Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Essentially this is a one-man show by Geoffrey Rush, with a little help from the supporting cast, many of whose characters Rush also plays some of the time. By the way, although the listing on this site mysteriously gives him top billing, fans of Stephen Fry will be disappointed to learn that he's in this two-hour film for about five minutes. Rush is superb, even managing the rare feat of convincingly looking older as the film progresses, though a lot of the credit for that should probably go to the makeup department. Just about the only things he can't do are Sellers' Goon Show voices (though at least he's better than the two actors in the thankfully very minor rôles of Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe).

The main problem is that Sellers is such a consistently unlikable character that, excellent though Rush's performance is, there's a coldness at the heart of the film which sometimes means that the viewer admires its technical virtuosity while not really being involved. According to many people who knew Sellers, this isn't an entirely unfair portrayal. However, it's probably an oversimplification to take Seller's own claim that there was no "real" Peter Sellers to be literally true just because it's his most famous quote, and a more complex and interesting film might have resulted if he'd been portrayed as more than a completely empty man who never stopped being dominated by his overbearing mother even after she was dead.

For instance, although it's touched upon in the scenes where he unquestioningly accepts the advice of the ludicrously fake "psychic" Maurice Woodruff (Stephen Fry), nothing is really made of Sellers' unbelievable gullibility about the supernatural, to the point where he walked off the set of "Casino Royale" because he honestly thought Peter Ustinov's amateur conjuring tricks were real magic, therefore he must be in league with the devil and might put a curse on him! This and other strange aspects of his character heavily imply that behind all those masks, the real Peter Sellers was fighting far nastier demons than he ever admitted.

Perhaps some more of that might have been interesting, rather than the deliberately artificial narrative techniques adopted here, where Rush as Sellers frequently breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to the camera and walking off the set, or suddenly switches character to someone previously played by another actor, all of which occasionally gets a bit too clever for its own good. But on the whole, it's a good if sometimes oversimplified portrayal of a talented man who played the clown for the whole world, while being at lot less fun to be around for those closest to him, especially himself. Just don't expect too many laughs.

This fact-based tale of an "unholy pact" between a professional criminal and an FBI agent (hence the peculiar title, which is never referenced in any way in the film itself, but it was the name of the best-selling book the film was adapted from, so they were stuck with it) tries so hard to be the new "Goodfellas" that one scene is blatantly Johnny Depp's attempt to match Joe Pesci's "funny guy" speech. Unfortunately, despite a potentially fascinating story, and the kind of performance from Depp that made him famous in the first place, before he got rich and lazy playing the stars of movies based on Disneyland rides, it doesn't quite work.

Depp's Whitey Bulger, who resembles Christopher Walken so much that I wondered why they didn't just hire him and save a lot of money on prosthetic make-up, is a magnificently reptilian larger-than-life villain, especially in the scenes where he does Very Bad Things, but he's never entirely convincing as a human being, which matters in a film that's supposed to be about real people. Also, the fierce loyalty that exists between several characters because they grew up together is constantly and clumsily mentioned, but that's both far less effective and far less believable than showing us the backstory like Scorsese did.

And, like most other films that want to be "Goodfellas", the movie is so determined to show us crime doesn't pay that absolutely nobody has any fun. Every moment of joy or normality is a brief prelude to at best heartache, more likely tragedy, and most probably somebody getting brutally murdered. Men who supposedly control vast criminal empires and must be making millions every year have the lifestyles of blue collar workers on their day off, which hardly seems worth the downside of living in constant fear of being unexpectedly shot in the head by your psycho boss. Even the FBI agents all seem to dislike each other intensely and are almost permanently miserable, because some of them are crooked too, and Crime Does Not Pay!

Ultimately this is an overly ambitious film which doesn't entirely come off. It may be more truthful than the epic tragedy of the Corleone family, but this glum saga of men who do dreadful things because they're greedy hypocrites or have something seriously wrong with their brains ends up being too depressing for its own good. And it's certainly a mistake to have the entire movie revolve around a performance which belongs in a film where everything is larger than life. Whitey Bulger is a spectacularly terrifying presence, but he overshadows the rest of the cast to the point where I sometimes had trouble remembering which of the other bad guys was which. And on a purely practical note, there aren't that many A-list actors with natural Irish American accents, so in a film where absolutely everybody is required to have one, the results are inevitably going to be patchy. In particular, Benedict Cumberbatch, who is neither Irish nor American, seemed to be struggling.

