A note from the management

Huh, been a while, hasn't it.

Heading into 2020, I feel like this project needs a couple of changes to keep it from dying entirely. The last few months, for work-related reasons, have been impossible. I'd like to keep this going (because I've paid for all these films, I should watch them, I mean really), but I gotta find a way to keep myself going here. So... two things I'm gonna do going forward.

First: Way back at the beginning here, the great Theo Panayides suggested going in random order rather than alphabetical. I shrugged that off at the time, preferring the orderliness that going in a distinct pre-determined order would bring... but now I'm starting to come around to his line of thinking, mainly because I've been stuck on the letter A for long enough that I'd like to see some other parts of The Big List come into play. I can admit when my ideas need work. I've got a couple more titles I would like to tackle in the hopper (get over here, All the President's Men), but after that it's up to chance. The first ten titles have already been chosen, even. Exciting!

Second, and here's the big one: While I still like the idea of having my own corner of the web for this, the plain truth is nobody clicks links or reads blogs anymore. That's just the Internet we have now, and my stubbornness alone won't change that. So I'm pulling down the curtain here and porting everything over to Letterboxd. (As for the pornographic films... well, I'm already using substitute films for the links I've been posting, so what's the difference in my opinion.) This will also give me an excuse if, say, I sit too long on a film to just dash off a paragraph or two, as I feel more able to do drive-bys in that venue.So look forward to more of that in the coming days - I've got a few films that I watched way back when to clear out.

 See y'all around.

51: Aliens (1986, James Cameron)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: So many times on VHS, basic cable and pay cable through the years. Most recently from this disc on April 8th, 2017.

Gonna make this quick, if only to put it behind me and move on to the next item. Besides, what am I gonna say about Aliens? It's Aliens. It's one of the best action films ever made and maybe the single best hybrid of action and horror to ever exist. It stopped the Alien ripoff in its tracks - nearly every film that would use the template from here on out was riffing on the Cameron instead of the Scott. It pretty much singlehandedly popularized the idea of the Space Marine. Sigourney Weaver got an Oscar nomination for this despite it being at the intersection of two genres the Academy likes to pretend don't exist. It's major, and you and I and your granny know that.

What struck me about it this time is how much character work Cameron is able to do within the space of little gestures and signifiers. It's a relentlessly propulsive film, one that never really pauses for breath because to slow down is to die - indeed, the one sequence that explicitly has its characters try and rest turns into a battle for life. Because of this, there's not a lot of time to get friendly with the mass of new character. So, like everything in this film, the character work is done run-and-gun style, on the move. The comfortable nature of the locker-room jaw-jacking, especially the back-and-forth between Hudson and Vasquez, establishes an easy camaraderie between these meatheads and also evinces the confidence which the rest of the film works to undermine. There's also a number of touches that speak to a fully-realized person within the quick sketches of many of the Marines, a sop against militaristic anonymity. My favorite of these is Ferro having "Fly the Friendly Skies!" scrawled in chalk on her helmet, though there's also something to be said for Apone's grabbing his ever-present cigar as his first action upon waking from hypersleep or Hicks dozing off on the drop. It feels weird to say that a film that breaks the two-hour mark is a damn model of narrative economy, but that's what it is.

Also, it's a neat touch that the climax starts with Ripley taking an express elevator... going down.

50: The Alien Within (1990, Ted Newsom [and Kenneth J. Hall & Fred Olen Ray])

Owned version: The Retromedia/Bayview Entertainment DVD released in 2013.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon. (I also own a copy of the VHS which I bought on eBay before I found out this got a DVD release. I will likely never watch that tape as a result.)

Seen before?: No.

After the last couple longer pieces, it feels nice to get something I can basically blow off.

According to the back cover of the DVD, The Alien Within is "[...] a project undertaken by writer/director Ted Newsom... in which he would construct a new movie from the bones of an earlier film, Evil Spawn. In doing so, Newsom created a new universe of characters..."

