Eve's Bayou

Eve's Bayou [Kasi Lemmons, 1997]:

A tremendous feature debut from actor turned writer and director Kasi Lemmons. The mood here is slow and sombre, perfectly evoking the sense of an endless, oppressive summer, which feels conjured from a half-remembered childhood, where parental disillusionment and the shadow of death have become distorted by superstition and the supernatural. One of the key films about the home, about family, and about how the foundations of both can be rocked by circumstances. The scene where Debi Morgan’s character re-lives the murder of her first husband as it plays out in the reflection of a mirror, then turns, physically entering the memory itself, is Tarkovsky-level directing. Morgan throughout is incredible and imbues the moments of the supernatural with a genuine emotional plausibility.

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th [Sean S. Cunningham, 1980]:

While not a great piece of cinema in the conventional sense, the stature of Cunningham's film is really elevated above other the icons of the slasher sub-genre by virtue of its third act reveal. The psychological and sociological implications of the killer's identity provide an emotional weight and dramatic complexity too often missing from films of this nature. Further, the appropriation of influences, from Mario Bava to John Boorman's film of Deliverance (1972), are applied incredibly well.

What’s fascinating about Friday the 13th, perhaps more so than films like Halloween (1978), Prom Night (1980) or My Bloody Valentine (1981) is that it almost becomes a cinematic Rorschach test. If you’re a liberal, you might see it as a film about youth being punished by the older generation for the perceived sin of enjoying themselves. If you’re a conservative, then you might see it as a retribution against the amoral, out-of-control youth debasing themselves and American family values. It's a film that taps into the politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the cultural mood of the era.

Friday the 13th [Sean S. Cunningham, 1980]:

The context is vague and indirect, but still apparent enough that it can be read into the development of the characters and the themes of the film: i.e. loss of innocence, parental responsibility and wayward youth (as well as the usual horror film connotations to voyeurism and objectification, sex and death, which are all apparent themes.) Similarly, the isolation of the setting as both a physical and metaphysical space, the nightmare of the final girl, the way fear creates wounds, the rebirth of the character “Jason” as he emerges from his watery grave to wreak havoc across further sequels, all seem (intentionally or not) self-reflexive.

More than anything the film also provides something of a reminder that early slasher films were essentially "a vibe." Later, there was an expectation that someone had to die on every third page of the screenplay, but here, as in Halloween, or something like Bava's proto-slasher film A Bay of Blood (1971), the film is content to luxuriate in the atmosphere of its lakeside setting, in the dumb teen preoccupations and concerns of its characters, and in the comings and goings of the staff attempting to get the summer camp up and running. 

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There [Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001]:

Melding a 1940s noir stylisation with a distant 1950s sense of atomic-age paranoia, this much underrated and underseen effort is not just the most imaginative of the Coen brothers' nihilistic investigations into the theme of accountability, but a subjective character study about a man seemingly content to drift through his own existence. Like the similarly underrated A Serious Man (2009), apathy is presented as a kind of hidden bliss here; the characters in both films only smited when they finally attempt to control their own destiny. A masterwork of dark irony, black comedy, and a peerless period aesthetic.

Over the Garden Wall

Over the Garden Wall [Various, 2014]:

Featuring beautifully crafted animation, endearing characters and a storybook narrative, Over the Garden Wall is a little masterpiece of perfectly balanced content and form. Created by Patrick McHale, the dark and often absurd sense of humour, the witty songs, the emotional maturity and the episodes of genuine surrealism (to say nothing of the thematically rich narrative, with its allusions to Dante's Inferno) all result in something that could almost be described as Twin Peaks for children.

Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin [Guy Hamilton, 1966]:

Director Guy Hamilton is both an underrated master and an underrated master of mise-en-scène, constantly enlivening every terse exchange or moment of surveillance with unique shot compositions and a remarkable use of location. The acerbic wit of Michael Caine's reluctant spy is a huge part of what makes the character so compelling here, as his “anti-Bond” Harry Palmer plays various sides off against one another, while seemingly doing nothing at all.

