The greatest head-melting movies on DVD…

1. No collection is complete without this

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) * * * * *

Cinema doesn’t come more head-scratchingly weird than legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi “visual poem”, a mind-boggling space saga with minimum dialogue and maximum classical music. “Explanations are for wimps” seems to have been Kubrick’s mantra, as an enigmatic black monolith inspires primitive man to start bashing people around the head with bones, before later luring humanity on a space-bound quest to Jupiter with tragic consequences. That’s nothing, however, compared to the final third of the movie, a brain-melting journey into another universe that ends with a time-accelerating hotel room, and a leap in mankind’s evolution. “If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered” said co-writer and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke at the time, and it looks like this particular space oddity will be stretching minds and confounding people for decades to come.

EXTRAS: Splash out extra dosh, and you can get the “deluxe edition” with a collectable booklet, film cel and the original soundtrack- otherwise, all you get in the standard version is a paltry theatrical trailer.

BEST BIT: In the middle of having his mind demolished by an annoyed astronaut, murderous supercomputer HAL 9000 regresses back to its ‘childhood’ and starts singing “Daisy, Daisy…” :

2. Essential Selections: The foundations of your collection

Brazil (1985) * * * * *

Ex-Python animator Terry Gilliam is your guide for this nightmare tour through the darker side of the modern world. In an endless city choked by paperwork and terrorist attacks, looking for your dream girl can be a dangerous thing– as meek bureaucrat Jonathan Pryce finds out to his cost. From SAS-style heating engineers to the terrifying corridors of the Ministry of Information Retrieval, Gilliam’s finest work redefines the onscreen ‘future city’, and plays like George Orwell’s 1984 on some seriously bad Acid.

EXTRAS: The R2 disc features a trailer and an illuminating half-hour making-of documentary, but seek out the 3-disc Criterion Collection edition for a whole lot more, including the “Love Conquers All” edit of the film that tacks on a happy ending.

BEST BIT: A gang of terrifying masked stormtroopers erupt into the flat of shoe repair man Harry Buttle with devastating force, all so that he can “help the Ministry with its enquiries.”

Fight Club (1999) * * * *

Pummelling you into submission and twisting your brain into knots for an encore, David Fincher’s psycho-mania marvel is one of the most demented Hollywood movies ever made. Edward Norton is the unnamed Narrator who befriends Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden, a freewheeling anarchist with plans for spiritual harmony that involve men beating each other up for the sheer hell of it. Only when Project Mayhem rears its head does Tyler’s true identity comes to light, and the result is a blisteringly strange masterpiece that leaves you bruised, battered, and desperate for another viewing.

EXTRAS: One of the funkiest original two-disc editions, Fight Club still stands up thanks to a huge selection of featurettes, and a truly unmissable commentary from Fincher, Pitt, Norton and co-star Helena Bonham Carter.

BEST BIT: Smashing down the “fourth wall”, the Narrator gives us a tour of Tyler Durden’s life as he sabotages restaurant meals and splices frames of pornography into family cartoons.

3. REALITY BITES
When the everyday world stops making sense…

Videodrome (1983)
It’s official: watching TV is bad for your health. Just ask Max Renn (James Woods), a television executive who views a violent pirate broadcast named “Videodrome”, and is soon neck-deep in a hallucinogenic conspiracy and inserting videotapes into a worrying vaginal slit in his chest. David Cronenberg’s fractured tale of horror throws the reality rulebook out of the window, and leaves us trapped in a world where even our own bodies can’t be trusted.
****

Pi (1997)
Obsessed by patterns in nature, paranoid number-cruncher Max (Sean Gullette) is investigating the New York stock market when he discovers a new 216-digit number that causes his computer to melt, and soon has him hallucinating about abandoned brains on the subway. Has he found the secret 216-letter name of God, or is he simply going insane? Either way, Darren Aronofsky’s hyper-intense, black-and-white drama is hypnotic, dazzling stuff that refuses to give any easy answers.
****

Donnie Darko (2001)
Teenage life in Eighties America holds plenty of problems for the emotionally troubled Donnie (Jake Gylenhaal), and that’s before an imaginary six foot bunny rabbit starts telling him that the world is due to end in 28 days. A mind-bending tale of time travel, social satire and Tears for Fears songs, this cult classic has already had multiple DVD incarnations¬, including the Director’s Cut which adds new songs, new scenes and new questions into the mix.
*****

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
You’re a Vietnam veteran. You’re suffering from major flashbacks to the war. And then, horrific demons start looming out of nowhere to scare the living crap out of you. Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lynne’s tale of damnation and salvation keeps the audience guessing as to what’s really going on, leaping adeptly between realities and indulging in some truly horrifying visions. Tim Robbins also excels as the confused, shell-shocked Jacob, tortured by glimpses of Hell on earth.
***

4. END OF THE BEGINNING
Stories that don’t just go from A to B…

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Jim Carrey decides to hit the “delete” button and get his memories of kooky ex-girlfriend Kate Winslet erased– but halfway through the procedure, he changes his mind and tries to fight back. With half of the movie taking place inside Carrey’s head as he re-experiences the affair in reverse, the film uses plenty of surreal effects and visual tricks, but it’s the relationship between Carrey and Winslet that’s the heart of this beautiful, backwards love story.
*****

Mulholland Drive (2002)
For 90 minutes, David Lynch’s thriller is a bizarrely compulsive tale of the dark side of Hollywood. Then, wannabe actress Naomi Watts and beautiful amnesiac Laura Elena Harring visit the reality-warping Club Silencio, and the whole movie turns inside out. Characters swap identities, time rolls back, and the audience gapes in complete confusion. Adding otherworldly tramps and minature OAPs is just the icing on the cake for one of the Sultan of Strange’s weirdest and most memorable movies.
****

Memento (2000)
Following Guy Pearce as he tries to hunt his wife’s killer and cope with a bizarre form of memory loss, this brilliant thriller tells its story in reverse, starting with a brutal murder and then working backwards to explore why it happened. The devious structure keeps us as disorientated as the hero, and the DVD itself features plenty of extras to help unlock the story- including the chance to watch the whole thing in chronological order.
*****

21 Grams (2003)
In the hands of anyone else, this tale of three people (Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts) united via a tragic car crash would be your average, run-of-the-mill drama. Instead, Amorres Perros director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu mixes up the order of events, delivering the story in a blizzard of initially confusing fragments. It’s a daring choice that forces you to pay attention¬¬, as well as perfectly mirroring the shattered lives and emotions of the main characters.
****

5. FUNNY WEIRD, OR FUNNY HA-HA?
The lighter side of Strange.

Schizopolis (1996)
Oceans Eleven director Steven Soderbergh writes, directs and stars in this whacked-out comedy that sends the weird-ometer spinning off the chart. The tale of corporate drone Fletcher Munsen who swaps places with his identical duplicate– a dentist who also happens to be having an affair with Munsen’s wife–, Schizopolis is part sketch-show, part satire, part rumination on the nature of reality, and has “Kooky” written through it like a stick of rock.
***

Being John Malkovich (1999)
It doesn’t get much stranger than Spike Jonze’s directorial debut, as tangle-haired puppeteer John Cusack discovers a magical portal leading into the head of John Malkovich, and quickly starts charging entry, as well as using the unwitting Malkovich to spice up his sex life. Mixing up ideas of fame, identity and reality, the film achieves the seemingly impossible by making Cameron Diaz convincingly dowdy, and climaxes with an unforgettable chase through the landscape of Malkovich’s mind.
****

I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Philosophy meets slapstick in Three Kings director David O. Russell’s hilariously bonkers comedy, which turns modern day Los Angeles into a surreal playground for all manner of intellectual tomfoolery. Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are the existential detectives hired by Jason Schwartzman to investigate a set of coincidences, and Jude Law is a smug corporate oik with a neurotic supermodel girlfriend (Naomi Watts)– but it’s Mark Wahlberg as a petroleum-hating fireman who steals the show.
****

Collector’s Score

So… how many do you have?
0-4 Slightly strange. You sometimes wear dark glasses when it isn’t sunny.
5-10 Medium strange. Weird is your middle name (but you don’t like to talk about it…)
11-14 Ultra Strange. Life is a psychedelic carnival, and you’ve got a front row seat.

Whatever happened to Tarsem Singh? The filmmaker behind countless adverts and music videos made an impression with his bonkers 2000 movie debut The Cell, and then vanished without trace. In fact, the Indian-born director (having shortened his ‘screen name’ to the Prince-like monicker of Tarsem) has spent the intervening time crafting an equally off-beat follow-up.

“When you tell a story to someone,” explains Tarsem, “The tale you tell them, the tale they imagine in their own head, and the tale they’ll remember in twenty years time are three completely different things. That’s what I wanted to explore, and it’s taken me over seventeen years of preparation to get there!”

The end result is The Fall, a bizarre blend of period drama and barmy fantasy that plays like The Princess Bride on very weird drugs. Starring Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace, it’s the story of a paralysed stuntman in hospital, whose friendship with a very young girl (Catinca Untaru) takes some dark turns thanks to the epic fable he invents for her.

Crammed full of eye-popping imagery, it’s a lush, ambitious story that took nearly five years to shoot across twenty four countries. “For the fantasy sequences, I’d use adverts I was working on to get to particular locations. I’d look for an ad that would take me where I wanted, and once the ad was finished, we’d get the actors over and shoot for just two or three days at a time.”

As if this wasn’t hard enough, try letting a six-year-old girl shape your film’s storyline, or getting your lead actor to pretend to be genuinely disabled. “When I found Catinca, I knew she had something magical– but she’d misunderstood what the casting director told her, and thought she’d be making a documentary with an actual disabled guy! That was when I realised the best way of getting a performance from her would be to maintain that reality.”

“Lee was fantastic, and kept it up for the entire time. He was a complete unknown then, so nobody on the crew knew he could walk. When everybody found out, some were really angry, but it wasn’t a ‘method’ thing. It was all for Catinca, because her reactions would have been totally different. The scenes between them are very improvisational – she really shaped how the film developed, and sent us in directions we’d never have gone otherwise.”

While it’s been a rewarding process, it’s not one Tarsem is in any hurry to repeat. “This was a one-off situation, and crazy in lots of ways – but I had to get this film out of my head. It’s like when you’re falling in love with somebody that’s got a problem – you see the train wreck that’s coming, but you can’t stop yourself.”

The best Documentaries available on DVD:

1: ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER (1999)
The Film: Spielberg’s Munich takes on the aftermath, but Kevin MacDonald’s Oscar-winning documentary focuses purely on the events of September 5th 1972 themselves. The story of how a group of Palestinian terrorists took nine Israeli athletes hostage at the Olympic Games in Germany, the film builds up a thriller-like atmosphere of escalating dread as it follows the crisis that unfolded on live global television, and the botched rescue attempt where five terrorists and all nine hostages died. A combination of razor-sharp editing, superb music and a fearless outlook, documentary filmmaking doesn’t get more important or necessary than this.
The Disc: Currently only available on R1, where all you get is talent files and a DVD Rom link for additional information on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Classic Moment: As the hostage crisis enters its final, fatal minutes, MacDonald uses CG images and colour-coded figures to show exactly how the reaction of the German authorities was so spectacularly mishandled.

2: CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (2003)
The Film: A close-up examination of a family buckling under pressure, this captivating film looks at the Friedmans, an ordinary Jewish family who suddenly find themselves at the centre of a horrific child abuse case. The question of who to believe gets more complex as the film progresses, while the extensive home movie footage shot by the family pitches you into the heart of the harrowing drama.
The Disc: The expansive Tartan DVD delves deeper into the unanswered questions, and includes a commentary, more home movie footage, and featurettes on the case.
Classic Moment: Goofing around outside the courtroom, the accused Friedmans are violently confronted by the parents of the children they allegedly abused, in a sequence all the more powerful for only being heard rather than seen.

