Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This is not a terrible film. If this site allowed a two-and-a-half star review, it would be about right. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because it's trying to do something well. Unfortunately, that something is imitating John Woo's "The Killer", and that's an incredibly stupid thing to do if you're not John Woo. The obvious failing is making the hero deaf since birth, and then giving us about 10 seconds of his silent world, but otherwise dubbing whatever ugly techno soundtrack seemed trendy in the late nineties onto a movie where we could be hearing literally anything, or nothing, to far greater effect.

The viewer also struggles to care about the protagonist. He's deaf and dumb, but since he's not retarded, it's hard to see why he's never learned to communicate with anyone else in the ways that deaf people usually do quite easily, therefore he has to shoot complete strangers for a living. This film is literally ticking the boxes of John Woo's "The Killer", except that instead of the hero's girlfriend being blind, he is himself deaf. And unfortunately it doesn't do it terribly well. Basically, if you've seen "The Killer". you've seen this movie ten times over.

This totally bonkers swinging sixties satire starts from a fairly logical premise - the president of the USA needs psychiatric help to cope with the immense pressures of his job, which in turn puts his psychiatrist under terrible stress, turning him into a loose cannon who knows too much - and takes it to its wildly illogical conclusion.

James Coburn was never better cast. In movies like the two "Flint" Bond spoofs, his creepy charisma and downright shark-like grin put you more in mind of the Joker (now that would have been an interesting rôle for him!) than any kind of good guy, but here, when he goes into his trademark "I'm a bit a manic, and look, I have absolutely perfect teeth that are slightly bigger than they should be!" mode, it's totally in character, since he's both paranoid in the sense that he believes everyone is out to get him, and absolutely right because they are, including several factions neither he nor the viewer have thought of until the film reveals that the ghastly truth just got slightly worse.

The comedy of paranoia is played out perfectly, with our increasingly deranged hero finding out that maybe the people he thought he could trust are his worst enemies, but friends can be found in extremely unlikely places. And interestingly, unlike most films from this era that involve hippies, it neither shies away from the fact that they take drugs rather a lot, nor attempts to show the audience that taking drugs automatically has bad consequences of any kind. In fact, the hippies have more fun than anybody else in the movie, and good luck to them!

Riddled with savagely satirical material, notably the "normal", "liberal" American family who have far too many guns and would undoubtedly have voted for Donald Trump, and very likely Hitler. Or the utterly vile head of the FBI who, being a borderline midget with an obvious inferiority complex, only hires absurdly short men as agents. Or the scene where our hero gets very professional and points out somebody else's Freudian slips while failing to notice that he himself is unconsciously gesturing with a rather large banana. And given that this film was made a quarter of a century before the rise of the internet, some of the themes that pop up towards the end are eerily prescient of modern-day ultra-paranoia.

It's not exactly a masterpiece, but as groovy sixties political satires go, it may be the best of the lot. It's certainly the only movie referenced by Austin Powers that actually has anything resembling a serious point to make. And maybe it still has something to say in the dark and troubled era of the Trump Generation. Even if it doesn't, it's a lot of fun. I'd give it four and a half stars if that was an option. And I'll never feel quite the same way about my internet service provider again...

Back in 1960, George Pal adapted H. G. Wells' novel pretty much faithfully, apart from giving the story a more optimistic ending than the one in the book. 42 years later, Simon Wells (presumably no relation to H. G.) did it again, and got almost everything wrong. For starters, both the original novel and the first movie adaptation got straight down to business by introducing us to a clever man who had built a time machine just because he could, and, after a brief explanation to his incredulous friends, hopped into it to see what the future was like. This version wastes a quarter of its not particularly long running time on a tragic subplot that serves no real purpose - why does a genius capable of building a time machine by himself in his spare time need any reason to do it other than curiosity?

