Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

In a blatant attempt to rip off ITV's huge hit "The Avengers", Verity Lambert, producer of the BBC's even huger hit "Doctor Who", tried to combine whichever elements of both shows kinda sorta fitted together, and managed to pick the worst possible combination. "The Avengers" worked because its absurdly "square" hero's partner was a swinging sixties with-it woman whose skills complemented his own, and they made a superbly effective team. Here, the even squarer hero, who is literally living in the past, is stuck with a much younger woman who, far from being an equal partner, is a daffy pixie who follows him around when he doesn't want her to (in one episode, she follows him to Japan!) because she's hopelessly in love with him, does the exact opposite of what she's told, especially when it's clearly a very bad idea, is much more trouble than she's worth, and usually has to be rescued.

And whose brilliant idea was it to give the show's fairly young target audience a hero who detested everything that made the sixties swing, especially anything to do with women thinking for themselves and being openly sexy, along with pop music, immodest fashions, modern furniture, and anything made of plastic? The poor guy is actually repelled by sexy women, and literally cannot look at a girl in a swimsuit! What's more, his independent, rebellious, and underfed-looking sidekick Miss Jones (remember, this was the era when the gold standard for female beauty was someone called Twiggy), who runs a disco, wears miniskirts (as well as any other sexy outfit they can find an excuse to stuff her into, including a Bunny Girl costume and a wet fishnet body-stocking), and is so kooky that her catchphrase is "Zoinks!", almost always screws up and needs our hero to save her. Whereas AA is constantly implied to be right because he rejects lax modern morals and clings to the values of 1902. Also, he's a little bit too enthusiastic about killing people, and some of the deaths and injuries border on the sadistic - especially an almost unbelievable scene where a woman gets a spiked running-shoe embedded in her face!

Apart from a few very early and very late episodes, the stories are painfully formulaic, in a way that worked for "Doctor Who" because he could pop up anywhere in space and time and anything could happen, but not for AA because every week he had to fight slightly weird crime in England (except for that one time in a studio set representing Japan, which probably only happened so that Miss Jones could dress up as a geisha). Something bad occurs, the police are baffled despite howlingly obvious clues, AA investigates with no back-up except Miss Jones, who he specifically told to keep out of it, she gets captured, he gets captured, the baddies fail to kill him when they really should, he escapes and stabs the baddies to death with his trusty sword-cane, The End.

An extremely belated attempt to resolve issues raised in the first five minutes of episode one in the most predictable way imaginable, and introduce a recurring villain who looks and sounds like an evil puppet who would be more at home on "Thunderbirds", came too late to save it from a thoroughly deserved cancellation. The hero is almost as unsympathetic as an opening sequence which makes him look like Jack the Ripper leads you to expect. His ever-hopeful wannabe girlfriend is annoying. And the only other major character, a butler who's supposed to be funny, is a profoundly creepy waste of space. AA's most important legacy is that Jon Pertwee pinched a lot of his schtick when he was the third Doctor, and did it far better. If you're feeling nostalgic, watch that instead. Or "The Avengers". Or anything else which ever got a sequel or reboot, or lasted more than two years, because you can see why this didn't.

If I say "vampire movie with an almost entirely black cast and crew made in 1973", the word "blaxsploitation" will inevitably spring into your mind. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is (mostly) a lyrical, symbolic art-house film which happens to involve a lot of black people, and happens to be about vampires. Of course, the studio wanted something very similar to "Blacula", and that's what they paid for. What they got was something completely different that the director snuck under the radar, which was why it was lauded by the critics but ignored by the general public, and almost immediately re-edited into a horribly butchered version that most of the people responsible for the original cut disowned, but was the only way you could see it throughout the video age.

So here's the genuine article, though it has to be said that the print, which was undoubtedly the best they could find, is watchable but not exactly perfect. Is it the legendary lost masterpiece a lot of people have claimed over the years? As with almost all films whose reputation rests to some extent on being impossible to see for a very long time, the answer is "not exactly". It's certainly way ahead of its time in its treatment of vampirism as an addiction. On the other hand, it's blatantly obvious that the director really wanted to make a movie about the scourge of drug addiction in black communities, and tailored the subject-matter he was stuck with to put his point across through extremely blunt symbolism.

Especially in the early scenes, the horror of being a junkie is powerfully conveyed, and the fact that the accidental addict is a highly intelligent, well-educated, and thoroughly decent man who nevertheless cannot resist the ghastly craving that makes him act in a subhuman fashion is put across very convincingly by Duane Jones, who you may remember as the hero of "The Night of the Living Dead". Unfortunately, the entire vampire thing is glossed over a bit too casually - apparently you catch it from African magic daggers if some nutter you happen to know stabs you with them for no reason at all. And the later stages of the movie, in which our hero meets the woman of his dreams, make him seem bizarrely indecisive. Does he want them both to live forever as vampires, or both find eternal rest? He seems to change his mind ridiculously quickly. As for the lengthy shots of people running in slow motion through flowers and such, juxtaposed with hammy imagery of blood oozing out of cracked antiques, they just made me wish for a bit less Ingmar Bergman and a bit more Hammer!

