Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Benedict Cumberbatch has been quoted as saying that when the BBC first proposed setting a special episode of "Sherlock" in the Victorian era, he thought they'd "lost the plot". Hang about - why is it crazy to set stories written in the 19th century about a character who lived in the 19th century in the 19th century? Are we to assume the viewers are idiots who have already forgotten that any versions of a character called Sherlock Holmes ever existed before he was played on BBC TV by a guy called Benedict Cumberbatch?

The sad thing is, he was right. Thanks to a contrived plot-twist you'll probably see coming long before it's revealed an hour into the tale, this is a ludicrously over-the-top parody of Victorian times, featuring endless clumsy in-jokes, lots of those flashy "look what we can do with computers nowadays!" visual effects that are mostly both distracting and unnecessary, and a desperately unsubtle tub-thumping feminist agenda because anything the BBC spends money on these days has to include lengthy sermons about various types of prejudice being wrong, no matter how much they get in the way of the plot.

We're also treated to the supporting cast going all meta and complaining about their fictional portrayal, Mycroft Holmes as a slightly thinner version of Mr. Creosote from "The Meaning Of Life", attempts to lampshade the silliest aspects of the story by having the characters admit they're silly, and of course Moriarty. Andrew Scott, the world's worst actor, once again portrays the Napoleon of crime as Graham Norton's evil twin, and repeatedly reminds us, whenever he isn't too busy pulling pantomime scary faces and randomly licking things, that although he's most definitely dead, he'll nevertheless be popping up regularly to ruin every episode he's in for as long as the BBC continues to make "Sherlock".

What started out as an excellent modern adaptation of one of the most iconic characters in fiction almost immediately began to drift into self-parody, and has now jumped the proverbial shark. Like the new "Doctor Who", it's up to its eyebrows in excess baggage that's been tacked onto a perfectly good and very straightforward franchise in an attempt to include something for everyone and thus sell it to the largest possible overseas market, and still they're finding new, ever more absurd ways to furtle around with it. Perhaps the writers know they're going to lose Benedict Cumberbatch unless "Doctor Strange" is a dismal flop, so in the time they've got left they might as well try out their craziest ideas. Whatever. After two very short series and one Xmas special it's already not as good as it used to be, and as of now I won't be wasting any more time on it.

Joe McGrath was a peculiar director. Almost all his films, which usually starred Peter Sellers and/or Spike Milligan, were a chaotic muddle of good ideas and utter incoherence, not unlike the patchier episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus". This is no exception. Almost plotless, it's really a series of themed sketches in which Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), the world's richest and most cynical man, tries to find out how far everybody else will go for money. He does this by using his limitless wealth to set up elaborate pranks, the most outrageous of which involves persuading hundreds of smug rich twits to embark on a luxury cruise where everything is secretly under his complete control. It's almost a precursor of "The Truman Show", mashed up with a few of those Monty Python sketches where some poor schmuck just wants to buy a pair of shoes, but reality has inexplicably broken down and the staff in the shoe shop are reenacting the Battle of Waterloo with real cannons or something.

Unfortunately it doesn't quite work. The oh-so-sixties anti-capitalist message gets a bit confused, and sometimes the antiheroic protagonist seems to be tormenting random passers-by who haven't done anything at all to deserve it. Also, the sheer hypocrisy of an obscenely rich man looking down on everybody else for wanting a little bit of what he's got far too much of is left oddly unexplored. And then there's Ringo Starr. Obviously in 1969 if you could persuade 25% of the Fab Four to co-star in your movie, you'd jump at the chance! Alas, being the least worst actor in the Beatles doesn't necessarily mean you're any good, and Ringo isn't. In fact, he's a complete waste of space whose dim-witted character exists purely for Peter Sellers to have somebody to do plot exposition at. He also appears to be trying very hard to deliberately ruin the funniest scene in the film, Spike Milligan's brilliant cameo as the traffic warden who finds out that every man has his price.

