Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

There are plenty of unique films out there, but this one is up there with "Eraserhead" in terms of being a cult classic that could never be remade, because to do a remake, you'd have to figure out what was going through the director's head in the first place, which is completely impossible. As for the cheesy seventies not-so-special effects, they actually help, since this is essentially a fever dream in which nothing whatsoever makes sense because it isn't meant to. Yes, it's that rarest of beasts, a film that's bonkers even by Japanese standards! And I mean that in a good way, as opposed to "even more sick, gory, perverted, and obsessed with schoolgirls than usual."

Okay, there are schoolgirls in it. Almost the entire cast are schoolgirls. Therefore, since this is a horror movie, quite a few schoolgirls get killed. And yet... How shall I put this? Does anybody remember the Goodies? Well, this is what would happen if those guys were real, and they tried to direct a perfectly serious horror movie. Absolutely nothing that occurs is remotely disturbing, because these (deliberately) one-dimensional characters are menaced by the most Surreal cartoon violence and peril you've ever seen. I'm pretty sure it's the only film ever made in which two different kinds of fruit manage to commit murder. Every single object in this house is lethal, so long as it isn't the sort of thing you'd normally have to watch out for in a horror movie. Forget about anything sharp - just keep an eye on those cushions...

Oh, and a special mention has to go to the cat. There are an infinite number of horror movies in which a real and visibly uncooperative cat represents the forces of evil, despite the fact that it's a fundamental law of nature that nobody will ever persuade a cat to see why it theoretically might want to attempt to act, let alone actually do so. Therefore some exceptionally wondrous state-of-the-art 1977 special effects were necessary to persuade us that this grumpy-looking brute could play the piano. Yes, really! And that's only the second most outrageous scene in this movie involving a piano. I'm not making this up. Rent the film and see. You know you want to.

I can see why Robert Duvall got an Oscar nomination; this is a tour de force of his acting skills, which are considerable, to the extent that it's almost a one-man show. The trouble is, I absolutely loathed the character he was playing. I'm not a Christian, but I enjoyed the recent Irish movie "Calvary" because the protagonist was a good though not perfect man trying to be absolutely unselfish and do what he genuinely thought was the right thing under almost impossible circumstances, and ultimately his religion mattered far less than his sincere attempts to good in the face of a relentless barrage of evil. Also, that film was intelligent enough to understand that a situation this melodramatic works best as a comedy, even if it's a comedy so black that many viewers won't think it is one.

The man we're obliged to spend over two hours with here is a monster. For a VERY long section at the start, he literally cannot shut up for one minute, and frequently one second, and appears to have Tourette's Syndrome, only with all the involuntary swearing replaced by the word "Jesus". I was reminded of Graham Norton's hyperactive, irrepressibly cheerful, and incredibly irritating priest on "Father Ted", except that nobody in this film seems to notice that our "hero" is both annoying and insane, except his wife, whose understandable departure results in the act of shocking violence for which he spends the rest of the movie being redeemed.

Unfortunately, this is a brain-dead happy-clappy Christian Fundamentalist idea of redemption. I honestly couldn't tell whether the moronic scenes of "tag-team preaching" (that really is what it's called, according to the credits) were meant to be a slapstick parody of true religion, or whether the scene where a crowd repeatedly raise their right arms and shout "Jesus!" in unison was supposed to resemble a Nazi rally, but I suspect they weren't.

Almost the entire cast appear to be extremely stupid, and utterly ruled by primitive ritual behavior which in many scenes they constantly reinforce by dragging Jesus and God into literally every sentence, and our noble, holy, and pathologically attention-seeking hero hardly ever really tries to helps another person in any way, unless you assume that ranting repetitively at everyone in sight until they succumb to social pressure and join in the mindless collective hysteria is the ultimate help you can give to anybody, since it means they won't go to Hell. If you're a rabid Baptist, you probably think this is indeed the case. If you're not, this film is all about a man who ought to be on major tranquilizers shouting "Look at me everybody! And that includes God!"

It may be that it really is as subversive as I sometimes felt it just might be - the very last scene before the credits roll is surprisingly reminiscent of the ultimate fate of that unbearably annoying "Father Ted" character who we last see still being relentlessly upbeat despite being buried under large rocks. But if so, they were afraid to offend anyone by doing it properly, and the subversive subtext is little more than a few in-jokes, if it exists at all. This is a scary portrayal of how easy it is for crazy people to gain followers just by sounding incredibly sincere about meaningless cult jargon, especially if they shout a lot. And the scariest part is that I don't think it's meant to be.

