straker-1 Reviews

Murder by Death (1976)

Terrible, just terrible

[1/10 · 1 June 2012]

On paper, this should have been a comedy smash. A cast to die for (pun intended), comic legend Neil Simon in the writers' chair, and a set up that offers many funny possibilities. Sadly, this promise is wholly squandered. Do not believe the stories you have been told about Murder By Death - it's HORRIBLE. Clearly, 99% of the small budget went on hiring Peter Sellers and David Niven, leaving nothing for anything else. The story - the world's greatest detectives assemble at a spooky mansion to solve a murder that has yet to be committed - should have been the springboard for great fun poked at the sleuth genre. But, instead...nothing happens. The cast sit in a room and talk, then split up and talk somewhere else, and then reassemble to talk some more. NOTHING HAPPENS. I actually had to check the timer on my DVD player when the closing credits mercifully spelled the end of this atrocity - I couldn't believe that just 90 minutes had passed or that in those 90 minutes the cast has effectively *not done anything*.

A fascinating cast, to be sure...David Niven, Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers (who had starred alongside one another in the past but had never been a trio in one film) together in one film is noteworthy in any case. Niven is his usual elegant and genial self, Guinness is fine, but Sellers seems oddly subdued. Perhaps it is the character he is playing, the serene mystic detective Sidney Wang (Charlie Chan), but my money is on him merely sulking because he's just one star among many for once. Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, appears as Jessica Marbles aka Miss Marple - and she's pretty bloody awful. Stick to Man From UNCLE guest spots and mute roles, Elsa, you have all the screen presence of a goat cadaver. James Coco, who is never anything but HUGELY annoying in any film, overacts like crazy as Milo Perrier (aka Poirot), while th4e normally great Peter Falk as Sam Diamond (Spade) is just flat out offensive. A worryingly young James Cromwell plays Perrier's assistant, and as a character is just as redundant and pointless as Wang's Japanese 'Number 3' son. Said son has the negative honour of delivering the worst of all the film's many ghastly lines - "Holy Shanghai!". This is symptomatic of a movie that is racist towards Asians in general, as well as homophobic and misogynistic...basically everything Sam Diamond says ticks one or more of those bigoted boxes. Eileen Brennan, whom director Robert Moore seemed to believe was very attractive, is wasted in a pointless role in which she has maybe eleven lines...as is Nancy Walker, whose role as the deaf and dumb maid gives us one of the movie's few genuine laughs - the silent scream. Truman Capote, bizarrely cast as the host of this murder mystery dinner, seems to have done all his scenes in an hour and then fled the set. The same seems to apply to Alec Guinness, who doesn't bother to disguise his boredom with the terrible script. I don't blame them. Talk about a voyage of the damned! This film was a ponderous trial to get through...ideas such as the shifting house rooms are brought up and then are not actually dealt with. The murder's twists and turns make no sense on any level, and you are left wondering at the end what the point of it all was. Every time it seems as if the story will actually start going somewhere, it immediately shuts down and goes back to the cast talking in the dining room. (No money, you see) And it's just NOT FUNNY. There are literally about six good lines in the whole thing, and even they aren't great. It's hard to believe Neil Simon, creator of such comedy classics as The Sunshine Boys, thought this drivel was worth filming. Robert Moore's direction swings between competent and inept with dizzying speed, and his job is not helped by the fact that all of the movie's very fake-looking sets appear to have been erected on one tiny soundstage.

Avoid this movie like the plague...do not trust anyone who says this film is funny. It's not. It's absolute garbage. A complete waste of the talent on screen, and any Peter Sellers movie that makes Where Does It Hurt? look like Blazing Saddles in terms of jokes must be bad. The pits. You have been warned.

The Starfighters (1964)

Makes Top Gun look like Twelve O'Clock High

[1/10 · 11 March 2011]

Lockheed's F-104 Starfighter, backbone of the USAF's Tactical Fighter Command during the mid-60s. Known as the 'Missile With A Man In It', this speedy jet had a few drawbacks to go with its' plusses. Firstly, it had a truly appalling safety record, which apologists to this day try vainly to claim was undeserved. Secondly, the plane's massive turbojet engine, pencil fuselage, ponderous loaded weight and ultra-thin wings (incapable of containing gas tanks) meant that the 104 tended to run out of fuel about three minutes after take-off. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Starfighter proved to be completely unsuited to the combat situations it was required to fight in during the 60s. Though able to carry ground attack weapons of considerable punch, there was no getting around the fact that the F-104 was not suited to the sort of warfare called for in Vietnam. Hence, this swift but dangerous false economy with wings was soon eclipsed by more versatile types employed in the Indo-China conflict.

It would seem that Lockheed and TAC were aware of the plane's numerous shortcomings, and thus we have an explanation of why 'The Starfighters' was made. Nothing else other than a PR campaign to paint the plane as not the colossal waste of time and money it proved to be explains the existence of a film like this. As so many other reviewers have said, there is nothing to recommend this film at all on any level. It has no story to speak of, the acting is slightly below third-rate community theatre standard, half of the runtime is extremely dull stock footage, and the whole thing just radiates pointlessness and redundancy from every frame.

The plot, such as it is, follows the 'adventures' of three TAC pilots assigned to George AFB to learn the ropes of flying Lockheed's new air superiority fighter. Our 'hero', Lt. John Witkowski Jr, is under pressure from his Congressman father to quit TAC. Witkowski Snr, who flew B-17s over Germany in WW2 and somehow managed to not only father at least one child but also join the Air Force and the Federal government without anyone noticing he was a ludicrously camp homosexual, wants his kid behind the wheel of a B-52 or B-58. But Junior's only interested in flying fighters, Daddy-o...oh, and he doesn't like talking about flying when off duty. He's that hard. He's a ginger Charlie Sheen. That's how John Witkowski Jr rolls, and you'd better learn that fast! The boys practise in-flight refuelling (a very tricky feat which this film tries to pretend is easy to do) and knock seven bells out of various decoy targets with a variety of weapons - inbetween extended and numerous bouts of heavy drinking, amphetamine use and extremely strange telephone pranks. Johnny's life becomes a bit more complicated when he's assigned a girlfriend (presumably from the base's general woman pool) and then involved in a heart-stopping crisis where his plane's undercarriage malfunctions very slightly. Then there's some more refuelling practise, and a snafu during a training flight that involves a never-seen storm causing a never-seen F-104 crash. After that, the trio and their squadron chums put on "poopy suits" and muck about in a swimming pool for a while, before packing up and leaving for Europe. The end.

I'm a warplane buff, big time, but even I was sent to sleep by the endless dull stock footage. Nothing even remotely exciting happens at any point; even the makers seemed to know this, which is why the moments that could by a massive leap of faith be portrayed as 'action sequences' are overlaid with 40s big band music or tootling cod jazz.

Let us turn our attention to the 'actors' and 'plot'. Playing our hero, John W Witkowski, is Robert Dornan, who was a (very poor) fighter pilot in real life and later became a (grotesquely bigoted) US Congressman -just like his screen Dad! Despite having a mildly decent TV career, Dornan is not what anyone would call an actor, and he shows this very clearly here; but in all fairness no-one involved with the movie was in danger of an Oscar nod. Dornan's two wingmates comprise a smug misogynist with leathery skin, and a mentally subnormal Goober clone. It's hard to tell which of them is less hateful. Our heroes are trained by Maj. "Madge" Stevens - a man so modest and so bad at his job he admits at one point that a rookie who's only been in the F-104 for an hour can outfly him in it - and commanded by Colonel Hunt, a lumpy foul-tempered beef roast in a uniform who gets worryingly excited by delivering fascist tirades at Chamber of Commerce meetings. Under his command, our flying fools inhale scotch by the barrel, gulp handfuls of speed and swap big heaping buckets of clunky, lifeless dialogue. An entire three-minute scene is devoted to Witkowski's lady friend explaining how she used to work as a corn de-tassler in Iowa. And you thought Quarantine was intense!

Yes, this is a horrible, horrible movie, whose only purpose for existence seems to have been as a puff piece to be shown at air bases and to NATO countries who'd bought this speedy white elephant - and wanted to know why it kept crashing or running out of gas before it'd finished taxiing onto the runway. One of the best MST3K episodes, and easily one of the worst movies ever made in the English language. Boring, pointless, sexist, badly acted, psycho-right-wing propaganda drivel. GREAT fun to watch with some pals and your favourite snacks.

Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars (2009) Season Unknown, Episode Unknown

Remember to change the water filters

[7/10 · 20 November 2009]

Well, after a seven month wait that seemed longer than the nine years between the TVM and 'Rose', we have the most ambitious and expensive looking DW episode ever. And was it an improvement on Planet Of The Dead, the last special? Well, yes, because...almost anything would have been better than Planet Of The Dead. But let's get down to specifics. What we have here is a solid, exciting, genuinely disturbing first half hour of classic Dr Who that shares with the instant-classic episode "Blink" a monster that would actually scare young children. To date, Russell Davies' creatures have usually been more laughable than frightening, and it is as of he's trying to make up for lost opportunities and mistakes like the Slitheen. I say 'first half hour' because things go a bit pear-shaped in the second half. The tension and claustrophobia of the story gets largely thrown out in favour of 'cosmic angst', lengthy flashbacks, and incredibly clumsy foreshadowing. Yes, we all know that there is one thing Russell D can't manage, and that is subtlety. The story's sets are phenomenal, as are the simple but effective CG-treated Mars surface shots. I do wonder about the scale and the engineering wisdom of the base in the CG shots, however - the dialogue states that the designers scrimped on every kilo, yet decided to make pointlessly long and ludicrously huge dome connector tunnels made of very heavy steel that don't seem to serve any function other than being long metal box-tubes. But that's nitpicking. As for the plot, it's not exactly original. John Carpenter's late 80s horror movie Prince Of Darkness is, in effect, stolen wholesale here, and the director's later film Ghosts Of Mars is also mined. Throw in obvious pinches from 28 Days/Weeks Later, and you don't have a great deal of new stuff here. It's only when the Infected plot basically slams to a halt and we get the 15 minutes of angsting that we see any new material. And what new material! We have a galaxy-weary Doctor more or less becoming the Master here, with his self-imposed rules about not messing with 'fixed' Time being thrown out. Davies and Ford do not give Tennant enough of a chance to do more than yell a lot in this, so the chilling implications of a rogue Doctor are undermined somewhat. But the writing for those scenes is very good, and Tennant himself is never anything less than superb. The acting in general in 'Waters' is good, with "that guy from Neighbours" (as I think we all greeted him when he appeared) being the obvious standout for me.

