Universal Monsters #6: Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Director James Whale initially resisted calls to make a follow-up to his 1931 hit Frankenstein, fearful of going over old ground and keen to move on to more prestigious projects. But when his arm was sufficiently twisted, he ended up producing a masterpiece – a stylish, smart and thrilling concoction of high horror and high camp, which stands as one of the genre’s greatest ever films.

Immediately after the mill fire that climaxed the 1931 movie, we learn that the assembled-from-corpse-parts Creature (Boris Karloff, dialling up the sympathetic quota even more this time) has survived. So too has his creator, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, in one of his final roles before alcoholism got the better of him). Soon, a strange and unnerving new character called Dr Pretorius arrives. He’s a former tutor of Henry’s and is played by the wonderfully effete Ernest Thesiger, an old friend of Whale’s. (The studio had wanted future star Claude Rains.) Pretorius is a far more amoral character – ‘To a new world of gods and monsters,’ he toasts gleefully in a shot destined for pop-culture immortality. He also carries around his own life-form experiments in small glass jars: miniature people, marvellously filmed via trick photography.

In order to further push the ethical boundaries, Pretorius blackmails Henry into building a female creature as a companion for the original. The result is played by British actress Elsa Lanchester. Topped by a Nefertiti-inspired hairdo that became often spoofed, the Bride is one of horror cinema’s most recognisable icons. It’s slightly surprising, then, that she actually only appears in the film’s final four minutes. (Lanchester had popped up earlier, though. She also plays author Mary Shelley in a meta prologue intended to set up the Gothic vibe of the story.)

Elsewhere, there’s true surrealism and theatricality in the way exteriors are achieved on interior sets, such as the dramatic backdrops of brooding clouds creating oppression in the graveyard scenes. In fact, the art direction constantly pushes things into heightened territory, while John J Mescall’s high-contrast, shadow-heavy lighting is extraordinarily artful, taking the tropes of German Expressionism and pointing the way towards film noir. This is not the real world – it’s ambiguous when and where the events are taking place, for example – but a fairy-tale land of burgomasters and peasants and barons and castles, all blended with humour, pathos and the-Creature-as-Christ parallels.

Several decades later, the production of this movie was dramatised in a superb 1998 film called Gods and Monsters, in which we hear Whale (played by Ian McKellen) refers to Bride of Frankenstein as ‘a comedy about death… the trick is not to spoil it for anyone who’s not in on the joke.’ This sly line of dialogue illuminates Bride brilliantly. Neither a relentless horror nor a tongue-in-cheek comedy, the movie expertly combines both. The effect is both bewitching and dazzling.

Ten audiences need something stronger than a pretty little love story (so, why shouldn’t I write of monsters?) out of 10

Next: Dracula is dead, long live his daughter…

Universal Monsters #3: Frankenstein (1931, James Whale)

I’ve set myself the challenge of watching all 28 films from Universal Studios’ golden age of horror that feature Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal minor plot points

Having had an enormous hit with Dracula, Universal boss Carl Laemmle Jr then made the profitably obvious move – he commissioned an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein has long been Dracula‘s only true rival as the most influential horror story of the 19th century, so it made sense to repeat the trick. However, as with Tod Browning’s earlier movie, this adaptation plays rather loose with the original book, using simply the central idea of a ‘mad scientist’ who assembles old body parts and creates a new creature. Given the budgetary and production limitations of the era, this scaling down of plot was a wise move: there was no need for the book’s Arctic sequences, university politics and flashbacks within flashbacks.

The fine cast contains some Dracula alumni – Edward Van Sloan and Dwight Frye, playing very similar types – plus the addition of Colin Clive as scientist Henry Frankenstein, Boris Karloff as the creature he builds, and Mae Clarke as Henry’s fiancée, Elizabeth. British actor Clive is extraordinary, playing his role on the edge of madness, and stretching his excited line ‘It’s alive!’ into about 74 syllables. Clarke, who earlier in 1931 had starred in gangster classic The Public Enemy, has more spirit and spunk than Helen Chandler had managed in the equivalent part in Dracula. And lugubrious Londoner Karloff – enigmatically credited as just ‘?’ – is given one of cinema’s greatest-ever make-up jobs and yet still shines with childlike sympathy. He’s a towering, terrifying ‘monster’ who you feel sorry for. (Dracula star Bela Lugosi turned the part down, offended at being offered a ‘scarecrow’ role. He’d wanted to play Dr Frankenstein.)

The key hire, however, was the director. Universal gave the gig to James Whale, a dapper, canny Englishman with a theatre background and a love of German Expressionism. He resolved to make sure his movie was as visually dynamic and full of atmosphere as possible, and he can be considered its true author. The on-screen writing credits are bewilderingly complex, pointing towards numerous hands at the typewriter, but it was Whale (below) who assembled all the elements and gave them the vital spark of life.

Watching the film today, Frankenstein has lost none of its intoxicating power. The story is straight-forward: Dr Frankenstein, aided by his ghoulish assistant Fritz, steals parts of dead bodies to create an entirely new creature; but the powerful, lumbering man brought to life by a bolt of electricity escapes and accidentally kills a small child, so the outraged locals hunt him down. This plot nimbly weaves around themes of ‘playing God’ and hubris, but never loses sight of the film being a quick-paced chiller for a wide audience. ‘I think it will thrill you,’ as Edward Van Sloan says in an outside-the-fiction prologue. ‘It may shock you. It might even horrify you.’ Meanwhile, the design work is extraordinary, especially the vertical sets that reach for the heavens, and there’s some great use of both sound and silence (there’s very little music). Whale’s masterful control of light and shadow, pace and mood, the spooky and the silly, all results in a gruesome and grisly genre film that pushes towards art.

Ten bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere, out of 10

Next time: We’re off to Egypt, as the Mummy awakens…

Dirty Harry (1971, Don Siegel)

Spoiler alert: these reviews reveal plot twists.

Story: A madman calling himself Scorpio starts killing strangers in San Francisco with a high-powered rifle. Assigned to the case is the San Francisco Police Department’s takes-no-shit Inspector Harry Callahan…

Harry Callahan: The movie’s title character, who became an instant icon of crime-thriller cinema, sees himself as an agent of common sense in an increasingly bureaucratic world. He upholds the law… by meting out his own kind of justice. And if that means cutting some corners that he considers unimportant, then so be it. For Harry, the end (peace and security for innocent people) justifies the means (strong-arming, intimidating and, if needed, killing bad guys).

In this regard, Harry is the father to whole generations of Hollywood heroes: Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, John McClane in Die Hard, Sylvester Stallone’s character in Cobra (a film which pointedly reused actors from Dirty Harry), various Arnold Schwarzenegger roles, Michael Douglas in Black Rain, Paul Kersey in the Death Wish series, and many more. These are all men who fight for what they believe is right… and ‘right’ is an apt word, given the disregard they often show for civil liberties and due process. (If made today, idiots would no doubt claim Dirty Harry as an anti-woke movie.) The danger, of course, is that this character type tiptoes along a line between good and evil. Who watches the watchers when the watchers themselves break the law? Harry is fundamentally a decent guy – a saviour, a protector, ultimately unselfish. But the movie persona of an arrogant, autonomous, male, right-wing cop who sees every situation in simplistic terms reached his apotheosis in Denzel Washington’s venal, morally corrupt Detective Alonzo Harris in 2001’s Training Day. There’s nowhere to go but down.

In this first film, Harry is a loner – there’s a brief mention of a dead wife, killed by a drunk driver – and we learn almost nothing about him outside of his job. The filmmaker John Milius, who worked on the script uncredited, has said that Harry has ‘no life except the hunt’. That’s why they gave the character a .44 Magnum, a handgun that was developed for hunting. There’s also a running gag about where his nickname came from. Is he ‘Dirty’ Harry because he hates everyone? Or because he’s a pervert? (In one comic scene, he’s spotted looking through a window at a topless woman.) Eventually, we learn the self-deprecating punchline: he always gets the dirty jobs that no one else wants, such as delivering $200,000 in cash to a ransom-demanding lunatic.

Considered for the role during pre-production were revered names such as Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, George C Scott, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. But then the part was offered to…

Clint Eastwood: When Dirty Harry came along, Clint Eastwood (above) was an actor on the rise. After cutting his teeth in B-movies and the bland TV western Rawhide, he flew to Europe for three successive summers to play The Man With No Name in a trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns. A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966) redefined an entire genre and made Eastwood a movie star. His transition to playing a modern-day, urban cop then came via culture-clash thriller Coogan’s Bluff (1968), his first collaboration with Dirty Harry director Don Siegel, in which he plays an uncomplicated rural policeman who must travel to New York City to extradite a murderer.

Dirty Harry was the next logical step on the actor’s career ladder. And he gives a performance of granite-like solidity, giving off radioactive waves of anger and impatience in every scene. Eastwood snarls and snaps throughout, only mellowing slightly when he mock-bickers with colleagues or when he’s kind to his injured partner’s wife. The film doesn’t feel the need to soften or deepen the character in the way subsequent cop films usually did – there’s no romance, no estranged children, no suicidal tendencies, not even a pet dog. Harry comes fully formed, fully defined and as unchangeable as a mountain range – unapologetically, whether you like it or not.

By the time he filmed Dirty Harry in spring 1971, the ambitious Eastwood had set up his own production company (Malpaso, which made all five Dirty Harrys) and also embarked on a parallel directing career, having helmed the stalker drama Play Misty for Me the previous autumn. As an in-joke, you can see a cinema marquee advertising Play Misty for Me during a scene in Dirty Harry. Clint also did some second-unit work for Siegel, most notably a short sequence where Harry prevents a man jumping to his death.

Villains: Andrew Robinson (horror film Hellraiser, TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) gives an extraordinary performance as the capricious assassin Scorpio (above). Robinson’s almost childlike faux-hippy influenced a thousand smirking serial killers in future movies – The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, Seven’s John Doe, et al – and is a great contrast from the stoic, serious-as-a-heart-attack Harry.

The two men are established in the opening few minutes of the film. Grinning and demented, Scorpio murders an innocent young woman while she swims in a pool on the roof of a tall building. Dapper and self-possessed in a sweater under a suit jacket, Harry later scopes out the crime scene with a forensic, almost dispassionate eye. Featuring widescreen shots of the entire city from atop a skyscraper, and cool-as-fuck incidental music, this pair of scenes tells us instantly what these two characters are like.

Harry and Scorpio are actually kept apart for big chunks of the story, in the proper cat-and-mouse fashion, so their first big confrontation takes place after an hour. Harry has tracked Scorpio to a deserted American-football stadium, which is a very wise choice for the setting. As well as being visually dynamic – the scale, the size, the empty bleachers, the glare of the floodlights – it reads as a gladiatorial arena. There’s also a wry pun going on, placing the two opposing characters on a level playing field. ‘Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac,’ said an early publicity slogan, comparing the two. ‘Harry’s the one with the badge.’ But is it level? Harry has a big gun and is willing to use it, and when cornered, Scorpio immediately becomes whiny and pathetic.

We never learn Scorpio’s real identity. In fact, we never learn anything about him. The film doesn’t care *why* he’s killing people – just that he needs to be stopped. This tallies with real life. The plot of Dirty Harry was inspired by the Zodiac Killer, a maniac who was responsible for a spate of murders in northern California in the 1960s. There have been several movies based on the crimes, such as David Fincher’s Zodiac in 2007. The killer has never been identified.

Other notable characters:
* San Francisco’s mayor (John Vernon, excellent) is a reasonable, canny politician but he has little patience for the maverick Harry, who he chides for his reluctance to work within the law.
* Harry’s boss is Lieutenant Al Bressler (Harry Guardino, watchable), a decent man who is often frustrated by Callahan but recognises his worth. Unlike many movie ‘police captain’ characters, Al is far from an idiot.
* Another, more comedic, cop is Inspector Frank DiGiorgio, played by John ‘less famous brother of Robert’ Mitchum. Harry likes him, though can’t resist taunting the older man over his lack of fitness. ‘Too much linguine,’ admits Frank.
* When the Scorpio case kicks off, Harry is assigned a new partner: Inspector Chico Gonzalez (Reni Santoni, later a memorable guest star in Seinfeld). Harry would rather work alone while his normal partner, Deitzick, is recovering from a recent injury, and is also sceptical about Chico because he’s young, a college boy (he studied sociology) and Mexican-American. But Chico eventually wins him round by disobeying Bressler’s orders and helping Harry during a money drop. After being wounded by Scorpio, Chico later resigns from the force. Unlike the widower Harry, he has a wife to consider.
* Dirty Harry is undoubtedly a male-dominated movie. In over 100 minutes of screen time, women are a sparse presence. Chico’s wife, Norma (Lyn Edgington), gets one substantial dialogue scene and a bus driver features prominently in the finale, but elsewhere there’s just a police office worker (one line of dialogue), a distraught mother (one line), a nervous girlfriend (one line), a secretary (two lines), two murder victims (no lines) and a woman Harry sees topless (no audible lines).
* Character actor Josef Sommer appears in a single scene as District Attorney William T Rothko, who has a barnstorming row with Harry. It’s Rothko who has to explain to Harry (and us) why a patently guilty killer like Scorpio has been released after his arrest: Harry didn’t follow correct arrest procedure and, according to a judge, acquired the incriminating evidence (a rifle) illegally. The scene represents the central thesis of the entire film, casting a spotlight on how certain people struggle with the idea of human rights applying to everyone… even murderers.