At its best, this is a potential masterpiece with a great central performance (I didn't take so much to Marlene Clark, whose big revelatory scene seems very contrived indeed, but maybe that's just me). Some of the vampire imagery is both truly horrific and sufficiently rooted in everyday reality to be even harder-hitting, and the viewer really does get that this is a good man struggling with a very, very bad thing. And then it gets all arty-farty and throws that away. Is Bill Gunn trying to emulate "The Seventh Seal" or "Mean Streets"? Probably both, and I think his undoubted talent would have expressed itself better if he'd paid homage to them one at a time. This is the kind of film where I can see there's something interesting and worthwhile going on, but I can't like it as much as I feel maybe I ought to.

In the decade after spaghetti westerns peaked and fizzled out, tough crime thrillers were the next big thing to come out of Italy. As with spaghetti westerns and Italian horror films, their big selling-point was that in terms of bloody violence, they went further than was considered tasteful, or even legal, in the USA or Britain. Good acting and well-written scripts weren't quite so important. This is one of the better examples, but it still isn't all that great. And, unlike a spaghetti western, it takes place in fairly recent times that don't have anything the slightest bit mythical about them, except maybe the unbelievably bad clothes everybody wore without noticing how terrible they were, so it hasn't aged that well.

A tough cop who is retired so he doesn't have to play by the rules any more, and is also conveniently thought to be dead, wants revenge on a bunch of bad guys for stuff you'll have forgotten about by the halfway mark. People shoot at each other with varying degrees of success, sometimes try to stab each other for a change, and have lots and lots of those fights where the sound of a fist hitting flesh is more like somebody beating a leather armchair to death with a sledge-hammer. Maurizio Merli, whoever he was, is handsome in a very seventies way, though the blond hair and blue eyes he equips himself with in an attempt to appeal to the American market are so fake that in the dubbed English version of the movie, other characters make fun of his appearance in ways that are no longer politically correct. And he can't act very well. I assume he's The Fist, since he hits more people than anyone else does by a very wide margin, when he's not kicking them or shooting them or throwing chairs at them.

Tomas Milian, who played the hero in quite a few spaghetti westerns, was getting a bit too weathered to be a leading man by then so he's a rather bored-looking baddie called The Chinaman (?), who I assume must be The Rat. And presumably John Saxon, who gives exactly the same B-list bad guy performance as he always did, is The Cynic. It's not made terribly clear. Neither is the plot, which gets extremely convoluted without being terribly interesting. Minor characters, many of whom exist purely to suffer some form of brutality, come and go so casually that you have to stop and think whether this is a new person or somebody you're supposed to remember from earlier on. The big set-piece robbery is extremely dull, apart from a laugh-out-loud scene where the laser-beams crisscrossing a corridor by way of a state-of-the-art security system are obviously solid plastic rods. And the violence, though slightly bloodier than you might expect from an American movie from this era, is rather uninvolving and utterly lacks the grandeur of a well-choreographed spaghetti western shootout. This is the kind of film that trendy people revisit because Quentin Tarantino says it's a neglected masterpiece, but which was forgotten about in the first place because it isn't very good.

This extraordinary film shouldn't really work because by normal standards it's a bit of a mess. The script seems to have been written very quickly, and sometimes makes no sense whatsoever. The plot device of the bank in El Paso, which everyone knows can't be robbed, going out of its way to set up a completely unnecessary loophole whereby it can be robbed after all if anybody finds out the secret. The bad guy's self-defeating strategy in the final part of the film - is he supposed to have a death-wish, or did the scriptwriters just land our heroes in so much trouble that they couldn't think of a plausible way to get them off the hook? And of course those strange bits of business where we're constantly given visual hints that Clint Eastwood has something wrong with his right hand, so he can't shoot very well unless he wears a custom-made leather glove, yet nobody ever explains this or refers to it directly, as if they're hoping we won't think about it too much. I guess that's because it was supposed to be a reference to Clint's hand getting broken in the previous movie, and it was only after filming was complete that anybody noticed he'd been wearing the glove on the wrong hand.

But none of this matters. These larger-than-life characters don't inhabit our reality, and we're not supposed to think they do. They're demi-gods to whom the normal rules don't apply. Lee Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer in particular is an angel of death so implacable that ordinary people are instinctively terrified of him, and he's packing an arsenal fit for a steampunk James Bond. One of the few serious mistakes this film makes is not letting him use all of it. I would have loved to know why he needed a pistol with a ludicrously long barrel. And what's that medieval-looking thing between the rifle and the shotgun? Clint Eastwood's Manco (the American print was slightly trimmed so that he really was The Man With No Name as promised in the trailer) is exactly who he was in the first film, but this time, instead of that annoying bartender, he gets to swap plot exposition dialogue with somebody who is his equal, and in some ways better.

