Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

It’s been 20 years since a nuclear meltdown ravaged the city of Tokyo, and even its name has been lost to the atomic. Known now as the Old Capitol, the streets are green with a queasy haze and the tenacious plant life pokes through the concrete and ensnares the broken buildings. Despite the inhospitable conditions, refugees are scattered among the wastes. Instead of investing in better hazmats, the Japan Ground Self-Defence Force turns instead to genetic engineering. The end result is Coppelion – three high school girls impervious to the ravages of radioactivity, charged with finding and rescuing survivors. Quite why you’d make high school girls for the task remains a mystery, but you can’t fault their results.

What’s perhaps most striking about Coppelion, other than the allusions to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, is the handsome animation conjuring Origin: Spirits of the Past. Both are examples of a ravaged future that doesn’t lose sight of wonder and beauty. Within each are lingering tales of survival and family, that aren’t mired in the doom and gloom of others in the genre. But in Coppelion’s case, what you see is what you get, and the black and white approach leaves the viewer with unfulfilled expectations.

If the backdrops are an arty accomplishment, then the characters disrupt the illusion. With their thick black outlines, each looks misplaced against the almost photorealistic settings. Factoring in the erratic musical accompaniment and often clunky CG additions, it makes for a vexing watch.

20 years might be too short a time for the level of dilapidation and natural reclamation seen, but Coppelion’s Old Capitol setting is its strongest asset. Despite the lack of depth to the characters beyond their given archetypes, there’s still something alluring on offer. Maybe it’s the sense of loss and loneliness mirroring real events, or perhaps it’s just the enduring story of Pinocchio, of these genetically made ‘living dolls’ looking for humanity in a nuclear waste.

COPPELION: COMPLETE SERIES COLLECTION / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: HIROMITSU KANAZAWA, SUSUMU KUDO, SHINGO SUZUKI / SCREENPLAY: TOMONORI INOUE / STARRING: ERICA LINDBECK, SHELBY LINDLEY, CASANDRA MORRIS, JOE THOMAS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Such is the mark of long-running anime shows and their snowballing success, that when more money is thrown their way, there comes an inevitable mark-up in quality. It’s been a source of satisfaction watching the evolution of Naruto’s animation, morphing as it did into the quintessential Shippūden style. And Road to Ninja boasts high production values in spades, using CG for some breath-taking sequences that take the viewer utterly by surprise.

The animation itself is prone to fluctuate between scenes, but it’s an immersive and attractive experience. The opening fight with the Hidden Leaf ninjas mucking in is a glorious testament to these characters and the journey that the viewer has accompanied them on until now. The twin tenets of friendship and hard work are grafted onto events, which feel both erstwhile and renewed.

Driving off the Akatsuki, the ninjas win plaudits from their parents and sensei alike. Sakura throws a strop at her mum and dad for being embarrassing and overbearing, while Naruto throws up a fuss at the lack of his own. With raging hormones and emotions running amok, both of their stances are perfectly understandable, and pairing the duo together, with their many differences, strikes a tender commonality.

After ditching her folks, Sakura grabs the first friend she can find, which just happens to be Naruto – forever a child of circumstance. Encountering Tobi of the Akatsuki, the duo is transported to an alternative world. It’s an old faithful trope that, at first glance, seems to play it safe. But flipping everyone’s character binaries is a cunning means to see them acting in ways that only fan fiction could previously offer, something the voice actors took delight in playing up to. The much hinted at twist is also nothing short of predictable, but unfurls into a terrific fight sequence. Likewise, Yuka Miyata’s snappy script does a lot to do away with any disappointment, with well-observed character interaction and plenty of laughs.

Less action-orientated than previous entries, Road to Ninja is a fable in the fullest sense of the word, and there’s a real lesson to be learned, whether you’re a ninja or a sales assistant. Shedding the typical episodic format that dogs lesser entries in the movie franchise, it bears the significance of the kids’ relationships with their parents, which has always been one of the show’s strengths, for an end result that feels well and truly separate and yet connected. What’s more surprising is just how poignant the movie is throughout, but particularly in its closing moments. This writer can’t be alone in mopping up a tear or two.

Special Features: Japanese commercial videos / Promotional videos / Art gallery / Trailers

ROAD TO NINJA: THE NARUTO THE MOVIE / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: HAYATO DATE / SCREENPLAY: YUKA MIYATA / VARIOUS: EMI SHINOHARA, JUNKO TAKEUCHI, TOSHIYUKI MORIKAWA, CHIE NAKAMURA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Going from Bond to Brando, Stevan Riley’s intimate documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, delves into the mind and psyche of Marlon Brando. Entirely based on self-analysing audiotapes that Marlon made himself, Brando is basically talking to and about himself, and these tapes chart both his long and varied career as an actor, as well as his extraordinary life away from the stage and screen. Acting almost like a confession, the film fully explores the complexities and insecurities of Brando by essentially telling the full story uniquely from his own perspective and entirely in his own voice with no talking heads or interviewees. What we have is just Brando on Brando and life.