Albert Popwell: The character actor Albert Popwell (1926-1999) plays a different role in each of the first four Dirty Harry movies, so deserves his own category here. He had worked with Eastwood and Siegel on Coogan’s Bluff, and would later appear in another Siegel film: the 1973 crime flick Charley Varrick, alongside Dirty Harry’s Andrew Robinson and John Vernon. In his Dirty Harry debut he has a small but key role: a bank robber (above) who is bested by Harry Callahan. See ‘Key moments’, below…

Music: The incidental score was written by Lalo Schifrin, an Argentinian with a stellar film-and-TV career. His CV before Dirty Harry came along included the television series Mission: Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E and the scores for movies such as Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt (a key influence on Dirty Harry), the Siegel/Eastwood team-up Coogan’s Bluff, and Kelly’s Heroes. His work on Dirty Harry evokes a brilliant sense of time and place, using a combination of jazz drumming, funky bass riffs and Rhodes piano vamping to remind us we’re watching a Hollywood cop movie that may be tough but also has *style*.

Key moments: While grabbing a hot dog during an early scene, Harry twigs that a suspicious car is parked outside a nearby bank. It’s a story beat that elegantly tells us this cop is observant, smart and doesn’t panic. Then, just as he takes his first bite of his lunch, an alarm goes off – there’s a raid in progress! Stalking across the street, Harry pulls out his handgun and easily kills most of the gang. The sequence is pure Western: the quick-draw sharpshooter subduing the bad guys in the town’s main street and barely popping a sweat. (Unlike the rest of this location-heavy movie, the sequence was filmed on a studio backlot in LA. There’s plenty of life, activity and traffic, however, so it’s easy to read the scene as a real San Fran street.)

Standing over the one robber still alive, who’s bleeding on the ground but within arm’s reach of his shotgun, Harry then gives us one of the most famous speeches in cinema history:

‘I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?’

The robber (Albert Popwell) resigns to his fate and surrenders, but then implores Harry to tell him whether he had any bullets left. (‘I gots to know…’) In this instance, it was a bluff: Harry pulls his trigger and nothing happens. However, much later in the film, Harry finds himself in the exact same situation with Scorpio. He recites the same speech, word for word. But whereas the dialogue with the bank robber had been a smirking Harry amusing himself by taunting a bad guy, now it takes on a deadly serious tone. He talks with steel and conviction – he means every word and he wants Scorpio to *suffer*. Also, it’s not a bluff: Scorpio reaches for his gun, and Harry blows him away.

Review: Given the era of American history in which Dirty Harry was made – the Vietnam War, student riots, the Miranda ruling, political assassinations, Watergate and all the rest – it was inevitable the film would enflame emotions. A story about a reactionary cop taking down a violent (and younger) man who refuses to abide by societal norms was always going to be seen as a right-wing wet dream. And sure enough the influential Pauline Kael – a film critic with a hyperbolic tone to much of her work – called the movie ‘a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values’.

Dirty Harry’s central thesis is certainly right-wing, promoting might-is-right, the patriarchy and the status quo. After Scorpio is caught halfway through the story, we’re intended to feel outrage and indignation when he has to be released because Harry didn’t follow proper arrest procedure. But it should be recognised that Dirty Harry is a much more dynamic and complex text than, say, the superficially similar revenge flick Death Wish. Harry is said by many commentators to be racist, for example, but a) this is in the jokey context that he hates *everyone*, and b) he’s shown being friendly with various non-white characters. Also, Scorpio is the true bigot: he targets black people, gays and women, people who he considers worthless. (As Clint Eastwood expert Mike Carlson has pointed out, while Scorpio wears a peace-symbol belt buckle, it’s twisted and deformed – he’s no pure-of-heart hippy.)

In any event, the notion that you can only enjoy – or be interested in, or find compelling – a work of fiction if you agree with the politics of its lead character/s is a decidedly shaky one. You don’t need to condone murder, torture and intimidation to love The Godfather; a socialist can be charmed by Downton Abbey. Characters can be complex, unlikeable, off-putting – and people will still want to watch and understand. So while it’s undeniable that Dirty Harry is a political tract masquerading as a neo-noir cop thriller, the film is also huge *fun*, whatever your politics. Like every great crime story, there’s terrific suspense and the thrill of the chase. Dirty Harry is never dull and stands up to repeated viewings.

A large reason for the film’s success is director Don Siegel, who has a total command of the material, the pace and the tone throughout. There are many impressive set-pieces – the opening, the ‘Do you feel lucky?’ confrontation, Harry’s row with the mayor, the money drop, the final showdown – as well as moments of humanity and humour. Every scene is vital for the plot and for our understanding of Harry and/or Scorpio. It’s a tremendous piece of filmmaking. Clint Eastwood had a long-standing collaboration with Siegel and actually insisted on him being hired for this movie. Earlier, Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, Out of Africa) and Irvin Kershner (Eyes of Laura Mars, The Empire Strikes Back, Never Say Never Again) had been in the running – the studio actually signed the latter when it was thought Frank Sinatra would play Harry.

Eastwood was also key in setting the film in San Francisco. He was born there and knew the Bay area well. Siegel initially wanted to film in Seattle, but the film benefits enormously from the switch to northern California. San Francisco’s undulating geography, picturesque landmarks and varied locations add a huge amount, making us believe in the world that Harry is trying to protect. (And virtually the entire movie is shot on location – no TV-style sets here.) San Fran also ties us into a rich movie heritage. As well as Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo, the city was also the setting for one of Dirty Harry’s direct influences – the 1968 Steve McQueen cop movie Bullitt.

Nineteen-seventy-one was year zero for the modern crime movie. As well as Dirty Harry, there was the release of the British gangster flick Get Carter, Blaxploitation classic Shaft and Oscar-winner The French Connection, each helping to create a new, tougher style for the genre. Violence levels were up, attitudes were more cynical, dialogue was terser. During a nighttime mission in Dirty Harry, we learn that Harry’s radio call sign is ‘Inspector 71’ – it could almost be a mission statement.

Ten extortionists, rooftop prowlers, rifle nuts, peepers out of 10

Next: Magnum Force

‘Phone home…’: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and 40 years of cinema-going

Steven Spielberg once said, ‘Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.’ And he knows his stuff. From the early days of his career – an episode of Columbo, the TV movie Duel, the blockbuster-defining Jaws – right up to 2022’s charming, autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, the director has done more than anyone to generate cinematic magic. His films balance craft and technique with wonder and emotion, creating profoundly beautiful entertainment. When The Fabelmans was released a few weeks ago, its publicity material quoted a critic who’d called the movie ‘Spielberg’s masterpiece’. I had to chuckle: he’d already made about eight of those.

I’ve been a fan of Spielberg for as long as I can remember. You see, the first time I ever went to a cinema was to see his film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. This 1982 drama was an enormous hit and a critical smash, so you probably don’t need me to waste the rest of this paragraph telling you that it’s about a young American boy called Elliott (played by a superb Henry Thomas) who encounters a lost, lonely alien and helps save the creature from rapacious authority figures who wish him harm.

I was very young when I first saw E.T., and only vaguely recall the event (my chief memory has always been more about the seat and the seemingly enormous screen, rather than the film itself). But I’ve always been very proud that such a classy and well-regarded movie was my ‘first’. So as I approached the 40th anniversary of E.T.’s release, I set myself a challenge: could I work out where and when I’d first gone to the pictures? These days, I keep an anal record of every cinema trip, so thought it would be fun to know where it all started. And I soon found that the details *could* be reconstructed – via a combination of hazy memories, family anecdotes and a bit of online research…

In the early 1980s, my parents owned a folding trailer tent like the one pictured above. When I was about three or four years old, we used it for a holiday to the Lake District in northern England, which was only a couple of hours’ drive from our home in West Lancashire. And on one of the days it rained. Constantly. So, looking for something to entertain two adults and a small child, my mum and dad took me for my first-ever trip to the cinema.

And the film that happened to be showing that day was the recently released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

This much, I’ve always known. But could I find out more? When I asked her about the day, my mother told me the cinema was probably in the town of Keswick. Or perhaps Kendal. One of the Ks, anyway. That was a start. A bit of Googling soon narrowed down my options to one likely contender: the Alhambra, an independent cinema that opened in Keswick on 22 January 1914 and has (mostly) been open ever since. The cinema’s opening-night offering was the Italian drama Quo Vadis – though due to a technical hitch, the screening had to be abandoned and remounted the following day. In the next decade, there was also a charming piece of British make-do-ism. At a showing of the first feature-length talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the cinema overcame the lack of sound equipment by employing, in the words of the local newspaper, ‘Mr Fred Bucknall, the popular Yorkshire baritone, who will render the full and necessary vocal accompaniment for this wonderful film.’ Keswick, meanwhile, on the shore of Derwentwater, was once home to the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and in part because of their efforts in promoting the natural beauty and serenity of the area, today the town is a tourist hub during summer.

I showed a photograph of the Alhambra’s beautiful facade to my mother and she immediately said it looked familiar – yes, *this* was where we went that rainy afternoon. Success! But *when* did we go? E.T. had been released in the United States in June 1982. However, in those dim and distant days films took several months to reach Europe. So the UK didn’t start screening Spielberg’s latest opus until December. This presented a slight problem – surely my parents wouldn’t have gone on holiday to the Lake District around Christmas? My mother didn’t remember specifically but said no, it wasn’t likely.

Then I did a bit more research… By the late 1970s, the Alhambra had ceased Saturday houses and just showed films four nights a week. When I went there, the cinema had become a ‘second run’ establishment, taking on films that had been playing up the road the week before. (That changed a year or so after my visit, when some ‘first run’ showings of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – another Spielberg film, fittingly – quickly sold out and gave the cinema a financial boost.)

So given that, I contacted the people who now run the Keswick Alhambra and asked about their schedules for both 1982 and 1983. I was told that those screening records are no longer extant, but a very kind man called Tom Rennie was able to look back through some old issues of the local newspaper, the Keswick Reminder, and he got back in touch with interesting news. The Alhambra had shown E.T. a couple of months after its UK debut. They’d run the film for two weeks, at 7.30pm each day from 3 to 15 March 1983 (except Wednesdays).

So it seems near-certain that my debut cinema trip was on a family holiday in March 1983 – the month I turned four years old and, at the time of writing, 40 years ago. That’s quite an anniversary; one surely worth celebrating with a self-indulgent blog post.

E.T. has always been very precious to me, not just because it was my ‘first’ but also due to subsequent viewings. The next time I watched the film was in late 1988, when it was finally released as a rental VHS. (The unusually long delay was reportedly because Spielberg disliked his films going to video, fearing the practice would result in a dip in cinema-going.) By that point, I was a VHS-obsessed nine-year-old who rented tapes every week, usually the same gems of the period over and over again – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid and so on. I had even got into the habit of acquiring my local video shop’s old, unwanted posters for my bedroom. One of the A1 beauties that was stuck to my wall with Blu Tack for several months was for E.T.

Over the years, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has been one of those movies that keeps coming back into my life. And each time I’m seduced anew by its childlike wonder, Melissa Mathison’s script, the great characters, the amazing cast, the tension and drama, the whimsy and jokes, Allen Daviau’s all-star cinematography, John Williams’s masterpiece of a score and Spielberg’s astonishing command of storytelling. I’ve rewatched the film on video, on television, on DVD, and I’ve always loved rediscovering its charm and beauty.

The only minor blight was a well-intentioned but clumsy re-edit that Spielberg instigated for the 20th anniversary in 2002. Extra scenes were added, CGI was used to modify certain shots of the title character, some dialogue considered offensive was trimmed out, and – most egregiously – shots of government agents were digitally tweaked to replace their guns with walkie-talkies. Spielberg later said the project had been a mistake, and he now urges everyone to seek out the 1982 cut. So do I.

As for the Alhambra, the cinema is still going strong with an excitingly eclectic weekly programme of both new releases and classics. (I live 250 miles away, so unfortunately have never made a return visit, but off the back of researching this blog post I now love getting their weekly listings via email.) There are two screens – a main room that sits 159, a smaller space for 29 – and since the year 2000 the Alhambra has run the annual Keswick Film Festival, which spotlights interesting and offbeat movies. The festival takes place every February and March. I’m smitten that it’s at that time of year. Feels special somehow, like they’re unknowingly marking my anniversary for me.

Do you know when and where your first cinema trip was – and what the film was? Let me know your stories in the comments section below…

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Enormous thanks to Carol Rennie and Tom Rennie of the Keswick Alhambra for help researching the dates the cinema showed E.T. in 1983.

Details about the Alhambra cinema be found here (please consider donating to their restoration appeal).

My list of every film seen at the cinema can be viewed here.

Frog Dreaming: Or, How I Was Haunted by a Kids Film from the 1980s

Let me tell you a story. It’s one of loss and rediscovery, and the 30 years of frustration that came in between. It involves a videotape and the boy from E.T. and Quentin Tarantino and a 1970s Doctor Who companion and IMDB and Twitter. And it all centres on a children’s film that deserves to be more famous than it is.

