Frightening_Uncle_Joe Reviews

Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966)

Gruelling

[1/10 · 5 February 2006]

Seeing this put me in a bad mood for the rest of the night. That's not a good thing for a comedy to do.

I'd be interested to see the US release of this, which I understand features a lot less of Franco and Ciccio. However, so far I've only managed the Italian cut, which regrettably is unspeakable, incomprehensible nonsense from start to finish.

There is one, and only one, good joke, a British general who speaks terrible Italian with an incredibly thick and somewhat camp English accent, and that's your lot. Even the normally reliable Vincent Price phones it in.

Bava can work cinematic miracles with high-camp sixties silliness - see "Danger: Diabolik" - but this is among the very worst films I have ever seen. Imagine a strange alternate universe where, having suffered a dreadful head injury, a demented Benny Hill sees out his twilight years directing feature-length episodes of "Chucklevision" and you'd be about there.

Elephant (1989 TV Movie)

Extraordinary

[10/10 · 11 May 2005]

I notice nobody actually from Northern Ireland seems to have commented on this... I grew up in Belfast through some of the worst of the troubles (and have been personally affected by the actions of both loyalist and republican terrorists) and I have to say that for me this film is pretty much it in a nutshell. The desensitising effect mentioned by some of the other comments is precisely what happens in real life; the fact that stuff blows up occasionally and every so often someone gets shot dead eventually starts to just become part of the scenery. I've lost count of the number of times I saw people walking through Belfast stop in their tracks for a second or two as a bomb was detonated nearby then just continue on their way. You learn to live with it, and that's the real horror, which I think is something Clarke portrays here with an extraordinary degree of empathy. Possibly some of it's because so many of the places in the film were so familiar to me but it really hit home in a way that no other film explicitly about Northern Ireland has ever done for me.