Author: scariousartists

Matt hails from North Yorkshire, and presently resides in South Korea where he teaches English. He escaped the Northern Film School in Leeds with a master’s, and is now an award-winning filmmaker and podcaster. In 2020, he wrote and directed the acclaimed sleep death in suburbia short, The Self-Seers.
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Ode to John: The Joy of McTiernan

by scariousartistsLeave a Comment on Ode to John: The Joy of McTiernan

This is both a nod, and an apology to John McTiernan. Not that he’ll ever know (or care), but at film school, I was cagey and downright secretive about how much I loved his work. His movies weren’t deemed “avant-garde a clue” enough for me to get away with stating I worshipped Predator, or regarded Die Hard as a true cinematic masterpiece. Back then, I copped out, and now’s my chance to put it right. Turns out every great film does not need to be a Tarkovsky, or a Bergman.

Pockmarked, ever so slightly effeminate, and grumpy as you like; undercover theatre guy, and self-appointed liker of actors, Albany, New York’s own, John McTiernan isn’t a filmmaker people often discuss. In fact, I seldom hear his name at all. Yet, his 1988 action movie bible, Die Hard, remains one of the most monumental movies ever, the foremost staple of its genre, and a guaranteed jingle-belter every year at Christmastime.

Even for a die-hard 😉 McTiernan car-waxer like myself, it was illogical to list him among my top tier of favourite directors, purely because he’s only made two movies that really knocked my socks off, as opposed to perhaps seven from Scorsese, or around twelve by Spielberg. Nevertheless, I absolutely adore his ’87-’88 one-two punch of Predator and Die Hard—every flashy frame of them, which I’ve absorbed countless times, and have now been assimilated into my consciousness, part of my persona, forever burned into my cinematic memory. Much like the manner in which McTiernan’s American Film Institute mentor, the filmmaker, Ján Kadár, once instructed him to, “Learn that movie! Where is the camera for that shot? What kind of lens was it? What was the camera doing?” John’s memorised, shot-for-shot remakes ranged from Fellini’s 8½ to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Much like a world-class instrumentalist, storing up hours upon hours of music in their mind, McTiernan squirreled away the “classics of the profession,” and learned their “visual melodies” frame-by-frame—off by heart. McTiernan once said of Kadár, “He made me learn to think of movies as a chain of images. Just like a music student could hold a concerto in his mind, you should hold the movie in your mind; the images—never mind the words, the images.”

Peculiarly, for me, the subsequent movies in McTiernan’s filmography remain vague to this day. Once upon a time, they called out from the colourful, promising VHS rental shelves of my youth, although I was far too immature to have acquired an aptitude for classifying movies based on their directors, systematically exploring filmographies, or even being conscious that the same bloke who made Predator and Die Hard, also did The Hunt for Red October and Medicine Man. Speaking of which, my mate Dave (who is now known as a mythic, legendary figure on our Rewind Movie Podcast episodes—along with his three older brothers, for acting out scenes from films throughout my childhood, including such diverse titles as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Action Force: The Movie, and Schindler’s List) lent me a pirate copy of McTiernan’s Medicine Man, which I barely recall watching, although I do remember Dave, aged about twelve, when asked if it was an appropriate film for me, unwisely performing a one-man show of a key scene for my safeguarding mum, in which Sean Connery declares he has, “Found a cure for the fucking plague of the 20th century!”

McTiernan’s lesser-known debut, Nomads (with friend of the show, Pierce Brosnan), impressed Arnold Schwarzenegger to such a degree that he hired the director to helm Predator—a film that would become a number one box office smash and eventually lead to the duo’s reunion on the Arnie vehicle, Last Action Hero. McTiernan’s ’87-’90 heyday remains credible and intact with audiences and critics alike. The thoroughly entertaining, second best Die Hard of the bunch—Die Hard with a Vengeance, is a personal McTiernan highlight. A cluster of one-watch wonders, including The 13th Warrior, half-decent redos of The Thomas Crown Affair, and Rollerball (a notorious box office bomb), and the maligned 2003 action thriller, Basic, starring John Travolta, rounded out John’s directorial efforts (to date).

From the cartoony, kinetic “force” of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, and the cocaine frenzy of Marty’s GoodFellas, to the ludicrous extremes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, camera movement was always exhilarating, exciting, and a somewhat rebellious act to me, as every filmmaking institution I attended from college to postgraduate film school, ignorantly disregarded it as show-offy, unnecessary, and an embellishment that rarely served the story. McTiernan was experiencing the same attitude from film editors to junior executives in 1988. John’s editor on Red October, in spite of being a talented enough chap, was actually “let go,” as he simply didn’t understand McTiernan’s vision to montage moving camera coverage. Shots can be cut together, regardless of whether the camera is in motion, or not—they should play as notes in the same key. Why a mobile camera is so evocative to me—particularly in Die Hard, is difficult to fathom. Perhaps it equates to the way David Lynch describes his experience with a moving painting. I am often moved by a pitch-perfect tracking shot, and a boom down-tilt up-track in can be enough to send chills through me if deployed correctly.

Aussie cinematographer, Don McAlpine, shot Predator, and by all accounts protected McTiernan throughout its arduous shoot, seemingly a willing collaborator in terms of utilising unconventional, European-style coverage. Movement of camera was McTiernan’s preoccupation at the time, and that explains why I tend to zero in on this particular era of his career. Jan “Yanni” de Bont, who shot The Fourth Man, and RoboCop for Paul Verhoeven, was ingeniously recruited by John for Die Hard. The progression is palpable, with everything from dolly-ins, lens flares, and jump cuts honed, perfected, and all in service of the visual storytelling. This is not some Michael Bay hotshot with twelve cameras whizzing around meaninglessly, trying to impress a lingerie model. McTiernan’s camera moves precisely where the audience’s eyes want to (and need to) go. Sadly, since the MTV era, shallow, unmotivated moves became the trend, and the photographic grammar of the action film was never quite the same.

The oblique, “Dutch” Dr. Caligari angles—I’m picturing the canted Hans as Bill Clay (my favourite scene from Die Hard), where something is off about the fella, and we know it. The question is, does McClane? All in collaborative cohesion are Jackson DeGovia’s complimentary horizontal lines running across the frame—a designer on precisely the same wavelength as McTiernan and de Bont. Die Hard‘s cuts compliment one another. Just as McTiernan, via Kadár, says – they’re in the same key. They fit like a jigsaw puzzle, with a thoughtful flow—cutting with a purpose, not for the sake of “coverage,” which is a dead giveaway of a capable director versus an exceptional one.

Taking a dim view of multiple camera coverage—another tired, easy fix, mediocre directors tend to wheel out, that should really be abolished and saved for cheapo telly, McTiernan warns that the master, medium, close-up, method of shooting is akin to churning out fast-food. It’s a machine-like production line process reserved for second-rate filmmakers, who, having failed to prepare, instead cover themselves from every angle and end up failing to express anything at all by conveyor-belting the same old generic junk into our eyes. McTiernan advises, “Telling a story is not a random access activity. There is a particular word, and order. There’s the right shot. If you have any nerve, you have to figure out what that shot is.” I also subscribe to his hypothesis that, if you don’t know what you want, or what you’re doing with your cutting, setting a few cameras rolling and hoping you capture what you need can be a disastrous “solution” artistically, and without walking that “right shot” tightrope, and consciously attempting to express your vision, you, by default, relegate yourself to a lesser form of filmmaking.

The borderline pretentious, typically cryptic McTiernan can grouchily flit from inflated, allegorical fast-food rants, to equating his, and the (in the loop) crew of Die Hard’s filmmaking approach, to Jacques-Louis David’s work as an 18th century royal portrait artist with ties to the French Revolution, who etched his own expressive undercover flourishes onto the scratched tombs of kings. They too, were sneaking out their takes by sneaking in personal details for the working classes, by concealing meaningful messages in their mainstream contemporary art, using the powerful “nobles” at 20th Century Fox, and the silver screen canvas of 1988. This is Die Hard—McTiernan, working within the broadest, most appealing genre to hand, and like an incendiary, profane (literally) Blue Peter, smuggling in his own personal expression and political leanings, disguised behind the violent, American cultural obsessions of exploding helicopters and Steyr AUG machine gun fire.

Quickly addressing what has become somewhat of an inane elephant in the room, Die Hard is absolutely, unequivocally a Christmas film. Why? Because the author, John McTiernan, says so. Never mind what the egocentric laughing stock, Bruce Willis, ignorantly declared at the end of his cheap Comedy Central roasting. Die Hard wasn’t intended to be a Christmas movie, but the joyful exuberance it delivered turned it into one. The irony here, is that McTiernan rarely cracks a grin unless it’s a wry one. He’s a miserable bugger, but surprisingly, he was the key instigator in terms of wrangling humor into Die Hard. He just couldn’t make another Dirty Harry. The only time I saw him giggle in any of his interviews was as he relayed an anecdote about annoying “the lawyer downstairs” inside Fox Plaza with deafening explosions during the Die Hard shoot, and with his history, I wonder if he always hated lawyers—it’s clear he despises authority, and often laments the runaway, unchecked greed and aggression of the USA.

Die Hard is a subversive, anti-authoritarian masterpiece. That’s the message. That’s what that toad, Roger Ebert, didn’t understand when he used his entire two telly minutes to denigrate the Dwayne T. Robinson character—one of many incompetent incarnations of authority, designed by McTiernan, with a rebellious agenda, to ridicule the establishment. Our working class hero, John McClane, is a real human being, and with the exception of Al Powell, the governmental figures surrounding him are intentionally painted as fools.

Even when McTiernan, as gruff as he may seem, and as hyperbolic as he can be, gets into his declamations and tirades, it’s clear that his filmmaking manifesto still rings true. He gets it. It’s a visual medium—and although a collaborative one, a director’s medium (theatre for actors, television for producers, cinema for directors), and as the singular conductor, he coordinates his orchestra—whether it’s cinematographer, Jan de Bont, designer, Jackson DeGovia, editors, Frank J. Urioste and John F. Link, composer, Michael Kamen, or star, Bruce Willis, in order to play the audience, as only the finest directors are capable of doing.

The Julliard, and AFI Conservatory graduate, McTiernan, once posed the question, “How do you get language out of a movie?” He views film in a musical form—more like opera. Imagine shots in a sequence as notes in the same key. The pace, lens length, and style of a shot can dictate that key. Book-based ideas, or “print logic,” doesn’t automatically apply to cinema. The emotion in Die Hard is played like music, and as a result, for fans like myself, watching (and rewatching) the film, is as pleasurable and rewarding as listening to your favourite song on repeat—perhaps even more so.

What do people really mean, or think, when they speak? Speech is merely translating emotion into noise. The technique of using words as an extension of the movie’s musical score, rather than to actively over-explain your story, is a crucial one when dissecting McTiernan’s work. The sound of the dialogue is more important than the words themselves. However, the feeling still comes across. Spielberg is another master when it comes to this approach. For example, there are an abundance of unsubtitled foreign languages in the Indy saga, and much like McTiernan, Spielberg is a director among the first to be cited as a filmmaker whose movies you can view with no sound, and still grasp the story—the cadence, inflections, and delivery of the dialogue is again, more important than the words themselves—they’re simply used to colour scenes, rather than acting as blunt, clunky exposition. It’s the intent in the intonation of his characters, whether we speak their language or not, we understand. We follow. I didn’t know what half the words from my favourite films meant when I was a lad, but I got the gist of the story. This is a true testament to the filmmakers.