As for the baddies, did you ever see a nastier-looking crew of desperadoes? If you pay attention, you'll notice that most of them get no lines and have very little to do in the way of acting. That's because they were real Spanish mountain men who weren't very different from the bandits they were playing. Some of them got their parts by defeating rival applicants in knife-fights, and one man who wasn't chosen stabbed the assistant casting director in the stomach. El Indio himself, although Gian Maria Volonte's overacting does sometimes get a bit out of hand (Sergio Leone put him through multiple unnecessary rehearsals in the hope of tiring him out too much to go completely over the top, but it didn't always work), is evil personified. That sermon he preaches in a desecrated church about a good carpenter corrupted by greed practically qualifies him to be the Antichrist!

Even the sets have a lot of personality. The El Paso set was so well-built that it's still standing, and you can have a drink in the bar where Lee Van Cleef was incredibly rude to Klaus Kinski. And of course there's Ennio Morricone's indispensable music. This score, based around the haunting melody of a musical watch El Indio is strangely obsessed with for reasons that eventually become clear, is one of his best. This is a gloriously archetypal western which does everything it's supposed to in grand style. And if it doesn't bear much resemblance to the reality of life in 19th century America, that's not a fault but a bonus.

This is of course the story of one of the strangest trials in legal history, which began with one man being tried for murder, and basically ended up with everybody except the defendant on trial for everything except murder. And there can't be anybody on the planet who doesn't know the verdict, other than people who aren't very likely to rent this because they live in a grass hut in the jungle. Presumably for legal reasons, never once in the entire series are we told straight out that OJ did it, nor are we shown the actual crime, which, given its brutality, is probably just as well (if you're squeamish about that kind of thing, you might like to know that gory depictions of the crime-scene are kept to an absolute minimum). But we're left in no doubt whatsoever that, whatever the jury said, OJ is guilty as hell.

The opening episodes are five-star brilliant, as everybody struggles to get to grips with the unfolding events, including the bizarre slow-motion car-chase involving the infamous white Bronco. John Travolta, who also produced the series, is fantastic as gleefully amoral showbiz lawyer Robert Shapiro, a man whose previous incarnation was undoubtedly a great white shark. Unfortunately, Travolta's character subsequently gets pushed into the background just as he was in real life, and we spend more and more time with the two prosecuting attorneys. This is understandable, since otherwise there would be no lawyers who aren't hypocrites, or major black characters who are neither hypocrites nor murderers, but unfortunate, since these two are far less interesting than the more morally dubious persons involved. And wouldn't it be nice just once for an American drama not to involve anyone whose messy divorce intrudes itself into a plot which isn't about divorces at all?

As for OJ himself, he's portrayed effectively but one-dimensionally as a blubbering man-child whose waterworks are motivated by self-pity, and since we can never be directly told or shown that he's guilty, he remains an enigma. Though personally I'd always have doubts about anyone who had a larger-than-life statue of himself in his own garden. However, the underlying issue - a very angry subsection of American society voicing their profound discontent with the establishment by rallying round a terrible person just because he represents opposition to The Man - is highly relevant right now. Though I doubt there's much crossover between people who think OJ is innocent and Trump supporters.

Overall, this is an extremely effective drama which inevitably flags a bit in its later stages, because, unlike fact-based movies such as "Apollo 13", where the action occurs over a few days, just about everything which can honestly be called action takes place in a very short time (and we don't even get to see the most dramatic event of all), and then a year of incredibly slow-moving legal proceedings has to grind past before we reach the conclusion we already know. And in the process, the most important moral issue - is it ever acceptable for somebody who has done something truly dreadful to be falsely exonerated because it strikes a symbolic blow that might do enough good to outweigh the initial evil? - becomes repetitive, and is partially buried under a lot of personal baggage, not all of it interesting, which you sometimes feel they're tiptoeing around because most of these people are still alive. Also, most of them are lawyers. And if this series tells us anything, it's that the USA is a particularly bad country in which to get on the wrong side of lawyers!

Oh dear, where do I start? This movie wants so badly to be "Star Wars" that it even begins with a shot of an impossibly enormous spaceship thundering across the void. Except that this spaceship is, as the pompously ham-fisted narration makes clear, a magic flying mountain, so it looks as though we're in "Lord of the Rings" territory too. Oh, and by the way, it's also painfully obvious that it's a poorly animated lump of carved polystyrene.

