Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Dashiell Hammett, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective story as we know it, certainly knew what he was writing about. Unlike Raymond Chandler or nearly all his other less famous rivals, Hammett had genuinely worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and apparently he had to do things that led to his resignation and never rested easily on his conscience. So a fictional tale in which this real author puts down his pen, picks up a gun, and tries to act like one of his own characters would actually be very plausible.

The trouble is, this isn't it. Wim Wenders, a director most famous for a movie about a glum angel in a trench-coat falling in love with a trapeze artist, isn't noted for his gritty realism. And Francis Ford Coppola, whose degree of participation isn't made clear by the two extremely non-specific production credits he gets, but whose visual style is all over this film, sometimes gets carried away to the point where the sets out-act the cast, as happens in "Dracula" and "Hugo". The result is that this slightly peculiar movie looks fabulous, but you get the feeling so much effort went into recreating the bustle and squalor of pre-war downtown San Francisco that character and plot development were sometimes neglected.

It's one of those films where you keep going: "Hey, it's Elisha Cook Jr. who played Wilmer in 'The Maltese Falcon' with Humphrey Bogart way back in 1941 playing some other bloke!" rather than being gripped by the complicated and confusing story, in which everyone who matters appears and disappears more or less at random, and everybody's double-crossing everybody else. This is of course exactly what happens in Hammett's most famous novel "The Maltese Falcon", and naturally this film's epilogue shows our hero starting work on that novel, which by now we know was inspired by the adventure we've just seen, except that he's going to rewrite everything the way he thinks it should have been, not the way it really was. There are two problems with this. Firstly, the obvious one that if you're familiar with "The Maltese Falcon" (and if you're watching this movie you probably are), you keep being distracted because you've spotted a detail which is going to end up in the novel. And secondly, "The Maltese Falcon" is so well-written that if the plot's a bit of a muddle it doesn't matter. Frankly, you couldn't say the same about this movie.

I like this genre and I wanted to like this film, but it doesn't quite come off. It reminded me a lot of Roman Polanski's "Chinatown", with the crucial difference that in that movie, as in "The Maltese Falcon", the larger-than-life characters dominate the story. Whereas here, so much attention is being paid to both the way everything looks and the necessity of including sly references to novels and movies other than the one we're watching now that we notice how flat the characters are, and how little the hero is actually accomplishing as the contrived plot leads him around by the nose. It's not terrible, but I'd definitely call it a well-intentioned misfire.

See that DVD cover image of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? It seems like an interesting idea, and maybe it would be if it had anything to do with the series as a whole. But the reality is that the dynamic duo briefly dress in those costumes for a photoshoot at the beginning of episode 5. It's all over in two minutes, it has nothing much to do with anything except that it's a Spanish cliché, and it isn't funny. Far more time is spent quoting Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch, and at least that's moderately funny, though less so than when the people who wrote it first performed it half a century ago.

"The Trip" was rather amusing. "The Trip To Italy" less so, and much more self-indulgent. And this is, as the DVD cover proudly proclaims, the funniest thing since "The Trip To Italy". Frankly, at least half of it could have been performed by any two reasonably articulate middle-aged blokes who were being paid to go on holiday. This problem is most obvious in the scenes where our heroes visit gourmet restaurants, eat very expensive food, and say how good it is. Watching other people having dinner is only entertaining, especially in a funny way, if something goes badly wrong with the meal. Yet what we have here is two real comedians pretending to be slightly fictionalised versions of themselves having meals at real restaurants which obviously agreed to take part on the understanding that any criticism of their food would be edited out. As the comedy gets thinner, the pointlessness of these blokes visiting restaurants at all becomes more and more obvious. The scenes where they just wander around improvising in random locations are a lot funnier because they don't have to keep stopping to put things in their mouths and tell us how yummy the posh nosh they're being paid to eat is.

As for the fictional elements, why bother? I'm not a close friend or relative of Rob Brydon, so I have no interest in watching home video footage of him mucking about with his wife and kids like any ordinary non-famous person does. So why would I want to watch him doing these things with people who are only pretending to be his family? One scene in particular, where the Brydon and Coogan spontaneously start performing Shakespeare to an audience of two production assistants and it soon turns bizarrely competitive, shows how much better they are (especially Coogan) when they just do their own thing instead of following a script which is neither funny nor interesting.

I won't be watching any future continuations of this increasingly pointless franchise. Following two off-duty comedians around waiting for them to do some proper comedy rather than just chatting is television at its laziest, the scripted parts are conspicuously less entertaining than the unscripted messing around, and the restaurant scenes are so sycophantic that I couldn't help wondering if bribery was involved. As for the good jokes, the first time I truly found something amusing took so long to arrive that I looked at the timer, so I can tell you that it occurs 23 minutes into episode 1, which is only 29 minutes long. Overall it's mostly harmless, quite often vaguely amusing, occasionally genuinely funny, and only rarely depressing. But mainly it's just lazy. Ah well, if the people who make this can't be bothered, neither can I, and when they graze their way through France in 2020 I won't be joining them.

