Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Once upon a time, Roger Corman was the ultra-prolific king of the B-movies. Although he's still alive, and still being credited as executive producer (whatever that means) of films like "Sharktopus", it's a long, long time since he directed anything, and this film pretty much marks the exact moment when he ran out of steam.

This is a counter-culture movie cynically thrown together by somebody who was always painting by numbers when it came to that kind of thing. Imagine a rip-off of "Head" without the Monkees, 90% of the budget, or 99% of the imagination, but with a soundtrack and a brief in-concert cameo by Country Joe and the Fish (obviously filmed separately from the rest of the movie, and very badly), major participation from Talia Shire (demonstrating exactly why A-list directors who cast their daughters in "The Godfather Part II" should have hired an actress instead), and the kind of humor you'd expect from a 44-year-old man taking that "don't trust anyone over 25" hippy mantra so literally that in this film, being over 25 equals being dead, in the belief that this will automatically make those young whippersnappers with their long hair and funny clothes go see it.

Corman clearly neither understands nor approves of the lifestyle he's pretending to pander to. He misses the point to the extent of including jokes about vegetarians becoming delirious from malnutrition unless they grow out of their silly food-fad and adopt a partially meat-based diet, and liberated women enjoying sex so much that multiple rapists collapse from exhaustion. Whether your political sympathies are with Tim Leary or Richard Nixon, it's an undeniable objective fact that a film which sneers at its target audience in the belief that they're so stupid they won't notice is a bad film by anyone's standards. Therefore this is a very bad film indeed.

Did I mention the atrocious improv-style acting? The irritating funny voices often used in lieu of actual humor? Or the impression that a director who would shortly give up directing already had, and the whole sorry mess was lumbering along without him? This movie is so misconceived that it's not even unintentionally hilarious in a "Reefer Madness" kind of way, it's just plain dreadful.

On the plus side, as feature films go, it's really short.

Robert Aldrich is one of those directors who had an enormous influence on cinema as we know it today, and yet nobody talks about him very much any more, except as that guy who made "The Dirty Dozen". Which is unfair, because he was in many ways as important as we currently think Quentin Tarantino is, only he had most of the same ideas first, and he wasn't a horribly annoying self-obsessed kidult who will never grow up.

Unfortunately this isn't one of his best films. Aldrich was always most interested in characters covering the full gamut of villainy, from flawed heroes to irredeemable bastards ("The Dirty Dozen" is basically an excuse to put every stereotype he ever cared about in one movie, which is probably why it worked so well). Here we see his remake of "No Orchids For Miss Blandish", a novel which 70 years ago was the "American Psycho" of its day, only more so because we weren't used to that sort of thing yet. It's basically "Romeo and Juliet" mashed up with "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - a spoiled little rich girl ends up in the clutches of a mentally retarded psychopath, his viciously depraved mother, and the other thugs who comprise their "family". The twist is that the craziest of the crazies falls in love with her, and if she can fake liking him well enough, she'll stay alive long after they really ought to get rid of her. How far will she go to live? And what are the chances that she'll start to genuinely like him along the way?

This ought to be perfect Robert Aldrich material. Where he goes wrong is in giving us a cast of almost uniformly horrible people without the film noir stylization needed to render these awful characters bearable. Scott Wilson (who is not officially Ed Norton's dad, but there's such a resemblance that you have to wonder) is grotesquely repellent as the horrendous Slim Grissom, and Kim Darby panics efficiently and looks suitably spoiled as the damsel in distress, but by the time they begin to show real human feelings, it's too late for us to care very much. The few characters who actually have a heart are kept mostly on the sidelines, and in the end, although the whole thing is extremely well done in its way (apart from some of the acting - Ma Grissom in particular is basically the wicked witch who tried to eat Hansel and Gretel), it's all too unpleasant to be genuinely involving. In terms of the sheer volume of sweat on display, this is one of the sweatiest films you'll ever see, and that goes for every other aspect of it too.

In its own way it's kind of good, yet oddly uninvolving. To see Robert Aldrich putting the jigsaw together just right in a film about nasty, sleazy people getting it all horribly wrong in a strangely fascinating way, see that wondrous cult classic "Kiss Me Deadly". It's actually a lot nastier than this film, but at the same time, a lot more fun.