I can't honestly call this film "good" in the conventional sense. The directing is terrible, with very poor pacing and every "shock" telegraphed far too long in advance, Gayle Hunnicutt is a waste of space apart from a couple of scenes where she gets to go nuts (when there are only four significant characters who aren't invisible ghosts, it's just plain careless to seriously underuse one of them), and Roddy McDowall manages to give a masterclass in overacting in a movie where nothing and no-one is exactly understated.

But hey, it's a lot of fun! Basically, it's "The Haunting" with all the subtlety replaced by things which might appeal to people who had just seen a ground-breaking new movie called "The Exorcist", though without having the courage to go anywhere near that far. Still, we do get sex-crazed ghosts, an abundance of spiky objects flinging themselves at our heroes, possibly the most extended scene ever in which the ultimate manifestation of satanic evil is represented by repeatedly throwing an understandably annoyed cat at some long-suffering actress, completely bonkers "science", and undoubtedly the silliest method of defeating a seemingly omnipotent supernatural force in the entire history of cinematic ghost-busting.

Pamela Franklin as the Linda Blair substitute comes out of it with the most credit, but Clive Revill (whoever he was) plays a character so unlikable that when, quite early in the film, the poltergeist attacks him with just about everything in the room that could possibly inflict damage, you'll definitely be rooting for the ghost (unfortunately its aim is lousy). And Michael Gough has such an unrewarding rôle that he probably had more fun that time he had to flounce about in pink satin as the king of the Moon. Still, second-rate though it is, it's certainly not dull. And Roddy McDowall heroically trying to render his lines audible while leaning into the blast of a wind machine turned up to 11 is a sight to behold!

I've got no idea why this drama is rated so highly. In terms of style, it superbly evokes the austere post-war Denmark of the late 1940s. That, alas, is where the good points stop. The basic plot - a fearless young journalist tries to uncover black market activities and stumbles upon something much bigger - has enough meat for a feature film, but this serial is six hours long! There simply isn't enough plot to carry this much story. Every significant event seems to happen at least twice, or if it involves someone dying, it nearly happens well before it actually does. And who, I wonder, is "the spider"? It's no plot-spoiler to reveal that this strange version of Copenhagen is so underpopulated that if you haven't noticed by halfway through episode one that there's precisely one character to whom our attention is being drawn in in an incredibly clumsy way who isn't directly flagged as a good or bad guy, you really ought to be paying more attention.

The hero is as one-dimensional as everybody else, but unfortunately he's almost permanently on screen, so we constantly have our faces rubbed in the fact that this guy can't act. When you have to establish the main protagonist's sexual magnetism by having women he doesn't fancy at all literally throw themselves at him every so often while he looks vaguely uncomfortable, something has gone badly wrong. Especially if the sexual attractiveness of this man has very little to do with anything. And almost every other aspect of the whole farrago is equally badly plotted. A minor character fakes insanity, and it's clearly established that he was fine yesterday and this is a legal dodge, yet later on he's raving mad and always has been, as if the scriptwriter simply couldn't be bothered to remember whether people who didn't matter very much were mad or sane. Suddenly giving a character a secret gay son who by an amazing coincidence is intimate with another character because nobody in the story doesn't know several other characters really well is lousy writing, and further reinforces the impression that Denmark has a total population of about 100. And so on.

This series obviously wants to be "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", but apart from understanding that a long time ago men wore hats and everybody chain-smoked (if you play a drinking game based on the number of close-up shots of filterless cigarettes to prove it really is 1949, you'll probably die), it completely and utterly misses the point. Especially in the last episode. The level of rather dull one-note grittiness throughout implies that we won't necessarily get a feel-good ending, but what we're eventually treated to barely qualifies as an ending at all. Presumably they're hoping for a sequel. I for one won't be watching it.

The problem with just about all of the current batch of superhero movies is that they ultimately revolve around massive property damage and the destruction of giant machines. This film consists of seemingly endless superhero-versus-armies-of-evil-robots mayhem, and the frenetic pace makes the whole thing one-note, since the level of danger and the often exhausting pace seldom let up right from the start. It's basically tailor-made to be described as "awesome" by people who use that word far too much because they're children trying to sound like all other children, or adults desperately trying to be 14 forever.