For instance, in Die Hard, the terrorists—excuse me, the “exceptional thieves,” are crackin’ jokes when Powell rocks up, and there are no subtitles whatsoever. McTiernan doesn’t need them, and nor do we. All that matters is, we know these guys aren’t concerned about the cops’ presence—in fact, they anticipate, and require it to successfully complete their heist. What we understand is what we feel; the mood, and the audible articulation of a feeling is paramount, not the specificity of a sentence.

Much like Francis Coppola’s (hopefully prophetic) interview coda in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, McTiernan also believes, with words to the effect of, “In a dream, an image has nuance. You don’t know the meaning, but you feel it. Text and words won’t even come into it. Music can be dramatic on its own. So can images,” that one day there will be a kid (or as Coppola poses, “Some little fat girl in Ohio”) who is a Mozart of movies—someone who can articulate purely and perfectly through the visual medium of film.

IRS tax debts, lawsuits, perjury, a wiretapping scandal, and the 328-day incarceration aftermath, sadly bankrupted McTiernan, marring his later career, and forcing the liquidation of his assets, making another directorial outing unlikely. The Hollywood Reporter harshly, and I believe, inaccurately, labelled McTiernan, “One of Hollywood’s most ‘despised’ people.” I prefer to label him a subversive, smart, and rebellious artist, who redefined the action film genre. The reverberations of his late eighties work are still being ripped off, and riffed on, to this day.

What I stumbled upon back then, and came to appreciate fully now, is a thoughtful, considerate storyteller, and a proficient filmmaker, supplying his audience with the exact information, in the precise order they require it, to enjoy the narrative to the greatest degree possible. It’s the gift of exposition—not a bag dropped clumsily at your feet. McTiernan cares, and the geography of his scenes is painstakingly well-established. He is not a self-serving director; he’s a generous one, with the viewer’s best interests at heart. He holds our hands. He understands that it’s harder to tell a simple story well than it is to baffle your audience with a mystery, and hide behind abstraction and vagueness.

Personal slip ups aside, McTiernan’s name should be forever etched alongside the greats. I owe this man. For the countless hours of joy. Whether it was sat alone in my living room as a child, wowed, watching the tops of skyscrapers detonate, or at a primary school sleepover, hooting and hollering in horror, as an alien warrior skins soldiers alive. These are the initial, early film-watching beats that made me fall in love with cinema in the first place, and still keep me coming back for more. In the immortal words of John McTiernan—Merry Christmas, and I hope we have a better year.

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Gimme Some Moore

by scariousartistsLeave a Comment on Gimme Some Moore

They, whoever they are, will tell you the Bond you saw first—the Bond you were born into, is inevitably your favourite. When I was young (and my heart was an open book), Roger Moore was my James Bond, and if there’s any explanation for my side parting or short-sleeved khaki shirts as a kid, it’s either my mum, or Moore.

Picture a Boxing Day afternoon in a cosy, North Yorkshire village. The MGM lion growls a big growl at us, and gives way to the United Artists presentation title. Gun barrel rifling appears. A tuxedoed gent enters screen right and fires his pistol into the lens, and every time it’s Roger Moore as 007, I’m relieved.

In ’64, whilst playing Simon Templar on The Saint, Moore appeared briefly as Bond in an episode of the BBC’s sketch comedy programme, Mainly Millicent. Following that initial introduction, the three key stages of Moore as Bond can be defined as:

I: Directed by Guy Hamilton—Live and Let Die in ’73 and The Man with the Golden Gun in ’74. II: Directed by Lewis Gilbert—The Spy Who Loved Me in ’77 and Moonraker in ’79. III: Directed by John Glen—For Your Eyes Only in ’81, Octopussy in ’83, and A View to a Kill in ’85.

For me, Sir Roger exemplifies the charm, charisma, comedic timing, and wisecracking one-liners of 007, and balances them adeptly with the ideal amount of heroic fortitude and romantic male lead—and it appears I’m not totally alone, as Moore was awarded “Best Bond” by Academy voters in both 2004 and 2008.

Rita Coolidge said it best in Octopussy’s underrated theme song, “All Time High”—”All I wanted was a sweet distraction for an hour or two.” That’s what Bond is. There’s security in the structure, and when it’s done well, it’s escapist entertainment at its very best.

Moore is the antidote—the dividing line between Bond fans who “read” GQ (meaning they scan endless pages of adverts, rubbing sample aftershave on themselves), covet expensive watches and cars, and fancy themselves as lounge lizard Lotharios, and the more casual, discerning Bond consumers, who see through the suave artifice, and appreciate the franchise for all its magnificent absurdity.

Still, detractors (Sir Roger included) preach their Connery spiel, say he “set the style”, was “the creator”, and argue Sean’s original is the pure, unbeaten incarnation of Ian Fleming’s super spy—often accusing Moore’s playboy personification of womanising more than Walther-wielding, and telegraphing those campy eyebrow raises. With his usual self-deprecating wit, Moore once confessed his acting range included just three expressions: right eyebrow raised, left eyebrow raised, and eyebrows crossed. He later amended it: “I added another one—I don’t move them at all.”

He knows the leading ladies looked young enough to be his granddaughters. He’s aware his chins were multiplying. Moore dialled back the arrogance of Connery, often playing down his lack of skill as an actor, seemingly reluctant to call himself a thespian—merely an “equity card carrier.” Although his critics may agree, these humble gestures were far too modest. In reference to being the longest running Bond, playing 007 for twelve years, aged 45-57, Moore shrugs it off, saying he “worked cheap.”

The truth is, the self-effacing Moore spent three terms at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and was an accomplished and versatile actor. I can totally buy Rog devouring figs in Greece with Melina in For Your Eyes Only, swanning about a soirée as James St. John Smythe, or as James Stock, making Stacey Sutton a lovely quiche in A View to a Kill—fall about laughing, and then get sucked right back into the action again mere moments later. Moore artfully transcends the daftness because it emanates from him intentionally.

Did Sean Connery ever trap a bottle-hoying (forgive me) “midget” in a suitcase? Can you picture George Lazenby whacking his testicles on an antenna while dangling from a zeppelin? Daniel Craig swinging through the jungle, yelling like Tarzan? Timothy Dalton makeshift snowboarding to The Beach Boys’ “California Girls”? Or Pierce Brosnan inflating a gangster till he popped?

I will concede some credibility is lost when a soused onlooker eyes his bottle of booze for the umpteenth time as Bond passes, typically doing something implausible and borderline idiotic. The most regrettable of these instances takes place in the often maligned, humour-heavy Moonraker, as a pigeon (yeah, a pigeon) double takes as Bond bezzes through Venice on an inflatable gondola. Octopussy is likely the second place offender with a farcical, impromptu, tennis-themed auto rickshaw pursuit.

These are perhaps the only scenes more retrospectively cringeworthy than the ones featuring Cool Hand Luke’s Clifton James as sweaty orangutan-alike, J.W. Pepper. His crackpot contributions include the completely unjustifiable cries of “little brown water hog!” and “pointy-heads” in The Man with the Golden Gun, and generally speaking, his contrived second appearance in a Bond movie makes little to no sense. He’s as superfluous as Scaramanga’s “third papilla.” At times, I wished 007 had put his license to kill into action and capped that roly-poly jackass himself.

When it comes to broad comedy and these vast tonal shifts—to quote a badly dubbed Fiona Fullerton as KGB spy, Pola Ivanova, in A View to a Kill—I suppose the bubbles either “tickle your Tchaikovsky” or they don’t. Personally, I tolerate them. Particularly in a film like Moonraker, which is not as light and breezy as it’s often made out to be. For example, that hilarious scene where Corinne Dufour is chased down and torn apart by two of Drax’s ravenous rottweilers, Bond’s gurning, g-force centrifuge nightmare, or the side-splitting dark alley encounter where a sinister, professional killer with steel teeth removes his big scary clown head and attempts to take a bite out of poor Manuela. 

How anyone thinks Moonraker is disproportionately comedic is beyond me. Bar a few goofy moments, it’s level pegging with the rest. For every giggle, like Jaws (memorably played by Richard Kiel) setting off the metal detector at the airport, there’s something to offset it. Take Drax’s ark: a Hitleresque plot to implement a final solution of his own, involving the execution of the entire human race, minus his flawless specimens (a perfect pretense to crowbar in the best-looking Bond girls in the series).

In my eyes only, perhaps, the ludicrous extremes of Moonraker actually make it a standout. It’s film literate—referencing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Magnificent Seven, the space station sets impress, I enjoyed the laser battle (particularly as a boy), and the overt comedy encapsulates everything I love about Moore’s Bond.

Moonraker also brings Moore together (for the final time) with all three franchise staples—Geoffrey Keen as the Minister of Defence, Bernard Lee as M, and (as much as I adore John Cleese) the one and only Q in my opinion, Desmond Llewelyn.

Lois Chiles is a proactive, comparably feminist Bond girl, and Gervaisian, Jeremy Beadle-alike, Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) ticks all the obligatory bad guy boxes as a world domination-crazed megalomaniac. It’s got some of my all time favourite Q-issued gadgets, including the hang glider speedboat and pulse-activated dart gun, plus Jaws gets himself a girlfriend. There’s an ornate, intricate score by John Barry, and the film hops from one set piece to another quite nicely. For some, the impatient, frequent switching of locales and the uneven tone will drag it down to a lower ranking installment.

Bond connoisseurs frequently cite Roger’s 1977 outing, The Spy Who Loved Me as being the quintessential Bond picture, and although I have more personal ties to Moore’s sophomore effort—Guy Hamilton’s The Man with the Golden Gun, I have to side with them (and with Alan Partridge). By his second collaboration with Moore, director Lewis Gilbert had perfected his take on the Bond movie archetype, and by Roger’s third of seven appearances, tailored it to fit him like a tan safari suit.

There’s the iconic, pre-title ski chase (echoed in two other Moore Bonds – For Your Eyes Only and A View to a Kill, stunning Ringo-wife, Barbara Bach, as Major Anya Amasova (Agent XXX) who, although has little to no acting skills, manages to blag her way through like a pretty zombie, Moore “delving deeply into Egypt’s treasures”, using a woman as a human shield (hello, Austin Powers), the throwaway xenophobia of “Egyptian builders”, Stromberg’s shark tank elevator chute, the first appearance of the monstrous, shark-eating man that is Jaws, some ropey slow motion, jump cuts, and back projection, and without doubt, the best theme song in the series—so good that Radiohead covered it. The Spy Who Loved Me is indelible as perhaps the toppermost of the poppermost in terms of Bond film satisfaction, and a strong foundation for newcomers to Moore. Or if you’re a fussy purist like me, you could always start at the very beginning.

The heavy-handed but flashy and immediate, blaxploitation-era Moore debut, Live and Let Die, laid the groundwork for both Roger, and Guy Hamilton’s fresh takes on 007. At 45, Moore is handsome and disarming as you like, in the best shape of his life, and at his most youthful as 007—impeccable throughout in his black shirt and brown leather holster combo, trademark suits, and at one point, rocking baby blue trousers and jacket over a white vest as his Jamaican boating attire.

