One day we’ll get a decent biopic about Anna Nicole-Smith. One that ranks up there with the pinaccle of TV-movie gold that is The Jayne Mansfield Story (or, given that Arnie plays her husband, should that be The Chain Mansfield Story?). The parallels between Mansfield and Nicole-Smith are manifest and I’m not a historian so I’ll leave that to some Media Studies student to deal with in an essay entitled something witty like “Pneumatic Thrills: The Dichotomy of Breast Enlargement in Post-Feminist Entertainment“. Or something.

There is a Nicole-Smith biopic, called simply Anna Nicole (or for the hard of thinking, The Anna Nicole Smith Story on DVD)  but it’s a half-hearted, quick cash-in released within months of her death in 2007. And it leaves out several vital events from her ‘story’ including her breakthrough with a series of H&M ads, her lesbian affairs and, most shocking of all, her film career.

Well, I say career. It was more of a period of community service, really. Except she didn’t have to wear a hi-vis vest with ‘Community Payback’ written on it. In fact, she wore very little at all.

She started off quite well with an inspired cameo as ‘Za-za’ in the Coen brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy, and then an extended cameo in Naked Gun 33 1/3.

From here someone had the bright idea that she should, and could, be a star. Why not? She had a massive fan base of teenage boys who were too young to buy Playboy Video Playmate Calendar 1993 or Playboy Video Playmate Review 1993, and with Pamela Anderson about to hit the big time with Barb Wire, it seemed the perfect time to launch Ms Nicole-Smith onto an unsuspecting Blockbuster Video audience.

She made two movies in quick succession in 1995, both directed by Raymond Martino who had graduated (or rather gone downhill) from the Lee Strasburg Acting School, to bit parts in Fall Guy, to straight to video trash starring John Travolta’s brother, Joey.

To the Limit was first, a mafia/revenge/buddy/reluctant allies/shagging thing that I have been unable to find yet.

But Skyscraper sounded much more promising. Nicole-Smith plays a helicopter pilot who finds herself stuck in a skyscraper taken over by hostages. Wow! What an original idea… Nicole-Smith playing a helicopter pilot. That’s the kind of ideas that get people to the top in Hollywood.

Nicole-Smith is Carrie Wisk (pfft) a helicopter pilot who ferries businessmen around the many skyscraper helipads of Los Angeles (though all the different ones she lands on were clearly all filmed at the same place) like a rich person’s taxi service. She’s married to a cop, Gordon (though always called ‘Gordo’ for some reason). Her first fare is dropped off, and he goes to dingy backstreet to exchange a briefcase for a large wad of cash from some bad guys. The bad guys decide they don’t want to pay and instead (in the only decent action scene in the movie) blow up lots of cars with a rocket launcher and shoot uzis indiscriminantly in the street in broad daylight.

Meanwhile Carrie whines on, in her underwear, about wanting a baby. She and Gordo fight and he goes to work. But wouldn’t you know it, he left his car at the station so asks Carrie for a lift. And she’s still angry with him, so we get a hilarious scene of her flying REALLY badly to get her own back.

Gordo and his partner, probably called Deadmeat or Target, catch more bad guys nicking a huge microchip from an electronics firm, which seems to run its R & D team from a used car forecourt prefab. Deadmeat gets blown up by that pesky rocket launcher and the bad guys get away.

Finally, about 20 minutes in, we meet the main bad guy. But it’s not immediately obvious. What is obvious is that he’s going to be very annoying. Not only is he called Fairfax (a villain name cliche that goes back to early days of US soaps) he likes to quote Shakespeare. No particular reason for this. It’s what’s known in screenwriting circles as ‘a lazy quirk’. Fairfax is played by a guy called Charles M Huber, a Senegalese-German who sounds like a French Matt Berry. He may also be one of the producers (Charles Huber) but even imdb is confused about this, since their entry for Huber without the ‘M’ tells us he died in 1960.

He’s Carrie’s next fare. She drops him off at a swanky hotel/resort, where he picks up another case and shoots another guy, again in broad daylight (luckily, no one is in the bar at the time, not even staff).

Next it’s off to the HQ of the electronics firm. Through clunky exposition we discover it’s saturday, so the building is almost deserted. There’s an annoying security guard who looks like Sweetchuck from the Police Academy films, a hard pressed career woman, who’s son is riding around the office on his trikey like Danny in The Shining and a few other bits of cannon fodder, one of which is set up to make us think he’s in with the bad guys, but isn’t. But then he does a deal with them and gets shot. So that was all a bit pointless.

Fairfax is here to get the final piece of his satellite-controlling-doomsday-scenario-meccano set, but wouldn’t you know it Carrie stumbles in looking for a phone (the bad guys disabled her radio on the chopper) and ends up with the case.

And, FINALLY, the Tesco Value Die Hard shifts into, well, not exactly top gear. More like second gear. Anything else would probably blow their budget.

Carrie does the firehouse escape from the roof, only using a winch from a window cleaner rig instead. She starts a fire to alert the fire brigade, but rather than blowing up the building, McClane-style, she just sets light to a waste paper basket.

There’s lots of cat-and-mouse running around. Lots of shooting. Lots of screaming. And Carrie shows off her never mentioned kung fu skills. Seriously, if your character is a helicopter pilot, you really should mention early on that she’s also an ace kung fu fighter rather than just have her start chopping guys throats out of nowhere.

There’s also lots of falling-from-buildings stunts, which all look reasonable good.

What’s no so good is the moment when they DO try to emulate Die Hard‘s exploding building money shot by superimposing what looks like a small electrical fire onto a shot of the building.

Having a tiny budget may excuse some things, like the fact Carrie’s helicopter and the later police helicopter are clearly the same helicopter, with ‘POLICE’ badly letraset on the side (at least two letters are wonky). It may excuse the fact that no-one in this film appears to have had any acting trainign of any kind (of which more to follow).

But it can’t excuse such gaping plot holes as the fact the building supposedly has an impenetrable computer lockdown, but three people manage to get in through a hatch on the roof with no problems. It doesn’t excuse the fact we’re told every employee’s ID card has a tracking device built in, so the bad guys can monitor everyone (and not monitor Carrie), yet when Gordo finally turns up, he appears on the tracker.

It also can’t excuse the fact that the film can’t decide how many “floors of terror” the building has exactly. We’re told at various points it has around 80. The building doesn’t look that big, and the computer tells us that the roof is floor 23!

How many floors of terror? Even the makers don’t know.

And it most definitely cannot excuse a scene which was thankfully missing from the version I saw. In the UK, this recently popped up on Movies4Men, a low rent movie channel where I catch a lot of the crap I talk about on here. Despite a late night showing it was missing two scenes. The first, a gratuitous shower scene for Nicole-Smith early on. The second however is even missing (for the most part) on the UK DVD version.

Carrie is captured and handed over to a bad guy to “have some fun with” whilst they look for the briefcase she has stashed. I think you can imagine what “have some fun with” means in the context of this sort of movie. What follows, from what I’ve read and screenshots I’ve seen (NSFW), is a rape scene that seems to be included just to show off Nicole-Smith’s naked body. I’m no prude, but I like to think that in more enlightened times (ie not the 1970s) where sticking a rape scene in a film for cheap thrills was now considered not a cool thing to do. But hey, that’s just me.

The version I watched cuts straight into her lying on the floor with her top off pointing a gun at the bad guy saying “You wanna fuck me? Fuck this!”, shooting him in the balls and he flies back out a window. Justice is served. Sadly not on the director though…

By now, I’m sure you’re dying to know how bad Nicole-Smith is. Well, surprise surprise she is dreadful. And I mean, with a capital D. I don’t think I have ever seen a worse performance in a movie.

