Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This show, despite being fairly obscure, seems to get nothing but rave reviews. Not knowing what to expect, I personally found it disappointing. It's clearly an attempt by Mackenzie Crook, who also wrote and directed, to play to his frankly limited strengths as an actor while trying to escape from being typecast as creepy weirdos like Gareth from "The Office", therefore his character Andy is essentially Gareth's non-evil twin, an equally nerdy and obsessive guy who happens to be a nice, totally harmless man whose life revolves around amateur archaeology rather than trying to be Rambo.

On the plus side, Andy and his best friend Lance, played by the excellent Toby Jones, have extremely convincing on-screen chemistry, and the scenes of them wandering across the English countryside talking rubbish while seeking that ever-elusive Saxon horde of gold, but alas, only finding worthless junk, are 4-star material in a 2-star program. They're seldom laugh-out-loud funny, but in a gentle, rambling sort of way, they're consistently amusing. As stand-alone sketches, they'd work just fine.

Unfortunately, here they're set in a framework which doesn't quite gel. The subplots involving these mens' love-lives tend more toward angst-ridden melodrama than comedy, and are sometimes downright mawkish and/or depressing. Given the already understated comedy of the officially funny scenes, that lowers the average when it comes to laughs. I suppose that's why random zaniness sometimes pops up in an otherwise realistic setting. Totally unrealistic portrayals of severe mental illness are always good for a laugh; so good that there two unrelated wacky loonies to double our fun! And what about those two guys who look and dress exactly like Simon and Garfunkel c. 1970, apparently without intending to? Mackenzie Crook must think that's the funniest joke ever, judging by the number of times he reminds us of it.

Other problems include a story which, instead of being episodic as you'd expect, has all the subplots proceeding over a stately 3 hours. Given the inconsequentiality of the material, at times the pace becomes absolutely glacial. In the scenes where our heroes wander around metal-detecting, this doesn't matter, because the whole point is that nothing much ever happens. But it tests one's patience when the burning question of whether Andy and Lance will be able to perform a song on open mic night at their local pub without making complete fools of themselves is dragged out over 3 episodes. "Father Ted" dealt with a very similar theme in half an hour, and managed to be a hundred times funnier.

What's more, despite the detailed characterization of the two heroes, the other characters are mostly one-dimensional clichés at best, and often badly underused, as if Mackenzie Crook populated his world with colorful stereotypes and then didn't have the slightest idea what to do with them. One poor actress literally gets through the entire series without saying or doing anything! And I'm talking about a character featured on the cover of the DVD, so presumably she's supposed to be significant.

This series will undoubtedly appeal to fans of "The Last Of The Summer Wine" who'd enjoy something similar with a younger cast, more soap-opera elements, and a much stronger emphasis on amateur archaeology. And since a second series has been commissioned, there must be plenty of you out there. But if you think that sounds a bit slow, give it a miss.

It's no coincidence that this DVD includes a trailer for "Gladiator". Both films are alternate versions of the events following the death of the last of the "Five Good Roman Emperors", Marcus Aurelias, and the accession of Commodus, the first of a long and ultimately fatal series of bloody awful rulers. Also, both films assume (for reasons based entirely on drama and not at all on history) that Marcus Aurelias knew his biological son was a bloodthirsty megalomaniac, wanted to nominate somebody else as his successor, but was assassinated before he could do so. Thus it's fair to say that "Gladiator" is a sort of remake.

Which is the better film? Undoubtedly "Gladiator". I'm a sucker for a good epic. I'd give "Lawrence Of Arabia" (which shares some of the cast of this movie) six stars if that was possible. But this epic is frankly overrated. I've given it three, after thinking about two, but ultimately it's a two-and-a-half-star film. Does the Roman Empire actually fall? No, not as such. It symbolically starts to in the last few minutes. Don't expect Rome to spectacularly burn before your very eyes. And the epic battle scenes aren't that wonderful either - bear in mind that this has a U certificate. "Spartacus" goes much, much further in every respect. And quite right too, because when you're telling this kind of story, it matters. Though full marks to second unit director Yakima Canutt - when you see the name of that legendary western stuntman in the credits, you can safely assume that any scenes involving horses will be spectacular. And he really pulls the stops out here.

