SJH’S FILM REVIEWS Part 1 A-C

A work-in-progress, Part 1 A-C:

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS (1953)

Dir: Charles Lamont

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the boys were past their best when they made this film.  Through a series of misadventures they find themselves on a rocket ship and land in the middle of the New Orleans ‘mardi gras’ convinced they are on Mars.  This is perhaps the most unfunny sequence in the film.  It drags on a bit.  Eventually they take off again and find themselves on the planet Venus, which is populated entirely by the Miss Universe contestants (well actually they made up all the extras on the film).  Orville (Costello) finds himself being adopted as a sort of mate by the Queen (Mari Blanchard).  This is the only part of the film, for me, which contained any chuckles.  The scene where the Queen shows off the previous beefcake male inhabitants of the planet, and Orville gives some very Ricky Gervais-style looks to the camera, IS funny.   I think the problem was it takes 50 minutes for them to get to Venus, and then we only have 25 minutes of the film left.  The Venus plot would be recycled a few years later in the Zsa Zsa Gabor “classic” Queen Of Outer Space. 

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)

Dir: Charles Barton

I kept reading rave reviews about how funny this was, so I gave it a go.  It’s certainly of interest to show where horror cinema was at in the 1940s.  The outright horror of the 20s and 30s had given way to comic send-ups like this, in which all the old favourite monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman) were reunited on screen once again.  Boris Karloff flatly refused to reprise his monster role, but Bela Lugosi is clearly enjoying himself no end, complete with Dracula cape, and the adorable Lon Chaney Jnr plays it admirably straight as the tormented Wolfman.  My problem personally is with Abbott and Costello themselves, who I find only mildly amusing at best (I accept that opinion is probably not popular, particularly as this film made it into the Reader’s Digest Top 100 funniest films of all time)*.  Lou Costello is an affable little chap, but his constant cries of “Chick!  Chick!” got on my nerves.  There are some clever jokes though.  Example: “I go mad at the full moon”.  “You and 10 million other guys”.  Worth seeing for Lugosi and Chaney, and for that splendid castle, which is everything a gothic castle in a film should be.  *Update: I’ve been converted to Abbott & Costello fandom since writing this review, see Africa Screams below.

THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971)

Dir: Robert Fuest

I watched this one on YouTube, where you can download the whole film for free. It’s a gloriously OTT piece of early 1970s British campness, starring the incomparable Vincent Price. He is Dr Anton Phibes, an academic driven demented with grief by the death of his beautiful young wife, due to a botched hospital operation. Phibes is determined to be revenged on all the doctors involved, and he has some truly original ideas as to how to go about it. He bases each murder on the Seven Plagues Of Egypt, so we have death by frog, death by locusts, death by blood, death of the first born etc. The whole thing has strong echoes of its sister film, Theatre Of Blood, where Price played a ham actor getting revenge on every theatre critic who had ever slated his work, and does so turning to the works of Shakespeare for inspiration (poor old Arthur Lowe having his head cut off and stuck on a milk bottle still haunts me to this day). Anyway, back to Phibes. The film begins with Price, seemingly clad from head-to-foot in black PVC, playing a pop-up organ in his sumptuous art-deco home. This kind of sets the scene for all the camp extravagance that is to follow. He is ably assisted in his dark deeds by his beautiful mute assistant (Virginia North), who has a habit of sawing away at a violin in the swirling fog. This film gets away with everything because not for one moment do we ever get the idea that anyone is taking this too seriously. It is wholly unpretentious, and yet the cast (full of old stalwarts, including the loveable Terry-Thomas, who plays a sort of reluctant blood donor I suppose you could say) all throw themselves into it with aplomb. There are some very gruesome moments – most particularly the death by locusts segment – and yet oddly we are all rooting for Phibes. He’s doing some terrible things, he’s completely barking mad, and yet he’s not doing it because he’s evil. When I watched this I found some of the YouTube comments quite touching, as everyone had sympathy for this grotesque character. TRIVIA CORNER: Keith Moon was watching this film the evening he died. Perhaps I should add his death had nothing to do with the film.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957)

Dir: Val Guest

Enjoyable little Hammer thriller from the 1950s, in which Peter Cushing heads a yeti-hunting team of scientists in the Himalayas, based at a Buddhist monastery.  It’s a surprisingly atmospheric number, although considering it was scripted by Nigel Kneale, perhaps not so surprising after all.  The delightful Richard Wattis is also on hand.   Although studio-bound, some of the mountain shots are stock footage.  TRIVIA CORNER: the monks were largely played by waiters from London restaurants.

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: THE MOVIE (2016)

Dir: Mandie Fletcher

Transferring 30-minute TV sitcoms to the big screen is a notoriously tricky one, and AbFab proved to be no exception.  It’s not that this movie is bad (it’s not), it’s just distinctly underwhelming.  Once the pleasure of seeing the girls again is over – a few minutes in – unfortunately the worst aspects of the TV show then take over, i.e the relentlessly unfunny celebrity cameo’s.  This was always the part of the show that I hated.  I preferred it when it concentrated on the solid-gold repartee between the main characters.  Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) accidentally manages to knock Kate Moss over a balcony into the Thames.  Believing she’s drowned her, Eddy flees to the south of France with old chum Patsy (Joanna Lumley).  The parts about the hysterical public reaction (particularly on social-media) to Kate’s death are spot-on, but the rest of it feels curiously tired and dated.  In particular, Saffy (Julia Sawalha) singing Janis Ian’s At 17 to a weepy-eyed drag club felt so patronising and old-hat I almost abandoned ship.  A homage to the legendary last scene of Some Like It Hot rounds it all off, but this time it’s as clunky and laboured as one of Theresa May’s speeches.  Plus point: Kathy Burke reprises her role as the fearsome Magda, marching through the film barking orders at everyone.  Minus point: the excrutiatingly annoying Jane Horrocks as gormless Bubble, who grates on my nerves like an automated helpline.  To add to the misery we also get her revisiting her Little Voice days by doing a lame impersonation of Shirley Bassey.  This was an indulgence that should have been nipped in the bud at the first draft.   Anyway, to sum up, I watched it through to the end, but I feel no great inclination to watch it again.  It’s a shame, I had high hopes of this one.

THE ADVENTURES OF JANE (1949)

Dir: Edward G Whiting

Jane was a cartoon strip which ran in the Daily Mirror on-and-off for decades.  She was at her peak in WW2, when she was credited with keeping up the morale of British troops serving overseas.  Jane was a young woman who was forever getting caught up in slapstick scrapes, which would usually involved her losing her clothes.  This low-budget attempt to revive her adventures in post-war Britain proved to be a total misfire.  The main problem with it is that it seems to be directed by somebody with a tin ear for film-making and particularly slapstick comedy.  Leaden visual jokes are telegraphed a mile off, such as the number hanging precariously over a bedroom door falling on a guy’s head, or Jane  (Chrystabel Leighton-Porter, who doesn’t get a mention in the credits) getting her skirt caught in a train door.  The performers seem to have no idea how to do comedy either.  I once heard that any comedy involving somebody losing their clothes in public usually has to hinge on their embarrassed reaction.  For instance it’s funny when a man loses his trousers and desperately tries to hide in some bushes.  It’s not funny when he carries on as if he’s not remotely bothered.   Jane seems remotely unperturbed by losing her skirt, and acts as cool as a cucumber throughout.  Very admirable no doubt, but not exactly hilarious.  Chrystabel Leighton-Porter was the original model for Jane, being married to the cartoonist from 1940 onwards.  She’s charming and smiles sweetly, but saucy and sexy she’s not.  This was a role calling for a Babs Windsor or a Jayne Mansfield type, and instead we get a sort of very young Margaret Thatcher, complete with very prim suits and hats.  The whole success of Jane had been her sauciness, but here she was hampered by the strict film censorship of the time.  Clearly just a couple of shots of Chrystabel’s shapely legs wasn’t enough to make a film a hit on its own. There are also long periods where nothing seems to happen, which in a film which runs at only 60 minutes long can feel bizarre.  For instance, we get to trail around after Jane when she goes shopping, all the while expecting something funny to happen.  It doesn’t, she just goes shopping, that’s all.   The beauty contest seems weird.  It goes on forever, and lots of rather bored-looking, fed up women in swimsuits walk around and around and around in a circle for an absolute age.  It was starting to remind me of Father Ted’s Lovely Girls Competition. The whole thing culminates in a car chase which made me yearn for Will Hay’s presence.  If this type of film proves anything it’s that not everybody can perform or direct comedy.  It’s not as simple as it often looks.  This was meant to be the first in a series, but the whole idea was abandoned when the public proved to be lukewarm.  Even in austerity-ridden late 1940s Britain, people clearly weren’t THAT desperate for entertainment.  TRIVIA CORNER: Jane had a bit of a revival in the 1980s, when the cartoon was brought back to the Mirror, and Glynis Barber played her on TV.  Neither were a rip-roaring success.  I remember the cartoon as the Mirror was our household newspaper at the time.  The whole thing felt charmless, with Jane having boorish, dreary boyfriends, and adventures such as Jane Loses Her Knickers In Space.  Nice.

THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1939)

Dir: Alfred L Werker

The second and last of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce collaboration to be made in period costume.  From then onwards Sherlock would be updated to modern times.  A thoroughly enjoyable little thriller, in which our heroes come up once more against their nemesis, Professor Moriarty (George Zucco), who is intent on stealing the Crown Jewels no less.  The photography on this is great, and the sequence where Holmes talks Moriarity up a dimly-lit staircase reminded me of an Escher drawing.  We also get to see Sherlock do a neat music-hall turn, where he gives a robust performance of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’.

AFTER THE BALL (1897)

Dir: Georges Melies

The earliest example of cinematic soft porn, dating from 1897, and made by Georges Melies.  Running at just over a minute long, the plot is acutely simple, even by the usual efforts of pornography.  A voluptuous lady returns home from a ball, and her maid helps her to strip off all her clothes.  The maid then gets her into the bath, and proceeds to pour a jug of coal dust over her.  I must admit that bit baffled me.  Was the maid being revolutionary?  Was this early slapstick, and not erotica?  No, according to YouTube Comments section (don’t say they never teach you anything), this was because water wouldn’t show up very well in early cinema, so they substituted sand or coal dust instead.  Fascinating slice of What The Butler Saw-style naughtiness.  Also interesting that the actress taking her clothes off makes no effort to be raunchy whatsoever, in fact she strips as briskly as if she’s going for a doctor’s examination.

AFRICA SCREAMS (1949)

Dir: Charles Barton

I saw a beautifully colourised version of this on Amazon Prime.  Bud Abbott and Lou Costello get mixed up in a diamond-rustling racket in darkest Africa.  A fun entry in the Bud & Lou canon, which is enjoyably reminiscent Carry On Up The Jungle, but without the bawdiness.  The film moves at a good pace, and there are some very funny, laugh-out-loud scenes, with a good supporting cast, including two real-life boxers who do a hilarious knockdown fight, a camp Christopher Biggins-type guy who runs around with a cup of water to put out a fire in his tent (apparently he based this on a real incident from his own childhood, when his bed caught fire!), and an elegant she-villain (Hillary Brooke) who plays the whole thing admirably straight.  I guess I’ve slowly been converted to the Abbott & Costello fan club.

AGATHA (1979)

Dir: Michael Apted

I have to say, in all honesty, that Vanessa Redgrave is not an actress I’ve ever warned to, and that’s not because of her political stuff. There’s just something about her screen appearances that I find vaguely annoying. That was very much the case when she played Mary Queen Of Scots, and yet here, as Dame Agatha Christie, she is actually adorable. I suspect playing a timid character, chronically lacking in confidence (when asked to give a speech at a book promotion, all she can mumble out is “thank you very much”), might have something to do with it, and yet she does seem to get under the skin of a woman who still seems quite an enigma, in spite of the massive popularity of her books. The film covers the ten days in December 1926 when Agatha Christie disappeared dramatically from public view, before finally being tracked down in a Harrogate hotel. Based on the book by Kathleen Tynan, it puts forward its own theory as to what happened to Agatha during those mysterious 10 days, and although the theory is frankly rather preposterous, it’s still an absorbing movie. Dustin Hoffman puts in a showy turn as a brash American journalist, who decides to track her down. He’s not really needed, and his constant wise-guy persona can be a bit wearying.  I was far more interested in Agatha kicking up her heels at the posh hotel and finally having some fun. If you’re a fan of Dame Agatha, then the film is well worth watching.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)

Dir: Martin Scorsese

I know some people rave about this film. For me, all I can say is … it’s alright I suppose. It’s certainly well-made, and the attention to period detail is first-class. If you want to wallow in Edwardian luxury then this is the film for you. There are some A-list actors on hand, but … heck, I’m running out of things to say about it. I guess I’m just not into people languidly pining for each other. For me, it just all feels too cold, too mannered, too utterly civilised, and vaguely disjointed.  But there is no denying that it is very elegant and sumptuous to look at.

THE AIRSHIP DESTROYER (1909)

Dir: Walter R Booth

Very early British sci-fi from 1909. Worth seeing as a slice of history, as it’s very much of it’s time, when paranoia about what the Germans may be building was growing apace. A bit like an Edwardian version of the Red Scare menace of the 1950s. It’s interesting that around this time we had the mysterious airship sightings in Britain, which makes me wonder if that was caused by the making of this film, or the film was inspired by it. Very much of its time, when inventors, still looking immaculate in their smart trousers and ties, knocked up big machines in their back gardens. Quite a lot of fun, and running at only a few minutes long you won’t exactly have time to get bored.

ALAN PARTRIDGE – ALPHA PAPA (2013)

Dir: Declan Lowney

As a die-hard fan of the legendary Mr Partridge I confess to having had misgivings about whether he would transfer to the big screen. What works splendidly for half-an-hour on the small screen, doesn’t always work for 90 minutes on the large one. But no need to worry, this is a very funny slapstick comedy, with the great Mr P on top form. Alan’s Norfolk radio station is facing a buy-out from a big corporation, and some of the old lags amongst the DJs are facing the axe as a result. Will it be Alan who has to go, or fellow ageing DJ, Irishman Pat Farrell? In true Partridge style Alan swings the boardroom vote by scrawling “JUST SACK PAT” on a flip-chart. Pat doesn’t take the news at all well. In fact, he decides to take the station hostage, and suddenly Alan is finding himself the hero of the hour as the police’s main hostage negotiator. The film licks along at a good pace, and the National Lampoon-ish style laughs are constantly coming. Some familiar old friends are here, such as Lynn, Alan’s long-suffering PA, and Michael, the Geordie doorkeeper. Colm Meaney (whom I mainly know as Chief O’Brien from ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’) is great as the tortured soul with the big gun. There are some great send-ups of the horrors of local radio: the excrutiatingly banal question-and-answer sessions, the cheesy music, the brainless breakfast show hosts. There is also an exciting finale on Cromer pier. What more can you ask? The Partridge phenomenon lives on.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1903)

Dirs: Cecil Pepworth, Percy Stow

One of the many things I’ve enjoyed about putting this film blog together, is tracking down very old films.  The ones from the Edwardian era feel as if they’re giving us a brief window into a world that has vanished forever.  Sometimes their strangeness can seem a bit too weird to modern eyes.  I’ve seen more than one commenter on YouTube describe films like this as “creepy”.  The characters can seem more like puppets that have come to life than human beings I suppose, and they can have a unsettling dreamlike feel.  But they have a magic – and often a charm – all of their own.  This was the very first adaptation of Alice to hit the big screen, and was a British film, made in 1903.  It runs at just over 8 minutes long (absolutely EPIC for that era), and neatly compresses Lewis Carroll’s entire story into that short running time.  The White Rabbit at the beginning can feel like the stuff of nightmares, but the procession of playing cards at the end is charming.  Interesting to think that the girl playing Alice would have been entirely at home in that Victorian girl’s outfit.

ALIENS (1986)

Dir: James Cameron

Follow-ups to hugely successful films can be notoriously tricky.  Aliens is one of those rare examples where it works.  You can argue til you’re blue in the face which one is better, Alien or Aliens, but I think that’s a waste of time.  They’re both extremely good.   At the end of Alien Ellen Ripley, (Sigourney Weaver), accompanied by Jones the cat, were drifting out into space in a deep sleep, in one of the most beautiful, poetic scenes I’ve ever seen in a sci-fi movie.   At the beginning of Aliens Ripley is rescued from stasis, and is horrified to learn that 57 years have passed.   She finds herself being castigated at an official enquiry into her actions aboard her previous ship.  She is reduced to working in a loading-bay, but then finds herself being called upon to help when a party are sent to investigate what has happened to a remote colony.  This is a highly absorbing film.   Good characterisation, plenty of excitement and good pacing, lifts it well above the usual Hollywood blockbuster.  Some of the Mother allusions get a bit tiresome and laid on with a trowel, but on the whole this film merits numerous viewings.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz

One of the great legendary bitch-fests of 20th century cinema, and a must for any Bette Davis fan. I’d heard heaps about this film before I finally got to see it, and although it’s undoubtedly good, and Davis is good value as always, I didn’t really take to it as much as I’d hoped. It’s a very talky film. There are interminably long scenes, in which characters do nothing but out-gun each other with sophisticated repartee. Which is fine. If you like that sort of thing. I just feel it’s way too Knowing at times, as if the characters weren’t really involved, but standing outside looking in, and passing bitchy judgement. And Margo Channing’s (Davis) constant angst about getting older gets really REALLY wearying after a time. “I’m 40! Forty!” she wails at one point. Oh get over it, love. Been there done that. Move on. Where I found it interesting was in the character of the sadistic Addison de Witt. When he finally gets together with Eve, it is like a coming-together of two psychopaths. “You laugh at THEM, you don’t laugh at me! NEVER laugh at me!” “We’re not capable of love, or being loved”. The film takes a very dark turn at this point, and is all the better for it. I would also like to add that I enjoyed the scene where Margo tells her best friend she’s getting married. This is all handled in a very mature, grown-up way. These days the women would have to go all scream-y and girly, and clap their hands and shout “squee!” and do very silly things like that. Nice to see a time when grown women acted like grown women.  TRIVIA CORNER:  George Sanders was a fascinating man, and his memoirs, now re-released on Kindle, are well worth a read.  In 1937 he said that if he lived to the age of 65 he would kill himself.  And so he did, leaving behind a suicide note which simply read “Dear World,   I am leaving because I am bored.  I feel I have lived long enough.  I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.  Good luck”.

ALTERNATIVE 3 (1977)

Dir: Christopher Miles

I remember well the impact this hour-long film had when it was shown on TV in 1977. Although done as a hoax, it felt so real that I recall everyone talking about it in shocked tones the next day. The TV show Science Report decided to make a hoax film and air it on the evening of April Fool’s Day. Unfortunately a strike by technical crew meant the show got delayed, and it wasn’t aired until a couple of months later, which somewhat makes the April Fools prank idea get lost in translation. Since then the plot of the film has emerged in numerous conspiracy theories. The idea is thus: the governments of the world secretly know that our days on Planet Earth are numbered, and are working to save a select few and transport them to safety on Mars. Put in the raw like that, the plot sounds rather silly, but the completely straight-faced playing of it, made it highly effective. Viewing it now, all these years on, it seems even more plausible. We now distrust governments so completely, and are constantly suspecting them of being up to dubious things we know nothing about, that we could easily believe them capable of anything. (Although the idea that they could be quite so organised is probably the most far-fetched idea of the lot). Some of the ideas in the story though do seem to have become all too real. The references to the climate changing now gives an unwelcome frisson. In one scene our host on the show goes to Cambridge University to interview a prominent German scientist. It is a hot day, and there are cicadas in the background. The scientist remarks that he never thought to hear them in Britain.  Also the part where they track down one of the US astronauts, and now find him to be a flabby drunk who is clearly battling his own demons, must have spawned enough Lunar conspiracy theories. You can easily find this film on YouTube, and if you’re interested in hoax TV, conspiracy theories, or simply want a well-made drama, then it’s well worth tracking down.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000)

Dir: Mary Harron

I remember this film had a somewhat negative reaction when it was first released*, and yet y’know, it’s pretty darn good.  Based on Bret Easton Ellis’s cult novel, the film revolves around Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a sociopathic banker, who lives a vain, shallow life in New York yuppiedom.  It is a life so obsessed with competition and triviality, that the sight of someone else’s superior business card can send you into a frenzy.  From what I can gather Bale wasn’t the first choice for the lead role, and yet it’s hard to imagine anyone else in it.  In the scene where he hires two prostitutes and then lectures them about a Genesis album, I can’t help feeling you get the gist of Bateman’s life.  The man is so boring and self-obsessed, that he has to hire women to listen to him chuntering on about nothing whatsoever.  *It seemed to confuse people as to what it was.  It has moments of pure horror, and yet also enough comedy to be a biting satire.

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

Dir: John Landis

David Naughton and Griffin Dunne play two likeable American backpackers having a perfectly dismal time of it on the Yorkshire moors. They seek refreshment at Ye Olde Hostelry of ‘The Slaughtered Lamb’, a tavern which I doubt will be making its way into the Good Pub Guide any time soon. There they find there’s no food available, and they have to put with gobby Brian Glover and his mates. Just before leaving they are warned to stay away from the moors. Naturally, this advice is not heeded, and soon we hear the ominous howl of a wolf. Left the sole survivor of a wolf attack, David wakes up in a London hospital, to learn that his best chum is dead. Even the angelic ministrations of nurse Jenny Agutter can’t calm David’s nerves as he is prone to nightmares where he is running naked through a forest and attacking the wildlife, and then he starts to get visitations from his dead pal. Done with huge panache, energy and a lot of fun, American Werewolf really is a treat to see. As far as I remember it single-handedly reignited the werewolf genre, which had been dead for some time. The man-into-wolf transformation scene – all done to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising – is still hugely impressive over 30 years on. David Naughton is a very likeable hero. He’s funny, a bit goofy, and we feel for him in his fear and confusion. Jenny Agutter is a bit TOO perfect as his love interest, in fact at times she’s so saintly she’s downright annoying, (anyway, since when was a bedtime reading service available on the NHS?), but she is the perfect English rose in many ways, and that’s what she’s being asked to play here. The final sequence of the big smash-up in Piccadilly Circus is an excitingly apt finale. There are also fascinating little snippets of early 1980s London life here. The complaints about the huge prices in the supermarket (the days of 22% inflation), a London bobby still happy to pose for photographs with tourists, and the TV advert where some good-time girl is advertising her tell-all memoirs in the News Of The World (that happened every week from what I remember). Look out for the congratulations message to Charles and Diana right at the end of the closing credits. Suddenly 1981 looks like the days of innocence and bliss. (It wasn’t really).

THE AMITYVILLE ASYLUM (2013)

Dir: Andrew Jones

My first thought on coming across this film, “was how much more can they flog the Amityville dead horse for?” I then read an absolutely scathing review of it, which perversely made it sound worth watching.  Sort of So Bad It’s Good.  I found a copy on YouTube.  The film opens with Ronald deFeo shooting his family again (we’ve been down this familiar old road a few times haven’t we reader?).  Then we encounter a young woman called Lisa (Sophia Del Pizzo), who is being interviewed for a cleaning job at a British mental hospital.  To her surprise, she gets the job, and … hang on a minute, you may well ask, what’s all this got to do with the Amityville Horror?  Well that’s a valid question.  You see, the asylum is built on the site of the Amityville house.  Yes.  Really. Which sort of ignores the problem that the Amityville house is very much still standing.  It’s also a British film, and in spite of the varied accents on offer here, it very much comes across as British, which makes the Amityville connection feel even more tenuous.   There is an absolutely peculiar scene in which Lisa is given the low-down on all the different cleaning products she will have use in the course of her duties, which felt like a very dry TV commercial.  They might as well have parachuted Barry Scott in to liven it up a bit.  It would have made about as much sense.  What really kills the film for me though is the dreadful camera-work.  It’s one of those films where the camera seems to spend most of it’s time slammed right into the actors’ faces.  This is disorientating.  Even when the camera does occasionally drag itself out of the actors’ nostrils, it then seems to focus on bizarre angles, like their torso’s, or blurry shots of blank walls.  The film does have Eileen Daly in it.  A genuinely quirky British actress whom I have a lot of time for, and I was hoping she could save it for me.  She pops up in this as one of the high security inmates, but there wasn’t as much of her as I’d hoped. It’s not all bad though.  Amityville Asylum does occasionally manage a low-budget low-key Atmospheric chill to it- that night-time hospital building can feel genuinely creepy – and with better camera-work I think it might have stood more of a chance.  Plus perhaps more sympathetic characters amongst the staff, and stop trying to pretend it’s American might have helped.  Call it ‘Horror Asylum’ or something.  Drop the dubious Amityville connection, which I assume was shoe-horned onto it to get it some attention.  Well it didn’t help.  It went straight to DVD.  Perhaps with a bit of tweaking it might re-emerge as a cult favourite.  But to be honest, I doubt anyone cares that much.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (2005)

Dir: Andrew Douglas

As if the first version wasn’t tedious enough, we now get an even more boring remake.  I’m astonished sometimes how successful the Amityville bandwagon has been.  The original book had it’s share of chills when it first came out, largely because I suspect we didn’t know what to make of it, and it came buried under a pile of hype.  But since then … well people work hard to keep it all going, I’ll give them that.  So anyway, just in case, (by some miracle), you didn’t know the story, Ronald de Feo shoots dead his entire family as they sleep one night.  And then, because nobody wants to live in the house of doom, it’s going cheap, and the Lutz family move in, only to find it’s haunted … or they hit upon the brilliant idea of faking a haunting to pay off the mortgage, whichever side of the fence you’re on.  This film was so dull that a short way into it, I actually started doing some work instead.

AMY (2015)

Dir: Asif Kapadia

Feature-length documentary about the tragic chantreuse Amy Winehouse, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 27.  I remember being shocked on hearing about Amy’s death, and yet at the same time, not entirely surprised.  Amy’s life seemed to have been spiralling out of control for so long, that she was an accident waiting to happen.  This is a well-made and sympathetic look at a unique talent.  She seemed to suffer from a crippling lack of self-belief, which inevitably would have led her to put her faith into people who frankly weren’t worth it.  Ella Fitzgerald once said that her own success was all down to the songs she sang.  She didn’t see that it was her own special talent that played a substantial part too.  And that also seems to have been the case with Amy.  From what I can gather Amy’s family have reacted badly to the film, which isn’t terribly surprising considering that her father comes out of it looking like a right bellend.  Ultimately it’s a very depressing film, but considering the subject matter that’s only to be expected.

ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY (2004)

Dir: Adam McKay

There is an innocence to this film which I find hard to resist. Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, a 1970s newsreader who is about to have his happy little world shattered when – shock! horror! – a WOMAN is assigned to his cheerfully misogynistic little team. In many ways Ron is like an American version of Alan Partridge. He comes out with lines like “I am important! I have an apartment filled with leatherbound books and an aroma of rich mahogany”. And yet for all his pompous buffoonery, he is quite loveable, and clearly loves his work. If you are looking for a sharp, biting satire about news channels this isn’t really the place to come. It’s a cartoon film, with a shamelessly childish air about it. At times it has a crazily surreal, Monty Python feel, such as the scene where all the newsreaders have a Gladiator-style showdown, and the final scene in the bear-pit at the zoo. The gang also have a go at singing Afternoon Delight, one of my very favourite songs ever. Seriously. I love comedy which has it’s heart in the right place, and such is the case here.

AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS! (1973)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker

One of the things I do like about the Internet is the way that some old films, which flopped on release, and were mauled by critics, are discovered by a fresh audience.  And Now The Screaming Starts was released by Amicus in 1973, and was savaged for years afterwards. And yet when viewed now it’s really quite an absorbing little piece of gothic horror. Ian Ogilvy and Stephanie Beacham play 18th century newly-weds, who return to the husband’s ancestral pile to set up home. Unfortunately Stephanie finds herself being haunted by a disembodied hand (straight out of The Beast With Five Fingers), and some dubious old ancestor who likes to put in grotesque appearances in the family portraits. I’ve read much criticism of Steph’s acting, but she does a good solid job of what’s required of her, which is to look beautiful in period costume – particularly that riding-habit she dons for a walk in the woods – appear suitably anguished at chosen moments, and also give quite possibly one of the longest screams in cinema history. Rosalie Crutchley also appears in one of her Sinister Housekeeper roles (see The Haunting below). Finding this again on YouTube I was pleasantly surprised how much people were enjoying it, which suggests that elegant low-key gothic horror has much more of a fan-base now than it did in the oh-we-must-be-so-cool-and-modern early 1970s, I’m glad to say. The only real criticism I have is that we have to wait a perishing long time (nearly 50 minutes) for Peter Cushing to appear.