Thankfully, the makers seemed to agree and try to keep her dialogue down to a bare minimum. This does lead to whole sections of the film not featuring her at all (I presume this is why the beginning is so protracted, and far too many incidental characters are introduced later on). there’s a wonderful clip on Youtube of outtakes from Skyscraper, where she is being fed lines, and just has to repeat them (I particularly like her “leading your hairspace”).

Skyscraper has nothing to recommend it, despite the best efforts of Total Film and Daily Star on the DVD cover above. It’s mainly very dull, and watching Nicole-Smith trying to deliver believable dialogue makes you nostalgic for early Arnie films. Which is where we came in.

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It was quite odd for me to not enjoy The Walking Dead earlier this year. I’d been led to believe this was a new pinnacle in televisual entertainment, and, as a zombie fan, it would be the ultimate gut-munching experience. Well, I found it to be glossy, watered-down, derivative and, dare I say, a tad boring. To me it seemed to be the zombie thing for people who don’t really like zombie things.

It also signalled the ultimate public acceptance of zombie stories into the mainstream. It’s been a long road, and people like to talk about why the turn of the millenium has seen a sudden surge of zombies into the popular consciousness. To which I say “Bugger off, I’m watching Zombie Flesh Eaters“.

The noughties is NOT the high watermark of zombie cinema. That’s like saying the rash of slasher remakes clogging up multiplexes the world over is signalling the high point of the genre. It’s just lazy Hollywood.

The true peak of zombie cinema was the turn of 70s into the 80s, starting with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. So popular was it in Italy, that they took the mantle upon themselves to batter audiences into submission with a succession of rip-offs of varying quality, but consistent gore quotients.

Nightmare City is a lesser example of spaghetti zombie-fests, but just as important, as, contrary to its US title, and to the best of my knowledge, it was the first zombie film to feature RUNNING zombies. No Haitian voodoo and shuffling worm eaters here. These radioactive rampagers could probably rundown Usain Bolt if his blood was tasty enough.

Not only that, but they still seem to have their brains intact too.  They can use weapons (or rather they utilise everything they can lay their hands on as a weapon) and even to have a plan of attack!

Nyom nyom

But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. First the plot. A radioactive leak has led to a plane load of ‘infected’ people running amok in an unamed city. That’s pretty much it.

Our focus initially is a TV reporter (Hugo Stiglitz) as attempts to rescue his doctor wife, after his attempts to broadcast the news of what’s happening our thwarted by The Man. Here the part of the once big star parachuted in to make the film sellable to the USA will be played by Mel Ferrer.

Along the way Mel’s daughter is given a sub-plot, as does another Army bloke who’s sculptress wife get’s her top off and mopes around the house.

It’s pretty episodic stuff, with no real narrative thread beyond Stiglitz rescuing his wife, then trying to escape the city, whilst Ferrer points a stick at a model of the city and initiates “…Plan H. We’ll keep Plan B in reserve”. Ferrer’s scenes were clearly filmed in about two days as, bar one scene, he’s never featured outside HQ.

 

“We’ll go with Plan H. Hitting them with a pointy stick.”

What it does have is an avalance of ridiculous set pieces, squirm-inducing dialogue and moments of bad movie gold.

After the zombies have seized the airport, they turn their attentions to a TV station. We are treated to an example of the station’s output, which, during the day at least, features a god-awful dance troupe in purple leotards. While it’s certainly more watchable than Loose Women, there’s no need to give us TWO extended views of it (totalling more than five minutes screen time). And handily the leotards have a habit of falling off and exposing the dancers chests as soon as the zombies attack. One poor woman runs direct into camera letting it all hang out before being grabbed and having a nipple sliced off. It’s nowhere near as nasty as it sounds, honest.

Loose Women.. Italian style

In fact, the women do come off very badly in this one. Whilst the men tend to get shot, or battered about the head, before the zombies feed on their necks like vampires, almost all the female victims have the indignity of having their tops pulled off, before being stabbed in the chest for a handy feeding hole (to be fair though, if they didn’t want their boobs exposed maybe they should wear bras. Not one woman in this film wears a bra). It’s worth mentioning here that director Umberto Lenzi is one of the less talented, but massively successful, Italian directors, who often created ultra-exploitative rip-offs of better films. the best known example is probably the abhorrent Cannibal Ferox, which he made next. This is far more fun.

Of course, this happens to be the TV station wear Stiglitz works, and he’s on hand to hurl an exploding TV at some zombies and make his escape.

The zombies continue on, taking over a power station, then the hospital where Stiglitz’ wife works. And so it continues…

It’s worth mentioning here, the wonder that is Stiglitz’ acting ability. This man makes Mark Wahlberg look like Jack Nicholson as far as emoting goes. he appears to have only one expression.

Here he is witnessing the zombie attack at the airport (note how his ‘top camerman’ isn’t filming this exciting breaking story)…

Or here, as the zombies attack the TV station he appears to ring for a pizza (or the military, I can’t remember which)…

Or here, where he’s very disappointed that the gas station they’ve found doesn’t stock Ginsters sausage rolls…

It’s an odd film in that it doesn’t seem to know which zombie mythology it’s following. Early on a scientist examines one they caught and explains about their regenerative qualities but also suggests the infection can be passed on. What’s odd is that we never see a dead body get up. Each set piece seems to feature different zombies, but still, you need to see the effect on their victims.

In the plus coloumn, it features a line which has permeated popular culture (at least if you like zombie films). This must be true as I used it for the title of a zombie essay at Uni, and I’d never even seen this film: “Aim for the brain!”. (Oddly, I have vivid memories of the video cover from when i was a nipper. The cover, in it’s skin ripping glory, made it look utterly horrendous. It’s a wonderful piece of trash artwork, which is why I chose to use it above, over its better known equivalents.)

It’s far from the best example of Italian splatter, but it’s certainly not the worst, though it probably has the worst ending to a zombie film I’ve ever seen. Seriously… the worst ending. EVER. In the right frame of mind, and a few shandies down, it can be entertaining. It’s certainly not dull, and you’re never more than ten minutes away from either some outrageous gore, or some ridiculous dialogue.

NB. If you’re wondering why the name Hugo Stiglitz sounds familiar, it’s because he was the name of one of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds

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One of the downsides to being a fan of bad movies is that sometimes a movie has such a dizzyingly, mythically bad  reputation that watching it can only lead to disappointment that it doesn’t match up to your expectations. In recent years I’ve been let down by Mommie Dearest, Exorcist 2 and even Showgirls. None of these films, in my mind, reach the fridge-stinking fromage odour generated by, say, Rentadick (a completely laugh-free ‘comedy’ written by John Cleese I recently watched the first 40 minutes of before the thought of slinging the TV out the window made me turn it off). I guess most people just prefer to watch Hollywood crash and burn.

I had this fear for a short time whilst watching Xanadu recently. I needn’t have worried. Everything you’ve heard about how bad Xanadu is is true. And then some.

Plot-wise it’s as flimsy as one of the dresses the dancers wear: Young guy meets old guy… they open a roller disco. That’s pretty much it. Whilst this opens up endless possibilities for comedy, bizarrely that’s one avenue the makers decide not to go down. Instead they chuck in a ‘muse’ storyline, where young guy is guided by said muse, who, it turns out, also helped the old guy out back in the 40’s.

