Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This is basically Spinal Tap with vampires. It's a low-budget mockumentary that has no pretensions, and delivers exactly what it sets out to. The idea that becoming a vampire is a random event which gives you immortality and superpowers without making you otherwise any more special than you previously were has lots of comedy potential, and is exploited very well. The vampire housemates we get to know over the course of the film are oddly lovable despite the horrible things they do (gore is wisely kept to a minimum, so there are very few scenes which can genuinely be called horrific), and the strictly literal interpretation of vampire lore provides plenty of laughs. For instance, if you think about it, people who have been the same age for hundreds of years and can't see themselves in mirrors probably would have dreadful fashion sense, and if you can't enter a building without being formally invited, getting into a nighclub would tend to involve a bizarre conversation with an utterly baffled doorman.

The best thing about this film is that it understands how potentially hilarious it is to portray the everyday lives of people who are essentially very ordinary, but just happen to be murderous supernatural monsters. One vampire in particular is hopelessly inept because he's new to it and wasn't very bright to begin with, and none of them quite know how to cope with the 8,000-year-old ravening utterly inhuman monstrosity in the basement. This is a very funny black comedy that doesn't pull its punches - all the vampires kill humans on a regular basis because that's what vampires do - and at the same time, gets a lot of mileage out of surprising plot-points like the fact that underneath the facade, they're not all that evil, and can't bring themselves to feed on a human who they think is a really nice guy. There's also a lot of comedy that derives from the Dracula-Renfield relationship between vampires and human servants who can go out in the daylight and do things they can't, in return for the promise that one day they'll become vampires and live forever, which is clearly not a thing their masters ever intend to actually do.

This is the funniest and silliest vampire movie since Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Slayers, Or, Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are In My Neck" came out almost 50 years ago - in fact, I'm surprised there were so few references to it, and I kept expecting them to revisit the gag about a vampire being immune to crucifixes because he's Jewish - and you can't help loving jokes like the scene in which vampires who have just discovered the internet get terribly excited about their newfound ability to watch youtube videos of the sun coming up. Daft fun with a knowing take on vampire movie lore, and highly recommended.

This movie should mark the point when we all realized Christopher Nolan wasn't quite as smart as he thinks he is. Earth (but basically America, because in movies this simple-minded nowhere else matters) has been struck by The Blight, a totally unexplained vegetable virus that kills everything humans - well, American humans, anyway - raise as a food crop. The solution? Build top secret spaceships and dive into a mysterious intergalactic wormhole that's recently appeared in the vicinity of Saturn in order to find a new home for humanity among the stars! Because that's got to be easier and less risky than... oh, I dunno, pouring those same quadrillions of bucks into curing the plant plague? Oh, hang about, it's also turning the Earth's atmosphere into pure nitrogen because, hey, Science Factoid: 80% of the Earth's atmosphere is already nitrogen, so that's totally a thing that could happen!

This is basically "2001 - A Space Odyssey" for stupid people. Which might under certain circumstances be a good thing; I mean, nobody worried that "Star Wars" and "Guardians Of The Galaxy" weren't exactly deep. Unfortunately, where they delivered gleefully implausible thrills and spills, this leaden effort spends most of its excessive running-time trudging through predictable emotional conflicts and explaining scientific concepts in an amount of detail which is simultaneously tedious and so over-simplified as to be just plain wrong. I'm one of the tiny minority of viewers who knew what Christopher Nolan meant when he had one character casually refer to something called "bulk", therefore I know "bulk" is not a magic thing which makes anything at all happen because the script says so. I also understand Einstein's theories of relativity (I seriously doubt that Mr Nolan knew there was more than one) sufficiently well to know why rambling on about them wrongly for ages fails to make the story any more realistic.

This is a classic example of science being used to justify wooly happy-clappy nonsense the director happens to like, but misused to the point where it gets in the way of what drama there is, which has to sit around twiddling its thumbs for half an hour while Science is dragged in to explain why something vaguely interesting is about to happen for a few minutes, accompanied by loud noises to wake up those audience members who have understandably nodded off. The number of direct nods to "2001 - A Space Odyssey" make it absolutely blatant that Christopher Nolan thought he was making the same film all over again, only better, because everything is explained in excruciating detail for the benefit of dullards. Chris old chum, the upper limit of your intellect is making Batman movies in which Batman hits people for reasons that are more complex than usual, so stick to what you're good at. A few more films like this and you'll be the next Michael Cimino. Remember him? Yeah, exactly...