It then goes on to give us a very silly vision of the near future (I know this film was made 14 years ago, but cities on the Moon by 2030...?), replaces the nuclear war of the 1960 version with a catastrophe which makes the classic "Space 1999" error of presenting sci-fi fans with a plot-point so scientifically implausible that it's just plain insulting, and when it finally takes us to the the year 807,000 where the action we've paid to see will occur, the Eloi are a somewhat underwhelming bunch of vaguely noble savages much given to that Enya-style pseudo-ethnic background music which implies that, despite otherwise being very primitive, they've invented the invisible symphony orchestra.

The casting is almost uniformly dreadful. Guy Pearce is appalling in the early scenes where he's meant to be both a Victorian gentleman and an absent-minded genius, and barely adequate the rest of the time. Samantha Mumba (remember her?) is about as good as pop stars who want to be actors usually are. One of her relatives is lousy as the inevitable plucky kid who can't act. And nobody else gets enough characterisation to matter, except Jeremy Irons, whose career hit a very bad patch in the nineties, resulting in supporting rôles in nonsense like this and "Dungeons & Dragons". Professional that he is, he's actually pretty good under all that telepathic albino mutant cannibal makeup, but you'll have to sit through three-quarters of the film to get to his fairly brief performance.

Overall, the whole thing seems pointless, with minimal violence and horror to get that precious 12 certificate, weightless CGI monsters, and a general feeling of "why should we care about any of these cardboard people or anything that happens to them?" If you don't mind the sometimes not-so-special effects, you'll probably have a lot more fun watching the 1960 version.

The greatest documentary feature film ever made about the failure of a movie to reach its full potential (or indeed get made at all) is "Lost In La Mancha", the story of Terry Gilliam's doomed attempt to make his version of "Don Quixote", shot by a film crew who happened to be on set making what was intended to be a documentary featurette about the finished movie. Instead, they managed to capture the disaster as it unfolded.

This film is in a different league entirely. Shot two decades after the critical and commercial failure of a truly abysmal adaptation of H. G. Wells' "The Island Of Dr. Moreau" (by far the best version to date is "Island Of Lost Souls" from 1932), it consists almost entirely of middle-aged or elderly people who had some degree of involvement with the movie, mostly very minor, talking about what went wrong, or simply reminiscing about all the fun they had off-set. Richard Stanley, director of "Hardware" (remember that?), "Dust Devil" (you might actually have seen that, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire), and almost nothing else, who was supposed to direct this film but didn't, gets an enormous amount of screen-time to ramble on about his incredibly idiotic New Age beliefs and how unfair it all was, while various other people comment about how great the film would have been if he'd directed it after all, or point out that he was (and obviously still is) a very weird person who simply couldn't handle a major film shoot on the strength of directing a couple of low-budget horror movies and having a friend with magical powers who could fix everything by Sufi voodoo. It should be noted that extras and low-ranking crew members he made friends with on set tend to take the former view, and industry professionals the latter.

Conspicuously missing are comments from actual director John Frankenheimer (who has the excuse of being dead), star Marlon Brando (likewise), and co-star Val Kilmer (remember when everybody somehow thought he had talent?). There isn't even much footage from the movie to illustrate the points being made (though the fact that there are a few brief clips proves there could have been), so in order to fully appreciate this documentary, you'll need to go back and watch a film nobody likes on any level just to see what they're talking about. And while the Australian lady who played The Sow Woman seems like a very nice person, the amount of screen-time she gets just because she was on set only highlights the complete absence of comments from anyone who really mattered. In fact, the only real actors interviewed mostly whine about how their part should have been bigger, or was cut altogether.

It does pick up in the last half hour, when we get to hear some moderately amusing anecdotes about what a bloody awful human being Marlon Brando was and Val Kilmer no doubt still is, but about two-thirds of it is essentially Richard Stanley going on about how great this film would have been if he'd been allowed to make it, despite the complete absence of evidence that he's a genius, while other people who know what they're talking about point out that directors aren't taken off films that are already in production without a very good reason. Overall it's a bit dull, and feels as though it might have been made by a close friend or relative of Richard Stanley. And since nobody really cares about the movie whose failure it documents, it's hard to see why it needed to be made in the first place.

