Bangkok Haunted (2001)

Director: Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam

Screenplay: Pisut Praesangeam and Sompop Wetchapipat

Cast: Pimsiree Pimsee as Paga / Jieb, Dawan Singha-Wee as Pan, Kalyanut Sriboonrueng as Kanya, Pete Thongchua as Nop

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror anthology from Thailand, Bangkok Haunted however does something very different in not having the wraparound start the feature, but immediately lunging into the first of three stories, so let us begin as such too. An ancient drum, for the first story, is being transferred in a truck. It is established to have a ghost woman haunting the instrument as the man watching the items in the back is more concerned of leaping out at speed onto the road to get away. The young woman that receives this drum, Jieb (Pimsiree Pimsee), is going to have to deal with the haunted consequences.

We see the drum's origins in 1917, as it is connected to an adopted girl whose parents died of sickness and whose adoptive father is a scholar of music. Raised to become a dancer, Paga (also played Pimsee) befriends another child, a disfigured and ostracised one, who when they become adults is infatuated with her despite Paga only views him as a brother whilst loving another man. This is the most conventional of the three stories in plotting, yet allowed enough space to breathe as Jieb in the modern day with an older male scholar, wandering into flashbacks in the past within her dreams without warning, realise something is amiss with the drum and research its past. It seems like a critique, for a forty four minute segment, that I will not write a lot about this segment beyond this, but it starts with a sound opening for the entire project by co-director Oxide Pang. Oxide Pang with his twin brother Danny came into prominence by the 2000s for films that caught the "Tartan Asian Extreme" wave of interest in the West for Asian genre cinema. Born in Hong Kong, they have juggled genres, action with Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and its 2008 remake with Nicolas Cage, alongside the original 2002 version of The Eye, a horror film about a woman who sees ghosts as a blind woman who was given her sight back through a donor's set of eyes. Their work outside the director's chair deserves credit too as Danny Pang was the editor on the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3), the first one of the many films from the East which caught on fire with interest for Western film fans. They have worked together as brothers but also separately, Oxide Pang making this film instead with Pisut Praesangeam, a Thai filmmaker/producer/screenwriter in the latter's home country, setting this anthology within Bangkok.

The first segment is the pair's most traditional anthology story in tone, one which does provide an appropriately macabre twist - [Spoiler Warning] one of Paga's arms was inside the drum and we learn how it got there [Spoilers End] - and feels the perfect length for its micro-feature tone by itself. After this, Bangkok Haunted's stories are more idiosyncratic in their structures. Probably the biggest virtue, for a film for whatever inexplicable reason I hated when I first saw it, likely due to its slow burn pace, is that all three segments are distinct. Even if the next two as tales entirely set in the modern urban landscape of Bangkok, those two managed to stand out from each other in tone, and since the entire feature is over two hours long and lets them all feel like micro-features, there is no sense of rushing plot points or losing their individual moods either. The wraparound, whilst with a spooky gotcha in the final shot, is not really a story but I still liked it, especially as it feels more like a nice wrapping that does not need to have a dynamic build. It is a curveball when that, only after a forty four minute tale, we have it established three female friends are telling scary stories in a cafe, with them critiquing plot logic or trying to figure out cool titles for each other's stories. It is actually a cool twist on the horror anthology tone to not have a twist, just a trio of interesting story tellers who are friends and engaging with each other.

Story two could be said to be too convoluted and weird for its own good, but it is weird for me as much in a good way. The mature tale of the three, with its explicit nudity and grotesqueness, it is about an essence called Phy Essence. The segment is almost out of order in explaining the plot details, which is why it could be extremely confusing, but as for our female lead, the Phy Essence is a love potion which you can buy hush hush, here in a funny moment in a sex shop where a male customer complains the porn tape he has rented is too damaged at the best parts. The essence is seen once slipped into a man's drink, but is a McGuffin, not really explained but designed to make men fall inescapably in love with the woman who uses it.

The essence, as established in the first scene in a hospital morgue with necrophilia overtones, is collected by one guy who finds recently dead and beautiful female corpses, and is made from the blood collected from their slit open necks. It is a task he secretly gets on with even if he is in danger of being caught, or finds a male colleague getting drunk on the shift and sleeping under a blanket on one of the gurneys among the corpses. That we see the corpses occasionally open their eyes or move their hands suggests that the Phy Essence has ill advised magical aspects too, more so as there is a ghost woman looming about, and that with one of the male suitors, you see the harmful effects of the essence. Not only does he effectively sleep with both a living and dead woman at the same time on a one night stand, but ends up first puking up for the initial symptoms, only to be at death's door with a Buddhist priest trying to help him. Another will be killed by a car and immediately come back as a ghost due to the essence, and it is clear the magic behind it has dangerous properties alongside the gristly nature of the concoction just making the dead angry and come back to haunt those involved in using it.