I gave it two stars because I think Christopher Nolan really was trying his best, and sometimes it looks good. For an infinitely better treatment of the topic of intergalactic boredom that's genuinely entertaining, see John Carpenter's "Dark Star", which must have cost about a thousandth as much. For the same thing all over again, see Christopher Nolan's next movie, because feeble echoes of motifs he's already used pop up throughout this one. And isn't it about time they passed a law stating that if treacly human (or indeed robot) emotions override the laws of physics in a sci-fi movie, you're not allowed to call it "science fiction" any more?

This film has gotten some pretty good reviews, and I have to admit that, taken as a dumb and largely gore-free psycho killer thriller, it passes the time well enough. The trouble is, it's a little bit too dumb to really work. The tone switches more or less randomly between genuine tension and black comedy, especially in the latter stages, meaning that the comedy isn't all that funny, and the tense moments are compromised because you don't take them seriously. And of course, it's no spoiler to reveal that most of the characters who die are so obviously doomed from the first second they appear on screen and reveal themselves to be stupid, promiscuous, immoral, or just plain annoying that they might as well be wearing red Star Trek shirts.

It would be entirely forgettable were it not for the performance of Dan Stevens as the central character. His ability to portray the same person as both glibly charming and horribly threatening, and to switch between the two effortlessly with no warning at all, makes him very watchable indeed. He's definitely somebody to keep an eye on, and given his acting ability, combined with good looks and a ripped physique, I think we'll be seeing him in a mega-budget superhero movie at some point. Maybe he's even got his eye on Bond or Batman, though I don't think he's quite that good. Then again, he's a young actor who obviously needs more experience and better scripts to reveal what he's truly capable of, so who knows?

Unfortunately, good though Dan Stevens is, the plot is so bonkers that I kept finding myself jerked out of the story by thoughts such as: "Wouldn't elite special forces personnel know that if you're trying to shoot a man inside a flimsy wooden building with automatic weapons, keeping your gun level so that all the bullets perforate the building in a perfectly straight line at waist height won't kill anyone who has the sense not to stand up?" Or: "If this person is so pathologically determined to conceal his identity that he murders anyone who knows who he really is, how come he uses his real name throughout the movie, and goes out of his way to connect himself with the relatives of a dead man linked to all the stuff he's trying to hide, even though he has no apparent motive whatsoever to do this?"

So basically this is a low-budget B-list action thriller that requires you to switch off your brain, and has loads of complicated backstory that's glossed over in a sentence or two because they can't afford to show you any of it, made a little bit special by one very good performance. And if the ending doesn't make you facepalm, you're not sentient.

Once upon a time, the BBC's approach to providing intelligent, high-quality drama for adults was to make quite a lot of it, rather than assuming that absolutely everybody would watch "Doctor Who" if they turned it into a slightly gay soap-opera. Which is why, way back in 1979, a fair bit of our license fee was spent on this superb adaptation of a thoughtful, downbeat cold war novel, instead of something in which good-looking people took their clothes off a lot that they could hopefully sell to America.

James Bond this ain't! And, strangely enough, it bears surprisingly little resemblance to the recent movie of the same name, which seems to have picked up on the fact that a few decades ago people smoked like chimneys, and not much else. Alec Guinness as George Smiley is no Gary Oldman, and I mean that as a compliment. This Smiley is a very flawed man whose innate goodness is almost crushed under the burden of using human beings as pawns in a giant game of chess where the stakes are so high that sometimes the players have to try and forget that they're manipulating real people in terrible ways. Other characters are even more damaged, notably one man who very early in the story suffers the horrific consequences of being a game-piece at the wrong end of a bad move.

Overall this is an astonishing tour de force of character acting, and one of the best things the BBC ever did. Since it's more than twice as long as the movie, we really get to know everybody, and even minor characters have real personalities. Far more than the movie, this serial brings home the small-scale human consequences of international power-games in which little people don't matter. You really get the feeling that every one of the characters thinks about this a great deal. Some cope by retreating into cynicism, and many have terrible stress-induced traits like alcoholism, chain-smoking, or borderline insanity. The best of them, such as Smiley, try to remember why it is that they have to do these dreadful things. And the worst? They're the true idealists who have no doubts whatsoever, because men with that kind of conviction will, as we find out, do absolutely anything to anyone.