What should have been a bog standard, fad-chasing low budget piece of exploitation somehow ended up as a mega-bucks Hollywood production starring the then hottest female actress/singer, probably the greatest Hollywood hoofer there ever was, a soundtrack by one of the biggest band of the day (if that day had been a few years earlier) and a guy with the looks and acting ability of Joe Dallesandro without the redeeming feature of a crotch you stick on a Rolling Stones cover.

In actuality Sonny is played by a plank of wood called Michael Beck who had made a bit of a splash as the lead in The Warriors.  Whilst in that film, a large ensemble cast seemed to paper over his acting deficiencies, here is is completely overshadowed by just about everyone, including a mural.

It all begins blandly, but not exactly appallingly, as we are introduced to Sonny, who recreates album covers for marketing materials. He had a dream to strike out as an artist but has gone crawling back to the day job with his tail between his legs. When we first meet him he is sketching a woman who looks suspiciously like Olivia Neutron-Bomb. Appalled by this he tears it up and chucks it out the window. The shredded paper appears to ‘awaken’ a mural of eight women. They dance about a bit in dresses designed to show off their pants as much as possible (including one who appears to be wearing a flesh coloured body stocking that gives her the appearance of the kind of anatomy you only see on Barbie dolls and Action Man) .

These ladies all shoot off into the stratosphere, except Ms Neutron-Bomb (Kira), who hangs about Venice Beach on her roller skates, ending up on an album cover that Sonny is replicating, and then leading him into an ‘hilarious’ chase sequence where he steals a bike and ends up crashing into the sea. This will not be the comedy highlight thankfully.

During this sequence we are also introduced to Danny McBride (Gene Kelly, exuding more effortless charm and charisma than the whole cast do in the entire film). he’s a self-confessed ‘beach bum’ who turns out to have been a Glen Miller-style big band leader in the ’40s. He’s got bags of cash he doesn’t know what to do with, so of course he decides he wants to open a club with this strange young man he just met on the beach.

They decide to site it in an abandoned wrestling auditorium (!) where Sonny had his first proper meeting with Kira. Although neither knows it (or at least it’s not clear in the film that they know) Kira was also Danny’s muse in his big band days…

It’s here that banality takes a rather special turn into downright crazy-apeshit bonkers, as we enter Truly Horrific Sequence #1: Danny and Sonny both have their own ideas about what the club should like. Danny wants an old-style jazz club; Sonny wants a truly bizarre … thing… that seems to combine the worst aspects of disco, punk, new wave and rejects from Kenny Everett’s Hot Gossip dance troupe. Here we get a startlingly bad ‘mash up’ of jazz and nasty synth pop (the band are played by California punks, The Tubes). What this sequence achieves in terms of how the club will look isn’t entirely clear, as the final result looks like neither. But we’ll come back to that.

Sadly, this won’t be the last time we see this lot

 Truly Horrific Sequence #2: and the point where I nearly turned off, just because I couldn’t believe what they were putting Gene Kelly through. He’s given a makeover. But this is no ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ kooky sequence. To the tune of ELO’s ‘All Over the World’ (though the choreography seems to have been blocked for a completely different tune, if any tune at all) Gene is subjected to some of the worst outfits seen in cinema history, has the indignity of emerging from a dressing room whose curtains are made to look like a pair of women’s legs, and those bloody dancers are back, prancing around on trolleys and shelving units, wearing Adam Ant cast-offs. For some reason a dancer is made up to look like a spider and emits a tiger roar.

Gene Kelly’s audition for Legs Akimbo did not go well

After this, you wonder just how bad things can get from here. Trust me, they save the best until last: Truly Horrific Sequence #3 is the club’s opening. I’m not going to describe it, because, quite frankly, I don’t think you’d believe me. All I’ll say is it features a 15 minute medley of song and dance; Kira changes outfits just by sheer will; Danny disappears and reappears; and Sonny continues to look confused and on the verge of tears.

This is the most acting that Michael Beck does

And then it ends. I swear the ending is one of the most arbitrary since Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It literally just ends.

It’s not hard to work out what’s wrong with Xanadu. For a start it’s a film about a roller disco that doesn’t feature a roller disco until the last 15 minutes. It’s a musical in which the lead actor doesn’t sing (his one number, a duet from Neutron-Bomb, is dubbed by (the horror!) Cliff Richard.

Stylistically it’s all over the shop: in trying to straddle itself between old-time musicals (of the kind Kelly helped create and dominate) and a trendy ‘new-wave’ look, it comes across just hideously contrived. It probably looked dated before it was even released.

From a technical point of view you have wonder what was going on behind the scenes too. You have probably the cinema’s most accomplished dancer, and yet his sequences are directed and edited in such a way that most of the time you can’t see his feet! (The duet with Kira early on demonstrates this best; it also looks like it was edited with a sledgehammer) How he manages to still put in a decent performance playing opposite the charisma vacuum that is Michael Beck, should have earned him an Oscar nomination at least.

Gene is doing some amazing tap-dancing here…
you just can’t see it

Oddly, Neutron-Bomb comes out of it pretty well. Her songs are bland without being unpleasant, she obviously has a good voice, and her slightly detached acting style actually helps the character.

The rest of the soundtrack is good too (the Cliff duet being the exception). The title song is rightly a camp classic now, and ELO fans are treated to some of their best work. Whether they all fit the film is a matter of conjecture. OK, they don’t. At all.

Depending on how you approach it, Xanadu is either a complete sensory ambush, or perfect post-pub entertainment. To modern, cynical eyes such as mine, it’s one of those films where you sit there slack-jawed going “what were they thinking?”. I haven’t even mentioned the ‘out of nowhere’ cartoon sequence, the scene where Kira pleads her ‘parents’ not to take her away from Sonny (a sequence which looks like an effects test for Tron), the fact that opening night of the club, the place seems to have more paid-for dancers than customer, and Kira’s astonishing exit which looks like she’s farted her way into the stratosphere.

Variety magazine famously labelled it ‘Xana-don’t’. That’s a bit harsh. It does need to be seen by everyone. Just once though. Not three times like I did to write this.

Fact: Xanadu was produced by Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon, who would latter make Die Hard

Fact: Xanadu was Gene Kelly’s last film, though most people have the decency not to mention that

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Luckily, it seems there’s more to American horror than just cheap and shoddy remakes. There’s still room in the market for cheap, shoddy sequels too.

 Cabin Fever 2 is a strange beast which appears to have been constructed as a completely unrelated film about a horrible disease, and which has had extra scenes added to turn it into a sequel to Eli Roth’s enjoyable original. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that no recap is provided at the start. This seems odd for a sequel made 7 years later, but which appears to take place the next day (there is a brief hyper-cut flashback later on, but it’s practically impossible to know what it shows unless you watched Cabin Fever within the last 24 hours).

 From what I could gather, the last survivor from Cabin Fever stumbles into a lake, infecting the water with the nasty disease from the first film. The contaminated water finds its way into the bottling plant of a local water company, and onto a high school prom. Gory hilarity ensues.

 At least that’s one plot strand.

 The other concerns a dopey sheriff/deputy/whatever, who was in Cabin Fever but I don’t remember him. investigating the death of the last survivor who stumbles in front of a school bus and recreates everyone’s favourite scene from Robocop (“Help me!”).  The bus is from the school where the prom is being held, but this fails to be relevant later on, as you would expect it to.

 The sheriff finds himself being tailed by mysterious men in hazmat suits, looking to put anyone who knows anything about what has happened with the contanimated water. They eventually find their way to the school, lock it down, and murder anyone who tries to escape.