One thing that lifts Live and Let Die is Paul McCartney and Wings’ anthemic title track, and Beatle producer extraordinaire, George Martin’s compelling music throughout. Madeline Smith as the magnetic Miss Caruso is a solid, most overlooked Bond girl candidate along with Emily Bolton as Moore’s Rio squeeze, Manuela, in Moonraker, and while we’re doing undervalued, if you’re into ruthless helicopter henchwomen (who isn’t?), you’d be hard pressed to beat the smouldering Caroline Munro as Naomi in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Yaphet Kotto does the trick as Kananga, his big, bald, metal-clawed, gun barrel-bending, muscleman henchman, Tee Hee, is threatening throughout, and the camp as you like, voodoo god of cemeteries and laughter addict, Baron Samedi—the man who unfortunately cannot die, adds an odd, effeminate element. Moore casually smoking a cigar in a hang glider is one of my top moments.

Amid the ’70s crash zooms, there are fun bits like the crocodile stepping stones, inflatable couch gag, and bus chase, but it was 1973 and there is unfortunately some “trouble”—namely the demonisation of Live and Let Die’s San Monique locals, and the African American characters in general. We’re firmly in voodoo land with fire-swinging, contortionists, and racial stereotypes-a-go-go. Back in NYC, you’ve got the Fillet of Soul, the Oh Cult voodoo shop, Harlem pimps and prossies, jive talkin’ taxi drivers—“Right on, brotha!”, and to counteract that, plenty of “honkies.” Perhaps it’s too little loo late, but the filmmakers did cast a variety of black actors as Bond aides and CIA agents—something which happens less and less in the coming years.

Roger Moore’s 1973-85 stint as successor to Sean, and predecessor to Dalton, was in many ways a parody of the Connery era in a similar vein to the Austin Powers series being a pisstake of Moore’s time as 007. Not as overt, perhaps, but Moore’s era did seemingly favour comedy at the cost of its credibility. In Moonraker, Drax’s munificence is boundless as he (like Dr. Evil) reveals his entire plan to Bond, and places him in an “easily escapable situation.” I find that in a world as preposterous as Bond’s, particularly with Moore in the title role, these ridiculous aspects truly belong.

Moore’s Bonds skewer the franchise from the inside. They pull no funny punches and show Bond for what it really is—a good laugh. He got it. He knew how silly it all was. A “secret” agent whose reputation preceded him—known by name, even by his tipple of choice (trivia time: Moore drank, but never personally ordered his vodka martini “shaken but not stirred”, he left that to Sean and company), and recognised immediately by the majority of his international adversaries.

It wasn’t all suave quipping, weird, elderly, fireside snogs, Bollinger ’69 sipping, and suspicious hairlines either. Contrary to popular belief, Moore held his own in the scraps, and at times you could feel a seething hatred for the villains he encountered. As fun as it all gets, Bond doesn’t like to lose. The evils Roger gives the barking mad Max Zorin after his “incompetence” dig in A View to a Kill are palpable, as is the vitriol directed at madman defector, General Orlov, in Octopussy, and the tension-filled dinner with the educated and urbane Francisco Scaramanga—The Man with the Golden Gun (played with class by Ian Fleming’s cousin, Christopher Lee), is perhaps the prime example.

The Man with the Golden Gun is sacred to me, and it stings to see it forever toward the bottom end of the Bond rankings. Saltzman and Broccoli’s last hurrah together feels like peak Bond. The fact of the matter is, I’d rather watch The Man with the Golden Gun on a Sunday afternoon than Goldfinger, regardless of whether it’s a better piece of cinema or not. It’s just more pleasurable.

It was shot partially on location in Hong Kong, where my uncle has lived and worked since he was 21, allowing us to visit several times over the years, enjoy the best holidays of my life in swimming pools, the shark-infested beaches of Repulse Bay, and follow in Moore’s footsteps at the swish Peninsula Hotel, where we never actually stayed, but once popped in, past the smart valets and trademark green Rolls-Royces for a posh high tea. Another real, dream-come-true was realised in 2010 when I travelled by longboat to Khao Phing Kan (often referred to as James Bond Island), northeast of Phuket, Thailand. It was overrun with tourists and cheap tat, but it was hallowed ground.

I always felt Moore enjoyed the company of women more than Connery. There’s Sir Sean’s troubling, well-documented views on disciplining the opposite sex, and a few ill-advised lines and gestures like Goldfinger’s “man talk” and bum slap, which depict a backward view of sexual politics. There’s a gentlemanly air separating Moore from Connery. There was a cruelty and a slight, dislikable edge to some of Connery’s behavior as Bond that’s lacking in Moore’s portrayal. His quips land relatively harmlessly and playfully, but when Connery demeans or strikes a woman, or drops a misogynistic clanger, we have to wonder where Sean ends and his Bond persona begins.

Ol’ Rog’s secret agent wasn’t exactly a gentleman when it came to handling certain female characters either. Throwaway digs like *tut* “women”, land like cringy sledgehammers. Maude Adams in The Man with the Golden Gun, receives a few swift backhands and almost gets her arm broken for her trouble (this scene, along with Bond pushing the elephant statue selling Thai boy into the river was later regretted by Moore), Live and Let Die’s ditzy double-crosser, Rosie Carver is deftly dispatched with an unfeeling air and not mourned, even for a second by Bond—he even spews out the crude line, “I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before”, in reference to her post-coital question of loyalty, and quite shockingly, the once virginal Solitaire (a twenty-year-old Jane Seymour) gets cruelly duped and bedded after Bond fiddles with her tarot cards, tricking her into the sack—her modesty and clairvoyance out the window, all to appease a sexual whim.

This is where some unfortunate wrinkling occurs, not only in the crow’s feet of Moore’s later Bonds, but also in the franchise’s overall dealings with race, women, and… little people. Regrettably, each modern rewatch does sadly tarnish each of Moore’s Bonds in one way or another. Take the For Your Eyes Only baddie, Kristatos, and his blonde henchman buddy, Erich, clouting young Bibi, the arm-twisting brutalisation and interrogation of Ms Anders, and the treatment of Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) in The Man with the Golden Gun—which although lighthearted, and is arguably a fitting dispatch of a villainous toerag, plays as degrading and cruel. Having said that, the little chap’s coming at James with a pocket knife—what would you do? Sticking Scaramanga’s mini henchman in a lobster cage atop a junk was perhaps a let off. Most of Bond’s adversaries catch a bullet. Redneck wiseass, J.W. Pepper, spouting Southern bigot swill and chastising Asian characters for “wearing pajamas” just about takes the cake.

Sadly, 007 himself is guilty of some casual racism too, with a cheap gag in Octopussy about keeping a cheery Indian character “in curry for a few weeks” (oh dear) after chucking him a fat stack of rupees. The years have not been kind to what was once, no doubt, intended as gentle ribbing, but in retrospect plays as inappropriate and offensive. Moonraker’s generic Asian, Chang, yelling incoherently and animalistically throughout his battles doesn’t help the cause either.

The Man with the Golden Gun unfortunately peaks the series’ contempt for cultures, but I still find it “quite titillating.” It’s got “magnificent abdomens”, a rubbish Lulu track, Wei Wei Wong’s Bottoms Up Club cheekiness, the canted German expressionist sets of Scaramanga’s deadly funhouse, and Britt Ekland’s stunning but scatterbrained, Mary Goodnight, getting stuffed in the boot of a flying golden AMC Matador X Coupe, destined for a Wicker Man island reunion with Christopher Lee. It could be the best Bond film. It’s not, but it could be.

When once asked if he did any of his own stunts, Sir Roger replied, “I did a couple of the love scenes.” The name, Roger More – sorry, Moore, has its own sexual connotations akin to the Bond girls surrounding him—from The Man with the Golden Gun’s nude swimmer, Chew Mee (really) and A View to a Kill’s prowling, jodhpured equestrian, Jenny Flex, to Moonraker’s droll doll, Dr Holly Goodhead, and the alluring Octopussy herself (Maude Adams was Moore’s favourite Bond girl, which may explain why she’s the only actress to play two 007 love interests). They’re not singled out as such. They match Moore, making him an ideal companion, as the ladies’ man who focussed more on impudent, wry humour and bedroom antics than cold-blooded assassinations. He’s going with the grain, not against it.

In fact, both Moore and Christopher Walken (who played Max Zorin—an experimental, Nazi Germany, concentration camp baby with a gargantuan IQ, who was also unfortunately psychotic as a side effect) were perturbed by the direction the films were heading, and called out the violence in A View to a Kill as being disproportionate, and not in keeping with the Bond aesthetic. The trigger-happy Zorin laughing maniacally whilst gunning down his own employees was seemingly taking the franchise away from its original intentions as a classy, espionage, spy thriller with elements of fun and levity, to a darker place tonally, where we would eventually, more appropriately in their cases, get the brooding, understated Dalton, and the jacked-up mass of Craig—objected to by many at first (including me when I first saw him emerging from the sea, built like The Incredible Hulk), but took the series exactly where it needed to go in the age of dark origin stories. After Moore, Craig is my second place runner. Roger was also a Craig admirer and although he loved Casino Royale, quite rightly pointed out that Quantum of Solace lacked the geography and simplicity of his era.

Having said that, the Moore Bonds (and many other early films in the franchise) can also play a little clunky. There’s a silly musical shorthand in films like Moonraker, which lets us know the location of the current scene. Ah, flamenco guitars! We must be in Spain! There’s also many a shoddy edit to advance the story. One in particular really stands out in For Your Eyes Only, with a rope climb wedge harshly and amateurishly jump cut to sell its instability.

You’d probably expect more from the director—former Bond film editor and second unit helmer (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), and blatant boob (and pigeon, don’t ask) guy, John Glen. We should credit/blame Maurice Binder for all the naked lady outlines. His slease-saturated opening sequences put more silhouetted t-and-a on screen than anyone else in the business. However, Glen himself somehow managed to sneak at least two fleeting nipples into For Your Eyes Only, not including the pair over his own name in the titles.

For Your Eyes Only somehow eluded me as a child. Perhaps I saw it once, but I didn’t tape it off the telly, nor did I buy the VHS when those bargain bin, buy one, get one free, Woolworths’ video deals were on in the late ’90s. Seeing as you’re asking, I bought a couple for my dad—early Connery classics like Dr. No and From Russia with Love, and Moonraker (which, for my money, has the best pre-title opening sequence of any of the Moore Bonds) and A View to a Kill for myself.

One saving grace of For Your Eyes Only is that it single-handedly saved United Artists’ bacon from bankruptcy following Michael Cimino’s financial uber-flop, Heaven’s Gate. Bill Conti’s funky, soft rock synth during the toboggan pursuit adds a cheesy energy, but really, aside from a neat Charles Dance cameo as henchman Claus, the interesting Thatcher-era London milieu, and aerial madness finessing the franchise’s earlier practical work, For Your Eyes Only is lacking. It disposed of Bond’s sense of humour in an attempt to pull back some credibility. I put it in the category of not daft enough, and a bit dull. It’s uncomfortable in its own skin, and falls between two stools in terms of its intentions. I also felt the absence of key production designer, Ken Adam.

It’s certainly, by far, my least favourite of Moore’s. The tedious underwater shenanigans are drawn out and laborious—although the attacker in a JIM suit with pincer grip reminded me of the unnerving Mr Igoe from Innerspace. I always find myself thinking, “Get to the siege on the bad guys’ hideout!” At least the Meteora mountain monastery section has boys’ own scenarios involving binoculars, rope, vertigo-inducing rock climbs with winches, and precarious death drops from an Alpine sheer face.

