A HARD DAY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Tense, Darkly Hilarious Korean Cop Thriller

This fellow
is having a harder day
than most.

A Hard Day (aka Kkeut-kka-ji-gan-da) (2014)
Dir. Kim Seong-hun
Starring: Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Jin-woong

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Have you ever have one of those days? You know the kind. We all have them. You're as boiled as a fucking owl on whatever rotgut you've chugged back before getting in your car to drive to the funeral parlour so you can deliver a fond farewell to your mother, laying stiff in her coffin, and then you hit some goddamn pedestrian, killing the bastard, and adding insult to injury, after tossing his sack of potatoes carcass in the trunk, you're stopped and hassled by a bunch of rookie traffic cops doing a spot check. It's a total piss-off, right?

Luckily, for Ko Gun-soo (Lee Sun-kyun) in Kim Seong-hun's A Hard Day, he gets a reprieve when the boneheaded tax-collectors-with-guns drop a few loads in their drawers upon discovering that he's a highly-placed detective within the Seoul police department.

Phew! He's on top of the world. For now.

Unfortunately, just as he's in the middle of a ceremony involving the nailing shut of Mom's coffin, he finds out about some mega-shit going down. A clutch of internal affairs dicks are onto his graft and high-tailing it to the funeral home to roust him. Now, he's gotta figure out some way to smuggle the corpse in his trunk into the funeral parlour and get it into his mother's coffin before the turncoats get there. Adding insult to injury, his partners want him to take the fall, the pedestrian he killed is a notorious made-man in the Korean mafia and he's eventually assigned to investigate the disappearance of said gangster.

This is going to be a hard day, indeed.

For us, Ko Gun-soo's troubles mount exponentially and we're treated to one of the most suspenseful, brutal and funny Asian crime thrillers in many a day. Director Kim Seong-hun displays a taut command of cinematic language to keep us sliding off the edge of our seats and both the action and laughs come fast and furious. Even more extraordinary is the perverse likability of this nasty piece of work for a hero. Granted he's Jesus Christ incarnate compared to the other filth around him, so that we're allowed to root for the least egregious wad of crap is some kind of miracle.

Reminiscent of Jon Finch's accused murderer Blaney in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy Ko Gin-soo just can't seem to get a break. His troubles pile up so insurmountably that we're hoping against all hope that he gets out of the various sticky wickets assailing him. The movie puts us directly in his shoes and as such, we can't help but marvel at director Kim Seong-hun's complex and downright dazzling approach to the material.

I'd like to say that Hollywood would do well to pay attention to these extraordinary Asian masters of art, craft and genre, but the reality is this: all that's going to happen is the crapping out of more lifeless American remakes of Asian movies directed by round-eyed losers with eyes made of tin.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

A Hard Day plays at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto via VSC. Visit the TIFF website for tickets and further info HERE.

LET US PREY - BLU-RAY/DVD Review By Greg Klymkiw - Hot Babe Cop KicksDemonic Ass

Let Us Prey (2014)
Dir. Brian O'Malley
Scr. David Cairns, Fiona Watson
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Liam Cunningham,
Douglas Russell, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Niall Greig Fulton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Brian O'Malley's Let Us Prey, is a rip-snortingly scary, utterly demented supernatural take on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which, for added kick, is liberally sprinkled with plenty of Irish Whiskey and smothered with globs of bloody haggis (as its Irish-Scottish co-pro roots demand).

If you've seen Lucky McKee's delectably vile The Woman, you already know what a great actress (and babe) Pollyanna McIntosh is. Well, praise be to Jesus and Lucifer, Let Us Prey serves up McIntosh's va-va-va-voom frame of womanhood stuffed into the tasty sausage sack of a form-fitting cop's uniform. Unlike McKee's picture, though, this plucky lassie is not about to be hung up nude in a barn and used for sexual gratification, but like The Woman, she more than admirably gets to exact major-league ultra-violent payback upon a fine selection of despicable scumbags.

Using the taut, imaginative screenplay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson as his blueprint for madness, helmer O'Malley skillfully leads us into the fiery pits of the first official night on the job for a newbie female cop in a Bonny Scottish police station located in the most remote locale imaginable (which, is pretty much all of Scotland, so there's always going to be weird stuff going on in that blessed country).

As you already know it's a variation on the great John Carpenter station-house-under-siege picture, it's best not to spoil things with too many details. All you need to understand before going in is that an event occurs which spirals out of control as the cop shop is besieged by evil filth of the highest order and, of course, MUST be dispatched -- with, of course, extreme prejudice.

We get an alcoholic thug, a mass murderer, a self-flagellating killer of buff, young fellas and amongst some garden variety corrupt, murderous cops, there's a child-raping kidnapper who may or may not be a demon from the utter depths of Hell itself. Of all nights, this is one in which our plucky heroine might have wished she'd been home washing her hair and eating bonbons in front of the telly.

But such is not to be the case.

Violence must be done by a hot babe and we, the audience, are all the better for it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Let Us Prey is now available on a gorgeously transferred BluRay and DVD combo pack via Raven Banner Entertainment and Anchor Bay Canada.

RED ARMY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - American Doc on Soviet Hockey Ignores Canada

RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA

AMERICAN PROPAGANDA

Red Army (2014)
Dir. Gabe Polsky

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Gabe Polsky’s feature length documentary Red Army is as much about the propaganda machine (of Cold War Russia/Soviet Union) as it is pure propaganda unto itself, by placing undue emphasis upon the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union on the blood-spattered battleground of ice hockey competition. Polsky has fashioned a downright spellbinding history of the Red Army hockey team, which eventually became a near-juggernaut of Soviet skill and superiority in the world.