Amazing sets and CG, a threat that's actually scary, a handful of the most poignant scenes in the show (the German crew-woman playing the video of her daughter and sobbing as she awaits her doom is, hands down, the best acted and shot scene in the entirety of DW)...there's a lot to like here. Some to not like, though - Murray Gold's music is typically overblown, intrusive and mixed FAR too loud on the soundtrack - but that's quibbling. A good special, all in all. Gripping telly!

OBVIOUS CONTINUITY ERROR The first humans on Mars? Er, sorry, that honour would go to the crews of Mars Probes 6 and 7 eighty years before Bowie Base even existed, as seen in Season 7 of the old show. :)

Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007 Video)

Godawful

[2/10 · 18 December 2008]

Terrible, TERRIBLE songs. Not a solitary laugh out loud moment. Series continuity is thrown out the window. A dull "story" that was just a grand tour of the show's best moments - bolted on to a supposedly clever and confusing time travel plot that was in fact neither. Racism everywhere, primarily anti-Semitism (the Scammers are obvious Jewish stereotypes) and the usual 'laugh at the darkies' rubbish you always get with Hermes and his family. Cruelty, disloyalty, mean-spiritedness and arrogant misanthropy masquerading as 'satire'. Which wasn't ever funny or thought-provoking. This travesty only gets 2/10 from me because it was well-animated. The almost universal acclaim this *extremely* poor movie gets just confirms for me that with fans you can put any old rubbish on screen with the Futurama logo attached, and they'll think it's the Dark Knight of animated comedy. And I kinda liked the series, too. Awful, just really awful. Did I mention the songs were terrible?

Elvis in Concert (1977 TV Special)

This is the end

[10/10 · 16 November 2008]

I rate Elvis in Concert a 10 for the simple fact that, by complete accident, it captured the single greatest entertainer in music history in his final concert tour. The footage has thus achieved a resonance and importance it didn't really deserve. Indeed, if the rumours are right, the producers of the TV special had decided in early August 1977 to shelve the material and wait for a better concert. Of course, there were no more concerts, so a compilation of two shows from the June 1977 tour were shown on CBS in October of that year as the last testament of Elvis Aron Presley.

To this day, EIC remains the only official Presley product to not have been released on VHS or DVD in its' complete form. Why? Well, the reason is painfully obvious to those of us who have seen off-air recordings of the special, or the various DVD/VCD bootlegs. Years of drug abuse and an appalling diet largely consisting of junk food had, by, mid-77, wrought havoc on Presley's system, and it shows in the TV special. The once-stunning rock god, handsomer than a Greek statue and capable of belting out 90 minutes of stage magic without breaking a sweat, was by the time of EIC an overweight, chronically stoned parody of himself. Presley is more or less out on his feet for the special. His voice remains powerful, though it is no longer daring, but the man himself is virtually immobile for the duration. Static, somnolent, sometimes literally clinging to the mike, sweat running off his bloated face in sheets, Presley in EIC is ripped out of his mind and terribly ill. Lyrics are slurred, stage movements are beyond minimal, and the rambling conversations with the audience and band (seen in outtakes, but cut from the special for the most part) got longer and more disjointed as the final end approached. All but one performance in the special is taken from the June 21st gig in Rapid City, with 'My Way' edited in from a show two days earlier in Omaha. Neither show is good, and it is baffling why the oft-bootlegged and easily superior June 26 tour-closer concert in Indianapolis was not filmed.

Even though the Rapid City show is at best lacklustre, it was a towering triumph compared to Omaha. The bootleg of the uncut Omaha show is painful to watch - the man is clearly blasted out of his mind on Dilaudid and Seconal, disoriented, immobile, barely conscious. The sole highlight of this show, chosen for the special, has seen release on official products - and I am curious as to why everyone seems to think that showing a live take of Presley delivering a song he'd been singing for years *with the lyric sheet held in front of him* was a good move.

Anyway, the special itself. The June 21st show is a fair example of his final tour, Elvis delivering sometimes good but mostly cookie-cutter versions of his old and new favourites, taking time out to wander slowly around the stage to do the inevitable scarf-dispensing. Albert Goldman and others have heaped scorn on EIC, describing how poor Presley looks and how wasted he seems. I have no reason to stand up for Elvis, not any desire to do so, but come onnnnnnnn, he's NOWHERE NEAR as bad physically and musically as those hacks would have you believe. But that is not to say that EIC is some kind of neglected gem. The man is very obviously in poor shape, the singing and stage presence are not remotely close to his usual standard, and it is only on tracks like Hurt, the gospel tracks (E dearly loved the old religious tunes, and it shows) and Unchained Melody that we get anything approaching the old magic. The man *did* had magic, once; in fact, he still had it not so long before this special. John Lennon was right in saying that before Presley, there was nothing. And now, in the last weeks of his life, the tank has, regrettably, almost run dry. We see in EIC the last flicker before the death on the toilet and the return to that nothing that preceded him. And in the case of Unchained Melody, it is quite sad to see a sweat-drenched Presley crouched at the piano, using the very last of his fading strength to belt out the lyrics. You don't feel like laughing at 'Fat Elvis' when you watch EIC, or at least you don't if you have any human feelings. You feel what I felt - sympathy. For God's sake, E, take a year off, get clean from the pills, and just REST.

A strange experience, Elvis In Concert. A must for the fans, a curio for those fascinated by the late 70s music scene. This is the end, dear friends.

And just as a closer, I am not a fan of his music. At all.

Believers (2007 Video)

A feature-length Outer Limits episode

[8/10 · 27 November 2007]

Great film! Some rather large plot holes that could have been easily avoided, if one were going to be honest, and at times the thing is frustratingly obscure and careless with logic. But Believers has a very creepy air, the acting is generally superb, and the ending is - if predictable a light year off - totally BRILLIANT.

The movie plays like a very long episode of The Outer Limits (the 60s original, not the wretched colour revivals), and that's no bad thing. I suspect this movie played better outside of the US - American audiences tend to like everything explained with a minimum of ambiguity, and this movie has a very cavalier attitude towards plot information. Bad plot flaws damage the overall impact - the incredibly half-hearted search for the paramedics, the far too swift 'sex conversion' of the hero's buddy, the unexplained resurrection of a woman cult member, the badly answered question of why the paramedics needed to be kidnapped at all etc. But, ahhh, I've seen A-films that have made worse mistakes.

Believers is most effective in the little details...the ever present loud speakers in the compound, constantly burbling propaganda you can only half hear, the glassy expressions on the faces of the cult members, the fact that these weird people are scary because they are NOT overtly evil. Perhaps more important is the fact that, like the Leader with the hero, the movie never tries to convince you to believe in what is happening...you can take it or leave it on one level or another. Comparisons with Jonestown are obvious, but the film's general tone owes a larger debt to the Aum Supreme Truth cult in Japan, with its' fetish for electronic devices and quasi-scientific esoterica, the usage of poison gas, and the idea that the charismatic leader holds a revealed "indisputable truth".

Daniel Benzali is electrifying as 'The Teacher', creating a sort of Colonel Kurtz character. The Quanta Group's second in command, who appears at the start in the TV interview, and whose name eludes me, is also superb. Check out the deleted scenes on the DVD for moments featuring both men, both apparently improvised for the most part, that are better than anything kept in the movie. Puzzling omissions. The movie also contains one of the more chilling torture scenes in recent memory, in the shape of the electro-shock 'purging' of the hero. Devoid of gore, this scene is made frightening (for me at least) by the complete lack of emotion shown by the torturers. "It's for your own good" delivered in a weary monotone is far scarier than a truckload of Texas Chainsaw evil-chuckling over a victim.

But *that* ending, a very erotic sex scene, the aforementioned EST torture moment, and a general air of weirdness and repressed hysteria, gives this film an edge. Well worth seeing.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

The best Bond. The best Bond girl. The best Bond movie. Full stop.

[10/10 · 2 January 2007]

Ever since it was released, On Her Majesty's Secret Service has been tarred with the brush of 'flop'. It's an awful movie, people would say. George Lazenby can't act, and thank God Sean Connnery came back to save the franchise's bacon in the next film. Not one to follow the herd, I decided to see OHMSS many years ago and find out what apparently made it such a terrible motion picture. I was rather surprised to discover that far from being the worst 007 movie, it was in fact the best one of the entire series....and that most of the people who bag it clearly have not actually SEEN it.

As a Bond movie guide once put it, OHMSS is probably TOO good to be a Bond film. Rather than copy the cartoon antics of You Only Live Twice, Service plays it straight, keeping strictly to the Fleming novel and avoiding the tedious reliance on gadgets and supervillains with super weapons that turned Connery's last two films and most of Moore's efforts into farces. Likewise, George Lazenby's superb 007 is stripped down to the basics - a physical man handy with his fists, but also an intelligent and sensitive human being. It is very hard to see Connery's Bond handling the romance angle of OHMSS with the ease that Lazenby's does. Bond #2 has been called 'The Human Bond', and thankfully these days this is no longer meant as a back-handed insult.

Diana Rigg as Tracy, the 'Bond girl', is a revelation. She's highly intelligent, independent, falls in love with Bond in a realistic manner and doesn't put up with his casual sexism for a second. Add to this Rigg's aristocratic beauty, and you have a Bond girl unsurpassed in the film series (though Michelle Yeoh in TND comes close). Likewise, Telly Savalas provides the definitive portrayal of series ubervillain Ernst Blofeld. Here in OHMSS, his plan is wholly plausible, a factor absent in the ones hatched in the movies immediately before and after it, and is in fact far more frightening and malevolent than nicking spaceships or zapping cities with a death ray. Savalas plays Blofeld with a cold, insouciant menace - like all good actors, he knows that to be a truly successful baddie you don't scream and rave.