Spielberg and Lucas really upped the game in ’81 with Raiders of the Lost Ark. The duo frankly put For Your Eyes Only to shame, and forced the subsequent Bonds to be of a much higher quality. Unfortunately not Moore’s back catalogue, which technically stayed a little clumsy. Dalton’s ’87-’89 films were a step up visually, and by the time Brosnan entered, they were, and now are, with Daniel Craig’s latest installments, leading the action film race in terms of both practical, CG effects, and big budget gloss.

My relationship to For Your Eyes Only is quite superficial and I honestly have little investment in the film. In my mind, there’s every other Moore outing, and then this thing in their midst. It has the pace of a relaxed stroll. I also feel like Spielberg and Lucas must have taken copious notes as they later cast Julian Glover as arch bad guy, Donovan, in ’89’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as nicking a few sidecar vs Nazi bike chase ideas.

It wouldn’t be the first time Steve and George pinched from 007, either. Octopussy, without doubt, laid the groundwork for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a year later in ’84, with its Delhi-set hijinks, Kamal’s palace somewhat resembling Pancott, and stuffed sheep’s head and spider-squishing certainly equates to Temple of Doom’s chilled monkey brains and tunnels of bugs. Then there’s the sexual tension—storming out of, and back into rooms, just like the “five minutes” sequence in Temple of Doom, but honestly, it plays better in the hands of Spielberg, Ford and Capshaw. Not to forget, Indy himself was, in part, born out of Spielberg’s desire to direct a Bond picture, leading to a grey, professorial Connery being perfectly cast as Indiana’s dad in Last Crusade.

Conversely, at one point in Octopussy, a car disappears through a secret door and is rapidly covered over—a familiar sight if, like me, you’ve absorbed every frame of Raiders (two years previous). So who’s stealing from who? Again, the theft is reversed in A View to a Kill, where the mine sequences have a distinct Temple of Doom flavour.

1983’s Octopussy (please note, whenever reading the title, it’s much more fun if you say it like Louis Jordan’s Kamal Khan), released the same year as Connery’s non-canon Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again, pulls no punches with its overtly sexual title and showcases one of the sauciest, suggestive softcore openings in the Bond oeuvre. Take Bond’s adolescent antics like zooming in on breasts, the leggy Bianca, Moneypenny’s younger model—Ms Penelope Smallbone, Magda’s suggestive lines like “I need refilling” and “That’s my little octopussy”, and Maud Adams’ naked pool exit.

Octopussy is all over the place, juggling tone clumsily at times. To illustrate, the film contains a facehugger octopus, a daft undercover crocodile boat disguise vehicle, Bond getting startled by a chimpanzee, battling shits in burgundy with leather waistcoats, hiding behind a fat bloke, double taking at a tiger head rug, the legendary AK47 banister slide, and one of my absolute favourite Moore moments—Bond in a gorilla suit, creeping around a train carriage, bonking into things, winking and nodding knowingly, having a ball. Not at our expense, but with us. The film even ends with a cheesy exclamation of “James!”

There’s a meta moment worth noting, in which the unfortunately named sidekick, BJ, whilst undercover as a snake charmer (oh dear again—there are a few of these Indian cultural shorthand issues like broken English, fire-walking, sword-swallowing, and a bed of nails), plays Monty Norman’s signature Bond tune on his flute, suggesting 007 is aware of his own theme music. Amusing, but odd.

“Operation Trove” isn’t a bad plot line. Steven Berkoff devours the scenery, overdoing it at literally every opportunity, but it’s all in good fun, General Gogol pops up and does his thing, there’s a dice-crushing henchman, Bond tells tigers to “sit”, survives snakes, blood sucking leeches and alligators, there’s a superb fight on a train (as per), Moore chucks out an “up yours” gesture at a car full of mischievous kids, it’s got a killer opening sequence and a thrilling plane escape denouement, albeit with a few shaky stunt doubles. Amid the ropy action cutting, there are some impressive aerial stunts, and the circus troupe harem get to play play double-crossed women who get a shot at revenge.

In For Your Eyes Only, Moore was edging into Humbert Humbert territory, playing opposite the figure skating teenager, Lynn-Holly Johnson (whose character was only supposed to be 16 years old, according to Moore’s autobiography), but thankfully he never crosses the line. Moore holds his own, aged fifty-odd in Octopussy, with Maude Adams inexplicably (canon-wise) returning to the franchise as the titular character, and definitely not The Man with the Golden Gun‘s very dead, Andrea Anders, who gets a golden bullet through her heart at the hands of ace assassin, Francisco Scaramanga. By the time Moore’s frolicking with Playboy bunny, Tanya Roberts, at 57 in A View to a Kill, age does become a concern.

A bit long in the tooth, Moore wisely brought his Bond reign to a close after seven pictures, with A View to a Kill (formerly From a View to a Kill) when he noted, “They were running out of actors who looked old enough to be knocked down by me”, and described “getting up out of a chair” as one of his stunts.

As the groaniest of all the Bonds, Moore never failed to emit some of the strangest sounds in the series, from audible words such as “Move!” and “Swing!”, to the barely perceptible “Frayse!” or “Schwaise!” There are plenty of incoherent “Oomph”s and “Uuhoooohh”s, and more indecipherable, unspellable utterances as Moore sort of falls off the Golden Gate bridge, swallows a golden belly button charm, gets done in with hockey sticks, dangles from an unlocked fire engine ladder, is tripped by a rigged steeplechase jump, gets squeezed and bear hugged by a sumo wrestler, kicked in the shin and whacked on the bonce with a trident by an angry dwarf, grabbed by the testes and slammed into a train carriage roof by a giant oaf, and my favourite being in the final of his installments, the elderly entry, A View to a Kill, in which Moore exclaims, “Ooohhhhhhuuuoowww” as he nearly falls off the Eiffel Tower, like a senior citizen on black ice.

A View to a Kill ups the sauce as we “dance into the fire,” Duran Duran-style with some suggestive, phallic glow stick pistol gesticulations. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’s Alison Doody makes a slinky impression in a mere few moments, and Grace Jones leaps off the Eiffel Tower (and the screen) as stern, Walken sidekick, Mayday. Jones is incredibly striking, but she’s a tad overpowering for most in terms of classic Bond girls. She’s more of a henchwoman who can bench press a bloke no bother (with her real life squeeze, Dolph Lundgren, looking on in knowing horror). A View to a Kill also features a second baddie “face turn” (following Jaws’ flip to the good side in Moonraker), with the major difference being that Mayday’s self-sacrifice ends with her being blown to bits after hindering Zorin’s “Operation Main Strike”, in which a catastrophic earthquake would have been triggered by flooding the San Andreas fault, sending Silicon Valley plunging into oblivion.

Moore’s complexion may not be taut, but A View to a Kill’s ominous score is, with that repetative, instantly recognisable, bending guitar note keeping things propulsive and tense. There’s a decent plot with a particularly hefty third act involving the mine and a Zorin Industries sky ship, where Walken does some insane work as the bewildered villain. It’s actually an underrated installment. If you needed further convincing, Moore hooks up with a British snow bunny agent hidden in a Union Jacked iceberg submarine, wears a slightly suspect leather jacket, Zorin’s Nazi doctor grandpa—the war criminal, has a bad fall with some dynamite, Steed from The Avengers (the ’60s TV one) gets bumped off in a car wash, and our main man Moore bows out of the franchise fittingly in a steamy shower with the beautiful Stacey.

Moore appreciated what Bond did for him, spending his twilight years pottering around Monaco as a UNICEF Ambassador and an animal rights and anti-sport hunting activist, trading in Bond’s Lotus Esprit S1 for a Smart car as “There’s nowhere to park.” He embarked upon tours with Q&A sessions, and appeared before live audiences, recounting career tales and regaling crowds with stories of past 007 glories. Moore also held onto his humility, once stating he wanted to title his book, “One Lucky Bastard.”

Sir Roger George Moore KBE died in 2017, leaving a legacy of warmth as Bond, and in many other big screen roles including Gold, a law-stretching, very Bondy turn in The Cannonball Run, and Michael Winner’s Bullseye! with Michael Caine, before popping up in Spice World in 1997 as The Chief. He also left us with enduring television characters like Ivanhoe, The Saint’s Simon Templar from 1962-’69, and Lord Brett Rupert George Robert Andrew Sinclair in The Persuaders!

If you fancy spending an hour or two (or fourteen) with the mellifluous-voiced man himself, I’d urge you to hunt down the “Bond 50” Blu-rays or eBay the older “Bond Ultimate Edition” DVD series, which have superb, meandering, anecdotal Moore commentaries on each of his entries, pop the cork on that Dom Pérignon ’52 you’ve been saving, and indulge yourself. He’s a joy to listen to, and for me, will always be a joy to watch.

P.S. I put together some foolproof 007 criteria to aid you in selecting your next Roger Moore adventure. Each category was scored out of five, culminating in a final percentage and subsequent ranking.

The categories were: Pre-title Action Sequence, General Storyline and Scripting, Theme Song and Opening Title Sequence, Villains and Henchmen, Bond Girls, and Moore’s Performance as Bond.

1. The Spy Who Loved Me 90%

2. Moonraker 83%

3. Octopussy 77%

4. A View to a Kill 77%

5. The Man with the Golden Gun 73%

6. Live and Let Die 70%

7. For Your Eyes Only 57%

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Best Dollar Eighty I Ever Spent

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Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory (1990)

One Letterboxd reviewer stated, “I hate westerns, and I love this movie!” Bizarrely, much like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, this is a western for audiences who perhaps either don’t like westerns, or who have never really given them a try. I personally prefer a western that romanticises and mythologises Billy the Kid. I don’t want to be informed about what really happened. I don’t want Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, I want Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I don’t want anything plain, run-of-the-mill, as it occurred – I want something heightened and extravagant.

Young Guns II is unashamedly a popcorn western, but it’s got moments that resonate, compelling shootouts, blood and guts, cheeky nudity, dramatic conflict, and dances a really entertaining jig when it comes to delivering an entertaining version of a classic tale – and entertaining movies are rarely something I mark down.

Blaze of Glory elegantly reframes its actors and moves the goalposts in terms of ticking the genre’s obligatory boxes. It’s welcoming, easy-breezy, and the style and well-worn elements it adopts are utilised terrifically. It’s a bit postmodern, certainly self-aware, hip, youthful, and above all, fun, and that’s what a lot of traditional westerns forget to be. They can drag. This movie takes all the tropes of your daddy’s west, drags ’em into the ’90s, chucks ’em into whatever the filmmaking equivalent of a SodaStream is, and has its wicked way with them.

In terms of Jon Bon Jovi’s ’87 power ballad, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” it is now my duty to correct a mistake from one of our previous podcasts, in which I incorrectly referenced the track as being part of the Young Guns II soundtrack. Screenwriter, John Fusco, did write the sequel to Young Guns while listening to it though, so I wasn’t entirely wrong. It’s not actually part of this film, but it is key to the backstory of JBJ’s involvement in the second Young Guns picture. He belts out, “I’m a cowboy. On a steel horse I ride. I’m wanted, dead or alive,” clearly referencing motorcycles, not actual horses – although I must mention the 1987 Filmation cartoon, BraveStarr, which featured Thirty/Thirty, the titular hero’s talking, transforming, “techno horse” or Equestroid, as that show would have provided José Chavez y Chavez himself, Lou Diamond Phillips, with the star vehicle of a lifetime, as a Native American galactic marshal, who could call upon “spirit animals,” granting him super-human hearing, strength, and speed. Hollywood, you failed us.