This is one of those films which is guaranteed to get almost entirely positive reviews because criticizing it might seem a little bit like sympathizing with nazis. Unfortunately, that doesn't automatically make it a good film. Some years ago, Louis Theroux made a BBC documentary about white supremacists (included in the currently available Louis Theroux box-set) which this film constantly reminded me of by covering almost identical subject-matter nowhere near as well.

The situation seems to lend itself to high drama. Neo-nazi bigots move into a remote fly-speck of a town and buy up dirt-cheap properties with the intention of taking over the town council and establishing their own little Aryan Utopia. Fortunately the plucky locals catch on to this dastardly scheme and stand up to the fascist bullies. The trouble is, although the film attempts to portray these events in this way, it's not quite what happened.

I suppose it would be a spoiler to reveal whether or not the white supremacists' dastardly scheme succeeds, so let's just say that if your cunning plan involves taking over the town council in order to accomplish things which will come as a nasty shock to the existing townsfolk, unless you're extraordinarily thick, you'll avoid mentioning this to everyone before you've actually done it. It might also be a good idea not to shout abuse at your neighbors, threaten them with guns, or plant rows of nazi flags in your front garden until you're the one making the decisions about who does or does not get to live in your town. However, it seems that neo-nazis aren't very bright.

Unfortunately, the black comedy potential of a situation which at times resembles that Monty Python sketch where Hitler stands in the North Minehead by-election is utterly wasted by righteously indignant film-makers who want us to take these horrible but obviously powerless and incompetent bigots seriously, when the point might have been made far more effectively by emphasizing their absurdity, or, as Louis Theroux would have done, encouraging them to talk until they ended up accidentally parodying themselves. For similar reasons, less than ideal behavior by any of the people we're supposed to side with is glossed over as hastily as possible, and absolutely nothing is made of the irony of bigots who want to rewrite local laws in order to exclude everyone they don't like from "their" town having the very same methods used against them.

So, although no decent person would argue with what this documentary is ultimately saying, I personally wish they'd said it in a less thumpingly obvious way, and paid more attention to the craft of film-making than to putting across a message which almost everyone in their target audience will completely agree with already. I'm afraid I have to categorize this as worthy but dull.

Some people think Wes Anderson can do no wrong. Personally I think he has both good and bad qualities, and unfortunately this film showcases the bad ones. Many of his characteristic tropes are present: a protagonist with an obsessively over-specific agenda that doesn't quite come off, a strangely retro and not altogether realistic environment, a romance that challenges taboos, and oddly over-serious children behaving like adults who haven't quite got the hang of it yet. But this time round, these elements don't come together properly at all.

Our "hero" is both wildly unrealistic and impossible to like; I was constantly distracted by the mysterious failure of the other children to bully him for being an obnoxious attention-seeking weirdo, which in real life they obviously would, mercilessly! Apart from him, every character has exactly one personality trait, if any. Brian Cox is wasted as the headmaster who constantly bemoans the fact that his favorite scholarship pupil's grades are so poor that he may have to be expelled, due to his spending so much time running every club in the school, yet he never takes the obvious step of not letting him run a ludicrous number of clubs, because the plot would be ruined if he did his job believably. The love interest is so naïve that she takes an absurdly long time to catch on that pretty young teachers really ought to strongly discourage 15-year-old pupils from creepily and blatantly fixating on them. And Bill Murray, who plays his entire part as if he's slightly concussed, is a millionaire industrialist who lets a schoolboy dominate his life because the script says so.

As the characters go through their stilted moves like chess-pieces, plausibly is completely abandoned. This isn't the kind of zany comedy where real-life rules don't apply and anyone can do anything without any lasting consequences, therefore it's both silly and slightly disturbing when our hero gets away with, amongst other things, playing a revenge prank that could easily have killed someone, and, in a casually mentioned accident caused by his own irresponsibility that we don't actually see, permanently maiming another child with explosives. It's even implied that he would have no moral qualms about committing murder!