In the late 1980s, when I was about nine or 10 years old, I had a day off school with a cold. My mother had to go to work, so she said I could stay at home alone. I was under orders not to answer the door or damage anything – I should just play on my Commodore 64 or watch TV. I don’t remember what I did during the morning, but I do recall my mum popping home at lunchtime. She asked how I was, made my lunch, and gave me some treats for the afternoon: a can of Coke, a bag of Quavers, and a VHS tape she’d rented.

I was a video-rental addict in those days and have very fond memories of our nearby video shop, County Road Video in Ormskirk, Lancashire. Even now, I can remember its exact layout. I can picture where the counter was, where the new releases were displayed, and which sections had the older tapes. I can remember the posters in the window and the bargain bin of cheapo action movies (which always seemed to contain the 1985 flick America Ninja, which to this day I’ve still never seen). I have a rush of Proustian recollection when I think about the shape and feel and smell of the VHS boxes. To a kid who loved films it was a really magical place, and I was allowed to rent one tape per week. I had a choice of hundreds: the 1980s was a golden era for video releases. So even if most weeks I picked the same titles over and over again – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid – I ended up seeing a lot of films and many of them are still very precious to me now.

However, the VHS tape my mother had selected for me that day was not a big, famous movie. It didn’t have Steven Spielberg or George Lucas’s name in the credits. It wasn’t a sequel. I hadn’t seen its box on the video-shop shelves or its poster in the window. I’d never heard of it. With time to kill before Children’s BBC began at about 4pm, however, I gave it a go…

For the next 30 years, I remembered two things from that solitary afternoon viewing. Firstly, I knew that I’d enjoyed the film. I had a warm memory of it being fun and exciting. Secondly, and crucially, there was a specific scene that stuck firmly in the deep recesses of my consciousness. However, other than that… I forgot everything else.

As the years went by, I forgot what it had been called. I forgot who’d been in it. I even forgot which country it had been from – America probably, but maybe it was British? I forgot whether it had been new when I saw it or whether it had been made before I was born. I was fairly certain it had been in colour, but almost everything else just faded away.

For three decades, every now and again, that specific scene would float into my head for one reason or another. It featured a young character – a girl, I thought – whose friend had drowned in a local lake. She was despondent, of course, but she now had a revelatory idea. Looking into a fish tank, she paid close attention to a mechanical toy truck at the bottom of the water. This miniature dumpster, part of a model flooded village or something, was raising and lowering its bucket. The girl realised that as it went up and down it was creating an air bubble. Perhaps, somehow, maybe, her friend was still alive at the bottom of the lake, trapped in a pocket of air…

I’d remember this moment and be angry with myself that I couldn’t recall what the film was. I wanted to see it again, but more importantly I wanted to vanquish the ghost. It drove me *crazy* not knowing, not being able to place it. I asked people if they knew where the scene was from. When the internet came along, I tried chat rooms and message boards and social media. I Googled and searched. But I was always unsuccessful, so much so that I began to question whether I’d made the scene up. Perhaps I’d got the context completely wrong. Memories play tricks, of course.

Then, in January 2019, success at last…

I was having one of my periodic attempts at tracking the film down. It had now been around 30 years since that solitary viewing, but while idling around on IMDB I realised that the website allows you to search films by subject matter. I typed ‘trapped underwater’ into the box…

And there it was – result number 27. A movie called The Quest.

It was a laser-bolt-to-the-brain epiphany. I soon found an online synopsis, which convinced me it was the right film. I also learnt that it had been released in 1986 (the date in the IMDB image above is a mistake) so had been just two or three years old when I saw it. And it had been set, as well as filmed, in Australia. However, one thing jarred. I didn’t recognise the title. ‘The Quest’ was so vague that it didn’t mean anything to me. A bit of research soon revealed that this is a film with *numerous* names.

The original title when released in Australia in May 1986 was Frog Dreaming, a reference to an Aboriginal myth mentioned in the story. However, that was deemed unsuitable for North America where it was retitled The Quest – hence the IMDB listing. And that was only the beginning of the multiple nomenclatures… In Argentina, it was known as The Mystery of the Lagoon; in Brazil, Quite an Adventure; in Bulgaria, The Boy Who Chases Ghosts; in Finland, The Battle of Spirits; in France and Spain, The Secret of the Lake; in Italy, The Mystery of the Dark Lake; in Japan, Legendary Adventure; in the Soviet Union, Spring Breakers; in Sweden, The Spirit Chaser; in West Germany, The Ghost Hunter; and in the UK, The Go-Kids.

The Go-Kids! *That* had been the name when I saw it! Memories now started to seep back, even more so when I looked up the extraordinary cover for the UK video release. Artwork for VHS cassettes in the 1980s was often a combination of gorgeous aesthetics and bat-shit-crazy excess, and The Go-Kids was no exception.

The film had been issued with a PG certificate by the British Board of Film Classification on 1 December 1986, then the marketing boys had clearly attempted to cash-in on the success of some recent rivals. The British title was pretty obviously chosen to remind people of the hit 1985 kids film The Goonies. The VHS artwork also owed a debt to the dramatic posters for fantasy flicks like Conan the Barbarian – the heroic poses, the male character placed centrally with females crouching down, the dramatic landscape. But The Go-Kids adds a helicopter, a huge skeleton, and a looming wraith bathed in demonic light. For extra measure, the lead character also seems to be holding a Star Wars lightsaber. (Spoiler: it’s actually a torch.)

As I gazed lovingly at the image, I saw that the lead character had been played by Henry Thomas, the star of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestial (1982). This provided me with a nice connection: E.T. was the first film I ever saw at the cinema, when aged three years old. But I hadn’t remembered that Thomas had also been in this. There was still so much I didn’t know. However, now I’d discovered the multiple names I had a way of actually seeing it for the first since about 1988.

My first step was to look up its trailer on YouTube…

Very quickly, more memories were returning – especially from the scene showing Henry Thomas’s character riding a bicycle on a train track. I recalled now that I’d loved the film’s Heath Robinson element – that sense of a young character being resourceful and bodging contraptions together. But as well as a nice injection of nostalgia, I was struck by just how *good* the trailer is. It shows off some gorgeous cinematography and macabre imagery, and sets up a spooky, exciting story without giving too much away. My resolve to see the film again quadrupled.

So I went online and found a DVD copy for sale. The film was (and still is) available to view on streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video, but I’m a fan of physical media and also found an Australian release that came with some special features. Being Australian, it used the original title of Frog Dreaming – which is what I shall do from now on. I clicked ‘Buy now’ and after a few days the disc arrived….

It was a very special experience, seeing the film for the second time – three decades after the first. I was nervous. What if it turned out to be awful? Surely we’ve all had experiences of returning to a cherished film or TV show from childhood and realising it wasn’t as great as we’d remembered.

Thankfully, I loved it.

As its publicity images suggest, Frog Dreaming is very much in the mould of The Goonies, E.T., Flight of the Navigator, Labyrinth and D.A.R.Y.L. – all those American movies from the 1980s about inquisitive and adventurous children. It’s an adventure film, a coming-of-age story, a detective plot. Perhaps most surprisingly it’s also part of a tradition that flourished back then but doesn’t seem to exist any more: kids films that are actively *terrifying*.

Some sequences of Frog Dreaming feel like they’ve straight out of a horror movie. The opening scene, for example, is filmed with slow, graceful shots of an empty rural landscape. Straightaway we feel menace and sense that there’s danger hidden in the undergrowth or below the waters of a remote lake. As bubbles rise to the surface of the lake, a rickety wind turbine begins to clink round and round as if coming alive (a visual and aural detail that now makes me think of the opening of Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in the West – not a connection I would have made in 1988!). The music, by Brian ‘not that one’ May, is eerie and foreboding. Something scary is happening, but we’re not quite sure what. Is there a monster in the lake?

The hero of the film is Henry Thomas’s Cody, a 14-year-old American orphan who is now living in Australia with his father’s best friend. Character introductions are always vital in films, and we first see Cody in a workshop soldering a gadget onto his push-bike. He then hooks the bike up to a train track and attempts a speed record – it’s the scene featured prominently in the trailer. The whole town cheers him on. We sense straightaway that this kid is special, smart, adventurous. (And the use of a BMX bike is, of course, another reminder of E.T.)

Later, Cody and his two friends go for a bike ride into the bush, into an area known by the local Aboriginal community as ‘frog-dreaming land’ – a place of spiritual importance. The kids soon stumble across the lake we saw in the opening, where they find a dead body and come to suspect that the water is hiding an enormous monster akin to the one in Loch Ness. Cody then learns about an Aboriginal myth relating to the lake, which tells of a rock-eating creature called a Donkagin, and he feels the need to investigate… (A quick word on the film’s racial politics. To modern ears, the script plays fast and loose with racially naive language – ‘blacks’, ‘black fellas’ and ‘Abos’ are all used casually – though in its favour the story is not disrespectful of native beliefs, and the Aboriginal characters are all given personalities and senses of humour.)

What’s most impressive about Frog Dreaming is its ability to view the world through its characters’ eyes. Unlike the prosaic adult characters, Cody can see possibilities and imaginatively turn the mundane into the magical – a common thread in 80s movies about adventurous children. The film shares this sense of wonder, imbuing Cody’s small-town world with danger and excitement. It’s really well-paced too: a tight 93 minutes with no fat or slackening of momentum. And there are many impressive sequences, such as the prologue I mentioned earlier and another creepy scene that sees Cody encounter a mysterious wise man called Charlie Pride. To get to Charlie, who he hopes can provide answers about Donkagin, Cody travels upriver a la Apocalypse Now and then meets Charlie on a spooky pier at night. Smoke, backlighting and fine cinematography create a tense moment that could be straight out of a Spielberg movie.

As for the all-important scene with the fish tank that had – for unknown reasons – lodged so doggedly in my brain for three decades, I was rather moved when it came around. I’d recalled it fairly accurately. A couple of details were off the mark (there’s no flooded model village, for example) but I was cheered that I hadn’t got it completely wrong. It was actually a surreal experience watching it again after so long. Almost like reliving a dream.

As I watched the film, I spotted some other familiar faces in the cast aside from Henry Thomas. Cody’s best pal – and the object of his unspoken affections – is a local girl called Wendy, played by Rachel Friend. Friend went on to be in the soap opera Neighbours during an era when I was watching it, appearing as a character called Bronwyn Davies. Wendy’s sister, meanwhile, is played by Tamsin West who later starred in the terrific Australian kids show Round the Twist, which was very popular in the UK when I was a child. She also sang its memorable theme tune.

But the biggest surprise came when Wendy and Jane’s mother made an appearance. Having spent so long searching for this film, it had never occurred to me that its cast might include someone I’d met. But I now saw that Mrs Cannon was played by the adorable force of nature that is Katy Manning. After several TV roles in Britain, including starring in Doctor Who from 1971 until 1973 (pictured below), Manning had moved to Australia in the early 1980s so her children could live in sunnier climes. Not intending to stay long, she was there nearly 30 years. She began a long-term relationship with the actor and singer Barry Crocker, gained Australian citizenship in 2004, and has since returned to the UK full time.

I’d met Katy soon after I moved to London in 2002. I was working for a production company that specialises in Doctor Who audio dramas and Katy played a recurring character called Iris Wildthyme. We’ve also met at parties over the years and to this day we share several mutual friends. She’s a sunbeam of positive energy and very popular on the Doctor Who convention circuit where she and Jo Grant, the character she played in the 1970s, are rightly cherished. I had no idea of her involvement in this film that had dogged my memories since the 1980s, and have not seen her since I rediscovered it, but it’s another lovely connection.

Having enjoyed my second-ever viewing of Frog Dreaming, I next tried to find out what I could about the film’s production. The script was written by Everett De Roche, who died in 2014. He had an extensive career in Australian film and TV, taking in horror movies such as Patrick (1978) and the Jamie Lee Curtis-starring Roadgames (1981). He also has a Doctor Who link: he wrote an episode of the 2010 spin-off series K-9. Inspiration for Frog Dreaming’s monster-in-the-lake plot came when De Roche stumbled across some old photographs of an empty quarry with a train track winding to the bottom. He’d tried to pitch his idea as a TV script in the 1970s, but it didn’t find a home until he was able to sell it as a movie 10 years later.

The film was shot in the Australian state of Victoria – mostly in the rural towns of Woods Point and Menzies Creek. The all-important location of the lake, however, was Moorooduc Quarry Flora and Fauna Reserve just south of Melbourne. Rather than a distant, isolated place far from civilisation, the reserve is actually surrounded by urban housing. Local legend had long claimed that the pool of water in its abandoned quarry was bottomless, but the police did some bathymetry work before filming and discovered it was only 40 feet at its deepest point.

Henry Thomas – just 14 years old at the time, with his voice breaking – was popular on set, especially because of his willingness to get stuck in. He even knocked himself out while filming the train-track bike ride. Attracted to the idea of filming in Australia, Thomas initially planned to play his role with an Australian accent – an idea then dropped – and also did some research into the local Aboriginal community. But soon after starting work, the actor had doubts about the director. He wasn’t the only one.

