid of completely bold, uncompromising experimentation and genre actually manages to work and it's never conventional because of the melding.

Personal Opinion 

It is to the director's credit, while very much transitioning to his winter period of filmic essays already signposted by films before like Slow Motion (1980), that he still made a film that cares for its narrative as much as the musings. From a script from a producer who was willing to fund his controversial take on the immaculate conception in Hail Mary, Godard uses it as a suit, an aesthetic, for his own ideas while still making it as was desired under his own terms. It turns back on the films from his first Breathless (1960) in the sixties, but with the matinee looks of a Johnny Hallyday against moments of the director disrupting his work further than the jump cuts of decades before. The two sides, of the past Godard and the one he would become after this, cooperate fully and the transition is felt here immensely with great results. This is also a film where a character pretends to do boxing sparring against his girlfriend's bared breasts, following her directions of which to box, the largest Toblerone I have ever witnessed in the flesh or in image, a clumsy waiter joke, self conscious computers with digital paint portraits of an actress in the film on them, and a monologue of how one washes their hands shows who they are that'll make Quentin Tarantino look like he's a twelve year old trying to write cool dialogue in comparison. With Godard, then or today, you get the intellectual meat but plenty of material and images you'd never see in most people's work, or together in one film like this, and it adds together to more than a plodding art film but something artistic with great character to it.

Videotape Swapshop Review: The Pumaman (1980)

From http://ayay.co.uk/backgrounds/b_movie
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Dir. Alberto De Martino

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - None

There's no lick of a chance this would get on the list. It's a very silly superhero rip-off film from Italy that only gets near to the abstract, passing outside the metaphorical library of unconventional films so far kept and breathing on the glass, in its perfunctory effects and how amusing they are.

Personal Opinion

Entertaining in its incompetence mixed with trying hard and Donald Pleasance chewing the scenery. A full review can be found here - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/21830/the-worse-of-the-worse-the-pumaman-1980-director-alberto-de-martino/

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/
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Medea (1969)

From http://www.parchiletterari.com/files/image/pasolini_vita14.jpg

Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

These sense of who Pasolini was is far more complicated when his filmography is build up. The Marxist who yet has a considerable chunk of his filmography based on mythological and literary historical pieces. The politics can still be seen in the Trilogy of Life (1971-74), Oedipus Rex (1967), and what was left of the uncompleted adaptation of Orestes, but the willingness, even in a social realistic form, to depict the fantastical, is eye opening when all that one knows of him is a Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), or The Gospel of St. Matthew (1964). The words of a centaur to a grown up Jason, who is seen raising the Greek mythological individual up from infancy, include that reality is fantastical, and that the fantastical is reality. The abstract supernatural tone of Teorema (1968), the absurdity of The Hawks and Sparrows (1966) and such films leads to an immense centre of dreamlike material which the politically minded director managed to sew to the bare reality to stress his point. The reality is depicted through them - the failed yet beautiful faces and bodies, the elaborate yet handmade and theatrical costumes, and real locations substituting fantasy ones. Even the most fantastical moments in his films - the bronze man in Arabian Nights (1974), the centaur here with his fake horse legs etc. - are depicted as obviously practical effects, theatre tricks, but given a reality for them. You can still see the fantasy, the myth, but its appropriated for a clear meaning of his own.

From http://marfapublicradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/CallasMedea.jpg

Appropriating the play by Euripides, the film after the prolong follows the titular protagonist, played by opera singer Maria Callas, a sorceress in her land who sacrifices her position to go with Jason, played by Olympic triple jumper Giuseppe Gentile, and his Argonauts, on the search for her land's golden fleece which she steals for him. The next and final half depicts the years later when, married, Jason betrays her by planning to marry the daughter of a king he was originally opposing, leading to tragedy and revenge. Medea is the old world, Jason the new world, Medea losing her abilities in a spiritual crisis for her betrayal. The film succeeds in that it is just a step ahead of fully being understood, scenes playing out that seemingly have no connection to what has transpired, leading to the uncanny. There is an abstract tone to the film in its pure fantasy, an ancient world interpreted in a theatrical way. Yet it is realistically made. Locations in Turkey and Syria make up the world shown amongst others, buildings carved from the sand as empires. Wooden masks, capes, gowns, metal chain jewellery, a coarse aesthetic beauty to the content. Pasolini went further and handpicked a score based on various types of traditional music. African. Music I recognise, in the squealing high horns, of Tibetian Buddhist monks or the same instrumentation and chanting. Even what I felt, how my ears interpreted them, as a East Asian string instrument with matching vocals nearly synched onto post synched actors. The world shown is of no clear time, timeless, a mass of cultures made into a cohesive world in terms of look and presentation. A sacrifice shown where a virile young man's blood and organs are painted onto a harvest to grow, a key and memorable sequence, using real natives of the local environment shot in as extras, feels as if one is in the same place as the characters. Pasolini made a fake world into a reality in how it is shown, connectable to even if also completely alien in culture.