What lets this film down isn't the pacing. "Lawrence Of Arabia" is much longer, and not much more actually happens. yet it never loses your attention for a moment. What it needs is better acting. James Mason gives it his all as a potentially one-dimensional good guy, but ultimately his character is completely irrelevant. Alec Guinness is as professional as he usually is as Marcus Aurelias, who dies early in the film, but if you've seen "Star Wars", you'll recognize his default performance in movies he doesn't truly connect with (compare his Prince Faisal in "Lawrence Of Arabia", who manages to be far more multi-faceted with even less screen-time). But Stephen Boyd is painfully wooden as the lead. What sane Emperor would have tried to nominate this pedantic moron as his successor? Christopher Plummer's Commodus is a far more sympathetic character (and a far better acted one) because it's not really this weak, flawed man's fault that he ended up with a job he's wildly unsuited for, and it's not until the final stages of the film, when his fragile sanity has totally crumbled under the pressure, that he's actually evil. And as for Sophia Loren... Well, just watch those. Strange. Early scenes where. She keeps. Pausing for no. Apparent. Reason. While gazing vacantly into the. Middle. Distance. You'd almost think, if she wasn't an A-list actress, that cue-cards might have been involved...

In short, a halfway decent second half of a double bill, if the other half is "Spartacus " or "El Cid". Though given the lengths of those films, they don't really need a B-feature. A rare case of the remake (or in the case of "Gladiator", unofficial semi-remake) being far better than the original. Not actually bad, but strictly for nostalgia buffs.

This utterly bizarre documentary is a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of people who sincerely believe totally implausible conspiracy theories. It pulls off the very sly trick of picking a subject which neatly sidesteps most of the political ideology that usually surrounds such belief-systems, and simply gives us a total of nine increasingly bonkers perspectives on something which appears to be perfectly straightforward - a horror movie based on a best-selling novel by Stephen King.

But if you're absolutely determined to look for hidden meanings where there are none, there's plenty of strange incidental detail to play with, given Stanley Kubrick's obsessive-compulsive approach to film-making. Some of the "theorists" are more coherent than others. The lady who's so determined to prove the entire movie is somehow about Minotaurs that she turns a briefly-glimpsed poster into the second-most-important character in the film, despite the fact that it doesn't actually show a Minotaur, borders on total incoherence.

And the fellow who thinks that, despite the complete absence of any Native American characters, or any suggestion that Native Americans might be involved beyond one throwaway comment that being build on an Indian burial site has given the hotel a spooky reputation from the get-go (a hackneyed idea Stephen King has used several times), the film is entirely about America's brutal treatment of its native population, admits from the outset that he reached this conclusion in a totally arbitrary way before he'd even seen the movie, hence his struggle to attach more importance to inanimate objects which appear for a few seconds in the background than the actual characters or story, comes across as far less sane than he thinks he is, and quite incapable of understanding why.

The most outrageously nutty contributor actually makes a comparatively good case for the entire film being Stanley Kubrick's confession that he faked NASA's alleged live footage of the Moon landings. Comparatively good compared to some of the other people in this film, anyway. He even tries to gain credibility by disassociating himself from those nutters who think we didn't really go to the Moon, though without explaining why, if we in fact went there, Stanley Kubrick had to fake any footage at all. Or indeed mentioning that this idea derives from an obscure French TV documentary that was a very deliberate joke.

It's not perfect. The non-stop flow of information can be tiring, especially during the slow patches. The complete absence of any personal information about these people other than what they choose to say about themselves is a pity - we don't even find out what any of them look like. And for somebody like me, the pretty much random B-movie clips used to illustrate some of the comments are very distracting - "Oh look, The Brain From Planet Arous!" is the kind of thought guaranteed to break whatever train of thought you previously had. But overall it's a fascinatingly mind-bending exploration of the way some people insist on reading far too much into nothing at all.

I didn't make it to the end of Disc 1, because this series is literally unwatchable. The premise is good: a comedian pretends to be a laughably inept spirit medium and attempts to convince unsuspecting members of the public he's for real. Unfortunately the execution is horribly crass. The fictional "Shirley Ghostman" is a supposedly straight man who is screamingly camp in a very irritating way, presumably as a clumsy parody of certain famous TV "psychics" who are obviously gay but won't admit it. The scenes which link together the rest of the show - Shirley Ghostman performing for a live audience who supposedly think he's for real - don't work either, since the dialogue makes it clear that by the time the second show was recorded, the first one had already been broadcast, so everybody knew it was a joke. Even in that first show, at the end of which a couple of halfwits are persuaded to say on camera how impressed they were with SG's psychic powers, it's apparent well before the end that 90% of the audience are either openly laughing, or having trouble getting their heads around how dreadful this supposedly real medium is.

