Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This movie got some excellent reviews. I can only conclude that the director has a lot of friends and relatives who like writing reviews, because this is yet another no-budget British indie horror film that got a lottery grant because in a desperate bid to revitalize the once-great British film industry they'll throw a wad of cash at practically anything that isn't porn, and then sank without trace because it thoroughly deserved to.

From the ultra-generic synth music and cheap'n'cheesy CGI crows accompanying the opening credits onwards, this ugly, depressing little film demonstrates at every turn why it won't be kick-starting anyone's movie career. As you might expect from the wince-inducing pun in the title, the promotional artwork of a sinister man with big black feathery wings, and everything you see from the get-go, the basic premise is made unsubtly obvious: an angel comes to a small town to judge its resident sinners, and it's not the kind of angel that would look pretty on top of your Christmas tree. And that's about it, really.

Everyone in the small cast (the town seems to be almost deserted for no apparent reason) is utterly vile, apart from the heroine, whose characterization consists of being tough, having something horrible in her past (the nature of which is clumsily revealed far too early), and not being an irredeemably awful person like everybody else. And of course the celestial being, since Liam Cunningham can act better than the rest of the cast put together, some of whom can't act at all. Almost everything done by almost everyone is evil, sordid, irritating, or all of the above, and the cinematography is remorselessly unattractive, no doubt on purpose. The juvenile delinquent "Caesar" (presumably named after the chimpanzee played by Andy Serkis rather than the Emperor of Rome), who gets a great many lines I think we're supposed to find funny, is especially talentless and annoying.

Overall, this movie is drably nasty to look at, very badly written and acted (except for some of Liam Cunningham's scenes), and thoroughly depressing on every level. Don't waste an hour and a half of your time with it, unless you automatically enjoy any film in which nasty people do nasty things before themselves being killed in nasty ways.

The best thing about this documentary feature is that it's a documentary, and therefore everything in it is real, subjectively at least. This is also its biggest problem. Since the main characters are real people just being themselves, they can't act, and they exhibit varying levels of screen charisma and coherence. In particular, somebody should have told the goofy hipster with the terrible goatee that if you already look and sound like Shaggy from "Scooby Doo", wearing two hats at once indoors does your credibility no favors!

Another slight difficulty is that other people's dreams are notoriously the most boring subject on earth, and large parts of this film consist of people telling you about their dreams, some of which sound more like vivid but perfectly ordinary dreams than sleep paralysis. We do get to at least partially see all the dreams and similar experiences we're told about, and some of these recreated nightmares are far more profoundly creepy than any fictional horror film. Then again, some of them are painfully low-budget, or represented by barely relevant stock footage (including a surprising number of inexplicable clips from an obscure 1950s B-movie about a giant space robot).

The director's previous feature, "Room 237", used an identically impartial approach. However, there he was dealing with very specific theories explained by people who'd had plenty of time to lick them into shape, mostly illustrated by clips from a very expensive film by Stanley Kubrick. Also, these theories were so clearly bonkers that no comments were necessary. Here, people who aren't necessarily all that articulate ramble on about a phenomenon which has profoundly affected their lives and which some of them believe to be objectively real, accompanied by visuals of extremely variable quality. It really could have done with a few other viewpoints. For example, the obvious similarity with alien abductions is mentioned, but all the director does with this is to show us a few brief clips from the movie of Whitley Streiber's "Communion", when what we need is an interview with someone who believes they're an alien abductee so that we can see how similar their experience is with the others.

Ultimately this is an unsatisfactory documentary which doesn't dig deep enough, partially saved by its sometimes genuinely terrifying and downright Surreal subject-matter, some of which is guaranteed to touch a nerve in almost anybody. It's got a fair bit of curiosity value so I'll go up to 3 stars, but I'd give it exactly 50% if half-stars were possible.