Is Lazenby a good actor in OHMSS? Well, it would be wrong to say he was brilliant in this field, but for his very first acting effort it is nothing short of amazing - and the bitter irony is that had he done Diamonds Are Forever (as he was asked to...he wasn't fired, but in fact quit owing to some hideously bad advice from his agent), his acting style and his version of Bond would have matured and gained a following. As it is, Lazenby's sole outing as Bond merely holds open prospects that were never realised. Can he act? Of course he can, and well.

Lengthy but never boring, gritty, wryly humorous, genuinely romantic, true to the source novel and possessing the two best tunes in Bond theme history (the title piece and Louis Armstrong's beautiful swansong We Have All The Time In The World), this is a *damn* good film. In cold terms of production values, calibre of acting and scripting and sheer general panache this is in no way a 'bad' film. It is certainly far superior to the two cheery disasters that followed, and Lazenby is lightyears ahead of the supposedly 'better' Bonds that Moore and Dalton incarnated. A complete masterpiece on all levels. Best Bond film ever. Best Bond girl. Best Bond. Lazenby rules! :)

Melody Rules (1994–1995)

THE worst TV comedy of all time, beyond any doubt

[1/10 · 21 December 2005]

As a Kiwi, I am shamed to admit that the worst sitcom in the history of the world hails from our clean green shores. I suppose that creating something this spine-shatteringly awful represents some kind of achievement, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll admit to that.

Back in 1993, NZ's third TV network was still a relative newcomer to the business and was keen to make its' mark in the ratings with its' own crop of original programming. 'Melody Rules' was something of a flagship show for TV3, and was accompanied by a considerable PR blitz prior to screening. The talent behind MR was, on the face of it, quite up to the task of making a half-hour sitcom, and locally produced comedy had always been received well despite its' faults. Thousands tuned in to watch the pilot...and when it was over, the sound of jaws dropping to the floor across the nation could be heard from space. Those thousands had witnessed something new: anti-comedy. Comedy utterly devoid of humour, pitched at the level of 4 year olds yet made for adults. The acting was terrible, too; someone should have realised that casting TV3 news anchor Belinda Todd, a woman who had (as far as anyone knew) never acted in any TV show before, as the show's lead was a bad mistake. But her dismally flat portrayal of single Mum Melody was basically the highlight amongst a cavalcade of amateurish and downright repulsive characterisations from the rest of the cast. These laughless grotesques were crammed into one tiny set for the entirety of the show's run. We occasionally saw the bedrooms of Melody and her family, but for 95% of the time they were crowded together in a lounge room set the size of a thimble that was so obviously fake it almost achieved Dadaist surrealism. And the comedy - oh dear Lord. TV3's laugh track machine had its' work cut out for it on this drossfest, as it gamely exploded with mirth at the hilarity-free banalities that tumbled from the lips of Melody and company. Most of the plots involved some stupid scheme to win a girl's love Melody's son had dreamed up, or the well-meaning silliness of Melody's chum (played by Alan Borough). The schemes were not humorous, the characters were not funny in themselves, and they *never left that damn lounge*. There was another character, a hideously filthy next door neighbour who had his own catchphrase. "Ya decent?!" he would bawl every week, entering the house Kramer-style with a load of fish or something equally vile-smelling. As signature phrases go, it makes 'Ohhhh Lucyyyyyyyyyy!' seem like a couplet by Ezra Pound.

I was a live sketch comedian at the time that MR was made, and met or worked with some of the people who worked on the series. Alan Borough, for example, compered a comedy competition my team entered around this time. From personal observation, I know that Borough and the others were capable of writing and performing good stuff. So, why MR turned out to be so unbelievably terrible is something of a mystery.

Part of the answer probably lies in the fact that a suicidally over confident TV3 commissioned two seasons of 22 episode apiece right at the start without having seen a frame of shot videotape. The makers promptly cranked out 44 half-hours as fast as they could. By the time the network realised they had created the worst comedy show since TV transmissions began in the late 1930s, it was too late. After a brief primetime run, MR was hauled off the air and TV3 tried to pretend it had never existed. In my student days, I fondly recall watching first-run episodes of MR, stripped two at a time, shown at 3 or 4 in the morning. I often wonder if they rated better then than they did in the early evening. Being college students, my pals and I would tape MR and watch it purely to make fun of it. Occasionally, though, I felt sad to realise that we knew we could *sneeze* better comedy than this show had produced, yet MR was the series that got the funding.

I am a lone voice in clamouring for a DVD release of all 44 episodes of Melody Rules. MR achieves a level of badness that even the worst American sitcom trash cannot even aspire to, and that sort of anti-brilliance is worth sharing with the world.

Celeb (2002– )

The worst British sitcom ever made

[21 December 2005]

Words cannot encapsulate the awfulness of Harry Enfield's sitcom 'Celeb'. To call it the worst British comedy series of all time is probably wrong, because a show this bad, this staggeringly unfunny, cannot rightly be called a comedy at all. Enfield plays a very poorly disguised Ozzie Osbourne, and the mercifully brief run of the series follows his 'zany' and 'madcap' misadventures in the world of rock and roll royalty. 'Celeb' has all the clichés...a dour butler, a sexy female lead, a dopey workshy son...and the total lack of anything approaching humour shows just why these clichés became clichés in the first place. Enfield, who has a modest amount of talent, totally blows his street cred here in his 'portrayal' of the Ozzie-clone rock god. Apparently, Enfield believes that all you need to do is yell every line at ear-splitting volume and make funny faces and the comedy will just work itself out. If this is so, he is sadly mistaken. The scripts are just *not funny*. There is no other way to describe them. In a mark of how desperate the people who made this televisual atrocity are to get people to watch it, they have the female lead dress in kinky outfits in almost every episode. I love T&A as much as the next man, but it's not enough. Oh, and she shouts a lot, too. The son doesn't shout much, but then that's a blessing. Most of the time, he seems embarrassed to be in the damn thing. There's a vague allusion to Posh and Becks in there amongst the rampant textual poaching from 'The Osbournes', but all this does is demonstrate that a fictional show about or press coverage of dimwit famous people is the only thing less watchable than a show about real ones.

Utter, utter garbage from a man who is capable of much better. If' there is a worse sitcom out there, I'd love to see it. Although I will admit that New Zealand's equivalent to Celeb, 'Melody Rules', exceeds Enfield's show in awfulness. This is because the company that made MR shot 44 episodes of it before anyone realised it was the worst TV show in history.

Avoid. Even if you love Enfield. AVOID.

Cleopatra (1963)

Mutilated potential classic

[7/10 · 13 December 2005]

Fritz Lang's Metropolis is rightly regarded as a classic, but many reviews make note of the 'illogical' story and bad character plotting. Characters come and go without rhyme or reason, and the plot makes no sense, they say. Well, yes, but that's not Fritiz's fault, nor the movie's; Metropolis makes little sense because 55 minutes of the film was hacked out and destroyed, never to be seen again, by the US distributors. Of course it's gonna be a dog's dinner with an hour missing, ya clods!!

The same is true of Cleopatra, and this is basically the only reason the film fell flat on its' 1963 release. It was originally intended to release Cleopatra as two three hour movies, the first dealing with Cleo's relationship with Caesar, the second her affairs with Marc Antony. Fox said no to this idea, and demanded a single four hour film instead. This decision is like taking Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy and removing an hour from each film wherever an hours' worth can be removed...a recipe for incoherence and total disaster.

So, with two hours of footage gone, major characters are reduced to glorified walk-ons, vital plot points and motivations are lost, and the story loses what LOTR has...length with the proper pacing. People will sit and watch 4 hours of Return Of The King because it flows properly. People will not sit and watch 4 hours of stitched together rough cuts...that's what Cleopatra is, even in the DVD roadshow edition...because what we have is something that is too bitty and haphzard to sustain interest.

But there is still glory in Cleo....Roddy McDowall, Martin Landau and Rex Harrison all act their socks off, the sea battle is kick ass, and Liz Taylor looks pretty scrummy in Egyptian softcore porn clothes. And only a Gen Xer like me could love that hideously pompous overblown dialogue.

Great film! For what it is. It just should have been TWO films, that's all. Real eyepopping trippy spectacle, done in a 'damn the money, full speed ahead' way that just doesn't happen any more. Like Casino Royale, Cleo is a wonderful disaster.

Depeche Mode: 101 (1989)

Definitely a product of its' time

[4/10 · 10 November 2005]

As a massive fan of DM, it goes without saying that I have seen this film numerous times. However, I watch it purely for the concert footage...the rest of the film is, um, pretty dreadful, sad to say.

Famed rock music film director DA Pennebaker followed Mode around on their late 80s Music For The Masses tour, which promoted the superb album of the same name. The title 101 derives mostly from the fact that the concert material included is from the 101st and final concert of the tour at the Pasadena Bowl, but is also a reference to the movie being a 'beginners course' on the band and how it ticks ie Depeche Mode 101. Amidst footage of the quartet playing live and exploring America is a second story thread covering a group of DM fans who've won a competition to meet the band, go on the tour in their own coach bus and attend the finale gig.

Now, as I said above, the concert footage is great. Mode are here on top of their form as stadium rock gods, which was a somewhat unusual achievement for an electrorock band back in the late 80s. Though the film catches the band before they recorded their 1990 masterpiece "Violator", there are still countless excellent tracks seen and heard here eg Behind The Wheel, the majestic Never Let Me Down Again, Everything Counts, Just Can't Get Enough from the Vince Clarke years, Shake The Disease and many more.

When Mode are onstage, they are brilliant. When they are not, they're, well, very boring. Nothing even vaguely of interest happens to the lads as they check out the US in the dying days of the Reagan administration. As an example, the probable "highlight" of the material is a visit to a country music store to buy cassettes. Not exactly thrilling stuff. I know all bands don't have to be wild and reckless idiots, but these guys make the Mormon Tabernacle Choir look like Rammstein.

The only real excitement comes from various clips centring on the band's lead singer Dave Gahan. Gahan comes across in 101 as being mildly psychotic, talking about a violent power inside himself he can't control, recalling a bizarre rage attack involving a taxi driver and so on. There's one point in the film where he throws a prima donna tantrum at some poor guy backstage - truly embarrassing. The man clearly had issues back then, which thankfully have been resolved. Songwriter Martin Gore and keyboardist Andy Fletcher are presented as very articulate, clearly massively talented, but also utterly colourless men; while the somewhat enigmatic fourth member Alan Wilder is the only one of the quartet who pulls off the rock star persona with any sort of aplomb.

