Hickok (USA, 2017)

Opening amidst a Civil War battle in which the nattily dressed-in-black Hickok (Luke Hemsworth, yet another hot-bodied Hemsworth brother, this one generally found in genre films like Death of Me [2020 / trailer] and The Osiris Child [2016 / trailer]) appears to be the only survivor, this well-made but hardly inventive western promptly jumps to seven years into the post-Civil War future, one in which Hickok has obviously slid down the economic ladder. Having blown his apparently last cents on a bordello babe and a bath, he suddenly has to "leave" town and ends up, more or less purely by chance, in Abilene, Kansas (the current — as in 2025 — location of the Greyhound Hall of Fame and, of lesser interest, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum). An act of frontier humanism at a poker table leads the town mayor, George Knox (Kris Kristofferson [22 June 1936 – 28 Sept 2024] of Blade [1998] and so much more), to offer Hickok the position of town marshal, which Hickok accepts, if but for purely mercantile reasons...

 

"No one's harmless with a gun and a belly full of liquor." 
Wild Bill Hickok (Luke Hemsworth)

 

Trailer to

Hickok:

In Hickok, like most movies dealing with folk heroes, be the hero Beowulf or Robin Hood or Wild Bill Hickok (27 May 1837 – 2 Aug 1876) or Bonnie & Clyde, diverse rumored truths and more-likely truths and total fabrications are woven into the narrative tapestry in whatever way that best fits the filmmaker's desires,* so the movie can hardly claim to be even a mildly realistic biography of the famed gunman's life. But then, seeing that historical veracity is not something innate to the "known" life stories of folk heroes and legends — and especially not to those of the Wild West — factual exactitude should neither be expected nor held as a benchmark.** The real question is simply, does the narrative*** (and, in turn, the movie) work?

* For example, John Wesley Hardin (26 May 1853 – 19 Aug 1895) may have been in town while Hickok was marshal, but he never became the town's deputy. And while there was indeed a showdown between Hickok and Philio Houston "Phil" Coe, it was anything but that as presented in the movie, and it hardly involved an ex-flame. And... And... And... And... 
** While alive, Hickok was known to be a teller of tall tales and fabrications regarding his exploits. Indeed, his penchant for doing so is aptly illustrated in a small but fun character-building scene in which he distracts an injured boy, Joey (Hunter Fischer), by spinning a cliffhanger adventure from his past.
*** The film was scripted by the less than productive Michael Lanahan, whose limited resume of credits (only four films?) appears to have begun with forgotten director Steve Carver's (5 Apr 1945 – 8 Jan 2021) singular '80s T&A comedy, the minor cult fave (at least for those into '80s T&A comedies) Jocks (1986 / trailer). Carver himself was a master of exploitation, as evidenced by his trash classics The Arena (1974 / trailer), Big Bad Mama (1974 / trailer, with Dick Miller), Drum (1976 / trailer) and more, who left film and the world too early.  

It does. The tale told in Hickok might not be new and is a bit by the numbers, but it unrolls at a comfortable speed that allows for action and moments of quietude, if not even character development and occasional dashes of humor. Along the same lines, the cinematography is clear and well shot, while the entire mise en scene rarely calls overt attention to itself or screams film set.

Across the board, Hickok forgoes the filth and realism of the contemporary, revisionist westerns, not to mention the grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies of the spaghetti westerns, aiming instead for an overall cleanliness that is almost traditional, and much closer to the westerns featuring cleanly shaven and dressed but manly men that many of us grew up watching on after-school television. (To its advantage, the movie also totally forgoes posse chases, cattle drives and "Injuns", things that were very much a staple of most old-school westerns.)

 

"I'll tell you one thing — guns are good for business." 
Doc (Bruce Dern)

 

As for the direction, the productive genre filmmaker Timothy Woodward Jr.'s* handicraft also seems to echo the old-school western. In Hickok, he evidences a solid grasp of form and an eye for pleasant framing, but never dips his toe into visual innovation or playfulness or unnecessary Wow!-moments. His action scenes and shootouts might rely too much on editing, but the flow and rhythm of direction works well with story told. Of equal importance, he obviously has a hand for directing his performers, for they all deliver decent performances. 