Prequels are tricky - just ask George Lucas! There are two problems with this series. Firstly, it's a Batman spinoff in which Batman himself doesn't appear because Bruce Wayne is 12 years old and hasn't invented him yet, so it has to concentrate on secondary characters instead of the elephant who should be in the room but isn't. And secondly, it's far, far too long. It's equivalent to the entire Star Wars saga (including the ones they haven't made yet) or the whole Harry Potter franchise, and twice as long as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, which actually had grown-up Batman in it fighting villains and everything. And it only covers a few months in the youth of the Caped Crusader - we are literally watching Bruce Wayne grow from adolescence to manhood in real time! At this rate, we'll first see him in a bat costume round about 2020 at the very earliest.

Meanwhile, we see a great deal of a wooden actor portraying the utterly one-dimensional Detective Jim Gordon, who, unlike every other version of the character going right back to 1939, is blandly handsome in an off-the-shelf standard action hero way, does not have facial hair or glasses, and above all, looks nothing like the much more expensive Gary Oldman. We also get to know a lot about Oswald "Penguin" Cobblepot as we follow his rise from creepy little mook to crime-boss of Gotham City, which is just as well, since he's by far the best character. Even so, he was born in the pages of a comic-book so he's not that complex, and his limited schtick gets a bit repetitive over the 15-hour running-time, despite the writers trying to flesh him out by turning him into a cross between Steerpike from "Gormenghast" and Norman Bates.

As for the others, they're a mixed bag. The lad playing Bruce Wayne manages rather well, but is mostly left on the sidelines in an interminable and very dull subplot about corporate corruption (or something), and his cute romance with 13-year-old Selina "call me Cat" Kyle seems more appropriate for an audience far too young to be watching something featuring explicit footage of spurting blood, dismembered body-parts, and eyes being torn out with spoons! Ms. Kyle, alas, is played by a truly dreadful actress, as are several other major characters. The grittily rebooted Alfred is far more interesting than Jim Gordon (as well he might be - back in the day, his dad was Doctor Who, so he should know all about improbable heroics) but doesn't get anywhere near enough to do. And talking of gritty reboots, does Maxie Zeus really deserve one? Mind you, since even the Riddler gets one, why not? I kept expecting King Tut to show up as a serial killer who literally mummified people.

As a mini-series, this would have been very good indeed, perhaps even great. As a bloated maxi-series, there's far too much padding, especially in the first half, and after taking forever to get anywhere, the storyline resolves almost nothing that really matters. Ah well, there's always Series Two, if you have the patience. I'm not sure I do.

I couldn't be bothered to watch very much of this. I knew in advance it was going to be a primitive no-budget serial from 1939, but sometimes that kind of thing can be fun. However, I had a nasty feeling as soon as I got to the chapter menu and saw that the producers of the DVD couldn't even be bothered to correct a howling typo like "THE MENCAING POWER", and sadly I was right. The slapdash transfer from poor-quality video to bargain-bin DVD (which is obviously what they did, since the picture is cropped to fit a TV screen) results in a horrible viewing experience, and the disc is so shoddily produced that one stereo channel on the soundtrack doesn't work, diminishing the amusement and nostalgia factors far below the point where it's worth sitting through four hours of migraine-inducing flickering with sound you can barely hear just to see Bela Lugosi hamming it up like a bacon factory on overtime. If a much, much better version was available, this might be reasonably amusing in a retro kind of way, but this one's for obsessive-compulsive Lugosi fans only.

Apparently most people find this mini-series terrifying. Speaking as someone who was decidedly underwhelmed by "The Blair Witch Project" and completely baffled by the success of "Paranormal Activity", I wasn't very impressed by this either. But being a bit blah and slow-moving I can forgive. What I find unforgivable is the attempt to make this dreck more frightening (which seems to have succeeded with most of its intended audience) by pretending this nonsense actually happened.

Yeah, well, technically I suppose it sort of did, in the same way that "Forbidden Planet" is based on "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare, only quite a bit less so, since at least both of the latter admit they're works of fiction. Almost everyone in the tale is named after and to some extent based on a real person, though since these events took place in 1977, most of the adults involved are now deceased, and it appears that none of the children had any input. However, the screenplay was co-written by one of two main investigators. the 80-year-old Guy Playfair, portrayed onscreen as a sort of ghost-hunting Alan Partridge, except that we're supposed to like him. Well, since the man himself helped to write the character, I assume we are; I honestly couldn't be sure. By the way, he's also written numerous totally uncritical books about poltergeists, mediums, reincarnation, and the undeniable fact that Uri Geller really can bend spoons with his brain.

