Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Without Professor Bernard Quatermass, we wouldn't have Doctor Who. The three serials he starred in back in the fifties, all written by the extraordinarily imaginative Nigel Kneale, were massively popular at the time, and all of them were adapted into movies by Hammer, the first of those films being the one that really put Hammer on the map and persuaded the studio heads that they should concentrate on horror. So despite only ever getting a fairly small amount of screen-time, Professor Quatermass had one heck of a lot of influence! This particular series even received the ultimate accolade of being parodied by the Goons, in an episode entitled "The Scarlet Capsule".

So is it still good? Actually, it is. As in the two previous series, Quatermass is up against an extraterrestrial threat which, for obvious reasons not unconnected with BBC budgets, mostly manifests itself by taking over humans and causing them to behave very oddly indeed. Having previously fought a mindless alien that was basically a disease and some very intelligent body-snatching space invaders, this time the prof is faced with ETs who are long dead, but whose partially successful prehistoric tampering with life on Earth is accidentally rebooted, threatening global disaster. This is a wildly creative tale of archaeology and witchcraft that, by way of a Martian spaceship initially mistaken for an unexploded V2, turns into occult-tinged sci-fi with profound moral implications. You've got a government cover-up of a crashed UFO, an alien autopsy, and "ancient astronauts" long before they were made up by Erich von Daniken (remember him?). And all this in 1959!

It's not perfect. In those days dramas were paced a lot slower than the frenetic speed we're used to nowadays, and there are long stretches, including almost the entire first episode, in which not a lot happens. The acting is very variable indeed, ranging from excellent bits of often semi-comic character development, including a strange lady who claims to be psychic and looks a lot like Les Dawson in drag, and a rare glimpse which Doctor Who fans will appreciate of John Scott Martin, an actor who spent most of his career inside a Dalek, playing a human being for a change, to the atrocious hamming which kicks in almost every time somebody is supposed to be terrified. And of course, you have to cut the BBC some slack for the not very special effects available almost 60 years ago, though to be fair, sometimes they look better than they did in the much more expensive Hammer movie.

But taken as a whole and bearing in mind when it was made, this is extremely intelligent and astonishingly imaginative sci-fi in which believably flawed people do the best they can in the face of an utterly bizarre threat, and some of them do it better than others. Highly recommended if you don't mind heroes not having superpowers and a complete absence of gunfights.

Yes, it's that rarest of beasts, a sixties Edgar Allen Poe film Roger Corman had absolutely nothing to do with. Vincent Price does provide narration (in French), but he sounds so disinterested, if not downright bored, that I didn't recognize his usually unmistakable voice, and, presumably at his own request, his name isn't in the credits.

Instead of Corman, we've got a trio of European arthouse directors doing a third of the film each. Roger Vadim goes first, with a tale bearing no relation to Poe other than borrowing the title of an unfilmable short story in which nothing happens. Mainly it's an excuse for him to show off his trophy wife Jane Fonda looking cute in various leftover Barbarella outfits. She also holds some of the tamest orgies you'll ever see on screen, and falls in love with a horse. Which sounds as though it ought to be a lot of fun on several levels, but it's just pretentious and painfully dull.

Louis Malle's "William Wilson" is a straightforward Poe adaptation, about an evil man whose conscience inexplicably comes to life as his good twin and keeps ruining his fun. That's it. Oh, and Brigitte Bardot gets whipped. It does at least try to be a horror movie in the Corman style, but it fails miserably, plodding along so lifelessly that its 40 minutes feel more like 80.

And then we come to the Frederico Fellini segment, in which a magnificently dissipated Terence Stamp, looking very punk rock indeed eight years before it was invented, plays a bad-boy Hollywood actor undergoing his own personal "Fear and Loathing in Rome", which may or not be semi-hallucinatory and/or a literal descent into Hell, and reminded me a lot of "Jacob's Ladder". Needless to say, this is far and away the best part of the movie. It even has the wit to savagely mock pretentious arthouse films while deliberately being one of those turned up to 11. I just wish we'd gotten to see a bit of the movie our hero is in Italy to make: the life of Jesus Christ reimagined as a spaghetti western.