In 1980 hardly anybody outside Japan knew what a ninja was. In 1981 the unashamedly trashy Cannon studio changed all that with their ramshackle but very profitable B-movie "Enter The Ninja", starring a middle-aged Italian who used to make spaghetti westerns as a very unlikely good ninja, and the previously unknown Shô Kosugi as a much more convincing bad ninja. Naturally a sequel followed in 1983, though in "The Revenge Of The Ninja" Shô Kosugi, the most plausible ninja actor in the business, was wisely made the hero. And when that film made money, though not as much as the first one because the novelty had worn off, inevitably Cannon had to churn out another sequel that tried to revitalise the already tired franchise by taking it in an incredibly ill-advised new direction. Hence this utterly barking mad tale of an evil ninja who returns from the grave by possessing the body of an increasingly bewildered female aerobics instructor. As you do.

This should be one of the all-time classic stupid movies, and if it was a little better-made in certain ways it would be. I mean, we're treated to, amongst other things: one ninja taking on most of the LAPD, including a helicopter, and damn near winning; a spectacularly unsuccessful Chinese exorcism involving a big-haired eighties girlie in chains; an arcade game that emits magic laser beams at the bidding of a ninja poltergeist; and an epic showdown in which we discover that earthquakes are caused by ninja zombies. What's not to like about that?

Alas, rather a lot. Top-billed Shô Kosugi, who had by now become the actor of choice for anyone wanting to make anything involving ninjas and had his own TV series, obviously couldn't spare as much time as Cannon needed him for, or cost too much, or both, because he's hardly in most of the movie. It's half an hour before we even catch a glimpse of him, and almost an hour before he does anything that matters. Instead, after the action-packed yet oddly lifeless opening battle with the police which kills the bad guy's physical body, we spend far too much time with some totally untalented lady in a leotard who gets possessed and understandably doesn't know what to make of it, and even worse, her waste-of-space boyfriend, who makes her look like a good actress and has the charisma of a cat litter tray. Once in a while she dresses up in her pyjamas of doom and throws jaggy things, but nowhere near often enough.

The scenes of all the bizarrely useless objects in our heroine's apartment ganging up on her by magic, which ought to be hilariously surreal, are as flatly directed as the fights, during which I kept wondering why the hell ninjas wear eye-liner instead of paying attention to who was punching who because that seemed more important. As for the plot, well basically, dead ninjas have whatever superpowers the scriptwriter has just thought of, the possessed leotard lady with the big hair is confused, her slimy creep of a boyfriend is more confused, nobody can act, and Shô Kosugi is late to the party but sorts it all out by hitting people. Oh, and there's shedloads of that eighties music that sounds as dreadful as the dreck we put on cinema soundtracks now because it's trendy will sound in thirty years.

This lesser-known Hammer horror is probably one of their most obscure films because it lacks all the ingredients you'd expect to find in any of their more commercially successful vampire movies (and some of their duds too): Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing, ideally both; or failing that, topless women who bite people and are probably lesbians. None of Hammer's A-list regulars are in the cast of this one, and even their second-stringers are in short supply. It's almost as if Hammer didn't have much faith in their own film.

Actually they probably didn't. Christopher Lee, in a doomed attempt to avoid becoming hopelessly typecast, refused to make a sequel to 1958's hugely successful "The Horror of Dracula" until 1966, so their 1960 follow-up "The Brides of Dracula" didn't actually have Dracula in it, and wasn't a hit. What's more, in response to accusations that they'd let Hammer get away with far too much gore in their Dracula and Frankenstein films, the censors had come down so hard on 1961's "The Curse of the Werewolf" that the version released at the time barely had a werewolf in it and made very little sense (happily nowadays it's available uncut). So in 1962 Hammer were basically trying to make the gory Dracula sequel the public wanted with very little gore and no Dracula, and they knew they'd be lucky to recoup the budget.

That's the practical reason why this movie is so unlike every other vampire film Hammer made. But, perhaps by accident, its sheer oddness makes it peculiarly effective. Prefiguring Roger Corman's "The Masque of the Red Death" and Roman Polanski's "The Dance of the Vampires", which isn't far off being a comedy remake, and even, to a surprising extent, "The Wicker Man", the concept of vampires being far more numerous and better integrated with human society than the Dracula franchise would have us believe is well ahead of its time, and the masked ball where every male guest is dressed as Satan is magnificently strange, all the more so because the almost permanently bewildered hero fails to notice anything suspicious about this. Due to the enforced lack of gory neck-biting, these vampires are forced to rely on over-elaborate mind-games, with the result that the film is plotted like a nightmare in which the dreamer is swept helplessly along by bizarre events which when he thinks about them afterwards make no sense at all, even if they seemed to at the time.