Where it falls down is in grossly distorting real events in such a way as to spuriously add weight to a very thin story while shoving idiotic belief-systems down the viewer's throat. Episode 1 is actually a fairly faithful depiction of what really went on. That's why very little indeed happens for most of episode 1. The remaining two-thirds ramp up the supernatural action (though not enough to increase the pace beyond sluggish) while deviating more and more from the real events it supposedly portrays, and of course throwing in cliché after cliché from every haunted house or possessed child movie you can think of.

Timothy Spall seems like a nice guy, but he's not an actor with a vast range, and here, his trademark screen persona often comes across as a bit simple-minded. Child actors are a very mixed bag indeed, but we have here a young lady in the other pivotal rôle who definitely has a career ahead of her in better material than this, and good luck to her because she's by far the best thing in it. And that's about it. If you accept that this is 90% fiction (and there's plenty of online material including youtube clips of the actual people involved to help you make your mind up), it's a slow-moving and rather silly ghost story owing a great deal to numerous other films, a few of which were actually worse. If, on the other hand, you honestly think that this is a documentary, you'll no doubt find it absolutely terrifying. Alas, that's because you have the IQ of a tree stump.

If you want both a vastly more entertaining Halloween movie and a (mostly) more accurate representation of what really went on in Enfield in 1977, rent the BBC's notorious 1992 spoof "Ghostwatch". It's much, much better in almost every way, and if you don't like it, at least it doesn't force-feed you New Age idiocy, and it's only two-thirds as long.

After "Django" was an unexpectedly massive international hit, dozens of other spaghetti westerns - some sources say over 50 - attempted to jump on the bandwagon. Many of the earlier unofficial sequels weren't initially intended to be about this character, but since almost any generic spaghetti western tough guy who wasn't Lee Van Cleef could at a pinch be said to look a bit like Franco Nero, they were able to redub foreign language prints so that the hero was now called Django, and nobody was any the wiser.

As it happens, in this particular print, the protagonist is never once referred to as Django (his name is Regan, though he spends most of the film pretending to be somebody else who isn't called Django either), and the fact that he wears a poncho in the opening scenes suggests they were trying to imply that he was Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name", a character who never caught on in the way Django did because the fact that he didn't have a name made it impossible to establish that he was the same guy if he wasn't played by Clint Eastwood, who was one hell of a lot more expensive than the likes of Anthony Steffen.

That being said, this is one of the best of the endless unauthorized Django sequels. Steffen is no great shakes as an actor (the usual terrible dubbing doesn't help), but he does all that's required of him pretty well, other than looking as though he has any chemistry whatsoever with the obligatory love interest. He went on to play Django a few more times, notably in the utterly bonkers but magnificently titled "Django The Bastard", in which our hero returns from the grave to avenge his own murder - if that reminds you of "High Plains Drifter", Django did it first!

There's plenty of the action you expect this kind of film to deliver, and the plot is less formulaic than usual, due to the ambiguity, only resolved near the end, as to whether the other, much more interesting main character is "Django's" friend or foe. It's not a masterpiece by any means, but it cracks along and does what it says on the tin. In summary, this is a good solid example of the kind of spaghetti western that doesn't try to be funny.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Given the late second flowering of his career and his appearance in two of the biggest movie franchises ever, it's hard to believe there was a time when Christopher Lee seemed to be a hopelessly typecast out-of-date horror star who, just like Bela Lugosi, was all washed up and had to take whatever work he could get. This isn't quite his equivalent of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" (that would be the Dracula film he made for Jésus Franco without knowing it would include lots of pornographic scenes from which his character was conveniently absent), but it's definitely on a par with "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein". And although he does his best to be professional, it's pretty obvious from the look on his face in every single scene that he wants nothing more than to go home, have a very long shower, and try to forget he was ever involved in this irredeemable dreck.

