Tag: movies

Shin for the win: Where to go when superheroes feel stale

Like many folks, I’ve been a bit over-saturated by superhero movies the last few years. 

I’m not declaring the superhero boom “over” like a lot of pundits are, but it’s all started to feel a bit rote. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has fallen into the quicksand of “what-next-itis,” where watching the movies feel like homework as bread crumb credit-scenes stack up endlessly teasing the next adventures. The movies are mostly “fine,” but I’m not getting the same epic kick I once did of watching Captain America, Iron Man and Thor share the screen for the first time or Black Panther leaping onto the screen. To be honest, it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever top the lead-up to Avengers: Endgame no matter how hard the studio execs sweat. 

But there’s far more out there than just one cinematic universe. So far, the best superhero-style times I’ve had at the movies this year have been Japanese tokusatsu films in the “Shin” heroes universe led by director Hideaki Anno. I’m very much a tourist in this world, but I like it. 

The Shin series has taken old Japanese favourites like Godzilla and Ultraman and reimagined them in bold big-budget films that combine Hollywood bombast with a distinctly tokusatsu* vision. (*Japanese “special effects” movies/TV shows) It’s included Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider movies. 

The Shin universe – “Shin” roughly translates to “New,” “True” or “God” in the title  – is a wonderfully strange one where all the somewhat cheesy energy of ‘60s Godzilla flicks and Ultraman TV shows are done up with modern special effects and a true reverence for the material that makes it all feel epic and magical. Sure, a 40-metre tall silver humanoid hero like Ultraman is kinda silly, but his first appearance in Shin Ultraman evokes a real sense of awe. 

The Shin universe kicked off with 2016’s remarkable Shin Godzilla. From the start, it undermines your expectations, like having Godzilla first materialise as a kind of google-eyed reptilian slinky who evolves rapidly throughout the film. While at first it may seem off-putting to not get to the Big G right away, it actually makes Shin Godzilla’s dangerous kaiju all that more impressive when he takes centre stage. The movie actually won the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award for Picture of the Year!

The Big G of Shin Godzilla is one of the venerable franchise’s finest and freakiest ‘Zillas, a truly sinister predator with no kindness in his eyes, no “helping” humanity against other monsters, and it boasts some of the most dazzling destruction sequences of the more than 30 Godzilla movies. It was a solid reminder that after more than 60 years Godzilla still has the capacity to blow us away, and Anno turned his live-action skills to two other famed Japanese franchises, with 2022’s Shin Ultraman and this year’s Shin Kamen Rider. 

I had a wide grin on my face the entire time I watched Shin Ultraman a few weeks back in the theatre. Ultraman is the Superman of tokusatsu heroes, an alien visitor fused with a human host who fights giant rubbery monsters and aliens galore. There’s been an insane amount of Ultraman series and movies over the years but, like Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman starts everything over from the beginning with a zippy tale of alien invasions, giant monster attacks and secret government agencies. It’s a giddy, unpredictable blast and unlike too many American superhero movies lately, you don’t feel they’re endlessly seeding the story with teases for a flurry of sequels. Instead, the Shin movies draw backwards on the franchises’ long history to create a world that feels deeply imagined yet new. 

I’ve been a Godzilla nut for years and a more casual fan of Ultraman, but when it came to watching Shin Kamen Rider, the decades of source material is something I was utterly unfamiliar with. It’s the intricate tale of insect-human hybrid “augs” battling for supremacy in a world full of zippy motorbike chases, cool helmets and bizarre villains. 

Unfortunately Kamen Rider (or Masked Rider in English) was probably the least successful of the three Shin films for me, thanks to some dodgy CGI and a sense they’re REALLY trying to jam all 50 years of fan lore into one two-hour movie. While Shin Ultraman also packs a lot of legacy story in, it feels slightly less rushed. But while it’s a bit of a chaotic jumble and overwhelming at times, there’s still more energy and originality in Shin Kamen Rider than I ever felt watching recent US hero snoozefests like The Eternals. 

The Shin movies have been full of surprises, instead of following the rather predictable path of recent superhero movies with that mandatory everybody-running-around-things-falling-from-sky-in-a-hail-of-CGI climax. They’re deeply Japanese – Shin Godzilla has a dizzily rapid-fire satirical take on Japanese bureaucracy, for instance – and don’t feel like they’re catering to a Hollywood audience. 