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)

Dir: Robert Fuest

Or as one Amazon reviewer put it “oh those hotpants!” Yes, if you like the sight of two nubile young women wearing very tight shorts to go cycling, then this is the film for you. Actually it’s also a very passable Brit thriller from the early 1970s. Pamela Franklin and Michele Dotrich (yes, Frank Spencer’s wife, Betty) are two nurses on a cycling holiday in France. Little do they know it but the long country road they are bickering along has been the scene of some unsolved murders. It reminds me a bit of those old Thriller TV plays from around the same time, and has some fairly eerie moments. Someone has pointed out that the film shows the differences between now and then, in that in those days (20 years before the Channel Tunnel) France was still very much a foreign country. These days I suspect the girls wouldn’t be able to cycle far without being nearly run down by British and German families in campervans. There is one scene though which never fails to exasperate me every time I see it. Michele Dotrich decides to do some sunbathing in a remote spot, but first of all festoons all the bushes with her underwear. I know she’s drying her washing, but even so, I do get a bit huffy with that naive bit of recklessness! Pamela though makes up for it in the intelligence and resourcefulness department. When I think what a Hollywood remake would be like … actually no I don’t want to think about that. ADDENDUM: yes, there has been a US remake (in 2010), with the girls now holidaying in Argentina. One critic’s waspish comment was that cinema must be in a truly bad way if it’s reduced to remaking films like this. Feel this is a bit of an unfair slur on the original, which isn’t bad at all.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945)

Dir: Renee Clair

A real pleasure to find this little gem on YouTube. To the best of my knowledge there have been at least 4 big-screen versions of Agatha Christie’s macabre book, about the systematic deaths of 10 people on a Devon island, and this, the first, is undoubtedly the best. Made in 1945, it sticks reasonably closely to the original book, although the ending has been altered, as I suspect it would simply have been too downbeat and horrific for the time. I think the reason this works where the others failed is simple … it uses the same location as the book, a small island off the English coast. The others by contrast went overboard with trying to create the most exotic, bizarre locations they could. So we have Ten Little Indians from the 1960s set at the top of a Swiss mountain (see further down this list), the 1970s version set in a big hotel in the Iranian desert, and the 1980s version (which I’ve never seen) set on an African safari. This film clearly shows you need to take the story back to its roots to make it work, and chuck out all the exotic gimmickry of the remakes. Shot in atmospheric black-and-white, the house on the island is well-utilised. There are some great touches, such as the opening where we see the characters arriving by boat, and are wordlessly shown each of them in turn. When they get to the house and introduce themselves, they do so directly to camera. There are times it feels more like a dark farce, as the dwindling cast huddle in any rooms that don’t have corpses in them, and complain about the servants being bumped off.

ANGEL (2007)

Dir: Francois Ozon

I was very pleasantly surprised by this film. It’s always difficult to come to a movie adaptation of a favourite book (in this case Angel by Elizabeth Taylor). Our expectations are rarely met in reality. This sticks fairly closely to the original story, which is always a bonus, and Romola Garai is spot-on as Angel Deverell, the flamboyant, eccentric romantic novelist. I get the impression the film didn’t do well on release, and although it came out a few years ago I only came across it in recent times. The gist of the story is that romance in real life cannot measure up to Angel’s fictional representations of it. It’s a very sad story, and Angel’s idiosyncratic personality might not gel that well with some viewers. It does help if you loved the original book. Angel starts off as a clumsy, selfish, blunt-speaking schoolgirl, who achieves fame and fortune through her pen, but winds up as a dotty, reclusive old lady, forgotten by her legions of fans.  The film is kinder to Angel than perhaps Taylor’s original novel, showing her well-meaning desperation to make life perfect for everyone at Paradise House, but ignoring the fact that they have their own needs and wishes.  I would take this film over the ponderous Age Of Innocence any day.

ANGELS AND DEMONS (2009)

Dir: Ron Howard

Dan Brown. The Illuminati. The Vatican. Tom Hanks. An awful lot of rushing about. Characters give lots of tedious explanations in place of real dialogue. I watched an hour of this. Then went away to watch Downton Abbey, when I came back it was still going on.  A very long film.

ANGELS AND INSECTS (1995)

Dir: Philip Haas

Very odd and quite unpleasant costume drama.  The only saving grace of it is the excellent Mark Rylance, who plays a naturalist, William, returning to Britain after working in Africa. He falls for a strange aristocratic young lady called Eugenia (Patsy Kensit).  They marry and produce a raft of children. Anyway, to cut a long story short, William finds out that Eugenia has been committing incest with her awful, arrogant brother (Douglas Henshall) all along.  The “insects” of the title are spelt out in a word game as “incest”, just to prod William a long a bit. A cold and unsavoury film, which won a trio of awards when it was released in 1995, but is very rarely seen now.  I think the only time I’ve been aware of it on television was once in the middle of the night. I watched it on a rented VHS tape quite some while back.

ANGELS REVENGE (1979)

Dir: Greydon Clark

There are a few contenders for the Worst Film I’ve Ever Seen.  Zeta One (see below) takes some beating but this one runs pretty darn close.  It was a cynical, cheap-as-chips rip-off of Charlie’s Angels, which had been a massive TV hit in the mid-to-late 70s.  A bunch of 7 curvy women in white jumpsuits set out to destroy a local drugs cartel.  I fully admit I’m probably not the kind of viewer this film is aimed at, most likely because the type of viewer they had in mind was a sex-obsessed teenage boy, but this is truly dreadful.  The acting is acutely painful, but the plotting is also bad.  At one point, about 10 minutes into the film, in the middle of an action scene, we suddenly get one of the women breaking in with some narration and asking “I expect you’re wondering how I came to be doing this?” (No, not really).  And we immediately get flash-backed.  I’m not a fan of films which tit about all over the place, and this was no exception, but I’m not so po-faced I can’t appreciate a film’s kitsch charms, in fact I have been known to quite enjoy it, and you would think that this film’s 70s vibe would fill that void quite well, particularly with the sequinned disco song sequence, but it’s all very dull beyond belief.  Best watched with the MST3K riff.

ANNA KARENINA (2012)

Dir: Joe Wright

You are either going to be utterly captivated by the style of this film, or find it a turgid plod.  I’m in the latter camp.  There is no denying it is very elegant to look at, but sometimes films which are overly gorgeous can feel robbed of any deep emotion, and that feels like the case here.  It’s well-acted, but I found it very difficult to care about any of the characters.  There was rather too much waltzing around, which gets tedious very quickly.

ANNE OF THE INDIES (1951)

Dir: Jacques Tourneur

Fabulous bit of vintage swash-buckling, inspired by the real-life story of female pirate Anne Bonny.  Jean Peters thoroughly enjoys herself as the hard-talking Captain Providence (now there’s a title).  When she saves a Frenchman (Louis Jourdan) from walking the plank, she finds herself falling for him, only to eventually discover that he has a wife (Debra Paget) back in port.  Louis Jourdan is wonderfully sexy as the love interest, oozing gallic charm, and making a refreshing change from the usual boorish thug we often have in this kind of thing.  Jean Peters does some nifty sword-fighting.  Debra Paget, who could so easily have found herself playing the Boring Little Milksop role, instead gives Capn Providence a run for her money in the verbal sparring department.  Thoroughly enjoyable.  This is clearly the sort of film Cutthroat Island was aiming to be.  Only it didn’t manage it.

ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS (1969)

Dir: Charles Jarrott

Any actor wanting to play King Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn might be advised to study Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold’s performances here. Bujold to me is the definitive Anne. It’s one of those performances where the historical character really does seem to come alive. With her flashing dark eyes, and soft French accent she knocks all over contenders into a cocked hat. Burton had some criticism for his role as Henry, with some accusing him of doing nothing more than bellowing. This isn’t true. He also plays Henry as sentimental and vulnerable beneath all the tantrum-throwing and bluster. Plus he looks damn sexy in a fur-lined dressing-gown, but that’s another matter.  In his diary Burton recorded that he thought Henry was mad, that he seemed demonic.  Burton had the hots for Bujold in real life, which won’t exactly come as any great surprise, and Bujold had to put up with Burton’s wife Elizabeth Taylor, hovering jealously on set. “I’ll give that bitch an acting lesson she won’t forget!” Bujold is reported to have said. Well she certainly did. The other actors all do a fine job too. Anthony Quayle gives a many-faceted turn as Cardinal Wolsey. One moment all powerful, the next frail, pathetic old man. Michael Hordern portrays Anne’s father as a greedy, ambitious man, but ultimately weak and hopelessly out of his depth in the high-octane dealings of the Tudor court. Irene Papas looks permanently moist-eyed and sad as the forlorn Queen Katherine. There are some great lines too, “I am accursed!” My favourite is the scene where Wolsey is in bed, and is told that the Duke of Norfolk is paying him an unwanted late-night visit. “The Devil take him!” he mutters. I’ve often muttered that one myself when dealing with unwanted callers.

ANOTHER MAN’S POISON (1951)

Dir: Irving Rapper

Bette Davis stars alongside her real-life husband Gary Merrill in this British-made thriller, based on a stage play by Leslie Sands.  The story is a fairly good one, involving a successful crime author called Janet Frobisher (Davis), who lives in some comfort on the Yorkshire moors.  Her first husband disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and along comes one of his old crime cohorts (Merill) who elbows his way in, and takes his place.  I think what stymies this film are the two American stars.  Bette is too big for it, and I don’t mean that in any physical sense!  What should have been an absorbing, atmospheric little thriller instead becomes all about Bette Davis and Mr Bette Davis.  I have a bit of a problem when revisiting some of Bette’s films lately.  I agree she was a great star, and a mesmerising screen presence, but she over-acts horribly at times.  She just never seems to be able to tone it down.  It always has to be about her and her cut-glass accent, swaggering about all over the place, and in a low-key film like this it destroys any chance at building up some true Menacing Atmosphere.  And her semi-demonic laugh at the end practically leads it into panto territory.  Plus I really didn’t like Gary Merrill.  He’s tedious and irksome, like a bargain basement Humphrey Bogart, but without any of Bogart’s charisma and wit.   Having said all that, I did like this film, and would be more than happy to watch it again, so the ones I’ve just slagged off must have done something right!

APOLLO 18 (2011)

Dir: Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego

Since The Blair Witch Project there has been a whole raft of what the critics call “found footage” films. You know the sort of thing – someone claims to have found secret documentary film footage showing some dark, horrible mystery, which usually involved the deaths of all concerned. Classic urban myth stuff. Naturally, they have all varied in quality. Apollo 18 is a bit of a mixed-bag. It takes up some of the conspiracy theories involving the Moon, but unlike Capricorn One, this isn’t a case of We Never Went There, more We Went There And Something Awful Happened So We’ve Never Been Back. I wasn’t impressed with the first part of it. It was dark and confusing, and I couldn’t get a handle on the lead characters. They seemed to be a handful of anonymous men in space. I think this is a bad mistake, frankly. You need characters you can care about, or at least can tell apart from one another. There is some scene-setting, involving the difficulties of living in space, all cramped together in a tin-can. The film improves in the second half, when spooky, terrifying things start happening on the Moon’s surface. This is classic haunted house stuff, albeit haunted house in space. If you’re overly-familiar with conspiracy theories, there might be a touch of same-old same-old about it all, but it’s still quite eerie in parts.

ARABIAN NIGHTS (1974)

Dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini

I watched this on a ropey old VHS tape a few years ago, which didn’t really do the film justice, but on the whole this Italian-made effort is worth a look. There are enough shots of nubile young Italians locked in passionate clinches in shaded rooms, tents and bath-tubs to keep us engrossed. From what I remember the demon is a bit of a letdown when he appears, but he’s alright. The most stunning part though was the young man donning his ragged priest’s vestments for the first time as bells ring out in the town all around him.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956)

Dir: Michael Anderson

This is one of those films that is probably more fascinating these days for the story of how it was made than what it looks like now.  In the 1950s Hollywood was very wary of that new young upstart on the block: television.  It had to do something that television couldn’t compete with, be as big, extravagant and colourful as possible.  Roll in Mike Todd, a larger-than-life mogul – who is more known these days as Elizabeth Taylor’s 3rd husband – to bankroll this extravaganza based on Jules Verne’s classic novel.  What followed was an epic 3-hour travelogue, packed with cameo appearances by stars of the time.  Does it work watching it now?  Well obviously I can only answer for myself, and that answer is a bit of a “meh”.  The problem with the all-star cameo appearance film is that it can dangerously stray into the territory of “the cast are all clearly having fun, but what about the viewer?”  This would certainly help scupper the original of Casino Royale a decade later.  It worked better in It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, where the veteran comic actors at least remembered that they had to be funny.  The cameo appearance film can so easily end up being self-indulgent, such as Frank Sinatra appearing briefly in this as a piano player.  As if the audience is meant to go “oh wow!  It’s Frank Sinatra, we are not worthy!”  There are sequences in this that are magical.  The colourful London streets, the hot air balloon ride over France to the accompaniment of Mantovani’s music, and the steam train ride across India.  Other bits just didn’t work for me.  The Ed Morrow introduction which made it feel like we were getting a school lecture, instead of settling in for an entertaining film (what the hell was that all about?).  The digression to Spain (not in the original novel), where we get a tediously long and dismally unfunny bullfight scene.  The disjointed bits, where for instance Fogg is one minute in Spain, and the next he’s at the Suez Canal, with almost the entire Mediterranean missed out.  I suppose something has to be said about Shirley MacLaine’s misguided turn as an Indian princess.  Even allowing for the fact that this was made in a different era, where white western stars often played ethnic characters, this was a bad misfire.  Shirl is about as Indian as Coca-Cola and Walt Disney.  Even David Niven is disappointing as Phileas Fogg.  I was surprised to read that he was extremely keen to play this role, even offering to do it for free, because it certainly doesn’t come across that way.  All too often he seems bored and wooden.  This is a role many actors would relish, as it’s great fun, but unfortunately Niven rather overdoes the staidness.  It’s easy to see why the film made such a splash at the time it was released, but these days it’s just too long and too self-indulgent.

AS ABOVE SO BELOW (2014)

Dir: John Erick Dowdle

I’m quite fascinated by the Paris Catacombs, so I was intrigued by this film, although I had a feeling in advance that I shouldn’t get my hopes too high.  It’s a “found footage” film, which is a concept which seems to have been done to death in recent years.  Cue lots of wobbly camera-work, and hysterical kids no doubt.  But this did have Paris as a setting, so I thought it was worth a go.  Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a young academic, who is hellbent on finishing her father’s work of finding the Philosopher’s Stone, which is buried far beneath the ground.  As soon as the Philosopher’s Stone was mentioned, I felt a pang of disappointment.  Oh no, not that old chestnut again.  And yes, here we are, roaming, or in my case, being dragged kicking and screaming, into Dan Brown territory.  We get to look round old churches, whilst Scarlett earnestly gets carried away uncovering old inscriptions on stone slabs.   She has around her the usual gang of snotty know-it-all youngsters, or ones who can’t stop goofing about.   They all come to the conclusion that hey, it’s just so convenient them being in Paris, because … ta da! … they can look for the Philosopher’s Stone in the Catacombs.  Oh very Scooby Doo.  She meets a man in a nightclub who can get her into the Catacombs after hours, and so down they go.  From then on, it becomes like Most Haunted but without the constant night-vision cameras, and Scarlett, game girl that she is,  at least doesn’t keep screaming like Yvette.  I didn’t find it particularly interesting, tense or scary.  Although Perdita Weeks is excellent as Scarlett, and does a good job of being a young female lead that isn’t a complete embarrassment to our sex, I didn’t care about any of the other characters at all, and all the stuff about eternal lights etc just tried my patience.  It was a great idea, but the execution of it was way-off for me.

ASH WEDNESDAY (1973)

Dir: Larry Peerce

I came across this little-known film in a book by critic Roger Ebert, in which he detailed all the films he has hated over several years.  It was made at a doldrums time in Elizabeth Taylor’s career.  She made some truly strange career decisions in the early 1970s, and whilst this one isn’t as odd as The Driver’s Seat (see below), it probably doesn’t rank as a high water mark in her illustrious career.  And yet, in some perverse way I quite like it.  It has a 70s glamour about it, and Elizabeth is very endearing.  She plays a middle-aged woman called Barbara, who decides that the only way for her to save her marriage to her philandering, dreary wooden stick of a husband (Henry Fonda, and God knows why she would want to) is by having copious amounts of plastic surgery.  She then takes herself off to a glamorous Alpine resort to recover, and, instead of whooping it up with her newly-restored beauty, she still pines for the dreary wooden stick.   There are a number of problems with this film, which is probably why Mr Ebert included it in his book.  One is the glacial pacing.  There are long stretches where very little happens, and unless you’re fascinated by the whole process of having plastic surgery, you might find it quite dull.  There is also the fact that Elizabeth was 41 when she made this film, and yet we have to accept that she has a 30-year-old daughter!  There is also the problem that Elizabeth is truly stunning when she emerges from the surgeon’s scalpel, her beauty offset by some fabulous fur hats.  It is mind-boggling that she would be pining for Henry Fonda, when she could be thoroughly enjoying herself living the high-life at a jet-set ski resort.  And if this type of film were to be made now, that is exactly what she would be doing.  We would be in rollicking chick-lit territory, and Henry Fonda would be banished firmly to the outer darkness.  Where he belongs.  But no, we are in the misogynist 70s, and Luscious Liz has to be pining for quite possibly The Most Boring Man Who Ever Lived.  As I said, NOT a high-point of Liz’s career, yet I find these early 70s films of hers quite fascinating.  Anyway, the moral of the story is here: that no amount of plastic surgery can save a marriage when the feeling’s gone.  TRIVIA CORNER: Other critics have pointed out that the reason we never see Boring Man’s Bit On The Side is that it would be impossible to believe that any man would dump Liz for another woman, and so no other woman would be able to eclipse her here.  Well not sure about that, after all Prince Charles did prefer Camilla Parker-Bowles over Princess Diana.  The only way that would work was if Liz was playing a total bitch, but she’s not.  She’s very sweet.  Richard Burton hated his wife’s film, calling it “trash”.  Maybe, but it has a low-key vibe that stops it from being the usual Hollywood trashy glitz.  It’s become a bit of a ritual for me to watch this film in February, and in spite of the cheesy music and Henry Fonda’s pompous and wooden performance, it’s still a bit of a guilty pleasure.   Apparently there were problems behind the scenes, with Richard Burton convinced Liz was having an affair and often causing her to appear nearly 3 hours late on set.  That, coupled with all the boozing, must have made for a stressful filming experience.  And yet none of it shows on the screen.  Liz gives an understated and sensitive performance.  Perhaps the end game of her own relationship to Burton enabled her to put some focus on Barbara having to face the harsh truth that her marriage was at an end, and nothing could save it.   These days though one would hope that we would see Barbara triumphing more at the end.  Seeing the boring old fart off on the train, and then heading back to the resort for some fun.  A mellow bit of 70s escapism.

THE ASH TREE (1975)

Filmed as part of the BBC’s excellent A Ghost Story For Christmas series, this has to be one of the best.  Although I saw many of these adaptations when they first aired in the 1970s, for some reason this one slipped under the net, and I only saw it for the first time very recently.  Edward Petheridge is Sir Richard Fell, an 18th-century aristocrat who comes to claim his ancestral home.  Linked with this is the story of a witch (Barbara Ewing) who was condemned to hang by an ancestor of his.  At her death she cursed the house, vowing that no one would ever stay in it for long.  This is a beautifully-photographed little film (it runs at only 31 minutes), with some nicely understated playing by the cast, who could so easily have gone completely over the top with the material.   Former Dr Who assistant Lalla Ward plays Sir Richard’s fiancee.  The culminating scene with the “spider-babies” is genuinely nerve-wracking.

THE ASPHYX  (1972)

Dir: Peter Newbrook

British cinema in the early 1970s produced some curious oddities, and this one is no exception.  The adorable Robert Stephens plays Sir Hugo Cunningham, a Victorian toff with a passion for photography.  When his wife and son die in a boating accident, he becomes convinced that there is a way to photograph the spirit of death at the moment of passing, and if that spirit could be captured and contained then a person could become immortal.   With his adopted son Giles (Robert Powell) he attends a public execution, and manages to capture the Asphyx on film, fuelling his obsession.  The Asphyx seems to have been largely ignored on release, and the intervening decades have not raised its status any.  And yet it is an original thought-provoking piece, with some genuinely creepy moments, particularly involving the spirit itself.  Part of the problem may have been that it is a downbeat low-key kind of film, and not the bodice-ripping over-the-top shenanigans that people had come to expect from Brit horror from this time.  Sir Hugo’s morbid obsession becomes extremely unsettling, and his determination to make his daughter Christina (Jane Lapotaire) immortal against her will is unnerving.  Sir Hugo has gone from being a kindly old soul into a complete monster.  SPOILER ALERT: The ending has Sir Hugo, now a very old, disfigured man, roaming the London streets of the 1970s.  His only friend and companion the guinea pig which he experimented on first.  When his body is crushed in a car accident, the police are horrified to discover that he is still alive.  The old question arises from this film of “would you accept immortality if it was offered to you?”  Well I guess there are all sorts of codicils to that one.  What if, like Sir Hugo, you ended up being in a terrible accident, and then having to live with the consequences forever more?  I can’t help being reminded of a Greek Myth whereby somebody asked for immortality from the gods, but forgot to ask for eternal youth.  They ended up as a withered specimen in a glass bottle, screaming “let me die!”

ASYLUM (1972)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker

Absorbing Brit horror anthology film from 1972. It begins stirringly enough with dishy Robert Powell driving up to a spooky house, with Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain as the soundtrack. He is Dr Martin, and he has come to take over at a private lunatic asylum. He is greeted by a wheelchair-bound Patrick Magee, who informs him that his predecessor is now one of the patients, and it is up to Dr Martin to figure out which one it is. Dr M is taken to what is presumably the high-security wing, and is introduced to four patients, who each tell him why they are here. The best story for me is the second one, where Peter Cushing plays a sinister cove who asks a poverty-stricken tailor to make him a suit out of a strange luminous material. I like these 1970s anthology films, and I think we should go back to making them.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (1959)

Dir: Bernard L Kowalski

The sort of mutant creature sci-fi b-movie so beloved of the late 1950s, with everyone’s fears as to what atomic radiation could do to everything.  This isn’t the best of the genre by any means, in fact it’s quite boring.  Probably the best things about it are the title, and Yvette Vickers who gives a good performance in the sort of role that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Tennessee Williams play (in fact, in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 send-up they make a few jokes along this line).   It’s basically set in a Florida swamp, with giant underwater leeches dragging locals in for food.   The film is let down by the fact that there are no moments of tension, and too many scenes where nothing much happens.   It’s not exactly engrossing.   There’s also a scene where two of the characters are being threatened at gunpoint in the swamp, and the guy is bawling his head off for mercy.  Unfortunately this ended up being unintentionally hilarious.   TRIVIA CORNER: Yvette Vickers achieved cult film status for appearing in Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman.   She also had a fleeting appearance as a party-goer in Sunset Boulevard (see below).  I remember reading about her death a few years ago.  It was all very sad.  She was last seen alive in 2010, at the age of 81, and her mummified body wasn’t discovered at her Los Angeles home until April 2011.  It is thought her body may have lain undiscovered for a year.

ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958)

Dir: Bert I Gordon

AKA Sad, Lonely Old Man Plays With His Dolls.  Well no, actually I made that up, but that’s what the gist of the story is really.  Presumably it was made to cash in on the success of The Incredible Shrinking Man a year before, but it’s nowhere near of the quality of that film.  In fact it’s all rather silly really, although it’s entertaining enough if you’re in an undemanding mood.  Sally (June Kenney) gets a job working for a kindly old doll-maker, Mr Franz (John Hoyt).  Something about him creeps her out though, perhaps it’s his way of referring to his miniature creations as if they’re real people.  Well – PLOT SPOILER ALERT! – that’s what they are.  He selects random people from the neighbourhood (even the mailman isn’t sacred) and shrinks them down to doll size, for company.   There are some utterly strange touches, such as the young blue-jeans girl who provides a very 1950s musical interlude halfway through, as if we’ve suddenly strayed into a Cliff Richard movie.  Plus Mr Franz telling a little girl she should spank her doll when she misbehaves (OK so).   It’s not classic sci-fi by any means, but if you have a weakness for low-budget 1950s movies then it’s an interesting curiosity.   There is one moment when you can read A Serious Message into it.  One of Mr Franz’s victims says she rather likes being shrunk and turned into a doll, as life’s easier and everything’s done for her.  Ah, is that an allegory for the modern world?  TRIVIA CORNER: its alternative title was I Was A Teenage Doll, presumably because most low-budget American films from the late 1950s seemed to have the word “teenage” in the title.

AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1976)

Dir: Kevin Connor

Peter Cushing and Doug McClure venture to the Earth’s core and fight prehistoric monsters, who are all very noisy. We get lots of close-ups of a big reptile’s eye, and Caroline Munro doing a Raquel Welch-style turn in a skimpy costume. The film does seem to have it’s admirers, and even though I normally like this sort of thing, it’s not very good. I don’t want to knock it though, it has it’s place in the world of entertainment.

AUSTRALIA (2008)

Dir: Buz Luhrmann

This is a film that people seem to love or hate.  I’ve read glowing reviews from ones who think it’s “magical” and “Gone With The Wind Down Under”, to bitter, scathing ones calling it one of the worst films ever.  So it’s certainly a movie that provokes strong reactions.  I personally found it very irritating, tedious, and far too long.  I love Nicole Kidman in it, who looks lovely, and is very endearing, although her character of Lady Sarah Ashley can feel like something out of a cartoon.  A Guardian review described her as “a parody British aristocrat”.  This would be fine if it was meant to be nothing more than a lightweight slapstick movie, but Australia aims high to be an Epic.   The brash humour got increasingly on my nerves, and I’ve had an absolute basinful over the years of the Stuck Up Snooty Lady falling for the Rugged (boorish) Charms of The Offbeat Hero (Hugh Jackman).  I mean, seriously, this is the 21st century, why are we still getting this type of rubbish served up as entertainment?  I didn’t watch all of it, as the thought of getting three hours of this did me in.

THE AUTOMATIC MOTORIST (1911)

Dir: Walter R Booth

Charming British shortie (the version I found on YouTube ran at just over 6 minutes).  A honeymoon couple hire a robot chauffeur, who promptly takes them on a dizzying whirl round the rings of Saturn and into the depths of the sea.  Everyone looks as if they’re having great fun, and why wouldn’t they be?

AUTUMN CROCUS (1934)

Dir: Basil Dean

For a few years in the 1930s, Dodie Smith – author of I Capture The Castle and 101 Dalmatians – had been a top West End playwright.  Autumn Crocus was her first hit.  It tells the story of Jenny, a sweet, shy schoolteacher, who finds forbidden romance with a married inn-keeper whilst on holiday in the Austrian Tyrol.  From what I remember reading in Dodie’s autobiography, Look Back With Astonishment, the filming of Crocus was troubled, and the end result wasn’t really worth the effort.  It’s more famous nowadays for being Ivor Novello’s last film.  He’s dashing, quirky and endearing, although having to stride around in lederhosen doesn’t really do him any favours in the sex god stakes.  Fay Compton, who had played the role of the school-teacher on stage, makes a charming lead, but, this is a Basil Dean production, and as such it’s way too talky, unable to shake off its stage-y origins.

AUTUMN LEAVES (1956)

Dir: Robert Aldrich

Joan Crawford plays Milly, a lonely middle-aged woman, who spent her youth nursing her sick father, and whose life now revolves around earning her living on a typewriter, and chatting to her gossipy landlady.  Whilst dining alone at a restaurant, she is joined at her table by a pushy young man, Burt (Cliff Robertson), who seems determined to make her acquaintance.   Naturally Burt isn’t all he seems, in fact he’s a dodgy piece of work, but of course Milly doesn’t realise that.  After a whirlwind romance, they get married, and Milly gradually realises that not all Burt’s exotic tales add up.  And then an attractive young woman (Vera Miles) turns up, also claiming to be Burt’s wife, who tells Milly that Burt’s a compulsive liar.  This is a pretty absorbing little thriller, and Joan is terrific (although her eyebrows can seem as if they’re threatening to take over proceedings!).  She’s charming, vulnerable, tough when she needs to be, in fact Joan at her intense, angst-y best.   Cliff Robertson is also excellent as the troubled Burt.  Joan regarded it as one of her better mature films, and it certainly holds up well as a neat, engrossing story.

THE AVIATOR (2004)

Dir: Martin Scorsese

Always a pleasure to see Leonardo di Caprio in a role worthy of his talents. Here he is excellent as Howard Hughes, one of the most eccentric American men of the 20th century. I remember when Hughes died, and everybody being shocked by the pictures of this brilliant, handsome man being reduced to a skeletal, bearded recluse. Di Caprio is good at conveying his chronic OCD behaviour, but also at showing us a man who wasn’t all rich-boy-flash-git, who had a strong centre to him. Cate Blanchett really makes the film too as one of his many movie star mistresses, Katherine Hepburn.  There is an absolutely beautiful piece of movie-making in this film, the scene where Howard lets Kate pilot his plane, and he watches her beautiful profile as she does so, all to the soft jazz melody of Moonglow. Hughes also became obsessed with Jane Russell’s breasts, even designing a special bra for her. He wanted to make her a star, (which he did), only to have some studio bod say “Howard, no one’s gonna want you to make an entire film about tits!”  Howard’s retreat to a darkened room, naked, unshaven, ranting and obsessive, has a Samuel Beckett quality to it. Di Caprio has never been better here.

BABY (1976)

One hour TV drama, scripted by Nigel Kneale (part of his Beasts season), which I remember absolutely terrifying me when I first saw it many years ago in the 1970s.  A young couple, expecting their first baby, move into a country cottage and begin renovating it.  Buried inside a wall they find a large jar, in which is a strange little mummified corpse.  From then on they are plagued by weird spooky occurrences.  Watching this again on dvd I still found it an eerie experience, and the ending actually made me jump out of my skin, even though I must have seen it before.  Film and TV buff Mark Gatiss once described it as “the most disgusting” thing he’d ever seen on television.  Still very effective after all these years.

