Recommended Horror Streams on Netflix and Tubi

The Platform

Netflix: Virtually worthless for 20th Century horror, but necessary for the here and now. 

1)     The Platform                        Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia                            2019

2)     Errementari                          Paul  Urkijo                                             2017

3)     Black Mirror                          Various                                                 2011-

4)     It Follows                               David Robert Mitchell                          2014

5)     Drag Me to Hell                    Sam Raimi                                             2009

6)     Get Out                                  Jordan Peele                                          2017

7) Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities    Various                         2022

8)     Okja                                       Bong Joon-ho                                        2017

9)     The Perfection                      Richard Shepard                                    2018

10)    Gerald's Game                     Mike Flanagan                                      2017

Tubi: You have to wade through a lot of trash, but there are treasures to be found.

1)     Dead Ringers                       David Cronenberg                                  1988

2)     Evil Dead 2                          Sam Raimi                                              1987

3)   The Last House on the Left  Wes Craven                                            1971

4)  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre   Tobe Hooper                                     1974

5)    The Old Dark House              James Whale                                         1932

6)     Mandy                                   Panos Cosmatos                                     2018

7)     Audition                                Takashi Miike                                         1999

8)    Monkey Shines                    George A. Romero                                    1988

9)    Re-Animator                        Stuart Gordon                                           1985

10)  The Unknown                   Tod Browning                                 1927

Dead Ringers

Ballerina

Jeon Jong-seo

I had very low expectations for Chun-Hyun Lee's Ballerina, an offshoot of the John Wick films, but was pleasantly surprised. The Korean feature, currently streaming on Netflix, is a revenge flick with unexpected reservoirs of characterization and a stylistic elan that is rare in the action genre. Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), a former bodyguard and assassin, discovers that her best friend has committed suicide, driven to the act by an involuntary BDSM session with a sex trafficker and drug dealer named Choi Pro (Kim Ji-hoon). Ok-ju gets her revenge after much carnage, though the film avoids the balletic action sequences that distinguished the John Wick series until the final reel.

Mr. Lee films the flashback sequences detailing Ok-ju relationship with her bestie by highlighting pastel colors and the nostalgia for happy times past. The sequences of Ok-ju seeking her revenge have a more realistic, grittier color tone. Throughout, Lee presents a narrative in which characters rise above or succumb to their shame, a notion which is perhaps old hat to the occidental world. Both Ms. Jeon and Mr. Kim are superb in this action genre delight. Mr. Lee is, at times, overly beholden to the influence of Refn's Drive, but Ballerina is a pop movie with genuine fizz and personality. 

The Rain People

Shirley Knight and James Caan in The Rain People

Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, from 1969, is a road movie that explores the byways of American alienation. Shirley Knight portrays a pregnant Long Island housewife who flees the milieu of a suffocating marriage to tour the country in her station wagon. She picks up a mentally disabled hitchhiker (James Caan) who proves difficult to jettison. She also attracts the attentions of a seemingly courtly policeman (Robert Duvall). The disparate strands of the plot eventually coalesce into tragedy.

After the relative disaster of his big budget musical Finian's Rainbow, The Rain People is an attempt by Coppola to craft a more intimate, personal film. The flick is influenced more by Antonioni than Minnelli. Coppola helps his three leads etch memorable performances, but his script, at times, feels hackneyed and derivative. The opening of the film, in which Knight untangles herself from her husband's embrace, lacks subtlety as a portrait of a woman leaving the suffocating cocoon of the suburbs. Similarly, when Caan's character starts freeing the animals at a roadside attraction where he has found work, the effect is all too reminiscent of Lennie and his rabbits in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: a ham-handed portrayal of an innocent far too noble for this wicked world.

Fortunately, the performances and Coppola's grace with the camera transcend these contrivances. As Roger Ebert noted at the time, the film is a "mirror image of Easy Rider" in that travelers search for both America and themselves. The Americana of the film's location shoots, a Veteran's Day parade in Chattanooga and a drive-in movie theater in West Virginia, linger in the mind's eye long after the machinations of the plot.  