From http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Medea.2jpg.jpg

Maria Callas, close to middle aged grace, commands the screen even if the film is viewed without her original voice in Italian dubbing. While never singing once, it's clear the prescience required for opera is shown in the performance. As well as sympathy for the old world, the apparently barbaric one, the director also created a feminist film, the plight of Medea that she is seen as a barbarian to her husband Jason even after rearing children from him. Killing her own brother early on, she is still sympathetic, the role of mythology to step back and see the complexities of gods and mortals, their worst and best sides, as well as the relation to normality to the fantastical. Pasolini doesn't over explain what is going on, confusing at first but ultimately more rewarding because the images and few words said speak much more than exposition. This shows the lack of boundary between the mythological and the contemporary which rears itself in existence in films like Teorema, the atheist still able to evoke more powerfully the unknown to rational human logic then a Christian or spiritual filmmaker. This paradox is at its most distinct that it was Pasolini, not a Christian like Mel Gibson, who made the greater portrait of Jesus Christ in The Gospel According To St. Matthew, not just for his down-to-earth, rational portrait of the Son of God but also the mystery he still leaves in. Had his take on Orestes been made, remaining in the filmed draft Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970), then he would, in filming the Greek play in current day Africa, have melded two sides, his real environments and the old world he felt nostalgia for, that were far closer bed fellows than presumed..

From http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9040/e783.jpg

The film is subtle, yet is full of pronounced, powerful moments. The sight of the two sides of the centaur, how they represent the mind of Jason to express and evoke, the old world and the old world desecrated represented by both sides. The potential flash forward in the future of the princess being struck down by accident, or purpose, by the curse of Medea, panic felt when scenes and dialogue almost repeat again suggesting it will actually happen in narrative time. The eloquence of the dialogue even in subtitles, how every character is not just an archetype, but gives a depth. How sumptuous the film is. Colourful but earthly, the blazing sun enough to symbolise the old God of the Sun reappearing to Medea to regain her power, one of the many subtle editing or short composition practices Pasolini used. It's surprising as well how gory and considerably nasty the film is too, the effective of severed prosthetic limbs not overbearing, not over elaborate, making an effect but linking the ancient plays and myth to today's horror films in comparison, how the physical, exaggerated violence is as much representative of the emotions behind them as they are probably more accurate to what happened in real history. Pasolini was able to evoke these tales, beautifully in films like Arabian Nights, without losing sight of a clear interpretation of his own thoughts, usually condemnation of modern life. Even as he rejected his own work, and made Salo in rampant disgust of the world he lived in, he still made the horror of that film with the same theatrics seen here or in a Oedipal Rex. Medea itself ends with this despair. We sympathise with the titular character in her abandonment. She takes a violent extreme, but in context of mythology, and the potential feminist reading, her despair is rational, despite its brutality. She shouts down Jason that nothing is possible anymore, the last line. 'Fin' is shown then, the film ends. Stark, cuts to the point. The old world dies screaming under her own terms. Pertinent now as it was in the Sixties when the film was first show. Usually the past is misappropriated, distorted or manipulated, so to encounter it in its true form is potent, shocking for the modern eye and liberating, which Pasolini was able to translate to the modern day.

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Abstract Scale (High/Medium/Low/None) - Low

Pasolini managed to make a clear, unique style of his own that shifts closely to a series of images that connect and have effect rather than a clear cut narrative. A film like Porcile (1969) or Teorema is this taken to its furthest, but Medea still has the same energy. That Pasolini deliberately used a highly well known opera singer, a celebrity, and an Olympic champion as his main protagonists here adds a specific detail unique to this film. Like Terence Stamp in Teorema, deliberate in using actors as well as non-actors, the director is able to take a recognisable face and give it new meaning in context of his work. This as much applies for the adaptations of the ancient and classical literary sources and the materials he uses too, creating new and alien contexts for recognisable material. Using other nations' environment and other cultures' music and making them gel perfectly with others. The clear moral battle for Pasolini, the existential fight, between the modernity he hated and the past he desired, is littered and shown through all his work I've seen, and in deciding to depict this through the mixing of the recognisable, the universal, with the abstract creates a peculiar but effective mix. Certainly enough for the scale.