Smiley may be a good man, but Alec Guinness triumphantly succeeds in conveying that he has repressed his emotional side in order to be able to do what he must, with severe personal consequences. His conscience is still very much alive, and he'll hate himself for giving an order that causes very bad things to happen to someone, but if the consequences of not giving it are even worse, he'll do it. It's said that the test of whether or not an actor makes a good James Bond is if you believe he'd kill you. George Smiley's no man of action, but behind his meek exterior is a razor-sharp mind backed up by the kind of willpower you need if sometimes you have to give the order to have people murdered. Do you believe that Gary Oldman's Smiley would have you assassinated (or worse) for the greater good? I don't, but I have no doubt whatsoever that the Alec Guinness version would. Though of course he'd feel terrible about it.

Very highly recommended indeed, if you like the kind of thriller where you need to pay attention to the intricacies of the plot, and there aren't any car-chases. By the way, if you enjoy this enough to fancy watching the sequel "Smiley's People", skip the bonus feature about John Le Carré on Disc 2, which contains major spoilers. It's rather dull anyway.

Unfortunately I didn't read the comments by the other reviewers before renting this. Hey, it's 80 minutes of Pete & Dud live, right? Also, almost all the people who previously watched it must have given it 4 and 5-star reviews for some inexplicable reason. So what could go wrong?

An 80-minute feature consisting of 51 minutes of pointless, boring introduction followed by 29 minutes of Pete & Dud footage, that's what! If you reckon you'd enjoy watching nearly an hour of a gaggle of celebrities - and by "celebrities" I mean Neil Innes, Alexi Sayle, and a bunch of D-list comedians I'd never even heard of - saying over and over again that Pete & Dud were really, really funny, accompanied by tiny snippets from sketches that might indeed be hilarious if you could watch them all the way through, you're gonna love this!

The production is horribly cheap on every level. The archive clips - every single second of them - have a distracting copyright notice across the top of the screen, and the Alexi Sayle interview seems to have been shot on a video camera that had something seriously wrong with it. The "celebrities" frequently misquote the sketches they're supposed to be in awe of, and having completely run out of things to say, several of them end up rambling on about how some of Pete & Dud's material was rubbish and they hate it. Even the "Saturday Night Live" footage isn't that great, being a mixture of slightly tired performances of over-familiar material such as the one-legged Tarzan sketch, and below-par new stuff aimed at the American market.

There are other compilations of archive footage available that consist entirely, or at least mostly, of actual performances by the two men you're interested in. For instance, the "Not Only But Also" DVD features most of the sketches this disc samples, and you get to watch them in their entirety. Even those tribute compilations in which celebrity talking heads pop up to eulogize Pete & Dud prove their point by showing you whole sketches, not 10-second mini-clips because that was all they could afford the rights to. Watch any of them rather than this cheap, cynical rip-off. Even "The Hound Of The Baskervilles" is better, because at least the claim on the DVD cover that Pete & Dud feature prominently throughout the movie isn't a lie.

This isn't quite where it all started - that would be "On The Hour" on BBC Radio 4 in 1991 - but it's where it all really started. Here we have the entire, sadly brief run of the chat show hosted by Norwich's most celebrated son (except possibly Bernard Matthews).

Alan Partridge is one of the all-time great British comic characters, easily ranking alongside Basil Fawlty, whom he somewhat resembles, since they're both arrogant self-centered fools too stupid to know how terrible they are at their chosen professions, but just smart enough to know when things are spiraling out of control, though of course they're far too pig-headed to admit it until it's too late. And they're both, underneath all the bluster, desperately insecure.

The big difference between them is that Alan Partridge is still with us as an ongoing character 24 years after his debut, so it's fascinating to look back at his one brief moment of glory in the light of how he's since developed. And it's all there right from the start. Watching his doomed attempts to cope with his guests, some of whom would have been problematic even for a good chat-show host, is comedy of embarrassment at its finest. And, appalling though he is, he's naïve enough that it's hard to dislike him, inexplicably mired as he is in the early seventies, just after Abba and just before punk.

He's the unpopular kid at school who desperately wanted to be noticeable and attractive and above all, liked, and 30 years on, still can't manage any of those things, so you feel his pain when you find out that he still hurts over the time the school bully stole the rather pathetic gift he got for his 10th birthday, or when it turns out that his entire supporting cast and crew had a great night out to which they deliberately didn't invite him, or when he endures the ultimate humiliation of having to announce on his final show that next week it'll be replaced by something the BBC thinks will get a bigger audience, despite being aimed exclusively at lesbians.

