Angelman's Place

As director Edgar Wright’s follow-up to his dead-on horror satire Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz (2007) is an even better, funnier and more richly multilayered movie, weaving multiple genres and homages to previous classics into one complex, rollicking, fast-paced and always entertaining film.

Our hero is the uptight, by-the-book Police Sargent Nicholas Angel—perfectly portrayed by an adorably serious and dorky Simon Pegg— a perfectionistic and therefore wildly unpopular member of the London police force who makes everyone else look bad with his obsessive exceptionalism. In the guise of a “promotion,” Angel is transferred out of London and basically put out to pasture, relegated to the tiny English country village of Sandford in Gloucestershire.

Quaint and picturesque Sandford is a perennial Village of the Year with a zero-crime rate and a lackadaisical police service (don’t call it a police force). Sandford’s Most Wanted is a runaway swan loose from the zoo, and the Neighborhood Watch Committee frets about kids in hoodies, living statues and crusty jugglers in the town square that might sully the town’s sterling reputation.

Simon Pegg as Nicholas Angel, with the Sandford Police Service

But Nicholas Angel senses a darker reality. At first in overzealous hot pursuit of shoplifters, surly townies and the aforementioned runaway swan, he realizes that a rash of bloody accidents and gory mishaps (all fatal) are in fact deliberate hit jobs.

A police officer who has never fired his gun,  Angel must embrace his dark side to fight evil—and is encouraged to indulge his secret predilection for firearms. With the help of his partner, Danny Butterman, son of the police chief (unforgettably played by Nick Frost), Angel sets out on an investigation that culminates in a town-wide explosion of vigilante justice. 

Inspired by Danny’s favorite movies Point Break and Bad Boys II, the last quarter of the film shifts gears from buddy comedy to a kick-ass shoot ’em up, a fitting tribute to  “every action movie ever made,” with further nods to classic conspiracy thrillers like The Wicker Man.

Danny (Nick Frost) and Nicholas on duty

Juxtaposing zany physical comedy with often gory scenes of violence and rapier-sharp wit, and peopled with a marvelous cast at the top of their game, Hot Fuzz is a no-holds-barred, adrenalin-filled thrill ride, further fueled by a rousing soundtrack of ’80s and ’90s pop music.  

The chemistry of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is the glue that holds the film together as the pair warmly salutes and satirizes the buddy comedy genre. They’re a classic comic team in the style of Laurel & Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Martin & Lewis, with Pegg as straight man and Frost as clown. (The pair would go on to make more films together, but none have matched the critical or financial success of Shaun or Fuzz.)

Jim Broadbent as Chief Frank Butterman

Billie Whitelaw as Joyce Cooper

Edward Woodward as Tom Weaver

The film is packed with well-known actors, a virtual who’s who in English filmdom—and no one does dry humor better than the Brits! From cake-eating Police Chief Frank Butterman, who makes sure criminals get their just desserts, played to the hilt by Jim Broadbent (Moulin Rouge), to the legendary, always menacing Billie Whitelaw (The Omen, Night Watch) as Joyce Cooper, proprietress of the Swan Hotel, to Wicker Man antihero himself Edward Woodward, the cast is uniformly stellar. There are also small cameos by Bill Nighy and Martin Freeman as well as unbilled bits from Cate Blanchett and Steve Coogan.

Timothy Dalton as Simon Skinner

Timothy Dalton, who started his career as an 80-year-old Mae West’s handsome young bridegroom in Sextette, is a standout as urbane supermarché owner Simon Skinner, who plays a clever cat-and-mouse game with Angel. (Dalton’s short-lived tenure as James Bond in the late 1980s might have benefited from some of the Welsh actor’s comedic adeptness and droll delivery. But after the feather-light performances of the previous Bond, Roger Moore, the producers wanted the series to take a darker turn. Both Dalton's films underperformed, though, and Pierce Brosnan restored Bond's light comedic touch in his interpretation of 007.)

Olivia Colman as PC Doris Thatcher

Attempting to apprehend Sandford's Most Wanted

With a script cowritten by actor Pegg and director Wright and skillfully creatively executed by film editor Chris Dickens and cinematographer Jess Hall, Hot Fuzz is rich, masterfully fast-paced storytelling for movie lovers, one of those films you have to see again and again to capture every nuance, reference and comic aside.

Thanks to Gabriela from Pale Writer and Gill from Realweegiemidget Reviews for hosting this amazing Not Bond Blogathon which will undoubtedly leave us all a bit shaken but not stirred. Look forward to reading all the posts!

Boy meets boy in a world where their kind of love was an impossibility. This is E.M. Forster’s Maurice (1987).