Basically, this is the story of a creepy adolescent psychopath who, because Wes Anderson understands locations far better than people, is supposed to be lovable. He isn't. It's all very skillfully crafted, but underneath the meticulous workmanship, the characters are soulless puppets I didn't believe in, let alone care about.

Round about the time this film was shot, Roger Corman was making American International Pictures a great deal of money with his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, almost all of which starred Vincent Price (they were churned out so fast that Vincent had to miss one because he was accidentally double-booked). So an utterly obscure studio called Admiral Pictures thought they'd jump on the bandwagon with this triple bill of 19th century horror stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, all of them starring Vincent Price.

Unfortunately it fell a bit flat. Director Sydney Salkow, who mainly did westerns, and is remembered almost entirely for directing the original Addams Family TV series, which wasn't exactly spine-chilling horror, entirely lacked Corman's over-the-top exuberance, and since Hawthorne didn't have Poe's manic morbidity, his tales must by 1963 have already seemed quaintly old-fashioned. Vincent Price is as professional as ever, but there's only so much he can do with scenes that are just him and somebody else talking absolute rubbish, of which, alas, there are many!

The first tale basically consists of two men talking far, far too much in order to stretch a brief and ludicrously contrived story that could have been told in ten minutes to four times that length. Then we get a twist that would have been obvious even if the synopsis didn't give it away, and a couple of seconds of very mild horror, though mainly it's about tragic love and regret. The same is true of the second segment, in which slightly more happens, but really it's just a fable about an over-protective father, and the nearest we get to any actual horror is the noise the guinea-pig makes as it turns purple. Yes, really...

The final third is as low-budget as the rest, all of which are shot entirely on small and extremely fake studio sets, pare the cast down to the point where there are almost no characters, however minor, who aren't absolutely necessary, and obviously didn't spend huge sums on the special effects. However, it does at least try a bit harder to scare us, with ghostly goings-on in a creepy old house that provide far more blood and horror than the other two parts combined. Still not very much though. And in a perverse change of pace, the characters struggle to pack their extremely stilted dialogue with shedloads of confusing and wildly improbable plot exposition concerning witchcraft, curses, family feuds, lost treasure, secret rooms, and a whole movie's worth of exciting-sounding things that happened 150 years previously, which we don't get to see because that would require a much more expensive movie than this one.

It's not absolutely terrible, but it isn't much good, and Vincent Price sometimes seems a bit lackluster, as if the director didn't know how to get the best out of him. Roger Corman did, and even the cheapest and least interesting of the Poe films they made together, while they're superficially similar to this, are far more fun, so you're probably better off watching one of those instead.

Although I'm usually a big fan of the Coen brothers, I missed this when it first came out because it seemed to fall off the radar almost immediately. Maybe that was because it's a rare dud from the usually reliable Joel & Ethan.

Part of the problem is that the tone is too light. The main characters - a successful divorce lawyer and a serial gold-digger - are rich, good-looking, thoroughly spoilt, and altogether appallingly selfish. Who cares what happens to people like that, unless it's horrible? Alas, from a very early stage it becomes apparent that, by an amazing coincidence, the two characters who are far and away the best-looking, as well as being played by the biggest stars, will eventually find true love with each other, and we're supposed to cheer because love is the one thing they don't smugly have far too much of already.

What they really deserve is a zombie apocalypse, but sadly there isn't one. The tone does get ever so slightly darker and nastier for a while towards the end, but it's much too little, much too late. George Clooney certainly has immense charisma, but expecting him to single-handedly carry the entire film with nothing but his winning personality doesn't work any better here than it did that time he was Batman. As for Catherine Zeta-Jones in what's actually quite a small rôle, she's the human equivalent of one of those spiders that eat their mates, and we're supposed to like her just because she's beautiful.

The Coens have shown repeatedly that they can do comedy, they can do nasty selfish people inflicting complicated unpleasantness on each other, and sometimes they can do both at once, but this time round, nothing quite works. The humor is mostly leaden. One minor character is screamingly camp for no reason other than to distract our attention from the dullness of the rest of the scene. George Clooney and his sidekick have an incredibly contrived conversation about the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay which I think we're supposed to laugh at because "Tenzing Norgay" is a wacky name if you're not a Sherpa. And of course there's the peculiarly pointless way the music of Simon and Garfunkel constantly pops up, as if any recurring motif qualifies as a running gag whether it's funny or not.