 Inside the school, everyone is getting the nasties from contaminated punch (peed in by the janitor for some reason), but rather than developing the skin eating symptoms from the original, they now just seem to vomit blood everywhere before dying. A couple of kids succumb to extreme excema (including one horrible pus-related incident) but this doesn’t seem to be its main side effect. It appears the more prominent the character, the longer lasting the symptoms before you die.

 We’re treated to a horrendously twee love triangle, an annoying fat best mate, some sub-Porky’s sex, and (taking a cue from the first film) lots of lovely film references for no apparent reason. All the prom scenes copy, almost shot-for-shot, scenes from Carrie and there’s an Evil Dead-riffing hand/chainsaw interface. These add nothing except to remind you of better films and think “Ah, that’s so clever that you’ve taken the time and effort to copy a better film, but not bother to make your film any good”, while stroking your chin.

 The two plots barely cross each other, strengthening the belief of major post-production tinkering (which there was). And the mood is so totally different from Cabin Fever.

 Where Roth’s film was a sweaty, claustrophobic throw back to the days of Last House on the Left and Evil Dead, this feels more like the tail end slashers from the mid-80s which tried to blu-tak Porky’s style student hi-jinks, onto excessive gore and thrills, usually failing miserably. There’s even an animated credit sequence showing the journey of the contaminated water (accompanied by a rather good tune, I have to say).

 Apparently the writer-director tried (unsuccessfully) to get his name removed after the studio ripped it to shreds and took two years before releasing it. It’s hard to imagine how an untainted version would be any better. It’s not the worst film I’ll see this year, but it is certainly up there.

 But, at least it’s not a remake.

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This is quite possibly the most pointless review I will ever write. If you see the title Titanic II, you probably know within about 2 nanoseconds if you want to see it or not. Nothing I say is going to dissuade or persuade you the either way.

But, I feel compelled to share with you the sheer horror of how dreadful it is.

People often like to bore others on message boards discussing what the worst movie ever made is. The problem is that these people have rarely (if ever) seen genuinely BAD films. They may know dull films, stupid films, badly acted films… but that’s just 90% of big studio pictures.

If you want REALLY BAD films, you have to delve into the murkier depths of the Sky EPG, or those dusty forgotten shelves in Blockbuster. There lurk films like Solar Attack, Digital Man and Fearless Dragon (all currently showing on Movies4Men, channel 323). For the past decade or so, the runaway leader in the arena of the ‘mockbuster’ was Asylum films. Specialising in tricking the stupid into believing their movies are sequels to genuine blockbusters, they carved a highly lucrative niche producing the likes of Snakes on a Train and Transmorphers and so on (The Day the Earth Stopped is perhaps the finest example of their titling, even if the movie itself is awful).

Asylum found themselves briefly known to the public at large with the release last year of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, with its wonderful trailer and headline-grabbing casting of Debbie Gibson. It was pretty poor but you got the impression watching it that that wasn’t really the point. The point was, they could make a profitable film from that title. It’s the way Roger Corman used to work. He’d give young directors a title, a poster and a budget and tell them to go make a movie.

According to an article in the Guardian a few months ago, all Asylum pictures work to a Dogme style list of rules including a $1million budget and four week maximum shooting schedule. they use experienced TV directors, who are used to working to such constraints, and won’t go getting ideas about art. With that in mind, you have to admire the fact they can turn out four or five films a year and probably never lose a dime. Unfortunately, they have NEVER made a good movie, and Titanic II is quite possibly the worst film they have ever (and will ever) make.

Plot? Rich kid inherits daddy’s shipping line. Decides to build a replica of the Titanic, and re-create its famous voyage 100 years to that fateful day (so technically, this film is set in the future). They manage to rope in a Day After Tomorrow sub-plot about melting ice caps which leads to the inevitable deep sea clash later on. Dennis Quaid will here be played by Bruce Davison, who, last time I looked, was a proper actor. He was in the X Men films and everything.

The rest of the cast is filled with people who sort of look like a cross between two other people (but who have mainly just appeared in Asylum films).  The rich kid is Gary Busey/James Franco, the female lead is Jessica Alba/Rosario Dawson, while Bruce Davison’s colleague is Eva Longoria crossed with the Joker. The ship’s captain looks like Dante from Clerks, there’s the Ron Livingstone-alike helicopter pilot, and so on. Since none of them can act, presumably they were all cast because bored people with a low attention span in the video store on a saturday night will look at the box and go “oh, it’s her… from… that thing… that we watched”, “yeah, that’ll do”…

(Incidentally, Shane van Dyke (rich kid) also wrote and directed, so you can shout at him for being crap for three different reasons! Jackpot!)

So, Bruce Davison is a coastguard who’s jurisdiction seems to stretch from New York to the Arctic, and he’s around to witness first-hand the first of the appalling SFX this film will deliver, when a giant polar ice cap breaks in two. Well, we’re ‘told’ it’s giant. The problem is we never see it in relation to anything else, so it tends to look like a lump of hard icing sugar. The ice fragment is so ‘giant’, we are told, that it will cause (dun dun dun) a Mega Tsunami! I have to admit, I thought this utter bollocks, but it turns out to be completely true. Whereas normal tsunamis are caused by tectonic movements, megatsunamis (no space) are caused by impacts or landslides. That’s probably the only real science this film contains.

Back in New York, Titanic II (or the Queen Mary, as that’s the boat they used for exteriors, and they did NOTHING to hide that fact except compositing the words TITANIC II onto the hull) is ready to roll. Yes, the voyage recreation is true down to the last detail, except where the boat actually travelled from.  You’d think an occassion like this would draw a massive crowd. But it appears, it’s just drawn a crowd of about 15 people. The same 15 people obviously want to see every inch of the ship, as they can be seen waving at it at the front, back and in the middle. Some even manage to get onto the ship to wave at themselves back on the dock. Incidentally, these do not look like the type of people who would be able to afford such a trip. They look like they’ve dressed themselves for an afternoon shopping.

We’re introduced to two blondes. One is a bit dim, and reads a book called “The Original Titanic”. I swear to God.

The other one is, of course, Bruce Davison’s daughter, and, of course, ex-girlfriend of rich kid. (At this point it’s worth noting that I can’t even be bothered to look up the character’s names, since to assign these people the term ‘characters’ is an insult to the English language. Within about 3 seconds you’ve worked out how the rest of the film is going to play out, so I won’t bother going into it.

The film is absolute joy for blooper spotters. from the aforementioned people waving to themselves in the dock (with well chosen camera angles to disguise how few people they are actually are) to the joyous moment when someone is walking along a corrider, on a boat, in the middle of the Atlantic, and you can see the New York skyline through the window! Yes folks, the interior of the ship is, in fact, a hotel (as also demonstrated by the fire exit procedure sign next to the lifts). I’m also pretty sure that one character dies twice: once driving a lifeboat, and once, back on the ship, in an explosion.

There’s also the marvellous sight of ‘shaky-cam’ effects when the iceberg hits, but the expensive crockery on the dining room tables (all three of them) stays firmly still. I’ve not seen that kind of thing since the legendary earthquake episode of Santa Barbara. Added to that, some of the extras seem to have trouble swaying in time with everyone else, including one chap who sways the wrong way.

Perhaps my favourite scene, is when Blonde A (Davidson’s daughter) finds her friend injured in the medical room (it’s at this point you discover they are nurses, not the ship equivelent of trolley-dollies). Despite the fact the room is a bit of a mess, there are still clearly lots of lots of medical supplies she could be using to treat her friend’s wounds. When dopey boyfriend says he can’t find what she’s asked for (it’s there, donut, in the medical cupboard you’ve just ignored), she proceeds to use a credit card and (I think) sellotape. What good this would do, I’m not entirely sure, but it seems to do the trick.

