Movies

Le beau Serge (1958) Claude Chabrol's accomplished first film. A young man returns to his hometown to find his old friend a cruel bitter drunk, and makes everything worse by trying to help. A movie of character, with the protagonist's errors encapsulated in the parish priest who blames the villagers for not letting him help them, instead of trying to find out what they really need. Has a fine nostalgic feel throughout, like a movie you have seen before but entirely forgotten. Just the thing for when you need to see a French semi-classic. 9/10

The Vulture (1967) Absurd British multigenerational-curse monster mystery, one of the few such set in Cornwall. After a vehemently unsuperstitious schoolmarm sees a human-headed vulture bursting out of an 18th century grave, brilliantined B-actor Robert Hutton, a visiting American Nuclear Scientist, comes to startling conclusions based on the scantiest physical evidence, bafflingly tying together teleportation by nuclear transmutation, and the bird-man worship of Easter Island. Broderick Crawford and Akim Tamiroff are the aging name actors dragged into this jaw-dropping, head-smacking absurdity. The script and dialog creep into the fringes of Ed Wood territory with their nonsensical non-sequiturs and bizarre leaps, as well as the dreadful acting from some tertiary characters. Tamiroff is one of my favorite unappreciated actors, and he certainly doesn't get much to work with here. They made the very wise choice of never providing a beauty shot of the idiotically conceived monster, but the attack sequences, when people get shoulder-grabbed by two big bird legs from above, are quite sufficient. Really quite astonishing at times, for all the wrong reasons, right up to the very last moment. Not a huge bulldada classic but definitely marbled with strong veins of it. Most normal people would not find it very watchable. 7/10 for screwiness.