In spite of this, many Canadians will call the film a total crock-and-bull story.

I wholeheartedly admit, however, the bias of growing up intimately within the universe of world competition hockey. My own father, Julian Klymkiw, played goal for Canada’s national team in the 1960s, a team that was managed by Chas Maddin (filmmaker Guy Maddin’s father). Guy and I eventually became the respective director-producer team behind Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful. Maddin went on to immortalise a ‘non-professional’ team from the wintry Canadian prairies in the Jody Shapiro-produced My Winnipeg. Maddin even featured a beefy lookalike of yours-truly wearing a uniform emblazoned with the name ‘Julian Klymberger’ (the surname being one of my own nicknames in years past and to represent my Dad).

To say Maddin and I were both well aware of the true rivalry in international hockey would be an understatement.

But one didn’t need to actually grow up in hockey families intimately involved with various Team Canada hockey leagues to realise that the United States was a blip on the Soviet rivalry-radar. The only famous match-up between the Soviets and America happened during the 1980 Olympics, when a team of veritable untested ‘kids’ hammered the Soviets (immortalised as the 2004 Walt Disney Studios feature film Miracle starring Kurt Russell).

Polsky’s film uses this match as the film’s primary structural tent pole, and completely ignores the historic 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series, which has gone down in most histories (save, perhaps, for America’s) as the greatest display of hockey war of all time. His film also ignores, though pays passing lip service, to the fact that the real rivalry throughout the 1970s and 1980s had virtually nothing to do with America and everything to do with Canada and Russia.

I know this all too well.

My own father eventually became the Carling O’Keefe Breweries marketing guru who brokered huge swaths of promotional sponsorship to Team Canada over 15-or-so years and, in fact, worked closely with hockey agent/manager/promoter and Team Canada’s mastermind Alan Eagleson. Dad not only spoke a variety of Slavic languages fluently, but his decades as an amateur and pro hockey player all contributed to making him an invaluable ally to both administrators and players of Team Canada. To the latter, famed Canadian sports reporter Hal Sigurdson reported, ‘Big Julie [Klymkiw] often rolled up his sleeves and got his hands dirty behind the Canadian bench.’

I’m not, by the way, arguing the absence of my Dad in this film – he did his thing, promoting beer to promote hockey and hockey to promote beer, which allowed him to travel the world and be with all the hockey players he loved – but what I’m shocked about is how Red Army can ignore my Dad’s old pal and colleague. The film includes ONE – count ’em – ONE off-camera sound bite from Alan Eagleson.

Polsky appears to have made no effort to even interview the man himself or include the reams of historic interview footage of Eagleson that fills a multitude of archives to over-flowing. Eagleson, for all the scandals that eventually brought him down, including imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement convictions, was the game’s most important individual on the North American side to make Soviet match-ups in the Western world a reality, and to allow professional North American players to go head-to-head with the Soviets. (Though Eagleson went down in flames, my Dad always remarked straight-facedly, ‘The “Eagle” never screwed me.’)

How, then, can a documentary about Soviet hockey so wilfully mute this supremely important Canadian angle to the tale? Where are the interviews (new or archival) with such hockey superstars as Gordie Howe (including sons Mark and Marty), Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Marc Tardif and all the others who battled the Soviets on-ice? Why are there only mere blips of Wayne (‘The Great One’) Gretzky, most notably a clip in which he sadly refers to the Soviets’ unstoppable qualities? Why are there not more pointed interview bites with the former Soviet players discussing the strength of Canadian players? It’s not like archival footage of this doesn’t exist.

There’s only one reason for any of these errors of omission: all the aforementioned personages and angles are Canadian. Ignoring the World Hockey Association’s (WHA) bouts with the USSR is ludicrous enough, but by focusing on the 1980 Olympic tourney and placing emphasis on the National Hockey League (NHL), the latter of which is optically seen as a solely AMERICAN interest, Red Army is clearly not the definitive documentary about the Soviet players that its director and, most probably American fans and pundits, assume it is.

America? HAH! Canada! YEAH!

As a sidenote, there's an excellent series of DVDs produced by the visionary Canadian producer-distributor Jonathan Gross and available through his company Video Services Corp. (VSC). The titles include Canada Cup ‘76, Team Canada 1974: The Lost Series, The WHA Chronicles, Canada Cup '84 and Canada Cup ‘87 and they ALL address this important aspect of Soviet-Canadian Hockey. I wonder if Polsky bothered to watch any of them? Only his hairdresser, or rather, conscience would know for sure. Full ordering info on the titles below review.

Even if one were to argue that the story Polsky was interested in telling didn’t allow for angling Canadian involvement more vigorously, ‘one’ would be wrong. The story of Soviet hockey supremacy has everything to do with Canada – a country that provided their only consistent and serious adversary, a country that embraced hockey as intensely as the USSR and a country, by virtue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s official policy of Canadian multiculturalism, that reflected the vast number of Canuck players who had Eastern European blood and culture coursing through them.

It’s also strange how Polsky, the son of Soviet Ukrainian immigrants, ignores the fact that a huge majority of great Soviet players were ethnically Ukrainian. I vividly remember meeting so many of those legends as a kid and listening to them talk with my Dad about a day when maybe, just maybe, Ukraine would have its independence and display Ukrainian hockey superiority over the Russians, never mind the rest of the world. (Given the current struggles between Russia and Ukraine, this might have made for a very interesting political cherry-on-the-sundae.)

Ultimately, Red Army is American propaganda, or at the very least, is deeply imbued with American propagandistic elements. Given that it’s about Soviet hockey players, I find this strangely and almost hilariously ironic, which in and of itself, gives the movie big points.