So instead of the one-note obnoxious boor a lesser actor would have made of him, Alan Partridge is just tragic enough to make us care about him without taking the edge off the humor resulting from his dreadful behavior towards his guests. And he's not always entirely in the wrong. Some of his guests are far worse than he is, and they deserve all they get. Once in a while, he even manages to be absolutely right, usually while wearing an expression of stunned incredulity that somebody this pretentious and/or horrible actually exists.

This is comedy writing and acting at its finest, and explains why, 18 years after this series was made, an entirely fictional chat show host was still popular enough to spin off a feature film that did rather well. If you liked the more recent Alan Partridge material, go back to his roots and see him the way he wanted you to see him. You'll also discover exactly why we're still waiting for the BBC to give him another chance, and the best he can do in the meantime is Radio North Norwich, gun-sieges and all. Highly recommended for fans of great character comedy and sheer silliness.

This is a "cult" movie. In other words, the violence is nastier than you'd expect from a mainstream movie made in 1973, and the budget correspondingly lower. Unfortunately it isn't very good.

The basic plot is that the hero, a cop so ruthless that he guns down criminals who are trying to surrender because life imprisonment's too good for them, wants to avenge another cop who died at a very early stage in the film, therefore he goes undercover as a pimp, and proceeds to behave so ultra-violently that the gang his late buddy was trying to track down will doubtless hire him for their next caper. Or something along those lines, anyway. Even for an Italian exploitation film, the English dubbing's atrocious, and clearly not written by somebody whose first language was English, so it's sometimes hard to tell exactly why people do things. Though I suspect it wouldn't make much more sense in Italian. Amazingly, this loopy scheme works! Though not before our... er... hero?? has arranged a vacancy for himself by cunningly sabotaging a bank raid, resulting in the deaths of several people, only some of whom were criminals as opposed to innocent passers-by.

Along the way we get a few frantic but under-populated car-chases (by the way, weren't early seventies Italian cars terrible?) in which the feat of driving at speed through a pile of burning cardboard boxes is supposed to be so impressive that we see it from several different angles in slow motion, and no matter how badly they crash, cars don't explode into fireballs like they're supposed to because the budget didn't run to it. Also, this is an Italian exploitation movie with no nudity whatsoever, despite featuring a palatial mansion filled with dozens of hippies indulging in a 24/7 orgy of sex and drugs. Which, in case you think that sounds interesting, resembles a refugee camp during an outbreak of sleeping sickness, a wasted opportunity that would have had Roger Corman spinning in his grave, had he been dead. As for the violence, it's no more excessive than you'd get in the average spaghetti western, and there isn't really a lot of it. There is, however, quite a lot of poorly dubbed Very Strong Language - always a cheap way to get an 18 certificate.

The biggest problem, though, is the hero. Luc Merenda is no Clint Eastwood, and that's putting it mildly! At absolutely no point did I care about him in the slightest, because when he's not smirking annoyingly, which he does most of the time, he doesn't really seem to have any emotions at all. Since he's the worst cop ever, allowing numerous people to die, some of whom are entirely innocent, just to avenge some other cop who was in the movie for about a minute, a wee bit of acting would help considerably, if only he could do it. But alas, he can't. Striking cheekbones though. However, there's nobody else in the movie you care about either, apart from a few minor villains so horrendous that you pay attention to them because you want them to die.

The twist ending is, I suppose, quite original, in that it isn't directly lifted from every other gritty thriller made just before this one, and it's very fashionable in terms of what radical young film-goers wanted to see back them (and maybe still do), but it needs more than a surprise baddie going all Bond Villain to save this weak effort. Especially as the criminal mastermind whose grandiose (and ludicrous) plans are revealed at a very late stage is trying to achieve them with the aid of a small gang of incompetent hippies, uncontrollable psychopaths, and of course undercover cops he hired by mistake. You have to wonder how they ever got to be a serious problem in the first place.

Sergio Corbucci was one of the masters of the spaghetti western, second only to Sergio Leone. Unfortunately, this isn't one of his most inspired films - indeed, he made it at a time when he was still learning his trade. The plot is extremely formulaic. It hardly constitutes a spoiler to say that the hero is a super-competent revenge-seeking man of few words who, in order to make the film last long enough to qualify as a feature, is captured by the baddies halfway through because he's unwilling to let innocents die instead of him, and sadistically beaten to a pulp, but gets better and kills all the remaining villains, because that's the plot of just about every spaghetti western ever made.