And as for the 'fan tour' thread, well it's unwatchable dross. Let's not kid ourselves. Maybe it's just because it's all so *very* late 80s, but the gaggle of young devotees do little for me but raise a feeling of irritation. They are, to a person, singularly shallow and vapid people, whose antics are banal when they aren't hide-your-face cringeworthy. Let me reiterate....*nothing* happens in the footage that isn't onstage that is of any interest. Nothing. Endless scenes of kids spraying their hair, arguing pointlessly, changing their clothes, getting lost in cities on the way to gigs and finding their partners in bed with another competition winner makes me wonder just one thing - if Cure fans were this mind bendingly dull back in '88/89. The love the youngsters have for the band is something I can definitely relate to, and is at times infectiously joyous, but if what we see was the most interesting stuff out of what was filmed of them, then I'd hate to see the outtakes.

But the music is all that matters, and in this regard 101 excels. The Pasadena concert, one of their all time best gigs, makes the film worth seeing. The recent DVD edition of the movie comes with a bonus disc containing what remains of the unedited concert footage (a good 80% of the performance), and thus makes the DVD an absolute must for fans. The audio commentary by the band (minus Wilder, who left Mode in the mid-90s) on the first disc is also, oddly, far more interesting than the film itself.

As a document of the boys from Basildon during their amphitheatre idol period, Depeche Mode 101 is invaluable. But if you're looking for excitement, you're better off getting the accompanying double live album (now available in Super Audio CD format).

Marooned (1969)

Apollo 12.5?

[7/10 · 4 November 2005]

A movie very much of its' time, 'Marooned' earned a lot of unintentional resonance from the real life near disaster that was the Apollo XIII mission...the release of the film and the perilous journey of Lovell and company almost coinciding.

Many have labelled the film boring, drawn out. There is some justice in this view, but one has to realise that 'Marooned' is a product of its' time. 2001, released about the time Marooned went into production, set a new standard for the A-list sci fi movie that was to last until Star Wars in 1977. The emphasis in early 70s SF was on realism, and a 'police procedural' feel. 'Marooned' follows this formula precisely, with action chucked out the window in favour of nuts and bolts technical authenticity. The Andromeda Strain, which came out around the same time, is another example of the action-free talkathon SF movie that typified the period.

Gregory Peck does his usual solid best in the main role of the guy that's got to get the stricken Ironman One spacecraft and her crew safely back to Earth. There's not a hell of a lot for Peck to do other than glower in rooms and look at diagrams, but he does what he can with the dry material on offer in his standard professional manner. Gene Hackman, as one of the endangered astronauts, gives the liveliest and best performance in the movie, especially during the scenes when panic sets in aboard the capsule. James Franciscus also gives a great performance...he was a busy guy in those days, what with doing the Planet Of The Apes sequel and gearing up to play Longstreet as well as shooting 'Marooned', all within the space of about nine months.

The FX footage looks pretty dated today, but at the time it was more or less state of the art, and still looks quite passable.

One very unusual motif used in this movie that appeals to me on an odd level is the way a resonant, droning electronic tone plays during every second of the FX footage. As a way of conveying the soundlessness of space, it's oddly effective. Probably annoys everyone else who's seen the film, though. :)

Yes, 'Marooned' is too long, yes it's dry, yes the acting is often wooden; but if you like your science fiction plausible then this is a fine movie. It's certainly not a *bad* film in any sense, and IMHO not at all boring. It's no 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'...what is...but it's still a good early 70s sci fi flick in my book.

Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Bore-gy Of The Dead

[1/10 · 17 October 2005]

For once, I've decided not to click the spoiler warning box, because there is nothing to spoil in this movie! A must-see for any fans of Edward D Wood Jr, this....remarkable...softcore striptease movie reaches new heights of what I like to call 'ultra-boredom'.

I don't believe it's impossible to have a plot in a porn film...mainly because it isn't...but Orgy Of The Dead managed to fall between both stools. It has no plot, and there is no porn! Not really. What we see on screen for the majority of the flick...an even dozen very listless horror-themed striptease burlesque acts, performed by a bevy of well-endowed but uninvolved-looking women...is about as erotic as a documentary on the construction of the Suez Canal. There's whipping, there's lots and lots of boobs being shaken, but unless you're an insane breast fetishist or a HUGE burlesque fan, anyone hoping to get a thrill outta this stuff is in for a letdown. This film is BORING, folks. This film brings new meaning to TEDIOUS! The stripping's not kinky or explicit enough to be titillating, and each strip goes for way too long. The music that accompanies it is...well, actually, quite humorously bad.

But! Lame as the stripping is, there is just enough Wood magic to keep da boat afloat. The angstrom-thin plot sees a wooden WASP couple being taken prisoner by ghouls after a car breakdown and forced to watch the above-mentioned strip n whip marathon. Inbetween acts, and sometimes during them, we get the 60s equivalent of DVD commentary, provided on screen by Ed's old pal Criswell. Cris, as the 'Emperor', presides over the festivities, reading his lines off cue cards in his inimitable shouting pseudo-Shatner-on-LSD style. "A pussy cat was born to be whipped!" is but one of his profoundly insightful comments. Criswell is DA MAN in this movie, proving with his 'performance' that you don't need to smoke wicked pot to act completely stoned. Cris's sidekick, a buxom pale-skinned Vampira clone dressed in what would come to be known (by everyone except Vampira and her lawyers) as "Elvira gear", also chips in with droll asides now and then. We cut to our tied-up 'heroes', the WASP couple, now and then, to learn how scared the woman is and how determined the man is to get away somehow. The stripping continues. There's some gold coins. Then more gold coins. Criswell laughs and calls for yet more gold coins. We cut to more stripping. Vampira Clone pouts and purrs a line while thrusting her Valles Marineris-deep cleavage outwards as far as she can. (Bless her.) Then a mummy and a werewolf come on and do a bizarre comedy double act that goes nowhere. Then there's a snake. Then more stripping, then OH MY BRAIN HURTS.

Ed Wood, now well into the alcoholic spiral that would kill him in 1978, scripted this megaturkey for his pal Stephen Apostolof to direct, garnering about 600 bucks for the sale of the story. Apostolof (billed in the credits in very cryptic fashion as "AC Stephen") seems to have taken tips on direction from Ed here, as can be witnessed in the initial car ride sequence. True to Plan 9, day and night freely interchange about four times during the course of one scene. Once our heroes are captured, we never move from the one 'spooky' forest set...there's plenty of fog, plenty of trees, plenty of Criswell shouting, plenty of female toplessness, but no actual motion of plot whatsoever. The film's not very long, maybe 70 minutes tops, but seems to make the 15-hour-plus Paris Alexanderplatz look fast-paced.

This movie is bad bad bad, but as the final collaboration between Ed and the world's most inaccurate TV psychic (Cris, of course), this is unmissable. As many other people have noticed, Cris and his busty assistant bear an odd resemblance to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky...a good deal of humour can be gained from taking the duo's on screen comments out of context in a "Bill and Lew" way.

One final note - "Monica" is by far the sexiest woman in the movie, and yet is the only one that doesn't take any of her clothes off. This seems deeply wrong to me, and probably killed the film's only chance of being even vaguely erotic.

This is trash, but it's Ed Wood trash (even if he didn't direct it)...and what's more, it's about the easiest 60s Wood trash movie to find, so go ahead and see it. Some great Woodian moments amongst the ultra-boredom. Too cheerful to be offensive, yet too tame to be arousing. More fun than you'd think, if you approach it with the right mind....or lack thereof. Criswell rules!

Monster a Go-Go (1965)

A multi-layered, compelling sci fi horror masterpiece

[1/10 · 9 October 2005]

OK, I lied to get your attention. This is the worst film ever made.

Now, I loved Manos: The Hands Of Fate, and I love Monster A Go-Go just as much. I really do. Why? Because films that are this bad, this...this STAGGERINGLY AWFUL...have a kind of transcendent Zen brilliance to them that I cannot put into words. I find myself wondering just what deep message the director was trying to express with movies this inept....something this strange HAS to have a meaning, I think to myself. No-one sets out to make a film this bad on purpose, do they?! In many ways, Z-graders are an insight into the drives and obsessions of their creators more than anything else.

I would rather watch this movie and Manos, and Red Zone Cuba 40 times than see True Lies twice - for the reason that there is nothing funny about a talented guy making a lousy picture, but there is something endlessly amusing and compelling about a determined bargain basement incompetent cranking out a 70-minute nightmare believing it to be a work of genius. And M.A.G-G is the king of those bombs.

So, why does Monster A Go-Go even exist? Well, it almost didn't. Bill Rebane, who would go on to pit Steve Brodie and Alan Hale Jr against a killer Muppet in The Giant Spider Invasion, started a sci fi horror flick called Terror At Halfday in the early 60s. The money ran out, and Rebane shelved the project. Then along came schlock legend Herschell Lewis, in need of a cheap B-picture to fill out the bottom half of a double bill deal. He snapped up Rebane's footage, shot some of his own, added a voice-over, changed the title, and BINGO thus was Monster A Go-Go unleashed on the filmgoing world in the space year 1965.

Just how much extra material Lewis filmed to 'complete' this cinematic train-wreck is open to dispute, though the addition of the almost totally pointless 'go-go dancing sequence' about halfway in (some groovy guys and gals lamely doing the Twist) and the irritatingly strident voice-over narration are dead certs. What is for certain here, though, is the released picture is about as incoherent and illogical as any film could ever be and still be called anything but 'rough cuts stuck together with sellotape'.