Despite being the only one of far too many sequels to "The Howling" to directly link with the events in the first film, it only does so in the most minimal way, and then ditches everything established in part one. Werewolves, it seems, are not people with some weird disease they struggle to control, but satanic monsters with magical powers led by a 10,000-year-old crone who regenerates into Sybil Danning in a ridiculous Barbarella oufit. Therefore established werewolf lore suddenly goes out of the window; silver bullets don't necessarily kill a werewolf for good, or even at all, because there are super-werewolves who are only affected by titanium weapons! I have no idea why this is so important that everyone keeps going on about it, since at no point does anyone who needs a titanium weapon to kill a super-werewolf not already have one. And why titanium? It's not plutonium or kryptonite; you can buy the stuff as easily as silver if you know you're going to need it!

This sums up the incoherent plotting of the whole film, which would be hilarious if it didn't spend so much time showing us poorly-faked semi-nude werewolf orgies and clips of a live performance of the title song by a post-punk band called Babel who are so terrible that even Wikipedia has never heard of them. The werewolf makeup is vastly inferior to that in the first film, and at no point does anyone fully transform - we see many close-ups of a human face extending into a muzzle (or rather, the same close-up many times), but they don't seem to have anything to do with the gorilla-suit werewolves we actually see in the long-shots. The obligatory heroic young man and his girlfriend are annoying, dim-witted, and can't act, and apart from Christopher Lee, who looks slightly nauseous, everybody overacts like mad, especially those unfortunates required to constantly behave like werewolves despite seldom being given any monster makeup at all because it costs money.

Utterly worthless, unless you have a thing about seeing Sybil Danning ripping her top off over and over and over again. Watch out for Jimmy Nail in a small part, proving that when he really makes his mind up, he can be in a movie worse than "Morons From Outer Space".

This is that rarest of beasts, a sci-fi movie from an era when we didn't get that many of them which has absolutely no cult following whatsoever, even of the ironic "so bad it's good" variety. Why? Because it's just plain boring. Or, in the modern parlance, it's as meh as you can possibly get.

In the wake of World War III, a handful of survivors must cross the radioactive desert which is all that remains of America in a sort of heavily-armed monster truck bendy bus that looks as though it was designed by Gerry Anderson which for some unexplained reason they happen to have. Along the way they must contend with murderously degenerate hillbillies, unstoppable hordes of armor-plated flesh-eating cockroaches, giant scorpions, and weather gone mad in a very seventies psychedelic kind of way (though not the mutant plants the synopsis promises us). How can a movie with a plot like this possibly be dull?

But alas, it is. B-list actors and a C-list director do nothing remotely interesting with the premise. The perils they face are either underwhelming or over in a very short time, apart from the crazy weather, which is frequently represented by clips from other much more expensive sci-fi movies such as "When Worlds Collide" (World War III is of course a lengthy montage of grainy stock footage). Mostly they drive across an empty desert in which those giant scorpions which were established as a major threat very early on never show up again, presumably because the special effects were more expensive than the normal-sized cockroaches which cause them far more trouble. Along the way, they pick up a slightly annoying kid, a very annoying lady who screams and has to be rescued a lot and has a silly French accent, and do a great deal of essentially good-natured and very poorly acted bickering.

And that's about it, really, apart from the worst deus ex machina happy ending you'll ever see. Everything potentially interesting, including the massive firepower of the Landmaster amphibious all-terrain battle-tank, is horribly underused, and instead we get endless footage of the sky turning a funny color and putting on a groovy light-show. Notable only for being yet another abysmal post-apocalypse road movie nobody cares about which George Miller borrows from extensively in "Mad Max: Fury Road" just so that obsessive B, C, and Z-movie addicts can play spot the obscure pointless reference. Don't waste your time.

I must admit to being disappointed with this film. The original "Mad Max" did wonderful, terrible things you wouldn't have thought possible on a budget that low. "Mad Max 2" took that raw energy, added a lot more money, and turned it up to 11, setting the benchmark for all subsequent post-apocalyptic movies involving vehicular mayhem. And then "Mad Max 3" tried to get even weirder while watering the violence down to target a wider audience, and the franchise died.

