'EX MARKS THE SPOT'....A TAIWAN TREASURE HUNT REVEALS WAY MORE THAN TREASURE......

  Ex Marks the Spot by Gloria Chao (2024)

     A whole lotta stuff going on here. Childhood sweethearts-to Hight School enemies-to....well, who knows?......an international treasure hunt loaded with confounding clues, riddles and Mandarin language symbols.....and a something-of-an-outcast teen girl coping with the treasure hunt, the sweethearts to enemies, an extra player to make it a romantic triangle....and her frustrating quest to connect with her Taiwanese culture and discover her own identity. I'm already fully exhausted from all that on her behalf.

     Gemma's late grandfather left her the treasure hunt clues which lead to Taiwan and possibly a much needed inheritance to help with her upcoming college tuition. . But the only path to Taiwan is through that ex-sweetheart/current enemy Xander, who's organized a summer tour through that country for himself and other Asian students. Sparks fly, incredible complex treasure clues get revealed through the stunning landscapes, mountains of mouth-watering Taiwanese cuisine are consumed. and deep family secrets rock Gemma and Xander's worlds together.

     Truly intricate, maddening treasure clues, but if you're no puzzle fan (like me), you might feel tempted to skim through those sections and go right to the emotional moments. And as much I'm impressed at the cleverness of the hunt on display, it's Gemma and Xander's journeys to self-revelations that make up the story's beating heart and that 's what really kept me turning the pages to the end.

     As our leads delve into the world of their grandfathers, the book evokes some beautiful picture-postcard imagery and enough delectable food to make you want to schedule an immediate flight out. . Ambitious and entertaining.

       4 stars (****)

'STOCKHOLM PENNSYLVANIA'......THE BOTTOM OF THE FILM FESTIVAL BARREL.......

 Stockholm Pennsylvania (2015)   How do we hate this movie?

            Let us count the ways.....

            No, let's not. It's a massive waste of time to spend more than a minute or two on this cinema atrocity.....

             Here's the epitome of film festival Culture-Vulture madness....

             A soul deadening, pretentious piece of excrement whose makers were so puffed up with their own importance, it made them oblivious to this cold hard fact......

             .......that the film fails to realize its lofty intentions so badly, with such wrong-headed incompetence, that it renders itself unwatchable, unfit for human consumption. 

               No question, its central idea promises a strong gut-wrenching examination of two damaged souls, each terribly wronged by the cruelest of fates.....

               ......and then proceeds to drop the ball at every opportunity, depending on its two superb lead actresses to make an audience think they're watching a fully thoughtful, thought-out film. 

                  But they're not. Not a thousand miles close.....

                  22 year old Leia (Saoirse Ronan) has been rescued from 18 years of basement captivity. At age four, a  malignant loon named Ben (Jason Issacs) abducted her from a playground and raised her completely isolated from the outside world. 

                  With Ben jailed, Leia's reunited with her parents Marcy and Glen (Cynthia Nixon, David Warshofsky), who haven't laid eyes on her since she was a toddler. 

                    While David can only stand by clueless and befuddled, Marcy's lifetime of emotional agony only gets worse. Leia remains a monsosyllabic stranger to her, like an otherwordly alien trying to cope with a strange envirionment  and even stranger people she's never known....her biological parents.  Her memories gravitate to the comfort and security she knew with Ben.

                  Yes, the setup sounds intriguing and if filmmakers with any semblance of talent were involved, this could've made for a compelling, riveting experience. 

                 But not writer-director Nikole Beckwith, who slows the proceedings down to an excruciating crawl.......every so often there are momentary flashes of perceptive clarity, but you'd need to guzzle gallons of strong coffee to stay awake for them. 

                  Then, during the film's final third, it goes so crazily off the rails, you can only gape at it in stunned disbelief.....

                  Nixon's Marcy, driven mad by Leia's disconnection to her, throws Glen out of the house and imprisons Leia, feeding her carefully scheduled portions of food and water. So once again, Leia finds herself held captive, only this time for reasons she can't begin to fathom. 

                 None of this looks or sounds real and it gets worse. Leia easily escapes and then the film pulls a pathetic, desperate Hail Mary pass to make an audience think it's relevant and controversial......

