For Your Eyes Only

John Glen – 1981

As a child during the later Roger Moore era of Bond movies – For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill – Eyes was my least favorite of the group, partially due to its more subdued tone coming after the outlandish Moonraker and especially due to its grating, dated, TV-cop-show disco score by guest composer Bill Conti. The great John Barry’s absence from The Spy Who Loved Me is the only thing that mars that film's otherwise perfect status, so it’s incredible that the Eon team let him get away again so soon. Fortunately, he returned for the three following consecutive Bond films, through The Living Daylights. For Your Eyes Only has grown on me over time. It shows Moore’s Bond acting his age admirably, turning down advances from an amorous underage ice skater, and genuinely bonding with leading lady Carole Bouquet before kissing her. It includes some interesting Bond lore, such as a reference to his late wife Tracy from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; a final ignominious appearance from Blofeld in the pre-credits sequence, and a mélange of plot elements from various Ian Fleming stories that make it feel genuine on the whole. The film also marks the debut of Bond veteran John Glen in the director’s chair, promoted from longtime editor, who would attain the distinction of directing more Bond films than anyone else; all five from the 1980s – the last three to star Moore and then the only two featuring Timothy Dalton. For Your Eyes Only may not have one of the great villains in the Bond universe – Kristatos is a smuggler moonlighting as a skater’s patron? – but it does have a memorable second-tier villain in creepy speechless assassin Locque played by creepy Michael Gothard, whose car gets kicked down a mountainside by Bond in one of his most cold-blooded moments.

Outrage

Ida Lupino – 1950

As if two separate stories with radically different agendas were clumsily stapled together at the middle seam, Ida Lupino’s Outrage begins as a harrowing and effective drama/thriller told from a female perspective and somehow ends as a sappy religious tract and morality play. A college-age working-class woman is stalked and eventually raped by a brute who operates a lunch stand near her office. The event traumatizes her to the point that she cannot identify her attacker, cuts off her engagement with her fiancé, and is wracked with feelings of humiliation and shame. She senses her neighbors and even strangers whispering and judging her. She leaves town to escape the pain, but with no plan, and ends up in a small town being proselyted by a self-righteous born-again Christian who persuades the vulnerable young woman that she should just endure life’s hardships knowing that God has her back. This de-facto cult leader is so noble, in fact, that he rebuffs the heroine’s affection and insists she head back home to the world that made her miserable. I find the entire premise loathsome, not only for ethical reasons, but because the first half of the film is so strong and full of promise. It sets up two things that never happen; justice for the assault victim, and – more importantly – a final act that works cinematically. Lupino’s use of film effects to suggest the protagonist’s state of mind throughout the first 30 minutes is absolutely riveting. Camera angles, shadows, psychological editing and especially the aggressive use of sound all converge to produce a sensation of dread and indignation. You never want this woman to be rescued or “helped” to get over her trauma; you want her to either orchestrate vengeance on her foul rapist, or at least decisively move forward in life on a clear path, not because a virtuous man took pity on her, but because she built up her own resolve. None of this happens. She limps back to her hometown where her attacker is still at large, with no reason to believe that her psychosis is truly cured and can only hope that she’ll find more religious fanatics who will hold her hand when she needs it. Lupino’s sharp and rigorous style in the first half is replaced by a bland and artless approach in the second, making the film feel exactly as it would if Lupino was fired and replaced mid-shoot, or she just plain lost interest overnight. The first half is so good, though, that I want to encourage people to see it. You’ll know exactly when it’s safe to turn it off; it hits you like a two-by-four.

Wildflower

Matt Smukler – 2022

God help us from screenwriters who think that intelligent teen characters can only display their “intelligence” by being really snarky and sarcastic. Can't smart people ever be modest and courteous too, or can they only brim with grating smugness? If they’re so smart, why can’t they carry on a conversation productively instead of just spouting witty epigrams? Anyway, this movie is annoying and mediocre when Charlie Plummer isn’t on screen. He’s the only highlight in this otherwise insufferable and pretentious film.

The Shrouds

David Cronenberg – 2025

It feels good to be in the hands of a master filmmaker, someone who includes nothing in his film except what interests him and what relates to his themes, and who has no impulse to pander to audiences or boards of studio executives. It must be far from easy, but at 82 years of age, David Cronenberg still manages make films that no one else would or could, fusing philosophy and technology to create disquieting but fascinating scenarios about highly potent existential issues. In this case, the subject is coming to terms with death and mourning. Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) is a wealthy tech entrepreneur who has developed a means for customers to view their loved ones’ remains as they decay in their graves. It’s outrageously morbid, even sickening to many, but it’s a business that takes off, and Karsh finds it personally comforting as he regularly studies his late wife’s corpse remotely. As always, Cronenberg pinpoints – as only he can – a fine midpoint between behavior that is equal parts disturbing and poignant. Many of his films are tragic, but in The Shrouds, possibly because it’s so autobiographical - (to the extent that star Cassel even quite resembles Cronenberg) – he allows his hero to move on from his neurosis, though probably not permanently.