If Fellini, or indeed anybody, had directed the other two segments with the same level of style, humor, and sheer bizarreness that he brings to the last part, this movie would have been an oddball Surrealist classic. But what we get is a tedious waste of time which at 80 minutes is long enough to be an entire film, with one-third of something worth watching stuck on at the end, almost like a prize for getting that far. And movies are supposed to be entertainment, not an endurance test.

This rather odd western obviously means well, but it attempts to combine genres in a way that doesn't quite work. Dean Martin, an actor I have very little time for, isn't as self-indulgent as usual (apart from singing the slightly silly theme song), but he's still inadequate as a leading man in a movie which is unsurprisingly stolen from him by Robert Mitchum, despite the latter having far less screen time. Mitchum pulls off the rare trick of being a gunslinging hellfire preacher in a slightly over-the-top western who can preach a sermon which is actually believable and doesn't make him sound like a raving lunatic. Roddy McDowall, another actor I have very little time for, fares rather less well in this respect, as an overacting psychopath who is not for one second a nice guy. At one point, he declares that he hates the entire world because it's flat!

Apart from Robert Mitchum, the acting honours have to go to Yaphet Kotto. The aspect of its well-meaningness this film handles best is its inclusion of a major black character by way of what is nowadays called "diversity". Kotto's bartender is a believable black man in a white man's world forced to take a a slightly subservient job, who is nevertheless good, brave, and competent, and, though not perfect, is still better than almost all the white men, and is both liked and respected by most of the significant white characters who aren't horrible. And a major plot-point hinges upon how out of character it is for him to appear to be cowardly or superstitious.

The heavily contrived whodunnit aspect of the film doesn't work anything like as well. I'm not going to reveal who is murdering everyone involved in a certain unfortunate card-game, but it wouldn't be much of a spoiler if I did, because from a very early stage, this is a whodunnit with an absurdly small number of suspects. By about halfway through you'll be banging your head against the screen and shouting "No shit, Sherlock!", assuming you still care.

Overall, this is an over-ambitious late sixties western which drops the ball by simultaneously trying, mostly in a very clumsy way, to appeal to the sensibilities of the times, and by inexplicably dragging in a plot structure which means that the only large-scale gunfight has to come out of nowhere and be provided by characters who exist only for this reason. I'd give it two and a half stars if this site allowed reviews to be entirely neutral, but I'm going up to three because Mitchum and Kotto deserve a nod. I'd probably go up to three and a half if Dean Martin was replaced by somebody less smug, then drop down again because this site doesn't allow three and a half stars either. In the end it's a sort of quite good western oddity which has never been copied, and you can see why. But at least its heart is in the right place.

This is a bad film. Thematically it's all over the place, because it doesn't know whether it's supposed to be horror or comedy, therefore there's almost zero actual horror, and not that many jokes either. Its rather low budget shows in every department, and as biker movies go, a gang of eight people, including two girls, zooming rather slowly around the sleepy English countryside pursued by one police car aren't the most formidable of menaces to society. Yet it's an unappreciated classic of so-bad-it's-good cinema. Look at that cast! Nicky Henson, best known for "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" and other soft-core seventies sleaze, teamed up with veteran Hollywood character actor George Sanders (who committed suicide shortly after completing work on this film, presumably for unrelated reasons, because no film's THAT bad!), and Beryl Reid, who was in two horror movies including this one, and shouldn't really have been in any.

This is one of a handful (I wish there were many more) movies made by an obscure Anglo-Spanish studio called Scotia, which also gave us "Horror Express", undoubtedly the best film ever made in which Christopher Lee meets a telepathic undead space gorilla on a train, and the sublimely-titled "A Town Called Bastard", an ultra-violent and very confusing spaghetti western notable for a scene where Telly Savalas is crucified in mid-air. As you might expect from script-writers of this calibre, the utterly bizarre subject-matter makes up for some lousy acting and the excruciating seventiesness of it all - there's even a biker called Gash who looks alarmingly like a teenage Alan Partridge.

