Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Once upon a time in a land far, far away from Hollywood, a little-known director made a low-budget mockumentary about a film crew recording the everyday lives of a dysfunctional household of modern-day urban vampires, and it impressed everyone so much that the lucky fellow soon found himself in Hollywood directing a megabudget superhero blockbuster. Of course, I'm talking about Taika Waititi from New Zealand and "What We Do In The Shadows", not Vincent Lannoo from Belgium and "Vampires", because although it was Lannoo who had the idea in the first place, it was Waititi who knew what to do with it so much better that very few people even noticed, let alone cared, that his breakthrough hit was a reboot of an obscure flop made by somebody else only four years previously.

Which in itself tells you a great deal about this film. Waititi understands several key points that Lannoo doesn't grasp at all. Notably that comedy, however black it is, needs to be funny. And the laughs in "Vampires" are few and far between. The idea of a sulky teenage vampire rebelling against her parents by becoming a sort of anti-goth who dresses in pink and wants to be an ordinary mortal is quite a good joke, but unfortunately it's almost the only one in the whole film, just as her pink coffin is used on the DVD packaging to sum up the entire movie because this inanimate object is the funniest thing in it.

These vampires aren't Waititi's lovably inept bumbling bloodsuckers trapped in house-sharing purgatory forever because they can't grow up; they're cynical monsters whose vices include extreme racism, pedophilia, casual murder of children and babies, and all-round sadistic contempt for their victims. We're supposed to be amused by the ex-prostitute whose marginally better new job involves living in the vampires' kitchen and answering to the name of "Meat", a "joke" that outlasts its welcome long before Lannoo tops it with a truly jaw-dropping "meat and vegetables" gag which has to be seen to be believed. Incredibly bad taste is not in itself funny, and making a heavy-handed political point by portraying the social class you hate as literal vampires is nowhere near as ground-breaking as Lannoo obviously thinks it is.

He also fails to grasp that in a comedy, the audience need to like the protagonists on some level, and this lot are simply horrible. Waititi's vampires work as comedy characters because they're irresponsible young men chaotically sharing a house who just happen to be vampires. Lannoo's don't because they're vile inhuman parasites who just happen to be middle-class Belgians. This is an ugly, mean-spirited film that leaves a nasty aftertaste. As for its "message", if you need to watch a movie about white people literally having black people for dinner before it crosses your mind that racism might be wrong, you'll probably side with the vampires.

If you missed this series first time round and don't know what to expect, the first warning sign is that the DVD was released not by Channel 4 Productions but by some obscure company I'd never previously heard of. That's a pretty strong hint that this is an unloved problem child disowned by its creators. Unfortunately it's easy to see why. In 1997 a new series called "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" was an instant massive hit in America, so in 1998 vampires were hot, though of course it would have been stupid for Channel 4 to try and make a British Buffy. Concepts that specific can only work once. So they went for the opposite approach; vampires are real and SAS-style commandos with vampire-specific weaponry controlled by a hush-hush government agency are our secret defenders against the horrific undead threat we don't even know about.

It's a great concept. Unfortunately it's handled astonishingly badly. Vampires allegedly have superhuman speed and strength, but never once in the entire five-hour running-time is this actually shown on screen. Apart from the four main characters, the top-secret anti-vampire agency is so poorly developed that I was never even sure what it was called. Those special-forces soldiers very rarely put in an appearance, and when they do, it's just a bunch of anonymous blokes in balaclavas shouting "Go! Go! Go!" while jumping out of a truck to dispatch some luckless bloodsucker in about five seconds. I never knew vampire-hunting could be this dull.

Even worse, since vampires don't kill or infect their victims except when they want to, for reasons usually involving self-defense, and the script tries to be ambiguous about whether metaphysical evil is involved or they're just people with a really weird disease, it's hard to see why they can't simply be left alone, a point the vampires themselves make repeatedly. Therefore extremely contrived world domination schemes have to be introduced to justify the good guys' ruthlessness, though they hardly need to be, since creatures invisible (including their clothes) to mirrors and all types of camera who can resurrect themselves from piles of dust are so obviously supernatural that they might as well be led by Christopher Lee in an opera cape.

The whole series is hopelessly muddled and cliché-ridden as well as being relentlessly glum and frequently tedious. The characters are cardboard cutouts who never have any fun and don't really seem to like anyone, including each other. Idris Elba in particular, as the white hero's buddy who Political Correctness decrees must be black, seems to know he's been cast purely for his colour in a show that won't get a second series, and he doesn't try very hard to act, or to give the impression that he likes his designated new best friend at all. In fact, he seems to dislike him so much that at one point he's quite keen to shoot him dead.

