"10 Cloverfield Lane" (2016) d/ Dan Trachtenberg

I was under the impression that I reviewed 2008's Cloverfield somewhere along the way, even if only through a brief one take. Apparently not. Where is my mind, like Black Francis used to croon. Still, that missing entry will not halt production here on tonight's review, the 2016 follow up, 10 Cloverfield Lane, a sequel in name only which Dean of Detonation, J.J. Abrams, who produced here, calls a mere "blood relative" to the original movie. Speaking of the original, the hulking, colossal beast is back for this entry, only now he's none other than John Goodman, a genre favorite since we first saw him in 1984's C.H.U.D., and he's supported by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who fright fans might recognize from her appearance in the Black X-mas (2006) reboot, though most, like myself, will have long put that calamity out of their consciousness by now, I'd hope.


"maybe you could take the next selfie out of three point stance? Sincerely, Brett Favre."
After a spat with her fiance spoils her generally cheery disposition, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes an angry, late night drive through rural Loose-uh-anna, where the radio confirms a recent blackout phenomenon occurring in major cities. To further compound matters, some reckless fuck suddenly head on slams her car off the road, and she wakes up in a leg brace, shackled to a wall in some concrete cellar. Hate when that happens, don't you? Her captor/saviour is a curious fellow named Howard (John Goodman), who graciously explains to the groggy accident victim that the country has come under attack from a threat of unknown origin, and that she is currently housed in a bunker from which she is unable to leave, due to the toxicity of the outside air. Validating Howard's tall tale to a certain degree, is Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), a fellow who's helped construct the very bunker that the trio has been subsisting in. He claims to have witnessed the attack in question, and subsequently fought his way into the quarters. Still, Howard confesses that he may have run Michelle off the road on purpose on that fateful night. Awww, somebody's got a crush.


The mashed potatoes in this vat belong to me. No one is allowed nary a spoonful unless overseen by me."
During one of Michelle's many mad scrambles toward freedom, after jacking Howard's bunker keys, she encounters a hysterical woman outside the main door and decked out in open sores and lesions, who frantically tries to break in, but Michelle seals her fate by taking Howard's side on this one and returning to the group after she brains herself repeatedly on the reinforced door. Time passes, revealing that Howard  may be concealing a dark secret or two of his own, showing photographs of what he claims is his daughter, Megan, except that the pictures show a girl named Brittany, a high school friend of Emmett's younger sister, who disappeared a few years back. Maybe you and Emmett should go ahead and fashion that makeshift biohazard suit, and keep it on the d-l from Howie, just in case he decides to put that fifty-five gallon drum of chloric acid he's got sitting around down there, to good use. Naturally things come to a tension-packed boil, guns are fired, acid gets spilled, and the bunker's entrance is finally breached, but what barely passes for a finale in this instance feels completely added on and unnecessary; a cuckold's by-the-numbers love letter to political correctness and gender balance. This development stunts the picture's possible growth for me, and designates it to the ever-heaping pile of ordinary big studio fodder. Approach with caution.


"...on rotation for three and a half minutes and my corn dog still tastes like rubber in the middle!"
Despite the flat, predictable ending, I found myself enjoying Goodman's performance a lot; a pity that it's immersed in such median genre fare, or I'd probably revisit it again soon. Not ruling such an occasion out altogether, mind you, just still feeling gypped by the production's assumptive nod to it's sci-fi-crazy audience, and it's believed limited ability to interpret it's own favorite cinema genre at the movies. On the scale, Lane musters up a deuce, no War of the Worlds (2005) by any means, but far from Nightbeast (1982). Wednesday nights seem like a perfect fit for a screening, if you feel driven to do just that sometime, for whatever reason.


Remember your first dime store Ben Cooper Halloween costume?

"Paranoiac" (1963) d/Freddie Francis

Tonight, we'll examine Freddie Francis' first effort in the director's chair for Hammer Studios, a tightly wrapped psychological thriller starring the always excellent Oliver Reed, as well as Janette Scott of Day of the Triffids (1963) fame. Closer in look and feel to the director's later film, The Elephant Man (1980), than the color-splashed genre romps the studio would come to be known for, Paranoiac wears a shroud of Hitchcock-esque deceit in weaving its potent parable of madness and money around Francis' richly framed black and white shots. They don't make 'em like this any more...