I Was a Communist for the FBI

Gordon Douglas – 1951

Unflappably loyal American Frank Lovejoy goes undercover as a communist subversive to help the FBI build a case against a spy ring, at great risk to his reputation with family and friends. It’s the kind of movie that, on impulse, you want to laugh off as completely artless, state-sponsored propaganda that can only be enjoyed ironically, but in fact, it’s too good and too (believe it or not) progressive, to dismiss so comfortably. Even the comically on-the-nose pulp title, mimicking sensational newspaper exposés, conveys some degree of self-awareness, the same type that would give us titles like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Married a Monster from Outer Space within the same decade. The naked earnestness of its flag-waving, hyper-patriotic agenda is undoubtedly laughable. It’s hard to imagine anyone less conservative than the John Birch Society finding the movie persuasive, plausible or even entertaining on its own terms. Workhorse journeyman director Gordon Douglas tackles the material as matter-of-factly as any other noirish crime drama of the period, comparable to Act of Violence, Mystery Street, or Storm Warning, that continued the noir genre’s swerve into social issues over strictly murder and detective stories. It couldn’t have been made at a more opportune time for this type of material. In 1951, both HUAC and Joseph McCarthy were at the height of their power, goaded on by the even more powerful J. Edgar Hoover, and Hollywood studios were happily cooperating with the professional blacklisting of anyone listed in Red Channels. The entire premise of the movie is both ludicrous and reprehensible, presenting as fact the notion that any outbreaks of unionization, civil rights activism and/or advocacy for the poverty-stricken could only be the result of direct orders from the Kremlin as part of a massive conspiracy to actively undermine the American system. Yes, miniscule, mostly ineffective spy rings existed, and there were traitors who deliberately fed classified information to the Soviet Union, but there was never – (in the 50s or throughout the Cold War) – anything close to the comfortably thriving mafia-like “fifth column” shown at work in I Was a Communist for the FBI. What makes the film a little intriguing, along with its lean, procedural Dragnet brand of storytelling, is that expressions of blatant racism and antisemitism are put into the mouths of the pro-communist antagonists, not the heroes. Honest, black union workers are shown to be victimized, not helped, by the rabble-rousing agitators, and union-busters wrap the pipes they’re going to bash heads with in recognized Jewish newspapers, presumably to frame Jews for the crime. This shows that the film’s producers understood that racism was frowned upon by a majority of audiences and that, rather than coding racist ideas to make them seem innocuous and pander to the public’s prejudices, they opted to make their villains even more hateful and hateable by making them the racists. That doesn’t make the film significantly less odious, but it is of interest as a kind of signpost about the country’s slowly evolving attitudes about race. Long story short, I Was a Communist for the FBI has the dubious honor of being one of the most famous Red Scare mania movies, but it’s far from the worst. The genre also includes winners like The Red Menace, The Big Lie, Guilty of Treason, and My Son John (the film that killed poor Robert Walker).

Scream

Wes Craven – 1996

It’s odd how Scream continues to exert such a commanding power after all these years. It’s still always credited with revitalizing the horror genre, even though its secret recipe was never really replicated. The fact of the matter is that it’s better than it should be, and that’s part of its mystery; somehow rising above Kevin Williamson’s hip TV-style dialogue and bottomless plot holes. It remains insanely popular, the rare non-supernatural thriller that was never misunderstood nor required rediscovery or reevaluation by succeeding generations. It’s always been loved for what it is, and – like all successful IP’s – it demanded a string of sequels, spinoffs and reboots, which only served to demonstrate that not even Williamson and director Wes Craven combined could force lighting to strike again. The Scream franchise is comparable to Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street in that there’s not a lot to them beyond the original standalone film, and fans are left having to do all the heavy lifting by filling in various sequels’ inadequacies with their feelings of love and nostalgia.