That first show includes such humorous highlights as our hero revealing to a member of the public who thinks he's for real that he gained his psychic powers by wrapping the family dog's head in clingfilm and shoving toys up its anus while it suffocated, and a lady who reads peoples' fortunes by examining their bottoms (who apparently is for real) being interviewed by an actor pretending to be a ghost-hunter who is at least borderline retarded, and makes all the most screamingly obvious jokes you can think of (and probably did while reading the previous couple of lines), as well as even worse ones about being sexually abused as a child. And so on. Almost all the jokes involve bodily functions or weird sexual habits, but if you're not funny in the first place, crude shock-tactics won't solve the problem.

Another aspect of the show, the ongoing "psychic academy" feature, seeks out the most gullible people on earth and persuades them to participate in what they think is a training program with a real psychic. This is almost funny, because there are sour, cynical, mean-spirited laughs to be had watching these dupes reveal themselves to be so stupid they have trouble counting up to ten, and so ignorant they don't know what a teapot is. But it's not really a very enjoyable kind of fun.

If a true master of character-based comedy like Steve Coogan had attempted something like this, the results could have been hilarious - can you imagine Alan Partridge interviewing a lady who reads peoples' bottoms? Though I doubt it would be possible for somebody as well-known as Steve Coogan to pull it off without being recognized, so it's understandable that they went with the much more obscure (and no doubt much, much cheaper) Marc Wootton. But maybe they should have asked themselves why he wasn't especially famous before giving him the job, because judging by this sorry mess, there's a very good reason. As for Sir Patrick Stewart, I can't imagine why he agreed to narrate. Presumably, like Stephen Fry, if he's in a good mood he'll agree be in absolutely anything. And since he doesn't really contribute anything other than a famous name to put in the credits, presumably the BBC knew all along that it was mediocre enough to need that kind of help.

Absolutely dreadful! Avoid like the evil dead.

As with so many post-sixties spaghetti westerns, tracking down the obscure ones turns out not to be worth the effort. And judging by the credits, this one seems to be more German than Italian, which automatically decreases the chances of it being any good. Absolutely nobody in this film can act at all, and dubbing even more horrendous than usual doesn't exactly help. The "hero" thinks he's a second-rate Clint Eastwood, but in truth he's a third-rate Chuck Norris, minus that distinguished thespian's fine acting skills.

Apart from the shortcomings in the acting department - not something I'd normally criticize a spaghetti western for, but you need at least one good actor in a central role to cover up the shortcomings of all those bit-players and extras, and this film has absolutely nobody who even halfway resembles a star - it's flatly directed, and painfully cheap. At no point are we shown any exterior shots of anything other than uninhabited wilderness, so I guess they couldn't even afford to hire one of the western frontier town sets that had already been built in Spain for other spaghetti westerns, let alone build one of their own.

Tonally it's all over the place, veering from cartoonish slapstick to unpleasant death more or less at random, accompanied by often painfully intrusive music ranging from the usual Ennio Morricone knockoffs to wildly inappropriate heavy rock to tell us what the mood of the scene is supposed to be, since the actors certainly aren't capable of conveying something that subtle.

And as an action movie, it's extremely short on action. There's a very brief and very one-sided gunfight near the beginning (the only time our gunslinging hero actually uses a gun), but apart from that, there's only a tedious and poorly-directed massacre, and a showdown which has to go of its way to have the main characters repeatedly run out of ammunition in order to last long enough to at least pretend to be The Big Action Setpiece that justifies the whole film. The weapon the bad guy ends up being forced to use is so ridiculous that you feel kinda sorry for him. As for the plot, there isn't one. People randomly scheme against each other for constantly-changing reasons, most of them relating to things that happened before the film started because they're too expensive to show us.

On the plus side, both characters who threaten to become the dreaded Odious Comic Relief are mercilessly killed before they've had a chance to become all that irritating. But that's nowhere near enough. Don't bother.