The sequence in which several bikers cheerfully commit suicide in various increasingly excessive ways in order to rise again as immortal superpowered agents of Satan is genuinely hilarious, but most of the humour is at least borderline unintentional, especially as George Sanders and Beryl Reid appear to be playing their parts absolutely straight (possibly Nicky Henson was too, but in his case it's impossible to tell). And what's with the toad obsession? But in its own way, it's tremendous fun. And there are an extraordinary number of direct visual references to the first "Mad Max" film, even though it was made six years later. Coincidence? I wonder...

As I said, it's not actually good in any conventional sense, but if you're willing to switch off your critical faculties and enjoy the sheer silliness of it, it's a gleefully daft hour and a half.

This is one those old sci-fi movies which, while you can see why it's regarded as a minor classic, hasn't aged that well. Its most striking feature is the concept, then almost unheard of in B-movies, that space aliens who look monstrous by our standards of beauty aren't necessarily evil. Since 1953, we've seen plenty of films in which freaky-looking extraterrestrials aren't the bad guys, so the main plot, which revolves around the highly intelligent and enlightened hero being prepared to accept that these strange and terrifying entities mean us no harm but not being absolutely sure it's true, isn't anywhere near as original now as it was over 60 years ago.

The biggest problem with this movie is that, since it's trying to be a thriller where instead of not knowing who the murderer is, we don't know whether the space monsters are good or bad, the aliens can't do anything which unambiguously shows them to be evil, meaning that the kind of army-versus-space-robots ray-gun action you expect in this type of film is in very short supply, though there is a little bit towards the end. Bearing in mind the special effects available at the time, it was a sensible decision to give the aliens in their true form as little screen-time as possible and never allow the viewer to look at them for very long, but actually the rubber suits are quite effective (the artist who designed the DVD cover above obviously didn't bother to watch the film, since the aliens look nothing like that, and have only one eye). And the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" notion of aliens replacing humans with lookalikes is well handled, giving the supporting cast a chance to play dual rôles as ordinary decent folks and creepily emotionless space invaders.

Richard Carlson, not exactly a household name, isn't the most exciting of heroes, though Barbara Rush as his girlfriend makes more of an impression, mainly because she gets to play an alien too and go all weird. And that blonde on the DVD cover is in the film for about 30 seconds (like I said, the artist didn't bother to watch it). Some of the dialogue is horribly clunky, such as the moment when one character explains at length that the thermometer currently registers the exact temperature at which humans are most likely to become irrationally violent, then immediately becomes irrationally violent. But on the whole, it's a pretty good though somewhat actionless psychological sci-fi movie which would have made a superb episode of "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits", but feels a little stretched as a feature film. Though on the plus side, the fact that it was originally shown in 3D isn't obtrusive, apart from some shots of falling rocks that go on for a bit too long. So, perhaps it is a classic, but it's certainly a minor and dated one. And I'm afraid it's nowhere near as much fun as the quite similar "I Married a Monster From Outer Space".

If anyone deserves the title of Worst Director Ever, it's not Ed Wood but Jesús Franco. This is one of several halfway okay movies he made at the start of his career, but he went on to make over 200 irredeemably dreadful ones under more than 30 pseudonyms, mostly increasingly hardcore porn with bizarre horror elements. Unfortunately, "pretty good for a Jesús Franco movie" isn't the same thing as actually being good. For starters, this is blatant rip-off of the Surreal horror masterpiece "Eyes Without a Face", minus everything which makes that film so extraordinary. It has exactly the same plot, with the addition of a maniac called Morpho who does most of the Doc's dirty work. Morpho dresses like Dracula (the Bela Lugosi version) and for some inexplicable reason kills people by biting their necks, but he's not a vampire, just a psycho with very fake ping-pong ball eyes. And by the way, he's blind. Yes, that's right, the villain sends a blind man to hunt down and murder women because that's clearly the most efficient way of doing it!