Rather like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (especially the TV version with Sir Alec Guinness), this film centers around an emotionally stunted man whose job renders him occupationally paranoid. But unlike George Smiley, our hero's function is completely negative; he's a secret policeman who, instead of doing nasty, underhand things to protect ordinary citizens from other people like himself, cuts out the middle man and spies on, interrogates, and otherwise persecutes anyone who dares to dislike living in what is obviously a dismal police state. (Note to self: never, ever move to any country with the word "democratic" in its name!)

Where this movie is extremely powerful is in its depiction of a man who does bad things not because he's a bad person, but because he lives in a profoundly warped society where horrendous levels of state repression are seen as normal, and gradually catches on that what he's doing is terribly wrong. Ulrich Mühe never has the easy option of expressing his changing beliefs in a passionate speech which conveniently explains everything to the audience. Since his one-man rebellion is initially for purely personal reasons, he has no allies to spout plot exposition at, so he has to express his doubt, fear, and many other emotions by looks, verbal nuances, and other subtle cues. This is called "acting", and unlike many movie actors, he's very good at it indeed.

Where the film falls down somewhat is its lack of subtlety elsewhere. Many of the supporting characters, especially the baddies, are a bit flatly written, and there are too many moments when the plot relies on people being implausibly bad at their jobs, or just plain stupid. The attempts of the secret police to search a small flat for something quite big hidden in a really obvious place will raise inappropriate laughter from anyone who remembers those Roman soldiers in "The Life of Brian"! And the utter grimness of every moment of everybody's lives, to the point when it almost seems as if the ability of the dissidents to sometimes be genuinely happy is the political offense they're being investigated for, goes so far over the top that the viewing experience is more depressing than it needs to be. Were Communists forbidden to have meaningful relationships? I don't think so, but if this film was my only source of information, I'd assume that behind the Iron Curtain it was a crime to fall in love.

Ulrich Mühe's performance deserves five stars, but there were too many other characters and plot twists I simply didn't believe in, and to be honest, I admired the acting and what the film was basically trying to say while not really having an enjoyable time watching it. I think most of us understand that Russian Communism was a bad idea and life in East Germany prior to 1989 wasn't much fun without being reminded every two minutes that they all had to live in a dreary grey prison where it was illegal to smile.

Half an hour into this 90-minute film, I realized I didn't have the slightest desire to waste another hour on it, so I gave up. I supposed I should have guessed that since Bruce Campbell, a C-list actor whose fame rests on having been in the early cult work of a director who later became enormously successful, is not only the star but also wrote, directed and produced, it might not be an unqualified masterpiece. But since he was actually very good in "Bubba Ho-Tep" I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.

I was wrong. While taking forever to set up a plot that apparently owes a great deal to every previous brain or head transplant B-movie, all of which are more fun than this one, the dismal script treats us to endless "jokes" relying on the necessity of the locations and most of the cast being Eastern European to save money. If you think it's hilarious for Bulgarians to talk like urban black American tough guys, only with Bulgarian accents and sometimes subtitles, you might actually smile once or twice as these cardboard clichés go through their poorly-written paces, but I certainly didn't.

Campbell plays a comedy stereotype American capitalist as woodenly as a very wooden thing. Ted Raimi, an "actor" whose movie career exists purely because he has a brother called Sam, attempts a zany Bulgarian accent, pulls wacky faces every single second he's on screen, and generally makes you wish he was dead just so he'd go away, though he does at least cope efficiently with a blatant bit of product placement, which in bottom-feeding Z-movies like this is far more important than being able to act. And an elderly Stacey Keach goes through the motions because he has bills to pay, but still easily steals the film because nobody else can act at all.

Maybe it gets better later on, but if the first third of the movie is this dire, what are the chances? I couldn't even be bothered to skip ahead for a quick look. Like nearly all films that deliberately try to be so bad they're good, it's just plain bad. Give it a miss.