Bon Jovi was openly a fan of the first Young Guns, said so in an interview, then when the sequel came about, Estevez got in touch, and hired him to provide some soundtrack music. JBJ penned and recorded a full LP of material – ten songs in total, for the Blaze of Glory album. Jeff Beck played lead guitar, Little Richard and Elton John were in on the sessions too, with the latter performing on the song, “Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Livin’.” The lesser known, slightly Springsteeny “Miracle,” and last bit of the end credits number, the easy rocker, “Billy Get Your Guns,” have a second and third, best of the rest vibe, falling a little by the wayside in comparison to the US Billboard number one, “Blaze of Glory,” which earned BJ an Oscar nom, snagged him a Golden Globe, and the whole endeavor kickstarted his somewhat ill-fated acting career, with a blink and you’ll miss it cameo in Young Guns II as a dirty prisoner getting spread out like tule rosa. 

I think what may have happened here was Bon Jovi’s ego clicked into high gear and saw this project as a parallel to what Bob Dylan did for Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 revisionist western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid soundtrack. The modern Dylan he isn’t, but comfortable shoes to seemingly step into, eh? A cool concept, and quite meta in itself – that’s the repetitive, cyclical nature of the business, I suppose.

We discussed Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” on our Prince of Thieves episode – here it was Bon Jovi with the hit single, “Blaze of Glory.” These two soft rock superstars influenced me immeasurably in the years that followed, which saw me mimic my mate Dave, by snapping up Adams’ So Far So Good, and Bon Jovi‘s Cross Road best ofs from the mid ’90s, and along with my trusty, classic Rock Anthems double disc set, and a burgeoning fascination with Queen, began to explore the guitar music that would form the foundation of my musical taste.

Often unfairly labelled as a “Teen Beat MTV western,” critics seemed to glance at the tight-trousered Bon Jovi promo, sneer, and then negatively associate the quick-cut music video era with this movie. It’s initially lazy journalism, followed by even lazier, copycat echoes in subsequent publications. Yeah, the movie has slow motion and musical sequences – but so did The Wild Bunch!

Young Guns II has been described as the Bon Jovi to Bob Dylan’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, directed by Sam Peckinpah, with Blaze of Glory scene-stealer, James Coburn, and Kris Kristofferson as the respective leads. It’s a snappy analogy, as it’s a poppier, more modern, frankly more derivative, and arguably overproduced film. Despite my Young Guns II nostalgia, I’m not devoid of sense – I’ll always take Dylan over Bon Jovi, but I know which film I return to more often. Cinephiles will all say Peckinpah obliterates Murphy, and it’s impossible to dispute that. Murphy never got anywhere near a film as intellectually affecting as Straw Dogs. However, I believe Young Guns II is far and away Geoff Murphy’s finest work, and a fitting closure to our completely unplanned three-peat nod to the late Kiwi director, following previous mixed bag episodes on Freejack, and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.

“Tonally all over the place” was another dismissive, one-line review of Blaze of Glory. If this is “tonally all over,” then I like it that way. There’s a misconception among critics that if a movie doesn’t just hold down the backbeat on a singular tone, and proficiently play one note throughout, à la The Exorcist, then it’s deemed to be inferior, or illustrate some kind of loss of directorial control, as if the filmmaker is inept because they shirked their responsibilities somehow, or failed to shepherd a pure vision. I enjoy films that dissect genres and step across lines. In terms of comedy, we saw it, and applauded it throughout Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with its giggles coming thick and fast alongside heavy plotlines involving rape and devil worship. Movies can be humorous, and dramatic, and absurd, and scary – all at once.

As we discussed on the episode, the constant undercutting of dramatic beats with humour is extremely clever here, with moments like the “proper burial” with Billy, Pat, and Dave kicking dust over the corpse of a deceased bandit, the portly drunk lady covering for The Kid with her, “What’s the matter? You only like boys?” line, and the masked lynch mob member’s “Uh-oh” utterance, following their accidental murder of Deputy Carlyle. These light, downright funny touches are all effective shifts in tone. I’d sooner a film was a bit daft than drab.

Charlie Sheen as Dick in the original ’88 Young Guns even says to Billy, “You sure as hell ain’t no Robin Hood,” so there’s always been this mythic, legendary aspiration to put Billy the Kid in that light, and I never really felt it came to fruition in the first movie, but in the second, he’s as big as Robin Hood, and Estevez and co. really sell it. Emilio has never been better for me. Alex Cox’s Repo Man, some might say – and the overall cult quality of that film aids their argument, but the mischievous, cheeky Billy Bonney is both firmly in Estevez’s wheelhouse, and extremely different to his real-life persona.

There’s something to be said for the original Young Guns – if nothing else, it bravely dipped its toe in the water, and acted as a trial run for Blaze of Glory. More Sheen wouldn’t’ve gone amiss here, but sadly Dick’s dead. Young Guns II is finessed, more stylised, more commercial and aware of itself and its strengths – a star-driven, soft rock western, reimagined. Young Guns knows what it is by part II; the first film meanders and it’s always looking to find its footing – the odd musical choices, etc. make that clear, but Blaze of Glory is confident, and certain which side its bread is buttered. I think Geoff Murphy should claim some credit for that – he honed it all in far better than Christopher Cain.

At the time of recording our podcast episode, Estevez (billed as writer/director), Christian Slater, and Diamond Phillips, are all seemingly on board another Young Guns sequel, and LDP recently confirmed that Emilio and the original Young Guns/Young Guns II writer, John Fusco, are currently working on the screenplay for Young Guns 3: Alias Billy the Kid, which is slated for a 2022 release.

Personally, I don’t want to explore the Brushy Bill avenue any further. The mystery is the best part. Fans of these kinds of cult films often convince themselves they want a reboot, but if you overexplain matters, these stories can not only lose their power, but also retroactively tarnish the original film, or films. Sometimes, we should just leave a film, or film franchise well alone. Besides, I have absolutely no idea how Young Guns could be revisited with the original cast, as Estevez stated in one interview, “Everyone is dead!”

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Kicking Arse for the Lord

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Braindead (1992)

And the award for most inappropriately misleading poster goes to… Peter Jackson’s Kiwi splatterfest, Braindead. Here, the madness begins with the theft of a Sumatran rat-monkey, progresses to tap into Anthony Perkins’ over-protective Psycho “mother” vibes, with ears falling in custard, and ends with a descent into orgiastic chaos with a Wellington lawnmower massacre. I believe the locations from the opening “SINGAIA!” scenes were eventually reused in PJ’s The Lord of the Rings, and there’s also a neat Skull Island nod (the mythical setting of King Kong). The period aspects of Braindead never really occurred to me on first viewing, with its Teddy Boys, and girls with 1950s glasses and attire. There’s charm in the crudity of the model plane sequence; a cheapness I didn’t appreciate at the time, but thoroughly enjoy now. They use some clever forced perspective. I love the stop motion rat-monkey at the zoo, and find all that handmade stuff endearing and miss it in modern cinema.

An almost British sensibility to the character approach, makes Braindead a little easier to digest for me. There’s even a “God Save the Queen” (on a horse) opening. I can identify with elements of the misplaced pride at play, mainly from the matriarchs in my family. What the neighbours think is the most important thing, and to be embarrassed or shamed publicly in some way would be a fate worse than death – something taken literally here. The rebirth of our hero (Lionel), emerging again from his mother, Vera Cosgrove’s body, albeit this time a giant, monstrous version of her on the roof of their house, represents a changed man, finally on his own – not under her strict control, but independent, and free to love whoever he chooses.

There’s a sequence, in which a baby hangs from a light fixture, falls into a blender, is promptly ejected, punched through a window, hits a man in the bollocks, the man’s wig falls onto the baby’s head, and gardening shears are then used to cut the wig off. When have you ever seen or heard of anything like that happening in a film? In fact, to illustrate the madness of Dead Alive, I’ll list some of its most bizarre and unique splatstick moments.

We have Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine’s Forrest J. Ackerman with a brief zoo cameo, Fernando the devoured dog, a kung-fu vicar “Kicking arse for the Lord,” a semi-severed headed zombie nurse with a syringe up her nose chewing off a zombie vicar’s face while they copulate… impaled, a woman punched through the back of the head resulting in the fist coming out of her mouth, a guy gets his legs eaten and only the bones remain, a zombie baby is hurled against a wall and caught up on its umbilical cord, there’s a zombie (literally) in a toilet, and a head used as a football. The lawnmower slaughter could be the goriest thing ever committed to film. A zombie “Baby Selwyn” emerging from a woman’s face by tearing it open, is another unforgettable image. Also, perhaps most disturbingly (or hilariously?), a violent beating of the infant Selwyn in a park – punching the toddler (mainly realised as a puppet, but also briefly as a crawling, human-sized double in a onesie) in the face, slamming him into the ground, and beating him in a bag. It’s not for the faint-hearted or weak of stomach. Honestly, the film is so grotesque and disgusting that it’s solely for the extremists – people who can appreciate a sick sense of humour and perverted visuals.

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Once They Were Almost Human!

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Shock Waves (1977)

Brooke Adams is Rose, our female lead – a sort of Karen Allen lookalike, who just about fulfills the movie’s obligatory bikini/cleavage quota. She is discovered floating in a dinghy, somewhere in the Caribbean, by a father and son fishing vessel. The tale is then frustratingly narrated in bookends by her, foolishly robbing the movie of much of its uncertainty and suspense. Why on earth this particular narrative structure ever took off is beyond me. It’s generally slow-paced, and takes about 40 minutes to really get going, but at a mere 85 minutes, you’ll be grateful that Shock Waves doesn’t waste a great deal of time.

Flashing back *sigh*, we meet bitter old sea captain on borrowed time, Ben (John Carradine), and the good-looking, incredible-haired Robert Redford-esque (again) navigator, Keith (Luke Halpin). Dreadful acting ensues, by used car salesman and uppity husband, Norm (who we pray gets butchered early), his wife, Beverly, Ronald Shusett double and drunkard cook with a necktie geezer, Dobbs, and Chuck – a wisecracking Billy Crystal mated with John McEnroe meets James Caan impersonator, medallion and tighty whities wearer, and coconut tree climber extraordinaire. A sinisterly scarred, luger-toting, SS Commander, Peter Cushing, is the elderly island occupant who warns of, “Danger in the water.”

Although the slow-moving, or should I say marching, Todeskorps – relentless, Nazi sea-zombies, somehow still functioning after all these years, are fairly mighty foes and can kick and smash their way through rickety old fences, their Achilles heel lies when their SS-issue goggles are removed, leaving them totally blind and stumbling into shrubbery, before collapsing and suddenly rotting in the blink of an eye.

Shock Waves certainly has a notable Jaws influence, with its deep underwater POV shots observing potential victims from the depths. It’s a handy, if derivative, technique and elicits immediate suspense. The tense, pulsing synth score, and downright freaky imagery of the underwater undead, lurking, as our characters are trekking through the jungle occasionally hits the desired mark. Although the watery tension is somewhat effective, there’s no real gore to speak of as the Todeskorps simply drown you. The film eventually descends into a simplistic stalk and kill exercise, as the thinly-drawn pawns are predictably picked off one by one as Death Corps fodder.

