True Detective Season 4, Episodes 1-3.

I have written about True Detective before. In fact, I have talked about seasons 1-3 separately. In summary, Season 1 is a masterpiece of modern television, Season 2 is alright but weak compared to Season 1 and Season 3 is better than Season 2 but not nearly as good as Season 1.

One of the things that made Season 1 so good, beside, well, everything, was the possibility of a supernatural presence. It is not confirmed and there is a functional rational explanation, but it could also be cosmic horror. Seasons 2 and 3 really do not have this and I think it is a big reason why they aren't as good as Season 1.

On to Season 4! Today we're looking at the first three episodes out of six. As of writing, I haven't yet seen the last three episodes, and I know nothing about what will happen in them.

This is the setup; we are in the fictional mining town of Ennis, Alaska, north of the polar circle. It is the end of December and the long night has set in. In other words, it will be pitch black for approximately two months. Snow, freezing cold and complete darkness makes for a grim setting and this is felt throughout the show.

Outside the town is the Tsalal research station. The scientists there drill deep into the ancient ice looking for new ways to understand cellular biology. Something happens and they are all found naked and dead on the ice. Investigating this mystery is Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her police department. She is aided by State Trooper Navarro (Kali Reis), and lets just say they don't get along very well. In fact, Chief Danvers don't get along well with anyone. If you want to be more exact, most characters don't get along with each other. This is a central motif in the season, the struggle to live in such a hard environment, the local mine possibly poisoning the local water, the cruel winter and so on. Ennis is a tough and nasty place to live, whether you are a native Alaskan or not.

So far, a few characters have mentioned “She has awakened”, which together with what happened to the scientists an a few other smaller things, infers a supernatural presence. Of course, this does not mean that there isn't a natural solution, but time will tell. One character sees dead people to use the old meme, but it feels more like Twin Peaks than a straight horror production. Being only at the half way point means that anything could happen. I like what I've seen so far even though the constant arguing, yelling and negative attitudes grates on the nerves after a while.

The show is very nicely filmed, with multiple great shots throughout. The actors are good and the effects are fine. I have no complaints from a technical perspective, and only watching the last three episodes will set the seasons place in the overall show.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!

 

Gods of the Deep

Sometimes I look forward to watching a movie and sometimes I toss a dart and hope I hit something good. This week's dart hit:

Gods of the Deep (2023).

To be fair, I don't actually know if 2023 is correct. IMDB says it is, but Letterboxd says 2024.

This is a Lovecraftian movie, as in based on the Cthulhu Mythos started by H. P. Lovecraft. In fact it wears it on the sleeve, and dove head first in the Mythos pool. I wish they would have resisted the temptation to call the company Pickman, but this is something a lot of Mythos movies do. I don't know if it is a loving homage or a way to try to look clever, but movies like Gods of the Deep are not subtle in anything they do.

A deep sea probe finds a strange hole at the bottom of the ocean between Antarctica and South America. This area is deeper than the Challenger Deep and the hole is clearly not natural. The owners of the probe, the Pickman Corporation, as in Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model (1927). They contact Doctor Jim Peters (Derek Nelson), an eminent astrobiologist at Miskatonic University to help go down there. The Pickman Corp. has developed a new high tech sub that can handle the incredible pressures. A small team goes down there and things get... squiggly.

Gods of the Deep is a British horror/sci-fi movie with a low budget. I couldn't find how low, but the cutting edge submarine is visibly built from corrugated roofing, PVC piping, thin acrylic and all the hazard tape you could ever want. That's not to say all the effects are bad, they aren't. In fact some are actually good, just as some are pretty bad. To their credit, they stayed within what they could portray in one fashion or another. Not all low budget movies do that.

What keeps Gods of the Deep from being a failure are the actors. They all do a hell of a job selling the entire thing. You believe that they see what they are seeing no matter how it looks. What is funny is that I could swear I have seen four members of the main cast in other movies, but according to IMDB, I haven't seen them in anything. Spooky...

So, do I recommend this movie? To Mythos fans I do. Everyone else should probably find something else to watch. These fans should also have a certain love for cheese or they won't have a good time. Gods of the Deep should be a failure, but for the actors and the fact that they did the best they could. They tried hard and somehow pulled off a win. Gods of the Deep is not a good movie, but it isn't a bad one either. I had a good time, but I doubt I'll watch it more than the once.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

 

What Have They Done?

This week I took a shot in the dark and watched:

What Have They Done To Your Daughters? (1974)

Co-written and directed by Massimo Dallamano, this movie is labeled as a Giallo and Poliziotteschi combination. Personally I think the Giallo part is fairly minimal, and only really comes to play with a killer in black biker leathers, but technically the terminology stands.

