Fireback (1983)

"He's heading for the jungle" says a cop as the hero of Fireback (1983) makes his getaway.  Which is more than slightly perplexing as the action is meant to be taking place in the United States.  Which, as far as I know, doesn't actually have any jungles on its continental territory.  Perhaps, "He's heading for the forest" might have been more accurate, although the area in question looks more like the woods at the end of someone's garden than a forest, let alone a jungle.  Such confusion typifies the problems with Fireback a Philippines based production pretending to be American.  Obviously shot entirely in the Philippines, it never feels authentic, the settings never convincing the viewer that the action really is taking place in the US.  It is all too generically 'US' -it never makes clear exactly where in the US it is supposed to be taking place. (Perhaps if it had been specified as Louisiana, they might just have got away with passing off the semi-tropical architecture, swamplands and 'jungle' as being in the Bayou).  The sense of dislocation isn't helped by the fact that the map on the Police Chief's wall (we never know exactly where he is police chief of)  is clearly of the Philippines, rather than any part of the US.  

The vagueness of the film's setting extends to its scenario - we open in the jungles of Vietnam, (the Philippines double as 'Nam more effectively than it does the US), where our hero, a weapons expert, is demonstrating a new multi-purpose weapon to a squad of American soldiers.  The camp is overrun by the Viet-Cong and the expert captured.  Next thing, we're at a military HQ where a rescue mission is ordered.  At this point, it seems a safe assumption that the rest of the film will be about the hero's rescue and how he uses his skills, (he can apparently construct a weapon from anything), to facilitate his and the rescue team's return to US lines.  But the rescue is only cursorily depicted and next thing the hero is back in a hospital in the US.  The whole Vietnam business has lasted barely ten minutes!  On his discharge, he finds that his wife has vanished, abducted (and, we subsequently learn, murdered) by a local gangster who had become enamoured of her when she thought her husband was dead in Vietnam.  This is where the real plot finally starts, as he tracks down the gangster, beating up and/or killing anyone who gets in his way, with the gangster, in turn, sending various hit men to try and kill our hero.  Framed for one of the few killings he didn't commit, the expert finds himself running from the police as well as the bad guys.

Hiding out in a scrap yard, A-Team style, he constructs not only a home made equivalent of the multi-purpose gun he was demonstrating in Vietnam, but also customises his car with a number of Bond-type gadgets.  Escaping into that 'jungle' after his whereabouts are discovered, he mows down lots of trigger happy cops with his gun.  Eventually evading them, he faces off against a Ninja sent by the gangster t kill him before finally facing off against the villain at the latter's hideout.  Preceding the closing credits, onscreen text tells us that the expert then went on the run, was eventually caught, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying in prison from heart failure!  Throughout, Fireback gives the impression that, with a little more effort, it could have been a half-decent low budget vigilante movie.  But, while it introduces a number of promising ideas and characters, it never develops them, instead effectively throwing them away all too quickly.  The gun he constructs, for instance, is never fully exploited, its capabilities never properly explored.  Likewise the customised car, which vanishes as quickly as it is introduced.  Some of the villain's henchmen look as if they are going to become interesting supporting characters, particularly the 'Man With the Golden Hand',  But that metallic hand is never explained and the character never rises above being a simple thug before he is summarily dispatched by the hero.  

Fireback was one of a number of action films that star Richard Harrison, (who, in the sixties and seventies had enjoyed success as the star of Italian exploitation films in a number of genres), made for Silver Star in the eighties.  Silver Star were a US/Philippines production company that specialised in shooting cheap action films in the Philippines and passing them off as American for the home video market.  Slackly directed in his debut by Teddy Page, (who was to become a regular director for Silver Star), on locations that look as if they might be producer and crew's apartments and gardens, Fireback, with its general air of cheapness, bad dubbing and perfunctory plot is actually quite entertaining and frequently unintentionally hilarious.  Clearly, it was a formula that worked, as many of Silver Star's subsequent films seem modelled on it, even down to using the same casts, crews and locations.

Some Observations on Social Media

Some brief thoughts on social media.  I finally managed to set up that feature on Jetpack that allows new stories on The Sleaze to appear on my Mastodon feed.  (Yes, I'm on Mastodon, but the problem is that I don't know anyone else there, so have barely used the account).  Interestingly, it got more interaction and likes than stories I've posted to Twitter ever have.  Despite not actually knowing anyone there.  Which tells us something, I'm sure.  Probably that postings from even insignificant non-entities like me get more visibility than they can on the current, emasculated, version of Twitter, where you don't exist unless you pay Elon Musk to get 'verified' and get a meaningless blue tick.  If you pay presumably the visibility of your Tweets will increase. Apparently, another factor is that I've blocked and muted a lot of conspiracy cranks and Nazis which, in Elon-world is a very bad thing which will reduce your visibility on the platform.  That said, it seems that Musk's aim right now is to reduce the whole platform's visibilty web wide.  The reason why I connected up my Mastodon account in this way was because Twitter no longer allows Jetpack to make automatic posts on my behalf, (I have to do it manually, if I remember or can be arsed, as nobody sees such posts anyway).  Which seems a bizarre business decision which will inevitably reduce the volume of content being posted to Twitter - instead it will all be extremist bile, crypto currency scams, pro-Putin propaganda and conspiracy crap.

Not that it will be Twitter much longer if Musk gets his way - the logo has already changed to the more than slightly sinister and utterly meaningless 'X'.  But hey, he's a business genius, so must know what he's doing, mustn't he?  I'm sure that over-paying for a globally recognised brand, reducing its value by two thirds by filling it full of Nazis, then changing the name and identity of said global brand is all part of his genius business strategy. We ordinary folks are just too stupid to understand.  In the long-term, it seems that Musk wants to transform Twitter/X into an 'everything' app, along the lines of a Chinese state-sposored app that he is emamoured of.  The problem being that the Chinese app is so widely used precisely because it is backed by an authoritarian state, giving citizens no choice but to use it, whereas Elon's 'X-App' will simply be yet another rich man's play thing dedicated to data harvesting in a crowded market.  The fact is that, thus far, users in the free world have been remarkably resistant to the idea of putting their eggs all in one basket.  Remember all the attempts to create 'walled gardens' of curated content that web surfers would never want to leave?  Anybody remember AOL?  Plus, the rich man behind this proposed new app is Elon Musk who, apart from those weirdo cultists who sycophantically drool over his every idiocy on Twitter, is simply not liked by anyone sane.  A fact which constantly seems to surprise the man himself, but the reality is that the majority of us see him for the entitled spoiled rich brat that he is, desperate for attention and desperate to be liked, but failing at both because he doesn't seem to actually understand real people.  But, because he has more money than sense, we have to put up with him constantly wrecking stuff on a whim.  Hell, making Mastodon a preferable place to publicise your work than Twitter in just a few months is one heck of an achievement.

