STALKED PLAYER

RIP to theatre critic, novelist & occasional actor Leonard Harris, best known as the handsome Senator Palantine in Scorcese's Taxi Driver, passed on at 81.

GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

As Barry Graham points out, this month marks the 109^th anniversary of the premiere of A Trip to the Moon, the pioneering sci-fi film from the great Georges Melies (Turner Classic Movies shows a collection of Melies shorts Monday at 7:45 am Phoenix time). September also marks the release of Apollo 18, a less charming lunar excursion.

Apollo 18, like Cloverfield & Trollhunter, uses the Blair Witch conceit: The premise is that we’re seeing classified footage of an Apollo mission, supposedly scrubbed for budgetary reasons but actually conducted in secret under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The stolid astronauts who land at the lunar south pole soon discover that—gulp—they aren’t alone…

Apollo 18’s opening was rescheduled several times, & Dimension didn’t screen the film for critics (in Phoenix, anyway), so I confess I wasn’t expecting much. The studio’s caution was understandable. I’d be surprised if it became a hit with a wide audience—even at less than an hour and a half, it’s too claustrophobic, oppressive & one-note. But on its own narrow terms, it works, for me at least. The two lead actors (Lloyd Owen & Warren Christie) even though they’re Welsh & Irish, respectively, flawlessly capture the aw-shucks machismo of American astronaut cadences, & the look of ‘70s-era film & video footage is lovingly recreated.

There’s nothing remotely new about the film in terms of sci-fi content, but the director, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, generates a strong atmosphere of desolation & dread, & there are some pretty well-timed jolts. There’s even a whisper of political disillusionment worked in.

On the other hand, maybe you’d prefer an earthbound alien invasion…

“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.

The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first & possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written & directed by Joe Cornish.

The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, & goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords & bottle rockets & the like, & take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.

Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer & Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, & the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega), is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled & sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—& their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.

The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—& the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics &, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.

SWOOP THERE IT IS

From Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, comes…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, a pterodactyl…

…which swooped down last month upon the Cardiff Kook, a bronze statue of a surfer that is reportedly much-loathed by the surfing community & often the target of pranks. As pranks go, this one is pretty spectacular—the prankster even provided a prehistoric backdrop.

SANGSTER THE MEMORIES

A fond RIP to British screenwriter & occasional director Jimmy Sangster, departed at 83.

Though he reportedly had no special enthusiasm for the genre himself, Sangster was one of the principal architects of the horror revolution at Hammer Studios in the ‘50s & ‘60s, writing The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) & Horror of Dracula (1958), the original Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing incarnations of those respective icons. His handful of directorial credits includes Lust for a Vampire (1971) & the underrated, amusingly nasty Horror of Frankenstein (1970).

But…

Monster-of-the-Week: …instead of any of these, let's give this week’s nod to his lesser-known terror the Rakshasa, a ghoul borrowed from Hindu lore, in “Horror in the Heights,” a Sangster-penned installment of the ‘70s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (quite probably that silly but fun show’s best episode). Seen here in his true form…

…the Rakshasa appeared to his victims in the shape of a person they trusted—to monster-hunter Carl Kolchak, it was as the sweet little old lady who worked in his office…

WARRIN' JEFFS

Per this story forwarded to me by my pal Dewey (who also suggested the superb headline), there are three, count 'em three, Jeff Buckely movies in the works. My Buckley-fanatic pal Dave might regard this as too few...

RIP to filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti, famous/notorious for 1962's Mondo Cane & similar now-quaint shock-documentaries—& also the popularizer of the term "mondo" (for, vaguely, "extreme," or "exotic") in English—passed on in Rome at 91.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE THING CALLED WRONG?

Disclosure up front: Barry Graham & I have been close friends for many years, since we both worked at the Phoenix New Times in the late ‘90s. We’ve collaborated on a couple of projects, edited each other’s freelance pieces for different newspapers, gone to scores if not hundreds of movies together, & talked on the phone with the stamina of teenage girls, if not always with an equal level of maturity.

Still, with as much objectivity as I can muster—& much as it pains me to feed the mad Scottish bastard’s ego—I must grant that Graham is probably the best writer of prose I’ve ever known well, & that some of the very best of said prose can be found in his novel The Wrong Thing, newly out from Switchblade.

Barry recites from & signs the tome Saturday at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, starting at 5 p.m.

Graham’s idea with The Wrong Thing was to put a human face on an archetypical figure, in this case the classic southwestern boogeyman: a murderous Mexican-American drug dealer known simply as The Kid. The Kid’s career is traced from his neglected childhood in a New Mexico barrio, through a string of gruesome murders & other crimes.

On the surface The Kid is likable & unassuming, even sweet—he loves his girlfriend & his cat, & reading & cooking. But whenever he’s confronted with any petty authority or crossed in the slightest way, he lapses into brutality with an almost slapstick haplessness, stumbling into homicide the way Jerry Lewis might stumble into a tray of desserts.

I don’t mean by this to suggest, by the way, that The Wrong Thing is black comedy. It’s horrific & sad, & Graham’s earnest tone insists that we take in the momentousness, both physical & moral, of every gory outrage. What keeps it from being depressing is the speed & exhilaration & straightforward beauty of the writing. Graham’s style—precise without fussiness, simple & conversational without forced chattiness—turns this tale from a case study into a tight, compact tragedy.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

Out this week on DVD is...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...The Colossus of New York, a 1958 yarn in which the brain of genius Ross Martin is salvaged after his accidental death & placed in this hulking yet deco-elegant robot giant...

...which has been thoughtfully equipped with death rays that he can shoot from his eyes. I've always had some affection for this cornball black-&-white robodrama, with its piano score by Van Cleave. Check out the trailer here.