SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

JoeytheBrit This was one of the early British chase films which, along with A Daring Daylight Robbery, sparked a brief craze for chase films and inspired Edwin S. Porter to make The Great Train Robbery. For my money, Daylight Robbery is probably the more exciting of the two British films (but it's a close-run thing) but A Desperate Poching Affray is far more sophisticated in terms of film-making technique. It's also an early use of realistic violence with gun-play and fist-fights throughout. No doubt it would have appealed to its working class target audience who frequented the travelling fairground exhibitions of William Haggar and his sons. This one is definitely worth a look.

peterjohnyorke "We believe that "The Poachers" (as the film was known by the Haggar family and in the USA)"was the first chase film" ("World's Fair", August 1914). US Film historians have commented that "The Poachers helped to set the pattern for subsequent chase films in the USA". The film sold 470 copies - more than any other film on record. It was made with a tame rabbit and a coconut-shy net,on the hills above the Rhondda Valley, according to Walter Haggar,who took part in it as one of the gamekeepers. Gaumont-British marketed in for over a year: it is in their catalogues from June 1903 to July 1904.For more details, see my book, "William Haggar, fairground film-maker", to be published by Accent Press Ltd. in May 2007, and visit www.williamhaggar.co.uk"Planktonrules'" comment of September 2006, it seems to me, is made with the benefit of far too much hindsight. William Haggar was quite isolated in South Wales, and may never have heard of Melies at the time when he made "Desperate Poaching Affray", which was, in any case, one of the longest British films when it was produced. This film was made principally for William's own fairground audience: he knew what they liked, and supplied it. "Anything good was marketed" commented his son Walter, and "The Poachers" (as it was renamed for selling in the USA) was so good that it sold 480 copies worldwide, more than any other recorded film.

Snow Leopard There's a lot of action in this short feature that makes it worth watching even though it is pretty unrefined. The "Desperate Poaching Affray" begins when a couple of game poachers are spotted, and then the chase is on. Quite a bit happens after that, and it packs a lot of activity into just a few minutes of running time. The emphasis is certainly on the action, as most of the actors just race around without trying too hard to make their actions seem believable. But there's no denying that you want to see how it comes out, and anyway, most of the so-called action movies made today have even lower acting quality and plausibility standards, without being nearly so efficient as this one is in terms of actual entertainment value.

Alice Liddel Unlikely as it might seem, this knockabout farmyard shootout is a precursor to the forbiddingly austere cinema of Robert Bresson - in its use of non-professional actors; and in its opening poaching scene, repeated in the master's 'Mouchette'. And, although this marvellous film is full of vivid action, brutal fisticuffs, fiery shootouts, and pond dunkings, with the breathless cast effectively tumbling the audience into the drama by hurling themselves in our direction, its vision of rural life is as bleak as Bresson's, an anti-pastoral in which the immemorial, supposedly natural and calm countryside becomes a frightening labyrinth of violence, power and murder.The film shows how a couple of harmless poachers are turned by circumstance into killers, a circumstance needlessly engineered by the forces of reaction. The boys only want to steal a bit of grub, it's not as if the landlord would miss it; but the minute they step onto his land, they are chased by class-traitor labourers and then the police. it would be wrong to call this Kafkaesque - they are clearly guilty - but this proliferation of law-defenders is nightmarish. They manage to use their ironically superior knowledge of someone else's land to evade capture; but eventually, like the Soviets at Stalingrad, sheer, faceless numbers win through. The momentum of the action, the harsh vibrancy of the sun-whipped landscape, and the gusto of the actors all create a sense of fun and exhiliration that is at the same time harrowing.It would be pompous to ascribe social critique to such a venture, but there is something very, very wrong about the propertied classes and their stoolies here.