BABYLON (2022)

Dir: Damien Chazelle

This massive colourful epic has divided just about everybody.  It’s the sort of film which makes me glad I don’t put star ratings on this blog, as it would be very hard to pigeon-hole this one.  I can appreciate where it works, but I can also see where it failed.  It is set during the late 1920s, and showcases all the hedonism and debauchery of the Silent Era, leading up to the advent of the Talkies, when so many careers were destroyed overnight.  I am fascinated by this era, so this should have worked for me.  It is impossible to exaggerate the excesses of that time.  Even Aleister Crowley – of all people! – was shocked by what he saw in 1920s Hollywood.  The only comparison since then has been the rock star excesses of the 1960s and 70s.  In Silent Era Hollywood bowls heaped with cocaine were placed around at parties.  Some of the stars earned huge amounts, lived in palaces and castles, and had affairs with anything that moved.  Read any book on Hollywood scandals and you’ll find a fair chunk from that era.  The whole extraordinary jamboree was only halted by the advent of the Talkies and the Wall Street Crash, which brought the whole party to an end. It was once said that if the 1960s was the party, then the 1970s was the hangover.  And you can easily say the same about the 1920s and 30s.  Where this film works is showing the whole insane madness of the time.  There is a terrific scene when starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) arrives on set out in the desert, and finds total mayhem.  Each booth is filming a different movie.  Directors are hollering.  Extras are massing.  Scriptwriters are slugging away on manual typewriters.  It is all gloriously in-yer-face.  One of the things I find fascinating about the whole silent movie genre is that, because they didn’t have to worry about intrusive noise, films were shot on stages side-by-side with one another.  I heard of one film where a star’s fans were shipped in to watch, and all applauded vigorously whenever the great one appeared.  Obviously that couldn’t happen on a sound stage.  Brad Pitt is terrific as over-the-hill old ham Jack Conrad.  A John Barrymore clone, a notorious hellraiser of that time, with touches of John Gilbert.  The part where, against all odds, he appears in a sunset love scene, shows beautifully how the magic of the movies can all come together and produce something truly special.  So why does all this sound as if I’m leading up to a big BUT?  Well much as I can appreciate how well made it is, and how boisterously over-the-top it is, it still left me feeling a bit meh.  The 3-hour running time has been a big issue for many.  It breaks Alfred Hitchcock’s 2-hour bladder rule.  This wasn’t a problem for me as I watched it on Prime, and could stop whenever I wanted.  It is not a film I would want to watch in the cinema.  We would have to go back to the old days of an Intermission!  Then there are the anachronisms.  I’m assuming these were done on purpose, and sometimes this can work (Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette for instance), but it didn’t for me here.  The biggest issue was the portrayal of Nellie, who I’m assuming is meant to be a thinly-disguised Clara Bow, a sassy little minx from a troubled background who was made a big star, only to be destroyed by her own excesses. The problem is that Margot Robbie simply looks too modern!  Clara Bow epitomised the Jazz Era, she was the ultimate flapper, so why didn’t they style Margot to fit in with the era?  I was left baffled by that one.  Then there is the matter of the relentless pace.  By and large this is a noisy cacophony of a movie.  The madness and high-jinks rarely lets up for a moment.  It was all starting to feel like Cutthroat Island, in that it just never stops.  It is an exhausting experience to sit through.  It is the same with the debauchery, which felt at times like being on an endless 18-30 holiday (showing my age here). This film seems determined not to give you a chance to think for a single moment.  I am still left undecided about what to make of this whole thing.  As I said, it’s the sort of film which makes me glad I don’t do a star rating.  ON REFLECTION THOUGH, I think its pluses outweigh its minuses.  The acting is pretty impressive throughout, and the dark scenes where the gangster James McKay (a brilliantly slimey Tobey Maguire) takes them to his satanic-style nightclub are quite unsettling, like getting a glimpse of Hell itself.  There is also a pretty banging soundtrack.  I would definitely watch it again.  I read one comment by a viewer who said that praise should be given to cinema when it does something different, and breaks out of the interminable (these days) Action Hero nonsense.  Hear hear to that one.

THE BANDIT OF SHERWOOD FOREST (1946)

Dirs: Henry Levin, George Sherman

What used to be referred to as Saturday Morning Fare, the sort of thing that would be shown to amuse the kids for a couple of hours.  An undemanding bit of swashbuckling.  Cornel Wilde plays Robin Hood’s son, roped in to save the Magna Carta, and protect the boy king, Henry III, (Maurice Tauzin).  As long as you accept that this isn’t exactly Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, then you should be in for a bit of escapist fun.  Plenty of sword-fighting, and a beautiful damsel in distress (platinum-haired Anita Louise), who looks great in tight breeches and a waistcoat, and shows a bit of resourcefulness when she’s trying to pass food to Robin in prison.  Maurice Tauzin is grating though as the boy king, sounding rather too much like an all-American brat for comfort.  Not a film that takes itself too seriously, thank goodness.

BANK HOLIDAY (1938)

Dir: Carol Reed

A film focusing on a group of people and the different ways they spend an August Bank Holiday weekend.  Fascinating, from an archaeological point of view.  Margaret Lockwood plays a nurse, who is supposed to be heading for a naughty weekend at the Grand Hotel with her boyfriend, but is haunted by a man bereaved after losing his wife in childbirth.  Kathleen Harrison is the fraught wife and mother of an unruly family, who finally stands up for herself after being asked to dance by a dashing young man.  Plus there are two young women arriving for the beauty pageant.  Garry Marsh (who I thought was great as the resident conman in the Will Hay prison comedy Convict 99) also pops up as the manager of the low-rent seaside vaudeville show, who absconds with the takings.   In many ways it is like a pre-war version of Holiday Camp.  It’s always a refreshing change to find a vintage Brit film which focuses on working-class characters, and not the usual stick-up-the-arse drawing-room-and-cucumber-sandwiches efforts that often appeared.   Fascinating to get a slice of pre-war holiday Britain, when hotels and B&Bs were crammed to the rafters, and people ended up sleeping on the beach instead.  Like a more lighthearted version of Brighton Rock.

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954)

Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz

Ye gods, what an absolute zzzz-fest this film is.  Ava Gardner plays Maria Vargas, an exotic Spanish dancer who is lured away to Hollywood stardom.  The film co-stars Humphrey Bogart, who is absolutely superb as a Hollywood scriptwriter, and Ava looks breathtakingly splendid.  But sadly this cannot take away what a turgid, lumpy mess the whole thing is.  It is painfully wordy.  There are long scenes where the characters just talk endlessly at one another, snarling and spitting venom, and generally making you wish they’d all fall down a mine-shaft.  You end up thinking “if making films is this awful, why do you bother, why don’t you go and do something else instead?”  Another problem is the character of Maria Vargas.  She is too remote.  It’s hard to get a handle on her as a person at all.  At times she feels like an alien, or like one of the statues in the cemetery at her funeral.  This might well be the intention for all I know, but it does make you wonder why we are supposed to care about her.  “Maria for instance, I could never figure”.  OK we get it, she’s enigmatic and remote, but it sure makes over 2 hours in her company feel tedious.  A depressing experience all round.

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)

Dir: Eugene Lourie

When you see films like this it’s easy to see why old monster b-movies are so much-loved.  This is fun.  It has a great story (based on a short story by Ray Bradbury), it has a monster, it has a lighthouse, and at just over an hour long, it’s my kind of length too.  Atomic blasts in the Arctic have broken out a dinosaur, which has been trapped for millions of years in ice.  The poor little thing … sorry the fearsome beast heads off in a leisurely fashion towards New York, taking time out along the way to demolish a lighthouse in the north Atlantic.  Once in New York, it stamps on the odd car, gobbles up the odd policeman, and breaks through the odd skyscraper, before it is finally trapped amongst the big dippers at Coney Island.  The only problem is that the Beast is more cute than terrifying!  Nevertheless, a monster movie as a monster movie should be.

THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR (1970)

Dir: James Kelley

Flora Robson and Beryl Reid play elderly spinster sisters who have a dark family secret concealed in their cellar.  The early 1970s was an odd era for British horror, and this is one of the most peculiar.  The two leads give their roles the kind of professional commitment you’d expect from an Ibsen stage play, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this is an underwhelming horror.  There is a lot of talk, with long conversations rehashing dreary family history, and the whole film groans under an intensely gloomy atmosphere. I came away from it feeling more depressed than entertained.

THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)

Dir: Coleman Francis

Often regarded as one of the worst films ever made, and I’m in no mood to argue with that one.  The film begins with a loud ticking clock, and a woman drying herself off in her bathroom.  She moves into her bedroom, and then looks vaguely bored as a strange man comes into her room.  She looks just as bored when he’s throttling her to death.   This film really can’t do murder scenes (it can’t do anything really), as everyone who gets killed has the same nonplussed, couldn’t-give-a-shit expression when the dark deed happens.   Anyway, this opening scene often baffles viewers, as it seems to have no connection with the rest of the film.  You could be forgiven at this point for thinking that The Beast of the title was referring to a serial-killer preying on lone women in their own homes, Boston Strangler-style.  But it’s not. I think I read on the IDMb site that this scene was only added by the director because he fancied a bit of nudity!   This should give you some idea of the level of cinematic genius we’re dealing with here.  The film then follows the sad plight of a lumbering Soviet scientist (Tor Johnson, Swedish wrestler and star of the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space) who wanders into the American desert, near a nuclear testing site, and turns into a murderous beast (naturally).  It’s hard to stress just how inept this all is.  The worst crime – in my opinion – is the intensely annoying Narrator Who Won’t Shut Up.  There is very little dialogue from the cast, and what there is was apparently added on later, giving everything a laughably disjointed air.  Instead we have the director  (at least I think it was him) giving an insufferably pompous and condescending narration, at times you can almost visualise him wagging his finger in moral condemnation (“an innocent victim caught in the wheels of justice”, “shoot first, ask questions later”, “a man runs, somebody shoots at him”, “man’s inhumanity to man” < look, are you making a sci-fi/horror B-movie or delivering the Sunday sermon??).   I hoped its quirky low-budget black-and-white style would at least give it some Atmosphere, but there’s just nothing.  It runs at just under an hour in length, and yet by 30 minutes in I really couldn’t stand anymore.  Please, whatever you do, don’t spend any money on this.  There are free versions available on YouTube, if you’re a sucker for bad cinema.

BEAU BRUMMELL (1954)

Dir: Curtis Bernhardt

Thoroughly enjoyable, colourful costume romp depicting the rise and fall of Regency dandy Beau Brummell (Stewart Granger) who, in spite (or because?) of his outspoken ways became a close friend of the Prince Regent (Peter Ustinov).  Unfortunately it was the very same outspokenness which led to his downfall, and banishment from high society.  (“Who’s your fat friend?”)  Brummell was a true trend-setter.  He would spend hours trying to tie the perfect cravat, and men-about-town would queue up simply to watch him get dressed.  He is credited with introducing the simple black suit, which became standard men’s attire for the next 200 years.   Granger apparently hated the film, which is a shame as he seems perfect in the role.  Some actors would have probably gone too over-the-top with the foppishness.  Ustinov achieves the almost-impossible in making the future King George IV – a King for whom there is little positive to say – sympathetic.  He’s spoilt, narcissistic and petulant, but also lonely, and at times like an over-excitable puppy.   The only disappointing note is Elizabeth Taylor putting in an insipid turn as Lady Patricia.  It doesn’t help that, for a lot of the film, she is saddled with an unflattering white wig, concealing her trademark black hair. It’s a relief when she’s allowed to go without it.  TRIVIA CORNER: the film ends with a touching reconciliation between Brummell and George, on Brummell’s deathbed.  In truth, Brummell outlived the King by 10 years.

BEGOTTEN (1990)

Dir: E Elias Merhige

I had to psyche myself up for ages to watch this one. Its reputation had well-preceded it as one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable films ever made. I had seen clips where a forbidding voice-over went on about something sort of Biblical, and we had eerie black-and-white shots of people rolling around on the ground. It seemed intriguing enough to warrant extra viewing, but I could never bring myself to do so, and this is from someone who sat through Salo, twice, so I’m not usually overly-squeamish. Anyway, one hot afternoon, I downloaded the entire film on YouTube, and braced myself for a disturbing hour-or-so of viewing … and was left feeling “meh!” The only thing that genuinely concerns me about this film is the idea that if I criticise it in any way I’ll get trolled by its ardent supporters, all telling me what a stupid numbskull I am, and how I should stick to watching Carry On films. In which case they’d probably be right. Weirdness I can live with. Controversy I can live with. Cinema – like any art form – should sometimes push boundaries. And new ideas are there to be seized and made use of. BUT boredom is something that always defeats me. And by golly, this film is tedious. The plot (which someone has kindly posted in YouTube comments, and is quite useful in understanding the film) concerns God, who decides to disembowel Himself using a rusty razor. I’m not entirely sure why, but presumably he’d had enough of Mankind and their endearing little ways. This I can quite understand, but you’d think God would find an easier way to end it all, quite frankly. God is represented by a grotesque figure sitting on some kind of veranda. He appears to be wearing a mask and a long robe. The “suicide” (well I’m presuming that’s what it is) seems to take forever. When you first see this image it IS disturbing, but after a while you get sort of acclimatised to it, and you think “OK movie, let’s move it along a bit shall we?” Eventually a woman wearing a disco skirt emerges from underneath God’s chair, and decides to impregnate herself using his dying semen. Classy. If you are devoutly religious, then this film WILL be upsetting and highly controversial, and you probably should stay clear of it. If you are a fan of extreme cinema, then it’s a must, but even running at a little over an hour long, I found it’s glacial pace almost insufferable. It seems entirely wrapped up in its own pomposity. And much as the themes in it are controversial, at the same time they feel strangely tired. Made in the early 1990s, the film feels like a throwback to the 1960s (all that God Is Dead stuff from that era), or the more avant-garde movies of the Silent Era. Weirdly, I found the random clips of it I’d seen prior to the viewing far more disturbing. When I came to watch it in its entirety the shock factor had gone, and I was just left with a cheaply-made film which felt like something some 60s hippy students had thrown together for an art class.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA (2013)

Dir: Steven Soderbergh

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon are absolute revelations in this absorbing biopic of that most flamboyant of performers, Liberace.  Covering his final few years, his troubled relationship with Scott Thorson (Damon), and his death from AIDS, Behind The Candelabra manages to be funny and tragic, scathing, and yet also affectionate.  The scene where we see Libs on his death-bed is deeply shocking, but the ending, where Scott envisages Liberace giving one final performance at his funeral is simply magical.  “Too much of a good thing is simply wunnerful!” TRIVIA CORNER: I liked the line about Sonja Henie so much I put it on Twitter, and immediately got earnest, po-faced types lecturing me about “beards”.  For crissake, lighten up, that’s not exactly in the spirit of Liberace now is it!

BEING THE RICARDOS (2021)

Dir: Aaron Sorkin

A biopic of Lucille Ball should always be a good idea, but this is one turgid, lumpen mess of a stodgy pudding.  For one thing it’s way too long.  It goes on forever, and the timeline is constantly titting about all over the place.  For another it has that fake docu-drama style, whereby actors pretend they’re real people making a documentary.  Sometimes this can work – as in the TV series Feud: Bette & Joan – but all too often it can be simply irritating. And for another, it has a drab feeling to it, with too many scenes which seem to be set in brown rooms full of brown furniture.  Ultimately though, I just can’t take Nicole Kidman as Lucy.  I don’t know what it is with Kidman, but increasingly she just irritates me.  She always seems as if she’s put out about something.  Now the film has to show the contrast between the lovable, ditzy Lucy viewers saw on the screen, and the tough old broad she was behind the scenes.  There’s no problem with that.  Lucy was notoriously hard-nosed, heck this is the woman who once made Joan Crawford (of all people) cry, because she told her her dancing wasn’t up to scratch!  Lucy wouldn’t have survived at the top of the showbiz tree for as long as she did if she hadn’t been tough.  But Kidman’s portrayal isn’t so much tough, as just downright boringly moody.  There is one scene which I did like though.  It is when they re-create one of the I Love Lucy scenes where Lucy joins an Italian woman in stamping round a vat of grapes.  I loved it.  It captured the spirit of just why the show was so phenomenally popular as it was.  It is just a pity that the rest of the film didn’t measure up to this.

BELLE STARR (1941)

Dir: Irving Cummings

The sort of airbrushed nonsense that gives Hollywood biopics a bad name.  In real life Belle Starr had been a 19th century female outlaw and thug.  And going by the few existing photographs of her she looked like the back end of a bus.  But that’s not good enough for Hollywood, no siree!  In this cut-price Gone With The Wind nonsense, we have the staggeringly beautiful Gene Tierney doing an embarrassingly bad sub-standard Scarlett O’Hara routine, fiddle-de-deeing all over the place in a screechy voice, and dying bravely for the good ole Southern cause.  Absolute rubbish.

THE BELLES OF ST TRINIANS (1954)

Dir: Frank Launder

Very first outing for the little horrors from the girls school from Hell.  Joyce Grenfell, as Sergeant Ruby Gates, has to go undercover as games mistress to expose a race-horsing racket.  It’s all knockabout (literally) fun, and Alastair Sim plays one of my favourite comic creations, that of Miss Millicent Fritton, the school’s headmistress.   Richard Wattis is also very funny as the longsuffering Man from the Ministry.  Interesting that the staff-room with it’s full qota of eccentric teachers isn’t that much more exaggerated from what I remember of my own school-days … except it’s nowhere near smoky enough.

BERSERK! (1967)

Dir: Jim O’Connolly

I once got slated by an Amazon reviewer for! putting in too many exclamation marks! into one of my books!  God knows what he would make! of the 1960s custom! for adding exclamation marks! onto the titles! of low-budget horror pictures!  Berserk! is one of those films which these days is more interesting for the making of it than the film itself, which is a pretty standard thriller about a series of murders at a Big Top, run by a ruthless ring-master (ring-mistress?) played by Joan Crawford.  This was the twilight years of Joan’s long and illustrious movie career, which in the wake of Baby Jane had degenerated into cheap horror flicks.  Even so, Joan is always very watchable, and without her presence this film would have little to interest most of us these days.   In his famous book Feud Shaun Considine described Joan as “shapely” in this film, and although she’s certainly still very trim, there is no denying that the years were weighing heavily on her.  Well fair play, she was 63 when she made this (Joan’s exact year of birth is always open to debate), but unfortunately it makes some scenes laughable, such as the one where she’s sharing a candlelit supper with a man considerably younger than herself.   Poor Joan looked every bit her age in this scene, which led to some audiences at the time laughing out loud.   One of her co-stars was Diana Dors, who meets a grisly fate in a Sawing The Lady In Half scene.  DD looks great in her circus corset, but in the rest of the film she looks several years older than the mid-thirties she was at the time.  Far from being rivals, she and Joan struck up a great rapport with one another.   POSSIBLE SPOILERS:  the film’s great revelation is that it’s Joan’s cherub-faced daughter Angela (Judy Geeson) who is behind the killings.  At the time it was suggested that Joan’s real-life adopted daughter Christina should play the role, an idea which horrified Joan.  Imagine what a grisly fascination that would have now! Oops those exclamation marks again.  If you’re as fascinated by circus life as I am, then the film is worth watching.  TRIVIA CORNER: by this time Joan was the widow of Pepsi magnate Alfred Steele, and Joan had continued to work tirelessly as PR for the firm, bringing in stockpiles of the drink on set.  I couldn’t help noticing that in some scenes, a few members of the circus audience were sipping from familiar-looking cans.  I could be wrong of course.   In one scene Joan is chatting in the circus refreshment tent with Judy Geeson.  At one point she sweeps some crumbs off the table with her gloved hand, and her face is a picture of annoyance and disgust.  Of course, it could just be that she was a good actress, but Joan’s OCD nature when it came to cleanliness (thanks to her own abused childhood) is now well-known.  I tried to find out more about Golda Casimir who memorably plays the circus’s Bearded Lady, but I could only discover that she played bit-part characters in a few films.

BESSIE (2015)

Dir: Dee Rees

Excellent biopic of legendary jazz singer Bessie Smith, who hit fame and fortune in the 1920s and 30s.  Often called the Empress of the Blues, Bessie, like so many torch-singers had a traumatic private life, plagued by alcohol problems, and stormy relationships.  This is a well-made film, beautiful to look at, and not shirking from showing Bessie in all her troubled glory.  Queen Latifah is quite brilliant in the title role.

BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2012)

Dir: John Madden

A sort of feelgood rom-com for oldies, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel brings together what would probably be called a National Treasure-trove (pause for a moment, I’m feeling queasy) of British actors – Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy – as a bunch of pensioners trying to relocate to India.  There are some great lines in it (“I can get HobNobs out here you know, I’ve found a way”), and interesting characters who all have their own demons to face.  It’s not the most demanding story you’re likely to find, but it does what it sets out to do perfectly well.

THE BEST PAIR OF LEGS IN THE BUSINESS (1973)

Dir: Christopher Hodson

A film so unbearably depressing that both times I’ve seen it now it has left me feeling grumpy the following day, which is probably not good considering I think it was released as a comedy.  Reg Varney plays Sherry, a middle-aged low-rent drag queen, playing in a dreary holiday camp.  Just about every tribulation, embarrassment and humiliation known to Mankind is heaped on poor old Sherry, including having a sociopathic boss (Jean Harvey), who can’t wait to be rid of him, and a wife (Diana Coupland) who is planning to run off with another man.   Reg Varney is extremely good, but his sad-faced bitter old clown portrayal is almost too much to bear at times.   The film also carries that overwhelming aura of cheap tackiness which seems almost exclusive to British cinema of the early 1970s.  Watching this you would legitimately wonder why so many of us get nostalgic for that particular decade!  I think it was released as a comedy simply because it starred actors whom people were more used to seeing in TV sitcoms.  But there’s no way this is a laugh-a-minute.  Worth watching just to see what Reg was capable of when he was given a decent role, but I can only agree with one viewer who said it was “the saddest film she had ever seen”.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (1944)

Dir: Edward A Blatt

It’s many years since I’ve since this film, but I’m including it here because I would love to see it again, and it only seems to be available on Region 1 DVD (don’t get me started). It was made during World War 2, and is a strange, eerie tale about a ship carrying passengers across the Atlantic. Gradually it dawns on them that they are in fact all dead, and are soon about to meet their Maker. From what I recall it rather overdoes the pious morality at times, but nevertheless it’s an imaginative tale, where the good get rewarded, and the awful get their comeuppance in ways that you don’t automatically foresee. Just to give one example: there is a dreadful old lady who has bullied her meek husband for years, and who is obsessed with material things. She gets punished by being given a castle … which she has to live in all alone, FOREVER. Crumbs. Incidentally, the crew of the ship are all suicides, who presumably are all having to work out their passage in the After-Life.  UPDATE 28/3/2019 – well I have finally got to see it again as part of a John Garfield DVD tribute, and I have to say it is even better than I remembered.  John Garfield is brilliant as a jaded, drunken war journalist, and the lonely fate of the  mercenary woman (Isobel Elsom) still makes me shudder. The sort of film that does linger in the mind.  It left me wishing there was a Part 2, where we got to follow the characters on their adventures in the After-Life.

BEYOND THE DOOR (1974)

Dir: Ovidio G Assonitis, Robert Barrett

Unsettling Exorcist-style film, very much in the vein of the demonic child movies that were so popular in the 1970s.   Juliet Mills is a young mother living in San Francisco, who finds herself dreading the birth of her latest baby, and she begins to act strange and hostile.  Horrid things start to happen in the family home, with demonic laughter, creepy dolls with flashing eyes and poltergeist-style crashing of furniture.   Much of the movie is set to some funky background disco music, which feels as though it’s strayed from Starsky And Hutch.  Although not as showy and grotesquely flamboyant as The Exorcist, this is still a very disturbing film.  It has a peculiar Atmosphere all of its own.   I watched this on YouTube, and there were some interesting comments below it.  One person wrote: “there is a sense of evil to it that trascends the limits of a movie”.  I felt that way about The Exorcist too, and it also certainly applies here as well.

THE BIBLE: IN THE BEGINNING (1966)

Dir: John Huston

Usually regarded as the last of the great cinematic religious epics of the mid-20th century.  This American-Italian film takes us from the Creation through to the moment when Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac.   It has many splendid moments, and is relatively free of the pomposity that can all so often makes this kind of thing  insufferable.  The opening sequence of when God created the world has an eerie magic to it, and the director has more scope with the Garden of Eden scenes than he would have had 10 years earlier.  (I read one Christian reviewer who objected to Adam and Eve’s butt-naked nudity, which is somewhat missing the point of the story).  The highlight for me was the Noah’s Ark sequence.  Huston couldn’t find an actor who was available to play Noah, so he took on the role himself (he also plays God’s voice, sometimes in the ultimate case of Narrator Who Won’t Shut Up problem).  He manages to keep these scenes just on the right side of becoming Disney-fied, and I liked Noah bidding a sentimental farewell to the animals in his charge.  The Tower of Babel and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are also very effective, and the latter is quite disturbing.  Where the film gets difficult for me is the whole Abraham and Isaac bit.  This part is helped by having Ava Gardner giving a very dignified performance as Abraham’s wife, Sarah (she said this was the only film role she ever really enjoyed playing, which is curious as it was a pretty hellish experience for her really.  She was in an abusive relationship with her co-star George C Scott, who left her so badly beaten that she had to wear a body brace for filming.  In later years Ava would feel physically sick if she saw him on TV), but the idea behind it doesn’t get any easier to digest, in that God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion to Him, and then does a “s’lright you know, I was only testing you”.   Apparently this was meant to be the first in a series of Biblical adaptations, but they never got made.  I guess the Big Screen religious epics had had their day, for a while anyway.  They were to make a comeback in the 1970s on the small screen, with well-made epics like Jesus Of Nazareth.  ADDENDUM: I’ve seen this film included in Phil Hall’s book Greatest Bad Movies Of All Time .  He makes some pertinent comments that the film is disjointed, and veers from spooky, mystical opening, to Disney stuff, to soap opera.  He has a point, but I would still watch it again, although I’d probably bail out about halfway through.  That God-being-a-bastard-to-Abraham stuff really does grate.  I suppose I should blame the source material ….

THE BIG CIRCUS (1959)

Dir: Joseph M Newman

Lavish film about the ups-and-downs of life in a 1950s travelling circus.  This isn’t any old fleabitten circus though, but a spectacular American big top.  It’s a bit too glossy and lavish (and heartily American) for me at times, as I tend to like my film circuses with a bit of a seedy air to them, but it works fine as entertainment, and it does have Vincent Price as the ringmaster.  There is also quite a spectacular scene about a tightrope walk across the Niagara Falls.

THE BIRDS (1963)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock

Usually, quite rightly, regarded as Hitchcock’s ultimate masterpiece. He seemed to reach the peak of his career with this one, as if he finally threw everything he had at the canvas, and then sank back, satiated. Adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier, and relocated from Cornwall to the Californian coastline, The Birds has been analysed at great length already. I don’t feel I can really add much more to it, except to say that it is a truly fine piece of film-making, although at times I have to confess to being baffled as to why. It’s very long for a start, and at times the pace may seem glacial to a modern audience, but this is Hitchcock enjoying himself.  After all, you don’t rush something you truly enjoy. Many snarky comments have been made about Tippi Hedren’s acting ability, but she is perfectly right for the role of socialite Melanie Daniels. She is beautiful, elegant, very sweet and charming, and resourceful when required. I don’t quite see why she has such a thing for Rod Taylor, nice enough guy though he is, and his mother (Jessica Tandy) is a complete and utter whingeing pain in the neck. I was more intrigued by his ex-girlfriend, the schoolteacher (Suzanne Pleshette), and the moody, twilight scene where she and Melanie discuss Rod over a stiff drink is a stand-out favourite. I’ve read people baffled by the climactic scene where Melanie is attacked by birds in the attic. Lots of angst about What Was Hitchcock Trying To Achieve? It’s quite simple really. To put it bluntly, it’s a symbolism of rape. The scene where Rod takes her out of the house afterwards, and she seems to be in a state of catatonic shock reinforces that. All in all, a highly disturbing film, particularly when you look at the director’s mindset in filming it, but cinematic art all the same.

BIRDS OF PREY (1930)

Dir: Basil Dean

Absolutely atrocious low-budget “thriller”, (I’m not even sure that’s what I should be calling it), the sort of film which would have Americans shaking their heads and going “those Limeys just dunno how to make a movie”.  The director, Basil Dean, was a big noise in the theatre at that time, but his forays into cinema are largely regarded as a disaster.  This one is a good case in point.  It’s far too slow and talky, there are too many stretches where nothing seems to be happening but a bunch of upper-class nitwits chatting, giving annoyingly affected little laughs, and complaining about other guests who clearly aren’t up (down?) to their social level.  The story involves one of them, a retired colonial policeman, being the target of a revenge plot by some ruffians who had run up against him years ago.  The murder, when it takes place, has no suspense whatsoever.  There is no Whodunnit aspect, as we see who damn well does it, and the rest of the film is taken up with some dim-witted coppers trying to figure out what the audience already knows.  The pacing is dreadful.  Nobody acts naturally.  The villains are out of Panto It-Must-Have-Been-The-Weird-Forriner-What-Did-It school. And the accents are like nails on a chalkboard.  Nobody these days – not even the Queen – speaks as painfully posh as this bunch do. Hollywood could have done something half-decent with this plot, but clearly it was beyond us at the time.