* Timothy Woodward Jr. doesn't seem to have had any "big hits" as of yet, and a move to the A-levels is still waiting, but his productive career (since 2012) as a reliable producer of genre product reveals a regularity of "quality" that makes one think he'll be around a while. Some of his films of fun include: Gnome Alone (2015 / trailer), Seven Faces of the Ripper (2014 / trailer), Decommissioned (2016 / trailer), Gangster Land (2017 / trailer), The Final Wish (2018 / trailer), The Outsider (2019 / trailer), The Call (2020 / trailer), and Till Death Do Us Part (2023 / trailer).

Of Hickok's cast, Cameron Richardson (of Rise: Blood Hunter [2007 / trailer], Women in Trouble [2009 / trailer], Wreckage [2010 / trailer], Dead Ant [2017 / trailer] and Hotel Noir [2012 / trailer]), who plays Mattie, the fictitious woman of the tale, deserves special mention: over the course of the movie, she makes her rather one-note if mercurial character likeable and, ultimately, both believable and understandable. As the movie's central bad guy, Phil Poe, big-man country singer Trace Adkins (of Maneater [2022 / trailer] and Trailer Park of Terror [2008 / trailer]) is also noteworthy, convincingly presented an alpha personality that slowly burns to an explosion.

 

In general, actually, the casting of Hickok works well: like most Woodward Jr. feature films, it utilizes an excellent cult-worthy mixture of familiar, semi-familiar and unknown faces;* going by this film, and assuming Woodward Jr. has some say in the casting, he not only possesses a decent grasp of perfect casting by type but also knows how to get his thespians to give decent performances.

* The familiar, cult-worthy names of Hickok are, of course, the old timers Kristofferson and Bruce Dern (of The Glass House [2001] and so much more), the latter as the alcoholic Doc Rivers O'Roark. As to be expected, both Dern & Kristofferson are given headlining credit in what must have been a one-day shoot for Dern and a three-day shoot for Kristofferson. Both men are given, at different points, portent and oddly inappropriate dialogue (particularly in the case of the alcoholic doctor played by Dern) regarding how a man must become a man and face his demons and stop running from the past. Kristofferson in particular seems to be a sage of the Wild West, spouting platitudes with enough gravitas that they don't necessarily sound stupid...  

Trace Adkins top-twenty hit from 1996,

There's a Girl in Texas:

When not in rags, Hemsworth's Wild Bill is far more cosmopolitan than the real, almost dandy-looking Bill (that's him below) probably ever was. Hemsworth is definitely a lot better dressed and cleaner, and by the looks of it a lot more muscular and chiseled — you never see Bill/Hemsworth fully naked, but he does have a nice shirtless scene that reveals a body worth drooling for. As for the 100% fictional Mattie, the woman of the narrative, aside from being well-acted and emotionally layered, she too is pleasant to the eye.* Unexpectedly, for this day and age, she has a nude scene; much too short and discrete, to say the least, and with a twice-as-stacked body double, but what cis-gendered dude is going to complain about that? 

* Named #52 on the Maxim magazine Hot 100 of 2005 list, she should have placed higher.

As a movie, Hickok could perhaps best be described as factually challenged comfort food. Nicely, if somewhat stodgily directed, it never looks cheap or on-the-fly and, to the contrary, plays out as if everyone involved wanted the do the best they could. As a movie, Hickok might not offer anything new, but much like well-made comfort food it has all the right ingredients put together in the right way. Hickok makes for easy viewing, and as such is a highly pleasant diversion — and not just for western fans.

The Terror by Night (USA, 1946)

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night."
Psalms 91:5

 

Of the numerous series that Universal had in production in the thirties and forties, the Sherlock Holmes series was definitely of the most consistent in quality. True, there were one or two turkeys amongst the twelve films featuring Basil Rathbone (13 Jun 1892 – 21 Jul 1967) and Nigel Bruce (4 Feb 1895 – 8 Oct 1953) as the famed detective and his good friend Dr. Watson – Sherlock Holmes & The Secret Weapon (1942) or Sherlock Holmes & The Voice of Terror (1942) are the two that come quickly to mind – but unlike any of the movie studio's horror series, most Sherlock Holmes entries tended to be either of equal or better quality to the film that preceded it. Terror by Night, the second to last film, is of no exception. Nowhere is to be seen the boredom that Rathbone supposedly felt for his reoccurring role, a boredom that led him to leave the series after Dressed to Kill (1946 / trailer) in search of stage work, notwithstanding the fact that four more movies were in pre-production. 

