Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kontroll!

Article theme: Downbound Train - Chuck Berry

Me at the end of a workday too.

In your heart of hearts, you still like Clerks. and Fight Club, but you're afraid r/criterion tryhards will bully you for "entry level" "film bro" taste. Sack up! But, in the meantime, you'll be pleased to know there's a better version of both: 2004's Hungarian sleeper kino Kontroll, set entirely in the underworld of a sprawling Budapest metro system so bleakly rendered that the film had to be prefaced by a piece-to-camera telling you it's not nearly so bad in real IRL.

The briefing room alone is impressively depressing (dimpressing).

Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is our existentially weary protagonist working the thankless job of ticket inspector and sleeping overnight on the station platforms, resigned to a purgatorial existence of his own choosing. Commuters routinely try to swerve their fares and get belligerent when haplessly entreated to comply. The inspectors are threatened with knives, sprayed in the face with foam and violently beaten by football hooligans. They drink on shift, play games of chicken with the trains, and there are suspiciously high rates of suicide among the passengers.

Yeah...I could tell you some stories...

But while this sounds about as fun as a chronic illness, Kontroll is at least half a comedy. Much of this sturm und/or drang is as perversely funny as After Hours, and what isn't is impactful in surprising other ways. There's compassion and cameraderie among the bickering inspectors, between Bulcsú and the kindly old train driver Béla (Lajos Kovács), and there's even a place for beauty and inspiration amid the grungy tunnels, in the form of archetypal dream waifu Zsófi (Eszter Balla):

And her bear behind.

Yet these contrasts only serve to heighten the powerfully oppressive atmospherics of the subterranean scenario. At its bleary, acrid core, Kontroll is suffused with the same dense fog of dualism and Jungian nightmare imagery as the darkest of Lynch and Bergman.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mighty Crusaders!

Article theme: Crusader - Saxon

Me and the boys gather round the sacred gaming chair (2025, colourised).

The Muslim conquests started in the 7th Century and devastated the Persian and Byzantine empires, not because the Arabs had superior technology, strategy or tactics, but because both empires had outsourced large swathes of their militaries to Arab mercs who simply defected to Islam en masse. No one has learned anything from this, as the Respectable Bipartisan Consensus for the west under the Global American Empire has been to continuously wage war on Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Palestine while simultaneously importing Muslim immigrants into Europe at replacement levels.

Great job, asshole! You really thought that one through.

The same staggering endemic historical illiteracy and incuriosity explains why most westerners now think that The Crusades were unprovoked wars of aggression by Evil Christians instead of the most provoked and justified wars ever fought in history - a misnomer actively astroturfed by every single institution in the first world in a campaign of systematic DARVO that would shame Amber Heard. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 after four and a half centuries of nonstop Muslim pillage and sporadic efforts at defence and reconquest by heroes such as Charles Martell and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador).

I choose to believe they were this dripmaxxed IRL.

But Italian kinograph The Mighty Crusaders, very loosely based on Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, the epic poem that should rightly be renowned the Christian Iliad, extends thoroughly unwarranted grace to the forces that occupied Jerusalem at the time of the First Crusade. Just as in Homer's oftener regaled narrative, this siege has heroes on both sides.

For never was a story of more woe, than this of Tancredi and his mid MENA ho.

Macchiato Luigi plays Tancredi, the mightiest crusader of them all. Ferrari Pepperoni plays his archenemy and love interest, Clorinda. Gabagool Ovaheah plays Armida, the ambiguously witchy femme fatale. The epic poem has straight-up magic spells being thrown about this way and that, but the movie, much like the 2000s Troy, plays down any hint of supernatural bewitchment, rendering some of the characters' choices dumber than we might allow had the sorcery remained overt. Crusaders also treats us to some Star Trekian fight choreography:

"To win a swordfight, whip your sword around in the air like you're a helicopter" - Shadiversity

But as dumbed-down an adaptation as it inevitably is, it's still based to have an aesthetic kino celebrating those who took the cross, to say nothing of a film set in the middle ages with a colour palette beyond brown and grey.

It's also funny how Italian it all is.

Watch The Mighty Crusaders, read the poem, press S to spit on Ridley Scott, etc.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Son of Sinbad!

Article theme: Girls, Girls, Girls - Mötley Crüe

It is a truth seldom acknowledged that thoughtcrimes like "orientalism" and "the male gaze" are the fundamental cornerstones of entertainment. Universally forgotten RKO gem Son of Sinbad opens with your friend and mine, Vincent Price, looking for the titular character amid the streets of Baghdad. A hot wench offers to lead him to his errant friend, but first proceeds to dance sexily for three and a half minutes of screentime. There are at least four more scenes like this in the movie.