The Palmer films aren’t merely the “anti-Bond” because they present espionage without action or pyrotechnics, but because they have a greater cynicism about politics and the machinations and manipulations of world events. The titular setting here – grey Berlin, where the ravaged scars of the Second World War stand in contrast against the construction of concrete modernity – is a world away from Bond’s exotic islands and luxury manor houses, but it’s a fitting location for a story that pits the Israeli secret service against former Nazi war criminals, while agents from both sides of the Iron Curtain attempt to manipulate events to their own benefit.

The divided setting suggests the divided loyalty of characters and the people they work for, as interpersonal conflicts are given the same focus as political ones. The sequence where the coffin is transported across the border, and the play on perception and deceptions, seems a precursor to another of Hamilton's films, Live and Let Die (1971) and a reminder of an earlier one, The Party's Over (1964). A quietly complex espionage classic.

Prom Night

Prom Night [Paul Lynch, 1980]:

The last vestiges of the 1970s are all over this, with the constant soundtrack of disco floor fillers and phantasmagoria of star lights and saturated color seen during the titular prom. It's an aesthetic that shows an obvious debt of influence to Brian De Palma's earlier, hugely successful Stephen King adaptation, Carrie (1976). Like Carrie, there's also a tracking shot through a girls’ locker room here, but it's more chaste and less shocking in this context than the markedly more sensationalist take by De Palma. The thrum of the soundtrack and cross-cutting between dance and terror might also make this as much a precursor to Lucio Fulci's similarly disco themed slasher Murder Rock (1984) as it is to the more analogous likes of My Bloody Valentine (1981), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) or Terror Train (1980).

Slow and for a large part bloodless, many see this as bottom of the barrel stuff compared to Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but I had a lot of fun with it. The third act especially is masterfully directed. A reminder that before the blockbuster boom of ‘80s slasher cinema (which focused more on elaborate deaths and gratuitous violence), many early slasher films were more concerned with themes of suppressed trauma and moral retribution. This is one of the saddest films of the sub-genre, haunted from the earliest scenes by the death of a child, and brought full circle with the eventual reveal of the killer's painful motives.

Prison

Prison [Renny Harlin, 1987]:

Part of a brief wave of horror films about murderers coming back from the dead after being executed in the electric chair, the blandly titled Prison, which has the distinction of being director Renny Harlin's first feature film produced in America, stands head and shoulders above its similarly themed competition, Destroyer (1988), Shocker (1989) and House III (aka The Horror Show, 1989), but that isn't itself much of an endorsement. Harlin's preferred brand of horror, at least as far as his later films, such as Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Mindhunters (2004) might suggest, tends to be of the old dark house tradition, albeit with the house transposed to an uncharacteristic setting, so in many ways this type of film is well within the director's wheelhouse.

To his credit, Harlin does well with the material. A lot of the supernatural sequences and the general tone of dreamlike unreality makes the film feel like the director's audition reel for the subsequent A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), but certainly the casting of a young Viggo Mortensen, veteran Lane Smith and a pre-fame Tommy Lister give Prison a bit of a pedigree. Tonally, the film certainly has some issues, being both too serious and grim in its violence and setting, but too hokey and often silly to take seriously as anything other than supernatural shlock.

FeardotCom

FeardotCom [William Malone, 20002]:

I have a real soft spot for director William Malone's earlier remake of House on Haunted Hill (1999) and that first run of films produced by Dark Castle Entertainment; the company set-up by producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler to release horror films with a distinctly old-fashioned flavor and lots of ornate style. Later films from the same company, such as Thirteen Ghosts (2001), Ghost Ship (2002) and House of Wax (2005), have a lot of nostalgic value attached to them for me, and Malone's subsequent film, this derided J-horror knock off, hits a lot of those same notes. This was a period when horror cinema was largely dismissed by critics, with few reviewers willing to look beyond the sensationalist violence and generic plots of these films to offer much in the way of serious analysis. Twenty years later and horror movies are now "elevated," with even the schlockiest of stuff being approached as if it's carrying some deep and rich social commentary.

