Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Presumably that four-star rating comes from fans who already loved this from seeing it on TV. And obviously some viewers find it hilarious, since it's had three series commissioned (I looked it up on wikipedia to see if other people found it funny, and I was genuinely surprised to find that they did). Not having previously seen it at all, I thought I'd give it a whirl because the description sounded promising. I got through one 22-minute episode, and had absolutely no desire whatsoever to endure any more on the off-chance that it might improve.

It seems to be trying for the kind of anarchic anything-goes style pioneered by "The Young Ones" (which, by the way, I consider to be one of the funniest sitcoms ever made), but in a strangely complacent middle-aged kind of way. Everybody is a zany one-dimensional caricature with supposedly amusing eccentricities that are clumsily explained, sometimes twice, in case we don't get the joke. The main character, Steven Toast, is smug, selfish, and completely uninteresting, and although at no point during episode one does he do any in-character acting, he certainly comes across as a very bad actor even when he's just being himself. The trouble is, you need to be a pretty good actor to get away with deliberately being lousy at your job in such a way that it's funny, and Matt Berry isn't that good.

The script (also by Matt Berry, who even composed the theme-tune) is extremely basic. Very weak jokes are hammered into the ground, and about half of them revolve around the concept of a beautiful young African woman being transformed by botched plastic surgery into an exact replica of Bruce Forsyth. This is treated in the crudest and laziest way imaginable, as if the concept was in itself so funny that no proper jokes needed to be written around it. The other gags are mostly just as bad. Quite often you can guess the punch-line in advance because it's either painfully obvious or simply old. At one point, our hero suddenly walks off the set so that we see the back of the scenery and the studio audience. Why? There's no reason for it, and no actual joke is made, but hey, breaking the fourth wall is hilariously adventurous and wackily random!

And worst of all, every so often somebody self-consciously uses an oddly stilted and completely unfunny bit of Very Strong Language in an obvious attempt to say: "Hey, you at home! I just said not only the f-word but the c-word too! Is this daring, sophisticated adult entertainment or what?" I would have to answer in the negative. Perhaps the other five episodes on this disc (and there's a pilot as well, if you're a glutton for punishment) are side-splitting masterpieces of grown-up Surreal hilariousness. But since writers of TV comedy series tend to put the best gags in the first and last parts so you'll be instantly hooked and left wanting more at the end, I would guess not. And I simply couldn't be bothered sitting through any more of this dreck to find out.

The thing everyone talks about concerning this movie is Tom Hardy's extraordinary performance as both Kray twins, which frequently means that he has to interact with or even fight with himself. While it's certainly true that he does a remarkable job of making two men with identical facial features appear extremely different, his portrayal of Ronnie Kray (the mad one with the glasses) suffers from the same ironic problem as Philip Seymour Hoffman's depiction of Truman Capote. Ron may in reality have sounded as though he was slightly mentally retarded and had a permanent cold, but accurately portraying him on screen makes him come across as such a ridiculous caricature that it looks like bad acting, inappropriate comedy, or both. I sometimes laughed when I wasn't supposed to because his foul-mouthed tirades combined with utterly irrational word-salad sounded like an out-take from Derek and Clive (he even starts talking about "the horn" at one point). And it's impossible not to think of Monty Python's Doug and Dinsdale Piranha when a statement about Ronnie being a bit out of control is accompanied by a shot of him walking into a night-club accompanied by a donkey wearing a dinner-jacket!

Another problem is that this film is trying very hard indeed, right down to copying specific scenes, to be a British "Goodfellas", therefore Reggie Kray's wife becomes the third major character - in fact, the only other character who really matters - right down to narrating the entire film. Unfortunately, Emily Browning gives a very lackluster performance indeed, her narration in particular being painfully wooden. Though to be fair, it must be hard to bring much conviction to dialogue as abysmal as: "We honeymooned in Greece. The Parthenon had stood for 2,400 years. Reggie's promise to go straight lasted two weeks." That's not scriptwriting, that's just word association!

Too many characters who ought to be interesting badly underdeveloped so that we can concentrate on Tom Hardy's one-man show, which gets a bit predictable with its constant emphasis on the "good" brother being held back from reforming by his loyalty to his psychopathic twin, and what shocking twists there are come too late and are clumsily handled. Also, we're shown surprisingly little evidence, other than the two murders that finally send the brothers to jail for life, that they're running an ultra-violent criminal empire. Mostly everyone just hangs around in pubs and clubs talking tough and hoping Ron doesn't have one of his funny turns.

