Classic Movie Review Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon (1973) 

Directed by Robert Clouse 

Written by Michael Allin 

Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly 

Release Date August 19th, 1973 

Published August 19th, 1973 

This week’s classic on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is Enter the Dragon, the final film in the all too short career of the legendary Bruce Lee. I have had little exposure to kung fu movies in my nearly 20 years as a film critic. Aside from some 80s cheese like The Last Dragon or the work of Jackie Chan, I have mostly ignored the genre having written it off based mostly on the stereotypes built from years of Bruce Lee knock-offs and cash-ins that soured more than just me on the idea of kung fu movies as anything other than the sad side of the B-movie genre.

Watching Enter the Dragon for the first time sadly is no revelation for me. While I came away with a great deal of respect for why fans took so much to Bruce Lee as a performer, I found the film not all that special. Lee’s magnetism goes a long way to making the otherwise predictable, bordering on silly story worth watching but the screen time spent waiting for Lee to start kicking butt is quite tedious and I found myself drifting.

In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee stars as a martial arts master, also named Lee, who is recruited by a shady intelligence organization to attend a martial arts tournament run by the kind of super-villain that only exists in martial arts movies, Mr. Han played by former Drunken Master star Shih Kien. Mr. Han owns his own island in the Pacific and despite the best efforts of this intelligence agency they aren’t sure if he is amassing weapons or not.

The agency needs Lee to participate in a deadly martial arts tournament hosted by Han on his island and find out if there are indeed illegal weapons that would allow international military to attack the island. Lee agrees to the mission and then finds out that the mission has a personal component for him. We meet Lee’s father and he informs Lee and us that Lee’s sister was murdered by Han’s thugs in a seemingly random killing.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review Black Christmas

Black Christmas (1974) 

Directed by Bob Clark 

Written by A. Roy Moore 

Starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Andrea Martin, Lynne Griffin, Margot Kidder, John Saxon 

Release Date December 20th, 1974

Published December 4th, 1974 

A static shot of a home at night greets as our entry point to Black Christmas, Bob Clark's legendary holiday slasher movie. Clark holds the shot of the house throughout the credits, which include the title of the film in a lovely script known, according to find my font, as the Pamela Font created by Dieter Steffman, a German designer with a long history of creating unique fonts used by The Rolling Stones for their album covers, among many other iconic pop culture fonts. The font is not important but, it's a minor fascination for me and I love the idea that there are people in the world who are famous for creating fonts. 

Following the end of the credits we cut to the front door of the house. The Greek letters on the outside of the home and the fact that a young woman enters the front door, lead us to the correct assumption that this is a Sorority House, home to a number of young college aged women. After we've seen the woman enter and a camera pan to a nearby window communicates what appears to be a party underway, we cut back to the front door but things are different now. Instead of a steady camera pan or a static shot, we are now in a perspective shot. We are in the perspective of someone approaching the sorority. As Christmas music plays inside, the soundtrack is dominated by the heavy breathing of the person whose perspective we have assumed. 

The subtle shift in camera style is skillfully played by director Bob Clark and his cinematographer, Reginald H. Morris. Even someone who doesn't pay close attention to such things as the way the camera is used in a particular scene, will understand the shift from a standard series of shots establishing a place and a status quo, will recognize that the camera perspective has shifted from a passive to an active participant in the scene. The Christmas music falls away, replaced by a subtle, deep bass, slightly unnerving. The breath of this new character is underscored by a chilling wind sound effect, the cold underlining the chill you feel as this heavy breathing individually slowly makes their way to the door of the Sorority. 

Without a word spoken, Bob Clark has amped up the tension and placed you in the perspective of an unseen character who may or may not be a dangerous killer. If you know the movie you are watching is a horror film, the title Black Christmas, is pretty good lead in that direction, then you can infer that you, the audience, are the killer. Clark here is commenting on the horror movie in general. Placing the audience in the perspective of the killer is an indictment of an audience who comes to a horror movie to watch people die. In the span of less than 2 minutes, Clark has demonstrated a mastery of film form that will play out further as he introduces actual dialogue, characters, and incident into Black Christmas.

The scene then transitions as the unseen heavy breathing person steps forward and the camera returns to its previous status as an observer of events. The shadow of this unknown individual crowds the frame, seeming to move forward toward the windows of the Sorority House and as this person slowly approaches the house, the camera recedes until we jump inside the house and a Sorority member, we will come to know as Barb (Margot Kidder), descends the stairs. Inside the house, the front door is open, presumably having been opened by the unseen man but, he's still outside, the open door is a red herring of sorts, a distraction. We are thrust back into first person perspective soon after as the unseen character climbs a trellis to an open window in the attic. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media