Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

You may have noticed that, unlike most films of this type from this era, the title of this one doesn't make it clear exactly what kind of monster we can expect to be thrilled and terrified by. Perhaps they were afraid that if they called it something like "The Horror Of The Were-Moth", potential viewers would find the concept too silly for words and not bother to go and see it. Which begs the question of why anybody ever thought a movie about a were-moth would be a good idea.

This is basically an inferior remake of Hammer's "The Reptile" from 1966. However, in that film, the title character transforms into a snake-woman with venomous fangs, which makes her a serious if somewhat unlikely threat. Here, the lady turns into a very large moth. What's she going to do - suck all the nectar out of your flowers? Ah, but wait - she's a vampire, just like real moths... aren't. So what it comes down to is, the titular "blood beast" has to behave entirely unlike the creature it's supposed to be, otherwise it would be completely harmless, and the movie would be completely pointless. They haven't thought this through, have they?

The best way to appreciate a movie which Peter Cushing reckoned was the worst film he ever made is to view it as an unintentional comedy, and giggle as the scriptwriters get into an ever more hopeless tangle. Watch how they try to keep the embarrassingly unconvincing monster (which looks rather like that creepy rabbit in "Donnie Darko") off-screen for as long as possible by having the police believe the as yet unseen killer to be an escaped eagle, then showing us a ferocious eagle which, by an amazing coincidence, one of the characters keeps as a pet for no reason at all. And then watch how, less than a minute after they've introduced this extremely contrived red herring, it's revealed to be totally irrelevant.

Marvel as the cops solemnly tell each other that a freshly-murdered corpse in the cupboard and several skeletons in the cellar aren't sufficient grounds to issue an arrest warrant because the budget doesn't run to hiring enough extras in Victorian police uniforms to stage a full-scale raid! Gasp as the dim-witted waste-of-space heroine wanders into what's supposed to be awful danger, at which point the writers remember that the monster only attacks men, so the poor girl has no alternative but to stun herself by mistake and accidentally set fire to the carpet! And scratch your head in bewilderment as they clean forget to explain how the hell mothwoman got to be that way in the first place!

It's an abysmal movie, but it's perversely enjoyable in an Ed Wood sort of way. Peter Cushing is excellent because he nearly always was. Almost everybody else hams it up with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. And Roy Hudd as a wacky morgue attendant seems to have wandered into the wrong studio, because he obviously thinks he's in "Carry On Screaming". Actually he's not far wrong.

Of course this film's dated. It was made in 1938. But some things never go out of fashion, and one of them is the brand of magnificent silliness on display here. This was the first of the true screwball comedies, and it established the basic formula for most of them: a sensible but vaguely unsatisfied man meets a woman he initially doesn't like because she's an untamed force of nature whose presence causes logic to give up and go home in disgust, but eventually they find true love. And along the way, she accidentally destroys civilization as we know it. Well, near as dammit.

One aspect of this movie modern viewers may not fully appreciate is the amazing amount of sexual innuendo it gets away with. In 1938, you really couldn't be even the tiniest bit naughty if you wanted to stay mainstream. But when you consider the American connotations of the word "bone", it's astonishing how far they push it, and that's one of the more subtle bits of symbolism on display! It's also the very first film ever to get the word "gay" in the modern sense past the censors, because they didn't know what it meant.

Cary Grant is an overly cerebral man fixated on a very, very dead brontosaurus and an explicitly sexless fiancée. Does he need to meet a wildly uninhibited woman who just happens to have a live leopard in her bathroom for basically no reason at all? Personally I think he probably does. Though to be honest, Katharine Hepburn is so completely out of control that I fear for him! The two leading actors give it absolutely everything. And they're ably supported by the best animal acting I've ever seen that doesn't involve CGI. Baby the leopard is an effortless scene-stealer; one look at his lovably gormless face and you'll wonder why pet leopards never caught on. And the dog Asta, billed here as a character named George, went on to support William Powell and Myrna Loy in the entire "Thin Man" franchise. Although this movie doesn't show us his ability to do back-flips on command, Asta has his finest moment here, in a scene they definitely wouldn't dare to film nowadays in case it went horribly wrong. You'll definitely know it when you see it...

It's old, it's naïve, and it's an absolute delight. Sometimes the prototype is better than the numerous modern retreads. Do yourselves a favor. Revisit a more innocent age when a grown-up movie could go completely bonkers without dumbing down or grossing out. You'll thank me for it in the long run.

This story marks the beginning of the Golden Age of the original series of Doctor Who. People forget that the Patrick Troughton years nearly killed it. Jon Pertwee was given one season to turn things around, and fortunately he succeeded. For over a decade, under him and then Tom Baker, the show went from strength to strength. And then it got silly. But that was all still a long way in the future.

