Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Making a bad movie isn't difficult. Even the greatest directors have all done it at least once. But it takes a certain kind of perverse genius to make a movie so jaw-droppingly bad that it seems to be a parody of itself. "Candy" achieves this magnificently.

From the trippy cosmic opening sequence revealing our heroine to be an extraterrestrial energy being, which is immediately shown to be untrue, has no bearing on anything, and is never mentioned again, to the closing credits accompanied by a song by the Byrds which is the best thing in the film, partly because it's also the last thing in it, this chaotic hotchpotch of incredibly sexist and even more incredibly sixties nonsense looks like the kind of movie you'd write if you were on serious drugs, which apparently the writers indeed were. One of them has a small part in the film, playing a man who is literally barking mad. The other, the once hugely famous but now largely forgotten comic novelist Terry Southern, was also partly responsible for, amongst other things, "Barbarella" and that bonkers version of "Casino Royale" with David Niven as James Bond. Both of which are high art compared to this film.

Ewa Aulin gets the dreaded "and introducing" credit that usually means "slept with the producer", and sure enough, she's such a dismally lousy actress that when another character drunkenly confuses an inanimate life-size replica of her with the real thing and has sex with it, you can't really blame him. That character is played by Richard Burton, and is apparently meant to be a spoof of Dylan Thomas, though given Burton's problems with booze, it comes across as an alcoholic actor playing a savage caricature of himself. He doesn't look or sound happy, and delivers his lines in such an odd and disjointed way, with long pauses in all the wrong places, that I'm pretty sure he was reading them off the scenery.

John Astin, the original Gomez Addams, gives a surprisingly good performance as Candy's uptight dad and his considerably less uptight twin brother, which is all the more surprising when you count the number of people in this film usually considered to be much greater actors than John Astin who are outperformed by him because they simply can't bring themselves to read these awful lines with conviction. Walter Matthau looks particularly uncomfortable, while Marlon Brando as a very fake Indian guru doesn't appear to be bothering to act at all. Ringo Starr, bizarrely cast as a Mexican, does attempt to act, but he really shouldn't have.

As this stellar cast bumble around looking deeply embarrassed, the plot, such as it is, meanders along by having the title character blunder into weird predicaments where almost every man she meets attempts to grope, seduce, or just plain rape her, and usually succeeds because she's too naïve and stupid to say no. But since this is a sixties movie and therefore has to be arty and satirical, these smutty situations invariably drag in heavy-handed anti-establishment symbolism and end up being as pretentious as they're tasteless. The whole dog's breakfast is rather like "Zardoz" reimagined as a Carry On film, and I don't mean that in a good way. Oddly, considering what it's about this film has remarkably little nudity, presumably in an attempt to avoid the dreaded R certificate.

Possibly worth watching ironically just to persuade yourself that such a thing exists, and it might make an interesting double bill with "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls", which, believe it or not, is a better movie. Marlon Brando later admitted it was the worst film he'd ever been in and he only did it as a favour to a friend. Ewa Aulin went on to land rôles in a few obscure Italian B-movies and an uncredited bit-part in Monty Python. She's the girl who gets jostled by the Hell's Grannies. A fitting capstone to a glorious career.

The general info page, presumably quoting the DVD packaging, would have you believe this sequel is like "The Street Fighter" only more so. The truth is that, like most sequels, it's the warmed-up leftovers of a movie that did unexpectedly well, and in every way it's a lesser film. Even Sonny Chiba's weird tendency to make funny noises and pull faces during fights in a misguided attempt to be more like Bruce Lee is greatly reduced (flashbacks to the previous film make this very obvious), which is one way in which the sequel improves on the original. The other is in giving the inevitable "funny" sidekick far fewer opportunities to be incredibly annoying.

Unfortunately, every ingredient is equally watered down, and mostly this isn't a good thing. The first film was a plotless bloodbath that worked on its own terms by being so outrageous that you didn't particularly care that it made no sense whatsoever. This time around, the hero, or rather anti-hero, isn't quite so rabidly amoral, and the battles, while undoubtedly bloody, aren't quite so gleefully over-the-top (apart from one moment of insane comic-book ultra-violence - you'll definitely know it when you see it). And given the short running-time, there's an awful lot of padding in the form of minor characters doing martial arts training we don't need to see nearly so much of, or plot exposition we don't need because what little plot there is doesn't make a lick of sense.

There are moments, such as the early scenes where our hero casually shows us that being handcuffed and surrounded by cops in a locked room with barred windows inside a police station is only a minor inconvenience to somebody as formidable as him, when it looks like turning into a genre classic. But there aren't enough of them, and when we do get to the big fight scenes without which this film would have absolutely no reason to exist, they're no different from those in the first film, right down to the return of a foe whom we saw explicitly killed (he got better), except that they're not as good and there are fewer of them. As for the story, it's such a mess that it looks almost as though the movie was supposed to be longer, but they ran out of money halfway through and had to suddenly abandon at least one subplot and pointlessly kill a major character plus a few other people who should have had far more to do.

