(A cheap and obvious pun, but it had to be made.)
In a slight departure from strict chronology, The Umbrellahead Review once again turns its attention to films found on some versions of Mill Creek's box sets, but not others. In this case, we're looking at the Nightmare Worlds release -- specifically the version included as part of our 250-pack box set -- which omits two movies we had to seek out from other sources.
One of these films was cut before we got our box set; one seems to have been added afterward. One was removed in favor of The Disappearance of Flight 412, that shaggy-dog story of a TV movie; the other replaced The Return of Dr. Mabuse, that unmemorable slice of early-1960s German murk.
Both films are superior to their respective swapmates -- if that's not a word, it should be -- and one of them is about to get the first grade of its kind on The Umbrellahead Review.
Grade: A
The simplest way to describe The War Game would be "sobering". We downloaded our copy -- split, it seems, into two individually-digitized reels -- from Archive.org. Normally when we watch movies we don't talk much, but we might chat or complain a little.
But by the time we got halfway through the first reel of The War Game, not a peep was to be heard hereabouts.
Produced, written, and directed by Peter Watkins, The War Game was filmed in preparation for a 1965 showing on the BBC, but after seeing its depiction of the effects of nuclear war on Britain, the bigwigs at the Beeb deemed it too traumatizing for broadcast. Subsequently it was shown at film festivals, ultimately winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.
But The War Game didn't reach British television until 1985, airing just before the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945 -- and nearly a year after the premiere of Threads, which did indeed traumatize millions of British people, adults and children alike.
Along with 1983's Testament and The Day After -- both of which did their parts to traumatize American families -- Threads is the most obvious point of comparison for The War Game. All these films were made for TV, and all of them offer a relentlessly downbeat vision of life after atomic war.
One crucial difference is that The War Game is not narrative fiction, but a documentary of sorts. It makes little attempt to tell the stories of specific people, but instead assembles a collage of scripted and unscripted interviews, recitations of quotes by prominent British public figures (most of them hopelessly fatuous, naive, or jingoistic), and enactments of what one might expect to be "typical" scenes in post-apocalyptic England.
You know, looters getting shot, injuries without doctors to treat them, utter and total loss of hope, that sort of thing.
The War Game is far less graphic than Threads, but in some ways is even more effective as a result. Watkins does a masterful job of weaving together individual heartbreak with collective destruction, not by creating characters for us to follow, but through the synecdoche of letting each person's words, facial expressions, and movements inevitably imply the whole.
If you retain any affection for the inhabitants of Great Britain and their ways -- and, please, don't let's conflate the British people with any misdeeds done in their name or the name of Empire -- then it's profoundly disturbing to see the total breakdown of those ways, sometimes referred to as "society". (You know, that thing Maggie said didn't exist.)
We know that The Day After had a profoundly sobering effect (there's that word again) on Ronald Reagan, who wrote in his diary that it was "very effective and left me greatly depressed...My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war."
Guess it takes Hollywood to reach Hollywood -- but The Day After also reached a massive percentage of the American public. The War Game was denied that opportunity, reaching only a handful of cinematic elites until its time had passed.
Impossible to say now what effect it would have had since -- in this timeline at least -- we miraculously made it through the remainder of the 20th century, and the first two decades of the 21st, without turning ourselves into glass souvenirs for curious aliens.
Anyone who's seen "The City on the Edge of Forever" knows better than to meddle with the past. So, who knows: had The War Game been shown, maybe it would have inspired a huge British anti-war movement that would, in turn, have inspired a countermovement that led to catastrophe. Push a pendulum, get hit in the face.
Better then to forfeit one's moment in the sun -- and an Academy Award sure as hell ain't bad -- than to reap "Two Suns in the Sunset". Nonetheless The War Game is more available than ever and, sadly, just as relevant as ever.
It retains its power to leave an audience in stunned silence -- and if that audience is unlikely to want to watch it again, that would seem to be a measure of its success.
The Severed Arm (1973)
Grade: C
After The War Game, the gore and goofiness of The Severed Arm come as a relief. True, it has ambitions of being something more than a standard-issue slasher/revenge film; in some details, it does elevate itself above that mean.
But when you come down to it, The Severed Arm is one of those movies whose relationship to the consumer is mainly defined by the one-to-one correspondence between its title and its contents: it does what it says on the can. For those who like freshly amputated upper extremities, it's not going out on a limb (ahem) to say, this is the sort of thing they'll like. It delivers.
Here's a really weird trope that we see a lot in films and TV: the idea that, in the face of a potentially lethal event -- poison gas, radiation, starvation -- you can precisely calculate the amount of time left. If you're able to finish a task or find salvation when you're below that number, you're golden; if not, you're inevitably dead meat.
Now, sometimes this kind of exactitude makes narrative sense, like in a scuba diving movie. But if you're wondering how and why an amputatable gets amputated in The Severed Arm, the main reason is that six bros get together, something goes terribly wrong...
...and before long, "Some of us...maybe all of us...can't make it through tomorrow" if they don't get to sawin'. (Chop chop.)
One might quote Dave Chappelle's sage observation -- "You were in on the heist, you just didn't like your cut" -- but, naturally, that holds little sway with the hack-ee. So when the other five bros begin losing limbs left and right...
...well, really more like left or right...
...the question doesn't really seem like "Whodunit?" so much as "Whatcha gonna do when they [in the 'third-person singular of unspecified gender' sense] come for you?"
Hard to say more without spoilers galore, though the presence of Deborah Wiley as Teddy -- daughter to don't-mind-'im-'e's-'armless -- complicates matters beyond the routine.
Is she a possible love interest with a disarming smile? Just an indignant and/or concerned family member? Something else? Only time will tell.
One of us recalls reading some pretty negative comments about The Severed Arm that implied it was in the same league as Manos or Eegah. Consequently, as we watched (hi, Ray!), the film defied expectations simply by being of ordinary quality.
That doesn't mean it was especially well-acted or well-written, mind you -- the script even invokes the old cliché about how the calls are coming from inside your house! -- but it never got worse than passable.
Of course it helps that, instead of our usual PD fare, we were watching a gorgeous widescreen transfer from Vinegar Syndrome, with intense colors and a beautifully crisp image. Between that, Phillan Bishop's moody analog synth score, and the lavish supply of marvelous 1970s aesthetics, the film is a feast for the senses.
By the way, some people who own DVDs of The Severed Arm have wondered if it ends prematurely. It's possible that sketchy releases truncate the credits to obfuscate copyright, but Vinegar Syndrome's release makes it very clear that the film's rather abrupt ending is intentional, and the final freeze-frame doesn't change during the credit roll.
If you see a still shot with two happy people, and one with a blank expression, you've seen the end.
(But the screenshot below isn't it -- just a chance to show off some cardigans and fancy prints.)