All this kvetching aside, Red Army is still a solid film. Focusing on the historic and political backdrop of Joseph Stalin and those leaders who followed him, all of who built up one of the greatest, if not the greatest series of hockey teams in the world, this is still a supremely entertaining movie. Polsky’s pacing, sense of character and storytelling is slick and electric. The subjects he does focus upon, the greatest line of Soviet players in hockey history, all deliver solid bedrock for a perspective many hockey fans (and even non-hockey fans) know nothing or little about.

Polsky even interviews a former KGB agent who accompanied the Soviet players to North America in order to guard against defection to the West. Here again, though, I’ll kvetch about a funny Canadian perspective. Dad not only played hockey, not only was he a marketing guy, but he even squeezed in a decade of being a damn good cop in Winnipeg, and when Team Canada went to Russia, Dad would go from hotel room to hotel room, find bugs (not the plentiful cockroaches, either) and rip the KGB surveillance devices out of their hiding places for himself, his colleagues, players and administrators from the West.

I’ll also admit to enjoying the interviews with the likes of NHL coach Scotty Bowman and Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak; however, the most compelling subject in Polsky’s film is the Soviet defenceman Slava Fetisov, who movingly recounts the early days of his hockey career, his friendship and brotherhood with the other players and his leading role in encouraging Soviet players to defect for the big money of pro hockey in North America. It’s also alternately joyous and heartbreaking to see the juxtaposition between the balletic Soviet styles of play with that of the violent, brutal North American approach.

Contrast is, of course, an important element of any storytelling, but in a visual medium like film, it’s especially vital. It’s what provides the necessary conflict. With Red Army, however, the conflict is extremely selective. It is, after all, an American movie, and as it proves, if Americans do anything really well, it’s propaganda. Us Canucks here in the colonies can only stew in our green-with-envy pot of inferiority. We know we’re the best, but we have no idea how to tell this to the rest of the world, and least of all, to ourselves.

Kudos to Polsky and America are unreservedly owed.

They show us all how it’s done.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Red Army is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media in Toronto and Vancouver, followed by a February 27 release in Montreal and a rollout in the rest of Canada later in the year. It previously screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014).

To read a full version of my essay Canada vs. America: The Politics and Propaganda of Sports in Gabe Polsky's RED ARMY and Bennett Miller's FOXCATCHER, feel free to visit my column: Greg Klymkiw's COLONIAL REPORT (on cinema) from the DOMINION OF CANADA at the ultra-cool UK-based magazine electric sheep - a deviant view of cinema by clicking HERE.

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HOUSEBOUND - BRD/DVD Review By Greg Klymkiw - Blood-Drenched Kiwi Kitchen Sink Horror Show now available via Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada & Raven Banner

Being the tender tale
of a mother-daughter,
an amiable paranormal
investigator, a creepy Teddy
and a creepier social worker.
One right Royal Kiwi
Kitchen Sink!

Housebound (2014)
Dir. Gerard Johnstone
Starring: Morgana O'Reilly, Rima Te Wiata, Glen-Paul Waru, Cameron Rhodes, Ross Harper, Mick Innes, Millen Baird

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Kylie (Morgana O'Reilly) is a nasty piece of work. Since leaving home, the chunky, unkempt, greasy, tattooed and criminally-minded lassie has been through the revolving doors of Kiwi drug rehab clinics and courtrooms more times than she can remember. A not-unsympathetic judge working for Her Majesty's Crown in New Zealand has all the facts at his fingertips. Her latest escapade involved smashing into an ATM for drug money.

Deciding Kylie needs some stability in her life. albeit forced, he orders her to several months under house arrest in the countryside with her dear Mum (Rima Te Wiata) in the old country homestead.

Prison might have been better since the family home was never, ever a place Kylie felt comfortable in.


With its overgrown yard, gnarly trees, scrubby woods and a creepy neighbour (Mick Innes) to boot, Mummy dearest's musty, ramshackle, pack-rat-crowded old house is chock-full of too many bad memories. It's hardly conducive to a mentally healthy recovery, especially since Kylie's forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet which keeps her from seeking any respite from the dusty claustrophobia of her childhood home. Adding insult to injury is the incessant nattering of her Mum and regular visits from a smarmy court-appointed slime-bucket councillor (Cameron Rhodes). Her only friend turns out to be an unlikely one, the beefy, amiable security dude Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), hired by the corrections department to monitor her incarceration.

Worst of all, it appears the house is haunted.

Luckily for Kylie, Amos is an amateur paranormal investigator and the two team up to solve the mystery of odd noises and goings-on. Needless to say, there's a whole lot more than meets the eye. Think of Housebound as an extreme kitchen sink melodrama (so popular in the UK during the 60s), that's infused with loads of black comedy, more red herrings than you can shake a stick at, plenty of muted whisperings, things going bump in the night, a surfeit of shock cuts and eventually, a few gallons of bloodletting.

Debut helmer and chief scribe Gerard Johnson, keeps the atmosphere thick with suspense and punctuates the numerous shocks with big laughs. If there's a problem it's that Johnson's script is too packed with red herrings and that it spins its wheels during the last third of the film. It's also a tiny bit of a letdown to discover that what seems to be, isn't, and is, in fact something else altogether.

Still and all, Housebound is an intelligent and finely wrought genre item. That its characters are vaguely plain, plain-spoken and a bit repulsive is an added bonus. If and when the movie is remade in Hollywood, it'll be scrubbed to a lily white and zapped dry of everything that makes it fresh.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars

Housebound opens January 16, 2015 at the Carlton via Raven Banner and will be available on BRD/DVD via Anchor Bay Entertainment (Canada) in very nice home editions. The Blu-Ray contains an excellent commentary with Writer/Director Gerard Johnstone and two of the film's producers. There are also deleted scenes and a trailer. It's available on XLRator in the USA. It was the Opening Night Gala at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.