"We're out of brandy, Williams. I should think that you'll order eighty-four more cases immediately..."
We meet the affluent Ashby family as they attend a memorial service at church for their deceased parents, when Eleanor (Janette Scott) is struck with a sudden vision of her dead brother, Tony, who may or may not have committed suicide some eight years prior. Her brother, Simon (Ollie Reed),  is a devil-may-care posh sot, who's taken to driving his E-type Jaguar through the estate's lush flower beds and drunkenly dart-fencing  poofs at the pub, when he isn't downing brandy's and/or Eleanor's busty nurse, Francoise (Liliane Brousse), that is. It seems that Eleanor's grip on reality has been steadily slipping since her brother's untimely demise, so much so, that she even tries to copy him, jumping blindly from a cliff out of misery, only to be saved by...her dead brother, Tony (Alexander Davion)? Well this certainly fucks Simon's chances for an inheritance pay out in three weeks' time, doesn't it?


"The flights on these...I believe they're crooked."
Of course, as is usually the case when dealing with a taut British thriller like this, nothing is as it seems at first glance. Eleanor's condition improves with Tony's arrival, but Aunt Harriet (Sheila Burrell) and Simon aren't at all sold on the man's identity, calling in the family attorney Kossett (Maurice Denham) to test him with family trivia, which he passes with flying colors, thanks to a thorough prepping from Kossett's son, who's been skimming cash from the family funds for quite a while. It's a good thing that he's an impostor, too, as Eleanor seems to have fallen in love with him somewhere along the way, and incest is the kind of scandal that might ruin the family name. His extravagant, drunken lifestyle forever nipping at his heels in the form of debt collectors and magistrates, Simon cuts his returned brother's brake line, nearly removing his recovering sister in the process to narrow down the division of his inheritance, and drowns the nurse when she realizes too late who the real family mental case is. If you didn't know, seeing a mysterious depiction of Oliver Reed on the release poster as you walked into the theater might have tipped it off for you, I dunno, anyway,  it's  Simon. But the shocks don't stop there, no sirree.


"Is that "Summer Holiday" by Cliff Richard and the Shadows? I bloody love that track!"
Scott went on to appear in The Old Dark House (1963) and Crack in the World (1965) while Sheila Burrell who had a long stage career, was Sir Laurence Olivier's cousin, no less. One of my favorite Hammer movies, hands down, and easily just as enjoyable as Christopher Lee leering with fangs displayed, at Veronica Carlson's technicolor tits, or a post-surgery Peter Cushing straining to wipe away brow sweat with a hand doused in bright stage blood. Sure, it's a British Psycho-clone like several others of the era, but one that's been masterfully handled by Francis and his crew, with solid performances from the cast, Reed's being the notable standout, of course, and thus, the sum of those excellent parts is full of enough suspense, mystery, and atmosphere to merit four Wops on the scale. A true classic. See it now.


Would you look at the state of that... Impossible to hire good clean up staff these days, 'innit?

"The Wind"(1987)d/Nico Mastorakis

When last we examined one of Greek filmmaker Nico Mastorakis' movies nearly five hundred reviews ago(the very first post on Wopsploitation, some useless trivia for you there) back in ought-seven, naturally, it was his wildly controversial, widely banned 1975 pioneer effort, Island of Death that we scrutinized.Some five years later, we find another Mastorakis film to focus upon, this time, one of his low-budget American productions from the mid to late eighties, a direct-to-video cat n' mouse pot boiler set in Greece and starring a surprisingly good cast that includes Meg Foster, Robert Morley, Steve Railsback, David McCallum, and none other than Wings Hauser as the unhinged American psychopath.Sure, I just named the killer in the opening paragraph, but you're probably not gonna cast an apex antagonist like Hauser in your film as anything else but, really, are you.Besides, apart from a few moments of enveloping paranoia, Mastorakis, who wrote, produced, and directed here(as he often does), plays the whole thing decidedly straightforward and un-giallo, despite some mounting comparison of this particular work to Argento's over the years, crafting methodical suspense out of the isolation of his main character, and anthropomorphising the island's foreboding, seasonal night winds, instead.Despite the film's mostly lethargic pace and seeming aversion to the plot twists, gore, or nudity required of a slasher or giallo, Wind manages to weave some real tension and atmosphere around the lush cinematography and solid performances from it's two leads throughout.