Now allow me to translate this from box-copy hype to reality: The Alien Within is literally just Evil Spawn with twenty minutes of extra bullshit added into it. This extra bullshit is shot with an entirely different cast, so none of this interacts with the older film in any meaningful way. In fact, one of the rare times the story requires that the new cast actually come into contact with the old is when two investigators discover the body of John Carradine; while Carradine surely would have reprised his role had he not been dead for two years already, Newsom achieves the desired effect by cutting to a freeze-frame of Carradine with his head bowed into his chest. As a further twist of the knife, the new footage is video-shot where the original was film. Whatever, this is a garbage cash-grab of a film, akin to the old grindhouse trick of creating a new title and ad campaign for an old film in order to wring a few extra dollars out of it, and I'm not wasting any more time on it. I'll write a proper review when I get to Evil Spawn (which, hilariously, is included on this disc as a "special feature").

One small point of amusement: The cast in the new footage is expectedly terrible, and how could they not be? The majority of the new stuff is static scenes of people waiting in cars or in office buildings, observing things happening in another film or talking about the things that have happened and are going to happen. I did think it might be amusing to build a film like this, centered on and constructed around another film, and then never cut in the older film, just scene after scene of people talking about stuff that happened offscreen somewhere else. But I digress - the reason I brought up the cast is to offer praise to the one member who makes something of his role, the inexhaustible Richard Harrison. He alone seems comfortable with the assignment, finding ways to ham it up even when responding to nothing. Because of course he'd be good at this - as Godfrey Ho's favorite white guy, he spent much of the '80s emoting to material from other films, material where most times he didn't even know what the context would be. Now that's a damn professional. I feel like he would have killed in the modern greenscreen blockbuster era.

49: Alien: Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: A few times in the late '90s - I estimate once from the VHS release and at least two more times via pay cable. I don't think that I've seen it at all in the 21st century, so definitely never from this disc.

What strange beast is Alien: Resurrection, anyway? If you're going to follow up an unrelentingly grim experience like Alien³, I can understand the impulse to course-correct into something a touch lighter. And, on the face of it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems like a good guy for that - Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children both achieve a tricky balance, indulging in fierce grotesquerie whilst maintaining a puckish, joyful spirit. But then, his subsequent career doubles down on the whimsy to rapidly diminishing ends, so maybe Marc Caro was the balancing influence he needed. And here, working with a Joss Whedon script that exhibits all the typical hallmarks of Whedonism, Jeunet gets garish. No, scratch that - he made a full-on goddamn cartoon.

Complementing the smartass personality of the script with a similarly outsized visual and performative lunacy seems interesting in theory. In other situations, it could work wonders. Here, though, the overblown comic-book mania, all tight sweaty bug-eyed closeups and odd canted angles, exists at odds with the studied writerly cool. (Not that I'm letting Whedon off the hook here - as usual, nothing bad in the film is his fault according to him, despite the presence of clumsy, possibly undeliverable, unmistakably Whedon dialogue like, "I am not the man with whom to fuck!") This turns Alien: Resurrection into a distended thing that works only in brief moments and flights of loopy inspiration, bits where the Venn diagrams of the disparate parts find a sliver of overlap.

Take, for instance, the bit with where Dan Hedaya, as hirsute human cartoon General Perez, straight-up eats a damn lemon. It's an interesting bit and instructive for the film. It occurs during an otherwise-dull dialogue exchange; Hedaya and Michael Wincott are dancing around the details of some illegal deal they've arranged, being kept vague for the purposes of silly late-film revelations. Meanwhile, there's the bright yellow of that lemon peel beaming a visual contrast to the silver, orange, khaki-brown and rust-brown that comprise the rest of the scene. The look of the film in general deserves comment - while it presages the orange/teal obsession of modern desaturated blockbusters, this practically blazes with light, with every surface rendered shiny, hot and reflective. All the better to illuminate small details, like that lemon - a sore thumb attached to a broken hand - and most of what is memorable in Alien: Resurrection is similar bits of little business amid the miasma: Dominique Pinon tearing his wheelchair apart to build a gun, Sigourney Weaver casually tossing up a basketball to make a behind-the-back basket, the spectacularly goofy acts of hypergore, a full-body cotton surgical dressing being pierced and shed like an amniotic sac, Brad Dourif pontificating in front of imprisoned Xenomorphs with his chin jutted out in a burlesque of delirious weirdness.

