Black Gate

Last weekend, I splurged a little and bought myself a ticket to see the new Mortal Kombat film. Film is giving it a bit much, to be honest. I saw the new Mortal Kombat movie. Here is my review:

Silly nonsense that was nonetheless very entertaining. I do not regret the splurge.

Look, this movie isn’t great. It’s barely good. I’d so so far as to say that it’s bad. However, it’s precisely because it’s bad that it’s good. Hear me out.

One of the best things about Mortal Kombat is that it leans heavily on its own silliness. It doesn’t shy away from the ridiculousness of the video game premise: that there are multiple realms, and every realm sends forth champions to fight in a high-stakes tournament. As part of the rules, if one realms loses enough times, another realm has permission to annex it. The film opens with Earthrealm (us) on the verge of invasion from Outworld. If we but lose one more tournament, it’s over for us.

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The Colossus of Rhodes (Warner Bros, 1961)

It was a time of giants on the movie screen. In Japan, inspired by King Kong (1933) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1954), the kaiju, led by Godzilla, were wreaking swaths of destruction across the modern world. But by 1958, Ray Harryhausen, who’d animated The Beast, was looking backward to the ancient world, where the giants of myth had their origins, and other filmmakers in America and Europe were following the same path. Hissing hydras raised their many heads in tales of Jason and Sindbad, while Sergio Leone recreated the Colossus of Rhodes, and though he didn’t bring it to life, it was as much mechanism as statue. To see what it would be like if the colossus walked, we are indebted, once again, to Ray Harryhausen.

The Colossus of Rhodes

Rating: ****
Origin: Italy/Spain/France, 1961
Director: Sergio Leone
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

This is Sergio Leone’s first film as a director, and it’s mostly excellent. After working as assistant director on sword-and-sandal epics such as Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959), Leone finally got to show what he could do as lead on this picture, which is probably the best-looking Italian historical epic of the peplum era. It has its drawbacks, though, particularly its questionable choice of lead in American cowboy star Rory Calhoun, who combines the glowering good looks of a Robert Mitchum with the leering insouciance of Dean Martin. An ancient Greek hero he ain’t. And, frankly, seven screenwriters is too many, even if one of them is Leone himself.

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The Adventures of Don Juan (Warner Bros, 1948)

Errol Flynn’s late-career swashbucklers are widely considered mediocre efforts, desperate attempts by an aging and fading star to recapture his youthful popularity, but that sells the films short. It’s true that by the late Forties, Flynn could no longer match the vigor and charm of his performances in Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940) … but really, who could? Compared to any other standard, Flynn’s later sword-slingers are average at worst and mostly better than that. Flynn wasn’t keen to make most of these pictures; he was well aware that he wasn’t the athletic rascal he’d been almost twenty years before, but he was still a solid leading man and now and then the old charm shone through. Enjoy these films for what they have to offer, and you won’t be sorry.

The Adventures of Don Juan

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1948
Director: Vincent Sherman
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Errol Flynn had given up doing swashbucklers after The Sea Hawk (1940), but with the revival of the historical adventure genre in the late ‘40s, Warner Bros. gave him a sword and put him back in trunk-hose for The Adventures of Don Juan.  It must be said, Flynn doesn’t seem entirely comfortable in the role of Don Juan de Maraña, the scandal-plagued womanizing rogue who is forced to give up his naughty ways and turn over a new leaf. After disgracing himself by plucking forbidden fruit at the English Court, Don Juan is summoned back to Madrid by the Queen of Spain (Viveca Lindfors) and commanded to reform. And, however improbably, he does, because his soul is purified for the first time by his true love … for the queen herself. (No, really.) Unfortunately, purged of the rakish qualities that made the character distinctive, Don Juan becomes a conventional noble who gets entangled in conventional court intrigues, saving the queen from a conventional treasonous minister by foiling his conventional plot at the last minute—as usual.

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Come Drink With Me (Hong Kong, 1966)

Even if you’re not a big fan of wuxia, or Chinese historical martial arts films, you’ve certainly seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so you’re aware of their distinctive visual style. That style, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere, it developed over time, and can be traced back to the work of one man, writer-director King Hu, the creator of the modern wuxia movie. This week we’re looking at Hu’s first three hugely influential films, which established the tropes, look, and feel of the genre in the Asian cinema of the late Sixties.

Come Drink With Me

Rating: *****
Origin: Hong Kong, 1966
Director: King Hu
Source: 88 Films Blu-ray

Sometime during the Ming Dynasty, a government official commands a file of troops who are escorting wheeled cages bearing captive bandits to prison. Suddenly they’re stopped by a white-robed man with a petition, demanding the release of the leader of the Five Tigers criminal gang. The petition is refused, and the response of the Five Tigers is instant: the troops are slain in a bloody massacre and their commander, the son of the local governor, is captured as a hostage. What can the governor do but send the Golden Swallow to rescue him?

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Romeo and Juliet, 1936

William Shakespeare was the greatest playwright in history (fight me!), but his record as a screenwriter is, shall we say, uneven. There’s a long list of films adapted from or inspired by the works of the Bard of Avon, but most of them are considerably less memorable than their sources. However, sometimes a filmmaker steps up and meets the challenge and the result is a movie one can watch over and over with admiration and pleasure. Here are three films based on Shakespeare that also play regularly at our notional Theatre of the Crossed Swords. [Insert favorite Shakespeare quote here!]

Romeo and Juliet

Rating: *****
Origin: USA, 1936
Director: George Cukor
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

What’s Romeo and Juliet doing in the Cinema of Swords? Isn’t that a love story? It is, but this version is a love story punctuated by four superb rapier duels, three of them involving Basil Rathbone, and one of those is against Leslie Howard — that’s right, Sherlock Holmes crosses swords with the Scarlet Pimpernel!

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The Night Gallery on DVD

Few things in life are more trying than playing second fiddle to a sibling whose charm, poise, good looks and dazzling achievements you can never hope to match. Just ask Night Gallery, forever standing in the shadow of one of the most legendary and beloved of all television shows, The Twilight Zone. (At this point I am morally – if not legally – required to disclose that I am a spoiled youngest child who got every freakin’ thing he ever wanted, at least according to my sister.)

In case you need reminding, Night Gallery was an outré-story anthology show hosted by Rod Serling that ran for three seasons on NBC, from 1969 through 1973. Each hour-long episode featured two, three, or even four separate stories (at least until the third season, when the show’s running time was cut back to a half hour), which Serling, in his role as the curator of a museum of the macabre, would introduce with a painting (or occasionally a piece of sculpture) illustrative of the tale, hence the series name.

Night Gallery shares many qualities with its predecessor, but several things distinguish it from the earlier show. Like Twilight Zone, Night Gallery was created by Rod Serling and he wrote some or all of over half of the episodes, but he did not produce the series. This was a big change and it meant that he had far less authority over Night Gallery than he did over his previous creation. (As the creator and face of the show, he thought that his wishes would be respected even without the producing title, but it often didn’t turn out that way.)

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Like most of you, I read and enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, so I was happy to see it get the premium specialty TV treatment, although I didn’t have the time or the right subscriptions to watch it until this year. I just binged all three seasons, and it’s a gem. It has a few flaws, the most major being its pacing, which might be why Starz dropped it after season three, but even these three seasons are a work of art.

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