"Would you mind terribly if I pulverized my poultry in the lavvy briefly?"
Sian Anderson(Meg Foster) is an American mystery novelist vacationing for several weeks in the remote Greek villa of Monemvassia, as rented to her by elderly-but-opinionated British chatterbox, Elias Appleby(Robert Morley), who tells her:"When I first saw this place, I nearly had an orgasm!", before warning her not to venture out in the brutal night winds, reminding her that she isn't in Chicago.While her overprotective beau, John(David McCallum), worries poolside(with a plexiglas window, no less) in America, the seasonal isolation allows for her to get to work on her latest novel, as she fleshes out an imagined argument between Appleby and his hired help, a gum-chewing American ne'er-do-well named Phil(Wings Hauser) who seems to appear and disappear with the sudden wind gusts, and who helpfully offers:"If you need to know about death, I'm right next door..."(!).Mighty neighborly of you, Phil.That night, she thinks she sees him burying a body out back, and after investigating further, discovers that the partially unearthed hand contains Elias' signature ring.While she struggles to determine whether the threat is real or imagined, and unable to maintain a phone connection long enough to relate her dilemma to her stateside lover(who can't get through to the Greek authorities on his end, either), she calls Elias' Greek wife with her suspicions, and when the woman comes looking for her husband in the blustery night, Phil feeds her sickle-fueled death, throwing her lifeless corpse into a pantry next to Elias, whose body he's moved to further complicate things.

Nevermind those limpid blue pools of hers, get a look at that delicious cigarette.
It isn't long before the peninsula's brutal winds usher in a prolonged game of cat and mouse between the homicidal handyman and the isolated writer, who barricades herself in, alternately pouring a pot of steaming hot water into his mush, stabbing his shoulder with a butcher knife, and repeatedly firing off a tactical shotgun in his general direction.John eventually gets through to the police, who send a landlocked sailor named Kesner(Steve Railsback) to check on Sian, but after much skepticism and precious little investigation, he's impaled through a door by Phil's sickle.Unwavered by his mounting injuries, Phil cracks a few poppers and harrasses the author with nursery rhymes and Humphrey Bogart impersonations over the phone, adding, matter-of-factly:"Do me a favor. Don't die quietly, okay. Talk to me." Sian boobytraps the door with some rope, and when Phil tries to break in, the door slams his sickle into his midsection, apparently killing him.As the writer tries desperately to flag down a couple of indecisive newlyweds outside the castle, Phil pops up again, chasing the hysterical girl to a lofty ledge, where he takes one of the more memorable slo-mo missteps in cinema history, and plummets, screaming, several thousand feet to the jagged rocks below, or at least an unreasonable dummy facsimile does.Roll credits.

"I don't usually terrorize women vacationing in Greece with a sickle, but when I do, I make sure I'm hopped up on Amyl Nitrite first." 
Ironically, the cover art depicted above would find itself on a Turkish poster for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning(!), with Robert Morley's familiar face painted over with a goalie mask, but Wings Hauser chasing Meg Foster down the length of the sickle inexplicably remains.Turks are fucking weird, aren't they?
Hauser would again appear in front of Mastorakis' lens the following year in 'Nightmare at Noon', most recently scoring a credit in Rubber(2010).Foster is a Reading, Pa. native who's appeared in everything from Welcome to Arrow Beach/ aka Tender Flesh(1974), and They Live(1988), to Leviathan(1989) and 1994's Shrunken Heads, and will be appearing in Rob Zombie's latest effort, Lords of Salem.With those glow-in-the-dark blue eyes, I can't hold it against her.During his long career, McCallum has scored genre credits in television shows like Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, while you'll most likely remember Morley as the rotund theater critic forced to eat his poodles by Vincent Price in 1973's Theater of Blood.After giving a critically acclaimed performance as Charlie Manson in 1976 tele-pic Helter Skelter, Steve Railsback has turned up in everything from Lifeforce(1985) to Ed Gein(2000), and even Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects(2005).On the scale, Wind merits a solid two Wops, and is well worth a look.

Now that's what I call: κολύμπι στο ποτάμι του λάσπη νέον σε Έλληνες πουλόβερ, or 'Swimming in the river of Neon Slime in a Greek sweater'.