I grew up reading Marvel and DC Comics and so all the inside references and teases and foreshadowings make sense to me and I know my Dr. Strange from my Dr. Fate, but it also kind of means that after 30-something MCU movies, it all starts to feel like something you’ve seen before. The fun part of the Shin universe is how it’s a doorway to another pop-culture world entirely, one I freely admit to only having the barest knowledge of. 

It’s a big old multiverse out there, and I kind of love feeling like an utter newcomer to some of it.  

The two minutes that almost make Superman IV: The Quest For Peace work

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace is not, objectively, a good movie. In fact, it’s pretty terrible. 

The 1987 finale to Christopher Reeve’s run as the Man of the Steel was plagued by huge budget cuts, a ham-fisted script and a clear lack of energy by everyone involved. It was such a big bomb it pretty much killed the franchise for years to come. 

What was a simple, not bad idea – Superman decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons after an annoying school kid writes a letter to him – became an awkward, choppy mess. 

I actually saw Superman IV: The Quest For Peace in the theatre with a buddy back in 1987 and I clearly remember we were about the only two people in there. We left there with that deflating sense of disappointment one often got with comic-book movies in the pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe days, where you’d watch stuff like Howard The Duck or the George Clooney Batman and Robin and wonder how, how did this happen? 

And yet, despite this movie being such a fiasco, I still end up going back to watch it every once in a while out of a morbid fixation, because you can just see a hint or two of the movie it could have been – a serious meditation on a Superman’s place on Earth, and the responsibility of caring for humanity without taking over the world. 

In particular, there’s about two minutes of footage where that movie clearly emerges, when Superman takes to the stage at the United Nations to tell them of his plans:

Unfortunately, even then you see the impact of the budget cuts (judging from the Superman flying scenes immediately after, about $1.99 was spent on special effects). 

And that script – hoo-boy. It ratchets up the campier elements of the first three Superman movies to unbearable levels, with little of the wit and sincerity that Superman and Superman II had. You’ve got a lame cliched evil businessman and his hot daughter (an embarrassed Mariel Hemingway) taking over the Daily Planet newspaper, Jon Cryer doing an appallingly unfunny doofus hipster teenager impression, and Margot Kidder looking very, very bored. Only Gene Hackman, whose genial scoundrel take on Lex Luthor was always worth watching, emerges unscathed.

And let’s not forget the all-time worst Superman villain ever seen on screen, the mulleted “Nuclear Man” clone that Luthor creates because he’s angry Superman eliminated the black market for nukes, I guess. Nuclear Man is howlingly cheesy, so bad the actor involved never did another movie. 

(As a side note, for an even more in-depth look at what a mess this movie was, on the DVD you’ll find more than a half hour of deleted scenes including an utterly horrifying slapstick fight with a “first” prototype Nuclear Man character who looks like he wandered out of a Benny Hill TV show. Some hopeful optimists out there on the internet still claim adding those scenes back to the barely 90-minute Superman IV could make an improved “director’s cut” but honestly, these scenes are generally even worse than the movie itself.) 

The whole idea that kick-started the plot – Superman makes the world safe from nuclear war! – kind of gets bounced around a bit and then abruptly discarded by the end. 

And still, I do love that scene when Reeve arrives at the United Nations, the good cheer and optimism that pervaded his portrayal of Superman just about selling the idea that the governments of the world would be happy with him throwing all our nukes into the sun. “As of today, I’m not a visitor any more,” Superman says, and gosh darn it, it just makes you wish such a person really was out there, somewhere. 

I don’t know why I watch 86 minutes of a pretty bad movie just to get that little moment, but somewhere out there in the multiverse, I like to imagine there’s a far, far better version of Superman IV directed by Steven Spielberg or someone that ran the table at the Oscars that year and gave that wee moment the kind of superhero movie it deserves. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #24: The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

What is it? The plot is simple: A peaceful alien arrives on Earth to deliver an important message, but is immediately met by fear and hatred. It’s an idea that’s been revisited countless times everywhere from E.T. to Starman to Arrival, but seldom with quite as much cool style as in 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie plays Klaatu, a seemingly human alien who arrives on Earth with an ominous robot sidekick, Gort, and who attempts to understand humanity. Klaatu grows close to an Earth boy and his mother, but fears that Earth’s warring nuclear powers threaten the rest of the universe’s stability. 