This obscure almost-legendary 1969 TV play from the genuinely legendary and incredibly imaginative Nigel Kneale is in fact not one of his finest hours. It has gained an exaggerated reputation due to the fact that it supposedly "predicts" reality TV, but in truth it does nothing of the sort. This is a blatant rip-off of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" with added end-of-the-sixties gloss - the screaming paisley costumes of the male characters and the fact that all the women are apparently painted gold really made me wish the BBC had filmed it in color! The Ancient Greek theory of catharsis - exposing the common people to theatrical representations of horrifically traumatic events happening to somebody else will harmlessly purge them of negative emotions, thereby helping society to function smoothly - is very obviously what inspired Kneale, and the fact that modern technology happens to be involved is just an excuse to turn this into a sci-fi tale. And far from predicting the future, that idea was well over 2,000 years when he pinched it.

As in almost all dramas on this theme, what occurs here is the exact opposite of what happens on contemporary TV shows such as "Big Brother"; it's no spoiler to reveal that the participants find out reality TV is a bit more real than they'd bargained for once it's too late to back out, because that's what always happens. What gives this story its power is the extent to which it pulls no punches at all, though that won't come as a huge surprise to anybody who's read Aldous Huxley. But to anyone familiar with the current output of the BBC, the fact that they used to broadcast material as controversial as this just because they felt they had an intellectual duty to do so may be a bit of an eye-opener.

The cast give it their all, some hampered more than others by the peculiar production decision that in the future everybody will have a vaguely South African accent, but the performances vary from superb (one actor in particular makes you go "uh-oh..." the instant he appears, and never lets up - you'll definitely know that moment when you see it) to downright peculiar. The male lead plays his part so bug-eyed that I found myself looking at his face and wondering if he had a real-life thyroid problem so much that I missed lines of dialogue, and poor old Leonard Rossiter gets another nomination for the sadly non-existent Mister Underused In Futuristic Dramas Award (how many people remember that he was in "2001 - A Space Odyssey"?). But overall this is somewhat patchy, and much less original than some people would have you believe. The last act really, truly does hit harder than you'll expect, but there's some very dated futurism to get through before then.

Overall, this is a dated and very patchy TV play whose ideas are more original in retrospect than they were at the time, with a conclusion which, moving though it is, doesn't really mesh with the mostly blackly comedic satirical drama we've seen up till then. Hugely ambitious, ahead of its time, well worth a look? Certainly. Just don't expect a work of genius you've somehow never heard of until now.

You'd think a film consisting entirely of a middle-aged rock-star talking about himself and his music, hanging out with his celebrity buddies, and doing a little bit of studio recording would be duller than chartered accountancy. However, Nick Cave isn't your typical incoherent egomaniac pop has-been. Remember, when he's not making records, this guy writes novels. Real ones, not rock-star vanity projects that somebody else wrote 90% of. So although he's probably broken the laws concerning narcotics nearly as often as poor befuddled Ozzie, his brain clearly isn't fried. In fact, he's obviously very smart indeed, as well as wildly imaginative, to the point where he can even be interesting while talking about the weather. Which is just as well, since he does in fact talk quite a lot about the weather.

Basically this is a guided tour of Nick Cave's fascinatingly bizarre mental architecture which grabs your attention from the get-go. What stopped me from giving it 5 stars was that the opening scenes grabbed my attention just a little bit too much by promising me the kind of film David Lynch might make in one of his less pretentious moods. And however good the movie we actually get may be, I was a little disappointed that it didn't go anything like as far as I initially thought it would. And also, although I realize that this is a documentary about what Nick Cave does on an average day, and most days he doesn't fight terrorists or save children from burning orphanages, it would have been nice if a little more had actually happened, and he'd gone out for a nice lunch with an old pal and so on ever so slightly less.

But these are very minor problems with a film which is mostly excellent. Long before the end I was wishing that Nick Cave was a friend of mine because he's obviously a tremendously interesting guy to hang out with. I even forgave him for that Birthday Party gig which was so loud I was partially deaf for a fortnight. And it takes a very good documentary indeed to do that!

When this film first came out there were queues round the block, because it was that rarest of creatures, a cult movie with a pre-existing cult. But almost overnight it was playing to empty cinemas. It's so imaginative that it's impossible not to like it on some level, but the trouble is, it's utterly incomprehensible and very badly made. Vivian Stanshall, who created the title character and might have been expected to play him, was a hopeless alcoholic whose participation had to be limited to few cameos as Sir Henry's utterly mad brother Hubert. He also co-wrote the script in a drunken stupor. And, depending who you ask, quite a few other key members of the cast and crew may have been drinking heavily throughout the shoot.