THE BITCH / LADY DIAMOND (1979)

Dir: Gerry O’Hara

In her memoirs Past Imperfect Joan Collins recalled being at the Cannes Film Festival, and seeing a helicopter trailing a banner saying “JOAN COLLINS IS THE BITCH”.  Someone said to her that she must be so pleased by that, Joan’s reaction was rather more muted.  The Bitch was the sequel to the hit disco soft porn effort The Stud, based on a bestselling novel by Joan’s sister, Jackie.  Joan returns as rich bitch Fontaine Khaled, now divorced from her billionaire husband, and the owner of a struggling London disco.  On the long flight home from New York she falls for the somewhat smarmy charms of a crooked Italian (Michael Coby).  This doesn’t stop her seducing her new chauffeur (Peter Wight), and famously dressing up in a black lacey corset, fur coat and chauffeur’s cap.  This film is a bit of a weird one for me, because it is very much in the Guilty Pleasure category.  It undoubtedly is pure unadulterated rubbish, with very few redeeming features (apart from the lovely Joan), and yet I find it curiously watchable.  Some of that might be down to the soundtrack.  For someone my age, it immediately transports us back to the days of the school disco!  It has a high 1970s nostalgia quota, although it has to be said, this is not always a good thing.  There is the running “joke” for instance, carried over from The Stud, of Sammy (Doug Fisher) having a penchant for very young girls, and of Nico at one point saying “I’ve sometimes had a bit of jailbait myself”.   The obligatory swimming-pool orgy scene has that mix of country house luxury and pure trash which is so of the 70s, and makes me immediately think of Jilly Cooper bonkbusters.  I have to say though that Joan, with her fur coats, first-class travel, and breakfast of boiled eggs and orange juice, was quite inspiring to some of us way back then, and (whisper it softly in this Puritanical hair-shirt age) still is.  TRIVIA CORNER: one of the bitchiest reviews Joan incurred with this film came from the unspeakably irritating journalist, Judy Wade, who only seems to be happy when she’s obsequiously fawning over members of the Royal Family (a trait I never find particularly appealing in anyone).  She had her claws well and truly out with this one, denouncing the film for its displays of “sagging female flesh”, “droopy bosoms”, and Joan looking “more seedy than sexy”. Miaoww!!  What absolute rubbish.  Considering she was in her forties by this time, and had had 3 children, Joan looks fabulous.  And the older I get the more I marvel at this.  There is one scene where we see a back view of her wriggling her way naked across the room, and I was utterly awed.  I haven’t had a bottom as neat and tight as that since I was in my 20s!  Back in the late 1980s I was at an all-female gathering, composed of women of all ages.  It was at the height of the popularity of the Dynasty TV series, and a couple of the women were having a right good old bitch about Joan, at which one of the older women said “we only say all this about her because she’s so lovely”.  How right you were.

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

Dir: Edgar G Ulmer

A young couple, Peter and Joan Allison (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells)  are honeymooning in Budapest.  A mix-up on their train causes them to be sharing a compartment with the eerily suave Dr Werdegast (Bela Lugosi).  When Joan is injured in a bus crash, Dr Werdegast offers to take them to the home of his friend Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff).  Far from being the dusty, gothic castle that perhaps we were expecting, Mr Poelzig’s home is in fact ultra-modern.  There is clearly unfinished business between Werdegast and Poelzig, dating back to Great War.  From this moment on, things get very very strange indeed.  Dr Werdegast has a morbid fear of cats, which isn’t helped by Poelzig carrying one around with him.  In the basement Poelzig keeps the corpses of young women, their beauty preserved, one of whom is Werdegast’s wife.  His daughter meanwhile, shares a bed with Poelzig. To add to the surreal atmosphere, classical music plays continuously in the background.  The couple find themselves trapped in the house, whilst Werdegast and Poelzig play chess for Joan.  Poelzig is planning to sacrifice Joan at a gathering of his Satanist friends.  I really don’t think this film could get any more weird if it tried.  The inspiration for the film was “suggested” (according to the opening credits) by Edgar Allan Poe, and the character of Poelzig was thought to be inspired by Aleister Crowley.  Apparently the film was denounced as “foolish” on it’s release, and yet it has acquired some cult status.  It’s very strangeness is intriguing, and it has a surreal allure which keeps you watching.  The ending where Lugosi flays Karloff alive is very effective, even though you only see it in shadow (that’s quite enough).  The whole thing is very reminiscent of the pulp fiction horror magazines of that era.  Well worth a look.  And you also get a chance to hear Lugosi speaking his native Hungarian.

THE BLACK SLEEP (1956)

Dir: Reginald le Borg

Shlock horror made on a shoestring, the sort of thing probably reviled by Serious Film Reviewers, but those of us of a more discerning nature love it.  It has everything.  Spooky castle, thunderstorms, a mad scientist, and the kind of cast we can only dream of these days: Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jnr, John Carradine.  Rathbone plays an unscrupulous surgeon who is desperate to find a way of removing the brain tumour which has left his beautiful wife in a coma.  He experiments on all sorts of hapless souls, who end up disfigured and deranged in the cellar of his castle.  It reminded me of a short story by Seabury Quinn, the kind of pulp horror fiction in the 1920s and 30s.  Some of the acting by the supporting cast makes you want to cry out in dismay, but if you’re up for it, it’s a fun piece of gothic horror.  The cast admirably play it completely straight, although to be honest I was waiting for some funny one-liners at times.   The whole thing was completed in 12 days.  Although Plan 9 From Outer Space is often credited as Lugosi’s final film, it was in fact this one.

BLACK SUNDAY (1960)

Dir: Mario Bava

“Oh please father! Help me!  Don’t leave me alone with all these horrors!” A huge cult favourite amongst horror buffs, and certainly a Must See if you love anything gothic.  The photography on this is stunning.  Shot in lustrous black-and-white, it has more gothic imagery than you can shake a stick at.  A black carriage trundling through fog, cobwebby cellar, a lantern bobbing down a stone passageway, decayed flesh, gnarled hands clawing out of a grave.  A castle with secret passageways and trapdoors.  The plot: an evil sorceress is put to death, only to return 200 years later to possess the spirit of Katia, her beautiful descendant.  Raven-haired Barbara Steele, the queen of the horror B movie, is certainly well-cast in her dual role.  Her big eyes can seem other-worldly at times.  The dubbing on the version I saw did it’s level best to hijack the film at times, and I could have done without the goody-goody peasant girl, but I watched this film for it’s imagery, not it’s acting (which can be pretty ropey).  At times it reminded me of a silent film classic.  Any dedicated horror movie buff should make some time to watch this at least once.

THE BLACK SWAN (1942)

Dir: Henry King

Vintage pirate flick, which packs more than it’s fair share of swashbuckling.  Watcheable these days mainly for the glorious Maureen O’Hara, who plays a haughty aristocrat Lady Margaret, who is kidnapped by a pirate (Tyrone Power).  Herself is at her loveliest, and she manages to take everything that’s thrown at her with dignity.  I found Tyrone Power’s character a bit boorish, but hey he’s a pirate, I guess they weren’t renowned for being sophisticated gents!  Maureen makes sure he doesn’t get things easy.  A must for any fan of pirate movies. TRIVIA CORNER: Ms O’Hara said that Tyrone was a lot of fun to work with.  There’s one scene where she’s trying to be indignant with him, and I swear she’s trying her best not to laugh.

BLACK SWAN (2010)

Dir: Darren Aronofsky

This film is that rare thing in modern cinema … a truly unique experience.  In fact, I would argue that anyone left completely unshaken by the last 30 minutes should have their pulse tested to see if they’re still alive.  At first I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.  It felt like All About Eve set in the ballet world, but without the bitchy, funny repartee.  A young ballerina, Nina (Natalie Portman), has to take over the lead role in Swan Lake, and finds herself becoming more and more submerged into her role, losing her own identity in the process.  She is bullied by her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), her sleazy tyrannical boss (Vincent Cassels), and most fatally of all, by a fellow dancer (Mila Kunis) who encourages Nina to move over to her dark side.  But as the film went on I became more and more swept up into it, until the final part felt truly astonishing.  It’s hard to put into words, but at times like this a film ceases to be simply a couple of hours of entertainment, and moves into a higher more magical sphere.  Sorry if that sounds pretentious, but this film was truly something else entirely.  I’m almost frightened to watch it again in case I can’t recapture that first rapture.  Even so, it’s become one of my favourite films of all time, and proof that cinema can still pull the rabbit out of the hat when it chooses to do so.

THE BLACK TORMENT (1964)

Dir: Robert Hartford-Davis

Sometimes it pains me that this film isn’t better known than it is. It rarely features in film guides, not even ones that specialise in horror movies. It dates from the early 1960s, and is a fairly effective little chiller, very much in the Victoria Holt gothic mystery/romance genre. Set in the 18th century, it concerns a young bride (Elizabeth Sellers), who is taken to her new husband’s ancestral pile on the top of a steep hill. Soon she finds herself being haunted by his dead first wife, who roams the grounds at night on horseback shouting “murderer! murderer!” Marvellous. The very first time I saw this – which admittedly was a very long time ago – I actually got quite spooked out by the scene where Anne sees the veiled phantom in her bedroom. The period detail is great without being overwhelming, and some of the lines are terrific. “Madam, you deliberately laid your whip across my arm!” TRIVIA CORNER: John Turner, who plays Charles, makes full use of his formidable voice in this film. He was to do the same several years later when he played Roderick Spode in the 1980s TV adaptation of Jeeves and Wooster.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Dirs: Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez

The Blair Witch Project was pretty much a cinema phenomenon, and has spawned a whole rash of copycat “found footage” films since. I remember all the hoo-haa when it first came out, and for a time plenty of us did actually think this film was the real McCoy, that this particular backwoods of America was haunted by some evil old woman with hairy arms who abducted children. Yes I know, silly. But you have to hand it to the PR people on this film, they knew what the heck they were doing. The film does work very effectively as a chiller, and refreshingly, just for once, it doesn’t involve mad slashers cutting people up with chainsaws. In fact, there’s something quite reassuring that we can still be spooked out by the sight of a few voodoo-like devices hanging from some trees. And how many times has Heather Donohue’s shot of her sobbing to camera, snotty-nosed and in a woolly hat, been spoofed now? I think it was even used on a beer ad for a while. I particularly liked the vox-pop scenes at the beginning, where the young film-makers interview the townsfolk for their take on the legend. This is very well done. For reinventing horror, and particularly in a way that was non-violent, it deserves all its kudos it gained.  TRIVIA CORNER: the actors were kept in the dark about the plot as much as the audience, and steadily deprived of food as the days went on.  Their gradual fear and confusion was probably very real.  It was so effective that Heather Donohue’s Mum received condolence messages from viewers for losing her daughter!

BLANCHE FURY (1948)

Dir: Marc Allegret

During the 1940s Gainsborough Pictures produced some highly successful bodice-rippers, classic ones like The Man In Grey and The Wicked Lady. Blanche Fury was an attempt to capitalise on their success, but to give the tried and trusted costume drama format a harder edge.  This has a strong feel of a Victoria Holt novel, albeit one without any happy ending.  Feisty young woman, Blanche (Valerie Hobson), reduced to waiting on bad-temped bed-ridden old women, is summoned to work as a governess at the estate of a relation.  Based on a real Victorian murder case, the story follows Blanche’s tortured relationships, ending in murder, and general tragedy all round. Although the film is handsome to look at, and boasts the ever-watcheable Stewart Granger in the cast, it wasn’t a great success.  I suspect the public at the time didn’t want the harder edge.  They were more used to Margaret Lockwood and James Mason smouldering at one another.  Valerie Hobson was an interestingly different actress.  But in this she seems too hard.  The first shot of her makes her come across as a spiteful vixen.  Nowt wrong with bad girls of course.  And in The Wicked Lady Margaret Lockwood committed her share of dark deeds, but she did all that with a sassy style.  In this Blanche is just cold-blooded and haughty.  According to Wikipedia, the producer Anthony Havelock-Allen, said the film failed to find an audience because “there was real hatred in it … and the public didn’t want it”.  Granger described it as “grim and melodramatic”, and it certainly lacks the flashes of humour you often get in vintage bodice-rippers. Still worth a watch if you love bodice-rippers, but it’s not an uplifting experience.

THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER (1963)

Dir: Alberto de Martino

Disappointing gothic horror.  At first it looks like it’s going to be top-notch stuff.  A spooky castle, a carriage and horses thundering through the woods, manic organ music, a thunderstorm, a wolf howling, a girl wandering around in a filmy nightie, and something monstrous lurking in the tower … all done with that dream-like other-worldliness you often get with vintage European horror.  Unfortunately it’s all rather tedious.  The characters are bland and annoying, and the story un-involving.  Emily screams or sniffles at nearly everything (when she’s not catatonic), and her reaction on seeing her afflicted father in the tower just feels completely over-the-top.  And that’s another part of the problem.  We are shown the man in the tower in the first 20 minutes of the film, and he’s somewhat underwhelming.  He’s more deserving of sympathy than having his silly daughter screaming the place down.  Daft cow.  The film has acquired some cult status, but I tend to agree with the director, who dismissed it as “a little film of no importance”.  Many films like this have a nostalgic charm, elegance, and good stories, but this just feels like a very dull parody of Fall Of The House Of Usher.

BLESS THIS HOUSE (1972)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Film spin-off of a popular Brit TV sitcom from the early 1970s, which starred Sid James and Diana Coupland as the longsuffering parents of two teenagers.  I like this film.  It makes me laugh (which is all I ask from a comedy really), and has a bit of an escapist feel to it for those of us old codgers who grew up in the 70s.   Sally Geeson is a delight as the eco-obsessed daughter, banging  on about pollution and tin-cans.  Robin Askwith takes the role of Mike, the son, driving about in a flower-painted Volkswagon Beetle, and working on obscure modern sculptures in the garage.  There is an innocence to it all, which you probably wouldn’t get in a film about disputes between neighbours, and wayward teenagers these days.

THE BLOB (1958)

Dir: Irvin Yeaworth

I quite like old cheaply-made B-movies, so I was hoping that this was going to be a lot more fun than it was.  It was actually just plain dull.  Bad acting, sluggish direction, and simply not much happening for most of the film except a lot of whining and moaning.  In fact, for much of it there was just inter-generational squabbling, with lots of “tsk! kids of today” type stuff.  Older authority figures complain that they’re resented by the youngsters because “I was in the war”, so I suppose it has a sort of archaeological  value in seeing all the 1950s concerns about the rise of The Teenager as a phenomenon.  It’s largely famous these days for being Steve McQueen’s first film, although with his rugged, manly good looks and quiet self-assurance it’s a bit hard to accept him as a typical snotty teenager (he was in fact 28).  The Blob itself is … well it’s just a liquidy mess.  It sort of oozes into places like an oil leak.  It was actually spoofed here in Blighty a couple of years ago by a Marmite advert.   TRIVIA CORNER: I found myself being more intrigued by the film the kids are watching at the drive-in (which is never a good sign with a film, when you’re more fascinated by what the characters are watching than the film you’re supposed to be watching).  I looked it up, and it was Daughter Of Horror aka Dementia (1955) (see below).

BLONDE (2022)

Dir: Andrew Dominik

Second adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.  When this version came out I read somewhere that it really was time we moved on from portraying Marilyn as the perpetual victim.  Yes, I agree.  No one is disputing that she knew her share of troubles.  That her childhood constantly haunted her, and that fame did more than its share of damage.  We all know that.  But no one’s life is perpetually one-note all the time, and if Marilyn’s life had been as relentlessly gloomy and awful as it is shown here then it’s hard to believe she would even have made it to 36!  Ana de Armas does a solid job in the title role (although I can’t help feeling that Jamie Lee Curtis’ somewhat demented enthusing that de Armas really seems to be Marilyn is completely over-the-top. Calm down dear).  We rarely get to see Marilyn’s fun, charming side.  Or her intelligence.  This was the woman, don’t forget, who took on Hollywood, told them they weren’t giving her good enough roles, and formed her own production company.  Yes, by the time she made ‘Some Like It Hot’ she was in a deeply troubled state, but she still managed to turn in one of the best comic performances of the silver screen.  Neither do we get to see the reconciliation with Joe diMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), when the two became firm friends in the last couple of years of her life.  At one point he even rescued her from a ghastly mental hospital in which she had been wrongfully incarcerated.  Joe mourned Marilyn’s untimely passing for the rest of his long life, although you wouldn’t think it here.  The film really hits a low note though with the depiction of her relationship with President Kennedy.  It basically boils down to a nasty and tawdry blow-job scene.  No sexy and glamorous ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ here.  There are some other bad taste moments, such as Marilyn having hysterics in an abortion clinic, and later shown peeing on the lavatory with her lipstick all messed up.  And far too much of the film is taken up with Marilyn having a frankly absurd 3-way relationship with Edward G Robinson Jnr and Charlie Chaplin Jnr.  There isn’t much in the way of solid evidence that this ever happened at all, so why is it given so much air-time here when there are more interesting stories about Marilyn to be told?  I guess because it suits the tawdry nature of the film.  Marilyn will always fascinate us, I’m sure of that, but she deserves better than this.  TRIVIA CORNER:  I’m not going to try and claim that the relationship between Marilyn and JFK was built on any true love.  At least certainly not from JFK’s side anyway, but there is a great anecdote about these two.  They were both invited to spend the weekend at Frank Sinatra’s house.  JFK famously suffered from terrible back trouble, which could limit his sexual activities.  One day, whilst in bed with the President, Marilyn offered to ring her own doctor and consult him.  There is something quite funny and touching about the doctor suddenly getting a phone call out of the blue from Marilyn asking if he could advise the President of the United States, who just happened to be there beside her!

BLOOD BEACH (1981)

Dir: Jeffrey Bloom

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …. you can’t get to it!” Haha lol.  Competent enough Jaws-style cash-in, which often gets dismissed by the critics, and yet it has its moments.  This time the horror isn’t in the water, but is lurking under the sands of Santa Monica beach (“the armpit of southern California”, to quote one character).  The opening sequence where the dog-walker gets swallowed to her doom is surprisingly effective and memorable.  The film is let down by some distinctly plodding talky moments, and probably not enough gore to satisfy modern horror viewers wanting some more explicit gory action.   The copy I saw on YouTube though was getting plenty of appreciative comments after it.  According to Wikipedia AllMovies dismissed it with “if you do search this one out, you should probably be looking for a job”. Oh shove off.

BLOOD CAR (2007)

Dir: Alex Orr

It’s the near future, and Jeremy Clarkson’s worst nightmares have come true.  Petrol is now so expensive that no one can afford to drive.  Cars are left piled up and abandoned, fit only for having sex in.  Mike Brune plays a nerdy, vegan school-teacher who finds out, by accident, that he can get his car to run on a mixture of wheatgrass (a disgusting-looking bogey-coloured drink) and his own blood. Suddenly, being the only guy around who can run a car sends his sex appeal through the roof, and he’s targeted by the local hot chick.  When the car runs out of fuel though whilst he’s giving her a lift, he realises he’s going to have to get more of his special brand of fuel.  He begins by having to fight down his vegan beliefs and go shooting a squirrel in the woods.  Of course it all escalates from there.  This is a stylish horror/comedy, done with a lot of panache.  My only real grumble is the constant dropping out of the sound.  I’m assuming that was deliberate on the part of the film-makers, and not that I was watching a ropey YouTube copy.

BLOOD FEAST (1963)

Dir: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Dear God, the early 1960s were weird, and some of the low-budget cinematic efforts from that era have to be seen to be believed.  In this one Mal Arnold – sporting a weird grey rinse – plays Faud Ramses, who runs an “exotic” catering company.   This might be one catering company where it pays to order a strictly vegetarian menu, as Ramses goes around killing young women, and putting their body parts in his banquets.  He’s doing this apparently to raise some old Egyptian goddess from the dead (oh not that one again).  I find it almost impossible to sum up just how truly bizarre some of the low-budget horror was from this era, and this one is a classic of it’s kind.  The acting is absolutely preposterous for a start, and so is the script (“those murders are taking all the joy out of everything!”).  The musical score consists of Carnival Of Souls-style organ music, someone sawing away fiercely on a cello, or blasting randomly on a trumpet, like an elephant blowing it’s nose.  Blood Feast is usually hailed as the first all-out slasher movie, and the murders in it were considered so graphic that it was put on the banned list here in Blighty for years.  It certainly must have been strong meat (ho ho) for the time it was made.  The copious lashings of blood are so vivid that it looks straight out of Hammer’s buckets of red paint department, but I still found the film an uncomfortable watch, even though the damn thing’s even older than I am (just about).

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1971)

Dir: Seth Holt

Another version of Bram Stoker’s Jewel Of The Seven Stars, though this is more tolerable than most, largely thanks to the magnificent Valerie Leon, who gets a rare starring role.   It’s the usual old guff about evil Egyptian queen reaching down the centuries who possesses the soul of a young woman in the modern era.  This has plenty of curve appeal though, and some moments (particularly set in the hospital) manage to be effectively eerie.

BLOOD OF DRACULA’S CASTLE (1969)

Dir: Al Adamson

If you enjoy camp, cheap-as-chips cult shlocky horror, then frankly they don’t come much better than this.  I ended up enjoying it far more than I had expected, in spite of watching a very scratched copy on YouTube.  It begins with quite possibly the cheesiest theme tune I’ve ever heard on a horror film.  A sort of sub-Tony Christie number.  You almost expect it to be break into Do You Know The Way To Amarillo?  Anyway, we find ourselves with a young couple having a fun day out at a marina.  They find they’ve inherited an old castle in Arkansas.  The only trouble is it comes with another couple already in-situ, the Count and Countess Townsend.  This is a bit of a bummer, because you see this couple are vampires, and they keep young girls chained up in the basement.  Every evening, at sunset, their faithful old butler (John Carradine) goes down there and drains off some of their blood, as though he’s drawing vintage wine from a casket, in order to mix the couple their nightly Bloody Mary’s.  The Count (Alexander d’Arcy) looks as if he belongs with the Addams Family, and the Countess (Paula Raymond) wafts around in elegant evening wear, sporting a sort of Raine Spencer/Nancy Reagan hairdo.  I’ve read criticism that Ms Raymond plays the Countess too low-key, but to be honest I think she’s fine.  I actually found myself losing interest when the those three weren’t on screen.  A word must also be said about the castle.  Apparently it was filmed at Shea Castle in California, and some of the interior reminds me of Norma Desmond’s mansion in Sunset Boulevard.  TRIVIA CORNER (1): Jayne Mansfield was originally pencilled in to play the Countess, but sadly fate took a hand.  Now what a film that would have made!  TRIVIA CORNER (2): the director of this, Al Adamson, was to die in odd circumstances many years later.  He went missing in 1995, and was later found buried under a concrete floor at his house.  Fred Fulford, who had lived with him, was charged with his murder.

BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1970)

Dir: Piers Haggard

Life was grim in the good old days. You had to plough a muddy field with your bare hands. The only bit of enjoyment you got was playing a gloomy round of cards by the light of a guttering candle. If you had to call the doctor out, he drank all your noggin, consulted books about witchcraft, and then cured you by slitting open your veins. And if you had a bad hair day everyone assumed you were possessed by the Devil. Blood On Satan’s Claw is an eerily effective Brit horror from the early 1970s. A farmer accidentally unearths a skull whilst ploughing one day, and from then on the village is plagued by witchcraft and devil-worship. There is a graphic rape scene at the centre of the film, which is still pretty unsettling to watch. The music is also highly atmospheric, being a sort of strange whistling affair, reminiscent of the kind that was used in the spooky old TV series West Country Tales. According to Wikipedia the film was a flop when it was released, but posterity has been kind to it. A fairly recent analysis of the horror genre on television has probably done wonders for bringing it to a fresh audience. Apparently the film was originally to be set in Victorian times, but the makers thought that era had been done to death, and – inspired by the success of Witchfinder General – relocated it to the 17th century, the era of rank superstition and witchcraft persecution. It’s an odd, eerie little chiller with graphic moments.

BLOOD SNOW (2009)

Dir: Jason Robert Stephens

Irritating modern horror which draws inspiration from the notorious Donner Party expedition of the 1840s, in which a bunch of gold rush pioneers got stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and had to resort to cannibalism. Fast forward to the 21st century and we have a small group of entirely characterless young Americans who are renting out a cabin in the same area. Naturally they do this in spite of being warned off by hostile locals at the nearest bar (obligatory really). The snow-drenched scenery is gorgeous, but the film defeated me because no one in it can act for toffee. In fact, it’s quite painful to listen to. There must be tonnes of young actors out there who CAN act, and would love to be given the chance to do so. But somehow films like this manage to pass over them completely. It happens all the time. TRIVIA CORNER: Incidentally, the Donner Party story also inspired Charlie Chaplin to make his masterpiece The Gold Rush, a classic case of comedy coming out of horror and tragedy.

BLUEBEARD (1972)

Dir: Edward Dmytryk

Not exactly the high point of Richard Burton’s career.  A nasty exploitative little film from 1972. Now perhaps the story of Bluebeard – the man who bumped off several wives – could actually be made into a half-decent little comedy-horror, if you had someone like Vincent Price or Johnny Depp in the title role, who would be able to camp it up outrageously.  Burton can’t.  That’s the trouble. As a black comedy it could work.  Unfortunately this has all the worst misogynistic attitudes of it’s era running right through it.  Burton simply couldn’t do comedy anyway.  He bumps off each wife for a variety of reasons, one is a randy nun who has had an affair with a Communist (the Baron does NOT like that!), another is incredibly boring and entitled, there is a fiery Suffragette who finds she has a masochistic side (yawn), and another is so sexually incompetent she gives names to her breasts!  UPDATE:  This film has virtually disappeared into oblivion these days, but I did come across a copy dubbed into French with no subtitles.  Undeterred I decided to watch it again out of macabre curiosity.   I’m a sucker for a gothic castle, and the one in this doesn’t disappoint, but I stand by what I said, that Burton was simply all wrong for the role of the Baron.  I understand he was trying to emulate Vincent Price, but he just didn’t have the camp flair and lightness of touch that Vincent would have brought to this.  There are some bits of it that are reasonably funny, such as the woman who won’t stop singing (Virna Lisi, reminding me of the sort of role Elaine Stritch or Carol Channing could have played), or Raquel Welch’s nun’s habit getting more skimpy each time we see her, but on the whole it’s too dark and nasty to be truly funny.  There are also some scenes involving the slaughter of animals which will be deeply upsetting to many modern viewers.   It’s all a bit of a shame really, as the film has many ingredients that would have made it ripe for a Corman-esque cult classic, but it’s simply all too heavy-handed.  I do like the castle though.

BLUE BLOOD (1973)

Dir: Andrew Sinclair

Tiresome and wordy horror, in which Oliver Reed plays Tom, a Satanic butler employed by the thoroughly annoying and foppish owner (Derek Jacobi) of a stately home.  Enter into the mix a bleating, whingeing German Nanny (Anna Gael).  The whole thing is a pointless waste of time, in which thoroughly unpleasant or irritating characters wonder around a big house having snide conversations with one another.  Even Oliver Reed lets us down here, with a bizarre, mangled Cockney accent which has to be heard to be believed.  Reed was London-born himself, but I don’t know what possessed him to attempt this one.   Even the children are revolting.  It’s hard to see what the makers were trying to achieve with this one, as it’s too ponderous and wordy to be a proper horror, and too trashy to be a quality play.   Worth seeing only for the kind of masochistic navel-gazing which British cinema liked to indulge in at this time.   TRIVIA CORNER: it was filmed at Longleat in Wiltshire which, considering its reputation for eccentric marquesses, was quite appropriate.  Incidentally, Hungarian-born Anna Gael, who plays Carlotta in the film, married the future Marquess of Bath [Longleat] in 1969.  Although she earned some kudos for becoming a respected war correspondent, she doesn’t seem a pleasant person.  In 2013 she was barred from her son’s wedding, when she made racist remarks about his bride, the daughter of a Nigerian businessman.  Sounds like she and this film deserved one another.

THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946)

Dir: George Marshall

Competent film noir – scripted by Raymond Chandler – about US navy officers returning from the war.   Johnny (Alan Ladd) finds that his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) has been having a high old time behind his back.  He leaves her, only for her to turn up murdered, and he then finds he is the prime suspect.  Another dream teaming of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.  Their films are always worth a watch if you like vintage thrillers.  They may not be as highly regarded amongst film buffs as Bogart and Bacall, but I find them very watchable.    TRIVIA CORNER: In January 1947 the horribly mutilated body of Elizabeth Short was found in a Los Angeles street.  She was nicknamed the “Black Dahlia”, thought to have been inspired by this film.  Her murder remains unsolved to this day.

THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953)

Dir: Fritz Lang

Decent enough attempt at a film noir, but let down by some underwhelming acting, and unadventurous writing and direction.  Anne Baxter (never an actress I find particularly appealing) plays Norah, a telephonist, who on her birthday receives a Dear John letter from her boyfriend, who is away fighting in the Korean war.  On the rebound Norah meets Harry (Raymond Burr), a randy artist, in a nightclub called the Blue Gardenia.  After several cocktails Norah accompanies Harry back to his apartment to see his etchings.  When she wakes up after passing out on the couch, she fears the worst, and attacks Harry with a poker, before fleeing the scene.  When she discovers that Harry has been killed, she panics and burns the black taffeta dress she had been wearing.  Meanwhile a hack journalist (Richard Conte) puts out an article demanding that the Blue Gardenia Murderess turn herself in.  There is quite a bit of the story that resonates today, with its hints at a date rape drug spicing Norah’s cocktails, and attention-seekers calling the press pretending they are the Blue Gardenia Murderess.  The whole thing though is let down by old prissy-knickers Anne Baxter, who does her usual impression of an ironing-board.  As I said, not a bad story by any means, but with a more vibrant lead it could have been so much better.  Nat King Cole puts in a great turn as the nightclub singer.