In this, the first adventure in which we saw the Doctor in colour (unless you count those two dreadful Dalek movies with Peter Cushing), the writers tried to get back to basics, with a snappy four-part format, and a considerably more serious Doctor, though not without a dash of the playfulness his predecessor took too far. And because the Doctor was now stranded on Earth (a plot device to keep the costume and scenery budgets as low as possible to offset the cost of filming in colour), instead of tiny wobbly sets made of polystyrene and tinfoil that we had to pretend were alien planets, the monsters could now be let loose in any part of England that isn't too far from Broadcasting House, which suddenly made the show a whole lot scarier. This story includes one of the most famously nightmarish scenes in any Doctor Who episode ever, and it takes place in Chiswick High Street!

Unfortunately, this particular serial has rather a lot of flaws. For one thing, it's such a blatant rewrite of "Quatermass II" that if that hadn't also been made by the BBC they could have been sued for plagiarism. Since that was a long, slow-building tale aimed at adults which relied far more on suspense and vague unease than action, even this dumbed-down rehash ends up with too many long stretches in which strange people behave creepily and dark hints are dropped that something's going on, but not much actually happens. The truly inspired scene in Chiswick got everybody's attention, but in years to come, that was all they really remembered about this serial. By the time the Autons returned in Jon Pertwee's second season, the writers had stopped trying to make a kiddies' version of Quatermass, and woken up to all the bizarre possibilities of a situation where any object made of plastic may be out to get you. Here, they never go further than the idea that shop window dummies are creepy.

It's also problematic that the Doctor is initially so confused by his enforced premature regeneration that for one and a half episodes out of four, he's barely in his own show, and it's left to the supporting cast to explain the situation to each other at great length while getting nowhere, because it's the Doctor's job to figure it all out, but he's either comatose or running around doing silly things in a nightshirt. And although the BBC meant well when they made his new companion an incredibly intelligent woman capable of doing a lot more than screaming until she's rescued, I can see why Liz Shaw suddenly vanished at the end of this season and was replaced by the not-quite-so-bright Jo Grant. The one quality a companion can't do without is likability, and Liz Shaw is strangely unappealing.

So it's a shaky start to a new era, though not without charm. Jon Pertwee's second adventure, in which the Doctor meets the Silurians for the first time, manages a far better blend of quite grown-up themes, notably the ethical dilemma of what to do about adversaries who are extremely dangerous but not truly evil, and giving the kids plenty of good old traditional rubber-suit monster action.

Yes, it's Ed Wood up to his usual nonsense! And once again, the synopsis isn't terribly accurate. Dr. Vornoff most certainly does not "recruit twelve men", because that would have doubled the size of the cast, and Wood could barely afford to make the film as it was. Indeed, he only managed to complete it with financing provided by a man in the wholesale meat trade on the condition that his son got to star in it. This explains the casting of Tony McCoy as the male lead, despite his complete lack of acting talent or good looks.

The equally talentless and not terribly attractive Loretta King was cast as the female lead for similar reasons. Unfortunately Wood completely misunderstood her offer to help finance the movie and believed her to be rich, when in fact she wasn't, and was only offering to contribute a trivial amount. But by the time he figured this out, he was stuck with her. (His girlfriend Dolores Fuller, who was originally supposed to play that part, is the blonde who appears in one irrelevant scene because Ed had promised she'd be in the film.)

With two leads who between them have the charisma of Andy Murray and are only slightly prettier, the film is almost fatally compromised from the get-go. What saves it from being a tedious wash-out is the extraordinary performance of Bela Lugosi. He's old and obviously frail, but he gives it everything he's got left, which turns out to be quite a lot. What with his immortal "Home? I have no home!" speech, his hypnotic hand-gestures (watch out for the voodoo grip from "White Zombie"), and of course that scene where he fights a giant octopus, he has plenty to do, and he does it, not exactly well in the conventional sense, but certainly with enthusiasm!

The plot, such that there is one, hardly matters. How or why Dr. Vornoff created his pet giant octopus, and, allegedly, the Loch Ness Monster (unfortunately the budget doesn't stretch to showing us Bela Lugosi wrestling with Nessie), is never explained. The gigantic Tor Johnson lumbers about doing his usual schtick, which doesn't include anything you could honestly call acting. And, despite still being alive when he made this particular Ed Wood movie, in some scenes Bela is replaced by an unconvincing "double" in an attempt to persuade us that he is suddenly seven feet tall. And of course there's that hilariously immobile rubber octopus Wood borrowed (without permission) from a prop warehouse, which was supposed to be animated by a motor he didn't know about, and is therefore a lot less lively than it was when it got to grips with John Wayne in "The Wake Of The Red Witch".

