Sharktopus

Beware the impulse buy. Last year, browsing DVDs while we were supposed to be doing a food shop, I was chuckling over the tagline to ‘Burning Bright’ (“true tiger terror”) when Paula found something even more awe-inspiringly awful. It was called ‘Army of the Dead’, the cover image was of skeletal hordes advancing menacingly in Conquistador uniforms but clutching modern day hardware, and the tagline was a masterpiece of stand-up-and-applaud cheesy audacity: “never trust a skeleton with a shotgun”. Needless to say, we bought the motherfucker. Two days later we took the motherfucker back, lied and said it wouldn’t play, and got a refund.

It was bad. Reeeeaaaaal bad. To call it a piece of shit would be an insult to excrement, a slur on the good name of steaming piles of turd.

So we should have known better when, doing a post-payday food shop at our local supermarket on Wednesday evening, we came across a DVD with this cover image:

We hesitated. We looked at each. “It’s going to be crap, isn’t it?” Paula said, a lone voice of reason. “But it’s called ‘Sharktopus’,” I replied, a sure-fire argument-winner if ever there was one. “How can you not want to watch a movie called ‘Sharktopus’?” In the shopping trolley it went. At the check-out, the bored and (I suspect) slightly stoned young man on the till looked at us (both straight from the office in rather formal attire) and looked back at our viewing choice in a slack-jawed double-take I wish I could have captured on my camera phone; on YouTube, it would have gone viral.

Last night, having returned from a book launch at the University of Nottingham’s Archaeology Museum of a title on Roman Nottinghamshire, I sat down to watch ‘Sharktopus’ (a Roger Corman production). It was an evening of contrasts.

To be fair, ‘Sharktopus’ wasn’t as bad as ‘Army of the Dead’ (elements of it even suggest that – a few films down the line and with a better budget – there might be a possibility of director Declan O’Brien achieving basic filmmaking competence). But that’s kind of like saying the smelly old guy playing the spoons in the town square is demonstrating better musicianship than Justin Bieber. It’s an inarguable fact, but … y’know …

‘Sharktopus’ starts with Nathan Sands (Eric Roberts) – the head honcho of a marine-biology outfit called Blue Water – demonstrating for the benefit of hardnosed Navy dude Commander Cox (Calvin Persson) the operational capacity of their new development: the S-11. In other words, our titular and tentacled friend the Sharktopus. Outfitted with a gizmo type thing that controls it means of electrical impulses, with Sands’s brainy and standoffish yet still kinda cute bio-geneticist boffin daughter Nicole (Sara Malakul Lane) at the controls (it functions a bit like a radio-control boat … one bigger … and, uh, with teeth … and, y’know, tentacles), things go tits up when it gets walloped by a passing boat, the electro-pulsar-control device thingy malfunctions and the Sharktopus heads down Mexico way to terrorize, terrify and chow down on anyone and everyone.

For “anyone and everyone” read “nubile girls in bikinis”. For its first half hour ‘Sharktopus’ consists of little more than bits of incoherent exposition being partitioned out amongst endless shots of nubile girls in bikinis. There’s the nubile girl in a bikini who goes running into the ocean for the obligatory ‘Jaws’ homage at the start of the movie …

… the nubile girl in a bikini with a metal detector who would have been better off with a Sharktopus detector …

… the nubile girl in a bikini one-piece with a cleavage-revealing slit down the front who inadvisably does a bungee-jump just as the Sharktopus is looking for a light snack …

… the half-dozen or so nubile girls in bikinis who plunge into the sea for no other reason than to frolic in the surf and bump up the bikini/nubile-girl count that bit further …

… and the nubile girl in a bikini who co-presents a pirate radio show hosted by the boorish Captain Jack (Ralph Garman).

The sudden outburst of hybrid aquamarine attacks on perfectly innocent bikini-clad nubiles comes to the attention of local reporter Stacy Everheart (Liv Boughn). Stacy kind of breaks the mould in not wearing a bikini, but she does model a nice line in midriff-baring tops as well as demonstrating a marked disinclination to fastening the top button of her denim mini-skirt.