Why didn't the vampires simply kill the poor guy when they easily could have? Because if they had it would have been a very short film. Do the locals know what the mysterious Ravna family are really up to? It looks as if the director wasn't sure, and changed his mind halfway through. How are two men going to defeat several dozen undead devil-cultists? The way they manage it truly has to be seen to be believed! There's even a strong hint that this would have been a lesbian vampire movie if Hammer had managed to pluck up the nerve to make one eight years before they actually did. And the very first scene is possibly the best prologue any Hammer film ever had; if the rest of it was that powerful it would be an undoubted masterpiece.

Which it certainly isn't. The script makes so little sense that I suspect they had to rewrite it as they went along to replace gory scenes the studio reckoned would be mercilessly excised by the censor with whatever else anyone happened to think of, the hero is a useless twit, his girl is a nonentity, and I don't think the innkeeper is entirely sure which movie he's in. But it's so unashamedly bizarre that I love it. This isn't by conventional standards a four-star film, but I'm giving it a bonus for featuring by far the most over-ambitious deployment of rubber bats on strings in cinema history. Because what's not to love about that?

The fact that a sexy horror comedy starring David Niven as Dracula actually exists sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Unfortunately it is. Yes, the film does exist, but it might as well not have bothered to, because it's abysmal on every possible level. It's a horror film containing hardly any horror. It's a bawdy sex romp with practically no sex. And worst of all, it's a comedy with absolutely no laughs.

I tell a lie. Worst of all, it's a movie which tries to jump on the blaxploitation bandwagon by including a major black character, and then misses the point by several light-years by making it central to the plot that the white characters regard being black as a disease. I know political correctness hadn't been invented in 1974, but that's unbelievably crass even for the early seventies!

The plot: Count Dracula's wife Vampira (not the one in "Plan 9 From Outer Space") is even deader than she's supposed to be and needs a transfusion, but unfortunately she has such a rare blood-group that the count has been looking for a donor for 50 years. He finds one when some Playboy models get involved just so there can be sexy brainless women around for the men to treat like objects. This accidentally causes Vampira to turn black. She loves her new look, but Dracula wishes to restore her lily whiteness by re-transfusing her with pure untainted non-darkie blood, in order to do which he needs to to track down the girl with the rare blood-group all over again, only by now she's hundreds of miles away in London. Much hilarity is supposed to ensue. It doesn't.

Nicky Henson from "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" and other soft-core seventies crap is his usual sleazy self as a "hero" who gets more screen-time than David Niven. Bernard Bresslaw from the Carry On franchise, Carol Cleveland of Monty Python fame, and other B and C-list seventies comedy icons try to be funny but the script won't let them. Linda Hayden, reprising her performance in "Taste the Blood of Dracula", is a very sexy out-of-control newbie vampire and by far the best thing in the film, but she's not in it for long. And David Niven is as professional as you'd expect him to be, but a lot of the time he looks very weary indeed. I don't blame him.

I was going to say this is as funny as you'd expect a vampire film written by the creator of "Are You Being Served?" to be, but in truth it's not even as funny as that. It's the kind of movie which makes you seriously wonder how it ever got made, because at no stage in its production can in conceivably have seemed like a good idea. Maybe it was a tax write-off, or the studio head was trying to win a bet that he could cast David Niven as someone even less appropriate than James Bond, or something. Anything but a genuine attempt to make a good movie, because it simply can't have been. "Love at First Bite" (1979) treats very similar material far more successfully, mainly because the script-writer remembered that comedies are suppose to include jokes.

Ignore the synopsis on the main page written by somebody who hasn't seen the series. This rather odd BBC production is far more concerned with the sexual exploits of an alcoholic restauranteur than the ghostly goings-on its target audience probably tuned in to see. In many ways it resembles one of those movie adaptations of short stories in which the supernatural content can't be stretched to anything like two hours, so it gets rationed out in little dribs and drabs between huge wads of padding in which two people fall in love, or some other people debate the reality of improbable things the viewer already knows are definitely real even if the characters don't. Though since the series was based on a full-length novel by Kingsley Amis, presumably everything in it was already present in the source material.

Although the very first scene gives us a creepy, gory foretaste of the horrors to come, the remaining 150 minutes deliver extremely little of what we were promised before the opening credits of episode one, and much of what we do get is that scene repeated for the benefit of people who tuned in late. Instead, we get Albert Finney giving it all he's got as a sweaty middle-aged drunk we're supposed to believe is irresistibly attractive to women because the script says so. His extremely selfish and immature behaviour is camouflaged by making almost everybody else either a nonentity or a caricature. Some of the braying morons who frequent his jumped-up gastropub wouldn't be out of place dining at Fawlty Towers; his daughter-in-law, the one person who believes him, is such a new age cliché that every single thing she says or does is brain-dead neo-hippie twaddle; and the trendy vicar who tries to be a modern Christian by openly disbelieving practically all of his own religion would be perfectly at home debating theology with three Irish priests called Ted, Jack and Dougal.