FeardotCom certainly isn't rich in social commentary, but for me it does a lot of things that elevate it above it's mostly dismal reputation. Essentially both a gloomy serial killer procedural in the spirit of the superior Seven (1995) by David Fincher and a revenge tale about a haunted website (with more than a few hints to similarly better films like Ring (1998) and Pulse (2001) respectively), FeardotCom is a film that survives on the strength of aesthetics. The retro-futurist production design by Jérôme Latour and noir-ish cinematography by Christian Sebaldt give the film a look of authentic expressionism, which more than compensates for some of the ludicrous plotting and derivative psycho-shlock. The surprisingly talented cast includes Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone as the main protagonists investigating these strange deaths and their links to the titular website, while the often scenery-chewing support comes from Stephen Rea as a mad doctor, with Nigel Terry, Amelia Curtis, Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier all appearing in extended cameos.

The Crow: City of Angels

The Crow: City of Angels [Tim Pope, 1996]:

A famously contentious and much derided sequel to the popular but ill-fated comic book revenge film The Crow (1994). Noted post-production interference and re-cutting from the always problematic Harvey Weinstein and brother Bob may have played some part in the film's many narrative shortcomings, but there's no escaping that this is fundamentally a derivative and inferior copy of the first film in both plot and theme. Visually, it's sometimes striking – the hyper-saturated colors, urban hellscape and vibrant ‘Day of the Dead’ pageantry of the final third, is a contrast to the first film's goth monochrome – but this is a definite case of diminished returns. Tim Pope, a music video pioneer of the early 1980s, has proven himself a great filmmaker many times across his numerous videos for artists as varied as The Cure, Talk Talk, The The, Soft Cell, Neil Young and The Style Council, and should've been a great match for the material. A real tragedy then that he ended up tangled up with such a compromised effort.

The Sea Shall Not Have Them

The Sea Shall Not Have Them [Lewis Gilbert, 1954]:

A rousing, men on a mission survival drama, which essentially cross-cuts two stories of wartime bravery, one involving the crew of an RAF Air Sea Rescue boat, the other involving the crew of a downed bomber stranded in a dinghy in the North Sea. Director Lewis Gilbert, who co-wrote the screenplay with Vernon Harris, uses the inherent conflicts and contrasts of the situation to document the minutiae of the RAF crew (the ranks and hierarchies) while engaging in scenes of intimate human drama. It's a great ensemble piece with some never-gratuitous gallows humor.

Death Becomes Her

Death Becomes Her [Robert Zemeckis, 1992]:

More so than the excessively deconstructive and indulgent Back to the Future Part II (1989), this macabre screwball fantasy occupies the same place in the filmography of director Robert Zemeckis that the similar unhinged and aggressively non-commercial Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) did for his friend Steven Spielberg. It's an example of an otherwise fairly "safe" or mainstream filmmaker abandoning good taste and sensibility to instead indulge in the unbridled quirks and eccentric influences that had been suppressed from his previous efforts. Tonally, Death Becomes Her isn't a million miles removed from the director's earlier Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), but it's pitched at a markedly more adult audience potentially attuned to its specific influences.

The screenplay by Martin Donovan and David Koepp is referential to everything from old dark house horror serials of the 1930s (with its mysterious female antagonist, its hints of exoticism, its elixir of life and its scenes of Bruce Willis evoking something of a Dr. Frankenstein-like mad scientist) to the camp melodrama and toxic sparring of All About Eve (1950) or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). There's a barnstorming musical number which begins the film (again, as in in Temple of Doom), a lot of allusions to film noir and the works of Alfred Hitchcock, a sequence modeled on the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and a general tone that feels very much akin to a series Zemeckis was producing during this period, Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996). It's also a kind of farcical body horror about death and the deterioration of the human body, making it almost a zombie movie, though no character ever uses the word.