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DRUM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Delectably vile MANDINGO sequel on Kino Lorber BRD

"Papa? You put Drum with Elvira.
She's a purty l'il wench and everybody says she's in heat."

PREAMBLE TO MY REVIEW OF DRUM

As a young adult in the 80s, I first saw Drum on a grand double bill with Mandingo at the Epic Theatre, an old and beloved childhood haunt.

When I was a kid in the 60s, the Epic (back then it was called the Colonial) was a mouldy grind house perched proudly upon the rubby-dub stretch of Winnipeg's Main Street Strip twixt a benign Woolworth's and a fleet of hooker hotels replete with wood-floored beer parlours absorbing decades of piss and sputum. The cinema stood next to a pair of equally foul grind houses, the Regent and the Starland.

The latter sadly became a clothing store soon after first discovering these glorious homes away from home. No matter, though. I still had two sleaze-pits to choose from.

YAPHET KOTTO
GO! GO! GO!
LIGHT THE FUSE!
WATCH IT BLOW!
& BLOW & BLOW!

Sometime between the age of 7 and 8, I started to haunt these hallowed joints of non-stop motion picture entertainment. This was, of course, unbeknownst to my too-trusting Mom who made me promise that I'd never go to any of them. "Filthy!" she'd proclaim, her lips pursed in disgust. "They're full of dirty, dirty, filthy men and they want to touch your dinky."Mom's dinky-fondling radar wasn't too far off, only it wasn't my dinky anyone was interested in. The dirty, filthy men had their own dinkies to think about. You see, as the fetid aroma of cum and urine danced about my olfactory regions, I'd happily sit on tattered seats, the soles of my Oxfords adhering to the sticky floors whilst tell-tale slurping echoed throughout the auditorium, competing with the loudly-cranked front-speaker mono sound as malcontent, alcoholic veterans of the Great Wars were vigorously fellated by toothless glue-sniffing hookers. 

This was all an added bonus to eye-balling triple bills for 35 cents in cinemas that admitted anyone, regardless of any restrictions placed on the product by Manitoba's Film Classification Board. I wallowed like a piglet in slop as Hammer horrors, biker flicks, Roger Corman extravaganzas and other forbidden delights unspooled. Occasionally there'd be Randolph Scott westerns, Gordon Scott Tarzan pictures and for some reason, The Big Trees, a 1952 timber man vs. Quakers melodrama starring Kirk Douglas and Edgar Buchanan was slipped in every month.

DRUM is now on
Kino Lorber
BLU-RAY!
Don't you know?

By the 1980s, all my favourite grindhouses closed, but the Colonial, now newly-christened as the Epic remained the sole purveyor of cinematic sleaze in Winnipeg. Alternating between standard exploitation fare Friday to Monday and soft-core porn Tuesday to Thursday, I was still a piglet in slop, albeit a trifle more porcine than in those halcyon days of innocence.

Because I'd missed Drum on its first release, I was thrilled to be seeing it on a double bill, advertised in a one-column-inch newspaper ad with the oh-so enticing tag that proclaimed:

“And now . . . the BARE NAKED Roots”. 

NEW ORLEANS
WHOREHOUSE FROLICS

Accompanied by two esteemed members of the Faculty of English and Film at the University of Manitoba, Professors Stephen Snyder and George Toles (writer of Guy Maddin films like Archangel, Careful, and The Saddest Music in the World), little did we know that our lives would irrevocably change forever. This, you see, was truly an epochal event for all three of us in all our collective years of seeing movies, both separately and together.

It would, dare I say, bind us forever like Siamese Triplets in a Royal American Amusements travelling freak show. Mandingo was amazing enough, but Drum allowed us to reach some stratospheric pinnacle of raucous delight that will never be paralleled.

Seeing Drum on the recently released Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray brought it all back to me. As we-three sat in that rank pit of putrescence, a grind house that would have allowed the late, great film critic Manny Farber to feel like he'd died and gone to Heaven, it was indeed Drum which inspired an indeterminate number of blood vessels to burst and veins to pop open with geysers of lifeblood.

Mainly because of the brilliant performance of star Warren Oates (though Yaphet Kotto and John Colicos proved to be no slouches), it was essentially a coin toss to determine what was louder in the cinema that day, so very, very long ago. Was it our seemingly non-stop cacophonous shrieks, snorts, spittle-spraying guffaws or the wet-vac slurps from toothless hookers fellating old men? Good gum jobs, I guess, never die, so long as a prestigious venue stands erect to allow them their place in the world and visionaries like Kino Lorber to keep our memories so vitally alive with BRDs of movies like Drum.

END OF PREAMBLE

"What a splendid animal he'd be,
stripped down and naked."
John Colicos (right) as Bernard DeMarigny
has eyes for Ken Norton (left) as Drum

Drum (1976)
Dir. Steve Carver
Starring: Warren Oates, Ken Norton, Isela Vega, Pam Grier, Yaphet Kotto, John Colicos, Fiona Lewis, Lillian Hayman, Royal Dano, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith, Paula Kelly, Brenda Sykes
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Drum is pure melodramatic B-movie magic on an A-level budget, courtesy of über-producer Dino DeLaurentiis.

Crisply directed by Roger Corman protégé Steve Carver (Big Bad Mama, Capone) and starring the incomparable Warren Oates, taking over the Hammond Maxwell role Perry King played so stalwartly in Mandingo, Drum was a movie so reviled that its original studio Paramount, backed off from generating a sequel to one of their biggest box-office hits of the 70s. DeLaurentiis simply set the film up elsewhere, but once the film was complete, its new studio United Artists was so embarrassed with the results, they almost didn't release the film.