                  Leia's seen sitting on a park bench, watching a little girl and contemplating an abduction of a child all her own.  Ugh......and double ugh......a climax that only come from someone who knows nothing about the subject of their film.....

                  Fit only for Film Festival Culture-Vultures......for everyone else, Zero stars. (0).

                  

'SPIES STRIKE SILENTLY'....ANOTHER SUAVE EUROSPY SAVES THE WORLD

Spies Strike Silently (1966)    Eurotrash knockoffs of the James Bond movies flooded the international market throughout the mid to late 1960's.....what we think of as the Golden Age Of Eurotrash Eurospies. 

         The quality of these films ranged all over the map.....from Pretty Good to Not Bad to Meh to Abysmal to Laugh-Out-Loud to You Gotta Be ****in' Kidding Me.......

          To our everlasting joy, American TV stations purchased entire packages of them to as perfect programming for 3 in the morning insomniacs......

         And BQ wallowed in 'em. Ridiculous and formulaic as they were, God help us, we couldn't get enough of 'em......

          Here's one of the better ones we stumbled into on Tubi, available as an uncut, but poorly formatted version taken from a widescreen print. 

          Anyone familiar with this genre knows these films came about as Italian-French-Spanish-German co-productions, populated with actors from all the participating countries. So of course, they arrived on TV clumsily dubbed in English.....(except for the James Bond-ish hero, usually played by some down-on-his-luck American actor in desperate need of cash....)

          Lang Jeffries, already slumming his way through sword 'n sandal peplums, switched from togas to spiffy suits as Secret Agent Mike Drum. If nothing, else, he sure as hell looks like a dashing, dangerous Sean Connery clone....

          Secret Agent Mike's on the trail of a mad mastermind who's killing off assorted scientists and their immediate relatives. (One poor girl takes a knife in the back during mid-swan dive into a pool.)

         Along the way, multiple pop-up assassins get Drum-beaten during regularly scheduled fight scenes......but these punch ups, though frequent, lack that propulsive punch of Bond films.

         Our man Mike finally tracks down the megalomaniac responsible, a ranting loony-toon who stole his world domination plot directly from "Dr. Mabuse Vs. Scotland Yard" (see our review of 12/5/24).

         (And oh my did we adore the unintentional dubbing blooper where the loquacious loon suddenly starts delivering his lines in German....)

          Though Mikey endures not one, but two brain-washing injections from the Supervillain, there simply ain't no stoppin' him. Just as he's rescuing a babe-in-distress, armed forces show up for a 'Goldfinger' style pitched gun battle with the bad guy's black-clad goons.  

          But wait! The World Dominating fiend has one more try to beat the Drum, and tussles with the Mike-inator in a '59 Chevy perched half off the edge of a cliff. 

          Let's credit the film here for its one and only inventive action sequence, as Mike and Mastermind show us that duking it out inside a '59 Chevy ain't easy......what with the limited leg and arm room available.  And the car wobbling over a cliff doesn't help either......

           Sorry, but we never did free ourselves from our permanent  addiction to goofball Eurospy movies.....among our favorite Guilty Pleasures.....

            You either embrace the glorious cheese on display or don't come anywhere near these films. 

             For us fans, "Spies Strike Silently", one of the better ones, earns 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)  For everyone else who can't comprehend this genre, you shouldn't waste your time. 

MERRY MERRY TO TO BQ VISITORS!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hannukah, Happy everything to all BQ visitors and families.....

Like the rest of the world (except Chinese restaurants) we're taking a break for a couple of days, but we'll be back at it by the end of the week.

We leave you with the above image from our own favorite Christmas movie of all time, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"....(which, come to think of it, we'll run tonight for the gazzilionth time....

Peace on Earth and good health to one and all. 

'THE HOLCROFT COVENANT'.....MUDDLED, BEFUDDLED, LUMPY LEFTOVER LUDLUM

 The Holcroft Covenant (1985)   Until "The Bourne Identity" came along in 2002, a variety of filmmakers botched up their attempts to make sense of Robert Ludlum's twisty, pulse-pounding spy thrillers. 

         This one's especially sad, coming John Frankenheimer, the once brilliant crafter of propulsive cinema like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Train".