The casting is crucial (aside from poor miscast Winona Ryder) and a key reason why, for all its deficits, Alien: Resurrection is oddly, compulsively watchable. The cast is stacked with memorable, visually distinctive character actors - beyond Wincott, Hedaya and Dourif, there's also Ron Perlman, J.E. Freeman, Leland Orser; as the Easter-Island profile of Perlman, the sunken malicious grin of Freeman or the hyperventilating panic of Orser seem like they should be framed as splash panels anyway, they help the comic-book feel of the direction slide down a bit easier. Then, of course, there's Weaver. As in Alien³, she's the glue that keeps the film from crumbling into its component parts. Her Ripley here, cloned from a sample salvaged off Fiorina 161, is stranger, more ambiguous, a hybrid creature who is unsure of her purpose or capabilities but knows she's dangerous and relishes that. This allows Weaver to play much of this with a delicious sinister bemusement, a note she throws her lean, towering frame into with gusto. While some of the hardass stuff in the script doesn't come off, everything Weaver gets is delivered with aplomb, whether calmly sizing up a knife-wielding Ryder or threatening to rip out Perlman's tongue. Yet, as before, there is left room for other emotional beats, here expressed through the Ripley clone's uncertainty about herself and confusion over foggy memories. This culminates in the film's best scene and maybe only one where the screenplay and direction truly mesh, the discovery of the clone room; the sequence shows off Jeunet's kitsch-as-surrealism ethos at its most productively nasty, with its jarred mystery fetuses, grotesque warped mutations and suicidal quasi-Ripley with approximately a thousand tubes leading in and out of it. It also gets Weaver's best work, a heady mixture of betrayal, heartache and bewilderment. That the scene culminates in a frenzied explosion of violence is no surprise; that it turns out to be a mass act of angry mercy is.

Ripley's hybrid status is ultimately mirrored by the new Alien Queen extracted from her at the beginning and its offspring, a genuine human-Xenomorph crossbreed. But the new live-birth reproductive system granted the Queen neuters all the dangerous aspects of the Xenomorph - about the only good thing to come from that idea is a cocooned Dourif yelling marvelously ripe dialogue about, "HER WOMB." And the offspring is.... well, I'm not sure where the best place to go with this would have been, but a furious dewy-eyed infant with Marfan syndrome seems like not the best option. The object lesson, I think, is: Some hybrids are better than others. I wonder if the divided makers of Alien: Resurrection intended that.

48: Alien³ (1992, David Fincher)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice before these two most recent viewings - once probably in December of 1992 on VHS, at which point I thought very highly of it, and once on May 16th, 2017, at which point I questioned that previously high opinion and wrote it off as me being a know-nothing 12-year-old. This also happened with The Abyss, and I guess there's a potential pattern emerging... or maybe not.

 Alien³ is an open wound of a film and also an openly wounded film. It's a nihilistic howl of a film that follows up its adrenaline-fueled crowd-rouser of a predecessor by stripping away the triumph of Aliens, then stripping and cutting further until Ripley has nothing left to lose except herself and arranges it so she welcomes such an oblivion. It's also a film where the studio responded to this nihilism by taking it into the editing room and feeding its soul into a shredder. In an attempt to carve it into a certain running time and certain summer-movie shape, Fox ironically destroyed its actual shape.

Watching the "assembly cut" available on the Blu-ray drives home what a fascinating film this was set up to be and also illuminates why the theatrical cut, though better than my 2017 viewing would have it, is still something of a misfire. The version released to theaters in 1992 cruises along at a decent clip, devoting the majority of its time to Ripley's paranoia about a potential facehugger infestation aboard her wrecked escape vessel and the burgeoning relationship between Ripley and medical officer Clemens (played with great pursed-lip gravity by Charles Dance)... right up to the point roughly halfway through where Clemens has his brain unceremoniously ventilated by the latest Xenomorph-on-the-loose, after which it collapses into a series of scenes where anonymous bald men in sackcloth are picked off one after another. (To its credit, the film itself seems to realize this - witness the late scene where assistant warden Aaron tries to give an order to an inmate only to realize he doesn't know his name.)