This isn't really a three-star film by any stretch of the imagination. And yet you have to kind of love it simply for managing to exist at all in the face of almost impossible odds, and admire the determination of Ed Wood in making a movie that anyone except him would have realized was irredeemably dreadful in every department. And of course there's dear old Bela, turning it up to 11 as if he knew this would be, not quite his last chance, but very nearly. It may only be Ed Wood's third-best film, but it's still a Dadaist anti-classic.

By the way, Officer Kelton, a minor character played by Paul Marco, also appears in "Plan 9 From Outer Space", where he hints that he has previous experience of incredibly strange police-work, so this movie might be a Plan 9 prequel.

By far the best thing about this movie is its poster art. Many more people are familiar with that surreal image of a gigantic wasp with the face of a beautiful woman clutching a helpless little man with ambiguous intent than they are with the actual film. There's a very good reason for that. It's absolutely abysmal. By the way, the person who decides which movies belong in the "classic" category really ought to consult a dictionary, because if they think this movie is a classic, they obviously don't know what the word means!

Spoilers are irrelevant with this type of film, because most of them are written to a very predictable formula, and this is no exception. You're promised by the title that a woman will somehow become a wasp, so she does. Then she kills a few people because that's what monsters do, nearly but not quite kills the screaming girlfriend of the dull hero, and is defeated. The end, and not a moment too soon! As with most of Roger Corman's worst movies, the entire point of the film is to show us a monster which the budget was too small to portray convincingly, or even passably, so its appearance is delayed for as long as possible - in this case, for almost three-quarters of the movie. And while we're waiting with growing impatience for something to actually happen, the characters tread water while trying to inject some tiny shred of suspense into the build-up to an event which is the only thing in the movie we're the least bit interested in.

To say the wasp woman isn't quite as impressive as the promotional artwork implies is even more of an understatement than usual. Corman's posters nearly always promised us a far bigger monster than the one we got, but here he outdoes himself by giving us a wasp woman who is the exact opposite of what the poster led us to expect! Instead of a giant wasp with a woman's face, what, after nearly an hour of boredom, we finally get to see is a normal-sized woman wearing a mask that looks like something children would make for a rather peculiar school play. It's shown as briefly as they can get away with, and is deliberately out of focus some of the time, but its inadequacy is still woefully apparent.

And the worst thing of all is that none of this is even laughable. Ed Wood might have gotten away with it because he would have been doing the best he could, and his enthusiasm would have shone through the ramshackle, threadbare mess, but Corman simply doesn't care. Draw the suckers in with a misleading poster, and if they hate the film, so what? They've already paid, and that's what matters. This is zero-budget exploitation cinema of the laziest kind, shot through with cynical contempt for its target audience. By today's standards it's unbelievably sexist, but even if you take into account that it was made almost six decades ago and forget about political correctness, it's still boring as well as inept, and that's unforgivable!

Oh, and the cherry on the top of your dismal viewing experience is that this is a lousy print. The visuals, though somewhat grainy, aren't too bad. But the entire soundtrack has degraded to the point where it sounds as though it was recorded through a drainpipe.

As usual, ignore the synopsis written by somebody who isn't terribly sure what the film is about. This almost entirely fictional gangster B-movie (the only details directly taken from real life are the main character's name and the fact that he has a machine gun) is typical of Roger Corman's cheap and cheerful output at the height of his career. Two things make it stand out, one being the performance of Charles Bronson. Long before the A-list stardom he'd eventually achieve, Bronson tended to be cast as a heavy. Here, he's a heavy with a difference: he's a coward who tries to cover it up by pretending to be superstitiously afraid of very specific things but fearless under normal circumstance, when in fact he's an insecure bully who can only act like a big man if he has a massive advantage, such as being the only person in the room with a machine gun.

The movie's other strength is that although all the major characters, and most of the minor ones, are horrible people, nearly all of them are given interestingly strange personalities, and allowed to develop in sometimes unexpected ways. I suspect this was partly accidental. The film goes out of its way to make the point that, underneath all his bragging and bluster, Kelly is the least brave and most unpleasant person in the entire cast, therefore everybody else, however basically evil they are, has to have moments where they're oddly nice or even heroic. But whether it was deliberate or not, it works. And Bronson's performance is, given the limited material he has to work with, very good. There's one scene in particular, where he suddenly drops completely out of character and becomes the weak, terrified and rather stupid little boy he really is, that proves Bronson could act when he was given the chance, though all too often he wasn't.