Viewed as a compilation of almost stand-alone comedy sketches, it's a pretty funny film which sometimes manages to be hilarious, and goes off on so many weird tangents that it's full of surprises. Viewed as an actual film, it's just Peter Sellers playing a lot of absurdly complicated practical jokes for a very contrived reason, while Ringo Starr follows him around being dense. And although the numerous celebrity cameos are sometimes amusing, most of those stars were obviously shoehorned into the movie for about a minute each just to get a lot of famous names on the poster, and they don't really contribute much to the film. What it all adds up to is silly lightweight fun that's sometimes very inventive indeed, but never manages to cohere into anything you could honestly call a story. If you don't have a problem with that, there are considerably worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

In case anyone believes this film to be a documentary because this rental company classifies it as one, I assure you that, even though all the major characters were real people, a documentary it most certainly is not! I can only assume that whoever decided it was one was under the influence of alcohol or drugs (I notice he or she didn't even manage to copypaste the plot summary correctly). Of course, I could be wrong. I'm no expert on 19th century Europe, so maybe Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler really were the same person, and maybe he/they liked nothing better than massacring Jews with a weaponized electric guitar. And maybe Franz Liszt, when he wasn't too busy playing the piano, hunted vampires with a flamethrower, flew around in a magic transparent spaceship, and sometimes got erections ten feet long.

I'm not making this up! At the top of the page you can see a couple of photos of Franz Liszt's spaceship, though for some reason, none of his ten-foot penis. But I assure you that, according to this film, he most certainly had one! You'll probably need to watch that sequence twice to reassure yourself that you weren't hallucinating the first time. I haven't a clue who Ken Russell thought his target audience were. Teenage fans of The Who at the height of their fame and lovers of classical music alike must have been repelled by Roger Daltrey playing Liszt's piano music surprisingly well (apparently that really is him playing) while simultaneously ruining it by singing dreadful pop ballads. And everybody must have been utterly baffled by almost everything else that happens.

Then again, this is a movie in which Pope Pius IX is played by Ringo Starr. It's so wildly inaccurate that the descendants of Richard Wagner tried to sue Ken Russell, but couldn't because the law of libel only applies to the living. I'm surprised Marvel Comics didn't sue as well, since this film includes the unofficial screen debut of a character who has since gone on to far better things. By the way, that's Rick Wakeman in the superhero costume.

But you know what? I'f you're in the mood, it's a lot of fun! You certainly haven't seen anything quite like it before, and you're unlikely to ever again. It's dreadful, but in a genuinely so-bad-it's-good way, and unlike dreck such as "Snakes on a Plane" or the entire output of Troma, it's honestly trying to be an excellent movie with a serious point to make. The extent to which it fails has to be seen to be believed. It was at round about this time that all the major studios decided Ken Russell wasn't a genius after all and stopped giving him money. You can see why - this chaotic, insane movie looks and sounds like an opera written by Tim Burton and directed by Ed Wood on acid. All the same, there's something oddly lovable about any historical drama which includes the line: "Piss off, Brahms!"

This is a very odd film, mainly because the story behind it is more important than the film itself. Roger Corman had taken a film crew to Ireland to shoot yet another forgettable B-movie (I forget which one). Among them was a very young sound engineer called Francis Ford Coppola, who had gotten the job because when at the last minute the usual sound man was taken ill, Corman asked if anybody else could operate the equipment, and Coppola put his hand up. Actually that was a complete lie. He just wanted to be part of the movie, and all he knew about sound engineering was what he learned from reading the instruction manual during the flight to Ireland.

Nevertheless, he muddled through, and Corman, who always had an eye for inexperienced young technicians who showed a spark of talent, noticed that his somewhat inept sound man was passionately keen on all aspects film-making, and seemed to be picking up the basics remarkably quickly through sheer enthusiasm. So he made him a very surprising offer. Since Corman, with his usual workaholic super-efficiency, had finished the movie he'd gone to Ireland to make both ahead of schedule and under budget, the entire cast and crew would be getting a paid vacation for the next couple of weeks, which to Corman seemed like a waste. So he told Coppola that if he reckoned he could whip up a script overnight and shoot a movie with the available resources before it was time to go home, he was welcome to give it a whirl.