I also liked the boat stopping on a sixpence while doing about 100 knots. They pull a handle, it stops.

Moments like this keep you watching, simply because of their jaw dropping awfulness. But that’s all there is. Your mind starts to wander to other things, like “do our heroes hide in a metal cupboard so they didn’t have to spend the money to actually flood the room they are in?”. The last twenty minutes or so, are brain numbingly dull, as they try to reach the ‘Diving Centre’ filled with scuba gear on the boat (I’m pretty sure that’s not one of the authentic details replicated from the original).

Kicking an Asylum movie is really a waste of time, but this is truly dreadful. A mix of Titanic, the Poseidon Adventure and Day After Tomorrow does sound like it could be entertaining, but not when your budget wouldn’t cover half an episode of Eastenders.

But, as I said, you’re either gonna see it or not. Nothing I say is gonna make any difference. Just bear in mind, it’s dreadful!. It’s NOT so-bad-it’s-good. It’s BAD!

Trailer  – seriously this is all you need to see

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Let’s face it, most of us at one time or another have wanted to smash Dennis Waterman’s face in. Whether it be not being as good as John Thaw in The Sweeney, not looking at all comfortable ‘having a ruck’ or ‘pulling the birds’ in Minder, or lisping his way through another tedious 55 minutes of New Tricks, Mr Waterman seems to project an air of ‘Please, smash my face in’ whatever he’s doing.

But you can vicariously live out the thrill of smashing in Dennis’ face without incurring any penalties from the police by simply watching Fright, a cracking, little-known Brit-thriller.

Fright falls into a strange little genre of still-mildly shocking Brit-thrillers from the early 70s which now are not only forgotten, but are hard to find and never turn up on TV (mainly because of network TV’s unwritten law that anything older than 10 years can only be shown in daytime. Except on Channel Five). This group also includes the likes of The Brute (soon to be reviewed exploitation study of domestic abuse) and the Joan Collins-starring Revenge (a strangely still prescient account of a community reacting to a child molester). Films such as these should not be forgotten by their homeland and need to be seen. Strange then that many are available elsewhere in the world.

But back to the matter in hand. Fright is probably the earliest film to depict the now standard (even cliched) babysitter in peril gambit. In this instance, Susan George is the unfortunate girl, babysitting a well-to-do couple’s child, whilst they celebrate an ‘anniversary’. Given the ominous glances exchanged by all and sundry, you begin to suspect that something is up, and sure enough things start to go bump, creak and smash in the night. Turns out the couple are celebrating the divorce of the lady (Honor Blackman) from her first husband who has been incarcerated in a loony bin, so she is now free to marry George Cole. Stop sniggering at the back.

Unfortunately on that very night, hubby #1 (Ian Bannen) has escaped his shackles and is returning home…

I know it all sounds very cliched, but as one of the first of its kind, Fright set the template for so many things that followed. There are fake scares with washing lines, creaking doors, trees banging on windows, the usual. But what raises Fright above the flotsam are the performances from the relatively small cast.

First up is Susan George, who in the early 70s made a very nice career being abused and having her clothes ripped off by vile men. Before Fright she’d been raped and stabbed by Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers) and had a schoolgirl affair with Charles Bronson (Twinky). This was to be followed by Die Screaming Marianne (guess the name of her character in that), getting raped twice in Straw Dogs, and the final indignity of appearing in an Italian Jaws-rip-off (Tintorera). The woman seems to have a serious psychological problem where she can only appear in films in which she must be firmly humiliated, preferably wearing very few clothes. I know actresses have a hard time of it compared to their male counterparts. Either that or her agent was a complete perv.

Here, she not only has to wear a dreadful purple mohair minidress, she has to fight off the advances of a cardigan-wearing Waterman, but she is then deflowered by the insane Bannen who is convinced she is his wife.

It’s this aspect that makes Fright such an interesting film. The second half of the film is almost entirely taken up with Bannen’s increasingly deranged belief that George is in fact Blackman. This is portrayed with great by director Peter Collinson (The Italian Job) and this section is easily the most unnervingin the whole film. Bannen is superb, only occassionaly slipping into full-blown mental mode, but it all seems perfectly natural.

The unhappy couple are superb too. This is easily Honor Blackman’s best performance in anything, and shows what a fine actress she could be given the right role, which sadly she rarely did. Cole too, at this point best known for his spiv character Flash Harry in the St Trinnian’s films, shows that given a good role (in this case, an emasculated husband-to-be) he could deliver a good dramatic performance. The one weakness is the supporting characters. During the unbelievably tense stand off between loony and victim, we constantly cut back and forth to Blackman and Cole’s friend, and Bannen’s doctor, trying to get the police to investigate his escape. The police seem less than excited at the prospect, and come across as foolish, not helped by the fact that one of them is Roger Lloyd-Pack (Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, showing a comic touch even then).

But it’s a minor quibble in a film that deserves wider acclaim and should be seen by anyone who loves a good, taut thriller.

Way Hey for Youtube! It’s on there…

If you just want to see Dennis waterman get his face smashed in… 7.00 mins onwards…

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NAKED SPACE VAMPIRES!!!!!

Need I say more?

Well, OK then. First a bit of history…

Cannon films, run by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (the “Go-Go Twins”) had by the early 80s found itself a niche in mid-range trash, normally starring Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris. They had also invested heavily by purchasing the ABC cinema chain, in a misguided attempt to circumvent traditional distribution. they would simply show their films in their cinemas.
By the mid-80s the Go-Go’s ego’s were far outweighing their talents, and despite owning the rights to several Marvel properties (including Spiderman), eventually adding Superman and He-Man to their slate, their big hope for 1985 was a huge, sprawling sci-fi epic, as the trailer proudl proclaimed “from the writer of Alien and the director of Poltergeist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacare!”.

What emerged was a $25 million dollar car crash of a movie, which is only epic in terms of budget and shoddiness.

Let’s not forget $25 million in 1985 was a LOT of money. (In comparison, the year’s biggest hit, Back to the Future, cost a relatively respesctable $18 million, and that had to deal with special effects and, notoriously expensive, period trappings. Also, the greatest film of 1985, if not the whole decade, Fletch, cost about half of Lifeforce‘s budget.) $25 million for a BRITISH film was even more unbelievable. That kind of budget was reserved for box office certainties, usually directed by Dickie Attenborough. Even today, you could count on one hand the number of Brit movies in the past five years that have come close to costing that much.

The Go-Go’s had secured Tobe Hooper (the aforementioned director) to a three-film deal. This would result in two personal projects (a dreadful remake of Invaders From Mars, and an entertaining, but flawed, sequel to TCM), but would start with Lifeforce. Hooper was a fan of the novel on which the film was loosely based (Space Vampires by Colin Wilson), and wanted to keep the title. But the Go-Go’s envisioned this movie about ‘naked space vampires’ as being something special. Therefore having a film about ‘naked space vampires’ being called ‘Space vampires’ would give off completely the wrong message (they seemed to have no problem with the posters though, which depicted… oh, a naked space vampire.)

The Quatermass-riffing plot involves a joint US-GB space mission, in the shuttle Churchill, to investigate (the then topic du jour) Halley’s Comet. There they find an enormous space ship hiding in the comet’s tail. Inside they find several dessicated corpses huge of bat-like creatures, and three naked bodies (2 male, 1 female) encased in clear boxes. They decide, obviously, to take them back to their shuttle.