Sir Henry Rawlinson and his loopy relatives first appeared in a series of monologues, nearly all of which were broadcast at random intervals over several years on John Peel's late-night radio show. To understand everything that happens in the film, you have to be intimately familiar with this material. Even the LP with the same name as the film omits some monologues that were the basis for important incidents in the movie, while including others which have nothing to do with it. For example, one major plot-strand isn't explained in any way apart from a totally baffling poem in fake Old English recited by a drunk over crowd-noise (it isn't explained on the LP either). Which, to the unprepared viewer, makes it seem as though Sir Henry suddenly commits gory mass murder for no reason at all, but nobody seems to mind and it's never mentioned again.

Even sight-gags requiring no explanation often fail because they're shown in the background, not necessarily in focus, while our attention is on foreground events, and no thought appears to have been given to whether things we're supposed to notice will be noticeable in black and white. In one particularly bizarre scene, a potentially very funny gag falls flat because the costumes necessary to make it work obviously aren't finished, and what's more, the visibly embarrassed actors don't seem to know what they're supposed to do, so presumably the director wasn't actually directing the film during that scene, and possibly others.

There aren't that many films that could have done with a commentary track during their theatrical release, but this is certainly one of them! Though as commentary tracks go, it's not one of the most coherent, especially towards the end. The glasses that can be heard clinking throughout may have had something to do with that.

The pity of it is that this could have been the bizarro masterpiece all those people queuing round the block when it opened thought they were going to get, if only the script had been adapted from Vivian Stanshall's hilarious radio sketches by somebody else who wasn't drunk, and the film had been directed by somebody who knew how to direct. I wonder if there's any chance of a remake?

This film looks like a home movie made by very rich, very stoned people, because that's basically what it is. Right at the beginning, it briefly seems as if there might be a plot. Ringo Starr, playing an ordinary bloke named Richard Starkey (his real name), and his morbidly overweigh ill-tempered aunt Jessie have bought tickets for the Magical Mystery Tour, a coach trip (and I use the word "trip" advisedly) during which amazing things will supposedly happen. And indeed they do. Aunt Jessie finds true love for about 5 minutes before that subplot is forgotten, which is a pity, since it's the only thing remotely resembling a plot in the entire film.

As for the rest of it, the people on the coach - the Beatles, various friends of theirs, and a dwarf because if you're making a self-consciously weird movie there has to be a dwarf - drive around Britain doing random wacky things. The late, great Ivor Cutler as Aunt Jessie's unlikely love-interest almost convinces you that this is the kind of film in which the actors can be bothered to act, but he's badly underused, and he doesn't get to perform any of the songs, poems or monologues for which he was best known. Which is most unfair, since the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band are allowed to contribute the strangely inappropriate song "Death Cab For Cutie", which has nothing to do with anything.

The Beatles of course perform a number of songs, all very much from their B-list except "I Am The Walrus", several of them accompanied by visuals which would no doubt be very impressive if you were watching them on a big screen under the influence of LSD, but are otherwise somewhat underwhelming. They also improvise a couple of terrible sketches in which they dress up as wizards and pointlessly muck about. Technical standards are equally random - whether the shot's even properly in focus seems to depend on who happened to be holding the camera at the time (by the way, Ringo is credited as the director of photography).

And then, after only 53 minutes, it just stops, although nothing has been resolved and the tour doesn't even appear to have ended. I guess they ran out of film. Or maybe it was supposed to be twice as long but some of the "cameramen" didn't know you had to take the lens-cap off. Of minor interest to Beatles completists, and anyone who wants to know what kind of film a heterosexual non-Satanist Kenneth Anger might have made when he was 12.

I did try to like this movie. Any film which attempts to combine "Mad Max 3", "The Warriors", "The Bed Sitting Room", "The Seventh Seal", and every samurai movie or spaghetti western you can think of is at the very least going to be wildly imaginative! The trouble, is, it's too ambitious for its own good. Many scenes are played as comedy of the broadest kind, yet the script contains almost no actual jokes. Almost everybody is a one-dimensional live-action cartoon character, and the cast, most of whom don't seem to be real actors, overact wildly, pull grotesque faces, and nearly all talk in silly voices or just make incoherent noises. And since a movie this cheap, even one with a rock'n'roll theme, can't possibly afford to use existing songs by anyone famous, the music is supplied by The Red Elvises, who play almost non-stop throughout the film, even if the scene would have been better with no music at all. Let's just say that, if you don't happen to be a huge fan of The Red Elvises, this may begin to irritate you well before the end.