Tom Hardy's very impressive and everything looks terribly authentic, so on a technical level it works, but it's oddly unsatisfying, and sometimes even a bit dull. "The Krays" from 1990 remains a far better depiction of the same people and events. By the way, whose brilliant idea was it to give this film the same name as a dreadful Ridley Scott fantasy starring Tom Cruise as an elf who likes unicorns? There must be a few people who ended up with the wrong DVD and couldn't believe what they were seeing!

For almost 40 years, ever since the moronic Medved brothers invented the craze for deliberately watching terrible movies you don't enjoy on any level just to sneer at them, this film has been hailed as "so bad it's good". There were even a couple of sequels. Unfortunately it's just plain bad, and unlikely to appeal to anyone other than the kind of teenager who watches childrens' TV ironically.

In many ways it resembles "Airplane" in style, only with a much, much smaller budget and absolutely no comic or acting talent on display whatsoever. Much of the "humor" relies on the assumption that the very idea of tomatoes attacking people is in itself so hilarious that no actual jokes are needed. Unfortunately the budget only runs to a handful of scenes of the tomatoes doing anything more dramatic than being rolled in the general direction of the cast or dragged along on a string, and just one brief sequence actually shows them causing the mass destruction they're alleged to be responsible for throughout the film, so mostly it consists of various cheaper bits of comic business punctuated by references to all the trouble the tomatoes are causing offscreen. Alas, almost none of this is the slightest bit funny - there are probably about two or three halfway decent one-liners in 80 minutes.

Here's an example of the level of hilarity on offer. An incredibly stupid special forces "disguise expert" randomly dresses up in various inappropriate costumes for no reason at all. While he's dressed as Hitler, another even stupider member of the team tries to kill him because he thinks he really is Hitler, even though he's black. And that's one of the better jokes. The whole sorry mess looks like a ten-minute TV sketch that somehow ballooned out of all proportion (especially on this DVD, a mediocre quality video transfer cropped to fit a TV screen), and because there's nowhere near enough comic material to fill the running time, almost every gag, however feeble, either goes on far too long or happens at least twice. Or both.

The oddest thing about this dismally unfunny little movie is that Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks!" is practically a remake, since both films involve the USA being invaded by monstrous beings against whom the army is useless, resulting in farcical situations in which government officials and soldiers are made to look foolish, and then at the last moment it turns out that the unstoppable horrors can be defeated by playing them a dreadful pop song. Therefore if you happen to be a clone of Tim Burton, you'll undoubtedly love this movie! But if you aren't, I'd give it a miss.

This very early Woody Allen film is from the days when he was best known for standup and sketch comedy on TV, and boy, does it show! This isn't so much a movie as a loose assemblage of unused TV scripts. The first third of the film, in which Woody lives in New York, does various bits of wacky business to show what a schmuck he is, and romances a girl with predictably limited success, is obviously a recycled half-hour sitcom that was probably rejected for being slightly too "adult" for American TV 45 years ago. It has almost no relevance to the rest of the movie, and most of it is somewhere between not very funny and not funny at all (though I did laugh at the scene taking the idea of a disappointed father who wanted his son to be a doctor to its illogical conclusion).

The second third, in which Woody arrives for no particular reason in a Caribbean country which is obviously meant to be Cuba, starts off rather well with a plot by a dastardly dictator and his henchmen to make evil use of this absurdly naïve American, but these villains are quickly sidelined, and we get another recycled half-hour sitcom which must have originally been about Woody joining the US Army, going to boot camp, and being rubbish at it, transposed to a Cuban rebel camp where exactly the same combat-training gags can be used. This is funnier than the first part, but still rather crude and almost plotless. Also, the hispanic actors cast as the rebels can't act at all, and some of them are clearly struggling with the English language. And the ill-advised "zany" jazz music that tells you which bits of this subplot are supposed to be hilarious is similar to but much more annoying than Benny Hill's relentless "Yackety Sax" theme. In fact, Woody himself apparently knew it was an incoherent, second-rate mess, since the first two-thirds of the film - Woody as a coward who interacts disastrously badly with any kind of technology and somehow becomes a "heroic" though hopelessly inept resistance fighter - were more or less remade as the far superior "Sleeper".