WARREN OATES
A MAN AMONG MEN
THE ACTOR'S ACTOR
is
MASTER
HAMMOND
MAXWELL
of
FALCONHURST

Drum is certainly no Mandingo, a genuinely great film by ace director Richard Fleischer, but while its aim is not as high as its predecessor, it's still one strange, subversive, alternately entertaining and repellent motion picture. Though straight-up genre director Carver seems out of his depth with the layered, crazed and snappily written screenplay by Norman Wexler, it is the writing which holds up remarkably well. Carver handles the action with taut, yeoman efficiency and much of the film's cast handle themselves superbly - notably the aforementioned Oates, a completely psychotic John Colicos as a flamboyantly mincing promoter of Mandingo no-holds-barred fisticuffs, the sexy and passionate Isela Vega as the Madame of an upscale New Orleans whorehouse (reunited here with her Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia co-star Oates), the late legendary Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith (Lemora, Caged Heat Joan Jett's real-life drummer) as Hammond's precocious, promiscuous daughter, Pam Grier (Jackie Brown) as the ultra-sexy bed wench and the wonderful character actor Royal Dano as a vicious slave trader. Happily, Lillian Hayman returns from Mandingo as "house Mammy" Lucretia Borgia, or as Hammond describes her via Warren Oates's pride-infused line:

"When I was a l'il sucker, I gots my titty milk from her".

Master Hammond (Warren Oates)
admires his new bed-wench Regine (Pam Grier).

Less successful is the gorgeous Ken Norton. His line readings are generally competent at best, but he certainly handles the muscular aspects of the role (both the violence and the sex) with the requisite stoicism and glistening pectoral flexing. Norton, in fact, returns to this sequel as a completely different character altogether since Mede, his Mandingo role, saw him pitchforked into a huge vat of boiling, burbling and decidedly scalding hot water.

Here, Norton plays the title character Drum, a young slave whose biological (and white) mother Mariana (Vega) has had her black lesbian lover Rachel (Paula Kelly) raise the lad as her own son. When Drum takes a swing in anger at gay aristocrat Bernard DeMarigny (Colicos), he asks for a bit more than raising the ire of this foppish French-accented sodomite, DeMarigny is first insulted when Drum refuses his advances, then tries to castrate our hero in retaliation and finally murders Drum's "mother", the lesbian lover of brothel keeper Mariana (in case you've forgotten). Drum might be justified in pounding DeMarigny, but being a slave he has no rights at all and is most definitely not allowed to wallop a White Man.

Drum is sold for his own safety by his biological Momma to Hammond Maxwell. Mom Mariana is sorry to see Drum go. In spite of being a lesbian, she also has a taste for the dark fellas and her son - I kid you not - is the spitting image of the African Prince who impregnated her and she's been mulling over a tumble with the lad. It's a good thing Drum's sequestered to the mighty Falconhurst plantation since he'll avoid castration, then death and a tumble (or several) in the sack with his biological mother (though he doesn't know she is his biological Mom). Later in the film, Mariana even does get a chance to salivate over her son's brawn and makes a healthy move in the direction of potentially copulating with him.

If any of this is sounding even a trifle insane, don't worry. It is.

Blaise and Drum fight to the death

At Falconhurst, Drum rises to power by being a loyal and trusted slave. He even makes friends with Blaise (Yaphet Kotto), DeMarigny's former "fighting nigger" who was saved from castration after losing to Drum in the whorehouse fighting pit and is now safely ensconced on Hammond Maxwell's palatial estate.

This squalid slave-breeding plantation, introduced to us in Mandingo, continues to be as full of fornicatin', sucker poppin' and whuppin' as it ever was.

In fact, we're all the better for Warren Oates playing Hammond since he's a lot more rugged, manly and delectably salacious than pretty boy Perry King could have hoped to be at this point in the character's life. Hammond Maxwell, as first portrayed in Mandingo revealed considerable duality in terms of the slave trade. With a more mature Oates in the role, we do eventually get to see this side of the character, but also within the context of two decades passing since the events of that film. Hammond was a product of his time, culture and upbringing in Mandingo, but Oates seems to naturally build on his conflicted feelings.

Now in middle-age, Hammond is courting Augusta Chauvet (Fiona Lewis), a fallen woman in need of a husband. Hammond himself is in the market for a wife to tend to his wayward daughter Sophie and run the more ladylike aspects of the estate. At this point in his life, he would have preferred to marry a whore, citing their practicality and loyalty being more to his liking. He's happy enough, though, with an indiscrete Southern belle. "She ain't exactly a Ho' but she sho' ain't a lady neither," observes our hero who also admits to having survived two wives since Mandingo. Those of us who know that film intimately will see through this, but even without seeing it, Oates manages to convey that he's a man with plenty of secrets. The fact of the matter is that Hammond actually had three wives. Being a paragon of discretion, he coyly doesn't mention his first wife. After all, he poisoned her to death with a laced hot toddy after she gave birth to a black baby (whom he also murdered).

Ah, it's a tough life being a plantation owner.

Always emitting tastily grotesque dialogue with a completely straight face (but with ornery Oates-ian relish) he manages to sicken us with such aplomb so that every time Hammond opens his mouth and drops a demented gem from screenwriter Norman Wexler's brilliantly absurdist adaptation of the bestselling novel by Kyle Onstott, it's often impossible to not let loose a huge series of belly laughs. Such, though, is the genius of Oates as an actor that his rendering of the plantation owner does not descend into pure camp (though much of the film does and certainly a few of the actors do). He plays the nutty lines with a straight face and as such, they're so much the funnier and sickening in one fell swoop. As well, Oates brings the weight of his own world-weariness and (relative) maturity to the character's feelings about his slaves.

