We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Swords and sorcery, alien threats, and cynical private investigators.
THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)
Legendary B-movie filmmaker Albert Pyun passed away at the age of 69 last November, following a long battle with dementia and MS. I have been a fan of a lot of Pyun’s films over the years, and have written about several of them before – Dollman, Captain America, Cyborg, Invasion, the Nemesis franchise, the Kickboxer sequels. And I have to admit, the fact that Pyun was cool enough to comment on the Kickboxer article here on Life Between Frames definitely gave me a greater appreciation for the man’s work. In tribute to Pyun, I have decided to start watching (or rewatching) my way through his career, starting with a first time viewing of his feature debut, the 1982 fantasy film The Sword and the Sorcerer.
Pyun landed a deal with producer Brandon Chase by bringing extensive storyboards to his The Sword and the Sorcerer pitch meeting. Chase was so impressed by the inclusion of storyboards in a pitch, he agreed to make the film for a budget of $4.5 million, and even ended up distributing it through his own company. The Sword and the Sorcerer turned out to be a surprise hit in ‘82. And while Chase wasn’t always the ideal producer (as evident from the fact that he took the “A Film By” credit for himself on the movie), at least he gave Pyun his break in the entertainment industry.
Pyun wrote the screenplay for The Sword and the Sorcerer with Tom Karnowski and John V. Stuckmeyer, and they had hopes that this would be the first entry in a franchise. But just in case this wouldn’t become a franchise (and for some reason it didn’t, despite its box office success), they seem to have packed multiple films worth of ideas into their script for this one. The structure of this movie is slightly insane. It begins with the villainous King Cromwell (Richard Lynch) conjuring an undead sorcerer called Xusia (Richard Moll) so he can use his magic to help him conquer Ehdan, the richest land in the world. So you might think this is the set-up for the entire film: the forces of Ehdan’s King Richard (Christopher Cary) fighting to defend their land from their magically-enhanced attacks. But no, we don’t see much of what Cromwell and Xusia accomplish together. The next time we see them, Cromwell is already on the edge of conquering Ehdan... so close to victory, that he decides to double cross Xusia and attempts to kill him. Ehdan falls, King Richard is killed. Cromwell rules. Jump ahead eleven years and a rebellion has risen up to challenge Cromwell’s rule, with the children of King Richard’s adviser – Simon MacCorkindale as Prince Mikah and Kathleen Beller as Princess Alana – leading the rebellion and Mikah hoping to claim the throne. Xusia is still out there, plotting to get revenge on Cromwell. And King Richard’s son Talon (Lee Horsley), the rightful heir to the throne, is roaming the land, working as a mercenary, wielding a triple-bladed sword. All of this story is packed into the first 30 minutes or so of the film’s 99 minute running time.
Once Talon and Princess Alana cross paths, we get down to the real mission of the movie: Talon is to infiltrate Cromwell’s castle and free the rebels that have been imprisoned there, including Mikah. In exchange, Alana will sleep with him. Talon isn’t the only one who has the hots for Alana, as Cromwell also intends to make her his bride. We just have to hope that Talon and the rebels will be able to crash their wedding.
The storytelling is a bit more scattered than it needed to be in the first third of the movie and it’s often evident that this was made quickly and on a small budget in California – especially since the major battle scenes are withheld from the viewer – but The Sword and the Sorcerer is quite entertaining. This was a great start for Pyun, and actually one of the biggest movies he ever made, if not the biggest.
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
Hammer Films had already been around for several years by the time 1955 rolled around – in fact, the company was founded in 1935, but it took an eleven year hiatus along the way to the ‘50s. But the sci-fi horror film The Quatermass Xperiment was the company’s first major international success and the beginning of Hammer starting to build toward becoming one of the most popular genre companies of all time.
The film is actually a remake of a mini-series that had aired on BBC Television two years earlier, condensing a story that mini-series creator Nigel Kneale had taken six thirty minute episodes to tell down into an 80 minute feature. And while this is a greatly shortened version of Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, the existence of the feature version is something to be thankful for, because four of the mini-series’ six episodes have since been lost, like so many episodes of the BBC series Doctor Who have. So, aside from the two existing episodes of The Quatermass Experiment, The Quatermass Xperiment (which is also known as The Creeping Unknown) is the only way to see the story get told in the 1950s style.