If the Coens had gone all the way and turned this film into the pitch-black comedy about two utterly despicable people who thoroughly deserve each other which it occasionally seems to want to be, it might have been up there with their best. As it is, it feels as though the studio ordered them to tone it down so that it could be marketed as a feel-good rom-com, and all the best bits ended up in the waste paper basket. By the way, at no point does any "intolerable cruelty" in the legal sense actually occur. Maybe it was an appropriate title for the first draft, and they simply forgot to change it?

Round about the end of the sixties, there were quite a few movies made that, although outwardly mainstream, had their hearts firmly in the anti-establishment camp. Many of them were in some allegorical way against the Vietnam War. And a fair number were westerns. Some of these subversive horse-operas worked better than others, but they all faced the same basic problem: how do you put across the message that shooting people is a bad way of solving problems in a genre where problems are nearly always solved by people being shot?

Hence this peculiar and deeply depressing film. As we learn even before the opening credits, Candice Bergen is miserably married to the absolutely vile Gene Hackman. Then she's mistaken for a schoolteacher and kidnapped by Oliver Reed, still a darkly brooding bad-boy sex-symbol in 1971, not the bloated wreck the booze would soon turn him into. Ludicrously, his motive turns out to be that he just wants to learn to read, and has absolutely no idea her husband is a mad millionaire with the resources to hunt him and his men down like animals. Bad mistake, Ollie...

And that's basically it. Our heroine inevitably falls in love with the rough diamond into whose arms fate has thrown her, mainly because he's not her husband. Along the way, we're treated to a disturbing number of scenes involving the rape, attempted rape, and general brutalization of poor Candice. They're not the least bit titillating because this film really, really doesn't want to make violence against women seem like a good idea, but there are still rather a lot of them, and they're no fun at all to watch. The same goes for the violence. Bullets cause realistic amounts of bloody damage when they hit bodies, and the victims sometimes take quite a while to die. Shooting people is clearly not at all a nice thing to do!

The trouble is, the movie is so busy putting its doubtless admirable message across that it forgets to be the slightest bit enjoyable on any level whatsoever. The outlaws, hunted by men with state-of-the-art rifles whose range their own weapons can't match, can basically do nothing but run for an hour and a half while being literally shot to bits. And Gene Hackman is wasted in a rôle where he has absolutely no character traits other than sadism. It means well, but it's an ugly, miserable film, and after watching it you may have to watch a gleefully irresponsible spaghetti western where hundreds of people die and it doesn't matter to cheer yourself up again.

The various incarnations of "Blackadder" are fondly remembered, yet people tend to brush this very first series under the carpet because it doesn't quite fit in with the rest. There are several reasons for this. The writing style isn't the same because the overrated Ben Elton wasn't involved yet. It looks very different indeed, less studio-bound sitcom than "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", because a much higher budget allowed for proper crowd scenes with numerous lavishly costumed extras, many impressive sets, outdoor location shooting at real castles, and a general feeling of proper historical recreation (albeit in a very silly way) completely lacking in the sequels. And of course there's the strange fellow at the heart of it all: Prince Edmund, alias The Black Adder, a self-imposed sinister soubriquet that impresses exactly no-one.

Unlike the sardonically witty anti-hero of the sequels, the first Black Adder is basically Mister Bean trying to be a Shakespearean supervillain, and of course failing dismally. Baldrick, the only character to remain pretty much the same in every series, is actually justified in proposing his trademark cunning plans because although he may not be very bright, he's still the smartest person in the room. Our bitter and twisted hero's attempts to inherit the throne of his father Richard IV (Brian Blessed, going completely over the top even for him and obviously enjoying himself immensely) instead of his older and greatly favored brother Harry allow a loose theme of parodying Shakespeare to run through the series, including a guest spot in the first episode for Peter Cook as Richard III, but basically it's all just an excuse to go mad in the middle ages.