Perhaps because Oates clearly relishes the role, he owns it in ways that suggest he's perfectly aware of its alternately satirical and human dimensions. He even plays with the black comedy in daring, dangerous ways. When he first complains to his newly acquired Mandingo "house nigger" and "prime breeding stud" Drum (Norton) that he doesn't speak "nigger-ish" enough, it's within the context of rudely taking a leak in front of some woman-folk. The scene is funny as hell, but also funny in that, "What the fuck did I just laugh at?" sense of incredulousness one has at one's own reaction. As well, Oates manages to handle the ignorance in ways that also betray Hammond's inner conflict. "You do have some human blood in you. You ain't all nigger," he says to Drum. Then, with a hint of both shame and sadness, Oates skilfully renders a capper-of-a-line when Hammond says, "That's probably why you're gonna hate me sometimes, but that's all right. That's just the human part of you coming out."

When Hammond repeats his "you don't talk nigger-ish enough" concern later on, it occurs during a moment when Hammond is in anything but a jovial mood. Oates calibrates his delivery with sheer malevolence. He essentially embodies the role with a sartorial splendour which veers from good-natured good old boy to a mean, ignorant, vicious slave owner. As well in this scene, Hammond chastises Drum for calling him "Mister" instead of "Master". Drum's response here is cheeky and hilarious. Oates has a rip-snorting time with his joyfully incredulous response to this. "That be a joke," he exclaims. "I ain't never heard a joke from a nigger before." This is a "first" that clearly pleases Hammond. Most slave-owners would respond as if they'd been insulted, but Hammond is a whole different kettle of fish, especially as Oates plays him.

The genuine conflict within Hammond about what it means to treat human beings as slaves is ever-present. During one "whuppin'" sequence, Hammond orders 30 blows. Oates clearly conveys that Hammond is doing what his culture tells him he must do, but he's unable to carry out the deed, entrusting it to someone else and even more astonishingly, he flinches with every paddle-blow to the slave's naked buttocks. Well before all the blows are meted out, Hammond breaks down and declares, with a big whopping lie that he's counted out the full allotment, forcing the punishment to end long before it's supposed to.

This and other moments which clearly contrast Hammond's otherwise appalling treatment of his slaves are played by Oates with such truth that it's impossible to ascribe villainous properties to his character. Given the melodramatic nature of the film, his performance is always straight-up. Not only are we blessed with seeing great work from one of America's most astonishing actors, but it's also one of the reasons that one cannot outright dismiss Drum as pure exploitation, no matter how vile, over-the-top and, yes, insane the picture gets.

The biggest problem for Hammond is Sophie (Smith), his slattern teenage daughter who favours being serviced by her Daddy’s Mandingo slaves behind his back. When the young men do not submit to her carnal desires, she gets her revenge by lying to her pappy about indiscretions having been performed upon her. At one point she accuses Blais of "fiddlin'" with her. She explains how he tricked her into playing a game in which he tells her to close her eyes, hold out her hands and await a surprise treat. In mock-horror, she weeps, "There, there in my hands, Papa, was his . . . THANG!"

Massah Hammond needs his whores like a
babe-in-arms needs its Mother's Milk.
He urgently queries his wife-to-be:
"You ain't gonna start messin' round
with my poon-tang, is you?"

I defy anyone to not bust a gut over that one. It's funny and sickening, especially since we know what must happen next. A few scenes earlier, Miss Augusta professes displeasure over all the talk about fornication. Hammond reminds her: "You just gotta get used to the idea that nigger-fornicatin' is what Falconhurst is all about. If my niggers stop fornicatin' then we stop eatin'". He also informs his wife-to-be that he wants his slaves, "bucks" and "wenches", to "git out and gits to humpin'". He then offers this dire warning: "These are strong boys. Their sap is rising. If I don't give them wenches to fornicate with, they're gonna be after the white ladies and then I gotta castrate em."

By any means necessary

Alas, Blaise has repelled all of Sophie's advances, but the utter horrors of this world of subjugation are such that he will not be believed. He will be castrated and sold to the meanest slave trader in Louisiana. This, in addition to an ever-mounting whirlwind of inhumanity will eventually lead to a violent climactic slave revolt.

It's enough to recall the tagline of another famous movie from the 70s:

"Who will survive and what will be left of them?"

Believe me, this truly is one insane movie. No matter how much you hate Drum or love it, you'll know for damn sure that you'll have never seen anything like it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

Drum is available on Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray. It's been lovingly, garishly transferred from a perfectly fine, grainy source print. It's also blessed with a detailed commentary track from director Steve Carver who lends considerable insight into the utter insanity of making the film. Canadians can get easy access to Kino-Lorber titles via VSC, Video Services Corp.

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GUMSHOE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Stephen Frears Debut Hardboiled Brit Kitchen Sink

Finney great as hardboiled schlub

Gumshoe (1971)
dir. Stephen Frears
Starring: Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, Billie Whitelaw, Janice Rule

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of the most infuriating things is when a picture throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, and resembles a ratty patchwork quilt designed to comfort the posteriors of smelly hippies sitting on a cold, rain-soaked, mosquito-breeding patch of earth during some loathsome folk festival. On the other hand, there are patchwork quilts like Stephen Frears’s first feature Gumshoe which, like the work of a serious folk artist, is designed specifically for aesthetic scrutiny.