And then, almost an hour into a 79-minute film, we suddenly get to the bit which, if you believe the advertising, is the main theme of the entire movie - Woody becomes a crude spoof of Fidel Castro. Which is relevant for about 10 minutes, before an excuse is found to ditch the Cuban revolution plot completely in favor of a long and desperately unfunny courtroom scene and a downright odd conclusion to the romantic subplot from Part 1. Unlike the Marx Brothers' "Horse Feathers", in which the idea of a wildly unsuitable foreigner becoming the dictator of a small country and causing mayhem is genuinely the entire point of the film, and is used in a surprisingly subversive way, the political satire in "Bananas" is almost as minimal as the relevance of the title (which is justified by one throwaway reference to bananas in the whole movie). This is really just Woody Allen finding excuses to do his usual schtick for 79 minutes, most of which have a loose theme sort of tying them together, and sometimes it's funny, but too often it isn't. Watchable if you're stuck for something to watch and not too fussy.

Antony Balch is regarded by some as one of the great what-ifs of cinema. What if he'd actually succeeded in filming "The Naked Lunch" 20 years before David Cronenberg, starring Mick Jagger? Would it have been a work of fevered underground genius, and would the other films he made before his tragically early death have scaled even greater heights? We'll never know, but judging by the only two feature films he managed to complete, "Horror Hospital" and this one, the answer is no. By the way, in case anybody somehow thinks a movie called "Secrets of Sex" is a "classic" because this website categorizes it as one, I should point out that some of their categorizations are very peculiar indeed!

This, Balch's first (and second-last) theatrical feature, is plotless early seventies soft porn trying desperately to be something else, and not quite managing; I assume he had a contract to make an "adult" movie, and attempted to put as many interesting ideas in there as he possibly could while keeping the nudity quotient high enough to satisfy his paymasters. Narrated, for no discernible reason, by a mummy (Valentine Dyall, the only name in the credits you might possibly have seen elsewhere), it's a series of short stories unconnected except by the extremely loose theme of "the battle of the sexes". Some of them are feebly horrific, some are clumsily comic, some are downright baffling, and all are "acted" by people who don't normally appear in the kind of films where acting is considered a relevant skill.

Balch is clearly taking a satirical poke at the soft-core genre even as he contributes to it. A screamingly gay man directing a movie intended to run in the kind of cinemas frequented almost exclusively by heterosexual males, he seems to have gone out of his way to alternate nude women with nude men, sometimes accompanied by the explicit suggestion that the audience might fancy both of them, in such a way as to create guilty confusion amongst virtually everyone likely to have seen this film in a cinema. Naked dancing girls are pelted with rotting vegetables. One episode revolves around what is obviously the most sexually un-arousing concept Balch could possibly think of for persons of any sexual orientation. And the nudity (of which there's a great deal) is sometimes dropped into the film like a Dadaist found object while other characters spout barely relevant gibberish almost worthy of Ed Wood.

It's an absolutely dreadful film which goes out of its way to deliberately alienate its supposed target audience in the hope of getting a reputation as an arthouse movie. Since this particular DVD was pressed by a company called "Slap & Tickle", I think we can safely say it didn't. While watching it, I tried to imagine what kind of person would find this movie, taken as a whole, erotic, and I honestly couldn't. But you know what? I have to admit that it's not quite like any other film I've ever seen. It's not good, but it's not offensively bad; it's just plain weird, and I'd recommend it on that basis. But no other.

The trouble with adapting Shakespeare for the screen is that nowadays his plays are practically religious texts, and they have to be approached in a suitably reverential manner. Which isn't what he intended at all. If he was alive today, he'd be writing movie scripts, and I don't mean those melancholy little indie pictures about gay coal-miners that win a prize at Sundance but don't exactly set the box office alight, I mean mainstream blockbusters. Hitler. Nixon. Osama Bin Laden. Princess Di. And since he had no problem at all with writing plays about wizards and fairies, Disney would probably have hired him for "The Force Awakens". And what about Dracula or Batman?

These plays were meant to be popular entertainment, not some kind of solemn ritual venerating the sacred words of the Bard of Avon. The standard text of "Macbeth" includes a poorly-written and irrelevant scene modern productions often omit because it's thought to have been added by somebody else to increase the number of crowd-pleasing witches and ghosts; so basically it's the special edition where Greedo shoots first. Unfortunately, what we have here is an excellent cast treating the play so over-reverentially that it's no fun at all, and utterly fails to convey any sense that these are real people living in a made-up world that works on its own terms. In fact, the genuine Scottish Highland scenery makes the characters seem even less realistic.