It is a very idiosyncratic story, probably more vague then it itself realises, very erotic and sexually explicit in a way that it is quite striking with time passing, be it the humour of the lead living next door to a couple in an apartment who are too loud in their passions, or the necrophilia aspects at the morgue. We had some transgressive films from this early 2000s wave that dealt with sexuality - like Takeshi Miike from Japan and the late Kim Ki-duk from South Korea, the later sadly someone we have to put a caveat around due to sexual misconduct allegations - but sexuality was not really as prominent in this era of violence, of action and genre films which did not really tackle those subjects, or the trend for ghost stories influenced from Asian filmmakers modernising them, only to get remade as American films that same decade. You can make the argument this is erotic for the sake of titillation, not for profoundness, but at the same time, you also have a story where despite this women are central to the plot, which is striking within itself. It is effectively a moral tale of women stuck in the position of needing the Phy Essence, because they feel they need to go out into night clubs for men to date, with the essence whose gift is too dangerous. It is a tale when even men who die from its effect become ghosts too, leading to a haunting here where those made to love a woman will do so even if, in one of the best shots of the whole film, they live together in physical embrace after her death in the same grave. With its very electronic, New Age tinged music, it has for all its all-over-the-place plotting a distinct tone that I appreciated, effectively a cousin to a segment for the Three Extremes (2004) anthology, which was expanded into a 2004 feature film by itself, a work directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan called Dumplings. Three... Extremes leant into the growing interest in Asian cinema at the time with three directors from three different countries - Fruit Chan from Hong Kong and known for films like Made in Hong Kong (1997), Takashi Miike from Japan, and one of the biggest figures to gain prominent and his career grown from this trend, Park-Chan Wook from South Korea. Dumplings itself in either its versions was explicitly about the theme I feel the Phy Essence is about, the idea of women forced to follow gendered conventions, in that case to stay youthful in a world when men's eyes wander to younger women, through the very twisted concept of Chinese dumplings made with human foetuses. Whilst Bangkok Haunted's own tale of ill advised love charms is stranger, they make a fascinating pair on the cursed love remedies from the perspectives of women if you have a strong stomach for one of the pair mentioned.

Story three begins with a scene of a crime, where a woman has hung herself in a warehouse. The police office on the case suspects it was not a suicide but a murder, believing there was no way for her to get up to where she was found alongside evidence of a struggle beforehand. Whilst the police chief refuses to press on with this idea, he investigates on his own terms, and the coroner cements his concerns when there are suspicious clues complicating her death. This is interesting as a crime mystery steeped in the supernatural; when a scene transpires when a random couple following him swear they saw a woman trying to get out of the moving vehicle, it is clear he is now haunted by her too. All three stories involve ghostly women wronged, and that really becomes apparent for this tale of a horrible series of circumstances for its one innocent, the woman herself.

Whilst in dire need of a high definition re-release, it is by this segment I came to appreciate Bangkok Haunted's general washed out and dingy aesthetic with moments of subtle colour. Even though one of the tales is partially set in 1917, with significantly more colour in the forest locations, this film really emphasises the idea of the back alleys and dark night streets of Bangkok throughout itself. With there being a second scene in this segment within a sex shop, as the lead makes enquiries on the woman leading to her husband, it is very atmospheric in imagining these ghosts drifting among the living in these cramped environments, the places not seen as idyllic and grungy but the real world for normal people stuck in crammed apartments trying to find ways to get on in life. They are not disconnected from the living either, which makes this aesthetic more appropriate, as it leads to suspicion of domestic abuse from her husband, seemingly changed and wheelchair bound from a car crash. The key to the segment from here is a series of red herrings, including a male lover of hers who is a boss at a construction site, where the many men in her life are not good people. This includes the lead himself who is revealed to have been part of it too. There is a sick humour as more people are revealed to be innocent when information is learnt when it is too late, including unfortunate deaths of suspects, and one of the best turns when someone's innocence is proven but through his involvement for another crime of political corruption. One twist comes fully from a murder mystery pot boiler - [Huge Spoiler] with the help of ice to be able to reach a hanging spot [Spoilers End] - and ultimately not even our white knight lead is a good man, just finding excuses to purge his own guilt from the things he did to the woman.