While Stacy and her ever-nervous and spectacularly ill-named cameraman Bones (Hector Jiminez) track down Sharktopus-attack witness Pez (Blake Lindsey) – a lecherous, alcoholic fisherman – Sands sets out to bring the Sharktopus back alive (after all, a lot of tax dollars and a potentially lucrative defence contract at stake). To this end, Sands reluctantly enlists the aid of cocksure shark-hunter Andy Flynn (Kerim Bursin). Andy is introduced in a scene where he tries to put the moves on two nubile girls in bikinis.

Andy has previously worked for Blue Water and is at loggerheads with Sands. There also seems to be some unresolved tension between Andy and Nicole. All put their differences aside – intermittently, anyway – to go hunting the snark shark. This is achieved by means of Andy and his best bud Santos (Julian Gonzalez Esparza) zipping around in speed boats looking moody …

… while Nicole and Pops exchange portentous and expository dialogue during split screen cellphone conversations:

Subject of Andy looking moody, the dude’s man-pout is astounding to behold. This guy’s pout puts anyone in ‘Twilight’ to shame.

(Interrupting this Agitation of the Mind review, we go live to WWE for tonight’s Pout Bout. First round, Andy the shark-hunting dude versus sulky emo chick:

Boo-yah! Unsmiling bint goes down!

Round two: Andy the shark-hunting dude versus sulky vampire dude:

Boo-yah! Slaphead neck-biter goes down! We now return you to The Agitation of the Mind.)

Eventually the endless montages of pretty people admiring the local colour at seaside resorts, where every establishing shot features the pert derriere of a nubile girl in a bikini sashaying into the frame, must end. And they end in blood. The Sharktopus, not content to keep it real in da water …

… decides to come ashore and walk around on its tentacles and start some shit with the now gun-toting Andy:

Call me unimaginative, but my suspension of disbelief began to experience serious challenges to its equanimity round about this point (in much the same way that the world count facility on my laptop is frankly aghast that I’ve already expended 1,100 words on this cinematic pile of poo).

In short, it all ends the only way this kind of movie can: man and shark resolve their differences, become friends, and fight for the common goal of world peace and environmental concerns, revealing ‘Sharktopus’ in its closing scenes as a poignant and powerful work of cinema by a soon-to-be major talent.

Nah, only kidding.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: news and events

Cracking new poster for the Alan Sillitoe Statue Fund event Friday next week (kudos to James K Walker): a screening of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' starring the incomparable Albert Finney. It's showing at Antenna, Beck Street, Nottingham; event starts at 7.30pm. The film will be introduced by David Sillitoe, in conversation with award-winning novelist Nicola Monaghan ('The Killing Jar'), there'll be live music from local band Blue Yonder, and - oh yes - there's a bar.

If you're in Nottingham next Friday, please come along. Click the poster to make it bigger, or email alansillitoepage@hotmail.co.uk if you have any queries.

Other news: the Alan Sillitoe Website is now up and running: www.sillitoe.com. Please pop over and check out the content we've already got online. The plan is to develop and expand the site and build it into a major resource on Alan's life and work.

Shutter Island

Ever had a movie spoiled for you? I mean the ending completely and utterly blown?

In descending order of both recency and annoyance, I present three examples:

3) Twenty years ago, my aunt was watching ‘Dances With Wolves’ when some stumbling inebriate came lurching into the cinema, a good hour and a half into the film, and stood swaying in the aisle, blinking myopically as he focussed on the screen. “Oh yeah,” he slurred, “seen this. Wolf gets shot.” And blundered back out.

2) Ten years ago, a mate of mine was driving to the cinema to see ‘The Sixth Sense’ – actually frickin’ en route – and listening to the car radio when a blabbermouth DJ gave the ending away.

1) Last year, the day before I was planning to go and see ‘Shutter Island’, I read an online review whose author didn’t have the common decency to throw up a spoiler alert. Moreover, the way this doofus painted the ending, it sounded like the kind of movie I’d feel conned by and get annoyed at. So I stayed away. There’s something downright fucking unholy about being made to feel that you need to stay away from a Martin Scorsese film.

