Shock

 I'm way more familiar with the work of those who built upon Mario Bava's career than with the work of the man himself, which is something I really should remediate. Looking up his last movie, Shock (directed with the help of his son Lamberto) seems to be regarded as a relatively minor work.

 That... sounds about right. It's still pretty good, though!

 Dora (Daria Nicolodi), her young son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and husband Bruno (John Steiner) move back to the house where Dora lived with her first husband, who went missing at sea seven years ago. Strange things start happening almost immediately, especially around young Marco, who keeps finding his way into the basement and acts strangely around a suspiciously bricked-off section of a wall. This is despite the us being shown that Bruno zealously keeps the basement locked and even lies to Dora that he doesn't know where the keys are.

 It soon becomes apparent that Marco is, if not possessed, at least being influenced by the ghost of Dora's deceased husband. This is at its funniest when, while Dora is getting it on with Bruno in the floor below, Marco suddenly sits up in bed and start screaming Filthy! Filthy! Filthy!. It's at its most disturbing when, while roughhousing, Marco gets on top of Dora and starts making making sex grunts. Along with A Christmas Horror Story, this is the second movie I see in the last few days that has a pre-teen get extremely oedipal. I regret nothing!

 In any case, while there are some jump scares (a couple of them pretty effective!), it's all mostly within the realm of plausible deniability as to whether something supernatural is going on or not... especially when we see Bruno surreptitiously spiking Dora's drinks. As things go on some doubt is cast as to what really happened between Dora and her first husband, too, as she seems to have blacked out everything that happened (electroshock therapy is mentioned). The film keeps its cards close to its chest up to the finale, which wraps up the mystery a bit abruptly but in a fairly satisfying way.

 The soundtrack, by the band Libra, is an extremely '70s funky prog deal that's jarring enough to earn a few laughs, but nevertheless scores a creepy calliope-like refrain whenever the ghost seemingly exerts its influence over Marco, and a lovely piano main theme for the movie.

 Effects are kept at a minimum - this is a very low budget movie with very little in the way of gore, but most of them are pretty effective and in a couple of cases, very ingenious. The cinematography and editing can get pretty drab except for a few standout sequences. The script, which went through a few iterations over almost a decade, is reasonably put together. Its story is compelling enough, and though there are some minor plot holes and clichés, it sets up recurring visual images - like a deeply ugly porcelain hand sculpture, which will be echoed by repeated hallucinations of a ghostly zombie hand - beautifully.

 The acting is great - particularly Dora, who is often heartbreaking in her vulnerability. She also gets a couple chances to look into the camera and say 'Marco!' with relish, which is the sort of script/acting choice that never fails to amuse me.

 Shock is an old-school slow burn that's a bit too subdued for its own good, and a little too artless at times. It's got a handful of truly great imagery and sequences, though, and its story remains compelling throughout. It might not be as visually polished as I expected but I enjoyed it.

Executioners From Shaolin (Hong Xi Guan)

 When the evil Qing dynasty learn that the famed Shaolin Temple is harboring rebels, the ruling manchu send the undefeatable kung-fu priest Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) to destroy it. He kills the headmaster of the temple handily after... trapping a low kick with his crotch in a scene that could only be improved if he screamed "prehensile groin technique!"

 The surviving students flee into the countryside, and after a narrow escape from imperial forces (aided by an extremely heroic sacrifice from fellow student played by Gordon Liu) they decide to spread out and crew the red boats that ply the rivers of China, passing themselves off as theater performers. One day, they hope, to get their revenge against Pai Mei and those nasty nasty Qing.

 Thus the stage is set for another traditional tale of sedition and revolution - but a funny thing happens: While alighting at the riverside, one of the rebellion's leaders, the inventor of tiger boxing Hung Hsi-Kuan (Chen Kuan-tai) has a meet-cute with Fang (Lily Li), a local beauty who also happens to be a master of the crane style.

 His quest for revenge is delayed as they court, get married and have a child. Honour demands a confrontation, however, one for which his skill in the tiger style may not be powerful enough.