In 1961, Akira Kurosawa accidentally invented the spaghetti western with "Yojimbo" starring Toshirô Mifune, which was remade a couple of years later in Italy as "A Fistful Of Dollars". 1962 saw the creation of another iconic Japanese sword-slinger, Zatoichi the blind masseur and reluctant (not to mention highly unlikely) avenging angel, who went on to appear in far more films than Yojimbo, mainly because Shintarô Katsu, a somewhat less talented and charismatic actor than Toshirô Mifune, was willing to devote his entire career to playing one part over and over again. It was inevitable that eventually the original Man With No Name, who had ridden into the sunset after one very disappointing sequel, would return to reinvigorate the increasingly stale franchise of his biggest rival.

Unsurprisingly, the results are about as fresh as those horror movies in which two famous monsters team up because they've already done everything they possibly could on their own. The tubby middle-aged Zatoichi visits a village with exactly the same problems as every other village he's ever been to, helps out a damsel in distress, and runs into a thoroughly bored-looking Yojimbo. There's also some gold that nobody can find (though astute viewers will guess where it is fairly quickly), numerous quotes from both the Japanese and Italian versions of the first Man With No Name film, a fair bit of that unfortunate "comedy" you always get in Japanese movies, and a big fight at the end where all the loose ends are tied up, mostly by being stabbed to death. So, business as usual, then.

The trouble is, very little happens for almost an hour and a half of this two-hour film. Lots of people double-cross each other at great length, everybody has a hidden agenda except Zatoichi, whose "simple good guy" schtick was by this stage in his career looking more like mental retardation, and until about 20 minutes from the end, when they all suddenly start slaughtering each other for reasons I'd mostly lost track of by then, it's frankly tedious. Our two slightly past-it heroes indulge in surprisingly little swordplay, and their inevitable duel is perfunctory. Of course, there's never the slightest possibility that either of them might kill the other, although for some reason the "Yojimbo" who appears in this film seems to be a different person from the fellow played by the same actor in 1961.

Oh, and I should warn people who don't like subtitles that this movie has some of the worst I've ever seen! They hover in a huge black area underneath the film, which has to be shrunk to accommodate it (and the print's lousy to begin with), drawing your eyes away from the action. They're bright yellow, switching to green to indicate that a different person is speaking, or red to tell you they're shouting, in case you hadn't noticed these things for yourself. And sometimes they contain Japanese words which are translated by surtitles that pop up above the film at the same time as you're reading the subtitles below it. Horrible!

Terence Young, best known for directing the first, second and fourth Bond movies, here tries his hand at a claustrophobic cat-and-mouse suspense thriller. It's obviously a deliberate move away from the sprawling excesses of Bond, but maybe he went too far in the opposite direction, because at times it feels like a stage play. In fact, so much of it takes place in one small open-plan apartment that I was surprised to find it wasn't adapted from a play.

The basic premise - a blind woman unknowingly has a valuable Macguffin stashed in her apartment, and ruthless criminals take advantage of her disability in an attempt to recover it - is ingenious, but it isn't handled as well as it might have been, and some of the plot points feel very contrived indeed. In particular, the absurdly over-elaborate ruse the villains employ to convince her to cooperate with them seems less like something real people would actually do than something a director would do if he was trying to remake "The Ladykillers" without the laughs mashed up with "The Night of the Hunter" without the cross-country chase, and with huge nods to "Peeping Tom", "Lady in a Cage", and probably a few other films I've forgotten about. There's also rather a lot of talk that exists purely to spin out a plot where for most of the movie the bad guys know almost exactly where the Macguffin is, and the protagonist is trying her best to give it to them because she doesn't have any reason not to, but she's temporarily mislaid it. If the villains had done nothing at all, they'd have gotten their precious doll back in a day or two!

When it works, it works very well indeed. The final scenes, where Alan Arkin really gets down to being as vile as we've known from the start he is, and Audrey Hepburn turns out to be less of a pushover than he thought, have the intensity of an A-list classic horror film. Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of mawkish padding about poor helpless Audrey Hepburn (who, by the way, looks pretty good for somebody who supposedly lost her eyesight in a car-crash that set her face on fire!) learning to adjust to her condition, when a woman blind from birth would have just as much trouble coping with a gang of murderous criminals and a lot less self-pity. And it's an equally bad mistake to have her character half-convinced that the terrible things the baddies say about her husband are true, while wasting any suspense this might have created by telling the audience from the get-go that it's all lies. Hitchcock would have left left us in doubt for at least three-quarters of the film, and quite right too!