BLUE MURDER AT ST TRINIAN’S (1957)

Dir: Frank Launder

Probably my least favourite of the St Trinian’s films, largely down to absence of Alastair Sim as the adorable Miss Fritton.  He only appears in the film very briefly, and for most of the film Miss Fritton is meant to be banged up in Holloway.   The film largely concerns the little horrors running amok as they make their way on a “goodwill tour” across Europe, and tangling with jewel thieves, headed by Lionel Jeffries.   The highpoint are some romantic interludes between Joyce Grenfell and Terry-Thomas (a dream cinematic pairing if ever there was one).   TRIVIA CORNER: “the school swot” is played by fleeting 1950s pin-up Sabrina, who – according to Wikipedia – was given top billing on all publicity, and appeared on posters wearing school uniform (can you imagine the kerfuffle that would cause now?!).  In the final result, she had a totally non-speaking role, which simply required her to sit up in bed reading a book, and ignoring all the mayhem going on around her.  Sabrina was marketed as a sort of British version of Jayne Mansfield.  Ironically, she would take over from Jayne in a low-budget film in 1969, after Jayne’s untimely death.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED (2009)

Dir: Richard Curtis

I’m hard pushed to think of any film from recent years that has been so spectacularly out-gunned by events In Real Life as this one has been. It was made as a fun homage to the days of British pirate radio in the 1960s. Except since then we’ve been deluged by Operation YewTree and the vile antics of Jimmy Savile et al. Suddenly this doesn’t look fun, but instead incredibly seedy. Take this line, when one of the DJ’s is watching a bunch of young girls approaching the ship: “it’s a boat-load of honey, and I wanna sleep with ’em all!” I’m sure the disgusting Mr Savile would have heartily concurred. Add to that scenes where lecherous DJ’s croon over the airwaves to listening schoolgirls. Kenneth Branagh tries his best in the pantomime villain role as the Man From The Ministry who wants to shut down all their fun, aided by a Mr Twatt (ho-bloody-ho), but it all looks hopelessly cartoon-ish, and has all the charm of an idiot’s stag night. For authenticity, I’m sure it captures the misogyny of the 1960s admirably. The only thing to treasure about it is the soundtrack.

BODY OF EVIDENCE (1993)

Dir: Dino De Laurentiis

Another film that didn’t do much for Madonna’s dream of becoming accepted as a great movie star.  It is a thriller in the Basic Instinct mode with Madge playing Rebecca Carlson, an over-sexed femme fatale who stands trial for murder when her ageing lover dies after watching some home-made porn.   I think the problem I had with this film is that it’s simply trying too hard.  The sex is relentless.   It might have benefited from a touch of Less Is More.  Also, call me old-fashioned but I feel for a femme fatale to be truly erotic in a movie she needs a touch of mystery about her, and we get to see all that Madge has to offer the moment we first see her.   Of course this film came hot-foot after Madge’s notorious book SEX, where we couldn’t have seen more of her if we’d been her doctor.   As Julie Burchill once put it, I felt like I would recognise Madonna’s private parts in a police line-up.  It is safe to say that in the early 1990s Madge was somewhat over-exposed, and this film just put the tin lid on it.  Take the infamous candle wax scene, where Rebecca (Madge) introduces her gormless lawyer (William Dafoe) into the delights of rough sex.   Just about everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the scene (if it had been Fatal Attraction that would have been included as well).  Madge pours candle wax on him, then champagne, then more candle wax.  I felt like suggesting she add some pineapple rings and whipped cream as well.   Rebecca of course is insatiable, and before we know it she’s unzipping him in a crowded lift, and seducing him in that most seductive of environments … an underground car-park.  It all feels a bit embarrassing and tiresome.  We also repeatedly have it hammered home to us how beautiful Rebecca is, until I kept expecting to see someone of the standards of Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe!  Now Madonna CAN look very beautiful, but in this film she simply looks a bit rough.  Certainly not beautiful enough to have hard-nosed policemen and lawyers going ga-ga over her.  And what on earth was that scene in the restaurant all about?  Whereby Gormless Boy goes into lip-smacking detail of the sexual elements of the case in front of his child son??  Having said that, I don’t actually think Body Of Evidence is as bad a film as some make out (I’ve seen a lot worse), but it’s problem is that all the characters are utterly unsympathetic and have no class.  In the scene where Madge masturbates herself in front of Gormless Boy, I felt like asking “why is a big star like you humiliating yourself this way?”  I asked the same question whilst watching one of her other films, Swept Away, too.  I think ultimately the problem is that Madonna’s films can always end up feeling like an extended music video, and this one is no exception. TRIVIA CORNER:  filming the court-room scenes was so tedious that two of the extras playing jury members actually fell asleep, and had to be shouted at to wake up.

BOOM (1968)

Dir: Joseph Losey

Based on the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Boom is a dreary, depressing bit of alternative cinema.  It must have come as a severe disappointment for fans of Burton & Taylor, who were perhaps hoping for more of the full-blooded sparring the couple had done in films like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf? and The Taming Of The Shrew.  Instead we have Elizabeth playing a dying woman, Flora Goforth, on a beautiful island in the Mediterranean.  Flora is occupying her final months writing a scandalous memoir and terrorising her staff.  Into this claustrophobic little world comes Christopher (Richard Burton) who has earned himself the nickname The Angel Of Death, because of his habit of visiting terminally ill people.  The film descends into a lot of rather pointless, abstract, gloomy waffle.  Tennessee Williams at his most depressing and tedious.   The biggest problem with this film is the casting.  Elizabeth tries her best, but as with the later Ash Wednesday (see above) she is still far too young and beautiful to be playing a character like this, who was clearly meant for a much older woman.  I can imagine someone like Bette Davis or Katherine Hepburn, or even Tallulah Bankhead, relishing such a role.  Likewise Burton is too old for the role of Christopher, who is clearly meant to be some kind of young hippy character, a long-haired Sixties beachcomber.  Without the dying older woman/offbeat young man vibe, a complete nonsense is made of the whole film.  It is hard not to think that the couple made this film just to get a holiday in Sardinia.  The location is the best thing about it.  The island is absolutely gorgeous, and Flora’s house (and her kaftans) are the stuff of dreams.  This film has its fans, notably director John Waters, and I’ve seen some praising the script (if you can get through it), others get all excited that this film is meant to be a gay tale, after all it doesn’t take that much of a stretch of the imagination to know that Flora is really meant to be a gay older man.  Back in the day, plays and films often had to go this way.  Much as I’m a big fan of Burton & Taylor, I do feel that this might have stood a chance with a different cast.  Perhaps it should be remade one day, but with Flora as a man?  Or as the older woman/younger man?   Anyway, back in 1968 Boom was a box-office flop, and it didn’t do much for Elizabeth’s career.  Richard could at least go off and do action thrillers, but Elizabeth’s spectacular film career effectively fizzled out in a row of eccentric European flops, of varying quality.

BOXING HELENA (1993)

Dir: Jennifer Chambers Lynch

This film is largely known these days (if it’s known at all) for it’s off-screen drama.  It was the film that bankrupted Kim Basinger when she pulled out of it, resulting in a catastrophic legal case.  Watching it though, I can quite understand why she got cold feet about it (as did Madonna apparently).  It’s a weird, nasty little tale about a surgeon (Julian Sands), psychologically damaged by his ballbreaking mother,  who is obsessed with a feisty young lady (Sherilynn Fenn).  He kidnaps her and confines her to his house, cutting off her legs and then her arms so that she will be completely dependant on him.  This is one of those films where Sands – who can either be very good or very awkward – is simply embarrassing.  There is a reasonably good twist at the end, but overall it’s an unpleasant film.  ADDENDUM:  I watched this again more recently, and I feel it doesn’t quite deserve the terrible reputation that it has.  As an art house film, it works just fine.  The problem is with the characterisation.  Although Sherilynn Fenn is very beautiful and glam (she has the look of a 1940s film star in this), Helena is such an obnoxious girl that you can’t imagine anybody wanting her in their house for five minutes, let alone going to such extreme lengths to keep her there!  Likewise the character of the Doctor is a snivelling, cowardly mess.  I know he is meant to be masochistic, but this is just embarrassing.  Fair play to Sands for having a go, as I can’t imagine many male actors wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a role like this, but he is simply too toe-curling.  There is also a major flaw in the plot which simply didn’t work for me.  For the doctor to be so obsessed with Helena, I would have thought it was because she was unreachable to him, that he was desperate because he couldn’t have her, sort of like Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.  But we are told that they did have a sexual relationship in the past, and that it was a bit of a disaster.  So if he’s had her, and it was a pitiful experience, why is he so desperate to have her again?  I mean, by all accounts he is very successful and respected, and pretty darn good-looking, so you’d think he’d want to put an experience like that behind him and move on?  But I suppose we have the whole tiresome Oedipus Complex thing, and how he’s trying to replace his cold-hearted bitch of a mother.   He also makes the Doctor a bit of a bore, and rather too pathetic and hopeless for someone who is as successful as he is.  On the whole, it’s a brave attempt at a complex theme, but it’s a depressing film all the same, and it didn’t do any favours for the careers of the director, or the two main leads.  The music though should induce pleasant feelings of nostalgia for the early ’90s.

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE (1962)

Dir: Joseph Green

Absolutely stark staring bonkers low-budget horror from 1962. It’s so mad it must surely fit into the It’s So Bad It’s Good category. A young surgeon wants to give his girlfriend a new body, after she is decapitated in a road accident. So where does our hero go to find a “doner”? Why only the nearest sleazy strip-joint of course. The head of his lady love meanwhile is attached to wires in a basement laboratory, and she has a habit of cackling most unpleasantly. Not only that, but a hideous deformed mutant is kept padlocked in a broom cupboard in a corner of the room (don’t ask). The film actually starts quite well, with a woman’s agonised voice crying “let me die!” But that’s about the only good thing about it. The acting is atrocious. Scenes that are meant to be horrifying are hilarious (such as the lab assistant who, after having his arm torn off by the monster, takes AN ABSOLUTE AGE to die, and staggers all over the house, clutching his side). The monster, when we finally see it, made me laugh out loud. BUT, having said all that, this film is so crazy that I’m actually quite fond of it. Worth seeing if you love low-budget trashy horrors of yesteryear.

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961)

Dir: Blake Edwards

When I bought my DVD copy of this the lady selling it to me went into raptures over it.  (I have often noticed that Breakfast At Tiffany’s has that effect on women).  She said “Oh Audrey!  I still can’t believe she’s no longer with us”.  The image of a radiantly beautiful Audrey Hepburn in long black gloves, wielding a large cigarette-holder, is one of THE most iconic images of cinema.  With her little black dresses, French pleat hair, and dark glasses, she became the epitome of female cool.   Watching this film again after a gap of many years, I found it as captivating as ever.  This is pure movie escapism.  That’s not to say it’s flawless, because it’s not, and I’ve seen some argue that it hasn’t aged that well.   George Peppard plays Paul, an aspiring writer, who moves into a New York apartment, which is funded by his  rich, older married mistress (Patricia Neal).  He befriends Holly Golightly, a quirky young woman on the floor below.  She’s a bit ditzy.  She sleeps all day, goes on odd visits to Sing Sing prison, and has a nameless cat for company.  Paul finds himself becoming obsessed with her.   In 1961 it must have been pretty tricky to try and convey the lifestyle Paul and Holly lead without offending censors and viewers all over the place.  The concept of a “kept man” seems fairly avant-garde (although Sunset Boulevard had done it ten years earlier).  Also Holly isn’t a completely sympathetic character.  She’s an unashamed gold-digger.  Plus she has a frankly tedious obsession with her brother Fred, and selfishly calls Paul by his name.  This part of the story is a bit of a drag to be honest.  From what I’ve read Audrey wasn’t comfortable with the character.  She didn’t like playing extroverts.  Truman Capote originally envisaged the role for Marilyn Monroe, and certainly the role does feel just right for Marilyn.  Audrey can seem a bit too prim for the role of a flaky young woman who leads a rackety life.  She simply doesn’t come across as the reckless little scamp from the wrong side of the tracks, who still occasionally nicks things from a dime store (“to keep my hand in”).  Marilyn would have fitted that role like a glove.  I suppose something must also be said about Mickey Rooney’s absurd portrayal of Mr Yunioshi, Holly’s Japanese neighbour.  It’s a stupid, cartoon character, which jars badly with the elegant tone of the rest of the film.   Well anyway, having said all that, it’s still a good film, and there are some scenes which are still great.  The sequence where Paul and Holly decide to spend the day doing things they’ve never done before is fun.  I have to say my favourite characters tend to be the secondary ones though.  John McGiver as the Tiffany’s salesman, getting sentimental over plastic toys sold in cereal packets, and the brilliant Dorothy Whitney as the full-throttle Mag Wildwood, “a model and a crashing bore”.   I still love it.  TRIVIA CORNER: Rumour has it that, to get the right level of authenticity at Holly’s Greatest Party Ever, director Blake Edwards plied the cast with real alcohol.  It paid off, that’s all I can say, it’s a lot of fun, and Audrey shows a masterly comic touch.

THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D (1941)

Dir: William Keighley

James Cagney and Bette Davis make an unlikely pairing in a ditzy screwball comedy, and this film has been usually met with a superior, dismissive wave of the hand by reviewers over the years.  Davis herself also had very little positive to say about it, and in biographies of her it tends to get glossed over.  And yet it’s actually quite a bit of fun, and many modern viewers seem to have greatly enjoyed it.  It is true that both Cagney and Davis seem a bit too mature to be playing roles that really seem more suited for a pair a few years younger.  Davis also seems too intelligent for a role that was clearly intended for a ditzy blonde.  In spite of all that, it is funnier than its reputation would have us believe.  Bette plays Joan (see what I did there?), an heiress about to be married to a nightclub bandleader (Jack Carson).  Her father arranges for her kidnapping on the eve of the wedding, and she is abducted by a pilot (Cagney), and they end up in the middle of the desert.  Bette doesn’t seem terribly at ease with slapstick comedy at times, but she brings a bit of class to proceedings, and Cagney is cheeky and likeable as her sparring partner.  There are some funny lines, and all the cast plays with gusto.  It’s a film which has aged better than either Cagney or Davis could have predicted.

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

Dir: James Whale

Outstanding horror from 1935, which by many people is counted as even better than it’s predecessor, Frankenstein, released 4 years earlier.  This is the sort of film which has been endlessly analysed, usually for it’s camp undertones, so I will just say what I found captivating about it.  First and foremost, the marvellously quirky Elsa Lanchester.  Even though she only appears for a few minutes, at the beginning and end of the film, the movie is still very much her’s. She owns it.  At the beginning she appears in Regency costume as Mary Shelley, discussing her creation with Lord Byron.  At the end she memorably reappears as the Bride, sporting the kind of hairdo that Sybil Fawlty would have envied, and hissing like a good ‘un (Elsa was said to have been inspired by the hissing of the swans in a London park).  Then there is Ernest Thesiger, camping it up splendidly as Dr Pretorius.  When I first saw this as a child I was captivated by Dr Pretorius’s miniature people, and watching it again now I still find them a lot of fun.  He also has some great lines. “Would you like a gin? Gin is my ONLY weakness”.  And “To the world of gods and monsters”.  As a connoisseur  of castles and haunted houses in films, I have to say the Baron’s is pretty good (“I think it’s a charming house” – Dr Pretorius).  And then of course there is Karloff, clomping around in boots and hobo’s jacket.  The only bit I can’t stand is Una O’Connor’s hysterical old woman act, which drives me nuts.  I sympathised with the Baron, when he wearily snaps “oh come in!” when she knocks on his door.

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (1951)

Dir: Curt Siodmak

Probably the only real reason to watch this low-budget flick from 1951 is the presence of platinum-haired Barbara Payton.  In this she has a sort of Lana Turner-ish role as the unsatisfied wife of a scientist, buried in some jungle outback.  A disgruntled old native woman doctors his drink one evening, and suddenly he starts to come over all animal after sundown.  Although the film runs at only just over an hour long, it plods along as though it’s under no obligation to entertain us at all.  Ms Payton actually does a reasonably good job, and acts her role with painful seriousness.  Unfortunately the film doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to be.  It’s not frightening, so it doesn’t work as horror, and in spite of Barbara, the trashy title, and the steamy setting, it doesn’t work as low-budget erotica either.  TRIVIA CORNER: Barbara Payton’s life was a terrible object lesson in how cruel the whole Hollywood environment can be.  Her career ended in the 1950s, and from then on she turned to prostitution to fuel her drink habit.  When she died in 1967, at her parent’s home (she had ended up homeless as well), her heart, lungs and liver had been wrecked.

THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

Dir: Terence Fisher

Dark Transylvanian forest, thunderstorm, carriage driving recklessly through the trees, yes we’re in vintage Hammer territory.  Low-key but effective effort from 1960.  There is no Christopher Lee.  Instead we have David Peel, as a strange young man who is kept manacled up in the ancestral family home by his anguished mother (Martita Hunt).  Yvonne Monlaur is the damsel-in-distress, on her way to a young ladies academy, who is enticed back to the house from the village inn.  She looks fetching in a lush Victorian negligee, but is a bit of an irritating dimwit, constantly ignoring good advice, and plunging everything into chaos as a result.  But I guess if she showed common-sense, she wouldn’t have gone to the house, and it would be a very short film!  Peter Cushing is on hand, to lend stalwart support as Van Helsing, but Freda Jackson acts everyone off the screen as Greta, the family’s demented servant.  In fact, at times her constant maniacal cackling got right on my nerves.  I’ve rarely seen such an irritating old bint on screen since the days of Una O’Connor.  It’s interesting to compare the restrained school scenes with the outright soft porn efforts in Lust For A Vampire, made just over 10 years later.  The 1960s changed everything.  ADDENDUM: watching this again, I was struck anew by just how beautiful this film is to look at.  An underrated, well-crafted little gem.

BRIDGET JONES’S BABY (2016)

Dir: Sharon Maguire

Someone recommended this film to me saying it was hilariously funny, and the best of the Bridget Jones series.   I had reservations.  The whole Bridget Jones phenomenon leaves me a bit cold to be honest.  I don’t dislike it at all, it’s just I’m fairly neutral.  In this one Bridget (Renee Zellweger, as if you didn’t know) is now in her forties, and having a sort of mid-life crisis (or, because this is Bridget, business as usual I suppose).  She’s still got a complicated love life, and her mum (Gemma Jones) still seems to be having more fun than she is.  There are some good lines in this – particularly “I’m dedicating my Autumn years to the pursuit of hedonism – and the scenes satirising Bridget’s workplace of the TV newsroom are spot on.  The irritating Emma Thompson sleepwalks her way through the role of Bridget’s gynaecologist though, and Colin Firth feels zombified. It’s an amiable way to spend a couple of hours, particularly if you want something undemanding to watch over a bottle of wine, which I guess is its role in the great scheme of things.  And there’s nothing wrong with that really.

BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (2001)

Dir: Sharon Maguire

I must admit I never really understood the whole Bridget Jones phenomenon.  We are meant to believe this young woman is a loser, and yet (a) she has an interesting job, (b) she’s not short of male attention, and (c) if you think she’s fat you really need to get out more.  But phenomenon it is.  It’s an enjoyable bit of chick-lit entertainment, and Rene Zellweger is great fun as Bridget (although at times it does seem to have typecast her into wacky screwball roles).  Hugh Grant and Colin Firth play the male eye-candy, and do a pretty splendid job of it too.  TRIVIA CORNER: when Bridget Jones first appeared in the early 1990s as a column in The Independent, I thought she was a real person.  This confused me for ages.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945)

Dir: David Lean

It’s quite astonishing really how well this film holds up after so many years. Of course it’s dated in parts. The children in particular speak with incredibly plummy voices, and Celia Johnson’s husband seems remarkably non-reactive, with his old-school Mustn’t Make A Fuss Now-type Britishness. But as a romantic film it still packs a powerful punch, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard do a sterling job of portraying doomed love. The comedy interludes in the station bar, with Joyce Carey and Stanley Holloway, add some much-needed light relief from all that angst amongst the steam trains. It’s been spoofed and lampooned many times, but I defy anyone not to be bawling their eyes out at the end of it. I feel quite weepy just thinking about it.

BRIGHTON ROCK  (1947)

Dir: John Boulting

Acclaimed British thriller, based on the novel by Graham Greene, about gang warfare in 1930s Brighton.  Never has the British seaside looked so seedy on film.  Richard Attenborough gives a legendary performance as young gang-leader, Pinkie, a more fully rounded character than we normally get in this kind of thing.   Naturally, being a Graham Greene effort, we also get some soul-searching angst about religion, and the superb line from Pinky, on the eve of his wedding, that he wishes he was a priest “as they get away from all this sort of thing”.   Mock-genteel tea-rooms, seaside vaudeville, pubs where women in fox-furs drink port-and-lemon, tatty boarding-houses, it’s an interesting little window on the Good Old Days.  TRIVIA CORNER:  the character of Kolly Kibber is fascinating.   He is part of a newspaper competition, in which he arrives in a seaside town, and anyone recognising him wins a prize.  I remember the Daily Mirror doing this kind of thing when I was a child in the 1970s.  They’d publish a picture of a man’s eyes, and saying which seaside resort he would be in and at what time.  If you recognised him, you won the prize.   As a kid I found something vaguely sinister about all this, and that was BEFORE I’d seen Brighton Rock!

BUNNY O’HARE (1971)

Dir: Gerd Oswald

This little oddity often tends to get glossed over in any biographies of Bette Davis.  Dismissed as one of the misguided bad films she had to make in her twilight years.  It’s not as bad as some would make out, but not brilliant either.  The plot:  Bette plays the eponymous Bunny O’Hare, an elderly widow whose life savings have gone into supporting her selfish grown-up children.  When the bank seizes her house, she takes to the road and a life of crime with Bill (Ernest Borgnine), and they embark on a series of bank robberies so that Bunny can continue to support her loathsome children.  The film is clearly trying to be a sort of geriatric version of Bonnie & Clyde, even down to the jokey banjo music on the soundtrack.  The problem is that it’s not very funny.  For one thing the endless bank raids just get boring, they are all too similar, and to be honest, you’d think the banks would get wise to it.  Part of the ruse is to cause chaos by releasing canaries into the bank, so you’d think they might be on the alert for this.  Plus Bunny wears the same disguise every time – poncho, long wig, hat and sunglasses – so you’d also think they might be on the alert for this as well.  Broad comedy was never Bette Davis’s strong point, as (game girl though she was) she always gave the impression of slumming it a bit, and so where you should be laughing at the comedy, you end up feeling sorry for her instead.  What is interesting about this film is all the generation gap stuff, with old timers having to deal with the Boomer generation, who are shown to be selfish, lazy and entitled, and prone to protesting about anything.  This would be fascinating viewing for any Millennials and Gen Z-ers who are often branded as selfish, lazy and entitled, and prone to protesting about anything,  by the … er … now elderly Boomer generation.

BURNT OFFERINGS (1976)

Dir: Dan Curtis

Haunted house horror movie from 1976 which was received poorly at the time of its release, but which seems to have since been re-valued, and is now regarded as much better than some professional critics would have you believe. I even saw it on a list of the 40 Best Haunted House Movies Ever. It is an intriguing little chiller, with a good, solid cast, and its fair share of eerie moments. Also, unlike a lot of more recent horror films, it doesn’t rely on flashy gimmicks to give you scares. I actually don’t understand what caused it to get so savaged in it’s day. The only real complaint I have about it is that nearly 2 hours running time, it’s probably a tad too long. Apparently it is one of Stephen King’s favourite films, and it does bear a similarity in many ways to The Shining. A married couple with a young son arrive to take up a temporary tenancy of an isolated house. Only instead of a vast hotel, we have a colonial white-pillared mansion. The owners are a creepy pair, who are offering the house at a vastly reduced rent, on condition they don’t mind putting up with their reclusive old mother, who lives in the attic.  Oliver Reed does a splendid job as a mild-mannered academic, Karen Black as his wife who finds her personality being taken over by the house, and the legendary Bette Davis as the feisty aunt. The gist of the haunting seems to be that it is the house which is the spooky entity, and the house demands a human sacrifice to rejuvenate itself every so often. An idea which was first used in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House. In essence, the house is vampirising the people who live in it. TRIVIA CORNER: Bette Davis hated making the film. She found Oliver Reed’s drunken rampages back at the hotel terrifying. It’s hard to imagine anyone terrifying Bette Davis, but she was a frail old lady by then. On screen though, they work well together, with no hint of any underlying tension. True professionals.

BY LOVE POSSESSED (1961)

Dir: John Sturges

It never ceases to amaze how Americans get so nostalgic about the mid-20th century, particularly when so many books and films from that era seem to speak of everybody constantly chewed up with angst and fear all the time!  ‘By Love Possessed’ is a sudsy small town melodrama, very much in the style of the hugely successful ‘Peyton Place’.  It’s a long film about a bunch of successful, comfortably wealthy people who all seem to be intent on finding something to be miserable about.  It’s a big screen soap opera.  Worth seeing for Lana Turner who was now on a downward slide, career-wise.  She plays Marjorie, the alcoholic wife of a disabled man (Jason Robards Jnr) who is (presumably) unable to satisfy her.  Lana does a decent job in the role, but she has to be one of the most elegant and immaculate alcoholics in movie history!  ‘By Love Possessed’ is an overheated title for a film where everybody is completely overwrought all the time.  One character even kills herself when she finds out that her childhood beau doesn’t really love her.  Yes, it’s that kind of film.  Yvonne Craig stands out as the nutty Veronica, a woman so unsettlingly screwy that she constantly refers to herself in the third person.  Jason Robards was reported to have said that this was the worst film every made.  Well I wouldn’t go that far, not by a long chalk.  It has its moments.  And it’s interesting to get all the generation gap stuff 1961-style.  “Your generation thinks you discovered sex, you didn’t, you just talk about it more”.   TRIVIA CORNER:  Yvonne Craig would later to go on to play Batgirl in the TV series ‘Batman’.  She was noticeably less irritating as Batgirl.

THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (1920)

Dir: Robert Wiene

If you want the cinematic equivalent of the Crazy House at the funfair, then this film is it.  Made in Germany in 1920, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari is often regarded as the first full-length horror film.  The sets are all abstract and crooked, and most of the actors wander about in panstick make-up, looking like a Goth’s dream.  At the beginning of the film, one young lady walks slowly towards the camera in a Ring-like white nightgown and long dark hair, reminding me of some creepy joke vids that used to be posted on the Internet years ago.  Dr Caligari is a very odd old man, who puts on a turn at a funfair, whereby he exhibits a young man, whom he claims has been in a deep sleep for the past 23 years.  He will rouse this man out of his protracted slumbers, and he will answer any question the audience asks.  The Somnambulist looks suitably freaky, with his Alice Cooper eyeliner.  When one man asks how long he has to live, the Somnambulist replies eerily “until dawn tomorrow” … and then the man is murdered in his bed. This is a truly eye-catching film.  I did wonder if it had been inspired by the peculiar “sleeping sickness” which afflicted some people immediately after the First World War.

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA (1945)

Dir: Gabriel Pascal

Several years before Elizabeth Taylor stunned the world in the epic Cleopatra (see below) came another hugely expensive take on the story of the Queen of the Nile. Caesar and Cleopatra was taken from the play by George Bernard Shaw, and it starred Vivien Leigh as the young queen, and Claude Rains as Julius Caesar. Like the 1960s version, the story of the making of this version of Caesar and Cleopatra could make a film on its own. No expense was spared. Sand was imported from the Egyptian desert, and care was taken to even make sure the stars in the sky would appear in the same place as they would have been during Cleopatra’s time. All fine and dandy, but it’s a shame more thought couldn’t have been put into giving the script and the direction some Oomph! I realise I’m probably committing heresy by writing that, after all this is the great Shaw we’re talking about here, but even so, this film is horribly stagey and theatrical. It is however a very beautiful-looking movie, particularly with its soft, dreamy colours. There are some magical shots, such as Cleopatra snoozing in her bed overlooking the waters of the Nile. Claude Rains is brilliant as Caesar. He’s an actor who is always worth watching. Vivien Leigh looks absolutely exquisite, as if she’s made of bone china, but plays the queen too much as a bratty upper-class schoolgirl. There is no denying when you’re watching her that she was an outstanding actress, but she doesn’t seem to have been allowed to give the role any depth. It’s simply not worthy of her. I found it hard to believe that she was making this nearly a decade on from Scarlett O’Hara. The film lacks all the earthy, torrid undercurrents that made the Liz Taylor version so notorious. Flora Robson also irritates the darned bejaysus out of me as Cleo’s bossy nurse. A tragic fact about the movie is the scene where Cleo goes to whip a quivering slave. Vivien tripped and fell as she rushed to do so, and miscarried her baby. Something she never forgave the director (Gabriel Pascal) for. The cost of the film was ruinous. It’s just a pity that by and large the makers of this movie were too damn awed by George Bernard Shaw to remember that they were actually supposed to be providing entertainment. No amount of Egyptian sand, bright stars in the sky, and lovely costumes, can make up for a stodgy, passionless pudding of a film.

CALL HER SAVAGE (1932)

Dir: John Francis Dillon

Ooh what a saucy little minx that Clara Bow was!  Made in 1932, this is one of It Girl Clara’s few Talkies.  She plays Nasa Springer, who can best be described as a Right Old Handful.  We first see her riding hell-for-leather through some woods (minus a brassiere).  She thrashes a rattlesnake with her whip, and then proceeds to beat the living daylights out of her besotted admirer as well.  When a guitar-player annoys her with his strumming (well it IS annoying to be honest), she smashes his instrument over his head.  In a forlorn attempt to turn her into a lady, her grumpy father packs her off to a Young Ladies’ Academy in Chicago.  Unfortunately Nasa sees this as a golden opportunity to get into even more trouble.  Before we know it, she’s getting into a cat-fight with brassy Thelma Todd, and racketing into an unhappy marriage.  This is a great film for Clara, enabling her to showcase all that red-headed fiery-ness, and yet bring out her sensitive side too.  There’s no denying she was a good actress, and a right sexy little bundle too.  TRIVIA CORNER: Clara’s platinum-haired co-star, Thelma Todd, had the terrible  honour of ending up as one of Hollywood’s most famous deaths.  She was found dead in her car in suspicious circumstances in 1935, and the mystery still remains unsolved to this day.

