BLÜCHER / THE BATTLE OF OSLO (2025)

Moving from previous documentary features to a WWII historical, Norwegian director Daniel Fahre tackles this locally famous war incident to good effect without overstating the case.  Keyed to the 1940 defense of Oscarsborg Fortress, an old structure meant to serve as a waterway buffer 30 minutes from the seat of government and the King in Oslo.  The fort underfunded and undermanned (largely with untrained recruits) in spite of pleas from aging fort commander Colonel Birger Eriksen (Bjørn Sundquist).  With the Norwegian military on high alert from nearby German/British naval activity and a large warship of unknown origin approaching, Norway’s neutrality & independence is on the line.  And no one can make out the markings or even an accurate distance to aim the fort’s two poorly maintained cannons.  Ordered to hold out as long as possible, the Colonel is running on instinct.  Something he’ll need to call on again when further attacks and a demand to surrender follow.  Told in flashback from a 1946 military investigation that's shot in b&w, the after-the-fact procedure is either mere face-saving or historical rewrite.*  Fahre works very close, presumably to save on the budget, but there’s enough large-scale battle sequences and explosions to get the situations across.  (Though too much ‘70s style rough hand-held camera work not a help.)  But the military dilemma and critical need for fast decisions register strongly.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *As they say in the Navy: Even if the Captain’s on the crapper when the fuck up happened, he’s still responsible for everything that happens on his ship.

THE DOG STARS (2026)

Now in his mid-80s, Ridley Scott is on a tear losing staggering amounts of other people’s money with every new project.  And eight more already announced.  The idea is when the Grim Reaper comes a’knockin’, Scott can say: ‘Sorry Grim, I’m already booked.’*  Exclude a pre-sold property like GLADIATOR II (disappointing in plenty of other ways   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/01/gladiator-ii-2024.html) and he’s had nothing but poorly received flops for a decade.  Now we get something no one asked for: a romantic, action-packed, near future dystopian fable.  Another major flop . . . and also the best film he’s made in years.  Even in handling the storyline; Scott’s Achilles heel.  Based on Peter Heller’s straight-forward bestseller helps: A post viral plague, a sparsely populated Earth, landsman survivers, roaming/ultra-violent scavengers, a Fight to Live another day.  (Make that Live to Fight another day.)  Easy.  Tall, hunky mechanic & pilot Jacob Elordi (with dog) is teamed with grizzled vet Josh Brolin (morphing into Nick Nolte), the two stocked with a warehouse of ordinance.  But when Jasper the dog goes down, widower Elordi asks ‘Is That All There Is?’ and takes off to find . . . something.  Crash-landing on Guy Pearce's isolated ranch, he finds daughter Margaret Qualley and so much in common.  For one thing, these gentle souls have all lost their spouses!   Another attack and a flight on the now fixed plane brings them to Scorched Earth Utopia . . . but is it?  Some of this is just silly, but handsomely observed (Scott’s strength), with four underrated actors perfectly cast.  Perhaps if it didn’t end three times, or found a new puppy for Elordi, it might have broken the current Ridley commercial curse.  Still, worth hanging in for.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Flashbacks to Elordi and his late wife include Jasper, the German Shepard, as a pup.  Only the pup’s fur is darker than the grown dog we’ve already met.  The opposite of what happens when that breed matures.  Scott’s reached the ‘Your Eminence’ stage where no one tells you when you’re making a mistake.  Including making a dystopian mediocrity when the genre is played out.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *An old George Burns joke based on his advance Las Vegas booking when he was approaching 100.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE (1985)