This incredibly bizarre murder mystery was the result, and given the circumstances under which it was made, it's fair to say that Coppola rose to the challenge magnificently. Actually it's not much of a mystery, since there are only two suspects: the guy who is really obviously flagged as a loony from the start, and the quiet one who wouldn't hurt a fly (have you solved it yet, Sherlock?). But hey, that's what happens when you've got about 12 hours to write the entire script before the cameras start rolling. And for a semi-improvised literally no-budget film, it's genuinely quite gripping, and full of stylistic flourishes. You might not have guessed from these humble beginnings that Coppola would go on to make the Godfather Trilogy, but given what he achieved when Roger Corman basically lobbed a camera at him and said "Make a movie NOW!!!", there was obviously untapped talent there from the start.

This isn't really Coppola's directorial debut, since he made at least one porno movie under a pseudonym, but as far as his PR people are concerned, it's the first film he'll admit to making, and that's good enough for them. At least two cuts of this film exist. If the onscreen title is "The Haunted And The Hunted", it's probably the original version. If it's the one retitled "Dementia 13", crucial scenes may be extremely confusing because the axe murders have been edited out. Hopefully in this day and age the very mild gore has been restored to all available DVD cuts, but you may be unlucky and get an old one. For a better and crazier B-movie about a murderously disfunctional family, see co-writer Jack Hill's utterly bonkers "Spider Baby".

Presumably this film is a belated response to one of the oddest features of "The French Connection", which is that a massive criminal conspiracy taking place in two countries is solved entirely by the Americans, the French apparently contributing nothing other than one cop snooping around Marseilles, and not doing it very well, since he dies about two minutes into the movie. While it's understandable that the French might want to depict the same or very similar events from their point of view, the elephant in the room is that it was inevitably going to invite a direct comparison with one of the best cop thrillers ever made. Which it really, really shouldn't.

It's not a terrible film; it's just nowhere near as good as the one it's trying very hard to mirror. The actors mostly do their jobs well enough, but the characters simply aren't that interesting. Gene Hackman's "Popey" Doyle was fascinating and memorable because he was a repellent and far from conventionally heroic man who was nevertheless unquestionably doing the right thing, though sometimes his methods were very questionable indeed. The French magistrate we're supposed to side with here is frankly a bit dull. He's a devoted family man who is shown throughout to be heroically good, and his flaws, such as a gambling addiction which has no bearing on the plot and anyway he's over it, are token attempts to stop him coming across as a plaster saint which don't really work.

The scenes involving organized crime and tough police work are gripping when they actually happen, but the whole film feels as though it should have been made half an hour shorter by much tighter editing of the numerous scenes of people in domestic situations doing nothing interesting or relevant to the story. Meanwhile, extremely important things are pushed into the background, such as a subplot in which the hero suddenly discovers that some of the cops he's working with are in the pay of the baddies, which pops up quite late in the film, briefly becomes significant, and is then largely forgotten.

While some fairly violent action occurs, there isn't as much as you'd expect, but what's far more damaging is that there's very little of the tension "The French Connection" gave us in spades. That film showed us cops and gangsters trying to outwit each other over one huge drug shipment, the progress of which we followed throughout the movie. Here, many shipments are apparently getting through, largely unseen by the audience, while the cops bang their heads against a brick wall until they finally sort it all out. There's no ticking clock, and I often didn't know whether a day or a month was supposed to have passed until one of the characters told me. Overall, it's a good story partly undone by extremely slack storytelling, and by the fact that it's not a patch on the superb film it directly imitates right down to its title.

Ever since they started selling Batman to a more mature audience, DC have regularly featured him in stories where he exposes the exaggeratedly hideous corruption festering in the heart of the Gotham City Police Department. This film gives you a pretty good idea what the GCPD would be like without Batman. Unfortunately, it's a documentary, so no fictional Dark Knight was going to clean house for the NYPD. And since the unofficial code these cops lived by meant that the very worst thing you could possibly do was to rat on a fellow officer, no matter what he'd done, it took them quite a while to get round to doing it themselves.