Enys Men

Enys Men

Mark Jenkin's Enys Men is an overly arty, yet striking supernatural film. Set on a remote point in West Cornwall, the film portrays a fiftyish widow who lives a solitary existence recording botanical notes on local flora and fauna. There is no drama per se, but we see the memories, dreams and reflections that fill the woman's mind as she goes about her daily routine. 

There are a number of significant themes running through the film, perhaps too many. Jenkin's posits the standing stones of Britain's pagan heritage as a more true portal to the past than the Episcopalian Church, but the overall effect is academic rather than felt. The past is always present for our protagonist and Mary Woodvine's performance is as aptly uningratiating as the film itself. We see her visions of herself during her troubled youth and those of her dead husband. These traumas merge in her mind with the societal and ecological lacerations of bygone Cornwall, particularly its history as a tin mining center. The fissures and scars left on the land and its bodies are a recurring visual motif in the film.

The main theme of the film and the one best expressed by its visuals is that of ecological peril. Indeed, the film's publicity trumpeted the small carbon footprint of the production. The gorse, fescue, seaweed, lichens and other natural wonders of Cornwall are the real stars of the film and give the film a pantheistic tug. The film, shot on genuine 16mm Kodak, is beautiful in a Terrence Malick, the world in a grain of sand sort of way. However, what contrivances the script has to offer have been trotted out by the film's midpoint, leaving us a plodding and unsurprising film.

The film has a color scheme that underlines the ecological theme. Red is used for petroleum products, a too obvious instance of a director grabbing us by the lapels and exhorting us to stop. Furthermore, the film is overly indebted to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now for its color scheme, an influence Jenkin is big enough to acknowledge. Jenkin has a director's eye and shows promise, but Enys Men makes me think he hasn't fully digested his influences.

Don't Look Now

Street Trash

              
J. Michael Muro's Street Trash, from 1987, is an above average exploitation flick. I wouldn't quite call it a good film, but it resembles The Toxic Avenger if that film had had competent direction. Muro integrates the action with fluent camera movements and studied framing. Street Trash proved to be an effective calling card for Muro who has become a successful Hollywood camera operator and cinematographer with credits that include Titanic, Strange Days, and Longmire. 

Street Trash is comic horror splatter set in Brooklyn. A fortified wine named "Viper" is causing imbibers to melt and then explode. Despite previous claims, it is truly the last gasp of action painting in the American cinema. One tolerance for this kind of flick may depend upon whether one can glean humor from a scene in which the cast plays hot potato with a severed penis. Besides drawing from Troma, the film lifts bits from Mad Max 2 and even Platoon, with the swamps of Jersey standing in for Nam. The cast is a collection of mildly talented unknowns with the exception of Tony Darrow, as a mobster who melts, and the unfortunate Ian Bernardo. Not one for the annals of cinema, but, within its seamy genre, this is a relatively handsome and explicable film. 

Aferim!

Teodor Corban

Radu Jude's Aferim!, from 2015, is an outstanding film set in the Romania of 1835. The film follows a constable named Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his teenage son Ionita (Mihal Comanoiu) as they track and capture as escaped Gypsy slave. The picaresque nature of the film provides for an overview of the Balkans which Jude, as always in his films, portrays as a cauldron of ethnic resentment. 

The beautiful black and white cinematography and graceful pans of the lead duo on horseback make this the most classically framed of Jude's films. However, the dialogue and narrative arc of Aferim! undercut this with a sardonic flavor that is Jude's trademark. The portrait of the Balkans in this film is that of a brutal and oppressive feudal state. The title, which roughly translates as bravo, is an indication of the dark irony Jude employs. 

Their mission to seize and return the Gypsy slave provides Costandin an opportunity to give his son an unsentimental education in how to survive in a cutthroat world. A few critics have drawn a parallel between this duo and the one in John Ford's The Searchers, but I found Costandin to be more akin to Rooster Cogburn than Ethan Edwards. Costandin shares Cogburn's gift for colloquialisms, discursive storytelling, and ribaldry. Costandin's patter is a mixture of folk songs, fable, and garbled scripture, a blend that contains kernels of wisdom amidst the blarney; ones left behind for the next generation. Teodor Corban's performance ranks amongst the best of this century.