The story has many trigger warnings as already brought up and also revealed, including a deliberate miscarriage with a coat hanger that is not comfortable to witness without being tasteless. They lead to this being the saddest tale of the three about a woman who did not deserve her lot, whose affairs were clearly to escape her misery, and whose fate leaves her a ghost watching those involved discover their own complicity and fall off the rails. It is a perfect conclusion to a trio of stories I unfairly dismissed in my youth, and I have absolute respect for the entire project, with three strong entries, being a very good horror anthology which took risks, be it telling a traditional ghost story, being very weird and sexual, and for this one to actually force one to sympathise for its female lead in its uncomfortable nods to how bad human beings can be to each other.

Visible Secret (2001)

 

Director: Ann Hui

Screenplay: Abe Kwong

Cast: Eason Chan as Peter Wong Choi, Man Kin-fung as young Peter, Shu Qi as June / Wong Siu-kam, Kelly Moo as young June, Anthony Wong as Wong-lin, Sam Lee as Simon, James Wong as Lo Kit, Wayne Lai as Peter's brother, Kara Hui as Siu-kam's mother

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

As a young girl, June (Shu Qi) saw a man is decapitated on rail lines, played by Anthony Wong, and whilst everyone was horrified by the body briefly wandering about headless, she learnt she could see ghosts when she found his head. Just because you can see ghosts however does not mean June has other problems to deal with, like ex-boyfriends, let alone when the karaoke room she wishes to use is haunted. A horror comedy, but with an emotional edge, it is noticeably by Ann Hui, an acclaimed female director whose career was sadly not that wildly available in the United Kingdom considering how well regarded she already was by this film in her long career. Behind such films like Boat People (1982), a sombre drama part of her acclaimed set of films about displaced Vietnamese refugees, she is also evidence of how Hong Kong filmmakers have developed the ability to switch genres with ease. Some legends found niches - John Woo with the heroic bloodshed genre, Wong Kar-Wai with doomed romances - but even those two examples changed tact and even genres occasionally in their careers too. In the case of Visible Secret, Hui is behind the camera for many dramas in her career, but has also made action films, comedies, and already had a film about people being able to see ghosts decades before called The Spooky Bunch (1980). By itself, it is noticeable how Visible Secret feels of its own in terms of mood and tone within a new decade.

You can see that, for a comedy, it plays with a sense of quiet emotion only to puncture it with moments of slapstick, ghoulish humour and bleak humour, where soon-to-be-fired hairdresser Peter (Eason Chan) encounters June during a one night stand together and find them entangled in each others' lives. Emotions are interrupted by how he lost his job, though the boy finds it cool to see blood even if it is his own, or the likes of one's uncle, meant to be in an old folk's home, appearing covered in red paint claiming to be attacked by ghosts and trying to bite someone's nose off. The possession of a single mother by two ghosts, arguing over the body within a spectacle of physical comedy for one of the film's stand out sequences, is contrasted by the sad final discovery after that sequence, and that tonal shifting by screenwriter Abe Kwong plays a huge part to the entire production. The drama is there, and many scenes this absurd humour is contrasted with sudden emotion, as Peter finds himself encountering the world of the supernatural, both learning too late people he has crossed paths with are already dead, or struggling through those many possessions and hauntings he encounters with June by his side. As the pair of slowly falling in love, June herself is not exactly as comfortable with her gift either, able to see the dead through one eye. Shu Qi stands out just in terms of her gothic appearance as the character, and the playfully flighty attitude June has at her happiest, but she also plays a young woman struggling with the sights in general, and is very captivating as the awkward co-lead with Eason Chan.

The world they exist in is also very distinct in terms of aesthetic. Of the early 2000s, with its digital effects and visual look, the film has an appropriately washed out mood to its urban landscapes. Colour is here, vibrant still, but within a Hong Kong city that feels stepped in melancholia and alienated young adults, it feels apt that among its docks and markets there are all the ghosts wandering about with all their stories. Random possession by a female ghost in a toilet, who committed suicide due to being jilted by a lover, makes sense with matter-of-factness in context to this world. Even when it has the least excepted reference to a Toblerone I was expecting to see, which would be unintentionally funny in another context as a Swiss chocolate popular in my home land, that is brought up in a deeply emotional meeting between son and his father that, seen twice in two different ways, is one of the scenes with the most heart in both versions. The comedic tone at times throughout Visible Secrets is clearly being used to emphasis the dramatic weight of its themes of loss and mourning.

In a world of muted green and blue lighting, the obvious theme for a story like this, with the ghosts when they possess people, is all the emotions and rage they dealt with in their lives they cannot get rid of. This is especially in mind to two of them being women spurned by men and heartbroken, and Antony Wong's character, whilst not returning in the full flesh, being a prologue figure important to the latter act but whose gruesome demise is entirely a bad luck of the draw in how it transpired. There is even a charlatan exorcist who finds himself embraced in June's case despite his open scepticism to his work, which just emphasises the tone and mood perfectly of the entire film, where the supernatural passe
s the weird lives of the living like ships passing in the night.