Russell Hagg had worked on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as an art director and had then written an early draft of BMX Bandits, a 1983 comedy-drama starring a young Nicole Kidman. But his early work as a director on Frog Dreaming did not go down well. Investors were frustrated by the slow progress and unimpressive rushes. It seems Hagg had interpreted the script as a warm, safe family film, rather than the dark adventure story De Roche had written. Thomas was also unhappy because Hagg was reluctant to listen to his suggestions. So the money men insisted the director be changed. De Roche was asked to take over himself but he balked at the idea and instead helped to find a replacement.

Brian Trenchard-Smith had just finished working on an episode of a TV drama called Five Mile Creek, which had introduced a new regular character played by Nicole Kidman. He’d known the actress since directing her in her first film – BMX Bandits. So when De Roche and his producer Barbi Taylor asked to see Trenchard-Smith as soon as possible, he was having dinner with Kidman in a restaurant. Shuffling across to another table, he listened as De Roche and Taylor asked him to take over their troubled movie. They specifically wanted him to form a bond with the unhappy star, Henry Thomas. Trenchard-Smith agreed straightaway and started work within 24 hours, essentially junking the first fortnight’s work and starting again. One of the first things he did was screen BMX Bandits for Thomas to show him the sensibility he thought they needed – fun, daring, edgy, and most importantly full of wonder.

I already knew of Trenchard-Smith’s work, in part because he’s been championed by my favourite film director, Quentin Tarantino. I’d seen the pair being interviewed together for a terrific documentary about Australian exploitation cinema, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), with QT gleefully telling Trenchard-Smith how much he loved his films in the 70s and 80s. In the same chat, Tarantino mentions that he wants to see Frog Dreaming (or The Quest, as he calls it). He has a copy, he says, but hasn’t had a chance to run it yet.

Originally from Britain, Trenchard-Smith was an established director when the Frog Dreaming gig came up. He had been working in Australia for 20 years or more, gaining notoriety for low-budget movies such as the George Lazenby crime film The Man from Hong Kong (1975) and the ultra-violent satire Turkey Shoot (1982). Frog Dreaming was actually one of three films he released in 1986: there was also the stylish post-apocalyptic action film Dead End Drive-In and the sentimental domestic drama Jenny Kissed Me (co-starring Frog Dreaming’s Tamsin West). Drawn to the Frog Dreaming project by both the script and a chance to work with E.T.’s Henry Thomas, Trenchard-Smith quickly had a positive influence on set. De Roche once said that the whole production instantly became sunnier, and that sense of drive and purpose and energy is evident in the finished film. Trenchard-Smith does a wonderful job with the material.

Soon after I’d seen Frog Dreaming again, I began following Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Twitter account. One day, on a whim, I sent him a private message to say how much I’d enjoyed rediscovering his 1986 classic. I wasn’t expecting a reply, but on 13 February 2019 he wrote back: ‘Thanks so much for your appreciation of Frog Dreaming/The Go Kids/The Quest/The Spirit Chaser/etc,’ he said. ‘At the time, I knew I had made something special for the young, who would one day become parents and show it to their kids and grandkids and so on.’

Quite right too. Assuming they could remember what it was called, of course.

Ten railway bikes and gyrocopters out of 10

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Quavers image is used by permission of Jason Liebig at Collecting Candy.

Thanks to the members of the Ormskirk Community Group on Facebook for helping me research the name of my childhood video shop.

The BBFC information can be found here.

This enjoyable YouTube video explores the film’s locations.

Our mutual friend Mark Wright helped with information about Katy Manning.

Thanks to Brian Trenchard-Smith (@GENERALMURRAY) for permission to quote from our Twitter chat.

 

 

REDUX REVIEW: The Terminator (1984, James Cameron)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 14 October 2019
Format: A 35mm print projected at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s West End.
Seen before? Yes, many, many times. 

Note: I have already reviewed The Terminator as part of another blogging series – you can check it out by clicking on this link. So instead of focusing on the film itself, this article is about one particular viewing…

Review: It’s a rainy October evening as I head into central London to watch The Terminator, a film I’ve loved since I was a child, on a big screen for the first time. I don’t specifically remember my first viewing of this sci-fi action masterpiece, but it will have been on VHS in the mid-1980s. At that time I adored films; I adored Hollywood films; and I especially adored Arnold Schwarzenegger films. I also, thankfully, had a mother who let me rent violent movies. I’ve watched it many times in the 30-odd years since, but tonight I get the chance to see it projected in a cinema setting. I’m excited beyond measure.

The Prince Charles Cinema, housed in a 1960s building that was initially a theatre, is the only independent cinema in the West End and is located on a pedestrianised side street to the north of the tourist-heavy Leicester Square. I’ve been here several times before, so am well used to the set-up: the small entrance where you can buy popcorn, the small bar where you can buy drinks, the chalkboard where they invite you to suggest movies they should run. It has two screening rooms – a 104-seater upstairs, a 300-seater downstairs – and at 6.15pm tonight The Terminator is being shown in the latter.

I get out my phone and show the email containing my pre-bought ticket to a friendly guy at the door. This has been a big change to cinema-going in recent years, hasn’t it? Not only the notion that you pre-book online rather than just show up and pay there and then, but also that your ‘ticket’ is a barcode in an email. Part of me – a rather big part of me, if I’m honest – misses the old system. I fret about my phone battery dying and them not letting me in, or the barcode not scanning properly. I worry that too many things can go wrong. In fact, the day before my Terminator trip, I went to see the newly released movie Joker at the Everyman Canary Wharf (a very fine little cinema indeed). I’d bought my ticket on their website the night before, but the email never showed up. In the end it hadn’t mattered: I’d simply strolled in, taken my seat, watched the film and strolled out again afterwards. Not one member of staff had challenged me. But it had added an unnecessary level of anxiety to the process.

It’s not a huge turnout tonight at the Prince Charles, which is a bit of a surprise. There are only perhaps 20 to 30 of us here. But this cinema has a brilliantly eclectic programme – later this week, for example, it’s also showing a documentary about Miles Davis, Eddie Murphy’s new film Dolemite Is My Name, a recorded performance of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show Fleabag, the horror film Get Out, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and 80s flick The Lost Boys. A screening of James Cameron’s 1984 classic doesn’t therefore stand out, no matter how much I adore it. There’s just so much choice.

After a refreshingly brief period of ads and trailers – no multiplex-style half-hour of tedium here! – the lights go down and the film begins. They use a variety of formats at the Prince Charles, sometimes loudly trumpeting the fact they have a 70mm copy of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey… or sometimes whispering that they project a few films digitally. Tonight, I’m watching The Terminator on an old 35mm print, which is occasionally scratchy and damaged.

Rather than detract, I find that this actually enhances the experience. We’re living through a shiny, sleek era of apps and high-def and broadband, and of course that’s great and has brought untold benefits. But it’s wonderful, once in a while, to be reminded what popular culture used to be like. To wallow in the nostalgia of imperfection and to feel a bit more connected to the world around you.

The print I’m now watching is clear and sharp and shows off Adam Greenberg’s cinematography brilliantly. But it’s also undeniably aged, gritty, textured. It’s been round the houses. It has history. The reel changes are also noticeable – if, that is, you know to look out for an occasional flashing dot in the top right-hand corner of the screen. (This device tips off the projectionist that they need to switch over to a new reel. I first learnt about it when I saw an old episode of Columbo in which the murderer’s alibi was based on making a reel change at a certain time. The practice has now vanished from multiplexes due to digital projectors.)

All this is part of the fun of seeing a favoured film on the big screen. It’s not a dispassionate experience; it’s emotional and visceral. When you know and love a movie as much as I know and love The Terminator, you’re viewing it in a different way from most people. Most people, it seems to me, watch a film once. Their pleasure comes from experiencing a new story for the first time, and after that they’re not sure what you’d get from it. They perhaps find the idea of repeat viewings peculiar, but for people like me rewatching movies is a vital part of the process. I once heard the film critic Mark Kermode being challenged about this on the radio. Sounding bemused by the notion of watching one film many times, the presenter Richard Bacon asked how often Kermode had seen his favourite movie, The Exorcist. Kermode guessed at least 200. ‘It works for me every time,’ he explained, ‘and every time I see it, it looks like a different film.’

I haven’t seen The Terminator or any other film quite that often, but tonight could easily be my 20-something-th viewing. Therefore the story doesn’t take me by surprise any more. I know every scene, every beat, and I can – and this evening I occasionally do – mouth along with the dialogue (‘The Uzi 9mm?’, ‘Look at it this way: in a hundred years, who’s gonna care?’, ‘Fuck you, asshole!’). But my enjoyment isn’t lessened any by this. It’s partly due to familiarity. It’s like seeing and hanging out with an old friend, even if you know it’ll mean hearing the same anecdotes and the same jokes. It’s also the effect Mark Kermode mentioned about The Exorcist. Each time you watch a cherished film, in some ways you see it anew. Already knowing *what’s* happening on screen means you can focus on *why* and *how*. You can appreciate the detail, you can track certain aspects, you can try to understand why it works so well.

Also, having it projected onto a big screen, which of course is how director James Cameron intended it to be seen, gives me a new context this evening. All my previous viewings had been on a TV. The early ones were also cropped into the ghastly pan-and-scan format. Now I can look up from my comfortable seat and enjoy The Terminator in its correct aspect ratio (it was shot with spherical lenses and is projected at 1.85:1), playing on a screen around 10 feet tall by 20 wide. I can be thrilled by the story, excited by the action, entertained by the wit, intrigued by the clever storytelling, wowed by the intensity and the sharp direction, charmed by the cast, impressed by the craft in the art design and music and camerawork. Outside it’s raining. In here, I’m safe and happy.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘Released just a week before Halloween 1984, [The Terminator] was the number-one movie in America for six weeks, on its way to grossing close to $100 million. I didn’t quite realise how successful it was until… some people stopped me walking down the street in New York. “Oh man, we just saw The Terminator. Say it! Say it! You’ve got to say it!” “What?” “You know, ‘I’ll be back!'” None of us involved in making the movie had any idea that this was going to be the line people remembered.’

Ten plates of burly beef out of 10

Next: The Expendables 2

Commando (1985, Mark L Lester)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 6 October 2019
Format: A DVD I bought many years ago.
Seen before? Oh fuck yes. 

I first saw Commando soon after it was released on VHS. I was only about eight years old and was absolutely enraptured: it felt like the perfect film. I’ve rewatched it many times in the three decades or more since, always thoroughly enjoying it, so here are 10 reasons why this 80s action classic is so entertaining. Spoilers ahead…

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Commando presents Arnie in such a way that all the aspects of his carefully moulded Hollywood persona are contained in one character. The plot features plenty of action and violence, for example, which utilise his enormous muscular body and towering presence. (His first shot is a mission statement: he’s carrying a fucking tree.) The script also uses the kind of comedy that Schwarzenegger was developing film by film in the 1980s. His dialogue around this time often favoured deadpan, James Bond-style quips and puns, which pepper and enliven Commando, adding a self-aware edge to the macho storyline (‘Where’s Sully?’/‘I had to let him go…’). But there’s also a big change going on here too, one that’s very important in the context of Schwarzenegger’s career. John Matrix is arguably the actor’s first *normal* character. (Well, relatively speaking.) He’s not a Greek god, a prehistoric warrior or a cyborg from the future – the roles that had made Schwarzenegger’s name but which didn’t call for much emotional depth. Here, when we meet Matrix during the film’s opening credits, he’s a kindly single father living a life of pleasurable retirement. He takes daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano, spirited) for ice cream and teaches her self-defence. We soon learn that he has a past as a stealthy military assassin, but – give him his due – Schwarzenegger never forgets that Matrix is a reluctant hero who just wants a quiet life…

2. The script
In fact, the only reason Matrix leaves his idyllic rural cabin and gets involved in the wider world is because Jenny is kidnapped by mercenaries. They then attempt to blackmail John into killing a Central American politician, which they hope will incite a fascist coup. But of course our hero is smarter than the bad guys. He gives his handlers the slip (by, you know, killing them) then ignores his mission and heads off to rescue his daughter… The fictional country at the centre of the plot, Val Verde, was later referenced in 1990’s Die Hard 2, which like Commando was written by Steven E de Souza. A writer whose style is full of attitude and momentum, de Souza was brought onto the project to rejig an existing script after Arnold Schwarzenegger had been cast. Commando might not be Shakespeare, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a sugar-rush, action-driven thriller, with stunts and spectacle as well as humour and humanity. It’s full-on and full-throttle, but the closer you look the more you also see a sense of playfulness. Far from spoof, it nevertheless has its tongue in its cheek.  

3. Rae Dawn Chong
John Matrix is on a mad dash to find Jenny before the bad guys realise he’s free, and he soon crosses paths with a woman called Cindy, played by Rae Dawn Chong. She’s an air stewardess whose sports car Matrix appropriates when he needs to give chase to the slimy henchman Sully. At first Matrix’s terrified hostage, Cindy then realises that this is a desperate man who needs her help and the pair become allies. (Extremely conveniently for the plot, she has been learning to pilot small aircraft, which comes in handy when Matrix learns that Jenny is being held on an island.) Playing the frustrated, sarcastic dialogue for all its worth, the actress lifts the character above the usual ‘female sidekick’ function and adds a huge amount of fun to the film, not least when she haphazardly uses a rocket-launcher to rescue Matrix from a temporary spell in police custody. Refreshingly, there’s no romance between the two leads. Why would there be, when Matrix is focused on saving his daughter’s life? (A sex scene was shot then wisely cut from the finished movie.)