It does give us the surreal spectacle of Sonny Chiba trying to look ruthless while eating a banana, but there are too many dull patches between the strangely pointless fights for it to be very much fun. And unfortunately the misogyny of the first movie still holds sway, with female characters existing only to suffer appalling brutality. In one scene a young child is forced to punch roof tiles until her hands bleed by her father, who is meant to be one of the good guys! This is particularly odd because the girl has no relevance to the plot and doesn't really need to be in the film at all. I'm not sure it's even worthy of two stars, given the number of times I found my attention wandering between battles. When is the world going to catch on that every obscure old B-movie with lots of violence in it isn't necessarily an unjustly neglected masterpiece just because Quentin Tarantino says so?

I've never really associated Mexico with vampires. If I was fatally allergic to sunlight it's the last place I'd want to be, except perhaps Mercury. However, according to this film, you'd be surprised how many Mexican villages have a problem with undead Hungarian noblemen rising from their graves in cloaks and tuxedos. Even the scriptwriter knows this is silly, and tries to get around it with one of those extremely specific bits of folklore movies like this often invent to justify supernatural implausibilities. But it's still silly. Though not as silly as the scenes in which the vampire transforms himself into a bat which inexplicably makes seagull noises. It doesn't help that he bears a striking resemblance to The Amazing Criswell.

This odd little film doesn't quite deserve three stars but the clumsy rating system won't let me give it two and a half. The visual quality of the print is extremely good for such an obscure old movie, and you have the options of English dubbing or the original Spanish with subtitles. Unfortunately, even in Spanish the acting ranges from entertainingly hammy, especially the two vampires, to barely adequate, apart from Abel Salazar as the hero, who is simply appalling. He's obviously trying, unsuccessfully, to channel Bob Hope's performance in "The Cat And The Canary" although that was a black comedy and this is supposed to be a serious horror film. Talking of which, I have absolutely no idea why it has an 18 certificate. One brief scene of the vampire attacking a child perhaps pushes it marginally into the 15 bracket, but otherwise it's barely even a 12.

It's not a completely dreadful film, but I can't honestly say it's good. The mist-shrouded sets are well designed and contribute more to the atmosphere than most of the cast do, it does sometimes achieve a moderate degree of creepiness, and there are even a couple of mild shocks. But it's terribly old-fashioned even for 1957, its two main influences being a 1939 Bob Hope comedy and Bela Lugosi's "Dracula" from 1931. It's hard to believe this film came out only a year before Christopher Lee made vampires truly scary again.

It's saddled with a script which completely forgets about one major subplot and often struggles to make any sense at all. Its leading man can't act, and thinks he's in a comedy even though the rest of the cast don't and the scriptwriter hasn't given him any actual jokes. It doesn't help matters that his leading lady can't act either and obviously finds him roughly as attractive as a lump of cold sick. And it could do with a bit less footage of people standing around trying to arrive at screamingly obvious conclusions the audience figured out half an hour ago, and a bit more actual horror. Still, if you're curious to see what a Mexican vampire movie is like, it's worth a look. And the bats doing seagull impressions are hilarious. Though you may be disappointed by the lack of masked wrestlers.

If you've ever wondered why hippies were sometimes called the beautiful people, here's your answer. They're all gorgeous, especially the girls, of whom we see a lot more than the boys, especially the very lovely Jane Birkin, often in various degrees of undress. Other good-looking flower children pop up from time to time, mostly played by briefly trendy Dutch hippie art collective The Fool. Their groovy clothes (designed by The Fool) are simply fabulous. The wildly overdecorated apartment Jane and her boyfriend inhabit (interior decoration by The Fool) is as amazing to look at as it would be exhausting to live in. And a lonely old man longingly spies on all these wonders, but mostly on Jane, through holes he's drilled in the wall. He sees wonders through a wall. Wonderwall. Get it?

Basically, this is a mash-up of two films, one of which has almost no plot except a little bit at the end because it's just a long advert for The Fool, and the other has almost no plot except a little bit at the end because it's about an emotionally stunted Einstein lookalike watching the first film and wishing he was in it. The fact that this character is played by Jack MacGowran, who was best known at the time for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett, suggests that the movie was trying to say something profound about the human condition, but the deepest message it manages to impart is that being an oversexed young hippie is more fun than being an undersexed old microbiologist, and you get to wear much groovier clothes.

Obviously influenced by "Peeping Tom" and "Repulsion" but completely in the dark about why those films are considered great, the movie blunders randomly from clumsily symbolic angst to zany imagery inspired by "Help!" that looks like deleted scenes from a substandard episode of "The Monkees". The professor spies on the gorgeous hippie chick doing a scantily-clad Vogue fashion shoot! The professor has a meltdown and gets a bit shirty with the charwoman! The professor puts on fancy dress and runs about in a field next to a motorway attacking Hippie Chick's boyfriend with huge replicas of everyday objects like a Silver Age Batman villain! No, wait, that was a dream! How zany is that! Are you having fun yet?