The special effects, which were groundbreaking at the time of the film's release, are still exceptional, but it is that morbid, Tales from the Crypt style humor and the willingness of the entire cast to commit to these wild tonal shifts that really impresses. Meryl Streep and the aforementioned Willis in particular are fantastic and deliver some of the funniest exchanges, but they're well supported by Goldie Hawn and an enchanting Isabella Rossellini. There's also a very funny cameo from film director Sydney Pollack as an emergency room doctor. Zemeckis can be an odd filmmaker to grapple with given the many faces and facets of his career, and Death Becomes Her is an odd fit even for him. It doesn't quite connect to his run of 1980s blockbusters, nor to his subsequent turn to serious dramas with Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997) and Cast Away (2000). In some respects it feels closer to a film he produced but didn't direct; another horror/comedy: The Frighteners (1996) from Peter Jackson.

Flashdance

Flashdance [Adrian Lyne, 1983]:

It's essentially a fairy-tale, and like most fairy tales there's an element of wish-fulfilment here around considerations of class and aspiration. Our protagonist, Alex - the industrial welder-by-day, exotic-dancer-by-night, who dreams of being accepted as a professional dancer at the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory - is imprisoned by economic circumstances. She meets prince charming in the form of Nick, her boss at the steel mill where she works, and this becomes a means for escape. Unlike Cinderella however, Alex still works hard for her escape, giving the film a Rocky (1976) like aspirational quality, where we see (through extended musical montage) the journey and progression of the character as defined by her work. As a contemporary of filmmakers like Tony and Ridley Scott, director Adrian Lyne's commercial sensibilities and hyper-stylized approach to the varied dance sequences give the film an incredible visual identity. Critics at the time lazily termed this style "MTV cinema", but it's much closer to what French critics at the time termed "Cinéma du look," as the filmmaker's quick, rhythmical cutting, expressive scenes of emotional conflict, lived-in locations and extensive use of backlight and diffusion, really helped to establish a new language in American filmmaking, which dominated the next two decades.

Days of Thunder

Days of Thunder [Tony Scott, 1990]:

What works is the action. The blur of color and movement as cars jockey for position, the thrum of engines, the sound of tires screeching. It’s in the thrill of the race - the rush of noise and movement - that the film springs to life, proving a technical tour de force for director Tony Scott and his crew. What doesn’t work is everything else. The dull protagonist, the unconvincing romance, the generic rivalries turned into friendships.

As screenwriter, Robert Towne can’t decide if he wants the film to be a straight rags-to-riches racing drama, a knockabout study on male ego and the rivalries between men, a sombre medical drama in which characters overcome trauma, a redemption story for a character haunted by past mistakes, or a generic love story ripped from the cheapest of daytime soap opera. 

The screenplay sets all these different elements against one another in the most predictable way possible, and rather than develop them into a coherent narrative or character study, merely watches them go around a few laps, like these cars on a race track. It feels like a succession of scenes that were written the night before the shoot and survived the final cut due to the insistence of Paramount’s publicity department. By no means terrible, but definitely a film in conflict with itself.

Anna

Anna [Luc Besson, 2019]:

Writer and director Luc Besson probably intended for the film's peculiar structure to draw comparisons to a matryoshka doll (the doll being the symbol with which his title character, Anna, a Russian criminal, turned spy, turned super model, is apparently linked.) So what we have is a series of nested flashbacks being presented as if they're different, hidden layers; each one intended to strip away the façade of Anna's differing personas to take us closer to the character's emotional truth.

It's an interesting approach, in theory, and especially for a film that deals with themes of espionage, role playing and appearance as deception. However, in practice, such intelligence is beyond Besson's capabilities, as he delivers a story that is less complex than convoluted. The structure, which cuts back and forth between 1985, 1987, 1989 and 1990 (and often flashing backwards and forwards three months at a time between scenes) is genuinely alienating, exposing the contrivances of Besson's plotting and the transparency of his narrative machinations. It also makes the relationships between his characters vague and unknowable, reducing every major plot point to a nonsensical twist. It's a fatal flaw in a film that already had a lot going against it.