4. The violence
The film’s opening scene is murder in suburbia. A middle-class couple are awoken one morning by the sound of a garbage truck, so the husband races outside to make sure they collect his bags. The two binmen then starkly gun him down in the street… We later see many more scenes of brutality: deaths, gunplay, stabbings, explosions, scalpings, dismemberments, a man plummeting down a cliff, a man being impaled on a pipe, and so on. (Some of the more extreme shots were trimmed out of the print originally released in the UK.) It’s the kind of ultra-violence you don’t get in this type of film any more. The 1980s saw savagery go alongside sass in many high-profile genre films, especially those starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was understood that adult audiences could decode fact from fiction, and take harmless pleasure from the cartoon action. But since then – for financial reasons – there’s been a split. The big-budget action successors to movies like Commando (the Avengers series, for example) are courting a wider age range of viewers so contain watered-down violence. It’s never too graphic, never too challenging. The really hard-core stuff, meanwhile, is mostly found in lower-profile films like John Wick and Drive. Times change; fashions shift; cinema evolves. Commando now feels old-fashioned but – if you’re of a certain age – in a brilliantly nostalgic way.

5. Vernon Wells
Every great action thriller needs an entertaining bad guy. And Commando has a beaut. A colleague of John Matrix’s from their old special-forces days, the thug Bennett is a moustachioed Australian dynamo of testosterone and arrogance. He dresses in a macho-gay outfit, all string vest and tight leather trousers, and comes off like some kind of sadistic Freddie Mercury. Bitter at his firing from the military (for being a nutjob), he teams up with Central American fascists and helps kidnap Matrix’s daughter; he even stages his own death to disguise his involvement. A thoroughly nasty piece of work, Bennett snarls and snarks and smirks his way through the movie. This is not a misunderstood character with a deep psychology: he’s just a shit. But actor Vernon Wells (Mad Max 2, Weird Science, Innerspace) knows that and plays up the campy villainy in such a gleeful way that you miss Bennett whenever he’s not on screen.

6. The other bad guys
Bennett is just one of a gaggle of entertaining foes in this film. The boss is pompous wannabe dictator Arius (Dan Hedaya), and like a Bond villain he has baroque underlings. The goons who try to coerce Matrix into flying to Val Verde, for example, include Cooke and Sully. The former is an ex-Green Beret (‘I eat Green Berets for breakfast!’ quips Matrix) and is played with a stern expression by Bill Duke, who co-starred again with Arnie in 1987’s Predator. The latter, meanwhile, is a slimy, suit-wearing 80s twat who thinks his seedy chat-up lines will work on Cindy. He’s played by David Patrick Kelly (The Warriors, 48 Hrs).

7. The director
When Mark L Lester got the Commando gig, his CV was a mixture of now-forgotten genre flicks, a roller-disco musical featuring Linda Blair, and the hit horror film Firestarter. Tasked with an Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle, he pushed all the dials up to 11. This is not a movie about nuance. Made today, Matrix would have a drinking problem or an estranged wife (Jenny’s mother is never mentioned), but Commando works so well because it’s stripped down to the essentials. There’s nothing but plot, action, humour and excitement. It might have cost $10 million to make, but it’s essentially and tonally an exploitation film; directed crisply and sharply, with lots of driving momentum and no flab to the storytelling. Lester understands the idiom so well, taking the story *just* seriously enough that it flies but never forgetting that this is an arch, escapist fantasy. He also provides us with plenty of vivid, well-chosen locations, such as the Californian woods where Matrix lives, a vibrant shopping mall (which was later used in another Arnie classic: Terminator 2), and Arius’s island compound (which was actually an estate built by the silent-movie star Harold Lloyd). The action sequences, meanwhile, often have a James Bond-style panache, whether it’s Schwarzenegger swinging across a food court or jumping off the undercarriage of a jumbo jet during take-off. Commando is 90 minutes long and packs a huge amount in.

8. The tooling-up scene
If one moment typifies both Commando as a whole, and Arnie’s mid-80s career generally, then it’s when Matrix has arrived on the small island where his daughter is being held prisoner. Cindy has flown them the two hours off the Californian coast in a seaplane, and now Matrix has come ashore in a dinghy loaded down with supplies. In a meticulously edited montage lasting 19 seconds, we see our hero ‘suit up’. He ties laces, clicks buckles, straps on guns, pockets ammunition, sheaths knives, cocks handguns, zips up his jacket, streaks war paint across his muscles and face, then strikes a pose like a superhero on the cover of a comic book. It’s a scene that adds little to the plot – all it’s saying is that Matrix has guns with him – but it’s hugely important on a more primal level. Psychologically – if that’s not too highfalutin a word to evoke when it comes to this film – we’re seeing Matrix prepare for the most important battle of his life. It’s pure ritual. (In 2007, this kind of tooling-up scene was spoofed with affection in Edgar Wright’s millimetre-perfect action comedy Hot Fuzz.)

9. The music
Commando’s score was written by James Horner, a man whose career was typified by exciting, vibrant and memorable work on films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Aliens, The Rocketeer, Sneakers, Patriot Games, Titanic and many more. Riffing on ideas he’d recently used in the cop film 48 Hrs, here his music is a joyous collision of electro sounds, sax gurgles and steel-drum melodies. (What do steel drums have to do with the plot of Commando? Nothing. They just sound cool.) The score drives the action and embellishes scenes with wit. As the credits roll at the end of the movie, with the bad guys vanquished and Jenny returned safely to her father, we also get to hear a rock song that was specially written for the film. Sadly, We Fight for Love by the supergroup The Power Station is one of those tracks you start to forget while it’s still playing.

10. The line
‘I’ll be back, Bennett,’ promises John Matrix when he’s being shipped off to Val Verde. As most viewers – both then and now – will have realised, this is a reprise of an especially memorable line of dialogue from The Terminator. In fact, it’s the *first* reprise of ‘I’ll be back’ – and it would be far from the last. The line has since been repeated or referenced in many other Arnie movies: all the subsequent Terminators, Raw Deal, The Running Man, Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, Last Action Hero, Junior, Eraser, The 6th Day, The Expendables 2… But here is where ‘I’ll be back’ evolved from a quotable bit of one movie and became a Schwarzenegger-specific catchphrase.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘I was riding the great wave of action movies, a whole new genre that was exploding during this time. Stallone started it with the Rocky movies. In the original Rocky, in 1976, he’d looked like just a regular fighter. But in Rocky II, he had a much better body. His Rambo movies, the first two especially, also had a giant impact. My 1985 movie Commando continued the trend, coming out in the same year as the second Rambo and Rocky IV. Then The Terminator and Predator expanded the genre by adding sci-fi dimensions. Some of these movies were critically acclaimed, and all of them made so much money that the studios could no longer write them off as just B movies. They became as important to the 1980s as Westerns were in the 1950s.’

Ten promises to kill you last out of 10

Next: The Terminator

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A few years after his mother was targeted by a robotic killer from the future, the young John Connor must go on the run – but like his mother before him he has a protector…

Main characters:

* The cyborg known as a T-800 may be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (now an enormous star who commanded a fee of $15 million). But this is not the same character we saw in The Terminator. It’s a different iteration of the same factory-produced model. When he arrives in the present in a flash of kinetic electricity, having time-travelled from the year 2029, it’s a scene that reminds us of the T-800’s entrance into the original Terminator film. He then coldly attacks a heavy-set biker in order to acquire ‘his clothes, his boots and his motorcycle’, so we’re primed to assume that this T-800 is bad news like his earlier counterpart. He searches for the child John Connor – the son of the first film’s Sarah, who we know will grow up to be an inspirational leader in the future war with the machines – and randomly spots him after driving around LA for a while. But then the cyborg *saves* John from another Terminator who’s trying to kill him, and we instantly understand the film’s cheeky conceit (admittedly, a plot twist that almost every audience member will have known before going in, thanks to trailers and word of mouth). Schwarzenegger’s T-800 has been reprogrammed and has actually been sent back in time to *protect* John from an assassination attempt. For the remainder of the story, he carries out his mission with unshakable commitment… As with the first film, this role is the finest of Schwarzenegger’s career. It’s true that part of the reason is that the T-800 doesn’t require much emotional acting or many nuanced line-deliveries, things Arnie has traditionally struggled with, but this is not totally a back-handed compliment. The actor’s undoubted presence – not just his size, but his posture and movement and gaze – are simpatico with the character. It’s difficult to imagine anyone playing the part more effectively.

* When the new Terminator – known as a T-1000 – arrives in the present, early scenes make us think of the Kyle Reese character from the original movie (further setting up the twist to come). But we also recognise that something is ‘off’. This guy kills a cop and steals his identity – all the better for tracking down John Connor, detective-like. When he finally does encounter John at a shopping mall, he’s about to strike when the T-800 intervenes and shoots him several times… but each bullet hit is harmlessly soaked up into the T-1000’s chrome-coloured liquid innards. We discover that this Terminator is composed entirely of a durable, pliable and intelligent fluid metal and can metamorphise into any solid object of comparable size – including people. (Writer/director James Cameron came up with a term to explain the character’s base material: ‘mimetic poly alloy’.) Played with granite conviction and actually quite a bit of charm by the hawkeyed Robert Patrick, and sometimes realised by cutting-edge CGI, the T-1000 is an amazing creation. Sequels can’t just trot out the same idea again, and making this film’s threat so different and fresh adds a huge amount of danger and tension to the story. For most of its running time, our heroes have no idea in the slightest how they’re going to stop him.

* John Connor, who we saw being conceived during the first movie, is now a rebellious 10-year-old who talks back to his foster parents and steals cash from ATMs. Estranged from his mother, he’s clearly a troubled lad who likes to ride his bike around the city to the sound of Guns N’Roses. The then-unknown Edward Furlong is really good in the part, largely because he brings no cuteness to it at all. This is a cynical, wise-beyond-his-years character who swears and knows how to use weapons, and Furlong’s sassy attitude works really well. He also has genuine chemistry with Arnold Schwarzenegger once the T-800 has convinced John to trust him…. and especially after John realises that his future self has reprogrammed the cyborg to accept any command John gives him. He even tries to humanise the T-800 by teaching him slang and sarcasm (‘Hasta la vista, baby!’), which works as both light relief and character development. But John also decides on a risky mission: once he knows about the T-1000 he insists that they go and rescue his mother, Sarah, who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. Once they successfully get her free and evade another murderous attempt from the T-1000, John is disappointed that his mum seems more concerned in his physical state than in an emotional reunion. The latter takes more time, but comes both gradually and believably. (At the beginning of the film, we see a 44-year-old John Connor during a flash-forward to the future war. He’s played by Michael Edwards, a former boyfriend of Priscilla Presley.)

* It’s clear straightaway that Sarah Connor has undergone a *massive* change since the first film. Not only is she institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital, but as her opening close-up emphasises she’s now muscular, intense and serious. The former happy-go-lucky waitress been diagnosed with acute schizo-affective disorder – delusions, depression, violent outbursts – which we realise has been brought on by the fact she knows the world is due to end in 1997. So we’re presented with a beloved character who is now radically different and yet who we still recognise as the same person underneath. It’s great writing from James Cameron, but it’s also undeniably great acting from Linda Hamilton: this is a blistering performance of primal power, full of aggression and complexity. When refused permission to see her son, Sarah begins a daring escape of the prison-like hospital… and due to Hollywood storytelling, her attempt comes on the very night that John and two Terminators are converging on the building looking for her. The moment when she first sees the T-800 – which of course instantly terrorises her, due to her experiences in film one – is shot with nightmare-evoking slo-mo and is hugely effective. (‘Come with me if you want to live,’ he says, significantly quoting Kyle from the first film.) But after her initial shock, she learns that this T-800 is on her and John’s side. Very slowly, she even begins to trust and genuinely befriend him. The last third of the movie is then kicked off when Sarah learns from her new ally how Judgment Day will come about. A scientist called Miles Dyson will develop a revolutionary new micro-processor that will eventually lead to sentient machines who want to do away with humanity. So without telling John or the T-800 she suits up with some weapons, and heads off to kill him…

Other characters:
* John’s foster parents are a working-class couple called Janelle (James Cameron regular Jenette Goldstein) and Todd Voight (Xander Berkeley). She seems to be trying to do a decent job, but Todd is a pessimistic layabout. When the T-1000 needs to find John, he kills Janelle and impersonates her while he waits for the boy to call home. When John does so, Todd’s bitching gets so irritating that the T-1000 simply kills him too.
* John’s best pal is the ginger-mulletted Tim (Danny Cooksey). A savvy little kid, he lies that he doesn’t know John when a cop (ie, the T-1000 in disguise) asks after him.
* Dr Silberman (Earl Boen) returns from the first film; Sarah has become something of a career case for him, though he still assumes that all her talk of robots and time-travel and the end of the world is delusional nonsense.
* Miles Dyson (Joe Morton, terrific) is the director of special projects at the Cyberdyne Systems Corporation. The company has in its possession a microchip and a mechanical arm recovered from the first film’s T-800 and Dyson is leading the research into this radical technology. (The implication, which was explicit in a scene cut out of 1984’s The Terminator, is that the factory where Sarah killed the cyborg in that movie was Cyberdyne property. Hashtag bootstrap paradox.) He’s not a selfish, careless mad scientist but rather a decent family man. After Sarah’s conscience prevents her from murdering him, he’s aghast to be told what his work will lead to, so offers to help destroy all the evidence.