3: SUPER-SIZE ME (2004)
The Film: A man with a mission, Morgan Spurlock sets out to test the true nature of fast food by eating nothing but McDonalds for thirty days. He’s soon experiencing waistline expansion and earning anxious looks from his doctors, but this gleefully insane experiment is just the hook for an energetic and wickedly funny expose of junk food culture and what it’s doing to the people who eat it.
The Disc: Not quite super-sized in the extras department, but there’s an enjoyable commentary from Spurlock and his girlfriend, Q+A sessions, interviews and a handful of interesting deleted scenes.
Classic Moment: If the statistics don’t put you off junk food, seeing Spurlock spew up a whole McDonalds meal on only the second day of his ‘quest’ should do the trick…

4: WHEN WE WERE KINGS (1996)
The Film: No sports personality has ever equalled the nuclear charisma of Muhammad Ali, and this gripping documentary captures him in full force during the run up to the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight against George Foreman in Zaire. A powerhouse of editing, it’s a fiercely gripping story of politics, culture and sport- but in the end, the film belongs to Ali, and he steals it time and again with jaw-dropping style.
The Disc: Aside from the trailer, we do get footage of two Ali fights- the ‘Rumble’ and the ‘Thrilla in Manilla’- uninterrupted and complete.
Classic Moment: “I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick! I’m so mean I make medicine sick!” Ali shows his poetic side at a pre-fight press conference.

5: PARADISE LOST 1 + 2 (1996, 2000)
The Film: A real-life horror story, these two films from Some Kind of Monster directors Joel Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky take an unblinking look at the ritual murder of three children in bible-belt Arkensas, and how three teenage heavy metal fans found themselves targeted as scapegoats. Following the story from initial investigations to the conviction and beyond, it’s a compelling tale of media panic that asks frightening questions about America’s judicial system.
The Disc: Two excellent documentaries for the price of one is all the extra value you’ll find here…
Classic Moment: Stepfather of one of the murdered children, and a likelier candidate for a culprit than any of the jailed teens, John Mark Byers performs a bizarre and creepy ceremony at the site of the killings.

6: BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (2002)
The Film: Farenheit 9-11 made him more notorious, but this amazing look at America’s love affair with gun culture is the finest moment yet in the career of professional establishment-annoyer Michael Moore. From banks distributing rifles as free gifts, to the showdown between Moore and NRA president Charlton Heston, this is powerful filmmaking unafraid to make us laugh while explaining some horrifying truths.
The Disc: A fair (if unspectacular) special edition, with featurettes, a weird commentary from production interns, and a Marilyn Manson music video.
Classic Moment: In Moore’s best example of video activism, he accompanies two of the school kids wounded in the Columbine massacre to Kmart (where the teens responsible bought their ammo) and asks for a refund on the bullets still lodged in their bodies.

7: DIG! (2005)
The Film: Ego battles don’t come much bigger than the clash between rock band front-men Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Anton Newcombe in this hilarious, compulsive portrait of the Dandy Warhols, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their bizarre rivalry. There’s a delirious fascination in Newcombe’s quest to seemingly sabotage his own success, but it’s also an intelligent look at the modern music industry, and the difficult question of Art vs Commerce
The Disc: It’s your choice- the current R2 release with just film notes and a directors interview, or the upcoming 2-disc edition that promises commentaries, deleted footage, extra music and much more?
Classic Moment: Newcombe decides a showcase gig for the record industry would be a great time to start an on-stage punch-up with his band…

8: LOST IN LA MANCHA (2002)
The Film: Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s fly-on-the-wall look at Terry Gilliam’s latest movie was supposed to be a traditional ‘making of’- but unfortunately, the movie in question was the infamous The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Capturing every aspect of how the production fell apart, this brutally honest ‘unmaking of’ is both tragic and fascinating, while using fragments of completed Quixote footage to give us glimpses of what might have been.
The Disc: Along with in-depth additional interviews with Gilliam and Depp, there’s deleted footage and more looks at Quixote via selected costume designs and storyboards.
Classic Moment: “Which is it, King Lear, or the Wizard of Oz?” As the storm destined to wash away most of his film equipment descends, Gilliam rails against the elements.

9: THE FOG OF WAR (2003)
The Film: The man at the heart of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, Robert MacNamara presents eleven vital lessons from his life as US Defence Secretary in Errol Morris’s brilliantly candid documentary. Mixing archive footage, graphics and lengthy interviews, it’s a measured and unbiased film that allows MacNamara to account for himself, and gives a sobering look into the world where bean-counters and bureaucrats decide how many people live or die.
The Disc: Twenty five additional scenes bolster up this slim disc, along with a breakdown of the eleven lessons.
Classic Moment: Step by step, MacNamara takes us through a meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis where JFK’s interpretation of two different communications from the Russian government was the only thing that stopped full-scale war breaking out.

10: ETRE ET AVOIR (2002)

The Film: Over the course of a year, teacher George Lopez patiently runs a single-classroom school in the French countryside, teaching kids from 4 to 10, and carefully helping them through the trials of growing up. Steering clear of any patronising “Aren’t kids just great?” moments, this gentle documentary instead turns out as a quietly absorbing and poetic study of learning as the hugely important experience it should always be.
The Disc: Aside from the excellent transfer, all you’ll find here are film notes and a short but interesting interview with director Nicolas Philibert.
Classic Moment: At the end of the film, Lopez says goodbye to his class for the last time before he retires, and only the stone-hearted won’t be wiping away a tear.

Twenty one hours and twenty six minutes of the best of Movie Horror…

Break out the popcorn, nail a crucifix to the wall and make absolutely certain the door is locked;- it’s time to spend Halloween the only sensible way, in the company of the greatest horror movies known to man. They’ve defined our nightmares for decades- so join us, as we cower behind the sofa, dispense important trivia and do our best to survive the ultimate Horror DVD All-nighter….

12.00pm: NOSFERATU
Cheerfully ripping off DRACULA by Bram Stoker without asking permission (and almost getting sued into the Stone Age by Stoker’s widow), German Expressionist director F.W. Murnau decided horror was the way to go- and jump started a genre in the process. With daft fast-motion sequences and over-expressive acting, this classic 1922 silent chiller may have moments of unintentional comedy- but it’s also got a haunting, lyrical atmosphere, and one of Horror’s most impossibly spooky villains in the rat-like, taloned bloodsucker Count Orlok (Max Schreck).

1.34pm: Practice walking up and down the stairs with your hands outstretched in funky NOSFERATU-style talons.

1.43pm: Realise you’re being rather silly, and go start the next movie.

1.45pm: HALLOWEEN
Stalk-and-Slash thrillers have been big business for decades- and it’s all thanks to director John Carpenter, an unforgettable theme tune and a spray-painted William Shatner mask. The original (and best) appearance of silent psychotic Michael Myers, Carpenter’s classic is all the more remarkable for spending its first half quietly building up atmosphere before unleashing a nerve-shredding barrage of scares. It made a “Scream Queen” out of Jamie Lee Curtis, and an appearance from Donald Pleasence was just the icing on the cake…

3.25pm: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
“To a new world of gods and monsters!” One of the first horror sequels, this follow up to the 1931 classic is also one of the most jaw-droppingly camp horror movies ever made. Dripping with surreal double-entendres and sly humour (mainly thanks to director James Whale’s background as a closeted homosexual in Hollywood), it’s both hilarious and genuinely haunting. Boris Karloff delivers another soulful turn as the Creature- and Elsa Lanchester’s fright-wigged Bride steals the attention in one of Cinematic Horror’s classic moments.

4.40pm: Attempt to order a pizza over the phone in the manner of Karloff’s Monster. Get as far as “Anchovies, BAD!! Stuffed Crust, GOOD!!” and then give up…

4.50pm: THE EXORCIST
Proving there’s nothing like possessed young girls spewing gallons of pea soup for getting people upset, director William Friedkin broke new cinematic ground while making his actors feel as uncomfortable as possible in this brilliantly harrowing 1973 horror classic. The tale of a twelve-year old girl and the decidedly potty-mouthed demon inhabiting her body, the full-on performances and dazzling mechanical effects mean that this landmark chiller is still as devastating as ever. Just remember- the power of Christ compels you!!

7.00pm: DRACULA 
For sheer style and gentlemanly vampire panache, you still can’t top Christopher Lee. Terrence Fisher’s 1958 movie injected heaving bosoms and lashings of blood into the previously starchy English Horror film, while turning his two stars into icons. Peter Cushing’s righteous, monster-bashing Van Helsing makes Hugh Jackman look like a big girls blouse in need of a haircut- but all the focus is on Lee, who steps into Horror legend, going from devilishly sexy to monstrous in the blink of an eye.

8.30pm: THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
The plot of Tobe Hooper’s transgressive masterpiece might sound like a SCOOBY DOO episode- a group of kids in a van investigate a creepy house, and then there’s lots of running and screaming- but despite never showing the titular piece of garden machinery slicing or dicing human flesh, it’s still a ferocious cinematic nightmare. Pitching hippie-style flower children against the monstrous chainsaw-wielding Leatherface and his nightmarish cannibal in-laws, this is full-blooded, screaming horror turned up to eleven.

9.53pm: You realise that choosing a non-vegetarian pizza may have been a mistake- and the side order of tomato soup was definitely unwise…

10.05pm: THE SIXTH SENSE
Forget about the twist. Even ignoring the now long-blown surprise ending, M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough movie as a director is a perfectly pitched exercise in subtle scares, building up a shatteringly terrifying atmosphere at its own gentle pace. It’s also one of the few films to feature a genuine performance from Bruce Willis, playing a troubled psychologist trying to help Haley Joel Osment cope with the fact that he sees dead people- and they’re not going away…

11.52pm: Take at least five minutes to work out how THE SIXTH SENSE’s final twist works. And then write “Punch M. Night Shyamalan” on your list of priorities…

MIDNIGHT!!!: THE SHINING
Stephen King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel so intensely, he had it remade as a dull TV miniseries- proving there’s no accounting for taste. In everywhere but the King household, Kubrick’s blankly terrifying odyssey into one man’s fractured mind is a masterclass in sustained dread, featuring possibly the most OTT Jack Nicholson performance in history, as a hotel caretaker going stark, staring mad. Is it due to ghosts? Is it all just his demented subconscious? Who cares? “Heeeeeeeeeeres Johnny!!!”

2.10am: POLTERGEIST
For kids in the 1980s, a haunted house story co-written (and allegedly co-directed) by Steven Spielberg sounded like an unthreatening choice. Instead, this barnstorming supernatural terror-thon helmed by TEXAS CHAINSAW director Tobe Hooper features all manner of brown-trouser experiences;- a demonic living tree, a swimming pool full of rotting corpses and a man pulling his own face off. As the Freeling family battle the evil forces infesting their home, Spielberg’s dark side turns out to be somewhere you want to steer clear of…

4.04am: There’s a scratching outside your door. Spend ten minutes convinced that it’s a demonic creature of the night, before realising it’s actually the neighbour’s cat.

4.15am: RING
The Naomi Watts-starring US remix of RING might have been more audience-friendly and lacked subtitles, but the Asian original has one small advantage- it’s pant-wettingly scary. The tale of a journalist racing to unlock the secrets of a cursed videotape before it’s mysterious powers claim the lives of her family, it’s an ambiguous, atmospheric experience that mixes folklore with technology, and turns something as simple as picking up the phone or switching on the TV into a potentially lethal experience.

5.51am: Spend the next five minutes hiding in the bathroom. Once you’ve convinced yourself that no long-haired Japanese women are going to climb out of the TV screen to steal your soul, sit back down and break out the Twiglets.