That's the movie's main failing, but it does have strengths too. In what is probably a direct reaction to criticisms of the way Superman has been portrayed recently, the heroes go out of their way to save innocent people, irrespective of whether it greatly adds to the difficulty of what they're trying to accomplish, and this is used as the yardstick by which ambiguous characters eventually measure up as good guys. When Captain America announces that, no matter what, the Avengers cannot abandon even one civilian, let alone allow thousands to die for the greater good, it rings true as the kind of thing a superhero would say, and we see plenty of evidence that they mean it, including the Hulk's growing awareness that he's too dangerous to be deployed in populated areas.

Unfortunately, the poorly-constructed plot doesn't allow proper development of this concept, since we don't really get any sense of growing tension. And when Hawkeye unexpectedly turns out to actually have a life, the astonishment of all the other characters merely highlights how one-dimensional they are (especially in light of the fact that significant others played by actresses who couldn't be bothered to do a cameo in this movie are casually referenced and then forgotten about). The number of times Hawkeye lampshades the fact that he's not remotely useful on a team which includes an actual god emphasizes the clunkiness of a script which belatedly tries to make an irrelevant character important while setting up a reason not to include him in any further Avengers movies (but maybe he might be there if his sudden character development makes everyone like him after all). And there has to be be something wrong with a superhero movie in which Hawkeye is the most interesting character, despite in-your-face remarks like: "I'm just a guy with a bow."

Ultron is the least interesting villain imaginable: a bad robot built for no good reason by two characters who struggle to justify their actions, who comes across as a mentally retarded monster who wants to wipe out the human race because the script says so. And the blatant attempt to portray him as Old Testament God Almighty who accidentally gives birth to Jesus Christ with superpowers is so clumsy that it would only work as a subversive joke in an insanely religious but collectively stupid country like the USA. And the inevitable romantic subplot that springs up out of absolutely nowhere unfortunately involves two people who would clearly rather wash their mouths out with sulphuric acid than kiss each other.

So on the technical level, this is a triumph of mostly pretty good CG objects being smashed against each other for unprecedented lengths of time. As a drama involving believable characters with more than one dimension, not so much. The almost endless action scenes are of course "awesome" in the sense of "quite good but my vocabulary doesn't run to another superlative that exceeds meh", but they really do get tiring after a while. I'd give this film a precisely average rating of two and a half stars, but since this site doesn't allow half stars, I'll go to three on the strength of Captain America's genuine heroism just like we want to see, and Hawkeye's differently heroic attempts to be a real person in a movie where nobody else is.

It's hard to know what rating to give a film like this! Logically it deserves one star on grounds of sheer what-were-they-thinking?, but it's so enjoyable that I'm giving it three - this is a rare example of "so bad it's good" that's actually good, as opposed to worthless dreck you watch with an ironic sneer on your face while pretending to be having fun. And since it's outside the extremely narrow genres devotees of bad movies have been unimaginatively strip-mining ever since those wacky Medved brothers set the ball rolling in 1979, it very seldom features on bad or weird movie websites. Which is a pity, since it's both worse (in the best possible way) and far, far weirder than many of the usual suspects.

Basically, this is a live-action Road Runner cartoon with Kirk Douglas in the rôle of Wile E. Coyote. Literally! Our anti-hero's methods of disposing of his foes typically involve large amounts of dynamite (supplied by the Acme Corporation, naturally), huge suspended rocks, or other methods so daft as to be downright surreal, all of which are lifted directly from the cartoons. And of course, Cactus Jack's nefarious schemes invariably backfire upon himself, with consequences that should be fatal but are merely embarrassing. The nominal hero is a squeaky-clean but hopelessly naïve moron whose actual name is Handsome Stranger, played by a not-yet-famous Arnold Schwarzenegger, presumably because the casting director thought his physical appearance and unique style of "acting" resembled those of a cartoon character. Which of course they do. As for Kirk Douglas, it always adds something to a silly film if the star is clearly enjoying himself, and I think we can safely say that Kirk's having a ball!