The plot? Oh Lordy, the plot. OK (deep breath) Astronaut Frank Douglas, who was apparently sent into space to investigate mysterious satellites, crash-lands in some woods and promptly goes on a homicidal rampage. Investigators from NASA or the Air Force or the Lions Club, I dunno, look into the mystery; and, as the movie progresses and the body count mounts we discover not just one but TWO conspiracies at work here! It is revealed that Frank has been mutated, increased to ten feet in height *and* sent into a murderous rage by an experimental radiation repellent given to him before the launch. Just as we are recovering from this JFK-like cover-up of the truth, the plot moves forward eight weeks - the murders have stopped. But where is Douglas? It turns out that the inventor of the mutagenic rad-repellent captured him and has been keeping him bundled up in his lab, feeding him over those weeks an antidote to the repellent to keep him docile. Then....boom, more plot twist action: the antidote wears off faster and faster every time it is applied, and each successive relapse into the killer rage is worse! Douglas finally murders his way to freedom, and heads for the big city to go hide in a disused sewer tunnel. The army and Civil Defence move in to tackle the shuffling radioactive lumpy-faced (and very tall) space-crazed giant, only to discover the film's third and final twist....

To list Monster A Go-Go's flaws would be to detail every second of the flick, so we'll go into specifics. My favourites are: the way half the cast vanish at the midpoint, only to be replaced by characters that are virtually identical. The incredibly muffled soundtrack. The bit where Dr Logan's glasses teleport onto his face in-between shots. The insanity of said Dr Logan's hiding of the Douglas monster, after it had killed at least six people, only to make it worse with an antidote that Logan already knew was harmful. The bafflingly surreal 'car breakdown/sweaty rude trucker kiss-seduction' sequence. The Fisher-Price Gemini space capsule Douglas came down in, which is about four feet high. The army goons who open fire at Douglas after the narration tells us the army has orders not to harm him. The absent music track when a character asks if his dining companion remembers 'that song'. The equally non-extant phone ring cue which is represented by someone going 'brrrr' off-screen. The house that has a front doorway but no door to go in it. The lack of any relevance to the 'Go-Go' part of the title. The thrilling monster attack on Logan's lab that we are...told about in narration. The way USAF colonels travel round in unmarked Buicks that go at 60 mph in reverse. The way the same black Plymouth shows up driven by four or five different characters. The opening line of the aforementioned narration that says that the events about to seen in the movie 'may not even be possible!'. The way the plot makes absolutely no sense at all. The almost total absence of the title's monster. And, of course...the ENDING. Or rather, the STOP. I cannot spoil this for you, folks, you have to experience the STOP yourself.

See this movie. You must, you must. If only to understand what Messrs Rebane and Lewis were trying to say...for my money, what they were trying to say was 'We have no idea what we're doing'. Gloriously, mind shatteringly awful. Absolute Z-grade gold. Worst movie of all time. Makes The Creeping Terror look...well, not as bad.

Street Fighter (1994)

Beyond terrible, but redeemed by three aspects

[1/10 · 3 October 2005]

Street Fighter: The Movie (why call it 'The Movie'? Isn't it obvious that is IS a movie?) is obviously horrible, but there are three things in its' favour.

1) It's better than the Double Dragon movie

2) Raul Julia, as the sinister M. Bison, showing everyone else in this film how a real actor acts...the fact that he was quite literally dying during the shoot only shows how great Julia truly was. 2a) Bison calling his planned super-city 'Bisonopolis' was an inspired decision. I would like to live in a city called that, just so I could write it on the SENDER ADDRESS box on the back of envelopes. "Jeff Stone, 43 Sagat Lane, Bisonopolis, New Zealand."

3) Kylie Minogue running round in a skintight leotard.

Otherwise this is one of the worst films of all time. Not as bad as Spy Kids, Get Shorty or DC 9/11: Time Of Crisis, but then what is?

Stephen E. DeSouza had a lot to do with this flick...De Souza also worked on the utterly atrocious 70s TV series The Gemini Man. Need I say more.

Did I mention Kylie Minogue runs round in a leotard? Oh, I did. I know this isn't a serious review, but a film this bad doesn't deserve to be taken seriously for a moment. Noisy, stupid, fun. That's all. And perhaps the weirdest swansong for a world-class actor since Bela Lugosi's posthumous cameo in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Genesis II (1973 TV Movie)

You should've added chimps, Gene

[5/10 · 26 September 2005]

Legend has it that ABC TV asked Gene Roddenberry if he'd mind very much putting an ape of some sort into his TV series Genesis II. Apes were very popular at that time, of course...these were the days when a new Planet Of The Apes movie came out every ten seconds. Gene told them where they could stick their apes, and so the network cancelled the proposed 13-episode trial run for Genesis II and made...Planet Of The Apes: The Series instead. And what a triumph that was.

Whether that's true or not, the fact is that ABC goofed in pulling the plug on Genesis II after the pilot movie...because of the three goes at the idea made by ABC and others, this is by far the best one. Our hero, Twentieth Century native Dylan Hunt, wakes up after a cryogenic snooze of umpteen decades to find himself in a bizarre post-holocaust world. Underground cities linked by "sub-shuttle" tube trains are host to various stratified castes of Humanity...some with two navels!

Roddenberry was never a man to do deft satire when a clunkingly obvious allegorical piece would do, and here we have a classic example. Genesis II plays like an episode of Classic Trek without Spock and company, only with a somewhat higher budget. The story's pretty terrible, as is most of the dialogue, but there's enough giddy 70s frills to make it worth watching. Trek vets Ted Cassidy, Mariette Hartley and Majel Barrett (Nepotism? What's that?) are along for the ride with our hero, played by Alex Cord. Cord's no great shakes acting wise, but he does the hero bit well enough.

There was definite potential for a series here...a series which would've lasted about as long as Planet Of The Apes did, admittedly ...so it's a great pity the promising potential of the pilot was never followed up.

The two remakes of the concept which followed, Planet Earth and Strange New World (both starring John Saxon as our modern day Rip Van Winkle), were so bad they defy description. Glen Larson lifted more than a wee bit of Gene's ideas when he presented Buck Rogers for the small screen 8 years later...and finally, more than two decades after GII was shot, the idea became a series in the form of the rather derivative Andromeda.

Of all of Gene's 70s pilots, The Questor Tapes was probably the one that deserved to be a weekly show the most, but Genesis II comes a close second. Bot brilliant, but certainly good enough to be worth 13 or 14 more episodes.

Why this is not available on DVD or VHS baffles me...hell, none of the Gene pilots are. Planet Earth is shown on TV here very rarely...it's appalling, but at least it's rerun now and then. All I can remember of GII are fragments from the NZ broadcast when I was about 4 years old. Surely every Trekkie worth his phaser would snap these pilots up on DVD? Hell, I'd even watch Planet Earth again...something I vowed never to do...if it came out on disc.

The War of the Worlds (2005 Video)

Astoundingly awful

[1/10 · 16 September 2005]

Like many WOTW fans, I was very happy to hear that someone was going to do a faithful adaption of Wells' greatest novel in competition to Spielberg's remake of the 1953 film...at last, the story as it was meant to be told, I thought to myself.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and how mistaken I was. In the end, Steve's War was actually pretty good...whereas Tim Hines' 'faithful' movie turned out to be one of the worst motion pictures ever made.

Where to begin? There is so much that is wrong wrong WRONG about Hines' War. There's the acting, which never gets above intermediate school play level. There's the 'special effects to rival The Matrix' we were promised, which were revealed to be at Plan 9 From Outer Space level. Behold the fearsome Martian tripods, which look like noodle sculptures! Not once are they matte'd properly into the live action. Marvel at the scene where a woman is squished by a tripod leg, in which we see a real person turn into a flattened prune...perhaps the worst CG effect ever seen in a movie! Faint at the climactic battle between the noodle-tripods and the warship 'Thunder Chld', where we see what appears to be a canoe with a funnel often moving *sideways* through the water! Goggle at the computer-realised horses, which all look identical, gallop in an identical fashion, and glide a few inches above the ground! Wince at the deformed gingerbread cookie aliens, who are about as realistic and scary as Spongebob Squarepants! Cry bitterly during the moment where our hero takes his wife stargazing in the middle of the afternoon, as bright sunlight streams down on the grass and trees from a blue and orange 'night sky' composed of giant paint splashes! And on and on and on...

There's the fact that Hines simply *cannot direct*, that his editor *cannot edit*. Shots are framed poorly if they are framed at all; the camera is often pointed at something that is not the subject of the shot. Interminably long stretches of the film consist solely of people walking somewhere. The prose of the book is transferred directly into dialogue without change, no matter how inappropriate or clunky it sounds coming out of someone's lips.

There's the fact that this high school video project-standard travesty runs for THREE HOURS. It feels more like seven. There's the way that you never, not for one second, believe you are looking at events taking place anywhere other than in modern day Seattle or paddocks outside of modern day Seattle. The budget was supposedly twenty million dollars. If it was in truth higher than twenty *thousand*, I'd be very surprised.

One has to wonder what the company that produced it, Pendragon Pictures (ever heard of them? Nah, me neither), thought they were doing here. Making a spoof, perhaps? That's the only explanation I can think of, because to imagine that this glorified home video could have any sort of theatrical release is to travel into the realms of the insane, the hopelessly naive, or the heavily medicated. I mean, heck, Manos: The Hands Of Fate is more fun to watch. It is THAT BAD, people!

Some viewers had commented upon supposed homoerotic and anti-Semitic aspects to the film. I saw absolutely no evidence of the latter; and while there are some scenes that are a bit 'Village People' in tone (the hero spends quite a lot of time with his shirt off tussling feebly with other men), I fail to see why this should matter at all. Look at Lord Of The Rings; plenty of very intense male bonding there, and that's a masterpiece. Trust me; implied gay subtexts are not one of this movie's "problems". It has plenty of *actual* ones, thank you very much.

I cannot overstate how bad Hines' War is, nor can I express my disappointment at such a monumentally botched opportunity. My last hope for a proper telling of Wells' tale now lies in Jeff Wayne's CG-animated movie. At least I know that will have good music. Hines' appalling disaster didn't even have *that*.

The Thing (1982)

Superior to the original - Carpenter's best movie, hands down

[10/10 · 15 September 2005]

I find it quite remarkable that Christian Nyby's The Thing From Another World (1951) is always held up as an all-time towering sci fi classic, yet when viewed against John Carpenter's 1982 'remake' it is blatantly clear which version has the edge...and how *bad* the 51 movie actually is. I saw Carpenter's movie long before I saw Nyby's, so maybe that is why I'm biased towards the former, but let's face it, people, the original film is stagy, badly acted and horribly overrated. On the other hand, Carpenter's film is edgy, paranoid, brilliantly shot and perfectly performed. I'm not being paid to say this, my friends; like Mr Tarantino, I freakin' LOVE this movie.