^{Marlon Brando had been something of a troubling individual; it’s always been worrying that many regard him as one of the greatest actors of his generation, yet he was someone who, for a great proportion of his acting career, had seemed to have lost faith in acting, and certainly in Hollywood. When he started off his career, he demonstrated how magnetic a screen presence he was when he did films like A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and Guys and Dolls, however since The Godfather it all went downhill for him. He just took up cheque-collecting and not learning any of his lines instead of proper acting with films like The Formula, in which he wore an earpiece, and Superman, where he just read cue-cards. In a way, he was a cinematic Elvis in that the star burned bright but soon became a caricature of itself.}

This downward spiral is evident in the documentary, and what we are witnessing is Brando slipping into the descent of despondent disillusion, which is only made worse and more harrowing by real-life family tragedy, which makes his whole life near-Shakespearean as a result. The documentary brilliantly gets under Brando’s skin, peeling back the layers to reveal someone who deep down was definitely a troubled, yet fragile and self-obsessed soul. Riley does an expert job of examining Brando during the toughest moments of his life (dealing with troubled parents and children) and him at his controversial. We hear how shocked he was about the invasive nature of Bernardo Bertolucci during the making of Last Tango in Paris, and him deriding Francis Ford Coppola for trying to crowbar a performance out of him for Apocalypse Now, so its during those periods that Brando felt nothing but anguished disappointment at how far he came.

In some significant scenes, we have the “ghost of Marlon Brando” speaking to us from beyond the grave as a CGI avatar (a la 2006’s Superman Returns). Bold, yet brilliantly realised in execution, and made all the more ironic as during the opening scene, Brando describes having his face electronically mapped to produce his CGI ghost, which enables him to dismiss the art of acting altogether by proclaiming that it’ll soon be dead thanks to the new digital age. Another thing Riley does brilliantly is interweave the audio recordings and mixing them in with the archival footage (interviews and behind-the-scenes material), and both go seamlessly together in creating that multi-layered portrait of Marlon. We don’t get to hear anything though about his experience on The Island of Dr. Moreau (a catastrophic failure and his worst performance) and the chaos he apparently caused on set (he wanted to change the script so he could remove the ice bucket and reveal a dolphin flipper on his head!), but when it’s all put together this well, that’s only a minor fault.

In the end, Brando has always been a fascinating, mumbling enigma, and Listen to Me Marlon offers a fascinating, yet haunting insight of a tortured man whose life has been filled with many ups and downs, and has always struggled to find any kind of resolution. Actually, much like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Brando probably couldn’t escape his own demons, as well as the horror.

LISTEN TO ME MARLON / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: STEVEN RILEY / SCREENPLAY: STEVEN RILEY, PETER ETTEDGUI / STARRING: MARLON BRANDO / RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 30TH

 

Three years after the original film, most of the gang is back together for more hijinks. The Sheik from the original film has to buy a new race to try and rectify the shame that he brought on his family by not winning the first race. Most of the racers are back for what are pretty tired re-runs of what we saw the first time around, but the biggest disappointment is the reduced time that the actual race has on screen.

Martin and Davis Jr.’s characters are in debt to a guy called Don Don, who is also in debt to a mob enforcer. The Sheik bails the characters out but Don Don hatches a plan to kidnap the Sheik and extort money from him. It all results in the racers teaming up to save the day, before going on to finish the race. That’s basically the extra plot that has been shoehorned into this at the expense of more racing stunts and adrenaline rushes; anything for the tired shtick of Burt Reynolds to gurn at the camera another dozen times.

If the first film was bad, then this is worse. It hardly manages to get itself off of the starting line. In fact, we don’t even see the ending of the race and who actually won, all so the creators can offer one last lame joke to the audience. It is literally as if the director has a checklist on a clipboard and is ticking off old clichés that almost worked the first time as well as trying to add a sub-plot that does the exact opposite of what you need in a race film. It all slows down to the point that you have to check to ensure that you’re sitting on your sofa and not in a traffic jam.

A real waste of acting talent – this was the last on-screen appearance by both Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin – it seems as though they’ve literally thrown everything at the screen in the hopes that something resembling a film sticks. Only the orangutan comes out of this with any real respect. Honestly, Rat Race was a thousand times better than this and that’s saying something. Indeed, Wacky Races, with Dick Dastardly et al, is a better representation of fun and racing than this turgid mess.

This signalled the end of Reynolds’ working arrangement with Needham – thank goodness – and is an insult to anyone with a maturity level above that of a ten-year-old. Sometimes nostalgia can be a bad thing. Take off those rose tinted glasses, the sun isn’t shining enough on this film for you to need them.

