ROCKY RANKING

The life and times of Robert Balboa.

Chris: Let’s start with the age-old question. What’s the first Rocky film you remember? Terri: Mine is Rocky II. My mum used to be a barmaid in this pub and we’d sit in the lodgings upstairs while she worked. It was New Year’s Eve and we rifled through their tape collection and found Rocky II to put on. I must have been nine or ten. And it knocked my socks off. The fight scenes are incredible. The whole class element of Rocky really touches me, but I remember being blown away by the emotion and the heart of it. I think, cumulatively, I’ve seen them all over 100 times.

Chris: How many times have you seen Rocky V?

Terri: Only about six times.

Chris: A mere six. That was the first one I saw in the cinema.

I grew up watching the Rocky movies, and Rocky IV was huge for me when it came out on VHS. Nick: IV was the first one I saw. It’s a good one to have as an entry point when you’re quite young because it’s so pumped up and silly and ludicrous. And then you go back and discover the ones that have a bit more soul. Chris: Rocky IV has soul. It has the Godfather Of Soul. Dan: Rocky IV was the first album I ever bought. Not just the first film soundtrack — the first actual album. I don’t remember the first Rocky I saw. They sat in the background of my childhood. Rockys one and two were mixed together. It was later in life that I discovered that he doesn’t win at the end of the first Rocky. What a twist!

Chris: The cumulative effect of these eight movies is a life lived on screen.

Terri: It’s one long story. One brilliant, continuous, heartfelt journey of love and loss and grief.

Nick: It’s almost like they’re rounds in a boxing match.

Dan: And it’s the same small set of characters, isn’t it? For the most part it focuses on Rocky, Paulie, Adrian, Mickey…

Chris: Apollo.

Dan: Something I noticed is that Paulie…

Chris: Is appalling.

Dan: He’s a terrible person.

Chris: Paulie is a racist shitbag. Nick: I love in Creed when they find his porno in his old room. It’s still there, on the table.

Dan: And they bury him next to Adrian. Give her a break. Even in death she’s still got him hanging around. But I noticed

that Paulie and Mickey never speak to each other when they’re in the same room.

Chris: Are you saying Mickey’s a ghost?

Nick: What if Rocky is the only one alive and everyone else is a ghost?

Dan: The way they framed him when he appears at the start of Creed II, I thought Rocky was a ghost.

Chris: One of the things

I love is the attention to detail. No small moment goes unremarked. Rocky Balboa has Spider Rico turning up, and the lady who works in Adrian’s in that movie is there in Creed II. The movies feel like Rocky is being constantly haunted by lines and reminders of his past.

Dan: I love that creative continuity created by Stallone. He lives Rocky, and Rocky lives him, which is why it’s a shame that in both III and V he lets the character down and almost rejects him, to a degree. We lose Rocky a bit in those two films.

Chris: V is, I think, a very well-intentioned attempt to get back to his roots. Each of the Rocky movies parallels where Stallone was in his career. And by Rocky V he’d had a few flops, and I think recognised that this guy is less interesting when he’s rich. So he tried to take it back to the feeling of the first couple of movies. It doesn’t work nearly as well as in Rocky Balboa. Terri: I hate Rocky V with a passion. But the way he digs into different parts of Rocky each time, I feel there is a consistent character study throughout the entire eight films.

Nick: There’s a sweetness to Rocky Balboa. The first film has quite a ’70s ending where he doesn’t have this triumphant victory, he just goes the distance. That film came directly out of Stallone’s pain, out of all his desperation.

Terri: Remember how isolated he was in that film? He lives in that one room, he has quite a bleak existence before he meets Adrian, he doesn’t expect much from life. It’s so much about masculinity. And it’s unashamedly romantic, in some ways.

Nick: The first film ends with them saying they love each other. That’s the real victory. And then she gets sidelined.

Chris: Adrian, Mickey, Apollo, Paulie — all these characters speak volumes about Stallone’s ability as a writer. It’s very easy for people to write Stallone off, but he’s a tremendous writer when he wants to be.

Terri: In Rocky III, which has many flaws, not least of all in Clubber Lang, who is so crudely and crassly drawn, the relationship with Apollo is absolutely gorgeous. One of his strengths is writing these beautiful relationships. You know, Tony’s grief when Apollo dies in Rocky IV and he says to Rocky that he “was like my son”. Any other writer would have spent pages trying to explore it and he nailed it in three lines.

Chris: The death of Apollo Creed had a profound effect on me as a kid. And rewatching these films destroyed me almost periodically — the scene in Rocky Balboa when he breaks down to Paulie about Adrian.