Is this a comedy? Since it features a car-chase so slow that at one point the pursuers overtake their prey on foot, during which cartoonish savages who talk in ooga-booga noises inexplicably try to stop the hero's car by pelting it with sweeties, one would think so. And then, as in quite a few scenes throughout the film, everybody suddenly realizes that the knockabout slapstick got boring some time ago, and our hero's comically inept adversaries pull out real weapons and are effortlessly slaughtered in seconds. Then again, the violence is almost always bloodless, or if it's supposed to be genuinely nasty, offscreen, and frequently accompanied by an attempt at humor, so there's often a jarring mood conflict.

This kind of thing can be done well - "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Hustle" do it magnificently - but it isn't done particularly well here. The fight scenes, of which there are a great many, some of them very long, are amateurish and repetitive, the hero lacks any charisma, and too many of the characters are downright annoying. Also, the symbolism is both overdone - the main villain is literally Death - and confusing. Is the hero a badass reincarnation of Buddy Holly? I think he's supposed to be, but it's never made clear. And although Death constantly talks about Buddy's guitar as if it's The One Ring, it's never revealed why it matters, or even if it matters. So full marks for trying to do something different, but ultimately this is no more than a quirky oddity.

This is a minor masterpiece. It doesn't take itself seriously for one second, but unlike so many Italian comedy westerns, it's still a proper action movie in which people die; one character even makes a running gag out of promising to remember superfluous cast members who get killed, and then of course instantly forgetting them. It's not in any way connected with the two movies in which Lee Van Cleef played a character called Sabata. When those films did well internationally, the Italian version of a movie called "The Bounty Hunters" was hastily re-dubbed so that the character played by Yul Brynner was now called Sabata instead of Indio Black, but you don't need to watch the Sabata films first. In fact, this movie is at least as good as either of them, if not better.

Outrageously over-the-top gunplay at regular intervals? Check. Ridiculously gimmicky weapons? Check (repeatedly). Villain so evil that he makes peasants run away so he can use them for target practice? Check. Huge sum of money that everybody is trying to get their hands on while double-crossing everybody else? Check. The Flamenco Of Death? Check. Wait, what??? This is an action-packed and very good-humored spaghetti western that ticks all the boxes, some of them more than once. The one thing it lacks is originality - the soundtrack even features a music-box that's somehow shoehorned into the plot. But if you don't mind seeing all the elements you've seen before rearranged yet again, this is a movie which rearranges them very well indeed.

Yul Brynner is the same as he usually is - effortlessly charismatic and really, really good at shooting bad guys. Every weapon you can think of and some that haven't occurred to you is employed to keep the mayhem interestingly varied. Every single character is a cliché, apart from one of the "heroes" being an amoral con-man who is highly intelligent but totally inept when it comes to violence. But everybody's having so much fun that the formulaic elements don't matter. Switch your brain off and watch badly-dubbed Italians slaughtering each other in that characteristic way they used to be so good at - you know you want to!

Incidentally, Sabata's ridiculously primitive rapid-fire gun was a real weapon, nicknamed the harmonica rifle.The reason you'll never see it in any western except this one is that it was as lethally impractical as it looks. But the fact that this film's one concession to realism is to give the hero the worst possible gun that actually existed because it looks cool sums up the proceedings very well. Daft, thoroughly enjoyable hi-jinks. Enjoy!

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with this film. Everybody talks about how wonderful the CG motion-capture special effects are compared to those pathetic rubber masks in the previous franchise (Tim Burton's woeful effort doesn't count), but you know what? Back in 1968, everybody went: "Wow! Those ape costumes are incredible!" Which, compared to every gorilla suit we'd ever seen up to that point, they were. We're getting spoilt!

Let's pretend that this film isn't about apes versus humans, but escaped slaves in the Wild West who found a wilderness settlement that attempts to recreate the half-remembered African life they were snatched away from, but inevitably come into conflict with a bunch of heavily-armed white folks running the gamut from not racist at all to full-on KKK. It would be very nearly the same film, but since we wouldn't be sitting there going: "Wowzers! The black characters truly look as if they're being played by actual humans who are black!", we'd all be more aware of any deficiencies in less effects-heavy areas, such as characterization and plot.