This typically trashy sci-fi quickie from AIP, the studio that gave us a million Roger Corman movies, gets off to a no-nonsense start as three scientists - the oldest, wisest one with the beard and monocle, the younger fellow who thinks he's Charlton Heston, and the token woman - invent time-travel by mistake in 1964, and thanks to the antics of the inevitable obnoxious comic relief character, soon find themselves trapped in the post-nuclear wasteland of 2071.

Unfortunately, it's downhill all the way from there. Some not too bad special effects are wasted in a movie which spends over three-quarters of its running time giving us little more than a guided tour of a threadbare future world where, judging by the incredibly annoying background music, the manufacture of robots, which we are shown at great length, is considered hilariously funny. The mild but undeniable sexual innuendo in a few scenes, and the modest amount of blood present during the fighting that eventually breaks out after an hour of talk interspersed with demonstrations of oddly primitive-looking "futuristic" machines, suggests that this movie wasn't intended for children, and I think most children would get extremely bored waiting for something to eventually happen, but it comes across as rather childish most of the time, with occasional outbreaks of pretentiousness.

Clearly ripped off from "The Time Machine" (1960) only with a much lower budget, and therefore much less impressive mutant makeup, it doesn't seem to know where it's going at all. Almost nobody except, alas, the horrible "funny" character you wish will die but you know isn't going to gets any character development. The token female scientist's big moment, when she pleads for the life of a harmless, innocent mutant played, rather disturbingly, by a genuinely deformed person, seems to be making an important moral point, yet neither that scene nor the character introduced in it are ever mentioned again. And it's anybody's guess what the ending is supposed to mean, since it appears to imply that the surviving characters are miraculously saved but maybe something very bad also happened. Probably they just threw a load of random weirdness into the script because hey, time travel!

With a better script it could have been a fascinating oddity, but unfortunately it plays out like a very early "Doctor Who" serial with a much higher budget than usual, but with all the cliff-hangers edited out except the one in episode four, and of course missing the Doctor. It means well, but it suffers from a woefully sluggish pace, "comedy" so unfunny you wouldn't know it was there if the music wasn't telling you to laugh, and a total absence of characters you actually care about. Of historical interest only.

Don't be fooled by the ludicrous hyperbole of the synopsis on the previous page (presumably copied directly from the packaging) - this is boring, ineptly filmed, pretentious garbage. Though to be fair, I didn't see all of the thrilling dramatic spectacles promised by that summary, because this film is over three hours long, and no way was I going to sit through the whole lot!

For starters, Paul Morrisey's qualifications as a director were that Andy Warhol fancied him (Warhol himself, though listed as co-director, famously had absolutely nothing to do with any of the films he supposedly made other than sticking his name on the product so that people would think it was Art). As directors go, Paul Morrissey makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles, and Yoko Ono look like Ed Wood. He really is that bad. His idea of making a long, totally static shot of somebody sitting in a chair talking seem interesting is to zoom in on random parts of their body, something which requires a bit of skill if the film isn't going to go out of focus. Alas, this is not a skill that Paul Morrissey possessed. Another skill he did not possess was the ability to record sound in such a way that it was clearly audible, and the entire film sounds as though it was recorded on a cheap cassette player by somebody standing too far away. Very likely it was. Mind you, on the plus side, the whole thing is shot in split-screen, so it must be Art.

The subject-matter consists of trendy sixties chicks, plus a few "girls" who nowadays we'd probably have to call "transgender women" (though they don't seem to be making much effort to appear feminine other than putting a dress on and being so camp they sound like self-parodies) talking about whatever they feel like talking about, mostly themselves. I suppose it was once genuinely shocking to see gay people, promiscuous women, and druggies discussing such matters on a cinema screen, but except from an anthropological point of view, this is simply tedious. Self-centered people who happen to have unconventional lifestyles drone on about sex and drugs and such, but it's hard to care about any of them, let alone like them. Nico's in it for a while, but she's no more interesting (or well recorded, or in focus) than anybody else.