Imparted in Costandin's lessons for his son is that virtue does not exist in a vacuum and that ethical behavior is always situational. When they capture the slave, they automatically feel sympathy for his plight, but they are compelled to do their duty, no matter how odious and the slave's fate turns out to be odious, indeed. Jude's ambivalence towards his cultural heritage is the crux of his work. Aferim! is an ode to Romanian culture, its traditions, music fashions, and parables. It is also a condemnation of that country's history of intolerance and cruelty.
         

Broken Lullaby

Ernst Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby, from 1932, is an obscure anti-war drama from a director more renowned for his sophisticated comedies. The downbeat picture was a box office fiasco and Paramount released it under a variety of titles (The Man I Killed, The Fifth Commandment) in a vain attempt attempt to drum up business. Reviewers of the day were respectful (Robert Sherwood effused in The New York Post "...it is the best talking picture that has been yet seen or heard"), but the trade papers correctly predicted its commercial prospects: Variety noted that the film "doesn't shape as a business getter" and Harrison's Reports warned that the flick "was too morbid for children or Sunday viewing."

The picture was based on Maurice Rostand's novella "L'homme que j'ai tue" which was later adapted into a play which met with success both in France and abroad. Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson collaborated on the screenplay, the latter would go on to pen some of Lubitsch's greatest films. Broken Lullaby was one of a number of film of that time (like The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918, Pilgrimage to name just a few) which expressed revulsion at the toll of World War One and championed an international humanism instead of nationalist fervor.

The film focuses on a French veteran, Paul Renard (Phillips Holmes), haunted by his killing of a young German soldier. Renard reads the dead soldier's journal and endeavors to make amends by visiting the man's hometown and final resting place. There, he meets the soldier's kindly parents (Lionel Barrymore and Louise Carter) and comely fiancée, Elsa (Nancy Carroll). Renard claims to be a chum of the dead man from his music conservatory days in Paris. Elsa and Paul are soon smitten. Paul's masquerade becomes untenable, but love emerges triumphant.

Phillips Holmes and Nancy Carroll

The portentous nature of the scenario makes Broken Lullaby heavy going at times. The film is weakest when it is at its most didactic. The transference of guilt is a theme stated too baldly. Worse are the deficiencies of the leads. Carroll was a Broadway star who was signed by Paramount upon the coming of the talkies. Her charisma is submerged here by her character's embalmed gentility. Even worse is Holmes (An American Tragedy, The Criminal Code) in one of the most dreadful performances of the early sound era. Pauline Kael, who dismissed the film as "drab, sentimental hokum", described Holmes in the film as "unspeakably handsome, but an even more unspeakable actor." Holmes' overwrought attempts to handle the already melodramatic dialogue sabotages every scene he is in. 

Much to my surprise, the best lead performance is by Lionel Barrymore. He has never been one of my favorites because he always seems to trot out one of two variations of his usual schtick: the kindly father figure (as in the Doctor Kildare pictures) or a sinister old codger (It's A Wonderful Life). Here he is wonderful, etching his character's pain especially well in silent moments. The support players are also superb, particularly Ms. Carter, Frank Sheridan, Tully Marshall, and ZaSu Pitts.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, Broken Lullaby has a number of extraordinary passages that are as effective as any in Lubitsch's ouevre. The framing and editing of shots is as superb in this film as in is in the same year's Trouble in Paradise, perhaps Lubitsch's best film. A sequence showing the spread of gossip in the village about the two lovers is equal to such bravura moments in Lubitsch's comic films. The opening sequence showing Paris marking Armistice day in 1919 is a signal achievement. After a few establishing shots, Lubitsch cuts to a view of the celebratory parade that also underlines the cost of the conflict.

The film then shows veterans in a hospital traumatized by celebratory cannonades. Lubitsch then cuts to Notre Dame where, after a memorial mass, we meet our protagonist. A tart shot conveys that swords have not been beaten into plowshares.