There is the one aspect of the film which may divide viewers thought, and that is the twist ending. To spoil two films at once - [Huge Spoilers] this is the same twist The Sixth Sense (1999) by M. Night Shyamalan had [Spoilers End]. It is on one hand a huge emotional gut punch, if one which has the potential to a) add a greater weight to scenes when revisited in terms of how characters interact, or b) just cause a tangled and confusing mess to rationalise it all. Taking it for what it is, then worry about this, it is the last dose of melancholia, emphasising the humour in Visible Secrets, even its scares, were always taking the backseat to the emotional drive of the film. It is for that reason, if with a caveat depending on the individual viewer's reaction to that twist, mine to the entire production was an admiration of Ann Hui's film in its entirety.  

Hellsing (2001–2002)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

For a tangent, I return back to an anime series I had not seen until the 2000s when I got into the medium. Naturally, there was nostalgia in this one case, as the likes of the original Hellsing come from a specific period of anime which I got into by the mid-2000s and no longer exists. ADV Films, who released this in the United Kingdom, no longer existed by the end of the decade due to financial problems, and Gainax, the divisive anime studio who produced this, were a prolific studio whose titles came out at the time I was getting into anime, and also suffered from severe financial problems by the end of the decade too. They still exist, but they are not the same big budget studio who divided people in terms of the quality of their work. This was also the era, for whatever bizarre reason, someone thought releasing three to four episodes a DVD disc, at full price as separate releases, was a good idea until sanity prevailed and we just got box sets.

Hellsing is an action horror about a secret group of vampire hunters in England, with the really cool choice to cast actual British voice actors (or try for proper regional accents) in a rare moment of English dub acting where, even notoriously as with certain Manga Entertainment dubs, even British recording productions pretended to have American accents. The issue comes with the knowledge this was the "original" adaptation of the source manga. Gainax, as the review gets into, were seemingly cursed with an inability get stories properly finished, and this one was struggled worse because said manga had barely started with material yet to reach when the show was in production. It tries its hardest with wrapping together the plot threads already there into a new story and having to bring in new series only content. Sadly, one of the most interesting inclusions in terms a new villain, for a 2000s production, touches on problematic stereotypes in horror fiction of African mysticism, and it still struggles by its end. Now it also has been entirely wiped from the slate due to Hellsing Ultimate, a more faithful adaption for straight to video which had a high budget, the manga fully to work from, and didn't need to censor the gore whatsoever for television.

The virtues are here, least in style, and I learnt a long time ago, I can find things to appreciate even in really bad anime, but this is exactly the reason, for all the things I think are great, I don't believe in having nostalgia. I would rather return to these productions of my memories as new again, strike that nostalgia dead, and find virtues even in a work like this I admit has huge crippling flaws.

For the full review, follow the blog link here.

Swordfish (2001)

 

Director: Dominic Sena

Screenplay: Skip Woods

Cast: John Travolta as Gabriel Shear; Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson; Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles; Don Cheadle as Agent J.T. Roberts; Sam Shepard as Senator James Reisman; Vinnie Jones as Marco; Drea de Matteo as Melissa; Rudolf Martin as Axl Torvalds

Ephemeral Waves

 

Swordfish takes a huge risk from the first scene, one willingly waving a red flag at the film critics of the time of its release, with John Travolta speaking to the camera about how unrealistic crime films are over an espresso. He even speaks about how even Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is unrealistic despite being an acclaimed film in the genre, [Huge Spoiler for that film] all because Sidney Lumet did not let the bank robbers get away with it [Spoilers End]. Swordfish as I will get into is a ridiculous film, so the brass balls of presumption to have this opening is hilarious, probably with full knowledge of the ridiculous gubbins the film gets into. Swordfish is an absurd film, and if I had to put a finger on why I hated this film once, as one of the worst films I ever saw, it is likely that I once held a stigma against "boring" Hollywood films. This was an era, the golden era of DVD rental stores, where I saw too many when my parents used to rent everything from a Global Video here in my English town. With the one or two weird titles that came through the exceptions to many of the big promoted titles of the 2000s, such as the low budget films which were able to slip in between the big budget films and be rented by accident, I saw a glut of the 2000 to 2005, to 2003 at least in terms of Hollywood. These are the titles, the pre-HD versus Blu-Ray war era of 2006, which lead to me having an allergy to big CGI explosions and remotely any sign the score was dictating the emotional cues in a film.