The uninteresting and often unpleasant cast spend far too much time dwelling on personal problems we don't care about because we don't believe in these people, if we did we wouldn't like them, and most of their angst arises from backstory we never saw that would have been resolved in a second series which didn't happen. The internal logic is so nonsensical that it sometimes manages to contradict itself over the course of one episode. And worst of all, in making it different from Buffy by removing everything that made Buffy daft and therefore fun, the writers forgot to replace those elements with things which were fun in a different way. At least it tried to do something other than jump on current teenage fashion trends and cynically cater to dreary goths, for which I'm giving it more than one star, though if this site's clumsy rating-sytem permitted I'd give it less than two. But in the end I'm afraid its greatest achievement is to show us the boring everyday reality of a supposedly glamorous profession which doesn't actually exist.

There was a time when "Psycho II" was considered to be the ultimate unnecessary sequel, since the original film so obviously didn't need one that it was 23 years before we unexpectedly got one anyway. Well, now we've got another Blade Runner movie a mere 35 years after the first! Was it worth the wait? Frankly, no. The way the critics hailed it as a masterpiece while lacklustre word of mouth among ordinary customers resulted in a very poor performance at the box office tells you most of what you need to know. This is a massive sci-fi epic about a future cop who hunts superpowered killer androids, and yet somehow it manages to be boring. Even Ridley Scott said he would have cut half an hour, and he was the executive producer! Though since Sir Ridley got the same credit on "Mindhorn", that doesn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with the actual making of the movie.

The hopelessly muddled plot is more concerned with mechanically ticking nod-to-the-previous-film boxes in trivial ways (the most ironic of which is a pointless cameo by a character from "Blade Runner" who is now in a retirement home) than either making any kind of sense or capturing the spirit of the first movie, which despite appearances wasn't really an effects-driven blockbuster at all. Like the original "Star Wars", one of its greatest strengths was the way the characters allowed the fascinatingly bizarre world they inhabited to unfold around them without constantly stopping to look at it because to them it was all quite ordinary. The true heart of the film was its hero's gradual realisation that the monsters he mercilessly "retired" had far more humanity than he'd been led to believe, while maybe he himself had less.

You'll see very little of that here. Ryan Gosling's nameless cliché knows all along he's a replicant, though it appears that, as in the Alien franchise, the over-emotional earlier models have been replaced by much more reliable and therefore much less interesting androids who behave themselves like good little toy soldiers should. Rutger Hauer's demonic yet ultimately sympathetic Roy Batty, the true heart and soul of the first movie, has no worthy successor. The dull protagonist mostly expresses what few emotions he has through a time-wasting relationship with his holographic AI "girlfriend", who is blatantly included purely because the tyranny of political correctness has made Strong Wimmin compulsory, so they can only get away with having a Girly Girl in the film by making her even less real than everybody else in a movie about androids. The ultra-violent female Roy Batty substitute makes even less impression than the boring hero. As for Harrison Ford, during his few scenes he looks like someone who didn't want to do it but was beaten into submission with a huge cheque. And Jared Leto's barking mad baddie is on screen for about five minutes, during which he does dreadful things for no reason at all in case we hadn't caught on that the guy who owns The Big Corporation is evil like he always is.

And so on. With characters this uninteresting, nearly every scene ends up being stolen by the scenery. Which it has to be said is magnificent, and that's why I gave the film more than one star. But without larger-than-life characters like Batty and Pris to inhabit this twisted wonderland, it never comes to life the way it should. This is a beautifully gift-wrapped box of nothing that doesn't feel as though it takes place in the same world as "Blade Runner", and doesn't make us care one tenth as much about its protagonists. Even the handful of questions we were left with way back in 1982 aren't fully answered. Instead, we get a whole new raft of unresolved plot-threads to be explored in an ongoing franchise which, since this movie lost $80m, presumably won't happen. Oh well, maybe "Blade Runner III" will get it right. If they stick to their current schedule, we'll find out in 2052.

It's nice to finally know for certain that on this site the word "classic" means nothing at all, unless perhaps it's a cryptic warning that the film is the exact opposite of a classic, but they can't tell you that because it might put you off renting it. If you have good eyesight, you may already have noticed that its own DVD cover describes it as "the Plan 9 From Outer Space of British pop movies", but even that's being too kind, because "Plan 9" is fun in a goofy kind of way, whereas this is just painful. A more accurate comparison would be with "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians". Or something Ken Russell might have made for the Children's Film Foundation if he'd been allowed to direct movies when he was twelve.

It actually begins very promisingly, with an incredibly strange song about choc-ices manically belted out by a barely recognisable electronically tweaked Lulu while grinning soft toys randomly jiggle about, as if we're going to be treated to a psychedelic parody of the Teletubbies three decades before they were invented. Or something equally nuts. Then, about two minutes in, the credits end and we're past the bit worth watching. Well, to be fair, a few of the musical numbers are quite good. But no better than what you'd find on any compilation album of sixties obscurities. And obscurities they are. You may have heard of Lulu, and Ginger Baker who would later be one-third of Cream is featured in the only musical number other than the title track that really gets your attention, in which no less than nine drummers all try to outdo each other. But the passage of time has been less kind to the likes of Ray Lewis and the Trekkers. Though Muppet fans may appreciate a rare glimpse of drummer Ronnie Verrell before he was Animal.