'I Found the Secret of Peru's Women Without Men'

 

One of the longest lived of all men's pulps, running from 1910 until 1970, Adventure, at the peak of its popularity in the thirties, was publishing anything up to twenty two issues a year, before settling into a monthly schedule for most of the forties and fifties.  By the time this issue was published in February 1965, it had moved to a bi-monthly schedule, which it pretty much maintained until its demise.  With its focus firmly on male orientated adventure stories, it tended to resist the trend toward overtly salacious content and lurid covers which dominated the rest of the men's pulp market.  Nonetheless, by the mid-sixties, the publishers clearly thought that even stirring tales of adventure weren't enough, on their own, to sustain sales. Hence the use of more suggestive story titles like the cover story:  'I Found the Secret of Peru's Women Without Men'.  (Masturbation springs to mind as the obvious answer).  Or gimmicks like 3-D photos of 'Your Adventure Girl'.  (3-D photos, usually of semi-clad women, had featured in meen's magazines, on both sides of the Atlantic, since the forties, at least).  Not to mention that free $5 Bonus Book: 'A Man's Guide to Lusty Women'.

The rest of the featured content, though, is still adventure orientated.  'South Sea Adventure - At Prices You Can Afford' addresses an ever-popular pulp magazine fantasy of untouched exotic South Sea islands populated by nubile native girls.  Although, surely by the mid-sixties, the South Seas must have become as much of a tourist destination as everywhere else.  'Get Lost on Ibiza -Spain's Hideaway Isle', though, reminds us that even in Europe, some destinations were still, as late as the sixties, relatively undiscovered by the tourist trade.  Nowadays, of course, Ibiza is synonymous in the popular imagination with young British clubbers, excessive drinking and controlled substances.  But this is a relatively recent development, fuelled by the advent of cheap air travel, which opened up Spain then Greece and Italy as popular tourist destinations for the British. It is also notable that the cover's flyer - offering $100 for readers' stories - tries to emphasise Adventure's distinction from other men's pulps: that its stories were 'true', rather than the entirely 'made up true stories' of competitors.  Just how many times that $100 was paid out is, however open to question.

The Hideous Sun Demon (1958)

Fifties B- movies were full of monsters that were 'Amazing', 'Colossal', 'Incredible' or simply 'Giant', but only the Sun Demon was 'Hideous'.  The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) was one of a number of independent low budget monster movies made during this era, produced outside of the mainstream studios, yet differing little from their B products, save for having even lower budgets.  This one is of interest because it is pretty much a one man production on the part of Robert Clarke, who stars, c0-writes, directs and produces.  Clarke could be found appearing in a number of fifties low budget science fiction and horror movies, including several directed by Edgar Ulmer, he later became a regular face on TV, featuring in many drama series.  The Hideous Sun Demon was produced on a tiny budget, shot on weekends and using film students from the University of Southern California as crew.  Yet, despite its meagre resources, the end result is certainly no worse than the average Bert I. Gordon film or AIP release.  Indeed, it is a good deal more polished and professional looking than most low budget independent productions of the time.

What the film lacks is any originality in its premise, being, in essence, a Jekyll and Hyde variant, with Clarke's protagonist receiving a dose of Gamma radiation from a new isotope, which causes him to turn into a scaly and ravenous monster whenever exposed to sunlight.  Despite all of his best efforts to stay out of the sun and live a nocturnal life, plot developments inevitably keep contriving to force Clarke into the daylight and start transforming.  The usual pseudo-scientific explanations for the transformation are proffered: the radiation caused a genetic mutation that reverts Clarke to some earlier evolutionary state.  The monster make-up is, for a film of this budget, reasonably effective, although its appearances are wisely kept to a minimum.  The film is surprisingly brutal in terms of the number of animals that get killed by the monster - a bird is crushed to death and a dog beaten to death with a rock.  It also strays into Frankenstein territory late on, with a young child offering Clarke friendship as he hides from the cops.  (Thankfully, she isn't brutally murdered for her troubles).  All-in-all, The Hideous Sun Demon, despite some exceedingly clunky dialogue and wooden performances from some of the supporting cast, remains a watchable B-movie, even if we seem to have to wait an age to get our first glimpse of the title monster.

Kill! (1971)

I'm pretty sure that Kill! (1971) - also known as Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!, just in case you didn't get the message the first time  - was the film which, when asked why he'd appeared in it, James Mason replied 'because I didn't that anyone in the English speaking world would ever see it'.  Unfortunately for him, this Italian-Spanish-West German-French co-production was released in English and was widely reviled.  Written and directed by novelist Romain Gary, the film is an absolute mess - choppy editing makes an already confusing script virtually incomprehensible in places, while poor day for night shooting makes some sequences virtually unwatchable, all of which is combined with some poor performances from international stars and uncertain direction from Gary.  Supposedly a globe-trotting international action thriller, produced by Alexander Salkind (later to produce the Three Musketeers and Superman films), Kill! seems to go out of its way to be as ludicrous as possible, with unlikely twist following unlikely twist and bizarre incident following bizarre incident as it builds to a truly insane conclusion.  Yet, it isn't entirely without merit and remains fascinating to watch.  While all too frequently dismissed as being simply an example of bad film-making, a more careful viewing of the film would seem to suggest that it was meant to be as weird and off-kilter as it it turned out to be.  

The problem with films which were as thoroughly trashed on their release (and subsequently buried by its distributors) as was Kill!, that very little remains on record as to the makers' original intent.  So, we are instead left to engage in some informed speculation as to its genesis.  What seems obvious from the film's scenario and structure is that it was intended as a parody of the whole James Bond inspired spy movie genre.  Not only does it feature a masculine, over sexed hero who, the more violent acts and killings her performs, the more attractive he seems to become to the heroine, but it also has a plot which takes the various characters to multiple international locations - although here they all turn out to be grimy looking and distinctly unglamourous.  Other Bondian tropes include the strategy meeting held by the villains, where they lay out all their plans in detail for the audience's benefit.  Except that, instead of the usual fabulous headquarters or glamourous villa that are the usual venues, this conference takes place with a porn shoot going on in the background.  Moreover, rather than plotting to hold the world to nuclear ransom, rob Fort Knox or kidnap space capsules, this group of miscreants are simply interested in cornering the global narcotics and hardcore porn markets, (increasing the market for the former by hooking children on drugs, just for good measure).  