If I'm making this sound like a comedy, that's because a lot of it essentially is one. In-jokes abound, from Finney seducing a woman by describing food in a (supposedly) sexy way, harking back to the most famous scene in his 1963 breakout movie "Tom Jones", to the casting of Nicky Henson in a fairly major rôle because he was in lots of sex and horror trash in the seventies. Frankly, it feels smug, and the genuinely scary moments juxtapose very awkwardly indeed with scenes of impossibly stupid and rather camp vicars casually telling their parishioners what a load of old tosh most of Christianity is, or an irrelevant and obnoxious character with the surname Burgess suddenly appearing for no reason other than to show the world what Kingsley Amis thought of another author with a notoriously vast ego.

The supernatural elements are (mostly) effectively handled, but there aren't enough of them, and the concept of a hero who may be seeing things because he's an alcoholic doesn't work very well when it's made as unambiguous as it is here that the weirdness is all literally true, except for one slightly silly genuine hallucination that happens far too late in the tale to make the viewer doubt the reality of everything else. As a traditional ghost story minus all the filler about our hero's amorous antics and so on, it's about the right length for one fifty-minute episode. Stretching it to three requires one hell of a lot of stuffing. And by the way, if you think deus ex machina plot devices are cheating, this story involves such an outrageously literal example that it has to be yet another of the author's little jokes! In the end, the whole thing stands or falls on whether you believe in and/or like the main character, which has a great deal to do with how brilliant an actor you think Albert Finney is. My answer to all of the above is "not really", so it didn't work for me.

Ever since it was announced that Darren Aronofsky would not after all be allowed to reimagine Batman as a garage mechanic with no cool gadgets whose grimly realistic adventures barely involve him dressing up as a bat at all, and Christopher Nolan was getting the chance to do it his way instead, movie buffs have wondered what that antiheroic superhero film that didn't quite get made would have been like. Well, now they know, because "Logan" is Aronofsky's "Batman: Year Zero" made by a different director and starring a different hero.

Alternatively, it's a superhero version of "The Wrestler", from its weary, scarred, and terminally ill hero hobbling arthritically into battle with nothing keeping him going but a cocktail of booze, drugs, and bloody-minded awareness of his own doomed obsolescence right down to the Johnny Cash song playing over the closing credits. Nobody wears spandex in this movie, except in the drawings we glimpse when Wolverine bitterly complains that very little in the comics portraying his alleged exploits was ever true, while waving a handful of the actual Marvel comics without which the franchise wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Praise has been heaped on Patrick Stewart's unflinchingly realistic portrayal of a ninety-year-old Professor X struggling with Alzheimer's (along with the somewhat less realistic problem of seizures which, because he has telepathic superpowers, are bad news for everybody within several hundred yards), and Hugh Jackman's equally good performance as his troubled but ultimately loving surrogate son, but you know what? This isn't the first film in which such things have been shown. It's just the first movie which took the audience by surprise by including them in a film everyone was expecting to be about men in tights punching robots. Will you enjoy the forthcoming Justice League movie more if it turns out that Superman is dirty and sick and swears a lot while popping pills and coughing up phlegm because that kryptonite gas Batman exposed him to in the previous film gave him cancer? I doubt it.

Yes, this film has two superb central performances from excellent actors giving it all they've got. But were it not for the brilliance of Jackman and Stewart, this would have been a nasty, ugly misfire notable mainly for being so relentlessly and horribly violent that I wondered how it possibly managed to be certified 15. Yes, we do finally get to see, over and over again, what logically ought to happen when a man with huge knives attached to his hands punches bad guys in the head, but I wouldn't exactly call it fun. And I suspect that the decision to show us that even superheroes eventually get old and die has rather a lot to do with the fact that at 49, Hugh Jackman is no longer plausible as a character who isn't supposed to age, and the 77-year-old Sir Patrick Stewart won't be starring in too many more action movies either. Personally I found this a bad, ugly and depressing film based around two performances so good that they almost saved it, and belonged in something far better.

Now that he's hung up Wolverine's claws for good, Hugh Jackman has a great career as a mature character actor ahead of him, and I can see him becoming the kind of star Robert DeNiro used to be. But this isn't a great film. In fact, if you look past those two superb central performances, it's a cynical excuse to kill off an entire branch of the Marvel heroic pantheon who had the misfortune to miss out on being part of Disney's mega-billion-buck Ultimate Cash Cow.

Although it's difficult to believe in an era where ninjas are up there with pirates and zombies as all-pervasive pop culture clichés, we didn't know what they were until Cannon Studios released "Enter The Ninja" way back in 1981. That cheap and cheerfully gory little B-picture was a big hit, so naturally they made a follow-up, and here it is.