Besson has been without interest for me for over a decade now, and Anna does little to reverse the downward trajectory that his career has taken. It's a joyless, by-the-numbers production that seems self-consciously manufactured to recall the filmmakers former glories, specifically La Femme Nikita (1990) and Léon (aka The Professional) (1994). Worse, it finds Besson pushing an incredibly sexist "female empowerment" narrative, where once again a wayward young woman is picked from the slums, rescued by an older male mentor (who also becomes her insatiable lover), and is then stripped (literally) of her identity and sense of self in order to be rebuilt as an image of the man's ideal.

Anna [Luc Besson, 2019]:

Thirty years ago, this same narrative was enough to see Besson tagged as a feminist filmmaker, but such a reputation now seems entirely ludicrous when we compare this tired scenario against the numerous sexual assault allegations that have since been made against the filmmaker, and how the nature of these allegations seem to mirror this male savior/male mogul ideal that he often endorses through his work. Anna might use her chess smarts to play the KGB and the CIA off against each other, but she does so by bed-hopping between the two factions and letting Besson's camera sneaks shots up her skirt.

As Anna, former model Sasha Luss deserved a better film. She delivers a strong performance, even with such weak material, and throws herself into the film's action sequences with great skill and enthusiasm. Besson was once a master of action cinema, but here he delivers mostly scenes of disorganized carnage or moments of self-parody.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Taxi: Notes on 'the Auteur' [12 September 2020] Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26 September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20 October 2019],

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye [Antonio Margheriti, 1973]:

A film that sits comfortably within two spheres of Italian genre cinema. First, the Gothic horror, in which wealthy characters gather at a brooding castle to grapple with long-held family secrets, animosities, and murderous greed. Second, the Giallo, where titular allusions to animals and a specific number of forewarned victims, set the scene for a slow-burning tale of murder and madness. Many of the films in this Gothic tradition are often erroneously referred to as Giallo films, but this one - helmed by the prolific Antonio Margheriti, director of the earlier Gothic horror classic, The Long Hair of Death (1964) - has some legitimacy to the claim.

Here, Jane Birkin plays a young woman returning to her family castle in the highlands of Scotland, where she immediately becomes embroiled in a veritable soap opera of familial dysfunction. There's a touch of the eccentric here too, as Margheriti includes a rogues' gallery of characters, including Hiram Keller as a handsome young madman who might've killed his sister, Doris Kunstmann as a French teacher with lesbian intentions, and Anton Diffring as a doctor with more than medicine on his mind. There's also a potentially violent gorilla that lives with Keller's character, as well as the all-seeing cat that bears witness to each of the many murders, with both adding to the sense of the strange and the uncanny.

Birkin would go on to give much better performances in later films by directors such as Jacques Rivette and Agnès Varda (among others), but she's undoubtedly at her most beautiful here, and is an always welcome presence. Her partner at the time, Serge Gainsbourg, also makes an appearance (uncharacteristically) playing the part of a laconic police inspector, which makes this of definite interest to the work of the pop provocateur. While somewhat prosaic and even old-fashioned compared to many other Italian murder mysteries released during this same period, Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye is quite excellent. It features a strong, often somber atmosphere throughout, and includes some almost psychedelic stylizations, including an early dream sequence and some exceptional use of light and color.

The Ballad of Tam-Lin

The Ballad of Tam-Lin [Roddy McDowall, 1970]:

I have a real fondness for strange, unclassifiable films, and they don't come much stranger and more unclassifiable than this. The only feature-film directed by actor and photographer Roddy McDowall, The Ballad of Tam-Lin (released in some territories as The Devil's Widow, The Devil's Woman, or simply Tam-Lin) adapts the traditional Scottish ballad by the poet Robert Burns and transposes it onto the then-contemporary world of swinging London.

