Place Vendôme (1998)

Place Vendôme (1998) fits the bill for French neo-noir in that the key female characters are glamorous blondes while the men are all weathered looking mutts. The cinematography feels very 1990s “movie for adults” in the dark hues of the interiors, and its overall polished feeling, reminiscent of a Grisham or Le Carre adaption from this era. And though it alludes to being a thriller in tone, Place Vendôme is more about intrigue, and how people will act in circumstances, and the sense of double-dealing and double-crossing in the world of high-end diamond-selling.

Mostly the film is a dramatic showcase for lead actress Catherine Deneuve, who plays the widow of a diamond merchant. We are introduced to her staying in a clinic, an alcoholic prone to fits of depression, struggling with social engagements and discussed by her husband’s staff as a “scary” train-wreck. After her husband’s death, Deneuve’s character begins to sharpen through the grief, particularly the discovery of precious diamonds he has squirrelled away. She starts to shake things off and return to her previous skills as a diamond seller, even as people around her are making moves to obtain the diamonds in question.

I was pulled into the movie through Deneuve’s fantastic performance, and the quartet of characters including a younger employee (Emmanuelle Seigner), a dodgy repo man (Jean-Pierre Bacri), and a mysterious figure from the past (Jacques Dutronc), eventually all connected by affairs past and present. Building to a simmering plot initiated by diamond rivals who have been ripped off, the film surprises in the very end by choosing to be sincere rather than fully suspenseful. In the end, this is an elegant melodrama that might test your patience, or understanding as the plot is very obfuscated in its unfolding. I enjoyed watching it, particularly the acting and the sense of classiness director Nicole Garcia takes to it.

Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

Silent Trigger (1996)

Dreaming about a YouTube ambient video titled, “Meditating with Dolph Lundgren in his high rise building sniper’s nest while raining.”

While Silent Trigger (1996) is an action movie that gives fans what they want – Dolph using a massive sniper rifle to take down masked mercenaries who are toting sub-machine guns – it also aims for an arty ambience, as if director Russell Mulcahy (of Highlander and Ricochet) rewatched Le Samoruai and wanted to get some existentialism into his pulp. Mulcahy also knows how to add a bit of sizzle to a factory-produced steak; this is the type of movie that has a shot of a building upside down, and then a boot steps into the image of the building, revealing we’re looking at the building’s reflection from a puddle in the street.

The movie is like a Metal Gear Solid cut scene with Waiting for Godot pretensions. Lundgren is a sniper who sneaks into a corporate tower under construction. He takes up position at a window on the top floor, and is eventually met by his spotter, a breathy British babe played by Gina Bellman (from the UK sitcom Coupling). As the film’s opening, and flashbacks strewn throughout the narrative, make clear: they worked together before in a vague Eastern European conflict, and there’s a level of distrust. Lundgren failed to clear his target and Bellman as a rookie showed more trust to her masters than her shooter. The only other inhabitants in the building are two security guards, one of whom is revealed to be a drug-taking psycho who takes orders from the spiders tattooed across his body. A lot of the movie is Lundgren waiting for the moment to take out his target, and the chemistry and intrigue he has with his spotter.

My favourite scene has the duo in an intimate conversation next to the green-lit windows as rain falls, ambient noise competing with the score that has a sexy exotic Deep Forrest sound. As soon as you hear that music, a love scene seems inevitable but we get there through Lundgren’s reflections on being in war and seeing the enemy in himself, and when they eventually have sex, the film cuts to flashbacks of them escaping from the war. To me, the film’s obliqueness doesn’t necessarily have any depth, but I appreciate its reaching for something, if only to be enigmatic and strange. That and its “tech shit” atmosphere of anonymous black bag organisations and click-clacking sniper rounds, and impersonal corporate interiors. Available on Amazon Prime. Recommended.

Automatic (1995)

“This guy is cool!” – security guard under his breath, watching a cyborg on a monitor wipe the floor with a crack team of mercenaries.