Taking a fashionably - for the early seventies - nihilistic view of the situation, the film takes the idea of Bond's 'Licence to Kill' to its logical extreme by having a rogue Interpol narcotics bureau agent taking matters into his own hands when the law enforcement and legal establishment prove inadequate when it comes to convicting and punishing the drug barons and pornographers.  But it isn't just him who takes this attitude, with James Mason's senior Interpol investigator, upon being told by a local colleague that cohorts of leading drug trade figures are arriving in Pakistan, suggests that they be machine gunned to death as they travel from the airport, with the killings blamed on local terrorists.  Elsewhere, other Interpol operates happily stand back and allow members of the gang to be mown down in cold blood by the rogue agent and his associates.  The film's stance is all too obvious: despite what James Bond-type films might tell you, the business of international crime is anything but glamourous, it is instead sordid and unpleasant - on both sides of the conflict - all carried out against a background of poverty and deprivation.  All of which could have made for a decent parody of the genre, interrogating all of its tropes and cliches.  For a parody to work, though, it has to be at least as competently made as its subject, which is where Kill! falls down badly.  Rather than emulating the slickness of the Bond films, it instead comes over like a cheap knock off of an OSS 117 movie with pretensions.

The film is further complicated by the fact that it seems to have been used by writer/director Gary to publicly enact a version of his recent private life.  His recently divorced wife Jean Seberg plays the female lead and Gary's script has her seemingly play out various of his grievances about their break up.  Early on, for instance, for no real reason, her character is seen wearing an Afro wig and her screen husband, played by James Mason, remarks caustically about it perhaps reflecting her latest crusade - black rights - to take her away from her marriage.  This appears to be a clear reference to one of Gary's complaints about Seberg with regard to the breakdown of their marriage.  It is notable that in the film Mason's character, particularly his hair style and facial hair, has more than a passing physical resemblance to Gary himself.  The character is also, like Gary, a middle aged man who finds himself cuckolded by a younger rival, in this case the rogue agent, Brad Killian (Stephen Boyd), in Gary's case, Clint Eastwood.  (Gary reportedly challenged Eastwood to a duel over his affair with Seberg, but the actor declined).  Watching the film, it is tempting to think of the Killian character as being an Eastwood surrogate: a young virile macho man of few words, who reduces the concept of 'justice' to gunning down or knifing to death anyone he deems 'bad'.  You can't help but feel the Mason character's disdainful view of Killian and his belated attempt to try and emulate his violent vigilantism as he concedes defeat, reflected Gary's attitude toward Eastwood.

As noted earlier, whatever the film's original ambitions, Kill! is ultimately undermined by poor execution, with murky photography, confusing editing and leaden script.  (To be absolutely fair, the version I saw looked as if it was a third or fourth generation duplicate of an already poor video transfer, which probably made it look even worse than it already was).  Even the stars can't lift it, with all of them defeated by a script that gives them ludicrous dialogue and little to work with in the way of characterisation.  Indeed, the four main stars, James Mason, Stephen Boyd, Jean Seberg and Curd Jurgens, look utterly defeated by it all and give correspondingly weary performances.  Boyd probably shows the most signs of life in his role as Killian, ridiculously attired in a leather jacket with no shirt and his shoulder holsters strapped across his bare chest, toting all manner of large firearms and knives and killing as if murder is going out of fashion.  His apparently endless quest to dispense 'justice' having become as much an addiction as any of the narcotics he opposes.  But the film does have its good points: a unique and very memorable musical score, a well staged car chase part way through the film and a climax that tumbles over into the surreal.  Indeed, this final sequence is alone worth sitting through the whole film for - if you've ever seen the Monty Python parody of a slow motion Sam Peckinpah shoot out, you'll have some inkling of what it is like.  But it goes far beyond that, with the bullet riddled corpses of the gangsters leaping back up and jumping up and down as if on trampolines, as a mortally wounded character experiences a series of bizarre dying visions.  

Not that any of this is enough to redeem Kill! as a film - it is still an unholy mess,ludicrous and over the top, that fails to work on any level.  It feels too clunky and inept to pass muster as a straight action thriller.  Its tone is too uneven, its script too weak and its direction and performances too unsure for it to work as a parody.  While its tone is too shrill and histrionic for it work as a piece of anti-drugs propaganda, (straight or parody).  But is quite fascinating, not to mention, enjoyable, to watch as its cinematic inadequacies unfold on screen.  It stands a salutary reminder that even bringing together a wealth of on screen and off screen talent and backing them with a sizeable budget, doesn't guarantee success.

Sailing Into the Seventies

One of the many pleasures of watching dodgy streaming channels on Roku is that one keeps bumping into old TV shows that you never really watched back in the day, but seem fascinating when seen again today. This week, I've been transfixed by The Love Boat, which originally ran in the late seventies and early eighties.  I remember flicking past episodes of it when they turned up in the afternoons on ITV - as nobody got shot in it, there was no nudity and there were no car chases, it never really appealed to the teenaged me.  But seen again now, it is a fascinating time capsule of US network TV entertainment of the era: schlocky, cheesy, cheaply produced on obvious sets yet imbued with a certain superficial glossiness.  It exists in a world where nothing really bad ever happens and even the worst of characters can be redeemed by the power of love.  There are no hard edges, only soft focus.  Which, of course, is precisely why it appealed to audiences and ran for so long - it reassured viewers that all was right with the world, that everything would turn out for the best and that nobody would get hurt.  Pure fantasy, of course, with no relationship to the real world, but for an hour or so every week it allowed people to escape into a safe, cosy and predictable world.  

That said, the main thing I've taken away from watching episodes is to wonder how Captain Stubing managed to run that liner when the only crew, apart from him, appeared to be the ship's doctor, the purser, a random bar tender and the cruise director.  Oh, not to forget his grown up daughter who, for some reason, always seems to be aboard.  I mean, seriously, they are the only crew members we ever see - there's never a sight of any other officers, any deck crew, any engineering crew or even any stewards.  There are plenty of extras running around pretending to be non-speaking passengers, (the only ones with lines are the guest star passengers of the week), but none in uniform.  On top of that, the captain never seems to be on the bridge, he's instead always strolling around the decks or in his office.  Who's running the bloody ship?  Mind you, I'm not sure it needs running as, judging by the fact that the decks never pitch or yaw, just stay dead level, the ship is never at sea.  My other big takeaway is amazement at the fact that the ship used for the exterior shots, the 'Pacific Princess', has London as her home port on the stern and flies the Red Ensign, denoting that she is a British merchant vessel - I was convinced that by the seventies most of the world's shipping fleets had been registered under dodgy flags of convenience (Liberia and Panama were pretty popular), for financial and legal reasons.  (The laws which apply on a ship at sea are those of the country it is registered to - including employment law, which naturally meant that, in order to keep crew costs down, countries with weak employment laws were favoured, especially when combined with low taxes).  So, if nothing else, we can be sure that the 'Love Boat's' meagre crew were at last paid UK sea rates and had some legal protections against unfair dismissal.