If this was fiction, it would be almost unbelievable, since the plot is almost identical to that of "Goodfellas", only with the mafiosi replaced by horribly bent coppers. It would also be a cracking good movie, apart from an ending which isn't quite as dramatic as it should have been, and was in fact supposed to be, because real life doesn't necessarily follow the rules of a Hollywood script. As a documentary, it isn't very visual, consisting as it does almost entirely of talking heads. It would have worked nearly as well on the radio, and that's a big failing for a movie. But otherwise it's an extraordinary film. The extent to which the main characters (none of these people are portrayed by actors - they're all real) fell from grace and ended up doing the exact opposite of what cops are supposed to do is simply jaw-dropping, and weirdly compelling.

Ken Eurell, a weak man who candidly admits that once he started down the slippery slope, greed took over and however much money he illicitly ended up with, "it was never enough", is the ex-cop who didn't ever quite manage to persuade his conscience to quit bugging him, though the circumstances under which he "reformed" weren't exactly heroic. Michael Dowd apparently never had a conscience. His unconvincing attempts to sound remorseful somehow always end up being all about himself, and he gives the distinct impression that what he really regrets is being caught. But his matter-of-fact chronicle of what a terrible person he became is bizarrely fascinating, even if he probably is an actual psychopath (or perhaps for that very reason).

And the vain, stupid man-child of a crime-boss who inexplicably agreed to appear on camera is simultaneously such a vile excuse for a human being that you really wish Batman could somehow exist after all just to give him a proper kicking, and blackly humorous living proof of the banality of evil. I actually laughed out loud when he revealed that, although he of course used to own a flashy custom pimpmobile with a massively excessive sound-system, not being black, he didn't like all that gangsta rap shit, so he used to cruise the 'hood blasting out Julio Iglesias and Bryan Adams.

Once again, the synopsis is slightly mangled and very misleading. This extremely strange movie has the twisted logic of a dream. During an increasingly chaotic cricket match at the mental hospital where he is a patient, Alan Bates tells Tim Curry most of the film's story in flashback, warning him at the outset that he's an unreliable narrator who sometimes gets things mixed up, but nevertheless it's all true. And the flashbacks contain a further layer of backstory which is never confirmed, and appears to be not terribly reliable either.

Appearing out of nowhere and inviting himself into the smug little household of fashionable but talentless avant-garde composer John Hurt and his devoted but vaguely dissatisfied wife Susannah York, on whom he casually cheats, Bates dominates them both in different ways with the extraordinary magical powers he allegedly learned while living for 18 years as an Australian aborigine. The Anglican Christianity which is frequently referenced, and the cricket match going on in the background throughout the film, are both impotent attempts by modern Englishmen to impose order on a universe which isn't having any of it, just as Hurt's pretentious musique concrète is a feeble parody of the raw chaos Bates can genuinely unleash to the point where everyone in earshot drops dead. However, it seems that letting aboriginal magic loose in cosy old England gives reality such a jolt that the magic becomes infectious...

Unfortunately, a movie that could have been "Eraserhead" meets "Straw Dogs" (in which Susannah York also appeared, and also had nude scenes, which seems to have been a contractual obligation, judging by the number of films she's in in which she actually keeps her clothes on) is oddly compromised by the story being simultaneously too weird and not quite weird enough. The utterly bizarre events which start to occur as reality unravels, and which aren't really explained at all, are somewhat devalued by an ending that's just a little too neat, and way too reminiscent of "Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected" (remember that?). If it had had the courage of its convictions and taken both the insanity and the ambiguity about what actually happened a bit further, like "Picnic at Hanging Rock", which had the genius not to neatly resolve anything at all, it could have been a classic weird movie. It isn't, but it's still a fascinating curiosity well worth a look because true originality and bold experimentation are always interesting, and in today's sausage-machine movie industry, even more undervalued than they were half a century ago.

By the way, connoisseurs of those "before they were famous" moments may enjoy the sight of a very young and very, very mad Jim Broadbent running around in his underpants.