If you're on serious drugs, probably. You might even be enjoying George Harrison's score, which, since this is 1968 and neither John nor Paul is involved, consists of shapeless sitar noodlings with no discernible tune and the odd snatch of backwards guitar because hey man, that's really far out! If you're not on drugs at all, you could probably experience everything good about this film in a much shorter time by flicking through a 50-year-old copy of Vogue, or simply by googling photos of Jane Birkin. The DVD has two versions of the movie on it, but I have no idea how the director's cut differs from the theatrical release because I haven't the slightest desire to watch this sometimes decorative but extremely tedious film ever again, and I certainly don't want to see it twice on the same day. Unless you're stoned out of your skull and/or unhealthy obsessed with Jane Birkin, the most enjoyable thing about watching this movie is spotting all the similarities to "Eraserhead" and wondering if they're purely coincidental, or maybe, just maybe, David Lynch did a heavily disguised stealth remake but will never, ever admit it.

Firstly, a technical note to clear up any confusion the DVD info given here might cause. It appears to refer to a more expensive DVD than the one you'll actually be sent, which doesn't have most of the special features mentioned, many of which are supposedly on a bonus disc which doesn't exist. And, as the previous reviewer furiously noted, although it claims here that you have the option of watching this Italian film in Italian, badly dubbed English is what you get. Judging by the credits, this appears to be the soundtrack recorded in Italy for the first US release that Roger Corman thought was so poor he recorded his own version, which presumably wasn't used on this DVD because it was for a print with so much violence cut that it was several minutes shorter.

Though actually the dubbing isn't really that bad apart from the leading man, and looking at him I got the impression that even with his own voice he probably wasn't the world's greatest actor. In films like this the handsome young hero is always the least interesting character, and Mario Bava was even less interested in him than most horror directors. This film starts a trend Bava would explore more fully a few years later in the very similar "Kill, Baby, Kill" for the male hero to spend most of the movie utterly bewildered while supernaturally dominant women run rings around him and generally steal the film.

Which Barbara Steele certainly does in the dual rôles of the innocent Princess Katia and her far-from-innocent lookalike ancestor Asa, who, in a prologue so nasty it got the film banned in the UK until 1968, was put to death for witchcraft, Satanism, vampirism, and being the lover of her own brother (something the English soundtrack never mentions, but why else do you think her descendants have his portrait as well as hers in their living room, and he has their family crest on his shirt?).

It's Steele's surprisingly limited screen-time as the demonic Asa, who has clung to some kind of life for 200 years inside a body only slightly better preserved than centuries-old cadavers usually are, that gives the film its power. That and imagery which exceeds even the new horror benchmarks recently set by Hammer in its graphic unpleasantness, especially the early scenes showing the very start of Asa's torturously protracted resurrection, which leave us in no doubt at all that she's is a putrid husk.

Unfortunately it waters down the surreal creepiness of the main plot thread, in which Katia and the rest of her glumly fatalistic clan live in opulent misery under the shadow of a curse which seems to be, as the perils in nightmares always are, excruciatingly slow-moving yet totally inescapable, by spending far too much time following the strangely pointless attempts of the wooden hero to figure it all out, and his tedious but inevitable romance with the gloomy Katia, who's supposed to be gorgeous but looks almost as off-puttingly weird as her evil undead doppelganger because Barbara Steele can't help it. If she was in movies today I'd suspect them of using CGI to make her eyes just a little bit too big, causing her face to slide into Uncanny Valley, but they couldn't do that in 1960 so she must really have looked like that. No wonder she ended up being typecast as a horror heroine.

It's not quite the masterpiece some people claim, more a patchwork of bizarre incidents and grotesque imagery that will stay with you for a long time, embedded in a story which could sometimes do with shifting up a couple of gears. But the best scenes are still very disturbing, and back in the day it must have knocked the socks off cinemagoers who had only just gotten used to horror movies actually daring to be a bit horrific, and then this came along in the same year that the even more excessive "Les Yeux Sans Visage" had audiences literally throwing up in the aisles at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Things would never be the same again.

I'm not sure this film is even worth two stars, but since that's the only score between "pretty good" and "utterly putrid" this site's clumsy rating system will allow me to give it, two stars it is, though one and a half is what it really deserves.

The biggest problem is Peter Cook, who at the time was predicted to have a glittering Hollywood career ahead of him. Show-biz gossip columns called him the new Cary Grant. And then he made this film, and it became horribly apparent that he couldn't act. His performance is so flat that it's less a performance than a Peter-Cook-shaped hole in the movie. There's one moment when he expresses the kind of sinister intensity that would have brought the film to life, but it's literally the last shot in the film, which is a bit late to suddenly start acting. Otherwise he only displays slight flickers of interest when he's romancing Vanessa Howard.

Poor Vanessa Howard. After a few bit-parts in Hammer horrors, her big break was supposed to be this film, followed by top billing in the barking mad "Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly", but they both flopped dismally for reasons that weren't her fault, and that was pretty much it as far as acting went for a lady who should have been a star, but undeservedly sank into such obscurity that this site's general info page thinks her name is Vanessa Leon.