Fortunately for Doctor Orlof, his nemesis is a cop who genuinely makes Inspector Clouseau look fairly efficient, because at least Clouseau's trying. This twit simply can't be bothered. Almost everyone in the film is better at his job than he is, and in order to accomplish anything at all, he has to be given lessons in basic police procedure by, amongst other people, an alcoholic vagrant and a ballerina. I'm making this movie sound hilarious, but it very seldom is, especially when it tries to be. I honestly don't know whether this character is supposed to be funny, or if he's just incredibly badly written.

Anyway, the worst policeman in the world bumbles about trying not very hard to catch two absurdly conspicuous mass murderers who make their getaway in a horse-drawn cart with a coffin in the back, because if he was any good this would be a very short film. While he does this, we are treated to leaden pacing, lifeless camera work, lousy dialogue made worse by atrocious dubbing (perhaps the movie is slightly better in Spanish, but I doubt it), terrible acting, and a conspicuous absence of actual horror. The women-in-peril scenes are so poorly shot and acted that there's zero tension, the special makeup effects are rudimentary (although the entire point of the film is that a mad doctor performs ghastly operations, none of these are shown because it would have cost too much), and there's hardly any blood. Morpho is completely inadequate as a monster (that's him at the top of the page), and Howard Vernon as Doctor Orlof is just a rather intense Spaniard with no charisma who can act slightly better than most of the cast, but still not very well. The only reason this film has an 18 certificate is a gratuitous shot of a topless woman lasting 3 seconds.

It's not unwatchable, merely flat and rather inept in every department without ever going quite as bonkers as you keep hoping it might. "Eyes Without a Face" is, in a very literal sense, the movie this is trying to be. So watch that instead.

I'll watch almost anything with Vincent Price in it, but I gave up halfway through this incoherent abomination. On the plus side, Vincent seems to be enjoying himself as a supervillain even Austin Powers wouldn't take seriously. On the minus side, there's everything else.

About three-quarters of the time, this film seems to be aimed at very young children, from the horrible performances of everyone other than Vincent Price - to call it overacting would be paying it a compliment, since even overacting is technically acting - to the Chuckle Brothers level of the "humour", much of which involves face-pulling, funny walks, and stupid people accidentally hitting each other with furniture and yelling. Except that the very mild but very numerous sexual innuendoes, a level of relentless sexism only an early sixties comedy is capable of, and the constant shots of gorgeous women wandering around in bikinis for no good reason suggest that its target audience is mentally subnormal adults.

Justly forgotten bland teen idol pop singer Frankie Avalon is excruciatingly dreadful as "secret agent double oh and a half", soon demoted to "double oh and a quarter", which is probably the funniest and cleverest joke in the film. The girls can't be blamed for giving atrocious performances, since they're all supposed to be robots unconvincingly pretending to be human, but the men have no excuse. And boy, could they use one! Seriously, this dreck makes "In Like Flint" look like "Skyfall"! It's not even "so bad it's good", because comedies that fail dismally to be funny cannot by definition be unintentionally funny. Give it a miss.

By the way, there's a sequel which by all accounts is very considerably worse. I'm almost tempted to give it a quick look just to see how that's possible, but I'll try to resist the temptation. I strongly suspect I'll succeed.

OK, I admit it, there's no way this film really deserves five stars. But you know what? Of its own very particular kind, it's a masterpiece! And if you're in the mood for a completely bonkers horror movie that piles absurdity upon absurdity while keeping a perfectly straight face, and doesn't stint on what was, for the time, seriously gory horror because it's European, there are few if any that reach the standard of this one. And it co-stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing! This is the kind of film Ed Wood might have made if he'd somehow been given a decent budget, and it's a hoot!

Made purely because a low-budget Spanish horror studio obtained at a bargain price a very good scale-model of the Orient Express, plus accompanying miniature scenery depicting Siberia, previously used in "Nicholas and Alexandra" (a rather dull melodrama memorable only for Tom Baker's performance as Rasputin), this has to be the only film set entirely in Siberia to be shot entirely in Spain. It's 1906, and Christopher Lee has found a two-million-year-old deep-frozen ape-man. Obviously it will come alive and kill people. Is that enough plot to keep the movie going for almost an hour and a half? No. Therefore we also get extraterrestrials, spies (it's the Orient Express - we must have spies!), mad monks, the Antichrist, and just when it seems as though it couldn't get any sillier, Christopher Lee with a sword in one hand and a shotgun in the other fighting a small army of zombies.