If these basic themes appeal to you, John Waters took similar ideas much, much further, in films which had a plot, and which were directed by a real director and filmed by cameramen who knew how to operate a camera. And he didn't delegate sound recording duties to the cat. Seriously, if your movie consists almost entirely of people talking to each other and the camera for three hours, it helps if you can be bothered to point the microphone in the right direction at least some of the time.

I would strongly recommend this film to anyone writing a PhD thesis on the movies of Andy Warhol and/or Paul Morrissey. If this is not a description of you, I would strongly recommend almost any other film that isn't actually evil.

Alas, poor Count Yorga, the forgotten vampire. And alas, poor Robert Quarry, the man who played him. In this era, if you were going to be a cinematic vampire, you pretty much had to be Dracula played by Christopher Lee or you were sunk. Can you remember who played the vampire in "The Brides Of Dracula", and what he was called? (Clue: not Dracula, despite the title.) If you can, you're a real mid 20th century horror movie buff, and quite possibly your name is Kim Newman.

For pretty obvious copyright reasons, a cheap porno movie based on "Dracula" but set in the early seventies to save money was never going to involve a vampire actually called Dracula. But when the production unexpectedly went mainstream and all the soft-core elements were ditched, it somehow became a hit, mainly because of the performance of Robert Quarry, who gets off to a splendid start as a medium only slightly less camp and more menacing than The Amazing Criswell of "Plan Nine From Outer Space" fame who is secretly an actual vampire, and therefore very well qualified to talk to the dead. Unfortunately, the concept of a vampire being far better integrated into the 20th century than Dracula ever was (Count Yorga can even drive a car!) is largely wasted by a talentless director more used to doing porn, a cast who are mostly abysmal, and in some cases obviously only there because they were hired to do explicit sex scenes that were later written out, and a script which forces the central character to constantly brag about how smart he is compared to human beings while dropping every possible hint to everybody in sight that he's a vampire.

Robert Quarry is actually very effective as a B-list Dracula willing to substitute jaded sarcasm for the effortless charisma of Christopher Lee, and his feral assaults on humans by running at them impossibly fast range from sort of scary in a nightmarish kind of way (the second of these two movies obviously had an enormous influence on "Phantasm") to hilarious whenever the camera angle makes it obvious that he's scooting along on a trolley without moving his legs. But otherwise the acting is almost totally lousy, and the women in particular are characterless vampire-fodder, the one exception being the mute lady in the second film who just happens to be played by the director's wife.

But you know what? This double bill of almost-forgotten crap is actually rather entertaining in a so-bad-it's-sort-of-good kind of way. It's very patchy indeed, and there are long dull patches, but when it gets nasty, particularly in the first film, it's very nasty indeed - one scene in particular will not appeal to cat lovers at all (see the title of this review for further details). You can almost see a semi-masterpiece trying to break through an impenetrable wall of incompetence. I'd give this two and a half stars if this site permitted a middle of the road rating, but it doesn't, so what the heck! Half a star extra for being bonkers!

PS: Answer to earlier trivia question: David Peel as Baron Meinster. Remember them? Thought not.

PPS: This disc includes a half-hour documentary in which übergeek Kim Newman dribbles down his fashionably steampunk waistcoat about what neglected cinematic masterpieces these two films are. But then, he would say that, wouldn't he?

This is a film which commits one of the most unforgivable cinematic sins. It promises us something it doesn't deliver. Set in a ridiculously simplified and very seventies future where all the world's problems, apart from massive class inequality, have been solved by addicting everybody on the planet to an ultra-violent sport, it shows us precisely three games of Rollerball. The first is approximately as violent as a normal game of American Football. After which it's about an hour between matches, and we never, ever get to see the kind of mayhem you'd expect from an 18 certificate movie in which a lump of steel the size of a grapefruit is fired at people on motorcycles who want to kill each other at 120 miles an hour. There's a tiny bit of blood now and then, but basically this movie is "adult" because there's one scene in which you get to see a few male bottoms, which I'm absolutely certain is there for no reason other than to bump up the certificate so that you think this film will be more fun than it actually is.