         We've no idea how or why Frankenheimer lost his mojo with this one, but the results are painful to behold......a stilted, stale piece of spycraft, indifferently acted by the entire cast, including its star, Michael Caine. 

        Caine's the title Holcroft, an architect who discovers his late Nazi officer father left him a windfall of four and a half billion dollars. 

         Seems that late, unlamented daddy, along with two Nazi officer cohorts started the billion buck nest egg so Caine could administer the money to make the world a better place and never let Nazis rise to power again.

           Okaaaaaay........

           But to control the cash, Caine must sign a covenant along with the surviving descendants of those other two Nazis - a British journalist (Anthony Andrews) and a high strung German symphony conductor (Mario Adorf, the only one here having some fun by hamming it up. )  Along for the ride as a standard Pretty Girl In Distress is the journalist's alluring sister (Victoria Tennent). 

            Then off we go to London, Berlin and Geneva where various guys with silenced pistols take potshots at Caine and more often than not, each other. Bodies fall all over the place, but the film presents the deaths in such a routine one-two-three-kick manner, why should we care?

          And anyone with even a passing familiarity with Ludlum's stuff could see the Big Giant Twist from a hundred miles away.....

          Worst moment - Caine's climactic scene, which no doubt was meant as a dramatic powerhouse. But after all the preceding random carnage and duplicity, the scene comes off as ludicrous and laughable. It probably provoked snorts and snickers from anyone watching it. 

            Best moment - the film's principal villain pontificates on the abysmal state of the world as a justifiable motive. And given today's frightening, ominous current events, this 1985 dialogue feels like a  prescient harbinger of our own chilling future.

              Overall, fit only for hardcore Caine fans and Frankenheimer completists. For everyone else, a dreary waste of time.

              1 star (*).

        

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP....SPECIAL "ALL HEIL TO PRESIDENT MUSK' EDITION....

 Greetings especially to all you Trump voters who didn't like the price of their eggs and gas....

           Are ya havin' fun yet?  Is the coming of your Dear Leader everything you ever dreamed of?

            What...no?  Really?  

             By the way, do any of you rocket scientist Trump voters remember voting for Elon Musk?  

              What.....no?  Really?  Too bad.

Unelected President Musk brings the country closer to a government shutdown with just a tweet.....and entices each GOP congressman a free slightly used Tesla, reconditioned and repaired after driverless crashes.....

Trump staff offers all GOP congress and Senate members free lessons in knee bending and ring kissing, in preparation for Jan. 20th....said Don Jr., "We want to make sure they're ready to lose their souls, balls and moral compasses from Day One....

Even before his Inauguration, Trump walks back his promise to lower grocery prices, now claiming..."it's hard to do"....English translation for Trump voters, "Lay out whatever cash you have left for your f***in' eggs and shut the hell up about it already. You people are bigger suckers than dead soldiers..."

George Stephanopoulos and ABC lay out millions to Trump to settle a libel lawsuit, with the money going toward funding a Trump library......Stephanopoulus was also force to promise to cut the ribbon opening the new library, will occupy an abandoned Taco Bell out on Gator Gut thruway in Georgia.......

'FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT'.....JERRY LEWIS'S ELUSIVE DISASTER THAT NEVER SAW THE LIGHT OF DAY.....

 From Darkness To Light (2024).....a revealing, exploration of 20th century cinema's most maddening, notorious never-seen film....

        We speak, of course, of 'The Day The Clown Cried', the 1972 Jerry Lewis film that collapsed amid bitter disputes between Lewis and the film's producer. 

         Just a recitation of the storyline induces cringes and severe upward eye-rolling.....a washed up circus clown in World War 2 Germany condemned to a concentration camp and forced to entertain Jewish children as he leads them into the gas chambers.

         The assembled footage of this movie, as of today, has only been laid eyes on by Lewis and a mere handful of people. One of the few, actor Harry Shearer, said even if you imagined how bad it could be, the actual film would dwarf your imagination in its capacity for awfulness. 

          We don't doubt that for a second. Through the post war years and through the 1960's, the arrogant, egomaniacal Lewis reigned as a comedy partner to crooner Dean Martin and then as writer-director and star of his own hit comedy movies. Praised for his filmmaking innovations (like video playbacks), Lewis split his persona between playing the slapstick idiot or the oily, insincere showbiz hipster. 