The problem, made very clear by the longer cut, is that the Ripley/Clemens relationship gets emphasized at the expense of every other character - much of what was removed gives dimension to many of the prisoners, both in terms of individual personality and as pieces of a whole in the society on Fiorina 161. Whereas in the theatrical we're merely told about the religion practiced by the monastic inmates, the assembly gives a deeper look at the day-to-day faith that gets most of these guys through, especially Charles S. Dutton's fervent Dillon and Paul McGann's holy-fool Golic. Golic's presence doesn't even make sense in the theatrical - he witnesses a couple other inmates get kacked, goes assumedly bonkers and then gets tied to a bed in the infirmary, left and forgotten after Clemens's death, which hardly justifies McGann's fourth billing.

Turns out McGann had a whole subplot, one the film damn near hinged on - his witnessing of the slaughter, complete with baptism-by-blood, turns him from a believer in the apocalyptic religion of Fiorina 161 to one who believes the apocalypse has arrived and it's his job to see it through. Hacking that inelegantly out of the film not only loses the point of the character and not only loses at least one of the film's most extraordinary images (Golic's eyes framed in light as he releases the Xenomorph and, in a way, achieves a transcendent release), it castrates the whole reason behind giving these guys a belief system at all. Ripley's journey towards martyrdom and savior of humanity carries a lot more heft when her final stop on the way there is damn near literally her fighting the Devil escaped out of Hell and onto this planet of fire and steel and forgotten men who believe the End had been nigh for some time because they don't fit into society's plan any other way. Her final act of sacrifice makes sense on its own, but it's even more potent when made the climactic act of a film with a fanatical concentration on acts of sacrifice... at least two of which didn't survive into the theatrical cut.

But while the studio cut is significantly weakened, Alien³ is a difficult film to fully dismiss, because even its compromised form houses a significant amount of exciting work. Fincher has every reason to disown this film, but it's undeniable that his impressive visual sense gets a full workout - the dominant decaying metal-and-rust scheme, the ghost of industrial progress leeched of life and color on a dying corporate waste planet, follows logically from the collapsing systems depicted in both Alien and Aliens, so much so that the occasional splash of color (e.g. amid the chilled slate-gray of the mortuary lockers, the sorrowful scarlet of the flowers attached to Newt's locker) sears the eye. But the presence of the foundry, filled with hot oranges and overripe flesh tones, gives an early contrast that slowly bleeds out into the tunnels and ducts of Fiorina, lit only by torches as they are, until the moribund colony appears to have been overwhelmed by cleansing fire by the final chase. This is accentuated by the constant layer of sweat and grime that appear to be a constant feature of life on Fiorina; the heat becomes panic, and the panic becomes overwhelming, inescapable. (The famed shot of the Xenomorph confronting Ripley in extreme closeup works in no small part because Ripley is almost as moist and drippy as her adversary.) Fincher also favors low-angle shots that emphasize the notion that the Xenomorph could drop into any scene at any time, keeping the tension high even through the voluminous dialogue scenes. It's deliciously satisfying when one of those low-angle shots pays off, i.e. the death of Warden Andrews.

