Empire UK

RE-RELEASES

139

The Town

That Dreaded

Sundown

1976

★★★

Last

Embrace

1979

★★★

River’s

Edge

1986

★★★★

Blame It

On Rio

1984

★★

The Skull

1965

★★★

Exit Through

The Gift

Shop

2010

★★★★

Cruel Story

Of Youth

1960

★★★

Getting

Even With

Dad

1994

★★

Angels

One Five

1952

★★★

➞ Not even Michael Caine can salvage this trouser-

rubbing sex farce. He’s the awkward married man. Michelle

Johnson’s his best friend’s daughter. Dread the rest. “I’m too

old for crazy!” shouts Caine as he congas up to Johnson.

A few fruity one-liners escape above the Ceefax-jazz score.

Otherwise it’s unedifying screwball Viagra.

➞ To Uxbridge 1940 and a Battle Of Britain quickie

affl icted by an unusual dose of vertigo: the action stays

grounded in the control room alongside John Gregson’s

raring-to-go rookie. Any air combat’s restricted to wonky

model work but it remains British cinema’s raucous most

realistic depiction of life in the RAF.

➞ Charles B. Pierce had a thing for swamps and unsolved

mysteries. As with Boggy Creek both feature in his exploitation

docu-drama inspired by Texarkana’s Phantom Slayer. One of

the slasher genre’s fi rst stabs it’s also the only horror to feature

death by trombone. Still chilling although Pierce’s unwise

comedy interludes remain as baffl ing as the case.

➞ Putting the argh in artefact this Amicus horror sees a

demonologist cursed by the Marquis de Sade’s skull and Peter

Cushing on prime form: the personification of repressed dread.

Freddie Francis toys with gimmicky skull-o-vision but it’s the

gothic paraphernalia that oozes menace. There’s a sense of

fl icking through an ancient forbidden occult book.

➞ Puberty is a child star’s kryptonite. Hence this fi nal cash-in

for 14 year-old Macaulay Culkin draining an empty bottle of cute

in an endless series of Macaulay Montages (see Macaulay do

mini-golf! karaoke! eat a sandwich!). The plot sees Culkin

blackmailing his father into loving him. Ted Danson’s ponytail

deserved its own spin-off.

➞ Taunted by a cryptic death threat Roy Scheider’s

strung-out spy tumbles into a Jewish conspiracy. Loaded

with pulp dialogue and a parping noir score if Jonathan

Demme’s Hitchcock pastiche is a tad too knowing to fully

engage it’s enlivened by ostentatious camerawork and

a cascading Niagara Falls climax.

➞ As Dismaland shuts Banksy’s oddball movie gets a

re-release. What starts as a history of street art mutates

into an act of documentary vandalism as filmmaker absorbs

subject and becomes a mini-Banksy Mr. Brainwash.

Shifty-eyed often hilarious but is it a hoax? The background

cameos of the Laughing Cavalier suggest the joke’s on us.

➞ Teen movie as amorality play: instead of reporting a girl’s

murder Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves stay frighteningly

silent. Tim Hunter’s ’80s anomaly is the anti-John Hughes

exposing the numb dead-eyed apathy of the Doom Generation.

Hugely infl uential too: it’s permanently on loop in Harmony

Korine’s head.

➞ This early surge from Japan’s New Wave is essentially

Nagisa Ôshima’s Breathless. With shabby bedsits reckless

lovers and petty crime shot on handheld cameras it’s thrilling

as a portrait of Japan’s messy loutish new youth. Ôshima’s

characters are so spectacularly unlikable that it’s like an

experiment in audience alienation. Maybe that’s the point...

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