Having already produced a critically acclaimed film version of Forster’s A Room with a View in 1985, producer Ismael Merchant and director James Ivory took the gamble of mounting Forster’s groundbreaking and explicitly homosexual love story with honesty and heart, in exquisite period detail.

As a gay man who came out in the 1980s, long before it was fashionable or even safe to do so (and as the AIDS crisis pushed an entire generation out of the closet to fight for their civil rights), Maurice was one of the first LGBT films I ever saw, and it remains one of my all-time favorites. I was dazzled by its romantic opulence, emotional honesty and intelligent treatment of previously verboten subject matter.

Hugh Grant as Clive Durham

The three British actors who form the forbidden love triangle in Maurice took the chance of being stereotyped forever and ruining their chances at stardom by playing gay characters. (A few years before in the USA, up and coming leading man Harry Hamlin had almost destroyed his burgeoning career by playing a homosexual in a controversial film called Making Love.)

James Wilby as Maurice Hall

Here you’ll see a young and handsome Hugh Grant, years before he leapt to fame in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The only member of the Maurice ensemble to make it to A-List megastardom, the charming Grant has since carved an indelible niche as a leading man in iconic light romantic comedies like Notting Hill and Love Actually. (But throughout his meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s, Grant never talked much about Maurice!)

Rupert Graves has continued to work steadily since he bared his soul (and much more than that!) in both Room with a View and Maurice, in dozens of films and TV series including V for Vendetta, the ABC series The Family and The White Queen for BBC.

Rupert Graves as Alec Scudder

In the film’s title role is the stalwart James Wilby, always at home in period drawing room settings in films including A Handful of Dust, Gosford Park and Merchant Ivory’s Howard's End. Wilby’s veneer of conservative Britishness makes him the perfect choice to play the role of a deeply conflicted man who makes the bold and daring, unexpected life choice of surrendering to his natural inclinations.

The film opens at Cambridge in 1909, where suburban upper middle class youth Maurice Hall (Wilby) meets and falls in love with Clive Durham (Grant), the scion of an aristocratic family and young master of Pendersleigh Park (think Downton Abbey).

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay touches upon the emotional, intellectual and socioeconomic aspects of E.M. Forster’s story. The richness of their liberal arts education at Cambridge is illustrated by readings from Plato’s Symposium on platonic male love (the professor warns his students to “omit the reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks”) and the society’s caste and class system where social roles are clearly delineated.

Mark Tandy as Viscount Risley

At Cambridge Maurice is drawn to Risley (Mark Tandy), a supercilious and cerebral upperclassman who has a “dangerous” interest in him. Through his attraction to Risley, Maurice meets the sweet and boyish Clive, and the pair immediately become intimate friends and soul mates.

At first it is Clive who is the iconoclast and sophisticate, determined to turn his back on the rigidly repressive stuffiness of Edwardian society—but eventually he succumbs to peer pressure and fulfills the role that society has laid out for him. Maurice is the uneducated, naive dolt who follows all the rules without question until his animal instincts lead him in the direction of freedom.

Clive resists Maurice's advances

The story is rife with reversals. Though it is Clive who first ardently proclaims his love, scandalizing Maurice, it is a newly lusty Maurice who pushes to consummate their relationship. But as the pair spoon and snuggle on a blanket during their romantic picnic, Clive fearfully recoils at Maurice’s physical advances.

Both characters grapple with their ideas of masculinity and respectability. When Maurice works as a London stockbroker, he dons a mustache that Clive finds “revolting,” yet for the second half of the picture (another reversal) it is Clive not Maurice who wears the mustache.

When Viscount Risley is arrested and “sent down” for dallying with a young soldier in a London pub as part of a sting operation — homosexuality is crime and major scandal — he is sentenced to 6 months hard labor but more importantly, by being branded a ‘twank’ (faggot), loses his reputation and his station in the social pecking order.

Distinctly middle class: Maurice's sister (Helena Michell) and mother (Billie Whitelaw)

Risley’s disgrace shakes Clive to the core and makes him determined to change, though Maurice wonders, “Can the leopard change his spots?” They both try. While Clive submits to a sexless marriage to the frigid Anne (Phoebe Nicholls), Maurice visits a hypnotist in the vain hopes that he can cure his condition ("I’m a degenerate of the Oscar Wilde sort”), to no avail.

Then Alec Scudder (Graves), the attractive but rough hewn under gamekeeper at Pendersleigh, makes a bold pass at Maurice, and the film erupts into the stuff of romance novels, culminating in rapturous male-male love scenes that might make Lady Chatterley herself start to blush. (Same sex love scenes may be commonplace today in mainstream entertainment, but the startling and unabashed full frontal male nudity of Maurice was still an uncommon sight in 1980s cinema.)