A few weeks ago, I felt that enough time had passed and added it to my rental list. The DVD turned up over the weekend. On Monday evening, fortified by half a bottle of wine, I sat down to watch it.

Damn, I wish I’d seen it at the cinema!

Granted, ‘Shutter Island’ isn’t perfect – at nearly two and a half hours it’s overlong and its revelatory final act threatens to drown the drama in exposition – but as an exercise in one of the modern masters of mainstream cinema basically fucking with the audience, it’s as audacious as it is pulpy. Even if Scorsese hadn’t namechecked Val Lewton as an influence, there’d be no doubt that ‘Shutter Island’ is his second sortie into schlock, his biggest and boldest battering at the barricades of the B-movie since Max Cady strode tattooed and unreformed from jail in ‘Cape Fear’ and promised that “you will learn about loss”.

In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about –

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is as good a place as any to ensure I don’t do unto others as was done unto me. In other words: SPOILER ALERT. I say again: SPOILER ALERT. And for a third time, just to make sure nobody holds anything against me: SPOILER ALERT.

In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about himself. About his past. About why his dreams are rendered into nightmare by memories of his dead wife Dolores (Michelle Williams). He learns why he doesn’t really know anything about his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) prior to their assignation to track down an escaped mental patient on the Alcatraz-like clinical facility of the title. He learns why his painful memories of the liberation of Auschwitz and inextricably bound up with the present, why he is so fixated on the whereabouts of deranged arsonist Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), and what the cryptic note left by the enigmatic Rachel Solando (played in two incarnations by Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson) truly means.

The dual casting of Mortimer and Clarkson is genius. Both have a fragile beauty, a visceral intelligence and a quixotic combination of vulnerability and steely resolve. The two Rachels, for me, are the key to the film. ‘Shutter Island’ is a study in duality. In Teddy’s mind, the facility gets mixed up with the death camps; his wife with one of the inmates; the head of security with a Nazi officer. The facility’s senior management seems to exist under a similar schism. Who is really in charge, the suave but persuasive Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley) or the authoritarian Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow)? Teddy’s dreams – vividly depicted in some of the film’s most challenging visual tableaux – centre around fire and ash, yet his fear of water is what opens the floodgates (pardon the pun) to the narrative’s nastiest resolution.

Having seen the film only in the context of knowing its ending, I’d like to hazard a guess that like, say, Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, it’s a work that becomes infinitely more rewarding – certainly a film that reveals itself as subversively multi-faceted – once you know what to look for. The opening scene, depicting Teddy and Chuck’s ferry crossing to the island, initially comes across as shoddily edited, all weird cuts, spatial dislocations and shots that clearly don’t match. In hindsight, it’s cinematic sleight of hand, a woozy syncopation that throws the viewer out of normalcy and into a state of mind.

Scorsese perpetuates the tactic right up until the final act: gothic imagery abounds, apocalyptic storms lash the island, the agonies of Mahler are seared into the soundtrack, paranoia bleeds into the fabric of the film, conspiracies ooze out of the woodwork and the stone walls, identities are incrementally challenged, reality and madness dance a dizzying pas de deux around each other, and the lunatics – in more than one chillingly effective set-piece – seem ready to take over the asylum.

In one respect, ‘Shutter Island’ is an almost-masterpiece of psychological portraiture; in another its pure shlock. The viewer willing to let go and just experience the head-fuck will find something reasonably close to the best of both worlds. For a work of such aesthetic artifice, ‘Shutter Island’ is pure cinema. It embodies a dichotomy and damn near resolves it.

To the doofus whose review I mentioned earlier, thank you for giving me the tools by which to fully appreciate ‘Shutter Island’ on first viewing. And screw you that I didn’t go see it on the big screen.

Hello, boys, I'm baaa-aaaccck!

I've been paid, the money-grubbing bastards who provide my internet connection have had their pound of flesh, I'm back online, and there's a slew of reviews in the pipeline, including a trashy Roger Corman cheapie, something dark and nasty from one of Korea's leading lights, another Giallo Sunday offering, and a double helping of Asia Argento.