Which, combined with a budget the BBC accountants subsequently decided was far too high and slashed to the bone for the sequels, allows the writers to let their imaginations run riot and give us full-blown parodies of, amongst other things, "The Magnificent Seven" and Ken Russell's "The Devils", packed with supporting characters you wish you'd seen more of - Frank Finlay's loathsome, feral, yet strangely compelling Witchsmeller Pursuivant definitely deserved his own series! And a special mention must go to Elspet Gray as Edmund's long-suffering mother, who is almost the voice of reason, but not quite because she's dafter than any of them, only in a different way.

This bizarre, wildly ambitious comedy ultimately overreaches itself (and its budget), but it's better to go too far than not to try, and it certainly tries, very enthusiastically indeed. A slightly flawed gem, but still greatly underrated, and well worth revisiting.

Of course you know these bargain-bin triple bills are inevitably going to consist of films which are at best second-rate, and the DVD production values won't be that great either. But it's hard to dislike these cheap and cheerful compilations, even if describing their contents as "classics" is perhaps not strictly accurate.

By far the oldest and least of these offerings is "The Corpse Vanishes", a very minor chiller so formulaic that you may think you've seen it before even if you haven't (especially if you're familiar with Larry Blamire's excellent parody "Dark And Stormy Night"). Bela Lugosi does the usual mad scientist stuff for the usual reasons, assisted by the usual generic sidekicks, including tiny Angelo Rossitto, who was in dozens of these things. However, despite his crimes being absurdly and unnecessarily specific, the police are all too mentally deficient to catch him, so it's up to the plucky wisecracking girl reporter to save the day. On the plus side, the inevitable "comic relief" character isn't black, and he's barely in the film at all. And Bela's always fun.

"Horror Hotel" is technically the best of the three. A young pre-fame Christopher Lee, struggling with an American accent, isn't really in it very much, but he certainly makes his presence felt when he is, and everybody else who's supposed to be sinister manages just fine. Its main failing is that it's creepily atmospheric rather than truly scary. Also, the pacing is oddly flat, and not a tremendous amount actually happens. However, it's a good example of an old-school "trapped in Nightmare Town where everything's a bit weird" movie, and it doesn't make it too obvious which characters will ultimately survive.

And finally, "The Terror", once described by Jack Nicholson as the only film he was ever in that didn't have a plot (presumably he'd forgotten about his walk-on cameo in "Head"). When Roger Corman finished "The Raven" under budget and ahead of schedule, he thought that, seeing as everybody had been paid in advance and they weren't due to go home yet, they might as well make another movie. Of course there was no time to write a script, so they just made it up as they went along, resulting in a chaotic story in which most of the characters don't know what's going on (some of them don't even know who they are), those that do know tell lies to everybody else including the audience, and most of what happens makes little or no sense, if they remember to explain it at all. Although Roger Corman officially directed, so did about half a dozen other people who felt like having a go, including Jack Nicholson and a very young Francis Ford Coppola. The result is the cinematic equivalent of one of those long, complicated dreams that aren't quite nightmares, but you still wake up feeling uneasy about completely random things. A real curiosity that's best watched in a spirit of pure Surrealism. By the way, if you've seen Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets", this is the movie playing at the drive-in.

If this dismal excuse for a horror movie has a redeeming feature, it is that after watching it, you'll never again unjustly accuse Ed Wood of being the world's worst director. The cast of B-listers on the way down, old has-beens who had long since hit rock bottom, wannabes who never would be, non-actors who just fancied being in a movie, and the director's big-breasted, huge-haired, and zero-talented wife struggle gamely with the dreadful script, but nothing could have put a gloss on this steaming super-sized chocolate log!

The two monsters the title would have you believe are the main attractions were clearly inserted into the story at a late stage in production, since they have very little to do with anything outside their own subplot, they carefully avoid being in the same shot as most of the principal cast members even when they're supposed to be in the same room, and the two plot-threads only get properly integrated near the end of the film, right at the point where the original script was obviously supposed to finish.