There's this Buddhist scroll which gives the first person to read it almost infinite superpowers, but that would clearly be a bad idea, so nobody's allowed to read it, ever. Which makes you wonder why they bothered to write it in the first place, but it's the MacGuffin, OK? So stop asking awkward questions. Anyway, in 1943 this Nazi wants it so he can rule the world and stuff, but Chow Yun Fat foils his plans because he's Chow Yun Fat. 2003, and the same Nazi, who by now is getting on a bit but has a whole bunch of henchmen with automatic weapons and black helicopters and everything, is still after Chow Yun Fat, who hasn't aged a day because The Scroll makes you immortal as well as bulletproof. So basically it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" meets "Highlander" with added kung fu.

Am I making this sound like a ridiculous amount of fun? Because alas, it isn't. There's surprisingly little action, and in between we get shedloads of tedious padding in which Chow Yun Fat, never the world's best actor and less so when forced to act in English, exchanges wisecracks with the usual annoying young man who can't act at all, who we're supposed to like because he likes himself so very, very much, and has cheekbones covered in designer stubble that comprise almost his entire face. There's a pretty girl in it as well because there always is, but she can't act either, though she did surprise me by at no point gratuitously taking off most of her clothes. And you know the fight scenes are badly choreographed when you find yourself paying more attention to the way all the main characters can only make truly athletic moves when the camera can't see their faces than the actual fight, let alone caring who wins.

I should add that, despite the title, there's almost no evidence that the monk is in fact bulletproof. And you see that DVD cover up there with Chow Yun Fat in his trademark two-gun pose? Well, that happens once in the entire movie, for about 10 seconds, and is blatantly only there at all so they could use it in the promotional artwork. It's not horrible; it's just not very good. And for an all-action movie, it's decidedly short on action. Also, is it just me, or should a film with this much lighthearted comic banter really feature genocidal Nazis?

This film has a clever concept with a lot of potential, but fails because it isn't handled at all well. Obviously inspired, perhaps a little too much, by the infamous Justice League of America TV movie that left all the heroes anybody cared about off the roster for licensing reasons, and spent as many scenes as possible being an awkwardly comic fly-on-the-wall documentary about the characters' off-duty lives because they were cheaper to show than superheroics, this film follows a day in the lives of the Specials, "America's sixth or seventh best superhero team" (so presumably ranked somewhere between the Doom Patrol and Section Eight).

It's a great idea which in some ways prefigures the increasingly disfunctional superteams we see onscreen nowadays, but it could have been done far better. "What We Do In The Shadows" does something similar with third-rate vampires, but despite its very low budget, it manages to show us enough glimpses of them doing vampirey things to keep us aware of what they are. And "Spinal Tap" (to which this film compares itself) repeatedly shows the band performing. Here, we see almost zero evidence that these people have any superpowers at all, except for a tiny bit of CGI right at the very end, which is of course featured in the trailer in such a way as to imply that it's a major aspect of the entire film. By the halfway mark I'd completely forgotten what some of them were supposed to be able to do, which didn't matter because they never did it. With a slight rewrite, the movie could have been about any group of B-list celebrities who dress oddly and bicker.

Some of the jokes are very funny, especially near the beginning, and Thomas Haden Church easily steals the show as Strobe, the sincere but unbearably self-important team leader, but the frequent attempts to get laughs out of the fact that one hero is mentally retarded are unpleasant, and are made all the more gratuitous by the fact that another hero has an even lower mental age for a completely different reason. And sometimes the very strong language (the only reason this film has an 18 certificate) becomes tedious because the scriptwriters thought that superheroes swearing was so funny it could be used repeatedly to save them the trouble of thinking up actual jokes. Though given its penchant for utterly tasteless humor, the movie gets oddly sentimental towards the end.

Overall, this is a waste of a great idea with some pretty good bits, but not quite enough to save it. Though given the popularity of all things superheroic right now, I wouldn't be surprised if a remake hits our screens in a year or two. Besides, if DC properties as obscure as Jonah Hex can have their own movies, how long can it possibly be before it's the turn of the Inferior Five?

This is one of the most important political spaghetti westerns, a surprisingly large sub-genre because the opportunity to set the film during the Mexican Revolution gave a lot of scope to directors with a strong left-wing bent, and of course, since these directors really cared about the message they were trying to put across, left-wing spaghetti westerns tend overall to be very good.