She's not the only actor short-changed by this movie. John Cleese plays a desperately eager-to-please advertising executive whose real passion is ballroom dancing, a charmingly odd character who soon vanishes in favour of crudely caricatured politicians and other nasty establishment stereotypes. Arthur Lowe is a lecherous buffoon who gets sidelined the moment the focus shifts from the early scenes set in an advertising agency to politics. And Graham Chapman just stands around smoking a pipe as if he can't think what to do with himself in this scene even though he wrote it.

Which isn't all that surprising, given that the script is as sub-Pythonesque as you'd expect from a couple of pre-Pythons who were still trying to invent the brand and didn't have two-thirds of the team on board yet. The only real laugh-out-loud moment is a ludicrously oversexed advert for peppermints which has very little to do with anything, and is probably funnier if you're old enough to remember those bizarrely sensual Cadbury's Flake ads ("Only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate..."). It's the kind of film in which a character called Peter Niss (get it?) is referred to by his full name disproportionately often because that's the best verbal gag they could come up with so they have to make the most of it.

But what really kills it stone dead is its cardboard anti-hero. If the plot had been similar to "Being There", with everyone somehow mistaking a nonentity for a charismatic visionary, it might have worked, but the writers obviously thought Peter Cook would be able to display devilishly irresistible charisma on screen, and the fact that he can't leaves everybody else behaving as if he has qualities he doesn't for no reason at all. I was reminded of those behind-the-scenes clips where the CGI character hasn't been inserted yet, so the live actors have to pretend to be tremendously impressed by a lump of polystyrene on a stick. The only movie Peter Cook starred in after this was the Paul Morrissey version of "The Hound of the Baskervilles", of which the less said the better. Dudley Moore did all right though. He's not in this movie. Perhaps that helped.

Pete & Dud may have been the greatest comedy double act of the sixties, but like so many comedians who are hugely successful on telly, they never quite managed to break into the movies. Dudley Moore did all right by himself much later on, but Peter Cook simply couldn't act, except in that exaggerated style which is fine for sketches but in a movie is just plain embarrassing. The only other movie the duo appeared in together, apart from a few cameos and the abysmal feature-length documentary "Derek & Clive Get The Horn", was the truly appalling "The Hound Of The Baskervilles", one of the few films with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of zero.

Which makes it all the more surprising that this hilarious modern reboot of the legend of Faust and Mephistopheles works so well. As the hapless Stanley Moon, Dudley Moore is quite likeable in his usual gormless fashion, but Peter Cook, who wrote the script and naturally gave himself all the best lines, is diabolically good as a relentlessly wicked but ultimately rather pathetic Satan. The main reason it works is that the episodic plot, in which Stanley ham-fistedly tries to use the seven wishes he swapped his soul for to win the heart of the woman he's hopelessly in love with, allows everything, including the personalities of the main characters, to change completely every few minutes, in effect turning the movie into a sketch show of the kind Pete & Dud excelled at.

A special mention must go to Eleanor Bron as the unsuspecting object of Stanley's affections. Although it's billed as a Cook & Moore film, it's really a three-hander with Ms. Bron as the only other significant recurring character, who, since she's blissfully unaware of the way reality keeps transforming with her at the epicentre, switches personalities even more drastically than the other two, and ends up being everything from a nymphomaniac to a nun. Of course she goes wildly over the top, but she does it very well indeed. And I got the impression she had a lot of fun doing it.

But what's most surprising and interesting about the film is the way it capitalises on its own deficiencies. Cook's stilted and wildly uneven acting doesn't matter when he's playing a bewilderingly mercurial and utterly non-human Prince of Darkness; if David Bowie had turned the part down, Peter Cook might just possibly have made a very convincing Man Who Fell To Earth. Even his total inability to sing is put to good use in a weirdly catchy musical number sending up pretentious pop stars. And if you can't afford special effects, it makes perfect sense for the Devil's base of operations in London to be a dismal nightclub which is actually a feeble manifestation of Hell, and whose hopelessly inefficient staff are bargain-bin avatars of the Seven Deadly Sins.

It's not a perfect film by any means. It's too episodic to hang together as well as it should, some of the less successful sketches go on a bit too long, Cook's performance is so erratic that sometimes it ends up on the wrong side of the line between strange and just plain bad, and the one time it tries to use any seriously special effects, they're so unspecial they're downright embarrassing. But the truly funny moments are very funny indeed, and there are plenty of them. It also pulls off the rare trick of being about religion without ever getting the slightest bit preachy. If you want to know how good this unassuming little film really is, try watching it as a double bill with the 2000 remake which, taking inflation into account, cost 15 times as much, yet strangely isn't 15 times as funny. In fact, it would be more accurate to say it's the other way round. If only Pete & Dud had made a Justice League movie...

One of the things people often forget about spaghetti westerns is how political they were. For some reason a disproportionate number of the directors of these films were extreme left-wingers who tried to include their ideology in their movies, with mixed results. It's perfectly natural for characters in a movie set during the Mexican revolution to be anti-capitalist, but the director must never forget that 99% of the audience paid to watch an impossibly lethal gunfighter shoot the rest of the cast to smithereens, not listen to speeches about politics of any kind.