Peter Cushing is an absolute delight, and clearly enjoying himself immensely, as Christopher Lee's charmingly dishonest professional rival. Lee perfectly balances arrogant pomposity and reluctant heroism. Alberto de Mendoza, an actor seemingly well-known in Spain who made no other English language films, actually manages to upstage Christopher Lee as a mad monk who is Rasputin in all but name, only slightly less sane. And a special mention must go to Telly Savalas, who suddenly pops up late in the film as a mentally retarded psychopathic Cossack whose performance leaves no scenery unchewed, and whose dialogue borders on Surrealism, even compared to the word-salad spouted by every character in the movie who attempts to sound like a scientist.

How crazy is this film? Hammer, a studio not exactly famous for subtlety, liked it so much that within months they'd more or less remade it, minus the train but still starring Lee and Cushing, as "The Creeping Flesh". And it was nowhere near as good. This is an underrated classic of trashy cinema that takes very little time to get going, and then seldom lets up for a moment. If that's the kind of thing that floats your boat, this is as good as it gets. Rent it now!

This third film in Hammer's so-called "lesbian vampire trilogy" (though the vampires in the second two films are very heterosexual indeed, even the ones who are supposed to be the same lesbian character Ingrid Pitt played in "The Vampire Lovers") is arguably the best, and certainly an improvement on the laughable "Lust For a Vampire". Peter Cushing, in his first rôle after a break from acting due to the death of his beloved wife, brings a desperate sadness to the part which probably didn't involve much acting, and was never better than he is here as a joyless, merciless Puritan who is nevertheless genuinely trying to do what he thinks is the right thing, not unlike the hapless Sgt. Howie in "The Wicker Man".

Unfortunately, the other actors aren't quite so accomplished. The Collinson sisters, cast because they were Playboy's first twin playmates of the month rather than for their acting abilities, both had to be dubbed (by different actresses, which helps the viewer to tell them apart), and, considering the reason they were cast in the first place, strangely get only one partially nude scene. They look very sweet, but that's about it. Damien Thomas, one of several forgotten actors Hammer tried out as potential replacements for Christopher Lee, who was getting more and more reluctant to keep doing increasingly contrived Dracula movies, is tall, dark and handsome in a very seventies way, but it's pretty obvious why he didn't end up getting Christopher Lee's job after all. Somebody or other plays a dashing young hero who doesn't actually do all that much. And although horror veteran Dennis Price is great fun as a reluctant and rather inept henchman who isn't terribly good at organizing satanic debauchery for his master, he has very few scenes.

As for the script, it's all over the place, to the point where people are bitten by vampires before any vampires exist to bite them, and some of the scenes of the Puritan vampire-hunters gleefully hunting down young women who aren't virgins because that's obviously the same as being a vampire are so Pythonesque that I suspect the scene where they all keep shouting "Burn her!" was directly parodied in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". More damagingly, while it's not exactly unpleasant to watch the Collinson sisters arguing in flimsy nightgowns, there's far more of that than the actual horror you might have been expecting, which is in very short supply until the last ten minutes. So all in all it's an above-average Hammer film which entertains without exactly being a masterpiece. Great theme tune though. And remember to look at the DVD extras: there's a hilarious deleted scene where 18th. century schoolgirls sing a ludicrously anachronistic pop song for no reason at all.

If you're given the admittedly improbable task of writing a fashionably dark and edgy superhero movie that isn't so dark and edgy it's no fun, while also having to include far too many established characters as well as introducing a couple of very important new ones, this movie represents pretty much the best way it can possibly be done.

Unlike the similarly-themed "Batman Vs. Superman", almost none of these people are genuinely trying to kill each other, and those that are have truly compelling motives. The main conflict, between Captain America and the much more powerful Iron Man, is between friends who disagree, initially for rather abstract political reasons, but it soon becomes very personal indeed for reasons that neither of them can help. In particular, Captain America, unlike Batman, stands up to literally the whole world because he simply will not abandon a friend, no matter what. As heroic motives go, that's a lot better than "Superman must die because I'm afraid he might go nuts and enslave us all, and by the way, I regularly drink myself to sleep."