         By the 70's his films degraded to near unwatchable and Lewis began to reveal himself to the public as the bitter, angry detestable man he'd been all along. 

        If nothing else, "From Darkness To Light" sheds some long overdue light on the inception, the production and the aftermath of 'The Day The Clown Cried'. Included are a rare interview with Lewis, who long refused to ever discuss the film, and actual extended film clips. 

          Lewis could only get the film financed and produced in Sweden by Nat Waschberger, a fast buck Euro-Trash schlockmeister. ("That Man In Istanbul"). After briefly meeting with Jeanne Moreau, Lewis managed to secure Bergman star Harriet Andersson for a supporting role, but the rest of cast was made up of third-rate non-entities.  (Which becomes painfully apparent in the film clips.)

           While actually still in production, the legal rights to the story and script became impossibly tangled and Lewis returned to the U.S. with copy of the film still unseen by all but a few. He donated it the Library Of Congress with the proviso they could hold selected screenings by 2024. As of this moment, no such screenings have happened and most likely the film will never be made available to the general public in any form. 

           From the clips shown in this documentary, it's painfully obvious that evoking realistic pathos was light years beyond Lewis's skill set. The scenes on view resemble outtakes from an aborted Ed Wood Jr. project. 

            Even more illuminating are the chunks of Lewis's interview about the film. Even as he grudgingly admits to his own failures, he remains defiant, combative and ultimately.....sad.  Mel Brooke, Rob Reiner, Sarah Silverman and Martin Scorsese chime in with their own insights and opinions. 

            Given that this could be as close to "The Day The Clown Cried" as we'll ever get, no cinema buff should miss it....

            4 stars (****).

 

          

'THE TOWERING INFERNO'......HAPPY 50TH TO IRWIN ALLEN'S BONFIRE OF INANITY

The Towering Inferno (1974).....premiered around this time 50 years ago. And served as semi-schlockmeister Irwin Allen's ultimate, quintessential disaster movie. Produced by two major studios and populated with a star-studded line-up of actors. the overlong film delivered everything Allen promised - a catastrophic spectacle of death by fire, water and falling from great heights. 

           Yet after this film's release to massive box office success, nobody fell from greater heights than Irwin Allen......

           Allen, a tireless self-promoter, specialized in borderline cheesy sci-fi TV shows and movies....("Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea", "Lost In Space", "The Lost World")  He struck gold with his 1972 upside-down cruise ship disasterpiece "The Poseidon Adventure".

          Hollywood execs salivated at the money to be made feeding the public's newly hungry appetite for special effects calamity. Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox bought competing best sellers about fires in gleaming glass high rises. ('The Tower' and 'The Glass Inferno'. 

           In a rare instance of common business sense, the two studios agreed to blend the two books into one humungous movie they'd produce jointly......and who better to bring this wing-ding to life than Irwin Allen.

           (In subsequent years, such economic logic went out the window, with studios releasing separate, competing films about   volcanos, meteors hitting the earth and even two James Bond movies......)

           Irwin Allen reveled in his role as impresario-ringmaster of a this super-production about a miles-high skyscraper catching fire. Upfront as the leads were the primary superstars of the era, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, along with equally in demand Faye Dunaway. Supporting roles included old Hollywood stalwart William Holden as the big-bucks builder, and Richard Chamberlin as his whining weasel son-in-law, whose cost cutting on the building's faulty wiring touches off the fire. 

          For Poseidon, Allen was then astute enough to leave directing the actors to smoothly competent Brit Ronald Neame. Fox and WB, knowing Allen was at best a Grade C journeyman director, insisted on the same policy, leaving the actors in the care of John Guillermin while Allen oversaw the blazes and rescues. 

           The overall result?  Like watching any three hour baseball or football game. You thrill to the high points, while there's entire stretches you could nap through without missing a thing. 