James Caan does his best as a two-dimensional character who nevertheless manages to have at least one dimension more than anybody else in the film, but frankly it's dull. In fact, without him, it would be one-star. Even the sport of Rollerball comes across as somewhat baffling. If I was playing a game where the basic idea was to hurt the opposing players as badly as possible, and I had a choice between a motorcycle and roller-skates, I know which I'd go for! And in terms of skill, it's essentially people hitting each other in a too-small arena and once in a while scoring a goal so easy that when anybody misses they're obviously doing it on purpose.

Sorry, but this movie drags. "Death Race 2000" ripped it off shamelessly and ended up being a much bigger hit because it did what it said on the tin. It concentrated entirely on an actual race which involved actual death, rather than spending most of its running time exploring the hero's existential angst. Also, Roger Corman is one hell of a lot better at directing action than Norman Jewison. The best I can say about it is that it's a really weird period piece, and James Caan almost manages to be good in the face of a script that no actor could really triumph over.

This very unusual film noir puts its characters in an extremely contrived but extraordinarily tense situation: several random people are held hostage in a ghost town by a homicidal maniac who thinks it's the perfect hideout because who would look for him in a place which will shortly be destroyed by an atom bomb? Obviously he plans to leave before the explosion. Unfortunately his best buddy is too badly hurt to travel, and the clock is ticking...

Dick Powell, an actor well versed in film noir, tries his hand at directing for the first time, and it has to be said that he's not the best director in the world. The pacing is rather flat, with too many scenes in which people point out, not unreasonably, that they really ought to be thinking about not sticking around too long, what with the atom bomb and all, but not doing an awful lot about it until suddenly it's very urgent indeed. And given the small size of the main cast, I don't see why one of them, the tactfully named "Dummy", has to be a complete nonentity who can't even speak, and is implied to be retarded. What's more, the hero doesn't really make much of an impression, or accomplish all that much other than winning the heart of the pretty girl in the pointy fifties bra.

Stephen McNally steals the film hands down as the mentally damaged combat veteran who causes all the trouble, and is partially redeemed by his loyalty to his best friend, but otherwise he's so unlikeable that it's impossible to care about him. The supporting cast are a lot more interesting, since their motives are far more of a grey area, and they almost make it work. But ultimately it's very hit-and-miss, and the sheer absurdity of the villain deliberately concealing himself right next to an atomic bomb which he knows will presently go off is hard to ignore. Also, would the US Army really have left a nuclear weapon unguarded in the middle of the desert for an entire day? Then again, it's so peculiar that I kind of liked it. It's not a great movie, or in any way comparable to the ultimate nuclear film noir, "Kiss Me Deadly", but it's a fascinating oddity. And, for its time, the ending packs a real punch.

This incredibly odd and very, very made-just-after-the-sixties film is an obscure example of that peculiar movie genre in which people with severe mental illnesses are really saner than everybody else. It also has the unusual distinction, along with "The Big Country", of being less well-known today than the band who named themselves after it.

I can see why it isn't better known. It's very flawed indeed, with a ridiculous number of inadequately explored or completely unresolved subplots, and abrupt mood swings from kooky romance to borderline tragedy with the odd bit of Surrealism. It doesn't seem to be able to make its mind up whether the delusional hero really does have the mental capabilities of Sherlock Holmes or is just a loony in fancy dress talking nonsense. And even though I didn't know until after I'd watched it that it was adapted from a stage play by the play's author, I guessed it probably had been, due to the long stretches of the film in which no scene-changes occur and people tell each other things we should have been shown, and the fact that despite constant talk of past events, there's not one single flashback.

However, in its own way it's oddly compelling. A lot of this is down to the performances of the two leads. Joanne Woodward is good as a middle-aged woman who is believably not all that attractive but definitely not hideous, as opposed to "Hollywood-ugly", meaning marginally less gorgeous than Marilyn Monroe. But George C. Scott is excellent as the only truly complex character, a good man who went mad for reasons we really should have been told far more about. Scott is one of those actors nobody talks about much any more because he wasn't in any true cult movies, but he was an extremely good actor who excelled in playing men who were simultaneously brilliant and damaged - "Patton" is undoubtedly his finest film. This is a much lesser work, but he gives it everything, and really makes you care what happens to him. It's a pity that almost everybody else is a cardboard cutout, and events which couldn't have been effectively portrayed on stage are mostly left out, apart from some mismatched interludes of "it's a movie so here's an irrelevant subplot in which something a bit visual occurs which I wrote specially."