It's nice to see a Native American avenging the massacre of his own people instead of being the white hero's sidekick, and Burt Reynolds looks surprisingly convincing in the role, probably because he's part-Cherokee, but I got the feeling his heart wasn't quite in it, and neither was anybody else's (Reynolds himself considers this his worst film, but seeing as he's worked for Uwe Boll, that's a bit harsh!). Corbucci's most famous movie, "Django", carries a similar anti-racist message, but allowing a Navajo to be the hero of the film and save the white folks who doubted him, and make a brief "I'm more American than you are" speech while he's at it, is neither as radical nor as entertaining as Django mowing down the massed ranks of the KKK with a machine-gun!

As for everybody else, characterization is minimal at best, and whenever somebody threatens to become interesting, they're either forgotten about or killed. In particular, the embittered half-breed villain's relationship with his conspicuously pure white and apparently less villainous half-brother keeps looking as though it's a major plot-point without ever really becoming one. And although there's a fair bit of action and some quite bloody violence, by Corbucci's standards, it's mostly both a bit tame and conspicuously low budget - watch out for the most underwhelming train-crash ever! Though oddly enough, the extreme youth and callow incompetence of the soldiers guarding the train appears to have been directly lifted by Sam Peckinpah in "The Wild Bunch".

I want to give this film 2½ stars but that's not an option, so I'm going to have to give it 2, because it's just not that good. Corbucci completists may appreciate it, but he made several vastly superior films, and I've yet to see one which is worse (though admittedly I'm not familiar with "Goliath and the Vampires"). And it has to be said that Burt Reynolds seems to get a lot more into his role whenever he has to be very athletic while keeping his face turned away from the camera, so that's presumably his stunt-double. As for Fernando Rey, the only other actor in this film whom you may have heard of, he's utterly wasted as a priest who has nothing to do with anything. Still, it passes the time.

First there was "The Young Ones", and pretty much everyone agreed that it was hilarious. It certainly made stars out of its main cast members, with the exception of Christopher Ryan, very much the Ringo of the quartet. After two series, having run out of ideas, the creative team pulled the plug. Then, a few years later, exactly the same people (minus Christopher Ryan) made "Filthy, Rich and Catflap", a sitcom about not dissimilar but somewhat older men behaving equally badly. It lasted for one series, sank without trace, and was sort-of resurrected as "Bottom", now minus Nigel Planer (but with Christopher Ryan, sometimes), which ran for three series and multiple stage-shows, and fully established the adversarial relationship between the fictional alter egos of Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson.

So - same creative team, same type of humor, pretty much the same characters. Why, out of these three shows, is "Filthy, Rich and Catflap" the one that didn't work and is almost entirely forgotten? Perhaps because it's a missing link like the poor old archaeopteryx, a feathered lizard that had to exist in order for birds to come about, but probably couldn't fly worth a damn.

The full-on Mayall/Endmondson ultra-violent relationship hasn't fully evolved yet; there's the odd bit of "Bottom"-style mayhem, such as Mayall getting an axe embedded in his groin, but it's mostly verbal bickering, and seems oddly lackluster. The constant showbiz slang, which basically amounts to leaving the ends off words, isn't funny at all, but is very frequently used in place of proper jokes. And some of those jokes are both poor and repetitive. For instance, every single time the doorbell rings throughout the series, which is often, because it supposedly sounds like a fart (though in fact it doesn't), everybody fans their nose, including the person who rang it. How we laughed!

The political and social humor is leaden in the extreme; they might as well have held up a placard every 10 minutes saying: "The police are fascists, the Tories are Nazis, and we hate Thatcher" - it's about as funny as the satire we're treated to. Ralph Filthy, the revolting, unashamedly degenerate theatrical agent played by Nigel Planer, is potentially the most interesting of the three, but, despite getting top billing, is on screen much less than the other two, implying that Planer was juggling two jobs and was only there half the time. And trying to lampshade abysmal jokes by having the characters repeatedly turn to the camera and admit the show isn't funny doesn't make it so. Still, if you love "Bottom" so much that you think you'd enjoy a (if you'll pardon the expression) half-assed version of it, you might get something out of this. And it does provide an early bit of proof that, if you catch him in a good mood, Stephen Fry will agree to be in absolutely anything before reading the script.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed revisiting Louis Theroux after all these years. This particular collection focuses heavily on people with odd sex-lives that, since the internet took over the world, seem a bit tame, racists whose horrendous views are just plain depressing, and conspiracy theorists whose odd ideas are nowadays downright commonplace next to your typical internet kook who calls everybody else "sheeple". As for the celebrities he spends time with, we're mostly talking about B-listers who have either lost it or never had it, and think that this unwitting fool will provide them with free publicity.