6.00am: SUSPIRIA
With the help of a pounding prog-rock score (augmented with occasional shouts of “WITCH!!”), SUSPIRIA is a blistering assault on the senses, and about as demented as the horror movie can get. A tale of supernatural shenanigans at a Ballet school, the nonsensical plot is just an excuse for director Dario Argento to indulge in audacious, full-on violence. From a guide dog hungrily turning on its owner, to a young woman encountering a room full of barbed wire, this is dark, dream-like and beautifully scary.

7.50am: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
The low-budget horror classic that gave birth to a groaning, shambling sub-genre, George A. Romero’s 1968 Black-and-White debut movie pushed the envelope with ground-breaking gore (most of which involved lots of butchers left-overs and chocolate sauce) and an adventurously bleak tone. Showing that being trapped in a house under attack from Zombie hordes isn’t a healthy lifestyle to consider, this hugely influential horror flick laid the groundwork for the edgier chillers of the Seventies, as well as delivering one of the bleakest ever movie endings.

9.26am: Congratulations. You’ve made it through the Ultimate Horror All-Nighter intact- but whether you’re now up to scaling the heights of the Ultimate Olsen Twins All-Nighter remains to be seen…

BOX-OUTS:

IN THE BEGINNING
Cinema arrived in the 1890s- and audiences didn’t have to wait long for the chance to be scared. The world’s first horror movie was a three-minute production in 1896 by legendary cinema fantasist George Melies, called THE DEVIL’S CASTLE- but it took a little longer for filmmakers to truly catch on. The next phase came in 1919, with the spectacularly eerie German expressionist classic THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI telling of a sleepwalking killer prowling a small town- and soon movies like NOSFERATU and THE GOLEM were showing exactly what horror could do. In 1926, Horror’s first superstar arrived in the form of actor Lon Chaney Sr. and his unforgettable appearance as the villain in the epic 1926 version of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Scary movies were an official sensation- and with Universal Studios producing versions of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, the age of the Movie Monster had truly begun…

ASIAN
They’re quiet, they’re restrained, and they’re here to scare the living crap out of you. Thanks to RING opening the floodgates, there’s an onslaught of Asian-made horror waiting to shatter nerves, and any upcoming Hollywood remakes are unlikely to equal the terrifying originals. Coming from a culture where vengeful spirits and ghosts are counted as part of everyday life, Asian Horror shows the otherworldly carefully insinuating its way into the ordinary world, often in the form of a long-haired female spectre with payback in mind. It’s also a genre prepared to ignore US horror film conventions and head in unexpected directions, killing off innocent characters and throwing in horribly disturbing plot twists or downbeat endings. The genre’s been around ever since creepy anthology KWAIDAN in 1968, and recently the number of Asian shockers has skyrocketed- with titles like THE PHONE, AUDITION and THE GRUDGE finding all new ways of freaking out international audiences.

GORE
Some filmmakers believe in the power of the imagination- but then others will cheerfully show you your worst nightmare in extreme close-up. Blood and gore was the realm of B-movies and exploitation flicks until the massive independent success of George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, who went onto even bloodier heights with 1978 sequel DAWN OF THE DEAD. Ever since then, gore has been an extra ingredient in the horror film mix- whether it’s the body-wrenching transformations of THE THING, the full-on comedy splatter of THE EVIL DEAD or the low-budget ketchup-fest of CABIN FEVER. However, when it comes to gory body horror, nobody can beat David Cronenberg, the Canadian filmmaker behind chilling masterworks like THE BROOD, THE FLY and VIDEODROME. With films that are devastating, intelligent and stomach-churning, Cronenberg is the crown prince of modern Horror- and nobody’s likely to challenge him for a long time…

CENSORSHIP
Horror has had a rocky relationship with the Ratings Boards, ever since Hammer movies started getting British censors hot under the collar- but it was during the 1960s, as cinematic taboos were shattered at regular intervals, that Horror started breaking rules and treading on dangerous ground. New “X” ratings were created to handle the latest ultra-gory Horror movies, and protests to ban films like THE EXORCIST became more common- but the problems didn’t truly explode until the arrival of Home Video. Suddenly, Italian splatterfests and hyperviolent slasher flicks were easily available for viewing- sparking off a moral panic about “Video Nasties” that only quietened down with the 1984 Video Recordings Act, introducing tougher classifications and banning many films altogether (Many of which were later de-restricted and are currently available on DVD…). Even now, Horror films are just as likely to inflame the “moral majority” as they are to scare their audience…

ITALIAN
A world where black-gloved killers stalk attractive, badly dubbed women and zombies wander the landscape tearing peoples arms off, Italian Horror is a paradise for those seeking the kind of taboo-busting movies Hollywood doesn’t have the nerve to make. The greatest examples are those helmed by director Dario Argento- and before making gleefully insane masterpieces like SUSPIRIA and OPERA, he invented the modern slasher movie with a set of classic “Giallo” mysteries including DEEP RED and THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. An Italian word meaning Yellow, “Giallo” films are usually pulp whodunnits concerned with mysterious psychopaths on a trail of murder- often involving beautiful women meeting messy ends. The other Italian horror favourite is pushing the Zombie sub-genre in an insanely gory direction, and Lucio Fulci is the name to pay close attention to, thanks to his hilariously bloodthirsty carnage-epics such as THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS.

THE UNSEEN
For all the gore, violence and gallons of blood that horror movies throw at the screen… sometimes what’s most scary is what you can’t see. Back in the 1940s, a set of cheaply made B-movies supervised by producer Val Lewton laid down the blueprint, making the most of their resources by concentrating on unseen terrors- and movies like CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE managed some truly insidious scares. From the original 1958 version of THE HAUNTING to Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, the Unseen in Horror Films has generated some of our worst fears- and after a long time in stasis, it made a colossal comeback in 1998’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. A zero-budget production, all BLAIR WITCH’s scares were in the shadows- and Hollywood soon cottoned on when quiet, subtle horror movies like THE SIXTH SENSE beat the more spectacular, bombastic fright flicks at their own game.

HORROR ICONS
From the moment Boris Karloff first shambled onscreen as the Monster in 1931’s FRANKENSTEIN, there’s always been a place in Horror films for iconic performers. Make-up effects may play their part in creating classic creatures- but they always require a haunting performance behind the mask, and the actors behind Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and the Phantom of the Opera have entered into cinematic legend. Every phase of cinema has had its horror icons- from Lon Chaney Sr. to Max Schrek, from Vincent Price to Christopher Lee, from Gunnar Hanson to Robert Englund- but it’s a burden that can also lead to excessive typecasting and a tragic end. For the best example, there’s Bela Lugosi, who shot to fame in 1931’s DRACULA thanks to his suave vamp style and diamond-eyed stare, but ended his career as a penniless drug addict, making hysterically awful films for legendary Z-grade director Ed Wood.

HAMMER
The most famous name in British Movie Horror started life as a quiet little production company making mysteries and war movies in the late 1930s and 1940s. It wasn’t until 1955, and their massively successful remake of classic TV sci-fi series THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT that Hammer Films started thinking that moving into Horror might be a good idea- and their mix of gothic melodrama and lurid colour turned out to be an ideal combination. New takes on classic horror with DRACULA and THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN turned Hammer into the ultimate scare factory, generating a slate of hugely successful horror and fantasy movies throughout the Sixties and Early Seventies. Their colourful, slightly camp style might now seem dated- but the truly great Hammer films like THE DEVIL RIDES OUT or CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF have a sense of dream-like lyricism that most right-thinking horror directors would kill for.

Originally published in DVD Review magazine
© Highbury Entertainment 2004

Déjà vu;- it’s the sensation of feeling like you’ve seen something before, and it’s getting difficult to look at the world of movies without experiencing it somewhere. Whether it’s crazed killer Leatherface powering up his chainsaw, mother Jamie Lee Curtis and daughter Lindsay Lohan exchanging bodies for the day, or George Clooney limbering up to “take down” another Casino as Danny Ocean, the art of the Movie Remake is all around us, often taking historic points in cinema and transforming them into something wholly different.

The process of using a previously successful movie as a template for further success (either financial or artistic) might feel like a recent invention, a symptom of Hollywood running short of ideas- but it’s actually been around for almost as long as Cinema itself, with the first recorded remake happening as early as 1898. Since then, the Remake has turned up in many different guises across the decades, with Silent movies being reworked as “Talkies”, Foreign language cinema being tailored for the international market, and classic Hollywood comedies being remixed for modern audiences.

But why do films get re-made in the first place? Directors will often talk about “updating a story for a new generation”, or giving an old classic an “exciting new twist!!”, but the fact of the matter is that it’s mainly down to a combination of fear and money. Movies are a tremendously expensive and risky business, so in Hollywood where, as screenwriter William Goldman once famously observed, “nobody knows anything”, film studio executives don’t want to bet their careers on green-lighting a costly film production unless they’ve got some assurances it’s going to work. As a result, it’s often easier to ransack the past than gamble on an untested screenplay- and remakes are theoretically a safe bet, with a previously successful movie to work from, as well as a familiar title to help with the marketing.

Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple, and there’s a whole selection of problems that can strike a remake dead in its tracks- like updating the story to fit with modern attitudes, or recasting roles made famous by previous actors. Even selecting a little-known foreign film to rework doesn’t always mean that success will follow- but with the current appetite for Remakes on the steady increase, it can’t be too long before even today’s movie hits are being fed back to us in new and bizarre combinations…

1: REMAKES THAT WORK

In the world of remakes, sometimes a healthy disrespect for the movie you’re updating is the best policy. Take director Steven Soderbergh’s opinion of the Rat Pack’s 1960 version of OCEAN’S ELEVEN:- “It’s the kind of film that gets remembered fondly by those who haven’t seen it- a wonderful document to have of those guys, but watch it for entertainment, and it’s excruciating.”

When setting out to remake the film in 2001, Soderbergh deliberately avoided duplicating the original, throwing out everything except the title, the basic plot and the character of Danny Ocean. The end result was a funky, slick heist movie that outstripped the original by a wide margin;- one of a number of remakes that reap large rewards by daring to remix, rewire or completely ignore their predecessors.

Often this happens because of a shift in attitudes, such as 2003’s lively remake of 1976 body-swap comedy FREAKY FRIDAY, which dumped the original’s chauvinistic portrayal of motherhood as being a “good little homemaker”. Or there’s THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR from 1999, which took advantage of relaxed attitudes about on-screen sex to replace the 1968 original’s suggestive “pawn-stroking” chess match with a genuinely saucy bout of rumpy-pumpy between stars Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo.

John Singleton’s loose 2000 remake of 1971’s SHAFT was sensible enough not to tamper with the basic set-up or Issac Hayes’ classic theme tune, but toned down the sexism and daft dialogue, while Martin Scorsese added intriguing levels to his 1991 remake of Fifties thriller CAPE FEAR by turning the whiter-than-white lawyer originally played by Gregory Peck into the morally flawed Nick Nolte.

Even additional gore helps when used in the correct manner- horror classics THE FLY and THE THING were both spawned from 1950s fright flicks, but transformed into genuine skin-crawling nightmares for the 1980s thanks to spectacular make-up effects, and directors David Cronenberg and John Carpenter working at full tilt.

In short- the remake game is a difficult one to play, but one that holds unexpected rewards- and stuffy film critics who blame the Decline Of Modern Cinema™ on remakes aren’t always speaking the truth…

2: CLOSE (BUT NO CIGAR…)

The original was a low-fi, almost plotless exercise in barnstorming terror. The remake was produced by the man behind PEARL HARBOUR and ARMAGEDDON. Horror fans were understandably spooked by the idea of Michael Bay masterminding a TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake, particularly when all he seemed to care about was having a recognisable title, saying;- “Everybody’s heard it so many times, it’s in the horror lore and lots of people think it was true!”