Overall, I'd call this a really interesting failure which redeems itself through some good acting despite the terrible script, and by genuinely trying to be different and make some kind of point, even if I'm not sure what it was supposed to be - good luck trying to figure out what happens at the end! By the way, if you're a big fan of Terry Gilliam, you'll probably want to see this, because "The Fisher King" is pretty close to being a remake.

Like "Fritz The Cat" two decades earlier, this is a one-joke film: it looks like a kids' movie, but it's full of sex, drugs, swearing, and extreme violence. Plus every gag they could think of in which somebody gets sprayed with somebody else's body fluids. Viewers of a certain age may find it hysterically funny that the main female character looks and sounds like Miss Piggy, apart from being a hippopotamus rather than a pig, has an eating disorder, and runs amuck with a machine-gun at the end. Which isn't a spoiler, since the image is right there on the packaging, and anyway, this movie barely has a plot. Oh, and there's a frog who is clearly meant to be Kermit, and guess what: he's a junkie! Hardy har har!

Viewers with a more sophisticated sense of humour will probably find the whole mess wearisome, while watching it with a kind of horrified fascination. The combination of visual inventiveness with the feeling that the director in some ways has a mental age of ten makes this film Peter Jackson's "Howard The Duck", and strongly suggests that, like George Lucas, if he strays too far from the franchise that made his name, he'll go down the toilet. As one character in this movie literally does. After eating somebody else's excrement. In close-up. With a spoon.

If you find the concept of a puppet rabbit with HIV vomiting all over several other puppets amusing, you're gonna love this! If you have the intelligence to notice that almost none of the jokes would be funny if they were performed by human actors, you might not enjoy it so much. And what more obvious indication that a movie is bloody awful can there be than an extended and totally irrelevant spoof of some other movie that was a recent hit when it came out? In this case, junkie Kermit has a dig at "The Deer Hunter" for no reason other than to pad out the running time, because the writers couldn't think of enough jokes about a star-studded TV variety show going disastrously wrong to fill an hour and a half.

This truly is the pits. It's not even a good print. I guess the distributors cared about this film only slightly more than I did. If you think the idea of a trashy American TV show breaking all bounds of taste and decency before going stratospherically weird has comic potential, and you'd like to see an 18 certificate movie based on this concept, I have four words to say to you: "Jerry Springer: The Opera". That's intelligent satire which goes much further than this childish effort does, and is genuinely funny. If on the other hand, your style is more "haw haw, the puppet said a bad word, then it done a great big wee on the other puppet's head, haw haw haw!", this is undoubtedly your idea of a five-star film. Good luck with that.

This classic of early cinema has to viewed with the understanding that 90 years ago, special effects were a wee bit less special than they are today. So, crude as it looks now, back then this would have been the equivalent of "Doctor Strange". And in this respect, the oddly stylized German Expressionist sets with their warped geometry help a great deal; everything seems dreamlike and off-kilter, so when the titanically huge Satan looms over a whole town, the model buildings look no less realistic than the full-size ones the characters inhabit. It's the kind of vibe Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton still go for, not always successfully.

The first half of the movie is definitely five-star. The saintly Faust, an elderly scholar willing to risk his soul to save innocent people from a terrible fate, soon finds out, with plenty of help from his new "friend", the gleefully horrible demon Mephistopheles, that hedonistic debauchery is much more fun than doing good deeds which don't always work out too well, especially now that he's suddenly young and handsome again. We're treated to an almost non-stop carnival ride through wondrously Surreal imagery ranging from the frankly tacky to the surprisingly effective, with something weird going on in practically every shot. It doesn't always make a great deal of sense, but I don't think it was ever meant to, and it's tremendous fun.