Which prompts the question: why isn't this the case in every movie?

Sinbad, Jr. (Dale Robertson), whom we shall call Sinbad for simplicity's sake, is not a sailor like his fabled father. In fact, no scene in this movie takes place anywhere near the sea. This Sinbad is instead Joey from Friends; an amiably dim Don Juan constantly running into and away from the Caliph's guards in the act of romancing said Caliph's harem of Howard Hughes' hand-picked hotties. Price's long-suffering sidekick, whomst Infogalactic tells me is supposed to be poetical polymath Omar Khayyám, tags along in his wake and tries to bail him out of trouble, like the Jeeves to his Wooster, but in a defiantly anachronistic fantasy Arabia.

"This is another fine mess you've gotten me into" - Omar Khayyám

"How anachronistic?" you ask. Well, for starters, the plot revives the Arabs vs Mongols theme from The Thief of Bagdad, with the villains stated to be agents of Timur. The OG Sinbad stories took place in the 8th Century, Khayyám lived in the 11th and 12th, and Timur wasn't born until the 14th. Who, however, cares? If you wanted a history lesson over entertainment, you'd read my ßlôg. Son of Sinbad is pure entertainment in the vein of Tall in the Saddle, Chandu the Magician and The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The lame sub-Bob-Hope humour in the script is masterfully spun into endearing territory mostly by virtue of Price, the silver screen's crown prince of ham, trying to phone it in and failing.

"Vince, we haven't started rolling yet. Vince no. Stop it" - director.

The cheerful, breezy tone could redeem many a stumble more than Son commits and should be studied by filmmakers intent on rendering every hero a surly asshole in a grim, humourless world to appeal to that kid who used to tell everyone to "grow up" without a shred of irony in primary school. An half-assed stab at a thematic subplot has Sinbad caught in a love quadrangle with three (main) love interests, but rather than draw everything to a screeching halt to berate the audience that This Is Wrong around the act-two-low-point, Son just pairs them off with other characters at random and leaves Sinbad's gf's plea for his monogamy (but not her) unsatisfied because Sinbad is Sean Connery, not Daniel Cr**g.

"I swear to love you until the end of the credits" - SinChad

So while bluehairs and Melonie Mack simps seethe and sperg, the rest of us can cheerfully separate IRL right action from old-school James Bondian fantasy. Watch Son of Sinbad, then read the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Vincent Price's voice. ♪ That's entertaaainment!

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Secret South!

There's something about that old-timey typewriter font.

16 Horsepower came on the scene in 1996, when Nick Cave's Let Love In and Murder Ballads had been all the rage in goth-folk-alt-country-roots-blues-whatever-rock, with Sackcloth and Ashes, an album of backwoods revival tent snake handling old tyme religion so bleak, vaguely ominous and mordant the insistently jaded yet clueless 90soids must certainly have taken it for sneering pastiche, a bit of aren't-those-dueling-banjos-rubes-creepy-and-weird condescension. But by the time they rolled out Secret South something became clear to even the densest George Carlin fanboy: David Eugene Edwards and his posse of preachers weren't joking; they meant every word of their musical ministry.

"But Pat", you splutter, spit-soaked dorito fragments spraying all over your mustard-stained "Better a wolf of Odin than a lamb of God" T-shirt, its structural integrity strained to the maximum over your sparsely hairy, heaving moobs, "Christian music suuucks!" A refrain long overdue a righteous repudiation: Christian *lyrics* suck. Finding a Christian band whose verbal cogitations stretch beyond sounding horny for the Lord can be a penance in itself, but your humble blôggeur is equal to the challenge. Lordian Guard is downright stately epic metal, Batzz in the Belfry is atmospheric ethereal wave, and even the tiresomely over-maligned Stryper eventually dropped an album of straight bangers sans the crush-on-Christ cringe. But 16 Horsepower remains the highest water mark for divinely inspired, transportive musikino on the theme of almighty God.

You might have heard their rendition of well-worn standard "Wayfaring Stranger", which dips audaciously into dark ambient, but don't expect the whole album to plow the same deep furrow: "Clogger" leads the pack with a hard rock stomp, "Praying Arm Lane" awes with the inevitability of judgement, "Splinters" sounds like the eye of an almighty storm, and Bob Dylan cover "Nobody 'Cept You" exults with an energy straight from beyond the veil. Banjos, organs, squeezeboxes and more find their way in and out of the mix but there's not a hint of gimmickry left over from the first two, more theatrical, albums. Clear a space in your top ten, and get it now.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Alamo!