John Bloom, who you may remember as 50% of the title character in "The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant", is a ludicrous Frankenstein Monster whose face appears to have been sculpted from dough by a small child, and "Zandor Vorkov" gets his one and only shot at stardom as Count Dracula, a performance so absurd that I wondered if the mystery man behind the clown makeup and daffy pseudonym was Frank Zappa, whom he certainly resembles a lot more closely than he does Dracula. As for poor old Lon Chaney Jr., making his last screen appearance as Groton the mentally retarded axe murderer, he wasn't given any lines because by then he was so ill he could barely talk, let alone act.

But worse than the terrible acting, the incoherent script, the non-existent production values, and even the visibly dying co-star, is the fact that it's just plain dull. Without the last-minute addition of the two famous monsters, this film would have been about a bunch of hippies who can't act doing deeply tedious things, some guy in a wheelchair talking mad scientist drivel at great length, and a few tiny, feeble glimpses of gore to maybe keep you half-awake. As it is, it's about that anyway, only with random appearances by monsters who look as though they've escaped from a school play. Not "so bad it's good", just so bad that when you hear that director Al Adamson was eventually murdered and entombed in the foundations of his own bathroom, you wonder if a movie critic might have had something to do with it. Or possibly Zandor Vorkov...?

The success of the gleefully gruesome "Reanimator" meant there was inevitably going to be a sequel. After all, director/producer Brian Yuzna has been known to somehow cobble together two full-length feature films out of an H. P. Lovecraft story three pages long. And, like so many sequels, especially obscure horror sequels, it exists purely to squeeze whatever juice remains out of a concept good enough for one movie. In other words, like nearly all of Yuzna's many bargain-bin HPL adaptations, it isn't very good (the good ones are the first "Reanimator" and the lesser-known but far better "Dagon").

After a brief prologue in South America which has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film - it looks very much as though they started shooting a script set in exotic foreign parts before they realized the budget wouldn't run to it - our two heroes are somehow back in the same jobs at the same hospital where a few months previously they caused a zombie bloodbath, and merrily getting up to more of the same.

Unfortunately zombie special effects cost money, so for most of the running time we see very little of the creatures that are supposed to be the main attraction. Instead, Jeffrey Combs overacts monotonously as the mad scientist who causes all the trouble, Bruce Abbott is equally one-note as the character you're meant to like because he has what was considered good hair in the seventies, and everyone else is just plain dreadful. None of the cast will be familiar faces unless you've seen a lot of Brian Yuzna's movies, and the nearest they have to a famous name is Claude Earl Jones, who, judging by his acting, must have been cast in the hope people would confuse him with James Earl Jones (presumably no relation, since Claude is white).

The tone is more comedic than the first film, complete with annoying "this bit's funny" music, and the more ambitiously weird the monsters are, the less screen-time they get, which, given some of the not-so-special effects, is just as well. The full horrors of Dr. West's experiments only come to light at the very end, and are almost immediately destroyed so that we don't get a proper chance to notice how low-budget they are, but even the cheaper bog-standard zombies we do get a good look at stumble around groaning and gurning for a very long time without accomplishing all that much. And whose brilliant idea was it to base a large part of the script on "The Bride of Frankenstein", thus drawing our attention to a very good film in the middle of a very bad one?

On the plus side, it's amusing enough during the small portion of its running time when it really gets going, so it'll just about cut the mustard if you enjoy watching horror films which don't take themselves seriously because nobody's under any illusions that they're making a work of art, or even a halfway good movie. Of course, it'll help if you don't mind those grainy video-to-DVD transfers cropped to fit a TV screen typical of third-rate horror films like this one. Ah well, at least it's better than the second sequel...

By any normal standards, this is an absolutely dreadful film. Like such misfires as John Carpenter's "Prince of Darkness" and John Boorman's "Exorcist II: the Heretic", it tries to combine modern technology (well, modern for 1978 - just look at the size of that computer!) with ancient magic, and fails dismally. But it does so in such a bonkers fashion that, viewed as an accidental comedy, it's genuinely entertaining in ways its makers never intended. Burgess Meredith, who pops up briefly and unnecessarily, certainly appears to think he's in a comedy. And Tony Curtis, whose career must have been in real trouble in the late seventies for him to end up in nonsense like this, sometimes casually holds his hand in such a way as to partly cover his mouth and avoids looking at the camera, just like an experienced actor concealing the fact that he's trying not to laugh.