The frequent action is ferociously well-handled without ever becoming more than the tiniest token bit bloody, and occurs often enough to prevent the necessary lumps of plot exposition from dragging on for too long. And considering how many people we're supposed to care about in this movie, character development is surprisingly well-handled. New character T'chala, better known as the Black Panther, makes his mark with absolutely no trouble at all, and almost instantly seems to have been there all along. The latest reboot of Spiderman is less successful. He may work just fine in the solo movie we're promised during the closing credits, but here he seems like a young-adult character in an adult-adult film, constantly saying "awesome" because that's the formula the middle-aged scriptwriters know applies to characters under 20, and generally coming across as an immature person Tony Stark really shouldn't be pitting against superheroes who might actually kill him. But that's not a criticism of Tom Holland's performance. Though rebooting Aunt May to the point where I initially thought she was Peter Parker's girlfriend is probably a step too far.

In short, this is one of the best formulaic superheroic movies that will ever be made. But it ultimately fails because however entertaining it may be most of the time, it's always shoving cardboard characters around in ways that set up several sequels. It's absolutely superb of its kind, but there's just too much commercial cynicism to let me truly care about it outside its obvious greed potential.

I suppose I should give this pretentious mess an extra star or two because, like everything Wes Anderson does, it looks absolutely gorgeous. But this is Anderson at his very worst. It resembles the kind of film an extraterrestrial might make after hearing from a visiting Earthman about strange and exciting new concepts such as "plot", "characterization", and "humour", but before really grasping what they mean.

A totally unlikeable self-centered dimwit persuades his two almost equally annoying estranged brothers to travel with him across India on a "spiritual pilgrimage" to bring the family back together again. These idiots, each of whom consists of a one-dimensional bundle of repetitive catch-phrases and tics, irritate each other, everybody else on the train, and the audience, constantly doing stupidly irrational things which Wes Anderson seems to believe are endearingly zany. His approach to comedy in this film is downright baffling. For example: one brother buys a live cobra for no reason at all. He knows it's lethally dangerous, but he buys it anyway, and the others don't object, or even comment. He then keeps it in a small container that looks about as secure as a shoe-box, and has a large skull and crossbones painted on it to constantly remind us whenever it's in shot that there's a LIVE COBRA inside! It escapes. Much hilarity ensues. Well, a very small amount. Oops, did I spoil a totally unexpected punch-line by revealing that the cobra escapes?

Likewise, the plot is a hopeless muddle. The "spiritual pilgrimage" is constantly talked about but fizzles out almost immediately to leave more room for repetitive bickering, and is then replaced by something else. Late in the film, the tone very abruptly switches to tragedy, these morons start to behave like adult human beings, and it appears that they've found their true spiritual awakening after all. Then we're back to the failed wackiness and they forget all about it, experiencing at least three more "spiritual awakenings", each more trite than the last. Towards the end I kept looking at the timer because whenever the movie seemed to be over, something else would start happening, and there were eventually about five "endings". There are also two beginnings, literally, since you can watch it with or without a 12-minute "Part 1" that has very little to do with the rest of it.

As a travelogue it would work just fine if The Three Stooges didn't keep getting in the way of the scenery, and it's a master-class in how to overdecorate a train. But as a movie, it's the cinematic equivalent of that unfortunate ailment which foreigners visiting India often come down with. It usually affects the lower intestine, but in Wes Anderson's case, it seems to have gone to his head.

Ken Russell's films got steadily more and more nuts until his career was in ruins, but in 1971 he was still being given pretty large budgets to play with, and although the content of his movies was already extreme, it wasn't totally out of control, and they still made sense. This was the first and best of the full-blown crazy Ken Russell films, and it's almost a masterpiece.