Banking on Outrage

I can't help but feel that the right-wing press plumbed new depths this week with their apparent surprise upon discovering that the UK's banks are private commercial entities with the legal right to decide upon who they do business with.  They seem aghast at the idea that such entities are perfectly entitled to close the accounts of existing customers who break their rules, don't meet their criteria for holding an account, or that they simply don't like.  Just wait until they find out that pubs and even shops have the right to refuse to serve anyone they like.  Yet, this seems to be the bizarre alternate reality we appear to have fallen into since that self-styled  'man of the people' Nigel Farage went running to the press, whining that his account at Coutts, the bank of Royalty and millionaires, had been closed.  According to him, it was because they didn't like his political views, according to the bank (backed up by internal memos released to Farage and publicised by him), the main consideration was that the amount he had deposited in his account had fallen below the minimum level required by Coutts.  In fact, it had fallen that low some time ago, but they'd held off closing the account immediately to see if the situation was rectified.  But it wasn't and this, combined with the possible reputational damage to the bank because of Farage's continued unsavoury political activities, led to the closure of the account.  There were no conspiracies and nothing sinister here, just a perfectly legal normal business decision.

But Farage is always given a public platform by the media and, as usual, used it to bray and bellow about this 'injustice', eventually resulting in an apology from Coutt's parent bank, Nat West, (who, incidentally, had offered Farage a regular account).  Obviously, the right-wing press got behind their darling, (who, let us not forget, is not and never has been an MP, having been roundly rejected by voters whenever he has stood) and the spineless Tories, as ever running scared of the extreme right minority that has captured their party, also fell into line, demanding action against Coutts and banks in general to prevent the woke bastards from 'cancelling' people they don't like.  Which is where this fiasco really gets bizarre - these are the self same people who usually start ranting on about the evils of the 'Nanny Sate' whenever any kind of government regulation of any aspect of private enterprise is proposed.  Yet, here they are, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak included, threatening to legislate against banks to force them to take on customers regardless of commercial and ethical considerations.  So much for their much vaunted support of 'freedom of choice', eh?  Which, of course, is the supposed basis of the capitalist system they supposedly embrace.  That and non-interference in markets and a reduction in legal 'red tape' restricting businesses 'freedom of action'.  We really do seem to have fallen through that looking glass, don't we?

Going Bananas

Back to model railways today - this is one of my most recent acquisitions:

This is a Triang-Hornby VIX ferry van - I've long wanted one of these, but second hand examples they always seem to be ridiculously priced on eBay, even at model fairs and the like they seem to start at a tenner apiece, often in less than pristine condition.  Anyway, I picked this one up from the local Toy and Train Collectors Fair for five quid - I'd never seen one in this livery before and it turns out that, by Triang-Hornby standards, it is a bit of a rarity.  By pure coincidence, after I'd bought it a video turned up in my YouTube recommendations by a guy who collects these.  It seems that this livery for the ferry van was only produced in 1973 for inclusion in the 'Freightmaster' train set.  It wasn't in the catalogue and couldn't be purchased as a separate item.  Only 15,000 were produced, which, by the standards of the time, made it a limited production run.  Which still seems like a lot, but one has to wonder how many still exist after fifty years?  I also wonder whether the livery is in any way authentic - I somehow doubt it as bananas were transported from the docks in specialised ventless vans at the time.

You might recall from an earlier post all those badly painted secondhand Triang-Hornby coach sides that I was planning to refurbish and use to convert some composite coaches into brake second coaches.  Well, the first of the conversions is complete:

It is still awaiting the addition of transfers for the numbers, but otherwise is finished and ready to roll.  I've three more to convert, (two more brake seconds and a full brake), but the parts for them make the repainting a bit trickier.  A previous owner fitted  them with South Eastern Finecast flush glazing, which improves the appearance, but cemented it in place, making it virtually impossible to temporarily remove.  This means that each individual window would have to be laboriously masked to facilitate respraying, a hugely time consuming task.  Consequently, I'm experimenting with some alternative approaches - I've managed to loosen the glazing strip in one set of sides sufficiently that I can insert a strip of paper between each window and the coach side to form a simple mask.  I'll attempt a respraying of these sides soon.  Watch this space.  (The completed coach was the only one still fitted with its original Triang-Hornby glazing - a strip of thin plastic - which is easily removable, which made it the obvious choice to start the project with).

We Can Remake it For You Wholesale

I was watching that Sylvester Stallone remake of Get Carter (2000) the other day and aside from marvelling that twenty three years have passed since its release, I was once again wondering about the logic of producing such films.  This version of Get Carter, like many modern(ish) remakes falls into the category of being an OK film if you can see past the fact that it is meant to be a remake of an iconic film and judge it on its own merits, instead.  The trouble is that this is difficult to do, as not only does it have the same title, same character names and basic plot, but even uses the distinctive theme tune from the original.  Technically, of course, it could be claimed simply to be a new interpretation of the source material - the novel 'Jack's Return Home' by Ted Lewis - given a contemporary US setting, but the aforementioned factors, particularly the use of the original film's title rather than the book's title, mitigate against it.  The same problem afflicts other remakes which present themselves as a reinterpretation of the source material, yet try to retain elements of the previous adaptation, (the second Total Recall, which, like Get Carter, is a decent enough film in its own right, but is weighed down by recycling that title - the source story was Philip K Dick's 'We Can Remember it For You Wholesale' - and various characters from its predecessor).  As soon as you do that, you invite comparisons which, if the film you are remaking is, like the 1971 Get Carter, considered a definitive example of its genre.

Obviously, I understand the commercial logic of these sorts of remakes: to trade on the name and reputation of the original - it is the same logic that drives the production of identikit sequels to box office hits.  Audiences like the familiar, the logic goes.  The further the new film, (be it remake or sequel), varies from the original, the greater the danger that audiences will be alienated.  Which is doubtless why the Get Carter remake replicates not just stretches of dialogue, but also entire sequences from the original, (the opening train journey montage, for instance).  Unfortunately, what it can't replicate is the essence of the 1971 version, replacing its working class gangster grittiness with a glossy look, softening the violence and giving its lead character a redemptive arc, instead of the nihilistic inevitability of the original's ending.  But at least it is still recognisably Get Carter, in contrast with that other remake of a British classic crime caper starring Michael Caine, The Italian Job, which simply retains the title, the idea of using Minis in a heist in Italy and a character called Bridger.  In its defence, it could at least be argued that it is a proper 'reimagining' of the original's concept, rather than an attempt to replicate it in a different setting.  

Which brings us to the question of what exactly is the purpose of a remake in the first place.  Back in the day, their selling point was that they added something the original couldn't offer - in the thirties that meant sound, in the forties and fifties it meant colour.  After that, the added value might be wide screen, 3-D or perhaps an ability to take advantage of changes in censorship regulations or moral standards, meaning that the new version could be more 'forthright', perhaps in terms of language, perhaps in terms of nudity, sex and/or violence.  Or, it might just be that the original didn't represent a satisfactory treatment of the source material.  (Sadly, this no longer seems to be a consideration, as studious seem to focus their energies remaking good films these days, presumably because they hope they can replicate the success of the original).

The trouble is that when films made from the seventies onwards are remade, there really isn't much that can be added in terms of new value or innovation.  Remakes of things like Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance, have to try and trade on the fact that make up effects have improved since the originals were made, so that the new films are gorier and more 'realistic.  Yet they are never as satisfying as the originals, which not only had a spark of originality about them, but also ingenuity in the way in which they made them so effective despite the makers not having access to those new special effects technologies.  The alternative is simply to remake the concept behind the original, so that you end up with the in-name-only remake, (like Roger Vadim's US remake of his own And God Created Woman).  Which leaves you wondering what the point of obtaining the rights of the original were, (aside from being able to trade on an already familiar title).  But we live in an age when just about every major studio release seems to be a remake or a sequel, the result of a dearth of originality and a lack of commercial confidence in new ideas, so I fear that we are eventually going to see just about every film, good, bad or mediocre that ever turned a buck at the box office remade in one way or another.  Brace yourselves.

(As a footnote, it should be noted that Get Carter actually had an earlier remake as the 1972 Blaxploitation film Hitman.  Like the Stallone film, this relocates the action to the US, but retains most of the plot and characters, suitably adapted to the new milieu.  Unlike the Stallone film, it succeeds in creating a distinct identity of its own, establishing a style and tone somehow suited to the new setting.  The change of title also helps it feel as if it is a reinterpretation of the source material with a distinct identity of its own).

'The Case For Bigamy'

 

Another bit of history that would have passed us all by if it hadn't been reported on by a man's magazine.  Who'd have thought that the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved by a bunch of girl skin divers raiding Castro's fortress?  As this is the October 1962 issue of Man's Action, I'm assuming that the cover story somehow ties in to that then recent event.  Certainly, in the wake of the crisis, the Cubans joined the gallery of cover villains beloved by men's pulps, which already included Nazis, Japs, Russian commies, Chinese commies and assorted other foreign types.  All, of course, with a penchant for torturing semi-naked women.  What I really love about this cover painting is that the two unflatteringly portrayed Cubans, (just look at the paunch on the one doing the torturing - not even Nazis got that treatment, invariably being portrayed as svelte murdering and torturing bastards), both sport Castro-style beards.  Presumably they were de riguer for all self-respecting Cuban communists.  Or maybe they are actually meant to be the Castro brothers themselves.

Elsewhere in the issue, judging by the stories trailed on the cover, it is business as usual: war and male sexual fantasies.  Not that any of it is made up, of course - I mean, that's a genuine 'open letter' revealing 'The Case For Bigamy'.  "I made two wives happy - why should that put me in jail?"  Well, if you were a Mormon, it probably wouldn't, but the reality is that the average adolescent reader of these magazines wouldn't have made one actual woman happy, (inflatable ones don't count), let alone married one, so the idea of satisfying two wives would probably have been their ultimate masturbatory fantasy.  Unlike a Cuban torture chamber, I'm guessing that the 'Torture Trap of the Nympho Schoolgirls' is one that most of the magazine's readers would like to fall into.  Jail bait sex is one of the enduring male sex fantasies, with the idea of the girls taking the initiative and subjecting their 'victims' to some kind of 'rough sex' providing the icing on the cake.  Of course, they'd be High School girls, making it all legal in most US states.  Because other wise it would, be well, pervy and only degenerate un-American commies would go in for that sort of thing...

The Sting of Vengeance

Perhaps I'm getting soft as I grow older, but recently, when a wasps' nest threatened to hold up my defoliation of my back garden, instead of destroying it and attempting to kill its occupants, I relocated them to the end of the garden, where they won't get in my way.  My attitude toward them was, possibly, coloured by my admiration for their sheer industriousness.  They had, in very quick time, succeeded in building their nest in a hollow they had excavated under a bag of garden waste I had left on the border I was working on.  Unfortunately, when I moved the bag, the nest was exposed and pulled out of position.  Obviously, the wasps were startled and confused and started swarming around.  Now, contrary to popular belief, wasps don't sting indiscriminately - they only do so when provoked.  Waving your arms around and panicking is, to them, provocation, a perceived show of aggression.  So, I just moved very slowly and they left me alone - even when I got close enough to get their nest onto a shovel and shift it down the garden.  unfortunately, it sustained some damage, but the last time I checked, they were busy carrying out repairs and seemed happy enough.  Most importantly, they are now out of my way.

Maybe it is an age thing, but I'm increasingly loathe to kill even household pests unless there really is no other alternative.  In the case of the wasps, they were also outside - if they had been inside the house I would have had little choice but to get in a pest controller.  But outside is a different matter - out there they keep far worse pests under control.  Besides, I have plans for those wasps.  I'm thinking that perhaps I can train them to do my bidding, like the eponymous Willard did with those rats in the 1971 film.  Sure, I know that they aren't as intelligent as rats, but the upside of that is while this might make them more difficult to train, it would doubtless also lessen the risk of them turning on me.  Willard might have ended up being gnawed to death by his rats, but I have no intention of being stung to death by my wasps.  Anyway, the plan is to train them to attack at the first whiff of a barbecue - as soon as that meat starts sizzling, I want them to fly to the source and swarm all over the perpetrators.  With any luck, that will result i a quick cessation of any back garden barbecues around here, so I won't have to put up with their stench for the rest of the summer.  So currently I'm wafting the scent from bits of burning meat at that nest while poking it with a stick, so as to get the wasps to associate that stench with an imminent  threat, thereby encouraging them to strike back at the source.  I f that doesn't work, I'll just have to resort to trying mind control, guiding them via my mental powers.  I know, I know, it's all a fantasy, but a man can dream, can't he?

Candy Stripe Nurses (1974)

Having watched Fly Me (1973) recently, I thought that I'd catch up with Candy Stripe Nurses (1974), another of New World's early seventies sex movies.  Sexy High School girls, bare boobs, bonking and plenty of innuendo sums up the film.  It pretty much follows the same format as Fly Me, featuring three main female characters and following each as they follow their individual sub-plots.  Except that rather than air stewardesses, this time around they are volunteer auxiliary nurses, (known as 'Candy Stripers' thanks to their striped uniforms).  One is a Latino bad girl who gets involved in trying to prove that her patient is actually innocent of the robbery he has been arrested for, while another gets a thrill from having sex with medical students in linen cupboards and patients in their hospital beds, who becomes involved in trying to revive the libido of a famous British rock star.  The third is a high achieving student with ambitions to be a doctor who investigates a doping ring secretly giving the High School basketball team performance enhancing drugs.