Automatic (1995) is a sci-fi action flick Die Hard knock-off which is mostly shot in the shadowy interiors of a corporate building, the HQ for robot/manufacturing company RobGen. Some movies are “warehouse action flicks”, this one is mostly a “conference room action flick”! Watching a DVD upload onto YouTube meant that the film was mostly swimming in darkness, as if you were watching a LaserQuest match from the sidelines with a florescent bar for lighting.

French martial artist Oliver Gruner (from Nemesis) is once again playing an emotionless cyborg, thankfully wearing a buttoned-up white shirt, so you can actually see him. When the sleazy boss of secretary Daphne Ashbrook attempts to sexually assault her after hours in his spacious office, the cyborg steps in and terminates him. This concerns John Glover – back playing a chipper yuppie CEO after Gremlins 2 but this time more evil – who wants to ensure his series of “Automatics” – his production line of buff-male cyborg security systems – won’t grow hearts and malfunction en masse. Sleazy Jeff Kober and his team of mercs are sent to “retire” these employees, and cover up the situation. What follows moves at a quick pace, an on-going chase through corridors, elevator shafts, ventilator ducts, and giving plenty of opportunities for Gruner to do a roundhouse kick or two, and fire off a bulky futuristic machine gun.

Clocking in at 90 minutes, Automatic is enjoyable straight-to-video cyberpunk trash with enough action and John Glover chewing the scenery to keep your attention. Bonus points for including character actor Troy Evans (you won’t know the name but you’ll recognise him) as that schlub security guard and Penny Johnson from The Larry Sanders Show as comic relief. Obviously echoes Robocop, Total Recall and Terminator, and has enough flashes of old-school computer graphics and fleshy mechanical props to appeal to any cyber-head. On YouTube. Recommended.

Dark Breed (1996)

Delving further into the world of PM Entertainment productions was a highlight for me of 2023, a repository for direct-to-video B-grade action schlock from the 1980s and 1990s, where they put the money on the screen with the amount of explosions featured, cars flipped on the streets and stunt-people flung through the air. My compulsion for more 90s cyberpunk action led me to PM Entertainment greats like T-Force and Hologram Man, and there’s something wonderful when PM Entertainment meets sci-fi. There’s a 1990s TV look to these movies and they often feel like an X-Files episode just with a higher budget for explosions and stunt-work, and this is the case for Dark Breed (1996), which is basically a photocopy mash-up of Aliens, Species and Predator 2.

A crew of astronauts (all with large American flags emblazoned on the backs of their jumpsuits) crash-land back on Earth after a mission in outer space, and are immediately hunted by the military. Something has contaminated the astronauts, and as evidenced by the cheap reptile eye contact lenses they give the actors, whatever it is ain’t local! It’s up to former astronaut military man Jack Scalia to save the day, stop an alien invasion of Earth as well as a government conspiracy to harvest the alien eggs for biological weapons. Oh yeah, and Scalia’s ex-wife (Donna W. Scott) was one of the astronauts(!) and she’s possessed by one of the good aliens thankfully! While this is a pretty stock plot with all the cliches, Dark Breed is an enjoyable time, especially with the fun action sequences. The first act has a night-time freeway truck chase including a helicopter and a fist-fight in a model home being carried by a truck. Then, later at the end of the second act is a daytime car chase where Jack Scalia winds up being pulled along the roads on broken satellite dish tied to the back of a van – definitely a case of the stunt team working backwards to ensure that stunt is in the movie whether it makes sense or not! You’ve also got casual use of rocket launchers, giant meca-machine guns with harnesses, gooey green alien eggs and reptilian creatures grabbing people in dripping warehouses. Oh, and even a wino played by George Buck Flower, king of the movie winos!