Unfortunately it sags badly in the middle, when Faust falls in love with the virtuous Gretchen. Faust chatting up a girl he really likes is a lot less interesting than Faust swooping down on a flying carpet to seduce a princess by gatecrashing her wedding accompanied by a retinue so magnificent it includes a couple of unnecessary elephants. "Strange visitors!" the footman announces, and he ain't kidding! The director obviously knew this bit wasn't quite working, because it's livened up by an utterly baffling and, given the horrific tragedy that will soon occur, wildly inappropriate comedy subplot in which an obviously reluctant Mephistopheles romances Gretchen's unattractive middle-aged aunt for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Also, the actor playing Gretchen's brother seems to have been told to play a serious rôle in a funny way, and gives the impression that the man is mentally retarded, although as far as I could tell, he isn't supposed to be. However, it does pick up again towards the end, as Faust has to face the awful consequences of his selfishness. And they really are quite nasty.

So it's not a perfect film by any standards, but, especially when you consider how long ago it was made, it's a very good one, and large parts of it really zip along, providing constant surprises and wonderments. And, 90 years on, that's still how most of us define a good movie. This film is a must for anyone interested in cinema history, but it's also a lot of fun if you just want to watch a movie.

This curiously-structured noir melodrama begins with the unexplained murder of Vincent Price by Henry Fonda, and spends the rest of its running time alternating between Fonda's rat-in-a-trap predicament, completely surrounded by cops attempting to get him out of his apartment alive or dead (they're not too fussy which), and flashbacks revealing how he got into this terrible situation.

In a way this is a pity, because since we already know Fonda will kill him, Price, despite not yet being typecast as "the Merchant of Menace", is obviously going to turn out to be such a despicable person that the hero of the film has no qualms about mercilessly gunning him down. And if we didn't know this, it would be very difficult to know quite what to make of Price's "Maximilian the Great", a B-list stage magician whose true motives are so hard to pin down that Fonda at one point not unreasonably compares him to a squirming eel. Price, whose greatest weakness was always a tendency to overact, is perfectly cast as a manipulative liar who is never for one second not putting on some kind of act, and inevitably overdoing it just a bit. He's by far the most complex and interesting character, a psychopath who achieves his ends through mental rather physical violence, and who, like all real psychopaths, greatly overestimates himself. I wish the whole film had been about him.

Fonda, though usually better when he was cast as somebody less squeaky-clean than the saintly authority figures he mostly ended up playing later in his career, is at times surprisingly bad. His "salt of the earth ordinary joe" (who is actually called Joe) horribly overdoes the not-too-bright aspect of being a nice but flawed guy, especially in some very early scenes, and later on, when we're supposed to accept that lots of other ordinary decent folk really like him, it's hard to understand why. Barbara Bel Geddes (who found true fame decades later as Miss Ellie in "Dallas") is simply not that good. She does her best, and she's quite cute in a vulnerable puppy kind of way (The Great Maximilian has a way with puppies - fortunately we're not actually shown this), but I could have done with less of her, and more of an underused Ann Dvorak, whose cynical floozy with a heart seems much more at home in this type of film. And it has to be said that some of the romantic interludes drag a bit, especially since Henry Fonda, a very charismatic man, plays Joe as a peculiarly unattractive manchild who women are drawn to because the script says so.

Although it does have its moments, it's somewhat uneven, and since this is an American remake of a French movie, its treatment of sexual jealousy is very coy, and it often struggles to convey to the viewer which characters have had sex with each other, a vital aspect of the plot, without actually admitting that any of them aren't virgins. But Vincent Price fans will enjoy one of his best performances, and, like me, wish he'd been the anti-hero instead of a supporting character. As this very particular type of movie goes, it's not bad, but "The Sweet Smell Of Success" does it far better.

This film seems to be extraordinarily popular with a very small minority who love it to bits. Everybody else should be aware that it's the comedic equivalent of torture porn. This is a documentary about two legendary comedians sitting in a studio for two days while they record an album, and discovering in the process how much they've come to hate each other. It was meant to be three days, but Dud walked out because he couldn't stand another minute in the same room as Pete. Apart from a few minor guest appearances, what you are watching here is the ugly, bitter end of the 20-year Pete & Dud partnership, and the effective death of Peter Cook's entire career.