As a token concession to the fact that this is allegedly a movie aimed at adult audiences, a love-triangle involving the three main characters inevitably develops (and some of the jokes about what Cactus Jack may end up doing to Charming Jones if he gets the chance are a tad politically incorrect by today's standards), but in almost every department, this is a comedy western as unashamedly bonkers as the cartoons it's based on, and in that respect, it's far better than Robert Altman's vastly more expensive but hideously misjudged "Popeye". This is a neglected anti-classic that, given the tiny number of comedy westerns that are any good at all, deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the overrated "Blazing Saddles" and the underrated "Evil Roy Slade".

This is yet another of those portmanteau horror movies that Amicus, Hammer's most successful rivals, specialized in. The all have exactly the same structure: four or five people find themselves in some slightly creepy place, in this film a tacky carnival sideshow, and a strange man gives each of them a vision of some extremely improbable and almost invariably fatal event which turns out to be either their predestined fate, or something which has already happened because they've died and gone to Hell. Or something very much along those lines. "Torture Garden" is one of the most obscure of these films. Unfortunately, that's because it isn't very good.

The 12 certificate should warn you that if you're expecting horror, you'll get extremely little of it indeed. In fact, at no point are we given more than the briefest of glimpses of anything nasty, nothing truly scary happens, and the whole thing barely qualifies as a horror movie at all. The cast is also rather disappointing. Most of these films take advantage of their episodic nature to have numerous surprisingly famous guest stars, since if they only appeared in one 20-minute segment, they didn't need to be hired for very long, but although we do get Peter Cushing, who was almost a permanent fixture in these things, and Jack Palance is delightfully cast against type as an over-excited and rather camp academic with a passion for Poe, most of the others are decidedly B-list at best, and some of the acting, especially that of the women, is atrocious. And Burgess Meredith, in the rôle usually given to Peter Cushing of the sinister man in the linking segments who reveals the ghastly fates of everybody else, is literally a pantomime villain; I kept expecting the Adam West version of Batman to rush in and punch him.

I was about to say that it's probably a bad idea for directors of horror films to attempt to persuade the audience that possessed pianos are a credible threat, but this movie and the completely bonkers Japanese horror-comedy-surrealism extravaganza "Hausu" were made in the same year, and they both feature homicidal pianos as well as possessed pussycats, so I guess that in 1967, everybody was smoking the same stuff as the Beatles. However, "Hausu" uses these ridiculous concepts infinitely more imaginatively. "Torture Garden" passes the time adequately, but it's definitely not a classic of its kind. And I sometimes had the feeling that I was watching a horror movie aimed at children. Robert Bloch, better known for "Psycho", allegedly wrote the script, but you could have fooled me.

Firstly, let's get the big problem with this film out of the way: the quality of the DVD transfer is abysmal. The color balance of the entire movie is so wrong it resembles that weird two-color technicolor they used very briefly in the 1930s before proper technicolor was perfected, and the resolution is so low that the film plays in a little window in the middle of the screen, because if you could see it full-size it would be just plain embarrassing. I have seen a worse quality DVD that wasn't a bootleg, but only once (if anyone's interested, it was "Mad Dog Morgan"). So although the movie has enough good points to just about merit two stars, this is definitely a one-star version. And since I had to order the DVD three times before I got a copy that wasn't too worn out to play at all, it's probably the best one available.

Lee Van Cleef was in seemingly endless spaghetti westerns round about 1970, because as spaghetti stars went he was the next best thing to Clint Eastwood, and much, much cheaper. Many of them weren't terribly good, including this one, and he obviously knows it, since most of the time he's not so much acting as sleepwalking. Which is a pity, since none of the other totally obscure actors involved, including the young man who gets at least as much screen-time as Lee Van Cleef, can act at all. There are numerous blatant lifts from other better-known spaghetti westerns, notably a lengthy and completely gratuitous machine-gun massacre, but these just serve to remind the viewer how much better-directed those films were.

A fair bit of violent action does occur, but it mostly comes out of nowhere after a lengthy spell of nothing much happening, and is poorly handled. Just about everybody's motivations are needlessly confusing, inadequately established, or sometimes completely unexplained - how the hell did the one-dimensional token love-interest girl get engaged to a man she's never met who doesn't have the slightest desire to marry her, and furthermore, turns out to be a psychopathic gay sadist with syphilis? The whole film is extremely badly plotted, and there are numerous jarring shifts between nasty killings we're supposed to take seriously and failed attempts at comedy, most of them involving horrible "comic relief" characters whose acting is even worse than everybody else's. I actually groaned out loud at the moment where the bad guys lined up all the completely irrelevant "funny" characters against a wall at gunpoint, and then inexplicably didn't shoot them after all.