Although it's rather light on gangster bank-robbing action, because that costs a lot more than having people argue in a room, and Corman was always having to squeeze tiny budgets until the pips squeaked, the lengthy scenes of these lowlifes simply going about their disreputable lives and trying, with varying degrees of success, to get along with one another hold the viewer's attention in a way repetitive small-scale shoot-outs probably wouldn't. Although nowadays Corman is celebrated for his trashy sci-fi, horror, biker and drug movies, this quirky little film is considerably superior to the worst of his better-known work , and deserves to be recognized as a minor but not at all bad entry in that weirdly specific but surprisingly large genre of films about tough gangsters who are secretly desperately insecure.

There have been quite a few different M. R. James adaptations over the years, mostly made by the BBC, though Jacques Tourneur's classic horror film "The Night Of The Demon", closely based on "Casting The Runes", is, I think, the only big screen version of one of his tales. Which is understandable, since none of them are long enough for that kind of treatment without a great deal of padding. The best effort by the BBC is their 1968 dramatization of "Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad" starring Michael Hordern, which is also available on DVD.

Unfortunately, this DVD shows the beeb at their laziest. Robert Powell is a good actor who can be very creepy (it's a shame he never got to play the Joker), but simply having him dress up as M. R. James and read these stories aloud as dramatically as possible stretches his talent too far, especially when it comes to the rustic and/or female voices. Some years after this series was made, the BBC tried something similar with Sir Christopher Lee which worked far better, because his voice was absolutely perfect, whereas Robert Powell's simply isn't.

To liven things up, we're very occasionally treated to a brief, silent clip of dramatized action. This almost never works. The D-list actors hired for these tiny parts are terrible, and when special effects are attempted, "special" they're not! One scene in particular has Robert Powell reading words that, taken by themselves, suggest something deeply disturbing, over visuals which - well, the phrase "killer muppets" inevitably springs to mind... Even the stories are poorly chosen. Given that there are only five of them, it's odd that one should be an obscure tale written for schoolboys, the juvenile tone of which is completely different from the rest.

"Much sought after", it says in the synopsis. By whom, exactly? Presumably people who didn't see them the first time round and assumed they'd be better than they are, and the Robert Powell Fan Club. Even the quality of the picture isn't that great. 1986 was long after the era when videotape was so expensive that the BBC routinely recycled it, so I can only assume they thought so little of this series that they couldn't be bothered to keep a really good copy. They had a point.

Obtain a book of short stories by M. R. James (your local library will probably have everything he ever wrote in one volume) and read a few of them after dark, alone in a room lit only by one reading lamp. If you don't find yourself glancing nervously at the shadows, you probably aren't human. That's the effect this penny-pinching travesty tries to achieve. It doesn't.

I almost gave this film one star. It's really worth about one and a half, but I'll go the full two for its sometimes genuinely atmospheric lighting, set design, and air of spooky weirdness. Unfortunately, that's about all that's good about it. Sometimes a movie becomes "legendary" just because you've never seen anything like it before, and for western audiences in 1980, this film must have come as a surprise, to put it mildly!

Firstly, the acting of the entire cast is both dreadful and completely over the top, and apart from the three characters who actually matter, nearly everyone is meant to be funny. I'm not a huge fan of that strange oriental brand of slapstick which intrudes into so many films supposedly aimed at adults, where people pull faces and bump into things as if the entire audience are either small children who got in by mistake or mentally retarded, and it's much in evidence here. Cross-eyed morons caper about in ways that would embarrass a clown at a kid's party, immediately before or after, or even during a scene you're meant to be frightened by. For much of its running time, this is basically a Hammer horror film starring the Chuckle Brothers. If that kind of thing makes you laugh, add another star.

The crudest tactic a horror movie can stoop to is the jump scare, and just about all the "scares" here are of that variety. Otherwise, the crude monster makeup and basic gore effects are about as good as what Hammer was providing ten or twenty years earlier, often worse. And several major plot elements, including the "surprise" twists, are pinched from much better movies the Shaw brothers obviously assumed their target audience weren't cinematically literate enough to be aware of, jumbled together in a way that doesn't make any sense at all.

The most extraordinary imagery in the film comes near the end, but unfortunately this sequence almost immediately degenerates into an excuse for a female character to perform a nude dance number more appropriate for a strip club that goes on forever. In fact, "excuse" is the wrong word, because there's absolutely no reason for her to do this, or indeed for her to have no clothes on in the first place. And then another lady strips off too and her body is shown at great length in extreme close-up, though at least she has a reason. One that was pinched from another movie, but never mind. This film is for grown-ups, and to prove it, here are some barenaked ladies. Enjoy.

Occasionally this kind of completely bonkers approach works, a good example being the truly deranged anti-classic "Hausu", but that movie genuinely embraces its own craziness and turns it up to eleven. This one simply assumes its audience are stupid, immature men, and gives them the kind of thing that would make a small child alternately scream and giggle, and then the female nudity they've probably sat through the rest of it waiting to see. You've got to admire the art direction though.