As well he might. In a strange mash-up of "The Exorcist" and "How to Get Ahead in Advertising", Tony's girlfriend has a supernatural fetus gestating in her neck. As you do. Placed in the ironic predicament of being a fake psychic who discovers that all the medieval bollocks he pretends to believe in is literally true and then some, our hero, in the face of such escalating absurdities as old ladies levitating for no reason at all and a demonically possessed surgical laser (apparently in 1978 American hospitals routinely performed operations with that device Goldfinger nearly used to castrate James Bond), must seek the help of a good Native American shaman to defeat the bad Native American shaman trying to reincarnate as a malignant midget who, amongst other totally random superpowers, can create arctic weather conditions inside buildings, conjure up giant transparent iguanas, and open magic gateways to outer space. Which of course leads to a "Star Trek" phaser battle between a psychedelic light show that, we are somewhat implausibly told, is Satan, and, standing in for the starship Enterprise, a nude woman.

Seriously, all of the above and more really does happen! If it wasn't for too many slow bits it would be a true anti-masterpiece, and even with them, it's genuinely so bad it's good, if you like that sort of thing. I do, and I rather liked this. Even if you don't, you'll have to admit that it's not quite like anything else you've ever seen. Especially not anything else starring Tony Curtis.

This ambitious but deeply flawed film is basically the Manson Family story minus all the unwanted baggage that using the name "Charles Manson" would entail, in the same way that "The Master" is about Scientology but pretends not to be to avoid legal problems. This frees the writers to concentrate on the main part of the story - how rational people get sucked into irrational cults and end up doing bad, crazy things, and what it's like to be part of such a cult.

It's a great idea, but it's very poorly handled. One thing which kept bugging me was that the nameless cult portrayed in the movie didn't seem to actually believe in anything whatsoever, presumably in case some religion or other took offense. With absolutely no convincing reason given why all these young women thought their scrawny, unshaven lord and master was so special that they ought to let him control every aspect of their lives and bodies, I had the distinct feeling of watching a parable unfold in implausible ways just because the script said so.

It doesn't help that the characters are thin to the point of non-existence. The heroine spends almost the whole film so traumatized that she's practically catatonic, punctuated with flashbacks to her time as a not much livelier sexually-abused cult victim, and a few lines of hastily sketched-in backstory that supposedly justify her extreme vulnerability to the Rasputin-like powers of middle-aged weirdos don't really explain anything, let along make her interesting. Her sister and brother-in-law are pure cardboard, and far too slow to catch on to how profoundly damaged the girl obviously is. The other cult members have at most one personality trait each, and do almost nothing to move the story forward. And as for their glorious leader Patrick, we're told literally nothing about him. I suppose the idea was to make him enigmatic, but what it actually makes him is barely in the film.

With a livelier script in which more happened, and interesting characters whose motivations made sense (or at least existed), this could have been, perhaps not a masterpiece, but certainly the important film it tried to be. Obviously they didn't have anything like the kind of budget and resources available to Martin Scorcese, but the people who made this really should have sat down and watched "Goodfellas" first. In that film, we're shown in glorious detail why it's fun and thrilling and sexy to be in the Mafia. And then we're shown a downside so horrible that it vastly outweighs all that has gone before. In this one, credulous young fools are sexually exploited while voluntarily having a glum time on a farm for no reason at all. And then it gets even worse.

Maybe they were worried that if they made their deranged cult seem like a fun thing to belong to for even part of the movie, people might be inspired to rush out of the cinema and join real Manson Families or whatever. But for a film like this to really work, it needs to show the viewer why anyone in their right mind would want to be part of a crazy little sect in the first place, and it doesn't. Also, however dark and serious their subject-matter, movies are ultimately entertainment. The audience should, on some level, enjoy themselves. And I didn't.

Firstly, whoever wrote the blurb describing this film as "A Hard Day's Night" on acid was obviously making a plausible guess which unfortunately turned out to be wrong, as whoever writes these blurbs so often does. It would be more accurate to say that it resembles "Help!" directed by Luis Buñuel. On acid.