           The superstars played to their strengths - Newman as the thoughtful, caring architect enraged and disgusted as his edifice wrecks due to cheap construction done behind his back.....McQueen as the coolest-of-the-cool fire chief quietly performing feats of heroism everywhere he goes.....(the film provides each star such moments: Newman scrambles up and down a twisted stairway railing to save a woman and two children, McQueen desperately grips a struggling fireman as they both dangle from the roof of an already teetering glass elevator attached to a helicopter cable. 

           (and yes, that O.J.Simpson as the security guard rescuing a kitty-cat, whom he certainly treats more tenderly than his wife....)

            Audiences didn't mind that the film suffered from the same paper thin cornball characterizations and connect-the-dots plotting  that afflicted all disaster movies (and what made them so easy to ridicule and lampoon in the 'Airplane!' comedies.).

            Nobody cared. Irwin Allen's Bonfire Of The Inanities served up what we craved and expected.....Flaming humans! Big explosions!  Crazy stunts!  Huge stars all sweaty and smudged! Bodies flying out the windows!  (Yes, kiddies, long before 9/11 that was considered popular entertainment......not so entertaining now, is it?)

           Returning to the film again, we had to smirk a bit at the astounding finale, which in a way, became a perfect metaphor for the rest of Irwin Allen's filmmaking career......

           Allen's gloriously matte-painted skyscraper turns out to hold gigantic water tanks on its roof......why this place needs enough water to turn the Sahara into a lakeside resort is beyond us. But it does come in handy for Newman and McQueen to detonate the tanks and touch off a deluge that sends a few more stuntmen into swan dives off the top floor. 

             Those final shots of water cascading down the steel Tower and dousing the inferno prophesied the rest of Irwin Allen's sad filmography.......

             'The Master Of Disaster' pressed on with the genre mistakenly handing over the direction to a....well, a Grade C journeyman....Allen himself. 

              The ludicrous 'Beyond The Poseideon Adventure' and the laughable killer bee epic "The Swarm" hammered nails into the coffin of the dead-as-a-doornail disaster film. Warner Brothers would only let Allen produce but not direct the woeful volcano flop, 'When Time Ran Out', his last dire stab at the genre.  Even with another director, the film still looked like an Ed Wood Jr. production with a slightly larger budget. 

             So for one moment in 1974 time, Irwin Allen rode the top of the wave of disaster movies until he himself insured their demise. "The Towering Inferno" still stands as his lasting legacy......silly, outdated, a curio of a long gone era but certainly an overstuffed buffet of all-star, old-fashioned Hollywood cinema. 

              2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).  These days, mainly for fans of the stars and film historians......

           

'CARRY ON'.....NETFLIX FINALLY GETS THE '90'S RIGHT! A GOOD DAY TO FLY HARD.

Carry On (Netflix 2024)    Regular BQ visitors know how much we've carped and snarked about Netflix assembling imitation 1990's thrillers like Doc Frankenstein slapping together his monster from spare parts stolen from other bodies........

          Just in time for Christmas, they finally got one right, pieced together from assorted chunks of 'Die Hard', 'Die Hard 2',  'Speed' those Liam Neeson train-plane-automobile thrillers, and even that long forgotten Johnny Depp nailbiter "Nick Of Time". 

           Of course, every breathless minute of it is ridiculous, over-the-top and filled with more plot holes than the moon has craters.

           Who friggin' cares? It's a rollercoaster ride. Nobody gets on a looping, cork-screwing coaster for insight into the human condition. 

            We do it for the thrills, the wham-bams, the clock countdowns and the thwarting of the obnoxious mastermind who's tormenting our hero......

            So we say, snap the safety bar down and take the ride, 

            Our everyday shlub who's forced to rise to the occasion is TSA slacker Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton of "Rocketman"). He's under the gun from 'The Traveler (a finely psychotic Justin Bateman), who's out to send a carry-on packed with Russian nerve gas on to a packed flight of 250 people.  Yikes.

            Kopek's must tow the line or the Traveler will order up the sniper execution of his pregnant girlfriend (Sofia Carson), who's also working the airport at an airline reservation counter. 

             From this point everything that could possibly spiral out of control for both Kopek and his tormentor spirals out of control. And we don't mind telling you we inhaled every ludicrous minute of it. 

             Bateman's a hateful handful in the great tradition of 'Die Hard's Alan Rickman and Egerton executes enough sprints through the crowded LAX terminal to qualify for the next Summer Olympics. 