But its most ironic flaw is a bad case of Hannibal Lecter Syndrome - a villain whose scenes are the parts of the film that really stick in everybody's memories, but whose screen-time is surprisingly brief. The actual male lead is Richard Crenna, a charming sleazeball who co-stars in three-quarters of the movie, but still gets blown off the screen by Arkin's handful of scenes. It almost plays like a short film about a blind lady menaced by a terrifying psycho, into the middle of which a full-length feature about the same lady suffering less traumatic harassment from some other guys who aren't anywhere near as scary has been unwisely inserted. I wish Young had cut back on the sentiment and made it full-on mystery-suspense-horror from start to finish. He might have given "Psycho" a run for its money as he apparently intended to, instead of making the occasionally brilliant but very patchy film we ended up with.

The most famous fictional character called Dollman is an obscure 1940s superhero with the amazing power of having the strength of an ordinary man despite being only one foot tall. So, like Ant-Man but less useful. And he rides around on a dog. The second most famous Dollman turns out to be a diminutive but otherwise human-looking extraterrestrial inexplicably named after that other guy you haven't heard of either, and his superpower is having a handgun so powerful relative to himself that it does lethal damage to full-sized folks. Since the special effects budget runs to only a handful of giant-sized props, and barely any of the kind of expensive pre-CGI effects required for tiny characters to convincingly interact with the rest of the cast, our hero's diminutive size has very little bearing on the plot. So this is effectively a film about an ordinary cop who shoots bad guys with an ordinary gun.

It's true that there's an alien bad guy, in the form of a hovering head the size of a cherry tomato, but for similar reasons his contribution to the action is minimal, and his Super Space Disintegrator Bomb with an alleged blast radius of 3 parsecs - blimey, that's almost 10 light-years!! - turns out to be roughly as devastating as a hand-grenade. Sorry about the spoiler, but come on, you didn't seriously think this straight-to-video piece of dreck could afford to blow up the solar system?

After a preamble which clumsily parodies "Blade Runner" and "Dirty Harry" (and features a few model shots which I'm pretty sure I've seen in several other slightly more expensive movies), the main plot has our one-dimensional hero saving some very stereotypical poor-but-honest citizens of the Bronx from a dozen or so even more stereotypical gang-bangers who hang out on a vacant lot waving guns and swearing until they're eventually put out of their misery. Meanwhile, irrelevant characters played by lousy actors pad the running-time by talking about things that don't matter and goggling in wonder at the mighty munchkin, perhaps admiring his amazing ability to almost never be in the same shot as anyone else.

At 72 minutes (plus 6 minutes of end-credits I didn't bother to sit through), this film feels much too long. If you think otherwise, you'll be pleased to hear that it somehow did well enough to spawn a franchise, one of which is a crossover with the equally popular and critically acclaimed Demonic Toys movies. But since sequels seldom reach the artistic heights of the original, I don't think I'll bother.

Irwin Allen was almost single-handedly responsible for the seventies disaster movie craze. In fact, Allen was so successful that by 1978 he was running out of halfway plausible disasters to make films about, and killer bees were the best he could think of. The trouble is, bees are not very scary. Obviously if millions of them chased you down the street they'd be scary, but that's not something you worry about unless you have a bee phobia, in which case you won't be renting this movie, will you? Now, wasps are scary. But if this film had been about killer wasps, Irwin Allen would have had to pay a bunch of stuntmen to be covered in live wasps, and there isn't enough money in the world for that! However, stuntmen will agree to be covered in live bees because... well, see what I mean?