And frankly, there are quite a few. Nobody in this film comes across as all that bright, including Caesar, who in the previous film was established to be very intelligent even by human standards. Much of what the characters do makes no sense unless they've read the script and know they're being set up for a battle with antagonists whose existence they don't yet suspect. For example, why would humans with no apparent enemies in an almost totally deserted world feel the need to huddle inside one pointlessly fortified building and obsess about the fact that they'll die unless they obtain vast amounts of electricity in a ridiculously convoluted way, instead of becoming 19th century farmers? Answer: because they'd get slaughtered far too quickly if they were inexplicably attacked by... ooh, I dunno - chimpanzees on horseback with assault-rifles, perhaps? Hey, it could happen!

And don't you get sick of those frantic and very long fights the hero always has to indulge in that inevitably take place in a building that's for some reason in the process of falling down? The ones they include so that every blockbuster will look like a computer game, and hopefully spawn one? If you think I'm being cynical, look how much, or rather how little screen-time and character development Caesar's mate gets. That's because the target audience want fighting and shooting and things blowing up, not love-scenes between two characters who are not physically attractive by human standards. And poor old - I forget Mrs. Caesar's name, if she even has one - still features vastly more prominently than any other female ape. In fact, out of hundreds of other on-screen apes, 50% of whom are presumably female, I don't remember a single one of them being identifiably non-male.

An intelligent big-budget action blockbuster? Yes, in the same way that some superhero movies are less goofy than others. But ultimately, this film is an excuse for Mad Max-style battles with an overlay of seriousness which only seems deep because most movies of this type have even less. Don't expect "Hamlet Vs. Macbeth, Only They're Monkeys", as some critics would have you believe. Though on the plus side, it looks very expensive, there are some excellent battles, the apes really are convincing, and Gary Oldman is as good as he usually is in what's rapidly becoming his misguided-sort-of-good-guy default performance.

This is one of the most baffling films ever made! "Cult" as in "totally obscure, very cheap, and bizarrely inept", but not "cult" as in "lots of people love this movie to bits", it has almost everything wrong with it. And yet, it's not quite like anything else you'll ever see. Loosely based on Spike Milligan's chaotic stream-of-consciousness "novel", which in turn was VERY loosely based on the life of William McGonagall, the Ed Wood of poetry, and, though it's hard to believe after watching this film, a real person, the movie combines real incidents, such as McGonagall's epic trek from Dundee to Balmoral Castle in the utterly delusional belief that Queen Victoria was a huge fan, and his disastrous stage appearance as Macbeth, with sheer fantasy.

A vaguely racist Victorian music-hall song turns, with no transition whatsoever, into a real battle between Zulus and British soldiers, one of whom is McGonagall's only fan, who sends him his only sincere fan-letter ever, unfortunately getting killed in the middle of writing it, which doesn't stop him finishing and posting the letter. Queen Victoria is married to Hitler because all Germans are Hitler; therefore several more Hitlers (wearing kilts) join Price Albert for a musical number while the Queen shows mildly pornographic magic lantern slides. The stage of a (real) Victorian music-hall represents anything from the Scottish Highlands, with minimalist scenery that wouldn't cut the mustard in a school play, to the actual stage of a Victorian music-hall. Almost everybody in the cast plays at least 6 barely distinguishable characters. Tiny bits of gratuitous nudity pop up randomly, apparently to prevent the film being classed as childish whimsy, getting a U certificate, and being shown to bewildered infants by mistake. When Spike fluffs his lines, they just keep rolling through several retakes. There's even an interval in the middle where the cast and crew are shown having lunch!

Completely and utterly out of control, with the actors sometimes obviously improvising, an out-of-nowhere shift from slapstick comedy to (historically inaccurate) tragedy in the last act, and gleeful disregard for all the conventions of film-making, not to mention an apparent budget of whatever was down the back of Spike's sofa, this is a spectacular failure on every level. Yet at the same time, Peter Sellers, the only person involved who seems to genuinely know what he's doing, is unforgettable in his fairly small role as Queen Victoria. And you have to admit that as terrible no-budget "cult" films go, it's different. If you're trawling the so-bad-it's-allegedly-good end of the cinematic spectrum and you're getting bored with all those cheap rubber space-monsters , you might find this oddity strangely refreshing. I can't honestly give it more than one star because there's so much wrong with it, yet it does have entertainment value of the "I can't believe they actually made this film!" variety. Recommended to connoisseurs of bad films who fancy seeing something that doesn't appear on all the usual lists for a change.