A Hallowe’en tie-in article touting SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET/’19 , a documentary on the making (and subsequent history) of the second ELM STREET fright-flick, and its current status as an ‘80s horror pic with a closeted gay sub-text (not so ‘sub’), along with the closeted gay actor in his first lead in it, hooks you in.  Heck, why leave the idea as a documentary?  This is feature film material.  Reboot the series!  But having never seen an ELM STREET, best to watch the film before the doc.  No?  Bad idea.  ELM STREET had already lost Johnny Depp (does he die in #1?), but as Part 2 had even bigger grosses than the first, how bad could it be?* (Rhetorical question.)  With writer/director Wes Craven replaced by crass horror specialist Jack Sholder and debuting scripter David Chaskin (only two further feature credits), the quick answer is very bad.  (Okay, it’s also the long answer.)  Above and below the line/in front and behind the camera; insultingly bad.  Featuring more bare male chests than a BAYWATCH marathon, but nary a fright or a giggle in this all-White suburban body-horror about creepy slasher ‘Freddy’ who shows up in the nightmares of 26-yr-old High Schooler Mark Patton, looking thin, miserable and out of condition.  And that’s before ‘Freddy’ bursts out of his flaccid bod as a corporal monster.  Featuring laughable effects, nonsense for logic, and Romper Room level acting.  (Are all the NIGHTMAREs this bad?)  It feels more like it's trying for a John Carpenter/HALLOWEEN/’78 vibe rather than Wes Craven.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Once upon a time, income on sequels were generally keyed less on intrinsic quality than on Box-Office results from the previous series release.  It often meant a one-film delay before a new word-of-mouth kicked in.  Pre-2000 James Bond films chart this theory nearly perfectly.  But recent decades no longer follow old patterns as the internet made old marketing theories and practices obsolete.

AS THE EARTH TURNS (1937)

In his twenties, he worked concept & special-effects on Golden Age Disney animation, then took to the air for his WWII service, returned for mostly non-theatrical, then won the 1950 documentary Oscar® with THE TITAN: The Story of Michelangelo.*  But what Richard Lyford is now remembered for are his amateur films, made as a teen film enthusiast.  Particularly his last, a forty-five minute sci-fi/mad scientist (chamber) spectacular.  How’d a kid in the Pacific Northwest do this?  And on a dime.  (Ever wonder what Ed Wood might have done if he had talent as well as moxie?  Here’s your chance.)  Spiffed up with decent restoration and a good music track by Ed Hartman, Lyford acts, directs, edits, shoots & produces this 45" b&w cautionary about the search to find Mad Scientist Pax who’s threatening world destruction unless peace breaks out on Earth.  Luckily, girl reporter Barbara Berjer has a lead on Pax and a mentor with pull in senior reporter Arther Verill (Alan Hoelting, not bad among the all-amateur cast).  Heading North by NorthWest to track the guy, the daring twosome surmount obstacles thru action-packed chases and adorable miniature special effects to reach Pax’s mountain cave lab.  There’s only one bad sequence (Berjer's kidnapping in the forest), but the rest of the film is what you always hoped a good Poverty Row Monogram feature would look like.  Great fun, legitimately exciting at times, and weirdly prescient in all sorts of ways.  The film’s been tagged as Early Indie or Experimental.  It’s not; more like the prize-winning amateur club fan entry of 1937.  Had Lyford’s momentum in commercial cinema not been stopped in its tracks by the war, who knows what he might have given us.  Watch with tolerance, but watch.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *TITAN, itself repurposed from an earlier release, available free on various platforms.  (Alas in pretty rough shape.)  It too was cribbed, inspiring the one & a half-reel intro that was in the RoadShow presentations of THE AGONY AND THE ECSTACY/’67.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/agony-and-ecstasy-1965.html

PANDORUM (2009)

Magpie doesn’t begin to do justice to this End-of-Days/Brave-New-World mash-up from co-writer/director Christian Alvart, a regular burgoo of ‘borrowed’ tropes from Noah’s Arc/Space Frontier stories, all seriously overdue at the DVD library.  Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster wake from hyper-sleep capsules on The Elysium, a huge vessel carting thousands of Earthlings on a long-distance/multi-year trip to colonize a replacement planet.  So where is everybody?  Searching for the control room on this Cruise Liner of a space-ship, Foster gets lost, then waylaid by various survivors and challenged by mysterious monsters.  It’s the ‘pandorum’ virus doing the dirty work, turning people into Cos-Play Zombies.  And should they survive these vicious SPLAT machines, the ship gets locked into oblivion countdown.  The best gag in the pic is how fit everyone looks!*  Those sleep pods work better than Ozempic and a free gym membership.  Meanwhile, back in the dark and grungy ship corridors, our lost brigade pretend they’re remaking THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (different sort of ship) a zillion miles from Earth. (Though a late twist does land them in hot water.)  Meanwhile, Quaid makes like Captain Nemo at the control panel; good guy or bad?  With feral fighting female Antje Traue for Foster to favor when not mourning his apparent widowerhood.  Oh, let’s not forget everyone’s least missed racist ‘80s cliché, the disposable Person-of-Color supporting actor.  Also on display, cut & paste action editing laid on with a trowel so you can’t tell action figure A from action figures B-thru-R, smothered in a propulsive/percussive score goosing up the pace like NFL highlights.  Nonetheless, secret happy ending: the film flopped badly enough to put the kibosh on two planned sequels.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  You wonder how post-millennial audiences handle the mesmerizing slowness of something like 2001/’68 when they’ve been inundated with ADHD speed in their space operas?  That distinctive slowness, one of things that made Kubrick’s masterpiece stand out and play in a believable manner, now hard to imagine getting a positive rating from influencers.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/2001-space-odyssey-1968.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One more good joke in here . . . but was it intentional?  You know those Emergency Light Sticks all the hardware stores stock?  You probably keep one in your closet for a power outage?  The ones where you shatter the interior glass tube and it glows with a greenish light?  Turns out, they’re standard issue for space travel two-thousand years on.