Inevitably Shakespeare's language is now as archaic as anything else that's 400 years old, yet good actors can deliver it in ways that make it seem natural, even if some of the words sound odd. But in this adaptation, everyone, including the non-speaking extras, acts in an oddly stylized and terribly meaningful way almost all the time. I was reminded of "The Wicker Man", but that in that film, the fact that everyone behaves in such a stilted ritualistic fashion is supposed to stand out as deeply abnormal. Even "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" constantly reminds us that while the knights pursue their pointless quest, ordinary people are getting on with their ordinary (though equally silly) lives in the background. But this version of Scotland seems to be populated entirely by lugubrious chess-pieces.

The self-consciously arty lighting, in-your-face cliché modern camera techniques (lots and lots of slow motion, some of it ultra-slow), and constant droning "Celtic ambient" music don't help either. Kurosawa's "Throne Of Blood" from 1957 remains the best attempt so far to bring this story to the screen, even though technically it's about a Japanese warlord called Washizu and not Macbeth at all (presumably because if your leading man is Toshiru Mifune, it's a tad optimistic to cast him as a Scotsman). Even Roman Polanski's extremely flawed 1971 version is, for all its faults, a lot more fun. This is a film tailor-made for winning prizes at highbrow film festivals, then playing to audiences consisting of three pretentiously arty people who will absolutely love it, and one other guy who thought from the image on the poster that it was "Mad Max: Fury Road" and fell asleep.

Although he never quite had Sergio Leone's extraordinary visual flair, Sergio Corbucci, the other great director of spaghetti westerns, had a much more active social conscience, and he usually tried to put across some kind of political message, therefore the plots and characters in his best films tend to be more complex than the usual "impossibly competent hero shoots lots of men who deserve to die" structure of most spaghettis.

This movie is Corbucci's most serious western, and despite the inclusion of various spaghetti tropes - ridiculously good shooting, gimmicky weapons, Ennio Morricone music, several familiar faces from the Dollars Trilogy - just about everything you expect from a film of this kind is turned on its head, right from the very first shot of a lone horseman riding across not a sun-baked desert but a frozen snowscape. It's no accident that just about every shot feels chilly, and the characters frequently comment on the lack of warmth. This a cold, cold film, where goodness is a handicap in world without mercy or compassion.

However, its inhabitants are a fascinating bunch. Although the hero, who isn't called Silence for nothing, is a bit of a nonentity, just about everybody else manages to break out of the expected stereotypes, even if they're only a very minor character. In particular, instead of being either a useless coward or a lackey of the baddies, the sheriff is a brave and genuinely good man who is unfortunately not too bright, therefore his sincere attempts to do the right thing invariably backfire in hideously ironic ways. This also makes him a rare example of a comic relief buffoon whose well-intentioned bumbling has realistically dire consequences.

Since the hero not only makes Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" seem like a motormouth, but spends a fair bit of the film in bed because, in yet another trope inversion, severe injuries are just as disabling for him as they are for normal people, the real "hero" is Klaus Kinski's Tigrero, a disturbingly convivial psychopath who is by far the smartest person in town, and never once does anything that a real villain wouldn't because the script's forcing him to implausibly give his enemies at least a halfway sporting chance.

It's not quite a masterpiece, and it does get a bit depressing at times, but this is certainly one of the most unusual and mould-breaking westerns ever made. The ending in particular is so off-kilter that the studio insisted on Corbucci reshooting a much more conventional climax. In the end it was scrapped because they had to admit that in the light of everything that had gone before it just looked absurd, but you can see that alternative final scene as a DVD extra. This is an important western and a hugely important spaghetti western, and is therefore highly recommended to anyone who likes that kind of thing.

By the way, unlike many DVD releases of spaghetti westerns, this is the original Italian-language version, though if you hate subtitles, you can opt for the usual horribly-dubbed English on the sound menu.

Antony Balch, a sort of cross between Ed Wood and Kenneth Anger, is one of the most unjustly neglected bloody awful directors. Almost unbelievably, this movie is his highest-budget and most professional-looking piece of work. Then again, he only managed to release two feature-length films before his untimely death.

Michael Gough, who back in the day starred in shedloads of incredibly strange films, has said regarding his performance that Balch screened "The Devil Bat" (1940) for him and told him to play the demented Dr. Storm just like Bela Lugosi in that movie, and I think he does a pretty good job. Robin Askwith, the deeply unattractive star of numerous dreadful early seventies soft porn films like "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" (did women genuinely find men like him irresistible back then? I find that very hard to believe!), is his same old unbearably smug self, but for once he manages to come across as a fairly competent actor simply because so many of the cast aren't actors at all; the hunky-in-a-very-seventies-way guy who shows up late on as a completely unnecessary second hero is presumably the director's boyfriend, and most of the smaller rôles are clearly played by anyone Balch knew who fancied being in a movie.