And then there's Weaver. The best justification for the studio gutting the religious angle is that they wanted the film to concentrate almost exclusively on Ripley and her relationship to the creature that she sighs at one point has been in her life so long she's doesn't remember what it's like not to fear it. Weaver's performance here is on the level of her Oscar-nominated turn in Aliens, if not a bit better. The autopsy scene, for instance, is a grueling watch; a lot of that work is done by Weaver's flinches and choked-back sobs, which cut harder and deeper than any bonesaw. I can't think of any other actress, for instance, who could deliver the line, "It's a metaphor, wanna come?" with the exact amount of wry, weary wit that keeps it from sounding too writerly. Nor could many, if any, make Ripley's quick jump into bed with Clemens work as an expression of sexual desire, a parallel desire for something like normalcy, a reaction to extreme stress and an outcropping of grieving all in one loaded look like Weaver does. The relationship with Clemens is as crucial as the previous film's relationship with Newt, as it allows Weaver a chance to access the full rainbow of emotions available to her rather than merely the panic and distress that the situation would demand; that this relationship is viciously severed at the midpoint should rend the film in two and nearly does. If it holds together at all, it's because Weaver's forceful turn, agonized in its despair and overwhelming in its ultimate catharsis, wills it to hold. By the end, even the one ally she was allowed, however briefly, to hold on to from Aliens has been torn away from her, turned into "a friendly face" meant to motivate her into cooperation with Weyland-Yutani. Her own body has been turned against her, a vessel for the death of humanity. Everything about her has finally been colonized, stolen, perverted, ruined. But her mind and will remain hers. To the end, that remains hers.

47: Address Unknown (1944, William Cameron Menzies)

Owned version: The 2019 Blu-ray release by Mill Creek Entertainment in partnership with Kit Parker Films, as included in the Noir Archive 9-Film Collection, Vol. 1: 1944-1954 set.

Acquired: From Amazon on May 3rd, 2019.

Seen before?: Never even heard of before this - a true blind-buy.

"Looks like a storm's coming."

I had no clue what this was about when I put it on, but it didn't take long to figure out. Ten minutes into the film, art dealer Martin Schulz has returned to his native Germany and is unpacking his belongings. His four cherubic blonde children cavort in the gated front yard, and we see them framed through the bars as a mysterious black-clad man man with a dog glares at them. As he stands, dark clouds begins to gather behind him; noticing this, the Schulz family invites him in.

As metaphors go, it's a pretty blatant one. But there are times for subtlety and times for immediacy, and Address Unknown is nothing if not a ferocious and immediate work crafted especially for and in response to tumultuous times, a bombastic work that confirms the above metaphor not five minutes later when Martin's partner asks in a letter, "Who is this Adolph Hitler who seems to be rising to power in Europe?" Martin's partner, left behind to run their studio in San Francisco, is named Max Eisenstein. The rising action in the film is Martin's indoctrination into Nazism, given a government post and comfort in exchange for his complicity (edging on approval) regarding the Jewish people - even those he once counted as friends, colleagues and family. His letters to Max become more curt, more official and couched in language parroted from the words spoken by his higher-ups and social betters (represented in the person of the Baron von Friesche, the man at his gate at the outset). Max is assured by Martin's son Heinrich, who has stayed in the US to help Max, that Martin is merely writing in a fashion that will appease the German censors, but soon, communication dries up entirely. This rising action, this gradual overwhelming corruption of an ordinary citizen, culminates in an act of violence, and Martin's refusal to offer a gesture of benevolence to prevent even this ends up being his downfall.

It's strange on its surface to see this included in a noir anthology - the plot certainly doesn't play out like a typical noir story, especially its second half, which more or less boils down to a series of aggressions manifested as telegrams. Formally, though, there's no way it could be associated with anything but - Menzies goes heavy on the looming shadows and light/dark dichotomy that plays into a strong majority of noir entries. Even in the earliest scenes, when things are still light and cheerful, he still lights a scene in the Schulz's bedroom so that the shadows of the iron grating outside are cast within, marking the homestead as a prison even before it's a proper home.

The second half of the film pays this off - as Martin begins to receive a sudden influx of letters from Max, all containing inscrutable instructions about the buying and selling of paintings clearly intended as some manner of code (the first missive in this series contains the line "YOU AND I WILL UNDERSTAND"), the home begins to feel as ominous as the country containing it. The barred gate becomes more prominent, a metal edifice meaning to keep in as well as out, and the mere presence of the postman becomes an existential threat; witness in particular the sequence of shots that stars with a wide shot of an empty room in which Martin hovers nervously in the background, then cuts to a shot of him foregrounded while the postman can be seen arriving in the background through a large picture window, a strong wind blowing the leaves in the courtyard away as though they were Martin's capricious good fortune. Isolated from the action, at the whims of forces above and beyond him, caught between a code he can't break and a governmental machine that assumes he can... he's a spectre in his own life, framed and shot like he already doesn't matter. The black-and-white checkered tile that serves as his flooring implies a chess match in which he is but a pawn, which is a clever touch; that the climax sees him locked out of his own home is another. This is sharp stuff.