After those crazy credits, we find ourselves on a ramshackle planet represented by the first of many small, cheap sets that would have been just about acceptable in a seventies "Doctor Who" episode, and meet Wilco Roger, a bumbling extraterrestrial played astonishingly badly by Kenneth Connor, one of several second-string Carry On regulars who serve no purpose other than to pad out the cast of young musicians who can't act with middle-aged actors the audience would have heard of, thus hopefully fooling them into thinking they were watching a competently made film. Connor and the other sitcom veterans look genuinely embarrassed to be there. They also appear to think the movie is aimed at very small children. Anyhow, this twerp has to reconcile warring tribes of third-rate rockers and fifth-rate crooners by bringing about a romance between two tenth-rate actors, and...

Well, you get the general idea. This might work as a late-night movie if you're of student age, at least half-drunk and/or stoned, and there are several of you egging each other on to watch it ironically, but apart from not all the music being entirely bad (though the sugary ballads that comprise half the soundtrack are truly abysmal), the only thing it's really got going for it is that incredible opening number, which you can watch on YouTube and save 85 minutes that would have been better spent doing just about anything else. Oh, and the gonks? The briefly fashionable cuddly toys are shoehorned into the film in a woefully misguided attempt to seem "with it" by a plot device whereby if Wilco Roger can't end the musical hostilities between Beatland and Ballad Isle, he'll be exiled to Planet Gonk. Which would apparently be a fate worse than appearing in this film. The mind boggles...

Well, this one has certainly polarised the reviewers! Personally I agree with the "emperor's new clothes" viewpoint; there's almost nothing to this film, but the gaping void at its heart is hidden behind a smokescreen of pretension and deliberate obscurity. Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first. According to this movie, when you die you become a small child's idea of a ghost, as in somebody draped in a sheet with eyeholes. And it's literally a sheet; the ghost next door, who presumably couldn't find a plain white one, is gaily decorated with pink flowers. Why? Because it's The Gimmick. An idea like this might be a sound basis for a ten-minute short made to pass a film school exam, but a cinematic feature? Not so much!

To stretch what little plot there is to feature length, almost everything that happens takes far, far too long. The ridiculously extended pie-eating sequence stands out (I hope for the actress's sake they got that in one take!), but throughout there are scenes where something time-consuming occurs for no good reason. Near the beginning, the leading lady drags a trunk from the house to the dustbin. It's very heavy so this takes her a long time. Since I knew her boyfriend was going to die (the clue's in the title) and you'd think he'd help the poor girl shift something she's only just strong enough to move, I assumed from the way the camera was dwelling on this as if it was hugely important that his body was in the trunk, which would provide a logical reason for him to haunt her. Nope. We never do find out what's in the trunk, because it doesn't matter in the slightest. She's just putting out the trash.

The whole film's like that. The almost completely passive ghost moves around slowly or stands perfectly still watching life continue without him. He can't speak, and although he does sometimes interact with solid objects, it happens so rarely and inconsistently that it comes across as though his poltergeist powers are triggered by hatred of Mexicans. I suspect that oddly out-of-character episode was included purely to allow them to make a deceptively action-packed trailer. Apart from this, hardly anything happens, and when it does it's often baffling. For example, suddenly the ghost can time-travel. Why? Search me! But it's incomprehensible so it must be Art.

The central character is faceless, voiceless, mostly powerless, often motionless, and for three-quarters of his screen-time totally unidentifiable as Casey Affleck, inevitably raising doubts in the viewer's mind as to whether it's really him because there's nothing remotely interesting happening on screen to distract us. At one point the late Mr. Affleck (or whoever that is under the sheet) watches paint dry, the only time I can remember seeing this literally happen in a movie. In fact, I'm not sure the word "movie" is strictly accurate, since it's more of a still life. Or possibly, given our hero's lack of metabolic processes, a still death? Whatever. As the old saying puts it, you're a long time dead. This film certainly conveys the tedium of being a mute intangible wisp with a bag on your head forever, but I don't think I really needed or wanted to know that. Frankly, if they'd left out the ghost entirely and simply shown the nameless guy's nameless girl gradually getting over his death, intercut with lengthy shots of his grave looking more and more neglected, it would have been equally meaningful and only slightly less entertaining.

Yes, it's another of those films described as a "classic" because it's old, obscure, a bit rubbish, and round here they think that's what "classic" means! In the post-war years, Tod Slaughter's Victorian histrionics seemed even more out of date than in truth they always had been, and the handful of extremely low-budget films he made failed to revive his career. This very low-budget effort was one of his last movies, and he looks both old and tired, with less of his trademark overacted villainy on display than usual.