Of course, like all movies claiming to portray real historical events, it's a wee bit exaggerated. For instance, Louis XIII, though he was probably gay, certainly wasn't an outrageously camp screaming queen, and he was a competent ruler, not a spaghetti western villain who used political prisoners dressed as birds for target practice! And like all Ken Russell films, at times it's badly compromised by overacting. Vanessa Redgrave can be forgiven, since it's hard to be subtle when you're playing a mad sex-crazed hunchbacked nun who thinks she's possessed by the devil, and all things considered, she's actually very good, but the two evil apothecaries (one of them played by Brian Murphy, an actor more usually associated with sitcoms - he was the male half of "George and Mildred") really ham it up as bizarrely ill-advised comic relief. And Michael Gothard somehow manages to overact even by the standards of Ken Russell films in the rôle of an exorcist who makes his unfortunate clients seem almost sane by comparison.

However, it looks magnificent, if sometimes repulsive, with graphic scenes of torture, death by fire, and much else that isn't very nice. And holding it all together is Oliver Reed giving the performance of a lifetime as Father Grandier, the flawed and hopelessly uncelibate priest who makes far too many enemies both personal and political, and has to be disposed of through a grotesquely absurd show-trial presided over by hypocrites and madmen. Reed, not yet beginning to bloat from the industrial amounts he was drinking, is superb as an imperfect man trying to be as good as he can be, and ultimately becoming heroic, and in the latter part of the film he totally dominates every scene by being the only believable character on screen. By the way, what his torturers do to him really did happen to the real Father Grandier, and isn't exaggerated at all.

If you can cope with some genuine nastiness and a great deal of astonishingly bad taste, this weird hybrid of "The Exorcist" and Terry Gilliam's "Jabberwocky" is absolutely unique, and makes you wish Ken Russell had made a lot more high-budget horror and fantasy films than he did. I hope one day they get around to releasing a Director's Cut restoring all the scenes the censor removed that went even further than what's on show here. Yes, really!

This movie is quite possibly the most seventies thing ever. You can see exactly why punk had to be invented the following year; they just couldn't take a chance on anything more excessive than this happening! You can also see how a man once hailed as a towering colossus of British cinema would eventually end up making movies on video in his back garden.

This utterly bonkers tale, in which we simply have to take it on trust that competitive pinball is the ultimate spectator sport, is stuffed from beginning to end with imagery so bizarre that it frequently resembles "2001 - A Space Odyssey" directed by Terry Gilliam and starring the Monkees. The music, which since this is a rock opera is non-stop, ranges from excellent in a seventies kind of way to dreadful in an even more seventies kind of way, but although the one song people still remember is usually Elton John's "Pinball Wizard", even though if you haven't seen the film it makes no sense whatsoever, Tina Turner definitely steals the show as the feral Acid Queen who gives Tommy the least appropriate amateur psychotherapy imaginable!

The acting is equally variable. As the catatonic Tommy, Roger Daltrey, who would only win an Oscar if there was one for Least Worst Actor In The Who, is better cast than he was as Franz Liszt, and Oliver Reed, just beginning to show the first signs of his slide from handsome brute to bloated wreck, is memorably vile as Tommy's hedonistic monster of a stepfather, though I could have done with a bit less of his singing voice (and rather more of Jack Nicholoson's, which is surprisingly good). Still, with a plot and scenery like this, you can't blame most of the cast for overacting.

Unfortunately, although the parts of the movie where Tommy is still locked up in his own head are an astonishing visual and conceptual assault on your eyes and brain, the overly blunt satire of fake religions in the last half hour drags a bit, and rather too much of it consists of a very smug Roger Daltrey singing hymns in praise of himself. The barking mad Church of Marilyn Monroe we encounter earlier on makes the same point just as well, and is far funnier. But the bits that really work aren't quite like anything else you'll ever see, except perhaps in other films from Ken Russell's "starting to go nuts but still getting decent budgets" period. If you're in the right mood, it's a hoot! I mean, what's not to like about a movie in which Tina Turner morphs into a psychedelic torture robot?