CAMILLE (1936)

Dir: George Cukor

I thought I’d treat myself to a bit of Garbo, and Camille is one of her most revered films.  Based on a novel by Alexandra Dumas, Greta plays Marguerite, a 19th century French farm-girl turned high society courtesan, who is secretly dying of TB.  She is courted by Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), who hopes that by spiriting her away to his family estate in the countryside, that it will help improve her health.  There is no doubting that this is a gorgeously sumptuous film.  The photography and the costumes are stunning, and Greta wears some incredibly luscious full-skirted gowns.  Greta herself is charming, witty (I don’t care what anyone says, she was a natural at comedy), earthy and sexy.  She definitely had that something special to her.  But I have to say that I found the whole picture as dull-as-ditchwater.  The film simply didn’t draw me in.  I can appreciate Greta, I can appreciate all its visual qualities, but it left me emotionally unmoved.   The characters might have been a realistic portrayal of 19th century Parisian high society, but it also means they are largely unlikeable.  And in spite of its opulent sets and costumes, it can feel weirdly drab.  Garbo fans must have loved it back in the day, but for me this is one film of Hollywood’s Golden Era which hasn’t aged well.

CAPTAIN KIDD (1945)

Dir:  Rowland V Lee

Charles Laughton is immensely watchable as always in the title role as the unscrupulous pirate who manages to fool King William III that he is an honest man.  He persuades the King (Henry Daniell) to give him a commission to go after the man he has falsely accused of being a pirate.  He recruits a bunch of rapscallions from Newgate Gaol to act as his crew.  I enjoyed this, and that was largely down to Laughton, who was a brilliant actor.  He is supported by Randolph Scott (who was much more at home in Westerns).  Barbara Britton doesn’t have very much to do as the token girl, Lady Anne, but she does look nice in 17th century costume.  The lugubrious John Carradine, better known to most for his roles in numerous low-budget horror films, also pops up as one of the crew.   I’ve read criticisms that it isn’t historically accurate (since when did you turn to Hollywood film for historical accuracy?), it’s not in colour, and there are no sea battles.  Nevertheless I enjoyed it.

CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER (1972)

Dir: Brian Clemens

An admirable British attempt from 1972 (although it wasn’t released until 1974) to sort of cross-breed the Hammer vampire tale with the spaghetti western genre. I watched this on YouTube, where it seems to have acquired cult classic status, and I’ve read glowing reviews of it from younger viewers. It’s a very imaginative effort, and I did like the way the hoary old vampire legend has been reworked to great effect. Instead of Christopher Lee in a black cape sinking his teeth into the necks of pretty girls, we have a strange entity in a hooded black habit, who is haunting a forest. Whatever it passes, such as flowers, or wild mushrooms, are left withered and rotted. Human victims are left aged and frail, even if they’re in the full bloom of youth. This to me seems a far more frightening concept than something nicking your blood, and I’m amazed it hasn’t been used more often, particularly in these days when everyone’s obsessed with health and youth.

THE CAR (1977)

Dir: Elliot Silverstein

I remember this being shown late one night many years ago, and the TV reviews being generally very dismissive of it.  Yes it is a bit of a silly story – a weird black car terrorises a remote desert town – and yet I think it still has it’s share of creepy moments.  Like Duel we never find out who the driver is, so we are led to speculate that it is the Devil behind the wheel.  I was reminded of it again when seeing it mentioned on the Church of Satan’s list of recommended films. (See Carnival Of Souls below).  Very very rarely shown on British TV these days, but it does seem to be available on dvd, and clips are on YouTube.  Apparently it was made to capitalise on the huge success of  Jaws, but with a car in the shark role.  Not as daft as you might think.

CARDBOARD CAVALIER (1949)

Dir: Walter Forde

Misguided attempt to set a slapstick comedy in Cromwellian England, starring Sid Field as a hapless marketeer-turned-spy, Sidcup Buttermeadow.  Field had been a popular comedian throughout the 1940s, but hadn’t had much success on the film front.  By this stage he was seriously ill, and would in fact die of a heart attack a year later.  Field is well-meaning enough, but something doesn’t make him translate well to the big screen.  He simply doesn’t cut much of a presence, and his humour seems dated even for 1949.  As though it belongs to a more sedate, quainter era.  There are other numerous problems with this film.  One is the script which has everyone talking in a “thee” and “thy” way.  This succeeds in dragging the whole thing down, and means any attempt at witty dialogue is thwarted from the start, as though verbally anchored to a ball-and-chain.  The other problem – sadly – is the lovely Margaret Lockwood, who is horribly miscast as the bawdy, barnstorming Nell Gwynn (who is a barmaid in this, not an actress).  Margaret is charming, but she simply comes across as too prim, too genteel and ladylike, to be convincing as the Barbara Windsor-ish Nell.  Putting her into a broad slapstick role feels undignified.  Apparently she wanted to do a comedy after a series of drama films, but this was all wrong.  A bitchy critic at the time wrote “seeing Margaret Lockwood on the receiving end of a custard pie is more satisfying than funny”.  I wouldn’t go that far, but I was left thinking “What on earth is she doing in this nonsense!”  And it’s incredible that she actually begged to appear in it!  It also doesn’t help that her trademark raven black hair is concealed by a perfect horror of a short, blonde curly wig.  This is the kind of film that the Carry On team could have done a competent job with, but they were a few years into the future.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Dir: Herk Harvey

I hope you like organ music, because oh boy, do you get a lot of it in this film. Mary is a young woman who is involved in a car accident. When she recovers she gets a job as a church organist in Utah. Unfortunately she finds herself being haunted by a sinister pasty-faced man in a black suit. Carnival Of Souls enjoys impressive cult status, and there is also something distinctly eerie and other-worldly about these kind of low-budget 1960s movies, which always gives them a disturbing quality. I can’t quite make my mind up about it. As I said, it has an unsettling air. Unfortunately I was put off by the acting which is absolutely atrocious. All the characters seem to drawl at Very Slow Speed as though they’ve been doped or lobotomised. I may have to watch it sometime again to do it justice.

CARRY ON ABROAD (1972)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

I do get sick and tired of po-faced politically-correct lot who seem to regard this film as xenophobic. It’s an unpretentious bit of fun, about a bunch of Brits who go on a weekend break to Spain. That is all. Am not sure where the xenophobic bits come in, unless it’s the running gags about the hotel being half-built (which are very funny). Trouble is, I’m old enough to remember when that was what you got if you went on a low-budget trip to the Med!  Anyway, if you’re NOT politically-correct, then this is a fun way to spend a bit of time. Most of the gang are here, Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Barbara Windsor, Joan Sims, Charlie Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Connor. June Whitfield also pops up as a whining, nagging wife who gets magically transformed into a saucy minx after an evening with a suave local.  There is also a sweet touch when the booze at the last evening’s party gets spiked, and the vicar leads everyone in a sing-song.  TRIVIA CORNER: this was Charles Hawtrey’s last Carry On.  By this point his drinking had made him nigh-on impossible to work with.  In fact, his boozing was now so bad that it had to be written into the script, hence all the scenes of him drinking anything he can get his hands on, Father Jack-style!  His character of Mr Tuttle, the fey alcoholic middle-aged mothers-boy, is thought to have been deliberately based on him.   To be honest, it’s a great finale for him though, as he is a delight, as always.

CARRY ON AGAIN DOCTOR (1969)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

The one which is probably most famous for Barbara Windsor appearing wearing nothing but 3 small sequinned love hearts, and earned her a place on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Sex Symbols list (although when it was shown on ITV3 recently, this bit was cut entirely, which must have disappointed many a viewer!).  Affable Jim Dale plays the hapless Dr Nookey who, after causing chaos at the hospital, is exiled to a tropical outpost to help the rogue-ish Dr Gladstone Screwer (Sid James, naturally).  At first Dr Nookey finds nothing there but rain, a cabinet full of whisky, and a jigsaw puzzle, until he stumbles upon Dr Screwer’s miraculous slimming tonic.  Dr Nookey knows that if he can get this back to Blighty then his fortune is made.  A fun entry in the Carry On canon.

CARRY ON AT YOUR CONVENIENCE (1971)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

The Carry Ons make a rare foray into political subject matter, and it didn’t go down at all well at the time.  The film centres around the strike-happy workforce of a bathroom fittings factory (the appropriately-named W C Boggs & Son).  It was an attempt to spoof the state of Britain in the early 1970s when industrial action was rife.  The film bombed at the box office, as it must have seemed as though the Carry Ons were attacking their most loyal fanbase, the working-classes.   Things can’t have been helped by the film’s finale when the militant trade union leader Vic Spanner (Kenneth Cope) is publicly humiliated by being spanked by his own mother (Renee Houston).   The Carry Ons wisely steered clear of politics after that.  And yet time has been kinder to it.  Reading viewers’ reviews of it now it’s clear that people feel more fondly of it, and it does seem to have a genuinely warm atmosphere amongst the cast.  It’s also well worth seeing for the boozy Works Outing trip to Brighton, which is an absolute joy.

CARRY ON BEHIND (1975)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

A sort of lukewarm rehash of Carry On Camping, but minus many of the gang, and without that indefinable magic which made the Carry Ons so legendary.  If it’s worth watching at all, then it’s for the unlikely double-act of Kenneth Williams and Elke Sommer as a pair of archaeologists on a dig at a camp-site.  Elke is very funny in a Ninotchka-ish role as an earnest Soviet scientist transferred to dear old Blighty.  Apparently there was a lot of bad feeling at the time, as she was paid substantially more than the rest of the cast, but to be fair, she virtually ends up carrying the film, with help from Kenny.   Sadly, Windsor Davis (funny man though he often was) and Jack Douglas can’t make up for the absence of Charles Hawtrey, Sid James et al.  Bizarrely, Joan Sims plays Patsy Rowlands’ battleaxe mother in this, even though the two ladies were only a few months apart in age!

CARRY ON CABBY (1963)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

One of the gentlest Carry Ons.  Sid James is the owner of a taxi-cab company, who finds himself at war with his wife (Hattie Jacques), when she sets up a rival firm in competition with him.  Sid’s gruff cabbies can’t compete with Hattie’s glamour girl drivers.  I love the idea of GlamCabs with its mini-skirted drivers, although many of the gags are tinged with an incredible innocence now.  It’s filmed in black-and-white, which gives it a bit of an unexpected gloomy air.  I saw a tribute programme on TV to the Carry Ons, which said that it was done this way because gritty kitchen-sink dramas were the order of the day.  Also stars the adorable Esma Cannon, who plays Hattie’s sidekick, and Amanda Barrie (she of the headlamp eyes) as a GlamCab driver.  She would go on to greater things the follow year as the Queen of the Nile herself in Carry On Cleo.

CARRY ON CAMPING (1969)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

‘Cleo’ and ‘Henry’ are undoubtedly better Carry On films, but I have a soft spot for this one. It was filmed in a sodden field in October, and shows middle-aged men leering over schoolgirls, which these days looks dodgy to say the least, but it’s still an engaging bit of fun. It probably helps if you remember the “schoolgirls” in this were being played by women in their late twenties and thirties.  It also contains Barbara Windsor’s legendary bra-busting moment, the most famous scene in Carry On history. I read a while back that Sir Laurence Olivier was being driven to work one day when he saw Charlie Hawtrey, on his way to the ‘Camping’ set walking along the side of the road. Sir Larry gave him a lift. What a conversation that would have been to eavesdrop on.

CARRY ON CLEO (1964)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Rightly regarded as one of the best from the Carry On stable. I’m not arguing. Kenneth Williams is superb as Julius Caesar, strutting around like Tony Blair in a hissy fit, constantly exclaiming that no one understands him. The magnificently shrewish Joan Sims gobbles grapes in her bath, and tears a strip off him for being 4 years late coming home from his latest invasion. Amanda Barrie makes an absolute adorable Cleopatra, spending most of her time in her asses milk bath, being ditzy and alluring in a bath-cap. Jim Dale puts in his usual loveable goofy turn as an ancient Briton, hampered by his bumbling best mate, Kenneth Connor as Hengist Pod, inventor of the square wheel. I watched the classic “infamy! infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” scene again recently on YouTube, and was struck by just how fast and furious the gags come flying. Respect.

CARRY ON CONSTABLE (1960)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Probably my favourite of the early Carry Ons.  Eric Barker and Sid James are in charge of a bunch of  hopeless new recruits (Kenneth Connor, Leslie Phillips, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey), and have the unenviable task of trying to turn them into competent policemen.  It’s a nicely feelgood, understated Carry On, before the days when the smut became so much more overwhelming.  The cast are a delight.  Leslie Phillips is more understated than normal, playing a well-meaning toff who wants to prove he can hold down a job.  Charles Hawtrey is nicely away-with-the-pixies as the extremely camp Constable Gorse, and Joan Sims is a joy as the prim but efficient Policewoman Passworthy.  Hattie Jacques is on hand too as Sergeant Laura Moon, who has a little secret understanding with Sid.  Joan Hickson pops up as a deliriously dotty,  boozy old aristocrat, giving me a bittersweet feel of what Tara Palmer-Tomkinson might have turned out like if we hadn’t lost her so early.   It all looks wonderfully innocent by modern standards.  In the Carry On world the policeman’s lot was made up of rescuing cats from church bell-towers, and helping old ladies across the road when they didn’t want to go, with perhaps the odd wages-snatch to add some drama.  (Younger viewers may be baffled by that last one.  It harks back to the days when everyone was paid in cash at the end of the week, and so vans carrying a firm’s wages on pay-day often became the target for robbers).

CARRY ON COWBOY (1965)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Another classy entry in the Carry On series, as the team send up B-westerns.  Jim Dale is a British sanitary inspector – Marshall P Nutt – who is sent to a mid-west town to check on its drains, only to be mistaken for the new sheriff.  Sid James is the Rumpo Kid, Joan Sims as the saloon madam*, Kenneth Williams as a drawling lawyer, the marvellous Angela Douglas as sharp-shootin’ Annie Oakley, and Charlie Hawtrey camping it deliriously as the local Indian Chief.  In many ways it’s like a forerunner of Blazing Saddles, particularly when Hawtrey downs a bottle of scotch in one go (see review of Carry On Abroad above).  I still found it very laugh-out-loud, and great to see the team on such top-form.  The shoot-out at the end, when Nutt makes full use of the drains to take on the Rumpo Kid, is legendary.  *TRIVIA CORNER: Joan clearly relished the chance to play a sexy part for once, a welcome change from the squawking Shrewish Wife roles she usually got lumbered with, and she makes a very classy Mae West clone.  She loved the promo pic of herself in her sequinned gown and long gloves.  It’s a pic I’ve often seen crop up on Twitter.  I hope she would have been pleased.

CARRY ON CRUISING (1962)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Can you imagine getting away with a title like that now?  Anyway, the Carry On team take on cruising holidays in this affable, but unambitious outing.  It does exactly what it says on the tin, although only three of the regulars are in attendance, Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Connor.  Lance Percival makes his only Carry On appearance here.   He was drafted in at the last minute to replace Charles Hawtrey, who got too big for his boots and demanded top billing.  Percival makes a very funny and affable replacement.  The wonderful Esme Cannon does her dotty old lady bit.  It all feels incredibly innocent really, particularly when you think what a send-up of cruise ship holidays would be like these days!  TRIVIA CORNER:  I gleaned this following enjoyable little nugget from the pages of Wikipedia.  In Cruising, Lance Percival’s character Haines the chef, breaks a load of eggs for a cake by dropping all the eggs and straining out the egg shells.  Apparently this has now become known as The Haines Technique in data processing.  So now you know.

CARRY ON DICK (1974)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Unfairly maligned late entry (ooh matron!) in the Carry On canon.  It’s true that it’s about as subtle as its title, and yet, frankly, you don’t watch the Carry Ons for their sophisticated wit!  This is actually quite a lot of fun, and the team – who had by now been together for many a film outing – seem very ease in one another’s company.  Sid James is the Rev. Flasher, the village vicar, who has a double-life as highwayman, Dick Turpin.  Barbara Windsor is his suitably bosomy serving-wench, and Hattie Jacques as his devoted organist.   Kenneth Williams – who has never been more endearing – is Captain Fancey, who is determined to bring Sid to justice.  There is a scene where Babs turns the tables on Kenny by coming on frisky to him, and he reacts with nervous terror.  These two were old friends in real life (Kenny famously went on her honeymoon with her!), and it shows here.  OK it’s probably never going to get listed as one of the greatest film comedies ever made, but it’s a nice, undemanding bit of escapism.

CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE (1978)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Sad, tacky end to the much-loved series (I don’t count the wholly misguided Carry On Columbus which came several years later), attempting to spoof the Sylvia Kristel Emmannuelle soft porn films.  Suzanne Danielle plays the nymphomaniac wife of the French ambassador to London (Kenneth Williams), constantly trying to get him aroused.   When that doesn’t work she’s prowling around London, trying to arouse anything in trousers that she sees.  Frankly these days you’d suggest she gets therapy urgently, rather than find her amusing!  It has none of the charm or  jolly innocence of the earlier Carry Ons, and there is something almost upsetting about seeing SD aggressively throwing herself onto a naked Kenny Williams, like seeing your genteel maiden aunt being violated.   The relentless barrage of sordid double entendres ends up becoming tiresome very, very quickly, and add to that there’s the horribly dated racist and homophobic rubbish.   Just awful.  TRIVIA CORNER: in his diary Kenneth Williams records how Suzanne came to his dressing-room to thank him for his help during filming.  He praised her as a nice, charming girl.  Which must go down as one of those rare occasions when Kenny didn’t have anything bitchy to say about a co-star!

CARRY ON GIRLS (1973)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

A down-at-heel seaside town decides to host a beauty contest to boost trade, which raises the ire of the local Women’s Lib movement, who decide to sabotage it.  And that’s basically it.  Except we do have the delicious sight of a very dishy Bernard Bresslaw in drag (he makes a pretty fine-looking woman too!).  Poor old Joan Hickson gets a cameo part as a dotty old lady, and there’s something a bit uncomfortable about seeing the future Miss Marple going on about her knickers!  My favourite character is Patsy Rowlands (who is always brilliant in the Carry Ons, and is seriously under-rated as a comic actress) as the woebegone Lady Mayoress, clumping around in her dressing-gown, chain-smoking, and constantly needing the lavatory.   Also stars Robin Askwith  in his only Carry On role, which is amazing considering he’s a total natural for this sort of thing.  TRIVIA CORNER: according to Wikipedia, Valerie Leon (who plays Bresslaw’s prim girlfriend) had her voice dubbed by co-star June Whitfield.  No one knows why.

CARRY ON HENRY (1971)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

The Carry On team take another hatchet to history, with this deliriously fun romp set at the court of King Henry VIII. Whereas Carry on Cleo was effectively a piss-take of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, this is a send-up of Anne Of The Thousand Days. So we have Joan Sims with a lay-it-on-with-a-trowel French accent, snacking on garlic bulbs in bed. Sid James is a randy Henry, appearing lecherously in his nightshirt, clutching his orb and sceptre. Barbara Windsor puts in her customary saucy, buxom wench mode (“Ma’am the King has done me!”). Terry Scott is Cardinal Wolsey (he threatened to wear his robes to church in real life to try and intimidate everyone), Kenneth Connor is the Prince Of Berks, and Charles Hawtrey makes one of the most unlikely red-hot lovers ever to grace the screen, Sir Roger of Bedside Manor, Wilts.

CARRY ON JACK (1963)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Only two of the Carry On regulars (Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey) appear for this affable send-up of life on the high seas, but it still manages to be one of the better Carry On’s.  It’s not Class A Carry On, but it’s still a more handsome production than some of the tatty ones which were to emerge ten years later (Carry On Dick).  Loveable Bernard Cribbins is due to take up his duties as Midshipman Poop-Decker on the good ship ‘Venus’, but is clomped on the head by Juliet Mills, who takes his place to go looking for her errant lover.  All sorts of undemanding silliness ensue.  Mills is a delightful female lead, and many of the jokes revolve around her looking pretty unconvincing as a young man in her naval uniform (even more unconvincing when I found out she was 3 months pregnant at the time, and was starting to find her breeches were getting too tight towards the end!).

CARRY ON LOVING (1970)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Not one of my favourite Carry Ons – there is something a bit odd about it – and yet, as with all the others, I usually watch it when it rolls round.  It centres around a dating agency run by Sid James and Hattie Jacques, who are pretending to be married.   It was a spoof of the permissive society as Britain swung from the 60s into the 70s.  There is a running gag of a young couple who pop up vigorously snogging at random intervals.   Patsy Rowlands is very funny as Kenneth Williams’s dowdy housekeeper, who transforms herself into a sexy vamp to seduce him away from Hattie.   Terry Scott though feels miscast as a randy young man (I think it’s because he’s simply too old for the role, and I read somewhere that the part was originally intended for Jim Dale, who would have been perfect), who winds up dating Imogen Hassall, as she escapes from her strange family, ruled by her tyrannical mother (an on-form Joan Hickson).  The film culminates with an all-out custard pie fight, astonishingly the first and only time that happened in a Carry On!

CARRY ON MATRON (1972)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Fun outing for the Carry Ons.  Sid James plays the head of a small family of crooks, who plan to break into a maternity hospital to steal their horde of contraceptive Pill (don’t ask).  Kenneth Cope is sent in under cover as a rather butch female nurse.   Some fun turns from the Carry On regulars, with Hattie Jacques where she rightfully belongs, as the Matron.   There is a lovely sub-plot, where she and the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Goode (Charles Hawtrey) enjoy cosying up to watch a medical drama together, only for Kenneth Williams to get entirely the wrong idea.  Joan Sims is also on fine form as the expectant Mrs Tidy, who can’t stop eating long enough to give birth.

CARRY ON NURSE (1959)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

AKA The One With The Daffodil Joke (probably), which for me anyway, is the one bit of the film which doesn’t really work, although I accept I’m in a minority with that one.   The film bears a strong resemblance to Twice Round The Daffodils, mainly because they were both adapted from the same play, Ring For Catty, by Patrick Cargill.  Daffodils was set in a TB sanatorium, as the makers mistakenly believed that TB was a thing of the past, even though thousands had died from it that year in Britain.  In Nurse the action centres on a generic men’s ward in a standard hospital, with the inmates suffering from a variety of mishaps.  Naturally, this being the wonderful fantasy world of Carry On, nobody is suffering from anything truly frightening, instead it’s a motley collection of appendicitis, broken wrists and sore bunions.   Kenneth Williams, Leslie Philips, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey (at his absolutely most fey), Wilfred Hyde-White and Bill Owen are the hapless inmates.  A fresh-faced Joan Sims is on hand to learn the ropes.  Much has been made (and quite rightly so) of Hattie Jacques as the formidable Matron, but I also liked Joan Hickson as the bossy but well-intentioned Ward Sister.  The part where she tells Nurse Shirley Eaton to run after her love interest is done with a sincere, deft touch.  With its black-and-white 1950s appearance it all feels endearingly restrained and elegant compared to later, more blowsy Carry Ons, and the scenes where the patients chat on the terrace can seem as if they’re staying at some plush Monte Carlo hotel rather than in hospital!   TRIVIA CORNER: Nurse was a box office hit in the UK,  cementing the Carry Ons in the national heart, but it also went down well across the pond.  In fact, one American cinema handed out plastic daffodils to customers as they went in.

CARRY ON SCREAMING (1966)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

Classy and very funny effort from the Carry On team, sending up the Hammer Horror genre with total panache.  Harry H Corbett, of Steptoe And Son appears in his only Carry On as a Victorian police sergeant investigating the disappearances of young women from a public park.  Little does he know it but they’re being kidnapped by a splendidly gothic brother and sister (Kenneth Williams and Fielding Fielding) to be turned into shop window mannequins.  I love just about everything about this film.  The cast all seem to be enjoying themselves (particularly Williams, who has never been better), a fruity-voiced Fenella vamping it up outrageously in a skin-tight red gown, Joan Sims in full throttle in one of her battleaxe roles, and Jim Dale in one of his loveably goofy modes.   It takes every horror element it can, from Hammer, the Universal studios classics of the 1930s, and the Addams Family and has a ball.  There is some superb comic timing going on here, and the actors all spark off each other splendidly.  A word must also be said about the costumes and decor, which comfortably ape Hammer’s attention to period detail.  Creepy old house with fog swirling around it, horse-drawn carriages, corsets and brandy decanters. Love it.  TRIVIA CORNER: Carry On Screaming was one of the more improbable entries in Channel 4’s list of ‘The 100 Scariest Moments’, but then so was The Wizard Of Oz.

CARRY ON UP THE JUNGLE (1970)

Dir: Gerald Thomas

I don’t usually think of the 70s Carry Ons with the same affection as the older ones, but I’ll make an exception for Jungle.  Spoofing old Tarzan films, plus Hammer’s lamentable Slave Girls/Prehistoric Women effort from a couple of years earlier, the gang head off into the jungle in pursuit of the legendary Oozlum bird (which has a novel way of getting rid of itself).  These days I’m reminded more of George Of The Jungle, with Terry Scott in the Brendan Fraser role. Sid James must have enjoyed looking all Clark Gable/Stewart Grainger-ish in his safari suit, bush-whacker hat and neckerchief. Frankie Howerd is as lovable as ever as eccentric ornithologist Professor Tinkle.  The statuesque Valerie Leon also puts in a memorable appearance as an Amazonian woman intent on kidnapping men for fertility purposes.   Jacki Piper is also very likeable as the demure young secretary, who befriends the chest-thumping Terry Scott.  TRIVIA CORNER: according to Wikipedia, Bernard Bresslaw gave some of his lines in Swahili.  Sid – who was South African born – was the only member of the cast who understood him, and congratulated him.  One of my favourite film facts EVER.

THE CASE OF THE WHITECHAPEL VAMPIRE (2002)

Dir: Rodney Gibbons

Absorbing TV film in which the great Sherlock Holmes (Matt Frewer) is called in to investigate a possible outbreak of vampire killings in darkest Whitechapel at Christmas-time.  It took me a bit of a while to get used to Matt Frewer’s interpretation of Holmes.  At first I found him too arch and supercilious (although that’s all too often Holmes I guess), and to be honest, I was missing Jeremy Brett.  But he grew on me.   Always fun to see Holmes, the hyper-skeptic and realist, having to deal with religious cults, spiritualist mediums, and anything that smacks of the supernatural, and the film is enjoyably atmospheric.   TRIVIA CORNER: Matt Frewer played the immensely irritating Max Headroom on Channel 4 in the 1980s.  All I can say is, he’s a vast improvement here.

CASINO ROYALE (1967)

Dirs: Ken Huges, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Val Guest, Robert Talmadge, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Ursula Andress, George Raft, Woody Allen, Bernard Cribbins, Richard Wattis and Ronnie Corbett.  This sounds like a film cast to die for.  So what the blazes went wrong??  Every time this film trots around on TV, you can hear a groan go up across the land as everyone saw Casino Royale  in the listings, and thought they were going to get Daniel Craig (see below) instead.  Every time I see this film, I think WHY didn’t it work?  It wasn’t through lack of talent (obviously), and it wasn’t through lack of zest and vitality.  The list of directors gives me a bit of a clue.  Too many cooks and all that.  I’m starting to develop a theory that the more directors a film has, the more chance of a dog’s breakfast it’s going to be.  And Casino Royale seems to illustrate that.  It’s very much of it’s time, it has the Sixties stamped all through it, but that shouldn’t exactly be a problem.  My own twopennarth is that it lacks warmth, and because it lacks warmth it lacks any true sense of fun.  Plus people always try to do send-ups of Bond films, ignoring the fact that the Bond franchise itself is the best one for doing that.  It has a smug in-joke feel, which must have been great for the actors – who were clearly queuing round the block to appear in this – but feels alienating for the viewer.  Sort of “look at all these big stars having fun … so why aren’t I then?”  I did read one review which argued that it tries too hard to be hip and cool, but instead comes across as a bunch of embarrassing old farts (and to be blunt, they don’t come much more embarrassing than Deborah Kerr does in this) trying to be down with the kids.  By 1967 the cool kids were into flower power and letting it all hang out, whereas this feels as if it’s stuck 5 years before.  Sellers looks dishy in his Cary Grant specs, but again there’s no warmth to him here, none of the bumbling charm of Clouseau for instance.  It’s worth watching for the scene where Orson Welles tortures Sellers with a bagpipe sequence, which should give you some idea just how bonkers it is.  But overall, it’s an over-long, over-indulgent mess, which proves – once again – that big names alone don’t automatically make a great film.

CASINO ROYALE (2006)

Dir: Martin Campbell

Daniel Craig’s first foray into stepping into Bond’s shoes, and a much welcome overhaul of the series.  Gritty and exciting, this ranks as one of the best in the entire Bond canon.   Taken from Ian Fleming’s first novel, the film can be confusing at times as it’s referring to Bond as a new character, yet to earn his 007 stripes, but no matter, that’s a small quibble.  The film is remarkably faithful to the original book, although opened out considerably.  Whereas the book was set entirely in France, the film – in true Bond movie tradition – ventures all over the place.  Starting in Uganda, and stopping off at the Bahamas, Miami, and Montenegro, before winding up with a spectacular finale in Venice.  Running at well over 2 hours you certainly get your money’s worth.  It might not have all the charm of the vintage Bonds, but Craig is a worthy successor to Connery and Moore.