This series gets off to a cracking start, with Tom Hiddleston very effective as the charming fellow with hidden depths who tries to do the right thing, and then has to live with the consequences. The problem is that there are five and a half hours to fill, and not really enough plot to fill them. Our hero's obsession with certain unfortunate events leads him to do some very questionable things indeed. However, the entire issue of who he really is gets brushed under the carpet in a way it never would have been in John Le Carré's earlier work. It's true that this is lampshaded by having various people literally ask him "Who are you really?" far too often, usually listing the various aliases he's accumulated thus far, but in the end there's none of the moral ambiguity present in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" or "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold". The good guys are entirely good so it's OK if they do bad things sometimes, and the bad guys are one-dimensional monsters, apart from the Very Bad Guy, who manages to pretend not to be a psychopath most of the time, so therefore he has two dimensions.

Of course, viewers being stupider than they were a few decades ago, much of the message is put across via the magic of Diversity. Hugh Laurie's alarmingly convincing psycho arms dealer (his days of doing sketch-shows with Stephen Fry seem very long ago indeed!) shows us he's bad by being a racist, though what with him illegally selling nerve gas to dictatorships and having people tortured and murdered and such, by the time he reveals this I already suspected that he wasn't a very nice man. Whereas Tom Hiddleston goes out of his way to be best mates with every available ethnic minority, and his supporting cast of secondary good guys seem chosen purely for their tick-the-box diversity, as if this automatically makes him a splendid fellow. Which is horribly lazy writing.

Hiddleston carries the whole thing and takes the acting honors, while so obviously hoping to be cast as the next Bond on the strength of this performance that at one point he even orders a vodka martini. Actually he'd be very good as Bond. But I digress. I'd have liked to see him being allowed to explore his character's moral grey areas a lot more, but maybe that would have lowered the viewing figures because who wants to have to think while watching TV? Laurie is as good as he can be playing a cardboard cliché. The very tall blonde girl with the pixie cut is basically there to lose her clothes, which she does extraordinarily often. Sometimes the cameraman clean forgets to include her face in the shot. It's like the racism thing. Yeah, I got why the hero might find her attractive the first time she found an excuse to undress in public, but it's been ten minutes since we last saw her model something from Victoria's Secret, so here we go again! And the actress playing the not only female but also heavily pregnant George Smiley substitute (diversity!) is so bad she often pauses at odd moments as if she's reading from an autocue.

It's got some splendid things going for it at the beginning, but it sags badly in the middle, and by the end it's trying unsuccessfully to be clever and Die Hard-ish simultaneously. There was a time when you didn't see John Le Carré's plot-twists coming. Not any more. "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" needed a TV series for the slow-burning, convoluted plot to build, and the movie compressed it until it was more style than substance, and sometimes hard to follow. Here it's the exact opposite. I suspect Le Carré wrote the book with a cinema adaptation in mind, because to stretch it to the length they have, they end up forcing us to admire an awful lot of scenery; the camera seems us to be almost as much in love with Majorca as it is with Exhibitionist Pixie Chick. In the bits where it gets moving, it does just what it ought to. But there's way too much padding in between.

Firstly, if you're the kind of person who hates spoilers, tough luck! The poorly-spelled synopsis on the General Info page you've just read gives away the entire plot. Unless of course by the time you read this, it's been rewritten by someone who can do their job competently.

Anyway, this film has a special place in the history of horror cinema, because without it, we'd never have had "Night of the Living Dead" and the ever-growing genre it inspired. This is not technically a zombie movie. The monsters are plague survivors (well, semi-survivors) who coincidentally have many of the traits of supernatural vampires, and not-so-coincidentally even more closely resemble the zombies George Romero would invent a few years later. But for all practical purposes, it's the first zombie film in the modern sense, even beating Hammer's "The Plague of the Zombies", despite never once mentioning the word "zombie".

Based on Richard Matheson's novel "I am Legend", later filmed under that title starring Will Smith, and in between the two, as "The Omega Man" starring Charlton Heston, this Italian version starring Vincent Price (have any three more different actors ever played the same character?) is at its best when it's a straight horror movie. Hordes of uncoordinated half-undead slowly, clumsily assaulting the hero's house with moronic determination, and relentlessly coming back night after night. His ghastly daily routine of scouring the city for randomly slumped bodies and disposing of them in such a way that they won't get up again at sunset. And in the flashback "how it all began" scenes, the awful way that he finds out exactly how bad this disease is.