Tomorrow, though, it's gothic drama a-go-go with Martin Scorsese. Book your tickets for the ferry crossing - we're off to Shutter Island.

Buddy, can you spare an extended line of credit?

A difference of opinion took place between myself and my internet service provider earlier today.

It went like this:

THEM: You owe us two months.

ME: I don't have any money right now. I'll get paid again on Wednesday.

THEM: You'll have to make a grace payment at the very least today, otherwise your account will be frozen and services suspended.

ME: I don't have any money right now. I'll get paid again on Wednesday.

THEM: We have frozen your account and services are suspended.

ME: You big meanies.

(Okay, it was more like "well to hell with you then, knobhead".)

In short, I'm posting this over at my mate Viv's and I'll be offlined till mid-next week. Feel free to write your own Giallo Sunday review: 'Seven Blood-Red Bludgeonings to the Head of a Telecommunications Operative'.

See you next Wednesday!

Ooooh, don't mention the war!

What do the following have in common?

Clue: they’re not intended to be taken seriously.

Taken

Who are your favourite big screen tough guys? Bogart? Cagney? Eastwood? Maybe the muscle men action hero types: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, van Damme? The martial arts brigade, perhaps: Lee, Li, Chan? How about heroic bloodshed poster boy Chow Yuen Fat? Takeshi Kitano?

No doubt all of them would stake their claim to the title. So let’s leave them queuing up outside the Movie Tough Guy Club while Liam Neeson strolls right in with a VIP pass, a fucking big gun, a thousand-yard stare and a palpable disinclination to put up with anybody’s shit.

On the basis of ‘Taken’ alone – although there are plentiful indicators in his back catalogue, from ‘Darkman’ to ‘Batman Begins’ – Liam Neeson is the big screen tough guy I’d want in my corner if the chips were down and the bullets were flying.

‘Taken’ – directed by Pierre Morel from a script by co-written by Gaellic genre factory Luc Besson – gives us Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former secret service operative estranged from his high-maintenance wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doing his best to be there for his seventeen year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and resenting the pull on her affections exerted by millionaire step-father Stuart (Xander Berkeley).

When Kim decides she wants to travel to Paris with her school friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) – a trip devoid of adult supervision – Stuart and Lenore blithely okay it. Mills, however, is dubious. Lenore and Kim pressure him and reluctantly he consents to the trip. His worst fears are confirmed during Kim’s first night on French soil when she and Amanda are abducted by Albanian gangster types who supply brothels with doped up American girls and auction off the better looking abductees to Arab sheikhs. (And, yes, the depiction of said foreign nationals is every bit as stereotyped as that last sentence implies.)

Mills is on the phone to Kim when the Albanians come calling and the connection remains unbroken long enough for him to deliver this little homily: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

This is the point at which Liam Neeson becomes the Angel of fuckin’ Vengenace. There’s a lot of actors who would have made a meal of that monologue; delivered it through clenched teeth. Neeson delivers it with the cool deadly formality of someone who would rip your heart out and serve it to you on a skewer rammed into your scrotum rather than look at you. Someone would won’t break a sweat at doing such a thing, nor consider it particularly excessive. Remember that line Michael Caine has in ‘Get Carter’ before he decks the fat bloke: “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. With me, it’s a full-time job.” Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills as the kind of guy for whom it’s a full-time job.

‘Taken’ unfolds with all the grim determination of its protagonist. Such criticisms as can be levelled – twenty-somethings Grace and Cassidy don’t quite convince as naïve teenagers; Holly Valance is bland in a supporting role; the bad guys are one-dimensional – are hardly valid when ‘Taken’ not only achieves exactly what it sets out to do (ie. serve as a delivery system for action scenes), but does so with such honesty, immediacy and lack of pretentiousness that its plethora of chases (vehicular and pedestrian), shoot-outs and hand-to-hand smack-downs add up to a full-throttle action/revenge movie that make most examples of its ilk look tired and anaemic by comparison. ‘Taken’ is about as good as this kind of movie gets.