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  #61  
Old 3rd April 2023, 05:35 PM
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Yesterday's Enemy (1959)

A serious take on the British army campaign in Burma during the Second World War in which a captain committed war crimes against the civilian population.

Stanley Baker is excellent here as the moral free captain who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants including the summary execution of the local people. The film delivers a strong anti war message throughout and is a million miles away from a typical boys own adventure you might expect.

For all the cynicism involved and disgust with the captain's stop at nothing to get what he wants treatment of others you still root for him when he's captured by the Japanese and they exact out identikit treatment to the British soldiers.

Val Guest filmed everything on sound stages, there's no location work at all and the sets are generally superb, however they are also constricting especially during the battle with Japanese forces late on in the film, you get the feeling it's like The Naked Gun where they have shootouts round a garbage can.

Yesterday's Enemy is a good film with a strong message but it's not a fun film, not the sort of thing that keeps you coming back for more.

The dvd i watched was excellent quality and beautifully restored with a nice full colour 24 page booklet from Hammer historian Marcus Hearn.
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Old 5th April 2023, 06:13 PM
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The Camp on Blood Island (1958)

Deep in the jungles of Malaya, British soldiers, women and children are held in prison camps by the Japanese as World War II comes to an end, under threat of death by the sadistic camp leader that if Japan surrenders all the prisoners will be murdered.

Hammer's powerful prisoner of war movie has some fairly strong scenes for it's time and is probably nastier than the majority of it's horror films in it's depiction of true horror.

It's well acted by the likes of Andre Morrell, Edward Underdown and Barbara Shelley and the Japanese although cruel are depicted more realistically than as mere monsters thanks to equally credible performances by the likes of Ronald Radd and Marne Maitland - even if they are under politically incorrect Japanese style make up - although the less said about Michael Ripper the better. I couldn't help but laugh at him, probably out of embarrassment.

Director Val Guest keeps tension levels high throughout and the action when it arrives is well staged and is better than it's low budget Bridge on the River Kwai tag might suggest.

Another great looking restored Columbia dvd, again with a colourful booklet from Marcus Hearn. However i will upgrade this onto Blu-ray during the October Indicator sale.
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  #63  
Old 4th June 2023, 04:45 PM
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The Silent Enemy (1958)

Based on the real life exploits of Lionel "Buster" Crabb, a bomb disposal expert who leads a team of divers who defuse bombs placed on the hulls of British ships off the coast of Gibraltar by Italian frogmen using 'underwater chariots'.

Crabb is someone i was unaware of until watching this film. Laurence Harvey is very good in the role depicting an officer who commands both the respect of his men and also his superiors in Naval High Command.

The underwater scenes are shot brilliantly with the location work on the coast of Gibraltar excellent giving the film a genuinely realistic look.

The Silent Enemy i found really entertaining and also enlightening as it builds up towards an almost Bond like race against time to destroy the Italian frogmen's underwater base before they decimate the incoming British Naval fleet on it's way to North Africa.

As a final thing it's probably the only film that Sid James, brilliant as the divers drill instructor, is cast alongside Italian Gothic horror star Giacomo Rossi-Stuart.

The 2022 Blu-ray from StudioCanal is excellent. The picture quality is immaculate even the under water sequences and there's some beautiful depth to scenes shot on land with the Rock of Gibraltar in the background.

The sound is 2:0 channel mono and is crystal clear. None of the hiss you sometimes get on speech with black and white films.

The Blu-ray boasts a Movietone news item on Crabb going missing whilst on a secret mission and there's a half hour interview with author Tim Binding which although decent was filmed during lockdown and the webcam images constantly pixelate although the sound is fine.
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  #64  
Old 4th June 2023, 10:13 PM
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36 Hours (1965)

The Nazis capture an American Major working in intelligence and convince him it's 1950 in an elaborate plot to extract information about the D-Day invasion which German high command expects to happen in a few days time at Pas de Calais.

This feels almost Hitchcockian in it's intricacies showing the lengths the Germans would go to in order to gain vital intelligence. In this case an entire fake American hospital on the German Swiss border staffed by doctors and nurses of the Allied occupation forces. In a way the more you think about it the more implausible it becomes and yet thanks to great work by James Garner as the Major, Robert Taylor as the Allied Doctor / German Major in charge of the operation, Eva Marie Saint as Garner's nurse director George Seaton just about pulls it off.

However if you don't go deep into the intricate details and just go with the flow it's a fantastic and enthralling piece of entertainment about a mass deception. What i enjoyed about it was the cat and mouse game with the actual facts played by Garner and what amounted to two factions of German officers. Those that simply agreed with high command that the invasion would be in one place and others who thought for themselves like Taylor's Major and factually Rommel for instance. The miss information and disinterest in what turned out to be the actual invasion plans were fascinating.

The HMV Premium Collection Blu-ray which looks very pretty is well worth a purchase for anyone interested before it, like so many other Premium Collection titles, disappears for good.
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  #65  
Old 5th June 2023, 06:14 PM
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Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Final Cut. - Clocking in at a good twenty minutes shorter than the Redux version released in 2001, the Final Cut, released and remastered in 2019, at just over three hours is director Francis Ford Coppola's preferred version.

It took me several viewings of the theatrical version to even begin to appreciate what a masterpiece this film was. Apocalypse Now never seemed like a movie, especially the first two hours, it feels like a 'look at life' in war torn Vietnam, albeit a look at life from the invading American point of view with the horrors and indeed frivolities of war there for all to see. The idea of troops surfing the waves and ogling performing Playboy Bunnies especially flown in, whilst others were flattening nearby Vietnamese villages just seems so, well, f*cked up, basically.