Frears’s long-form debut wanders between loving parodistic homage and straightforward detective drama – a picture that succeeds winningly in spite (or perhaps even because) of its desire to both comment on the form of detective fiction whilst being the thing itself. In this sense, Gumshoe comes close to satire, but because it doesn’t have a mean bone in its celluloid body (save for some of the roughing-up the genre demands) and never quite comes close to roasting the folly of humanity over an open fire in the Swift-like fashion we’ve become accustomed to, it doesn’t really earn the right to be called satire either. It earns the right, however, to be called a kick-ass picture that stays with you long after it’s unspooled.

Spinning the tale of clinically depressed schlub Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) and his obsession to parlay a photographic memory of hardboiled detective movies into his own reality, Gumshoe uses every cliché in the Warner-Brothers-RKO book. Of course, so does Eddie, and he’s the one driving the narrative – a narrative where dream gives way to reality.

When we first meet Eddie, he’s undergoing therapy and working in a seedy working class Liverpool nightclub as an emcee, bingo caller and standup comedian. Longing to be part of the world of rumpled Humphrey Bogarts where he can merrily be dispensing wisecracks, justice and indulging in kisses and repartee with a bevy of femme fatales (and potential victims of the evils of higher powers), he’s a man in search of something, anything that can help him escape what a miserable drudge his life has become. Turning 31 years of age, Eddie treats himself to a want ad in the newspaper announcing his services as a gumshoe – a private eye for whom no job is too big, too small or too dangerous. Quicker than he can spit out a hard-boiled quip, he’s offered a seemingly routine job on a case that eventually extends well beyond its simple surface intrigue.

The convoluted mystery that follows is, like most mysteries, secondary to the world and style of the genre itself. What really sets Gumshoeapart is that Eddie’s just a regular Joe and most importantly, his stylized patter and adventures are set against a kitchen sink British backdrop that would definitely be more at home in the "Angry Young Man" genre of the early 60s where the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay and Laurence Harvey railed against the injustices of working class life, but seldom found a way to crawl completely out of the muck. Eddie’s character is certainly not unlike those abovementioned anti-heroes. His ex-wife Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), a woman he will always love, left him for his own brother William (Frank Finlay), a shipping magnate who offered the sort of stability Eddie could never provide and, even to the end, has no intention of ever providing.

And, of course, in any great crime drama, betrayal always cuts deeper than anyone involved in the proceedings could ever imagine and in Gumshoe, betrayal is laid on thickly indeed, pistol-whipping Eddie constantly in the face.

This is an incredibly strange, beautiful and compelling picture. I’ve avoided detailing too much of the mystery, not so much for the continual surprises it offers, but because there is a political backdrop that, while dated, seems to have as much, if not more resonance in our contemporary world of strife and the gradual discovery of this makes for extremely engaging viewing. Also, Eddie’s family situation is one that figures very prominently in the proceedings and this is an especially poignant touch.

Save for a clunker of a performance from Janice Rule (though she looks great) as a femme fatale, the movie explodes with great acting. Finney fits his role like a glove and frankly, it might be one of his best performances in a very stellar career. As his brother Willie, Frank Finlay is the icy epitome of familial meanness.

Neville Smith’s screenplay bristles with crisp hardboiled narration and dialogue and the characters are full of delightful eccentricities and subtexts that always add to the forward movement of the convoluted, but always compelling narrative. The cinematography by Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission) dazzles with its stunning virtuosity. Blending film noir stylings with garish kitchen sink realism, this is perhaps one of the picture’s greatest achievements. The lighting and compositions are in perfect tandem with the strangeness of the screenplay and the two worlds that are often separate, but occasionally blend together, is always a visual wonder to behold. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s weird-ass score that veers from parody to homage to out and out straight up romantic old-Hollywood stylings is occasionally jarring in the wrong ways, but more often than not, hits the notes it needs to.

And last, but certainly not least, threading this altogether is Frears’ bold, yet controlled direction. He clearly loves these characters and this world. And frankly, so do we.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three and a half stars

Gumshoe is currently available on the Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.

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THE DARK SIDE OF THE CHEW - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Closing Gala Planet In Focus

Gum. The DIRTY secret.
The HEART of DARKNESS!
The desecration of body,
of soul, of Mother Earth!
The environmental PESTILENCE!

The Dark Side of the Chew (2014)
Dir. Andrew Nisker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Watching this film was so utterly repulsive that I found myself gagging and retching throughout. These aberrant expulsions and reflex actions had nothing to do with the quality of the film or lack thereof. In fact, the picture so successfully delivered an important Western Union to my brain that I could have no other response. You see, I hate gum. I have always hated gum. Even as a kid, the very idea of incessantly chomping upon an atrophied orb that I had to spit out, leaving the mindlessly masticated, gob-glistening wad of filth on the ground, sickened me to the soul. And believe me, I had to spit out that malformed plug of putrescence for others to step upon because the very idea of having to, God forbid, touch it with my fingers, if even to dispose of it, induced within me a need to blow chunks of bilious puke willy nilly.

I hated seeing people chew gum. I hated when those same people blew bubbles, cracked it and even worse, chewed it with their maws agape. Where, when, why and how I developed this hatred of gum is a mystery to me. All I know for sure is that I've always possessed this unhinged aversion to it. Worse yet, in middle-age-crazy, my hatred for gum has accelerated with such force that I still go apoplectic when I see and/or hear anyone chewing it, but now, I know that if I was allowed to legally carry a handgun, I'd be tempted to use it upon whatever miscreant displayed such bovine behaviour.