Article theme: The Yellow Rose of Texas/The Eyes of Texas  - Elvis Presley

Because by any other metric it's great, the risible angle John Wayne h8ers have to take toward his epic masterpiece is that it is historically inaccurate on several counts, which puts it in the company of every single movie ever based on an historical event.

Everyone knows the real Crockett waterskied everywhere on two alligators.

I mean, did the Iliad faithfully capture the factual details of every moment of the Trojan war? There is a case to be made that movies should have to disclose their deviations from true events, but if you think this is anywhere near the worst offender, or that its purview is actually history and not myth, you need to put down the crack pipe. The facts are simply that 200-odd men stood against 7000, knowing defeat was inevitable, to buy time for General Sam Houston's army to escape north and lick itself into shape to claim the territory from the grasp of Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Who would win? I mean, yeah, actually it's the second lot, but it's the thought that counts.

"MaKe TeXaS mExIcO aGaIn" squealers can cope and seethe; if anything, Wayne's romantic narrative is too kind to Santa Anna, who didn't even bother to dispute the charge of despotism laid at his foot, went around calling himself the Mexican Napoleon, and was so narcissistic-slash-bug-fuck-insane he once held a funeral with full military honours for his amputated leg. Despite being an absolute cartoon, Santa Anna was reinstated three times by various disgruntled factions in old Méjico in between periods of exile for fucking everything up, only to fuck everything up again. His legacy is losing Texas because he was as incompetent as he was megalomaniacal. Yet Wayne - himself a boogeyman for his pinko detractors - was uninterested in the farcical demonology that would inevitably result from a proper treatment of the not-so-great dictator, showing more warmth and empathy for the enemy troops than any lib has ever mustered for someone who so much as called him a fag on 4Chan:

Much of the drama at the film's core is derived from clashing personalities under the pressure of imminent death. Richard Widmark plays Jim Bowie rough and ornery, Laurence Harvey plays Will Travis with a huge stick up his ass, and the Duke himself plays Davy Crockett straight down the middle, a canny diplomat who speaks the language of the rough-and-ready volunteers and the distinguished men of state with equal fluency. Charges of caricature could be levied by fanboys of any colonel of the three, but as a dramatic dynamic it keeps what might be a dull wait sparking with uncertainty, internal conflict and odd-couple humour. There's even a subplot in which Wayne trolls some glory-supporting merchant trying to pressure a young Latina hottie (Linda Cristal) into marriage, before packing her off to safety in old-timey chivalric fashion.

The character is listed in the credits as "Sausage Fest Disruptor", which I personally felt was just a little on-the-nose.

The fact you know from the jump everyone dies at the end (spoilars!!1) makes it all the more vital to pack the early scenes with endearing nonsense of this genre. You'll feel cheated of a whole series of Wayne-as-Crockett adventures, to the point of forgetting Wayne played Wayne in everything he ever made, which is quite the achievement for his 5,475th film. Moreover, he surrounds himself with such a strong cast of oddball minor characters that no scene passes without robust populist humour and pathos. Wayne sank $1,500,000 of his own money into the project, and his palpable love of the heroes outshines any question of intended disrespect. The Alamo is the siege classic to which misguided Zulu fans might best be gently redirected.

Roll call at an average Texas school (2025, colourised).

Contrary to what decades of character assassination might have you believe, the ideals for which the Duke actually stood were downright naïve in their let's-all-get-along would-be moderate-centrism.

In real life republics as a system are best characterised as utterly immunocompromised against destabilisation by l*ft-wing psychopaths, at which point the best-case scenario is that a Franco steps in to salvage the nation at the cost of many lives, and in the very worst cases you get a Mao. I have no faith in Wayne's dream, but perhaps, like Plato's own Republic, it's something that can only be truly realised beyond the confines of this world. For Wayne, that dream was one worth sharing. In his utter, naked earnestness, he gave a fitting tribute to the men who died for that impossible dream.

Pulping in the 90s: The Shadow and The Phantom!

Article theme: Original Sin - Taylor Dayne

When Alex Baldwin isn't fatally shooting crewmembers on set, he sometimes acts in movies.

Alec nooo

The Shadow

One such movie was the 1994 Shadow, in which Baldwin plays another asshole who shoots people, except, unlike in real life, a Tibetan monk known as the Tulku bullies him out of his asshole ways and into a life of 1930s proto-superheroism. Baldwin, hitherto an evil opium kingpin based somewhere around the Hindu Kush, insists he doesn't want redemption, but the Tulku tells him tough shit, and that's that, apparently.