But just like Batman, Superman (twice), and pretty much everybody else except Bicycle Repair Man, Max is back with the inevitable gritty reboot. Which, in this instance, is actually less gritty than the first two original films, though considerably more so than the third. Deprived of a low-budget pre-apocalypse origin movie, Max is established to be mad via some perfunctory "Why didn't you save me, daddy?" hallucinations illustrating a pop video idea of what it's like to be clinically insane. Unfortunately, Tom Hardy is no Mel Gibson (hey, remember when we liked Mel Gibson?), and a script which instantly plunges him into an endless car-chase occupying almost the entire running-time gives him little opportunity for character development, except of the most predictable kind. Especially as a peculiarly forced militant feminist agenda gives Charlize Theron's Furiosa at least as much to do as Max, and she does it considerably better, almost making our hero redundant in his own movie.

There are endless visual nods to all three previous Mad Max films, none of them necessary, and deliberate lifts from every other vaguely cultish movie with remotely similar subject-matter, including "The Cars That Ate Paris", "The New Barbarians", "The Ultimate Warrior", "Hell Comes To Frogtown", and even "Star Wars" (if you haven't heard of all of those films, it's because some of them aren't worth pinching ideas from, or even seeing). And in keeping with modern sensibilities, we get plenty of annoying stylistic quirks, such as absurdly speeded-up action that suddenly goes slo-mo, and ridiculously fake color to remind us that this is a live-action cartoon, when the more realistic approach of "Mad Max 2" would have been far more shocking. But then, as the minimal gore and surprisingly preachy tone shows, this time around, George Miller was less concerned with gleefully nihilistic ultra-violence than getting that precious 15 certificate which means more bums on seats.

It's true that the incredibly inventive battle-scenes are lively and diverting, but since we get to see very little else for two solid hours, they end up being a bit tiring. And when the old lady bikers show up, I couldn't help wondering if it was a deliberate reference to Monty Python's "Hell's Grannies" sketch. Sadly there was no cameo from Bicycle Repair Man.

This is almost a masterpiece. Criminals with a perverse yet inflexible code of honor interact with each other as if they were pieces in a game of chess between the Devil and Richard Nixon. Characters constantly surprise us by doing something callously evil for no reason at all. Then their motive becomes apparent. Oh, but wait - was that really why they did it...? The plot has more twists than a centipede doing the hokey-kokey. Just about everybody manages to betray somebody somehow or other. Many of these betrayals end up being ironically inverted, but so do apparent friendships. This is a dark, twisted world in which you really don't know who your friends are!

This really is a film in which you honestly don't know what the characters will do next, still less why, in a way which makes you keen to find out. Its main flaw is that the web of double-triple-whatever-crosses is too intricate, at the expense of the extra character development which the movie would have benefited from. The not entirely dissimilar "Goodfellas" went to great lengths to give us everybody's backstory. Here, we have major characters committing seemingly inexcusable acts because of things we later find out about that happened to people who are barely in the film, or aren't in it at all and are merely mentioned in passing. This does not endear the protagonists to us, or make us care what happens to them. By the way, there are literally no "good guys" in this movie whatsoever, including the cops.

As a truly relentless film noir that dares to be far darker than anything made in America at the time, and will genuinely throw quite a few surprises your way, this is well worth seeing. It's just a pity that the major characters aren't developed enough to make us care a bit more about them, especially as they have a habit of mercilessly doing horrendous things to other characters so underdeveloped that we have no sense of why they could possibly deserve such treatment. Still, although it may be flawed, this is definitely a milestone in the film noir genre, and fascinatingly different from everything Hollywood was doing at the time.

First of all, Henry Fonda isn't in this film; there seems to have been some confusion with "My Name Is Nobody" (to which the German print of this movie pretends to be a sequel), in which he did indeed co-star with Terence Hill, aka Mario Girotti, a blond, fair-skinned Italian who spent most of his career pretending to be American thanks to the miracle of bad dubbing. Talking of bad dubbing, in this movie it really is atrocious even by spaghetti western standards. Almost everybody ends up with an incredibly annoying cartoonishly silly voice, notably Miou-Miou, who sounds like Betty Boop, and Klaus Kinski, utterly wasted in a ridiculous cameo. Even Patrick McGoohan has a silly voice, despite the fact that he seems to be doing his own dubbing. I suppose he just wanted to fit in with the general tone.