Why I never saw it: Some movies seep into the collective unconsciousness so much, you think you have seen them. Any somewhat movie-literate person recognises the image of Gort emerging from Klaatu’s spaceship. Yet when I was a teenager discovering all those old ‘50s sci-fi classics, this one wasn’t on the afternoon TV movie rotations. Somehow, the movie itself had slipped through my watchlist over the years but because it is so familiar, watching it felt a bit like rediscovering an old book you read and loved long ago. 

Does it measure up to its rep?  From the creepy theremin soundtrack to the bold and simple iconic designs of Klaatu’s flying saucer and Gort’s lurking menace, Day The Earth Stood Still is a template for what we think of when we think of smart science fiction. Don’t overlook Rennie’s quietly charismatic performance as Klaatu, one of the first of many cinematic “strangers in a strange land” to ponder the mysteries of us earthlings. Rennie anchors the movie when it threatens to dissolve into kitsch or sentiment (Keanu Reeves played the role in a widely ignored 2008 remake, which I haven’t seen). Sure, Klaatu’s relationship with naive little Earth child Bobby is a plot device that is a bit saccharine, but Patricia Neal’s thoroughly humane performance as his mother works very well, especially as she comes into her own in the final act. 

The 1950s were an absolute golden age for science fiction movies. Sure, they had existed before that and SF’s roots date back at least to the Victorian work of Jules Verne, but in the devastated aftermath of World War II, SF became a way for us to work out our feelings about the brave new world of atomic energy, mass death and the cosmic unknown.

Anyone who calls themselves a science fiction fan has at least a few ‘50s movies they love, from the original Godzilla to the creepy creatures of The Blob, The Thing and Them to the more thoughtful, contemplative vibe of classics like Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man and War Of The Worlds. The Day The Earth Stood Still stands firmly in that company, as science fiction that asks questions and makes us question our own beliefs. It’s ahead of its time and thoroughly of its time all at once. 

Worth seeing? Absolutely, because while the cold war paranoia that coursed through the bloodstream of so much 1950s science fiction has eased a bit, the movie’s message hasn’t lost relevance. We humans are still self-destructive, often brutish creatures determined to sabotage our world’s possibilities, as the last few years have so thoroughly reminded us. When Klaatu says at the end, “the decision rests with you,” that’s a message that resounds still 70 years on. Hopefully eventually we’ll listen.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

I’m running around getting ready for a holiday and juggling deadlines like they were howler monkeys escaped from the zoo, but here’s a quick look at some other things by me elsewhere on the internets:

It’s just about time for Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival, the bestest time of the year if you love movies, and I have already bought far too many tickets. You can read my preview of all the film fest action right here at Radio New Zealand, and it also doubles as a bit of a tribute to film festivals in general, which we all know are the best-ivals.

How To Live Your Best Life at the New Zealand International Film Festival

Meanwhile, I’m also keeping up an occasional book reviewing side hustle over at NZ’s best weekly current affairs magazine, The Listener, which after a few pandemic-plagued years without a web presence has recently launched a bigger digital footprint.

You can read my latest book review of David Grann’s excellent historical page-turner The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder right now in the latest issue at good newsstands everywhere in New Zealand, and the review is also online right here (paywalled):

David Grann’s rip-roaring account of an 18th century mission gone wrong

The triumph of Stephen Root, or, The Raven spreads his wings

I love a good character actor, and one of the best in the business is Stephen Root, who’s been kicking around for ages but really took his work to the next level with the recently completed pitch-black comedy Barry. 

For a glorious episode or two, the supporting character actually became more interesting than the show’s star. 

Root is a key “hey, I know that guy!” actor. In his career he’s racked up nearly 300 acting credits, and in many of them, he’s outright stolen the show from bigger stars. 

