LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. (2023) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. (2023) BASED ON THE NOVEL OF THE SAME NAME BY RUMAAN ALUM.

DIRECTED/SCREENPLAY BY SAM ESMAIL.

MUSIC BY MAX QUAYLE.

DISTRIBUTED BY NETFLIX.

STARRING JULIA ROBERTS, ETHAN HAWKE, KEVIN BACON, MAHERSHALA ALI AND MYHA’LA.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘I FUCKING HATE PEOPLE.’

This is one of my favourite ever Netflix films. I’ve watched it three or four times already and will definitely watch it again. It’s an American apocalyptic psychological thriller film part-produced by Higher Ground Productions, the company founded by the Obamas.

Julia Roberts is phenomenal in it. She’s been my favourite mainstream actress since the early ‘Nineties when I first saw her in SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY with Patrick Bergin, and I still love her today.

This movie is something she can really get her teeth into as well, as opposed to the type of character she plays in frothy, bubbly romcom films like PRETTY WOMAN and RUNAWAY BRIDE, proving that she has great acting chops as well as her trademark good looks which are ageing beautifully. Her hair and legs and face are all still as lovely as ever, and she hasn’t gone down the plastic surgery route either which bodes well for them.

She plays Amanda Sandford in LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. One weekend, she and her husband Clay and their children Archie and Rose leave New York for a break in a magnificent summer home rental with a swimming pool, access to a beach and a nearby small town, plenty of local wildlife (namely deer) and just a general feeling of being somewhere picturesque where you’re getting-away-from-it-all.

My favourite scene in the whole movie is what happens with the gigantic oil tanker when they go to the beach. I love big spooky ships anyway, and this scene is fantastic. It’s the first thing to suggest to the viewer that something’s not quite right.

By the time we notice that the local wildlife are behaving strangely and that the owners of the rental house, the elegant George Scott and his mouthy daughter Ruth, have returned in the middle of the night pleading a ‘black-out’ as their reason for so doing, we’re pretty much convinced that something sinister is afoot.

The house Wi-Fi is not working so no-one can use their phones or computers. Also, Rose Sandford cannot watch the last ever episode of FRIENDS, which is super-important to her. Most frightening of all, the TV is displaying a warning from the EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM. That only happens when the end of the world is imminent…

Planes are dropping out of the sky, the very thing people were worried about back in 1999. Remember Y2K, or the Millenium Bug? Self-driving cars are crashing into each other and blocking up the freeway, so the Sandfords can’t leave the area and go home, much to their frustration.

Ear-splitting high-frequency noises make Archie’s teeth fall out in a gruesomely grotesque scene that you won’t forget in a hurry. The words ‘hackers,’ ‘cyber-attack’ and ‘coup d’etat’ get bandied about…

Amanda, who definitely wears the trousers in her marriage, doesn’t trust the newcomers George and Ruth at first, but the more that bad things happen, the more she realises that George is likely to be of much more use to them in an apocalyptic-style crisis than her husband Clay, a self-admitted ‘useless man.’ She and George even have a strong sexual attraction to each other, but they’d feel guilty about their respective spouses if they acted on it. Awww.

A very trim and fit-looking Kevin Bacon of FOOTLOOSE fame plays Danny, George’s belligerent, gun-toting survivalist neighbour. He’s been expecting this kind of scenario, or something like it, for a long time now and he’s ready for anything.

With a houseful of food supplies and medicines, will he give George and Clay the antibiotics they need for the now gummy Archie? Who does Danny think is responsible for the chaos and confusion that’s going on…? He’s got some theories if y’all wanna hear ’em…

Rose goes missing as well towards the end, which prompts Amanda and Ruth to go looking for her in the deer-filled forest. They find more than just deer and so does Ruth…

The score contributes hugely to the jittery, unsettled and suspense-filled feel to the film, and so do the unusual upside-downy sideways-y camera angles. This is now one of my Top Ten End-of-the-World-slash-disaster-slash-alien invasion-slash-survival films, on a list (in no particular order) that includes the following:

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW- 2004.