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Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

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The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974)

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie aka Don’t Open the Window, aka No profanar el sueño de los muertos (Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead), was perhaps the biggest oddity among my selections, and clocks in tidily at just over an hour and a half. Also, how about this as a candidate for best poster ever! In all honesty, you might have to struggle through. I did. Manchester Morgue boasts our first of several Robert Redford-looking protagonists – this time it’s Jeremiah Johnson era, with Ray Lovelock labelled as a (forgive me for quoting) police-hating long-hair in faggot-clothes, who’s into drugs, sex, and every kind of filth.

Although it may fool some (including me) into thinking we’re in a little petrol station, somewhere near Lake Windermere, the majority of Manchester Morgue was filmed on location in Rome and Madrid, and in spite of almost the entire cast and crew likely being Italian, you’ve got folks saying things like, “Wee lassie,” “Struth,” and “Well done, Clive.” Lines like, “I haven’t the foggiest,” “I’m mad about apples,” and “Have you ever come across any of these satanists in your investigations?” when said in a thick northern accent, are a bizarre highlight.

Of course, the “science is bad” trope rears its cliched head (not for the last time in our selections), as the Ministry of Agriculture is clearly to blame for all this chaos. Although their modern machinery’s radiation, used to alter the behaviour of insects on farms, making them turn on each other, seems to be the catalyst, for this primitive contraption (which, “Runs like a charm”) to cause such anarchy is unlikely, as it’s roughly the size of a combine harvester.

Emerging from a morgue with bandaged head injuries, all sewn up from their autopsies, Sleeping Corpses’ zombies will sometimes strangle you before ripping you apart. They have strength, can fight, and possess the uncanny ability to raise each other from the dead. The classic, lurching zombie gait is prevalent here – arms outstretched in front, clamouring to claim their victims. These ghouls will also use weapons. For example, one bludgeons a doctor in the head with an axe, and others can climb ladders and exhibit shows of strength beyond the zombie norm. At the Manchester Morgue, it’s even possible to be bitten by a homicidal baby.

It’s the relatable shocks that remain the scariest and most palpable – like when someone gets a ’70s syringe jammed into their arm (likely for real). A British bobby gets a gravestone lobbed at him, a reanimated female corpse takes a gunshot directly to the head and peculiarly ploughs on, and there’s a number of putty clay-deaths with victims’ bodies appearing to be made out of Plasticine. There’s also a single note on the soundtrack that’s eerily reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead, and may have been either a nod or a steal. Again, much like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, our protagonist meets an unjust end.

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This is No Sunday School Picnic!

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Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Here it is. The original. The film that created the modern zombie, spawned multiple sequels, and an entire subgenre of spin-offs, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Pittsburgh’s George A. Romero, and his production company, The Latent Image, were busy making commercials for Iron Beer and Calgon, and opted to invest in a 35mm Arriflex camera to up their game. What resulted is maybe the most important and influential independent movie ever made.

The positive effects of horror can often be found in its covert warning signs and cautionary tales. Romero felt the Richard Matheson novel, I Am Legend, was about revolution. This was the angry ’60s – Vietnam, the civil rights movement, social justice riots, and overt racism still prevalent in America. In Night, Duane Jones stars as Ben – the African American conduit for Romero’s political discourse (although he was reluctant to admit such things). The finale is a lynching of sorts. It’s bleak, it’s hopeless, but it felt honest and of the time. It’s a self-reflexive movie, in the sense that its most quoted line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” is a comment on the predictability and staleness of the horror films that preceded it. In terms of why it all occurs, Romero once stated, “God changed the rules. That’s the only explanation I need. No more room in hell.” It’s an amazing quote, isn’t it?

George Romero was 27 years old, and served as writer, cinematographer, editor, and director. It’s a little clumsy and clunky in places, looking back, but don’t forget it’s an indie film, made very cheaply. A modest budget of $114,000, meant the cast and crew actually lived in the abandoned farmhouse they rented, and all bathed in a nearby stream for the duration of the shoot. A lot of Night’s actors were also investors (two of which even volunteered to be set on fire), producers, makeup artists, or co-writers, with even Marilyn Eastman doubling up as both Helen and the eye-catching, bug-eating zombie. Romero himself even built the rubbish clay hand that gets whacked when it reaches through the slats of the makeshift barricade. The community banded together, with news helicopters, real police and their dogs all uniting in the interest of making a movie. The sound mix only existed because the guy that played Barbara’s brother beat the bloke that ran the sound studio in a chess match. Some bold lighting decisions raise its game, with Night clearly lit for black-and-white, featuring plenty of shadows and jet black areas of the frame, adding uncertainty and tension throughout.

In Night, Romero’s marauding ghouls stumble around, bumping into cars, blinded by headlights, and although they can use weapons, they don’t really try their hardest (at times) to breach the house. Some don’t exude the urgency of the first, now legendary, “Cemetery Zombie.” One lumbering zombie outside even gets caught in a clothesline. The graveyard ghoul picks up a brick, and smashes the car window. He moves fairly quickly, jogging along – certainly shambling faster than walking pace. Later this month, we’ll encounter modern, fast-moving zombies – an evolutionary zombie lore Marmite, which no doubt enhanced the immediacy of the terror, because before you know it they’re onto you. On the other hand, it depends what kind of nightmares you relate to. The slow-moving zombie approach echoes those very specific dreams where it feels like you’re trying to run through a swimming pool, and you just can’t escape whatever is chasing you. Here, Barbara has time to consider her actions, but that time is filled with dread and suspense for an audience.

Fledgling zombie film directors out there, take note! Romero rarely “directed” his zombies specifically. According to George, if you state exactly what you want actors to do, everyone mimics it and does the same. They make the same sounds, they raise the same arm, etc. If you free the actors from direction, and ask them to bring their own undead interpretations, you get all original stuff.

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If You’re Going to San Francisco

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The Rock (1996)

I should begin by publicly apologising to my old school friend, Ben, whose bargain bin copy of The Rock I accidentally-on-purpose held onto forever. He recently reminded me of the giant-boxed ex-rentals and free posters up for grabs in Richmond’s video shops like Trinity Video and Choices—the former was a tiny cupboard of a shop next to Woolworths, stocked with VHS tapes, a range of computer games, and some Games Workshop miniatures, the latter was perched at the top of the marketplace, where I later applied for a summer job, attempting to copy Quentin Tarantino (or Randy from Scream), but was sadly rejected.

In an era when I should’ve been solely revising for my GCSEs, I was rewinding and rewatching tapes of Nic Cage in The Rock, Face/Off, and Con Air instead; obliterating essential brain cells at a time when I needed them the most, in what can only be described as an act of pure escapism. Little did I know, I was in fact (sort of) training myself to make films—something I didn’t realise I wanted to, or could do until the following year when I enrolled at a local technical college to become a sports journalist, but was bug-bitten and ensnared by a calling to make movies. I always loved them, but the possibility hadn’t ever occurred to me, in spite of my undercover obsession with Dawson’s Creek—its lead’s worship of Spielberg mirroring my own, and the intriguing Scream 2 film class discussion on sequels. Once I learned about no-budget filmmakers like the rebel without a crew, Mariachi man himself, Robert Rodriguez, and credit card maxer-outer, Kevin Smith, tearing an indie trail, I thought, why not give it a go?

It all began the day I uncharacteristically thrust myself forward to direct a mock episode of a Coronation Street scene in Darlington Tech’s glamorous hair and beauty department as part of my BTEC Media course. Then, alongside fellow students, armed with Canon XL1s and Speed Razor editing bays, we cobbled together a few music videos and fake adverts, and soon after, aged 17, I directed an eleven-minute teen slasher ripoff, penned by my best friend, Sam, entitled Night Class; a film in which it inexplicably takes a lad 2 minutes and 10 seconds to walk through a graveyard—”Bayhem,” it certainly was not. It owed more to whizzing around in a wheelchair dolly, trying to be Darlington’s answer to Rodriguez, and attempting to remake John Carpenter’s Halloween in a college in North East England. Nevertheless, it marks my first time really picking up a camera and trying to tell a story on my own terms. Storyboarding, casting, not so much lighting, but operating camera, and perhaps most invaluably, cutting. It remains the most fun I’ve ever had making a film, under our self-consciously titled production company name of Ego Trip Films, which reveals we were aware of getting ideas way above our stations, but did it anyway, and for that I’m incredibly proud because not many people bother, even after receiving “the call” to be creative. Yes, it’s just a daft little short, and it’s nothing if not derivative, but I’m so happy it exists.

Bay’s sophomore effort, The Rock, arrived hot on the heels of his buddy cop feature debut, Bad Boys, just a year later in fact, and much like the Will Smith vehicle, it captivated the minds of teenage lads throughout my village, secondary school, and beyond. The grandiose execution, gloss, and sheen encapsulated everything we expected from a big-budget Hollywood actioner. Every frame dripped expense. As far as I can tell, coupled with 1998’s Armageddon, it’s the more credible half of Bay’s masterpiece double-header. In short, The Rock rocked.

Sometimes a photographic eye, and a keen knack (bordering on wunderkind genius) for visual storytelling finds itself in the body of a thoughtful artist like Bay’s Propaganda Films mentor and eventual rival, David Fincher, and sometimes it lands in the socket of a juvenile mind, who with confidence to spare, barges his way to the top, by analysing, understanding, and then catering to the vast American sensibility. Fincher makes Se7en; Bay makes Bad Boys. Both worthy films for different occasions, but whichever you prefer ultimately tells you who you are, and which side your bread is buttered.

So who in the name of Zeus’s butthole does Michael Bay think he is? With an endless parade of supermodel girlfriends, this baseball-capped, Aviator shades wearing, Michael Bolton lookalike ticks every stereotypical Tinseltown director box, but turns off so-called “real filmmakers” left right and centre—no one at film school would confess to liking anything he did, let alone being a Bay fan. Aside from this jock-looking frat dude, occasionally shirtless, with long, ’90s rock and roll locks, looking like he should be either in, or at the very least, producing Bon Jovi records behind the camera, what do Bad Boys and The Rock have in common? The suited and booted, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.

Both these influential figures were the fat cat, filmic fathers of Bay. Simpson exploded off the planet in ’96, prior to the release of The Rock, with pony-tailed hair and his trademark black Levi’s 501s, aged just 52, in a self-destructive haze of cocaine, pills, high-class hookers and bizarre sexual practices. But Jerry persisted without him, completing the film on his lonesome, then cut Simpson’s high-concept movie formula and established aesthetic from hit films such as Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop II, Top Gun, and Days of Thunder, and without ever really altering anything, pasted it across the board to bring us films like Con Air and Gone in Sixty Seconds (also with Cage), Enemy of the State and Bad Boys II (reuniting with Will Smith), and Pearl Harbor (back with Bay).

Michael Bay is the kind of fella you might find schmoozing with Charlie Sheen or John Stamos behind a waterfall—a Sports Illustrated swimsuit babe under each muscular arm in the Playboy Mansion’s grotto. He’s the filmmaker who finds it totally acceptable to yell deafeningly into a bullhorn on set, behind a giant Panavision camera, as if manning a recoiling machine gun, walls collapsing in around him, with his affected grandad shirt unbuttoned slightly too far, no doubt carefully calculated for maximum manly hairy chest display, cellphone chock full of supermodels’ digits, and the giant, chiseled jaw and smirk of a man who’s doing precisely what he wants to do, how he wants to do it, 24/7, and is succeeding in making a shit-ton of cash in the process. He wants to date pornstars, and cast hot chicks who look like (or actually are) Victoria’s Secret models, to show off their flawless physiques. This man does not exude the paternal presence of a godfatherly Steven Spielberg, instructing Drew Barrymore to cover up after her Playboy spread; he’d more likely convince her to strip down further. As Nicolas Cage says in the movie, SHAME ON HIM.