You know how cheap everything is going to be throughout when a handful of men ride up to a castle that must have had everyone in the audience who had seen "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" shouting "It's only a model!" and announce that the other 300 warriors who were supposed to accompany them got killed on the way. And so it goes. A very eighties-looking princess with hair bigger than her face is about to marry the hero, who, naturally, is a prince, when the wedding is crashed by baddies who had the sense to bring guns to a swordfight. All is lost!

Or is it? Predictable shenanigans follow. The Beast, a sort of extraterrestrial antichrist whose starship tries to rip off H. R. Geiger's designs for "Alien" combined with Salvador Dalí's sets for the dream sequences in Hitchcock's "Spellbound" on about a tenth of the budget of either, wants to marry the big-haired princess because there's a prophecy that she and her lawful wedded hubby will be the parents of the king of the galaxy (so this is maybe a prequel to "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe"?). The hero, who is of course the only wedding guest to miraculously survive being shot, must rescue her with the help of The Glaive (a magic jaggy frisbee which featured much more heavily in the advertising than it does in the film, presumably because animating it was expensive), a sarcastic elderly mentor who will obviously die at some point just like Alec Guinness did in "Star Wars", and the usual band of ragtag semi-reluctant followers, most of whom serve no purpose other than to be killed. There's even a half-assed version of The Force to save the day with when all else fails.

Unfortunately, the whole thing's so flat and lackluster that it doesn't come close to rivaling the so-bad-it's-good high-camp idiocies of the likes of "Star Crash", and you end up simply not caring what happens to anybody. In the course of this damp squib, you'll see not-yet-famous actors like Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane wasted in nothing parts, Todd Carty desperately but unsuccessfully trying to break out of being forever typecast as Tucker Jenkins in "Grange Hill" (remember him?), "Carry On" regular Bernard Bresslaw unrecognizable behind terrible animatronic Cyclops makeup, and some bloke as the please-kill-him Dreaded Comic Relief who looks and sounds exactly like Alan Partridge trying to play Gandalf. Oh, and somebody plays the hero. Full marks for doing its best on a limited budget, but in the end it's all a bit of a yawn.

Poor Anthony Perkins. His breakthrough rôle in "Psycho" meant that he would forever be typecast as twitchy, socially awkward guys with mental health problems of a potentially homicidal nature who don't relate too well to girls.

So it comes as no surprise that the character he plays here is, in the movie's first scene, being released from a mental institution where he has spent a long time for unspecified reasons which eventually turn out to be quite extreme. We also shouldn't be surprised when he's almost immediately (and very clumsily) flagged as a Walter Mitty-type fantasist who can barely open his mouth without claiming to be somebody anyone with half a brain can instantly tell he isn't. Frankly, given his behavior throughout the film, it's not very plausible that they let him out. It also comes as no surprise that the girl he presently hooks up with is no good. I don't mean to include any spoilers, but this movie's called "Pretty Poison", and that's co-star Tuesday Weld up there on the DVD cover pointing a gun at somebody and not looking too unhappy about it - draw your own conclusions!

Perkins is excellent as a man who tries to cover up his difficulty at coping with a world he's had no direct experience of since he was 15 by constantly dropping hints that he's a poor man's James Bond, most of which seem to be more for his own benefit than anybody else's. And it's not difficult to see why Tuesday Weld might be able to exert a considerable amount of influence over almost any young man. The interplay between them, as he ensnares her in his live-action secret agent rôle-playing game for a variety of morally dubious if not downright illegal purposes, initially casts him as the manipulative madman. But maybe his strings are being pulled too?

Most of this byplay between the two leads works very well. What brings it down a notch is the oddly artificial nature of the situation. You can see what they were thinking. Hey, wouldn't it be a great gimmick if that guy from "Psycho" played another psycho who exploits an innocent girl, but then it turns out she's the real psycho? The trouble is, they take that gimmick just a little bit too far. Perkins is plausible, but Weld is initially too sweet, innocent and gullible to make her hidden depths of utter craziness believable. It's well played, but I didn't really buy it as a potentially real situation. "Gun Crazy" (the 1950 version) is a better exploration of a not dissimilar relationship between two misfits who get up to very bad things together.

By the way, it's nice to see Beverly Garland, Roger Corman's B-movie queen in the previous decade, still getting work playing Tuesday Weld's mother, a lady who knows she's well past the first flush of youth but is determined to grow old disgracefully, and sees through her daughter's new boyfriend's lies in less time than it takes her to finish yet another large gin and tonic. I'm not sure if that's a step up or down from being strangled by an evil traffic-cone from Venus, but it certainly makes a change.

Made just after "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", this film was obviously greatly influenced by it, right down to including one huge lift from it which is then subverted by a particularly cruel twist of fate. But it's a genteel, very British take on a similar subject. The barely human grave-robbing cannibals are replaced by people who are, or at any rate used to be, thoroughly respectable "pillars of the establishment", and the regime they impose on the inmates of their private prison bears more than a passing resemblance to the sadistically irrational world inhabited by the schoolboys in "If...."