Therefore the script has to constantly and monotonously remind us that these aren't nice, cuddly, useful little American bees, but horrid African bees that really do exist and really do kill people and everything, even if they look exactly like regular bees. Maybe if I was African I'd find this scary, but I'm not, and it don't. We also have to accept that these particular bees, in addition to forming an implausibly gigantic swarm for no apparent reason, also just happen to have suddenly become immune to all known insecticides, hyper-intelligent, and insanely aggressive towards, amongst other unlikely things, helicopters, trains, and nuclear power stations. Mind you, this is a film which starts with the world's foremost bee expert casually wandering into the control room of a nuclear missile base because he happened to be driving past and the gate was open, and discovering that, by an amazing coincidence, everyone's just been stung to death by a new kind of bee! Presumably they encouraged a chimpanzee to play with scrabble letters until they vaguely resembled a script. After this, it's almost believable that the US Army is too stupid to build a bee-proof command center in an area they know is about to be attacked by bees, and they have to find out by trial and error that it's not safe to use flame-throwers indoors.

During the long dull patches between increasingly unlikely bee-related catastrophes resulting in ever more massive explosions, the cast struggle to come up with yet another reason why the entire military might of the USA is powerless against insects with attitude, the guest stars randomly die in contrived ways somehow involving bees, and the extras try to appear threatened by what looks like (and quite likely is) superimposed footage of tea-leaves swirling in a fish-tank. A movie as spectacularly misconceived as this can't possibly have anything going for it other than unintentional humor, and that kind of accidental comedy quickly wears out its welcome. Roger Corman knew this very well, which is why his tightly-edited creature-features never exceeded 90 minutes. At a whopping two and a half hours, this sprawling, ponderous mess would have benefited from Corman ruthlessly amputating half of it. Sadly he didn't.

It's passionately sincere, it pulls absolutely no punches, it's way ahead of its time (this is very nearly a found footage movie made in 1971), and it's got a political message so right-on that you can't disagree without sounding like a Nazi, so inevitably it has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. But is it really all that good?

The short answer is no. Since it's obvious from the start that the odds are so stacked against the hapless protagonists that, since this is a realistic kind of movie in which the good guys don't automatically win, it can't possibly end well for them, the story is partly non-linear, switching back and forth between the protagonists' hellish trek across the desert towards the freedom we suspect all along won't be attainable, and the farcical "trial" they undergo beforehand. The courtroom scenes take up most of the running time, and consist of people, some of them much more sympathetic and articulate than others, spouting politics and/or swearing a lot while handcuffed to a chair in a tent. Apparently the amateur actors weren't really acting, and at least one of them ended up in jail because of his real-life ultra-radical activities, which adds authenticity to these scenes, but you could get similar results by pointing a camera at any group of angry young people. It's Blair Witch Syndrome 28 years early, with exactly the same shortcomings.

Politically it's manipulative in ways that aren't always honest. For instance, having one side of the argument put across by people sincerely expressing their genuine views about things like racial inequality and the war in Vietnam, and the other by cardboard stereotypes whose idiotic arguments are carefully scripted to sound like hypocritical rubbish. Or by having one side showing how noble they are by being concerned about social issues that actually exist, and their adversaries revealing their wickedness by subjecting the good guys to monstrously cruel treatment in a situation which is entirely fictional. Whether you think the views of the makers of this film are right or wrong, tactics like this cheapen their argument, and don't make for particularly good drama either.

As for the extremely contrived endurance test at the heart of the movie, why would such an absurd procedure exist? A get-out-of-jail-free lottery for anti-government activists that favors the most fit and determined is obviously counter-productive! If, on the other hand, it's always rigged so that nobody wins and most of them die, why are there so many volunteers? I'm not surprised that when this film inspired Stephen King to write his novella "The Running Man", he ditched almost all of the social realism, and by the time it came back round to the screen again as a second-rate Big Arnie vehicle, it was completely unrecognizable as a sort-of remake.

This is a scrappy, depressing, unsubtly didactic, and greatly overrated movie. If you want to watch a film about a group of innocent people facing inescapable doom due to grossly unfair legal proceedings which has a lot to say about the horror and futility of war and the abuse of power by selfish hypocrites, but also has a proper story, interesting characters, and isn't entirely nihilistic, you'd be better off with Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory", unless you have a peculiar obsession with hearing hippies use very strong language.