Most notable star in the cast is the great character actor Jonathan Banks (Mike from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul) as the leader of the astronauts, with half of his scenes distorting his voice to make him sound more alien (and he would have been a perfect guest star on The X-Files). This is the third PM Entertainment movie with Scalia as the hero and I like his slick-haired, tough-guy persona, and he always meets the material with a serious energy; he’s not checked out or looking down at this trash genre fare. There’s a bit of (unintentionally) funny dialogue and weird digressions like when our hero’s ex-wife now possessed by a good alien meets him at a diner and does a variation of the Five Easy Pieces scene when she can’t order a pizza for breakfast. Directed by Richard Pepin who is responsible for most of the PM Entertainment I’ve seen at this point.

Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Dangerous Game (1993)

With Dangerous Game (1993), Abel Ferrara makes a movie about making movies, so you’re gonna get histrionic method acting shouting, people wearing sunglasses indoors smoking cigarettes like vampires, catholic themes about indulging vices and expunging guilt, and copious scenes of drinking and drug-taking while a Schoolly D track pumps away in the background. For Dangerous Game, Ferrara reunited with Harvey Keitel after Bad Lieutenant, and collaborated with pop star Madonna (and her Maverick company helped produce it for MGM). To Ferrara, making movies is boiled down to a director workshopping scenes with his actors; I remember reading somewhere that Ferrara was compelled to make this movie by the question of how an actor – such as Keitel in Lieutenant – can go to extremes for the camera and walk away from it.

Scripted by regular Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John and heavily improvised during its shooting, Keitel plays a stand-in for Ferrara, a New York director named Eddie Israel, who is working in L.A. with his stars, Sarah Jennings (Madonna), a TV star branching out to a gritty movie, and Francis Burns (James Russo), an actor friend of Eddie’s who has a lower star profile. They’re making a relationship drama called Mother Of Mirrors that hinges on a classic Ferrara theme of sin versus piety; a marriage in turmoil when the wife rescinds their sex-and-drugs lifestyle causing the husband to react with violence and assault. Mother of Mirrors, man, what a title – as it’s a hall of mirrors here! We watch the “actors” perform scenes that see-saw on a tension of things going too far, violently or abusively, while other scenes step outside the movie-within-a-movie to include the machinery and crew around the acting. We shift from actual rehearsal footage shot on video to scenes shot on film. As a viewer, I just took it all in but there is clear confusion and tension between if a scene is “real” (like, is this actual rehearsal footage shot on video) and improvised (Keitel-in-character directing Madonna and calling her a “commercial piece of shit”). Actors go to extremes for the director, and then are seen later hanging out at a bar, knocking back booze and hanging out with guest star Richard Belzer. All the while Eddie’s family is back in New York, his son and his wife, played by Abel’s then-wife Nancy Ferrara.

The casting of Ferrara’s wife can’t help but offer meta-textual readings (apparently Keitel’s idea) as Eddie explores his own failings through his work, a fact that the film eventually takes him to task for: being a hypocrite, asking for truth and commitment from his actors, while not confessing his own infidelities to his wife. As a fan of Ferrara, this adds a fascinating layer and points towards later work like The Blackout and New Rose Hotel, the ways in which all of their third acts dissolve into wandering, searching introspection (or confusingly meandering depending on your perspective). While I’ve always found Russo to be a bit one-note in his intensity, Madonna is more compelling as the soap opera actor giving herself over to this production to be tested and put through the wringer; apparently, she did not like the experience of filming, clashing with both Keitel and Ferrara, and didn’t promote the film afterwards. She’s really good though, one of her best dramatic performances. However, the focus is most on Keitel’s character, and he gives a great performance, that tempers the extremes of his previous work with Ferrara by the way he reflects the director (aping the hair, the jacket) but is shot through with his own idiosyncratic tough-guy persona.

There’s a video out there of Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch talking about Dangerous Game at a retrospective screening, providing an insight into how chaotic its making was. Love hearing Ferrara rap about making movies to an audience: “L.A… I mean we got our asses kicked there, no mistake!” Recommended.