Where: We’re mostly in Los Angeles again. John’s foster parents’ house and the shopping mall where he encounters both Terminators are in the San Fernando Valley neighbourhood of Reseda. Later, after her break-out from the hospital, Sarah, John and the T-800 flee the city. ‘Just head south,’ says Sarah, and they drive into the desert. They eventually hook up with a Mexican family who Sarah and John know of old.

When: The ‘present’ story begins at night, carries on through the following two days and ends before dawn on the third – so takes place over not much more than 48 hours. The first movie had internal evidence that its main storyline took place in either 1983 or 1984, and the latter year is confirmed here in both a voiceover from Sarah and when we see John Connor’s date of birth on a monitor screen (28 February 1985, which means he was conceived the previous May). But John in this film is clearly not six years old so we’re obviously not in 1991, the year of Terminator 2’s release. John is now 10 (which is just about plausible: actor Edward Furlong was 13 during filming) and the story is set in 1995. There’s a continuity error, however, when the T-800 tells Sarah what is due to happen in the coming few years. Our terminus ad quem – or to put it in a less pretentious way, the date before which this story must be set – is 29 August 1997, which Sarah says is when the upcoming apocalypse will occur. Despite that being only two years away, the T-800 explains that Cyberdyne will start to supply the military with computer systems in three years’ time. (In real life, incidentally, 29 August 1997 was the day Netflix launched as a DVD-rental service. So when your on-demand service tries taking over the world, you can’t claim the clues weren’t there.) We also see 2029 in a brief flash-forward to the war.

I’ll be back: Since the first Terminator movie, Arnie had playfully quoted his catchphrase in some unrelated films. Along with his bulk and his accent it was a key part of his Hollywood persona. The first instance came in 1985’s endlessly enjoyable action film Commando (‘I’ll be back, Bennett!’), then over the next few years it was alluded to in violent cop movie Raw Deal (‘I’ll be right back’), media satire The Running Man (‘Killian, I’ll be back!’), likeable comedy Twins (‘If you’re lying to me, I’ll be back!’), entertaining sci-fi thriller Total Recall (‘I’ll be back!’) and so-so comedy film Kindergarten Cop (‘I’m back!’). So when reprising his most famous role, it was obvious that he would also reprise his most famous line. But where would James Cameron fit it in? We actually have to wait quite a way into the film, over 90 minutes. While trying to escape the Cyberdyne offices, Sarah, John and the T-800 are trapped in a lift. Cops have arrived and flooded the lobby with teargas, meaning no escape. But then we realise that the T-800 doesn’t need to breathe. ‘Stay here,’ says Arnie with a slight smirk. ‘I’ll be back.’ He then leaves the lift, deals with the cops, and returns for his human colleagues in a van.

Review: James Cameron had form for this kind of thing. Not long after making the original Terminator film, he had been hired to write and direct a sequel to another recent sci-fi classic. Aliens, his 1986 follow-up to Ridley Scott’s stratospherically wonderful Alien (1979), was at least the equal of its predecessor – some would say it surpassed it – and Cameron achieved this by doing something very clever indeed. In essence he repeated the first film’s premise (a monstrous threat terrorising humans), but now played it out in a different format (a war movie rather than a horror). The resulting film is absolutely related to its forebear spiritually and thematically, but it also has its own unique attitude and style. So, when it came time to create a sequel to The Terminator, Cameron used the same trick. Intense, pacey and thrilling, T2 is unquestionably in the same vein as the first film. It has the same slick, precise storytelling, the same apocalyptic concerns, the same attention to character. But it’s also bolder, deeper, larger in scale, and quite obviously made on a bigger budget. Cameron had actually started his career in frugal filmmaking, cutting his teeth on Heath Robinson-like Roger Corman productions, but here he is spending $100 million (a record movie budget in 1991, some of which was paid for by sprinkling the Pepsi logo throughout many scenes!). All this means that, instead of the first Terminator’s thrilling rawness and punky edges, we now get an unparalleled Hollywood sheen. This is a supremely confident film, made by a skilled crew going all-out to do their best work. The revolutionary computer-generated special effects, for example – which build on similar images on Cameron’s previous film The Abyss – threw us back into our seats in 1991 and are still enormously impressive today. Crucially they’re deployed sparingly, surgically, and are always focused on telling the story. It’s not just the CGI used for the fluid movements of the T-1000; there are also numerous in-camera techniques such as prosthetics, puppets, models and rear-projection screens. Just generally, the movie is a visual marvel: the action is tough and huge and powerful and visceral, everything is photographed beautifully (check out the blues hues for the night scenes) and the editing is unimprovable. But all of that only goes so far, of course. A great film needs great characters and a great story – and T2 exceeds in these areas too. In another echo of Aliens, this script neatly builds a family unit for us to follow and root for: instead of Ripley, Hicks and Newt as the parents and child, we have Sarah, the T-800 and John. Watching their triangular bond develop as the film progresses is a genuine joy, and more importantly the process increases how much we care about them. If all that wasn’t enough, the whole enterprise is also founded on one of the best reversals of expectation in genre-cinema history. Arnold Schwarzenegger – an embodiment of terror and savagery and brutality in the first film – is now playing a protective good guy. What a brilliant coup.

Ten thumbs-up out of 10

See here for a Redux review, which looks at the differences between Terminator 2’s original cut and the Special Edition edit…

The Terminator (1984, James Cameron)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A cyborg is sent back in time to 1984, intent on killing a woman called Sarah Connor. Her only hope is a man from the future with a secret…

Main characters:

* The star of the show is Linda Hamilton. She’d just made the horror film Children of the Corn, but The Terminator took her to a whole new level: one of a science-fiction icon. As the story begins her character, Sarah Connor, is an everyday young woman living an unambitious but happy-enough life in Los Angeles. A bright, likeable person who works as a waitress at a diner called Big Jeff’s, Sarah shares an apartment with her gregarious friend Ginger and – how’s this for an oddball detail? – a pet iguana. But her life is turned upside down when she realises that someone is murdering local women who share her name. The killer, a slow-moving but extremely powerful assassin displaying no emotion, then catches up with her and is about to pull the trigger… when another man saves her life and they go on the run together. The nervous and intense Kyle Reese tells her that he’s been sent back in time. His mission is to save her from a part-organic android called a Terminator, which wants to kill her before she can conceive her son – a son who will grow up to be an important military leader in a future war against self-aware machines. As you’ll appreciate, this is a lot of information for Sarah to take in. But when she later sees the relentlessly savage Terminator in action, she’s convinced by the outlandish story. She also starts to bond with kindly Kyle and they eventually sleep together… Sarah Connor is so much more than a stereotypical girl-in-danger. As the story develops we see her grow and learn. Bit by bit, she becomes more assertive and more confident, eventually taking the lead in her and Kyle’s attempt to evade the Terminator (‘On your feet, soldier! On your feet!’), yet we always recognise her as a human being with fears and doubts. Hamilton gives an absolutely terrific performance, selling every phase of her character’s journey, every shade of her personality. (The actress later married The Terminator’s writer/director, James Cameron.)

* Kyle Reese is a sombre and serious man in his 20s; his lack of humour is understandable given that he grew up in a 21st century ravaged by a guerrilla warfare with sentient machines. His mission is to protect Sarah from the Terminator, and he knew before he time-travelled that it was a one-way journey into the past. Suffering from nightmares and post-traumatic flinches, as well as physical scars from his war experiences, he seems singularly devoted to Sarah – and it’s only gradually that we realise why. In the future, Kyle was a colleague and friend of Sarah’s grown-up son, John. Through him he learnt about and fell in love with Sarah. By that time she had proved herself as a fearless leader in her own right as well as being the mother of humanity’s saviour, the Mary to John’s Jesus. Where Sarah is in this future – whether she’s died, for example, or is a 70-year-old elder stateswoman – is never explained, but Kyle hadn’t met her before he travelled to the 1980s. So rather than personal experience, his devotion developed through John’s stories and a single Polaroid of a young Sarah looking wistful. ‘I came through time for you, Sarah,’ he tells her as they grow close while on the run from the Terminator. They soon have sex in a motel room – it was the first sex scene your current blogger ever saw, aged about seven or eight – and the implication is clear: they’ve just conceived John…  Playing Kyle is Michael Biehn, one of those actors whose career contains two or three very high points but a surprising amount of trash too. He gives classy, interesting and very effective performances in three successful films written and directed by James Cameron – The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss.

* For the role of the T-800, the robotic killing machine from the future, Cameron wanted to cast someone who could blend into a crowd. He initially plumped for Lance Henriksen (who was later given a different role in the film) while ex-NFL player and future jailbird OJ Simpson was also considered. But when Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned for the part, it made business sense to cast the Austrian. He’d just had a big hit with Conan the Barbarian and his star was on the rise… It did mean a rethink of the character, however: the Terminator would now be significantly more ostentatious and noticeable. His first scene sees him arriving in the 1980s, totally naked and looking carved and chiselled like a statue of a Greek god. He’s also often filmed from below and framed like he’s a giant, adding to the sense that this machine is an unstoppable force. (In reality, Arnie’s height has long been a bone of contention. He claims to be 6’2”, but some have said he’s actually under six feet and wears lifts in his shoes.) Even if the original idea of an assassin looking like an everyman makes more sense, in this film you can still see a pop-culture icon being created before your eyes: the looming walk, the steely gaze, the dispassionate intent, the monotone voice, the Teutonic accent, the dry humour (‘Fuck you, asshole’), the brutal violence. Famously, the character only has 16 lines of dialogue in the whole movie. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has 100 times as many – 1,569 of them – in *his* eponymous story. But which one looks better punching a car window in, eh?

Other characters:
* There’s the aforementioned Ginger (Bess Motta) and her sex-mad boyfriend, Matt (Ross Rossovich), who are both victims of the Terminator when he comes looking for Sarah.
* Early in the film, the T-800 encounters a street gang and kills two members before stealing the clothes of a third. One of them is played by the great, sadly late Bill Paxton who pops in his small role (‘I think this guy’s a couple of cans short of a six-pack’) and soon had an impressive CV that included James Cameron’s Aliens and Titanic among much else.
* The sequences involving the police focus on the fatherly and deadpan Lieutenant Ed Traxler (Paul Winfield) and his gleefully cynical sidekick, Sergeant Hal Vukovich (Lance Henriksen). When they arrest Kyle, he keeps blabbing about being from the future, so Traxler and Vukovich call in a criminal psychologist called Dr Silberman (Earl Boen) who doesn’t have much sympathy for Kyle’s fantastical story.
* Although not a hugely important character, I mention Sarah’s co-worker Nancy (Shawn Schepps) because she has one of my favourite lines of dialogue in cinema history. Early in the story, during a busy shift at the diner, Sarah is dealing with customers who are complaining about her getting their orders wrong. Then a cheeky kid deliberately plops a dollop of ice cream into her pocket. Sarah sighs with quiet frustration. Nancy breezes over and says: ‘Look at it this way: in a hundred years, who’s gonna care?’ I say that mantra to myself after every one of life’s frustrations.

Where: Most of the film is set in and around Los Angeles. In a coda scene, Sarah is seemingly in Mexico. The Terminator’s LA is a grimy, crime-y city. We see suburbia briefly but there’s little glamour or glitz or showbiz here; instead it’s a place of rundown streets, gangs, hobos, cynical cops, punky nightclubs, flophouses and construction sites. It’s also often dark and threatening: around 90 per cent of this movie is set at night. One location with a surprising legacy is a nightclub called Tech Noir (entry fee: $4.50). Spooked by news stories of other Sarah Connors being murdered, and sensing that a strange man is following her (it turns out to be Kyle), our Sarah ducks inside a club to use its phone. This is where the Terminator first catches up with her, and where Kyle first intercedes (‘Come with me if you want to live,’ he says, coining a franchise catchphrase). So Tech Noir is very important to the story. It also had an effect outside the fiction. The Terminator is part of a sub-genre of movies that blend science-fiction ideas with film-noir stylistics – Blade Runner is its key text – and the nightclub gave the concept a name.

When: The bulk of the story takes place over about 54 hours. According to a line of dialogue, we start in the early hours of Thursday 12 May and events progress until daylight on Saturday morning. It’s usually assumed that the film is set in 1984, the year it was released, but 12 May 1984 was a Saturday. The date works if it’s 1983. (Having said all that, at one point we catch sight of Sarah’s timecard when she clocks in at work – and that’s for a pay period that will end on 19 May 1984. Time-travel stories, eh?) Kyle also experiences a series of flashbacks to his earlier life in the year 2029, and there’s a coda scene set several months after the defeat of the Terminator.

