A solid no-budget short that has a brief and stressful patch of tension. It's not breaking any new ground with its concepts and if it had been content to simply run with that, it would've been fine. Instead it fumbles its final moments and leaves the viewer with the un-jumpiest of scares, which disperses the unease that might've been held with a more ambiguous close.
The dialogue is sharp, the subject matter cutting, and the camera work has some stellar moments. The injustice on display highlights a still-relevant divide between both race and class, that conflict getting exacerbated by a press so focused on selling papers that they stoke local anger into action. It hits close to home for sure, 75 years later.
Joseph Losey was blacklisted from Hollywood not long after this film was released, and between this and his remake of M it's…
At some point while watching this movie- I think it was sometime during the Battle of Pelennor Fields- the actors cease to be actors on a set or on location, and transform for me into characters in a world that is on the edge of falling into darkness, and from that point on in the film I can no longer hold back the emotional investment I feel. The coronation, the return to the Shire, and especially the very end are all sobfests.
It's a student film and it feels like it in its meager budget and amateur talent across the board, but there's plenty here to appreciate in of seeing that talent in an early format, with John Carpenter's solid direction and Dan O'Bannon writing a dry (very dry) run of a bunch of stuff that would be explored far better half a decade later in Alien.
It's so weird how poorly some of the stuff here flows and how well…
