Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the sequel no one wanted to make, including the studio — quite a different attitude to today, eh? But Fox were in financial troubles. For his part, Heston managed to negotiate a reduced role and suggested an ending that would kill off the potential for any more sequels. Well, that worked…

Picking up where the first film left off, it sees Heston’s character, Taylor, disappear mysteriously. After a second Earth spaceship crashes on the planet, its only survivor teams up with Taylor’s girl, Nova, to find him, which leads them to encounter a society hiding (you guessed it) beneath the planet of the apes.

Overall, this feels like trashier sci-fi/adventure than the first one, with a certain B-movie aesthetic to the underground mutants, and a first half that’s just a bunch of running around. Yet, despite that, there are some powerful ideas and solid social commentary here, mainly about blind faith and the terror of military leadership. Plus, the mutants’ use of telepathy as a weapon is quite clever, and their unmasked designs are suitably eerie rather than just ugly. It also has one of the most brutal and bleakest endings ever seen in a Hollywood blockbuster — or probably outside of one, come to that.

The violence in the final act was originally cut in the UK, and when it was finally released uncut on video some 17 years later, it earnt a 15, a rating its retained ever since. In the US, it’s always been rated G. Those Americans and their insouciant attitude to violence…

Obviously I watched this two years ago, and at the time I assigned this three-star rating. But I will say that I remember it more fondly than that. As noted above, it takes a while to get going, and it doesn’t have the same classy aspirations as the first film, but its unrepentant fatalism is almost admirable.

Here’s another one I found more enjoyable than I feel I should have.

For starters, it’s wild this ever actually got made. I mean, the title is an amusing idea — it’s basically a five-word gag, isn’t it? — but ponder for a moment how that’s going to play out as a full narrative. To live up to its title, it has to make an effort to follow the plot of the novel, and there lies the rub: no one wanting a zombie movie really wants to sit through a Regency romance, and no one wanting a Regency romance really wants it sullied by zombie-based action and gore. Well, inevitably someone will fall into that Venn diagram, but, as someone who’ll quite happily watch either of those genres in isolation, even I struggled to find the idea of such a mash-up too appealing. It needs a clever hand on the tiller to negotiate those treacherous waters, and I’m not sure the director of 17 Again and Charlie St. Cloud was that person.

But, as I said at the start, I did find it surprisingly watchable. It does have a certain amount of wit and fun with the concept, like turning arguments about accomplishment into ones about fighting style. Sometimes the zombies and fights are tacked on to the existing story, but sometimes the narrative is neatly remixed to include the zombie threat. And like any true action movie, scenes of high emotion are settled not with words but with a good dust-up. There’s a solid cast too, including Lily James (always a bonus) and reliable stalwarts like Charles Dance, although, as Darcy, Sam Riley sounds like he’s battling a nasty throat infection. But Sally Phillips is basically a perfect Mrs Bennet for this or any other version, and the same could be said of Douglas Booth as Bingley, or Matt Smith, on fine comedic form as Mr Collins.

It does drop the ball sometimes. The climax doesn’t put enough effort into eliciting tension (it’s like they ran out of money or time or effort: “can the heroes make to the bridge in ti— oh, they just did”); at least one apparent subplot doesn’t go anywhere at all; and a mid-credits scene suggesting the story isn’t over feels lame. It definitely pulls some punches in aid of landing a PG-13 rating in the US, which is unfortunate — it’s a mad concept; it needs to do it properly, go all out and get an R. (I’d still say it’s perhaps a bit too gruesome for PG-13, which is why it landed a 15 over here.)

I still think the director is the problem. A surer hand would’ve made more of the verbal sparring during the physical sparring; would’ve sold the tension of the action. Apparently David O. Russell was original set to direct, which is mad — can you imagine choosing to follow awards-winners like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle with this? Apparently other directors “considered” included Matt Reeves, Neil Marshall, and Lord & Miller. Presumably they turned it down rather than any producer thinking Burr Steers was a better pick — Lord & Miller, in particular, probably would’ve nailed the tone. But, all things considered, what we got could’ve been a lot worse.

Here we reach the first real hurdle in these two-year-old roundups, because it turns out I made no notes whatsoever after viewing The Quiet Earth. I did note down some quotes from the booklet essay accompanying Arrow’s Blu-ray release, but it seems a bit rich just to list those excerpts.

What I can tell you is that The Quiet Earth is a science-fiction film about a scientist who wakes up one morning to find everyone else has disappeared — not fled, not died, just gone. What unfolds from there is a mix of mystery (what happened?) and a kind of existential character examination, both of this man and of ourselves — what would you do if you were the only person on Earth? Only, it doesn’t play quite as heavily as that makes it sound. There are more plot developments, but to say too much would spoil the discovery. And it is a film worth discovering. As Amy Simmons puts it in the aforementioned essay, it’s a “deeply relevant work which reflects darkly upon our age of estrangement and isolation. […] Shifting in tone from horror to comedy to pathos and back again, the film’s great strength is in the themes it explores and satirises — namely nuclear fears, technophobia, and cultural and geographical isolation — which are even more urgent now than when the film premiered in 1985.”

I’m doing it a disservice with this pathetic little ‘review’, but hopefully someday I’ll revisit it and come up with something more insightful.