I feel that the Scream franchise took a wrong turn right out the gate, desperately rushing out Scream 2 in 1997, just under a year after the first film’s debut. The problem for just one sequel, let alone six, is that all of the interesting characters from the Scream universe didn’t even survive the first film, meaning that we’re left with a handful of so-so heroes who get picked off over the years, no consistent villain, and absurd amounts of ret-conning. If the creators had been capable of tempering their greed with a little imagination, they could just as easily have made a prequel or two back in the 90s instead, so that not only Sidney and Randy, but Casey, Steve, Billy, Tatum and Stu could all appear. It sounds far-fetched, but what keeps Scream so interesting after all this time? It’s not the notion of slashers in ghost masks targeting pop-culture-referencing teens. It’s Williamson and Craven’s ingenious world-building. Scream approaches Twin Peaks dimensions with its effective presentation of so much lore and tidbits of backstory about the fictional Woodsboro community, populating it with the likeable, intelligent high schoolers of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think that’s where the magic is. So many mysteries. What was really going on with Sidney’s parents, (and everyone’s parents)? Who was Cotton Weary? How could Billy and Stu kill one person and successfully frame Weary for the crime, stay dormant for a full year, and then make a complete mess of massacring all their friends while right in the glare of the police and media spotlight? Are Billy and Stu more like anarchists or just bloodthirsty? Are they lovers too? Are they equal partners or is Stu just Billy’s pawn? Just one film teases so much fascinating backstory. (And how in the world exactly is Steve killed? I’ve seen the film over a dozen times and I still don’t know what happens in that scene.) The point being, there is so much material to explore, it would have been great to see the same cast in at least one more film leading up to the events of the crime spree.

Aside from its postmodern analysis of the changing role of media at the fin de siècle, it’s hard not to be aware of class issues when watching the film too. The main characters are all fairly privileged and live in fabulous houses on isolated cul-de-sacs. Parents all seem to be out of town, leaving the kids to have sleepovers and host house parties. Casey and Sidney are so easy to target because they’re known to be home alone. Stu is more worried about his parents being mad at him than about being arrested for murder. Even the most “wrong side of the tracks” character, Billy Loomis, has a yuppie father who feels entitled to chew out the sheriff for questioning his son about Casey’s murder. Randy, the goofy, official third wheel of the clique of friends, seems to be the only one who actually has a job, though even he is proud of having been fired from the video store twice already, suggesting that he’s more likely employed on the orders of his parents than because he’s actually supporting himself. Though shown to be very bright, Sidney is so removed from natural instincts by her lifestyle that she doesn’t accept that her boyfriend is a psychopath until he literally tells her so himself, and she’s so conditioned to feel safe in an SUV that she doesn’t see, hear or even sense that the vehicle’s liftgate is being opened by the killer right behind her. This is a world where the affluent prove to be vulnerable precisely because of their isolation from the real world and consequences for their actions, and where a working-class drifter like Cotton Weary can be easily framed and convicted for a crime committed by rich kids. “My mother wouldn’t have touched him,” Sidney reassures herself, incredulous that her mother could associate with someone so low class.

As for the film as is, its series of impossible situations is notorious, and no one really minds. Trying to figure out how the killers could possibly know to be here or there at various times is pointless. The plot is not a conundrum to be pondered like Carpenter’s The Thing; it’s all a meta joke to be laughed off, just like the characters’ sometimes correct and sometimes wrong movie references. It’s such a unique film, lightning in a bottle, that appears effortlessly crafted on its surface and yet depends so much on quirks of character and Craven’s knack for unsettling angles and injecting a sense of foreboding into brightly lit, suburban locales. It is a bit too long; the third act and climax take up nearly all of the second half of the runtime. The cat-and-mouse chasing around the property gets repetitive after a while, especially for repeat viewers no longer on pins and needles waiting to learn the story’s twists and resolutions. These criticisms are pretty minor, though, as the film’s enduring allure can’t be denied. I still watch it every year or two around Halloween.

The Phantom of the Opera

Terence Fisher – 1962

Hammer Films’ resident auteur Terence Fisher made a string of sumptuously lurid horror films in the late 50s and early 60s, and deserves a huge chunk of the credit for the revitalized studio’s success. He essentially crystalized the Hammer brand that fans still recognize and love today with films like Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, The Mummy, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, and The Curse of the Werewolf. Hammer and Fisher continued their cycle of classic remakes with The Phantom of the Opera, and as with their others, they wisely made it their own instead of a by-numbers re-staging of past versions. Surrounded by rich and ornate production design, Herbot Lom plays the scarred musical genius wreaking havoc on an opera house to avenge himself against the corrupt owner (Michael Gough) who stole his compositions and ruined his life. Behind a pale, one-eyed mask, Lom uses voice and gesture to create a feeling of gravitas. The mask itself might be the greatest detail in the film. It looks like hand-pressed clay, completely primitive and without aesthetic intention. Aside from having the rough shape of a human face, and nostril holes, it includes no opening for a mouth. Though the Phantom can speak, the absence of a mouth in his mask represents the cruel theft of his ability to express his talent. While not a forgotten film, Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera is easy to miss compared to their more famous works starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Of the many screen adaptations of the classic story, this one is my favorite.