 Executioners From Shaolin is another classic Shaw Brothers film from director Lau Kar-lung, and its tone is far lighter than its premise might lead you to think - this is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because love story itself and the Hung family life are genuinely charming and sweet; Bad, because there's a lot of grating comedy about idiots behaving like children that I could not manage to find endearing - Cheng Kang Yeh (I think), specifically, is insufferable, and the film gets a lot better once the film leaves Hsi-Kuan's compatriots aside to focus on his family life and quest to kill Pai Mei.

 The fights are impeccable - very old school in that you can set a metronome to them, but pretty inventive and the athleticism of the performers is above reproach. The fighting is a lot dirtier than most other Kung Fu movies I've seen, with a bunch of eye gouging and a lot - and I do mean a lot - of attempted testicle crushing, kicking, snatching and clawing. Many of the moves are pretty comedic, too; I'm not sure how to feel about the climactic move that brings about Pai Mei's final defeat on a dramatic level, but I can't argue that it got a huge belly laugh out of me.

 There's also a good share of cool and original training montages, the highlight of which is a target dummy with marbles running through it to represent chi flows. Or something, I'm no expert (clearly). But it is pretty cool.

 More than anything else, the film ends up telling a very satisfying, deeply felt story about inter-generational revenge that manages to make kung fu techniques and philosophies integral to their development. I love that sort of thing.

 There's so much to like here. Fang's mastery of the "two-adduction stance", where she locks her legs in an unmovable fighting stance, comes into play at her wedding night in a very cute, funny, and successful show of pride; Years later, her son (Wong Yu) trains with her father in a brilliant fight that begins over the dinner table (a chopstick duel that predates Fearless Hyena's by a couple of years) and then moves to wreaking havoc among the clotheslines. The final result? The almost mythical warriors chastised, one mending clothes and the other doing the washing.

 I think this film suffers from being placed next to the other classics Lau Kar-lung produced during his decades as a director. And to be perfectly honest, I found the film to be a little on the slower side, with a little too much time devoted to unsuccessful comedy. But it's a great story, well told, with the requisite amazing kung fu and characters that are a lot easier to root for than these movies normally manage. It's another good one.

The Last Wave

  Hasn't the weather been strange... could it be a warning? Asks the oddly worded poster for The Last Wave, Peter Weir's 1977 follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock.
 Like his previous film, it's another languid, atmospheric take on a mystery that's never really resolved. Or rather, it is, kind of, but it's a vague resolution that just raises more questions. It's complicated.

 Things kick off in a tiny school somewhere in the Australian outback on a cloudless, sweltering summer day. Suddenly thunder rings out, then driving rain; the children get herded back into the classroom shortly before huge hailstones start coming down, breaking windows, hurting one of the kids and scaring them all half to death. A great scene.

 A short time later, rainstorms are hammering Sidney, but at least these ones have the grace to come from cloudy skies. There we meet our protagonist, David (Richard Chamberlain), a corporate tax lawyer.
 Because he's offered some advice to humanitarian organizations in the past, he's asked to help mount a legal defense for a group of aboriginals who stand accused of killing another man. Feeling unqualified, but intrigued, David takes the case.

 As the days go on, David is assaulted by vivid dreams - including a creepy one where a whole street is drowned, and one where he sees one of the aboriginals in his house; a neat trick, since he hasn't met them face-to-face yet. When he later recognizes him from his dream, he starts getting convinced that something supernatural is going on. He tries to get explanations from the aborigine in his dream (David Gulpilil) and their shaman (Nandjiwarra Amagula), and gets... well, something about being a 'Mulkurul', a made-up term that the Wikipedia entry for the movie tells me has to do with 'a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bearing sacred objects with them'.
 The weird stuff is intriguing, but not a lot gets explained - just a few tantalizing connections, like David being from South America, and then discovering what look like Mayan drawings and artifacts in the sewers beneath the city. 

 It's an appropriately dream-like movie, glacially paced and drenched through (ha!) with water imagery. Almost every scene features running water in some capacity, and it turns out to be an eerily effective motif. The film oozes atmosphere thanks to some great cinematography (courtesy of Russell Boyd) and a cool electronic-and-didgeridoo-powered soundtrack (from Groove Myers).