Terence Hill, never a particularly good actor, gets by in most of the many comedy westerns he appears in thanks partly to his good looks, but mostly due to the manic energy he imparts to the numerous slapstick fight scenes, usually featuring bizarre acrobatics. Unfortunately this film has far too little daft action, and way too much supposedly comic repartee between people who mostly can't act (Hill's co-star is some guy who was in hardly anything else, for reasons which rapidly become obvious), dubbed by even worse actors trying to sound funny. The one extended acrobatic slapstick sequence serves literally no purpose whatsoever; our hero breaks out of jail, inexplicably sticks around for a while to cause total mayhem in ridiculous ways for no reason at all, and then escapes like he was going to in the first place, before he suddenly had to pointlessly clown around, be shot at, and blow irrelevant things up because the movie was getting a bit boring.

The whole film has the same problem. The prologue seems to promise us the kind of tightly directed and surprisingly dark comedy western you'd expect from the director responsible for the superb "A Bullet For The General", but has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film. The hero's literally supernatural speed at drawing a gun (a gag Mel Brooks would steal in "Blazing Saddles" and use far better) is established as if it's going to matter, and then forgotten about completely. Minor characters suffer surprisingly nasty deaths while far worse people are merely humiliated in cartoonish ways. And the double-triple-whatever-cross that drives the plot never really makes a lick of sense, even after it's all explained at the end. The whole thing's a disjointed mess that struggles to find a consistent tone.

And worst of all, the horribly intrusive music, which frequently sounds like a grotesque parody of Ennio Morricone, is actually by Ennio Morricone, who obviously took the money and ran. The one scene in which he manages to bestir himself to give us a touch of the old magic not only sounds like a lazy pastiche of his earlier classic film scores, but for some reason also plagiarizes, of all people, Beethoven! Very disappointing. See instead the same director's "A Bullet For The General", which isn't that dissimilar in a lot of ways, apart from not being a comedy, being infinitely better in just about all respects, and using Klaus Kinski appropriately, as opposed to having him say "ow, my balls!" in somebody else's voice.

Based very closely on Truman Capote's book of the same name, this is a blistering portrayal of true evil that pulls no punches at all, except when it comes to showing us the gory details of the crime around which everything revolves. Which is just as well, because an explicit depiction of this event would have been almost unwatchable.

A film like this stands or falls by its central performances, and both the actors playing the utterly vile protagonists are extremely convincing indeed. The central theme of Capote's book is that evil isn't an abstract supernatural force; it's something that human beings inflict on each other for all kinds of twisted reasons. By understanding, even empathizing with these evil men without in any way condoning or excusing their actions, he was trying to show how a man becomes a monster, and how, if his life had gone differently, that monster might have been just a man. This movie does a chilling job of conveying the void that these two men are trapped in and consumed by, and how ultimately doomed they were right from the start. And when that doom finally comes to them, it's portrayed not as a glorious triumph of justice, but as a sordid procedure so terrifying that it's hard not to feel at least a shred of sympathy for the wretches who have to undergo it, no matter what they've done.

The characterization is perfect. We find out that both killers had horrible childhoods, yet the one who actually does by far the worst things is, paradoxically, the one who might have been a decent man if he hadn't gotten trapped in an escalating downward spiral of nihilism, and we understand that he feels guilt and self-loathing about what he did, though the fact remains that he did it anyway. The other, played by an actor who looks as though he must be related to Edward Norton but apparently isn't, is the true force of evil in the partnership, a psychopath who would have been bad no matter what, and doesn't even understand the concepts of guilt or remorse, yet is superficially charming because his incapacity to feel guilt makes him a superb liar.