Perhaps it's because he realised the futility of near-as-dammit remaking "The Body Snatcher", which came out only four years earlier and starred Boris Karloff, whose mighty shoes he was never going to fill. Not that he tries to, since this semi-historical tale of the exploits of Burke and Hare with the names of the characters ever so slightly changed for legal reasons portrays William Hart/Hare as the dim-witted Irish thug he really was, as opposed to Karloff's almost supernaturally malevolent serial killer. Which is a problem, because Slaughter can't really do an Irish accent. Though at least he attempts one, unlike some of the "Scottish" characters.

Obviously filmed for peanuts, with a few tiny sets representing the whole of Edinburgh, the horror is only present in homeopathic quantities. Hart and his even stupider partner Moore commit a grand total of three murders, one of them entirely offscreen, though it's mentioned in passing that they've killed a dozen other people prior to the events we actually see. Which would result in this film being about ten minutes long if it wasn't heavily padded with bits of business that think they're funny. In addition to the wacky antics of the bumbling baddies the movie is supposed to be all about, Daft Jamie, a mentally retarded man with a very music-hall version of learning difficulties, gets more screen-time than William Hart!

The most interesting thing about the film is that it was written by its assistant director John Gilling, who went on to write and direct a number of movies for Hammer, including "The Flesh And The Fiends", a far less comedic remake of this film with Donald Pleasance replacing Tod Slaughter and doing a much better job. It's hard to dislike this odd little picture because, like a lot of Tod Slaughter's movies, it's clearly doing its best despite both its plot and its star being at least 20 years out of date, and having a budget even smaller than its modest ambitions. But there's very little substance of any kind to it, unless you're a big fan of sub-Goon Show jokes about the mentally disabled, and the once-formidable Mr. Slaughter looks as though he knows he's past it but he needs the money. I'm giving it two stars only because this site's clumsy rating system doesn't allow one and a half.

I was surprised to see this series listed here, because I thought that, as with so many of their early shows, the BBC had lost it forever. So before renting it I checked, and I was right. Out of six episodes, only the first two escaped deletion, so one-third of the story is what you'll get if you rent this! The General Info page gives no indication the serial is incomplete, but if you look at the very bottom of the DVD page, you'll notice it mentions that the DVD extras include the scripts of the four lost episodes.

Alternatively, you could rent the Hammer movie version. It's seriously flawed by the hideous miscasting of Brian Donlevy as the hero because they thought they needed an American star to boost overseas sales, but is otherwise excellent, and it doesn't have two-thirds of the story missing. On a happier note, the BBC managed not to destroy the second and third Quatermass serials, so if you rent those you'll get the whole thing. Anyway, since the rental company didn't see fit to tell you that more then half of what you were hoping to watch isn't on the disc because it doesn't exist, I thought maybe I should.

Yes, it's another "classic" horror film, in that very special sense of the word "classic" they use around here meaning the exact opposite of what you, me, and the Oxford English Dictionary think it means! The plot concerns the usual gaggle of cardboard stereotypes getting into trouble in an isolated place, as usual, and being killed one by one until, as usual, only the traumatised Final Girl lives to tell the tale. That's not a spoiler, since the rest of the characters are so expendable that the film begins with Final Girl's rescue in circumstances that obviously mean no-one else made it, and their fate is revealed in flashback. And a laughably avoidable fate it turns out to be! From the moment early on when the captain throws the ship's radio overboard for no reason at all, it's obvious that these bickering nincompoops are their own worst enemies.

Which indeed turns out to be the case. Their undead Nazi adversaries may be unable to drown, but apart from that they don't seem to have any special powers, they're slow and stupid, they hate sunlight, and there appear to be only six of them. If our heroes hadn't been so good at repeatedly foiling their own attempts to escape, the soggy stormtroopers wouldn't have posed much of a threat. On the plus side, the monster makeup is effective, and the sight of the zombies' expressionless goggled faces rising from beneath the waves is genuinely nightmarish. Well, it is the first time you see it. And maybe the second time. The third, fourth, fifteenth times, not so much. Trouble is, that rising-creepily-from-the-water schtick is all they've got. Otherwise it's just a bunch of terrified tourists in a derelict building being menaced by waterlogged morons.

Brooke Adams gives a more or less competent performance as the least annoying piece of zombie fodder, but she isn't required to do much more than wear a bikini and look scared. Ultra-prolific B, C, and Z-movie veteran John Carradine does his scrawny, overacted best to add a touch of class, but you know an actor like him who's been in films you've actually heard of must have cost too much to be on set for more than a day or two, and sure enough, his character doesn't last long. Top-billed Peter Cushing, who really could act and must have cost a lot more than John Carradine, is on screen for even less time, in the thankless rôle of a Nazi Robinson Crusoe, whose sole function of explaining why the lagoon's full of pasty-faced ghouls in SS uniforms isn't strictly necessary, since the opening narration's done it already. It's one of the very few occasions when Cushing's professionalism falters and you can sense how little enthusiasm he has for the job, but you can't blame him.