He never did matter, of course - he was never more than a functionary. His actions only mattered inasmuch as they were extensions of the desires of the State, a State that demonizes a section of the populace to the point where it demands censoring of the Sermon on the Mount. (Again, a clever move - conflating an attack on Judaism with an attack on Christianity.) This attempt inspires an exasperated cry of, "Can that little man do this?" and while the immediate target is the censor, the larger import is evident: can these little men, these tyrannical and terrified little men, do this? And the answer: only if other little, terrified men do nothing to stop it. A bloody handprint on the doorframe of Martin's home signifies his irreversible transition into one of these little men - but where blood on the door was a sign of salvation for the Israelites, here it presages the sickness of Nazi Germany suddenly refusing to pass over Martin's house as a punishment for that whom he did not protect. The final, last-minute twist of the knife is a jaw-dropper of an affirmation: You never know who your inaction is going to hurt - or what response that will inspire.

46: Alien Agenda: Under the Skin (1997, Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Tom Vollman/Ron Ford/Michael Legge)

Owned version: Same 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that its sister anthology Endangered Species was on.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

I took less than half a page of notes for Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. By contrast, I nearly filled a whole page for Endangered Species, a film which I reviewed by basically saying, "This all kinda sucks except for the Tim Ritter segment, which has SO MANY GOOFY THINGS IN IT, YOU GUYS." One of my notes reads, "theme song is some Toad the Wet Sprocket-sounding stuff with the refrain, 'Close your eyes and remember the good times / We'll all be dead soon.'" Another reads simply, "mmm, brain salad."

I mention this as a way to say, what the hell is there to say about this movie other than this is barely a movie? If it isn't as bad as the last time I saw Lindenmuth and Vollman team up (Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust), it's not for lack of trying. Vollman's piece is a half-assed crime thriller that burns its first ten minutes on a stubbly, sunglasses-wearing alien supersoldier pursuing, catching and ultimately de-limbing some putz who was late on his gambling debt. This has no bearing on anything - the supersoldier gets pushed to the periphery after this and the newly one-armed schmo disappears entirely - as Vollman instead reveals that his main plot is actually about some other guy, a low-level functionary in a crime family and how he gets caught between the cops, his higher-ups and a new syndicate that is, y'know, aliens in disguise. I cannot fathom the paucity of imagination it takes to be told to write a featurette about an alien invasion and your big idea is, "What if I tried to remake King of New York but in thirty minutes?" If you don't want to make an alien-invasion film, don't sign up for the alien-invasion anthology, chief.

Lindemnuth's, meanwhile, starts with the abduction of a biologist and then turns into... something. There's aliens in disguise and doubles and a chupacabra? As often happens with his films, it feels like Lindenmuth had an idea and didn't develop it very well. Or, maybe it's a case of him having a few ideas - this segment plays in halts and hiccups, like it might actually be several scraps of unfinished shorts precariously pasted together into an inexplicable shape. The sole highlight in this section is a series of abductee interviews, similar to the interviews that opened Endangered Species, but where Ford's broad caricatures (glimpsed briefly here as well, somewhere within the crazy-quilt second half) serve only to grate, these interviews play surprisingly well. The actors declaiming the dialogue are credible, and the way the stories slowly develop is satisfying. These bits were directed by Legge, an under-the radar mainstay of cheapo cinema with a corny yet ingratiatingly morbid sense of humor, and the modest, off-kilter sensibilities these stories display (one involving a man with one arm, another involving an alien with a yen for fast food) make them a refreshing oasis in a desert of inspiration. It doesn't provide the relief that Tim Ritter's segment of Endangered Species does, but we take whatever we can get around here.