Personal Opinion:

It's amazing that a director I first approached as a mere intellectual art director has a significant chunk of his filmography devoted to films like Medea or the Trilogy of Life. Myths, fantasies, the erotic, comedic, even films that are legitimately great entertainment. Even his most abstract films has bursts of humour. Even Salo has a sick sense of one despite the abomination and shit eating. The films, alongside gems like Porcile, have been a revelation, more so when the same attitude and presentation is given to the depiction of the modern day as the ancient worlds. His works are an open dialogue to his issues with the present and the past, depicting the unreal faithfully and adding oddness to its nature alongside his own pertinent political ideas, startling as a result. On first glance Medea might be seen as a lesser work, but then one compares it to other films based on Greek myths and would see how significantly superior it is to most films.

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Final Stab (2001)

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/70kxjh8SvZc/mqdefault.jpg

Dir. David DeCoteau

In the beginning, knowing completely this is not a great film, the opening credits of visual distortions of the killer's mask is quite memorable, if just to remind me of the contents of a lava lamp, and that's more than enough to be very interested in a film. It may sound ridiculous, but any interest is better than no interest at all. You're set up with a young romantic couple Charlie (Jamie Gannon) and Angelia (Melissa Reneé Martin); Charlie is suffering from reoccurring nightmares, and Angelia's older sister Kristin (Erinn Hayes) knows of the reason, setting up a faux serial killing spree at an infamous home of a real one with her ivy league cronies to send him to the hospital in a strait jacket. However someone else is also there and it's no longer fake corn syrup but actual blood that's being split. I admit to having viewed slasher films as one of my least favourite genres for a long time, and it wasn't helped when I was younger that I grew up during the post Scream (1996) era where films like Final Stab were made, films that I just thought were dreck. Final Stab is not great, yet its strangely compelling. Significantly, my old criticism that all slasher films were the same is lost when it's obvious, while the plotting and archetypes (the jock, the goody two shoes etc.) are shared between this and other films, that even a movie like Final Stab that never gets mentioned in lists of praised films in the sub-genre has its own idiosyncrasies of interest.

From http://horrorhothousereview.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/final-stab-1.jpg

DeCoteau is a conventional director here - very tight, close-to-the-actors framing of scenes with very little sense of space, emphasis more the exposition dialogue and the deaths rather than anything else. What's interesting about him, having become a little obsessed with his name when I kept seeing work of his at a young age during the early 2000s DVD boom, is how his career has spanned the history of straight-to-video cinema, from its beginnings with VHS in the eighties to DVD now. He has worked with a mummy, Linnea Quigley, a mockbuster of Hansel and Gretel, and Eric Roberts as a talking cat. One area I've yet to go into, DeCoteau a gay man, is his various horror films from a homoerotic slant, which would be worth looking into, and actually would deserve praise before even seeing them for staking a mark in the horror genre from a very little done viewpoint. Final Stab itself, where a killer picks off the one-by-one as is expected in the slasher subgenre, is perfunctory at best as a great film or not, perfunctory as a slasher film in terms of quality too. Its average for me in that scale and it's not going to be a film slasher fans immediately go to. As a lurid genre films it lacks what's desired for most people either. There's no nudity baring one bare chested guy in just his boxers, some blood but nothing shocking, no unique kills or craptacular fashion and music tastes shown from the early 2000s to wince about. There is instead a very over eager score which, unless I'm going insane and losing my ability to judge musical sounds to each other, had bongos as part of the percussion. It is close to the current era of horror cinema where most of the characters are insulting each other even as friends, twats to use the English vernacular to be around, although here at least there are characters, even if one dimensional, who are sympathetic despite some still being vain egotists. Most of the film is full of catty remarks between people as they insult each other, either because the screenplay was an attempt at Joss Whedon one-liners or, God help us, the American were this obnoxious at times.