             And it's Christmastime at the airport, so everybody's pissed off even without realizing they might end up nerve-gassed to death. 

             Carry-On will now take its well earned honor as of our favorite Happy Holiday guilty pleasures.  By all means, bring on 'Carry On II', (maybe taking place during Spring Break?)

             4 stars (****).

'THE TRAIN'......BURT'S ALL ABOARD FOR ONE THE BEST OF ALL WW2 ACTION-ADVENTURES....

 The Train (1964)     Let's get right to the point here. We don't want to wait till the end of the review to hand out the rating.

          Right now, BQ tells you this is a 5 star (*****) all-time great. One of our favorite World War 2 movies and one of the most visually spectacular. 

          What's sad......no studio or director in this day and age would ever attempt a film like this without their hundreds upon hundreds of CGI digital artists. 

           All the action sequences in "The Train" are filmed live on set. Explosions, incredible train crashes....and the lead actors performing their own stunts. 

          More importantly, everything that goes into making a truly great movie is plainly on view here.....the acting, story, composition of shots for maximum dramatic impact. 

          In short, everything that's missing from a superhero movie.

          Paris 1944 - the occupying Germans are on the verge of fleeing the city as Allied forces invade Europe. Ruthless Nazi Col. Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) an imperious art-loving dilettante, plans to transport all of France's cherished classic paintings back to Germany.

          Putting the paintings on a train puts Von Waldheim in the path of French railroad inspector Labiche (Burt Lancaster). He forces Labiche to personally engineer the train.....a double-edged sword of a job, since Labiche has already been tasked by the Resistance to thwart the train's passage to Berlin without destroying the paintings. 

           From this point the film becomes a gripping duel of wills and reckless one-upsmanship between the two men, while Allied air raids wreak explosive damage to trains and the railyards.  And that's not all that collides.......

           Director John Frankenheimer, given access to real trains and tracks, stages some of the most eye-popping action sequences (and stunning train crashes) ever committed to film.  But he never forgets this is a human story, with drama scenes done with carefully composed shots that feature Lancaster in the foreground and the supporting cast alongside reacting to him.

             The incendiary issue that drives the film never gets lost in all the action.....Labiche agonizes over whether all the lives sacrificed to save the the paintings justifies the carnage. And Frankenheimer hammers this point home in the film's final shots, leaving it to the audience to decide. 

              We could easily go on and on for another few hours about how much we love this movie, so we'll wrap it up with a recommendation that no cinema buff should dare miss "The Train".

              Again, we say 5 stars (*****). If you haven't seen it, stop everything you're doing and seek it out.  Right now. 

'THE PSYCHOPATH'.....THE 'PSYCHO' AUTHOR DREAMS UP ANOTHER HELLISH MOTHER-SON COMBO......

 The Psychopath (1966)......barely makes it to 80 minutes, but for horror buffs (and lovers of obscure 60's cinema like us) it's a diverting little piece of Halloween candy with a satisfying nutso ending.

         This distinctly British thriller came into the world via American producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. They moved across the pond to operate their Amicus production company. For a while through the 1960's, they functioned as something of a rival to the horror house of Hammer. 

         Amicus gravitated to portmanteau scare-a-thons, featuring multiple short stories within one feature film ("Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors", etc)  And sci-fi fans well remember their two "Dr. Who" movies with a doddering, kindly Peter Cushing taking on armies of Daleks rasping 'Exterminate!'

         For 'The Psychopath', they turned to prolific pulp novelist and screenwriter Robert Bloch, whose novel 'Psycho' became Hitchcock's you-know-what. And once again, Bloch presented us with a strange young man under the thumb of his very weird, very frightening mother. 

         Only this time, mom's no stuffed mummy parked in the fruit cellar. She's very much alive and holding a vengeful grudge dating back to the end of World War 2. 

         Bloch's new mother-from hell is wheelchair bound Mrs. Von Sturm (Margaret Johnston) a once wealthy German aristocrat with a simpering, dutiful son (John Standing). After the war, Mrs. Von S. saw her wealth and property usurped by four members of an Allied tribunal. 