The plot, which was apparently made up in a great hurry after funding had been obtained on the strength of the title alone, involves a mad scientist running a "heath spa" which turns every last one of its guests into radio-controlled lobotomized zombies, apart from the ones who get decapitated in a ludicrously contrived way just because. Naturally, this has been going on for years without anybody noticing. Why does he do it? No coherent explanation is provided for this or anything else.

But ultimately, who cares? This is a woefully inept, utterly chaotic film, yet it's strangely enjoyable. Irrelevant soft-core groping and painfully unconvincing fight scenes that are stretched out way too long to pad the running-time aside, quite a lot happens, none of it remotely plausible, and much of it genuinely surprising due to its sheer randomness. It was obviously a massive influence on "The Rocky Horror Picture Show": at one point, Robin Askwith manages to get beaten up by a drag queen, and there's even a hilariously terrible Spinal Tap-ish band thrown in for no reason at all (some of the director's pals looking for publicity, I assume). It's actually very gory, but in a totally undisturbing way because you don't take any of it seriously for one second. And Skip Martin, who was in even more of these things than Michael Gough because every bad horror movie needs a dwarf, steals it hands down as far and away the most complex and interesting character. Which isn't saying a great deal, but still.

I wanted to give this 2.5 stars but that's not an option, so I'll be generous and award it an extra half-star for not giving a hoot about anything whatsoever, including the actors' ability to act, the director's ability to direct, or the fact that it doesn't involve an actual hospital in any way. Definitely in the "so bad it's good" category, but never mentioned in the usual internet listicles because they just recycle the same old turkeys they can find on other identical sites. Oh, and as insults go, describing somebody as "a lemon meringue pie on heat" is truly inspired!

This is the movie famous for being the one that Joan Collins hates being reminded she was in - and this is an actress who was once clawed to death by a demonically possessed baby! Unfortunately, that's all it has going for it. American International Pictures, best known for producing endless Roger Corman B-movies, were obviously trying rather forlornly, in an era when B-movies had ceased to have any real purpose, to repeat the success of Corman's Poe films with an H. G. Wells franchise directed by Bert I. Gordon, very much a C-lister even on a good day, who, possibly because his initials spelled "big", was obsessed with the idea of some animal or person growing unfeasibly large, a phenomenon which occurs in just about all his films.

Unfortunately, the plot is painfully formulaic for three-quarters of the mercifully short running time. A bunch of very seventies and thoroughly unlikeable people get stranded on a dismal beach next to a swamp, where they spend half an hour being tediously unpleasant before the ants even show up. About those ants: mostly they're real ants unconvincingly back-projected, and therefore conspicuously fail to pay any attention to the humans they're supposed to be within a few feet of and keen to snack upon. When they do attack, which happens disappointingly seldom, dummy ants are thrust into shot, while the camera shakes vigorously in a failed attempt to conceal the immobility of these oddly furry plastic insects. "Them!" portrayed giant killer ants infinitely better, and that was made in 1954. And throwing in a blatant rip-off of the music from "Jaws" doesn't make them any scarier.

After endless repetitive running away from stock footage of totally disinterested arthropods while they bitch at each other, the survivors finally stumble into a wildly improbable plot-twist which might have been enjoyably schlocky if it had come right at the beginning and provided a mystery for the characters to solve, and if it hadn't been handled as tediously as everything else, but it didn't and it was. Nobody involved can act except Joan Collins, and she obviously isn't trying - mostly her facial expression is that of somebody whose agent is shortly going to wish he had never been born. Don't waste your time.

Oh dear... Yes, it's another of those films which the trendy critics fall over themselves to say they love, but which somehow don't appeal to a very large audience. The gimmick here is the exact opposite of the current "Planet Of The Apes" franchise. Instead of chimpanzees who have the intellectual and communication skills of humans but look exactly like and in some ways behave like chimpanzees, we've got humans who live in what seems to be a perfectly normal modern British city, but have the intelligence, behavior patterns, and verbal skills of chimpanzees.

The trouble is, that's it. The performances are actually very good, but since these "people" have the mentalities of oversexed ultra-violent toddlers, all the themes covered are extremely basic. Alpha males squabble and clash with varying degrees of violence, up to and including extreme, for the ownership rights to the prettiest females. Along the way, we get a very blunt satire of the chav lifestyle - many scenes are basically Paul & Pauline Calf taken to their logical extreme and then some, losing almost all the jokes along the way; these people may know how to operate computer games and the widescreen TVs they covet, but they can't even talk, and their bodily wastes usually end up on the floor. However, on the plus side, there is explicit onscreen genital mutilation played for laughs.