Sergio Sollima (there were also a disproportionate number of spaghetti western directors called Sergio) doesn't quite pull off the required balancing act in this over-preachy parable about a mild-mannered history professor with TB who goes west in the hope that a drier climate will improve his health, gets mixed up with outlaws, and discovers the joys of doing, for the first time in his sheltered life, what a man's gotta do. Unfortunately he gets a wee bit carried away and turns into Hitler.

Gian Maria Volontè, best known for playing Clint Eastwood's deadliest adversaries in both the "Dollars" movies, dominates the film as Professor Fletcher, and though he does overact at times, he's a good enough actor to bring a bit of depth to his part, unlike his co-star Tomas Milian, best known for starring in the infamous "Django Kill!". Milian is adequate when it comes to looking mean and ornery, but it's hard to see why so many other characters find him irresistibly charismatic. And what's with that haircut? He looks like the bassist from Spinal Tap! It doesn't help that his character is called Beauregard. Or indeed that his girlfriend is a dead ringer for the young David Bowie. He'd be fine in a more typically daft spaghetti western where all the hero wants is revenge or some gold or something and there are usually acrobats involved for no reason at all, but in a movie this serious he seems a bit lost.

It's also plotted in an oddly lopsided way, as if it was meant to be significantly longer but the money ran out and they had to cut a lot of scenes towards the end. Professor Fletcher's rise from total obscurity to being the most wanted and feared outlaw in the west seems to happen overnight, on the strength of precisely one robbery that wasn't what you could honestly call an unqualified success. And how exactly does Beauregard get out of jail? There's certainly one event which would have been the dramatic high point of the entire movie if we'd actually seen it, but it would also have been very expensive to film, which is no doubt why it happens offscreen, considerably diluting the power of the message the director is trying so hard to put across.

As the story of a doomed friendship between two very different men who learn both good and bad life lessons from each other it works fairly well, but the professor's transformation from a kindly, mild-mannered wimp into a murderous psychopathic rapist who thinks he's Professor Moriarty mashed up with Alexander the Great is a bit much to swallow. "A Bullet For The General", made the previous year and also starring Gian Maria Volontè, is a very similar film indeed, but it does a much better job of not letting its serious political point get in the way of the story, and when it promises you a battle, it jolly well gives you one! Whereas this is an ambitious, well-meaning, and peculiarly disjointed film that doesn't quite hit its marks. It has a bit of a cult reputation, but I suspect that most of its fans are applauding its trendy politics rather than its middling quality as a western.

Yes, it's another of those movies billed as a "classic" by the folks round here, who, as far as I can tell, think that word applies to any film whose own packaging says it's a classic (so presumably they think the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy?), every film on the infamous "video nasties" list, and every movie ever made by Italians. This movie was undoubtedly made by Italians, so by the in-house definition it must be a classic. As usual, by everybody else's definition it's the exact opposite.

From the director of "Requiscant", a misfiring spaghetti western about a borderline retarded holy fool who wins gunfights mostly thanks to divine intervention which somehow forgot to be a comedy, comes further proof that if you haven't got the slightest idea how to film action in general and gunfights in particular, you really shouldn't make westerns. Some of the cinematography is so odd I assumed the film was shot in 3D, but apparently it wasn't, so presumably Carlo Lizzani (credited as "Lee W. Beaver" in an attempt to persuade American audiences the movie wasn't foreign) believed that if he included enough extreme close-ups of faces and other random objects looming into the camera lens at peculiar angles, it would look like a Sergio Leone film. Predictably, it doesn't.

Though it sounds a lot like one, in an "Ennio Morricone on a day when he simply couldn't be bothered" kind of way. In fact, it sounds so much like an exceptionally bad Morricone score that I looked it up, and that's exactly what it is. Presumably it was at his own request that his name was omitted from the credits. Which sums up everything wrong with the movie. Thomas Hunter, in his first major rôle and hoping to make the breakthrough into stardom (he didn't) is absolutely appalling. He would have been perfectly cast as one of the many slimy varmints gunned down by the hero, but inexplicably he plays the hero. Henry Silva and Dan Duryea, both well-known and thoroughly dependable western character actors who appeared in some genuine classic westerns alongside the likes of Randolph Scott, clearly know they're in a film so bad it's not worth making any attempt to save it. Duryea, who has very little to do except at the end and is completely absent from most of the film, seems to be trying not to laugh and only just succeeding, while Silva delivers a performance so over the top that it's the only truly entertaining thing in the film, though I very much doubt that Lizzani/Beaver directed Silva to act like a parody of himself. And everybody else acts about as well as the supporting cast in badly-dubbed spaghetti westerns usually do.

People get killed in various ways, dynamite explodes, horses thunder about, and so on, but it doesn't really add up to anything except a list of ticked boxes. The overall feel is that it was made by a director who, if he was a chef, would think the secret of good cookery is to chuck all the ingredients straight in a casserole, bung it in the oven, et voila! If this movie was a meal, even the fruit salad would involve unpeeled fruit, and the chicken wouldn't bear thinking about. Luckily you don't have to eat it, just watch it. In fact, you don't even have to do that if you don't want to, so you probably shouldn't. One more thing. If you're familiar with the name "Dino De Laurentiis", you might find it useful to know that he produced this film. If you're not, you might find it useful to know that in the movie industry he was nicknamed "Dino De Horrendous". Enough said...