The Quatermass of the title is Professor Bernard Quatermass, played by Brian Donlevy. The experiment he has conducted is the unsanctioned launching of a manned rocket into space. Communication with the three men on board the rocket was lost while they were in space, and when the rocket is remotely brought back down to Earth it’s discovered that two of the men on board have been reduced to jelly by some sort of alien life form. The remaining man is not only in a catatonic state, but also appears to be gradually mutating. Eventually, this mutating astronaut manages to escape from the hospital and out into the night. He starts out by attacking people and animals, absorbing their life forces. But Quatermass suspects that these acts of space vampirism are just the first steps toward an apocalyptic event...
The Quatermass Xperiment starts off with the rocket making its crash-landing on Earth, but then director Val Guest (who also wrote the screenplay with Richard Landau) lets the story takes its time building up to the astronaut’s escape. We get the back story on Quatermass and his experiment, we watch as he figures out what happened on board the rocket. More than half of the running time has gone by before the astronaut is up and walking around. Thankfully, he stays busy causing trouble once he’s loose – and at the same time, actor Victor Wordsworth is able to make sure we retain some sympathy for his character even when he’s sucking the life force out of people. At least, up until the point when the astronaut ceases to have any bit of a human appearance.
During the first half of The Quatermass Xperiment, I was starting to get impatient and felt that the movie could be livelier than it was. But the second half made up for it, and Hammer’s first global hit was an enjoyable viewing experience overall.
HICKEY & BOGGS (1972)
Walter Hill is a highly respected filmmaker who has directed, produced, and/or written several films that are considered to be all-time classics. Movies like Alien, The Warriors, and 48 Hrs. He got his start by selling his original screenplay Hickey & Boggs, about a pair of private investigators who take a “missing girl” case that unexpectedly gets them mixed up in a mess that involves $400,000 in stolen cash and a small army of mob hitmen, to Warner Bros. Hill had written the script with Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind for the lead characters, but somehow it ended up in the hands of a celebrity who was best known for his comedic work: Bill Cosby. Who is best known these days for being a convicted sex offender, although his conviction was later vacated. It’s odd that Hickey & Boggs would ever have been offered to Cosby, because it is a very dark and cynical script. But Cosby was interested in starring in the movie – under the condition that Robert Culp, his co-star in the 1960s secret agent series I Spy, make his feature directorial debut on the project. Culp agreed to direct the movie and star in it alongside Cosby... then ran into budgetary issues with Warner Bros., so he bought the project from the studio and raised the budget for himself. And eventually had to settle for half the budget he had wanted to get from Warner Bros. (He wanted a $2.2 budget from WB and ended up with $1 million on his own.)
Cosby is Hickey and Culp is Boggs, a P.I. duo having trouble paying their bills. So even when they learn that the missing girl they’ve been hired to track down is in possession of $400,000 that was stolen from a bank... $400,000 that the mob wants... they stick with the case, dodging assassins and bullets because the authorities are offering a $25,000 reward for the cash. As the case takes them into more and more dangerous situations, the Hickey and Boggs vs. the mob situation becomes personal. Especially since the mob kills Hickey’s ex-wife, the mother of his daughter.
Hickey & Boggs has a running time of 111 minutes, and Culp has said he had to whittle 50 minutes out of it to get it to that length. The finished film definitely feels scattered, you can tell that chunks of it were removed. At the same time, it’s not exactly the most lively movie. It can test a viewer’s patience even in its current form, so a longer cut would have been a real endurance challenge. The plot is dense and complex, it’s difficult to follow what’s going on from moment to moment – and while Hill probably did want it to be a bit of a mind-bender, that might not be entirely his doing. He has said that Culp changed the plot by about 20% through rewrites.
As slow and hard to follow as the movie is, it does have a watchability to it, and at times it has a tone and style that’s reminiscent of the films Shane Black would write in the future. (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Nice Guys, etc.) This is more dour than anything Black has ever done, but the fact that Hickey and Boggs are so low-key and cynical is part of their charm. These guys seem to go through life expecting everything to be bad. Which is a benefit for them, because things do get really bad for them over the course of this story. It’s not too surprising.
No comments:
Post a Comment