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john-p
Reviews
In Search of Athelstan (1981)
"In this place, in 939, was buried the first king of all England ..."
Exemplary historical documentary from the second series of Michael Wood's groundbreaking "In Search of the Dark Ages", telling the story of the almost forgotten Anglo-Saxon king who played a key role in the creation of England. Made on a tiny budget, but - like many such productions - making up the shortfall by stimulating the viewer's imagination, the programme benefits from excellent photography, an eclectic but weirdly appropriate music soundtrack, and Wood's own evocative script and sonorous narration, offsetting the almost boyish enthusiasm of his pieces to camera. The standout sequence is his account of the Brunanburh campaign, a thrilling helicopter ride across the "Dark Age Vietnam" of Northumbria towards the site of the lost fortress, which he argues was at Brinsworth in Yorkshire. Sadly unavailable in any format, this series remains a landmark in popular TV history, and shows that you don't need lavish reconstructions to bring the distant past to life.
Black Christmas (2006)
Christmas Pudding
I can't believe that some people out there actually enjoyed this film. It's yet another pointless, witless remake of an original which, though not brilliant, was genuinely unsettling and still memorable many years after viewing. This cheapo quickie, by contrast, has been thrown together without imagination or talent. The writer-director has either never seen a proper slasher movie or has simply failed to grasp what makes them work.
The movie disappoints on every level. It introduces a laboured backstory for the killer, but makes the sorority girls so one-dimensional that you literally cannot tell them apart, let alone care what happens to them. The killer's predilection for gouging out eyeballs is unpleasant-nasty rather than scary-nasty, and is an inadequate, low-budget substitute for the great Tom Savini SFX of yore. You need only compare Black Christmas 2006 with the best of the 80s slasher pics (probably Joseph Zito's The Prowler, which really goes for it), or the brilliant recent women-in-peril chiller The Descent, to realise just how woefully inadequate this film is. The only compensation is the short running time - and even at 84 minutes, the damn thing seems to drag.
Rules of Engagement (2000)
Objection, Your Honour!
This movie has just premiered on British TV. I approached it in a positive frame of mind. I'm not one of those professional whingers who'll lay into a film just because it's about the US military (See the knee-jerk reviews of superior fare like Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun etc). But try as I might, I couldn't escape the conclusion that this film is a disgrace to its own country.
Spoilers follow.
Never mind the idiotic plotting (Okay, let's track down an anonymous NVA officer in two weeks flat). Never mind that the Marine unit clearly didn't give a damn who they were firing at (Witness their failure to notice a single weapon or muzzle-flash as they massacred the crowd) The `moral' of the opening sequence turns out to be that war crimes are justified if they achieve the desired goal. So that's most of the Waffen SS off the hook, then.
Even in a dramatic sense, the film is a botched job. This could have been a `Rashomon' style drama, with different takes on the same event, and a real debate about which one was the true one. Instead we have black & white platitudes, demonised foreigners and an attitude to non-American humanity that is best summed up by the phrase `Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out.'