It used to be an unofficial tradition that when popular entertainers at the BBC slipped off the A-list and their contracts weren't renewed, they'd be snapped up by ITV for whom they'd squeeze out a last-gasp series or two. It happened to Morecambe & Wise, it happened to the Goodies, and here, alas, we see it happening to Pete & Dud. Unlike those fading comedy teams, Dud's greatest success was still ahead of him, though poor old Pete never quite recovered. But the partnership was on the rocks, and it shows.

Another problem is that when these shows came out, a bunch of lads calling themselves Monty Python had just turned television comedy inside out and tied a few knots in it, and everybody wanted to be like them. Pete & Dud were not Monty Python and never would be no matter how hard they tried, and here we see them proving it. They try so hard to be Pythonesque that they even steal the concept of "senile delinquents" from the Python "Hell's Grannies" sketch, complete with Dud blatantly copying Terry Jones' "Mrs. Ratbag" voice. And it simply doesn't work.

Possibly this DVD doesn't really do the show justice. Apparently it was compiled from an archive of material previously thought to be deleted that turned up unexpectedly, and it's not clear whether this was the entire run of the series or just a random selection of reels, so perhaps it's not so much "The Best Of" as "The Best Of What Was Left After The Real 'Best Of' Had Been Lost Forever". But if this was the "very best" of however much was left, I'd hate to sit through the worst! The most ambitious sketches tend to go on too long and are more peculiar than funny, while the sketches that do more or less work are mostly "Dagenham Dialogues" just like the ones in their previous BBC series. Though even on this familiar ground they're struggling a bit, since one of these is a rehash of their famous routine about being stalked by gorgeous movie stars who are allegedly in love with them, only not as funny.

The technical presentation is a bit of a muddle too, which doesn't help. Location footage has been preserved on high-quality colour film stock while studio scenes are on grainy black-and-white videotape, so the DVD lurches from one to the other at odd moments, once in the middle of a sketch. Some sketches follow on from each other so randomly that it's impossible to tell whether they were meant to be shown in that order, while the gap between others is filled by ageing B-list celebs who pop up to tell us what brilliant comedians Pete & Dud were, or how funny the sketch we've just seen was, almost as if they're afraid we might not know without being told. One of these blathering fogeys cuts in very abruptly to burble about the brilliance of the joke we heard a few seconds ago, and we never do get to see the end of the sketch he interrupted.

Pete & Dud at their best were very funny indeed, and this isn't by any means their worst (that would probably be "The Hound Of The Baskervilles", a movie which has to be seen to be believed, and if you do you'll wish you hadn't), so there are amusing moments here and there, but this is the tail-end of a franchise which, like so many others, should have called it a day sooner. Even the studio audience don't sound all that enthusiastic. I can't say I blame them.

Sergio Corbucci and Franco Nero will always be best known as the director and star of "Django", which was essentially "A Fistful Of Dollars" remade with added ultra-violence. Here they try something similar by more or less ripping off "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" with added Surrealism. Franco Nero is bizarrely cast as a Polish mercenary, mainly so that he can get away with wearing clothes and facial hair appropriate for European high society (apparently he's a friend of the composer Frederic Chopin) in revolutionary Mexico. Though at one point he finds an excuse to disguise himself as an angel, in a scene which also involves a crucified bearded lady with a halo and a machine gun. I'm not making this up, honest!

Talking of strangely dressed characters, according to legend, Jack Palance liked to buy his movie costumes, but after "Shane" led to him being horribly typecast he ended up with far too many identical black evil cowboy outfits. So when Sergio Corbucci approached him to play yet another western baddie, he asked if his character could somehow wear a variety of stylish tuxedos for a change. Which is why the psychopathic Curly is a flamboyant homosexual, complete with a green carnation in his buttonhole like Oscar Wilde and a boyfriend called Sebastian. Like I said, this is NOT your usual western! Did I mention the gunfighting clown? Yes, really...

It's not a perfect movie by any means. Tony Musante, a second-rate actor who would later be incredibly annoying in "The Pope Of Greenwich Village", is nowhere near as bad here in the clichéd rôle of the selfishly anarchic Mexican who eventually learns the true meaning of revolution, but he's still a wee bit irritating. Franco Nero's amoral Pole isn't really a character at all, just a string of plot devices whose personality changes at random intervals to give everybody else a reason to like or dislike him as required by the script. The chaotic, massively destructive action is magnificent whenever it gets properly going, but it flags in the middle, presumably because blowing up a town every ten minutes would have been too expensive if they'd kept doing it throughout the movie. And Jack Palance must have been even more expensive, since Curly is barely in the film compared with the other two, though he almost manages to steal it anyway. We could have done with less Tony Musante and more Jack Palance, the only western villain I can think of who likes killing people so much that he's obviously sexually aroused by it.

Still, if you don't mind a western featuring terrible dubbing, variable acting, a complete absence of logic, clowns, and a Jack Palance nude scene, this barking mad excuse for Italians to cause as much damage to the scenery and each other as they possibly can should certainly keep you entertained for an hour and three-quarters. And it's got one of Ennio Morricone's better scores too.