As in "Chainsaw", the horror derives from what is literally a nightmare situation: somebody goes for what seems to be an innocent drive in the country, and, for what amounts to no reason at all, is suddenly imprisoned in a madhouse where the lunatics are definitely running the asylum! Though since these awful people were rejected by the mainstream establishment for going too far almost thirty years before the events in the film take place, and have since been acting secretly and illegally, the satirical point the film is trying very hard to make gets a little bit blurred. However, it certainly manages to remind us that in repressive societies, power usually ends up in the hands of deranged monsters who hypocritically abuse the very laws they claim to be upholding.

Although much of the early part of the movie seems to promise us the sexploitation Peter Walker tends to be associated with, giving us gratuitous glimpses of female nudity and a protagonist too daffy to realise that going off for the weekend with a man she hardly knows who makes jokes about cutting her face with a steak knife and calls himself "Mark E. DeSade" is a really bad idea, once he gets down to business, Walker is wise enough to concentrate on the decidedly unsexy villains instead of the prettier but much less interesting victims and their friends, most of whom can't act too well. And, unlike a truly exploitative director such as Jesús Franco, Walker never tries to make the torture of women titillating. What happens to the unfortunate girls is surprisingly un-explicit, with just enough shown for us to get the idea (though the censor may have had something to do with that).

Although it's poorly paced, relentlessly grim, and sometimes mean-spirited, and the scenes outside the prison often look as though they might veer into soft porn at any moment, the large part of the film that takes place inside the titular establishment has real if crude power, thanks very largely to the performance of Sheila Keith, a good enough actress to add subtle undercurrents to what might easily have been a one-dimensional rôle. The villains are victims of their own cruelty almost as much as the women they torment, obsessively sticking to the letter of meaningless rules they constantly twist but can't break in a desperate attempt to maintain the crumbling illusion that they're doing the right thing for the right reasons. Keith in particular, without saying or doing anything to make it explicit, conveys that the twisted joyless monster she has become is the result of a lifetime denying to herself that she's a lesbian, and she's punishing pretty girls for making her feel sinfully attracted to them.

This movie isn't the masterpiece some people say it is, and it's not "fun" on any level, but it's several orders of magnitude above almost all other "psychos torture helpless women" movies, and it really is trying to make a good point, albeit clumsily. It's certainly an interesting take on a clichéd situation, and well worth a look if you're a horror buff. By the way, if you think Sheila Keith is good in this, you should see her pulling all the stops out in "Frightmare" as a sweet old lady with a very nasty secret indeed...

I tried to like this film. I really did. But about halfway through I began to get seriously bored. Tony Jaa is certainly very athletic indeed, and I'm sure I'd lose a fight with him inside one second, but he doesn't have much acting talent beyond being quite good at scowling, which he does constantly whenever he's not hitting people or jumping over things. And after you've seen him leap high into the air and hit somebody else on the top of their head with his fists, elbows or knees twenty or thirty times, the novelty wears off, even when he tries to add variety by doing it with his trousers on fire. It doesn't help that every stunt they were especially pleased with is shown in slow motion twice, or even three times.

Muay Thai may be a highly effective martial art, but as a visual spectacle it's extremely repetitive, which is presumably the reason for an extended sequence lifted straight from a Mortal Kombat-type computer game, in which, for absurdly contrived reasons, our hero has to fight a succession of increasingly peculiar opponents, culminating in a chap called Mad Dog, whose fighting style consists of hitting his opponents with furniture. Which in turn becomes repetitive: after you've seen Tony Jaa get six or seven chairs and tables smashed over his head, it ceases to be entertaining, even when Mad Dog ups the ante by walloping him with a refrigerator.

The plot is of course almost non-existent, though it still manages to be muddled. Bad guys who wanted a valuable Buddhist amulet, which seems to be important but is quickly forgotten about, instead steal a worthless idol's head in a fit of pique, and if the villagers don't get it back in time for the holy festival, God won't end the drought by magic (the scriptwriters completely forget to inform us at the end whether this weird procedure, which seems embarrassingly primitive for the 21st century, actually worked). Therefore the country boy has to go to the big city and hit people. A lot. Unfortunately, to do this he needs to spend most of the movie in the company of the dreaded Comic Relief Character, whose wacky antics are uneasily juxtaposed with genuine violence and tragedy, such as an overlong car-chase involving far too many identical taxis, which mixes cartoon slapstick and zany face-pulling with several people getting burned to death.

"Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Hustle" do the improbable comedy action thing infinitely better. Here, the "comedy" just gets in the way of the increasingly brutal and increasingly monotonous serious fighting. And I have no idea what the sassy, tomboy-ish female lead is doing in the film at all. She gets a great deal of screen-time without ever contributing anything relevant to the plot other than having to be rescued a few times, and isn't even the love interest, since the hero, a novice monk about to take his vows, appears to be totally asexual. My guess is the first draft of the script included a bit of romance, then they found out that Tony Jaa's acting skills weren't up to anything as challenging as smiling, let alone kissing.