I first became a Root fanboy with his hilarious work on the classic ‘90s sitcom NewsRadio as arrogant, distracted millionaire station owner Jimmy James. Root was surrounded by terrific talent like Dave Foley and the late, sorely missed Phil Hartman (and another guy who obnoxiously became the most famous member of the show’s cast by hosting reactionary podcasts, but forget about him). 

Root’s James was a great comic creation, a kind of easy caricature of rich bluster animated by quirky little moments, and provided many of NewsRadio’s best scenes. I can never quite make it without laughing through the bit where Jimmy James hosts a reading from his memoirs, which were accidentally translated into Japanese and then back into English again, somewhat mangling the text:

Just listen to the perfect cadence Root gives lines like, “But Jimmy has fancy plans – and pants to match!”  

In the 1999 cult classic comedy Office Space, Root plays the opposite of Jimmy, the mumbling office drone Milton, obsessed with his red stapler, turning a pathetic geek into something indelible. 

Root has the knack for standing out even in the smallest roles, whether he’s popping up as a creepy blind predator in Get Out, on TV on Succession, Justified, The Book of Boba Fett or in one of his many Coen brothers movie roles. 

But he’s never quite been the star of the show, like most character actors. That’s why I loved so much what we saw in the final few episodes of Barry, where he played the shady mentor and handler of Bill Hader’s disturbed assassin Barry Berkman. 

In the series, Fuches is another one of Root’s great cowardly losers, always looking like he just rolled out of bed and constantly nearly getting killed. He’s a boastful manipulator who never quite rises out of the gutter, until toward the end of the series when he’s jailed and the series jumps forward in time several years.

When Fuches is thrown in prison, he demands other prisoners call him the “Raven,” another one of his bombastic fantasy projections of himself. He’s promptly beaten nearly to death, and that’s the last we see of him until the story picks up years on. 

In that time, Fuches has actually transformed himself into The Raven, a tattooed mob boss terror with his own gang of cutthroats. Released into the world, The Raven is suddenly a real threat instead of the bumbling poser Fuches was. The small, dumpy guy everyone has underestimated is now the most dangerous man in the room.

Barry was a fascinating series – sometimes its reach exceeded its grasp, I felt – but the few episodes where Root flies as the Raven are among the series’ peaks. Everything about The Raven is different from Fuches – his body language, his swaggering self-assurance, the murderous glint in his eye. 

After years of side roles and small parts, it’s a damned pleasure to see Stephen Root suddenly take the centre stage. It’s kind of like watching a wallflower turn into the life of the party, to see the skill he’s built up as a character actor over the years turned outwards. 

The Raven felt like the apotheosis of Stephen Root to date, a high point in a career filled with vivid sketches and gags. Take a moment to appreciate the little guy, the battler who in the end takes control of his own story. You never know when they might spread their wings … or stick a knife in your back. 

‘The Invisible Man’ at 90 – still a sight to behold

Sure, a monster bursting into your bedroom in the middle of night is scary, but a simple mysterious creak from a shadowy corner? A sense that someone is there, watching you, unseen? Ghouls and vampires are bad news, but an invisible man? Well, that’s terrifying.

James Whale’s 1933 film The Invisible Man turns 90 years old later this year, and remains a quick-witted, vivid early science-fiction thriller. 

I sat down with the 19-year-old to watch it again recently, and at the end, he turned to me and said with a note of surprise, “That was really good!” Not all of those sometimes antiquated black-and-white horrors would get that kind of reaction, but The Invisible Man remains a model of slick, efficient filmmaking, in and out in just over an hour’s run time.

The story is simple – a man turns himself invisible, and is trying to find a cure. But the experimental formula he tampered with is also slowly driving him insane. 

The Invisible Man is one I watch every few years and clustered right up there in the top 3 Universal Horror movies for me (jostling with, of course, my beloved Creature from the Black Lagoon and depending on my mood that day, either James Whale’s Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein). 

Whale was the best of the classic horror directors, lending a keen visual eye and a wry sense of camp to his scare-fests. Pairing him with the stage actor Claude Rains here was a masterstroke, because for huge sections of the picture the Invisible Man has to carry the film with his voice alone, and Rains’ purring, manic mad scientist is a gleeful delight, pinballing between vicious cruelty and tragic victim. (Originally Frankenstein’s Boris Karloff was tipped for the role, and while I love Karloff, it’s hard to imagine his sinister invisible growl having quite the same impact.)  