Despite all these fears, the final product was a surprisingly respectable remake- but couldn’t match the sheer random terror of the 1974 movie, even with a bigger budget and better performances. It’s a problem the majority of remakes end up suffering from;- no matter how watchable the new version might be, you’ll often be better off hunting down the original.

Take the bizarre case of MANHUNTER and RED DRAGON- both adapted from the Thomas Harris’ novel that introduced Hannibal Lecter, but MANHUNTER came first in 1986, helmed by MIAMI VICE creator Michael Mann with a brief appearance from Brian Cox as Lecter. Naturally, when Anthony Hopkins turned the character into a horror superstar, the aim was to “correct” the original movie with a more faithful adaptation- but despite boosting the size of Lecter’s role and being much closer to the original novel, 2002’s RED DRAGON still isn’t as interesting or scary as the subtle, chilly original.

Remakes may sometimes surpass what’s gone before- but for every OCEAN’S ELEVEN there’s an ITALIAN JOB, replacing a well-loved original with a fun but forgettable action movie that just happens to have the same title. Other remakes can easily follow the same pattern- even unofficial ones like 1987 psycho-thriller FATAL ATTRACTION, closely recycling the “vengeful ex” plotline that was done first and better by Clint Eastwood in the edgy 1971 movie PLAY MISTY FOR ME.

From Disney’s pointless live-action take on 101 DALMATIONS, to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan going through the motions in YOU’VE GOT MAIL, an internet-enhanced reworking of the 1940 James Stewart movie THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, below-par and average remakes are all around. The best way of coping with these is to remember- “New” doesn’t automatically equal “Improved”…

3: REMAKE DISASTERS

You don’t mess with a classic. It’s a well known rule when it comes to Remakes- but apparently, nobody told this to Sylvester Stallone. Urgently wanting to reclaim action star credibility after a long time out of the spotlight, in early 2000 Stallone chose to update 1971’s brutal Michael Caine gangster thriller GET CARTER for the new millennium.

Unfortunately, the faded star was so hungry for a hit, he decided the original’s ultra-dark climax wouldn’t play in today’s climate. “I’m a big sucker for redemption,” said Stallone at the time. “What we’ve done is take the character and try to move it into a year 2000 sensibility.” With a tacked-on happy ending, the new version of GET CARTER dumped classic Brit fatalism for dull action, and flopped so spectacularly that it limped straight onto video in the UK.

It’s a big risk with remakes- changes intended to update sensibilities or increase commercial potential can easily blow up in the filmmaker’s face, and tweaking the ending can be the biggest risk of all. Tim Burton found this out to his cost on 2001’s PLANET OF THE APES, when his attempt to out-do the original 1968 movie’s classic “Statue of Liberty” twist ending resulted in one of the most ludicrous climaxes in cinema history, an incomprehensible scene that pushed an already unremarkable remake into the realms of brain-bending disaster.

Whether it’s Jan De Bont turning previously creepy 1963 chiller THE HAUNTING into an overblown CGI-fest, or John McTiernan tripping himself up doing a teen remake of 1975 sci-fi thriller ROLLERBALL, remakes can make you wonder if anyone involved even watched the original- but sometimes, being too faithful can be just as dangerous. Gus Van Sant’s exact, shot-by-shot 1998 remake of Hitchcock’s PSYCHO might have looked great inside an art gallery, but was as a film was a pointless exercise that somehow looked even more dated than the original.

The pitfalls of the remake won’t be turning filmmakers away any time soon;- and choosing a flawed original is no guarantee of success. Just ask Guy Ritchie or Madonna, who must both be wishing that they’d never looked at the original 1974 version of SWEPT AWAY and thought “Hey, we could do that!!”…

4: FOREIGN REMAKES

“I didn’t even know it had already been done until I finished the movie.” admits actor Brian Cox about his appearance in 2003 fright flick THE RING. “It didn’t strike me as a Japanese film- I just thought it was a very exciting thriller.” The horrifying tale of a cursed videotape, RINGU (1998) and its respectable US remake are just the latest in the long history of Foreign Language movies being given a Hollywood makeover.

No matter how many break-out hits like AMELIE or CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON might rake in cash at the multiplexes, mainstream cinema audiences feel that reading subtitles is way too much effort. They far prefer watching the story remade with English dialogue and familiar actors- a process that’s been happening for a surprisingly long time, including classic 1960 western THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN plundering the plotline of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterwork THE SEVEN SAMURAI.

It was, however, the success of frothy comedy THREE MEN AND A BABY (adapted from French hit TROIS HOMME ET UN COUFFIN) in 1987 that really got Hollywood’s attention, and soon producers were rooting through the output of other countries for the latest sensation to rework. Luc Besson’s LA FEMME NIKITA was spun into the Bridget Fonda vehicle THE ASSASSIN and then into a TV series, while even James Cameron got in on the action, with his 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger spy comedy TRUE LIES being a close remake of the French comedy LA TOTALE!

More recently, we’ve had Adrian Lynne’s 2002 erotic drama UNFAITHFUL directly updating 1969’s LA FEMME INFIDELE, and Steven Soderbergh treading the remake trail again in 2003 with his stunning take on the 1972 Russian sci-fi movie SOLARIS.

As with all remakes, however, there’s still the potential for filmmakers to be brought down to earth with a bump. Hugh Grant failed to twitter his way through NINE MONTHS, the appalling 1995 retread of French comedy NEUF MOIS; the dreary Sharon Stone update DIABOLIQUE ruined one of Cinema’s nastiest twist endings; and- funniest of all- VANILLA SKY fumbled it’s reworking of Spanish drama ABRE LOS OJOS, giving us the priceless sight of Tom Cruise looking like Quasimodo and shrieking “Tech Support!” for no apparent reason…

5: THE STEALTH REMAKE

So, you’ve got a prospective bridegroom meeting his in-laws for the first time- and making a serious mess of things. What you haven’t got is either Robert DeNiro or Ben Stiller playing the lead roles, as low-budget 1992 American comedy MEET THE PARENTS and its 2000 big-league reworking are a great example of the Stealth Remake- choosing an obscure original movie, and then keeping extremely quiet that you’re doing a full-scale update.

The original MEET THE PARENTS was an American independent comedy that only got a minimal cinema release, but it shares the title and plot as well as enough gags in the big-budget remake for the original’s screenwriters to get an official story credit. It’s a strategy that gives filmmakers all the advantages of a Remake without worrying about annoying fans of the original- and it’s more common than you might realise.

Long-forgotten B movies can be a gold-mine for quick and easy updates, as THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS proved, stealing the 1954 original’s title and a few aspects of the storyline. GONE IN 60 SECONDS performed a similar act of thievery on a low-budget 1974 thriller- while, on supposedly classier terrain, 1998’s MEET JOE BLACK took the basic premise of the 1934 movie DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY- which only lasted 79 minutes- and stretched it over a mind-numbing three hours.

Easier to cope with was Mel Gibson’s 1996 kidnap thriller RANSOM, which took it’s storyline from a dimly remembered 1956 movie starring Glen Ford, while even the Michael Caine and Steve Martin romp DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS had its roots elsewhere, being a reworking of the 1964 David Niven comedy BEDTIME STORY.

Stealth remakes can turn up anywhere- and can even be used by directors as a cunning way of “upgrading” a previously made film. Michael Mann’s epic 1995 crime drama HEAT scooped major acclaim- but Mann was remarkably quiet at the time about the whole film being an expanded version of LA TAKEDOWN, a TV movie he’d written and directed in 1989. Whatever happens, keep your eyes peeled- you never know from what direction the next Stealth remake might appear…

6: MISCASTING

Cary Grant. Michael Caine. Charlton Heston. Any actor would be nervous about stepping into the shoes of these Hollywood Titans- but you have to wonder how the most recent replacement for all three of these icons ended up being the Artist Formerly Known As “Marky Mark”…

He gained acting credibility playing Dirk Diggler in 1997’s BOOGIE NIGHTS, but ex-pop star and Calvin Klein model Mark Wahlberg has since been seemingly determined to be crowned “King of the Remakes” in a clutch of toweringly unimpressive roles. PLANET OF THE APES saw him lost amongst the monkey make-up effects, proving exactly how important Chuck Heston’s biblical performance was in the groundbreaking original, while THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE (a 2002 rerun of the 1956 thriller CHARADE) saw him mistakenly trying to be as suave and sophisticated as Cary Grant while simultaneously wearing a Frank Spencer-style beret.

Only 2003’s THE ITALIAN JOB is in any way forgivable- and while it’s bizarre to think of Wahlberg instead of Michael Caine as Charlie Croker, the sight of Noel Coward’s Mr Bridger being replaced by Donald Sutherland is a lot more brain-taxing. It also shows how difficult it is to recast such an iconic role when remaking a film;- assembling a movie cast is difficult enough under normal circumstances- for example, only a small twist of fate prevented first choice Ronald Reagan from playing Rick in CASABLANCA- but trying to correctly cast an already famous role can be like trying to bottle lightning.

Many remakes have stumbled thanks to this problem- you only have to think of a bleach-blonde Bruce Willis in the bland remake of classic thriller DAY OF THE JACKAL; Harrison Ford looking uncomfortable standing in for Humphrey Bogart in light comedy SABRINA; or butcher-than-butch Wesley Snipes trying to camp it up as a transvestite in TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE NEWMAR, the lame US take on Australian hit THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT.

It’s a simple fact that as long as there are remakes, there’ll be miscast actors taking on completely unsuitable roles- and in a world where the ideal replacement for Peter Cook in the 2000 remake of BEDAZZLED is Elizabeth Hurley, it seems that anything could be possible…

SIDEBARS

HOORAY FOR BOLLYWOOD!

Anyone thinking that Hollywood has it easy ripping off other countries’ movies can take comfort in the fact that payback exists, thanks to the dazzlingly colourful world of Bollywood cinema. The Indian film industry actually beats Hollywood by sheer volume, producing an incredible 800 movies a year- but in order to keep up with demand for their brand of extravagant drama, Bollywood producers often have to hi-jack their plots from some very familiar sources.

Adding the traditional Bollywood ingredients like daft sentiment and immense song-and-dance routines to light comedies like SOME LIKE IT HOT ( and MRS DOUBTFIRE (AUNTIE NUMBER 1) isn’t straining credulity too much- but a three-hour musical version of THE EXORCIST (JADU TONA) takes some beating… Alongside this, there’s been rewrites of RESERVOIR DOGS (KAANTE), THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (KHOTEY SIKKEY), THE ROCK (QUAYAMAT), DEAD POETS SOCIETY (MOHABBATEIN) and THE GODFATHER (DHARMATMA), amongst many others.

Naturally, Bollywood’s habit of never bothering to ask permission to remake has attracted some legal wrangling from the US, so they now have to be a little less blatant in their plundering- but it’s difficult to imagine how they could have been less outrageously blatant than with the amazing Bollywood take on SUPERMAN.

Cunningly retitled SUPERMAN, the 1987 production actually hi-jacks huge chunks of special effects footage and music from the original 1978 Christopher Reeve movie, as well as throwing plenty of new romantic subplots and knockabout comedy into an overstuffed storyline. With a baggy-suited Superman battling his evil Elvis-quiffed childhood nemesis, it’s a jaw-dropping combination of superhero action and dancing girls, and one of the most deliciously insane remakes you’re ever likely to see…

FAMILIAR FEELING
The Five Greatest Remakes currently available on DVD…

HIS GIRL FRIDAY
One of the oldest remakes, and still the best;- this lightning-paced 1946 comedy from director Howard Hawks rewires newspaper satire THE FRONT PAGE with a female twist, pitching devilishly cunning editor Cary Grant against his top reporter (and ex-wife) Rosalind Russell.