I’ll be back: After about 57 minutes of the film, Sarah and Kyle are at a police station. The latter is under arrest, while the former is being cared for by officers who think she was Kyle’s hostage. In a neat piece of writing, Lt Traxler tells Sarah not to fret: ‘We got 30 cops in this building,’ he says, implying she’s completely safe. The Terminator then storms the station and dispassionately kills every single police officer in his attempt to find her… The moment when he gains entry is where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most infamous catchphrase was born. Walking into the quiet reception area, the T-800 asks to see Sarah Connor. A bored and distracted desk clerk tells him to return in the morning. The Terminator surveys the wooden-and-glass barrier that protects the station’s innards, then leans in and says, ‘I’ll be back.’ A few moments later he does so: in a high-speed car, that crashes through and destroys the station’s lobby… It wasn’t written as an arch piece of ‘movie dialogue’ – James Cameron was going for underplayed irony that would only ping on repeat viewings – but the phrase ‘I’ll be back’ quickly took on a life of its own. It’s been reprised in all the Terminator sequels, as well as several other Schwarzenegger movies.

Review: The idea for The Terminator came to James Cameron in a fever dream while he lay ill in an Italian hotel bedroom (‘It was this chrome skeleton emerging phoenix-like out of the fire’) and that nightmarish quality purveys throughout the movie. There’s a bleak, edgy, violent tone, almost like a Halloween-style slasher film. The incidental music is percussive and unsettling – all harsh clangs, eerie drones and mournful electro washes – rather than a Hollywood score of reassuring lushness. And Cameron’s masterful control of pace and point of view creates tension right from the word go: we feel like we’re experiencing events along with Sarah and Kyle, rather than being objective viewers. The story is simple. It’s a chase movie with the good guys evading the bad. But for various reasons, we’re gripped and intrigued throughout. One is that the sharp script centres on extreme situations, and has no interest in anything that doesn’t help tell the story. Another is that the characters feel like they have lives that exist beyond the barriers of the fiction (Sarah has easy-going, natural friendships; Traxler is clearly a cop who deals with difficult cases on a daily basis; what we see of Kyle’s war service seems like the traumatic tip of an horrific iceberg). There’s also the thematic unity of the movie, which expertly supports a central idea – a machine attempting to kill a human being – with numerous examples of technology being unhelpful. A construction site reminds Kyle of the mechanical war engines of his youth. Ginger doesn’t hear her boyfriend being killed because her Walkman headphones are too loud. The Terminator locates Sarah by listening to an answerphone message. Dr Silberman’s misses seeing the Terminator because his beeper distracts him. But these conceptual jokes never get in the way or draw attention to themselves; they’re part of a fully realised vision, which is exciting, suspenseful and packs a hell of a lot into a lean, trim running time of 103 minutes. The high-octane final 15 minutes are then breathlessly brilliant and focused, almost like a modern action thriller has time-travelled back 35 years to terrorise 1980s cinema. And just when you think it’s peaked with an enormous explosion, we get a then-innovative false ending: the Terminator emerges phoenix-like out of the fire, kicking the movie into an ever higher gear. A masterpiece.

Ten nice nights for a walk out of 10

See here for a Redux review, which details a specific viewing of this glorious film in October 2019…

An American Werewolf in London (1981, John Landis)

Spoiler warning: This article reveals plot details.

Moviedrome was a wonderful way of screening films on television. Broadcast between 1988 and 2000, it was a BBC2 showcase for horror, action, art-house and science-fiction flicks, which were introduced on-screen by the film director Alex Cox and later by the critic Mark Cousins. In truth, the movies would have been screened anyway but the smart and insightful intros made them feel as if they were part of a carefully curated season. It was marvellous television and now much-missed.

If you were watching at 10.30pm on Sunday 22 July 1990, you will have seen Alex Cox – filmed on a bleak hillside and pretending to be spooked by an out-of-shot werewolf – presage that night’s offerings by saying, ‘The film is a weird mixture of naïve comedy and apocalyptic violence with an abrupt ending…’ This was my first viewing of the 1981 comedy-horror An American Werewolf in London, which had been written and directed by John Landis. I was 11 years old and fell in love. To this day it remains my favourite horror film.

The movie was shot in early 1981, Landis reportedly wanting Britain’s drab weather to provide a gloomy backdrop for his story. The crew did some filming in the Black Mountains in Wales (standing in for Yorkshire), but the majority of the production was based in and around London. So I thought it would be fun to spend a few weeks exploring the movie’s use of the city. Perhaps I could visit some of the filming locations as I try to discuss why I love this movie so much?

I begin my odyssey, however, by immediately breaking my own rule and leaving London. I’m on a train that will take me a mile or so outside the M25 motorway, a notional defining barrier of Greater London. But I know the journey will be worth it because I’m going to fulfil a long-standing ambition. I’m going to have a pint of beer in the Slaughtered Lamb…

As the movie begins, David Kessler and Jack Goodman climb down from the back of a sheep lorry. They’re young American men on a backpacking holiday in Yorkshire and a local farmer has given them a lift. It’s a terrifically witty introduction and Landis has confirmed that the visual gag – the characters being treated like livestock ready for the abattoir – was deliberate. Tramping across the countryside, the boys then end up in a village pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, where they get a decidedly frosty reception from the suspicious locals. Brian Glover’s chess player unsettles the newcomers with ghoulish jokes; David Schofield’s darts player threatens them for putting him off his game; Rik Mayall just smirks impishly. The scene is a horror standard: outsiders treated with distrust in a pub. The same kind of thing can be seen in movies such as Dracula (1931) and The Wicker Man (1973). But by combining a genuine air of menace with just the right amount of self-aware humour, American Werewolf’s is the best example.

In reality, the Slaughtered Lamb was a Hollywood-style composite. Despite being set in Yorkshire, the exterior was a redressed cottage in Wales. For the interior scene, meanwhile, the crew found a real pub in the brilliantly named Surrey hamlet of Martyr’s Green. That’s where I’m going now. Getting off the train at the rural station of Effingham Junction, I walk north for about two miles down a meandering and often pavement-less road. On either side of me is woodland, from where I can hear the pop-pop-pop of paint-ball guns. Occasional cars zoom past. A few cyclists are out on morning rides. Then, after 25 minutes in increasingly warm sun, I reach my target: a country pub called The Black Swan. It’s an old building with a modern extension added in 2006. A small beer garden is out front, a car park round the back. The locals affectionately call this place the Mucky Duck.

It’s 11am as I arrive, the specified opening time on the pub’s website, but a guy tidying up outside tells me they won’t be ready for ‘about half an hour’. He’s friendly about it, rather than the cool reception David and Jack received at the Slaughtered Lamb, so I hide my disappointment and have a wander around the local area to kill time. The Black Swan is opposite a turn-off for the historic village of Ockham, where the 13th-century philosopher William of Ockham was born (he devised the keep-it-simple principle of Occam’s Razor). I walk over there and enjoy the tranquillity of the Surrey countryside.

When I return to the pub at 11.30, a couple are already at an outside table with drinks, so I go inside. What a moment for an American Werewolf fan. Here I am, in the Slaughtered Lamb. The interior of the pub has changed an awful lot since 1981. It’s now less working-class and dingy, more upmarket and airy. All of the film’s set dressing is long gone, of course – that pentangle on the wall wasn’t genuine – but the space has also been opened up and the layout I recognise from the movie is now just part of a larger bar. But I can still see the framework of the Slaughtered Lamb. The way I came in is through the same door David and Jack used; the bar is in the same place; over there is the corner where the chess game was going on. And after I’ve bought a very nice pint of IPA and taken a few photographs I sit at a table just to the right of the door – in other words, on the very spot where David and Jack plonk themselves down during their visit.

For a very long time, I assumed that the interior of the Slaughtered Lamb had been a film set constructed at somewhere like Twickenham Studios. It’s wonderful to be in the ‘real’ place, even with all the cosmetic changes. Sadly I can see no acknowledgment of the pub’s popular-culture heritage on display; no signs or framed photographs from the filming. But then something rather wonderful happens. The bar staff have put on a playlist of inoffensive music, as bar staffs tend to do when they want to generate some atmosphere, and before long I’m listening to a track that was used in An American Werewolf in London. It appears to just be a coincidence, but it provides me with a neat way of talking about the film’s music…

An American Werewolf in London does have a score, and it was composed by an all-time great: Elmer Bernstein (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Ghostbusters). But what’s more memorable to most viewers are the pre-existing songs that Landis used to complement his scenes. There’s also a cute running joke going on. To reflect the werewolf motif, the director chose tracks with the word moon in the title: three different recordings of the ballad Blue Moon, the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit Bad Moon Rising, and Van Morrison’s light-as-air jazz-pop classic Moondance.

It’s the latter I can now hear as I drink my beer in the Black Swan. A poetic yearning for a bit of alfresco sex, it was recorded in New York City in August 1969. At the very same time, in Yugoslavia, John Landis was working as an assistant director on the satirical war film Kelly’s Heroes. During his nine months on the movie, he encountered some local gypsies who believed in the undead and the incident inspired him to write a script about a werewolf. But it was then put in a drawer (metaphorically at least) while Landis made inroads in the film industry. At the age of 21 he directed a cheap horror spoof called Schlock (1973), then followed it with three hit comedies: The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Now a rising star of the Hollywood directing fraternity – someone who delivered popular and profitable films, someone who was friends with Steven Spielberg – Landis dusted off his old werewolf script and began pre-production. He hired his friend the special-effects genius Rick Baker to design the make-up then began scouting locations in England. For the story’s lead character of David, Landis cast 29-year-old David Naughton, who was then best known in the US for a series of Dr Pepper commercials. In the role of David’s pal Jack, the director plumped for Griffin Dunne, who was 25 and later married Bond girl Carey Lowell. David and Jack are superbly cast. They absolutely feel like believable pals with an easy-going yet deep friendship.

As I leave the Black Swan pub, I have a much more pleasant time than Naughton and Dunne’s characters do in the movie. I simply walk back to the train station. After leaving the Slaughtered Lamb, David and Jack have a terrifying encounter on the Yorkshire moorlands. Lost at night, under the light of a full moon, the pair are menaced by some kind of wild beast – David is badly injured, while Jack is mauled to death. It’s a brilliantly shot sequence, director of photography Robert Paynter creating a lot of menace from smoke and artificial moonlight.

Three weeks later David wakes up in a London hospital and is soon spooked by a ghostly visitation. His now-undead friend Jack appears by his hospital bed to urge David to kill himself, otherwise he will inevitably transform into a werewolf… The scene is a marvel. Jack’s matter-of-fact appearance in the room is all the more effective because Landis simply cuts to him via a conventional edit, rather than using any supernatural effect or melodramatic music. Griffin Dunne also looks so brilliantly ghoulish, thanks to some world-class monster make-up featuring deep scars and bloody rips in his neck. He’s one of cinema’s greatest zombie-like characters.

The hospital featured in these scenes is fictional, but for the filming the crew used the interior of the abandoned Princess Beatrice Hospital in west London. It had been founded in 1887 and initially called Jubilee Hospital to mark Queen Victoria’s half-century on the throne. Various name changes and redevelopments followed – it was only known as the Princess Beatrice from 1931 – until it was considered obsolete and closed down in March 1978.

When I visit the surviving building on the corner of Finborough Road and Old Brompton Road, having walked there from Earl’s Court tube station, I do so knowing that I won’t be able to go inside and see where David recuperated. It’s long since been converted in hostel accommodation.

But I’m in the area anyway, as it’s on the way to another key filming location from An American Werewolf in London. When David is discharged from hospital, he accepts an invitation to stay with the nurse who’s been looking after him, Alex Price, and she takes him to her modest flat in a converted townhouse. Much to David’s understandable delight, the pair soon become lovers in a shower-and-sex montage scored by Van Morrison’s Moondance. Alex is played by Jenny Agutter, then 28 years old and the most famous member of the cast after big films such as The Railway Children, Logan’s Run and The Eagle Has Landed. The actress brings an awful lot to the movie, combining star power with believability, an English-rose quality with a fierce sex appeal.

In the film, Alex’s workplace is a tube ride away from where she lives. In reality, the filming locations are only about 150 metres apart. I turn off Finborough Road and zigzag onto a parallel residential street. Very soon I’m walking into a familiar view and I find myself standing on the spot where John Landis’s camera filmed Alex and David arriving at her home.

I’m on Redcliffe Square, which was laid down in the 1860s by the surveyors George and Henry Godwin. Across the road I can see St Luke’s, a squat and rather beautiful Anglican church built in 1872-73 and also designed by the Godwin brothers, while to my right is number 64, the address used as the location of Alex’s flat. What’s most striking is how little it’s all changed. Visiting the Black Swan pub had required a bit of mental squinting to see how it had been transformed into the Slaughtered Lamb. No such process is necessary here: other than the trees being fuller of leaves and the cars being modern – and the obvious absence of Jenny Agutter and David Naughton – I could be in the movie. The architecture of the building is exactly the same. Even the railings and the familiar black front door are still here.