Swordfish is now an old film, and it presents a transitional period in Hollywood cinema, beginning with its co-producer Joel Silver. Silver would work throughout the 2000s and 2010s onwards, but his golden era is that of the golden age of American action films, from producing Lethal Weapon (1987) to Die Hard (1988), someone who expanded the types of films he was producing in the nineties with titles like The Matrix (1999) earning him success. He was however still returning to the bread-and-butter of his earlier career with action films, the changes to how they were presented how he continued from the eighties with films like the one covered in this review. Swordfish also presents us with a director, Dominic Sena, who came from the lineage of music video directors who were especially making their voices known in the nineties, working with the likes of Janet Jackson. Then there is a screenwriter with a tiny writer career altogether, Skip Woods, who was early within his work here but with the likes of The A-Team (2010), attempting to reboot the legendary eighties TV series, to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a divisive spin-off in the X-Men superhero series, I can now see where the cartoonish nature of Swordfish comes from. This is not detraction to this film, as the flaws are a greater problem than the tonal choices, but the later films showing where this one was coming from in terms of its screenwriter’s voice. Swordfish has the mentality to throw anything at the wall, even if nonsensical, and it is to the point this can be held responsible for an urban myth of a man being personally executed by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for treason, which just added a ridiculous cherry on top of this deeply flawed film. In many ways, tame in places but attempting edginess in others, this is a grindhouse exploitation film but on a Hollywood budget, if one with many issues that show blockbusters and exploitation films can share similar issues.

It has a plot, and that I had wrote that with tongue-in-cheek comes from this feeling like a pastiche of crime films, and not a detriment either. Hugh Jackman does find himself in a schism as someone who can played the washed and embittered figure of Stanley Jobson, old enough here to look like an aged renegade who went to prison, and crashed-and-burned after being a cool hot shot, but not as a hacker. It does not capsize his performance, but he feels like the Golden Age of Hollywood star who could never be this person in real life. If he as this character was anyone but a computer hacker, the image and style of performance would work in terms of verisimilitude. As a computer hacker, due to how it is portrayed here, it is up to Jackman's natural charisma to suspend disbelief. He has the virtue of the classical matinee idol, even when his big breakthrough was a 2000s plus phenomenon, the superhero becoming a more respectable casting choices as the films were making money, whose character in any other circumstances would not work if a similar actor like him was cast. Anyone else would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but he can make this matinee take on a hacker work in the same way Cary Grant would have stuck out, as we would have not minded, if dieselpunk was a concept in thirties Hollywood cinema.

The lynchpin that helps with the film to improve it, Jackson's character is a hero willing to commit a major hacking crime to steal millions from the US government, but he does so to earn the money needed to get legal custody of his daughter. In what could be an odd conservative slant, but I think is more a weird quirk of a film that is PG-13 for most of its tone, but prods at the older Joel Silver films which had more R-rated content, the ex-wife has connections in the adult film industry. The ex-wife is a troupe of action cinema anyway from John McClane, here a porn actress with her porn mogul boyfriend with a possible drama in a more complex melodrama even in a blockbuster action film left on the table. One where she is unhappy regardless of her career being porn or not, drinking all the time, in which no matter how she tries to connect to her daughter, her hatred for the husband pushes the adolescent away. Like some Hollywood films, i.e. many, that is not the case and she is an archetype that does cause one to wonder how many screenwriters accidentally showed axes to grind, and in the case of Skip Woods here, may have just taken a troop from films he had seen before. The demonization of porn was an idiosyncratic spin but is so slight it is a weird quirk among many.

More so as, whilst this has moments of adult risqué, factoring the one infamous moment of the film involving the lead actress Halle Berry, playing the femme fatale who brings Jackman into John Travolta's plan, this is a film a world away from a gristly reality. This makes the sudden moments of adult tone more surprising with hindsight, considering Jackman's test for the job is literally attempting to hack the US government's secret website whilst former soccer/football player Vinnie Jones has a gun to his head, and a woman is giving him oral under the work table, flickering of an old R-rated film here and there abrupt when it happens. Most of the film however is a broad over-the-top story; even if there are casualties, including one hostage in the opening at the heist blown up by a contraption she has on, one foot is in the nineties Hollywood mould and one in the new era means that everything is broad, of archetypes and lack of causality. Considering as well hacking is the title premise too, expect none of it to be realistic at all, with actors talking jargon and all meant to look cool in a "cinematic way". It is also less a concern than being a bank heist film, which presents in itself the sense of this film trying to match a new era, where the internet would become more prominent, only to still feel awkward.