OCEAN’S ELEVEN
George Clooney and director Steven Soderbergh get in a Las Vegas state of mind along with Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon in this superior reworking of the Rat Pack’s flawed 1954 original. A state-of-the-art heist movie, this smash hit oozes style and confidence from every pore.

A FISTFULL OF DOLLARS
The film that invented Clint Eastwood also took its plot from Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai movie YOJIMBO. Playing two gangs off against each other, Clint’s nameless gunslinger is in control from the start, while Sergio Leone’s operatic direction rewrote the rulebook on Westerns.

THE FLY
The original was a genial 1950s horror flick. The remake had those not terrified out of their wits reaching for the sickbag, as David Cronenberg’s body-horror sensibilities cranked up the fear, and Jeff Goldblume’s teleportation-obsessed scientist found himself mutating into a monstrous insect.

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
A sassy, sexy crime caper for grown-ups, this update of the 1968 original swaps Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway for Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo, and cranks up the heat between the billionaire gentleman thief and the female insurance investigator out to snare him in more ways than one…

NOSTALGIA AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE…
The Re-makes We Don’t Want To See

It might only be a matter of time- but if we’re lucky, there’ll be a while before the remake craze plumbs these murky depths…

PERFORMANCE
Giving the wigged-out 1971 original an urgently needed touch of BritPop, Robbie Williams is the cheeky reclusive musician and Jason Statham is the gangster who hides out in his dilapidated mansion. Soon they’re swapping identities, while singing songs about how terrible it is to be rich and famous.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Relocated to a near-future Beverly Hills, this teen-comedy update of the Kubrick classic stars Frankie Muniz as Alex, the wacky skateboarding tearaway who just can’t help indulging in ridiculous ultraviolence. Wrongly jailed and reprogrammed to behave himself by mad scientist Nicolas Cage, will Alex make it to the Prom on time?

CASABLANCA
The GIGLI reunion everyone’s been craving!!! Ben Affleck is Rick, and Jennifer Lopez is Ilsa in this latino-pop musical take on the mysteriously song-free 1942 original. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays up a storm as Sam, while Ralph Fiennes mugs shamelessly as Victor Laszlo.

GONE WITH THE WIND
Catherine Zeta Jones is Scarlett O’Hara, Michael Douglas is Rhett Butler, and Gary Oldman is the head of the Martian Fleet sent to eradicate humanity, in INDEPENDENCE DAY director Dean Devlin’s adventurous sci-fi “re-imagining” of the classic Hollywood romance.

Originally published in DVD Review magazine
© Highbury Entertainment 2005

It was the summer when Anakin embraced the dark side, the Caped Crusader returned to Gotham City, and Tom Cruise just wouldn’t shut up about Katie Holmes. As far as unique experiences go, however, Summer 2005 may be most notable for Michael Bay greeting the release of his latest full-tilt, maximum volume blockbuster The Island by exclaiming “It’s a debacle! It’s the worst opening weekend I’ve ever had!”

It has, in short, been a long, weird and baffling summer. Mega-budget productions touted as cast-iron hits have seriously underperformed, and the whiff of disappointment has remained in the air despite plenty of films raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Stranger still is the fact that, in terms of quality, it’s been one of the strongest summers we’ve seen in years. Movie standards have generally been higher, the bigger films have been getting better reviews, and even box-office underperformers like Kingdom of Heaven and Sahara turned out as flawed but genuinely interesting and entertaining movies rather than simply rubbish that deserved its fate.

When it comes to the winners, of course, there’s no surprise in who came out on top. George Lucas’ traditional bizarre pessimism proved again to be completely unfounded, as Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith overcame a higher certificate and some of the creakiest dialogue known to man, conquering the box-office to the tune of $800 million in worldwide grosses. Cranking up the violence level and featuring kiddie-unfriendly footage of a crispy-fried Jedi, Episode III’s tone of doomy betrayal did little to slow its success, and also sparked off something in other filmmakers, resulting in a surprisingly provocative shift towards darker Summer movies with harsh, downbeat edges.

Who could have predicted that Steven Spielberg would deliberately traumatise Dakota Fanning with quite so much gusto in his gritty take on War of the Worlds? Or that Christopher Nolan’s sharply made Batman Begins would turn a bloke in a bat costume into the kind of multi-layered character you’d normally find in an arthouse flick? Taken separately, these were all daring films that amazingly managed to triumph financially- but arriving together over a two-month period, they stamped a level of darkness onto Summer 2005 that’s been more of a curse than a blessing.

The trouble is that when three of the top films of the summer are all at the extreme end of the 12A certificate, there’s little around for one of the biggest sections of the audience- the family. “Blockbusters by their nature are pitched mainly at adolescent boys” says Screen International’s Box-office analyst Robert Mitchell, “but the batch we’ve had this summer haven’t been so good at crossing over to the general family audience, and that’s where the big money is. Combine that with the fact that there’s been fewer genuine family films, only one Summer CGI animation, and no big sequels like Shrek 2, and it’s certainly been a contributing factor to the slump.”

Proving this firmly are the strong showings of the few family films that have been around during the Summer. There’s been big success for CG cartoon Madagascar, and also for superhero romp Fantastic Four, whose $53 million US opening weekend raised Marvel’s fortunes and managed to briefly turn the tide of the slump. Nobody could claim that FF is anything but a weak entry in the recent batch of superhero movies (especially compared to the storming Batman Begins)- and yet, it won through thanks to being family-friendly popcorn entertainment in a summer where the competition was virtually non-existant.

Tim Burton’s candy-coloured Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also scored big-time, reaching nearly $150 million after just 17 days in the US alone, while Johnny Depp’s charmingly bonkers performance proved that while Hollywood may be struck with doubt and uncertainty, it can still rely on good old-fashioned star power to bring home the money.

Earlier in the year, things had not seemed quite so certain, with rumours of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s alleged marriage-wrecking affair on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith casting the unwelcome spectre of the Ben Affleck/J.Lo disaster over the movie’s chances. And then, there was everybody’s favourite diminutive Scientologist, as Tom Cruise turned into a publicity hungry lunatic in record time and found it impossible to restrain himself from leaping onto sofas, getting engaged to women he’d only just met, and lecturing talk-show hosts on the insidious evils of psychiatry.

A major celebrity backlash was expected, and yet what we got was a surprisingly happy ending, with the frothy cocktail of Mr and Mrs Smith scoring over $300 million worldwide, and the re-teaming of Minority Report’s Spielberg and Cruise proving even more profitable, with the combined gross of War of the Worlds smashing the $500 million barrier. Will Smith showed that his usual charming streetwise shtick hadn’t yet worn out its welcome in Hitch, while even the lower-level stars have shown staying power, with frat-pack regulars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan propelling sleeper hit Wedding Crashers over the $100 million mark in the US.

Of course, these ‘talent’-heavy successes can’t always be guaranteed, as proved by the weak US showings of Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man or Nicole Kidman in Bewitched. It’s worth remembering, though, that two of the most recent flops- The Island and Stealth- are movies where the concept was supposed to be the star, instead of less-known performers like Scarlett Johansen or Josh Lucas. The consecutive failure of both films could be a sign that the appetite for the patented Big Dumb Blockbuster(tm) with low-level actors and high-level special effects may be dying out after a decade of prosperity. On the other hand, it could simply be that both were misconceived from the get-go, and they’ve helped define the biggest Studio losers of the season, with Sony and Dreamworks’ live-action division fighting it out for the wooden spoon award.

So, with the Summer all but over, what does the near-unbroken slump and the poor showings of so many movies mean for the future? In practice, if you look at the big picture, all it really means is that 2004 was a bonanza year for cinema that 2005 was always going to find nearly impossible to beat. “Last year,” explains Robert Mitchell, “you still had a Lord of the Rings movie in January and February- and then, of course, there was Passion of the Christ. A foreign language movie opening in March and earning $370 million- that’s a completely unrepeatable fluke, and it’s meant that 2005’s been lagging behind almost from the start.”

The one lesson that should be learned from Summer 2005, however, is don’t underestimate family audiences, and try not to put all your eggs in one basket. “We’ve ended up with a weird situation this year where two of what should be the biggest movies of 2005- the new Harry Pottter, and King Kong- aren’t opening till November and December,” says Mitchell. “That’s a gigantic chunk of this year’s cinema-going that hasn’t happened yet, and despite the slump, that could well put the industry back on track. Yes, the summer blockbuster season is always supposed to be the biggest earner in theory, but it’s often the other parts of the year that are the deciding factor. You can lose the summer, and still win the year – it’s only a battle, not the whole war.”

LESSONS IN LIFE:
What Summer 2005 has taught us…

Evil aliens who’ve been planning to invade Earth for millions of years will still forget their vaccination shots.

Be nice to that pouty, grumpy Jedi Knight- otherwise, it’ll come back to bite you in the end…

Angelina Jolie couldn’t look unsexy if she tried. Very hard.

Having your body transformed into an unconvincing (and decidedly bendy) mass of orange rock will play merry havoc with your sex life.

Knocking a helicopter out of the sky with a vintage 19th century cannon is surprisingly easy.

A family-friendly Will Ferrell is a bland Will Ferrell.

Nobody, but nobody, wanted to see another XXX movie.

An underdog team with no chance of winning will, amazingly, make it all the way to the finals and triumph over adversity. Who’d have thought it?.

Out of all the reactions a director could wish for with a new movie, shocking Oliver Stone has to rank near the top of the list. “He couldn’t believe it,” says ex-Tarantino collaborator and Oscar-winning PULP FICTION co-writer Roger Avary, “He said to me ‘How did you do that? How did you get them to let you make that?!?’” The film that sent Stone’s head spinning is also the Canadian-born Avary’s first movie since making his directorial debut with 1995 Parisian heist thriller KILLING ZOE, and in the intervening time he’s learnt one vital lesson;- “I finally realised it’s easier on the eyes to look at lots of young beautiful kids than a bunch of French junkies!”

Adapted from AMERICAN PSYCHO author Bret Easton Ellis’ darkly satirical College saga, THE RULES OF ATTRACTION pushes the teen movie boundaries and nearly received the dreaded NC-17 rating in the U.S., thanks to some full-frontal nudity and a harrowing rape sequence. Familiar territory for Ellis and Avary- but the last actor you’d expect to be along for the ride is DAWSON’S CREEK star James Van Der Beek as dope-dealing man-slut Sean Bateman.

“When James’ name was first discussed,” says the 37 year-old Avary, “my reaction was the same as everybody’s- ‘Dawson?!?’ But when I met him, there was a moment when he took his sunglasses off and I could see his eyes had this capacity for looking totally cold and dead, like sharks eyes. I was sure he could do the role, but the moment I cast him, everything nearly collapsed. The studio wanted someone ‘edgier’, and plenty of other actors didn’t want to be in the ‘Dawson movie’, but we stuck to our guns, and just had to make it for less money.”

To capture the multi-viewpoint style of the novel, Avary used a barrage of techniques;- from backwards footage, to split-screen sequences that ‘fold’ together into a single shot (“Nobody understood that scene until we filmed it- you could literally hear this collective sigh from the crew of ‘Oh, that’s what he was trying to do’”), but his real challenge was filming the manic European tour of party animal Victor (Kip Pardue);- seventy hours of video edited into four mind-frazzling, adrenalised minutes.

