Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

Southern gothic insanity and soap opera extraordinaire. I re-watch this every ten years or so, and it’s always better than I’d remembered. It means nothing, says nothing, but it’s fabulous. Even on this, my whateverth rewatch, the movie was more than half finished before I remembered that the smartass maid is the magnificent Agnes Moorehead. She’s so good you never think of Bewitched.

Some of the Southern accents got on my nerves, not because they’re Southern but because the actors get the accents wrong. Looking at you, Joseph Cotten.

This was the follow-up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and like that classic, it was also supposed to star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two golden era stars who loathed each other. After a week of filming, though, Crawford quit, and was replaced by Olivia de Havilland, who’s so, so very much better in the role than Crawford would’ve been.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hustle (1975)

Burt Reynolds plays a lousy human and lousy cop who lives in a swanky semi-mansion no honest policeman could afford. He caught his wife fucking another man, so now she’s gone and he lives with a beautiful prostitute (Catherine Deneuve). Reynolds and Deneuve are about half the movie, and they’re a snooze.

The other half has Reynolds and his partner (Paul Winfield) hesitantly investigating the death of a teenage girl found dead on the beach — suicide, says the coroner, but the dead girl’s father doesn’t believe it. That story is surprisingly gutsy, and makes for a fine half-movie about cop-work and about America.

If there was more of that and less of the tedious romance with Deneuve, I’d give this a BIG YES, but the sucky half of the movie is so relentlessly sucky, best I can do is…

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hustling (1975)

Directed by Joseph Sargent, one of my favorite lesser-known directors of the 1960s and ’70s, this is a raw, earnest, but dated drama about prostitutes on the streets of New York.

Lee Remick plays a reporter who wants to understand and explain what drives women to sell their bodies, and the co-stars include Monte Markham as her husband, and not-yet-famous Jill Clayburgh as the movie’s main hooker, talking with a fake, grating Bronx accent.

The move treats sex workers with respect, generally, but they’re all held out as victims and they all have that Bronx accent, and they all say friggin’ instead of fuckin’, because this was made for television. The movie, though, builds toward saying something and almost does.

Amusingly, it opens with a shot of streetwalkers in New York, with a theater marquee in the background showing The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which is Sargent’s best-known theatrical film.

Watch for WKRP‘s Howard Hesseman, unfunny as a bored cop.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hydra (2009)

Hey, this is fun. It’s a cheap horror movie, where airplane-sized multi-headed snakes slither around a tropical island looking for human snacks.

First thing to like about it is, no wasted time — people are eaten within the first few minutes, even before the opening credits announce that Hydra was written, directed by, and stars someone you’ve never heard of. The star is the three-headed snake.

The hydra snakes are cool, but they’re the only special effect here, and not enough to carry a movie, so this is also an uncredited remake of one of my favorite stories, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” You know that story — rich bastard billionaires go hunting for humans — and the setting is the hydras’ island.

The effects are adequate CGI, neither believable nor embarrassing. The script is silliness, but enjoyably so. The characters are familiar archetypes, and the performances are good enough to keep things simmering. Snazzy music, too.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hydra (2019)

Knife-fight! Urinal murder! This Hydra is set in a back-alley sushi bar in Tokyo, where a quiet, mysterious dude named Mimoto works in the kitchen. With a big scar on his face, you will not be surprised that Mimoto used to be a hit man, and still has the knack for violence when trouble comes knocking.

God, I’m tired of hit-man and used-to-be-a-hit-man movies. There are probably about a dozen hit men in the world, but a thousand movies about them.

With brooding noir, then bone-crushing action, this one simmers nicely, but never quite comes to a boil. The story isn’t resolved at the end, but instead serves as an invitation to a sequel, or maybe this is a well-made pilot episode for a TV show. You’d come back for more, though.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

… and out of alphabetical order …

Apocalypto (2006)

A Mayan tribe is at war with another tribe, and it’s bloody as bloody hell, one frenzied action sequence after another and it never lets up. The good guy / bad guy dichotomy is very basic — all the enemies are ugly and sneering and scary; all the guys on ‘our’ side are sweet-faced cherubs, and it goes without saying in a movie that all their wives are gorgeous.

But so what? It’s a movie, and movies come with tropes. What matters is, it has believable and smart characters who want to survive, and you’ll want them to. It’s frickin’ riveting, an action flick unlike any I’ve ever seen — often amazing — while also offering a meditation on what survival really means, and a kick-in-the-groin ending.

Mel Gibson made it. He was a so-so movie star, never bad, but certainly never sold me a ticket on his name. Then came the Sugar Tits incident, and his later revelation to be a wingnut and Trump-lover. Safe to say I’m no fan.

I haven’t and probably won’t see The Passion of the Christ, but I’ve heard it has almost B&D levels of violence. This was his follow-up to that, and it’s almost as violent. Assorted deaths include darts in the face, neckbit by a flying snake, scull caved in by a rock, face ripped off by a panther, etc.

But maybe I have an undiscovered kink — I enjoyed the brutality, once I’d grown accustomed to it. War, after all, is not so tidy as it’s usually presented in the movies.

I’ve noticed more in my advanced years, that when someone falls to the ground in a movie, in a way that would hurt like heck in real life, it makes my scrotum scrunch up and I can almost feel the pain. That happened a lot with Apocalypto.

The cast is entirely aborigine, non-actors speaking their native languages, and I wonder if they got residuals.

Verdict: BIG YES.

3/10/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.

No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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