Tommy (1975)

Ken Russell's 1975 film version of the Pete Townshend's rock opera Tommy is a study in excess, providing eye-popping visuals and grotesque tableaux to accompany the music. To label Russell's style of filmmaking "over the top" is putting it mildly. While some deride his work as vulgar and blasphemous, I believe Russell is one of cinema's true visionaries.

Roger Daltrey plays the title character, and having sung the role hundreds of times on stage, acquits himself admirably. Unfortunately, he would not fare as well with his future film roles.

Ann-Margaret plays his mother, and received an Academy Award nomination for her work. She emotes for the ages as she gets covered in baked beans, chocolate sauce, and soap bubbles while riding a massive phallic pillow. That's worth an Oscar nom any time...

Also in the cast are Keith Moon as Uncle Ernie, Elton John as the Pinball Wizard, Tina Turner as the Acid Queen, Jack Nicholson as the Doctor, and best of all, my main man Oliver Reed in full gargoyle mode as Frank, Tommy's stepfather.

When I first saw this movie as a 13 year old with a Who fixation, I hated Ollie for not being able to carry a tune in a bucket. Seeing it again 30 years later, I realized that he's the best thing in it, whether he's leering at Ann-Margaret, blowing cigar smoke in Jack Nicholson's face, or stomping on "Sally Simpson's" fingers.

We first meet Frank when Tommy and his mother go to a summer holiday camp, where Frank is a "greencoat." Ollie does some great physical comedy as he hosts a "lovely legs" competition ("Have you ever seen a lovelier pair?" he asks), won by Tommy's mum, of course. Soon, Frank's sleeping with her, and when Tommy's father, presumed dead, unexpectedly returns home, Frank caves in Daddy's skull, killing him for real. Tommy witnesses the crime, and is struck deaf, dumb, and blind by the trauma.

Reed's part got bigger and bigger as Keith Moon's got smaller and smaller, probably due to Ken Russell's familiarity with Oliver, and the fact that he could drink himself into stupor at night and show up on time and line-perfect in the morning, while Moonie remained stuporous. Nonetheless, Reed and Moon became bosom buddies, their carousing continuing after both relocated to Beverly Hills. I recently saw the blazer Reed sported in the holiday camp sequence on Ebay going for $2400 US. If I'd had the cash to spare, it would have been mine...

Tommy is not a total triumph: Townshend's score is heavy on the synthesizers and light on guitar crunch; the story is a bit nonsensical; and some elements of the film now seem dated in the extreme. However, Ken Russell's audacious direction is never dull, and as I mentioned, Oliver Reed is totally genius in it. No Pavarotti for sure, but unmistakably, undeniably Ollie.

Available on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Video. Get it online at The Oliver Reed Store.

A shorter version of this review was first published at Viewpoints.com, where you can read hundreds more of my write-ups, mostly film-related, as well as my reviews of books, local Austin places, various types of junk food, and some damn fine ales.

Ollie-Bama!

The Brood (1979)

1979's The Brood is a gory, Canadian-made horror flick that has its roots in divorce court.

Following a bitter divorce and custody battle, director David Cronenberg wrote and directed this psychological shocker about a woman (Samantha Eggar) whose rage manifests itself by her giving birth to malevolent dwarves who kill anyone she perceives to be a threat to her happiness. As divorce metaphors go, this one certainly goes for the throat.

Art Hindle plays her estranged husband, who has custody of their young daughter (Cindy Hinds). This is no doubt very upsetting to Eggar's character, who is currently undergoing radical "psychoplasmic" therapy with the shadowy Dr. Hal Raglan, played by Oliver Reed. Ollie is excellent in the part, but aging fast, graying and a bit bloated from all the boozing. However, he seems unfazed by having come full circle, having started his career with the early '60s Hammer films, and now starring in another, different kind of horror, involving psychotic female rage and evil midget kids with no genitalia. It ain't exactly Curse of the Werewolf.

The atmosphere of the film is very '70s, and most Canadian. A host of character actors from the Great White North (Henry Beckman and Nuala Fitzgerald as Eggar's parents, Susan Hogan as a sympathetic teacher) die badly at the hands of the title characters before the final showdown at the Raglan Institute. The death of Hogan's character is particularly brutal, as she gets beaten to death by the mallet-wielding title characters in front of a classroom full of second-graders. Maybe she reminded Cronenberg of his ex.

The third-act reveal of Eggar's exo-womb is still mighty disturbing. I was reminded of the Panasonic color televison ads she was doing at the time: "My hair is auburn, my dress is emerald green, and my malevolent dwarf-children are covered in gore that is vividly scarlet."

There is a remake currently in development, which on the surface seems absurd, but there is a serious lack of originality among the majority of modern Hollywood filmmakers, who have already puked out unnecessary remakes of movies like Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. "The Horror Hacker" at AMC.com put it this way: "But really, what talent or originality does it really take to pitch a remake of a thematically rich classic film? In my opinion, that's why Cronenberg films should not be remade. His films are so complex and multi-layered that any remake is likely only to dumb down the story rather than explore the subtle horror behind everyday events. The day someone has the bright idea to remake Videodrome is the day I stop watching movies."

The Brood has gained a cult following over the years, and has aged better than other early Cronenberg works like Rabid and Videodrome. The director's nasty divorce begat not only a pretty scary creepshow, but also a rock band: there is a British act who call themselves David Cronenberg's Wife.


Available on DVD from MGM Home Video.

A shorter version of this review was first published at Viewpoints.com, where you can read hundreds more of my write-ups, mostly film-related, as well as my reviews of books, local Austin places, various types of junk food, and some damn fine ales.

The Oliver Reed Store

If you enjoy these essays and want to see the films, please visit The Oliver Reed Store for DVDs of Ollie's Greatest Hits.

Most titles are US Region One NTSC releases, but we do have the The System DVD in stock for our friends in the UK, and for our American customers, the VHS edition under the title The Girl-Getters.

Payments accepted via PayPal.

Available on DVD:

* The Devils
* The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers
* Oliver!
* Tommy
* Women in Love
* Ken Russell at the BBC
* Gladiator
* Crossed Swords a/k/a The Prince and the Pauper
* Hammer Horror Series
* Revolver
* Tomorrow Never Comes
* The Brood
* The Shuttered Room
* The Girl-Getters a/k/a The System


...and more to come.

Tomorrow Never Comes (1978)

Here's a brutal little item for you all, Peter Collinson's 1978 made-in-Quebec crime drama Tomorrow Never Comes. Oliver Reed trots out his American tough guy accent as Jim Wilson, an embittered, burnt-out cop in a corrupt resort town who, on his last day on the force, must deal with an out-of-control hostage situation.

When Frank (Stephen McHattie) returns to town to find that his girlfriend Janie (a bloated Susan George, near the end of her career as a sexpot) is now the mistress of the richest man in town, all heck breaks loose.

After being on the receiving end of a bad beatdown by some local creeps, Frank's clearly not at his best when he goes to Janie's place to confront her. After woozily menacing a gay bellhop and a black maid, Frank draws the attention of a particularly inept police officer who somehow gets shot with his own gun. And the siege is on.

Director Collinson's greatest claim to fame was his stellar work on 1969's The Italian Job, but most of his filmography consists of such unrelenting nastiness as 1967's The Penthouse, Straight On Till Morning (1972), and Open Season (1974), which are all variations on the same basic plot. Quentin Tarantino has professed a special fondness for Collinson's The Sell Out, from 1976, also with Reed.

The film's Canadian pedigree is obvious by the presence of such canuck character actors as Raymond Burr, John Ireland, and Paul Koslo (particularly bad as Reed's cop rival), cast to satisfy the Government requirement that a certain number of featured roles go to natives of the Great White North. Slumming along with Reed are fellow Brits Donald Pleasance (as a tubercular French Canadian doctor) and John Osbourne, the playwright of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. Pity Collinson couldn't convince him to doctor the script.

Still, the movie has its moments. The Laval and Montreal locations evoke a sweet '70s nostalgia (for me, anyway), and the close-up of Ollie hoisting a can of Molson Export Ale is one for the ages. The scene where Reed attempts to bring McHattie to justice by drugging his beer is pretty awesome as well, and the downer ending is well-telegraphed if not well-choreographed.