This is a barely watchable copy of a movie that was only borderline watchable in the first place, and is for spaghetti western completists only. By the way, at no point in the film does anyone ride through a storm.

This review is mainly of "The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman", since the B-feature on this disc, "The Screaming Skull", is so minimal in all respects that it resembles "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera" minus 50% of the cast, 75% of the budget, 90% of the skeleton, and 100% of the jokes. It's notable only as the film with possibly the most desperate B-movie gimmick of them all: free funerals for people who died of fright while watching it! Though I seriously doubt they ever had to make good on that promise.

The main attraction isn't significantly better in artistic terms, but at least it's much more eventful. Sadly the print's in terrible condition. I also suspect it's heavily cut, since there's none of the gratuitous female nudity you normally get in Italian horror films from this era, despite several moments where it looks as though there's about to be, so I assume some of the gore is missing as well. Not that any of this matters, since it was never a masterpiece to begin with. It's hugely derivative of other films, notably the German "Blind Dead" franchise, and even more blatantly, Mario Bava's "Black Sunday", only without any of those subtle qualities known as "talent" which made that movie the horror classic this clunker can only dream of being.

The addition of a werewolf, presumably inspired by those crappy Universal sequels in which tired old monsters met each other in various combinations and/or Abbott and Costello, turns the whole thing into a hopeless muddle where no-one's motivation makes much sense, unless they're attempting to break the horror-movie record for repeatedly ignoring screamingly obvious warnings. The prologue is particularly baffling, since it doesn't belong anywhere in the continuity of the rest of the film; it looks very much as though the director felt he had to reassure audiences from the get-go that both of the promised monsters really were in the movie, in case the obligatory slow bit at the beginning before the horror kicks in had people fleeing for the exit, unable to bear the most truly horrifying thing in the film - the leading lady's "acting".

There are tiny glimmers of style and atmosphere here and there, though all of them seem to have been pinched from some other film, but it's best viewed as an unintentional comedy with all the clichés present and correct in no particular order and turned up to 11. Of special note are Paul Naschy's grimaces as his lycanthropy kicks in - there are moments when he could almost be William Shatner! - and the championship level of stupidity displayed by The Final Girl who, when specifically told not to forget the crucifix which is her only defense against the vampires that have repeatedly tried to kill her, instantly forgets the crucifix for no reason at all. This is by all normal standards an absolutely dreadful movie, but I'm giving it twice as many stars as it deserves for being gleefully unashamed of its own loopiness, and therefore a lot more fun than many films which cost far, far more. A surprising number of which have both werewolves and vampire women in them.

On the plus side, what we have here is a Scandanavian movie which, like many films made outside Hollywood, does whatever the director thought was a good idea, as opposed to being homogenized out of existence by a committee trying to jump on the latest bandwagon before the kids get bored with it. What the director is trying to do is to make a good old-fashioned western like they don't make any more. Hero suffers Very Bad Thing at the hands of Very Bad People, Hero takes entirely justified revenge, The End. And full marks to Kristian Levring for avoiding the temptation to turn his movie into yet another Tarentinoesque spaghetti western pastiche where the protagonist basically has superpowers and takes down an army with his immense gimmicky guns in slow motion; though possibly he was just being sensible, since he obviously didn't have anything like the kind of budget Tarentino gets, so blowing up towns and slaughtering hundreds of baddies with giant weapons was never really an option. On a related note, since America in the 19th. century received vast numbers of immigrants from all over the place, there's no reason at all why the hero of a western shouldn't be Danish - other independent European directors take note!

On the other hand, it's just a little bit too faithful an homage to the classic westerns, to the point where it becomes somewhat stylized and formulaic. It was a good move to make the hero an ordinary man who, apart from his military background, has no special qualities other than courage fueled by rage at the dreadful things done to those nearest to him. Unfortunately, with a few token and poorly developed exceptions, characterization is almost non-existent, and just about everybody is a complete scumbag. Likewise, the settings, in particular the villain's lair, a town almost all of which has been partially burnt down for reasons nobody ever bothers to tell us, seem too minimalist to be real places rather than environments which exist to facilitate shootouts, and the use of rather odd filters that exaggerate certain colors makes the whole thing seem a bit unreal, thus somewhat defeating the point of making the action believably realistic, since that very realism often makes the extensive and sometimes ugly violence less dramatic and/or exciting than it would have been in a more over-the-top movie.