To the movie's credit, certain problems with "Enter The Ninja" have been addressed. In those years of dawning political correctness, it presumably occurred to them that making the evil ninja Japanese and the hero the sole Caucasian ninja in the entire world was maybe a wee bit racist. More prosaically, it definitely occurred to them that casting a past-it sixties action star as a super-athletic martial artist, meaning that the hero has to be filmed from unusual angles or wear some kind of headgear every single time he does anything spectacular to hide the fact that it's not really him doing it, was just plain daft. Therefore in this non-sequel, Franco Nero's slightly flabby middle-aged white ninja is nowhere to be seen, and the considerably more appropriate Shô Kosugi, the villain in the previous movie, plays the good guy this time round (though not the same character, who by the end of "Enter The Ninja" no longer had a head), and it's a white guy playing the baddie who can only make impressive moves when his face is totally hidden.

Not that this is a good film. The acting ranges from rudimentary to appalling. Kosugi's quite good at what acting he's called upon to do, most of which boils down to scowling while hitting people, but the villain is so bad he's sometimes funny. He actually does the "Mwaaahahaha!!" laugh while attempting to torture a scantily-clad woman to death with a jacuzzi - how eighties is that? And the less said about the supporting cast the better. However, you judge films for what they are, and this one never tries to be anything other than what it says on the tin. There's a ninja. He gets revenge. What more do you want?

It has to be said that some of the fighting is a bit tedious, especially the contests that don't involve either Kosugi or his adversary's masked stand-in, but as the violence escalates, it becomes downright Pythonesque. Who knew that ninjas distract their enemies by producing life-size replicas of themselves out of nowhere? And I'm pretty sure that Kosugi's foes in one battle were deliberately intended to come across as an evil version of the Village People. But hey, if you want to see a movie in which an invincible Asian in black pyjamas defeats a horde of baddies, many of them in fancy dress, with weapons even Batman would think were absurdly contrived, you could do a lot worse than this.

classic (comparative more classic, superlative most classic)

1. Of or relating to the first class or rank, especially in literature or art.

2. Exemplary of a particular style.

3. Exhibiting timeless quality.

That's how Wiktionary defines a classic. This site categorises this movie as, amongst other things, "Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy" and "Classics General", so I suppose it must be one of the greatest films ever made and I just don't get it.

But seriously folks, when I tell you that by far the most entertaining thing about this movie, and the only reason you've heard of it, is that outrageous title, and ironically even that one laugh is missing from this DVD because the print of the film they used bears its original title "The Madmen Of Mandoras", you'd do well to believe me, because by thinking about the words "They Saved Hitler's Brain" for a few seconds and giggling at the fact that a film of that name exists instead of watching it, you'll save yourself an hour and a quarter of tedium.

According to some sources, the movie was unreleased for almost a decade because the money ran out before filming was complete, until years later a producer looking for something to fill the bottom half of a double bill aimed at the teenage drive-in crowd, most of whom weren't paying much attention to what was happening on the screen, realised that if he didn't give a hoot about quality, buying two-thirds of a movie for peanuts and finishing it any old how meant he could make a feature film for practically nothing. This may explain the extremely muddled plot, in which, after the early scenes explain the vital importance of a certain military secret being well guarded, the US authorities vanish from the story the moment the secret is stolen, and everything has to be sorted out by a civilian, his wife, and some random foreigners they happen to get involved with. It may also explain why, especially in the very low-budget action scenes, two sets of characters appear strangely reluctant to get close enough to each other to be in the same shot.

Of course, the whole thing's a hopeless mess, and most of its running-time is devoted to the hero and his good lady hanging around in a fictional banana republic getting very confused (along with the audience) about which of the Latin Americans they meet, all of whom act very oddly, can be trusted. This dull padding between the tiny scraps of ineptly staged "action" isn't enlivened by the inclusion of an incredibly irritating comic relief girlie with the IQ of yeast, who talks in a bizarre hippie/beatnik dialect which I think is unique to this movie, and serves no purpose other than to make you wish she'd hurry up and die. Alas, she doesn't.

Oh, and that hilarious gimmick of Adolf Hitler's living head being preserved in a jar because it seemed like a good idea at the time? It's the only thing anybody remembers this movie for, but it's so underused that what's left of the ex-führer is simply a found object which is pointlessly shown to us once in a while for a few seconds, and the luckless actor (who doesn't resemble the extremely famous man he's portraying in the slightest), whose dialogue runs to a grand total of four words and whose body-language is drastically limited by his being somewhat lacking in the body department, is reduced to literally pulling funny faces in an attempt to convey that Hitler isn't very nice and is also a bit mental, which most of us probably knew already. Mind you, this is a movie in which a top secret US government chemical weapon test is represented by stock footage of an elephant having a snooze, so what can you expect? Don't waste your time like I did.

