Don't Look Now - 1973 film review

There are a lot of hopeless horror movies around, but there are also several masterpieces. My three all-time favourites are The Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now (Midsommar, which has grown on me, is not too far behind, but I don't think it's quite in the same league, while The Shining didn't impress me quite as much as it did most people). I first watched Don't Look Now in the 70s and the shock ending made a great impact on me. It's an arty film, perhaps too self-consciously so, but a recent viewing confirmed that it hasn't lost its power.

The premise is simple and is based on a short story, rather than a novel, by Daphne du Maurier. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland play a married couple, the Baxters, whose young daughter dies tragically in a drowning incident. The little girl was wearing a red coat at the time. The couple are deeply affected by their dreadful loss but some time later travel to Venice, where John Baxter is working on an ancient church. In Venice, they meet two elderly sisters, one of whom (superbly played by Hilary Mason) is blind and psychic and claims to be able to see the little girl. Meanwhile, a series of murders is being committed in the city... 

The first time I watched the film, I found it quite bewildering. At that time, I'd never visited Venice, which makes a fantastic setting for the story. Venice is gorgeous, but it also has its macabre side, with all those bewildering twists and turns of the alleyways and the ever-present canals. Water is a central theme of the screenplay and the camera work is dazzling.

I've always been a Julie Christie fan and although the casting of Donald Sutherland must have seemed like a gamble, he is terrific too. This is a film that could easily have slipped into pretentiousness, but the performances are so effective that the risk is averted. The result is a haunting gem.

In Fear - film review

In Fear is a low-budget British horror film that is at times genuinely frightening. Less ambitious than The Shining, yes, but I found it at least as impressive, partly because writer and director Jeremy Lovering was wise enough to keep the film short - it's just 84 minutes long, and perhaps could have been cut even more ruthlessly - there are only three characters, and the storyline is restricted in terms of both time and place.

Tom (Iain De Caestecker) has been going out with Lucy (Alice Englert) for just two weeks. He's taking her to a music festival, but springs a surprise on her - he's booked them into a hotel before they reach the festival. She agrees to accompany him, but an incident in a pub (the setting is Ireland, though the film was shot in Cornwall and Devon) in which Tom gets involved in a contretemps with some locals, is rather unsettling.

Off they drive to the hotel, but soon they get lost. Round and round the narrow country lanes they go, following signs that seem to lead nowhere. And is someone watching them, enjoying their discomfort? The sat nav is on the blink, the hotel isn't answering the phone, and the petrol is running low. Soon bad things start to happen....

I have vivid memories of a beautiful evening which I spent driving in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains with my family a good few years ago. Incompetently, I got lost - and as I drove round and round the narrow country lanes, my petrol started to run low....so I really did find it easy to empathise with Tom and Lucy's plight. I'm not suggesting this film is a masterpiece, but Englert's performance in particular is excellent, and a creepy soundtrack enhances the fear factor. Well worth watching.

The Shining - film review

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining was released in 1980, but I've managed to miss seeing it all these years - though I was keen to repair the omission. Kubrick was a gifted film-maker, and this movie, based on a novel by Stephen King which I haven't read, has enjoyed a great improvement in its reputation after receiving rather mixed reviews on its first release. It's now widely regarded as one of the great horror movies.

Essentially, its storyline'offers a variant on the "haunted house" theme. Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) is hired to spend the winter looking after the remote Overlook Hotel. He's warned at the outset that the hotel has an unfortunate history - a previous caretaker, called Grady, went crazy and dismembered his family. But Jack isn't daunted. He's a writer,wanting to work in peace on his next project, and is accompanied by his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny.

At first all goes fairly well. Jack gets down to work - and what writer wouldn't fancy the idea of a long break in congenial surroundings to get some serious writing done? Unfortunately, the wise writer, in my opinion, takes interruptions in his stride, and Jack really does not handle interruptions at all well. What's more, Danny starts seeing disturbing visions. Soon, things turn rather nasty...

I was amused to see Philip Stone playing the part of Grady; I remember seeing him, when I was a small boy, in a crime series called The Rat Catchers, starring the once-popular Gerald Flood, that my parents used to watch, though I can't remember much about it. He was a quintessentially English actor, so it was rather odd to see him in this film. Jack Nicholson, needless to say, was entirely convincing as the increasingly deranged Torrance.

The film is stronger on visual effects (the spookiness of the vast hotel is cleverly done, and there's a terrific climactic sequence in a snow-covered maze) than on narrative consistency. I gather King has mixed feelings about the adaptation, but on the whole, it's a gripping film, even if there's plenty of scope to debate whether the demons plaguing Jack Torrance come from within him or from outside. I'm glad I caught up with it at long last.