Fast forward three months, the shuttle returns having had a fire on board. the crew are all dead, but the clear boxes, and their naked inhabitants, have remained intact. They are taken to London.

Turns out these guys and gal are space vampires who need to ‘feed’ every two hours to survive. This they do by sucking the ‘lifeforce’ from another human. This is rendered surprisingly well, with some excellent animatronics standing in for the lifeforce-less victims.

After the first attack, SAS expert Colonel Caine (an absolutely dreadful Peter Firth) joins up with Dr Fallada (an embarassed-looking Frank Finlay) to try and figure things out. At this point the shuttle’s escape pod is discovered with the only survivor from the Churchill: hooray, it’s confused prank monkey Steve Railsback! (see review of Turkey Shoot for more on this titan of bad movies).
Colonel Carlsen (Railsback), is flown over from the States to mission control in London where things have gone a bit tits thanks to those pesky space vampires, in the space of what seems about three hours.

Things now take a very odd turn, and to try and explain everything that happens for the rest of the film would be both pointless and utterly confusing. But I’ll try.

The space vampires can jump bodies; the lady space vampire takes any opportunity to show her norks, whilst her male counterparts often find objects nestling, Austin-Powers-style just in front of their meat and two veg; Carlsen develops a telepathic link with lady vampire.

About an hour in, Carlsen, Caine and ‘the minister’ (perfectly played by Aubrey Morris) find themselves at an asylum run by a clearly demented Patrick Stewart, whilst tracking down the now body-swapping lady vampire. This sequence takes up about half an hour of screen time, but does set up the marvellously convoluted set up for the final act: London In Ruins!

Yes, our heroes return to town to find a badly rendered miniature London burning to the ground while vampires (who now seem to resemble zombies) run riot. Of particular interest to me was the wonderful reproduction of Chancery lane tube station: exact in every detail you could believe it was a real tube station. Unfortunately not Chancery lane, to which it bears no resemblance whatsoever.

The final twenty minutes is an absolute mess of incident, nothing makes any sense, but there’s some good gore, and what a surprise, that sword that Dr Fallada took delivery of earlier may just come in handy.

Sadly, Lifeforce has been all-but-forgotten in the annals of history. Which is a shame because I believe it was a genuine attempt to make a spectacular, Hollywood-style movie in Britain. I admire its balls, even if it’s sadly a bit of a mess. An entertaining mess, but a mess nontheless. Railsback and Firth are utterly dreadful. Peter Firth, particularly given his wonderful performance as MI5 boss Harry Pearce in Spooks, seems to think he’s in a silent movie: every action is exaggerated beyond belief, he reminded me of Eddie Izzard’s silent movie star in Shadow of the Vampire. The rest of cast is filled with reliable Brit stalwarts like Finlay, pre-Picard Stewart, Nicholas Ball and the excellent Michael Gothard, who disappears halfway through the film for some reason.

One high point is the fantastic score by, of all people, Henry Mancini. But this is no cool, jazz soundtack, this a bombastic symphony of thundering action themes. The main theme is amongst the best of John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. Lifeforce was heavily cut for it’s US release (losing about 20 minutes), and sadly this theme, as well as some music within the film, was replaced by Alien-a-like music by Michael Kamen. It’s fine, but also seems to be an attempt to ‘class up’ the movie (as with replacing the opening narration with a text crawl).

This film does need reappraisal. It’s no classic in the traditional sense, but it is a classic of British Exploitation, a genre that lies dying and unloved in our post-post-post modern society. I bet Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) loves it.

Trailer!

(Note: while the DVD is easily available at a budget price (expect to pay no more than a few quid)  some wonderful chap has put the whole bally thing up on Youtube…so try before you buy. But do buy.

Choice Peter Firth acting moments can be found here particularly 3 mins in)

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‘Freedom is obedience, obedience is work, work is life’

 Ozploitation is big business at the moment. Since the release last year of the excellent documentary Not Quite Hollywood, everyone and their dog has been jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that Brian Trenchard-Smith is an unacknowledged genius and Tony Ginnane movies piss all over Jerry Bruckheimer’s.

Of course this is nonsense. Whilst Aussie films of the 70s and early 80s did chuck up a few gems (Patrick, Road Games, the Mad Max series) they also made just as much useless tat as Hollywood did, and were as keen to exploit hollywood product as much as any other third world country (in cinematic terms, that is).

With this in mind, I finally decided to check out Turkey Shoot, a film which had sat unwatched on my shelves for almost two years.

It’s far from original, has some dreadful acting, a terrible script, and a budget that would barely cover a couple of episodes of Neighbours. And yet, bugger me, if it’s not one of the most balls-out entertaining exploiters I’d seen in a long long time.

In a dystopian near-future (aren’t they always), a totalitarian rule is enforced, and disidents and trouble-makers are rounded up and taken to ‘training camps’, where under a scrict regime of monotonous tasks and regular beatings, they are re-trained to be allowed back into normal society.

We open with three new residents on their way to Camp 47, the most notorious of the lot. Run by governor Charles Thatcher (sounds like Charles Gray, looks like Alistair Darling’s dad), and his vicious head guard Ritter. Our three new guys are seasoned camp escapee, Anders (Steve Railsback), gorgeous wrong woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, Chris (Olivia Hussey), and another woman who has been accussed of being a prostitute, Rita (Aussie TV regular Lynda Stoner).

The opening act introduces the day to day of the camp, including a couple of other characters including the cowardly Dodge, and Andy, both of whom are dragged into the governor’s evil plans.

What the residents of Camp 47 don’t know, is that Thatcher likes to have his rich friends over for a bit of sport. Each friend gets to pick a prisoner, who is then given their freedom, if they can avoid being hunted by their chosen big-knob for 24 hours. Such is the fate that befalls our heroes, each is hunted by either the odious Secretary Mallory (some kind of politician), lesbian femme fatale, Jennifer, “camp Freddie” look-a-like Griff (and his strange circus freak, dog-boy Alph(!), the film’s one big bad idea), and Thatcher himself, who has his sights trained firmly on Andy and Anders (not as confusing as it sounds).

If this all sounds familiar, well that’s because it blatantly is. Whilst the kids on imdb discuss which bits were ripped off for The Running Man (and undoubtedly some were) the rest of us will of course recognise it as the basic plot of The Most Dangerous Game, a story that has been filmed, officially and unofficially, so many times it’s orgins are almost forgotten.

Whilst the story may be as original as a baked bean, it’s execution (pun intended) is surprisingly good.

The pacing of the opening exchanges is superbly handled, taking in an introduction to the camp, the main characters, and the governor’s plot within about 20 minutes. Ritter (played by Roger Ward, should be familiar to fans of Mad Max) clearly establishes himself as the character you’re going to remember the most, and is, of course, not given nearly enough screentime.

Railsback and Hussey were, in 1982, very established names, but neither really excels here. Railsback falls into that category of actor where you just can’t help thinking “who the hell must have turned this down for HIM to get the part?”. After making his name as Peter o Toole’s confused prank monkey in The Stunt Man, he seemed to sleepwalk his way through the 80s and 90s, nearly always playing the confused prank monkey in films such as the underated Lifeforce, Alligator 2 and , god help us, Barb Wire. Hussey always seemed ready to break out into superstardom after her appearance in Jesus of Nazareth, but never did. Instead she ended up in TV movie/animation voice-over hell. Here she is given NOTHING to do, except cower and whimper lots. She does get her top undone a couple of times by the lecherous prison guards, but her big topless scene is rendered laughable by the substitution of a pair of stunt breasts which are hilariously over-sized in comparison to Ms Hussey’s own.