2012- 2009.

RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR- 2006.

CONTAGION- 2011.

CONTAINMENT- 2015.

INDEPENDENCE DAY- 1996.

WAR OF THE WORLDS- 2005.

SIGNS- 2002.

ALIVE- 1993.

THE IMPOSSIBLE- 2012.

The list would also include a load of old black-and-white B-movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), etc. They’d be in a category of their own because there are so many of them.

Why am I so fascinated by films like this? The sheer scale of some of the catastrophes is what draws me to disaster films, in the same way probably that a lot of us love watching monster movies like JAWS, KING KONG, GODZILLA, JURASSIC PARK/WORLD, etc. Also, I think we like to watch this stuff happening to other people in a voyeuristic kind of way while hoping against hope that it never happens to us…!

Anyway, do try to watch LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND if you can. It’s still on Netflix and it’d be one hell of a way to celebrate this May Bank Holiday.

TRAIN. (2008) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

TRAIN. (2008) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY GIDEON RAFF.

STARRING THORA BIRCH AND GIDEON EMERY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is going to be a short review because there’s actually not a whole lot to say about this slasher horror film. It falls into the ‘torture porn’ category, which I’m personally not crazy about. I usually prefer a nice cerebral horror movie to the kind where someone’s just being horribly mutilated and chopped up purely for shock’s sake.

TRAIN is very similar to the HOSTEL films, with the American young people and the foreign country and the chop-chop splatter-splatter and the bloody body parts everywhere, but it’s mainly set on a train, as you may have gathered from the title.

Thora Birch plays the lead role of Alex Roper, part of a US college wrestling team who’ve come to Eastern Europe to wrestle some of their Ukrainian counterparts. Now, I do dig Thora Birch. She’s the lead girl in one of my favourite films of all time, THE HOLE from 2001, and her character in it is delightfully twisted and self-serving.

Anyway, in TRAIN, she and her boyfriend, Todd, and their pals Willy, Claire and Sheldon, end up taking a dodgy train home, on the advice of an even dodgier Eastern European woman, after a night of partying causes them to miss their real train. Even the party invite has almost certainly come from a dodgy source.

What the young folks and their coach don’t know is that this mysterious train they’ve taken is a sort of mobile hospital, in which unsuspecting dopes- or dupes- like themselves have their organs brutally and none-too-hygienically harvested by terrifying Eastern European thugs. Then, the organs are immediately transplanted into the waiting patients, who are all conveniently aboard the grubby old choo-choo too, in hospital beds.

Thora is, of course, the last girl standing as the Eastern European baddies (would this very obvious stereotype be permitted to show its face in a film in the woke climate of today?) slash and stab their way through her ill-prepared team-mates.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a bunch of fit young well-fed wrestlers from ‘Murica might put on a better showing of protecting themselves in a fight, but no, they are pitiful to a man, or woman.

The baddies have no trouble at all in subduing them, expect for Thora, whose character eats razor blades and barbed wire for breakfast. Haha, I’m only joking, lol. She runs rings round the villains just the same, though. Here’s what mainly happens:

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Chop-chop slash-slash hurt-hurt skin-skin.

Oh yeah, that’s all there is. If you like seeing people eviscerated, then you might enjoy this film, but if you genuinely don’t, then maybe steer clear of TRAIN and its bloody ilk. Yes, ilk, I like that, very much. Like I said, I myself prefer a horror film with a bit of a mystery to it, like BURNT OFFERINGS or THE CHANGELING. But each to his own. Over and out…

THE CALLING BY BOB RANDALL (1981). A BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE CALLING BY BOB RANDALL (1981).

BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is one of my favourite old horror books, along with Robert Bloch’s PSYCHO, Robert Marasco’s BURNT OFFERINGS, Shirley Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and Ira Levin’s ROSEMARY’S BABY.