Based on H.G. Wells’ thrilling novella, Jack Griffith, the Invisible Man, is instantly a striking figure from his first moment on screen, wrapped in bandages and dark glasses, a simple but brilliantly effective way of rendering the character visible when he needs to be. The special effects are remarkably good for 1933, a few wires and puppetry seamlessly creating the illusion of a man who isn’t there. 

The Invisible Man also unique in the classic Universal Horror menagerie because Griffith is very much an ordinary man who did this to himself, not some mythical creature like Dracula or the Mummy or a victim of others’ meddling or evil like Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man. He is human, which makes his crimes that much more brutal. 

Griffith: “An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, rape and kill!”

And hang on to your hats – with more than 100 people murdered during his reign of terror, the Invisible Man actually had the highest body count on screen of any Universal monster – more than Frankenstein’s creation, more than Dracula. Sure, most of that is the terrifying train derailment he causes near the movie’s climax, but Griffith still strangles, assaults and terrorises with gleeful abandon. 

Coming as The Invisible Man did in that delicate global tension between the devastation of World War I and the genocide of World War II, it’s hard not to see many a would-be dictator’s fantasies in Griffith’s speeches. 

Invisibility is a curious dual curse and blessing in the world of horror – you could go anywhere, in theory, do anything, but if you can’t turn it on and off, you’re also forever separate from the human race, a witness without an audience. 

The concept has been revisited many times, in a series of gradually less effective sequels in the ‘40s, none of which starred Rains, and a goofy Invisible Woman movie in 1940 that made the concept into a laboured comedy with a lot of teasing innuendo, but generally invisibility seen on screen is a man’s world.

More modern movies like Kevin Bacon’s 2000 slasher flick The Hollow Man and the excellent 2020 Invisible Man starring Elisabeth Moss leaned into the Invisible Man’s toxic masculinity with mixed results but there’s something to that – an Invisible Man also implies sex (generally in these films, you’ve got to be naked to be truly invisible, after all) and stalking and predation, factors most of the Invisible Man movies dip into. To be honest, to be invisible is generally to be up to no good, isn’t it? 

And looming over all those spectres is the inimitable Claude Rains, who 90 years on has yet to be truly bettered in the niche world of invisible horror movie villains. From that unforgettable bandage-clad visage to the cackling madness echoing through his voice, Rains still shows us that there’s nothing quite as scary as what you can’t see at all. 

The New Zealand wrestler who played Frankenstein’s monster

Everyone knows that Boris Karloff played Frankenstein’s monster. Most horror fans remember the late, great Christopher Lee, as well. Benedict Cumberbatch has played the creature. Heck, even Oscar winner Robert DeNiro has played the monster.

But did you know about the New Zealand wrestler who once played Baron Frankenstein’s horrific creation?

Ernie “Kiwi” Kingston’s turn as the monster in 1964’s The Evil Of Frankenstein by Hammer Films earned him a small but notable place in horror history, but the wrestler’s acting turn is shrouded in obscurity, nearly 60 years on. It was pretty much the only film he performed in. 

The Hammer Frankenstein cycle of movies from 1957-1974 still hold up well as a colourful Gothic series of chilling tales about man’s desire to play God, led by the inimitable Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein. Unlike the earlier Universal Frankenstein films, the focus on these was squarely on the evil doctor himself and his mad obsessions as he creates monster after monster in his quest to unlock the secrets of life and death. 

Evil of Frankenstein was the third of six films Cushing starred in, and a kind of weird outlier – the story didn’t seem connected to the two previous movies, and it’s the only one of the series not directed by Hammer maestro Terence Fisher.

A professional wrestler, 6 foot, 5 inch “Kiwi” Kingston, as he was credited, played a hulking, grotesque version of the monster, freed from frozen ice and abused by a rogue hypnotist (as you do). 

“As a person to work with, quite timid, gentle, quite reserved,” costar Katy Wild, who played a mute girl that befriended the monster, in a documentary on the Evil of Frankenstein blu-ray.  