My victims could be man, woman and child. My aim would be so true that I'd show no discriminatory mercy. I'd fill anyone full of lead and proudly declare that I'd be much happier watching an endless loop of Divine eating fresh, steaming dog shit in John Waters's Pink Flamingoes than to ever again witness purported human beings chew their goddamn gum as if they were raised in Texas.

Andrew Nisker's The Dark Side of the Chew is, at least for me, both a blessing and a curse. His one-hour TV Ontario (TVO) documentary beads its eyes upon the environmental pestilence of gum and has given me even more reasons to justify my hatred towards it.

Appearing in the movie himself, Nisker shanghais us aboard his Conradian tugboat for a country-hopping journey into a veritable Heart of Darkness. Nisker is Willard. Gum is Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.

What Nisker discovers is an environmental Apocalypse!

Now!

What we learn, as Nisker himself learns, is that gum is one of the biggest environmental blights upon the planet. In days of yore, gum was derived naturally from a weird-ass tree in the jungles that once teemed with the Mayan Aztecs. However, when the natural source of gum started to dry up, almost to the point of extinction, gum manufacturers had to find a new sticky source to inject with oodles of sugar and surround with flavoured, crunchy candy. And what, pray tell, did those pesky corporate piggies come up with? Well, hold onto your hats, folks.

Gum is made of plastic!

Yes, plastic. And where, oh where, does most gum end up? You guessed it. On sidewalks. Now, if it just stayed there, accumulating like some toxic, viscous gunk on the pavement, ever accumulating until. . . what? Mounds of sticky filth - impeding byways and highways? Nope. That's no good. And get this: there isn't a city that doesn't spend enough money to feed the world's starving populations several times over for several millennia to clean gum off the streets. Where does it all go? Into the water. Yup, tons and tons and tons of plastic are steamed off the streets and into the sewers and back into the water. From gum. Your gum, Clarabelle Cow. And this is not much good for any living thing.

Gum chewers are chewing plastic (cancer) infused with sugar (diabetes) or sugar-free chemicals like Aspartame (dementia), then they're spitting it up onto the ground whereupon it's "cleaned" up, right back into the environment.

This, frankly, is appalling enough, but Nisker doesn't stop there. Nay, he takes us deep into the heart of gum's darkness and we learn more about it in one hour than one would think was humanly impossible. We discover fossilized gum, we travel to various manufacturers of gum and we even get a couple of tastes of "greener" gum options. It still adds up to the same thing - waste and pollution.

Nisker even seeks to test out the scientific and medical claims made by gum manufacturers. A few of these tests are downright illuminating. Not surprisingly, we learn there is no truth to the ludicrous claims, but worse yet, we learn that many of the claims are so outrageous that they seriously affect those who buy into it and subsequently use it upon our children.

Ultimately, Nisker's film is so exhaustive, he might well have just called it Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gum But Were Too Ignorant To Ask. We get the history of gum, its sociological and culture impact and most of all, the damage it's doing to ourselves and our planet.

All of this is presented in a breezy, clever and entertainingly digestible fashion. (Except, for me, during closeups of people chewing the wretched stuff and the clever digitally animated ooze of gum that floods the streets and even chases Nisker at one point like a river of molten lava, is hardly the stuff of intestinal comfort. I can feel the mounting need to expunge like some character in Sam Shepard's La Turista, the desire to engage in the dreaded Aztec two-step.)

For me, though, his movie makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I haven't been a madman for all these years. I now have an Encyclopedia Britannica worth of reasons to detest gum even more. And now, I even dream about gum and in my dreams I see a glob of gum crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and ending up into the eco-system, the food chain and into my mouth - to ingest the cud-chewings of plastic, spat out upon the sidewalks of the world.

It's enough to make you sick.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

The Dark Side of the Chew is the Closing Night Gala of the 2014 Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto. For further info, please visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

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LET US PREY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 2nd Closer 2014 Toronto After Dark Film Fest

Let Us Prey (2014)
Dir. Brian O'Malley
Scr. David Cairns, Fiona Watson
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Liam Cunningham, Douglas Russell, Bryan Larkin, Hanna Stanbridge, Niall Greig Fulton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If you've seen Lucky McKee's delectably vile The Woman, you already know what a great actress (and babe) Pollyanna McIntosh is. Brian O'Malley's Let Us Prey, is a rip-snortingly scary, utterly demented supernatural take on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which, for added kick, is liberally sprinkled with plenty of Irish Whiskey and smothered with globs of haggis (as its Irish-Scottish co-pro roots demand).

Featuring McIntosh's va-va-va-voom frame of womanhood stuffed into the tasty sausage sack of a form-fitting cop's uniform, she's clearly not here (as in McKee's picture) to be hung up nude in a barn and used for sexual gratification, but like The Woman, she more than admirably delivers the goods in terms of ass-kicking and major-league ultra-violent payback upon a fine selection of despicable scumbags.

Using the taut, imaginative screenplay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson as his blueprint for madness, helmer O'Malley skillfully leads us into the fiery pits of the first official night on the job for a newbie female cop in a Bonny Scottish station house located in the most remote locale imaginable. All you need know is that an event occurs which spirals the whole joint out of control as it's besieged by filth of the highest order - all demanding to be dispatched.

We get an alcoholic thug, a mass murderer, a self-flagellating killer of buff, young fellas and amongst corrupt, murderous cops, a child-raping kidnapper who may or may not be a demon from the utter depths of Hell itself. Of all nights, this is one in which our plucky heroine might have wished she'd been home washing her hair, then eating bonbons in front of the telly. But such is not to be the case. Violence must be done and we, the audience, are all the better for it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half-stars
Let Us Prey was one of the closing night films at the 2014 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. It'll be coming to cinema and home entertainment venues near you via Raven Banner Entertainment and Anchor Bay Canada.