This scene in fact raises the question of taste. Ozploitation films were never known for their taste, and many feel Turkey Shoot is no exception. I disagree. In scenes like the one above, many American or Euro sleaze films would have gone on for a full clothes-ripping, full frontal rape scene for no good reason other than the director/producer wanted one. In Turkey Shoot, the scene takes place in a shower, where we have already scene copious nudity, both male and female, and the attack is over almost as quickly as it starts, with the potential rapist coming out second best.

In the violence stakes too, the film manages to stay just the right side of the taste barrier. Most of the deaths are messy, and in-your-face, but, possibly given the slightly amateurish effects work, they somehow retain a charm that is never repulsive, and mostly raise a giggle. There is one exception, but thankfully the fate of one protaganist is kept off-screen, with the viewer merely left to view the build up and aftermath, and are left to wonder what happened in between.

The hunt itself takes up the majority of the film, and is surprisingly tense. Each prisoner is released at half hour intervals, allowing each to have their own mini-adventure in a suitably lovely looking location, each offering its own dangers. Railsback gets to clamber over some very dangerous looking wet rocks, whilst Hussey has to deal with a burning cornfield.

After a couple of deaths for either side, the scene is a set for an explosive finale, with the air force called in to firebomb the camp when it becomes apparent that Thatcher has lost control. Here, we get some nicely intergrated stock footage and some nice explosions.

There has been much discussion of the various versions of the film, with some said to be cut by anything up to fifteen minutes. The uncut version under review runs a tad over 90 minutes, and is a breezy ride. It motors along without pause for breath, and whilst the sleazehounds may be a little disappointed, anyone out for a fun action movie and some good gore could do far worse than this, mainly because it’s simply the sort of thing that just doesn’t get made anymore.

There are 3 clips on this page

Trailer

(Director Brian Trenchard-Smith briefly achieved fame by following Turkey Shoot with BMX Bandits, which introduced the world to a bright young actress called Nicole Kidman.

The DVD under review is the UK edition on the Hardgore label. If you shop around you should be able to get it pretty cheap; I got mine in my local Poundland. The cover prominently features the dog-boy Alph for some reason. The picture quality is excellent, but the sound is tinny and crackly.

Although the film never states it, the trailer says the film is set in 1995, so why the American title was Escape 2000 is a bit of a mystery.)

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 With Hollywood seemingly on a mission to remake every single film of the past 30 years, it’s nice to remember those more innocent times when smaller nations would shamelessly just rip-off the latest big budget blockbuster with little or no concern for international copyright law.

Whilst the Turkish variants of Star Wars and Superman are now the stuff of post-modern, kitsch legend, the kings of the rip-off were undoubtedly the Italians. usually they would just make a cheap knock off of a hit and stick a ‘2’ on to it’s title, until the lawyers came-a-knocking and they’d have to come up with something a bit more original (Alien 2 aka Contamination, Terminator II), or simply churn out their own variants of popular genres, such as the Dirty Harry riffing Mark the Cop series. Even the spaghetti zombie craze of the late 70s/early 80s was a response to the success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (titled Zombi in Italy, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters, was known as Zombi 2 in its homeland… try and keep up).

“Alright, smart arse, what’s that got to do with Holocaust 2000?”, I hear you murmer. Well, perhaps the king of Italian rip-offs is one Alberto De Martino, the man behind Operation Kid Brother (aka OK Connery), Blazing Magnums and The Antichrist. It shouldn’t take long to work out the uncredited ‘inspiration’ behind those films. For it is he who also directed the film under consideration.

Consider the following: American industrialist, played by Hollywood has-been, lives in London; he has a rather odd son; he receives ominous, religious-flavoured warnings about the end of the world; several British character actors die in ridiculously contrived accidents… any of this sound familiar?

OK, one more clue: his son is in fact the son of Ol’ Nick himself!

Yes, it’s Omen 2! Except they couldn’t call it that because 20th Century Fox were already making that, so instead we get the Tesco Value Omen 2, Holocaust 2000.

Kirk Douglas plays Gregory Peck, an American in London, who has married into a rich family business. We’re not quite sure exactly what they do, but currently they are planning a large nuclear energy making machine in an unspecified Middle eastern country, that looks like Tunisia (very popular location at the time), but isn’t.

Just before destroying large swathes of the landscape, Kirk shows a sexy photographer an inscription, “IESUS”, in a cave, that has been there for over 10,000 years. Then blows it up. There’s the suggestion that this is all very ominous, thanks to one of the more barmy Ennio Morriconne soundtracks (much of which sounds like it was rejected from Exorcist 2 for being slightly OTT) , but this pre-credits sequence chucks so much at you in five minutes, that you’re not sure what’s important and what’s not. It is vital to remember how Kirks sexy new reactor will work to create the heat only found at the centre of the sun: “combining atoms and laser beams”. So that’s how it’s done.

Back in London, Kirk holds a banquet for his investors, whilst some anti-nuke interpretive dancers protest outside. Mrs Kirk decides she doesn’t like his project anymore (maybe it’s a bit late for that), and as, technically, it’s her company, there’s nothing he can do about it. Luckily for Kirk one of the protesters (bearing a spooky resemblance to General Zod from Superman 2) has crashed the party simply by putting on a tux and lighting a cigarette. He mumbles something about Kirk being evil and tries to stab him. Kirk’s grown-up creepy son (Angel, groovy name… or is it?) intervenes, only for Mrs Kirk to receive a gloriously gory shivving instead. So Kirk’s back in business.

This pretty much sets the tone for the first half of the film.  An obstacle is put in Kirk’s way, the obstacle is overcome by the intervention of a gory special effect. The best example probably bestowed on the military dictator who takes control of Madeupistan and decides to oppose the building of a giant bomb machine on his doorstep. He falls victim to one of the squishiest beheadings in film history (incidentally, this is far better than the much-loved version in Dawn of the Dead released the following year).

Within about two minutes of Kirk’s wife’s passing, he shacks up with the saucy photographer from earlier. Creepy son seems to positively encourage this. There is a truly jaw-dropping sequence where the two go to Kirk’s country retreat for a weekend of rumpy, which is preceded by a five minute sequence of them cooing over a deer. It’s like a catalogue photospread in movie form, made all the more insane by Morriconne’s music, which sounds like a rejected Emmerdale Farm theme.

Kirk says what we’re all thinking

Now things start to get a bit bonkers. There’s really far too much to go into everything, so here’s the edited highlights… A supercomputer testing the failsafe systems keeps churning out the number 2√231 (IESUS backwards in this film’s logic). The design of the reactor bears a ‘strong’ resemblance to the description of the beastie that will destroy the world in the Bible. Anyone who opposes the project meets a swift end (including one that was, believe it or not, ripped off itself in Omen 2). Kirk has a nightmare that spells out all the plot points in BIG BOLD LETTERS in case we haven’t got it yet… and gets his arse out. Yes, Kirk Douglas’ arse. It’s certainly the scariest thing in this film.

Through some exposition that I wasn’t really paying attention to, it transpires that Kirk’s second son is the son of the devil. As his new girlfriend is up the duff, this comes as a bit of a shock, and he spends the next 20 minutes of the film trying to trick her into an abortion. Then he remembers that earlier in the film he’d told his girlfriend that Angel had been born a twin, but his umbilical cord had strangled the other twin and it died at birth, so… DUN DUN DUUUR! Do I need to spell the rest out?