This film is very cheap indeed, the characters are dull and annoying, and the action, what there is of it, is clumsy and repetitive. It's also probably the least gory modern zombie movie ever made, since the zombies don't eat their victims and kill them by drowning. The nastiest injury in the whole film has nothing to do with zombies - it's caused by a sea-urchin! Seriously, if you can't afford gore effects, why would you make a zombie movie? Maybe they underestimated the cost of hiring Peter Cushing for the afternoon and had to take it out of the blood budget. If you spend a couple of minutes right now watching the trailer on YouTube, you really have seen all the best bits and you don't need to rent this movie.

Disgusted by the excessive violence of the Hammer films he'd appeared in so many of, Christopher Lee formed his own production company, Charlemagne (named after the Holy Roman Emperor he was very fond of telling people he was allegedly descended from), to make the kind of movies he'd be proud to star in. For this, the first Charlemagne production, Lee not only contributed his own talents but brought on board his good friend Peter Cushing, a real pro who almost never gave a bad performance, and borrowed a Hammer director he'd worked with before and trusted to do a good job. What could possibly go wrong?

Almost everything! It's not impossible to make a creepily atmospheric horror film that isn't drenched in gore, and there are many fine examples. Sadly this movie is pretty much a masterclass in how not to do it. With only a few minutes of the film left to go, Peter Cushing suddenly figures out the entire plot and gives the lucky viewers a quick verbal rundown of the truly horrific (and wildly implausible) events that have been happening all along, unknown to and unseen by anyone, including the audience. Only then do we realise that this murder mystery has remained mysterious by the cunning trick of not giving us the slightest hint of what it's actually about, which is a pity, because a gradual revelation of the ghastly truth would have been both far more interesting and a lot more horrifying than the dead ends and red herrings we've been trying unsuccessfully to make sense of for the last hour and a quarter.

Imagine a version of "The Wicker Man" in which Sgt. Howie wanders around a perfectly normal Scottish island questioning people about the missing girl and finding they genuinely know nothing about her, and then ten minutes from the end he discovers that the oddly secretive occupants of the big house on the hill are pagans who throughout the film have secretly been holding magical orgies we never got to see. It's that bad!

Oddly enough, it has far too many similarities with "The Wicker Man", which came out later the same year, to be coincidental. Yet it's so ineptly written that it seems less like a rip-off of that film than the work of somebody whose only knowledge of its plot came from overhearing someone telling their friend about it on a crowded bus. Intelligent people believe absurdities simply because the plot requires them to. Characters have long boring discussions about things which turn out to be irrelevant because the scriptwriter's brilliant decision not to tell us what's really going on until the movie's nearly over means it needs one hell of a lot of padding. For the same reason, hundreds of people accompanied by police dogs and a helicopter search a bleak stretch of moorland for a ridiculous amount of time without finding the slightest trace of Diana Dors, who is wandering around in plain sight in a shiny crimson raincoat.

As for the out-of-absolutely-nowhere shocking revelation which explains the tedious muddle we've just sat through, it's so ridiculous it feels as though a writer who was making it up as he went along found himself with no remotely good ideas and a deadline looming. By the way, if you're assuming from the the DVD cover illustration that this movie features a weirdly masked killer, you'll be very disappointed. That image does appear very briefly in the film, but it's not what that picture implies.

This was the first film made by Charlemagne Productions. It was also the last. It isn't hard to guess why.

These odd little shows (each episode is only 10 minutes long, apart from the 20-minute pilot) rely heavily on a target audience who no longer exist: viewers old enough to remember television for schools c. 1980, but young enough to automatically fall about with laughter at the sight of retro technology. If you're too old to watch kids' TV ironically, you'll probably find these spoofs gently amusing rather than uproariously funny, and if you're too young to recognise a Dymo embossed label, you may find this 2002 series as dated now as the genre it parodies was in 2002.

Fortunately, it has enough inventiveness to partly get around the fact that sticking Dymo embossed labels on absolutely everything and having men in lab-coats constantly point at stuff with pencils isn't intrinsically hilarious. It's at its best when the scientific facts it solemnly informs us go beyond being wrong or even absurd and become downright surreal. For instance, when the already ludicrous experiment of mixing sulphur with champagne for no apparent reason produces results you definitely won't be expecting. At such moments it resembles a broadcast from some parallel dimension whose technology isn't quite as advanced as ours, and where the laws of physics seem to have been written by Bart Simpson, Salvador Dalí and Gandalf. If they'd gone with that approach throughout it might have been truly first-class comedy.