Overall, the tone is somewhat lighter than Fly Me, with neither the drug story nor the crime sub plot getting anywhere as dark as the white slavery/drug trafficking story line in the earlier film.  On the other hand, it lacks any equivalent to the pretty surreal King Fu fighting scenes in Fly Me.  Moreover, unlike Fly Me, Candy Stripe Nurses never manages to tie its three separate plot threads together for a finale, with each reaching its own individual climax at the film's conclusion.  Candy Stripe Nurses, with its animated title sequence, innuendo filled theme song and general bawdiness, is even more like a seventies British sex comedy than Fly Me.  Indeed, it is very reminiscent of the later British sex comedy What's Up Nurse! (1977), both in tone and content, or perhaps even some of the medically-themed Carry On movies.  Ultimately, like Fly Me, Candy Stripe Nurses is basically exploitation fluff, completely unsubstantial, but enjoyable enough while it is on. 

Modern Films Are Rubbish! (Or Are They?)

I found myself watching something called Human Hibachi 2 (2022) the other day.  It was streaming on a Roku channel I had on in the background while I did something else and, for some reason, I ended up watching it.  It was, unfortunately, very much typical of many modern direct-to-streaming micro budgeted horror movies: sadly lacking in just about every department.  In my opinion, at least.  Yet it - and the film it is a sequel to - seems to have a small but devoted cult following online.  I strongly suspect that age plays a big part in how one perceives such things - I'm old enough that my seminal experiences of horror films involved watching Hammer movies on late night TV as a kid in the seventies.  Thanks to BBC2's 'Horror Double Bill' seasons that used to run during the Summer on Saturday nights, not only was I able to run through most of Hammer's Gothics, but also some of their psychological thrillers, most of the Amicus and Tigon back catalogues, older stuff from Universal and RKO, plus a whole load of independently produced stuff, (including a lot of William Castle films and US-Philippines co-productions).  It was quite an education.  Then I discovered Italian horror films.  This was the viewing experience which defined, for me, what horror films should be like - how they should look, how they should be structured, how they should feel.  Even the lowest budgeted, most technically deficient, of these films tended to have a certain sense of style, reflected in their cinematography and production design and most could create, even momentarily, a degree of suspense, eeriness or just unease.

All of which brings us back to Human Hibachi 2 and my negative reaction to the film.  A backwoods cannibal movie shot in 'found footage format is probably the best encapsulation of the film, as it follows a family of cannibals inspired by the first film in the series, itself a found footage suburban cannibal film, (presented as 'real' footage in the sequel).  My first problem with the film is that whole 'found footage' angle - not only has the format had its day, but it is much more difficult to pull off then it looks.  For the modern breed of micro budgeted film makers, it appears to offer a legitimate excuse to present poorly shot on a hand held camera footage that looks like a home movie off as a professional film.  Poor cinematography, poorly framed shots, bad sound and lighting, amateurish acting - it can all be excused by the idea that it is 'meant' to look like that.  Doubtless, for a generation of horror fans brought up on films shot in this style, this is what they think a horror film should look like, explaining the followings they build up.  The problem with Human Hibachi 2 (and many similar films) is that it never convinces as 'found footage' - it simply doesn't look amateur enough.  That's where the skill lies in pulling this style of film off: hitting the balance between that 'amateur film maker' look while keeping it sufficiently professional to remain watchable, (which is why they sometimes employ the framing device of presenting the 'found footage' as part of a faux documentary out together by professional film makers).  Human Hibachi 2 never manages to hit this middle ground.  It all looks slightly too glossy, too smoothly shot and edited to be amateur footage, but not smoothly enough that it looks truly professional.  Instead, it just looks like a poorly lit, shot and acted no-budget movie, without even the ghastly fascination that the average Andy Milligan movie (a 1970s near equivalent standard of film making) brings.

It is also fatally flawed by the omission of a proper framing story - while much of the movie is meant to be 'found footage', even to the extent of the unseen camera operator exchanging dialogue with the participants, there are other sequences where it is unclear who is meant to be filming the participants. A sort of shift from first to third person narration, to use a literary analogy.  Disconcertingly, the style of shooting remains the same, whether it is meant to be 'found footage' or not.  Aside from the 'look' and problems with its narrative structure, the way in which the film executes its 'found footage' format eliminates any opportunity for suspense, tension, or even any decent shock sequences.  It can't even muster any decent gore and the sight of dismembered 'bodies' on screen quickly becomes repetitive, robbing such scenes of any shock value (quite aside from the fact that such scenes have been done to death by horror movies since the eighties).  It all comes over as old hat, a tired theme that isn't carried out here with any originality or verve.  But then, I'm judging Human Hibachi 2 on the basis of my own experience of horror films - I've seen the same subject matter carried out with greater style and energy in various Italian shockers from the eighties, for instance.  But for those who haven't grown up with those experiences, to whom the sort of films I cut my teeth on probably seem like silent cinema, it might well seem original and in keeping with their ideas of what constitutes a 'good' horror film. 

To be fair, while I didn't like Human Hibachi 2, I wouldn't rate it as anywhere near the worst horror film I've ever seen.  Sure, it was, in my opinion, dull, thanks to a complete lack of pace and narrative drive, not to mention the poor acting and lack of characterisation, but at least it was competent in the sense that boom mikes, cables and other equipment didn't keep coming into shot.  Moreover, even though everything was too brightly lit, that did mean that you could at least see what was going on. Also, while I feel that Human Hibachi 2 is all too typical of what I don't like about modern low budget horror movies, it wasn't so bad that it made me want to give up on the whole genre.  Micro budget films can be decently made and even the 'found footage' format, when executed wiith skill, can still be an effective means of story telling.

Social Media Fatigue

Like just about everyone else in the world, I created a Threads account this week, before realising that there's absolutely nothing I want to say on this latest social media app.  But what the Hell, I thought, I already have an Instagram account (that I have, likewise, never posted on) and its one in the eye to Elon Musk who is turning Twitter into shit.  Although I don't know why I even care that the South African twat is demonstrating his idiocy by screwing up Twitter as I've pretty much given up on actually using that as well.  My posting on Twitter, which has always been paltry, has dwindled away to practically nothing.  Rather like my use of Facebook.  That's the thing, I quickly found out that I had little use for social media.  I am, after all, deeply anti-social.  Yet I still feel obliged to keep joining new forms of it.  Part of the problem lies with the fact that whenever I think about posting anything, anywhere, I come to the conclusion that I'm already saying everything I want to say on my website and this blog - without the constraints placed on me by social media networks.  I don't see the point of repeating it in condensed form elsewhere.  Besides, I've found that social media doesn't generate traffic - The Sleaze has a Facebook page where links to stories are posted automatically as they are published.  Despite over a hundred followers and lots of likes, the views of the story synopses there rarely, if ever, result in views of the actual stories themselves on the site itself.  Twitter is even worse in terms of converting Tweets into visitors.  