He’s even started cutting the footage into a full-length feature entitled GLITTERATI, but looks back on the raucous two-week Euro-shoot as one of the hardest things he’s ever done. “I shot it all myself- sometimes 18 hours a day- and me and my producer would be following Kip around Europe with no idea where we’d end up next. Kip stayed in character as Victor the whole time, and I’d film him everywhere, whether he was taking a shit or making out with a girl;- and girls love it when you’re an asshole like Victor. Although, I guess having a camera following you around makes it seem much more glamorous…”

If knowing when to start and finish is important in life, it’s even more vital in the world of Movies. The first five minutes of a film has to pull you in and introduce you to the characters, while the ending has the even harder job of resolving everything, tying up all the knots, or shocking you into disbelief. The job of both elements, above everything else, is to make certain the story sticks in our minds- so join us, as we explore what makes beginnings and endings tick by looking at fifty of the greatest examples cinema has to offer…

MOVIE OPENINGS:

25: SUNSET BOULEVARD

“The poor dope. He always wanted a pool- and in the end, he got himself a pool.” Not many movies can claim to be narrated by a corpse, but Billy Wilder’s blackly comic drama does it in style, opening with Joe Gillis (William Holden) stone-cold dead and floating in a luxurious Hollywood swimming pool. His premature death doesn’t, however, prevent him from explaining to the audience the events that led up to his unfortunate watery demise, and his beyond-the-grave voiceover is a perfect way to enter into the film’s pitch-black look at the highs and lows of life in the Movie world.

24: MAGNOLIA

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble drama breaks dozens of conventions in depicting the interconnections between its characters, and sets up the themes of fate, chance and ‘random’ events in a brilliantly stylized prologue. A self-contained set of tales, it veers from a silent movie-style depiction of a murder and hanging, to the weird story behind a scuba diver found dead in a tree after a forest fire, to- most memorable of all- a suicide that, thanks to a twist of fate, becomes a murder where the perpetrator is the victim’s own mother. And, as the Narrator (Ricky Jay) insists, “These strange things happen all the time.”

23: SUSPIRIA

The first twenty minutes of Dario Argento’s hallucinatory horror masterwork features an unthinkably creative and lurid murder, but the viewer’s attention has already been hi-jacked by the first five minutes. As Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is driven to a remote German Ballet school in the middle of a rainstorm, the thunder roars, the lightning cracks and the pounding prog-rock score is augmented with screams of “Witch!!” Combine this with Argento’s full-throttle visual style, freaky colours and inexplicable shots of rushing water, and its an opening that welds your eyes open before you’re even aware there’s anything to be scared of.

22: FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

He may be smug, ceaselessly lucky and convinced of his own brilliance, but it’s hard not to agree with Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) when he pulls off a performance as richly over-the-top as the one which opens John Hughes’ barnstorming teen comedy. Absolutely determined to spend the day anywhere but school, Ferris fakes illness with a shameless display of blank stares and sweating, winds up his disbelieving sister, acts like a cute puppy dog for his concerned parents, and then turns to the camera the moment they leave the room in order to exclaim: “They bought it!”

21: THE GODFATHER

“I believe in America.” With these words, the legendary crime saga gets off to a quiet but utterly compelling start. A world away from the previous, slam-bang depictions of gangster life, Francis Ford Coppola’s stunning drama starts as it means to go on, in semi-darkness, as an undertaker asks for ‘justice’ to avenge his daughter, and crime lord Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) calmly takes the matter onboard, but not without delivering some harsh, important words on the subject of respect. A slow, graceful entrance for one of Brando’s pivotal roles, and a literate beginning for one of Cinema’s true classics.

20: ALIEN

It might feature blood, screaming, and a grotesque creature erupting from someone’s chest, but the first film in the Alien franchise has a beautifully restrained start. Heading through deep space, the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo receives a mysterious transmission, and we watch with almost documentary-style detatchment as the ship begins the slow process of waking both itself and its crew. From the activity of the computer reflected in space helmets on the bridge, to the quiet, bleary awakening of Kane (John Hurt) from suspended animation, space travel has never seemed so realistic and weirdly serene.

19: BLUE VELVET

Green Lawns. White Picket Fences. Happy smiling faces. All images of classic Americana, but it’s David Lynch sitting in the director’s chair, so the calming montage set to Bobby Vinton’s classic title song doesn’t take long before it turns seriously weird. A man hosing his lawn suddenly clutches his chest and collapses in pain. As his dog leaps over-enthusiastically at him, the camera heads down into the grass, transforming it into a jungle, swooping through until it finds the gleaming shapes of insects violently fighting each other- the perfect visual metaphor for the film’s journey into the dark heart of suburbia.

18: TOY STORY 2

Having spent the entirety of the original CGI classic Toy Story as a fish-out-of-water, there’s something truly satisfying about seeing square-jawed hero toy Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) where he belongs- zooming through the stars, and blasting the hell out of the minions of Emperor Zurg. Pixar’s animators pull out all the stops in this sequence, cramming in 2001 and Star Wars in-jokes, before Buzz is unexpectedly atomized, and the action pulls back to reveal that we’ve actually been watching neurotic plastic dinosaur Rex (Wallace Shawn) making a total hash of trying to complete the Buzz Lightyear videogame.

17: RAISING ARIZONA

From the moment habitual re-offender Herbert “H.I.” McDonogh (Nicolas Cage) poses for his mug-shot and falls for policewoman Ed (Holly Hunter), the pre-credits sequence of the Coen Brothers’ madcap comedy barely pauses for breath. A blizzard of events rush past at a dizzying speed, and there’s plenty of whacked-out Looney Tunes-style humour as H.I. bounces in and out of prison, finally marries Ed, and faces tough problems in their quest for a baby. Featuring more gags than some comedies manage in their entire running time, it’s a blistering tour-de-force that pitches you straight into the movie’s lunatic headspace, leaving you wondering what could possibly happen next.

16: GOODFELLAS

Driving through the night, Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci hear a noise from the boot of their car. They pull over, Pesci opens the boot, discovers the presumed corpse inside isn’t as dead as he thought, and instantly starts stabbing it to finish the job. As Ray Liotta watches impassively, his narration tells us- “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Cue the opening credits, and this sucker-punch of exquisitely timed violence ushers us instantly into the world of the gangster, with the aid of Martin Scorsese’s fiercely controlled direction.

15: SCREAM

A genuine shock to rank with Janet Leigh being killed halfway through Psycho, the beginning of Wes Craven’s satirical slasher flick cranks the fear factor up to maximum as the cute and resourceful Drew Barrymore comes under attack from a savage sicko with a liking for prank calls and movie references. After a series of devastating jolts, it seems Drew is destined to escape and become the heroine of the film- until, moments before her parents arrive home, she’s caught, stabbed and disemboweled, making it absolutely clear to the audience that anything can happen, and nobody is safe.

14: ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

On the first viewing, the pre-credits sequence of music video director Michel Gondry’s romantic mindwarp can seem ridiculously low-key, taking almost seventeen minutes to chart the initial meeting and flowering romance of introverted cartoonist Jim Carrey and blue-haired free spirit Kate Winslet. It’s only when you reach the ending, and realize that Carrey and Winslet have actually already had a love affair but have both had their memories of each other erased, that the true genius of the opening sinks in. As with the rest of this Charlie Kaufmann-scripted weirdfest, it’ll leave your brain gently fizzing for weeks to come.

13: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Proving that love really is all you need, this classic magical wartime fantasy from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger starts with a view of the entire universe, before zooming towards planet Earth, and finally focusing in on the desperate conversation between an American radio operator (Kim Hunter) and a poetic English Bomber pilot (David Niven) who knows he’s minutes away from death. Over a few short exchanges, they start to fall in love, and it’s impossible not to be swept up in the film’s wonderfully English romanticism as Niven leaps to his doom, only to find a very different destiny waiting for him…

12: THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

The first ten minutes of Peter Jackson’s take on Tolkien’s fantasy classic have an almost insurmountable job. How do you introduce an unfamiliar audience to the insanely complicated world of Middle Earth without burying them under a pile of mythical references and unpronounceable names? The answer turns out to be a brisk prologue that races through Middle Earth’s history in double time, tracking the tale of the One Ring and finding time for a truly mind-blowing battle sequence, a cameo from a pre-Andy Serkis design of Gollum, and even some genuine giant monster-style bashing from the spikily-armoured Sauron, all narrated by the dulcet tones of Cate Blanchett’s Galadirel.

11: CITIZEN KANE

A film doesn’t get called “the Greatest Movie ever made” without good reason, and Orson Welles’ groundbreaking directorial debut sets out its desire to dazzle in the stunning opening sequence. Using models, composite shots, surreal lenses and bizarre editing, it shows the last minutes of legendary newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane as he expires in his colossal, castle-like retreat of Xanadu. A pair of lips say the word “Rosebud”, a snow-globe showing a tiny house rolls and smashes on the ground, and the mystery that drives the film begins- who, or what is Rosebud, and why did it mean so much to a man like Kane?

10: JAWS

Brutal economy is the name of the game in the movie that transformed Steven Spielberg from promising newcomer into a directorial superstar. Combining prowling underwater shots, suspenseful views of the ocean surface and John Williams’ infamous theme, the film gets off to a horrifying start as innocent hippie-chick Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) discovers it’s unwise for promiscuous, drink-loving teens to go skinny-dipping when there’s a hungry Great White Shark on the loose. It’s also the perfect showcase for the style forced upon Spielberg thanks to failure of his mechanical shark, with the ocean-bound killer not even showing a fin while chowing down on its helpless victim.

9: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

The pre-credits sequences in Bond films have evolved from mere teasers into fully-fledged stunt-heavy spectaculars that are often more memorable than the movies they’re introducing. Few of them, however, have reached the sheer exuberance of the opening of The Spy Who Loved Me, which sees Roger Moore’s debonair agent summoned away from a spot of rumpy-pumpy in a mountain cabin and suddenly encountering a gang of ski-bound KGB assassins. A high-octane chase follows, which ends with a charmingly ridiculous punchline as Bond skis off a cliff to escape, and then saves himself from a colossal drop by releasing a Union Jack-emblazoned parachute.

8: MANHATTAN

“Chapter One- He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. New York was his town, and it always would be.” With shimmering black-and-white widescreen photography and the sounds of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, the opening of Woody Allen’s masterful comedy drama is a cinematic love-letter to his favourite city. The towers and skyscrapers of Manhattan have never looked so magnificent, and Allen’s traditionally nervy voiceover gives the whole sequence a brilliantly ironic edge that perfectly sets the scene for the realistic, complex and romantic events that follow.

7: HALLOWEEN

The film that kick-started the American slasher movie genre is given a brilliantly eye-catching opening by director John Carpenter and his devious taste for suspense. We follow the point-of-view of Michael Myers in what looks like one unbroken shot (actually three separate shots cunningly cut together) as he spies on his teenage sister having sex, dons a Halloween mask, waits for her boyfriend to leave, and then brutally stabs her to death. As if the creepy voyeurism of the sequence wasn’t enough to disturb, Carpenter then tops this by revealing that the perpetrator is actually a cute, blonde and seemingly innocent child.

6: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Sometimes, all you need is one gigantic, rolling boulder. Throwing the character of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) straight into what he does best- dicing with death in ancient temples- Spielberg marshals an opening sequence that’s an absolute masterclass in adrenaline and well-timed shocks, with gruesome rotted corpses, tarantulas, spikes, pressure-activated poison darts, and the vital “collapsing building” factor. Add in a chase by natives, Paul Freeman’s villainous rival archaeologist Belloq, and a close encounter between Indy and his least-favourite breed of reptile, and you’ve got everything you need to know about our battle-scarred hero in one audaciously entertaining package.

5: TOUCH OF EVIL

From Citizen Kane onwards, Orson Welles was always looking for ways to rewrite the cinematic rulebook, and this 1958 thriller gave him another chance to shine. Originally only contracted as an actor, Welles ended up in the director’s chair, and used the same adventurous visual style as in Kane to create the breathtaking opening sequence. Following a bomb as it gets primed, placed in the boot of a car and driven across the Mexico/America border to be detonated, the unbroken three minute and twenty second tracking shot was like nothing that had ever been seen before, and raised the curtain on Welles’ last major Hollywood movie.