It’s one of those little old paperback books that you pick up out of curiosity in the second-hand bookshop, and then you take it home and read it and you never forget it till your dying day, lol. I’m surprised a horror film wasn’t made from it, that’s how good it is.

It’s the story of Susan Reed, a New York housewife in the early ‘Eighties who seems to have been singled out for a particularly sinister destiny. At first, everything is normal enough. She has a husband, Lou (Lou Reed, geddit?), whom she still loves and they still have sex and everything so things are okay enough in that department.

Susan is devoted to their small daughter Andrea and their dog Sweet William, an adorable old mutt who’s really Susan’s from before her marriage to Lou. She’s just gone back to work as an illustrator on a women’s magazine, and her best friend Tara works there too. They’re always ducking out at lunch to shop and gossip. It’s a decent enough life, so, when things start to go pear-shaped, we know that it’s Susan’s nice comfortable existence and lovely little family unit that’s at stake.

After several bad omens, it all begins with a phone call…

‘She was pouring out frozen French fries when the phone rang.

Weeks from then, Susan would still be unable to verbalize how she knew there was evil on the other end of the line, but she knew.

There was no sound. Nothing. No background noise, no voice, no static, no air, no white noise.

Nothing but a presence. A despicable presence.

She listened to it, shocked.

It was as if time and space had imploded. She was listening to a black hole.

Mesmerized, stunned, she took almost a minute before she spoke.

“Yes?” she said, and her voice came out thick and fear-laden, only to be sucked into that black hole.

She hung up quickly.’

This is Susan’s first direct contact with the ‘thing’ that seems determined to take over her life. We see her desperately trying to keep up a semblance of a normal life, but things start to fall apart pretty quickly.

She tries to explain to Lou and Tara what’s going on, that she’s being deliberately targeted by a supernatural force that wants to drive her out of her mind, but Lou in particular just thinks it’s hysterical woman stuff. You can tell he’s worried that there might be an interruption to the flow of clean laundry, collected dry-cleaning, sex acts and home-cooked meals that Susan typically provides, lol. Men, huh?

Anyway, the dread and suspense just keep ratcheting up and up and up till Susan does the only thing she thinks will protect her family from her and the monstrous ‘thing’ that threatens to destroy her. She runs, but there are some things you can’t run from…

The impact the vile ‘thing’ has on the poor family dog, Sweet William, is heart-breaking. If this were a film, it would merit an entry on doesthedogdie.com, a website I heard about during one of Ricky Gervais’s comedy shows on Netflix. You can input any film in the world, apparently, and they’ll tell you if a dog or a cat or any other living creature died or was hurt in it.

Good old Ricky; he gives the slightly bizarre example of Schindler’s List, a film which refers to the horrific murder of Jews in their thousands during the Holocaust. Does a dog die in it, though? No, but there might be the manhandling of a farmyard chicken…!

Anyway, THE CALLING is a brilliantly chilling book that I think can still be found for sale on some online platforms. It spooks me good and proper whenever I re-read it. Who was it who said that the greatest con perpetrated by the devil on humanity was to convince the world that he doesn’t exist? The devil doesn’t exist? This book begs to differ…

EDUCATING RITA. (1983) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

EDUCATING RITA. (1983) DIRECTED BY LEWIS GILBERT. SCREENPLAY BY WILLY RUSSELL.

BASED ON THE PLAY BY WILLY RUSSELL.

MUSIC BY DAVID HENTSCHEL.

STARRING JULIE WALTERS, MICHAEL CAINE, MICHAEL WILLIAMS, JEANANNE CROWLEY, MALCOLM DOUGLAS AND MAUREEN LIPMAN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is still such a quaint and endearing movie. I saw it recently on the big screen as part of this year’s ONE DUBLIN, ONE BOOK festival (it was introduced by Louise Nealon, who wrote SNOWFLAKE, the book part of ONE DUBLIN, ONE BOOK) and I must say, though the disc was a bit scratchy and the sound was gone in places, it still looked pretty good.