What puts it firmly on the B-list is its over-reliance on the assumption that cheap schools programmes from a long time ago that even their target audience only watched because they were literally forced to are funnier than they actually were. Sequences where dull experiments to prove something banal are over-described and the only humorous element is that one piece of the lab equipment has a silly name feel like padding, as if these 10-minute shows started out as 5-minute segments in a sketch show. And even if you find the concept hilarious, parodying a genre as tiny and specific as this inevitably limits the possibilities more than would be ideal.

It's kind of amusing in a low-key way, with moments of inspired lunacy that have the warped logic of those uneasy dreams where everything is disturbingly off-kilter but nobody notices. I wish it had all been like that, but I suspect the writers simply didn't have the imagination to come up enough truly weird material. The fact that programmes only 10 minutes long sometimes feel padded suggests that may be the case, and the abysmal second (and final) series, in which a very similar premise was stretched over half an hour, confirms it. Still, at its best it's very funny indeed, and even the worst bits are, in this short and snappy first series at least, over before they've outstayed their welcome too badly.

By the way, the DVD menu is ridiculously cluttered and rather annoying, but don't forget to check out the extras, because they include a 20-minute pilot episode with some of the best jokes in the whole series.

The first series in this peculiar franchise, which spoofed the micro-budget schools programmes the previous generation of kids had been forced to sit through, worked quite well because the deadpan style, with mostly off-screen presenters solemnly giving the audience information ranging from the stultifyingly dull to the screamingly bonkers, allowed plenty of scope for creativity. Many famous comedians, notably Peter Cook, have made us laugh by portraying stupid, ignorant, and/or insane people talking about intellectual topics wrongly but with the utmost seriousness, and there's always room for one more.

Sadly, the warning signs were already there in series one. Even with a runtime of only ten minutes, the episodes sometimes felt padded, as if the extremely narrow limitations the performers placed on themselves by spoofing something far too specific meant they couldn't think of quite enough jokes. Here we see what happens when they pick an even more specific target - "Tomorrow's World" c. 1980 predicting the technology of the year 2000, retro-parodied in 2005 - and try to get six half-hour shows out of it.

I only bothered to watch the first one. I was reminded of Monty Python's "How To Do It" sketch, in which over-eager children's TV presenters obviously based on the "Blue Peter" team told us how to rid the world of all known diseases. The difference being that the Pythons knew how many laughs that idea was good for and wrote a sketch lasting just over one minute, not three hours.

What really sinks it is the sheer laziness of the concept. Of course a popular science show made decades ago that tried to predict the future of technology will, from the perspective of a future that is now the present or the past, often be laughably inaccurate. But if that's the entire joke, why not show actual "Tomorrow's World" archive clips in which they get it spectacularly wrong? It would have been a lot funnier because it was meant to be taken seriously at the time, and also a lot cheaper than shooting a whole new series parodying it twenty years too late. And even that would have been desperately lazy humour of the "Hee haw, wasn't the past funny? Lookit that huge cellphone!" variety. But at least it would have been better than this.

The only remotely interesting thing about this incredibly pointless flop is that the people responsible for it went on to have extremely successful careers as comedy writers and performers. Proof that you really can make a pact with the devil?

If your perception of Steven Soderbergh's work is based on the "Ocean's Eleven" franchise and other formulaic blockbusters, this extraordinary film will come as a real surprise, though perhaps less of one if you remember his earliest movies, such as "Sex, Lies and Videotape". And if the slick, glossy, mega-budget heist thrillers Soderbergh is best known for are what floats your boat, you'll hate it!

If, on the other hand, you're interested in finding out what happens when a successful graduate of the Hollywood sausage machine temporarily abandons mainstream moviemaking and the enormous budgets that go with it to make exactly the kind of film he wants to without having to compromise his vision in any way, this is a must-see. Its cut-price aesthetics and irrepressible energy resemble the kind of film that gets young directors noticed in the first place - "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" springs to mind - but since it was the work of somebody who had already made the big time, it didn't have to be aimed at any target demographic whatsoever. Which is just as well, since baffled audiences stayed away in droves and it grossed about $10,000.

Loosely revolving around the lives of executives working for a huge corporation promoting the quasi-religious lifestyle management system Eventualism, which, though it's never properly defined, is an obvious parody of Scientology, the film follows, in a meandering fashion with numerous bizarre detours, the misadventures of a stressed-out and terminally dysfunctional office drone in a failing marriage (played by the director with everything turned up to eleven), who is surprised to discover that he is somehow two physically identical but otherwise very different people at the same time, a quality which is eventually revealed not to be unique to him.