Unfortunately it's very flawed in other departments. Price is horribly miscast. He's obviously there purely because he's a generic American horror star, therefore his presence will sell the movie in the lucrative US market. In totally unrealistic situations where he can overact like mad, rolling his eyes and quoting Shakespeare while throwing his foes to starving rats or whatever, he's just fine! Here, as an ordinary man in an extraordinary predicament who for large stretches of the film has no-one to talk to except himself, in hideously clunky voiceover exposition, he often seems very awkward, especially in the flashbacks to pre-plague days, where he's downright wooden, though to be fair, everyone else is even worse (possibly lousy dubbing from Italian is partly to blame). In fact, the entire script, except where it directly quotes the source novel, is so bad it's just as well there's less dialogue than usual. And the low budget doesn't help. In particular, his home is so inadequately fortified that the inability of the zombies/vampires/whatever to get in, despite three years of trying to for hours on end every single night, makes them seem too useless to be all that menacing.

In the end, it's a very minor film with big ideas it couldn't properly bring off, a big star badly misused, and a disproportionately huge future impact. It's not without good bits, but mainly it's a historical curiosity.

Howard Hughes, who produced this film, eventually went stark raving mad. Judging by some his production decisions on this and other movies, he was never entirely sane to begin with. There's nothing here to equal his casting of John Wayne as Genghis Khan (and then giving most of the cast and crew cancer by shooting the film on a nuclear test site), but there's a peculiar schizoid quality to the whole thing, as if a completely different movie from the one we're watching is gradually converging on it, until by the end they're hopelessly entangled. Which makes it perhaps the oddest film in the noir genre, and worthy of cult status for its sheer eccentricity.

Robert Mitchum, playing an easygoing, streetwise hard man with a soft center, who gets going when the going gets tough, and may have a veneer of cynicism but always does the right thing, is absolutely in his element, and effortlessly carries most of the film. Jane Russell, with whom Howard Hughes was obsessed for two reasons, both of them on display in nearly every scene she's in thanks to her wardrobe of low-cut dresses, was never going to be the biggest star ever, despite Hughes's efforts, and, were it not for that ever-present cleavage, is so tall, square-jawed, and occasionally deep-voiced that she could almost be an unusually convincing drag queen. As for Vincent Price...

Well, we'll come to him in a moment. To start with, it's all about Mitchum finding himself for no apparent reason in a situation so suspicious he'd have to be asleep not to notice he was almost certainly in serious danger, and trying to get to the bottom of it. And of course bumping into Russell, to whom he's instantly attracted, and who may or may not be part of the sinister scheme. As a mystery, it's badly compromised by the fact that we've seen what the villains' plan is at the very start of the film, so we know he's wasting his time with irrelevant padding in the overlong midsection of the movie. There's even a storm which delays the baddies just to give Mitchum extra time to get involved in irrelevant subplots and flirt with Russell.

And then Vincent Price shows up. Not yet typecast as a horror actor, he plays a slightly past-it Errol Flynn-ish movie star. He's a self-obsessed man-child with the IQ of a geranium, and also the third corner of a very unlikely love-triangle with the two leads. Price plays this simpering idiot extremely well, but he's obviously the annoying comedy relief character who serves no purpose other than to waste celluloid and our time. And then... Well, let's just say that as unexpected character development goes, this is a doozy that you definitely won't see coming!

I notice the film had two directors. This may explain the increasingly obvious mismatch in style between the main plot-threads, which culminates in two completely different and totally incompatible movie genres literally battling for domination of the film they've somehow both ended up in, to a degree we wouldn't see the likes of again until "Cowboys and Aliens". Vincent Price fans who aren't aware of his early work will love this movie, which I'm pretty sure is the first one in which Price was allowed to turn his overacting dial to 11, and he's obviously making the most of it and enjoying every minute. Noir buffs get to see Robert Mitchum being Robert Mitchum very well, and towards the end, taking part in some genuinely gritty and, for the time, extremely violent pulp action. And everyone else gets to see a movie so bizarre you've got to love it.

Films about anti-heroes are always tricky to pull off. You need a bit of subtlety. And the words "Directed By Roger Corman" do not bode well in that department. Corman was always happier with giant crabs, Hell's Angels, and evil telepathic traffic cones from Venus than he was when trying be profoundly meaningful, and by 1971 he was almost at the end of his directorial career (though he's still alive, and still getting executive producer credits on dreck like "Sharktopus").

Talking of subtlety, you probably remember John Phillip Law as the handsome but blank-faced angel in "Barbarella". He was in a few other things, doing much the same, and here he's as wooden as ever, and often looks slightly brain-damaged. Oddly enough, the Red Baron does suffer slight brain damage late in the film, and Law's attempts to convey this are indistinguishable from the rest of his performance, except when the script clues us in that this is him looking confused because he just had a memory lapse, as opposed to his normal kind of looking confused.