Highly recommended if you just want to watch an extremely fit young man who often takes his shirt off jumping about and hitting people hundreds of times in slow motion. Not so highly recommended if you're looking for a good story with memorable characters. And, apart from a downright surreal fight in a tree between numerous men covered in mud right at the beginning, the visuals aren't all that interesting either. Frankly, the whole thing seems less like a movie than Tony Jaa's show-reel, in which he demonstrates his skill at punching, kicking, jumping and scowling in the hope of landing parts in chop-socky films with much bigger budgets than this one.

This incredibly misconceived comedy was the first attempt to bring a character from "Viz Comics" to the big screen, and the only good thing anyone in their right mind could possibly say about it is that it's nowhere near as bad as the second live-action Viz movie, the unbelievably horrible "The Fat Slags". Viz, which isn't even mentioned in the credits, had absolutely nothing to do with the film after they signed away the rights for a bit of easy money, never dreaming anyone would actually make the movie. Which is presumably why the main character's name was changed from Johnny Fartpants to Patrick Smash, though he looks as much like his comic-strip counterpart as a living person possibly can.

They should have stuck with his original name, because the idea of a couple whose surname just happens to be Fartpants coincidentally having a son who lives up to it in spades is a lot funnier than any of the jokes in this howling clunker. The decision to adapt a scatological spoof of a children's comic-strip aimed at adults back into a children's film inevitably waters down the humour to near-homeopathic levels, and the gleefully hyper-flatulent Johnny becomes the lonely misfit Patrick, whose unwanted talent makes him miserable until unlikely events turn him into a hero admired by the whole world. Which misses the point about as entirely as it's possible to without coming back round and hitting it from behind by mistake.

Bruce Cook, who gets the dreaded "and introducing" credit, stars as the boy with two stomachs. After this inauspicious debut, he had bit-parts in two more movies, and hasn't been heard of since 2003, which, judging by the level of talent he shows here, is just as well. Rupert Grint, fresh from the first Harry Potter film, is even worse than he was in that, to the point where he almost makes Bruce Cook seem fairly good when they're on screen together. Second-billed Stephen Fry is in the movie for three minutes, in the same scene as "Carry On" veteran Leslie Phillips, whose dialogue consists, in its entirety, of: "Order! Order!" and "The witness will answer the question." How we laughed. At least Simon Callow and Ned Beatty put in a bit of effort and overact like the troupers they are, though somehow I doubt that either of them likes being reminded that they were in this turkey.

Nowhere near as funny or as filthy as it needs to be, it doesn't even fail spectacularly enough to be memorably disastrous, and the triumphantly life-affirming last act is simply nauseating. Johnny - I mean Patrick - even gets to make a speech obviously meant to inspire any disabled children in the audience to never give up their dreams. This from a boy who gets to be an astronaut at the age of ten because he farts a lot. Funniest joke in the whole thing: the theatrical trailer which manages to avoid mentioning that the movie involves farting, even though that's its entire and only reason to exist. By the way, if this film really did get 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, Rotten Tomatoes is broken.

Although everybody thinks this is a sequel to the two "Dollars" movies, it's actually a prequel set at least ten years prior to those films. And I very much doubt it's even that, since Clint Eastwood's "Blondie", although he does don the iconic poncho over 90% of the way through the movie, doesn't appear to be the same character (in particular, he's far better at using a rifle). I suspect that, just as "Angel-Eyes" was supposed to be played by Lee Marvin, but he was tied up making "The Dirty Dozen", another actor was originally cast as "Blondie", hence his nickname, and the reference to him having "golden hair", which Clint Eastwood conspicuously doesn't. Possibly Lou Castel, who was rather good as an amoral bounty hunter in "A Bullet For The General"? Or even Terence Hill?

Anyway, this remains one of the greatest westerns ever made, possibly the greatest of them all. The characters are, as title implies, pure archetypes (though Clint Eastwood insisted on a partial rewrite to justify his character being called "good"; it was his idea to include a scene of Blondie playing with a kitten). Angel-Eyes is an absolute bastard with no redeeming features whatsoever, and Lee Van Cleef nails it perfectly - even Blondie's a little bit scared of him! Blondie, oddly enough, is the least interesting main character, maybe because, as Eastwood pointed out at the time, he's not really very heroic as heroes go. And Tuco? Eli Wallach turns it up to eleven and steals the movie hands down as a complete and utter rat who you can't help liking even if you're not sure why. As a famous reviewer once pointed out, Tuco doesn't deserve the money they're all after, but he wants it so much that you end hoping he gets it.