I suppose it helps that Carpenter actually chose to do an adaption of the source novella, Who Goes There?...Nyby's movie is really nothing like the book at all. William Campbell's often tripped-out 1938 story has been translated by Carpenter into an artifact of its' early 80s era. That is to say, plenty of gore, post-Watergate world-weary 'heroes' who react instinctively rather than earnestly, and a distinct lack of hope. One might almost call it the welcome antidote to the mawkish saccharine (another and wholly opposite facet of the early Reagan era) that was The Thing's box office opponent, ET.

Carpenter in The Thing is light years from the rubbish he'd trot out after his last truly great movie, Prince Of Darkness (though In The Mouth Of Madness was a rare return to form amidst some truly lousy movies from Mr C). Here, he's the youthful, edgy, guerilla filmmaker with a touch of stoned poetry that made him the cult icon he is today. The direction is sparse but deft, showing great economy of movement and some of the best examples of 'directing lots of people in a tight space' work I have ever seen. Carpenter knows when to not direct and just let scenes play - he makes you think you are watching a tape of true events at times, just as our heroes do at one point in the story.

And it's genuinely *scary*, too. Our scruffy band of Antarctic outpost scientist heroes are confronted by and trapped with a defrosted alien menace that can imitate any life form it encounters...and imitate it so perfectly that it seems that even the duplicates don't know they're duplicates. Our characters are forced into a nightmare where paranoia is actually a virtue, where you can literally trust no-one. There's one thing the creature wants, and that is to reach a populated area and begin an infection that could swamp the entire human race in just 27,000 hours....

The oft-mentioned gore is pretty extreme, and there are numerous examples of sheer gross-out body horror. The most famous example has to be *that* bit with the defibrillator paddles- oh God, that bit made me jump out of my skin the first time I saw it. Leonard Maltin might claim that the 'non-stop parade of icky effects' are off-putting, but the grossness of the effects is the *whole point*, Lenny! This creature literally devours a victim, absorbs its' DNA and changes into the victim! To show this process as anything other than flat-out crunch-and-splatter would be..well, silly.

Kurt Russell gives the performance of his career here as our hero, Macready; a shaggy-haired, alcoholic, sombrero-wearing chopper pilot who's the only one of our isolated protagonists who realises the truth -that survival is all that matters - in time to save himself. But that's not to say that the rest of the cast are slackers; each of the other 11-odd people in the all-male cast are top-notch. Wilford Brimley excels as the doomladen Blair, Keith David's his usual great self, and a nicely cast-against-type Donald Moffatt (remember him from Logan's Run: The Series?) gets the film's best line when he's tied to a chair.

And who can go past Ennio Morricone's music? It's one of his last scores, and one of his best...a moody, pulsating collection of mainly bass tones that serves the same function as Bernard Herrman's slashing strings in Psycho - to heighten the palpable sense of unavoidable doom.

There is literally NOTHING wrong with this movie, folks. Not a single false step in the whole flick - even the so-called 'cop-out' ending is perfect. It is up there with Alien and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers '78 as one of the three best sci fi horror movies of all time. Forget the RKO original, because it really is not very good at all. THIS, though, this is the stuff.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

The 1st Review Of Kill Bill By Jeff Stone

[14 April 2004]

Contains spoilers

"A triumph of style over substance" is a well-worn cliche in filmdom, but it sums up Kill Bill Vol. 1 perfectly. On the face of it, this is a beautifully directed, hyper-kinetic action movie...but look even slightly below the surface and you begin to see the many cracks in the mask. The first thing that struck me about the movie was the declaration in the credits that this was 'The 4th Film By Quentin Tarantino'. My immediate response was: "Yes it is...so what? Why it is necessary to point this out?" My second response was: "It's not the 4th film by Tarantino, it's the *first half* of the 4th film." The declaration might be a good way to sell the movie in a trailer or on a lobby poster, but to actually use it in the *opening credits* is probably the most repugnant example of a director's self-love I have ever experienced. OK, onto the specifics of the movie. As I said, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is fantastically directed, and ranks as Tarantino's finest effort in this field. The mixture of media (anime and live action) is inspired, if hardly original - Oliver Stone, for example, used it in Natural Born Killers, the original screenplay of which Tarantino wrote. The pace never flags, and the shifting timescale is handled as deflty as it was in Pulp Fiction. (Still not sure the voiceovers were necessary, though). The movie strikes me as a sort of Tarantuino Greatest Hits compilation. That's what ultimately sinks Kill Bill, folks. It's completely unoriginal. The plot is wafer thin, if not non-existent. One might argue that the 'revenge flick' genre, of which this movie is definitely an example, needs no plot, but that's just a cop-out. We've seen so many takes on this idea that anyone attempting to do it these days has to bring something new to the table. And for all its' undeniable visual artistry, Tarantino just gives us the same old stuff again. Oh, but it's a tribute to grindhouse 70s cinema, you might say. Indeed; but what Tarantino and many other people seem to have conveniently forgotten is that 95% of those movies were *terrible*. Uma Thurman is very good as The Bride...why her name is bleeped out on the two or three occasions it is used is just one of the bafflingly pointless touches in the flick...and acquits herself excellently in the battle scenes. Sadly, however, most of the dialogue she and everyone else is given to say is ghastly, clunky nonsense. The dialogue is like the film as a whole...you are constantly being told that you are watching a spoof or 'homage', and if a movie has to do that to convince you it's just kidding, then you're in trouble. The plot, such as it is, has numerous plotholes, most of which concern The Bride. How does she manage to evade capture or even police attention for her numerous murders? Where does she get the money from to buy plane tickets and hire(?) motorbikes? Why does she need to draw up a death list for herself comprising only five people; five people she knows intimately and will never forget?!! Guest star Sonny Chiba, of the classic 70s Street Fighter series, is the definite highlight acting-wise. Chiba plays master sword maker Hanzo Hattori with great dignity, tempered with humour (his argument with his assistant is very funny)...I get the feeling he hasn't been given the chance to play such a nicely shaded role too often. The other major star in the movie, Lucy Liu (as Oren Ishii) is at the other end of the scale. Liu is, I'm sorry, folks, as completely wooden here as she is in every other film she's done. And it doesn't help that her hugely distracting lazy eye turns every close-up she's given into an unintentional visual joke. The film also has a very peculiar schizophrenic attitude to the Japanese, also...one moment it treats Japanese culture with reverence and respect, and the next it's depicting the people of that country as babbling, incompetent idiots who can't fight to (literally) save their lives. The biggest joke of the movie comes at the end, when, after The Bride has wiped out 60 or 70 Yakusa killers single-handed, Liu comments that The Bride 'cannot fight like a samurai'. Beg your pardon? The final battle between Oren and The Bride is also hugely anti-climactic, and largely consists of the two women staring at each other. Other points to close with. 1) Has no-one in this movie outside of the anime sequence heard of an invention called the gun? 2) If you're going to blatantly steal the torrential blood sprays from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Quentin, at least have the courtesy to show a character saying "Ni!" or 'Tis but a flesh wound' at some stage. Ridiculous. 3) The all-female Japanese rockabilly band, the 5678s, that feature during the Yakusa battle, must've been chosen by Tarantino because they were the single worst exponents of their art on the planet. 4) The only reason The Bride rides a motorbike in the Tokyo sequence is so Tarantino can put her in yellow bike leathers and thus poach some glory from Bruce Lee's unfinished masterwork Game Of Death. 5) The trailers and lobby art slogans proclaim that in 2003, Uma Thurman will kill Bill. Er, she doesn't even come close to Bill in Vol. 1. I think you should've been honest and said that she'll do the deed in *2004*. Well, I'll be keen to see Volume 2, if only to see the rest of what should've been one movie. Despite what I've said, this was a good popcorn flick that starts off as a slickly-edited collision of Reservoir Dogs' blood and and Pulp Fiction's episodic structure and turns into idiotic crud only in the third act. A hugely derivative, obnoxiously smug, clunkily written, occasionally pretentious movie, but good all the same.

The Creeping Terror (1964 TV Movie)

Hands down, THE worst motion picture of all time - I loved it!

[11 April 2004]

There are some movies that insult your intelligence, that present you with inane dialogue, bad direction, non-existent plots, and sloppy acting. Some movies contain one or more of these factors...some contain all of them in varying degrees. But in The Creeping Terror, each factor is included and ramped up to a Spinal Tap 11. The Creeping Terror is the worst movie I have ever seen. It takes badness to a level I had previously thought unattainable. Motion pictures of this anti-calibre (Manos: The Hands Of Fate is another example, and even THAT is better than this ultra-turkey) are so mind-bendingly awful they achieve a kind of transcendent brilliance that is impossible to describe in words. It takes real effort to make a movie this bad, folks. Anyway, the 'plot'. Reversed stock footage of an ICBM or Mercury rocket crashlands in Angel County, California, and disgorges a hideous man-eating creature that resembles a squashed fish finger with a camo print bridal train. The pantomime meance crawls with painful slowness about the countryside, killing people by somehow encouraging them to not run away and actually force themselves into its' bottomless gullet. As the alien snacks on the populace, the government tries to keep the threat under wraps, while assigning a scientist who is younger than one might think, an army commander with a troop of six men and a newly-wed deputy sheriff to combat the invasion. Legend has it that most (if not all) of the soundtrack of The Creeping Terror was lost after shooting was completed, and if this is true, then the loss was a truly inspired accident. In the place of 99% of the dialogue, we get *incredibly* earnest narration. Narration that swerves giddily off-topic at any moment, mind you. For instance, in the midst of the non-action, the voiceover guy and the movie stop to deliver a bizarre homily on the virtues of marriage. This is accompanied by a scene where the deputy and his new bride make out like demons in front of the former's pal. Creepy is an apt word, especially with a title like this movie has. Voiceover Guy keeps you amused as the flick staggers through its' short-but-interminable duration, detailing what our heroes are discussing as they mouth the words. Some events that need explanation are not narrated, others that do not are. There's no pattern to the use of voiceiver, any more than there is a pattern to the plot. But it gets worse. Who can go past the thermometer scene, in which a soon-to-be-eaten mother takes her baby's temperature THAT way? Thankfully, the act is implied rather than shown, but one must wonder what the scriptwriter was thinking...or on...when he wrote that part. 50s and 60s monster flicks always have some sort of sexual moral on show, and Terror is no exception. Most of the carpet monster's victims are eaten while they're necking. Or dancing. Yes, the hysterically drawn-out jive dance massacre near the end of the film (which comes complete with irrelevant greaser fistfight) shows us clearly that if you're going to boogie on down to the devil's music in the mid-60s, you should fully expect to be consumed by a panto slug from Venus. There are so many fantastically awful bits in the movie I could mention...the death of Fat Grandpa, the anti-tree rage attack said fat person's grandson has shortly before the slaying, the tootling music that replaces sound for most of the movie's last third, the scenes where the army guys pretend to fire their toy guns at the alien...and the truly demented scene where the deputy sheriff ineffectually beats the control panels of the UFO with his gun...and later a steel pipe... for an uninterrupted two minutes without the slightest success. The concluding narration, where Dr Bradford's hope for the future of Humanity is detailed by the narrator, rivals or beats any of the crazy speeches in the films of Russ Meyer or Ed Wood. Students of fetishism may see some significance in the way the director lingers on shots of female legs sticking out of the alien's mouth. Demented beyond words, this is a Grade AAAA+ ultrabomb that makes Plan From Outer Space look like Dawn Of The Dead. Lovers of bad cinema must see it! There is NO film worse, trust me. Oh, and I must add that the deputy sheriff's wife's exceptional beauty makes me wonder why *this* was the best movie she could manage to get signed on for.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