Damiano Damiani had a patchy, largely undistinguished career, and this was probably his finest hour, except perhaps "My Name Is Nobody", a very different kind of western which may have been partly directed by Sergio Leone. The two men obviously influenced each other, since Leone's last (and worst) western "A Fistful Of Dynamite" is close to being a remake of this film. Both movies are about a chaotic, largely amoral Mexican bandit supposedly fighting for the revolution but mainly for himself, who forms an unlikely friendship with a wily gringo, and eventually learns what it truly means to be a revolutionary. And of course, along the way, lots of people get shot, things get blown up, and so on.

Damiani lacks Leone's visual flair, but you could say that of almost all directors. And he does add some very distinctive touches. Everyone remembers Klaus Kinski's mad monk delivering a benediction which he punctuates by lobbing grenades, but I was particularly struck by the way that, although films of this type virtually always portray the government troops as faceless cannon-fodder led by a sadistic madman, for once Damiani bothers to show us that the rebels' enemies are human beings too, some of whom have highly admirable qualities, so every death genuinely matters.

Of course, plenty of luckless guys in beige uniforms die all the same, probably about a hundred, so there's certainly no lack of the kind of action you're hoping to see. There is, however, a stronger emphasis on character development than usual, even minor characters who otherwise wouldn't matter. In fact, the entire movie is basically about how our extremely flawed hero El Chuncho's character develops. This is perhaps one of its weaknesses, since it does become a little preachy at times with its rather obvious "will Chuncho be seduced by money or do the right thing?" message.

The casting is also slightly odd. Gian Maria Volonté, the extremely memorable villain from a couple of Clint Eastwood movies with "dollars" in the title, is well over the top at times. This was apparently his main failing as an actor, which Sergio Leone kept more or less in check by making him rehearse his scenes so many times that he was too tired to chew the scenery by the time they pointed the camera at him. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have told Damiani about that little trick. And Lou Castel is so unappealing on every level that it's hard to see why certain other characters are instantly attracted to him even though he's clearly a calculating self-centered reptile from the get-go, unless the part was originally written for an actor with more charisma - Terence Hill, perhaps?

All in all, this is a slightly flawed but very good Italian western that takes itself more seriously than most, but doesn't compromise on the violent action its target audience came to see.

I don't know who writes these synopses, but the one given here seems to be of a completely different film. This is actually a peculiar comedy that mostly follows the trend for sequels to light-hearted spaghetti westerns to get even lighter of heart, sometimes reducing the body-count to zero. The trouble is, it can't quite make up its mind whether it wants to, resulting in a disconcerting unevenness of tone that ultimately ruins it.

Sabata, "the only invincible man in the countryside", as the excruciatingly dreadful theme-song helpfully informs us, is on the trail of "something big", which involves a lot of money we glimpse briefly, and a woman who gets murdered for knowing too much. As comedies go, this is very dark indeed, but hardly has the story begun when it's shoved to one side and barely mention at all for ages. Instead, Sabata, who has more gadgets than Batman and even less chance of losing a fight, and at one point seems to be literally indestructible, indulges in tediously unfunny repartee with annoying people who can't act, defeats numerous baddies in absurdly contrived non-lethal ways so easily that he looks rather smug most of the time, and the plot manages to simultaneously become extremely confusing and stop dead. Also, circus performers bounce around on trampolines a lot because in films like this they always do, and there are so many undersized peculiarly-shaped pistols no self-respecting gunslinger would carry unless the store was all out of proper guns that it comes across as incredibly strange product placement.

And then, more than halfway through, suddenly it's grimdark time again! Sabata abruptly starts ruthlessly gunning downs his foes, the genuinely horrible baddie is in the film properly instead of hanging about in the background because he's at odds with the zaniness of everyone else, all that stuff involving the murdered girl everybody had completely forgotten about resurfaces, and the story finally starts going somewhere. If the whole film was like the prologue and the second act, it would be a minor classic. Unfortunately it's half a good film with half a very bad film in a completely different style grafted onto it; I suspect the studio may have decided it was too gruesome and not wacky enough at a late stage in production. It has its moments, but there's also way too much of Lee Van Cleef being casually unbeatable while idiots pull faces and spout dismally unfunny comic dialogue.