Julie Walters, in her first feature film, plays the eponymous Rita, a twenty-six-year-old English hairdresser who’s not happy with her lot and wants to try to improve it by doing an Open University Course in Literature. Michael Caine (JAWS 4: THE REVENGE) is Frank, the scruffy, shambling alcoholic of a college professor assigned to be her tutor.

She sees him once a week in his college rooms, and he teaches her how to pass exams on the likes of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. What she teaches him is almost more valuable; how there are more ways to look at a poem, play or novel than just the usual, narrow-minded academic one. She’s a breath of fresh air in his stuffy old rooms.

It’s a real case of opposites attracting, though not necessarily in a sexual way. Rita lives in a shabby side-street with her husband Denny, who, in an infamous scene accompanied by David Hentschel’s fabulous score, burns her books on a bonfire in the yard when he finds out she hasn’t come off her contraceptive pill like she’d promised him.

Her family in general don’t see the point of her trying to better herself intellectually when her lot is clearly to marry, have kids and grow old on the street where she lives. Is she wrong to want something more, to want to ‘sing a different song?’

Frank the tutor is a deeply unhappy man. With a failed marriage behind him, he doesn’t even care any more if his students see him literally falling down drunk on the job. He’s on thin ice with the college governors and probably only avoids the sack because the college don’t seem to really sack anyone; they just give their recalcitrant staff loads of warnings, lol.

Frank’s live-in girlfriend Julia is openly cuckolding him with his pal Brian, played by Michael Williams from situation comedy A FINE ROMANCE, in which he co-starred with his wife, Dame Judy Dench. Brian pretending to be on the phone to his publisher, Morgan, in order not to be caught in flagrante delicto with Julia is very funny, especially when Frank tells him they’ve had their phone cut off due to non-payment of the bill.

If Rita can instil some much-needed self-respect into Frank, she’ll be doing him a huge favour. He gets more and more miffed as Rita’s journey towards self-betterment takes her on an upward trajectory, away from him.

At the same time, he’s falling to pieces and sinking ever lower in the eyes of his students and his colleagues. He’s also jealous of the easy way Rita fits in with the other students, even the posh ones. What’s it going to take to get him to pull himself together and stop wasting what’s left of his one wild and precious life…?

The film was shot mostly in Dublin while purporting to take place in an unnamed British university town. The whole thing looks gorgeous, and, as I mentioned earlier, is set to the most fantastic music by David Hentschel, an English music producer who has engineered for such artists as Queen, George Harrison, Mike Oldfield and Elton John.

Oh, one last thing! Maureen Lipman, star of the British Telecom ‘You got an Ology?!’ commercials, has a small but crucial role in the film as Rita’s room-mate, Trish. I thoroughly enjoyed my trip down Memory Lane anyway, seeing this little gem on the big screen at the weekend. It’s an oldie but a goodie; catch it if you can.

BAZ LUHRMANN’S ELVIS. (2022) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

ELVIS. (2022) DIRECTED AND CO-PRODUCED BY BAZ LUHRMANN.

STARRING AUSTIN BUTLER, TOM HANKS AND OLIVIA DE JONGE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I think this might be Baz Luhrmann’s best ever film, and I didn’t even like it the first time I saw it; I thought it was too Baz Luhrmann-y, lol! Repeat viewings showed me the movie’s merit, and I even grew to like what I thought of at first as the bizarre casting of Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, complete with a fat suit, a fake nose and an unidentifiable accent.

 The story is told from the point of view of Colonel Parker, the man who managed Elvis Presley from 1956 to his tragic early death in 1977. Even after Elvis’s death, the Colonel continued to manage the singer’s estate till his own death in 1997 at the age of eighty-seven. I think Elvis’s widow, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, took over its management then.

We see the Colonel meeting Elvis in the mid-Fifties, when he’s already managing popular country music acts of the day such as Hank Snow, played here by David Wenham of LORD OF THE RINGS fame. Parker very quickly realises what a find he’s got in Elvis, the white boy with the black man’s unbelievably powerful bluesy singing voice.