This two-film franchise tends to be dismissed as a joke because of Blacula's name, but, like "Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde", a ludicrous title unfairly detracts from a surprisingly good film. The best thing about it by far is William Marshall, who I wish had been lent to Hammer to co-star with Christopher Lee, since he's the only screen vampire of the seventies who had the same dark charisma and feral intensity as Lee's Count, and in a showdown between those two it's anybody's guess who'd win. In fact, along with Lee's Dracula and Max Shreck's Count Orlok from "Nosferatu", Marshall's Blacula might just be one of the top three cinematic vampires of all time.

Though strictly speaking he's a bit of a movie monster mash-up. Of course he's a vampire, but he's also got elements of the werewolf, in that unlike Dracula he's a good man cursed through no fault of his own with an evil secondary personality he can't control who desperately wants to be cured if it's possible, which is a major sub-plot in the second film. And he's very like the mummy as well, since after being buried for centuries he's barely had time to find out what year it is now before he runs into some girl who just happens to be either the exact double of his long-lost love or her actual reincarnation, so his primary motivation is tragic romance rather than simply biting people 'cos he's evil.

It's not without its flaws, including some very peculiar vampire makeup. Bringing undead pallor to the skins of a mostly black cast obviously set the makeup man a huge challenge, but he really shouldn't have saved money by using the same batch on the white vampires, on whom it's so excessive that they look like zombies in a home movie George Romero made when he was 13. And the inevitably schizoid results of mashing up gothic horror with blaxploitation mean that the scenes in which everybody is being very seventies and very black tend to have not much to do with vampires, while in the scariest and goriest supernatural scenes the actors' ethnicity is mostly irrelevant. But it compares very favourably indeed with Hammer's attempt to do something similar in the awful "Dracula AD 1972", where the poor old Count looks utterly lost, and as sick of it all as Christopher Lee really was by then. Whereas Blacula can walk into a Harlem nightclub wearing a tuxedo and an opera cape and still be by far the coolest person in the room, thanks to the extraordinary screen presence of William Marshall, who in his less feral scenes reminded me a lot of James Mason.

Overall, it's a rather silly but satisfactorily bloody and sometimes genuinely creepy horror double bill that has the wisdom not to try too hard to be anything other than trash (it was after all made by AIP, whose most prolific in-house director was Roger Corman), yet manages to be very good trash indeed thanks to a superb central performance from an actor who must have been horribly typecast by these two films otherwise I'm sure we'd have a seen a lot more of him in less bizarre rôles. And since it was made almost half a century ago, the stereotypical soundtrack it has to have because it's about black people consists of disco and funk, not the hideous din we'd be forced to endure nowadays.

This disc is a mixed bag of sketches from a comedy duo nowadays remembered mainly for their appallingly foul-mouthed alter egos Derek and Clive (not featured on this DVD), but who were absolutely huge back in the day, dominating the cutting edge of British comedy in the decade between the disbanding of the Goons and the rise of the Pythons. Unfortunately this was the era when the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, used to wipe master tapes to save money and storage space, so a great deal of their television work has been lost forever, and this is supposedly the best of what's left.

I say "supposedly" because some of the sketches are odd choices. Whoever wrote the General Info obviously didn't bother to watch the disc and mentioned Peter Cook's very popular upper-class twit character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling on the assumption that he'd surely be included in a compilation like this. But he isn't, so you'll look in vain for "Frog & Peach", or the sketch about teaching ravens to fly underwater. Instead we get a version of "Bo Duddley" which is nowhere near as good as the one on "Derek & Clive Live" because they couldn't go that far on television, a weird portrayal of Beethoven as a pop star which looks like an outtake from "Lisztomania" but seems more concerned with showcasing Dud's genuine musical talent than being funny (though it's worth it for the sight of Pete's Wordsworth surrounded by very sixties dancing daffodils), and a spoof of British arthouse cinema which goes on far too long and won't be properly appreciated by anyone who hasn't seen "The Lion In Winter", a film the general public would have been much more familiar with 50 years ago than they are now.

However, we do get several of the legendary Dagenham Dialogues, including the first, in which these two dim-witted nonentities somehow convince themselves that they're being stalked by rampant hordes of the sexiest women in Hollywood, and the most quotable, "Art Gallery", which spawned the once-popular meme "that could confuse a stupid person". Though I wish they'd left out the clip of them trying to recreate the old magic 20 years on, in which it's painfully obvious they don't like each other very much.

We also get a merciless and therefore hilarious spoof of "Thunderbirds" which might well be the high point of the disc, and "The Glidd Of Glood", a bizarre fairy tale left over from Peter Cook's abandoned attempt to write a book for small children, which looks like a clip from an early Terry Gilliam film shot in a parallel universe where he realised that "Jabberwocky" had a lousy script and made this movie instead. I wish he had. And if you can still remember who Greta Garbo was, Pete's savage parody of the Swedish Siren is both very funny and slightly scary, as his comedy characters often were. If he was doing his drag act today, he'd be the perfect deranged gal pal for Pauline Calf.