Mod stylizations define the film's aesthetic, as Stephanie Beacham's sheltered vicar's daughter, Janet Ainsley, falls under the spell of Ian McShane's sexually charged photographer, Tom Lynn. Tom is part of a travelling coven of bored and beautiful scenesters who congregate around the wealthy, middle-aged American heiress, Michaela Cazaret. Cazaret in turn has bewitched the young Tom, resulting in a sparring love triangle that increasingly moves into the realm of the supernatural, as pastoral romance and folk horror influences combine with the excesses of drugged-out psychedelia.

Cazaret is played with great command and sensitivity by the fading superstar Ava Gardner, and it was in part McDowall's awe for Gardner, and his desire to provide the actor with a comeback role more befitting her talents and ageing beauty, that led him to direct the film.

The Ballad of Tam-Lin [Roddy McDowall, 1970]:

In terms of style and aesthetics, the film is a real time capsule, building on the influences of European art-cinema, with its careful, widescreen compositions, bold primary colors, and extraordinary use of the natural landscape. Here, a scene of seduction plays out across a series of stop-frame images, while frequent dissolves between characters, scenes and locations work to accentuate the dreamy, barely lucid tone that defines the film throughout. Many viewers will no doubt see such adornments as entirely dated, and that's fair enough, but as someone who really values fearless originality in picture-making, the excesses and indulgences of McDowall's film feel purely cinematic, and make sense within its strange witch's brew of bucolic fantasia, 60s art-house decadence and genuine horror.

The third act shift into psychotropic terror is a trip in every sense of the word, and sees the text of the original poem manifest in both literal and figurative visions of escape, transfiguration, and salvation from supernatural retribution.

The acclaimed folk-rock group Pentangle supply the soundtrack (along with instrumental music by Stanley Myers), which makes full use of the poet's verse and often underlines literal translations from text to screen. In any context, this is a film that remains obscure and fascinating in the best possible way, and is one that seems (intentionally or otherwise) to tap into the confluence between hippie era utopia and the darker, black magic influences threatening the dream of this generation of young lovers, which seemed to be permeating the culture following the Manson Family massacres.

Eye for an Eye

Eye for an Eye [John Schlesinger, 1996]:

If you’ve ever wondered what a late Michael Winner film might look like if it was produced with "prestige film" talent, then look no further than this. Everyone here is doing exceptional work - especially the starry cast, who commit entirely to the complexity of their individual characters, as well as grappling with the sensitivities of the plot - however, despite the hard work of all involved, the film is no less morally questionable or manipulative in its sensationalist pandering to fears around violent crime and justifications of vigilantism as something like Death Wish II (1982) or Dirty Weekend (1993). Disappointing for a filmmaker of John Schlesinger’s great talent.

Born American

Born American [Renny Harlin, 1986]:

Given the implications of the title and the politics of the era when the film was first released, the expectation here was for something steeped in jingoistic, pro-U.S., anti-Soviet propaganda, in which the north American protagonists get to espouse their traditions of liberty, freedom and justice for all, while simultaneously violating a litany of international laws and treaties. Surprisingly, this isn't the case. While the film is unashamedly anti-Soviet to an almost parodic level, it also seems to view its trio of American characters with a level of derision. These teens, who travel to Finland for vague reasons and immediately cross the border into Russia for a bit of fun (taking photos of military checkpoints and shooting a bow and arrow into the snow is apparently how these kids get their rocks off) are shown to be so aggressively stupid and naïve that one can only conclude that co-writers Renny Harlin and Markus Selin (the former making his feature debut as director) are lampooning the perception of north American exceptionalism as enthusiastically as they're lampooning Soviet sleaze and corruption.

It's a strange film, with some plot points that are so brazenly bizarre that they could've come from a work of science-fiction. For instance, Harlin and Selin begin with a very grounded, character-based study of three American teenagers on a road trip across the Soviet border (which initially recalls elements of Walter Hill's film Southern Comfort, 1980) before hauling the characters off to prison for what can only be described as an even more sensationalist and reactionary version of the Alan Parker/Oliver Stone adaptation of Midnight Express (1978). Here, inmates compete in games of human chess, while high-ranking Russian ministers with a propensity for torturing inmates with jumper cables attached to their nipples, bribe the U.S. counsel with unwilling victims dragged from the women's prison.