I have to say that I increasingly find Twitter deeply depressing in terms of the levels of human ignorance that it reveals.  At any given time on any given day the trending topics column is full of stuff that you know, if you click on them, will be a stream of people who demonstrably know nothing about that subject pouring out bile about it.  I mean, the other day 'Antarctica' was trending - that can't be controversial, I thought, so out of curiosity clicked on it.  What I found was a load of idiots talking ill informed bollocks and puking out conspiracy theories.  Facts?  They were in short supply.  There were, obviously, the climate change deniers telling us that the Antarctic ice wasn't melting - not that they've been there personally, of course, but some bloke on Facebook had told them it wasn't.  Then we had all the cranks who think that there are secret Nazi/alien bases there or lost worlds full of dinosaurs - the fact that the fossil record shows that Antarctica once had a milder climate seems to confuse them as they never seem to have heard of Tectonic plates and continental drift.  Obviously, 'they' must be trying to hide something there because aircraft are 'banned' from overflying the continent.  In reality, of course, international aviation regulations simply limit how far away from a suitable airport that commercial planes can fly - there are no airports in Antarctica.  Light aircraft that can land on the ice can and do operate there.  But, as ever, conspiracy nuts always find facts very challenging, which is why they always try to ignore them.  Depressing as Hell - topics about politics, though, are even worse.

As I've noted before, though, it is important to remember that Twitter users (or, indeed, users of any social media platform), aren't representative of the wider population, the overwhelming majority of whom never use social media.  Which is just as well, as if one was to go by Twitter, the majority of voters in the UK are apparently Boris Johnson loving neo Nazis who hate foreigners and think that Nigel Farage is the victim of a left-wing conspiracy by the British banking system.  This, des[ite the fact that, according to the polls, Labour is widening its lead over a deeply unpopular (and increasingly right-wing) Tory party.  Oh, and despite the fact that Nigel Farage actually had his bank account closed because he no longer has enough money to meet the minimum requirements for holding an account at Coutts, not because of a conspiracy.  (Apparently, he feels that he is too important to have a NatWest account, which he has been offered as an alternative).  Anyway, back to my Threads account - I still can't think of anything remotely interesting to post there...

A Load of Old Dudu

The 'Superbug' or 'Dudu' series of films is something I've long been aware of but, until last week,I  had never seen any of the five films in the series. If you didn't know, these films are most often described as the German answer to Walt Disney's 'Herbie' films, like them featuring a VW Beetle car capable of performing amazing feats.  While 'Herbie' seemed to be possessed of some kind of living spirit, 'Dudu' (which, we're told in the English dub of the first film, which is set in Africa, is Swahili for 'bug' or 'insect'), is technologically enhanced by his owner, to the point in some films that it seems to have its own AI.  The films were produced in West Germany between 1971 and 1978, all directed by and starring Rudolf Zehetberger (billed as 'Robert Mark' in the English language versions of some films).  Aimed primarily at children, the films were cheaply made but popular.  The film I caught last week was the last of the series and not, as it turned out, a good starting point.  Made three years after the previous entry, Son of Superbug (aka The Return of Superbug) feels like an afterthought to the main series.  Indeed, it isn't really a 'Dudu' film at all - the eponymous VW is wrecked during the first five minutes or so, (which must have been pretty traumatic for kids who had seen the previous films).  Rather than repair or rebuild 'Dudu', the hero instead spends the rest of the film driving around in a six wheel all terrain vehicle - he is also accompanied by an irritating talking robot crab thing called 'Picho', which acts as a sort of 'Dudu' substitute.

Actually, the switch to the six wheeler is rather confusingly presented, in the English language version, at least.  After 'Dudu' is shoved down a steep slope, breaking apart in the process, we quickly cut between a shot of its body shell sliding away on its roof and its owner, (referred to in this film as 'El Gauncho' rather than 'Jimmi Bond' as he is in other films), tipping the six wheeler, which is on its side, upright.  The implication seems to be that the all terrain vehicle was originally incorporated into 'Dudu' - perhaps the original edit made this clearer.  So, in spirit, one could argue that 'Dudu' lives on in spirit for the rest of the film - except that his technological functions are now embodied in 'Picho' rather than the six wheeler.  (The original German title translates as 'Two Awesome Beetles Clean Up', with 'Dudu' and his successor six wheeler, by implication, the two Beetles).  Thereafter the film settles down into a treasure hunt of sorts, as various parties seek out a horde of stolen Mafia gold which has been hidden on Lanzarote.  These include the usual stereotypical Mafia don and his henchmen, the retired German army officer who masterminded the heist and a local shady millionaire who is also trying to dispose of his young nephew in order to get full control of the fortune he is heir to).  'El Gauncho', using 'Picho' and various other gadgets inevitably outwits them all and saves the boy.  The film is very roughly made and, in places, surprisingly violent for a film ostensibly aimed at kids - not to mention the fact that its kiddie-friendly hero is presented as an alcoholic.

I can honestly say that watching Son of Superbug didn't leave me wanting to watch any of the earlier entries in the series.  The fact that the dubbing isn't exactly brilliant and that, for its English language version, it seems to have been edited with a hammer and chisel  resulting in abrupt jumps in the narrative and an overall 'lumpy' fee; obviously doesn't help.  Nonetheless, it still comes over as a poorly constructed piece with an overly complicated plot, poor dialogur and wildly variable performances from the multinational cast.  Add to that the intensley irritating 'Picho', (at one point it looks as if a Mafia hoodlum played by Sal Borghese - well versed in playing this sort of comic relief incompetent sidekick from his many collaborations will Bud Spencer and Terence Hill - is going to shoot the robot: I was gleefully cheering him on), and you end up with a mind numbing experience like Son of Superbug. 

The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

I went on another of my increasingly frequent detours into my film-watching past over the weekend, when I discovered that a film I hadn't seen since the eighties was available to stream on a completely legit service via Roku.  The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) was director Albert Pyun's first and some would say best feature film.  Cynics would doubtless add that being his best wouldn't be difficult in view of his subsequent output.  But that would be a tad unfair: although Pyun tended to work well within the low budget direct-to-video market, some of his films do rise above the usual level of this sort of fare. Moreover, they are all competently directed, making decent use of the usually meagre resources at his disposal and frequently display a degree of imagination higher than might usually be found in an essentially derivative genre.  Sword and the Sorcerer, though, can't be said to be particularly original.  Indeed, it is clearly a quick cash in on the contemporaneous Conan the Barbarian (1982), which kicked off a cycle of similar fantasy films, yet it succeeds in establishing its own style, seemingly derived from classic 'swashbuckling' movies that starred the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Sr.  