Come on, guys...it's not THAT bad

[4 January 2003]

Let me state up front that, in my opinion, Battlefield Earth is not repeat NOT a good movie - but neither is it nearly as bad as many think it is. Looking at reviews in the newspaper, magazines and even here on IMDB, someone who had not seen the movie would be forgiven for thinking that BE is the single worst motion picture of all time. It is NOT. BE suffered from the most blatantly prejudiced pre-release smear campaign I have ever experienced. Almost as soon as principal photography had begun, people were crowing that it was an absolute all time stinker. Hey, that's really fair. 99% of the vitriol poured on BE, at least prior to the release, was based entirely on the fact that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote the source novel. One might argue that having this as the reason for deciding a film sucks makes as much sense as panning a newly-discovered Wagner symphony, because Wagner was a raving anti-Semite. I challenge anyone to find a single instance of Scientology propaganda in Battlefield Earth - the movie, that is - apart from the name 'Psychlo'. The fact of the matter, folks, is that it is not a Church recruitment movie, but simply a botched attempt at doing a pulp SF epic.

Let's take a look at the movie itself, trying for a moment to forget Hubbard had anything to do with it. And what do we have? We have a badly paced, poorly acted, *atrociously* plotted mess of a film

that is, quite frankly, an insult to the novel more than anything. Say what you like about Hubbard (and many have)...the truth is that almost all of the gaping plotholes in the movie are *not* in the book. What sinks Battlefield Earth? The casting, for one....Barry Pepper is simply terrible as the hero Jonnie Tyler. Far too weedy and diminuitive to be credible as a rabble-rousing hero, Pepper wanders through the movie snorting and pouting and rasping out sub-Braveheart 'call to arms' speeches that ring false at every turn. None of the other humans are any better, mind you. John Tavolta's performance as alien bad guy Terl is about the only thing that makes BE worth seeing. Gleefully OTT, he is infinitely more likable than Tyler - this was the case in the book as well, I should add. Nobody likes a sickeningly perfect hero like Tyler...we're all cheering for the rascally villain! Well, we don't in BE, but that's not Travolta's fault. Forest Whitaker turns in a suprisingly average performance as Terl's sidekick Ker...nuff said. Let's get to the crux of the matter, though....the plot. BE was written by first timers who apparently had less experience in penning good scripts than the poor people who shot Scientology films under Hubbard's frenzied direction in the late 1970s. There are plotholes large enough to fly a Pyschlo gas drone through everywhere - I'll list just a few. 1) Our caveman heroes not only find 1000-year old Harrier jumpjets that are still airworthy, they also learn to fly them in SEVEN DAYS using only one flight simulator. 2) Over this millennia, the Pyschlos, who prize gold above all metals, have strangely not bothered to check Fort Knox...inside of which Jonnie and company find thousands of bars of the yellow stuff. That was handy. 3) The method by which the humans destroy the planet Psychlo is so amazingly easy, it makes my brain bleed wondering why no other race has ever tried it before. There are lots of other things that destroy any chance this movie had of being even vaguely good...the baffling decision to shoot 90% of the footage in Dutch angle (slanted shots...think the Batman TV show), the numerous and almost sacriligeous deviations from Hubbard's book (one would think Hubbard's every word was Holy Writ, given that his Church oversaw production at every step) that cause plot problems that didn't need to exist...the enfuriating way that the story, already rushing to get finished in only 2 hours, stops every now and then for utterly pointless padding scenes (the sequence where Terl finds out what humans like to eat is the main offendor there)...the wide variation in FX quality from excellent to bloody terrible...and so on. Oh, BE is bad alright, it's ghastly - but it is not THAT bad. There are far worse movies out there that got none or very little of the bad press BE received. Spy Kids, for example, is one of the most peurile, plotless, intelligence-insulting loads of drivel in film history...yet it was a hit! SK makes BE look like Ben Hur. Battlefield Earth is hugely enjoyable as a cult anti-classic, and for that reason alone it is worth seeing. An object lesson in how NOT to make a science fiction epic.

They're making an animated series of it?!!! WHY?!!!

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

Whuh? (aka the Son of Lost Highway)

[12 December 2002]

I knew next to nothing about the Mothman case until fairly recently, and I was lucky to be able to read the book by John Keel before seeing the film. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much...the book is fatally disjointed, rambling, scientifically inaccurate (my favourite bit is where Keel sneers at the idea of there being planets around other stars), and...well...it seemed very strange to me that UFOs could buzz this town for months on end, as Keel makes clear, without anyone taking photographs of, or filming, a single one. Keel's other writings on flying saucers are, to put it mildly, X Files nonsense...tales of secret alien bases in Nevada, a war between Uncle Sam and the Greys etc etc. But, from the other books I have read, it was clear that *something* very strange had happened in Point Pleasant West Va. in 1966/7, so I decided to give the film a go.

And...well, it's a mixed bag. The Mothman Prophecies plays like David Lynch on an off day ie it has the concentrated, almost autistic strangeness of a Lynch movie but it lacks the coherent inner logic that even the strangest Lynchian moment possesses [There are many shots on the movie that are in fact clearly ripped off Lynch's Lost Highway]. What we get is ambiguity in spades, lots of very artsy direction, and a story that starts out telling us nothing and ends up telling us...not a great deal more.

This is the problem, you see - the film is based on 'true events', but you can't come straight out and say 'alien moth people turned up in this town and warned folks about a coming disaster' because you CAN'T BACK THAT UP. So, the director is forced to show us lots of strange things taking place without giving us any clear idea as to what is going on. With that said, the story delivers more information than some viewers might think and have claimed here...but again, said info is all so hazy and snowed under by flash cuts, wobbling Se7en-esque superimpositions and Metal Machine Music sound dubs that the point gets lost. One feels fuzzy-headed after seeing this flick, for sure.

Richard Gere, who for some reason reminded me of Harrison Ford in this film, underplays the central role of John Klein (Keel) to good effect. The sort of movies he's known for tend to inspire little but contempt in me, so it was good to see him tackle a new genre. Will Patton is excellent as the tormented contactee Gordon, while Laura Linney is...flat as the sympathetic town cop. The film can never decide whether it's a tale of lost love and emotional redemption or a flat psych-horror, with the result that the intended emotional weight is either submerged or knocked out of the frame completely.

We never see the Mothman. So? We never saw the Blair Witch either. What you don't see is far scarier than what you do...an elementary lesson that Robert Wise learnt in The Haunting but has passed most directors since him by. It would have been nice to see even a small glimpse of the creature, sure, but given that no-one (not us, not the cast) ever find out what really happened, the lack of an 'enemy' is actually quite fitting. One's mind fills in the blanks for something that would always have been grosly disappointing had it been shown, I think. For my part, the scene where enitity Indrid Cold talks to Klein on his hotel phone (the scene was stolen wholesale from Lost Highway as well, btw) is far scarier than a barnful of slavering mothmen onscreen.

Where were the UFOs that were so prominently featured in the book? Well, you can watch a deleted scene on the DVD where the cast look at some lights in the sky we are never shown, but other than that, sorry folks. So, mothmen are OK to talk about in this movie, but not flying saucers?! Perhaps the director was afraid if he explored the UFO angle, people would dismiss the film as a Scully and Doggett rip-off. Too late!

Ah, but strangely absent factors are so typical of this movie...the director has nothing to show us but smoke and mirrors. Pellington has talent, and not a small amount of it, but classy photography and sheer chutzpah can't carry a story with so little flesh to it.

One extra point for the dramatic and very well directed disaster scene at the end...I won't spoil it, but that part was very VERY well done. In fact, the whole film is beautifully made...but like an Easter egg, there's nothing under the shell. Still, I liked it.

So, if you dug Arlington Road, see this movie. If you love films that are all style and no substance, see this movie. If you liked Lost Highway, you've *already seen* this movie.

One point *off* for the making of featurettes on the DVD, in which the director pontificates with truly breathtaking pretentiousness about all manner of things, some of which are to do with the movie. You'd think he could have at least shaved for the opening scene, for the love of Mike.