 Unfortunately, that is most of what it's running on - Atmosphere. Also: Fortean phenomena, a vague apocalyptic sense of menace, a few woolly mysteries, and some nice visuals. The narrative is too much on the thin side, and to be honest I found it a bit of a chore to get through.
 Weir has stated that he wanted to explore what happens when a modern pragmatic person gets a premonition, and David's journey from rationalist to believer is engaging (aided by a very likeable performance from Chamberlain and Olivia Hamnett, who plays his wife). Though I did laugh when he starts talking about sorcery as a murder weapon at a courtroom, silly wig and all.
 Meanwhile the native actors do a good job of playing a closed-knit group trying to gauge this intruder's attempts to poke at a body of knowledge no one ever shows any interest in.

 I don't know; This is the kind of movie that I suspect I would have liked if I had watched it on a day when I'm more in tune with its wavelength - it's certainly well-made and weird enough to merit a revisit someday.

Jabberwocky

 Sometime between Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Terry Gilliam decided he wanted to make his own movie, distanced from the troupe that he had helped make famous. Well, not too distanced - Michael Palin plays the main character, and Neil Iness and Terry Jones make an appearace... so, between them that's half of the Pythons (along with a load of '70s British comedians).

 But for good or ill, it's clear that this is Gilliam's show.
 It's clear in the production design, the framing of the shots, and the bleak, misanthropic worldview. As far as being, you know, good... well, that'd need to wait until the next movie.

 Palin plays Dennis Cooper, an apprentice cooper that is more interested in the business-side of coopering than on the actual barrel making. His father and employer loathes him for it, and disowns him on his deathbed.

 With no other means of sustenance, Dennis goes off to the big city to make his fortune so he can come back and ask for the hand of his grotesque childhood sweetheart. But the guilds have all the business sown up in town, to the point that a legendary cooper Dennis meets soon after sneaking into the city has resorted to cutting his own feet to make more money begging.
 No matter. Soon Dennis befriends a knight's page, who takes him under his wing, and they embark on a series of mildly funny adventures that will end up with Dennis going against the Jabberwock, a beast that's ravaging the land.

 Cooper is your quintessential Palin character, a good-natured goof with unending reserves of innocence and optimism who is then run through a wringer for comic effect. His bumbling attempts to help always backfire, and his modest aims in life (get a little business and return to his hometown sweetheart that clearly can't stand him) fail upwards tragically (he ends up getting the traditional happily ever after, except that it's at the expense of everything he actually wanted.)

 The filmmaking is great, if a bit unpolished - there's lots of imaginative shots and great use of darkness, and Gilliam's trademark lived-in clutter. The sets are a wonder (they were lucky enough to be able to reuse the run-down Oliver sets at Shepperton, just before they were demolished.) While their lines aren't always that great, the actors seem to be having a blast. Palin is likeable and annoying as ever - this is probably peak Palin as a role- and there's always something interesting going on somewhere in the frame.

 Unfortunately I just didn't find it very funny. Unlike Brazil or other later Gilliam films, the humor isn't subtle (or subtle-ish) or ironic or organic; Here it's wall to wall jokes and humorous situations. Except... that they're mostly pretty bland. Trying to distance itself away from the surrealistic humor of Monty Python, the script instead relies on standard farce, gross-out humour, very broad jokes and mugging hysterically to the cameras. Very of its time.
 The best jokes in the movie, like the way they end up deciding who wins a tournament, are very... well, Pythonesque. And the whole exaggeratedly dirty medieval look and casual violence, which might have carried some of the humor, was already familiar from Holy Grail.

 Even if there aren't a lot of laughs, it's amusing enough, in a very basic way. It's always interesting to look at as well, despite the low budget and rough edges, and the ideas it plays with are fun. I'd watched this before ages ago when I first became obsessed with Monty Python and didn't care for it at all. This time around, trying to let it be its own thing I liked it a bit better. I'd take Holy Grail or Time Bandits over this in a heartbeat, but I've watched way worse movies for the sake of completism.