Unfortunately for Kingston, his turn as the monster is hampered by what is probably the worst makeup in any major Frankenstein movie I’ve seen. Inspired by Karloff’s iconic look, it’s a sloppy, blocky mask that looks a bit like a grocery bag soaked in papier-mâché. The too-huge brow and lack of mobility prevents much in the way of facial expression. You can just barely see Kingston’s eyes poking out from under all the goop. 

It’s a shame because it’s possible less oppressive makeup might have given Kingston more to work with other than lurching around a lot … although he wasn’t exactly a trained actor. 

“Kiwi Kingston was actually cast for his hulking frame and not his acting ability,” the documentary on the movie notes. 

While he was indeed a Kiwi, he seems to have spent most of his life overseas.

A Christchurch history page says he was “born in 1914, to Ernest John Kingston and Edith Emily (nee) Hammond. As an amateur boxer in New Zealand Ernie had been runner-up in the heavyweight division at the N.Z. champs in 1938. He was also a top rugby player and general all round sportsman.”

He made a name for himself in NZ sport, as seen in a very fit photo from 1940 in the national archives. Like a lot of kiwis, Kingston went on a big OE (overseas experience) but in his case, it sounds like he never really returned. A wrestling blog from 2005 tells a little of his background:

“… Towards the end of the 30’s, a big strong rugby player, boxer, and wrestler, did some service in the air force and ended up in Britain. He was a (wrestler) Anton Koolman pupil in Wellington in the late 30’s, and it is sad that he was almost unknown in his own country. I refer to big Ernie Kingston, who ended up a huge name in Britain and all over Europe. He became known as ‘Kiwi’ Kingston, a big rough diamond from Banks Peninsula.”

He loved horses – “he had a pony field where he collected ponies that had been discarded and looked after them until they died,” his Evil co-star Caron Gardner remembered. 

Evil of Frankenstein was just about it in terms of movie stardom for Kingston, who only appeared in a tiny role in another Hammer film, Hysteria. He did apparently later wrestle under the stage name “The Great Karloff” which is a kind of awesome tip of the hat to his Franken-forefather, though.

Ernie Kingston died in 1992, and there’s not much out there on the internet about his life in later years I could find. 

But there’s only a handful of people out there who can say they played Frankenstein’s monster in a major Hollywood movie over a century or so of films. Kiwi Kingston’s turn as the monster long before Peter Jackson helped put New Zealand horror movies on the global map is a small but fascinating little piece of film history. Not bad for a lad from the bottom of the world.

One Scene, 10 Perfect Shots: ‘Blow-Up’, 1966

There are many reasons to miss the late, great Roger Ebert, but one of my favourite things he ever did was introduce me to the idea of “a shot at a time” movie watching session. He’d do this at festivals and universities, pausing films they watched repeatedly to discuss certain images and points, learning whole new ways to consider the art of film: “Perhaps it sounds grueling, but in fact it can be exciting and almost hypnotic.”

In an age where movies are just another distraction, it can be hard to focus on them. You’re tweeting, Googling and hunting for memes on your phone while you watch with one eye on your laptop. (I’m as guilty of anyone at doing this sometimes.)

Some films deserve more. Take Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 pop-art masterpiece about an arrogant, disillusioned swinging London fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who accidentally discovers a murder. Enigmatic, beautiful and mesmerising, it’s one of my top 20 films of all time, and I got to see it on the big screen the other night for the first time in years, where Antonioni’s astounding control and vision really dazzles. 

One of the key scenes of the movie comes near the climax, where the photographer stumbles onto a rock concert filled with zombie-like youth, staring placidly at the thrashing band (the Yardbirds with a pre-Led Zep Jimmy Page). At one point, guitarist Jeff Beck smashes his instrument and throws it into the crowd, who suddenly erupt from their passive trance into a frenzy.

It’s a short scene, but it’s always stunned me – Antonioni combines a disaffected view of youth with a kind of controlled horror. Why are these teens here? What set them off? Who is the watcher and who is the audience? Blow-Up blows me away every time I revisit it, because it’s a movie that demands you question it, that you linger on the imagery, that you don’t just haphazardly file it away in your headspace with all the other distractions of the day. It’s still not for everyone. As Ebert, bless his memory, said, “Movies that require you to figure things out for yourself always leave a lot of frustrated customers behind.”

