Patguy Reviews

Score (1973)

Classy and clever

[8/10 · 5 January 2001]

"Score" is more or less a period piece now, filmed as it was in that post-sexual liberation/pre-AIDS window when it seemed that sexual, political and aesthetic freedom were essentially linked. The film is a manifesto for sexual liberation purely, brushing only briefly by sexuality's darker aspects (the somewhat creepy Mike, and a certain core hollowness in Elvira and Jack's marriage). The characters are psychologically simplistic (Betsy's nun fixation, Eddie's glaringly obvious repressed homosexuality), but--important in a film of this type--extremely likeable. Claire Wilbur and Gerald Grant are particularly good in their roles.

All of this is wrapped up in good-natured sex and spot-on stoned dialogue. Even the music's entertaining--particularly the early-Rolling Stones ripoff that functions as a recurring motif and perhaps as well the goofy thematic heart of the film.

The trailer for "Score" recommends, "Watch it with someone you want to excite!" Well, it might not be as libidinally exciting now as it was thirty years ago, but it's still fun, and sweet, and highly recommended.

BBC Sunday-Night Theatre: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) Season 5, Episode 50

Excellent, exhausting adaptation

[8/10 · 29 October 1999]

Difficult to find, and largely overshadowed by the 1984 film, this live television performance from 1954 deserves to be made more widely available.

At the time controversial for its scenes of torture and sexuality, it provoked an outburst of Thought Police-style outrage among politicians and assorted editorialists. In fact, the program seems brutal even today, with its depictions of comprehensive hopelessness and deliberate cruelty.

Peter Cushing was probably the most famous live television personality in Britain at the time, and he puts in a typically excellent performance. Yvonne Mitchell and Andre Morell neatly tie up the remaining emotional possibilities in this dystopia, with the rest of the cast expressing only various shades of despair. A very young Donald Pleasence plays Newspeak-auteur Syme, confronted here not by "Ultimate Evil," but rather doublethink and "Double-Plus-Ungood."

"We are the dead."

Nightwish (1989)

General praise for an unexpectedly fine movie

[8/10 · 16 October 1998]

A strange and unnerving film, Nightwish moves among horror movie conventions the way The Player moves among genres. Never quite comprehensible, the movie follows its own associative logic while pretending to become, at various times, an alien invasion film, a mad scientist film, a ghost story, a beast-from--beyond-perhaps-it's-Satan-himself movie, and uncountable others. The acting is quirkily good, the writing witty, and the off-balance nature of the scenes allow the film to move between eeriness, gross-out horror, humor and an even odder element of eroticism--the latter supplied mostly by the lovely Alisha Das, whose character at times seems to treat the proceedings like an especially elaborate session of unnatural foreplay.