From a period when the western genre was just about played out, this is one of a number of films, several of them starring and/or directed by Kirk Douglas, exploring the last days of the Wild West, when most of the legends were dead, and those that weren't were embarrassing dinosaurs who had no place in the new, not-so-wild west except as aging carnival exhibits. Sam Peckinpah did it best, notably in "The Wild Bunch" and the more elegiac "Ride The High Country" (in which Randolph Scott starts the film as literally an aging carnival exhibit, complete with stuck-on Buffalo Bill beard), and of course there's Sergio Leone's "Once Upon A Time In The West", whose title says it all, a point missed by absolutely everybody who has since pinched it.

This is a very minor example of the same sub-genre. Kirk Douglas, a dependable if unsubtle actor, is a middle-aged legendary gunfighter trying to settle down, who finds that his past, combined with his lack of normal work experience, results in his having to earn a living by being paid to hang around in the saloon talking big and acting legendary - it's no spoiler to reveal that he at one point explicitly compares himself to the whores who work there too. Johnny Cash, who is really no actor at all, is oddly effective as another long-in-the-tooth legend even more alienated than Kirk; and he deserves a bonus point for not doing the predictable thing and bursting into song for no good reason.

Naturally, these two end up providing the titular gunfight. The film's basic theme - the inevitability of their acting out their appointed mythical roles and finding out who's faster - is also its biggest weakness. Two men who are basically friends agreeing to try to kill each other at an appointed time and place for a morbidly curious paying audience because it's the only way either of them can make a decent amount of money, but mainly out of sheer boredom, needs to be handled in a much more subtle way than this to really work. The major problem is that, once this idea has come up, which it does fairly early in the film, there's no real tension thereafter. We know what's going to happen, and since they don't seem to particularly care who wins, neither do we.

See the aforementioned "Ride The High Country" for a film in which a similar showdown seems to be increasingly inevitable throughout the film, but the two men involved really want to avoid it even if their old-fashioned attitudes won't let them, and the viewers care what happens to both of them. Also, you don't know how things will in fact pan out, which helps rather a lot. Here, our two potentially doomed anti-heroes trudge towards their tawdry destiny in the manner of gunfighters written by Samuel Becket. The central performances give it something, but ultimately it's a deservedly obscure curiosity which rams its message home in a tub-thumping fashion, probably because Kirk Douglas was trying to say, in this and other films he made around this time (such as the superior and much more action-packed "Posse") that the Vietnam War was a bad idea, Alas, lumpenly symbolic westerns turned out not to be the ideal way to do it.

Spike Milligan's anarchic, freewheeling prose has never been satisfactorily adapted for the big screen, and this most recent (and probably last ever) attempt fails worse than most. The problem isn't that the cast and crew weren't giving it their best shot. Clearly it was a labor of love, with a great deal of talent being fruitlessly thrown at an unfilmable book in the hope some of it would stick, and that's why it deserves more than one star. But the best you can honestly say about it is that, as movies based on the work of Spike Milligan go, it isn't the worst - that would be "The Great McGonagall", the "Plan 9 From Outer Space" of historical dramas (which is actually more entertaining than this, though for all the wrong reasons).

On the downside, it simply isn't funny. And for the film of a novel whose sole purpose was to make people laugh as much as possible, that's a serious problem. The trouble is that the descriptions of the events in the book are much, much funnier than the events themselves, and although the film tries to squeeze in as much of Spike's undiluted prose as possible by way of narration, mostly we're left with one-dimensional caricatures overacting desperately in an attempt to make feeble slapstick seem hilarious. What might have worked as half an hour of non-stop zaniness in the spirit of "The Goon Show" is stretched to an hour and a quarter, which, though still very short for a modern feature film, is at least twice as long as the material is good for. And the quaint "ould oirishness" of it all hasn't aged well - "Father Ted" dealt with similar themes infinitely better.

I remember that when this film was released in 2002, it got pretty good reviews, yet opened throughout the UK in a grand total of 3 cinemas before sinking without trace. In hindsight, the critics obviously couldn't bring themselves to be honest because Spike died almost simultaneously with the release of the movie, which is dedicated to his memory (though it seems the distributors took a more pragmatic view). Well, that was 13 years ago, the period of mourning is over, and we can tell the truth now, This is tedious, misconceived rubbish whose one saving grace is that its heart's in the right place. Unless you're a Milligan completist, rent "Father Ted" instead.