Broken Lullaby is by no means top drawer Lubitsch, but moments like these display his greatness. Holmes' performance upends the film, but the film's finest moments linger in my mind. The film has been relatively neglected critically despite spirited endorsements by Jean Mitry and Jonathan Rosenbaum. As the plague of warfare infests the Ukraine and the Holy Land, Lubitsch's impassioned denunciation of armed conflict in Broken Lullaby seems both deeply felt and all too timely.

Neighbors 2, The Third Generation

Chloe Grace Moretz and Zac Efron in Neighbors 2

Nicholas Stoller's Neighbors 2 is a rote sequel that provides some chuckles, but is ultimately forgettable. Here, as in the previous film, Stoller gets nice performances out of Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron and Dave Franco. However, there are no memorable moments like the breast pump scene from the first film. Stoller is not untalented, a neo-feminist critique of his own work embedded here shows an active mind. Most of the time, though, the film is on auto-pilot. Because Stoller's style here is mostly invisible, it is more productive to think of this as a Seth Rogen film. The usual touchstones are here: a bromance, Rogen's body used for comic effect, arrested development and, um, weed. Harmless fun, I suppose, but Rogen's corpus generally leaves me hungry for film by a real filmmaker. 

Namely Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His The Third Generation, from 1979, is batshit crazy and barely coherent. Yet, it satisfied me as a work of personal vision. Like Seth Rogen, Fassbinder has obsessive themes that figure in his works: the sado-masochistic nature of personal relationships, the conflicted camaraderie of groups, the thwarted promise of Socialism, the depravity lurking behind the glittering artifice of the bourgeoise, mirrors, film history and, um, schedule one narcotics. This last item is foregrounded in The Third Generation in the portrayal of the addict, Ilse. Numerous times in the film, she is shown preparing her fix while, in the background, feckless terrorists prattle on about their plans. After she dies from an overdose, Fassbinder offers a touching close-up of Gunther Kaufman, a lover of Fassbinder, weeping for her. The scene seems to portend Fassbinder's own descent into drugs and subsequent death. It also reminded me of the death of the infant Rocamadour in Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in which intellectuals' think they are grappling with grand ideas while their loved ones fall by the wayside.

I wonder if Fassbinder was reacting against the success of his previous feature, The Marriage of Maria Braun. That film was, for Fassbinder, relatively tidy, a well constructed Sirkian melodrama, neat and explicable. The Third Generation is overstuffed and haywire, with inspiration from Bresson and Godard. Capitalism in The Third Generation, as in the work of the two esteemed and crazed Marxists, is little more than a harbinger of fascism. The Third Generation is a paranoid work laden with text, both visual and aural. The soundtrack is constantly cluttered by overlapping emanations from TV and radio. Both because the characters live in a media saturated culture and because they are constantly turning up the volume in fear of audio surveillance.

Hanna Schygulla in The Third Generation

The film carries a sense that the socialistic ideals of 1968 have been subsumed. Fassbinder has Bulle Ogier try to lecture students on the revolution of 1848, but they are more interested in advancing their own agendas than in learning the lessons of history. The terrorists' kidnapping of business titan Eddie Constantine (a nod to Godard's corporate critique, Alphaville) displays that revolutionary ideals have evaporated. The terrorists are dressed for carnival, even their hostage is in a celebratory mood and blows streaming whistles. Tragedy has descended into farce and nothing more needs to be said. The film ends abruptly.

The film leaves me with a frisson of elation. Of course, it helps that I am neither a Marxist nor a heroin addict. Seeing the familiar faces of Fassbinder's stock company fills me with joy at their bonhomie and esprit de corps. They are all banding together for a higher purpose. A group of misfits united in play. The tone in The Third Generation is that of curdled disgust in the face of a hopeless system, but the players play on. (10/25/16)

Talk to Me

Sophie Wilde in Talk to Me

Danny and Michael Philippou's Talk to Me is an assured feature debut from the Australian duo. The twins gained renown from their RackaRacka YouTube on which they debuted such manic films as "Harry Potter vs Star Wars" and "Ronald McDonald vs Cookie Monster". The films are comic action shorts, heavily influenced by pro wrestling, in which the duo and their friends set about destroying their suburban Adelaide home in cartoon garb.