CASTAWAY (1986)

Dir: Nicholas Roeg

The film of Lucy Irvine’s bestselling book can be seen as a parable about marriage compressed into one year. Gerald meets Lucy. Gerald can’t believe his luck because Lucy is sexy, smart and beautiful. Lucy thinks Gerald is witty and adventurous. They get married and set up home together (albeit on a tropical island on the other side of the world). Lucy goes off sex, Gerald gets bad-tempered. Lucy becomes more shrewish and naggy, Gerald turns into a fat lazy old slob who just wants to lounge around all day. Lucy finally lets Gerald have his oats. Gerald can’t believe his luck, and becomes a more loving, caring husband as a result. At the end of their time together, they have reached a state of mutual understanding and respect. Both Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohue are first-rate as the two leads, which is just as well as they largely have to carry the film between them. I remember when it came out the real-life Lucy saying that if Gerald had been as cute and cuddly as Oliver Reed, she’d probably still be on the island! And certainly Reed does a fine job of making Gerald likeable. A lesser actor would have made him a boorish lout. This proves what a good actor he was, and he deserves to be remembered for more than just drunkenly making a tit out of himself on chat shows. Amanda Donohoe also does well in the difficult role of the complex Lucy, a woman made tense and difficult by a traumatic life (read her pre-Castaway memoirs, Runaway, for more info on her past). The film taps into our fascination with desert islands, and shows us that it’s not all golden beaches and the freedom to wander around in the nude. When their garden fails, the couple face near-starvation, which is summed up by them driving each other to a frenzy by describing their favourite food. It also has a great theme song by Kate Bush, Be Kind To My Mistakes.

CASTLE SINISTER (1947)

Dir:  Oscar Burn

If you love really bad films then you’re in for a treat this one, which has to be one of the worst I’ve ever seen.  Now I admit I might have said that about a few others in these pages, but ‘Castle Sinister’ is an almost textbook example of how NOT to make a movie.  When I first came across it on Amazon Prime, it looked pretty good.  I love old low budget b&w movies, and this one was set in a spooky Scottish castle, with a resident roving phantom, and a Wartime espionage plot.  What’s not to like?  Well I think the burning question is more of a case of how could they cock it up so badly?  It’s hard to know where to begin really.  The acting is incredibly amateur, and as there are no familiar faces amongst the cast, I suppose it’s not very surprising that no one seemed to go onto other things.  The pacing is another.  The film only runs at 45 minutes, and yet it would still try your patience.   The phantom – wearing the kind of mask that would become very famous decades later with ‘Scream’ – isn’t remotely spooky, and in fact seems comically inept.  There is also that bane of old films, the day-for-night photography.  The worst thing for me though was the narrator’s insistence on telling us everything that happens, instead of letting scenes speak for themselves.  It goes against the whole fundamental rule of Show Don’t Tell.  This is the sort of technique which unfortunately reminds me of ‘The Creeping Terror’ (see below), another little cinematic masterpiece.  The whole thing is lacking any kind of zest.  It’s the kind of plot that either needs to massively overdose on the whole Gothic Atmosphere bit, or go the other way and become a zany comedy.  I have read some who have tried to credit this film for being an early example of British Horror, but if that’s the case then it’s hard to believe British Horror ever survived as long as it did!

CAT AND MOUSE (1958)

Dir: Paul Rotha

Dreary low-budget quota quickie, which could have been so much better.  It’s let down by unsympathetic characters and two boring leads.  A deserting GI (Lee Patterson) takes a young woman Ann (Ann Sears) hostage, believing she knows where a cache of stolen diamonds are hidden.  Much of the film is a two-hander between Patterson and Sears, and they both try the patience inordinately.  Patterson’s wannabe tough guy routine gets old very quickly, and Sears is restrained to the point of being emotionally constipated.  The scenes between them should have been tense, but you just don’t care about these two.  It doesn’t help that Ann comes across as a vacuous dimwit most of the time.  She practically swoons when Patterson kisses her, so does she secretly yearn for him?  It’s never entirely clear.  And she does some unspeakably stupid things, like accepting a drink from him (which is drugged naturally) just as she has a chance to escape.  Not only that but she is actually knocked unconscious by a flying pillow!

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Dir: Jacques Torneur

I’m writing this one largely from memory, as it rarely appears on television these days, the full film isn’t available on YouTube, and the DVD is too expensive, BUT it is a classic of the horror genre and well-deserving of its reputation. In fact, one Halloween I did dig out the two most famous scenes from the film – the swimming-pool scene, and the scene where Alice is stalked as she walks along the street, which are available on YouTube – and posted them to Twitter. Simone Simon is a young dress-designer, Irena, living in a classy apartment in New York, who is haunted by a legend from the Balkan village of her ancestors, which says that if she has intimacy with a man she will turn into a big cat. Which is a bit unfortunate when she meets and falls for an engineer (called Oliver Reed), played by Kent Smith. Shot in scrumptious black-and-white, the film has oodles of Atmosphere. The couple marry, but Irena can’t shake that dreadful legend from her mind, and so we have to assume that the newly-weds’ life is somewhat lacking in intimate bliss. To add to Irena’s misfortunes, Oliver shares an office with Alice (Jane Randolph), who confesses that she secretly loves him, and she just can’t bear to see him so darn unhappy. Hmm, if you ask me, that Alice is a right bitch, although I think we supposed to believe she’s just an all-round good ole American gal, down-to-earth, and not like these moody European women. Irena gets suspicious about Alice’s intentions (you can’t really blame her), and starts to stalk her in cat form. The scenes in the street and at the swimming-pool are genuinely creepy, and still hold up well now. There are also some engaging secondary characters, such as the zoo-keeper, the cleaner at Oliver’s workplace who is obsessed with removing cigarette ash from her bosom, the chatty waitress at the restaurant, and the receptionist at Alice’s lodgings with her delightful 1940s slang. Watch out for the wedding breakfast scene, where Irena is accosted by a fellow Cat Woman. The film was remade in 1982 with Natassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. That is a good too, and the relocation to New Orleans works well, but the original has the edge for its monochrome, haunting quality.

THE CAT’S MEOW (2001)

Dir: Peter Bogdanovich

I was expecting to enjoy this one a lot more than  I did.  The era of 1920s Hollywood is one I find endlessly fascinating, and it covers one of the great mysteries of that time … what happened to movie producer Thomas Ince aboard Randolph Hearst’s yacht in 1924.  Hearst, and his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, threw a lavish birthday party for Ince, which ended in Ince being shot dead.  To this day no one fully knows what happened.  There are all sorts of theories, that Hearst shot Ince in a jealous rage when he suspected him of having an affair with Marion.  Or even that Charlie Chaplin did it (for the same reason).   The main problem I have with this film is the sluggish direction, plus the general all-round muted, somewhat dull atmosphere, and that kills it for me.  I admit this is entirely a matter of personal taste, and that many will vehemently disagree with me.  And then there’s the matter of the casting, which is a bit hit-and-miss.  I have a lot of time for Kirsten Dunst (mainly from performance in Marie Antoinette), but she just doesn’t feel right as Marion, and I don’t know why (sorry, I know that’s not much help).* Edward Herrmann and Eddie Izzard as Hearst and Chaplin, respectively, are spot-on though.  I’ve read complaints that this is a hatchet job on Chaplin, but I actually think – particularly considering what we know nowadays of his love life – that it’s reasonably sympathetic.  I’ve also seen criticism of Jennifer Tilly’s helium-voiced turn as the arch-bitch journalist, Louella Parsons.  But Parsons was an over-the-top character, and it’s actually quite interesting to get a showing of her in her younger days, before she became the vicious old witch of the gossip columns in the 1950s.  Sadly, Joanna Lumley just doesn’t cut it for me AT ALL as romantic novelist Elinor Glyn.  I think that’s probably because I always envisage Elinor as some formidable grand-dame, sort of a bit like the characters Margaret Dumont would play in the Marx Brothers films.  All fox furs and regal bearing.  She was a true Edwardian diva of literature.  Whereas Lumley’s portrayal is a more a low-key version of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, only nowhere near as funny.  She feels too modern, too knowing, whereas I always get the impression that Elinor didn’t know she was a caricature of herself by this stage (though that may well be just my impression of things).  That was the biggest disappointment for me, particularly as the main reason I watched this was to see Elinor Glyn portrayed on film.  There is some vigorous debate about this film on the IMDb website, with one viewer even calling it the “worst movie ever”.  I wouldn’t go anywhere near that far (they’ve obviously never sat through Robot Monster, or Madonna’s version of the Wallis Simpson story W.E), I would just describe myself as mildly disappointed.  It’s not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not as good as I thought it was going to be. ADDENDUM*: I read the relevant thread about Kirsten Dunst on the IMDb website.  Many people seemed to feel that she was dreary in the role, too affected, and she didn’t fit in with the era in which the film is set.  Marion was certainly a bubbly personality, a gifted comic actress, but Dunst just portrays her as a ditzy blonde airhead, with zero charisma and likeability.  Whatever the opinion, Dunst’s performance helped kill the film for me.

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

Dir: Arthur Hilton

Cult curio from the heyday of the sci-fi B-movie.  A bunch of scientists are on their way to investigate the Moon, only to find that the interior is inhabited by an entirely female population, all dressed in black, and sporting Princess Margaret hairdo’s.  I actually enjoyed this, and I can see why it’s attracted cult status.  Yes, it was made for about 4p, and even though it runs at only just over an hour long, it has too many long talkie periods (plus we’re halfway into the film before we even meet the Cat-Women), but I liked it.  The story was interesting, and some of the arty shots of the Moon are quite atmospheric.  In fact I put the footage of that segment on my second YouTube channel.  Marie Windsor plays the token woman, Helen, amongst the crew, and looks uncannily like a young Joan Crawford.  I read some criticism that she seems no different to the men, but frankly, this makes a change from Screamy Woman Who Has To Be Slapped To Her Senses, which is what we often get from this sort of thing.  Helen does have hysterics when she’s menaced by a giant spider in a cave, but I would have been screaming my tits off at that moment too.  One of the production team said he was dismayed when he saw the giant Moon spiders, thinking it would make the whole thing look absurd, and what are spiders doing on the Moon anyway?  Well if it comes to that what are women in black leotards with Princess Margaret hairstyles doing on the Moon?!  I’m almost tempted to read all sorts of Freudian psychology into this one, with the Moon being strongly associated with women etc etc, but I’ll leave that for those better qualified to do so.

CAVALCADE (1933)

Dir: Frank Lloyd

Based on a play by Noel Coward, this film shows the life of two English families (one upper-crust, one working-class) during the first few years of the 20th century.  It’s very much of it’s era, with lots of “England won’t be the same place without the dear old Queen” sort of stuff.  It’s a bit too slow in parts (although, having said that the Roaring Twenties seemed to be dismissed in a flickering montage of gloom and depravity), but it’s interesting enough, and still very moving in parts. TRIVIA CORNER: it was one of the first films to use the word “damn”, which caused some concern amongst the censors at the time.

A CHALLENGE FOR ROBIN HOOD (1967)

Dir: C M Pennington-Richards

Low-budget non-horror offering from the Hammer stable.  Even as undemanding teatime viewing fare, I found it hard to like this one.   I know comparisons are odious, but it’s safe to say we’re not exactly talking Errol Flynn here.  Barrie Ingham does the smug, characterless know-it-all bit as the legendary outlaw.  He is backed up by a supporting cast who look as if someone bought up a job-lot of cut-price actors at the bargain bin of a jumble sale.   Characters are prone to breaking into hearty guffaws of laughter (which frankly made me want to slap the lot of them).  To add to the misery we also get some unendurable singing in Ye Olde Sherwood Forest.   Gay Hamilton makes almost no impression whatsoever as Lady Marian.  The absolute nadir is a custard pie fight (yes I know that’s not what you’re expecting in a Robin Hood film), which is signposted a mile off, and is as lame as all the rest of it.  I would argue if you’re going to put an all-out custard pie fight in a film, then it has to be as spectacularly messy and anarchic as possible.  Hardly anyone gets hit in this one.  When I read up on this film afterwards, I was astonished to see it had had so many positive reviews, although someone on the IMDb website did say you know you’re in trouble when you get Alfie Bass as the special guest star!  The New York Times said it was “excellent”, and that the low budget “seldom shows”.

CHARLOTTE GRAY (2001)

Dir: Gillian Armstrong

This is one of those films that you expect to work, and it doesn’t.  Cate Blanchett is the eponymous heroine who parachutes behind enemy lines  into Occupied France during WW2, to help the French Resistance.  The photography on it is beautiful, and there is good attention to period detail, but perhaps that’s part of the problem. It doesn’t make the film ring true.  Everyone looks too well-nourished, sleek and immaculate for people suffering the extreme trials and tribulations of Wartime.  This feels more like a sentimental TV advert than a realistic movie.  I also have a problem with the character of Charlotte herself, who carries an aura of insufferable superiority around with her all the time.   I know comparisons are odious, but I kept being reminded of Carve Her Name With Pride, which is an infinitely better film in every way.  It has very good reviews on Amazon, but although it’s well-made, it just didn’t work for me.

CHEER BOYS CHEER (1939)

Dir: Walter Forde

The last comedy Ealing did in peacetime, before WW2 broke out.  Released in August 1939, it is often seen as a satire on the time, with a quirky, idiosyncratic brewery (meant to be the Brits), facing take-over by a ruthless organisation obsessed with efficiency (meant to be Nazi Germany).  It’s an engaging film, and worth seeing for Will Hay’s sidekicks Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott, appearing without him for a change.  They’re no less funny without their old sparring partner (in fact some have argued they’re even more so). Nova Pilbeam, as the token girl, doesn’t seem at ease with comedy, coming across as rather too muted and serious, although she’s a good sport, and does her best.  (Her voice reminds me so much of Jenny Agutter).   There’s a very funny piece where the CEO of the big brewery is shown reading a copy of Mein Kampf!  Can’t help feeling you could easily remake it now, with all the fears of small businesses being crushed by huge faceless corporations.

CHEMICAL WEDDING (2008)

Dir: Julian Doyle

Perhaps it’s old age coming on, but I seem to have reached a stage in my life where I am seriously bored by Aleister Crowley, and even more bored by any attempts by overgrown students to make out that he was some kind of misunderstood genius.  Having said that, I do think there is scope to make a good film about Crowley’s bizarre life, if only to show how he criminally abused and wasted the many talents that Life saw fit to give him.  This film isn’t it though.  In 1947 two young men go to see a dying drug-addicted Crowley at his Hastings boarding-house.  The jolly theme tune – Henry Hall’s Bogeyman – is played so loudly and is so distracting though that I couldn’t make out a single word of what the two men were saying to each other when they arrive there.  Crowley, a sad, panto figure in shabby pyjama’s (one YouTube comment-er remarked that he looks remarkably like Coronation Street’s Fred Elliott), goes over-the-top and dies on them.  Fast-forward a few decades, and there are sinister plans afoot to resurrect Crowley.  This is where I got seriously fed up with the film.  I don’t know which was worse, the earnest, annoying students, the brash, rude visiting American, or Simon Callow hamming it up HORRIBLY as a university professor.  Jeezus, the man can’t even pour out a glass of wine without gurneying all over the place!  He seems to have been under the impression that he was appearing in some old Comic Strip spoof.  And then we have my absolute bete-noire of horror films – the violent slam-dunk noises which are put in when anything happens.  When this occurs just because a girl has opened her eyes (oh God, how many times has that been done???) you know it’s bad.  I’ve read some reviews comparing this film to the old Hammer horrors, which makes me rise in umbrage, as the Hammers were in a class way above this.  I also take issue with a ‘Guardian’ review which said “at least it isn’t boring”. But it is!  I have to confess the tedium did me in, I couldn’t finish it.  The only good thing I can say about it is that you can download it for free on YouTube, which saves you from having to part with any cash for it.

THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS (1949)

Dir: John Paddy Carstairs

Dated, dull and talky British comedy, really only of interest as it touches on the seismic shifts that were taking place in UK society in the immediate post-WW2 era.  It centres around the son (David Tomlinson) of an impoverished toff (A E Matthews), returning from active service, who decides to run as a Socialist candidate in an election, and finds himself up against  the family butler (Cecil Parker) who is standing as the Tory candidate.  I’m usually up for a bit of nostalgia, but this is all too smug and self-satisfied.  There are some mildly amusing lines, such as the elderly toff saying that the aristocracy have finally been rumbled, but it’s all has the feel of a stilted old drawing-room comedy.

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT (1945)

Dir: Peter Godfrey

Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) is a popular and respected food writer, famed for her cosy despatches from her Connecticut farmhouse, where she paints an idyllic picture of herself as the perfect rustic wife and mother.  Unfortunately it’s all a load of old hooey.  In reality Elizabeth is a childless single woman tapping out her articles in her city apartment.  Things become complicated when a returning war hero, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), makes a request from his hospital bed that he wants to meet her.  Elizabeth faces ruin if her cover is blown, and so has to rustle up a husband, a baby and a farmhouse all at once.  This film sometimes makes it onto lists of popular Christmas movies, and I can see its appeal, but sadly, even with the ever-reliable Stanwyck in it, it didn’t really work for me.  I don’t have any major criticisms of it, it … well it just didn’t work for me.  It’s too cheesy, too of its time, and some of the supporting cast are hamming it up all over the place (Una O’Connor as Norah, the Irish housekeeper, must be an acquired taste).  There are too many things which simply just don’t work, including having Elizabeth falling for Jefferson the very moment she meets him.  Well Jefferson is a likeable enough character, but it’s hard to see that he would have someone falling so completely nuts about him on first sight.  This is a stage farce at heart, and I know they don’t have to be rooted solidly in reality, but no, it still didn’t work.  TRIVIA CORNER:  there was a made-for-TV remake of this story in 1992, which I haven’t seen, but which seems to have been pretty much reviled by all who did.  I can’t help feeling that you could easily take the same story though and update it now, but have Elizabeth as one of those perfect YouTube/Instagram vloggers, the sort who live in perfect houses (never a cushion out of place), and who consistently turn out perfect cooking, and who pose all the time in the snow wearing matching woollies and carrying takeaway coffee mugs.  I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Dir: Orson Welles

It’s a funny thing.  If you were to ask me for a list of films I’d want to take to a desert island, it’s doubtful Citizen Kane would be on it (but then, that’s because I’m probably a Philistine, who would pick films like The Legend Of Hell House and Carry On Camping instead), and yet when I come to watch it again I truly appreciate it’s greatness.  Inspired by the life of media mogul Randolph Hearst (the Robert Maxwell/Rupert Murdoch of the inter/war years), Kane is a masterpiece of the corruption of power.  There is a scene where a colleague objects to the way Kane always refers to “the people”, “as if you own them”.  It resonates just as much (probably even more so) than it did back then.  My favourite character is Kane’s second wife, the tragic Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) whom Kane wilfully tries to force into opera stardom, even though she has limited talent.  The scene where she knows she is bombing on stage I find almost unbearably sad.  Watching it again, I couldn’t help thinking that no person truly capable of love would force their loved one to go through such public humiliation, just so that he could get his own way.  And then there is Charles Foster Kane’s monstrous great house ‘Xanadu’, a place so huge that even a big guy like Kane can stand comfortably under the mantelpiece, and where the characters have to shout across the room to be heard by each other.  Lonely Susan spends her time in this gothic great pile doing jigsaw puzzles.  Orson Welles peaked early with this one, and I’ve heard it said that he seemed to live his career backwards, peaking at the beginning and then gradually declining over the decades that followed.  The trouble is … how on earth do you top Citizen Kane?  TRIVIA CORNER (1) Much mental energy has been expended over the years on the Rosebud question, and what it all means.  I’ve seen someone argue that it’s Kane harping back to the one time in his life when he knew happiness, free from the constant mental strife of relentless ambition, to when he was a child playing with his sledge.  In the scene where Susan finally leaves him, and Kane mutters “Rosebud”, it is packed full of pathos.  Kane is wondering why Life has so consistently failed to measure up to that early happiness, in spite of all his efforts to secure it.  So, for me anyway, Rosebud is a symbol of carefree childhood happiness.  That elusive magic we can spend our entire adulthood trying to find again.  TRIVIA CORNER (2) Welles insisted that Kane was a compendium of several different characters (which is usually the way with anything creative, to be fair), and that Hearst was just a part of it.  But it won’t stop people drawing comparisons with Hearst.  I would argue that – possibly – Hearst’s private life was less tragic.  Marion Davis (the Susan character) genuinely seemed to love him, and they had fun times together, summed up in the title of her memoirs, ‘The Times We Had’.  When Hearst hit financial problems, Marion bailed him out with a $1,000,000 cheque.  Unlike Susan, Marion was talented, a gifted comic actress, whose talent is more respected now, all these years on, than it probably was at the time.  In fact, from things I’ve read, Hearst was more of a hindrance to her career than a help, stopping her from doing roles that she would have relished.  When Hearst died in 1951, Marion married a few weeks later.  Her husband was said to bear a strong resemblance to a young Hearst.   Perhaps it’s not surprising that the marriage was a troubled one.  Marion summed it up by saying “thank God we all have a sense of humor”.

CITY UNDER THE SEA (1965)

Dir: Jacques Tourneur

Undemanding fantasy romp about a house in Edwardian Cornwall which is menaced by strange, reptilian figures which come out at night.   Tab Hunter and David Tomlinson investigate, and find an entire underwater community, ruled over by Vincent Price, which seems to have discovered the secret of immortality.  Naturally – as is often the way with this kind of thing – there is a rumbling volcano nearby (off Cornwall) which is threatening to shatter the aquatic idyll at any moment.  This is an engaging tale, with enjoyable gothic elements to it (as you’d expect from Jacques Tourneur), and some allusions to Edgar Allan Poe.  The only thing that really grated on me was Harold (David Tomlinson) and his unhealthy obsession with a damn chicken!  A chicken called Herbert.  How very, very silly.   TRIVIA CORNER: according to Wikipedia the damn chicken was added by Louis M Heywood, after it was felt that the script needed some humour.  One of the producers, George Willoughby, quit in disgust.  I don’t blame him.

CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981)

Dir: Desmond Davis

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first, yes it’s overlong, yes the lead hunk is bland (Harry Hamlin), and yes some of it’s galaxy of A-list stars do seem to weigh the film down a bit.  Laurence Olivier may have the authority to play Zeus, but he seems far too grand and theatrical for the film, and Ursula Andress as Aphrodite doesn’t seem to have much to do, other than stand there and look decorative in a Grecian dress.  Having said all that, it’s still got a great story, and entertaining special effects by the master, Ray Harryhausen.  It also beats the pants off it’s 2010 remake.  Perseus’s girlfriend, Andromeda (Judi Bowker) is doomed to be sacrificed to the Kraken, and Perseus has to find a way to rescue her.  The Stygian Witches (cannibals who live in a cave, with one eye between the lot of them) advise him that he will need the head of the gorgon Medusa.  Some films are worth sitting through for just one scene alone, and for me the showdown with Medusa is well-worth waiting for.  It’s creepy, tense, and Medusa herself is a formidable opponent.  I’ve seen the remake version with Russian model Natalia Vodianova, and it’s heavy emphasis on CGI (plus having Medusa in a bikini top, which makes her about as scary as an underwear catalogue), and it just doesn’t match it.  Although I have seen some argue that the remake shows more sympathy with the original character of Medusa, a beautiful woman cursed with a head of snakes, who turns anyone who looks at her to stone.  Even so, the original still wins hands down for me.  I loved it when it first came out, and will still watch it when I get a chance.

CLEOPATRA (1912)

Dir: Charles L Gaskill

One of the very first feature-length films to be made in the USA.  It features The Helen Gardner Picture Players, with Helen Gardner herself in the lead role.  I’ve seen some sneering at this picture, but you have to remember it was made nearly 110 years ago, the year the Titanic set sail!  It would be fascinating just on those grounds alone.   There are parts of it that are probably unintentionally funny to modern eyes, but it’s also strangely watchable, and you have to admire the way they were able to produce such an epic story on what would be the equivalent of about a million dollars now.  Helen Gardner may be a rather more beefy Queen of the Nile than we are used to seeing, and sometimes she seems to thump around the sets as if she’s about to start swinging punches at her male co-stars, but she is pretty mesmerising all the same.   The scene where she bewitches Mark Antony (Charles Sindelar) involves her prowling around him, with a long veil over her head, giving a very good impression of a menacing spider.   She was clearly heralding the era of the Vamp two years before Theda Bara was!   TRIVIA CORNER: I wanted to find out more about Helen Gardner.  Apparently she was the first actor – either male or female – to form her own production company.  After a busy and prolific career, Helen retired from acting in 1924 at the age of 40, when her popularity waned.  Little seems to be known about her activities after that.  She died in 1968 at the age of 84.  Gardner was clearly one of the early pioneers of cinema, and yet she is almost entirely forgotten now.   I liked the opening credits on Cleopatra where the actors were listed by their titles and surnames, Miss Gardner etc, perhaps we should go back to that!

CLEOPATRA (1934)

Dir: Cecil B de Mille

Thoroughly enjoyable biopic about the Queen of the Nile, starring the very likeable Claudette Colbert in the title role.  Although it has plenty of the trademark Cecil B de Mille lavish spectacle, it’s much less pompous than the Elizabeth Taylor version, or the British 1940s  Caesar and Cleopatra.  There are some bits you can get po-faced about if you want, such as Cleo’s lady-in-waiting Charmain (Eleanor Phelps) having blonde hair and plucked eyebrows, and Calpurnia (Gertrude Michael) looking as if she’s hosting a swanky dinner-party for the 1930s American elite, but I don’t care.  Warren William makes a far more believable Caesar than Rex Harrison did (there’s a touch of Daniel Craig about him), and Henry Wilcoxon is a rugged, sexy Marc Anthony.  But with a de Mille picture it’s the spectacle you turn up for, and he doesn’t disappoint.  There are high camp moments galore.  The cat-fight featuring ladies wearing leopard-print costumes, the burning hoops, the female onlookers bitchily dissecting Cleo’s looks during her entry into Rome, Claudette dripping in pearls, and Cleo and Marc Anthony consummating their relationship in such over-the-top style that you simply have to wallow in it.  The entire story is brought in too at a brisk 100 minutes.   Eat your heat out Mankiewicz.

CLEOPATRA (1963)

Dir: Joseph L Mankiewicz

Whole books and films have been made about the making of this hugely expensive epic. It seems to have a reputation as a bit of a bleedin’ disappointment, yet it’s not. It does have a hackneyed, and somewhat pompous, beginning, with the kind of risible narrator which must have been already out of date when this was made in 1963. And at times I did find myself missing Sid James, Amanda Barrie and Kenneth Williams, who sent the whole thing up beautifully in Carry On Cleo. As a visual spectacle though it’s still pretty awesome, particularly Cleopatra’s entry into Rome which ranks as one of the great stunning scenes of big cinema. When I first watched this many years ago I was a bit disappointed with Liz Taylor. I must’ve been having an off day, because she’s great. Imperious, witty, sexy and emotional by turn. Apparently when she first saw the finished product, she ran to the ladies’ powder room and was violently sick. But really, she gets the job done fine. I warmed to her from the first scene when she criticised Caesar’s maps for being out of date.  My only criticism of her is that she has a tendency in some scenes to look a bit matronly.  Having said that, in the entry into Rome scene, where she winks knowingly at Caesar, she looks about as splendid as it’s possible to get.  Rex Harrison puts in a solid (though frankly not very exciting) turn as the ageing Caesar, although his early scenes where he’s constantly admonishing Cleo with his “young lady” remarks, I kept expecting him to morph into Professor Higgins.  Richard Burton makes an OK Mark Antony, but my favourite is Roddy McDowell as Augustus. I don’t really need to say any more than that. This is a film that any film fan needs to watch at least once. If you want to get the full benefit of the lavish scenes though it’s probably best to watch it on a big screen, and not on a small portable dvd player as I did. ADDENDUM:  I watched this again recently, or at least tried to.  I had been reading Patrick Humphries’ book Cleopatra And The Undoing Of Hollywood, and thought I’d refresh my memory of it.  The book details how the sheer mad, wanton extravagance of making Cleopatra nearly managed to sink a film studio, and helped bring to an end the old days of Hollywood, with its power-crazed moguls and stars able to command any sum they wanted.  Cleopatra was supposed to be the epic to end all epics, and it’s interesting to see WHY this didn’t turn out to be the case.  This time round I managed about an hour of it, before giving up.  It’s easy to see where the money went.  The film is visually stunning.  I still liked Liz in the title role, and I think she does a better job of it than she was often given credit for.  But Humphries is right to add that the problem was she had no gravitas.  At times she had the same problem that Vivien Leigh had in Caesar And Cleopatra (see above) several years earlier.  They both can too easily come across as wilful, petulant schoolgirls instead of a powerful queen of the ancient world.  Aside from lavish spectacle, battle scenes, and extravagant costumes, there is also one other element movie-goers want from Cleopatra’s story – sex.  And lots of it.  In the first half there is no chemistry at all between Caesar and Cleopatra.  That goddamn Professor Higgins act got in the way again.  Caesar and Cleopatra were peers, both rulers with unlimited power, both used to getting their own way.  But there is no sense of that here.  In the second half, with Burton coming in as Mark Antony, you should expect the spice meter to go up through the roof.  After all, their relationship was the scandal that had gripped the world, but there is little in the way of chemistry here.  It is probably fair to say that they used up all it all up in private, leaving nothing for the public screen.   Not an uncommon problem with real-life couples who appear together on the big screen. There is also another major problem – pacing.  There are too many long periods where bugger all happens.  We find ourselves hanging around Cleopatra’s palace like a bunch of bored courtiers, wishing something would happen to alleviate the monotony.  Cleo is confined to her apartment, listening to desultory music, and lounging around in the nude.  This all looks lovely of course, but a film needs more than pretty images.  It needs a plot, and action.   Audiences came to this film expecting to see lots of sizzle between Burton and Taylor, and instead had to sit through a first half with Rex Harrison, and then an underwhelming performance from Burton, who makes it very clear that he regards himself as slumming it.  In the past I would have called it a flawed masterpiece, but I wouldn’t go that far now.  It’s more a classic case of Style Over Substance.  There is nothing here for the viewer to get emotionally engaged with.  A fatal flaw in any film.