The Monkees were of course nothing more than a blatant American Beatles rip-off created by a huge corporation to make a lot of money. So it's truly amazing that, knowing they were reaching the end of their shelf-life, they managed to persuade their bosses to let them make a film infinitely more daring and subversive than anything the Beatles ever achieved in that area, possibly because the real Fab Four squandered their one shot at true artistic freedom by getting too stoned to focus the camera properly, faffing about on a bus for a fortnight, and then trying to pass it off as a movie.

Before we've even reached the opening credits of "Head" (it's almost unbelievable that the studio bosses missed that drug reference!), Mickey Dolenz has apparently committed suicide and gone to Psychedelic Mermaid Heaven. After that it just gets weirder. Unlike the Beatles, although they don't actually take drugs onscreen, they do manage to include some very blatant marijuana references. They also merrily sing a song with lyrics admitting that they're a manufactured band, and portray their hysterically screaming fans (intercut with footage of Vietnamese civilians panicking because their lives are in danger, including a clip of somebody being shot in the head for real) storming the stage and tearing the band to bits, only to discover that they're plastic dummies. Comedy skits similar to those on their juvenile TV series end with the boys getting bored and literally breaking through the scenery in search of something more interesting. And so on.

The plot, insofar as there is one at all, is that the Monkees repeatedly end up in a Kafkaesque factory mass-producing a mysterious product which turns out to be themselves, and despite their best efforts, they're unable to escape from this recurring nightmare. Along the way we get Davy Jones, the stand-in for Paul MacCartney, fighting a real-life heavyweight boxer (Sonny Liston) and having his pretty face graphically beaten to a bloody pulp, dim-witted nice guy and George Harrison substitute Peter Tork mercilessly sending up George's fascination with Indian mysticism, and the most ironic bit of product placement ever. And of course the famous scene in which our heroes pretend to be Victor Mature's dandruff.

They may have been the least authentic sixties band of them all, but somehow the Monkees made what is possibly the most genuinely subversive counterculture movie of the entire decade. It's certainly a lot of fun, though to perceive it as a masterpiece, you'd have to be as wrecked as Jack Nicholson was when he wrote it. But you'll have to admit that, although they're not the world's greatest actors, in that respect at least, the Monkees were better than the Beatles.

The immediate thing that strikes you about Dara O'Briain is how pleasant and engaging he is, in a way which makes him exactly the kind of person you want to hear amusing anecdotes from, in same the way that "alternative comedians" weren't; that's why Ben Elton made far more money from writing that Abba musical than he ever did by shouting about how bitterly he hated Thatcher, and younger readers will probably have to google "alternative comedy" to find out what it was.

This DVD illustrates that point very well. When Dara's sticking to what he's best at and simply being a nice man telling you funny stuff, he's very funny indeed - his routine about the questionable value in later life of the kind of things parents teach pre-school children is brilliant observational comedy. Where he goes slightly wrong is the edgier stuff. It suits some comedians, but not him. Whenever he throws in a bit of "adult" language, it seems forced, as if he felt that the audience might not feel they were getting proper grown-up entertainment without the requisite amount of swearing; and the "things men find sexy" routine doesn't quite work, partly because it includes some oddly repetitive punch-lines which Dara seems to think need to be told multiple times before the audience will admit they're funny. The same goes for the moderately amusing bit about "The Return Of The Jedi", the not particularly brilliant conclusion of which is repeated so often that it looks as though he had to drag it out because he was short of material.

And he definitely should have omitted the long and almost entirely unfunny true story about how he accidentally risked his life doing something pointless for Comic Relief. Apart from sounding a bit smug, it leads up to a punch-line so feeble that he has to tell the mostly English audience in advance that it's really a killer line if you're Irish and understand the historical context. I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing Steve Coogan's inept stand-up comic persona Duncan Thicket would do! Dara might as well be telling a Jewish joke that requires him to stop in the middle and explain to all the gentiles in the audience that the gag works far better in Hebrew.

The material in this 90-minute performance varies from two-star to four-star, with maybe even a few moments of five-star, but it could do with being more consistent. However, overall Dara's pretty funny, and sometimes he's very funny indeed. It's not genius laugh-till-you-fall-off-the-sofa comedy, but it's easily good enough to do its job of amusing you for an hour and a half.