The Final Cut with it's 4K remaster is something to behold. Not only can Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore love the smell of Napalm in the morning, in 4K he can hear it decimate his sound system too via the intense Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

And as for that 'Wagner - death from above sequence'...Wow! Just wow!!! It's a stunning piece of film making from the beautiful way Coppola frames the composition to the roar of helicopters in and out of the speakers. Truly one of the greatest sequences in the history of cinema.

It's during the final half hour when Martin Sheen's Captain Willard reaches his goal of finding the jungle habitat of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz that the film ventures into woozy horror territory. It's a last act that feels like the grungiest of Italian cannibal films and the murder of Kurtz intercut with the sacrifice of a cow is sickening to see. Don't do what i did and look into the cow's eyes as it's neck is being hacked by machete swipes. It's f*cking obvious it's real and all the more harrowing.
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  #66  
Old 5th June 2023, 08:27 PM
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Brilliant write-up, Dem

Apocalypse Now is a great film, one of my favourites, and one I've seen countless times.

The 4K release is outstanding, with the AV quality, on the 4K Ultra HD discs noticeably better than the (admittedly impressive) Blu-ray discs. The HDR really makes the colours 'pop' and accentuate the contrast levels, with the Dolby Atmos track being as good as you accurately described. The object-based sound is impressive in making the action sequences seem even more violent, and the sprawling Kurtz compound seem uncomfortably claustrophobic and horrific.

In part of a review I wrote many years ago, I said:

"The making of 'Apocalypse Now' is almost an analogy for the Vietnam war itself: Americans, full of money and ambition, travel to a distant country that they know nothing about believing things will run smoothly then find that what can go wrong, does. Coppola even admitted afterwards that "we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Martin Sheen had a heart attack, Francis Ford Coppola had a nervous breakdown, Marlon Brando turned up 100lbs overweight and not having read either the screenplay or 'Heart of Darkness', several members of the crew were kidnapped by Filippino guerrillas, the shoot was set back by a typhoon and ended up lasting over 200 days and costing over $30 million, nearly bankrupting Coppola. It is probably for these reasons that 'Apocalypse Now' resembled the chaos of Vietnam more than most other films about the conflict and is the finest Vietnam War film and one of the greatest war films ever made."
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Old 5th June 2023, 09:40 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs View Post
Brilliant write-up, Dem

Apocalypse Now is a great film, one of my favourites, and one I've seen countless times.

The 4K release is outstanding, with the AV quality, on the 4K Ultra HD discs noticeably better than the (admittedly impressive) Blu-ray discs. The HDR really makes the colours 'pop' and accentuate the contrast levels, with the Dolby Atmos track being as good as you accurately described. The object-based sound is impressive in making the action sequences seem even more violent, and the sprawling Kurtz compound seem uncomfortably claustrophobic and horrific.

In part of a review I wrote many years ago, I said:

"The making of 'Apocalypse Now' is almost an analogy for the Vietnam war itself: Americans, full of money and ambition, travel to a distant country that they know nothing about believing things will run smoothly then find that what can go wrong, does. Coppola even admitted afterwards that "we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Martin Sheen had a heart attack, Francis Ford Coppola had a nervous breakdown, Marlon Brando turned up 100lbs overweight and not having read either the screenplay or 'Heart of Darkness', several members of the crew were kidnapped by Filippino guerrillas, the shoot was set back by a typhoon and ended up lasting over 200 days and costing over $30 million, nearly bankrupting Coppola. It is probably for these reasons that 'Apocalypse Now' resembled the chaos of Vietnam more than most other films about the conflict and is the finest Vietnam War film and one of the greatest war films ever made."
Thank you, Nos. I think between the two of us we've reviewed it quite well.

Have you watched the Heart of Darkness Film Makers Apocalypse feature? Is that good?

I think i'd also like the 2012 StudioCanal Blu as it has the original theatrical cut on it.
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Old 5th June 2023, 10:46 PM
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D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)

A bit of a mixed bag for me, this is only a film about D-Day during the final twenty minutes the rest of the film is a talky romantic war time melodrama in which Dana Wynter falls for American officer Robert Taylor whilst her husband to be, Richard Todd, is out in Africa fighting.

There's not really enough going on here and it seems they came up with a subplot about a maverick colonel (Edmund O'Brien) to use up several minutes and attempt to up the general interest in what is a pretty anemic war film. Hanover Street (1979) managed the love triangle and war story so much better.

Having said that the action when it finally happens is nicely done with the final scenes surprising to say the least.
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  #69  
Old 6th June 2023, 10:22 PM
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Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs View Post
Thank you, Nos. I think between the two of us we've reviewed it quite well.

Have you watched the Heart of Darkness Film Makers Apocalypse feature? Is that good?

I think i'd also like the 2012 StudioCanal Blu as it has the original theatrical cut on it.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a superb documentary, a must-watch for any fan of Apocalypse Now. If you haven't seen it and want, I'll happily lend you the DVD.
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Old 6th June 2023, 10:47 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs View Post
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is a superb documentary, a must-watch for any fan of Apocalypse Now. If you haven't seen it and want, I'll happily lend you the DVD.
Thanks Nos, that's very kind but it's disc 2 of the 2022 StudioCanal Blu-ray
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