On the other hand, there’s a complicity in any actress willing to work with Bay on a teen boy-titillating blockbuster like Transformers; a knowledge you’ll be tacked on the walls of college dorms across the USA and beyond. A line has to be drawn; you work with Bay and face his wrath, or seek out a more fulfilling project for a fraction of the pay, but I’ll bet you won’t be voted “FHM’s Sexiest Woman in the World” anytime soon. There’s a price to pay for that particular honour. I hesitate to say all this without being labelled a “problematic” Bay-sympathiser, but a filmmaker instructing an actor (in this case, Megan Fox) to arch their back 70%, as was reported by the now shamed, Shia LaBeouf, on the Transformers set, is merely something any artist could, in theory, ask of their subject. Should we “cancel” a Pablo Picasso or an Egon Schiele for requesting their muses bend over? What’s the difference? One perv paints with light? Can we be fair across the board here? Let’s not vilify him for doing precisely what he’s hired to do, all the while excusing the collusion of studios and the cinemagoers themselves.

Isn’t this exactly what audiences ultimately demand from a top-tier hotshot movie maker anyway? The bums are on seats. The money’s rolling in. Is his filmography really any dumber than the majority of the movies and TV shows we’re subjected to each year, particularly nowadays? This is Bay’s art. Yeah, it’s excessive, it’s chauvinistic, and flat out obnoxious at times—just like the man himself, but isn’t that an artist’s right? To express himself and his worldview? However deplorable it may be? Bay’s not an intellectual. Why are we holding him to that standard? He blows stuff up and says things like, “This island is so fuckin’ bitchin’!” But this is where the trouble starts – because he’s no dummy either. He’s a frat boy auteur, ready and willing to use you for what you can give him and his movie. Isn’t that why he’s paid the big bucks? Surely Bay’s just doing his job as a purveyor of the perverted to the perverted masses? Who’s lewd and lascivious here, really? The guy putting it up on screen, or the crowds queuing ’round the block, willing to fork over their hard-earned money to see it? Maybe a bit of both, eh?

There’s a part of most men—a sliver in some, a character-defining chunk in others, that covet his lifestyle. Do women understand there’s a little Michael Bay in all of us? Take every panel of petulant judges on TV, or every creep casting director, or model scout. If he (or she) is sick, then so’s the industry, and if we can all admit that, then why consume anything it vomits out? We, as moviegoers who enjoy Hollywood and crave more are innocent, I suppose? We’re comfortable reviling Bay, dispelling him as a hack, without ever acknowledging or understanding that he isn’t the real problem—we are. He’s just feeding the bears as far as I’m concerned. Bay is holding the mirror, and we are the warped reflection.

Bay lost me forever with 2001’s Pearl Harbor—something I’ve still never absorbed in its entirety, but saw enough to be completely turned off. Everything that followed disappointed me. Especially his take on a childhood favourite, Transformers. But his first three—that out of the traps trilogy of Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon, comprised an incredible trio of unabashed, people-pleasing, cutting-edge action movies. Will Smith’s edgy leap to commercial fame in Bad Boys, from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air heralded his arrival as one of the stars of the late nineties and the new millennium. The Rock was Connery’s spectacular revival, and perhaps my personal favourite, Armageddon, which takes Bay, Bruckheimer, and Simpson’s cinematic formula and scale to stratospheric proportions where it explodes into a meteoric catastrophe of bewildering brilliance.

The Rock popped up on special edition DVD along with Armageddon on the revered Criterion label, which felt puzzling at the time, but now I think I understand it. Those films are curated under the criteria of being culturally and artistically significant—here illustrating America’s culture of excess. Perhaps they consider Bay to be a satirist? Either way, John Schwartzman’s lush cinematography, and the guidance of Bruckheimer, make this pairing peak Bay—a dog in his prime, in his time, throwing the kitchen sink at his movies with a youthful, arrogant exuberance that translated to the screen fervently. Every amped-up Tony Scottism reverberating through the mind – the fast cuts, constant tracking and trucking of multiple cameras, and larger than life performances. How could a film ever get bigger than Armageddon? I’m still not sure it can! At 136 and 151 minutes, these bloated, indulgent broad strokes, to this day, define his brand of film. They’re staggeringly expensive, but it’s all on the screen, as they say, and Bay and his buddies made their money back many times over.

As the times change, the films of the past don’t. A world once sated by Bay is now hyper-aware of the circumstances surrounding said entertainment, and the real-life repercussions relating to him and his methods. We’re progressing as empathetic beings, we’re more considerate perhaps, but where does this leave us in an industry (don’t say industry) where primal desires are still sought by audiences who long for the days of Bay and company’s incendiary fireballs and male gaze bias? They’ll likely have to dig out their old DVDs and Blu-rays, because the time of the cigar-chomping movie mogul is through, and the insensitive, barking filmmaker is next. The weaselly Weinsteins and sleazy Simpsons are dead, and with them goes their bloated bigot blockbusters. I’m sure it’s for the best. But for better or worse, if for no other reason than posterity, as a record of the flashy MTV era, we’ll always have Michael Bay’s The Rock. The final hurrah of Don Simpson, and one of the genre-defining movies death-rattling around the mid-nineties, for me, should be rewatched, and respected as a massive milestone of excessive action cinema.

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Sex Crimes

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Wild Things (1998)

Exec-produced by a “streaky” Kevin Bacon, directed by John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mad Dog and Glory), and described as “Scream meets Body Heat” by its breakout star, Denise Richards, Wild Things is a film I somewhat sheepishly, but repeatedly return to. It helped define a specific era of late-nineties cinema, along with other genre gems, Scream and American Pie, in the sense that it was subversive, exploitative, adult, and something the previous generation wouldn’t necessarily flock to.

Wild Things felt like it was crafted especially for my 17-year-old college crowd. There’s sweltering sexuality from the outset—the growly Mandalay Pictures logo, paired with George S. Clinton’s sleazy saxophone score, immediately conjures memories of sliding in the verboten VHS. Scenes such as the “I Want What I Want” wet t-shirt car wash and its immediate soggy aftermath, the revealing motel threesome, and the artwork-adorning lesbian pool kiss, all exude an unmistakable ’90s steaminess.

In spite of Matt Dillon’s gurning, it’s all less laughable than most depictions of “coitus” in erotic thriller peers like Fatal Attraction (mad scrambling sink hydration), Color of Night (Bruce’s underwater Willis and bath time toy tank body off-roading), Body of Evidence (Madge’s hot dripping candle wax), Showgirls (splashy pool thrashing), and 9½ Weeks (iconic fridge-raiding and awkward alleyway waterfall fumblings), and to up the adolescent interest, featured starlets from popular television programmes of the day, in various states of undress, cursing, and acting in a manner we were not used to seeing on their weekly episodic shows. These actors were suddenly let loose; unleashed into the wild to fend for themselves without the protection of network telly censors. R-rated horrors, comedies, and thrillers, boasted an edginess, and a tantalising sense that anything could unfold.

In terms of blatant beauty, Denise Richards stands out from the crowd—she has magnetism, and the camera clearly loves her. Check out the wide shot of the Blue Bay Buccaneers’ cheerleaders, for example. The eye trains on her. There may as well be an iris in. It’s all about Denise. Unfortunately, following Wild Things, Starship Troopers, and perhaps her career apex as Brosnan Bond girl, Dr Christmas Jones, in The World Is Not Enough, Richards retreated into Playboy centrefold, E! reality TV territory, and regrettably got mixed up with bi-winning warlock, Charlie Sheen.

In 1994’s television drama series, Party of Five, Neve Campbell played the sensitive, and highly intelligent orphan, Julia Salinger. The hype around her and co-star, Jennifer Love Hewitt, who appeared as Bailey’s beau, Sarah, is perfectly illustrated in an objectifying but shamefully spot-on scene from Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, in which Josh Hartnett rips off gullible high schoolers by flogging them supposed nude tapes of the pair. I was the perfect age to fall for each of them a little—Neve in The Craft and the first two Scream films, and J.Love in the teen slasher, I Know What You Did Last Summer and its ludicrously titled, but firm guilty pleasure, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Wild Things was released the same year as Scream 2, and 1998’s MTV Movie Awards neatly illustrated Campbell’s burgeoning stardom.

Actors’ jumps from angsty, but relatively safe and comfortable TV to risqué features, seemed to be the transitional trend. You’d often hear muted mutterings like, “Dawson gets to say ‘fuck’ in Varsity Blues!” or “Buffy snogs that girl from Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane in Cruel Intentions!”

Party of Five, Dawson’s Creek, and My So-Called Life spawned the careers of many promising young performers. It seemed to happen much more back then, with Campbell, Love Hewitt, and Scott Wolf graduating from Party of Five to features such as Scream (alongside Friends’ Courteney Cox, who made Wes Craven’s horror buzz a bit louder), Scream 2, Wild Things, and the first two I Know What You Did Last Summer movies—Wolf most notably appearing in Doug Liman’s Go, alongside Dawson’s Creek’s “good girl gone bad,” Katie Holmes. Capeside’s other inhabitants, namely Dawson Leery himself, James Van Der Beek, Joshua Jackson, and Michelle Williams, each popped up in small screen-subverting roles in Varsity Blues, Urban Legend, Cruel Intentions (alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s bedroom wall pin-up, Sarah Michelle Gellar—who also appeared in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2), and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later.

Throughout the nineties, even Saved by the Bell’s Zack and Jessie, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Elisabeth Berkley, were appearing in “grown-up” films like the underrated (and unfairly overshadowed by its ’98 doppelgänger, Dead Man’s Curve) Dead Man on Campus, and Showgirls. Beverly Hills, 90210’s Shannen Doherty made Kevin Smith’s Mallrats with Campbell’s Party of Five squeeze, Jeremy London, and My So-Called Life helped usher in the careers of Claire Danes and Jared Leto (an actor I felt was so promising in Girl, Interrupted and Requiem for a Dream, that I used to refer to him as “the best actor of his generation”—something I later regretted and retracted).

To take Wild Things too seriously is a discredit to the film’s well-balanced daftness, and would also rob you of the sheer fun of it. After all, a movie featuring a fake-collared, funny-boned, scene-stealing Bill Murray, and a preposterous raccoon witness (faraway the funniest wild animal cutaway in a film chock-full of them), “acting” somewhere between intrigued and startled, before the scene abruptly fades to black, is hardly the motion picture to pick apart in terms of it tackling hot topics. Wild Things neither desires, nor deserves, to be appointed as spokesperson. However, the film does resonate awkwardly upon rewatch, partially due to its prescient rape themes, dealt with much more carefully in hard-hitting documentaries, The Hunting Ground, Audrie & Daisy, and 2001’s Raw Deal: A Question of Consent.

To me, the self-awareness, the winks, nods, and tongue-in-cheekness of it all, just nudges Wild Things onto the acceptable side of the line, and shouldn’t, as they say, “trigger” too much. The high-wire is certainly tiptoed in terms of serious issues being wrung through the mangle by filmmakers in search of nothing but a sensationalist, sizzling box office hit, but they don’t dramatically teeter, especially when comparing the movie to arguably the genre’s biggest blockbuster, Basic Instinct, which has its own, more graphic and troublesome date rape subplot. Having said that, the hyper-sexualisation of high school girls plays as questionable at best, but alarmingly wasn’t out of place back in ’98, with Britney Spears parading provocatively in school uniform 24/7 on MTV in her racy music video for “…Baby One More Time.” Although Neve and Denise were 23 and 26 years old respectively in Wild Things, it does bring into question how much the filmmakers and complicit studio would have been willing to ask and “show” if the actors’ ages mirrored those of their characters.