As for how foolish Louis Theroux really is, that's a hard question to answer. It's always been his trademark that he pretends to be the naive person on the planet, thus tempting his interviewees to say more to him than they really meant to. Yet he goes very easy indeed on Neil Hamilton, a corrupt MP who took bribes, was the very last UK politician to support leaded petrol because money was more important than all that health-scare nonsense, and has repeatedly endorsed borderline or actual Fascist political causes, including directly supporting Mussolini's granddaughter's ultra-right-wing ambition. And even the notorious Jimmy Saville episode ends with Louis admitting that he still quite likes him.

It should be noted that, although the episode with Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine became famous because of the incredibly strange and utterly fake sexual assault allegations that coincidentally surfaced while he was in their company, it would have been, as he himself admits, probably too dull to broadcast if their shamelessly smug self-promotion hadn't been spiced up by this dramatic turn of events. You'd think he might have found excuses to raise the tension just a little bit by making a few Fascist connections, as he did with many people stupider and less media-savvy than the Hamiltons. But of course, they weren't in a position to scupper the entire episode by refusing to cooperate any further, so he could be a little tougher on the nobodies, a fault apparent in almost all of his "hanging out with a celebrity he pretends to like" documentaries.

By far the most famous program Louis Theroux ever made (and by far the most fascinating thing in this collection) is his documentary on Jimmy Saville. It's clear from the get-go that there's something horribly wrong with the man, and his utter inability to empathize with anybody at all, his honest belief that admitting his primary motive for charity work was to make people think he was wonderful didn't devalue it, his repeated claims that he could get away with anything because he was "the Godfather", and the moment when he admits on camera that he has to tell lies to the media about his feelings concerning children to avoid accusations of molesting them (amongst many other things) make it very plain that we're looking at a clinical psychopath. Yet Louis never quite seems to get it. Of course, he may have been faking stupidity in order to encourage other equally vile people to expose themselves on his show. But if that's true, isn't that ever almost as tacky and unethical as all the things he claims to be having a go at?

So in the end it's a very mixed bag. Some of it's too dated to be of interest, some of it's just plain mediocre, and some of it's so riveting that it pushes the average score up. But too much of it's overshadowed by the feeling that either the presenter really is an idiot, or, more likely, he's cynically pretending to be one, and avoiding hard questions if they might put off potential interviewees from appearing on future shows, even if that means going far too easy on people ranging from the very dubious to the absolutely inexcusable, unless of course they're expendable nobodies. And that makes me think more of Louis Theroux as an actor, but less of him as a human being.

This low-budget horror movie is unusual in a number of ways from the get-go; it's Australian, which means it's outside the Hollywood mainstream, and the director is female, which is unusual anywhere, especially in the horror genre. Which Jennifer Kent (previously unknown, but destined, judging by this film, to be somewhat better known in years to come) clearly knows and loves. "Cabin In The Woods" was hailed as a triumphantly original horror film because it took all the desperately tired horror clichés and semi-humorously justified them in a parody that liked itself just a little bit too much, and was ultimately cosily self-referential underneath all the gore and CGI. This film is completely off-the-wall. The references are there (some of them in the form of actual movie clips watched by the characters on TV), but they're eclectic to say the least; "Nosferatu" is a major influence, and I'm pretty sure "The Haunting" (the original, not the abominable remake), "The Exorcist", "The Omen", and pretty much anything else involving a haunted house and/or an evil child are in there somewhere. As are early and rather creepy Disney cartoons about the big bad wolf. And I'm pleased to see that Ms. Halt is well aware of Mario Bava.

The two central characters, the surprisingly unglamorous Essie Davis (remember, this isn't Hollywood), and the quite extraordinary Noah Wiseman, who I hope escapes the curse of child actors and has a long and fruitful career ahead of him, are superb as a mother and son who both have major problems of an absolutely believable kind. Apart from Mister Babadook, of course... Who is the most original monster we've seen in a very, very long time. Not that we see much of him - a clever director (and we definitely have one here) knows that hiding your monster as much as possible makes him scarier. But Ms Kent really shows how smart she is by understanding that, even in the era of CGI, not only is less more when it comes to being scary, but if you clearly establish your monster as a stylized creature that might have sprung from an exceptionally ill-advised children's storybook, the kind of CGI you can afford for a low-budget film will work perfectly if you know what you're doing. Which, fortunately, she does.