4: APOCALYPSE NOW

War is Hell, but Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic opens with a look at its weirder, darker and beautiful side. A lush jungle bursts into flames accompanied by “The End” by the Doors, and as helicopters zoom past the camera, the sight of Martin Sheen’s Colonel Willard lying in a hotel room starts mixing through the images of warfare. Showing the character’s mind still drifting back to his time in the Vietnam jungles, it’s a slow, graceful and utterly compelling mix of visuals, music and eerie sound design, which is then subtly mirrored at the film’s bizarre and disturbing climax.

3: BLADE RUNNER

Los Angeles, 2019, and as a tiny ‘spinner’ craft zooms across the sprawling landscape, audiences are thrown straight into one of the most detailed visions of tomorrow ever realized. Blade Runner’s stunning cityscapes are still the benchmark for the “fantasy metropolis” over two decades later, and following such a visually stunning opening, it does the sensible thing by shrinking the focus to two people- replicant-hunting Blade Runner Holden (Morgan Paull), and nervy Tyrell Corporation employee Leon (Brion James). One clammy suspense sequence later, Holden has been blasted through the nearest wall, and the audience is fully immersed in a classic dark future.

2: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Hi-jacking the image of three criminals waiting for a train from 1952’s High Noon, the beginning of Sergio Leone’s epic Western turns into one of the longest (and quietest) credits sequences in cinema history. Over a near-wordless, muic-free ten minutes, three anonymous killers commandeer a ramshackle train station, and then spend their time cracking their knuckles, getting distracted by a drip in the ceiling, or trapping an irritating fly in the barrel of their gun. The silence is only broken by the arrival of the train, with Ennio Morricone’s creepy score heralding the appearance of Charles Bronson’s Harmonica, and the inevitable gunslingling showdown.

1: STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

It’s 1977, and cinema audiences are sitting down to watch the latest film from the director of American Graffiti. Strangely enough, he’s gone from Fifties nostalgia to Sci-fi adventure, but nobody’s expecting anything remarkable. After the words “A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away” and a lengthy title crawl, the camera reveals a planet, and a pretty spectacular-looking spacecraft zooms into view, with laser blasts hitting it. Wow, think the audiences. That’s pretty good.

And then, the unstoppable, seemingly never-ending mass of the Imperial Star Destroyer slides into view over the camera, and an entire collective generations’ jaw hits the floor. In one single shot, for better or worse, a new era of Hollywood was ushered in, and the following ten minutes would rewrite the rules of Blockbuster Cinema.

With virtually all the story gaps filled by the Prequel trilogy, it’s hard to imagine exactly how daring the opening sequence of Star Wars was back in 1977. Not only did it introduce incredible new special effects, but it also dropped us into the centre of an intergalactic conflict with virtually no explanation, and made our only audience identification figures into a camp robotic butler and something that looked more like a dustbin than a person.

At the least, there was no doubting the white clad, feisty Leia was our damsel in distress, or that the heavy-breathing Vader was the black-hearted villain of the piece. The classically simple story was a fairy tale recast in different clothes, but the sharp editing, breathtaking images and bursts of humour from R2D2 and C3PO meant it didn’t matter that the real hero of the piece didn’t arrive until twenty minutes into the movie. There have been bigger films and better films, but no other movie has ever managed to open with such a concentrated burst of pure, magical storytelling.

MOVIE ENDINGS

25: BRAZIL

The “It was all a dream” ending is the biggest cliché in storytelling, but Terry Gilliam makes it work like a charm in his fantasy masterpiece. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) has been rescued from the Ministry of Information Retrieval, and reunited with Jill Layton (Kim Greist), the love of his life who he thought was dead. There’s just one problem- nothing we’ve seen has actually happened. Suddenly, we’re back in the torture chamber Sam was rescued from, and the film leaves him alone, insane and humming the title song ‘Brazil’, having found the only safe haven in Gilliam’s inhuman, soul-crushing bureaucracy.

24: DR STRANGELOVE

The End of the World isn’t meant to be funny, but nobody told master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. His pitch-black Nuclear comedy was originally to end with a custard pie fight between US Generals in the War Room, but instead has Peter Sellers’ crackpot scientist Dr. Strangelove battling his rebellious Nazi-saluting right arm and accidentally calling the President “Mein Fuerer”, while the other Generals are more worried about potential post-apocalyptic sex than the oncoming doomsday. Add Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again” accompanied by a visual symphony of Atom Bomb explosions, and it’s one of the most beautifully lunatic endings in cinema history.

23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

Rebellious psychiatric patient and convict Randall P. MacMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is a force of nature, making it all the more tragic when he’s transformed into a slobbering vegetable. Finally ready to escape, the Chief (Will Sampson) can’t bear to see his friend like this and quietly suffocates him with a pillow. Then, he achieves what MacMurphy failed at earlier in the film, wrenching a sink unit from the floor and hurling it through the window to escape, and the howl of sheer joy that comes from fellow patient Taber (Christopher Lloyd) is a perfect expression of this finally uplifting, memorable climax.

22: THE SEARCHERS

The ultimate example of John Ford’s Western filmmaking style also gives one of his most distinctive endings. After spending years hunting the Indians who wiped out his relations and kidnapped his niece (Natalie Wood), embittered and racist Civil War veteran Ethan Edwardes (John Wayne) is moments away from killing her for “going native” and joining the tribe- but instead, reclaims his humanity and takes her home. The final shot sees her reunited with her family, but Ethan is left outside and has to turn and walk slowly away into the epic landscape of Monument Valley, destined to remain alone.

21: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

Gunfights don’t come more operatic than the final showdown in this Spaghetti Western classic, as Tuco (Eli Wallach), Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) and the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) duel each other for a cache of Civil War gold. The extreme close-ups of the characters’ eyes, or their hands hovering at their guns boost the tension, Ennio Morricone’s score hits stunningly lurid heights- and then, with the fight over, there’s a fabulous twist as Tuco finds himself double crossed and forced to stand with his head in a noose, as ‘No Name’ recreates the scam they ran earlier in the story, but with potentially fatal consequences.

20: EASY RIDER

After the gleeful, energetic opening to this counter-culture classic, with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda gunning their Chopper motorcycles along the highway to the sounds of “Born To Be Wild” by Steppenwolf, there’s something deeply upsetting about watching things go spectacularly wrong for them. Encountering prejudice and closed-mindedness almost everywhere they go, their journey to ‘find America’ is brutally cut short when they are killed at random by a group of rednecks. The sight of their prized motorcycles exploding in flames is a powerful symbol for the death of the Sixties ideals, and a moving coda to a wildly experimental movie.

19: STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

From Vader dropping the “I am your Father” bombshell to the final shot of Luke and Leia watching the Millenium Falcon speed off into Space, the climactic sequences of Episode V are Star Wars at its most propulsively exciting. John Williams’ score keeps the energy bubbling, while there’s a bumper crop of classic moments from Lando’s horrified reaction to the Lightspeed drive failure, to Luke and Vader’s eerie telepathic conversation, and R2-D2 finally saving the day. It’s also one of the first genuine serial-style movie cliffhangers, leaving audiences with questions that, at the time, wouldn’t be answered for another three years.

18: CHINATOWN

Film Noir thrillers have traditions when it comes to their endings- the case is solved, the criminals are punished, and the hero gets the girl- but Roman Polanski’s revisionist take on the genre upends this in one horrifying scene. Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nichoson) looks on helplessly as a car crash kills his lover Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), and he’s unable to stop her shell-shocked daughter being taken away by the man who is both her and Evelyn’s father, the incestuous industrialist Noah Cross (John Huston). A brutally downbeat ending to a thriller that isn’t afraid to look at the darker side of humanity.

17: PULP FICTION

Quentin Tarantino’s second film ties the narrative into a series of exciting loops, no more so in the finale, where Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) encounter the fun-loving criminals Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honeybunny (Amanda Plummer) from the film’s opening sequence during a brilliantly tense robbery. Despite Tarantino ratcheting up the unbearable suspense, the sequence becomes less about imminent violence, and more about Jules finding his way in life, and choosing not to kill. A weirdly moving and powerful scene, which gets added bonuses in the ‘Bad Mutha Fucker’ wallet gag and Jules and Vincent’s brilliantly nonchalant exit.

16: DON’T LOOK NOW

The kind of finale that leaves you both terrified and scratching your head in bewilderment, Nicolas Roeg’s multi-layered supernatural drama climaxes with Donald Sutherland pursuing what he thinks is the red-coated ghost of his daughter through the darkened streets of Venice. Unfortunately, he’s made a fatal mistake, and in a horrifying sequence discovers the figure is actually an ugly dwarf wielding a razor who then violently attacks him. As Sutherland’s throat is slashed, we see a blizzard of images depicting his memories as he dies, and it’s a devastating shock ending that lends this mournful drama a nightmarish quality.

15: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

Spielberg’s natural talent for creating a cinematic sense of wonder gets its ultimate expression in the majestic appearance of the alien Mothership at the climax of his UFO epic. A near-perfect blend of light and sound, the sequence takes us from a freeform jazz-style communication with the ship, to hundreds of returning ‘abductees’ emerging from the blinding light, and finally, Richard Dreyfuss’ everyman getting to meet the child-like aliens and journey to another world. The Special Edition revealed the interior of the mothership to less impressive effect, but Spielberg has since snipped the footage from the DVD, restoring it to its full magical glory.

14: THE WICKER MAN

A bizarre mix of Horror movie and Folk musical, this classic cult film saves the truly disturbing twists for its ending. After spending the film trying to prevent the pagan sacrifice of a young girl, policeman Edward Woodward suddenly finds out that he’s been manipulated, and it’s him who is the chosen sacrifice. Dragged into a colossal, menacing Wicker Man, he is finally burnt alive, screaming out prayers to God at the same time that his audience are singing lively harvest songs, which all adds up to a finale even more terrifying than the mustard-coloured roll-neck sweater sported by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee).

13: CARRIE

After the delirious excess of the sequences where tragic, telekinetic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) takes spectacular revenge on her classmates, director Brian DePalma needed something to give the audiences a final jolt in their seats. He did this with a weird, unsettling dream sequence where Sue (Amy Irving) lays flowers on Carrie’s grave- only for a hand to suddenly lunge out of the ground to grab her. One of the most memorable cinematic shocks became one of the most copied, with the “hand from grave” surprise ending up as one of the biggest Horror Movie clichés of the Eighties.

12: BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

Legends always have to come to an end, and the partnership between outlaws Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance(Robert Redford) wouldn’t be as brilliantly mythic if they didn’t eventually fall in battle. It’s only a matter of when, and after escaping from various law enforcers and a seemingly unstoppable posse, our two heroes are finally cornered by the Bolivian Police. Bloodied, battered, and aware their number may be up, Newman and Redford’s star power maintains the winning humour, and charges the movie up for their final dash into a hail of bullets, and the brilliantly memorable freeze frame over the sounds of gunfire.

11: LIFE OF BRIAN

The Python team’s infamous take on organized religion and Biblical epics simply had to end with a crucifixion scene. As the hapless accidental messiah Brian (Graham Chapman) is raised onto his cross, there’s an unexpected emotional impact as he finds himself abandoned or rejected by everyone, even his mother Mandy (Terry Jones). It’s at this point, however, that fellow crucifixion victim Eric Idle reminds him to ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, and the resulting cheery song is so infectiously toe-tapping that it ended up having a life as both a hit single and a football terrace chant many years later.

10: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Proof that Horror can be as socially conscious as any other genre, George A. Romero’s microbudgeted Zombie masterpiece has a devilish final shock. The lone survivor of the besieged house, Ben (played by black actor Duane Jones) can see the local sherrif’s forces approaching, and it seems his nightmare is finally over. Instead, without being given a chance to react, he’s mistaken for a Zombie and shot through the head. The sequence of still images behind the end credits continues the chilling and mesmerizing impact, as Ben’s body is grabbed with meat-hooks, and dumped on a pile of corpses ready to be burned.

