Film review- Fear City (1984)

Starring Tom Berenger, Melanie Griffith, Billy Dee Williams

Directed by Abel Ferrara

By Roger Crow

Forty years after it thrilled and probably appalled cinemagoers, director Abel Ferrara’s equally slick and grungy thriller is dusted down for a new audience. 

As the helmer also gave us The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, you know it’s not going to be a movie for the easily shocked. 

Following a truly awful opening song by New York Dolls veteran David Joahnsen (the ghostly cabby in Scrooged), it feels like we’re in pre-Showgirls territory with lingering shots of strippers in a seedy club. Star of the show is Melanie Griffith, before she was really famous, and major actors like Tom Berenger and an uber smooth Billy Dee Williams. 

The villain is a ripped martial artist who parades naked around his warehouse and scribbles his Travis Bickle-style ramblings into an eponymous journal. I imagine one of the pages read ‘How on earth did I get involved in such a so-so movie?’  

Anyway, he goes around killing strippers while generic cops, including punch-drunk ex boxer Berenger, try to track him down. 

Like Tom’s later movie Someone To Watch Over Me, there’s one of those opening 

aerial shots of New York, but once Ridley Scott gave us his take on the Big Apple, everything that came before looked a bit lacklustre by comparison. 

Picture and sound quality is rather good on the new version. It’s scrubbed up well, with those reds really popping. Oh and as it’s obviously always raining in New York, those neon reflections look great too. 

Around the same time, Brian DePalma was working on Body Double, another slick and sleazy serial killer thriller with Griffith, which owed a debt to Ferarra’s Driller Killer. 

So, an A/B-list cast sold short by a Z-list script. Berenger and Dee Williams deserved far better, as did Griffith and Maria Conchita Alonso (Predator 2). Look out too for Ola Raye, who popped up in that Michael Jackson Thriller video a year before. 

One for curious eighties thriller fans only. 

Cast 8

Script 5

Direction 5

Score 3

Film review – Argylle (2024)

Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Worthington, Henry Cavill

Directed by Matthew Vaughn 

Certificate 12A

By Roger Crow

Remember the old Ronnie Corbett gags which started off as a simple joke but took a meandering route to get to the punchline? Imagine 90 minutes of that and you get the latest epic from Matthew Vaughn. Nine years ago, after fantasies like Stardust and X-Men First Class, he really struck gold with Kingsman, which had a relatively simple Pygmalion-meets-James Bond quality. Aside from terrific action scenes and a winning, star-making turn from Taron Egerton, it was everything 2015’s Spectre should have been and wasn’t.

Alas, two hit-and-miss Kingsman follow-ups have led to Argylle, an early candidate to sweep the boards at the Razzies 2025. Following that OTT opener set in Santorini with Dua Lipa as a convincing femme fatale, gritty reality goes out the window. (Sorry Dua fans. She’s in in for all of 10 mins, despite her prominence on the poster).

Anyway, we discover Bryce Dallas Howard is the prim and proper flame-haired author whose Argylle spy novels have won legions of besotted fans. She’s about to put the latest one to bed but her mother (Catherine O’Hara) thinks it needs more work. 

While on a train with her cat in a backpack, she encounters Sam Worthington’s bearded, shaggy haired individual who claims to be a spy. Thanks to a conceit in which Henry Cavill plays her eponymous hero, we cut between him doing stunts and Worthington. Which is fine in short bursts, but we get no end of quick cuts from one to the other. Annoying.

Now l’ll suspend my disbelief with most things, but when our heroine falls asleep in Worthington’s car in the UK and wakes up in France, that’s when alarm bells start ringing. 

What follows is a sugar rush of outrageous set pieces, typically balletic stunts, some bad CGI, and some occasionally funny moments. Oh, and there’s a scene involving oil and makeshift ice skates which begs all kind of questions, like why is there so little oil on the heroine?

Bryan Cranston and Samuel L Jackson also star in a movie which owes a debt to SLJ’s sublime The Long Kiss Goodnight, but is about as subtle as a rhino in a gold dress rampaging through a china shop.

The use of The Beatles’ final tune Now and Then is also a curious one, as it was supposed to be the beloved song of two key protagonists, but as it was only released last year, it feels far too new in its finished form. And don’t get me started on that cheesy action scene set to Light Up, which used those multi-coloured clouds pioneered in Kingsman. 

Argylle was slated by one broadsheet, and though not a one-star movie, it’s generous to give it three out of five. The comic book tone is fun, but the narrative is all over the place with a meta hero that deserved his own movie without the angst-ridden heroine. 

Brains in neutral, expect little, and it works small wonders. 

Cast 8

Script 4

Stunts 8

Effects 3

Score 8

Possibility of winning Razzies 100%