It's not a perfect film. The supporting cast are mostly rather wooden, and Quincy Jones' background music is sometimes extremely obtrusive, particularly the syrupy Disneyesque "these are nice people" theme in the dreadfully overdone scenes establishing how innocent the doomed family are. Why is this even necessary? I think most viewers would get that they don't deserve to be slaughtered without seeing them being oh so very, very wholesome! And the interlude in the desert with the old man and the little boy is so obviously there to symbolically show that no situation is absolutely black and white, and even terrible people can have moments of goodness, that it feels (and presumably is) very fictional indeed compared with the rest of the film. But overall this is a very powerful and unflinching exploration of the dark side of humanity, and although it's not exactly fun to watch, it's hideously compelling.

This film is utterly baffling in a very early seventies kind of way. Apart from a few shouts and some untranslated Spanish background chatter, only the two main characters ever speak, and although we learn quite a bit about things they got up to back in England, the women in their lives, and other totally irrelevant people and events we never see, they never get around to explaining what the hell's going on.

At the start of the movie, two men are running for their lives across what appears to be an arid and sparsely populated region of Spain, relentlessly pursued by a sinister yet somewhat undersized black helicopter whose pilot we never get a good look at. Who are they? Escaped convicts? Fugitive prisoners of war? They've obviously escaped from somewhere, because, somewhat improbably, their hands are tied behind their backs, but we never find out what these two Englishmen are doing in Spain, where they escaped from, or any other relevant bits of backstory (presumably it's all explained in the obscure novel the movie is based on, which I've never even seen a copy of, let alone read). It appears later in the film that the action is taking place in a near-future fascist dystopia, and we see some slightly oddly-dressed soldiers from no identifiable country, so maybe this isn't Spain after all, in which case we have literally lost the plot.

Robert Shaw is one of those actors who were huge back in the day but are now almost forgotten. Which is a pity, because he was a fine character actor who was equally likely to play a good tough guy in "Jaws", a bad tough guy in "The Taking Of Pelham 123", and somebody who was none of those things in the screen version of Harold Pinter's play "The Birthday Party". Here he's an amoral tough guy who seems to owe a great deal to Eli Wallach's magnificently horrible Tuco in "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly". Unfortunately, although his performance is mostly very good and at times he nearly manages to channel Tuco's gleefully anarchic spirit, no amount of good acting can salvage a lousy script. The often horribly stilted dialogue does him no favors at all, and he loses our sympathy by doing something utterly inexcusable only a few minutes into the film. Also, his peculiar habit of automatically doing the exact opposite of whatever his much more intelligent companion recommends, even though he himself admits that this is extremely stupid, turns him into not so much a character as a cardboard cutout symbolically representing instinct versus reason with a running gag tacked on.

Malcolm McDowell is oddly subdued, probably because he realizes that he's the second-best actor playing the second-most-interesting character in a film which for all practical purposes only has two people in it, but basically he's an older version of Michael Travers from "If...", so maybe he was in a terrible foreign prison run by fascists as a punishment for his actions at the end of that film? Or maybe not, since his character in this movie is called Ansell. Whatever. Since we don't have a clue what's really supposed to be going on, anything's possible.

The film is uncategorisable because it resembles a stark, minimalist Samuel Beckett play with two thinly-sketched protagonists swapping existentialist banter which for some reason has been turned into an action thriller by replacing the stage with an entire country, and throwing in firefights, explosions and helicopter attacks at random intervals. I'm giving it one star each for Robert Shaw's performance, and because it dared to be different. I'm not giving it any more because it's different in a way that doesn't work.

This is the legendary Hong Kong action movie that was very selectively ripped off by an unknown first-time director when he was writing his low-budget debut feature, a funny little film called "Reservoir Dogs"; and the rest is history. The trouble is, just like Quentin Tarentino, "City On Fire" is greatly overrated. A couple of years after it was made, John Woo also pinched quite a few of the plot elements, including the casting of both male leads, and recombined them in "The Killer", causing Hollywood to take the kind of interest in Woo they never took in Ringo Lam. And there's a very good reason for that.