Overall, this is a solid attempt at a traditional western with a few modern stylistic touches, and the nods to other classic westerns are seldom too obtrusive, apart from loads of indications that Kristian Levring likes "A Fistful Of Dollars" a hell of a lot, and "High Noon" not so much (which puts him in partial agreement with John Wayne, who hated both of them with a passion). But I think it's been a little bit overrated by some critics just because we've seen so few decent westerns in the last 40 years that it seems more original than it really is. By the way, in case you're wondering, the actor called Eric Cantona playing the evil henchman clearly based on Mario Brega's character in "A Fistful Of Dollars" really is the same guy who used to be far better known as a footballer.

Some classic films stand the test of time better than others. This is one of those that unfortunately doesn't. The Casbah of Algiers is an odd location for a film noir, being all whitewash and blazing sunlight, and from the viewpoint of today's increasingly multicultural society, it doesn't seem anything like as exotic as it must have to French audiences in 1937. In fact, the movie's main plot-hook, that enforced exile in an "alien" country completely unlike France is literally a fate worse than death for a true Frenchman, nowadays comes across as slightly racist, as does the one-dimensional cliché fiery gypsy girl whose blazing animal passions are no substitute for the love of a civilized French woman.

Of course, you have to make allowances when you're watching a movie almost 80 years old. But the film has other flaws too, notably that very little actually happens. Pépé mopes, romances his new love, and mopes some more. The central performances, especially Jean Gabin's, are excellent, but there's still way too much moping. A proper film noir needs a fair bit of action, and this is sadly lacking. The shootout near the beginning is anticlimactic, staged so poorly that it's downright desultory, and has no consequences at all; even worse, the only gunfight that really matters takes place entirely offscreen. And there's that scene where Pépé and his gang plan a robbery which sounds as though it'll be rather exciting, but never actually carry it out, or even mention it ever again. Apart from one genuinely noir-ish scene featuring a couple of quite nasty deaths, it's completely lacking in both violent action and true darkness, and the protagonist's eventual fate makes him seem not so much tragic as just a bit of a wuss.

On the plus side, there's the acting, which is mostly very good, and some extremely interesting characterisation, notably the utterly unsympathetic slimy little creep of a policeman who, though technically in the right because he's trying to arrest a gang of armed robbers who are undoubtedly guilty, uses the dirtiest tactics imaginable, and by cynically exploiting everything that's still good about these bad men, ultimately comes across as far worse than they are. But Saturnin Fabre is no Orson Welles, and this is no "Touch Of Evil". And in terms of essentially good characters who do bad things and are undone by their human weakness and basic decency, this isn't a patch on "Rififi". By the way, given his amazing performance in "L'Age d'Or", it's a shame they couldn't think of anything better to do with Surrealist icon Gaston Modot than have him lurk on the sidelines looking slightly retarded. As classics go, a very minor one.

Well, let's see now. This is a fairly low-budget horror film over 80 years old, so you can safely assume that any sex and violence is pretty much non-existent, and the reason it was banned for decades in the UK had more to do with our draconian censorship laws than anything truly offensive about the film. You can also take it as read that the special effects are very crude indeed. H. G. Wells, the author of "The Island Of Dr. Moreau", on which it was closely based, publicly disowned it. And both modern remakes, bizarrely starring Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando respectively, were unmitigated disasters. So this film has to be terrible, right?

Actually, it's an incredibly atmospheric minor masterpiece. Bela Lugosi has a very small part but he was seldom better, and fans of Devo will enjoy seeing where that "Are we not men?" quote came from. The hero is, inevitably for this era, blandly forgettable, but Charles Laughton is simply fantastic as a mad scientist who for once doesn't overact but is still very mad indeed, in the rôle you'd think Bela would have gotten. And he really sells a horribly crazy character who has no idea there's anything wrong with doing ghastly, pointless things to helpless animals just because he can. He's the best kind of movie villain - you utterly detest him because any sane person would, but you're still fascinated by him. And what ultimately happens to him - the scene that got the film banned in the UK - is implied rather than shown, but it still packs a real punch.