So what we have is a gormless Red Baron who is supposed to be charismatic because he's good-looking, but often comes across as a wee bit "special needs", up against another anti-hero, the Canadian pilot Roy Brown, who is supposed to be hopelessly un-charismatic, and is therefore played by Don Stroud as a miserable, charmless cynic who in terms of likability makes Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle from "The French Connection" look like The Little Mermaid. Everyone else is either horrible or a nonentity, which makes it very difficult to engage with the plot or care what happens to these people.

The worst of it, though, is the script. Almost everything said or done by anybody is some kind of parable or allegory, usually a heavy-handed statement on the horror and futility of war, and many of the characters seem to have psychic powers that enable them to deliver clunky prophetic lectures about World War Two while still fighting World War One, or discuss the pros and cons of becoming a Nazi before they've been invented. Corman obviously means well, but he's laying it on with the proverbial trowel.

Of course, there's plenty of action, almost all of it in the form of plane-on-plane combat. But it's oddly lifeless and very repetitive. It's also sometimes hard to tell who has shot down who, what with the swarms of identical planes (it helps when the Baron decides to liven his squadron's color-scheme up a bit), close-ups of numerous actors wearing the same helmets and goggles as everybody else so you have to memorize the shape of everyone's mouth if you want to know who's still alive at any given point (why couldn't some of them have had facial hair?), and the fact that the stunt pilots can trail smoke to show they've been hit and loop around aimlessly for as long as they like, but the planes can't crash or explode unless they turn into unconvincing models on a different bit of film from all the real ones. Its heart's in the right place, but it's far too preachy for its own good. And it's kind of boring.

Documentaries about someone who flatly refuses to cooperate with the filmmakers in any way are always problematic, and this is a film about a huge organization worth billions which not only won't cooperate, but actively tried to prevent the movie from being made. No wonder it was in development hell for 20 years. This of course means that the nearest we get to penetrating the secretive world of Scientology is Louis Theroux pointing at a peculiar fake castle some distance away behind a forbidding barrier of razor-wire and saying "That's where it all happens." And later in the film, elaborate measures are taken to try and prevent him from even standing outside the fence looking in!

Since no Scientologists at all, let alone senior ones, were willing to be interviewed for this movie, actors are used to portray David Miscavage, the extremely controversial current head of Scientology, and its most famous practitioner, Tom Cruise. This doesn't really work the way it's supposed to. We're shown brief clips of the real Miscavage and Cruise speaking on TV, and then the film cuts to various different men reading their lines, sometimes not at all well. No convincing reason is ever given for this, and I was sometimes confused as to the context in which some of the more extreme things said and done by the actors portraying Miscavage were originally supposed to have happened. It feels like a gimmick. It also feels like padding they had to put in there because the man they really wanted to talk to was literally hiding in a castle surrounded by razor-wire.

Also problematic is the extent to which the film focuses on Mark Rathbun, who for over 20 years was effectively the vice-president of Scientology before becoming its bitterest enemy. His relationship with Louis Theroux is prickly to say the least, and it's repeatedly made obvious that he's not being altogether honest about his own rôle in the very bad things he accuses his ex-boss and ex-friend David Miscavage of doing. He's not a person I feel inclined to like or trust. And although it's not his fault, in a film which constantly substitutes actors for real people in a haphazard way, Rathbun's resemblance to Bill Murray is a wee bit surreal.

What makes the film work as well as it does are the constant attempts by Scientologists to interfere with it. If they'd simply ignored it, it would have consisted almost entirely of accusations made by a rather unpleasant man who clearly isn't telling the whole truth. But when all the Scientologists who end up unofficially appearing in the movie seem to be going out of their way to act like members of a completely bonkers religion made up by a tenth-rate sci-fi writer that brainwashes people into behaving as though they're mentally ill, Mark Rathbun's testimony seems a lot more credible. The bizarre manner in which these cult zombies do absolutely everything has to be seen to be believed. If the entire film had consisted of Scientology being given opportunities to shoot itself in both feet and anywhere else you can possibly aim a gun at, and obligingly doing so, it would be a five-star comedy. Unfortunately there are rather a lot of pointless bits you have to sit through before the cultists pop up again and show you how weird, crazy and sinister they are, apparently with no awareness whatsoever that this is bad publicity for Scientology because they've forgotten how reality works. But it's probably worth the price of admission just to see Louis Theroux trying to keep a straight face while barking orders at an ashtray.