This horror trilogy has precisely the same strengths and weaknesses of both almost everything in Roger Corman's Poe franchise, and the numerous other anthology films made around the same time, mostly by Hammer's rival Amicus. Its biggest strength is the always dependable Vincent Price, who, though not the world's most versatile actor, shows off his full range here in triple rôles as a tormented drunken slob who, in contrast to Price's usual performances, is almost totally charmless and looks genuinely dissolute, a camp dandy who overacts outrageously, and a very nice old man (almost a preview of Edward Scissorhands' "father") who, when the chips are down, gets very nasty indeed.

The first story is almost plotless Poe-by-numbers - a miserable drunk lives alone in an old dark house, obsessively in love with the corpse of a wife who won't stay dead. Price is very good - he even somehow looks puffier in the face than at other times in the same film - but there isn't really a story. And when the house inevitably burns down, you'll greet as an old friend that stock footage of a blazing barn that appears in every film Roger Corman ever made in which a house burns down.

The second part is the bit which tries to be funny. There's always one of those, and you always wish there wasn't. However, it's far better than the usual comic relief in anthology films, due to the double act of Peter Lorre, who unfortunately overdoes the drunk acting because everybody always does, and Vincent Price, who is great fun as the most pretentious wine-taster ever. Even the cat's quite good, considering that there's no such thing as a cat who can act, or has the slightest desire to try to (and this cat's facial expression suggests that he has less intention of hiding his contempt for the entire movie industry than is usual even for a cat in a movie). And it doesn't make the mistake of forgetting that people ought to die in nasty ways in all segments of a compilation horror film, whether they're supposed to be funny or not.

The third and final part is again almost plotless, but gets away with it thanks to a splendidly boo-hiss performance from Basil Rathbone as by far the nastiest person in the film (Vincent Price somehow plays three different characters without ever being the bad guy), and a nice bit of horror that gives you a rare chance to see Price in heavy gross-out makeup. But overall, it has to be said that this is a middling effort with some very primitive special effects, and a distinct lack of scares - if it was reclassified today, it would definitely be a 12 rather than a 15. Still, I bet it's the only film ever made whose credits include special advisors for both hypnotism and wine-tasting.

Never mind "Phantasm" - this is the best film Don Coscarelli ever made, and probably the best film he'll ever make. It's also by far the best performance you'll ever see from Bruce Campbell. What sets it apart from most horror films is its humanity. Two aged and infirm men in a seedy retirement home find a belated new purpose in life defending its residents from a supernatural threat which they are hopelessly ill-equipped to cope with, but which, since they're already suspected of being senile and delusional, they can't tell anyone else about. The mummy they're up against is actually rather inept - why else would it be reduced to sucking what life remains out of a bunch of geriatrics? - but the two men who take it on have trouble standing up, let alone fighting undead monsters!

And yet, despite usually being categorised as a wacky comedy, this film really is full of heart. The hero, "Elvis Presley", is probably the real Elvis, though there's just enough doubt about that to make you wonder if he's the delusional old man everybody thinks he is, while still having complete sympathy with him, and genuinely caring about his heroic efforts to do the right thing in a totally bizarre and almost impossible situation. As for his best friend "JFK", he's heavily implied to be truly delusional - after all, JFK wasn't black - with just enough uncertainty for him to possibly be JFK after all, yet even though he's portrayed as both crazier and more physically disabled than "Elvis", he too is consistently shown to be a noble, likable, and tremendously brave man who tries to fight the good fight even though he has almost zero chance of winning a fight with anything more muscular than a daddy-long-legs.

Something far too many makers of horror movies forget is that you really ought to care about the heroes, otherwise the film has no meaning. Like Spinal Tap, these two mummy-hunters are both ridiculous and useless, yet you genuinely do care about them and want them to triumph. They are good men who aren't terribly good at what they're trying to do, but they do it anyway because nobody else will. And at absolutely no point in the entire movie are you expected to automatically like somebody just because they're physically attractive (quite the opposite, in fact). This isn't a perfect film by any means, but it's so far ahead of just about everything in the horror genre in so many ways that I'm giving it full marks anyway. If there were more horror movies like this, horror movies wouldn't be a joke. And if there were more intentionally funny horror movies like this, they wouldn't be a bad joke.