Just about the only thing wrong with it is that they didn't go with the mind-bendingly surreal makeup designs still photos of which are included in the DVD extras. Oh, and this being 1932, Lota the Panther Woman's rampant animal sexuality, supposedly a crucial plot-point, has to be so downplayed that she might as well be a slightly troubled nun. But overall, as vintage horror classics go, it's up there with "The Bride Of Frankenstein", and far better than the Lugosi version of "Dracula". As a bonus, real movie buffs can have fun spotting obscure young actors who weren't famous yet slumming it as Beast Men - Randolph Scott is easy to identify, but good luck finding Alan Ladd!

Oh, by the way, the photo at the top of this page is of Frederick March in the 1931 version of "Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde", and has no connection whatsoever with this film.

Steve Coogan is one of the funniest men on the planet, and I'm a huge fan. That being said, he's not infallible. The acid test of any comedy series is how often you laugh, and I laughed so seldom while watching this first disc that I can't be bothered to watch the second one. Coogan did a series in which every week he played a lesser comedy character who was good for 30 minutes of humor but no more, and ideally Tommy Saxondale should have been part of that series, because he's basically a feeble rip-off of Alan Partridge.

Partridge is a D-list celeb who hangs out with a fascinating gaggle of similar entirely fictional people, some of whom are even worse than he is. And that's funny. Saxondale is an ex-roadie for real early seventies rock stars, most of whom are still alive, so the BBC can't afford to have them on the show, and when he talks about them, he has to be very careful in case they sue. And that's not terribly funny. Partridge is, as Coogan himself put it, not gay but terrified that he might be, so the many scenes in which, for some wildly implausible reason, he's placed in a very gay situation to which he reacts with a mixture of abject fear and horrified fascination are hilarious. Saxondale is moderately embarrassed about being sexually attracted to overweight women, but because laughing at people for being fat isn't really all that funny, the whole running gag is oddly muted, and his partner is nowhere near big or unattractive enough for it to be implausible that a rather dim middle-aged pest controller needs to have a rampant fat fetish to live with her.

And so on. It's all a bit weak. His anger management classes are curiously irrelevant, given how seldom he loses his temper, even in the scene where he shoots somebody non-fatally with a low-power air-gun under circumstances where I personally would have done a lot worse. And some of his funniest monologues are very out of character, because we're looking at Steve Coogan ceasing to pretend to be stupid so that he can be genuinely witty, even if Tommy Saxondale shouldn't really be that clever. His sidekick is a complete waste of space who exists to have things said at him, and Morwenna Banks, who has struggled to become a comedy star for about 30 years without quite managing it, shows exactly why she's failed and will never succeed by not understanding the difference between playing an irritating comedy character such as Sybil Fawlty and actually being irritating. Thankfully she's not in it very much.

This is a major misfire from an entertainer you can forgive because he's usually much better. If the idea of Steve Coogan playing a fool with bad dentures who fancies fat ladies and has a vague connection with Jethro Tull instantly floods your trousers with uncontrollable humor urine, you'll love this. Otherwise, maybe not.

You really need to see this! Never mind the knee-jerk recommendation from boring old Quentin Tarantino, this truly is a unique movie. Director Jack Hill said that its theme was unconditional love, and he succeeds magnificently in selling the idea of people who ought to be genuinely evil to the max, but aren't because they can't help it, and are guarded by a protector who isn't evil either, but will literally give everything for them. Of all the deranged kidult movies, this is definitely the best. Lon Chaney Jr., never a truly good actor and an almost unemployable dying alcoholic when he made this, liked the script so much that he managed to stay on the wagon throughout and gave one of his best performances ever. He even sings! (Apparently many retakes were required - the song genuinely has to be heard to be believed.)

The complete stupidity and uselessness of the hero and heroine are way ahead of their time, as is the notion that the supposed monsters genuinely can't help it. And don't worry about finding the title character disturbingly sexy - she's much older than she looks. Right from the beginning, when horribly typecast Mantan Moreland's cameo ends in the worst possible proof that for once he's absolutely right not to want to go anywhere near that creepy old house on the hill, you know this film's going to mess with your expectations. It was so nuts that it was almost impossible to sell, and had to be re-titled "Cannibal Orgy" (not strictly accurate), and then, when that didn't work, "The Liver Eaters" (even less accurate). But seriously, how could you have a better title for anything than "Spider Baby"?