Colorized trailer to

Terror by Night:

Despite the title of this movie, the overall mood and feeling of Terror by Night is much less "horrorific" than such superb entries as The Pearl of Death (1944), The Scarlet Claw (1944), The House of Fear (1945) or The Woman in Green (1945). In fact, more so than most of the films that preceded it, Terror by Night is a traditional mystery story, a simple tale of a crime (and murders) committed by a person or persons unknown and how the crime is solved – and the criminals foiled – by the master detective. Gone (or at least substantially subdued) are the long shadows and seemingly supernatural or monstrous trappings that made many an earlier Holmes film almost come across like a horror film disguised as a mystery. 

In Terror by Night, the "why" is known from the beginning: the famed 400 carat "Star of Rhodesia" diamond is stolen, the people who die do so either to facilitate the crime or hide the identity of the criminals. The only question that remains unanswered is "who", and as to be expected, Holmes (Rathbone) solves the mystery as Watson (Bruce) and Lestrade (Dennis Hoey [30 Mar 1893 –25 Jul 1960]) bumble along for the ride. (They do so in more ways than one since the film is set on a train.) 

That the film is more of a traditional crime film is possibly due to the scriptwriter brought aboard for this entry, author Frank Gruber (2 Feb 1904 – 9 Dec 1969). Though Frank Gruber earned most of his money in his later years writing western novels and teleplays under his name and the pseudonyms Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston, C.K.M. Scanlon and John K. Vedder, Gruber began his writing career writing lightly comic, hard-boiled pulp detective stories and novels. In fact, just prior to writing the screenplay for Terror by Night, he supplied the scripts to two acknowledged minor crime film classics, Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios (1944 / trailer), starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and the George Raft vehicle Johnny Angel (1945 / trailer). Hardly surprising, then, that Terror by Night is such a straight crime mystery. 

In theory an "original story" using minor plot elements from diverse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, the screenplay almost seems influenced by Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express, which was first published twelve years earlier in 1934, as all the action in Terror by Night takes place aboard a night train. (In this case, not the Orient Express but one heading from London to Edinburgh.) 

On the train, Roland Carstairs (Geoffrey Steele [27 Jun 1914 – 7 Feb 1987], in the biggest film role of his life — a full five minutes of screen time), the son of Lady Magaret Carstairs (Mary Forbes [1 Jan 1883 – 22 Jul 1974] of The Picture of Dorian Gray [1945 / trailer]), hires Holmes (Basil Rathbone, of course) to accompany them on the journey for protection since there had already been an unsuccessful attempt in London to steal the famed Star of Rhodesia. (The piece of ice and its legendary trail of bad luck seem to be modeled after the actual Hope Diamond.) Inspector Lestrade (Dennis Hoey, in his last appearance in the series) is also on the train, obstinately on his way to a fishing holiday, though it is pointed out to him that it is not fishing season. At the last minute Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) and Maj. Duncan-Bleek (Alan Mowbray* [18 Aug 1896 – 25 Mar 1969]), Watson's old army buddy from India, also manage to catch the train as well. No sooner does the train chug off into the night does Holmes find a mysterious note telling him to bug-off, Roland is found dead, and the diamond stolen! 

* Mowbray is a familiar face seen in many a film, usually in the background. Amongst others parts, he played Inspector Lestrade in the 1933 version of A Study In Scarlet (full film) and has a memorable bit part in the underrated but truly great film noir classic, I Wake Up Screaming (1941 / trailer). 