The originality of the premise, and the lengths to which it's taken - remember, chimpanzees have almost no inhibitions whatsoever about anything - initially drew me in because the cast really do give it everything they've got. But this is a textbook example of a one-joke film, and that joke is taken so far that it quickly ceases to be funny. Things like a TV cookery show for humans with the minds of monkeys might have worked very well as brief running gags in a sketch show (by an amazing coincidence, this film was made by the team responsible for "The Mighty Boosh"), though a similar spoof of "Cheers" seems absurdly belated, but the sheer relentless ugliness of it wears you down after a while.

I'm giving this repellent film more than one star because the level of effort the actors, most of whom appear to believe it's worth taking seriously, put into it is genuinely surprising, and at times comes close to making it work. But it's so one-note that they have an impossible task, and although it does have funny moments, they're outnumbered by things that are simply repellent. Yes, it's original, but that isn't everything, and it's a very shallow kind of originality. By the way, if you sometimes wonder whatever happened to Toyah Wilcox, here she is, playing a somewhat past-it but still marginally sexy chav ape-woman. And, almost unbelievably, the soundtrack is provided by what's left of King Crimson! I suppose at their age they need all the work they can get.

After the rave reviews, I was hoping for much more than I got. I can see why it won a few prizes: it's the kind of film that gets film festival awards without really appealing to all that many people. It's also very similar to "Dogtooth" from the same director, which had a lot of the same basic themes, but a much richer vein of pitch-black humor, far more imagination, and an ingenious explanation for the utterly skewed world its characters inhabit. But this is a one-dimensional dystopia with absurdly specific rules that blatantly exist purely so that a torturous allegory can be spun from them. I was reminded of those old "Star Trek" episodes where the entire population of a planet have some ludicrous lifestyle such as pretending to be Napoleon, simply so that Captain Kirk can show up and explain how silly they're all being by punching them in the face. I also suspect that this film wouldn't have existed if "The Invention of Lying" hadn't been made first, and that wasn't exactly a masterpiece.

One crucial aspect of the movie, which I notice isn't even hinted at in the trailer, is that everyone is a borderline autistic who delivers almost every line in an emotionless monotone, including a lobotomized-sounding narrator who sometimes tells us in a flat, utterly disinterested voice about things another character has just said word for word. This is perilously close to plain old bad acting, even if they're doing it on purpose, and it wears out its welcome pretty quickly.

Another seemingly vital aspect of the film, which all the publicity material heavily emphasizes, is that the characters inhabit a world where anyone who is for any reason single has 45 days to find a new mate, otherwise they're somehow turned into an animal. This is in fact a cosmetic touch of random weirdness which has absolutely no significant bearing on the plot, though it does allow an otherwise dreary forest to be rendered lazily surreal by having a camel or a flamingo wander by occasionally. If this bizarre gimmick had been replaced by "people who are single for more than 45 days get shot in the head", it would have been the same movie with a less wacky hat on.

Why does any of this happen? If the fantasy world had been better imagined I wouldn't have cared, but it isn't, so I did. Why is everybody obsessed with being part of a couple? Since gay couples are permitted, it's not about the necessity to breed because they're running out of children, and religion is never mentioned once. And what's with the animal transformations that don't matter anyway? Ultimately, who cares? It's weird for the sake of weirdness without being interesting, it's only occasionally funny, its moral is clunkingly obvious and delivered by people who seem to have brain damage, and worst of all, it's pretentious. This is the kind of movie critics love just because it isn't about the Avengers smashing robots. That doesn't automatically make it good.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. A remake of "The Bride Of Frankenstein" from the point of view of the monsters, in which that strangely sexy she-creature who was in the original film for about two minutes before everything blew up was a major character - why not indeed? And I have to say it gets off to a cracking start, with all the usual steampunk paraphernalia going into overdrive on a dark and stormy night to bring unholy life to a shrouded something which turns out, when the bandages come off, to be Jennifer Beals from "Flashdance", complete with incredibly eighties hair! Basically, it's a Ken Russell film which for some reason they didn't invite Ken Russell to direct.