Caste and class system: The underkeeper and the gentleman

Maurice climaxes in a happy ending for Maurice and Alec (“Now we shant never be parted,” whispers Alec) and a resigned sadness for Clive who looks out the window longingly into his past, with wife Anne at his side.

The man that got away: Clive and Anne (Phoebe Nicholls)

The principals are ably supported by a cast that’s a virtual who’s who of accomplished British character actors, including Denholm Elliott, Ben Kingsley (sporting the oddest American accent you’ve ever heard) and Simon Callow (Bedrooms and Hallways). There’s also a tiny cameo by Helena Bonham Carter (if you blink, you’ll miss her).

The hip hypnotist: Ben Kingsley steals a scene

Billie Whitelaw, beloved to horror fans in films like The Omen and Night Watch, is delightfully dotty as Maurice’s dear mother, who witnesses an intimate moment between Maurice and Clive. The imperious Judy Parfitt (Wilde, Dolores Claiborne) is marvelous in her brief scenes as Clive’s terribly correct, upper-crust mother.

Maurice was something of a coming out statement for filmmakers and longtime life partners Ismael Merchant and James Ivory. (Merchant died in 2005; Ivory recently won a Best Screenplay Academy Award for his adaptation of Call Me By Your Name.) Though they never flaunted their 44-year collaboration and love affair (rarely ever speaking publicly about it at all, in fact), their shared love of the material is evident in their daring film treatment of E.M. Forster’s lost novel of same sex love in Edwardian England.

A labor of love: James Ivory and Ismael Merchant

Thanks to MovieRob for inviting me to participate in his Genre Guesstimation celebration of LGBTQ+ movies!

Horror movies are among my chief cinematic pleasures, and the one that scared me the most as a child was The Omen (1976). I begged my father to take me to see it, and he reluctantly complied, but it scared the bejesus out of me and I was forced to sleep with a night light on for years to come. I would even run out of the room in terror whenever the TV commercial for the film would come on...the frighteningly hollow and cold-blooded tones of the Gregorian chant-inspired theme music by Jerry Goldsmith (the aptly titled opus “Ave Satani”). I was 10 years old.

It wasn’t until the dawn of the Blockbuster Video era in the mid-1980s that I was able to muster up the courage see the 1978 and 1981 sequels to the terrifying original. As a college student at Northwestern University, I also had the opportunity to take a screenwriting seminar taught by a fellow alum—the talented David Seltzer, who wrote the original screenplay that started the Omen phenomenon.

The Antichrist is perhaps filmdom’s greatest arch-villain, bringing about not only murder and mayhem but quite possibly the end of the world itself, and the character of Damien Thorn as portrayed in the Omen trilogy gives viewers a fanciful birds-eye view into the mind and heart of a born killer as he grows from infant to adult.

The three faces of Damien: Stephens, Scott-Thomas and Neill

Obviously inspired by the huge popularity of previous horror classics Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, The Omen enjoyed less critical acclaim but was nevertheless a big box office hit that spawned two entertaining sequels. Seltzer’s original screenplay boasts a strong and compelling narrative and an inventive mythology that provides the blueprint and the backbone for the rest of the series. Punctuated by violent set-pieces and steeped in Catholic and apocalyptic lore, the Omen films chillingly represent the personification of evil in the person of a single character—Damien Thorn.

Born of a jackal and bearing a 666 birthmark—the sign of the Beast as described in the Book of Revelations—Damien does have his share of issues. But he does not have to bear the burden of responsibility alone. He’s surrounded by a bevy of hellbound helpers (played by some of filmdom’s finest character actors) determined to do away with anyone standing in their antihero’s path to ultimate power. One can’t be an effective devil without fearless acolytes, and Satan’s minions are brought to vivid life with wonderful performances in all films. 

Over the course of the three films, each of Damien’s enemies is dispatched in a creatively vivid and violent fashion through a series of gory freak “accidents”—including but not limited to hangings, stabbings, burnings, impalings and dismemberments—that are the hallmarks of the Omen oeuvre.

The Omen (1976): The Littlest Devil
The diminutive Antichrist is portrayed in the original Omen by young Harvey Stephens, but Damien is really just a supporting character in this opening chapter. This first film is headlined by Gregory Peck (Gentlemen’s Agreement, To Kill a Mockingbird) as diplomat Robert Thorn, the Ambassador to Great Britain, and beautiful Lee Remick (Anatomy of a Murder, The Days of Wine and Roses) as his wife Cathy. (The ever-prolific horror movie genre is a saving grace of aging A-list talents who want to keep their names above the title!)

Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn

Lee Remick as Cathy Thorn

As the movie opens, the Thorns’ newborn child has been murdered and replaced with the spawn of the devil, setting the prophecy and plan of the Antichrist’s rise into motion. All is idyllic for the young family until, at Damien’s elaborate fifth birthday party, his nanny (Holly Palance, daughter of Jack) is given the evil eye by a big black Hellhound dog and ends up swinging from a rope in a spectacular suicide sequence. (“Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!” )

The new governess, Mrs. Baylock, played by the brilliant Billie Whitelaw (Night Watch, Hot Fuzz), is soft-spoken with a gentle brogue and wears sweater sets and sensible shoes. But she turns out to be one tough customer, aided by her fearsome familiar, the ferocious black dog, by her side, to guard her young charge: “Have no fear, little one. I am here to protect thee.” Mary Poppins she is not—a spoonful of hemlock rather than sugar seems to be her preferred prescription.

The marvelous Billie Whitelaw as Mrs. Baylock

Religious imagery and terminology are laid on thickly throughout the film. “Accept Christ, Mr. Thorn,” a crazy old coot of a priest admonishes Gregory Peck. “Drink his blood and eat his flesh.” Later, the seven knives of Megiddo, the sacred implements that are the only weapon that can destroy the Antichrist (and appear as an important plot device in all three films), are given to Thorn by Buchenhagen (Leo McKern).

David Warner (Time After Time, Titanic) is memorable as a photographer whose pictures show premonitions of the violence to come—to others as well as himself, the victim of one of the most gruesome “accidents.”

The devil dog, hound of hell, appears in chapters one and three

At first, it’s not quite clear if Damien, played by the young, cherubic-faced Harvey Stephens, is truly the embodiment of evil, or merely a hyperactive and migraine-inducing spoiled brat. Indeed, he drives his adoptive mother Cathy Thorn, played beautifully by Lee Remick, batty to the point of neurosis.  When the animals at the Windsor Lion Country Safari are terrified of Damien, the giraffes stampeding away and the baboons attacking the car, Cathy muses, “What could be wrong with our child?”

Just follow David Warner's bouncing rubber head in the decapitation scene

Indeed, the obstreperous Damien pitches a hysterical fit when approaching an Episcopal church for a wedding, ripping off poor Lee’s glamorous blue satin turban and socking her in the face; and is truly an annoying presence in the Thorn drawing room, throwing billiard balls and yelling at the top of his lungs. (No wonder Cathy starts seeing a psychiatrist, since spanking the little devil is clearly out of the question.)

But alas, Cathy’s fears are not unfounded. When she gets pregnant, her new baby must be gotten out of the way. While she balances precariously against a top-floor balustrade to fuss with a potted plant, evil Damien mows her down with his tricycle, causing her to fall, break her back and lose her unborn child. (Later, Mrs. Baylock pays her a visit in the hospital to finish the job.)

Young Stephens does give a memorable performance, especially in the climactic scenes with Gregory Peck and Billie Whitelaw, fighting tooth and nail against his adoptive father, who has had quite enough of Damien by now, thank you very much.

Damien: Omen II (1978): The Devil’s Advocates
Now living in Chicago with Robert’s brother, Richard Thorn (William Holden), his wife Ann (Lee Grant) and Richard’s son Mark (Lucas Donat), thirteen-year-old Damien (Jonathan Scott-Thomas) attends a military academy and comes of age—with a little help from his friends.

Top stars like Lee Grant, recent Oscar winner as Best Supporting Actress for Shampoo, and William Holden, who had headlined the acclaimed 1976 Best Picture Network, obviously never declined any paying gig, including this schlocky horror movie (indeed, Miss Grant’s autobiography is entitled I Said Yes To Everything). Actors need to work and earn a paycheck just like the rest of us!

A-listers Lee Grant and Bill Holden—slumming for a paycheck?

 A bloody continuation of the violent acts that must be taken to ensure Damien’s clear path to omnipotence, this chapter focuses upon the many protectors and helpers that surround Damien—conspirators are everywhere to prepare the way for Satan’s kingdom.  At the military academy, platoon leader Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator) is so enamored with his young hero that he can barely look the boy in the eye. “Our time has come,” remarks businessman Robert Foxworth, who does away with old Lew Ayres to run Bill Holden’s vast conglomerate until Damien comes of age. Lee Grant, the nurturing earth-mother stepmother, plays favorites, turning out to love one of her adopted children just a wee bit more than the other...