Well, actually, a fake diamond gets stolen, for Holmes exchanged the fake for the real one when he first got on the train. Lestrade takes the diamond into his possession but, of course, it gets stolen from him. Everyone in the train car is now a suspect, but most turn out to be red herrings — even as the body count grows! Holmes comes to suspect that the mathematical genius Col. Sebastian Moran, the evil compatriot of his arch-enemy Moriarty, is the brain behind the crime, but since the train seems full of people who pass the time doing math for fun this little tidbit doesn't help much. Of course, the viewer can figure out the bad guy long before anyone in the film does, but the ending does have an unexpected — if not possibly far-fetched — twist to it. 

Terror by Night is an enjoyable 50+ minutes of quick-paced entertainment with some fine moments. The fight scene in which Holmes is nearly thrown to his death from the train is probably one of the great highlights of the entire series, and even now, almost 50 years after it was filmed, it still packs an exciting wallop. Lestrade is surprisingly bearable, and Dr. Watson, though a buffoon as customary, is actually rather humorous at times – especially during his interplay with the suspect Professor William Kilbane (Frederick Worlock [14 Dec 1886 – 1 Aug 1973] of Ruthless [1948 / full movie] and She-Wolf of London [1946 / trailer]). 

The movie also features — and under-uses terribly — one of the great beauties to ever appear in the series, Renee Godfrey (1 Sept 1919 – 24 May 1964) as bad gal Vivian Vedder. She never had a career to speak of, but every scene in Terror by Night that she appears in she manages to steal completely from all other actors present. Her career, on the other hand, was stolen first by children and then by cancer.

The Hollow (Canada, 2015)

Talk about a surprise. Released on DVD as The Burning Curse, this movie proves that sometimes contemporary TV horror movies can easily hold their own as decent flicks. In another time, in the days back when TV horror movies always faded into black when the horror hits, or let it happen off-screen, this movie would have probably never have been aired on TV. Instead, it would probably have hit the screens, without prior publicity, as part of a double or triple bill at your local grindhouse or struggling mall theatre, and it would have stood out as the unexpected discovery amidst the grime: a well-made, low-budget horror movie with dread and scares to spare — but no nudity — that keeps you enthralled until the obligatory final scare. It's the type of contemporary TV movie that restores one's faith in low-budget genre films — the movie proves that such films don't need to pander for cheap laughs or be bad-on-purpose, as so many contemporary genre films do and are. 

Trailer to

The Hollow:

Like many horror movies today, The Burning Curse opens with a "name" actor, the familiar face whose name you may or may not know who, for whatever reason (i.e., friendship, rent, new car, lack of better offers, etc.), shows up long enough to solidly register onscreen before — well, you know. (It's been a horror movie trope since Psycho [1960 / trailer], at the latest, and riffed upon with diminishing returns in the Scream franchise ever since the first one [1996 / trailer] directed by Wes Craven.) In The Burning Cross, the familiar face is Deborah Kara Unger, who was once found in movies like The Hurricane (1999 / trailer), The Game (1997 / trailer) and Payback (1999 / trailer) but now is entering her MILF character actor phase. She plays Aunt Cora, who lives on the secluded island known as Shelter Island — a misnomer, to say the least, as the island ends up offering little shelter but a lot of death.

The three main characters of the movie, the dysfunctional trio of sisters (with varying acting talent) consisting of Sarah (Stephanie Hunt of April Apocalypse [2013 / trailer]), Marley (Sarah Dugdale of In the Shadow of the Moon [2019 / trailer] and There's Someone inside Your House [2021 / trailer]) and Emma (Alisha Newton of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters [2013 / trailer] and Scorched Earth [2018 / trailer]), are already living a horror story of their own — if an emotional one — when we are introduced to them. Bickering and seething with emotional instability and pain, they are on their way to Aunt Cora's, broke and with nowhere else to go after having spent all the life insurance money paid out after the fiery death of their parents on the treatment of the troubled youngest, Emma, who survived the car crash that killed their parents. 

Thus, they are oblivious to the portentous warnings to stay away from the island, which is due to be hit by a major, once-a-century storm, and catch the last ferry over — only to be met first by an empty town and, soon thereafter, an unstoppable unnatural entity out to kill everyone on the island.* It seems that some hundred years ago, the town burnt three witches at the stake, who promptly placed a curse and massacred most of the town during a major thunderstorm; now, a century later, on Halloween, the curse is revived as the next storm of a century rolls in...