Talk to Me represents an attempt by the twins to leave the comic mayhem of the RackaRacka films behind. Except for a comic moment in which a hypnotized teen French kisses a bulldog, the film is traditional teen oriented horror fare that is played straight. An embalmed hand is used to conjure the spirits of the dead. The teens become hooked on the summoning ritual and deadly consequences result. Addiction is the primary theme of the film, though it is an addiction to social media rather than narcotics that is portrayed as a threat to youth. 

The brothers' technical knowledge of the nuts and bolts of filmmaking is on display throughout. The spasms of gory action are well handled. The twins even use a graceful tracking shot following a teen entering a party to create a memorable opening scene. Some of the more expository scenes betray awkwardness and not all of the young cast are effective. However, this is one of the few recent horror films that provides a satisfying denouement. Talk to Me has some rookie errors, but, overall, it bodes well for the future of the Philippou brothers.

Quick Cuts, October 2023

Ellijah Wood

An odd and disarming sleeper, Ant Timpson's Come to Daddy is a gory and well modulated horror film. Ellijah Wood plays Norval, a suicidal nebbish, who is summoned by his long lost father to a remote coastal address. Norval is soon in distress and must test his resourcefulness in order to survive. Spam, again, in a cabin, but also a thoughtful meditation on masculinity and its discontents. The cast is expert, particularly Stephen McHattie, Madeleine Simi, Martin Donovan, and Michael Smiley. That Rex Reed did not like it should be reason enough for for horror aficionados to check it out. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra's Good Manners, from 2017, is a Brazilian werewolf film with unusual subtlety and compassion. The film successfully folds a host of hot button issues, such as racism, sexuality, class issues, vegetarianism, and religion, into the narrative deftly. The high rises, shopping malls, and barrios of Sao Paulo are filmed with just enough expressionistic flavor to make them a fitting setting for this otherworldly fable. The filmmakers linking the onset of puberty and adolescent rebellion with their young werewolf's tale displays a keen understanding of the roots of lycanthropy. Another sleeper currently streaming on Tubi.

James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is a very minor triumph of production design and spritely direction. The look of the film hews more closely to kooky Barbarella than solemn Star Wars and all for the better. The last quarter drags because Gunn tries to combine action with pantheistic uplift, but most of the film is cheeky fun from the screenwriter of Tromeo and Juliet. Not as good as 1, but much better than 2.

Bernard Girard's Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, from 1966, is a workmanlike heist film starring James Coburn. Dated and overly cutesy, the film tries to coast on Coburn's charm, but is nether tough enough to work as a crime film or funny enough to work as a comedy. I did like the film's use of LAX as the site of the crime and the film's costumery. In fact, I can't get Camilla Sparv's pink and grey houndstooth maxi skirt out of my mind, though I wish I could get her performance out of there. Featuring Aldo Rey, Robert Webber, and Severn Darden with cameos by Rose Marie and Harrison Ford.

Paul Haggis' The Three Next Days, from 2010, left little imprint on the culture and now I know why. A stupefyingly extended riff on a French film entitled Pour Elle, The Three Next Days tells of a teacher (Russell Crowe) who must spring his wife (Elizabeth Banks) from prison where she is serving a life sentence after being unjustly convicted of murder. Plausibility is never an issue in a film in which Crowe and Banks are never believable as a couple. A talented cast (Brian Dennehy, Olivia Wilde, Daniel Stern, Liam Neeson, RZA) is squandered in a project both incoherent and grandiose. The make-up, music, and cinematography are all subpar for a major studio film in this disaster.

My wife and I both burst out laughing at the bald badness of Ruby Baby's ending. Would that the rest of the movie had been as inadvertently entertainimg. 

Sanctuary

Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott

Zachary Wigon's Sanctuary is a two handed chamber drama. Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a dominatrix, and Hal (Christopher Abbott), a poor little rich boy with daddy issues, take turns playing alpha dog. An exercise in cosplay, Sanctuary occasionally transcends its ludicrous premise, Rebecca blackmailing Hal to become CEO of his company, due to the immediacy of its direction.