THOMPSON’S LAST RUN (1986)

Back when it was something of an event when an old-time movie star hit the small screen, Robert Mitchum splashed-down in Dan Curtis’s WWII maxi-series THE WINDS OF WAR/’83 and its follow-up WAR AND REMEMBRANCE/’88.  Mitchum’s disengagement growing steadily over the nineteen episode run.  Turning seventy between all that heavy-lifting prestige, he’s more engaged and far more animated in some of the tv pics he started to embrace.  None more so than this modest ‘find,’ tonally something of a  partner to THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE/’73.*  Here, he’s in prison for his safecracking ways when a surprise visitor comes by; niece Kathleen York, his only living relative other than her little boy.  Unaware he’s about to be transferred to Texas on a life sentence, and desperate for a new start (she’s been turning tricks to get by, she steals Mitchum from Wilford Brimley, the about to retire Sheriff handling the friendly transfer.  These two geezers with a long history between them, the inevitable cat-and-mouse chase nicely structured by writer John Carlen and believably staged by director Jerrold Freedman.  Even a neat double-helix bit of crisscross justice right at the end.  Keep expectations in check and swallow hard at some contrivances in the first half of the third act, and you just might be pleasantly surprised at how satisfying this is.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *EDDIE COYLE no modest/pretty good surprise, but a full bore masterpiece that holds its cards close to the vest and speaks quietly.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-friends-of-eddie-coyle-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  A foot race at the end features a lot of stunt doubling for a wheezing Brimley; whereas Mitchum appears to be doing all his own running.  No slow-cranking fakery for Bob!  What a pity no one thought to steal the scene from GUARDIE E LADRI / COPS AND ROBBERS/’51 that sees Robber Totò totally running out of steam just as Cop Aldo Fabrizi also runs out of steam, their chase continuing on foot, but at a slow, exhausted crawl.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/guardie-e-ladri-cops-and-robbers-1951.html

SLEEP, MY LOVE (1948)

Now in her mid-forties, Claudette Colbert was just off THE EGG AND I/’47 (that alarmingly successful city-folk-go-hayseed comedy that not only birthed Ma & Pa Kettle, but eventually GREEN ACRES), when she made this transparent ripoff of GASLIGHT/’44.  (One of many, GASLIGHT itself a remake.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/gaslight-1944.html)  ‘Presented’ by Mary Pickford, though husband Charles ’Buddy’ Rogers takes screen credit, it’s impeccably produced in all ways but the one that counts: the screenplay.  Again, there’s a ‘caring’ husband (Don Ameche in the Charles Boyer role) ‘gaslighting’ wife Colbert to drive her nuts & grab an inheritance (Ingrid Bergman’s spot), while Robert Cummings takes on the Joseph Cotten role of guardian angel.  Knowing the audience is going to be ahead of the action, this iteration reveals the villain by reel two, but has more than enough juice left from cast & crew to hold interest.  (Supporting players include Raymond Burr, George Coulouris, Key Luke, Rita Johnson, Ralph Morgan and a stellar Hazel Brooks.)   Plus director Douglas Sirk covering studio sets & exteriors like a curious crab.*  (Influenced by George Cukor’s use of vertical tracking in the 1944 GASLIGHT?)  A tricky shoot-out climax especially fine.  Shot with noir trimmings by Joe Valentine, a Hitchcock regular at the time.  All good. If only the script knew when to tighten the screws and when to loosen up.  Poor Claudette has to go ON or OFF crazy more often than 'La Sonnambula’ in Bellini’s opera.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *Sirk & Colbert had better luck with THUNDER ON THE HILL/’51.  And Colbert got closer to GASLIGHT in THE SECRET FURY/’50.       https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/thunder-on-hill-1951.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-secret-fury-1950.html