Several "Best Of..." compilations put out by different companies exist for this series, all of which feature the same obvious choices and an apparently random selection of other material, but this is a perfectly decent greatest hits album where the ratio of genuinely superb to not-so-great comedy is pretty good, and there's nothing terrible, apart from a thankfully brief sketch that isn't from the original series and shouldn't be on this disc. Otherwise it's a fine introduction to the legacy of two comedy greats who aren't quite as well remembered nowadays as they should be. I'd give it three and a half stars if this site's rating system wasn't too clumsy to allow such fine tuning, but when they're at their best, Pete & Dud are so good I have to award them four stars rather than three.

This film is notorious for two things; being one of the most baffling movies ever made, and also one of the most pretentious. Which would normally damn a film to richly deserved oblivion, but since it commits both these cinematic crimes on purpose, it gets a pardon for its sheer audacity. Besides which in technical terms it's a very good film indeed, which always helps.

What may put viewers off is the unrelenting oddness. It's one of the very few movies to successfully capture the paranoid unease of those anxiety dreams that slowly but inescapably turn into nightmares. Perhaps it takes place in the same world as "Eraserhead", and while the hapless Henry is trying to cope with his mutant baby, on the other side of the Atlantic his marginally more fortunate upper-class cousins are having a holiday that isn't nearly as much fun as it should be. It certainly inhabits the same twilight zone as that oddest of B-movies "Carnival Of Souls", which is near-as-dammit a remake in the style of Roger Corman on an Ed Wood budget, right down to a soundtrack featuring almost the same relentlessly disturbing atonal organ music.

From the very first scene, in which characters who talk in an absurdly stilted fashion are revealed to be actors in a pretentious play being watched by the real cast of the film, who then turn out to behave just as unnaturally as the actors without apparently being aware that they're doing anything unusual, it's clear that something very odd indeed is going on. But what exactly? One character is obviously meant to remind us of both Cesare the Somnambulist from "The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari" and the chess-playing Grim Reaper from "The Seventh Seal", so does it all take place in the mind of a lunatic, or is everybody dead? We are, eventually, given a strong hint that one possible explanation is more probable than any other, but it's still so full of holes that the real truth may be even weirder and totally unguessable, if there is one at all.

Although it's an extraordinary piece of work, it's not quite a masterpiece, mainly because the complete artificiality of everyone in it and everything that happens to them makes it hard to care about these people, if they are people rather than pieces in a game whose rules we're never told. Like a complex and baffling stage magic performance, such plot as there is exists purely as a framing device for the illusions, making the film so cold at heart that even the characters in it frequently mention how chilly it is for the time of year. But the web of weirdness these pawns are trapped in is so compellingly bizarre that it's no wonder numerous other movies have borrowed its stylistic flourishes, from "The Shining" (film buffs will have fun spotting all the little bits Kubrick pinched) to its alleged influence on Dario Argento's "Inferno", and distinct similarities with "Jacob's Ladder" and "Berberian Sound Studio".

Delphine Seyrig would definitely be crowned Queen of Weird Arthouse Movies if there was such a thing, having worked with everyone from Luis Buñuel to Jack Kerouac and starred in a lesbian vampire film, but this movie is odd even by her standards. Therefore it's highly recommended to anyone who loves incredibly strange films. Viewers with more conventional tastes should watch it in a group. That way, even if you hate the film, you can still have fun arguing about what it was about. But be warned: the argument may end up being quite a bit longer than the film.

Blimey, this forgettable little straight-to-DVD cheapo "Tremors" rip-off got five stars from the in-house critic? I can only assume bribery was involved. That or she's the director's wife, daughter, or mother.

A small, isolated rural community is suddenly besieged by tentacled monsters that grab people, and are therefore called "grabbers". Not "graboids", because this isn't "Tremors" at all, good heavens no! It's a completely different film in every conceivable way! Well, it's slightly different in several ways. Such as being unable to afford Fred Ward, let alone Kevin Bacon. It's also set in a country with very strict gun laws, which results in by far the funniest running gag; the locals arm themselves as best they can, and end up with a fearsome arsenal that would be barely adequate if they were trying to fight off nervous kittens, let alone giant vampire space squids.

Unfortunately the other novel feature of the plot, the allergy of the monsters to alcohol, is massively overused in tediously predictable ways. In particular, the endless scenes of the islanders drunkenly partying in an effort to render themselves inedible. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, the hero's a recovering alcoholic - now there's a surprise! Equally unsurprising is the cheapness of the CGI, resulting in weightless-looking monsters that wouldn't cut the mustard on "Doctor Who".

It's not completely dreadful, but it struggles unsuccessfully to achieve the difficult balance between comedy and horror that "Tremors" got exactly right, and ultimately there's so little to it that it would have worked better as a half-hour sitcom pastiche along the lines of that "Father Ted" episode that spoofed "Speed". In fact, if Father Ted had somehow wandered into this movie and blown up the space squids with his exploding milk-float, it would have been just as plausible as what really happens, and much funnier. The best I can say about it is that at least it's better than all those increasingly dire sequels "Tremors" didn't need but got anyway.