Things worked out pretty well for Brian De Palma. In the seventies he was making the kind of quirky, overblown, wildly original and downright bonkers movies Ken Russell was also becoming increasingly notorious for, yet a couple of decades later, Brian was shooting billion-buck Hollywood blockbusters, while poor old Ken was literally reduced to making movies in his back garden starring his wife. Maybe some of the revelations in this film about how showbiz success is really achieved are truer than anybody ever realized?

In this typically over-the-top early Da Palma romp, the classic tale of The Phantom Of The Opera, mixed with a hefty slice of the Faust legend, runs headlong into pre-punk seventies pop at its most self-indulgent, and the results are a glorious train-wreck. An evil record producer who is not entirely unlike Phil Spector does the dirty on our hapless hero, a Barry Manilow wannabe who ends up as a glam rock version of Darth Vader. Along the way, we're treated to merciless spoofs of various clearly recognizable stars who were very big in 1974, notably KISS substitutes The Undeads (sic), whose stage-show involves the hilariously unconvincing dismemberment of the audience, and Gerrit Graham stealing the show as Beef, an outrageous posturing sissy who seems to be the love-child of Ziggy Stardust and Meatloaf. And after that, it gets silly.

Jessica Harper, famous these days for "Suspiria" and nothing else, is rather odd as the love interest, with her disproportionately huge head perched on a tiny body that looks about 13, her strange facial expressions and even stranger disco dance moves, and those distractingly peculiar eyebrows, but I suppose she's not really any weirder than the rest of the cast, seeing as it includes a bird-faced cyborg piano-player with metal teeth and a screamingly gay Frankenstein monster.

They don't make 'em like this any more! And you know what? They should! Also, why is this less of a cult movie than the boring old Rocky Horror Picture Show? Highly recommended, if you're in the mood for something that looks and sounds like a Hammer horror film written and directed by Spinal Tap.

Despite being a Coen brothers fan, I thought I must have somehow missed seeing this when in came out 8 years ago. But as I started watching, it felt oddly familiar. It gradually dawned on me that I'd seen it after all, but I couldn't remember a thing about it. It's very unusual indeed for me to completely forget a film. Unfortunately, having watched it again, I can understand why I found it so forgettable the first time round.

This is an attempt to recapture the magic of "The Big Lebowski" by recycling its essential themes and plot elements. Misguided people with strange, obsessive agendas pursue a MacGuffin they think, wrongly, is valuable, and the production team assume that much hilarity will ensue. One scene from "The Big Lebowski" involving a very minor character is repeated almost exactly, and the same menacing music (from Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition") that accompanies Jeff Lebowski's landlord's dance is heard when somebody's call is put on hold, just to tip us the wink. But this time round, everything falls embarrassingly flat.

Almost all the characters are horrible, shallow people obsessed with their outward appearances because there's nothing really going on inside them, whose numerous sexual entanglements are so joylessly robotic that one of them has even built a huge and extraordinarily creepy mechanical sex-toy just so we don't miss the point of that subtle bit of satire. With a mean-spiritedness which has become more and more apparent in their later work, the Coens show us nasty people motivated entirely by greed, lust, vanity and spite being nasty to each other, decide more or less randomly which of them will get away with it, mete out ghastly fates to those who don't, and introduce one token character with finer qualities just to be dumped on because hey, life isn't fair, even in comedies!

Several excellent actors are underused in multiple subplots which never properly cohere. Tilda Swinton in particular has absolutely nothing to do except be so unpleasant that it's impossible to understand why two other people in the movie find her attractive. John Malkovich is his usual irrepressible self, but he interacts so little with the main protagonists that he's barely in the same film. George Clooney is cast against type as a charmless creep, which kind of defeats the object of hiring George Clooney. And Brad Pitt is annoyingly unfunny as a man-child with the IQ of live yoghurt. The jokes don't work, you don't care about the characters, and the plot exposition is lazy and confusing, as if even Joel and Ethan Coen had begun to lose interest before they'd finished filming. It wouldn't even deserve two stars if it wasn't for some of the acting. Definitely one to file and forget.