The club encounter in Blow-Up is just about a perfect scene to me, and every frame, with these unforgettable faces and colours, is worth considering. Here’s One Scene, 10 Perfect Shots from Blow-Up: 

The full scene:

Horror movies Aotearoa style: New Zealand can be a pretty scary place

I used to see this guy occasionally when I returned to visit America from New Zealand, and every single time he saw me, he’d unleash a stream of lame dad jokes about hobbits and orcs.

…Because that’s all some Americans know when they think of New Zealand, you see, is Peter Jackson’s admittedly excellent Lord of the Rings movies (and the rather less excellent Hobbit follow-ups). 

New Zealand movies are so much more than that, of course, from Oscar-winning director Jane Campion or the askew comedy of Taika Waititi to the awesome talents of Bruno Lawrence, Karl Urban and Sam Neill to some brilliant Māori filmmaking. The now-New Zealand-based James Cameron films his gazillion-dollar Avatar movies here and Wēta Digital’s special effects are all over screens from Marvel superheroes to Cocaine Bear. 

But also, New Zealanders are really good at scaring the crap out of you. 

A pre-hobbit Peter Jackson made some of the first NZ horror movies to gain notice worldwide with the splatter-horror/comedy low-fi genius of Bad Taste, Brain Dead and Meet The Feebles. Many other great NZ horror movies have followed ever since, including Black Sheep, Deathgasm and Housebound.

But in the last year or so, even more New Zealand-made horror has kind of taken over the world, with four well regarded scare-fests topping the box office or winning critical acclaim – M3GAN, Evil Dead Rise and Ti West’s X and Pearl.

These films aren’t generally entirely made by New Zealand directors, actors and writers or explicitly even about New Zealand, but by simply being filmed down here and using a hefty amount of local cast, crew, and behind-the-scenes personnel, they’ve got a heavy kiwi sensibility packed into their DNA – a little alienation, a little finding horror in everyday objects, a little wry black humour.

Scary robot doll movie M3GAN is deeply silly but fun spin on the whole “evil technology fears” trope, and while its generic America suburbia and offices setting doesn’t scream New Zealand, big chunks of it were filmed here and NZ director Gerard Johnstone gives the material a nice, creepy edge and added in the viral dance scene that helped make the movie a surprise hit. 

I haven’t seen the intensely gory brand new Evil Dead Rise as it looks a little too much for me, to be honest, but I love that a blood-soaked elevator scene prominent in the trailers was filmed near the mall I used to go to all the time. The whole Evil Dead franchise has many ties to New Zealand – producer Rob Tapert has been with Sam Raimi’s goopy undead franchise since the very beginning, co-created ‘90s kiwi TV sensation Xena: Warrior Princess and is married to its star Lucy Lawless, and the excellent Ash Vs. Evil Dead TV series was all filmed down here. 

But the best of the lot of recent NZ-shot terror for me are the psychosexual horrors of Ti West’s X and its prequel Pearl, which after many delays is finally being shown in NZ cinemas. Both films were filmed at a spooky Whanganui farm, and feature many familiar NZ acting faces. 

X is a proudly sleazy movie about a 1970s porn movie being filmed at a sinister farm that plunges into unexpected depths of emotion amidst its gore and sweat, while the prequel Pearl shifts back in time to tell the story of the elderly woman at the centre of X as a young, hopeful girl with dreams of escaping her stifling family farm. Both movies star Mia Goth, one of the most unique presences on screen in quite a while (without spoilers, she plays multiple roles across the two films). 

I think Pearl is the first great movie I’ve seen to take on the COVID pandemic and all the uneasy, awkward feelings of fear and anxiety churned up by it. Set during the 1918 flu pandemic, it’s a world of recovering trauma where young Pearl (Goth) fears she’ll never fulfil her dreams. Much of Pearl was written while West and Goth were in quarantine here in New Zealand, and the script richly evokes how uncertain the world felt in those early pandemic days. 

An awful lot of movies are shot in New Zealand these days – we’re a hip, cool place, we’re cheap, got a lot of great screen talent built up here, but really, enough with the hobbit jokes, already.