Jonathan Scott-Thomas as Damien Thorn

 As for Damien himself, Scott-Thomas portrays him as a well-mannered and well-behaved young man, but does use his “evil eye” to punish a bullying classmate, and later to murder his cousin and best friend Mark in order to claim his birthright. As Damien’s latent talents emerge, he is admonished not to attract attention: “Someday everyone will know who you are.”

In this film, the satanic familiar switches from a black dog to a raven, ostensibly for one of the violent murder scenes to steal boldly from Hitchcock’s The Birds. (For the third film, the black Hellhound canine returns.) Poor Elizabeth Shepherd, resplendent in a fur-trimmed, blood red coat, gets her eyes pecked out by the nasty, angry bird, then stumbles into oncoming traffic. Ouch!

Elizabeth Shepherd and a Hitchcockian feathered friend

Before William Holden can end the madness by destroying Damien with the newly rediscovered knives of Megiddo, Lee Grant literally stops him dead in his tracks with histrionic aplomb, and chapter two ends in an operatic fiery conflagration as the Thorn Museum burns to the ground.

Lee Grant camps it up in the finale: "Daaamieeeeeen!"

The Final Conflict (1981): Devil-May-Care Savoir Faire
This one is all about the eternal appeal of its bad boy antihero. In The Final Conflict, New Zealand actor Sam Neill (A Cry in the Dark, Jurassic Park) makes a handsome and charismatic Damien—but make no mistake, this is one mean and cold-blooded dude. Unlike the soft-spoken and unfailingly polite Damien played by Scott-Taylor in Omen II, Neill’s Damien is as hard as nails.

Sam Neill as the DILF version of Damien—the devil you'd like to....

 As the third film opens, the seven knives of Megiddo are unearthed from the remains of the Thorn Museum fire just as a cosmic alignment is taking place in the heavens, the one that will herald the Second Coming of Christ. Thus Damien, now an adult, must accelerate his plan for world domination by doing away with the Ambassador to Great Britain to obtain his father’s old job (apparently part of the prophecy and a prerequisite for Damien’s rise to political power) and gain a coveted appointment as president of the (obviously Hitleresque) United Nations Youth Council. Indeed, the American Ambassador’s gruesome suicide is the first of several violent set-pieces in the tradition of the other two films.

Damien and his evil brethren then embark upon a crusade to destroy all infants born on March 24th—the date of the Nazarene child’s birth.

Damien and his nemesis

Not quite as broad and campy as Omen II, The Final Conflict does have its share of over-the-top characters and broadly outlandish scenes of gory violence. The knife-wielding monks (including an elegant and thickly-accented Rossano Brazzi) and religious fanatics fight for the good guys, while Damien’s satanic henchmen include a pair of mean-spirited boy scouts, a wild-eyed priest who drowns the baby he is baptizing, and a sinister nurse (with a faint female mustache) wielding a hypodermic.

Neill is effective, even though he does gnaw the scenery in a few places. Damien’s monologue, a prayer to Papa Satan before a grotesque life-size Christ statue hanging backwards on a cross, is memorably florid as he praises “the violent rapture of my Father’s kingdom…” “Oh god of desolation…save us from Jesus Christ and his grubby, mundane creed…” he intones (with a remarkably straight face). 

A large part of this devil’s appeal is as a sex symbol—indeed, Mr. Neill is very easy on the eyes as the grown-up Prince of Darkness. In the film, Damien is having sex with reporter Kate Reynolds—“The Barbara Walters of British journalism” (well played by Neill’s real-life former paramour Lisa Harrow)— and (it’s implied), maybe even with her teenage son Peter (Barnaby Holm), who turns out to be another devil-worshiping acolyte. In bed with Kate making love, Damien roughly flips her over to face the mattress in order to—well, let’s just say the devil’s favorite flavor definitely isn’t vanilla.

"Nazarene, you have won...nothing."

Lovers of the Omen chronicles like me were delighted when 20th Century Fox released digitally remastered versions of these horror classics in a Blu-Ray collection a couple of years ago. The collection includes the trilogy, plus the 2006 remake with Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles and Mia Farrow in the Billie Whitelaw role. (The less said about that one, the better, though!)

Of the three Damiens, only Mr. Neill still works as an actor. Stephens is now a real estate developer in London, while Brazilian-born Brit Jonathan Scott-Taylor added only a few more film and TV roles to his credit before disappearing from public life in the mid-1980s.

When Shadows and Satin,  Speakeasy and Silver Screenings announced this year’s Great Villain Blogathon, Damien Thorn was the first character to pop into my mind. Thanks to them for inspiring me to add the Antichrist to their villainous lineup this year! I look forward to reading all the entries of this stellar annual event!