An astute businessman with a hard head and an eye for a good deal, he finds a meal ticket for life in Elvis, taking an unprecedented fifty percent of his massive earnings. Elvis, who gets to be world-famous, the envy of every man alive and every woman’s dream guy, living on the fabulous Graceland estate with his parents Vernon and Gladys, his wife Priscilla and their daughter Lisa-Marie, seems to be okay with the arrangement for a good long while. His manager does a good job of making Elvis believe that he only has his best interests at heart.

We can see Parker wheeling and dealing throughout the film behind Elvis’s back, however, arranging deals that are good for Tom Parker but not necessarily for Elvis. Elvis wants to make a serious movie, for example, and be as much revered for his acting prowess as Marlon Brando, but Parker’s greed and excessive demands ruin Elvis’s chance to star opposite Barbra Streisand in A STAR IS BORN. The role goes to an excessively hirsute Kris Kristofferson instead.

The Colonel also locks Elvis into lengthy contracts and residencies in Vegas when Elvis wants to go abroad and tour. But the Colonel turns down all requests for Elvis to play overseas, no matter how much money is proffered.

That’s because the Colonel has a dark secret he desperately wants to keep from Elvis, and, when it finally comes leaking out, there will be a troubling confrontation that pits the two previous best buddies against each other. Where . . . or when will it all end . . .?

Austin Butler is ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS as Elvis the Pelvis. He has the stunning, dark good looks, the charm, the sexy smile, the hip-wiggling moves that outraged the TV-watching and newspaper-reading public. He has the lot. He’s the perfect choice as Elvis and does a phenomenal job portraying the King as the vulnerable, gentle and generous person he was under all the hype and glamour and sex-crazed groupies.

He’s brilliant too when it comes to playing the Elvis decimated by drugs, bad advice and exhaustion caused by the most punishing of work regimes. We now know, of course, that Colonel Parker was pulling the financial strings behind the scenes and a working Elvis was an Elvis that was bringing home the bacon, and that was the way the Colonel wanted it.

Speaking of hip-wiggling, which I did earlier, some people even want to put the real Elvis in prison early on in his career for the groin-thrusting things he does while he’s performing. It drives the watching wimmins wild with knicker-throwing desire, but I think it’s B.B. King, Elvis’s friend, who says that no-one’s going to put a rich white man in jail…

Elvis grew up in such a racist society, and you definitely get a sense of this in the film. Lots of references to ‘coloureds’ and ‘Negroes’ and also to the death of Martin Luther King, a man whose impassioned speeches Elvis seems to have admired.

Elvis adored the music of the black artists he listened to in his youth, and even the Colonel himself thought Elvis was a black kid when he first heard a recording of his music. It was such a big thing to have a black-sounding boy being white that it even added to the novelty of Elvis as a singer at first.

All the great songs are in here, from YOU AIN’T NUTHIN’ BUT A HOUND DOG and HEARTBREAK HOTEL to SUSPICIOUS MINDS and the powerful poignancy of GLORY GLORY HALLELUJAH. I think Austin Butler actually sings the songs here himself, with bits of the real Elvis mixed in at times.

I never really thought of myself as an Elvis fan, as he was very much before my time, but after watching this movie, and Austin Butler’s incredible performance as the tortured King, I think that might just be about to change.  

THE DANDY HIGHWAYMAN: A TINY STORY BY SANDRA HARRIS.

The carriage was rumbling its way through the forest when a small herd of horses, five or six at the most, suddenly came thundering alongside, blocking its way forward and forcing its frightened driver to bring the ponderous vehicle to a jerky halt. A brace of pistols poked through the carriage window and a voice as smooth as dark chocolate bid the occupants to climb out with their hands up.

Trembling with rage, Sir Roger de Courcy climbed out first and then aided his much younger wife, Tabitha de Courcy, to do likewise. They found themselves surrounded by five or six horsemen on big dark steeds, the steaming breath from the beasts’ huge nostrils blending with the early evening fog. All the men had pistols pointing at the unfortunate pair.