For a similar but better film that consistently maintains its dark tone throughout, see "Adios, Sabata", an unrelated movie which was hastily turned into a sequel to this one by redubbing the hero's name.

The first great spaghetti western archetype was that guy played by Clint Eastwood who, since he didn't officially have a name, was only identifiable if Clint Eastwood played him, therefore he was soon supplanted as the all-purpose scruffy but deadly Mysterious Stranger by Django, who went on to appear in about 50 films, played by at least 20 different people. The second was Eastwood's co-star in "For A Few Dollars More", Colonel Douglas Mortimer, the black-clad Southern gentleman with all those gimmicky weapons played by Lee Van Cleef. Here we see him starting to metamorphose into a more versatile stereotype, still played by Lee Van Cleef, but now called Sabata, and conveniently deprived of any cumbersome backstory. Lee Van Cleef would go on to play Sabata in one more film, and Yul Brynner would step in for his third outing, before he turned into another guy called Sartana who was essentially the same person only a lot younger, and could be played by any generically handsome Italian who happened to be available. One time he even met Django.

This film has almost no plot whatsoever. Some guy who can do things other characters flat out state to be impossible moments before he does them turns up out of nowhere and copes with a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with him for no apparent reason. There's a lot of money involved, but well before the end you'll have forgotten why. And although it's not explicitly a comedy, much of what happens is so absurd that it might as well be, including the unnecessary inclusion of several acrobats just because spaghetti westerns were obsessed with them for reasons nobody has ever figured out. Several characters have incredibly strange hairstyles - another inexplicable feature of many spaghetti westerns - and that fat bloke with rectangular glasses whose entire career consisted of playing evil cowardly bankers in spaghetti westerns lurks in the background looking sweaty and terrified. So it's pretty much par for the course.

But it's a lot of fun. The characters may be flat, but they very seldom pause for long enough for us to worry about it. The comedy doesn't get in the way of proper gunfights where numerous people actually die, and the nonsensical plot zips along so fast that you soon stop caring that you don't have a clue what anyone's motive is for anything, or how ludicrously impractical the hero's handgun is. You even stop noticing all those bizarre hairstyles after a while, apart from that guy with the banjo of course. If you switch off the logical part of your brain you'll enjoy this. If you don't, it'll hurt. So just go with the flow. By the way, whoever wrote the official blurb on this site claiming that this film "gallops to a final, spectacular shootout that's one of the biggest gunfights ever seen in the movies" presumably looked at the DVD cover, observed that Lee Van Cleef had a gun, and made a wild guess. Sadly they were wrong.

I cannot for the life of me imagine why this is billed as either a "classic comedy" or a "classic western", except that I suppose if they described it as an "incredibly obscure bloody awful comedy western that isn't funny which you've never heard of for a very good reason", it would be rented once in a blue moon on purpose by masochists, rather than reasonably often by people like me accidentally.

Don't get me wrong - I really like good comedies, and I absolutely love good westerns. But this is not a good western on any level, and it would be stretching a point to say it's a comedy at all. It has everything you'd expect from a bad film of this kind, notably extremely intrusive and incredibly annoying "wacky" music that lets you know you're meant to be laughing at scenes devoid of any actual jokes. This film is the worst example I've ever encountered of this particular phenomenon, with the singer not only butting into the action accompanied by irritating banjos and anachronistic electric guitars to loudly tell you things you don't need to know, but resorting to lengthy outbursts of vocal funny noises in a failed attempt to make people riding horses or firing guns in random directions funny.

But what really sinks it is that about three-quarters of the "jokes" revolve around rape, which is first mentioned in the second line of the theme song, and after that it's pretty much non-stop rape jokes until the closing credits. Before I saw this woeful abomination, I thought the most rape-obsessed comedy film in existence was the abysmal "Yellowbeard", but even that desperate misfire does at least derive its tasteless humour from the fact that the rapist is an anti-heroic monster so depraved he simply doesn't grasp that rape, or indeed murder, is a thing you shouldn't do whenever you feel like it. Here, the rapist is the "hero" we're supposed to like, even though he's played by the profoundly creepy James Coburn, and we're reminded over and over and over again that rape is no big deal because women really like it, so long as they're raped by somebody as handsome and lovable as James Coburn. There's even a "joke" in which we're told flat out that no jury would convict any man of raping this woman because it's her own fault for being too attractive!