Casino Royale (1967)

A delirious folly

[6 December 2002]

Casino Royale cannot be explained, merely experienced. Long derided as an incoherent mess, the story of how the movie became what it was is (if anything) more interesting than the film itself. Columbia acquired the rights to Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel partly because Eon Films decided that the book had no potential as a Sean Connery action thriller. Once the property was secured, plans were made to make it as a straight drama starring Sean Connery anyway! Connery turned the part down, so producer Charles Feldman decided the only way to go with CR was to make it into a spoof. David Niven and Peter Sellers, who had appeared together in the 1964 classic The Pink Panther, were hired to appear as Sir James Bond and Evelyn Tremble respectively, and the one and only Orson Welles signed on to play the villain Le Chiffre. Filming began in early 1966, and continued...and continued...and continued...and continued.... People wonder why Casino Royale is such a complete mess, and co-director Val Guest comments on the recent DVD edition that the intention was to create an acid-era festival of senselessness. This is, to put it mildly, somewhat untrue. The reality is that Peter Sellers went completely insane during filming and did his utmost to wreck the picture. Sellers took against Orson Welles after the famous director made fun of the former's penchant for not turning up to filming, and from that moment on Sellers refused to speak to Welles or appear in the same scene as him. Sellers also had script approval, and demanded constant rewrites. Vast amounts of money was poured in to salvage the swiftly disintegrating spectacle, gigantic sets were constructed and never used and then...Sellers, his contract up, simply walked off the film with his role half-complete. Producer Feldman, faced with hundreds of hours of meaningless footage and a star who was completely off his trolley, made a desperate bid to salvage the project. The myth would be created that Casino Royale was always meant to be a glorious comedic sprawl, with multiple directors each doing a chapter in the story. This was a clever, if doomed attempt, to cover up the fact that the movie was basically a patchwork quilt of footage shot simultaneously by no less than five directors in order to link up the material that had already been shot. It's not a meaningless load of nonsense because we never had a complete script and the star went crazy - we *meant* it to be that way! The result was not entirely successful. The film itself? Well, it's good fun. The incoherent structure means that trying to follow the 'plot' is impossible...the only thing to do is to revel in the various badly-connected set pieces and enjoy the opulent madness of it all. David Niven, whose part was expanded in order to cover for the absent Sellers, is excellent as Sir James Bond, and Woody Allen (who loathed every second of filming) provides some of the few laugh-out-loud gags as 'Little Jimmy Bond'/Dr Noah. Ursula Andress is, if anything, worse than she was in Dr No as the wooden and incomprehensible Vesper Lynd, while Peter Sellers is oddly subdued and pallid as baccarat master Evelyn Tremble aka James Bond 007. Also of note are the gorgeous Barbara Bouchet as Moneypenny, William Holden as a CIA agent in the opening scenes, and an early role for Jacqueline Bisset. Also look for George Raft and Peter O'Toole in cameos...the latter's scene with Sellers is particularly strange in a film that is nothing but weird for the entire 140 minutes. Things get madder and madder as the film progresses...surreal dance numbers, flying saucers, dream sequences for the sake of them, and the legendary all-out battle at the Casino Royale to end matters. You have to be on the movie's wavelength, I think, to fully enjoy it. Even so, the sudden killing off of Sellers' character (who does appear again at the end in the Heaven sequence...a stroke of luck on the part of the makers, who had no idea that Sellers would not complete his part) and the general 'throw everything in and hope the viewers will dig it' nature of the story makes Casino Royale very heavy going. Still, I love it for it's glorification of excess. A true relic of its' era, and far and away the best worst film of all time. That they managed to assemble *any* sort of movie out of the wreckage left by Sellers' walkout is a tribute in itself. And for a Sellers fan like myself, having my hero utter 'My name is Bond...James Bond' is totally priceless. The DVD edition is a must, presenting the movie in WideScreen (the previous VHS releases were all pan and scan atrocities), along with the must-see long-thought-lost 1954 American telemovie version of the story. The contrast with the '67 film is...somewhat jarring.

Hoffman (1970)

Peter Sellers plays it straight for once...and is superb

[3 November 2002]

Ask people what they remember about Peter Sellers, and if they know him at all they'll talk about the Pink Panther films or The Goon Show. In other words, he's forever labelled as a comic actor. In "Hoffman", Sellers plays against type in a straight dramatic performance - and, to be blunt, he's brilliant. "Hoffman" was ignored at the box office upon its' release in 1970, and never got a proper US release. Even today, with a million films on VHS and DVD, you'll have a hard job finding a copy. Audiences were clearly not prepared to sit through a film in which Peter Sellers didn't play four characters, fly through the air and crash painfully, or mask himself in make-up or funny voices. That "Hoffman" is essentially a filmed stage play with only four characters, and is largely just Sellers and Sinead Cusack talking for two hours, also clearly worked against its' success.

This is unfortunate, as here we have what is arguably Sellers' best performance. Sellers essentially plays himself...pale, somewhat gaunt, well-spoken, with an undeniable air of restrained madness about him. Sellers' Benjamin Hoffman is a hollow man, a man who has no existence outside of the things he remembers - and the unattainable image of the woman he adores from afar. Fate plays into Hoffman's hands when he obtains blackmail material on the woman's fiance...his price for his silence: a week alone with her in his flat. Sinead Cusack plays this prisoner of Hoffman's desire brilliantly, alternating between fiery Celtic indignation and a childlike quality. Though she can leave Hoffman's clutches at any time, she can never bring herself to do so...firstly out of fear for her future husband, and later because she finds herself captivated by the strangeness of her urbane blackmailer. Sellers is the very picture of quiet madness in this movie, never raising his voice and never displaying any hint of the obsessions that drive him in an overt manner. Hoffman is not a rapist, nor a maniac, but rather a emotional vampire who draws life from the innocence and youth of his 'guest'. Hoffman takes her to dinner, for walks in the park, to a department store, (in one notable scene, Cusack is pictured standing beneath sides of beef - a metaphor almost too unsubtle to work properly. But it does), he treats her with the utmost respect, he never so much as kisses her. In short, he tries to make her love him even though his every utterance and opinion arouse little but hatred in her. Hoffman is clearly goading her with his studied misogyny and his overbearing attempts to make her feel 'at home', fearing that if he ever became a person to her, or she to him, the spell he has cast would crack. And dreams are all Hoffman has, all he knows. Sellers' wraithlike appearance reinforces the vampiric quality of Hoffman...a man who has had all joy and wonder sucked out of his life by crushing domesticity. The Dracula metaphor is explored further in Hoffman's comments about wanting to consume his captive, and in a scene where she bares his neck to him. In short, "Hoffman" is a neglected gem, one of the few movies in which Sellers could escape his clownish characters and simply be Peter Sellers, actor. Or perhaps, Hoffman IS Sellers...? Jeremy Bulloch, best known as Boba Fett in the Star Wars series, plays the little-seen fiance. Also of note is the rather excellent score, composed by Ron Grainer. Grainer, of course, gave the world the best TV theme tune of all time..."Doctor Who". Matt Munro, who sang the title tune to From Russia With Love, does the honours here also with the melancholy song 'If There Ever Is A Next Time'. No Sellers fan should miss this movie. A masterpiece.

Game of Death (1978)

If only he'd lived to do the ACTUAL film....

[23 February 2002]

Game Of Death, as directed by Robert Clouse and released in 1978, is not the film Bruce Lee wanted to make. It's not even close. But things didn't turn out that way - and so we're left with this...this THING in the shape of a Bruce Lee movie. Always billed as 'Bruce Lee's last performance', Game Of Death is in fact his PENULTIMATE movie role. Lee suspended production on GOD in order to do Enter The Dragon, and died before he could add to the footage he'd already shot. According to a documentary, Warners (very pleased with ETD) had agreed to pick up GOD and turn it into a mega- budget extravaganza Golden Harvest could never have envisaged. Oh, if only... The material Lee shot is explosive, thrilling, and among the best work he'd ever done for the big screen...but there is simply not enough footage to make a film out of. Apart from a literal handful of linking shots, Lee's footage consists entirely of fight scenes. If Clouse had been sincere in wanting to pay tribute to Lee, then he would have made a documentary showcasing the footage. But no; fans and the company wanted a new Lee movie, so Clouse gave them one. And what a pile of rubbish it is. Lee's poetic and multi-layered story (which was more complete than was until recently believed) is thrown out the window in favour of an appalling sub-Bondian crime-revenge caper. About the only thing that stays the same is the 'Lee fakes his death' subplot, which may or may not have been included in the completed movie. The performances of everyone in the new material is nothing less than abysmal. Perhaps the worst of all is movie legend Gig Young, who seems drunk or stoned throughout. Young committed suicide after making GOD, so he probably WAS off his head. Fellow veteran Dean Jagger cackles his way through his part as a bizarrely evil bad guy, and Colleen Camp seems to be in it just to say "Billy!!". Chuck Norris, Lee's opponent in Way Of The Dragon, appears again c/o stock footage from that film. Kareem Adbul-Jabbar manages to escape disgrace by appearing solely in the Lee footage - one can imagine what reply he gave to Clouse when the latter asked him to 'complete' his role.

The aforementioned Billy is Lee's character...played in the new footage by a succession of doubles. Shots from previous Lee films are spliced in wherever they'll fit...and often where they won't...in order to fake a larger role for the departed master. Perhaps the most degrading moment is when we see a Lee double sit in front of a mirror, upon which a photo of Lee's face has been crudely cropped and glued. Watching this immobile face perched atop a wobbling neck is the very pits of bad taste. Mind you, it's hard to go past using footage of Lee's actual funeral for the funeral scene of his CHARACTER as an example of unbelievable crassness. Inexplicably, Clouse chose NOT to use a good chunk of the Lee footage available to him...the final battle in the Pagoda, where the bulk of the material is set, could easily have been extended at the expense of the dull and tacky new footage. There were wonderful little moments Clouse could have included - for instance, a scene where Lee picks up a slender metal fighting stick and taps out 'Shave And A Haircut', capping it off with an ironic smile. Did he use that great bit, or any of the others? Hell no. The problem is made even worse when you take into account that the length of prints varies almost from country to country - entire fights vanish from some version, and that's not including the battle Clouse LEFT OUT!!! To sum up, Game Of Death is nothing but an insult...rather than have your memory of Lee sullied, I suggest you take a look at one of the many documentaries on the man. Recent efforts, such as Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey, feature newly-uncovered GOD material.

One point for John Barry's excellent 007-ish score, though.

NOTE: Game Of Death II, produced in Hong Kong in 1981, is actually a better film. Deleted scenes from Enter The Dragon provide a new appearance by Lee, and his character's convenient death allows 'co-star' Tong Lung to ably take over the movie for the duration.