As horror films go, this one has extraordinarily little gore. What it has is proper edge-of-seat scariness. This film scared me, and not once did it do so with the kind of cheap jump-cut that automatically gives us a fright in the same way that we'll jump if somebody says "Boo!" And it's startlingly original. Your perception of exactly who or what the monster is changes repeatedly throughout the film, largely due to the performances of the two leading actors, and I defy anybody to say "I knew it!" when they find out how it all ends. No spoilers - it suffices to say that it's not how you expected. Especially if you're going by the rules of formulaic Hollywood slasher movies. And don't bother flipping those rules on their heads either - this movie is too original to attempt the "exactly the opposite of what you expected" gambit and hope you'll applaud such a daring conception. Very original indeed, with characters you actually believe in and care about. And it certainly creeped the hell out of me! What more can you possibly want from a horror film? If you're a gorehound, forget it. Otherwise, highly recommended.

Remember when the BBC not only wanted to make truly classy stuff, but actually had a legal obligation to? No, probably not. It was a long time ago (and quite possibly in a galaxy far, far away). So you might want to give this a look. It's the epic tale of a man whose slight physical disabilities caused everyone to think he was a half-wit, thus allowing him to stand on the sidelines while the mightiest empire the world had ever known almost self-destructed due to to being run by a clan of privileged monsters who, to say the very least, were mad, bad, and dangerous to know, until he finally became Emperor because the rest of them had wiped each other out. So basically, a thinking person's Game Of Thrones.

In modern terms, this is no epic. In 1976, CGI didn't exist, and the BBC have never had Hollywood budgets. If a scene calls for our heroes to watch 500 gladiators fighting 1,000 starving lions in front of 50,000 spectators, what you're actually going to see is the main cast in the royal box plus a handful of extras, and it'll all be conveyed by sound-effects and reaction shots. In fact, every second of this was shot in the studios of Television Centre in London. If a battle is crucial to the plot, it's dealt with in the Shakespearean manner - a couple of soldiers come in and tell somebody else what's happening just over there, conveniently off-camera. And so on.

Worth watching anyway? You betcha! In a situation like this, there's absolutely nothing for it but to call upon people who can do a thing called "acting" and tell them to pull all the stops out. And that's exactly what every actor who matters in this story does. Brian Blessed, the patron saint of bearded people who shout a lot, has no beard, and shouts so seldom that, when he does, you remember why he got typecast as a man who's very good at that sort of thing. And the best bit of acting he does is pure stillness - you'll definitely know it when you see it. Everybody else is so good that there are too many actors to single out, but a special mention must go to John Hurt as Caligula. He's over the top in the best possible way, and the sheer horror of trying to stay alive in a regime run by such an absolute madman is very well conveyed. But overall it's an ensemble piece that couldn't work without everybody giving truly heroic performances, especially Derek Jacobi as Claudius, who has to age about 40 years over the course of the story, but does so as best you could possibly expect him to, as do several other of the less doomed cast members.

Of course, most of them are doomed. This series, and the books it's based on, have had a tremendous influence on every subsequent drama ever made that was any good about dangerously influential but lethally disfunctional families. After watching this, you'll understand exactly why Tony Soprano's mother was called Livia. Highly recommended, because they don't make 'em like this any more. But they should!

Not everyone will like this film, but nobody can deny that it makes a change from the usual formulaic Hollywood fare - it's nice to see a movie about a mysterious man in a mask who isn't a superhero for a change (though if he was, he'd definitely have the most eye-catching but least practical mask of the lot, unless they ever get around to making that Flaming Carrot movie).

In case you're wondering, this is NOT the Frank Sidebottom story, despite being co-written by Jon Ronson, the keyboard player in the Frank Sidebottom Big Band, even though it's about a very eccentric musician called Frank who wears an almost identical outsize fake head. This Frank is basically a cross between Captain Beefheart - the album the band spend half the film trying to make, and the strange, obsessive conditions under which they make it, are obviously meant to remind us of "Trout Mask Replica" - and the outsider musician Daniel Johnson; he's a very sick man who defeats his inner demons - partially, at least - by adopting an absurd persona that makes perfect sense to him, and meticulously creating what he honestly believes to be music expressing his true genius. Of course people laugh at him - who wouldn't? - but they're not meant to.

In many ways, it's a fascinating, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic view of the lives of a band composed of misfits, most of them either probably or definitely mentally ill, doing their own thing and not giving a damn what the world thinks, to the extent of having a name nobody can even pronounce, let alone remember (I certainly can't). Since this is not your standard struggling-rock-band tragicomedy, very little that happens plays out quite how you expect it to, and that's one of its strong points, another being good performances from most of the cast, and a superb one from Michael Fassbender.