          And here's an un-surprise......the four men, now middle-aged and well-to-do are droppin' like flies at the hands of a murderer. The fiend favors leaving life-like doll replicas of the victims......and wouldn't you know, Mrs. Von Sturm ekes out a living making life-like dolls. 

            Hmmmm......sounds like an interesting case for Inspector Holloway (Patrick Wymark, giving his usual smooth comforting delivery).

            Renowned cinematographer turned horror director Freddie Francis does his best to whip up a few unsettling moments and scares, but the fast 'n cheap budget doesn't much help him. (Shooting the film in bright color and wide screen Techniscope didn't generate the creepy atmosphere this story needed to come off).

             The MVP here? Clearly Margaret Johnston as the mom straight up from the depths of hell. In the film's over-the-top finale, you can almost hear her sneering "Hold my beer" to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.  And whole doll business comes to a truly unforgettable conclusion in the final macabre shot.

             No world beater for sure, but for British horror completists, it'll only take up an hour and 20 minutes, so why not?

              2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)

'BLACK DOVES'.....'TIS THE SEASON TO BE BLOODY......

 Black Doves (Netflix series-2024)     We surprised ourselves by semi-binging this 6 episode espionage-action series set in London. 

          Had a damn good time with it, too. Top loaded with brutal action, twists upon twists and occasional bursts of sick humor. 

          Real gritty spy stuff?  On the surface, yes. But this show dials up all the usual tropes we've come to expect.....way, way up. 

           All the major players, naturally, are lying, conniving psychopaths, sociopaths and uh....rather untrustworthy.....all skilled in bone crunching hand-to-hand combat and ready to whip out the guns to rack up high body counts when called upon. 

           And they're called upon to do this stuff frequently. By the time the final episode's over, London's littered with enough blood splattered corpses to keep a morgue busy for two years. 

            A labyrinth of a plotline?  You bet your Glock on it. China's ambassador to Britain is found dead of a drug overdose and his wild-child, drug addict daughter has gone missing. China's not buying the overdose story and it's looking like no amount of Brit diplomacy can avert World War 3. 

            On top of all that, 3 random people get whacked including the lover of Helen Webb (Keira Knightley), the wife of the British Defense Minister. 

            But Helen's no ordinary dutiful politician's partner. She's an undercover agent for a shady intelligence outfit that swipes state secrets to auction off to the highest bidder. And that includes all the top secrets Helen overhears from her beloved husband. She duly spills them all to her boss, the mysterious, cryptic Mrs. Reed. (Sarah Lancashire)

            Talk about a long term deep cover assignment......Helen's been married to the politico for 10 years, pumped out two children and shmoozed with the high and mighty as her hubby climbs up the ladder to maybe 10 Downing Street itself. 

           Not only does she seethe and grieve over her lover's death, unknown assassins target her for unknown reasons. That prompts Mrs. Reed to recruit triggerman Sam (Ben Wishaw) to wipe out the threats to Helen before she goes on her own vigilante murder spree. 

           Sam, by the way, has a whole host of his own problems.  After he botched a hit job ordered up by reptilian crime lord Lenny (Kathyrn Hunter), he'd fled the country, abandoning his gay lover Michael. (Omari Douglas). Still in trouble with Lenny, Sam's forced to ally himself with a pair of wisecracking young hit-girls (Agnes 'O Casey, Ella Lily Hyland).

            Believe us when we tell you we've only sketched out the bare minimum of the twisting, turning plot complications that bring freelance spies, street thugs, pro assassins, Chinese diplomats, CIA agens and London crime kingpins all colliding together. 

           Don't worry about losing track.....the show never bores, with each episode providing furious punch-ups, pitched automatic weapons firefights and dead bodies galore. 

           The more we thought about how much spycraft and carnage are packed into this show, we began to think of it as a ridiculous, overheated but whole-lotta-fun guilty pleasure.......

            Acting is uniformly top-of-the-line, particularly Knightley and Wishaw. And special commendations to O' Casey and Hyland as the hit-girls, gifted with all of the show's wittiest retorts and laugh-out-loud moments. 

            We realize how hard it's become to pick out something to watch amid the literal oceans of streaming series and movies now available......BQ says give this one try.

             4 stars (****)