I originally saw Sword and the Sorcerer when it first came on to TV in the mid-eighties, with a late night screening on ITV - its scheduling dictated by a couple of gory sequences, a crucifixion and some female nudity (all pretty tame by today's standards).  I remembered it as a cheap and cheerful action film with a stand out sequence toward the end when a character tears his own skin off to reveal that he is really a demon underneath.  Watching it again, after all this time, I was pleasantly surprised to find it still an enjoyable experience.  Sure, it's budget was clearly pretty low, but the production values aren't too bad - the sets at least look solidly built, (probably borrowed from another, better budgeted, production) and the cast are mainly TV actors, but they are mainly adequate for what the script requires of them.  While leading man Lee 'Matt Houston' Horsley is no Errol Flynn, he's decent enough in the action scenes and soon-to-be-in -Dynasty Kathleen Beller is attractive and feisty enough as the heroine, the film does boast a stand-out villain in the great Richard Lynch.  Playing the villainous usurper Titus Cromwell to the hilt, (he's so untrustworthy he even double crosses a demon he has revived to assist his rise to power), B-movie veteran Lynch entertainingly chews up the scenery whenever he's on camera.  The script is surprisingly good, frequently subverting genre conventions to good effect, (both the brave rebels and the hero's own band of mercenaries prove incompetent and end up being unceremoniously and easily captured when storming the castle to save him, for instance), throwing a few decent plot twists and reasonably witty lines, while never taking itself too seriously.  Pyun moves the whole thing along very smoothly and at a decent pace, with well handled set-pieces, so that it never drags. Oh, and that bit where George Maharis' tears his head apart to reveal the demon, still stands up pretty well.

It's easy to criticise films like The Sword and the Sorcerer - and it was treated with absolute scorn by critics on its original release - but the undeniable fact is that it made a pretty decent profit when it was released, (to cinemas, in the US at least, rather than just a direct-to-video release).  It had the advantage of being early to the market when sword and sorcery films started to become popular and of not being a Conan clone.  Most of all, though, it has a sense of fun, which carries it through its various deficiencies. 

Dracula 3-D (2012)

If, back in the late seventies, in the wake of Profondo Rosso (1975) or Suspiria (1977), it had been announced that Dario Argento was to direct a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, then expectations would have been sky high.  The idea of the director bringing the visual sense, deft use of acoustic effects and sheer style that he had demonstrated in his 'Giallo' movies, to the Gothic classic would have been something to look forward to.  Unfortunately, though, Argento didn't make his Dracula until 2012, when his best films seemed long behind him, with the result being a major disappointment. To be honest, the last Argento film I really enjoyed was Opera (1987).  While (in my opinion) an improvement on its predecessor, Phenomena (1985), it still fell well below the high standards he had set himself in his earlier films.  But in comparison to Dracula 3-D (2012), it looks a masterpiece.  The film's problems are numerous but start with a fundamentally flawed script which fails completely to offer any new angles on the oft-told tale.  Indeed, it seems to be a compendium of ideas ransacked from other Dracula movies and lumped together with little consideration of coherence, characterisation or plot development.  Large parts of the scenario - Harker being a librarian rather than an estate agent and the decision to set the whole story in Transyvania, thereby relocating key London scenes to a village near the castle, comes from Hammer's Dracula (1958), with Van Helsing's casting of the silver bullet coming from the company's later Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), while the identification of the Count with the historical Vlad Tepes Dracula, (not mention Mina being the reincarnation of his lost love), is taken from the Coppola Dracula (which, in turn, had lifted the idea from Dan Curtis' TV movie Dracula (1974), which had starred Jack Palance), to give a few examples.  

The problem with this approach is that it means that various significant characters and events central to the source novel vanish - Lucy's suitors and the arrival in Whitby of the ghost ship carrying Dracula to England, for instance - and, worse, by wrenching these borrowings out of their original context, the whole story becomes dislocated.  In the Hammer Dracula, the librarian Harker is actually an associate of Van Helsing, at Castle Dracula to try and kill the Count, which, after his demise, neatly brings the vampire hunter into the story.  In this version, however, with Harker simply being a librarian and there being no Dr Seward and no asylum to justify his presence, Van Helsing simply wanders into the latter stages of the story.  His presence is 'explained' by a clumsy flashback to 'Carfax Asylum' in England and an earlier encounter with Dracula, (implying that the events of the novel have all occurred offscreen in the film's past).  It makes little sense and never really justifies Van Helsing's rather arbitrary presence in the film.  Worse still, without a local asylum, the character of Renfield is left high and dry, presented as some kind of random local nutter.  Stripping the story down to its bare essentials can pay dividends for film makers - as shown by Hammer's fast-moving and highly efficient 1958 production - but unfortunately, Dracula 3-D's script feels the need to provide substitutes for the missing characters and events - none of them very good nor particularly interesting.  The whole sub-plot about the village's leading figures colluding with the Count for a quiet life ultimately goes nowhere and isn't developed enough to provide any kind of commentary upon the nature of feudalism, while characters like the policeman, the inn keeper and the sinister trader are barely sketched in.  

But even with a weak script, prime Argento would surely have been able to make something out of the material.  But it isn't prime Argento at the helm.  There is none of the visual sense and lush style of his best 'Giallo' movies here and consequently no atmosphere, no suspense or feeling of menace.  Far too much of the film seems to take place in bright sunlight, on the streets of an underpopulated and far too clean and wholesome looking village.  The sets are unimpressive and, in many scenes, cheap looking.  The whole thing comes over as flat and uninvolving, like a TV movie.  This impression is reinforced by the dreadful CGI used in too many scenes, with the practical special effects being no more convincing.  On top of all of this, Argento fails to get interesting performances from most of his cast.  In particular, Thomas Kretschmann is badly miscast as the most underwhelming Dracula ever to see the screen - he fails to exude any menace, let alone the imperiousness and sense of ancient evil the role requires.  Marta Gastini and Unax Ulgade as Mina and Johnathan Harker respectivelsy likewise fail to breath any life into their underwritten characters, while Asia Argento's Lucy is largely uninteresting, whether live or undead.  Only Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing comes close to giving the sort of performance required for this sort of film.  While his Van Helsing is neither as crazy and eccentric as Anthony Hopkins' interpretation in the Coppola film, nor as steely and obsessive as Peter Cushing's in the Hammer films, he is at least memorable and the only character in the film who seems to know what they are doing.

Obviously, I've never seen Dracula 3-D in 3-D, so I might have been missing something.  Perhaps when shown stereoscopically it doesn't feel as flat or look as cheap.  But I can only judge it by the 2-D version I was recently able to stream, (which, to be absolutely fair, seemed to be a TV edit, cutting out some gore and nudity).  On that basis, it is a major disappointment.  Particularly for fans of the director, like myself.   It just doesn't feel like an Argento film, capturing neither the somewhat stylised look of his seventies films, (which it would have benefitted from), nor the somewhat harder edged, more realistic look of his eighties and nineties output. Even frequent collaborator and 'Goblin' keyboardist Claudio Simonetti's score fails to lift the film, sounding bland, derivative and detatched from the on screen action.  Worst of all is the lack of orginality in the film's execution: it is a film of borrowings, none of them apparently properly understood, resulting in a treatment that feels tired and hackneyed.  It speaks volumes that Argento wouldn't direct another film for ten years after this failure.