Is this what Eventualism is supposed to be all about? Perhaps, though since Eventualism doesn't really exist, what its philosophy might or might not be doesn't much matter. What matters is a scathing satire of the American corporate lifestyle resembling a cross between "American Psycho", which in 1996 was a best-selling book but not yet a film, and David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", which wasn't made until 2002, seasoned with the lowbrow lunacy of "The Kentucky Fried Movie". In their saner moments, the characters obsessively worry about a rumoured corporate spy who they all suspect each other of being. At other times they speak in clichés, foreign languages and gibberish, or switch identities with their doppelgangers, without anybody else noticing. One character breaks the fourth wall and abusively storms out of the movie into a parallel plot-strand that made him a better offer. And so on.

What's really going on? Darned if I know! This is definitely a "Marmite movie" you'll either love or hate. But even if it's not your cup of tea at all, it's encouraging to see a major Hollywood director proving that he can still make completely original films when he's given the chance. So what if it lost money? With a budget of less than 0.1% of what big studios spend on generic cash-cows about men in tights punching robots, it's the kind of risk they could afford to take all the time. I wish they would.

Poor Tod Slaughter. For a few years at the end of the 1930s he was Britain's second-biggest horror movie star, eclipsed only by Boris Karloff, and truly a household name. Yet after the war interrupted his career along with everything else, he suddenly became a forgotten has-been who, long before his death in 1956, had fallen out of favour with the public so completely that to manage it nowadays he'd have to be exposed as a child molester. Which, in case you're wondering, he wasn't. So what went wrong?

Watching this triple bill - and it really is three feature-length movies on one disc, so purely in terms of quantity you get your money's worth - it's easy to see both why he was so popular back in the day, and why his fame was short-lived. When he suddenly became a movie star at the age of 50 in 1935 by starring in "Sweeney Todd" (making him, amazingly, one of only three actors to play the character on the big screen in the sound era, the other two being Johnny Depp in 2007 and whoever it was in Andy Milligan's "The Bloodthirsty Butchers" in 1970), his boo-hiss one-dimensional pantomime villainy was already old-fashioned, and wouldn't become fashionable again for another 30 years, by which time such clichéd baddies had literally become cartoon characters.

Which is why he's such fun. Never mind the rest of the cast. You've never heard of any of them, and they're almost without exception at best forgettable and sometimes downright awful (looking at you, Comic Relief Guy in "Maria Marten"), but that doesn't matter because they only exist in order to give Slaughter's baddie something to do. I don't think I've ever seen any other movie villain who was meant to be taken seriously literally twirl his moustache while cackling, but Slaughter actually does it in "Crimes at the Dark House", the least ridiculous, most genuinely menacing, and best-acted of these three very mild horrors.

In addition to this, the last film he made before his failed postwar comeback, the disc includes his first two movies. "Sweeney Todd", his breakout rôle, is absurdly hammy by today's standards, featuring a villain so blatantly evil that nobody in their right mind would let him anywhere near them with a razor in his hand, even if he didn't drop sinister hints about "polishing off" his customers every time he opened his mouth. It's also extremely tame, with absolutely no gore, and censorship so strict that they're not allowed to even mention cannibalism despite it being a major plot-point (they sneak it in under the radar, resulting in one magnificently dark joke). But it's low-budget unashamedly over-the-top melodrama from a more innocent age which they obviously didn't take all that seriously even in 1935, and if you appreciate it for what it is, it's a lot of fun.

"Maria Marten" is the weakest of the trio, perhaps because it's based (very loosely) on a sensational real-life murder case, therefore Slaughter has to play a character who, vile seducer and murderer though he is, might almost pass for a human being, and that wasn't one of his strengths as an actor. If he was around today he'd probably be doing the voices for all those motion-capture monstrosities whose first name is usually "Darth". It's not great. It's not even good in any conventional sense. But it's entertainment, and that's what counts. Tod Slaughter has to be by far the best so-bad-he's-good actor not to have a cult yet. Join now and be the coolest movie buff on the block when everybody else decides he's fashionable!

For some unexplained reason, even though spaghetti westerns were Italian rip-offs of a quintessentially American genre in the first place, no country other than Italy seemed to be able to get the formula quite right, including America. So when Israel tried making what might be called matzo westerns if enough of them existed to require a name, the results were predictably underwhelming.

During the 27 years it somehow managed to stay in business, Cannon produced dozens of the tackiest and most ill-advised movies ever made, its trademark being an incurable tendency to jump on cinematic bandwagons just a little bit too late, and try to infuse new life into a fad that had already run its course with an incredibly stupid gimmick. Hence that movie about the aerobics instructor who gets possessed by an undead ninja. As you do.

So when I tell you that this film is a spaghetti western produced by Cannon and made in Israel, you won't be surprised to learn that firstly, it involves a gunfighting vicar pretending to be a ghost, and secondly, it isn't terribly good.