9: SOME LIKE IT HOT

Having dodged the mob and made good their escape, runaway musicians Tony Curtis and Jack lemmon can finally abandon their disguise as women- but for Lemmon, this means coming clean with the ageing playboy (Joe E. Brown) he’s accidentally gotten engaged to. After trying every conceivable excuse why they can’t get married (“I can never have children!!” “We can adopt!”), Lemmon finally tears his wig off and exclaims “I’m a man!”, to which Brown, without even a hint of a reaction, replies- “Nobody’s perfect!” , rounding off Billy Wilder’s brilliant comedy with one of the single greatest closing lines in movies.

8: KING KONG

Stop-motion animation had already featured in movies like The Lost World (1927), but nothing prepared 1933 audiences for the climax of King Kong, where the titular gorilla takes New York by storm, hi-jacks his lady love Fay Wray, and then dies in combat with a flock of bi-planes at the Empire State Building’s summit. The animation from SFX pioneer Willis H. O’Brien is astonishingly expressive, adding an unexpected edge of pathos and tragedy to Kong’s final moments, while the line from Robert Newton’s daredevil filmmaker Carl Denham- ” It was beauty that killed the beast” is just the icing on the cake.

7: SEVEN

Manipulated by nameless killer Kevin Spacey into a journey into the desert, detectives Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman discover the hard way how sick their captor is when a package containing the head of Pitt’s pregnant wife Gwyneth Paltrow is delivered, all so Pitt can kill Spacey, becoming the last of his “seven deadly sin” murders by embodying Wrath. David Fincher’s dazzling direction spares us any gore, keeping the horror purely in the mind, and as Pitt is unable to stop himself from fulfilling Spacey’s plans and blowing the killers’ head off, the bleakly nihilistic message of this pitiless thriller is rammed home.

6: THE GRADUATE

Benjamin Braddock’s (Dustin Hoffman) desperate race to the church to stop Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross) from marrying someone else has been imitated and spoofed so many times, it’s easy to forget how iconic it is. As Ross and Hoffman battle their way through angry relations and finally leap to escape onto a bus, it seems like a classic feelgood ending- but then Simon and Garfunkel singing ‘The Sound of Silence’ appears on the soundtrack, and the film ends far more ambiguously, with both characters facing the future with unease, and trying to work out whether they’ve actually done the right thing.

5: PLANET OF THE APES

Few shock endings have been blown quite as comprehensively as Planet of the Apes, with the image of a ruined Statue of Liberty even turning up on the film’s DVD cover art. That it still works, despite the secret being known, is a testament to the film’s clever satire, as the astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston), having gone from cynical misanthrope to passionate defender of humanity, is confronted with proof of mankind’s folly, and the true identity of the mysterious Ape Planet. Heston’s near-biblical anger at the revelation is powerful stuff, and makes the attempted twist ending of Tim Burton’s ‘re-imagining’ look ludicrous by comparison.

4: THE SIXTH SENSE

Sometimes, it’s all about what the audience isn’t being told. All throughout M. Night Shyamalan’s ghost story, the fact that Bruce Willis’ psychologist hasn’t talked to anyone, successfully opened a door or changed his clothes hardly seems important. It’s only when Willis discovers his estranged wife asleep in front of their wedding videos, and he sees she’s been holding onto his wedding ring- the ring he thinks he’s still wearing- that it falls into place, and he finally realises he’s been a ghost all this time. A brilliantly devious surprise ending, and one that Shyamalan seems unable to top no matter how hard he tries.

3: CASABLANCA

A showcase of Forties-style Hollywood moviemaking at its finest, Casablanca’s ending is a marvel of storytelling, and yet wasn’t even written until halfway through the film’s production. As the hard-boiled Rick (Humphrey Bogart) sacrifices his chance for happiness with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) for the greater good, the mixture of doomed romance and heroism is a potent cocktail, and both stars turn in iconic performances. The mix wouldn’t be perfect without the sardonic and sarcastic presence of Claude Rains as Captain Renault, and his walk with Bogart into the darkness at the film’s close is the stuff of cinematic legend.

2: THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Five minutes before the credits roll, and Customs agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) is convinced he’s gotten the truth about crime lord Keyser Soze from crippled con-man Verbal Kimt (Kevin Spacey). In fact, he couldn’t be more wrong, and the sequence that follows pulls the rug from under the audience in the most staggering way imaginable. Through Kujan’s perspective, we realize that everything we’ve seen in Verbal’s story has actually been invented using details displayed on a nearby noticeboard, and the shattering realization that Verbal is actually Keyser Soze is only narrowly matched by the fact that we’ve been comprehensively lied to for the entire movie.

1: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

A sentimental ending can be hugely important, and Frank Capra knew this more than anyone. One of the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, Capra was behind a whole slew of hits like Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Mr Deeds Goes To Town, and the 1938 Oscar-scooping classic It Happened One Night.

Despite his reputation for corny, crowd-pleasing sentiment, Capra also knew that sentiment needs to be earned, and doesn’t work without hardship. His 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life proves this more than anything, spending the majority of its running time heaping disaster after disaster on the head of George W. Bailey (James Stewart), a dreamer who’s desperate to escape the small town of Bedford Falls, but finds life always gets in his way.

The harsh disappointments build to the point where George is contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve, and it’s only a helpful Angel giving him a nightmare glimpse of what life would have been like without him in Bedford Falls that finally persuades him to choose life. After some amazingly dark and intense scenes, and a genuinely disturbing performance from Stewart, Capra finally lets loose the sentiment, and the result is the working definition of “heartwarming.”

Returned from the flipside town of Pottersville, George is so full of life that he rushes home, barely caring about the policemen waiting there to arrest him for misappropriating bank funds, and it’s here Capra creates his greatest hymn to the community spirit of small-town America. Everyone in Bedford Falls arrives at George’s house having clubbed together with enough money to save him from his debt, George finds himself declared “the richest man in town”, they all start singing ‘Aud Lang Syne’, and not even the ear-piercing screech of nightmare ‘cute kid’ Zuzu Bailey can put a damper on the quintessential Hollywood feelgood ending.

He may have started off making fake vomit in his Mum’s kitchen, but Stephen “Stevie” Bettles (26) now transforms everyday actors into mutated monstrosities as a Make-Up and Creature Effects artist. Between major projects like LOST IN SPACE and SLEEPY HOLLOW, he works on everything from TV series like FARSCAPE to low-budget horror films and music videos for bands like Cradle of Filth.

How did you first get interested in SFX make-up?

I used to be terrified of horror films as a kid, but I never liked being scared so I handled it by finding out how the effects were done. The more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it… and when I was 15, my Mum saw an article in the newspaper about an apprenticeship at Universal Studios in Florida. She said “Hey, how about doing it there instead of in my kitchen?”, so I went for it, got it… and it all started rolling from there.

What kind of stuff does your company do?

We do any prosthetics make-ups, as well as full-scale creature effects;- demons, monsters, robots, you name it. Sometimes we’ll design and sculpt something from the ground up, and sometimes the production designer gives us a drawing and says “Build that!”- it varies from project to project, but it’s always very collaborative.

Is CGI affecting the amount of work you’re getting?

Not really. It means we sometimes do bits of creatures rather than the whole thing, but people forget that CGI’s just a tool, not an instant solution. Actors prefer working with something real;- if they’re going to play an old person, they don’t want you to say “We’ll make you look old in post-production.” Like on LOST IN SPACE- Gary Oldman was against doing the Spider Smith character as CGI, because he felt it would just take his performance away and turn him into a cartoon.

Is he really as mad as he appears on screen?

The thing about Gary is he expects everyone around him to be as professional as he is. He’s not an actor who’ll throw a fit or stomp his feet, but he’ll speak his mind or point out problems, and if you haven’t done something about what he’s pointed his finger at, he gets a bit more emotional. He’s great to work with, though, 110% professional, and could switch on in an instant.

Ever had anything go seriously wrong?

There’s often something that doesn’t go as planned, but you just do your best to get it looking as good as you can. Prosthetics are re-made every day, so lots can go wrong- you could make the best one in the world, but if it’s lit or photographed badly, it can still look awful. What can be a bit frustrating is when something you’ve worked on isn’t used- it’s sometimes nearly three months work ending up on the cutting room floor.

How often does that happen?

It happens a lot, especially on big budget films. On LOST IN SPACE, for example, you were going to see the grown-up version of the little alien Blawp creature the Robinsons picked up. It was one of the first things I did on a big film, it got made and looked great… and they cut it from the final version. It’s a shame, because you want to sit at home with your mates watching it and go “I did that bit!!”… but, at the end of the day, you get paid and that’s the important thing.

What were you responsible for on SLEEPY HOLLOW?

Most of the stuff I did was on the decapitated bodies- getting the severed neck-pieces right, and weighting them so they looked convincing if they were carried. Also, the full-size animatronic horse that was built for Christopher Walken;- he has in his contract that he doesn’t ride live animals after a bad experience on a previous film. I puppeteered the horse while he was riding it, and he’s a brilliant character with a real “gangster” presence about him.

Wasn’t Ray “Darth Maul” Park one of the stuntmen?

Yeah- I remember, we were doing a cast of a part of his chest, and it was just before PHANTOM MENACE came out, so we were all “Ray, can you do some lightsabre stuff?” Eventually he went “Oh… alright then”, and ended up getting so into it that the guy I was working for, Gary Tunnicliffe, grabbed a broom and they ended up having this massive mock-up lightsabre fight in the workshop!

What have you got lined up next?

There’s THE FERRYMAN for Midsummer Films- it’s about the Grim Reaper, and there’ll be loads of fun creature stuff like Banshees. Also, we’re under consideration for work on a top-secret project later this year;- it’s for a major horror director, and we’ve got our fingers seriously crossed…

(Originally published in Hotdog, July 2001)

Stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen takes a look back at his five favourite special effects movies.

Dante’s Inferno (Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe di Liguoro, 1911)
It’s an Italian adaptation of Dante’s epic poem, but what fascinated me was that it’s based on the work of Gustav Dore, an artist who’s a massive influence on me. I once thought about making Dante’s Inferno in stop-motion, but then I started thinking “will people want to sit through a whole movie of tormented souls?” so I abandoned it

The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925)
My parents were great cinemagoers, and they always took me along, even when I was four. This was the first genuine stop-motion movie, but it didn’t have a huge effect on me- partly, I think, because there wasn’t any sound, just this tinkling piano accompaniement! It wasn’t as vivid, but seeing those dinosaurs definitely stayed at the back of my mind.

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
I saw Kong when I was thirteen, and I haven’t been the same since. Nothing like it had ever been seen, and the sequence where Kong fights the Tyrannosaur was just so overpowering. It was the biggest honour of my life when I worked on Mighty Joe Young with Willis H. O’Brien, the man who did the Kong effects. I’m sure Peter Jackson’s remake will be good, but there’ll always only be one true Kong!.

Gone With The Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
It wasn’t just special effects films I watched while growing up- the dramatic qualities and performances would also impress me, and Gone With The Wind was amazing stuff. The sequence where Atlanta burns is wonderfully convincing, and it’s actually part of the Wall set from Kong that’s burning, as they were made on the same backlot.

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
I get letters from fans who say they prefer my creatures to computer generated images, but I do have a lot of respect for what CGI can do, and Jurassic Park was truly astounding. Trouble is, then came the hype, and instead of the ‘dream quality’ stop-motion has, it’s all about making things photo-real. If you make fantasy too realistic, though, you bring it down to the mundane. It’s a difficult balance to maintain.