Unfortunately it's not perfect. Given the fairly small main cast, it's a pity that some of the characters are so underdeveloped, and I found it hard to believe that these people could live and work together with no other company for a whole year without developing slightly more team spirit, which makes it hard to care whether or not the band breaks up when, as in every movie ever made about a rock band, it seems likely that this may happen. Luckily Fassbender's performance holds it all together - he really is almost unbelievably good, considering what he's wearing on his face. Well worth trying if you want something different.

It's best to know the story of "Hamlet" before you watch this film, since if you don't, you may be confused by the fact that, this being a reimagining of "Hamlet" from the perspectives of two minor characters, the main characters from Shakespeare's play only interact with our two anti-heroes in the few scenes in which they're part of the official version of the play, and since they're not present to witness most of the important events that motivate everyone else, we don't see them either.

On the plus side, if you like intellectual comedy, this is funny in a very clever way, though not exactly laugh-out-loud hilarious, and a young not-yet-A-list Gary Oldman is great fun as the smarter of the pair (even they can't always remember which is which), and makes you wish he'd made more comedies. The somewhat forbidding Tim Roth, however, seems a rather odd bit of casting.

Unfortunately, there are too many scenes that feel exactly like a stage-play made into a film, probably because that's what this is. And letting the author of the play direct the film - it's the only movie Tom Stoppard has directed - wasn't such a great idea, since Stoppard seems to have little grasp of cinematic technique. He doesn't properly appreciate that, while audiences will accept very basic scenery on stage, in a film, it helps if you can really believe that you're in a castle or on a ship. It's a pity the proposed movie directed by John Boorman fell through - I'd love to have seen this done in the style of "Excalibur"!

The basic premise of fictional characters gradually becoming more and more aware that they're helpless to control their destiny, and what's more, there's something badly wrong with reality, is interesting, but visual aspects of this that ought to work very well on film, such as their inability to comprehend scene-changes that suddenly place them in a new location, are handled in an oddly unvisual and rather flat way. Ultimately this is little more than a play with a camera pointed at it. However, it's a very good play if you like that sort of thing. And Gary Oldman's excellent.

In 1978, Paul Morrissey, best known for directing semi-improvised gay arthouse movies and a couple of gory horror spoofs for Andy Warhol, thought he'd try his hand at making something in the style of the Carry On films. It was not a wise move, to put it mildly. As Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore talk in extremely broad and, especially in Dud's case, incredibly annoying accents (Jewish and Welsh respectively). A galaxy of English comedy stars, all at least a decade past their best, struggle gamely with material that's utterly beneath them, but when the comedy highlight of a film involves a chihuahua with an impossibly huge bladder pissing endlessly all over Dudley Moore, that film is in deep, deep trouble.

The DVD contains two versions of the movie, and oddly, the director's cut is, at a very concise 71 minutes, 10 minutes shorter than the theatrical release included in the extras. I had no intention of watching another, longer cut of this howling clunker to see what had been taken out, but it tells you something when the director of an 81-minute film reckons it needs trimming! The short interview with Paul Morrissey also included in the extras doesn't address this point, but he does reveal that Dudley Moore wasn't at all happy with the crudity of the humor, which may explain his terrible performance. Peter Cook seems to be trying even less hard, and many of his contributions to the script are scenes which have nothing to do with the plot, including a completely irrelevant and, in the context of the film, nonsensical reworking of the famous "One Leg Too Few" sketch he wrote in 1960.

These pointless scenes, some of which feature Dud (thankfully giving us a break from that horrible Welsh accent) in drag as Sherlock Holmes' mother, are funnier than anything else in the film, probably because they're the bits where the script had the most input from Peter Cook and the least from Paul Morrissey, but they're nowhere near enough to redeem this gobbler. When a movie opens with the sight of Dudley Moore ironing a pair of soiled underpants in front of some nuns, it's hard to see how it can go downhill from there, but somehow it manages to, culminating in a dinner-party scene where Dud accidentally drinks dog urine before being sprayed with projectile vomit because everything's better with random parodies of "The Exorcist". If you think that sounds hilarious, you might manage to enjoy this so-called comedy, but I doubt it.

By the way, if you're tempted by the fact that in the publicity material Spike Milligan is third-billed, and the artwork on the DVD features his face more prominently than anybody else's, you should know that Spike's in this film for exactly one minute.