What may surprise you is how very, very bad it is, given the presence of Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance, and, if you know your spaghetti westerns, the director of the Sabata Trilogy, all of whom had plenty of experience making very entertaining films in this genre with barking mad plots. I can only assume that, given the porn-movie levels of incompetence displayed by most of the crew and just about all the locally-recruited cast (viewers who didn't know it was made in Israel probably spent the whole film wondering how the obvious Jewishness of everybody in this supposedly Texan town was going to affect the plot, and being baffled when it never did), they simply gave up. Though to be fair, Lee Van Cleef does his best, despite being saddled with two appalling wigs, one of which is meant to make him look like Jesus, and a sidekick who would have been a more appropriate partner for Lassie. But his heart clearly isn't in it.

Jack Palance appears to be simply messing around. His overacting is so extreme I honestly thought his character was supposed to have senile dementia, but in a "this movie is beyond help so I might as well have fun" kind of way that isn't much fun for anybody else. Sybil Danning contributes a few seconds of partial nudity, hence the obsolete 18 certificate, and is otherwise just Sybil Danning. As for adorable teen moppet film and pop star (and a few years later, washed-up junkie has-been) Leif Garrett, he's so dreadful that halfway through the movie his character mysteriously loses the power of speech, presumably the director's last desperate attempt at damage limitation. Though inexplicably Cannon made another equally abysmal Jewish spaghetti western co-starring Lief Garrett and Lee Van Cleef ("Kid Vengeance" if for some reason you're interested).

As for the potentially hilarious business of our hero pretending to be his twin brother back from the grave to avenge his own murder, that only features in the last quarter-hour of the film, and is one of the few parts of it where the director's enthusiasm rises slightly above zero. The rest consists mainly of terrible actors talking too much, misplaced melodrama that slows down an already sluggish story, a few ineptly staged shoot-outs, and Leif Garret's thankfully dialogue-free non-adventures in a very dull desert. Oh, and there's a lengthy scene involving several attempted rapes which the cast seem to be deliberately playing for laughs. This embarrassing travesty makes even the worst Italian westerns look like masterpieces. If you want to see a proper spaghetti western with lots of daft gimmicks and a totally bonkers plot starring Lee Van Cleef, watch the first two Sabata movies instead. If you want to see Leif Garrett in anything, you're beyond help, so you might as well watch this.

This movie is legendary for all the wrong reasons. Once considered the ultimate box office bomb, the insane amount Hollywood spends nowadays on what back in the day would have been cheap and cheerful B-movies means that, even adjusted for inflation, its huge losses are equalled or dwarfed by several films every year. But it's still a stupendous failure, for such ridiculous reasons that a making-of documentary would probably be much more entertaining than the film itself. The main thing you need to know is that the relatively obscure and inexperienced Elaine May got the job of directing a colossal blockbuster mostly shot on location in Africa because both its stars owed her favours and they thought this movie would do wonders for her career. It didn't. She was so out of her depth that she had a nervous breakdown on set and only managed to finish the film at all because the huge battle that was meant to be its thrilling action-packed explosive climax was almost entirely left out. Her next directing job was a TV episode in 2016.

The plot concerns two incurably optimistic but not very bright singer-songwriters who think they're the new Simon and Garfunkel because they're oblivious to their own complete lack of talent. Which all by itself should be enough plot for a movie, and apparently in the first draft of the script it was. And it's not intrinsically a bad idea for them to get a booking in some third-world backwater because they're the only artists desperate and stupid enough to accept the gig, and for them to be smuggling a priceless McGuffin lots of shady characters want but they themselves don't know they've got. The trouble is that this plot-point ends up dominating the movie so completely that their Z-list showbiz career becomes irrelevant and is barely mentioned for most of the film, even though seeing a lot more of that would undoubtedly be funnier than watching two idiots lost in a desert trying not to die.

Everything else is just as bizarrely misjudged. For example, there's a running gag about them being tricked, for no discernible reason, into buying a blind camel which they keep with them for the rest of the film. Because CGI wasn't around in 1987 it had to be a real live camel, and making it bump into things risked injuring the poor beast, therefore the only bit of funny business that specifically requires a blind camel is used minimally and soon dropped altogether. So the joke is that they have a camel which every so often they remind us is blind. How could anyone have ever thought that would have audiences rolling in the aisles? You can't even see where the huge budget went. The desert sequences could easily have been filmed in the USA, the Moroccan market-place is small enough that it would have been far cheaper to build it in California than go to Morocco, and the massive battle involving vast numbers of extras swarming dramatically across the Sahara was never filmed at all owing to director meltdown.

At times you can see a perfectly good comedy about two men trying to do something they passionately believe in but are very bad at struggling to get out, but what it most resembles is one of those terrible non-horror movies Hammer used to make in which the cast of a popular sitcom got a big-screen outing where they abandoned the TV show's setting and went on a disastrous holiday. Perhaps if the writers of this megaflop had ever seen "Holiday On The Buses" they would have had the sense to confine the action to New York, but sadly for all concerned they obviously hadn't. Quentin Tarentino believes this film to be an unjustly neglected masterpiece. In this, as in so much else, he is wrong.