Ideally, Wild Things should be segregated as a silly-smart, exploitative, but not mean-spirited movie; deeply affecting social commentary, this is not, and to invoke it too much is the shortest route to crippling the film of its lurid, but fiendishly entertaining qualities.

So if you’re thinking of venturing back to the South Miami swamps and Coconut Grove humidity, to get a bit hot under the collar, there are two cuts of Wild Things currently available. The unrated version is worth favouring over the truncated theatrical, as it features 6½ minutes of extra footage. It’s a bit saucier, there’s more Bill Murray, dirtier alternative lines, and an interesting third act bonus story nugget.

Anyone interested in going one step beyond Wild Things might enjoy my month-long, 30 Days Hath Sextember season of sordid films, showing the peaks and troughs of the once ubiquitous erotic thriller genre.

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A World of Shit

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Full Metal Jacket (1987)

I was a terrible sleeper as a kid. I’d often only drop off if I was watching TV downstairs, or had my dad read to me. A clunky old television soon changed that. When my grandparents finally bought a new living room telly, their old box (and I mean old) was suddenly up for grabs, and fortunately found its way into my bedroom. It had a plug-in, external aerial, which could just about provide a watchable picture if you jiggled it enough, balanced it precariously on the edge of the set, or a nearby flat surface—if the cord would stretch; the perils of terrestrial TV before the digital switchover. It also thankfully had an early remote control—it was the size of a brick, but it had one. I’d watch late night movies, controller in hand, and hone my talent for switching over during adverts and back to the film again, before, or just as the film recommenced—a skill I have proudly retained to this day. Sometime during secondary school, which would put me between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I recorded a late night screening of Full Metal Jacket, with commercials littering the broadcast, which would make it a Channel 4 standalone showing, or more likely, part of one of their many Stanley Kubrick seasons over the years.

Kubrick was once described as “a remarkable, genius, nightmare, warm, caring, distant, cold, expansive, funny, hugely intelligent, totally driven man” and again, “the most patient man, and simultaneously the most impatient of tyrants.” In truth, Kubrick was at the mercy of his wife, Christiane, and daughters, Vivian and Anya, whose feminine powers helped keep him in check, in spite of his domineering nature. According to Christiane, Stanley was the opposite of a recluse. This was one of many misconceptions about the man. He was curious and gregarious, but didn’t suffer fools. He worked from home as it was logical and convenient. No one recognised him as he never gave television interviews, so he enjoyed popping to Ryman’s on the high street to look at the new stationary—always paying with cash to remain anonymous. If he made you coffee or tea, he’d spill it. He’d burn your toast, but he would always offer. He was bitingly sarcastic, and often very funny. On Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick put several Warner Bros. executives in a van during shooting, and told them not to come out. That is power, and evidence of his playful, humorous nature. Maybe I’m blinded by how much his work means to me, and I have no doubt Shelley Duvall would disagree, but I like the sound of Stanley.

Yet, the manner of Kubrick’s directorial approach precedes him. “Regimented” doesn’t come close. He’d spend two days on an actor, performing one line, over and over, doing 66 takes or more, and then not include it in the final film. Kubrick would sometimes light for an entire day, and then send everyone home. It took seven days alone just to light Pyle’s bathroom scene in FMJ. Kubrick purportedly shot a million feet of film on both The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. His maniacal, repeated takes on the former resulted in a gargantuan 100:1 shooting ratio. On Full Metal Jacket, he apparently averaged close to thirty takes—the most being 37, on Lee Ermey, for the unlocked footlocker scene. Matthew Modine’s theory was that Kubrick in fact liked to halt shooting, for whatever reason imaginable. It was the chess player within him. It gave him time to step back and reassess. He also cracked the code of Kubrick’s exhaustive drilling of actors in as insightful a way as I’ve ever heard it put. He found the actors’ complaints about, “Why is Stanley doing this to me?” egotistical, and instead contemplated, “Why is Stanley doing this to himself?”

Films are built in the edit; why not do thirty takes if you can? Or if you feel the need to explore the minutiae of something to a ridiculous degree? How many directors would do that if they didn’t have suits and studios breathing down their necks? I hesitate to say a lot. Yes, Kubrick went over schedule massively, but only 10% or so over budget. He famously took his time, ordering in McDonald’s and pizzas for the cast and crew, or vegetable curry for himself, which according to Modine, in his superb Full Metal Jacket Diary and iPad app, was all Stanley ate. It was a humble setup. Kubrick would parsimoniously count the plates at lunchtimes to ensure the crew was as skeleton as humanly possible. Stanley didn’t want to rush, or have any pressure during shooting. Pre, and post-production, ok—just not during turnover. For me, this precision and keen attention to detail is where Kubrick pulls away from his contemporaries. As Martin Scorsese said, “One of Stanley’s pictures is equivalent to ten of somebody else’s.” I do feel that’s a touch modest, especially coming from Marty, but it’s a claim that makes you wonder if Kubrick could be the best filmmaker we’ll ever experience.

After Stanley refused to grant Modine a day off to visit his wife in hospital for the emergency C-section birth of their son, Boman, Modine threatened to cut his own hand with a knife in order to guarantee an A&E visit. Seemingly outwitted, all Kubrick could muster was that Modine should’ve named his kid, “John,” or something else “normal.” Later, regarding Full Metal Jacket’s potential alternate endings, Modine broke Stanley’s golden rule of there being “no bad ideas” and criticised both the director, and the cast, in Stanley’s Winnebago. Kubrick, who had by this point, adopted some good ol’ British swearing, chose to refer to Modine as a “miserable cunt” for an extended period of the shoot. I know the type. Nothing is right. Nothing is good enough. We often want to please these people when we’re faced with them—especially when they hold a position of authority over us. On some level, we may even fear them, but ultimately they don’t command our respect. However, love him or hate him, Kubrick did.

As incredible as his films are, I find myself wondering if it all could’ve been achieved without these provocative methods. Would the films be what they are if Kubrick had behaved differently on set? Wouldn’t they be almost identical if he’d just lightened up, used one of the first three takes, and treated everyone with a gentle respect?

Personally, I believe it’s who he was that made his filmography so unique. Those innate, methodical quirks may have been unpleasant for some, but you can’t pick and choose with artists, with friends, with lovers, with people. It’s all or nothing. We should accept them entirely, or not at all, and that’s how I regard Kubrick. We mustn’t chop him up, remove the rotten bits, and separate the aspects of his character we agree with. Who knows, maybe the key to what makes his films so special is that Jungian dark side he seemingly embraced.

Kubrick began developing Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers in 1980. By the time it came to fruition as Full Metal Jacket in 1987, Vietnam films had become a ubiquitous subgenre. To be clear, I love and respect Francis Ford Coppola’s work. He’s without doubt among the toppermost of history’s greatest directors. Although his 1979 Vietnam movie, Apocalypse Now, has sheer cinematic clout, and the scale and chaos of it stuns, Full Metal Jacket boasts an intent, and to a degree, an execution, that Apocalypse lacks. As foolish as it may be to compare apples and oranges, I only invoke Apocalypse Now to emphasise the importance of Full Metal Jacket, and to place it alongside the very best of its peers, where I believe it holds its own. As I did, you’re probably comparing the quality of the imagery in each film in your mind – something I concede is debatable as to which is superior. When I picture the napalm strike, or the destruction of the Kurtz compound, I’m wowed every time, but I don’t believe most take as much intellectually from Apocalypse as they do Full Metal Jacket.

For one, Apocalypse Now was helmed by a certifiable madman (at the time). Coppola had lost the plot—gone insane. Just look at his wife, Eleanor’s stunning documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, and see for yourself. Coppola descended into madness, to the threshold of his sanity, he had no idea how to end his movie, was concerned he was making a pompous film on an important subject, and that it had become a pretentious failure, all the while teetering on the verge of suicide. Brando and Hopper’s scenes are strong, but they were ultimately improvised on the spot by drug-addled maniacs. All power to them, it’s a dazzling piece of work, and even more than that, an appropriate mirror for Vietnam. As Coppola said, “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam.” Conversely, Kubrick knew precisely what he was making. Sure, he shot thirty-odd takes of scenes, just to see what happened, but when he experimented, he did so within an already cemented vision. Also, throughout his life, Kubrick didn’t alter a frame of Full Metal Jacket. No reduxes were necessary. Coppola, however, returns to Apocalypse endlessly and fiddles. Stanley Kubrick made the film he wanted to make the first time.

Some call Full Metal Jacket the best “war movie” ever made, whatever that means. Despite the astounding execution of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach opening, as a complete piece, FMJ has a cold commentary and resonance that Spielberg’s WWII drama lacks. It has less abstraction and pretension than Apocalypse Now, and simultaneously evades the melodrama of Oliver Stone’s Platoon. It’s more of an intelligent allegory. We feel as if we know where the bodies are buried, but still have to dig.

At the climax of Full Metal Jacket’s first act, the ethereal howls of Vivian’s score wither and merge with my favourite shot—the now totally iconic, Steadicam tracking entrance of the Da Nang hooker (and A View to a Kill Bond girl, Papillon Soo Soo), with Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ playing. This gelling of striking image and subliminal lyrical content are second to none. Before this scene can be decoded, we need to view the ending’s adolescent sniper as being an incarnation of Vietnam—a physical representation of the entire war. No heavy firepower, just a brave girl defending her country by any means necessary. The Vietnamese people were underestimated, taunted, and abused, but ultimately “won” out over the U.S. Army. When factoring in FMJ’s female roles in particular, this karmic revenge payback message is evident in Sinatra’s salty, swaggering lyrics: “You’ve been a’messin’ where you shouldn’t’ve been a’messin’. You keep lyin’ when you oughta be truthin’, and you keep losing when you oughta not bet. You keep playin’ where you shouldn’t be playin’, and you keep thinkin’ that you’ll never get burnt (ha). One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.”

I tend to watch Full Metal Jacket alone. It conjures a mood I don’t mind dwelling in for a couple of hours, and then I leave it well behind, if I can. Subjecting someone else to this film could be classed as a cruel act. This one’s solely for the phoney tough and the crazy brave. It is depressing, but no more depressing than watching the news. It’s such a sad experience, partly because it’s still going on. It’s a Vietnam War period piece, yes, but at its heart, it’s just as much an exploration of modern warfare. We only wish it was the past, and not our present.

Full Metal Jacket doesn’t answer questions. It won’t comfort you with false hope. It’s a stylised look at how absurd war is, and challenges us to just look; look at what we’re doing to ourselves, and each other. Look what we’re capable of, and how we continue to echo our violent mistakes of the past. It’s an uneasy watch. It’s obsessive and clinical, but has an action as clean as Pyle’s rifle, Charlene. It’s a pornographic view of a stripping away of human decency and humanity to further a corrupt and evil political cause. It’s a Kubrickian warning that these actions, if repeated, will ultimately result in our downfall. It’s not a perverse, cold study; it’s a cold study of the perverse—a film sliced in two by a cinematic magician, who then challenges us to put it back together again in our own minds.