BURNING / BEONING (2018)

With just seven features over three decades, Korean writer/director Lee Chang-dong  has a buzzy new film out (POSSIBLE LOVE/’26 - not seen here), his first since this award-winning creep-out from eight years ago.  At once straight-forward and nuanced, it moves like a daydream following the affairs of a lonely/longing young man (Yoo Ah-in), living by himself at his fast emptying rural family farm close enough to Tokyo for his warehouse job, while considering himself a budding writer.  (William Faulkner his favorite.)  On a work delivery, he bumps into an old acquaintance (Jeon Jong-seo), one-time neighbor who went to his grade school a few years behind him.   Then it’s chat, drinks, bed.  Yoo Ah-in only looks shy; Jeon Jong-seo a bit of a flake.  And while they’ve only just been reacquainted, and she’s off the next day for a dance/music course in Africa, perhaps he could watch her cat while she’s away?   But when she returns, she’s partnered with a smooth operator (Steven Yeun), a rich guy with an odd, indiscriminately seductive vibe.  The rest of the film, which involves disappearance and maybe murder, invokes metaphor, a term discussed by the literate threesome; one you’ll grasp long before anyone on screen does.  And that’s a problem as the film feels stretched out of all proportion.  Two and a half hours for something that might have fit in a half-hour anthology format.  Pretty thin gruel.  It would have worked better as one of those tri-part portmanteau films that seem to have gone out of fashion.*  It’s well done by all; and has a finish both obvious and satisfying.  Perhaps a period setting was needed to add social heft and the difficulty of breaking etiquette between classes, giving reason to reticence.  Perhaps Lee Chang-dong’s new film lives up to the buzz.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *With current financial  models governing theatrical releases, are the days of portmanteaux pix gone for good?  Back in the 1950s, Somerset Maugham alone had three (ten stories worth); while in Italy, Vittorio De Sica was likely champ.  Three or four of them on his own (plus another in English) and multiple contributions to ones with multiple directors.

MARS ATTACKS (1996)

Tim Burton functions best when the budget is tight and content pushes him past his comfort zone.  (In other words, not one of his ALICE films.)  So why is MARS ATTACKS so much fun?  The exception that proves the rule?  It could lose a reel or two, but you’ll be giggling too hard to mind.  Based not on a book (comic or otherwise), but on a series of TOPPS Chewing Gum Trading Cards*, story and tone largely inspired by ‘50s Sci-Fi (think THIS ISLAND EARTH/’55; WAR OF THE WORLDS/’53*).  With a huge, unnecessary All-Star cast showing who can get their laughs within the agogic Burton rhythm (Jack Nicholson, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, and especially Sylvia Sidney can; everyone else can’t).  But the film’s propulsion doesn’t come from smart dialogue, dumb gags or narrative inertia, but from its elegant high-concept design and lo-fi execution.  Particularly out in space when enemy space craft ominously orbit Earth.  Twenty years after STAR WARS, these may be retro toy models, but grandly purposed and displayed like the imaginatively painted box the scale model kits came in.  Commercial artwork that both ignited and ultimately limited the Burton æsthetic.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  *The idea man behind the TOPPS card series, Len Brown, isn’t properly credited on screen, but did recently get this excellent NYTimes obit.  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/arts/len-brown-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

DOUBLE-BILL/SPOILERS/LINK:  *Just as WAR OF THE WORLDS had the aliens defeated not by weapons of mass destruction, but by ‘the little things,’ viruses and such, so here, where they are felled by a double dose of sub-operatic kitsch: Rudolf Friml operetta sung by Grand Old Opry’s Slim Whitman.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/this-island-earth-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/war-of-worlds-1953.html