All in all, a decent time-waster that's worth a rental from Netflix.

Tomorrow Never Comes has recently been reissued on DVD in a bare-bones, full-screen edition by Televista Video.

Originally published 4 December 2007 in BLOG! by JM Dobies, and subsequently at Viewpoints.com, where you can read hundreds more of my write-ups, mostly film-related, as well as my reviews of books, local Austin places, various types of junk food, and some damn fine ales.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

The 1961 Hammer Films production of The Curse of the Werewolf, directed by Terence Fisher, marked Oliver Reed's first starring role, even if Clifford Evans got top billing. It is also one of my favorite Hammer horrors, and my favorite werewolf movie of all time.

After Hammer had put its unique stamp on Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy, it was inevitable that the studio would make its own variation on The Wolf Man. When a proposed co-production about the Spanish Civil War fell through, the ever-frugal Hammer executives ordered a script to make use of the sets that had already been built. Producer Anthony Hinds adapted Guy Endore's novel The Werewolf of Paris, writing the script under the pseudonym John Elder, transplanting the action to 18th century Spain. The result is an atmospheric, grim little tale of lycanthropy, good vs. evil, and the horrors of adolescence. Or as the ads for the fim so colorfully put it, ‘He fought the hideous curse of his evil birth, but his ravished victims were proof that the cravings of his beast-blood demanded he kill… Kill… KILL!’

Unlike Universal's Wolf Man films of the '40s, The Curse of the Werewolf does not hold back on the sex and gore, especially in the version released in the US, which contained scenes the British censors had ordered excised from the film (it is this version which is included in the Hammer Horror Series DVD boxed set, available HERE). The werewolf's origin story is particularly twisted, as Leon is the bastard offspring of a feral lunatic rapist and the town jailer's deaf mute daughter, played by the Yvonne Romain. When she dies in childbirth, Leon is adopted by the kindly Don Corledo, and after an uneventful childhood, develops an unnatural bloodlust at the onset of puberty, allong with an overwhelming urge to roam the countryside disemboweling area livestock.

Trapped in a world he never made, Leon inevitably graduates to killing humans as things go horribly wrong with a local prostitute, when in the middle of a "date," Leon turns into a werewolf and rips her throat out.

Only true love, it seems, can cure Leon's full moon fever, and it arrives in the second act in the person of the lovely Catherine Feller as the virginal Christina, who loves Leon despite the occasional lycanthropic mayhem and savagery at the local bordello. But when the bodies start piling up, the local authorities are forced to take action.

From the opening scene, the recurring theme is cruelty: the cruelty of life, the cruelty of fate, and the cruelty of the ruling class, for it is the cruelty of one particularly nasty noble that sets Leon's fate in motion. In his highly insightful essay for Cinemafantastique, Steve Biodrowski writes that The Curse of the Werewolf "plays out like a deliberate piece of Theatre of Cruelty, in which most of the sympathetic characters come to a tragic end. The result is not especially frightening, but undeniably effective, in a depressing sort of way."

Quite true, as Hinds's bleak view of humanity pervades the film, and subsequent Hammer horrors, such as Evil of Frankenstein, for which he provided the screenplays. Terence Fisher gives the film that iconic Hammer feel, with great color cinematography by Arthur Grant.

Oliver Reed, though raw, and a bit over the top at times, is riveting. He manages to capture Leon's torment while still projecting the charisma that would make him an international star. His performance, and the vivid production values, easily make this my favorite werewolf movie -- well ahead of The Wolf Man, even if that film came first. Lon Chaney's Lawrence Talbot is just a mopey lummox with a death wish, while Reed's Leon combines danger and vulnerability to make for a much more compelling character. Talbot is basically suicidal, while Leon wants to live. And therein lies the tragedy.

The Curse of the Werewolf makes a fine double feature with either 1958's Horror of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee, or Paranoiac, from 1963, a sub-Hitchcock psychodrama featuring another early performance from Reed.

For further reading, check out Steve Biodrowski's essay on The Curse of the Werewolf at Cinemafantastiqueonline.com.