It’s OK if you want to start thinking of New Zealand as the place you go to get scared, too. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #23: Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984)

What is it? What a time to be alive. The country was riveted by the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale. The plucky cassette Walkman was in everyone’s home. We all woke up each day asking, “Where’s the beef?” And looming above it all, breakdancing fever burned through America like a raging inferno in those halcyon days of 1984, 39 years ago now. Not one, not two, but three movies dedicated to the dance sensation hit the big screens. First came Breakin’ in May, followed by competitor Beat Street in June, culminating in the December 1984 release of the Avengers: Endgame of poppin’ and lockin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. 

Breakin’ and its sequels joined a long line of teen-oriented dance movies from Beach Blanket Bingo to Bring It On to Step Up, all frothy pop culture trend-chasing at its height.  The first Breakin’ wraps up all its dance numbers around the story of rich white girl dancer Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) who becomes friends with a couple of streetwise breakdancers, Ozone (“Shabba-Doo” Quinones) and Turbo (“Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers). For the sequel, the producers at Cannon Films turned to the time-worn concept of “puttin’ on a show,” as a beloved youth centre is being threatened by a cartoonish evil yuppie developer and the only way to save it is… with dance! The awkward yet oddly unforgettable title of Breakin’ 2 ensured it would endure in film history. But as a movie… well… 

Why I never saw it: Weirdly, I saw Breakin’ on the preferred medium, VHS tape, sometime during its original 1980s heyday, but about 30 seconds after it was released, Breakin’ 2 and its insane subtitle became a punchline. To see it would have been complicit in its very lameness. It got referred to in the title of a terrific documentary about the ‘80s delights of the parent film company,  Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. More disturbing, because we can’t have nice things in this life, somehow the word ‘boogaloo’ got hijacked by a bunch of racist idiots, too. 

Does it measure up to its rep? Look – this is a ridiculous movie. With a title like that, how could it not be? But it’s kind of charming, too in a completely inane way. A gaudy, Hollywood snapshot of early hip-hop culture, it’s not quite as grounded in reality as the first Breakin’ (which was hardly a Bergman film by any means). Like most sequels it’s bigger, brasher and louder, immediately kicking off with a giant dance number where an entire multi-racial neighbourhood gyrates and dances down the streets, from construction workers to old ladies to traffic officers. Truly, Breakin’ 2 kind of defies words. It’s a movie one has to describe in YouTube clips:

It also features an utterly non-violent “breakdance battle” which might just be the greatest thing you’ll ever see: 

And that’s not even getting into the stunning ’80s fashions, the compelling bro-mance between its two leading men, the scene where young Boogaloo Shrimp is healed by the very power of dance, the entirely random puppet scene. I can’t pretend it’s a good movie by any means. The actors are all stiff and weirdly aware of the camera. The late “Shabba Doo” is a strangely charismatic awkward presence, eyeballing the camera with Brando-esque intensity, while Lucinda Dickey – who starred in both Breakin’ and the utterly magical Ninja III: The Domination and then vanished from screens – has a perky charm of her own, even if you don’t buy the reality of her “character” for a second. But you watch a movie like Breakin’ 2 for the dance numbers, and they’re elaborate, campy and colourful nonsense, and yet somehow, I smiled at every one of them. 

Worth seeing? Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is cheese through and through, of course. How could it not be? And yet, while it may seem like damning with faint praise, it’s got a good heart. Far more diverse than many movies of the time, it gently teases its very chaste interracial romance and fundamentally has a message of inclusiveness and acceptance, which I dig. There’s a place for this kind of airy escapism in cinema. Sure, you can pop it on the screen of your choice and laugh at it the entire time, at the fashions, the dance moves, the glorious camp of it all, but you know – for all its corporate synergy fad-hopping origins and essentially clumsy filmmaking, it’s weirdly sincere.

Somehow, watching one of these goofy teen movies where all the world’s problems can just be solved with silly dancing is a bit life-affirming. To quote the deeply profound lyrics of the soundtrack song, “When I’m dancin’ / It seems like everything’s all right / Everything’s all right / I believe in the beat.” There are worse things to believe in.