CLOVERFIELD (2008)

Dir: Matt Reeves

I REALLY wanted to like this one.  It sounded right up my street.  Found-footage and big alien monsters.  Marvellous.  Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the fun I thought it was going to be.  The plot: a bunch of young friends are holding a party, when a big monster attacks New York. I think the problem for me was that it was simply too noisy (the poor old dear) and too chaotic.  And at times the relentless noise and dashing-about began to feel as if it was hiding the fact that really the film doesn’t add up to much.  There is one absurd part which sticks in my mind when I think of Cloverfield: Apocalyptic chaos is reigning supreme, and in the midst of all this mayhem a tourist-hire horse-and-trap gently clops down the street.   Perhaps I’m missing something.  Perhaps there’s Some Great Significance to that.  I dunno.  I may need to see it again. Sometime.

COCO BEFORE CHANEL (2009)

Dir: Anne Fontaine

I didn’t enjoy this one.  Yes, it’s well-made. Yes, it’s well-acted. Yes, if you’re fascinated by Coco then it’s a good look at how she got started. But I still hated it. I think part of the problem for me is that I just can’t warm to Coco Chanel. So she revolutionised women’s clothes. Ho-hum. I still think she was a cold fish, and she ended up dying alone, with everyone terrified of her. She was also a Nazi collaborator. It’s going to take more than a few elegant dresses and a bottle of perfume to make me like her. If you’re nuts about fashion and haughty, cold-blooded French women, you’ll love it. Enjoy.

THE COMEBACK (1978)

Dir: Pete Walker

I’ve seen this film slated by Serious Film Reviewers, and yet to be honest, it’s pretty good.  Popular 1960s crooner Jack Jones plays Nick Cooper, a singer who put his career on hold to please his wife, but is now desperate to get back into the big time.   He rents a gloomy gothic pile in the English countryside, which is staffed by a peculiar Scottish housekeeper (Sheila Keith), who is every bit as unsettling as Mrs Danvers.  Her husband is played by Bill Owen, in a rare non-comedy role.  Meanwhile, Cooper’s ex-wife (Holly Palance) goes to their old penthouse apartment.  There she falls victim to a screaming, axe-wielding killer in a fright mask.  It is the scenes around this grim apartment block which are genuinely unsettling.  It has a definite creepy feel to it, far more than the gothic mansion.  I watched this late at night, and I did find it very unsettling in parts.  It is perhaps let down by the twist at the end, which to be honest was a bit underwhelming, and Pamela Stephenson makes a bland female lead.  But this was a solid British horror effort, and has been credited (if that’s the word) with being the forerunner of the 1980s trend in slasher movies.  It certainly doesn’t deserve the sneering it has attracted over the years.

THE CONQUEROR (1956)

Dir: Dick Powell

I am fascinated by the darker side of Hollywood, but when you read books about Hollywood tragedies and scandals, there is one that is remarkably little documented, and that is the making of The Conqueror.  This isn’t just about the film having one of the biggest casting mistakes in film history (more of that in a moment), but that the making of it is thought to have contributed to the deaths of many involved.  The Conqueror  was shot in the desert near the nuclear testing site in Nevada.  As if this wasn’t grim enough, the producer, Howard Hughes, also arranged for some of the radioactive soil to be taken back to the studio’s as well.  In the space of a few years afterwards, the director Dick Powell, stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendariz all succombed to terminal cancer.  To add to the roll-call of tragedy, both Wayne’s sons and Hayward’s son also had to be treated for tumours after visiting the set.  It has been pointed out that The Duke was a very heavy smoker, and this probably contributed to his demise more than any other, but The Conqueror still has to remain one of the most tragic film episodes in Hollywood history.  As to the film itself, well what can I say?  Apparently John Wayne begged to play the role of Genghis Khan, the notorious Medieval Mongolian war-lord.  There were some misgivings about this at the time, but Wayne was flying high after the success of The Searchers, and it was felt that no one could say no to him.  So here you have one of the most bizarre casting decisions in film history: Wayne, the all-American guy playing a Medieval Mongolian war-lord.  Then we have the script, which is so thick-eared it beggars belief, with Wayne and Moorehead constantly referring to each other as “my mother” and “my son”, like a second-rate Monty Python sketch.  Wayne was said to have been in despair with most of the lines he had to deliver.  It doesn’t help that when Khan has to deliver a public speech, he sounds as if he’s got a built-in PA System in his voice!  Then we have the dodgy sexual politics.  Now Wayne’s leading ladies notoriously got a hard time of it (in fact the only one I can think of who ever seemed comfortable as his female co-star was Maureen O’Hara), but poor old Susan Hayward really goes through the mill.  She has her dress ripped off, she’s slapped in the face, she’s raped (but oh it’s OK, she enjoys it really doncha know).  No wonder she looks grumpy and fed up for most of the film.  I don’t blame her.  At one point she does a pretty aggressive sword-dance, and you can understand why Wayne looks uncomfortable all the way through it!  Talking of dancing, we also have a topless Lee Van Cleef doing a pretty strange little number too, as if someone’s just tried to electrocute him.  I don’t think I have ever been so relieved to see the magic words “THE END” come up on a film.  TRIVIA CORNER: producer Howard Hughes was so depressed by the end result that he ordered all copies to be locked away, and the film wasn’t released into the public arena until after his death in 1976.  It was said that during his final years of reclusive existence, he would watch it over and over again in his room.  He would order the projectionist to wear a blind-fold though.  The projectionist must have been grateful for small mercies.

THE CONSTANT HUSBAND (1955)

Dir: Sidney Giliatt

I can’t think of any genre that’s dated quite so horribly as the 1950s English upper middle-class comedy. Sometimes I can quite see why the Angry Young Men were so determined to kick out the likes of Terence Rattigan and co. The Constant Husband is by no means the worst I’ve seen of this ilk. If you’re feeling half-awake it can rumble on unobtrusively in the background, but when it’s not being flat and dull, it occasionally rises to the level of mild annoyance. It simply has no zest to it. All the actors are going through the motions, as if they know it’s a waste of time. The plot isn’t bad as plots go. Rex Harrison wakes up in a Welsh seaside boarding-house, with no idea who he is or how he got there. He’s suffering from total amnesia. Gradually, he begins to piece together this life, only to find that he’s weaved a tangled private life, with several wives on the go. Now, as an idea for a comedy, this should be OK, but it needs to be done with a A LOT more panache. It’s hampered too that because of the era in which it was made it has to tone down any saucy bits so much that they barely exist. I can’t help thinking that Hollywood would have made a damn sight better job of this. Now, don’t get me wrong, I can be as patriotic as the next person, but can you imagine a film like this with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, or Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, or Bob Hope and Lucille Ball? Yes, see, it would be on a different level entirely. As it is, it’s just dreary and turgid, and we also have to put up with George Cole hamming it up mercilessly as a young Italian.

COR BLIMEY! (2000)

Dir: Terry Johnson

Exceptional TV film based on the relationship between Carry On stars Sid James (Geoffrey Hutchings) and Barbara Windsor (Samantha Spiro).  I can’t praise the acting in this film enough.  It must be extremely difficult to play characters whom the general public are already very familiar with.  Very hard not to go for all-out imitation or caricature, and Sid is one of those unique people I would have thought was nigh-on impossible to portray, but Hutchings is brilliant.  He really does seem to be Sid at times.  The whole – sometimes fraught – camaraderie between the Carry On team is captured perfectly, and Adam Godley does a masterly performance as Kenneth Williams.  The man who was a thoroughly arch intellectual snob at times, and yet also prone to puerile schoolboy obsessions with farting, bottoms and bowel movements, and liked to embarrass people by dropping his trousers at every opportunity.   It’s also a tribute to Samantha Spiro’s acting that the scene towards the end where the real Babs comes in and takes over the role is so deftly done that I didn’t even see the join, even though I had read about it beforehand and knew it was coming.   I do have a criticism though – and I feel a total and utter insufferable pedant about this – and that’s that the Carry On chronology is all over the place.  For instance, we have a read-through for Carry On Emmannuelle whilst Sid is still alive, even though it wasn’t made until 2 years after his untimely death.  And there’s a reference to Jim Dale sliding down a staircase on a tea-trolley a few years before that particular film was made.   Plus we have Bernard Bresslaw playing Cardinal Wolsey in Carry On Henry, even though that role was taken by Terry Scott.  In a lesser film little artistic licences like this could have been monumentally annoying, but it doesn’t detract from the whole experience, and the final scene between Babs and Kenny is just so lovely.   For us die-hard Carry On fans, it’s a worthy tribute to our heroes.

COUNT DRACULA (1977)

Dir: Philip Saville

For me, this is the definitive Dracula film. Forget that overblown load of old flatulence, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where Gary Oldman mooches around, either looking like Glenn Close, or a lugubrious bloodhound in tinted glasses. No, for my money it’s Louis Jourdain (although Frank Langella in the 1979 version is also well worth a look). It stays extremely close to the book, there are no Hammer-esque liberties taken here, and the cast underplays things nicely. We get so used to seeing hysterical versions of Dracula, where everyone’s hamming it up to the hilt, that it’s nice to see a low-key version for a change. The opening scenes where Jonathan Harker travels by coach up into the Carpathian mountains are laden with menace, and a feeling of impending doom. Unusually too, for a Dracula film, the Brides are shown, not sporting snakes in their hair, and creeping up from under the bed, as in the Keanu Reeves version, but simply marching resolutely, in their white dresses, towards a cowering Harker. With this scene the film pays homage to its Victorian wet dream origins. Harker is the decent, spiffing English chap being seduced against his will by these formidable, exotic foreign ladies. As Stephen King once put it, it’s quite a shame when the Count bursts in and breaks it all up.  Pretty Susan Penhaligan also makes a charming Lucy, showing her simply as an exuberant schoolgirl, instead of the hysterical nymphomaniac she’s sometimes portrayed as. Louis Jourdain got some criticism in his role as the Count, with some feeling he was too … er … bloodless. He’s not. Here Dracula isn’t a tormented romantic soul, or a horrid reptilian creature, he is the refined aristocrat, shut out from a world that has left him behind. Although we see him scaling his castle walls, batlike, and dumping a baby in a bag for his Brides, it is the scene where he brags about his fine notepaper to Harker that sums up the Count for me. In his gloomy, decaying castle, he is still living on past glories, unaware that nobody cares.

THE COUNTESS (2009)

Dir: Julie Delpy

Excellent French/German film about the life of the notorious Erzsebet Bathory, the blood countess, who allegedly murdered hundreds of women, in the mad belief that washing in their blood would restore her youth and beauty.  The achievement is all Julie Delpy’s, as she wrote it, directed it, produced it, starred in it, and even did the music!  For me she has become the definitive Bathory, even managing to eclipse Ingrid Pitt (see below).  I am so tired of revisionist history, which tries to portray Bathory as some wronged woman at the mercy of jealous noblemen.  The Countess sticks to the more familiar view of the legend, which has Bathory as one of the strangest women in European history.  it is beautifully shot, with moody views of the countryside, and the Countess’s castle.  The film also wins Brownie points from me for not copping out at the end.  It covers the Countess’s punishment, which was to be walled up alive in a room of her castle.  A brooding, dark gothic tale, which should be absolutely required viewing for anyone who is fascinated by the real-life Countess Dracula.

COUNTESS DRACULA (1971)

Dir: Peter Sasdy

One of my favourite Hammer efforts. To my disappointment it doesn’t seem to be highly regarded these days, or at least not amongst male reviewers, which astonishes me considering the amount of heaving bosom that is on permanent display. One argued it didn’t contain enough sex and violence (okey-dokey), another argued that he couldn’t find Ingrid Pitt sexy when he knew she could change back into an old hag at any moment. (Sigh). The film can be best viewed these days as an adult dark fairy-tale about ageing, and trying to hang onto the glories of youth at all costs. Instead of sticking needles into her face and making it freeze up with botox though, the Countess here bathes in the blood of young virgins. Only trouble is, the effects keep wearing off, and she has to keep topping it up (a bit like botox really). And every time she relapses into Old Bag mode she gets uglier and uglier. The magnificent Ingrid Pitt is at her sexiest (in spite of what neurotic New York reviewers may say), and clearly relishes her role as the dastardly Countess Bathory. She is supported by a capable cast, and a location which ranks as one of my favourite castle sets. The penultimate scene at the wedding altar is quite shocking the first time you see it.

COVER GIRL KILLER (1959)

Dir: Terry Bishop

If you want good, solid proof that there was more to Harry H Corbett than simply playing Harold Steptoe, then this is it.  This is not to undermine his comic portrayal of poor old Harold, as he was quite brilliant in Steptoe And Son, but he could also do straight-up serious roles as well.  In this sorely under-rated little British B-movie, he plays a sleazy serial-killer preying on glamour models and showgirls.   The very first time I saw this, several years ago, I thought the killer was a bit hammy and over-the-top with his flasher-style raincoat and beer-bottle glasses, but not so.  There is an intensity about Corbett’s performance that lifts it above simply being another run-of-the-mill film noir effort.  He has to be charming and plausible enough to lure the girls into trusting him, and yet at the same time barely able to conceal his contempt for them.   Also we never find out who this guy is, he has no name, he is simply The Man, which gives a strangely supernatural element to the whole thing.

CRACK IN THE WORLD (1964)

Dir: Andrew Marten

Above-average apocalyptic film.  Dana Andrews (whom I will always have a soft spot for, after Night Of The Demon) plays a dying scientist, who causes mayhem when one of his experiments causes a huge crack to form in the world.  Janette Scott, looking very beautiful with her Monroe-esque blonde bob, plays his wife, who is also taken with younger scientist Kieran Moore (it seems we often have to have a troubled threesome in these types of films).  The final half-hour is very exciting, and I remember the ending have a big effect on me when I first saw it many years ago.

CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954)

Dir: Jack Arnold

Proof that, even after all these years, a man in a lizard suit can still be quite effective in the scary stakes. A party of explorers are on some remote Amazonian river, which (unbeknown to them) is frequented by a hideous reptilian monster. The scene where the graceful Julia Adams, in a white swimsuit, swims down the river whilst being tracked by the monster below, is still quite unnerving. (I’m not surprised that this was a big influence on Steven Spielburg when he came to make Jaws several years later). The feuding bare-chested men back on the boat all looks a bit unintentionally gay these days though.

THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

Dir: Freddie Francis

One of the least known of the British gothic horrors from the 1970s, and often airily dismissed by classic horror enthusiasts, but this is actually not bad at all, and has become a bit of a favourite of mine.  Peter Cushing plays Professor Hildern, who returns from his travels overseas with a complete skeleton in his luggage.  The Prof was told by the natives of the region that it belonged to an older race of evil giants, who could be resurrected by rain.  He does indeed find that the old bag of bones grows flesh when water is poured on it.  In the story we also have Christopher Lee, doing a chilly performance as the Professor’s callous half-brother, who runs a lunatic asylum, where the Professors wife has been incarcerated for many years.  Also in the mix is the Professor’s daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), who has been kept rigidly close to home all her life, because the Professor fears she may have inherited her mother’s madness.  This is a pretty decent story, and although the monster can look a bit laughable in close up, the scene where it walks into the Professor’s house is pretty darn creepy.  Lorna Heilbron also does a good turn as Penelope, going from demure, wholesome Edwardian girl to wild child on the town to crazed lunatic.  The twist at the end is pretty good too.  There are also some thought-provoking moments, such as the Professor pondering whether Evil exists as an entity in its own right, and that if this creature is allowed to walk the world unchecked then nothing but horror will follow in its wake.

THE CREEPING TERROR (1964)

Dir: Vic Savage

This has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst films ever made, and I am not going to argue with that one. This film can even make Robot Monster (see below) look like a masterpiece, and that’s saying something.  Where do I even begin with it?  There is a forbidding voiceover which seems to take the place of dialogue much of the time.  I assume this was done to give the film some kind of realistic documentary flavour, but instead you find yourself thinking “can’t we just hear the actors?”  Of course when you do, you wish they hadn’t bothered.  The story is this: a monster from an alien spaceship is out to terrorise the inhabitants of a small American town.  How the monster doesn’t reduce them to fits of hysterical laughter instead is one of the great mysteries of the universe.  The monster looks like some flea-bitten old rug that has decided to go for a stroll in the countryside, and when it does it strolls VERY VERY SLOWLY.  Honestly, you could be the most unfit person on the planet, and you could still easily out-walk this one, and not have to remotely break into a sweat doing so.  I find it hard not to call this ‘The Creeping Carpet’.  Only watch if you really are a connoisseur of really bad films.

CRIME OF PASSION (1957)

Dir: Gerd Oswald

Barbara Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson, a hard-nosed reporter, who ends up falling for an assuming police officer (Sterling Hayden).  He takes her to live in 1950s Small Town America, where Kathy quickly finds herself becoming bored with trying to be the perfect housewife.  To try and alleviate her boredom Kathy throws herself into various unsavoury schemes to try and get her unambitious husband up the career ladder.  It all ends in murder.  Worth watching for Stanwyck (as all her films are), and it’s an absorbing plot, but certainly not the best of her career.  Stanwyck though always gives her all.  Just look at her facial expression at the end.

THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952)

Dir: Robert Siodmak

Colourful and popular pirate swashbuckler, although personally I found it a bit tedious, largely because it’s humour grated on me.  It sort of felt relentless at times.  Worth watching to see Burt Lancaster doing some very impressive acrobatic shinnying up the ship’s masts (well he did start out as a circus acrobat).  Eva Bartok makes a formidable leading lady in one of her few film appearances.  When I first began watching I could have sworn she was Maureen O’Hara!  There’s plenty of action to keep you watching.

CROOKS IN CLOISTERS (1964)

Dir: Jeremy Summers

Enjoyable vintage Brit comedy, about a hopelessly inept gang of crooks who stage “the world’s smallest train robbery”, and then have to go into hiding. They disguise themselves as monks on a Cornish island (as you do). A pretty endearing and comical holy order they make, particularly considering they include Barbara Windsor as Brother Bikini (she does a pretty nifty jive in her monk’s habit too). A nice bit of escapism comedy, which should be better available than it is these days.

CROWSHURST (2017)

Dir: Simon Rumley

Donald Crowshurst was very much the outsider underdog in the 1968 round-the-world yachting competition.  People always like an underdog, so when it looked as if the impossible might happen and Donald might actually win, then public attention focused on him big-time.  Unfortunately it was all a big lie.  Donald had sailed to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and then intended simply to sail back up again, slipping in behind the other competitors.  He didn’t expect to be the winner!  If he had returned home then the fraud would have been well and truly exposed.  Donald disappeared off the coast of South America in 1969 and has never been found, although his boat now lies beached in the Caribbean.  I remember as a child often hearing about the search for Donald Crowshurst on the news, but I was too young to really take in what it was all about.  This is a low-budget quirky re-telling of his ill-fated adventure.  Justin Salinger does a fine job in the title role, particularly as he has to carry large chunks of the film all by himself.  Donald’s lonely life on the ocean waves is conveyed very well.  Perhaps a life of total isolation, only hearing the sound of the waves and the creaking of the boat, might sound alluring to some of us in these noisy, frantic times we live in, but several months of it would drive anybody completely nuts.  So full marks to Salinger for this difficult, one-man role.  There were times when he reminded me of the late, great John Hurt.  Some of the quirkiness can get a bit tiresome, such as the characters all singing ‘Jerusalem’ for instance, to convey the somewhat desperate air of patriotism that surrounded the whole venture.  But on the whole this is an absorbing portrayal of a man whose big dreams often far exceeded his practical realities.  The ending was very moving.

CRY OF THE BANSHEE (1970)

Dir: Gordon Hessler

Gloomy horror from 1970, which has one saving grace … Vincent Price, who seems to revisit his Matthew Hopkins role, but without the same success.  In folklore, a banshee was a wailing spirit, of an old woman or a witch, who predicted death when she was heard.  In this film it’s a rabid dog.  It scarcely seems to matter, as the film’s not much cop anyway.  The peculiar opening credits set the tone, with the trippy Terry Gilliam artwork.  And then we’re in the 16th century.  Price is a ruthless man, ruling his area with an iron hand.  Punishments are meted out severely.  A woman is whipped through the village, and put in the stocks.  A very young brother and sister appear in front of Price, and end up killed, when the sister resists his advances.  I feel like I’m running out of the will to live writing up this plot.  Rape seems to feature overpoweringly in this film.  You could argue that was the time it was set, more like the time it was made. There’s far too much of frightened women having their bodices torn off, and men acting like apes.  Sorry to sound like Mary Whitehouse, but there you go.  I got fed up with it.  TRIVIA CORNER: the title of this film apparently was the inspiration for Siouxsie And The Banshees when naming themselves.

THE CRYSTAL BALL (1943)

Dir: Elliott Nugent

Farcical fun starring Ray Milland and Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady Paulette Goddard, in a convoluted tale about a fake psychic called Madame Zenobia (Gladys George).  Lots of mistaken identity, and some cheerful slapstick ensue.  It’s all good, clean fun, and both Milland and Goddard are very funny.   My favourite has to be the running gag of the old lady who always happens to be just outside the apartment door when something happens.  “You’re my favourite so far”, she says to Milland, after he gets a punch on the nose!

A CUCKOO IN THE NEST (1933)

Dir: Tom Walls

Film based on an Aldwych farce from 1933.  Being over 80 years old, naturally it has dated, but it also has a great deal of charm and curiosity value.  It’s mainly watchable these days for Ralph Lynn, a monocle-wearing comic actor who specialised in this sort of thing.  He is very funny.  The farce centres around two old friends (Lynn, and Yvonne Arnaud), who are forced to spend the night at the same hotel, and if the truth got out, a huge scandal would ensue.  The plot is nonsensical to modern eyes, which can make it exasperating.  The timing can also feel painfully long-winded, and there are far too many “idiotic yokels” in the cast, but it’s heart’s in the right place.  It was misguidedly remade in 1954 as Fast And Loose.  Even in the strait-laced early 1950s it must have seen lamentably innocent (Kay Kendall causes one man to almost have a seizure by appearing in the kind of flouncy nightgown which is about as revealing as a floor-length buttoned-up thick cardigan).  It doesn’t have the charm of the original.

CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR (1968)

Dir: Vernon Sewell

British horror from 1968, which these days is largely of interest for seeing Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff in the same film.  Other than that, there’s not really very much to recommend it.  Mark Eden plays Bob Manning, who drives into the countryside in search of his missing brother.  There he winds up at a country house which is holding it’s annual celebration of a witch-burning.  It’s all a bit hackneyed, but there was a lot of this kind of stuff about in the late 1960s/early 70s (in films and books I mean, I can’t speak for real life, though I have heard rumours doncha know).  He finds himself watching bemused as some “wild young things” hold a sort of swinging rave, which largely seems to involve two girls having a paint fight.  Boris Karloff was 81 when this film was made, and not in the best of health at all, spending the film confined to a wheelchair, but he really is the only reason to spend time on this.  Other than that, the pace moves at a plod, and it’s all rather uninspired.

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)

Dir: Terence Fisher

Hammer at its very best. A colourful, elegant, fast-moving adaptation of the Frankenstein legend, with the splendid Peter Cushing plays the Baron. The film opens with him about to be sent to the guillotine for murder, and he decides to recount to a priest the process of how he got there. Melvyn Hayes plays the Baron as a young, precocious boy, and Cushing takes over the role as an adult. I know you’ve probably read heaps of praise about Cushing’s talents as an actor, but they really are deserved. He wasn’t just a a gifted actor, who had the knack to make any film he appeared in watcheable, he was also one of the most nicest. Even here, when he’s playing an outright psychopath, he still manages to bring charm to the role. Hazel Court (absolutely mistress of the magnificent art of bosom-heaving) plays his fiancee. She doesn’t have much to do, other than look beautiful in crinoline dresses, but she does what she can with the role. Christopher Lee is almost unrecognisable as the Monster. The original make-up, made famous by Boris Karloff in the early 1930s, was still in copyright, so Hammer had to do their own version. By all accounts, the other actors found Lee’s make-up so revolting that he had to take his lunches alone. The film got panned by the critics when it was initially released, branded as gratuitous and nasty. But it proved to be a smash-hit, and set Hammer on their long, lucrative horror career. The scene where the Baron and his tutor first bring a living creature (a dog) back to life is particularly well-done. It still ranks as one of my favourite versions of the Frankenstein tale.

CURSE OF THE MUMMY (1970)

Why do people keep trying to film Bram Stoker’s The Jewel Of The Seven Stars?  It rarely works.  The story is pretty hackneyed, and would defy even the most brilliant director to make something of it.  This one was part of Thames TV’s Mystery And Imagination series, aired in 1970.  Patrick Mower plays an Edwardian doctor, called out in the middle of the night, to attend an archaeologist (Graham Crowden), who has collapsed.  It turns out the prof is an Egyptologist, obsessed with bringing back to life an evil old queen, whose mummified body he keeps in the house.  And wouldn’t you just know it, his unspeakably annoying daughter (Isobel Black) bears a strong resemblance to her.  Hammer tried this story (Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb), which isn’t regarded as vintage Hammer, but is certainly better than any other effort, and in 1980 Charlton Heston tried it (The Awakening), which didn’t work at all.  I hope no one else gets any bright ideas about it.  Some plots are best left forgotten.

CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

Dir: Terence Fisher

In 18th century Spain a beggar turns up at feast being hosted by an evil marquess.  He is made to dance for his supper (a ropey old chicken leg), but then wrecks everything by making an off-colour joke about the marquess and his beautiful young wife.  The beggar is chucked into the dungeons for his sins, and left to rot.  Fast forward 10 years, and the evil marquess, now a widower, is a truly revolting sight.  When a mute serving-girl repels his advances, she is thrown into the dungeon as well, and is raped by the beggar, who has long since been driven insane by his solitary confinement.  On release, the girl stabs the marquess and then flees into the forest.  She is taken in by a kind couple, who find she is pregnant.  When it’s worked out that her baby is due on Christmas Day, a feeling of foreboding creeps over the household, as this is considered unlucky.  The film from then on charts the life of the baby as he grows up into a handsome young man, Leon (Oliver Reed), albeit one at the mercy of his dark side.  As is often the case with cinematic versions of the werewolf legend, Leon is a sympathetic character, haunted by the curse that has been put on him by his birth.  This is an elegant, well-made effort by Hammer, and the first half hour in particular is a favourite of mine, as it has a weird Grimms Fairy Tale feel to it.  Reed is good, as always.  For anyone who thinks he may have been nothing but a fat, mad old drunk, I can only say that every film I’ve seen him in he gave a committed performance.

CURTAIN UP (1952)

Dir: Ralph Smart

Comic farce about the mishaps of a small town repertory company who have to put on an awful play written by the theatre owner’s dotty aunt (Margaret Rutherford).  The divine Miss Rutherford carries the entire film, and it’s easy to lose interest when she isn’t on the screen.  Robert Morley plays the over-the-top director of the masterpiece.  I normally love him in anything, but his character here is so hammy that he borders on insufferable.   It’s the kind of film which should appeal to anyone who has ever worked in showbusiness, or appeared in amateur dramatics, but is probably of less appeal otherwise.  The knowing theatrical in-jokes can be a bit grating.   Kay Kendall gives elegant support as the company’s leading lady.

CUTTHROAT ISLAND (1995)

Dir: Renny Harlin

It endlessly fascinates me as to why this mega-budget swashbuckler became such a notorious mega-flop.  The clue – for me anyway – might lie somewhere in the fact that I’ve never yet managed to watch it all the way through.  It certainly looks spectacular, and you can see where the budget went.  Doubtlessly if I was watching it on the big screen, I might well get caught up in all the rollicking adventure of it, but it’s plain to see the viewing public didn’t.  So I can only make random guesses as to Wot Went Wrong.  Well first off, there’s the CASTING.  The secondary roles are fine, with plenty of quirky characters, as you would expect in a pirate film.  The problem is the two leads.   Geena Davis tries her best as pirate queen, Morgan, but with her little brown eyes and rosy cheeks, she never manages to remotely convince us she’s tough and ruthless.   She looks more like she should be playing a small-town librarian in a feelgood romance.  And then there is Matthew Modine, who manages to achieve nothing above the level of Vaguely Annoying as her male co-star.   He has all the watchability and sex appeal of a damp lettuce (at one point Morgan says “he has It”, and I raised my eyebrows with incredulity).   There is absolutely no chemistry between them whatsoever.  Then there’s the RELENTLESS PACE, and I mean RELENTLESS.  The bloody thing never lets up for a minute.  It’s like watching a mega-budget Tom & Jerry cartoon.  Guns and canons are fired, swords are swished, everybody keeps constantly leaping out of buildings, Morgan swings on chandeliers, gets shot (but carries on fighting regardless), falls down through scaffolding, head-butts someone, lands on a convenient carriage etc etc.  Ye gods, the woman is invincible … so much so she has no credibility at all.  OK, I know this is a fantasy swashbuckler, we’re not meant to be talking cold hard reality here, but when you know she is going to survive absolutely everything that is thrown at her, and survive it with complete aplomb, you sort of cease caring what happens to her.  The film hauls us along like an unstoppable express train, music thundering at us at every turn.  Then there is THE PATHETIC ATTEMPTS AT HUMOUR.  Now we all love a bit of wisecracking, but this is all just plain irritating, and is often used to cover up (and we’re back to this one again) the complete lack of chemistry between the two leads.   At one point too it feels as though Woody Allen has taken over script-writing duty, with one character having some kind of existentialist meltdown (“I’m not meant to be here”), and this is utterly bizarre in a pirate movie.  Well I guess it proves ONCE AGAIN that mega-bucks don’t automatically make for a box office hit.