One huge difference between this and lesser spaghetti westerns is that, instead of piling on even more violence than previously because massive, gory gunfights are what the genre is all about, this film isn't afraid to move at a surprisingly stately pace, with long stretches of scene-setting and character interplay between the inevitable bloodshed. The bloodiest scene, a truly epic depiction of a battle in the American Civil War, isn't glamorous at all, and bluntly informs us that war is a senseless waste of human life. As for the climactic showdown, it mainly consists of three men standing perfectly still for several minutes. And yet it all works magnificently. You really believe in the stylized world these impossibly skilled gunfighters inhabit, in a way that no modern superhero movie has quite managed to achieve. Of course, Ennio Morricone's score helps no end. Not all of his many, many film scores were great, and some were so bad they sounded like self-parodies, but this is perhaps his best, and certainly his most famous.

This version restores nearly all the footage excised from the original cut, some of which helps to make sense of the plot, such as explaining what Bill Carson is doing in the middle of the desert, and why Angel-Eyes suddenly pops up in charge of a POW camp, so if you haven't seen this movie for ages, it's worth taking another look. Though they probably should have left that surreal scene with Tuco in a strange artificial cave talking to a dead chicken on the cutting-room floor...

Remember "The Dirty Dozen"? This is the same film in fancy dress, only de-clawed and castrated. In that movie, men who were mostly very bad indeed, and in one case spine-chillingly loathsome, went on a suicide mission to ruthlessly slaughter a bunch of senior Nazi officers (and any civilians who happened to get in the way, including rather a lot of women) in the hope of having their sentences reduced if they survived. Of course, most of them didn't.

Here, we have various allegedly evil people going on a "suicide" mission we know all the remotely interesting characters will survive because they might be needed later in this massive ongoing franchise, therefore they're accompanied by a useless bunch of totally expendable soldiers who might as well be wearing red shirts. They're up against a generic supervillain who wants to rule the world because that's what generic supervillains do, and a horde of mindless crystal zombies who can be smashed to bits with neither accountability nor gore. So, your standard "superheroes vs. far too many robots for far too long" scenario. All of which takes place in a gloomy deserted cityscape that's both visually boring and identical to the way the inevitable computer game will look.

Will Smith is an actor I've never been as impressed by as everyone else seems to be, and as Deadshot, by far the most important character, he totally fails to convince us that he's anyone other than Will Smith doing his default charming wisecracking schtick. There's a token flashback in which he actually kills someone for money, but other than that, there's no evidence whatsoever that he's anything other than a really nice and witty guy who loves his daughter, and just happens to be shooting magic robots with a machine-gun because it's one of those days. Margot Robbie is tremendous fun as a controversially sexed-up Harley Quinn who, alone of all the characters, genuinely seems to be mad, but absolutely nobody is all that evil other than their boss Amanda Waller, a truly horrible person who (not a spoiler at all) is a major ongoing character in the comics so no way is she going to be killed like she so richly deserves. And most of them barely have personalities at all.

In addition to lousy characterization and dimly-lit, badly-choreographed fight-scenes, the plot has holes big enough to fly the Death Star through. For example, it makes sense that the secret service is trying to cover up a terrible mistake by using these covert and expendable operatives instead of calling on real heroes who would obviously be far more effective. But it makes no sense at all that a gigantic glowing vortex in the middle of a major city that has already resulted in massive casualties wouldn't cause people like Batman and Wonder Woman to show up and help with what is obviously a supernatural situation the government is lying about by trying to pin it on terrorists!

I'm giving this one star as a movie overall, plus half a star each for Will Smith's engaging but incredibly miscast performance, and the funny, sexy, crazy Margo Robbie, who actually belongs in this movie. Oh, and a version of the Joker with sightly less charisma than Gollum is in it too for about five minutes. Batman's in it for nearly as long - shouldn't he be on the poster so they can pretend it's about him? He's got to be a bigger attraction than Captain Boomerang.

This extremely silly thriller occupies an odd no-man's-land between gritty modern crime dramas and Agatha Christie's genteel country house whodunnits. Though to be strictly accurate, it's not so much "whodunnit?" as "who didn't?", with just about the entire cast getting mixed up in the murder that happens five minutes into episode one, some bonus murders that happen later on, or various other bits of criminality, though of course some of the suspects turn out to be red herrings.

Obviously inspired by the superb 1955 movie "Les Diaboliques", it starts off in very similar territory, with an unpleasant husband being murdered, only for doubts to arise almost immediately as to whether or not he's really dead. Luckily for people who've seen "Les Diaboliques" (and if you haven't, you really should), it soon goes off in several other directions, though the theme of confusion as to who exactly is dead at any given moment is revisited somewhat implausibly as the story progresses.