Terri: If you think about when these films were made, it says so many interesting things about pride, masculinity, about ego. And all these are beautifully done through Rocky but I think more interestingly through Apollo Creed.

Chris: The Creed films reinvigorated this franchise.

Nick: I love that they flipped it, so Adonis Creed is kind of the anti-rocky. Instead of this poor guy from the streets, he’s from Hollywood. They’re about this guy coming to terms with his name and his background and his father.

Terri: It’s got a warmth and authenticity that feels fundamentally Rocky, but is so original and modern. The way they reimagined him training in Philly, with quad bikes and hip-hop, and the way Ryan Coogler used ‘Gonna Fly Now’ is so completely inspired and beautiful.

Chris: Creed feels as authentically about the African-american experience as Rocky did about the Italianamerican experience. I think Stallone should have won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that. There’s a real sense of the weight of history in everything he does. It doesn’t have a talking robot, but despite that this is the best of the franchise. Nick: Rocky IV has the best action. Rocky versus Drago is so immense. And Dolph Lundgren is incredible.

Chris: He’s a mountain come to life. That film is utterly fucking ridiculous. It’s a huge 1980s poodle-haired rock video that is occasionally interrupted by bouts of talking and punching.

Dan: At one point it’s a montage of montages.

Terri: But the narrative heavy-lifting done by those montages is remarkable.

Nick: Eisenstein would have loved it.

Chris: Right, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!

THE THEME OF this month’s column — perhaps inevitably — is shut-in horror, with folk cooped up indoors and turning gruesomely on each other.

Stephen S. Campanelli’s overheated Southern gothic

Grand Isle casts the insanely busy and busily insane Nicolas Cage as a drunken, self-hating failed Marine married to demented, sexpot Southern belle Fancy (Kadee Strickland). Hapless handyman Buddy (Luke Benward) gets caught in their mansion during a hurricane, with the mercurial couple set on seducing or killing him — Cage’s Walter offers the poor sap cash to murder his wife. Everyone delivers theatrical monologues about how crazy they are and one thing the hosts agree on is that their visitor shouldn’t take the triple-locks off the cellar door. Not top-tier Cage, but a full-bloodedenough-to-be-entertaining ride.

In Frank Sabatella’s The Shed , misfit teens Stan (Jay Jay Warren) and Dommer (Cody Kostro) discover a newly infected vampire (Frank Whaley) hiding from the sunlight in an outbuilding… and get into a complicated relationship with the ravening monster. Various folk who’ve given the poor kids a hard time get lured to the shed to be fed to the creature. An uncomfortable, scruffy depiction of fraying small-town America where predators abuse kids even before a Nosferatu-look über-vampire sets up shop, this has excellent work from a mix of veteran character actors (Timothy Bottoms, Siobhan Fallon Hogan) and unfamiliar youngsters.

Marc Meyers’ We Summon The Darkness explores another American division, as a war between Satanic Heavy Metal and Militant

Christianity is played out at a villa where a concert afterparty goes horribly wrong. Strangely calculating groupie girls (Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson, Amy Forsyth) and standard-issue rocker guys (Logan Miller, Keean Johnson, Austin Swift) go from playing fun games (uh-oh line: “Never have I ever… drugged someone’s drink”) to a ritual body-count that doesn’t pile up as initially expected. Johnny Knoxville appears late in the day as an anti-rock evangelist, but Daddario — always keen on roles that lift her out of the ‘pretty girl who needs rescuing’ category — is MVP here, with a showstopper scream-queen turn. It flounders in the home stretch, but the build-up is terrific.

Orson Oblowitz’s Hell Is Where the Home Is is in a recent sub-genre of ‘Airbnb thrillers’, where a group of people having their own problems lease an isolated, picturesque getaway house only to find unwanted intruders ramping up a bad situation. Here, trouble arrives late at night in the form of Fairuza Balk — welcome in any film, even if her character here isn’t — who claims she needs to use the phone but is soon giving unwanted relationship advice and lingering as if expecting something bad to happen. Her presence leads to shifts in the balance of power, a gory accident, semi-justified stabbings, gun-wavings and revelations, plus unhelpful visits from sinister cops and masked machete murderers.

Abe Goldfarb’s mostly black-and-white, micro-budget The Horror At Gallery Kay starts as an edgy indie drama with a lesbian couple (Maine Anders, Rosebud) visiting a relationship counsellor (Brian Silliman). Overlapping, Rashomon-like stories lead to a darker place, a tiny art space with shrouded pictures and statues. Clive Barker-y gore and wonder intrude as a story emerges about a hidden city pre-existing New York and eager to reclaim its place in reality. Funny and strange, it opens up cosmic vastness even as its drama is confined to two rooms and a corridor.