Dud was a totally unexpected rising Hollywood megastar. Pete was a critically acclaimed comic genius with no career management skills and alcohol and mental health problems who was suddenly in the shadow of the partner he'd always regarded at least partly as a stooge. Desperate for money, Pete begged his old buddy to record one last album with him, and then, apparently under the influence of either serious amounts of booze or total insanity (or indeed both), took the opportunity to pour out all the envy and resentment he'd built up in an utterly deranged flood of bile until his best friend walked out and barely talked to him ever again.

Hilarious, no? Actually, it does have its funny moments, when the gleefully filthy sketches spark a little bit of the old cameraderie. But nearly all of this material is available, some of it in extended versions, on the CDs "Ad Nauseam" and "Come Again", minus the ugly, tedious bickering in between. And even when they're recording, too often Pete simply screams at Dud in a truly pathological manner. As for Dud, his constant mirthless laughter seems to be provoked more by nervousness than amusement, and at one point he has to be talked out of leaving halfway through both the album and the movie. Mind you, when it gets to the stage where your co-star is deliberately spitting chewed-up food into your hair, walking out is probably your best option.

It was actually illegal to own or watch this film in any form until 1993, due to its combination of almost non-stop incredibly strong language, and a very crude discussion about the sexuality of Jesus Christ at a time when blasphemy was still a crime. Perhaps that's why some people think it's a good film. But really, it's mostly just depressing. Russell Mulcahey, who also made "Highlander", its terrible sequel, and lots of movies you've never heard of for a very good reason, points the camera in roughly the right direction and hopes for the best. Third-billed Richard Branson (yes, that guy!) pops up very briefly as the perpetrator of a practical joke Dud isn't amused by in the least. Dudley Moore grits his teeth and tries to bear it, but can't. And Peter Cook makes you like him a lot less than you did before watching this film. So don't.

This creaky old thriller advertises itself as being a Vincent Price movie, but actually it was made just before he got promoted from dependably sinister character actor to A-list leading man, so he doesn't get all that much screen-time, which is a pity, because he's by far the best thing about this tepid Old Dark House murder mystery.

The Bat, a masked serial killer who, despite his name, does not in any way dress like a bat (presumably to avoid lawsuits from DC), but does at one point release a bat into somebody's bedroom for no discernible reason, has a backstory which, if we actually saw it, would make the film about twice as long, but to save time and money, he's just mentioned a couple of times before popping up in the flesh because the script says so. Who, out of a cast so small that several characters are talked about but never actually appear on screen, can he possibly be? Is he Vincent Price, who is clearly established at a very early stage to have multiple connections with bats and therefore absolutely must be The Bat?

Well, if you've ever seen a film like this before, you'll know he's not the clumsily labeled obvious suspect, so it's not a spoiler to say that Vincent Price is not The Bat, despite practically having a neon sign over his head reading "I AM THE BAT". And there are so few other suspects that you won't have much trouble guessing very early on who the fiendish criminal mastermind really is, if you care. Which you won't, because the cardboard characters in this extremely dated movie give you very little reason to care about them. It's not far off being an overlong Skooby Doo episode, apart from the fact that a few people die, completely bloodlessly of course, despite supposedly having had their throats ripped out. Compared with the kind of films being made by Hammer and various European studios at the time, this tired effort must have seemed old-fashioned by the time they'd finished shooting it. If I didn't know it was made in 1959, I'd have guessed it was at least a decade older.

What really sinks it is the script, which makes no sense whatsoever, but not in a hilarious Ed Wood kind of way. If Vincent Price isn't The Bat, why does he coincidentally happen to have a satanic bat idol hidden behind a curtain in his office? Who knows, and who cares? It's a very minor film indeed that only sputters into life when Vincent's on screen being as good as he nearly always was. Otherwise, it's formulaic, illogical, and rather boring.