Depending on your age, the name "John Thaw" immediately conjures up one of two tough coppers: Jack Regan from "The Sweeney" or the much better behaved Inspector Morse. So it's a bit disconcerting to see him playing a slimy, murderous, upper-middle-class estate agent. And since he's by far the most important character, it's a pity that he's so completely unlikeable. He also seems very stiff at times, probably because the part requires him to suppress his natural accent and do it all in rather posh BBC English. In fact, there are no genuinely likable characters at all, other than people who aren't on screen long enough to make much of an impression. Even the policeman trying to sort it all out is excessively cold and merciless, though to be fair to him, almost everyone he ever talks to apart from other policemen seems quite likely to be a murderer, and several of them are.

On the plus side, if you can forget how daft some of the plot-twists are, and ignore the way that absolutely everybody seems to be involved in multiple crimes that coincidentally just happen to tie in with one another, it's actually a very ingenious fast-moving thriller that, because of its episodic format, has a duty to surprise you at frequent intervals which it fulfills admirably. It's dated and wildly implausible, but in its own way, it's a lot of fun, and compared to most other BBC productions of the time, nowhere near as creaky as you think it's going to be. Well worth a look if you forget the hype about it being a neglected masterpiece and just want a decent murder mystery that doesn't drag.

Greatly altered from Ernest Hemingway's short story about two hit-men who wonder why their victim doesn't care about dying (the 1964 remake was much more faithful to the source material), in this version, the title characters, after making a memorably nasty impression in the first few minutes, are almost completely absent from the film, and don't even notice that Burt Lancaster is oddly apathetic about being shot dead. By the way, if you remember seventies private eye Frank Cannon, whose trademark was being fat, you might enjoy seeing the actor who played him, William Conrad, as one of the murderers.

Lancaster of course steals the film, as he usually did, despite having surprisingly little screen-time. Although we nowadays remember him as a square-jawed hero, he was always better at playing characters who were somewhere between flawed and irredeemable (he would have made a fantastic Batman). Here he plays a basically good but rather dim-witted boxer drawn to the dark side through a combination of an injury that ends his boxing career and his overwhelming attraction to the irresistibly sultry Ava Gardner, which is definitely lust rather than love, an emotion Lancaster manages to project superbly, despite the Hayes Code meaning that he couldn't say or do very much about it on screen (this film is clearly having fun getting things past the censor - there's even a not-very-veiled reference to heroin addiction), and we truly understand that he's a nice guy who just kind of got swept away by events he wasn't smart enough to think through until it was too late.

Where it falls down is giving us a hero in the unfortunate form of Edmond O'Brien, the insurance investigator who solves the mystery simply because he's an obsessive-compulsive jobsworth with the charisma of a car-park. Whereas a true film noir masterpiece like "Rififi" shows us all the events from the point of view of the people directly involved in them, here we mostly see this dull and totally unsympathetic man interacting with people more interesting than him, and the things that really get our attention nearly all occur in flashbacks. This was probably a deliberate joke on the part of director/scriptwriter Robert Siodmak (who pretty much invented what we nowadays think is the ancient myth of the werewolf), since he goes out of his way to point out at the end that the hero's death-defying exploits have resulted in his insurance company's customers having their next year's premiums reduced by a tenth of one cent, but all the same, it badly undermines the film's appeal to make us spend so much time in the company of the least interesting person in the entire cast.

It's not a bad film. It's just nowhere near as good as it would have been if they'd omitted the central character entirely and let us spend much more time with everybody else.

The backstory: a miniscule Viking tribe consisting entirely of people in their twenties sends all its menfolk off to sea in a random direction for some unexplained reason. Three years later, the women, plus one token man who didn't go on the earlier expedition for no reason that's ever explained, get a bit lonely and go looking for their men. It turns out there's a huge whirlpool patrolled by Nessie within easy rowing distance of their tiny Nordic homeland, and everyone sucked into it either dies, or is cast up exhausted on shore and enslaved by an evil Germanic furry-hatted tribe of whom there appear to about two dozen at most, and made to inefficiently chip rocks in a cardboard cave for no apparent reason.

The frontstory: people who can't act, including the most weary-looking villain you ever saw, whose every moment on screen exudes an air of "please pay me and let me get out of here!", furtle about trying to instill some sort of life into dismal dark-age clichés filmed on a budget of pocket change, and fail miserably. Jonathan Haze almost manages to do something interesting with his rôle as the wimpy son of the incredibly macho chief (I suspect the Monty Python team took notes, and used them in the development of Prince Herbert of Swamp Castle), but the rudimentary script won't let him. And the "Great Sea Serpent" is so briefly present and so cheaply animated that, until some token hastily-tying-up-the-loose-ends scenes at the end, I assumed it was stock footage from another movie.

This is Roger Corman at his laziest and most cynical. Never mind his cult reputation; this movie is obscure for a very good reason: it's absolutely abysmal! On the plus side, it runs for barely more than an hour. But it seems much longer. And not in a good way. Avoid.