In the film, it’s in this ground-floor flat where the full horror of David’s predicament becomes clear. Alone as the full moon begins to rise, David suddenly shouts out in pain… His werewolf’s curse has struck, and as he screams in agony (‘Jesus Christ!’ he cries. ‘I’m burning up!’) his body contorts and twists, changing him from a man into a hairy, snarling beast… The scene is rightly famed as a wonder of special effects. This is where Rick Baker and his team show off their astonishing skills with prosthetics and make-up. His transformation complete, David leaves the flat. He’s on the hunt…

David may have metamorphosed into a rabid lycanthrope, but the only notable change to the Redcliffe Square location I can see today is a sign on the front door saying ‘ADDRESSED MAIL ONLY. NO FREE PAPERS, NO JUNK MAIL’ (Perhaps they should add ‘No werewolves’. Or ‘No American Werewolf fans researching blogs’.) I hang around for a few minutes and take my photos, hoping no one asks what I’m up to. No one does. I then chance my arm and walk up number 64’s steps, recreating David and Alex’s approach. It’s always a thrill to be in a location that was used in a cherished film or TV show. The best movies are ‘transportative’; they invite you into a heightened, escapist world that might be superficially similar to reality but somehow seems magical or unreachable.

This happens in An American Werewolf in London. It’s set in an everyday 1980s London – one of packed tube carriages and newspaper vendors and trashy adverts on TV – but even before the supernatural plot comes into focus the film feels ‘other’ and ‘special’. All good films do, if they have smart direction, classy camerawork and a skilful cast (things that distinguish American Werewolf hugely). So there’s a kind of spiritual connection that happens when you visit a filming location. The place is both eerily strange and reassuringly familiar at the same time.

I feel this vivid sensation again a few days later when I head up to leafy Hampstead in north London to see the site of werewolf David’s first kill. Known as Middle Heath Road until the 1860s, East Heath Road snakes around the north of the locale, dividing the streets and houses from the vast open parkland of Hampstead Heath. To get there I take a pleasant, undulating walk from the tube station. I pass through a quiet, well-off residential area and see a house where, according to a blue plaque on its wall, the painter John Constable once lived. Then after a few minutes I hit the T-junction with East Heath Road and see a view familiar from the movie.

It’s actually quite a short sequence that was shot here in 1981. A young, posh couple (played by Geoffrey Burridge and Brenda Cavendish) get out of a taxi. They’ve come to attend a dinner party with friends, and jovially walk down the side of a building towards Hampstead Heath. They’re sneaking round the back so they can playfully scare their hosts, but they’re about to encounter David in the form of a ravening werewolf… The block of flats featured in the film and which I can now see is called The Pryors. It was built at the beginning of the 20th century to the design of the architect Paul Waterhouse and was only allowed on the Heath side of the road because it was replacing an existing property. Former residents include the novelist Ernest Raymond and the acting couple Jean Forbes-Robertson and André van Gyseghem.

As with Redcliffe Square, what’s immediately apparent is how little has changed – but then again, why would it be different? This is a fine piece of architecture in a well-to-do area of London. I’m oddly amused to see that the post box visible in the movie is still here (or at least there’s now a modern one in the same position), while a pedestrian crossing has been added since 1981. As well as the building’s frontage, I take a look down its left-hand side, where a hedge separates the block from the wilds of Hampstead Heath. This is where the posh couple walked arm in arm to their doom…

With dusk falling fast, the trees and hedges feel full of menace. The light from the streetlamps doesn’t reach very far into the Heath and total darkness is only a few steps away. Not wanting to risk an encounter with a werewolf or any other potential danger, I keep close to the road. Occasional cars come past, a couple of joggers too. But mostly it’s quiet. After taking my photographs, I then retrace my steps back towards the tube station. Hungry, I look for somewhere to eat. In a delightful alleyway called Flask Walk, I find an equally pleasing pub called The Flask and dive inside for a beer and a burger.

Talking of pubs, the Slaughtered Lamb makes a reappearance in the film long after David and Jack’s visit. David’s doctor, Dr Hirsch, has had his interest piqued by David’s stories of a werewolf attacking him so he travels to the Yorkshire village of East Proctor to investigate. Hirsch is brilliantly played by the fuss-free actor John Woodvine, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who brings both gravitas and a light touch to the part. He’s just one of many wonderful supporting actors in this film. Elsewhere, there’s the deadpan Lila Kaye as the Slaughtered Lamb’s landlady; Landis’s old pal Frank Oz cameoing as a man from the US embassy; and Paul Kember as a charmingly buffoonish British policeman.

However, back in London, the werewolf David is tearing through the city… After his attack on the posh couple, he stalks some tramps near Tower Bridge then terrorises a lone commuter in an atypically quiet Tottenham Court Road tube station. (The commuter is played by Michael Carter, later Jabba the Hutt’s aide Bib Fortuna in Return of the Jedi.) The following morning, a now-human-again David awakens – naked and understandably discombobulated – in the wolf pen at London Zoo, then later freaks out while in Trafalgar Square with Alex.

As you can see, this section of American Werewolf ticks off many hugely famous picture-postcard landmarks. Interestingly, though, in earlier drafts of the script some of them aren’t specified. Tottenham Court Road is just ‘a subway station’, while others were changed during the filming process. A scene of David using a public phone box, for example, was written as Leicester Square but then moved to Piccadilly Circus. As that location features so heavily in the movie’s final third, I feel I must take a pilgrimage…

Piccadilly Circus, one of central London’s most recognisable areas, is busy as I arrive on a rainy October evening. Because I’ve lived in London since 2002, I’ve been here many times before, so it’s not a surprise that it’s full of tourists and traffic. It always is. (It’s not for nothing that ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus’ is a British cliché used to denote a busy place.) But tonight my plan is to attempt to see the area through fresh eyes. Can I place it within the context of An American Werewolf in London? Can I ignore the smartphone-obsessed crowds and the horn-honking cars, and see if I can visualise where the film crew worked and how John Landis staged his remarkable and chaotic sequence here?

In truth, the Circus – the word has its roots in the Greek for circle or ring – is simply a crossroads. But it’s taken on a cultural significance over the years, not least because of two major features: the massive advertising hoardings first installed in the 1890s, which tonight glitter and flash and pulse with digital persistence, and the central fountain often called Eros but which actually includes a statue of the Greek god Anteros. When the nearby Regent Street was laid down by the architect John Nash in 1819, its meeting point with the venerable thoroughfare Piccadilly was shaped into what we now recognise as Piccadilly Circus. Shaftesbury Avenue, built in 1886, also connects to the junction and it’s on that road – famed throughout the world as the spine of London’s theatre district – where I first turn my attention.

In the movie, David is on Piccadilly Circus when he spots his undead friend, Jack, standing outside the ticket office of a cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. He races across the street and follows Jack inside, only pausing to buy a £2.80 ticket to the porno See You Next Wednesday. (Landis buffs will know that the title See You Next Wednesday is an in-joke; a motif the director adds to most of his movies.) I don’t race across the street now, however, because that would mean risking my life with the traffic. I also don’t go inside the cinema, because sadly it’s no longer there.

The Art Deco-styled cinema the Eros News Theatre first opened its doors at 7 Shaftesbury Avenue, along the northern edge of Piccadilly Circus, on 20 August 1934. It was a real success for several years, but by the time John Landis and his crew came here it had developed a reputation for being a rent boys’ hangout and for showing soft-core pornography. It had also been renamed the Eros Cinema. The cinema later closed down in February 1985; the final screening was of the Bo Derek flop Bolero. After a period as a jewellers’, the space was then converted into a branch of clothing store Gap in June 1997. The shop is still there now and is open as I walk over. I wonder how many people inside tonight realise that the entrance they used was, in a 1981 horror film, the ticket office of a porno cinema.

It’s inside the Eros Cinema where David Kessler is forced to face his zombiefied victims – the posh couple, the tramps, the commuter from Tottenham Court Road. He then metamorphoses again into his werewolf form. Bursting out of the cinema, past the assembled crowds and the police called by the cinema’s ticket attendant, he rampages across Piccadilly Circus. It’s the movie’s huge action set-piece. Cars crash, buses skid, pedestrians are run over, policemen’s throats are ripped out. In the kind of director’s cameo that Alfred Hitchcock would have balked at, John Landis – who’d worked as a Spaghetti Western stuntman earlier in his career – is flung through a shop window.

When planning all this stuff, Landis had sweet-talked the Metropolitan Police into letting him take over Piccadilly Circus for two nights. No movie had been allowed to shoot there in 15 years because of the disruption caused to central London traffic, but Landis got the permission after screening his recent comedy film The Blues Brothers to 300 police officers. It went down a storm, apparently. Thankfully, there’s none of that chaos here tonight. I look around, mentally replaying the American Werewolf scene over what I can see. I’m far from the only person taking photos as Piccadilly Circus is something of a tourist mecca. The nearby Criterion Theatre is preparing for a performance of The Comedy About a Bank Robbery. A street artist is painted silver and impressing the crowds by standing very still. A busker starts to plink away on his electronic keyboard and is soon belting out Bohemian Rhapsody. Before leaving I also look for the red phone box where, earlier in the film, David makes a call home to America. It’s not here any more.

That’s mercifully not true of everything in this city. In certain areas it’s all but impossible to avoid London’s rich and cherished heritage, and I’m reminded of this as I make my way to the site of Amercan Werewolf’s final sequence: the rabbit-warren of streets to the south of the Thames between London Bridge and Westminster. Leaving London Bridge underground station, for example, I walk past the vibrant Borough Market, which dates back around a thousand years. I admire the gorgeously Gothic architecture of Southwark Cathedral, a building begun in 1220. I see tourists flocking around a sprightly modern replica of Sir Francis Drake’s 16th-century galleon ship the Golden Hind. And I stumble across the sole surviving fragment of the 12th-century Winchester Palace. All of this in just a five-minute stroll.

I then arrive at my final destination – and David Kessler’s too. Clink Street, which these days is a very smart, pedestrianised alleyway, has changed greatly from when John Landis and his crew came to this area to film their final scene. An upmarket eatery sits opposite a shop selling Union Jack-branded tourist tat, while many of the buildings have changed beyond recognition in the last 38 years. The street’s name comes from the nearby Clink Prison, a notorious institution that opened (and then presumably swiftly locked) its doors in the 12th century and served as a penal institution until it burned down in 1780. (It’s now a museum.)

As I wander around, it’s early evening – earlier in the day and significantly lighter than when the werewolf David was chased here by the police after his Piccadilly Circus rampage. The street is busy with tourists, commuters, people on nights out, and at least one fool taking photographs for a blog. I assume I’m the only person here who realises that he’s walking on hallowed ground. No one else seems to be aware that this is where David was cornered by the cops. Where Dr Hirsch and Alex looked on in horror. Where Alex broke through the barriers to comfort the werewolf. And where a police gunshot rang out fatally…

The legacy of An American Werewolf in London and its director have, sadly, been quite haphazard. John Landis made at least one more classic – the riotously enjoyable comedy Trading Places in 1983 – but his output has had its share of duds too. At least neither he nor anyone else from my favourite horror film had anything to do with a truly ghastly sequel called An American Werewolf in Paris. In the same year as that turkey (1997) there was also a better-received BBC radio adaptation of the 1981 film that reunited some of the cast, while a remake of the original movie is currently in development and is set to be directed by John Landis’s son Max.

But whatever has happened since 1981, and whatever may happen in the future, we’ll always have An American Werewolf in London.

Ten bathroom mirrors out of 10

Notes and acknowledgments

As well as providing lots of encouragement, my friend Lizzie Hopley helped enormously by giving this blog a read before I published it and pointing out some errors. (Any that remain are entirely my fault.) Andy at the Gap UK press office gave me the information about their Piccadilly Circus branch.

My trips to the filming locations were carried out in a slightly different order from how I’ve presented them above. I visited Clink Street on Tuesday 20 August 2019; the Black Swan pub on Saturday 24 August; the old Princess Beatrice Hospital and Redcliffe Square on Monday 2 September; East Heath Road on Monday 16 September; and Piccadilly Circus on Monday 14 October. Photos © Ian Farrington 2019

There is some dubiety about exactly where the final scene of An American Werewolf in London was filmed. Some online sources claim it was a short distance from Clink Street, in the nearby Winchester Walk, but the Bankside area has been so massively redeveloped over the last four decades that it’s difficult to be sure. The scenes of police converging in the area were certainly shot on Clink Street, so I chose to focus on that location.

Incidentally, Clink Street can also be seen in the 1940s film Oliver Twist, a 1977 Doctor Who serial set in Victorian times, and the 2001 movie Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Black Swan pub also features in Deadly Slumber, an episode of ITV crime drama Inspector Morse originally broadcast on 6 January 1993.

I used a wide variety of sources, both print and online, for the factual information in this article. There’s little point listing them all, but these websites and books were especially helpful:

You can watch Alex Cox’s Moviedrome introduction to American Werewolf in London here, while this website helped with Moviedrome generally.

These sites were good starting points when it came to identifying American Werewolf filming locations:

https://www.timeout.com/london/blog/15-places-that-appear-in-an-american-werewolf-in-london-061617

https://www.reelstreets.com/films/american-werewolf-in-london-an/

Information about Princess Beatrice Hospital was gleaned from this National Archives site.

Background details about East Heath Road were found in Streets of Hampstead by Christopher Wade (Camden History Society, third edition, 2000), a locally published guide to the area. This private residents’ website was also useful.

Some details about the Eros Cinema were found on this site about cinemas around the world.