What Have They Done To Your Daughters? opens with the police finding a young girl that has hanged herself. What puzzles the police is that she is completely naked. Inspector Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli) is on the case together with assistant district attorney Stori (Giovanna Ralli). Soon they discover a sordid prostitution ring that pimps out teenaged school girls to rich old men. The biker in black runs around with a meat cleaver killing, and little by little, the case gets darker and more dangerous until certain unpleasant realities leads to a grim ending.

The subject matter is of course really unpleasant, but the movie handles it well. There is nothing seductive about any of it, not even the brief scenes of nudity that are scattered around the film. Speaking of nudity, the hanged body in the beginning is clearly a puppet, and a badly made one at that. I thought at first that they went with a prop to spare the characters actress, but she shows up in a flashback scene completely nude anyway, so I don't get the bad prop. There are many ways of faking a hanging without endangering the actor.

The director, Dallamano, has twelve directing credits on IMDB and 45 cinematographer credits so it is clear where his expertise lay. That's not to say that there is anything wrong with his direction, but that the entire movie has the look of someone who really knows and cares about cinematography. There are so many great scenes in What Have They Done To Your Daughters? that it becomes pointless to try listing them.

The actors are all really good, being mostly veterans. They know what they're doing and I have zero complaints on that score. The score is fine, and the effects are excellent. Speaking of effects, there isn't all that much gore here, but when it shows up it is There with a capital T. Because the blood is used sparingly, it becomes more shocking, which is nice.

What I found most enjoyable about What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is that I couldn't predict this movie at all. At this point I have seen a lot of both Gialli and Poliziotteschi movies and they, like so many genres, tend towards certain patterns. What Have They Done To Your Daughters? doesn't outright break the rules, but it circumvents a few of them very nicely. What is also really nice is that the villains, the people running the teens, make mistakes. They screw up and that is a refreshing experience. The tendency is to portray the people running conspiracies as infallible. Not so here, and on top of that, the cops are very competent.

So, do I recommend this movie? Oh yes, definitely! Despite the vile subject matter, What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is a top notch thriller that doesn't shy away from the nastiness but also doesn't glorify it. Thriller fans of all kinds should have a good time here, not just Gialli lovers. The movie hints at being based on a true story or at least based on similar events in real life. I don't know about that, but it does add an extra layer of grime on top of the existing slime.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!

 

It's not even the 13th precinct.

I decided to knock another movie off the “I'll watch it some day” list, and watched:

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Written and directed by John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is one of those movies that have been floating around in my periphery for decades. It has always been mentioned with a certain reverence like, “it's alright, but it's no Assault on Precinct 13”... At least that is the impression I had about the movie.

The movie opens with a group of gangers being gunned down by the LAPD in South Central. We learn that this gang, a mysterious multi-ethnic gang called Street Thunder has stolen a cache of weapons that include assault rifles and suppressors. The leaders of Street Thunder swear a bloody vendetta against the police and (for some reason) the citizens of LA.

We meet Highway Patrol lieutenant Ethan Bishop, who is asked to run the last night shift for a precinct that is moving. It's the final night and everything should be quiet. Suddenly a prison transport bus arrives as one prisoner is very ill, and that is when a man hysterical with fear runs into the station. He is being chased by Street Thunder and it becomes a desperate fight for survival until help can arrive, if it can arrive.

Assault on Precinct 13 is incredibly solid, and I think it's because there was one person at the helm, not a room full of people who all wanted their ideas to shine. The movie is perfectly balanced and if anything would have knocked that balance askew, the movie would have failed miserably. As it is, it is a tense and fun movie. It is competently shot, but it is the actors and the dialogue that really shines. They have great chemistry and it all works so well.

If you are the kind of movie watcher that wants everything explained, then I'm sorry but you're going to be disappointed. What I wrote about the gang is pretty much all you get to know. A fun fact is that no ganger says a single word. Carpenter has admitted that one of his influences for Assault on Precinct 13 was Night of the Living Dead (1968) and he wanted the Street Thunder thugs to have a somewhat zombie like style.

When the movie was released in the US it received a lukewarm reception, but it got an incredibly warm reception in the UK, which spurred a popular reception in the rest of the world, leading the US critics to have to revisit their critique. The UK distributor was called Michael Myers, and a grateful Carpenter wanted to do something nice for him, so he used the name in Halloween.

So, do I recommend this movie? Yes. It is a solid action/thriller that despite all the shooting doesn't dwell too much on the killings. Well except for one scene... It's solid and the actors really knock it out of the park. It's not one of Carpenters best but it is good enough. I'm glad I watched it, and I might see it again one day.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!