What I’ve Caught Up With, March 2026 Part 2
Film: The Flesh Eaters (1964)
A weird little science fiction/horror movie, The Flesh Eaters is, in terms of actual plot, no different from plenty of cheap, low-rent horror films like The Killer Shrews. Jan Letterman (Barbara Wilkin) works as the assistant to boozy actress Laura Winters (Rita Morley). She hires Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders) to fly them a short distance, but a storm forces a landing on an island inhabited by Professor Peter Bartell (Martin Kosleck). Oh, and the island is surrounded by glowing microbes that devour the flesh of anything they contact. Did Bartell make the microbes? Is he going to kill everyone? Well, he does have an accent. Anyway, this movie is pretty direct and interesting only for the amount of blood in a movie from 1964, including one bit where a beatnik (Ray Tudor) drinks a bunch of the microbes and is eaten from the inside out. It’s dumb, but it has moments.
Film: Hard Eight (1996)
Everyone has to get their start somewhere, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature-length film was Hard Eight. An older gambler named Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) meets a drifter named John (John C. Reilly) in Nevada and decides to take him under his wing. A few years later, both of them are moving around Nevada, living well in hotels. Things change when John falls for a cocktail waitress/part-time prostitute named Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) and gets mixed up with a casino security agent named Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson). Things go sideways when Jimmy brings up Sydney’s past. You can see a lot of formative Anderson in this, but ultimately, it feels a lot like The Grifters with less sex and fewer oranges.
Film: The Prowler (1951)
In a rare bit of honesty, The Prowler gives us a noir storyline where the bad guy is a cop. Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) reports a peeping tom, and one of the cops who shows up, Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) quickly becomes obsessed with her. The two start an affair and want to run off together, but Susan’s husband (Sherry Hall) stands in the way. Webb sets up a situation where he pretends to be a prowler, which gives him a chance to kill John Gilvray but make it look like an accident. When Susan turns up pregnant—but too pregnant to avoid people figuring out that she and Webb were involved before her husband’s death, things get twitchy. The Prowler is a pretty simple story, but a pretty effective one. It’s a solid noir and Van Heflin was built for this kind of role.
Film: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay) gets in trouble with the law and ends up in a reformatory headed by a reform-minded governor (Michael Redgrave). When it’s discovered that Colin has talent as a distance runner, he becomes an opportunity for the governor to demonstrate the value of his reforms in competition. Much of the film is told in flashback as Colin considers his life while running. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a punk film before punk became a thing—Colin is rebelling against the system because he understands that the system is designed to grind him down to nothing, a fact that he hammers home at the end. The idea of a film about disaffected youth is hardly new but has rarely been done better.
Film: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026)
I enjoyed Peaky Blinders, but the series really did need a punctuation mark to end it, and thus we have Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, which brings us back to our favorite criminal gang, albeit in the World War II era. While Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) deals with the aftermath of his life of crime, the world has moved on. His son Duke (Barry Keoghan) is making a plan with British fascists to destroy the British economy by bringing in £75 million in counterfeit notes, allowing Germany to win the war. And so, Tommy is forced to return to see if he can stop the plot despite the fact that he’ll get no credit. The cast is a good one—Tim Roth, Stephen Graham, Rebecca Ferguson—and a number of people from the original show reprise their roles. If you haven’t watched Peaky Blinders, you don’t need this, but if you have watched the show, you’ve probably already have.
Film: The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1967)
Sometimes called Late August at the Hotel Ozone or Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon in the original Czech, The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is a bleak post-apocalyptic film that certainly feels like it’s filled with post-WWII and Cold War sensibilities. A group of young women is led by an older woman through a blasted landscape. Eventually, they come across an older man who, like the older woman, remembers the time before the apocalypse. What is left of civilization remains in those two older people, and civilization can’t survive against the forces of chaos and destruction. This isn’t a happy movie, but at least it’s quick. Be warned—there are some animals killed in the making of this.
Film: Female Trouble (1974)
Well, what do you expect from John Waters? Waters could get away with things in film that no one else could even consider attempting—his movies are terrible, offensive, and disgusting, at least in this part of his career—and people who would hold their nose at this kind of forced camp and terrible acting smile approvingly. Female Trouble more than anything feels like natural sequel to Pink Flamingos. In fact, the plot isn’t that different—Dawn Davenport (Divine) quits school, gets pregnant, and decides to live a life of crime. Eventually, she falls in with a group who believe that crime and beauty are synonymous and fuel her criminal rampage until she is captured. I mean…it’s John Waters, so you know what you’re going to get, and you’re going to get a lot of it.
I've seen 3 films from what you saw. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is an amazing film as is Female Trouble as I love the trashiness of John Waters. Now I prefer to call Hard Eight in its original title Sydney as I do think it is a phenomenal debut film from PT Anderson. Criterion needs to get that film and a few others of his into their collection.
ReplyDeleteIt's a little surprising that Anderson has only one movie in the Criterion collection that has physical copies.
DeleteLoneliness is the clear class of this half of the movies, but Hotel Ozone is worth tracking down.
I’ve only seen a few of these but two of them are excellent films.
ReplyDeleteThe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is not a happy, peppy viewing experience for sure but a worthwhile one with an exceptional performance by Tom Courtenay.
The Prowler is a solid noir that provides Evelyn Keyes with a better role than she usually received but Van Heflin makes the film. While he was all wrong in Joan Crawford’s “Possessed” as a selfish chick magnet the selfish bastard he plays here fits him because it requires a different sort of moral bankruptcy that suits his disheveled world weariness.
Female Trouble is what it is. Either you roll with it and then forget it, or you should stay far away.
Paltrow has kept me away from Hard Eight though I don’t think I ever took the time to look at the rest of the cast list which is strong so maybe someday.
You know me, I’m not a horror guy though I will give the gentler horror of the 50’s and 60’s a chance from time to time but you saying there is a lot of blood in The Flesh Eaters makes me reluctant, along with the title!
I never watched the series so Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man isn’t something made for me.
The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is new to me. It sounds very bleak.
The Prowler was surprising in a lot of ways and I liked it--and you're right that Heflin sells the role well. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was the class of this half of the catch up films, though, one that I think should be better-known.
ReplyDeleteI do sometimes wonder why John Waters gets away with what he does. Someone else making that movie would get no traction, but Female Trouble? I watched the Criterion version.
Hard Eight is good, not great. I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. The same is true of Hotel Ozone--it is bleak, but it's definitely worth your time.
The others, though, you can pretty easily skip without much loss.