Yes, it's another of those films hailed as a "classic" because it was made longer ago than last week and the reviewer needed a random adjective! Also, Quentin Tarentino likes it so it must be good. Actually it's the least popular of the three crude blaxploitation B-movies Pam Grier used to be slightly famous for, until she became a lot more famous for starring in Tarentino's overrated homage to those films.

In other words, it's not terribly good. All the usual blaxploitation tropes are trotted out. Black people say and do exaggeratedly black and very seventies things, and the usual cardboard stereotypes pop up, such as the jive-talking pimp who has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but all blaxploitation films were contractually obliged to include a jive-talking pimp. We also get all the usual action thriller clichés: fist fight, gun fight, car chase, rooftop chase, cat-and-mouse with a killer in a derelict building, all the boxes are ticked. Yet it isn't very thrilling. The action is very flatly directed, and apart from the inevitable big gunfight at the end, there isn't really all that much of it.

One problem is the source material, a cartoon strip which you'll be familiar with if you read American newspapers between 1970 and 1974, but otherwise you won't have any more idea than I did who all the minor characters we're obviously supposed to recognise are. It's also not the best idea in the world for the heroine to be a fashion photographer with no combat skills or special qualities other than bravery and looking like Pam Grier. It might have worked as a comedy in which the recklessly bold Friday wasn't so much plucky as suicidally stupid, but as the feminist icon she's sometimes rather desperately held up to be, she's downright ludicrous! In particular, there's a scene where she goes to great lengths to put herself in extreme danger, having apparently forgotten that a tough private eye with a gun who also happens to be her best friend (Yaphet Kotto in a thankless rôle) is literally standing next to her! But of course, she's the star of this movie and he's only a supporting character, so he doesn't get to help her out all that much, even when he obviously should have.

As the confusing plot muddles its way to a hastily-explained resolution, the action constantly pauses while we're treated to various set-pieces that presumably tie in with the long-forgotten comic-strip, such as Eartha Kitt putting on a totally irrelevant fashion show while overacting so atrociously that even the characters in the movie notice, and a scene the political correctness crowd won't like too well in which black homosexuals are not only mocked as simpering freaks but turn out to be despicable race traitors too, because if you're willing to do one disgustingly unnatural thing you're obviously into them all. Pam Grier is very likeable, but in terms of both appearance and acting ability she's basically the black Raquel Welch. Overall this is a very minor B-movie in a genre which didn't last long because once the novelty wore off it had nowhere left to go. By the way, that 18 certificate is justified by a bit of blood, one not very explicit sex scene, a few gratuitous topless shots and some mild swearing, but this is really a fairly mild 15 that hasn't had its classification reviewed in decades.

The synopsis given on the main page is, as is so often the case on this site, extremely misleading, and obviously written by someone who hasn't seen the film. Our hero decides to assassinate Hitler because a) it's more challenging than hunting boring old tigers, and b) Hitler obviously deserves to be shot because he's Hitler. Though since Adolf hasn't yet show his true colours by starting a global war, presumably the heroic assassin must have the same psychic powers possessed by Christopher Walken in "The Dead Zone". Anyway, his failure to kill Adolf, the first thing that anybody mentions about this movie and just about the only reason it's remembered, happens roughly two minutes in. Unfortunately there's over an hour and a half still to go.

His escape from Nazi Germany across hundreds of miles of hostile territory, injured, exhausted, friendless, and hunted by the entire Gestapo, was no doubt thrilling, but we have to take that on trust because we only see the last few minutes of this epic journey, presumably because showing us all of it would have needed a much higher budget. In just about no time, pausing only for an irritating shipboard interlude featuring a very, very young Roddy McDowall, he's back in England. Where, despite having recently beaten infinitely greater odds, he's hopelessly outclassed by the mighty undercover task-force the Nazis despatch to London, of whom there seem to be about six. Of course, he can't tell the police because... Actually I've forgotten why not. I think they got the explanation out of the way as hastily as they could to prevent the audience from noticing what a painfully contrived plot device it was.

Despite making almost no sense, if the movie was about a brave but outnumbered man being hunted by ruthless Nazis as implied by its title, it might still be a cracking good thriller. Unfortunately, three-quarters of the film is a cute semi-comic romance between our upper-class hero and some lower-class lady he happens to run into, involving endless incredibly stilted and awkward dialogue, accompanied by a syrupy and deeply annoying string arrangement of "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square" which seems to be stuck on auto-repeat. Then, about 20 minutes from the end, the cast and crew suddenly remember this is supposed to be a thriller about a life-or-death struggle with merciless Nazi spies, not "My Fair Lady" minus the songs, and it gets dark, tragic, and even somewhat thrilling again. But it's far too little, far too late. George Sanders is at his villainous best as the surprisingly English-sounding Nazi who makes the contest personal, but he isn't in most of the film. And John Carradine as another nasty Nazi looks even scarier but has even less to do.