The final, delirious half an hour includes Kirk bashing his wife’s murderer’s head in with a wooden pole, a ward of babies being poisioned by a miopic nurse who keeps vitamin drops and bleach in identical bottles, and one of the most anti-climactic non-endings I’ve ever seen.

(NB: It’s here I should point out the various versions of the film. Apparently in Europe, the film has an open-ended climax where you don’t know what is going to happen re good vs evil. In the States an additional ending was filmed and clumsily tacked on to ensure you know who wins. Details of this ending can be found the imdb message board for the film. Incidentally, many reviews mention Kirk stomping the murderers’ head, but in the version I saw, entitled Rain of Fire, he definitely smashes it with a pole.)

And I still haven’t mentioned the Kubrick-a-like mental institution, where the inmates are bunched together in perspex boxes, the oh-so-subtle religious symbolism, or the terrible sight of actors like Anthony Quayle having to do this kind of nonsense to pay the rent.

What’s perhaps most suprising, apart from Kirk’s arse, is the fact that this was co-financed by a British film company. At the arse-end (pardon the pun) of the 70s there was very little British film industry to speak of, so you can’t help but wonder if they had the kind of money to spend on toss like this, what films they could have been making.

Toss it may be, but it’s entertaining toss if you are so inclined. Kirk gives a very enthusiastic performance, and doesn’t look anywhere near as embarassed as he could be. The set pieces are handled well and it’s rarely dull. It is appallingly written though. Scenes begin and end at arbitrary moments, there are plot holes so big you expect the film to be sucked inside out, and ultimately it makes little sense. Purveyors of bad movies will lap up every bonkers second of it.

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If you find yourself watching a high school comedy (it could happen) and you can’t decide if what you’re watching is a medium-budget piece of Hollywood fluff, or a zero-budget, heartfelt indie film, there are some simples tests you can apply.

(a) Is your main character a tall, attractive blonde, from a rich family, who’s a bit of a bitch, but will learn the error of her ways by the end of the film, and probably end up with the sensitive bloke rather than the wanky jock-type ‘stud’ she wanted?

(b) Or is she a, short, akward brunette, considered a bit odd by her peers, has a very small circle of friends, comes from a poor (probably broken) home and rejects all potential suitors until she realises that she fancies a boy who she’s probably been friends with since she was in nappies?

Or how about:

(a) Is the soundtrack filled with pop songs by the hottest acts and dance track remixes?

(b) Is the soundtrack filled with IMPOSSIBLY hip stuff by singer-songwriters, and ‘alternative’ acts, many of whom you’ve never heard of?

Or:

(a) Do the characters talk in exaggerated ‘teen’ talk, endlessly discussing going to the mall, cars, dad’s credit card?

(b) Do the characters talk in quirky slang, endlessly discussing cool bands and obscure films?

If you answered mostly (a), surprise surprise, you’re watching a probably guiltily entertaining piece of Hollywood pap like Clueless, or Mean Girls, chuckling away and probably hating yourself when its finished.

If you answered mostly (b) you’ve just wasted your time on another breakout indie hit, that critics have wet themselves to praise as ‘the future for filmmaking’, but you’ve considered a very dull, worthy comedy-drama, which forgot to include much in the way of laughs.

That, or Juno.

I really wanted to like Juno. At the time of its release I felt sorry for it, because its cinmea release in the UK coincided within weeks of the release of the bigger budgeted, high-profile, Knocked Up. Juno‘s later Oscar success meant it found its audience on DVD. Having seen both films now, I can only say my sympathy for Juno was misplaced.

It’s quite easy to say what’s wrong with Juno. It has nothing to do the cast, who are, to a man, brilliant. Ellen Paige is shaping up to be a star for years to come, and Michael Cera is a very gifted comic actor, despite (or maybe because of) his far-from-matinee idol looks. The support cast includes the wonderful JK Simmons, the astonishing Jason Bateman (watch Teen Wolf Too and tell me that’s the same actor) and even Jennifer Garner.

It’s not really the direction either. Jason ‘my dad made Ghostbusters‘ Reitman does a fine job.

What let’s it down, is ironically what won the film it’s Oscar. The script by Diablo Cody is diabolical.

Now, Ms Cody became the subject of much press attention when it emerged that this neophyte scritpwriter used to be a stripper. Whoop-de-fucking-do. I hope she was better at that than writing. Everything about Juno strikes of indie-by-the-numbers. Every scene has at least two crowbarred ‘quirky’ one-liners inserted into it; every character is a wise cracker, whether it suits them or not; everyone is cool in their own way; and absolutely NOTHING is believable in anyway. And that includes Ms Cody’s name. Becuase it’s not. Christ, she’s even created a quirky alter-ego for herself.

If you don’t know, Juno is a 16 year old who gets pregnant after her only sexual experience with her male friend, Bleeker, a geeky runner with an obsession with orange TicTacs (!). Her only other friend appears to be a cheerleader, Leah, who fancies the fat, bearded geography teacher (ker-azy!). She has absolutely so bearing on the plot at all, and merely pops up supportively at opportune moments, normally just as you’re forgetting that she’s in the film. So we’ve got a ‘deep’, emo girl who’s only two friends are a cheerleader and a geek jock… Mmmm… interesting mix. I’ve spent a day in an American high school, and believe me, Heathers is the most realistic portrayal of high school cliques I’ve ever seen. This is fantasy stuff.

Juno does make it to the abortion clinic, but after an encounter with a a girl from her school who is protesting and claims foetuses have fingernails, Juno then has a change of heart because the waiting room is bit noisy, what with everyone having amplified fingers and pens. So she decides to keep it, and give it up to a pair of Stepford Yuppies who can’t conceive, Mark and Vanessa (played by Bateman and Garner).

What so far, has been infuriating cutesy and kooky, but still watchable, now descends into another deminsion of awfulness completely. Juno and Mark become close, as they both play guitar (and seemingly nothing else). They have kooky conversations about music, but their tastes seem to be reversed, with Juno preferring 70s punk, and Mark liking late 80’s garage and grunge. They argue about the merits of Sonic Youth (Juno thinks they’re weird, but likes The Stooges!), and he introduces her to the joys of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, which she proclaim are cooler than Suspiria (released in 1977, the same year as punk’s peak… mmm, I’m noticing something here. This is what passes as character development.

On the subject of music, the whole thing has one of the most grating soundtracks I’ve ever heard. The whole thing is filled with simpering, ‘cool’, guitar balladry of the alternative variety. It’s so self-conscious everytime I song started I expected Juno to face the camera and go “hey, cool tune… what do you mean you don’t know who Belle and Sebastian are? I can’t believe you don’t know them!” Well, I do, and they’re a good band, but two songs almost back-to-back, I could do without in a  film. Loved the Cat Power version of Sea of Love though.

But, as I said earlier the whole thing is soooooooo cool, it alienates you from the story. Hey, maybe that was the point. It’s just so by-the-numbers, there really isn’t an original idea in the whole 90 minutes (and it felt longer than that: I had three cigarette breaks; I can normally manage without if the film’s any good). Everything in it reminded me of things like Garden State, which, of course, just made it seem even worse, because anything that reminds me of that joyless two hours of my life should be taken out and shot. Fuck The Shins!

When all’s said and done though, Juno still retains a smidgen of sympathy from me because it was 2008’s independant toe in the water. Every year has one. The year before it was Little Miss Sunshine. You know, the quirky, wacky film that every critic falls in love with, and manages to persuade the public this is the kind of film they should watch all the time. Then the public forgets that it really likes films without the marketing budget equal to the GNP of some European countries and goes back to watching Epic Movie. And yes, there is no link to that.

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