From http://horrorhothousereview.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/final-stab-2.jpg

Knowing this is far from great, I decided to rewatch this film, after many years, with only the desire to be entertained. It's fascinating, and does actually become entertaining, to see such a film trying to be dramatic. Sisterly antagonism, skeletons in the closet, revenge for being rejected and unspoken desires as a person in a boiler suit and mask carves people up. The decision to have it set up as a prank, a fake serial killer running around the single setting, only for real murders to take place is quite amusing and interesting for what it is - an upfront, somewhat crass reference to Friday The 13th (1980) aside, its more watchable to see the difference between pretending to be dead and being dead. It's junk but its charming, seeing stereotypical looking young actors playing stereotypical archetypes. For example the, for a lack of a better word, bimbo character is the stereotype only without a lurid nude scene like more explicit slashers show, and the actress playing her, with pronounced curves, probably dyed blonde hair and California tan, is as much as a b- and c-movie archetype of an actress too, adding a perplexing joy to viewing the film. The male actors are the same - light thin wool jumpers, rippling muscles, platinum blonde hair, a little vapid and too square jawed to stand out from each other. Obviously this is dangerously close to character assassination of the real people, not just critiquing characters in a straight-to-video slasher film they play, but it's from affection, that suddenly came about, viewing this film of how the type of actors after Scream (1996) cast for these roles were as much of the late nineties and early 2000s as the content was.

From http://pics.imcdb.org/0is120/finalstab2fj3.2135.jpg

Now accepting slasher films for what they are, there is fun in this despite being far from said greatness. A sudden plot twist involving two men having had a relationship is abrupt, never took further, but the most inspired thing in the film. It's wrong in a lot of ways to enjoy such bitchy, insulting dialogue being thrown around by the characters at each other, but there's a suitable level of smarminess to it that's amusing, especially from Erinn Hayes as the Queen of snide comments. A pointlessly large cast is there for killer fodder, but it's too innocuous to be dubious, just to spill fake blood for the sake of it in a silly way. Slasher films have an inherent campiness to them in hindsight, especially those around teens, ivy leaguers and youth trends, that is ripe for me to devour with joy now, and this has it despite being a quickie slasher, let's be honest, made for the commercial market of video first. It's been great to jettison my snobbery over these films, especially with having the darkly humorous joy of some of the content in this unintentionally hysterical. A truly Oscar worthy performance of a knife victim is seen, the actor able to create this realistic performance by actually dying with a knife plunged in his back, looking like he's fallen asleep on the job while no one realises the blood on the floor has haemoglobin in it rather than corn syrup. At least one dead person is ignobly stepped over and ignored in one scene too. The disposability of characters in slashers, far from nasty and nihilistic, has a ridiculous side to it that can be finally appreciated by an Englishman like me who has a corpse like sense of humour. The one legitimate virtue of this film, while I mainly enjoyed it for its rudimentary straight-to-video tone, is that it does have a clear ghoulish sense of humour to the material that goes against the ordinariness of what's onscreen. It may have been churned out, but moments have too much of a winking sense of humour; not ironic, taking itself seriously, but with a silliness to its tone. This especially comes about with the twist ending, which is completely ridiculous and may be accused as being really bad scriptwriting. But slasher films have always had baffling twist endings since their beginning; I can point to Happy Birthday To Me (1981) as a key example of this, and even the first Friday The 13th has an ending there just for a cheap jolt regardless of it being great to watch. Viewing Final Stab, its recommended, like I did, to not care about grand artistic merit as you watch it, not turn your brain off, but just admit what it is, and find any sliver of merit you can find from it. It's not Halloween (1978), but that was obvious seeing the cover, so its redundant to compare the two.

From http://i.ytimg.com/vi/BQJ-EizbRNQ/0.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

There was no way this would get onto the abstract list - a standard, generic looking straight-to-video slasher as a killer prowling around an abandoned house. What you see is all it has, entertaining for me, but not odd, atmospheric in an oneiric way or ending up with a random pie fight taking place like a Boardinghouse (1982).

Personal Opinion

I'm having an epiphany with slashers. Once my least favourite film genre with biopics; now I just despise biopics the most. Most of it was an apparent sense of creative stuntedness with the subgenre, a lack of imagination. Now, its still not a creative subgenre at times, but I can find fun in a Final Stab because they still have individual quirks between them of their own. With the help of a podcast called The Hysteria Continues, I can see how idiosyncratic and peculiar to each other these films can be, like one punk song to another, and just have to watch more of them. Some might raise an eyebrow with me beginning with a Final Stab, but to find entertainment in it, and not feel like I wasted a night's viewing, means more in that it proves I can now like the maligned subgenre in its less-than-well regarded places as well as its highs, and far from dismissing Final Stab, I repeat myself again and say that this is still above many other films in quality and entertainment, worth praising in itself.