* A tried-and-true narrative MacGuffin found in many a movie in a variety of forms — the first to come to our mind (though surely not the first to use the idea) is Mario Bava's gothic Black Sunday (1960 / trailer), though there the witch returns (as a vampire) to fulfill the curse herself, and instead of an entire town she has her sights set on a single family (though she is hardly loath to an occasional non-family member). Bava's other gothic masterpiece, Kill Baby Kill (1966 / trailer), is likewise a variant, in this case the curse of but a singular, wronged child upon an entire town.

The narrative of The Burning Curse a.k.a. The Hollow is straight and narrow and only pauses to take the time to introduce characters and their backgrounds. Some plot points seem rather extraneous — Emma's presaging dreams indicate a supernatural connection that never goes anywhere, the whole it-happens-on-Halloween aspect is rather opportune but unnecessary, and the disappearing car is less logical than a convenient excuse for having the two older sisters deal with the horror of moving a body from another vehicle* — but in general the movie is an effective and linear run-from-a-supernatural-monster movie.

* It would seem that, though never explicitly stated, one of the demon's talents is driving cars, for much like the car of the three sisters gets driven off, Aunt Cora's RV also shows up somewhere it logically shouldn't be.

As such, The Hollow manages to offer some pretty decent shocks and scares as the sisters try to escape or at least survive an extremely mobile creature that cannot be killed. Okay, the CGI of the creature is a bit too CGI at times, but the superhuman creature itself is an interesting mixture of earth and ember, attacking and killing with quickly growing, rooty vine-like tendrils and/or burning fire. (A combination derived, one might conjecture, from the wood and fire used to execute the three evil witches a century previously.)

Director Sheldon Wilson, a capable if still unsung genre-movie specialist (who has made a lot of movies set on Halloween night, some with monsters that look suspiciously like the one in this movie), milks a lot of atmosphere from his island setting, more so within the deserted, body-strewn small town and the fecund but dreary oppressiveness of the old forest than within the oddly in-shape tunnels and rooms of the deserted power plant where the three sisters face their final battle(s). Wilson also stages a variety of good shock scenes, the most memorable being the totally unexpected woman being literally blasting out through the front door of a house and the demise of a likeable (if not too bright) young man (Jonathan Whitesell of The Unspoken [2015 / trailer] and Bad Times at the El Royale [2018 / trailer]) who looks too closely at a map. Wilson and his co-scriptwriter, Rick Suvalle — the latter seems to swing between scripting kiddy films and TV horror like this move, Roadkill [2011 / trailer], and Sheldon Wilson's Scarecrow [2013 / trailer]* — also mine a lot of tension by keeping the demon's appearance irregular and unexpected, but always threatened. At least, that is, until the final scenes in the deserted power station, at which point the demon is pretty much fixated on getting the last three survivors on the island and becomes a bit more omnipresent.

* Which basically reuses the monster from this movie, but without the fire-power.

Lastly, The Hollow is also solidly anchored by the three young sisters around whom the narrative revolves. A dysfunctional and emotionally damaged trio, they all have clear-cut personalities and act and react realistically (if perhaps too loudly) throughout the movie. A bit more time than normal is given to both their introduction and their family dynamic, and it only helps to make the viewer feel and root for them in face of a situation with apparently no way out. (In general, actually, the movie manages to make almost every character that has more than two lines a relatively well-delineated personality with clear motivation.) 

Still, in regard to the sisters, one really begins to wonder why they don't frigging get it through their heads to stop screaming and shouting all the time. Indeed, one of the movie's unintentional funny moments involves a no-name, half-dead minor character telling two of them to stop shouting because it'll draw the monster, only for the monster to show up and kill that no-name character as the sisters run away in panic.

In short, The Hollow might not really offer up anything truly novel in the narrative department, and it does have a few WTF moments — the sisters really make too much noise all the time, and people separate a bit too much — but it is a good example of a good-looking, atmospheric movie that manages to overcome both its low budget and its arguably old-chestnut plot to deliver a solidly and effectively crafted horror story.

Has nothing to do with the movie, but

 Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves: