Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This extremely violent gangster movie may be a classic, but I'm afraid it hasn't aged quite as well as some classics. It's not exactly dull; given the number of people who shoot each other at regular intervals, it hardly could be! But there are two major problems with it, which are not entirely unconnected.

Firstly, Paul Muni's performance as the title character, who for legal reasons isn't actually called Al Capone but it's not very hard to guess who he's based on, is downright odd. He's not a bad actor, and I'm sure he's only doing what Howard Hawks told him to, but he's subtle the way Vin Diesel is shy and retiring! The "Godfather" trilogy is acclaimed as two of the best films ever made (shame about part 3) because of its Shakespearean portrayal of a good man being inexorably corrupted for reasons that to begin with aren't his fault at all. But there's nothing even slightly tragic about the downfall of Antony Carmonte (Al Capone - same initials! - see?). I'm not even sure "downfall" is the right word for someone who never rises above the gutter, and Muni plays AC as practically subhuman.

He's basically a wildly exaggerated caricature of a horrible twenties gangster who almost seems comic at times. He's at his best when he gets to be genuinely menacing in a serious context, and at his worst when he has to portray Al Capone as a bragging, ignorant, moronic clown with no taste who would be a joke if he didn't kill people. They're so determined to deprive him of any redeeming features whatsoever that they come as close as they possibly can to implying that he's capable of raping his sister (this film also comes closer than any other movie from that era I've seen to having someone say the f-word - surprisingly, not Muni). Which ties in with its other huge flaw. It's preachy, and that's never, ever good. Crime doesn't pay, therefore everybody who commits it is irredeemably vile and gets their just desserts (though the cops seem scarcely more likable). And although the opening credits inform us that every event portrayed in the film is true, Al Capone was still up and running when it was made, so everything that happens to Antony Carmonte at the end is wishful thinking. Both endings, in fact - there's a really grim alternative one available on this disc as an extra.

It's lively, it's ferocious, it's got some first-class floozies, but in the end it's too one-note to make it as a true classic. And what's with the running gag about the mentally retarded gangster who is literally too stupid to answer the phone? By the way, look out for Boris Karloff as a character who is Bugs Moran in all but name; he's almost very good apart, apart from his obvious struggle not to sound English.

You know you're probably not going to get too many high-budget thrills when a fifties B-movie pinches the pennies till they scream by scraping so close to the 60-minute mark it needs to reach to technically be a cinematic feature that in the slightly faster DVD format it's not even quite an hour long. This sorry effort doesn't disappoint in that respect.

Naturally, it disappoints in every other possible way. A very young Jack Nicholson looks good in comparison to everyone else because he's actually giving a performance. Otherwise, he's little more than an absolute beginner coping adequately with a dreadful script. And when I find myself thinking, during a scene when the leading lady, who is also allegedly the most sympathetic character, is in danger, something along the lines of: "that girl really ought to change her hairstyle, and she's not that pretty, and when's this 'wild ride' we've been promised gonna start 'cos we're running outta movie here! - oh yeah, PS, I wonder whether or not she'll be raped in a minute?", there is clearly something amiss with the acting, the direction, the script, and possibly the Universe!

Nicholson has the unenviable task of speaking every single one of his lines in hideous pre-hippie beatnik slang because that's how the probably not very young and deeply uncool scriptwriter assumed cool kids spoke, in the same way that if this movie was remade today, the youngsters would all say "awesome" with such monotonous regularity that they sounded like donkeys. Well, he tries... All the major characters are supposed to be about 18, but apparently the average mental age of the men is more like 12, because they're so confused about girls that they come across as desperately trying not to admit they're gay, an almost certainly unintentional aspect of the movie which to modern eyes is far more entertaining than anything that's actually meant to be there.

As for the rest? Kids bicker on the beach, dance listlessly to dreary xylophone jazz, impress each other by driving in suicidally stupid ways which the budget strains to show us for even a few seconds, and argue like people in a botched lobotomy support group about the merits of true love versus deliberately trying to have near-fatal road accidents. There's a hot-rod derby which looks as though it must have consumed at least half the budget, but even so, nothing much really happens. And the inevitable car crash at the end is, I think, the lowest-budget vehicular mishap ever filmed! Even Edward D. Wood Jr. would have at least thrown in some non-matching stock-footage to make it look as though a car had actually crashed!

By the way, in terms of picture quality and sound, this DVD is very much of the "nobody gives a hoot about this worthless old waste of celluloid except the Jack Nicholson Fan Club, therefore production standards are irrelevant so we might as well save some money here" variety. Ah well, at least it was short.

Westerns tend to sun-baked and tense, with confrontations escalating into brief moments of violent action. This one's snowbound, and although it's certainly tense, it's rather slow and oddly lacking in gunplay. Robert Ryan's borderline antihero, a man almost as cold as the landscape he inhabits, begins the film planning to do something extremely unheroic for a very bad reason, but is sidetracked by the arrival of seven brutal thugs on the run after a robbery.

Unfortunately, the pace then becomes a little too stately. Burl Ives, oddly cast but quite effective, is the half-decent leader of the outlaws, and the only thing keeping them in check, but he's got a bullet in him and he's not at all well, so he moves around slowly if at all, and spends a lot of time in bed. His fluctuating health is one of the ticking clocks that ratchet up the tension: will he recover and lead his men out of town, or will he die, leaving them free to rape and kill? The other is the cavalry troop pursuing the robbers, but they're two days behind, so not exactly an imminent threat. "High Noon" gives us an actual ticking clock, so we can see the hero's destiny getting ever closer. Here, it's all a bit vague and meandering. The cavalry will eventually show up, and hopefully the weather will improve before they do and Burl Ives won't drop dead, all of which will probably happen, or not, within approximately 48 hours. It's not really very thrilling.

The hero's problem is how to persuade these men, almost all of whom have few if any redeeming features, to ride a long way out of town through deep snow (slowly) before bullets start flying and everybody dies. Burl Ives is interesting as a once-good man who made one terrible decision, lost everything, and gave up, yet obviously longs for some kind of redemption. Some of his gang are nearly horrible enough to be in a spaghetti western, but the worst of them keep threatening to do dreadful things without usually getting around to doing them. And one crucial scene takes place practically in slow motion because everybody's chilled to the bone. As a character study of people who are nearly all seriously flawed it's not at all bad, but it really could do with just a little bit more action: the fastest-moving and most action-packed scene consists of women being forced to dance energetically with men they detest for quite a long time. And as heroes go, Robert Ryan's grim-faced and rather miserable tough guy is very hard to like.

Considering this is supposed to one of the classic giallos, I was somewhat underwhelmed by it. The story is rather basic: pretty girls strut around in revealing clothes, they misbehave a bit, they start getting murdered, the police are about as useful as a chocolate fireplace, and so on. And without giving anything away, when the reasons for their deaths are finally revealed, they come across as a wee bit too trivial to justify all the preceding carnage!

Talking of not giving anything away, one odd detail I found distracting was the way that the murderer, who wears a loose coat, a totally featureless mask which doesn't even have eyeholes, and never speaks, seemed to be going to a lot of trouble to avoid giving any clues as to their identity, or even their gender, even when there was nobody there except some poor girl who'd be dead in a moment, or already was. It's as if the murderer is thinking: "I'm killing models dressed as Rorschach's Evil Twin, which is kind of improbable. Hey! Maybe I'm a fictional character! I'd better not drop reveal who I am to this empty room in case there's a secret invisible camera, and hundreds of people who hate spoilers are watching this in a cinema!"

Some of the acting isn't too great either, making it hard to believe in and therefore care about these characters. Cameron Mitchell is dependably suave, but some of the girls are a bit wooden. I suppose if your character's main contribution to the movie is to be murdered while wearing transparent underwear, if you're a great actress you probably wouldn't have auditioned for that part. And by today's standards, it's not that gory for an 18. Perhaps a little more so than a Hammer horror, but not much.

In the end I found it strangely lightweight, given its subject-matter, and neither very involving nor the least bit disturbing. But it's quite lively, gleefully decadent, and it's a proper murder mystery with a proper masked maniac whose identity you can try to guess. It's not the masterpiece some people claim, but if you like that sort of thing you could do a lot worse.

I can't say much about this film because I didn't watch it. The sound plays extremely faintly on one stereo channel and not at all on the other. I sent it back, but the replacement disc was the same one, so I guess that's all they've got. From what little I saw, it looks like a scratched, grainy print, and if, as the poster promises, it's supposed to deliver "WIDE SCREEN THRILLS!", they must have chopped off about half the film to get that TV aspect ratio. It doesn't have a reputation for being particularly worth seeing anyway.

As early film noirs go, this one is pretty good. Unfortunately it's not quite as good as it might have been. Part of the problem is that extensive rewriting has taken place to reduce the amount of content considered too sordid under the absurdly restrictive Hays Code, so although the plot is basically the same as the source novel, sometimes murders are committed by different people, and some characters who die in the book don't, while others who didn't do.

This is in some ways a good thing. In particular, almost all the non-white characters have been removed, which is just as well because those bits of the book now come across as offensively racist, especially the numerous references to a Native American's foul body odour. On the downside, some characters' motivations get a bit muddled and confusing because they're now doing the same things for different reasons. In particular, the hero seems at one point to have suddenly gone over to the Dark Side and is willing to commit murder, as well as getting extremely confused about who he's supposed to be in love with, while another character witnesses something that isn't in the book and ought to be horribly traumatic, but apparently forgets all about it within hours.

Another unavoidable problem is that Humphrey Bogart will always be the definitive Philip Marlowe, and Dick Powell is no Bogart. Wisely, he brings a different interpretation to the character. He's more playful, occasionally making a bit of a fool of himself (though never to the extent that Elliot Gould did in "The Long Goodbye"), and not quite as confident, which is appropriate in a story where the hero is pumped so full of drugs that he goes temporarily insane and nearly dies. In scenes where he's in over his head and knows it, or physically in no shape to cope with anything, he's at his best, and his raw desperation is entirely believable. But he's not very charismatic, and it's hard to see why women find him so attractive, even if one of them is nowhere near as gorgeous as the script thinks she is. She's not the only odd bit of casting. The fake psychic Amthor should be both weirder and scarier, and the big guy playing the learning-disabled Moose Malloy isn't sure whether to go for tragedy or laughs. But it's a solid enough adaptation of one of the earlier and better Raymond Chandler novels, and it doesn't mess around like some Chandler films do, by never showing us the main character's face, or switching the action to the seventies or England. And it's not directed by Michael Winner.

This is supposed to be Woody Allen's first "masterpiece", but, like all his earliest work, it shows that he still hasn't shaken off his roots on the stage and the small screen. Basically, this is a series of sketches on the theme of bank robberies, prison breaks, etc., interspersed with Woody doing his usual stand-up schtick. Which means we get plenty of scenes of him moaning about being a nerdy failure who is unattractive to women and extremely Jewish. This kind of witty self-deprecation works better as stand-up than in a movie, where instead of saying these things to us, he's saying them to a beautiful young woman, who, having just been told all the (very convincing) reasons why she should run a mile, falls in love with him because the script says so.

Some of the jokes are good. The basic idea of a hopelessly insecure man robbing banks very apologetically would make a great sketch, but how many variations on this theme are there? Fewer good ones than we see here, I'm afraid. And some of the writing is frankly lazy. For instance, Woody's embarrassed parents conceal their identities during a TV interview by wearing those joke shop "Groucho glasses". It's vaguely funny the first time, but we cut back to them every few minutes for the rest of the film, and it's the same "funny" image every time. A running gag would be if their disguises got progressively sillier until by the end of the movie, they were dressed as pantomime horses. Done this way, it's barely even a gag!

Similarly, the scene where a sheriff, who is looking for six prison escapees who are all chained together, fails to notice that the six men he's talking to are all chained together, falls flat because the joke is so feeble. The sheriff is too stupid to spot the screamingly obvious. That's the entire joke. If the convicts had placed themselves so that the sheriff couldn't see the chains because of objects in the way, meaning that they had to keep changing position as he walked around the room until they were all in ludicrous postures, that would have been a lot funnier. But it would also have taken a lot more takes to get it right, so maybe they simply couldn't be bothered.

What this movie looks like is an episode of a sitcom called The Woody Allen Show dragged out to three times its natural length. And the sequence in which a blackmail subplot causes our hero to suddenly become a ruthless killer who attempts to stab a woman to death with a carving-knife, which they obviously threw in there because they couldn't think of enough bank robbery jokes and needed another crime for him to be useless at, makes a character we're supposed to find loveably inept appear genuinely evil, and doesn't even seem to fit in properly with the rest of the film. Still, tastes differ, and if you like those later Pink Panther movies Peter Sellers only did for the money, or even the ones he didn't do at all because he was dead, you'll probably love this.

This cheap and cheerful B-movie does exactly what it's supposed to and not a lot more. If you've seen any other Old Dark House movies (including "The Old Dark House"), you'll be on very familiar territory here, and you won't have too much trouble guessing whodunnit long before the cast do. Its main selling-point is the presence of Bob Hope, a comedian sufficiently restrained to star in films that aren't exactly comedies, such as this one, a thriller in which several people are killed (not a thing they usually found funny in 1939), yet still be funny. He achieves this by stepping into the stereotypical hero rôle, but playing him as distinctly unheroic. He's obviously a basically good man, but he's very far from perfect. His cowardice, which becomes more and more apparent as the film progresses, along with his jittery attempts to talk himself into being at least slightly brave, are both his comic trademarks and the main reason to watch the film.

A "hero" who tries to talk big to impress the girl he's fallen for, but seconds later admits he's terrified because he's smart enough to know when lying is completely futile, is a refreshing change from the square-jawed nonentities who almost always saved the day in this kind of movie (and often still do). There's a lovely moment when, without even letting the camera see his face, he physically conveys that, having given the only available gun to the woman he loves so that she can protect herself if the murderer shows up, and having previously established that he needed to be holding it to be truly brave, and suffered a crisis of confidence when he found out afterwards that it wasn't loaded, he then realizes he might need it himself, and he has to force himself not to take it back again. The fact that he doesn't makes him a hero. The fact that he wanted to makes him interesting. And the way he does it makes him funny.

Otherwise, the proceedings are extremely routine. It's a bad movie with a very good central performance. In particular, especially given its short running-time, it takes absurdly long for the characters to find out either that anyone has actually been killed, or that the crazed killer they know to be in the general area is actually in the house, so as far as they know, for most of the running-time they're not in immediate danger and they're literally jumping at shadows, or the activities of the inevitable black cat (not the person mentioned in the title - an actual cat). In its own unpretentious way, it's fun though. And there's mercifully little of the horrible ethnic stereotyping typical of that era - no hilariously cowardly and superstitious black servants, for example. Bob Hope was very much against that sort of thing, which is probably why, the one time a minor Native American character pops up and appears to fulfill these expectations, they're subverted in a way that gives him the punchline and the joke's on Bob.

The first thing that struck me about this compilation, before I even got as far as the episodes, was that, although all this material was made and originally broadcast by the BBC, these discs were released by a company that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Beeb. Presumably that's because Spike's relationship with the BBC eventually got so strained that they sacked and basically disowned him, to the point where they had trouble finding enough material they were happy about airing to fill the tribute evening they broadcast when he died. The reasons for this aren't as apparent here as they will be in Volume 2, but if you're likely to be offended by white actors in blackface, cash registers being referred to as "Jewish pianos", or Pakistani Daleks, you probably shouldn't rent this!

The second thing that struck me was how extraordinarily self-indulgent it all was. Re-watching Monty Python recently after a long time, I was surprised how many sketches I'd completely forgotten because they weren't very funny. With Spike's shows, there's a much smaller ratio of inspired lunacy such as the Irish astronaut who thinks the lift at Harrods will take him to the Moon, or those extremely politically incorrect but very funny Pakistani Daleks, to sketches which seem almost completely random, and consist to a great extent of Spike staring at the camera in his trademark "I'm mad!" way while saying not very funny things in his default "This is funny!" voice. And some of the supporting cast, not to mention nearly all the guest musicians, are obviously on the show because they're friends of Spike, and there's a very good reason why you won't see them anywhere else.

When it's good, it's hilarious. But far too often I found myself thinking that if I was laughing as much as the cast were at their own jokes, I'd be having a lot more fun than I was. Even the good bits are sometimes less funny than they should be. Everybody chuckles fondly at the mention of Jehovah's Burglars, but that great idea about people whose religion compels them to rob you is almost immediately abandoned, and the sketch becomes incoherent, as far too many of them do. I think these shows may have seemed funnier at the time because if your only way to see them was on TV for half an hour once a week, you'd forgotten about the weaker gags by the time it came on again, and it wasn't so obvious how repetitive some of the jokes were. But viewing it in large doses, I was disappointed to find that it hadn't aged as well as the best Goon Shows, despite being considerably more recent. Spike seems to be relying on the fact that he's officially the funniest man alive, so the audience are primed to expect everything he says or does to be funny. I suspect that if he'd somehow ended up with a studio audience who didn't have the slightest idea who he was, the silence would sometimes have been deafening.

This is a workmanlike but very minor sci-fi B-movie about a meteorite which, like the Blob in the movie of that name, has the ability to constantly grow, and thus threatens mankind, suffers from one insurmountable problem. Its "monsters" are lumps of rock. Not living rock that can run after you or anything like that. Just odd-looking geology which kills people who get too near it because it's highly toxic (by the way, despite what it says on the previous page, nobody turns to stone from fear - why would that happen?), and threatens a whole town because as it grows, it topples onto anything downhill from it.

So what we have is a very slow-moving "monster" which, once everybody catches on that it might give them a fatal space disease, poses no threat to anyone who isn't directly in front of it and unable to move out of the way within an hour or two. And since it completely lacks both the desire and the ability to do anything on purpose, it's not really all that menacing. With a monster this underwhelming, the film desperately needs some interesting characters, and it doesn't have those either. There's a handsome guy and his pretty gal, another handsome guy, an older man, a little girl in peril - the usual crowd.

Worst of all, these fearsome rampaging space crystals never actually trap or surround anybody. The nearest they come to directly posing a threat to anyone apart from the tiny handful of people who perish almost instantly is to infect a couple of characters with a "petrifying" illness that seems to lowly turn them into leather, and they'll die unless they get an injection in time. Other than the vague and much too abstract threat of these naughty boulders multiplying infinitely and covering the whole world if the hero's plan fails, the nail-biting danger he faces at the film's thrilling climax is that what he's about to do might be illegal unless he can get the governor's permission, and the governor's gone to lunch or something. Can you stand the suspense?

Altogether a rather dull thriller which fails to thrill, in which there's far more talk about geology and footage of men looking tense while dripping various substances on small rocks than anything resembling action. Much less fun than similar movies in which the monster has legs with which to run after the hero, and fangs with which to eat him when it catches up.

It's pretty obvious why Christopher Knight was cast as the lead in this, his breakout film. Marlon Brando, not yet the flabby caricature he'd become in later years, was A-list box-office gold, and Knight looks, sounds and acts like Brando. Well, he kinda sorta does, in the same way that George Lazenby is near-as-dammit Sean Connery. It's also not hard to guess why Knight's cinematic career ended after only one more movie. He's terrible. He tries so very, very hard to be Brando that I felt a bit sorry for him, but the face-pulling he frequently indulges in is downright comical, especially in scenes where he's trying to appear heartbroken. If he was a comedian doing a Brando parody, he'd be superb. As a substitute for the genuine article, he stinks!

His character isn't very appealing either, and not in a good way. Studs is a borderline moronic man-child who, five minutes before the end of the film, finally figures out that maybe he shouldn't be so selfish all the time, and he probably shouldn't still be living with his parents at the age of 28. For the previous hour and a half, he mostly feels sorry for himself, often at unnecessary length in voiceover, or hangs out with his obnoxiously immature buddies, two of whom are a criminally underused Jack Nicholson, who would have been infinitely better than Knight in the lead rôle, and an equally wasted Frank Gorshin (hey, two future Batman villains in the same movie!). They spend their days and nights playing pool, getting drunk (not many actors can act drunk really well, but Knight is exceptionally bad, and he has to do a great deal of of it), or coming up with ever nastier ways to be appallingly sexist.

Strangely for a supposedly gritty tale of a young man growing up in a tough neighborhood during the roaring twenties, there's absolutely no violence or physical danger (the only death in the film is the result of a random off-screen road accident), and although there is quite a lot of sex, it's portrayed so carefully that sometimes we have to be told what just happened. If the source novel was banned in several countries, I can only assume this version was heavily censored! What we're left with is the story of a dull and unpleasant young man's decade-long journey to the realization that he's not the centre of the Universe, and what's more, he's rather thick. Or, if you want to look at it another way, one actor's epic struggle to be another, far better actor. Studs takes ten whole years to figure out that it's time he grew up. Presumably the actor who played him had five times his IQ, since it only took Christopher Knight two years to accept the bitter truth that he wasn't Brando.

This is another of those minimalist early Roger Corman B-movies with a budget so tight that it barely manages to be an hour long and thus qualify as a feature film (speeded up from 24 to 25 frames per second by the DVD format, it doesn't even reach the 60-minute mark on disc). It's also another of those films which this site describes as a classic, apparently because with cars, "classic" just means "old", so obviously the same is true of films. Since it was made in 1957, this movie would indeed be a classic, if only it had four wheels, an engine, a steering-wheel, and ran on petrol.

The worst thing about it is that the two minutes of opening credits show us extraordinary semi-abstract images implying that we're about to see a Surreal horror movie involving teenagers possessed by Japanese demons, women shape-shifting into eight-armed insectoids, and nude girls being flogged with a cat-o-nine-tails, possibly co-directed by Salvador Dalí and the Marquis De Sade. If the remaining 58 minutes delivered anything like this, the movie would be a true classic that makes "Spider Baby" look like "Little Women". Alas, the nearest we get to seeing this magnificent bizarreness brought to life is a few seconds of non-explicit fully-clothed spanking.

Susan Cabot's performance is good enough to save it from one-star dismalness, but not quite good enough to make us care about the obnoxious bitch she's playing. In fact, she probably seems better than she is because everybody else is lousy. The permanently sneering Dick Miller is supposed to be a nice guy, Barboura Morris, who was in so many of these movies despite being completely devoid of acting talent that I assume she must gave been Roger Corman's girlfriend, gives her usual non-performance, and the wet blanket who gets bullied for being slightly fat is very annoying indeed.

Also, although I obviously didn't expect "adult" entertainment from a 60-year-old film rated PG, I did expect the attractive, amoral Sabra (is that really a girl's name? - sounds more like a curry) to be highly sexed. Back in the day that was almost the textbook definition of bad behavior for girls, so her apparent asexuality seems very peculiar. It's true that she does attempt, briefly and unsuccessfully, to be a seductress, or at least a temptress, but even then it's made clear that she doesn't really fancy the fellow, or indeed anyone. And the pregnancy subplot is treated so coyly that it almost seems as though the poor girl caught babies the way other people catch measles.

Overall, this is a very minor film with one good performance (two if you include Sabra's vile mother, who appears for just long enough to show us where her daughter got it all from), and feminine misbehavior which, despite being the entire point of the film, is mostly rather dull. Though if there are any aspiring directors out there, isn't it about time we finally got to see the movie those jaw-dropping opening credits promised us...?

To call this film a "thriller" is stretching the definition of the word to its limit. Although its basic plot - a man is mistaken for a different man and accidentally becomes involved in something extremely dangerous he doesn't at first know about, let alone understand - is the same as that of quite a few thrillers, "North By Northwest" for example, the title says it all. Jack Nicholson's character is a strangely passive protagonist who is literally along for the ride. It just happens to be somebody else's ride.

The film's major virtue is that it's extraordinarily well made. The scenery deserves to be credited as at least three-quarters of the cast, and Antonioni really knows how to make it perform. Even though architecture features heavily, he's never crass enough to give us a shot of Big Ben or Tower Bridge so we know we're in London, and scruffy little backstreets get the same loving attention as cathedrals. Antonioni also does an excellent job of persuading us that these characters inhabit a world where ordinary people are going about their business doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with the main characters and their adventures. When did you last see a Hollywood movie in which the Universe didn't revolve around the hero? This film cleverly plays with that idea by throwing in an enormous coincidence which our hero notices and gets a bit paranoid about, but which is actually meaningless and irrelevant.

Its major flaw is that, frankly, not a lot happens, and what does happen doesn't always make sense. Jack Nicholson, acting the way he could before he became an A-list megastar and descended into self-parody, is excellent as the reporter so world-weary that, given a chance to pretend to be dead and reinvent himself, he jumps at it before you can say "Reginald Perrin". But since he seems to be both emotionally and, nearly all of the time, geographically distant from the few remaining people in his life, there doesn't appear to be any good reason why he needs to go to such lengths to escape from very little other than a marriage that's obviously on the rocks anyway. "Escaping from himself" in the way that he does comes across as the kind of unrealistically symbolic thing characters in arty fiction do, and his acceptance of a destiny which all but the most naïve viewers will see coming a very long way in advance is even more unrealistic, especially in a movie that constantly shows us ordinary people getting on with their lives in a perfectly normal fashion.

This is a superb piece of pure film-making, but as a story, it doesn't have much substance. Oddly it's not boring, but I think that's mainly because it's so technically accomplished and beautifully shot. And I'm afraid that, although she's extraordinarily cute, Maria Shneider often appears to be having trouble acting and speaking English at the same time. It's arthouse cinema at its best, but for better or worse, probably a bit of both, it's very arthouse indeed.

I don't quite know what to make of this incredibly odd movie! It looks to me as though its director, who is better known for much nastier horror films such as "Cannibal Apocalypse", was trying to spoof all those Old Dark House movies, but, not having much experience with or understanding of comedy, forgot to include any actual jokes.

The most baffling thing about this film is that the plot concerns the rich and supposedly cursed Clan MacGrieff. If your main cast are from every part of Europe except Britain, your extras are all conspicuously dark-skinned Mediterraneans, your locations are about as Scottish-looking as the surface of Mars, and the only distinctly Scottish element in the entire story is the family's name, why not just make them Italians, instead of desperately trying to pretend that all these people and places are Scottish? They couldn't even get hold of the right kind of bagpipes! This inevitably means that the dubbing is even worse than usual, thanks to the awful "Scottish" accents. Though if you're one of those people who can't bear badly-dubbed movies, you do have the option of viewing it in Italian with subtitles.

The extremely French and extremely naughty 26-year-old Jane Birkin is cast as a virginal Scottish schoolgirl, which suggests that we may not be intended to take any of this seriously. Oh, and for no reason at all, the Laird of Castle MacGrieff has a pet gorilla. Mind you, he also has a flock of fruit-bats in his cellar, so presumably this is a part of Scotland where the wildlife is as atypical as the architecture. But this has very little to do with the main thing we're here to see: seven people getting killed, just like it says in the title. While being watched by a cat. This is the second most baffling thing about the film. The presence of the cat whenever anyone dies has nothing to do with anything, and at no point is it implied that it might have. What it does mean is that a completely irrelevant animal gets so much screen-time that this is very nearly a horror movie starring Bagpuss.

This is a terrible film that deserves half as many stars as I gave it, but I kind of enjoyed it, in a perverse so-bad-it's-good way. It probably helps that I live in Scotland. It's too gory and not funny enough to be a comedy, too absurd to be horrific unless you're automatically horrified by a bit of blood (or a really bad Scottish accent), and if you like murder mysteries, this one won't challenge your powers of deduction all that much, since it follows the tired old trope of flagging everyone as the murderer except the actual murderer, but what with one thing and another, notably Jane Birkin running around in a transparent nightie pretending to be shy, eighteen years old, Scottish, and an actress, and of course that man-in-an-obvious-gorilla-suit gorilla, it's oddly endearing. It certainly opened my eyes to the ghastly truth about Bagpuss.

This zero-budget quickie barely scrapes over the one-hour minimum length needed to qualify as a feature film. Opening in a very small nightclub where the Platters, a pre-rock doo-wop combo whom you may actually have heard of, perform a couple of songs because they're the most famous name on the poster, the action quickly moves to a sleazy bar which, oddly, is much the same size and has much the same layout as the posh nightclub, almost as if it's the same set re-dressed. Excuses are found for the Blockbusters, a more authentically rock'n'roll band, to do a few instrumentals which are mostly sung over by a young lady who can't sing, but it doesn't matter, since they aren't exactly Bill Haley and the Comets, however much they want to be. They haven't even got a Wikipedia page.

Having gotten the obligatory musical numbers out of the way, along with a very enthusiastic dance routine by two youngsters who play no further part in the action, what's left of this miniscule film concentrates on the adventures of Shorty (Dick Miller, who was in a lot of B-movies, but whose immortality rests on that scene where he sold several guns to the Terminator, and didn't get paid in the worst way). I do believe the ever-cynical Roger Corman, knowing this throwaway little film didn't matter, was indulging in a bit of stealth parody here. Shorty is an obnoxious creep who constantly behaves as if he hates the world and wants the world to hate him. His idea of fun is to pick a fight with a complete stranger simply because he can't stand anyone being taller than himself (which, as his name suggests, applies to a lot of men), and then make him back down by pulling a knife.

However, Shorty, being the designated hero, ends up saving the day, because everybody knows that if an extreme psychopath who has killed three people in the last half-hour points a gun at you, if you repeatedly insult him without showing fear, there's absolutely no way he'll shoot you - right? The big hint that this entire film is mocking itself, and very likely its target audience, is the inclusion of an absurd middle-aged beatnik who talks ludicrous gibberish at considerable length before our straight-talking hero bluntly informs him that he's making a complete fool of himself. And of course the assumption that the leading lady will automatically love the hero of the movie, even if he's a nasty, aggressive little jerk with a massive inferiority complex and an even bigger death-wish. It's a very minor film indeed, even for Roger Corman, and the acting's mostly atrocious, but it's a harmless enough way to pass an hour.