I was reminded of those sci-fi B-movies whose poster promises a rampaging monster, but in the actual movie it only appears on screen right at the end for five minutes if you're lucky. Fritz Lang was a genius, but he had his off days, and he always did his best work when he a generous budget to play with. This is a cheap propaganda film with a staggering amount of padding which for most of its running-time is in the wrong genre. Of course, you can't argue with the point it's trying to make unless you're a Nazi. But good intentions don't automatically result in a good movie.

This delightful old-school British comedy is essentially a showcase for the unique talents of Alastair Sim, and it's worthy of five stars whenever the camera is following him rather than the rest of the cast, which fortunately applies to a large part of the movie. His amiably psychopathic hitman is billed (in his own words) as a strange kind of hero who only assassinates people who thoroughly deserve it, yet he's repeatedly show to be a hypocrite who doesn't care about collateral damage to innocent bystanders, is willing to casually dispose of anyone who gets in his way, and is doing it all for money. But it's the two-faced amorality of the character that makes him so funny and engaging. The long sequence where he plays chess with an unsuspecting policeman while getting rid of a dead body behind his back is treated exactly like a sitcom situation where the hapless protagonist has to simultaneously have dinner with two people who don't get on without them finding out about each other, except that instead of trying to avoid social embarrassment, the anti-hero is attempting to cover up a cold-blooded murder, and what worries him is the inconvenience of it all, not the fact that he's just killed somebody.

The scenes with George Cole as the world's worst vacuum cleaner salesman and Jill Adams as the pretty girl he inevitably falls for while thwarting the killer's plans more or less by accident haven't aged quite so well. The extremely contrived ways in which the two of them end up in apparently compromising situations, causing her pompous twit of a fiancé to assume she's in the habit of casually leaping into bed with door-to-door salesmen, are hopelessly old-fashioned in a nudge-nudge kind of way, the joke being that a woman is wrongly believed to be sexually active and therefore bad, but we know she isn't which takes the curse off it. The unashamedly sleazy occupants of the third-rate hotel the film is named after where the big finish takes place, most of whom really are there for dirty weekends with people they aren't married to, are far more fun, and I wish it had been them who blundered into the plot and became accidental heroes, rather than the quite likeable but not terribly interesting characters played by Cole and Adams. But in the end it's Alastair Sim who carries the entire movie, and he does it so well that I'd recommend this to anyone who doesn't have an irrational aversion to Alastair Sim.

NOTE: The 1990 BBC TV movie "The Green Man" starring Albert Finney, which is also available from this rental company, is not a remake of this film, but a completely unrelated supernatural thriller which happens to have the same title.

A lot of people think Alfred Hitchcock was a unique director who will forever be in a class of his own. They obviously haven't seen anything by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who was as good if not better at racking up nail-biting suspense as Hitchcock at his best ever was, especially in his two masterpieces, this movie (which Hitchcock wanted to make, and would have if Clouzot hadn't already bought the rights to the source novel) and "The Wages Of Fear". And if Clouzot is the French Hitchcock, "Les Diaboliques" is definitely the French "Psycho", despite being made five years earlier.

The plot revolves around a situation which Hollywood in the fifties would have considered very strong meat to the point of being borderline unfilmable. A young woman is married to the headmaster of a ramshackle private school, who is unfortunately a petty tyrant who treats his physically frail wife abominably, and openly conducts an affair with one of the teachers (Simone Signoret, far more hard-boiled and sleazy in this film than Hollywood ever allowed her to be, even when she was playing a sexually conflicted were-panther), knowing that his wife, who he cynically married for her money which he needed to buy the school, will never divorce him because as a Roman Catholic she believes it to be a mortal sin. Unfortunately for him, his mistress, whom he treats no better than his wife, has come to hate him, and between them the two women concoct a seemingly foolproof scheme to get rid of him once and for all.

It would require multiple spoilers to say much more about the plot, though it won't ruin any surprises if I reveal that, as in every other movie ever made in which someone commits "the perfect crime", things don't go entirely according to plan. Its strength lies in the fact that at absolutely no point in the story do we know what's going to happen, because there are no clearly defined heroes who are obviously going to triumph in the end, and the plot-twists that start to arrive thick and fast quite early on are so utterly bizarre and inexplicable that maybe, as the title implies, there's something truly devilish going on. The brilliant screenplay keeps you guessing right until the very end, to the point where you don't even know which genre the film belongs to - is it a weird but ultimately straightforward murder mystery, or has it crossed the line into supernatural horror?