Wigon, counterintuitively, opts for a widescreen (2.39:1) framing of the duo with the action limited to a 45th floor penthouse suite in Denver. Rebecca and Hal are often at loggerheads and Wigon emphasizes this by often having them at opposite sides of his frame. Wigon's skill almost makes this a good film, but Micah Bloomberg's script stretches one's credulity so much that Wigon can't wallpaper over the illogic. There is a mechanistically transgressive air to the film. It as if Jeanne Dielman... was the goal, but the end result seems more like The Odd Couple. 

The two leads are watchable. Abbott is almost too perfectly cast as the submissive Hal. If someone wants to remake Salo. he would be an apt victim. His performance is technically perfect, but doesn't quite mine his character's neediness. Qualley is not perfectly cast, the role calls for the belligerent moxie of an Aubrey Plaza, but she is game and fares well when required to spurt out rat-a-tat dialogue. When Qualley descends from the dubious pedestal of sex symbol, a career in comedy awaits. 

Uppercase Print

Serban Lazarovici as Mugur Calinescu in Uppercase Print

I found Radu Jude's Uppercase Print to be immensely entertaining and informative. The film is based on Gianina Carbunariu's play of the same title which tells the travails of a Romanian teenager named Mugur Calinescu after he chalked protest slogans on walls in the city of Botoșani in 1981. The play's text consists of testimony in the archive of Romanian state security. This Jude has performed on a soundstage with different backdrops (depending on the mode of testimony) by actors who address their unseen audience. 

These sequences Jude juxtaposes with found footage from Romanian television archives as counterpoint; an absurdist dialectic. The regime's propaganda conceived for mass consumption contrasted with that same regime's imperious control of its citizens' actions and thoughts. The television footage is a potpourri of patriotic piffle, schlock, Romanian variants of Soviet kitsch, cultural uplift, and documentary footage. The range is wide: a hospital patient tells how his hand was accidentally amputated by a lathe, laws against honking cars are explicated, and we watch snippets of a reality show called "Divorce Court." As in Bad Luck Banging and Loony Porn, there is a satiric tone primed to induce discomfort. Jude keeps all his disparate footage in 1.33 aspect ratio to make it seem like a unified stream. 

It is not a unified stream, of course, and the disjunctive, polyphonic nature of the film may alienate some. There is little dynamism in the film and it is not a showcase for its actors. However, I think it is pretty terrific. The best comedy, pitch black as it is, of 2020.
 

Joy House

Lola Albright, Alain Delon, and Jane Fonda in Joy House

Rene Clément's Joy House, from 1964, is an entertainingly trashy mystery thriller. The film transfers the majority of the action of Day Keene's pulp novel to an estate overlooking the Mediterranean outside of Nice. There, after a prologue in New York and a prolonged chase along the Riviera, we meet Marc (Alain Delon), an aimless gigolo on the run from a New York mobster who resents the fact that Marc was having an affair with his younger missus. Marc, broke and desperate, hides out in a Mission House where he meets the wealthy benefactor of the institution, Barbara (Lola Albright), and her younger cousin, Melinda (Jane Fonda). They are both intrigued by the young stranger and suspiciously soon he is hired to be their chauffeur and all around house stud. 

Barbara and Melinda both seek to sink their claws into Marc (the flick was entitled Les felins in France), but Barbara, who has the bucks, seemingly holds the upper hand. She inherited a fortune when her husband was murdered, possibly by Barbara's since disappeared lover. The relationship between Melinda and Barbara resembles that of Cinderella and her step-mother. Albright ably supplies both the regal surface and the tormented interior of her character. Fonda nails the chipper optimism of a young woman seemingly pleased to be her cousin's scullery maid, yet one concealing a steely undercarriage. One of Clément's few visual coups is his introductory shot of Melinda and Barbara which presents them as sisters of mercy when they are actually femme fatales.

The sprawling castle on Barbara's estate hosts one big secret and I won't be the spoiler. However, this twist is revealed way too early in the film, foiling the film's stabs at suspense. Clement and cinematographer Henri Decae have fun prowling around the Byzantine castle filled with stuffed animals, tchotchkes, two Picassos and a Giacometti, but the twists and turns of the plot add up to little. Lalo Schifrin's jazzy score is a plus, though it loses a little zing if you heard its recycled parts used in television's Mission Impossible. 