The prominence of John Travolta is notable for the tone, and another factor affecting your ability to enjoy this or not is how you gauge his character and performance, the villain Gabriel Shear already idiosyncratic before you have later era Travolta acting interpreting him. I do not mind him here, and actually found him one of the more entertaining aspects, if with a caveat that the performance does expose too much. Travolta, already by this point having played Nicolas Cage, who played him, in John Woo's Face/Off (1997), an example of strange Hollywood cinema when it is done right, can have good scenery chewing. He really was knee capped, even if you do not factor in the controversies of the Church of Scientology, when Battlefield Earth (2000) was released, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel which a) had the controversies of Scientology, from its founder's voice in the text, as an albatross, b) had a drubbing that lasted to the modern day, and c) presented John Travolta as the lead evil alien in dreadlocks, giant platforms and leather costume hamming the performance so much it could turn some vegetarian. The Face/Off reference is appropriate as Travolta could have done a Nicolas Cage, who managed to ride financial debt and mockery to be an unsung hero in terms of committing himself to acting both well and/or so far up to eleven he transcended the mockery. Travolta here, since he is the most prominent aspect of Swordfish, struggles with a sense of self seriousness here, trying to be "cool" in his suits, slicked back hair, taste in expensive coffee and high lofty musings provided by Skip Woods' script. He is meant to be the awesome real anti-hero, but if Nicolas Cage had played this role, it would have worked despite the other problems with the film, whilst there is a sense of artificiality with the performance with Travolta that does undercut this. Despite being one of the memorable aspects for the better with the film, it does accidentally expose something beyond the film to consider with any other performance of his when I encounter it.

The biggest problem with a film like this for all its mad turns, a film about hacking that eventually however leads to a bus of hostages being carried along in the air by a helicopter, entirely in the fantastical more over the top than most fantasy, is one that lead to me being ambivalent to blockbusters from youth. So many, as here, we would dismiss as "mindless" to munch popcorn to, but in truth, for all of us saying we want to have serious profound dramas all the time, most of us just want to have a fun time but with the issue always instead finding something wanting. So many of these films as here you could pluck out cast members and plot points entirely underutilized and see the problem was always that the films skimmed over their most interesting aspects. With the aspects you begin the count being underutilized, the real folly of many blockbusters I dismissed in my youth were where you had weirder, more tantalising premises never fulfilled.

Whatever you think of the acting potential of Vinnie Jones, the notorious Wimbledon F.C. soccer player who was as known for his aggressive on-pitch style as much as for the work he did as a player in a variety of team, he gets little here it is strange he was even cast. Considering the only time you see him stand out, threatening to use rocker launcher ammunition as a suppository on one of the hostages, is just near his end of a role as a generic thug, all the real issues with blockbusters was always the lesser sum of all the parts of their high budgets and casts. The example which stands out is with Halle Berry. It is tasteless to say this, but Swordfish became the film where she as an actress was comfortable going a topless nude scene sunbathing. It only becomes sleazy when reduced to the images of a celebrity as a sexualised object, rather than the actress comfortable committing to the image of eroticism, something you get from the "Mr. Skin" attitude of reducing an actress' entire career to a compilation of her nude scenes out of context, a reference to a real life website that specializes in locating, posting, and rating instances of female nudity in television and film¹. In context, the scene is not tasteless, but plays as a sex comedy bit where Berry, who did the scene to become more confident in her own body onscreen², becomes the figure in control, whilst it is Hugh Jackman who becomes the punch line to the empowered and comfortable woman, even blushing in his character in the moment. Far more insulting with time having past is simply how little Berry actually has to do. It is more egregious your sole female lead has nothing to do, a femme fatale who may be playing both sides but is a blank slate. Even a "dumb" action film could have benefited from what film noir did, the ability to give actresses in these potentially dubious roles meaty performances as compelling figures, something you could see Halle Berry do in what little she has here, but never gets.