CANNONBALL RUN II / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: HAL NEEDHAM / SCREENPLAY: HAL NEEDHAM, ALBERT S. RUDDY, HARVEY MILLER / STARRING: BURT REYNOLDS, DOM DELUISE, DEAM MARTIN, SAMMY DAVIS JR., TERRY SAVALAS / RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 30TH

 

The Chowder Society – a group of four elderly men who have known each other since they were young – gather together each week to tell ghost stories, never daring to talk about the unspeakable horror which is individually haunting them all. A horror from their past. A horror that refuses to stay buried.

Only Don Wanderley, the ‘black sheep’ son of one of the Chowder Society’s members, can even begin to solve the puzzle. He’s an English Professor and when he meets the beautiful University secretary Alma Mobley he doesn’t realise the danger he has stepped into. But Alma Mobley is a dazzling enigma. Who could blame him for falling so blindly into a revenge plot that has taken the ghost decades to set into motion?

Ghost Story is a film that has divided viewers and critics ever since its first release. Based on Peter Straub’s brilliant novel, it alienated fans of the book because there was so much interesting important detail the film didn’t have the time or, quite possibly, the budget to portray (in the novel, the ghost is a shapeshifter) and, for the horror movie fans who never read the book, who wants to see a movie about four old men in peril? Even when the peril comes in the drop dead (literally) gorgeous form of Alice Krige?

It’s a genuine shame, because Ghost Story (the movie) deserves far more credit than that. It’s a very cleverly constructed thriller in the true spirit – no pun intended – of what all the best ghost stories should actually be about: a spectre intent on revenge for reasons that aren’t revealed until the very ending. It’s all about guilt, sex and vengeance – is there a better recipe for fear? With that brief in mind, Ghost Story is unfairly ignored because, almost thirty-five year years since its release, it remains an extremely effective and incredibly good-looking horror film.

But maybe another reason Ghost Story failed so spectacularly at the box office is because its core cast – the four elderly Chowder Society gentlemen – were four actors whose true fans no longer wanted to follow their idols into such dark and twisted territory: True, John Houseman had recently appeared in The Fog and Melvyn Douglas had played a villainous part in The Changeling, but what about fans of Fred Astaire and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. who were probably horrified that their heroes would appear in this kind of movie? And Craig Wasson as the son who brings all the nasties home to roost would never make the grade as a leading man, despite Brian De Palma’s later endorsement of him when he cast Wasson as the embattled hero of his less-than-cutting-edge Hitchcock-meets-giallo melange Body Double.

Maybe because it wasn’t well received, Ghost Story has never received a stellar home video release. That’s a shame because there’s so much to admire here – director John Irvin does a great job, especially in the darkened rooms as the Chowder Society spin their tales, and in the wintertime exteriors of New England (or, at least, that’s where the story is supposedly set) with a moment involving Douglas Fairbanks Jr. wandering confused through the deep snow that is especially striking. And let’s not forget Jack Cardiff’s fantastic cinematography and Dick Smith and Albert Whitlock’s wonderfully unsettling make-up and effects work.

Alice Krige, as the vengeful spirit, is at her most ethereally beautiful in this film. She effectively plays two roles (although they eventually turn out to be the same character) and no matter how many times we watch this film, one or two of her line readings never fail to make our blood run cold. “I will take you places you’ve never been… and I will see the life run out of you.”

On that note, kudos should also go to screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen for adapting Straub’s very difficult, very complex book. True, his screenplay doesn’t have the depth of Straub’s writing and two characters that are heavily featured in Straub’s novel – a feral man and boy, apostates of the ghost – are shoehorned into the film so awkwardly it would probably have been better to leave them out entirely – but there are few novel-to-film adaptations that are completely successful, and when Ghost Story gets things right it gets them right very well.

Finally, another large reason the film sets the nerves jangling lies with Philippe Sarde’s extraordinarily creepy score. His main title theme stylishly sets us on edge for what is to come and the rest of his music is so subtle, it works exactly as a ghost story should – slowly, imperceptibly, working beneath the picture, building the tension.

For all these reasons, Ghost Story deserves urgent re-evaluation, and this new Blu-ray release gives us a great excuse to re-evaluate it. Picture and sound are both excellent and the extras are plentiful, including a film commentary from John Irvin, a charming interview with Alice Krige, and segments about developing the screenplay, the film’s genesis as a novel, and an homage to the genius of Albert Whitlock. We have been waiting a long time for a company to do this terrific film justice, and Second Sight’s Blu-ray has knocked it out of the park.

If you’re looking for a horror movie that is intelligent and engrossing, and which will chill you on a psychological level and deliver one or two nasty frights in the process, look no further than the exemplary Ghost Story. Very highly recommended.

GHOST STORY / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JOHN IRVIN / SCREENPLAY: LAWRENCE D. COHEN / STARRING: CRAIG WASSON, ALICE KRIGE, FRED ASTAIRE, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR., JOHN HOUSEMAN, MERVYN DOUGLAS / RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 7TH