Everything that happens once the plot gets going, which it does very quickly, is incredibly tense due to the constant uncertainty. Even the most trivial of random incidents which wouldn't normally matter suddenly matters one hell of a lot when you're trying to commit murder without anyone noticing. And then it gets weird. So weird that the audience have no more idea what's really going on than the characters do. And, despite the complete absence of either gore or the kind of cheap jump-scares Hitchcock wasn't above using in "Psycho", it gets much scarier than just about any of the so-called horror movies being made at the time, and most of those made since, mainly because the characters and their situation are believable, so the intrusion of the seemingly impossible into their world is as terrifying to them as it would be to us. It may be over 60 years old, but this film is still a masterclass which should be compulsory viewing for anyone planning to make a thriller, because they simply don't come any better than this.

Sam Fuller made some interesting films, but this isn't one if them. Although it doubtless pressed all the right buttons at the time, nowadays its ranting paranoia about "Commies" just seems embarrassing, especially since with the benefit of hindsight we now know that Communist infiltration of the USA at that time was practically non-existent, and the evil hypocrisy of Senator McCarthy and the HUAC is now seen as a shameful blot on American democracy that ruined numerous peoples' lives and drove some of its victims to suicide over an alleged "threat" that didn't really exist to any meaningful extent.

Richard Widmark, who would have won the Academy Award For Sneering every year if there had only been such a thing, sneers magnificently as somebody bad with a small b - he picks pockets - who encounters Bad with a very big B indeed - Commies!!! - and has to choose between the temptation of vast sums of money, which in his cynical sneering way he believes is the only thing he's interested in, and doing the right thing. Basically, does he want to get very rich by selling out every decent hard-working American to grovel under the jackboots of Stalin forever, or would he ultimately prefer to turn the vile Commie traitors over to the FBI to be shot out of hand like the rabid dogs they are? Gee, I wonder if you can guess how this film ends...

Widmark is good, because within his limited acting range he usually was. Most of the supporting cast are good. The basic idea of a selfish petty criminal having to weigh personal gain against admitting that some things matter a lot more than he does is a perfectly sound one, and features heavily in the plots of quite a few films in this genre. What sinks it is a script that allows Commies absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. They're despicable one-dimensional cowards who are evil through and through, and nothing else. They can't even shave properly! If throughout this movie you replaced the word "Commie" with "Nazi Cancer Daleks From Hell", it would make just as much sense, and be a lot funnier. Even the confusion our reluctant hero experiences when he's attracted to a girl who is - horrors! - a COMMIE!! isn't used for proper dramatic effect because nobody genuinely attractive could possibly be one of those subhuman Commie scum, so she's soon revealed to be a dupe who didn't know who she was really working for, and just about throws up when she finds out. Technically it's well made and acted, but the constant one-note anti-Commie hysteria utterly ruins it.

This peculiar but sometimes effective horror movie owes a huge inspirational debt to Mario Bava's extraordinary "Black Sunday", which was banned in the UK until 1968 so very few people would have noticed the similarities. Although the basic concept of a woman executed for witchcraft returning centuries later to wreak bloody vengeance upon the descendants of her killers also features in many other films, Yvette Rees, the obscure actress who plays the undead Vanessa Whitlock, was obviously chosen for her resemblance to Barbara Steele rather than her acting ability, which, since she's given no dialogue and almost nothing to do except be scary, I presume must have been non-existent.

Acting is not this movie's strong suit. Top-billed Lon Chaney Jr., who by this stage in his career was a barely employable alcoholic, is a puffy, bloated mess. Clearly unwell, he sometimes recites his lines so uncertainly that I suspect he was using cue-cards, he makes no attempt to disguise the American accent his extremely English character shouldn't have, and his over-the-top attempts to be menacing resemble the bluster of an obnoxious drunk arguing with a pub landlord who won't serve him any more booze. Fortunately a convenient plot-device means he's absent from most of the film. Diane Clare is sweetly helpless in a way which got her several major horror film rôles, but she's not much of an actress, and the most interesting thing about her is that the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody was allegedly her great-grandfather. And almost everybody else does their job well enough without making much of an impression, though the older actors are generally better than the youngsters.

However, it has enough flashes of brilliance to stand out as an interesting film that doesn't quite work. The activities of the reanimated witch provide real haunted-house creepiness, in particular the moment when both we and the hero first notice that something is very badly wrong indeed. It's a shame the main protagonists are so dull - did they have to be property developers? There's a yawning gap where the eccentric Van Helsing type who comes to their aid against the witches should be. It's also unfortunate that the embarrassing Chaney is in the picture at all, especially as his ancestor Vanessa Whitlock's resurrection renders his character completely irrelevant. And the half-baked romantic subplot pinched from "Romeo and Juliet" adds very little because both actors are far too lightweight. They don't seem to be all that passionate about each other either, which would help. Since this is a creepy film rather than a gory one, the fact that it's in black and white doesn't matter, but in most other respects it would have benefited from getting the full Hammer treatment. In particular, it needed at least one of their regular stars in the cast - the names Cushing, Lee and Price spring to mind. Instead, all they could afford was a sozzled has-been who cost a lot less than Karloff and was slightly less dead than Lugosi.