Swordfish is okay, where really the issue is of how so many of these films have everything but feel like disparate parts. This is more so the case as, for a film released a few months before the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the start of the second Gulf War, one of the more compelling loose ends is the knowledge that Travolta's character is actually a black ops agent, a thief who is stealing his own country's money to fund protecting the country from terrorist threats. This kind of subversive touch, lost in the ballyhoo, could have been something to let breathe and allow this a knowing air of subversion and weirdness. This is more so now, as mentioned in the review, it is likely due to this film, from one glib comment in this film from Travolta about U.S. President Thomas Jefferson personally seeing to a treasonous person, that people thought this actually happened despite the fact the screenwriter clearly added that into the dialogue as a fictitious flourish^{3a & 3b}. This perverse afterlife to the film is weirder than fiction, making one wonder what this series of fragments, proudly as over-the-top as possible, could have been if playing more to these crime tropes fully committed to a mad edge. Far from the worst film ever made nowadays, Swordfish however from my teen years, like many of those films, could have been lodged fully into the memory if it had the courage to go up to eleven than just come off as silly. Face/Off, brought up earlier in this review, was a silly film I first saw in my teenage years, but it is remembered for good reasons, which is not surprising as director John Woo, able to fully unleash his style from his eighties Hong Kong films, came from a style of filmmaking that never let the stranger or even kitsch aspects undercut taking their dramas seriously nor not making the action scenes as inventive as possible. If this got sillier and Travolta got to pontificate more on movies over espressos, Swordfish could have been something more even if it had become a favourite “so-bad-it’s-good” movie for people to talk of on podcasts, but instead what it is cautious as too many of these films are.

 

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1) The nadir of this, which I am amazed was allowed to go forth, is of course when Seth MacFarlane hosted the 2013 Oscars and performed the song We Saw Your Boobs, which came off as a demeaning when, to be honest, a song called "We Saw Your Butt" about male nude scenes might have avoided this by playing to a jovial glee without the gender bias.

2) Halle Berry bares her soul, written by Bruce Kirkland for Canoe.ca, archived from the original published July 11^th 2012, originally published July 20^th 2009.

3a) Execution on the White House Lawn, taken from Monticell.org.

3b) Jefferson still survives, unlike the other guy, written by Anna Berkes for Jefferson Library.wordpress, published November 5th 2008.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

 

Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter & Larry Sulkis

Cast: Natasha Henstridge as Lieutenant Melanie Ballard; Ice Cube as James "Desolation" Williams; Jason Statham as Sergeant Jericho Butler; Clea DuVall as Officer Bashira Kincaid; Pam Grier as Commander Helena Braddock; Joanna Cassidy as Dr. Arlene Whitlock; Richard Cetrone as Big Daddy Mars; Liam Waite as Officer Michael Descanso; Duane Davis as "Uno" Williams; Lobo Sebastian as "Dos"; Rodney A. Grant as "Tres"

Canon Fodder

 

Ghosts of Mars was just okay. That really is not a good place to put oneself in a review, but for what was once a loathed film for me from John Carpenter, that pretty much is the perfect irony when returning to this. This was not even with the loaded issue for other viewers of the weight of his legacy against his later films before he retired and became fully a touring musician. It is deemed that John Carpenter’s career ended on much weaker films, and sadly that is a concept which I have heard with the legacies of a few big names. It seems absurd, and the argument that directors as they get older lose their spark misses context, when some get better and more interesting the less “popular” they are, and when you have a case like Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira was getting critical acclaim when he was making films past a hundred years old. With Ghosts of Mars, it feels less like a film of an older director losing his style; in fact, if this came from a young director in their twenties, it feels like the film that catches attention with hope that they capitalize on the style they have and add more personal voice to the later films. That is the real irony here, as Ghosts of Mars is sound in scope, with ambitious aspects, but the presentation is conventional at times to the point it lacked something, which could be found from anyone of any age.

The setting is a tantalizing one, with this one tiny story within it even if with grander concerns. Mars is colonized, and unfortunately, an entity of its past are possessing the settlers in isolated colonies, turning them into husks to be controlled and kill those not taken over. A Martian police unit has been sent to pick up a criminal, James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube), from a jail in a mining colony. In attempting to collect Williams, the group find themselves within a colony where no one is around, until they find the headless bodies strung up and survivors turned into a horde of killers responsible for this. The tone of this, including that their only form of escape from these killers is a giant space railway train, evokes the western genre in an outer space setting. We never got a western from John Carpenter despite the fact he has always been open in his admiration for them and inspired by them. One of the most obvious examples is how the premise of Rio Bravo (1959) inspiring Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and this is important as that is an earlier Carpenter film evoked in Ghosts of Mars as the police and Williams find themselves trapped in a place of head hunters.