Evil Baldwin's creepy Fu Manchu nails crack me up. It's like if he became an African warlord and wore a giant plate through his lip.

The Tulku has a magic flying dagger that makes faces at you in between trying to stab you. IDK if CGI this vintage is nostalgic yet, but look at it. It's so silly.

Though I'll spend much of the remaining runtime missing Evil Baldwin, Good Baldwin is a passable substitute, especially when they let him improv:

I kinda want to splice this into his Glengarry Glen Ross scene but I'm far too lazy, so just...picture it.

Now based in New York City at its art deco height, Good Baldwin has mastered the nebulous powers of the Shadow (1994), which is just as well, because an evil villain (John Lone) is about to wake up from an ornate sarcophagus, claiming to be the last descendent of Genghis Khan. This is an odd claim because it's widely believed ol' Genghis crushed so much puss that .5% of the entire Earth is descended from him, but maybe Lil' Khan believed his ancestor's claim that he was just playing naked Twister with four hundred ladies when he walked into the old man's yurt aged four wanting a glass of airag and a bedtime story.

Lil' Khan knows how to make an entrance.

Rather than make NYC the seat of his Lil'khanate, Lil' Khan plans to blow it to high Tengri with a magic-meets-science Frankenstein nuke. I have no idea what he intended to do next, but did the Mongols ever really think that far ahead? I'd love to crack wise about the lack of foresight that leads a world-spanning empire to fragment and be absorbed into Islam but, well, I'm British, so, uh...nevermind. Fortunately Lil' Khan is as entertaining a villain as he isn't practical, amusing himself doing things like mind-controlling the guy from the diner in Mulholland Drive to do a header off a skyscraper for bagging on his steppe chic ensemble.

Bet that homeless bum behind the Winkies doesn't seem so bad now, huh Winkies guy?

Sadly our hero puts a stop to his malarkey in flamboyant fashion. For some reason the Shadow wears a mask that only covers his mouth, but grows a longer nose so that his Baldwin form can't be identified by nose size. IDK how many trvely dedicated hardcore Shadow fans were frequenting the cinema in 1994, but I think they'd have gotten away with giving him a proper mask instead, because it's weird watching a movie wondering how the protagonist's Pinocchio powers work. Does he read CNN headlines every time he transforms?

Wearing my mask like this daily from 2020-22 to troll Fauci goblins. Not all heroes wear capes (but I do).

The Phantom

But The Shadow wasn't the only 1930s pulpkino to drop in the 90s, and NO, The Rocketeer isn't the other one. The Rocketeer is based on a pretender comic strip from the 80s and is boomer truth regime bootlicking ASS. The other one is 1996's purple-bodysuitkino The Phantom (1996).

Sadly, he doesn't yell "slam evil!" when he punches people. Missed opportunity, honestly.

Billy Zane (Twin Peaks) plays the titular hero who, despite his ominous-sounding name, is an entirely amiable bro void of the mandatory angst that makes most heroes such a bore. He lives in the jungles of Madeupistan but gets caught up in Treat Williams' (Deep Rising) evil scheme to unite three magical skulls that, when placed together, unlock the incredible power of welding:

"What a treat!" - Treat.

Even when trained on a person, this hilariously underwhelming superweapon is only about as useful as a handgun, maybe moreso if it doesn't require ammunition, but Treat Williams is so pleased with himself when he gets it, he reminds me of Béla Lugosi at the end of Chandu the Magician. Other villains include Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Showdown in Little Tokyo) as a pirate, Ritchie from The Sopranos as a gangster, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the ambiguously gay nympho leader of an all-chick squad of pilots who turns face in the end, which sounds suspiciously like Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, but apparently she was a real character in the OG comic strips so IDK who ripped off whom. Kristy Swanson (The Chase) rounds out the cast as Zane's love interest, who is apparently unable to see through his proto-Clark-Kentian disguise:

"Hmmm...nope, could be anyone" - Kristy Swanson.

Just like The Shadow, The Phantom is a good-natured time-killer with fun setpieces and period detail, but apparently most of the scenes developing the Swanson/Zane romance were cut, and you can feel their absence. Swanson's bonding scenes with Charlie Sheen in The Chase were a charm showcase that would elevate the characters' dynamic here. Hilariously, more definition is lavished upon the dynamic between Swanson and Zeta-Jones:

The great debate!!!

So, which is better? The Shadow, but I prefer The Phantom. But whichever you prefer, it's nice to know there were such sovlful tributes to the old-school pulp heroes released within at least my lifetime. Have a great week and don't forget to lock the door before you slam your evil.

Hey now.