Joy House's biggest flaw is Delon's lack of facility with English dialogue. His romantic scenes with Albright and Fonda bog the film down instead of ratcheting things up. Clement does utilizes Delon as a sex object well and shows off the actor's physical ability. When Delon is swimming, climbing up rocky hills, running for his life, manipulating cards or brandishing tennis racquets, his performance is solid. Unfortunately, his presence did not help the film succeed commercially or critically. Howard Thompson in The New York Times deemed it "dismal claptrap" Joan Didion and Andrew Sarris were more attuned to its trashy charms with Sarris extolling it as "mindless entertainment."

I am of that mind, but the film still leaves me on the fence about Clement. Compare the overwrought effects Clement employs in the final scene with that of Howard Hawks' professionalism at the end of Land of the Pharaohs. The fates of Delon and Joan Collins are the same in both films, but the conclusion of Hawks film has an element of chilly fatalism brought out by the director's understatement. Hawks' handling of the conclusion transcends the cheesy underpinnings of his film while Clément's flick remains mired in the fromage. Jane Fonda has remarked that the making of Joy House was chaotic with Clement often working without a script. She also said that Clement attempted to nail her on the casting couch. Despite this undoubtably unpleasant experience, Ms.  Fonda's efforts and those of Ms. Albright make Joy House worth seeing.

Delon, Fonda, and Rene Clement

Electra, My Love

If you don't dance, Jancso doesn't want you in his revolution

Miklós Jancsó's Electra, My Love, from 1974, repeats the phantasmagoric collectivist musical stylings of his Red Psalm to occasionally sublime effect. Loosely based on Lazlo Gyurko's play, the plot borrows elements from the myth, chiefly the revenge aspect, but jettisons large chunks of that material. The film concludes with Electra and Orestes ascending to the heavens in a red helicopter (a literal firebird) whilst intoning "...blessed be your name revolution." Jancsó is having his cake and eating it, too. Though praising Marxist principles, Electra, My Love can be read as a rebuke to Hungarian strongman János Kádár, embodied here as the usurper and murderer of Agamemnon, Aegisthus. The film is certainly a rebuke to the mind control of authoritarian regimes in whatever era. 

The film is best enjoyed by those who do not need the binding backbone of a plot. Electra, My Love is tableau that moves, dances, and sings. The three grounds, fore, middle, and back, are continually shifting in an interweaving of drama, horseplay, folk balladry and dance. The best corollary would be the tapestry like work of Sergei Parajanov, though I don't remember a chorus line of whip wielders in the Armenian's ouevre. Filmed on the plains of the Pannonian Steppes, Jancsó stages the musical drama as a pagan fertility rite which is contrasted with the desiccated order Aegisthus seeks to forge through force and propaganda, herding the populace like horses. Like all of Jancsó's work, singular and more than a bit nutty.

Reptile

Benicio Del Toro

Grant Singer's Reptile, currently streaming on Netflix, is an unsuccessful mystery thriller, but, at least, it does not feel like it was designed by an algorithm. The film is a police procedural centered on a murder in Westchester County. By film's end, we are not surprised that institutional corruption is as endemic in the tony New York suburbs as it is in our urban centers. Singer tries to ratchet up the tension or something with numerous artsy mirror shots to little visual or thematic impact.

Reptile is distended rather than taut. The locales are appropriate, but there is no regional flavor. The flick is a rote crime film with an above average cast. Benicio Del Toro, in the lead role, is always watchable and he and his onscreen missus (Alicia Silverstone) have a more interesting rapport than usual in such genre exercise. Michael Pitt, climbing out of movieland purgatory, Sky Ferreira, and Dominick Lombardozzi all have interesting moments. Eric Bogosian and Justin Timberlake do not. Timberlake is egregiously miscast as a rich, cuckolded Mama's boy. I at least believed the Mama's boy part and JT does get to show off his smooth golf swing, but why hire a performer like him and ask him to tamp down his charisma.