What sets this film apart is its staggering level of non-stop inventiveness. Not a single frame of it is quite like anything else you've ever seen, except those century-old German expressionist silent movies where anything could and did happen, if you've seen them in slightly imperfect prints with the original hand-tinting lovingly restored but all the scratches left in. Only crossed with "Un Chien Andalou", "Eraserhead", and a print of "White Zombie" that's had paint thinner spilled on it.

This is also what prevents it from being a masterpiece. There are more than enough ideas here for a trilogy, let alone one movie, but the structure of the nearest thing it has to a plot - multiple barely-connected stories nested within one another so that although none are longer than 15 minutes, some have a gap in the middle lasting an hour and a half - feels more like a clever way to turn a lot of unconnected short films into a feature than an actual movie, and eventually becomes incoherent in the most literal sense of the word. Guy Maddin seems to have forgotten how much the power of "Un Chien Andalou" was diminished in its semi-sequel "L'Age d'Or" (which has a similarly chaotic structure to this film and was obviously a major influence) because this kind of random bizarreness isn't really sustainable over feature-film length. At very nearly two hours, "The Forbidden Room" stops looking quite so novel long before the end, and starts to get a bit tiring. I should also add that, in the same way that watching "The Blair Witch Project" caused some people to feel seasick, if flickery old home movie footage is hard on your eyes or gives you a headache, this film definitely won't be much fun for you!

All the same, it manages to be laugh-out-loud funny more often than a lot of so-called comedies, and packs more imagination into every ten minutes than the average superhero franchise spreads over ten hours (for about a millionth of the cost), which are clearly things to be encouraged. If Guy Maddin could escape from the art-house ghetto and meet the mainstream movie biz halfway, I'd love to see the results - "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" done properly, perhaps? Or even The Goddam Forties Batman versus Hitler? In the meantime, we've got this film to be going on with, and it's certainly different. Probably too different for a lot of people, and certainly not perfect, but if you're in the mood for a profoundly weird movie that you don't have to take seriously for one second, it'll be years before anything else comes along that's both as strange and as silly as this.

The reason to watch this film is Jake Gyllenhaal's performance. Playing antihero Louis Bloom as a blue-collar version of the monstrously selfish Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho" crossed with the dangerously disconnected Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver", Gyllenhaal, who looks as though he hasn't eaten for weeks, is scarily convincing as a psychopath who does terrible things not because he's a sadistic maniac, but because he honestly has no conception of why he shouldn't do whatever he wants, irrespective of who gets hurt and how badly.

Unfortunately, every aspect of the storytelling is about as subtle as you might expect from something which is meant to be a nihilistic fable for these amoral times. When the opening scene shows the protagonist doing something which, although we don't see exactly what happens, is heavily implied to be very bad indeed, it's not a huge shock when later on he unambiguously does terrible things. And when somebody who starts out with no redeeming features whatsoever spends the rest of the movie learning to be more technically competent at being horrible, that's not really character development, and only just qualifies as a story arc.

Louis Bloom may be intentionally and very convincingly portrayed as an utterly empty man so morally defective he doesn't know there's anything wrong with him, but you could say exactly the same about Burt Lancaster's extraordinary performance in "The Sweet Smell Of Success" way back in 1957, and that film also has a real plot to keep you interested, as well as a supporting cast you actually care about, although they mostly aren't very nice people either. Whereas this movie is about a man so unpleasant that he doesn't even get worse as the story progresses because he's already at rock bottom, and the few other significant characters are only there to be duped or victimized by him. Technically it's in many ways an extraordinary achievement, but it's also a grubby, depressing, and over-simplified allegory which is easier to admire than to like, and in the end I found the whole film as unengaging as its "hero".

In the late sixties Hollywood hurriedly learned a few lessons from the massive popularity of those new-fangled "spaghetti westerns". Unfortunately it didn't learn them very well. This is a typical example of an American western in the Italian style, with lots of violence, some of it quite nasty, taking place against a Mexican revolutionary backdrop. There's even a bit of gratuitous nudity to prove it's for grown-ups. Sadly, the bizarre stylistic flourishes of a true spaghetti western are completely absent, along with all the fun.

The elephant in the room is the casting. They seem to have gone overboard in the political correctness department, resulting in the three main characters all being non-white, even though there weren't enough big-name actors of the appropriate races available. Jim Brown is black so that's OK, and you can more or less get away with casting Burt Reynolds who really was part-Cherokee (though not a very big part) as a mixed-race man, but Raquel Welch as a full-blooded Yaqui Indian? What were they thinking???

Further problems arise with the plot. The clumsily established backstory makes Jim Brown's sheriff so stubborn that he sometimes seems half-witted, forces him to unconvincingly bond with Burt Reynolds by literally chaining them together (a plot-device blatantly pinched from "The Defiant Ones"), shows us so many examples of the Mexican army being beastly to the Indians that it becomes depressing, and wastes a massive amount of its running-time having the central trio bicker repetitively about politics. As for those crates of rifles everybody keeps going on about, they're a very dull Macguffin that the Indians don't really seem to need, since whenever the script decides to let them stop being victims for a while, they're capable of storming heavily fortified Mexican army strongholds just fine without them. And anyway, their ultimate weapon turns out to be Raquel Welch in a wet shirt.

The big battle scenes are poorly staged and lifeless, the three leads spend so much time being annoyed with each other that they get on the viewers' nerves too, and there's nobody in the whole film interesting enough to care about; one barely relevant minor character stands out simply by not being completely predictable. Ultimately the ingredients just don't gel, and the whole thing falls flat. You're probably better off watching the similarly-themed "Vera Cruz", to which this film owes an enormous debt. Despite being made in 1954, it's massively superior in every respect. Unless of course you think no western is complete without Raquel Welch in a wet shirt.

Given the subject-matter, I was expecting this to be a sort of "Pirates of the Caribbean" for grown-ups. Which I suppose technically it is. Unfortunately, along with the mythical creatures and general silliness, they seem to have cut all the action. Makers of this kind of serial traditionally put the most exciting bits in episode one to get you hooked, and the season finale to leave you wanting more. Since the first disc left me with no desire whatsoever to watch the remaining two, I can't comment on how it ends (though seeing as the character names imply that it's a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island", I assume treasure is left on an island, and young John Silver probably loses a leg), but judging by the first three hours, the fact that it does eventually end must come as a blessed relief.

The opening episode begins promisingly enough, with exactly what most viewers will have tuned in to see - a merchant ship under attack from pirates. Unfortunately, after the most desultory of naval battles and a brief, confusingly-filmed fight which the pirates win almost without trying, it settles down to business as usual, meaning nearly an hour of dreary plot exposition. By the end of episode three, having spent most of the intervening time looking for a vitally important piece of paper which is temporarily the Macguffin until no further mileage can be squeezed out of it, our heroes are kinda sorta thinking they might actually set sail on the high seas and do some of the pirating which is allegedly the entire point of the story, but which has been conspicuously absent for the previous three hours, possibly because having them all twiddle their thumbs in port is cheaper to film.

And while we're waiting for something to happen, we're treated to acting, much of it dreadful, from people who seem to have been left to make up their own minds whether this is a serious period drama or some kind of zany spoof (one character in particular obviously thinks he's Jack Sparrow), tiny smidgins of underwhelming action which is oddly coy about showing us anything seriously violent, frequent soft-core female nudity to remind us that this is adult entertainment, including a totally gratuitous lesbian couple who exist purely to increase the ratio of female as opposed to male nudity and sexy behavior, and lots of tediously repetitive and woodenly delivered Very Strong Language to prove that this really, really is for grown-ups.

The sets look nice, and the production team were obviously attempting to take a mature approach to what is traditionally a childish genre, but they simply didn't know how (possibly because Michael Bay was an executive producer), and the cardboard characters are completely incapable of keeping things interesting while enough plot for one feature film is dragged out over the length of several. Maybe it suddenly becomes an action-packed thrill-a-minute roller-coaster ride from episode four onwards, but given the leaden pace of the first three, I won't be sticking around to find out.