The entire film has an odd tone that's pitched somewhere between serious commentary on proxy wars and the CIA's involvement in prolonging the Soviet conflict, and the most ludicrous action movie (n)ever released by The Cannon Group. As director, Harlin is already showing a lot of potential, despite the limitations of the text. While the film ultimately exemplifies many of the weaknesses that still affect his work to this day (under-written characters, vague plotting, a questionable tone) it also shows a natural talent for directing large-scale action and gritty heroism. With its snow-bound locations and emphasis on ordinary men pushed into violence and survival by extraordinary conditions, we can already see faint traces of his later Hollywood movies, such as Die Hard 2 (1990), Cliffhanger (1993) and even his found-footage horror film, Devil's Pass (2013). 

The Presidio

The Presidio [Peter Hyams, 1988]:

A serviceable conspiracy thriller from director and cinematographer Peter Hyams - a dependable journeyman of such films as Capricorn One (1978), Outland (1981), 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) (an early example of what is now known as a "legacy sequel"), Time Cop (1994), Sudden Death (1995) and End of Days (1999), among others. Hyams tends to get overlooked by the contemporary movie culture, enraptured as it is by the lure of the autocratic auteur. I suspect this particular film might’ve retained more of a legacy had original co-star Kevin Costner not backed out, but it's still provides decent entertainment value. As criticism, the courtship between the characters played by Mark Harmon and Meg Ryan, and the complications this creates between our protagonists, Harmon and Sean Connery (the father of Ryan's character), is somewhat predictable, but the mix of murder mystery, action movie and lament of old soldiers still carries some weight. Similarly, the San Francisco setting (much of it fogbound) provides a great atmosphere.

Sliver

Sliver [Phillip Noyce, 1993]:

I've often felt there was a fine line between Hollywood's cycle of 1990s erotic thrillers and Italy's cycle of 1970s giallo movies, which might explain why I'm so fascinated by the sub-genre of films like Shattered (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), Final Analysis (1992), Striking Distance (1993), Color of Night (1994) and Jade (1995). These films, many of them critically derided, have a surface of contemporary Hitchcockian mystery, but are more often closer in tone to the lurid, psychosexual thrills of films like A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), Death Walks on High Heels (1971), Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972), The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) and Deep Red (1975), among others.

For all the Hitchcockian pretentions on voyeurism and dehumanisation present in this slick thriller from director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, this psycho-killer loose in a modern high-rise movie is much closer to The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) than it is to Rear Window (1954). Sharon Stone, an icon of this particular sub-genre of films and an underrated actor in her own right, is an engaging presence as the protagonist, Carly Norris, a successful, thirtysomething career woman who takes on a luxury apartment where the last tenant, an apparent doppelgänger for Carly, allegedly committed suicide.

Sliver [Phillip Noyce, 1993]:

There are shades of Roman Polanski here, specifically The Tenant (1976), though the connection might rest with Ira Levin, who as well as writing the book that Sliver is based on, also wrote the source material for the Polanski directed Rosemary's Baby (1968). Noyce's direction is stylish in a sleek, typically 90s manner, accentuating the bland and empty surfaces of these modern apartments and the disconnect between tenants (where their lives play out on fuzzy black and white video monitors as entertainment for a potentially voyeuristic killer.)

Sliver hits a lot of the right notes for this kind of film, which is well made on a technical level, but it's undoubtedly flawed by the fatal miscasting of both the male leads, as well as the fact that the motivations of the characters are dully predictable. Essentially, Noyce's film lacks a compelling enough hook to give weight to its scenes of surveillance and investigation. That it toys with the self-reflexive relationship between the viewer and the viewed is interesting, but there needed to be more of an emotional connection with the character and a stronger sense of mystery to draw the audience in. When you have a murder mystery where the identity of the killer becomes obvious from the first scene, and there is no misdirection or red herrings to provide a distraction, then the result is something that feels very plodding and predictable.