[feel free to mentally add your own punctuation to the headline, but I kind of like it the way it reads]

The British film studio Hammer is legendary among horror fans for their lurid and lusty Technicolor revisions of the classic monster movies of the thirties, but they came the horror revival through a general focus on genre films, notably (but not limited to) thrillers, mysteries and science-fiction films. The Icons of Suspense Collection: Hammer Films (Sony) gathers six black-and-white thrillers made between 1958 and 1963, all distributed in the U.S. by (and some co-produced by) Columbia.

These Are the Damned

These Are the Damned (1963), Hammer’s answer to Village of the Damned, is the highest-profile film of the set, and the most anticipated. It’s a rare auteur piece (directed by American expatriate-turned-continental class act Joseph Losey), a long sought after science fiction item (Losey’s only true genre film outside of noir and crime cinema) and a Hammer rarity that was cut for American distribution and has been restored for its home video debut. And it’s a strange collision of exploitation elements, visual elegance and emotional coolness, a fascinating oddity with strange angles that don’t all fit neatly together but add up to a brilliant structure.

It begins as a different kind of genre film: in a cute little seaside vacation town in Britain, Teddy Boys on motorcycles led by the almost simian-looking King (Oliver Reed, with a dark glower and hulking menace) send out a gorgeous young bird (Shirley Anne Field) to attract the interest of an older American tourist (Macdonald Carey). Then they jump the gent for his cash, beating him brutally and dancing away while whistling their theme song (“Black Leather,” a weird quasi-rock chant that doesn’t sound like anything these chaps would adopt but does include almost nihilistic lyrics with nursery rhyme simplicity: “Black leather, black leather / Smash smash smash / Black leather, black leather / Crash crash crash”). “The age of senseless violence has caught up with us, too,” explains Bernard (Alexander Knox), a local authority figure who run a secret project nearby and has his own younger woman (Viveca Lindfors), an eccentric artist who sculpts eerie-looking statues in a small vacation home known as “The Birdhouse” perched, as it turns out, over the heart of the project. It’s all strangely complicated and almost arbitrary the way Carey’s ugly American Simon Wells sweeps Field’s frustrated sweater girl Joan out of King’s clutches, down the bluff from The Birdhouse and into a secret cave system where a small group of children of the atom are raised without human contact beyond video communications.

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The infamous photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees (some of them innocent of any crime) by American MPs at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have become iconic imagery of American military shame, displayed so many times that they have begun to lose their shock value.  Errol Morris returns to these photographs, which were taken from three separate cameras and freely shared with the servicemen and women posted at the prison, as exhibit A in his investigation what happened, how and why. Standard Operating Procedure brings the horror back to the images

Morris interviews five of the seven indicted MPs (including Lynndie England, whose “thumbs up” poses with naked prisoners gave her instant global notoriety) among his numerous witnesses. His technique is unsettling and direct: they look directly at the audience, challenging us to really confront their stories and experiences. Even more unsettling is his use of the eerie cameraphone footage of the MPs with the prisoners which, unlike the photos, has not been dulled by media overexposure. The result is not simply a political documentary. It’s a police procedural, an investigative mystery, a study in perceptions, a portrait in how the media shapes a story and how the government shapes a story for the media. He finds compelling evidence of institutionalized behavior tacitly, if not the explicitly, approved by officers up the chain of command. So why wasn’t it pursued?

For Morris, it all comes back to the photos themselves. The only crimes prosecuted were the ones seen by the public in the leaked photographs: the evidence that shamed the military, embarrassed the United States, convicted the MPs involved, and now stand as the iconographic image of American arrogance and hypocrisy. Eyewitness statements can be contradicted or denied. The photographs could not, and the people in those photos were branded with the crimes. Standard Operating Procedure challenges us to really understand not just what the pictures show but what they don’t show (absence of leadership and accountability, absence of a plan, does not show up in a picture) and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system, or standard operating procedure?

Read  the DVD review on MSN here.
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