And that's where they went wrong. Ken would have kept the frantic excesses of the prologue going for the whole movie, because when you start a film with Sting from the Police reanimating Jennifer Beals from "Flashdance" in an exploding castle during a thunderstorm with the help of Quentin Crisp, you can't make it any more camp without them all breaking into a chorus of "Let's Do The Time Warp Again", so you might as well leave everything turned up to 11 until the end credits roll. Sadly, this lot don't. Jennifer Beals is very pretty, suitably baffled-looking, and completely impossible to mistake for anyone except her from "Flashdance". As for Sting, he acts about as well as you'd expect, considering that he's a grown man who calls himself Sting (it could have been worse - at least he's not Bono).

Clancy Brown is reasonably convincing as the well-meaning but mentally retarded monster who teams up with David Rappaport, by far the best actor in this mess (the inevitability of being typecast in rubbish like this because he was a dwarf finally wore him down so much that he committed suicide), but he's neither very monstrous nor remotely interesting, and you can see the way things are going to work out for those two the proverbial mile off. Jennifer Beals and Sting have about as much chemistry as two inert gases on a blind date, but it doesn't matter because their part of the plot lumbers along with almost nothing happening apart from some painfully clunky feminist propaganda from the wrong century, and a few ideas pinched from the underrated 1973 TV movie "Frankenstein: The True Story" that they don't have the slightest idea what to do with.

There are a few brief moments of gothic craziness which made me wish the whole film had been like that, but mostly it's a feeble melodrama with minimal violence and nothing you could honestly call sex, and it seems very tame compared to the Frankenstein movies Hammer made 20 or even 30 years earlier. Dull, disappointing, and despite spending almost its entire running-time trying to make you feel sorry for the monster, it succeeds far less well than either the original films with Boris Karloff, or Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein". Truly there are some things man is not meant to tamper with...

Dylan Thomas wrote "Under Milk Wood" in 1953 because the BBC commissioned it as a radio play, and it was subtitled "a play for voices". A few years later, when TV had become the dominant broadcasting medium, he might have written a revised version with that in mind, but as it stands it's very clearly intended to be a work you listen to rather than watch. And since Thomas died a month after completing it, this is the only version we've got.

The main difficulty with adapting it for film is that we're constantly hearing the voice of a narrator describing things, many of which are extremely trivial. Mental pictures of events rather than actual visuals are such a fundamental aspect of the narrative that the most important character, who perceives a great deal of what happens, is blind. So seeing them as well tends to be a bit redundant, especially if the entire point of the scene is a poetic description of somebody putting the kettle on.

The 1971 film version with Richard Burton had similar problems, which is presumably why it was 44 years before anybody tried again. This conspicuously cheaper adaptation oscillates between over-literal depictions of trivial incidents, semi-abstract close-ups of random objects (the director seems to be obsessed with water, especially that bit of stock footage with the purple jellyfish), overacted and usually inappropriate comedy, and gimmicky visual effects, including far too many shots from the point of view of the blind character, who in this version isn't completely blind but has very blurred eyesight. And when all else fails, random weirdness, such as four Maoris in grass skirts performing a haka for no reason at all. In the sea.

In other words, it's arty, and not in a good way - it doesn't help that the first half-hour consists entirely of dream-sequences. At times it resembles the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour", which can never be a good thing! There's also a lot of mostly thankfully brief sexual imagery of a crude, often downright repellent kind, which takes Dylan Thomas's basic idea that in a society which disapproved strongly of almost all forms of human sexuality (remember, this is 1950s Britain), people still did that sort of thing because people always do and there's nothing wrong with it, and uses it for cheap laughs.

This pretentious, self-indulgent film doesn't really serve any useful purpose. If you want a far better idea of what "Under Milk Wood" is meant to look like, obtain a copy of the 1954 BBC radio broadcast and listen to it with your eyes shut.

Anyone expecting something based in any way on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson which happens to share the name of this series is going to be disappointed. Set 50 years later than the events in the book, it follows Dr. Henry Jekyll's grandson Robert as he tries to cope with the improbably hereditary consequences of his grandfather's drug-induced transformation. Which, since this series owes far more to "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" than its alleged source-novel, means that he's basically the Incredible Hulk. Since it's also trying to copy "Men In Black", "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", and goodness knows what else, there's a secret organization trying to protect the world from legendary monsters, all of which exist, including those incredibly daft Japanese ones. There's also an even more secret organization of monsters who want to take over the world and do random evil stuff because... well, who says they need a reason? They're monsters, right?

