Tag / film reviews

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A Plague on Both Your Tin Mines

The Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, 1966)

The first zombie movie was released in 1968 – this must be true, as I heard this on the radio several times last year (and an article doesn’t quite say it ). So clearly I hallucinated this DVD of a 1966 film I encountered as I work my way through the Ultimate Hammer Boxset. (Although, let it be said, that this boxset is far from ultimate as boxsets go.)

There is a reasonably familiar horror/Hammer narrative. People from London travel to remote village full of suspicious locals and disturbing events. Rather than the bloodsucking vampires of the Dracula films, we have blooddraining zombie masters, and the incomers are a London-based doctor (André Morell) and his daughter (Diane Clare), responding to a letter from a local GP (Brook Williams) about a mysterious plague. Rather than a mittel-European village, surrounded by not even trying day-for-night filming, there’s a Cornish village. They are worried about incomers, just not necessarily about the right incomers.

The vampire narrative is easy to read in Marxist terms, indeed, Marx explicitly writes about capitalists sucking blood and surplus labour/profit being undead. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” he writes in Capital, elsewhere he discusses “British industry, which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too.” Engels adds, “But here, too, necessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class.“

In Plague we have peasants being turned into zombified labourers through the manipulation of blood. Perhaps to maintain heteronormativity, it’s female rather than male blood being drained. The peasants as zombified slaves are counterparted by drummers from the Caribbean, with the kind of casual racism of Hammer’s She (Robert Day, 1965).

If the real villains of the piece are the squire (John Carson) and the huntsmen, the peasants seem disturbingly disposable – it’s the professional middle classes we’re meant to be concerned for. Indeed, just like Jonathan Harker in the original Dracula, although the doctor Sir James Forbes is closer in class to Dr Seward. We’re not even that bothered about the good local doctor’s wife, Alice Mary Tompson (Jacqueline Pearce), as we know she’s going to turn into Servalan.

It perhaps should be objected that if you want an efficient workforce in your tin mine, than a zombie workforce may not be the best choice. Such has struck me before – in the various cyberslave armies in new Doctor Who somewhat ad nauseam, although that itself possibly begins with the robomen in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (21 November 1964–26 December 1964).

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Deus-ed Up, Or: All the Deus-Bros.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Here be spoilers, although not really until paragraph eight onwards (nine if this is one). I’ve tried not to give the ending away. 

There’s a reading of Harrison Ford’s rather plank-like performance in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982 etc) as Rick Deckard that suggests it is in fact a rather nuanced representation of a replicant. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but there you go (he can’t be one of the six escapees because…).

I got the same feeling about Domhnall Gleeson about ten minutes into Ex Machina. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but then again, what does? I was also reaching for Bluebeard and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), neither of which end well.

Bluebeard is the one when a duke invites his bride to stay in his castle whilst he goes off on a jolly, leaving her with the keys to all the rooms but instructions not to unlock the seventh door. Obviously she does, just as Eve ate the fruit and Pandora opened the box. It’s Story.

So Caleb (Caleb Williams, son of Jephunneh or son of Hezron, a villain in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a computer game character who is a gunslinger) is a computer jockey who wins the golden ticket and gets to go to the chocolate factory the CEO of Bluebeard Bluebook’s secret lair. Before you it, know he’s flying across a landscape straight out of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) to the secret lair. If Gleeson has a look of both Nathan/Justin from Queer as Folk, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan is more bearish, pummeling a punchbag, swigging a beer from a bottle and being furry under a vest. Apparently he is a genius. (Nathan — son of David, Nathan Fillion played Caleb…)

Caleb, before he goes any further in his bonding over beer, vodka and sushi with Nathan, has to sign all kind of non-disclosure agreements to make sure we feel uneasy.

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Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

The short version: it’s very pretty, so who cares about the flaws.

The longer version: remember that recent film that kills off a major character only for him to come back to the protagonist – except it’s all a hallucination due to oxygen starvation? Imagine waiting an hour, hoping it’s all a dream.

The even longer version:
We are haunted by 2001, A Space Odyssey. Like it or not, it has become the yardstick of the serious sf movie, the sf art film. It travels at the kind of pace that we rarely see in Hollywood film these days and when we do, I often find it self indulgent rather than joyous. Alternatively, given the action takes a couple of million years and travels to infinity and beyond – sorry, beyond infinity – that’s somewhat speedy as an average. The apes take a while and the stargate sequence really frustrates my students, but there is a joy in the miniatures and the classical music that has rarely been bettered. Hal 9000 created a new stereotype, the evil shipboard computer, to such an extent that I never trust a computer to run a ship.

And so comes along Interstellar, another pretender to the tradition, weighing in at 2hr 49 mins, nine minutes longer than its daddy, minus overture and intermission, or indeed Strauss, Ligetti and Wagner on the soundtrack. Nolan’s done interesting movies – I’ve a soft spot for Falling, a disappear up its own fundament psychological thriller, I enjoyed Memento, despite our not knowing much more at the end than the beginning and The Prestige is an interesting take of Priest’s novel, unfortunately shorn of its present day framing device. I eventually caught up with the Dicklite Inception on DVD and it has its moments, but too many of them seem to being situating women as less good than men. He did some comic book franchise, too, set in a dystopia where almost all women had died out.

So we have Interstellar, a film which I had singularly failed to find three hours to see prior to Saturday, and which I saw in one of the smallest cinemas in existence. We have nostalgic talking heads, telling us how things now have changed, We have Matthew McConaughy as Coop, an actor I last saw in Reign of Fire alongside Christian Bale, and the facial resemblance here suggests that so kind of synthespian shenanigans have been going on. We have a future in which the crops are failing one by one – Death of Grass anyone? – and the solution to this is to ruin the soil even more by growing the same crop in the same fields. Me, I’d be exploring hydroponics and such like. This is a world that needs more farmers and fewer engineers (although in guessing there’s a wriggle out of this) and where there’s a Sekrit Plan to evacuate Earth run by Michael Caine. But that is to get ahead of ourselves because there a Sekrit Messages being sent to Coop’s daughter, Murphy, including binary or Morse code coordinates for the Sekrit Rendezvous (because poltergeists, like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, know where Greenwich Meridian Line is. Before you know it, Coop has met Dr Brand and her father, Michael Caine, who turns out to be an old friend and clearly marked for death in tragic circumstances at the three quarters point if the movie.

Look away now. Spoilers.

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