As for the other jokes, there mostly aren't any, unless you're willing to be amused whenever the musical equivalent of canned laughter tells you to crack up. And since this is a comedy western, therefore (except in one very atypical scene) nobody dies, there's very little you could call action either. It's boring, it's poisonous, and it should be avoided like a sandstone suppository.

This obscure film from an even more obscure production company is an obvious attempt to cash in on Roger Corman's hugely successful Edgar Allan Poe movies, all but one of which starred Vincent Price (and the only reason he wasn't in "The Premature Burial" was that Corman was churning them out so quickly that Vincent was accidentally double-booked). Based on the writings of Guy De Maupassant, primarily his classic short story "The Horla", this film finds Vinnie in very familiar territory, playing a charming, well-meaning, and smugly complacent 19th century authority figure who soon starts to go dangerously nuts for incredibly strange reasons.

Unfortunately, the production values are very poor. The almost totally invisible monster is clumsily portrayed, the fact that Paris consists entirely of tiny indoor sets is often painfully apparent, and both the script and the supporting actors are so busy woodenly retreading slightly out-of-date horror movie tropes that sometimes you could be watching absolutely any film from this era. Worst of all, the direction is very flat, giving Vincent Price too few opportunities to go over the top in the way he really should in a film like this, and submerging the few moments of horror in far too much predictable costume drama.

If half stars were allowed, I'd put this film precisely on the borderline between good and bad, but I'll give it three stars because anything starring Vincent Price gets the benefit of the doubt, even if he's not at his best. It's a great story that would have suited him down to the ground if it had been handled better, but unfortunately the whole issue of whether or not the totally implausible invisible being that drives him to kill might perhaps be a figment of his imagination is pretty much forgotten about, and a lot of potential is wasted. Still, Vincent Price is always worth a look, even if he's not at his best, so in all fairness I have to say this deserves an honourable mention, but it's nothing to write home about.

The background to this film needs a bit of explaining. It started out as a stage play co-written by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, a strange man whose career mostly consisted of somehow persuading comedians you've actually heard of to co-write really weird comedy scripts with him. Judging by his solo work, those other guys wrote all the jokes. If you've read the play, which was published as a rather thin paperback, you'll know it's about as funny as the proverbial sick baby (and does in fact include jokes involving a sick baby), yet it was a huge hit that ran for years. Why? Because Spike Milligan, who could seldom be bothered to learn his lines anyway, used it as a context in which to improvise, and most nights he was hilarious.

So how do you film something like that, other than by pointing a camera at Spike Milligan and hoping he's on a roll tonight? Richard Lester, who in better times worked with everyone from the Beatles to Superman, solved the problem by leaving Spike out almost entirely; he doesn't play the central character he wrote for himself, and has very little to say or do. Instead, a galaxy of sixties British comedy talent learned lines that were supposed to be the backdrop to somebody who's barely in the film making genuinely funny stuff up, and brought them front and centre, including the jokes about a sick baby. Even more bizarrely, the "vividly realised post-apocalyptic London" mentioned in the blurb, which presumably quotes the back of the DVD case rather than describing the actual film, is in all but a very few scenes represented by a bleak, featureless quarry. They might as well have simply left the camera running in front of the stage play.

There's so much talent involved that it can't help having some inspired moments, though Pete & Dud are almost as irrelevant as Spike, and give the impression that they know it's not working but are willing to go through the motions for long enough to collect that nice fat cheque. But these genuine laughs, and the handful of scenes where we find ourselves in territory that's basically Mad Max with jokes instead of bullets, only serve to remind us how misconceived the whole thing is. "Delicatessen" is a superb black comedy in which people in denial attempt to carry on as normal after the apocalypse. If this film had been less reverential of its source material and done something along those lines, its stellar cast might have made it a masterpiece instead of the misfire which, unfortunately, it is.