I'm making this sound like fun. Unfortunately it isn't. The monsters are decidedly underwhelming, especially Mr. Hyde, who, in an obvious attempt to save money, is just Dr. Jekyll overacting, wearing a bit of eye-liner, and punching people in slow motion to show how strong he is. Some of them have mutations that are almost always covered by their clothing, and the carefully rationed CGI we do get to see looks cheap. Perhaps this is because a major but pointless subplot connecting the action with Sri Lanka ate into the budget, but they had to have it because otherwise a drama set in Britain long before it was even remotely multicultural wouldn't have included enough non-white characters to satisfy the demands of Political Correctness.

But what really kills it is the sluggish pace. Finding out basic information seems to take forever, including things the viewer already knows - it's two whole episodes before the hero, who by then has transformed several times into a completely different guy with superpowers, figures out that the original Jekyll & Hyde were the same person! In between, we get repetitive fights interspersed with too much long-winded plot exposition that doesn't really tell us much, and all-too-brief glimpses of the supernatural horrors that are meant to be the main attraction. The horror, by the way, is very mild indeed.

And then there's the acting. Nobody is noticeably good, and many of them, particularly the villains and the women, are absolutely dreadful - the obligatory love interest seems to be using an autocue. Richard E. Grant's the biggest star they could afford, but even he looks restrained compared to some of these rampant hams! Oh, and unless my ears deceive me, the Ultimate Cosmic Horror the baddies are trying to unleash is called Lord Trash. So maybe this is supposed to be a comedy? If so, they forgot to include any jokes other than that one.

This review is of episodes 1-4. There are another 2 discs to go, but I won't be renting them because I simply can't be bothered sitting through almost 7 more hours of this to find out how Mr. Hyde saves the Universe from Lord Trash.

It's hard to give this film an accurate star rating because it's really two interwoven one-hour films about events that happen 30 years apart. If the sixties half of it had been expanded into an entire movie, with the later part reduced to an epilogue or a framing story, it would deserve 5 stars. Paul Dano is superb as the young and very troubled Brian Wilson, achieving both commercial and artistic success because he's an enormously talented musician, while simultaneously falling apart due to a combination of having an absolutely dreadful control-freak father who wants to be a pop star by proxy through his sons (that sort of domestic arrangement seldom works out too well in the long run - exactly the same thing happened to Michael Jackson), and taking LSD when he already has schizophrenic tendencies, which is never, ever a good idea! (See "The Devil & Daniel Johnston" for further details.)

The lengthy scenes of some of the Beach Boys' best songs being put together in the studio by an incredibly committed, sometimes manic Brian Wilson are riveting, and truly succeed in conveying how talented you have to be to produce a genuinely brilliant piece of music of that complexity, even if it's only a 3-minute pop-song. And of course, the fact that the end results are represented by the actual music of the Beach Boys at the peak of their powers doesn't exactly hurt. Paul Dano is very convincing indeed as a nice young man who just wants to make music but is rapidly descending into madness that terrifies him and he can't make it stop. And it really does look like the early sixties, partly because the director went to the trouble of sometimes using obsolete film-stock so that it resembles the slightly grainy movies we're used to seeing from that era instead of a crystal-clear modern one.

The nineties scenes aren't so great. John Cusack is a bit of a cliché as the pitiful, twitching man-child Brian Wilson has become, and not terribly interesting. As for Elizabeth Banks as the unbelievably nice car salesperson who saves him from the frightful Dr. Landy, she's just plain dull. And there's far more simplification and whitewashing going on in this part of the film than the sixties portion, which is by all accounts painfully accurate. In particular, the fact that Brian Wilson's next of kin made an extremely dodgy psychiatrist his legal guardian and let this quack control every aspect of his life is never addressed. The truth is that the combined effects of alcoholism, cocaine addiction, massive abuse of various other substances, severe mental illness, and weighing 300 pounds were so obviously going to kill him in the very near future that they had no choice but to turn him over to the one guy who could control him well enough to save his life, and unfortunately that short-term fix eventually went horribly wrong. But here we see a pathetic innocent saved by a knight in shining armour (female for a change) from a parasitic monster who is 100% to blame for everything, because that's neater and cleaner than the real story. And what's with that huge visual reference to "2001 - A Space Odyssey"???

So it's a film of two halves, one of which is far better than the other. But that half is so good that it's well worth seeing the film. As for the lesser half, the constant switching between sixties and nineties means that it keeps returning to the part you're really interesting in before you have time to get bored. All the same, I wish it had been a whole movie about Brian Wilson's descent into madness, and the menagerie of crazies he hung out with more and more as he drifted away from the other Beach Boys. To mention just one name: Charles Manson...