As cities on fire go, this is not a particularly large conflagration. It opens with a savage murder and a brutal robbery, and closes with the bloodbath where most of the characters end up dead that it was inevitably going to, but in between, there's a very, very long middle section about angst, trust issues, male bonding, and other things that don't strictly qualify as "action", including tedious byplay between our conflicted hero, his whiny girlfriend, both of whom have a mental age of 12, and her best friend, who behaves as if she's a major character despite serving no purpose whatsoever - presumably her love-triangle subplot ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Gritty realism is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not. Ringo Lam is no Martin Scorcese, and "City On Fire" is no "Mean Streets", however badly it wants to be. Chow Yun-Fat is certainly no Robert DeNiro; in fact, he's not a very good actor at all, constantly pulling his trademark sneering grimace to indicate any strong emotion, in the same way the almost equally talented Antonio Banderas shows us he's extremely angry/determined/badass/etc. by making his mouth perfectly circular. The realistic elements simply highlight how cardboard the characters are and how stylized their behavior is.

Absolutely nobody ever behaves like an adult - at one point the protagonist and his new best friend literally have a food-fight! And since the police force is basically a very strict boarding-school with an exceptionally nasty bully, it's no wonder our developmentally challenged hero bonds so quickly with a ragtag band of rascally scamps with whom he can raid the tuck-shop for a midnight feast and other wizard wheezes - oh, sorry, I mean rob jewelry shops with extreme violence and shoot people in the head.

This kind of material has to be played as over-the-top ultra-violent black comedy, something John Woo understands perfectly (or did before Hollywood sucked the talent out of him), and Ringo Lam doesn't. The characters are too flat to care about, their motivations are so contrived that they might as well have visible strings, and worst of all, it's an action movie which for most of its running time has no action. Watch "The Killer" instead to see how it's supposed to be done.

This painfully honest and often harrowing portrait of a highly creative man who has struggled throughout his life with both manic depression and paranoid schizophrenia is almost unique, the only comparable work being "Derailroaded", the story of the late Wild Man Fischer, another outsider musician with exactly the same mental health problems. The difference is that Fischer had zero musical talent, and very little archive footage exists of his brief D-list semi-fame as a dancing monkey in Frank Zappa's freak show before he was discarded again. From an early age, Johnston obsessively recorded everything he could about his life, initially on audio cassettes and 8mm film, later on grainy video when that became available, so we can see, or at least hear quite a lot of what was going on in his life at any given time instead of merely being told about it by a narrator. Also, unlike Fischer, Johnson has talent. He plays the piano extremely well; his voice, though not particularly good, isn't painful to listen to; and he can even write songs other people want to record in a non-ironic way.

The one major failing this documentary has is that it's taken for granted throughout by everybody that Daniel Johnston is without question a genius. Is he, though? Kurt Cobain thought so, or at least said he did, but that doesn't make it true. And a huge proportion of Johnston's cult status derives from the somewhat indirect fame he gained as the guy who made the album whose cover was on that tee-shirt Kurt Cobain wore in quite a few publicity photos, though since the actual record only existed as a self-distributed cassette, nobody knew what he sounded like. It's worth remembering that the album he eventually recorded as a result of all that publicity - his first and last with a major studio - was a dismal failure, selling less than 6,000 copies. As a lyricist, he's no better and probably quite a bit worse than many other quirky songwriters such as Robyn Hitchcock or Ivor Cutler; but of course, they never went authentically mad. And Daniel Johnston certainly did go very mad indeed! Wild Man Fischer may once have shat in a cupboard because he couldn't remember which room was supposed to be for that purpose, but he never deliberately crashed an aircraft in the belief that it wouldn't matter because he was Casper the Friendly Ghost!

The real power of the film lies in its account, much of it illustrated with videos taped at the time, of a sensitive, highly articulate young man utterly losing his mind, and never quite getting it all back. Johnston's actual music, surprisingly little of which is used in the film without interruptions or voiceovers, is infinitely less moving. However, as the story of an extremely minor musician descending into a terrible place most of us cannot begin to imagine and desperately trying to climb out again, it's tremendously compelling real-life drama. By the way, if you're slightly mentally unstable and you're wondering if this means it would be a bad idea to take LSD, you really ought to watch this film before you make your mind up...