“What is the meaning of this?” bellowed Sir Roger, almost purple in the face with anger. He straightened up to his full height of six feet and addressed himself to the highwayman from whom he felt an air of the most authority emanating. “I’ll see you all hanged for this, ye reprobates and blackguards!”

“I can assure you that that will never happen,” replied the one to whom he spoke, the man whose deep rich tones had ordered the man and wife to leave their carriage. “And now, my dear Sir Roger, if you would be so kind as to divest yourself of your valuables, my esteemed colleague will pass the hat round, as it were.”

One of the horsemen jumped down from his mount and waved a black velvet sack in front of the richly clothed Sir Roger, who roared: “You know my name, sir? Then you will also know my occupation, and the name by which the vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells of English know me!”

“The Hanging Judge,” mocked the man who seemed to be the head bandit. “With many a notch to your belt. But I’m very much afraid that there hasn’t been a noose fashioned yet that’ll fit me, your Worship!”

Here he bowed sarcastically, before pointing his pistol in the Judge’s furious face. “But enough of the pleasantries. Valuables, now! And yours too,” he added, training his weapon on the beautiful young woman at Sir Roger’s side. “My word, this is a prize indeed! She sparkles brighter than any jewel.”

“Remove your filthy eyes from my wife’s person at once, you jackanapes!”

The young lady’s eyes flashed fire as she coldly addressed the head highwayman. “You would do well to heed my husband’s words. You would not like him to gift me those pretty blue eyeballs of yours in a velvet bag, I daresay, but if I ask for them, he will do it.”

“Any balls of mine I’m sure you’re welcome to use as you will, my Lady. You have quite a firebrand for a wife, sir,” said the head highwayman admiringly then to her husband. “Take off your dress,” he ordered her while keeping his pistol trained on Sir Roger, who bellowed now with the rage of an angry bull.

“I will require some assistance,” the woman said haughtily.

“Permit me.” The lead bandit jumped lightly from his mount and stood behind her, removing one glove before unhooking the expensive gown at the back and easing it down over her curvaceous body, clad now only in pale peach-coloured petticoats.

Standing behind her, he put his hands on her heavy breasts and fondled them while an apoplectic Sir Roger, five pistols trained on him, could only watch in impotent rage. The bandit then yanked her head round and kissed her full on the mouth, whereupon she slapped him with all her might across his face and scratched the skin of his cheek with her long, painted nails to boot.

“My word, you’ll pay a price for that, you fiery wench!” said the lead bandit, though he was laughing at her spirit. He liked a woman with spirit. He quickly re-mounted, then made a signal to his man on the ground, who grabbed hold of the Judge’s wife and handed her up, as if she weighed no more than a doll, to his leader, who placed her in front of him on his big black horse.

“You’ll swing for this, you devilish fiend!” screamed de Courcy as the dandy highwayman with the ruffled, pristine-white sleeves and shirt-front and diamond cufflinks under his black bandit’s cape prepared to make off with his semi-naked young wife.

“I rather fear that you will never have that satisfaction, Sir Roger!” cried the lead bandit. “Now, we must away!” At a signal from him, the whole band of thieves thundered off through the dense, rapidly darkening forest, leaving the unfortunate nobleman and his driver to stare after them in anger and consternation.

“What the hell kept you?” demanded Tabitha de Courcy as she clung to the horse’s mane for dear life. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming! I was afraid I’d have to spend another night with him, and I really can’t stand him anymore, after ten poxy years of marriage, you know I can’t…!”

“I had business to attend to, my love. But I was always coming back for you.”

“You owe me a dress,” she grumbled.

“I’ll buy you all the gowns in the world soon enough, you sexy slut.”

She smiled and nuzzled her face into his gleaming shirtfront as he bore her away to his hideout. For Lady Tabitha de Courcy, bedtime simply couldn’t come fast enough.