The three stars of this film had worked well together in Roger Corman's weird but thoroughly enjoyable comic fantasy "The Raven", so it seemed reasonable to cast them all again in another vaguely Edgar Allan Poe-ish mildly horrific comedy. Unfortunately, instead of Corman, American International Pictures hired Jacques Tourneur. His best-known films are all strange, dreamlike tales in which the protagonists experience slowly mounting unease that gradually builds to real terror and mortal danger, such as "Cat People", "I Walked With a Zombie", and "The Night of the Demon", and he liked to make his supernatural horrors so subtle that the studio sometimes forced him to insert explicit footage of the monster in case people felt cheated by the ambiguity as to whether there was a monster in the movie at all. Which is the exact opposite to the kind of style you need if you're making a comedy.

Not surprisingly, Tourneur's direction shows no understanding of comic timing whatsoever, and all the slapstick is completely flat. Zany cartoon music and speeded-up action are thrown in here and there as if these things are funny in themselves, sometimes at wildly inappropriate moments. The tone lurches randomly from nonsense that wouldn't be out of place in "Carry On Screaming" to genuine nastiness, such as Vincent Price ruthlessly smothering an old man with a pillow, but there's not very much real comedy, and almost nothing you could call terror. The characters are nearly all defined by one feeble, repetitive joke; Vincent Price's wife thinks she can sing but she can't, Peter Lorre is a burglar who is lousy at burglary, and so on. As for Boris Karloff, he's utterly wasted as a senile old fool who gets less screen time and character development than a cat called Rhubarb.

Much of the comedy derives from people doing odd things just to be wacky, such as John Barrymore (who suffers the indignity of being billed lower than Rhubarb) in the rôle of a man who goes into cataleptic trances where he recites Shakespeare while attacking his own furniture with a sword, thus endangering Peter Lorre in a ludicrously contrived way. As for Vincent Price, giving one of his worst performances ever, he's an alcoholic, presumably an attempt by the writers to give an unpleasant and unfunny character more bits of comic business, since it has very little bearing on the plot. This fails to amuse because the scriptwriters seem to have thought that drunks were so intrinsically hilarious that having Price stagger and slur his lines would bring the house down all by itself. Also, very few actors are good at convincingly pretending to be drunk, and Vincent isn't one of them. Lorre is his usual odd self and gives the best performance in the film, and Price sometimes manages to bring his usual touch of class to a poorly written part, but Barrymore overacts to the point where even Price seems restrained by comparison, Karloff's barely in the movie, and nobody else matters all that much. Rhubarb's quite good though.

Amazingly, two feature films were based (very loosely indeed) on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven", in which absolutely nothing happens other than a man moping about his deceased girlfriend, and a bird flying in through his window, causing him to mope even more. This is the earlier of the two, and bears no resemblance at all to Roger Corman's fantastical comedy about rival magicians, except that Boris Karloff's in both of them.

Karloff isn't particularly good here. He's obviously trying to channel the Frankenstein monster - at one point when he's angry he snarls just like it - but his makeup this time round is somewhat less impressive, consisting as it does of a bit of latex on one side of his face and a woefully unconvincing false eye. And his peculiar but very English lisp, which sounded fine when he was playing well-meaning scientists whose experiments got out of hand, is completely wrong for an uneducated American hoodlum, though for most of the film he talks through a half-paralyzed mouth, and sounds much the same as he did in "The Bride Of Frankenstein", only not as effective.

Bela Lugosi, despite being second-billed, has far more to do, and does it far better, though he's a frightful ham, and there are moments when he pauses in an odd way between lines as if either he's reading from a cue-card or he's still having a bit of trouble with the English language. But you're never in any doubt that he's completely nuts, even though the last part of the movie requires him to be several orders of magnitude more bonkers than he was to begin with, and it's worth the price of admission just to watch Bela go crazier than a snake's armpit.

The plot of course makes no sense whatsoever. It's true that Lugosi's actions aren't meant to be remotely logical, and his basement torture chamber is justified by his Poe obsession, but why would he have all that other stuff built into his house? It's also very much a film of its time. Nothing the least bit horrible is actually shown, other than Karloff's supposedly terrifying makeup job, and the tortures Bela inflicts on his victims are of a kind where the torture consists mostly of knowing something awful is going to happen to you and being unable to escape, so I think that 15 certificate must have been awarded a very long time ago. Several characters exist for no reason other to try (and fail) to make us laugh, as if we need comic relief padding in a movie not quite an hour long. And the heroine has very little to do except scream, and, inevitably, be kind to the ugly guy, with predictable results. Though it's interesting that the "hero" is ultimately no more use in a crisis than she is, and accomplishes nothing at all.

It's old, it's creaky, and there's no acting you could honestly say was good in a conventional sense, but it's lovable in its own daft retro way. And Bela's a hoot!