The one thing which has not aged well – in a film where the practical art design is juggled with working with CGI, for a film from the early 2000s with a soundtrack by Carpenter full of heavy metal riffs – is actually that parallel to old western films. Space westerns as a concept allow the idea, through a new frontier that is uncharted, to explore the issues of the western, allow us to reflect on the past. One of the most loaded of these is colonization of land, especially as the American Wild West is set in the context that land actually belonged to the many tribes of Native Americans. Ghost of Mars never explicitly refers to this, but by accident the film is riffing on the idea of this, which is not good by mistake as these titular ghosts, literal as we learn of who they are, are psychopaths who disfigure their hosts with body piercings, wearing victims’ faces and collect their severed heads on pikes. It is a dicey position to deal with themes of white colonization in horror with plot tropes like this, even when the colonialists are to also be criticized or even if all of this is unintentional. There is a reason why S. Craig Zahler, when he made an actual horror western with Bone Tomahawk (2015) went out of his way with the script to distance ideas to avoid this, with an actual Native American character on the leads’ side, as they are about to enter the hostile lands of a cannibal tribe, openly dismisses the “troglodytes” as they are called as being nothing like an indigenous American tribe but simply monstrous, and even that film still got called out by some reviewers as racist. You cannot really nod to themes of outsiders fighting the hostile forces of uncharted landscapes without bringing up uncomfortable colonial issues, or racial stereotypes, and Ghosts of Mars even when dealing with hostile Martian ghosts unfortunately falls into this.

Everything else about Ghosts of Mars beyond this is just okay, entertaining but just not at the batting average expected from John Carpenter, which becomes the curse for any creator who manages to string a series of legacy defining works, more so when just one of them would have been enough to cement a legacy, but Carpenter managed multiple in a row. That is the issue, that his highs were so big, even the less regarded ones, or under seen, like Christine (1983) appear with hindsight to be better than most. The issue here is that we are just missing that one twist in the plot, missing that one turn or shock of his style of the films before to stick out. The whit is still there, and actually this is jokier even if the nastiness of the threat is here. In the downtime, whilst some of the nods to the female cast being gay are crassly put, there is a fascinating nod I completely missed in my youth to the setting being a matriarchal colony. It is merely the backdrop, causing one to wish this film had been more a success and Carpenter could have made another film in this world, as it provokes a fascinating turn on gender politics without needing to be the central concern. At a period where Mars’ colonization has been dealt with in areas like the lack of breathable oxygen but is still early days, we have already set up that the figures in high power of women, that is never explained aside from the fact that, barring Ice Cube as the anti-hero, our lead is Natasha Henstridge, allowing her a good meaty role as a result of this. Men are still here, including a baby Jason Statham before his career grew, but the women are in charge, with Pam Grier as the head of the police group, and the script making jokes the explicitly cut down to size macho bullshit, even accidentally cutting their own thumb off whilst high at one point, in the downtime. Whilst Statham plays his character as a horn dog who tries too hard to proposition to Henstridge multiple times, his is one of the only male characters with Ice Cube’s "Desolation" Williams to be reliable, the most comedy coming from William’s supposed savors from jail, his brother and his two colleagues, who become the butt of most of these jokes. Cube himself, doing better than Busta Rhymes infamously in Halloween: Resurrection (2002) as a hip hop star in a genre film at this point, is stiff at first, too much attempt to make him edgy and cool, and thankfully he is able to get to the point of standing out when he and Henstridge just get to play a buddy cop duo role stuck in this hellish scenario.

The aesthetic also stands out. The practical effects are still visible, in the production design juggling the aesthetics of the western genre with science fiction on a lower scale genre film, working around ways to depict details like the giant tank-like train, a symbol from western iconography, which still work and have their own distinct sheen. There is a sense of cool pulp sci-fi in the Millennium, and it feels closer to this new century and decade than a film washing over in aesthetics from the nineties either. The music is also strong for me, in mind that there is now a greater emphasis on chugging metal riffs, prominently involving the thrash metal band Anthrax but also including guitarists of note like Steve Vai, Buckethead and Nine Inch Nail’s Robin Finck. It feels less nu metal, as the time frame have shown to have been prevalent, but feeling part of what was to become the “New Wave of American Heavy Metal” that fully formed in 2005 onwards if in context of a John Carpenter score. Some may find it inappropriate, but for me it befits the aesthetic of the entire film, which is strong in itself. With the isolation of the red earth of the setting, all the colonial town setting has lo-fi science fiction aesthetics, with steel grey and heavy looking vehicles, heavy looking guns, and the costumes either suggesting struggling on in life or the uniforms of officers designed more for practicality in this environment. The world does breath into life in the little details.

It is just a shame that the film is missing just the last little thing to get it over, the iconic aspect that a lot of Carpenter’s most well appreciated films had. This was also the film, until Carpenter’s final theatrical work The Ward (2010), we were left with as it did not do well at the box office at all. It is, in its own context, a good as a solid genre film, even in spite of issues raised by accident with the narrative. It is just a shame that this is missing that one diversion away from an A-to-B plot, which made Carpenter’s films from his golden era stand out, something which could have made this more of a highlight within the filmography.