Film Reviews by Frank Talker™

Very good low-budget special-effects (by Doug BESWICK) - reminiscent of "The Thing" (1982) - unsuccessfully attempt to mask an under-written screenplay and its ludicrous plot: Mutant, man-eating ticks indirectly-produced by steroids; originating from cartoon-villain yokels trying to increase the growth-rate of their marijuana plants deep in the backwoods of California!

Rosalind ALLEN and Ami DOLENZ are above-average performers wasted in weakly-characterised roles - much like most of the (less able) cast - which no amount of acting brilliance could ever hope to salvage. However, a highlight occurs in the second act when a sly doctor (played by Judy Jean BERNS) defeats a malicious tick by simply stepping on it - the kind of humour the rest of the movie would have richly-benefitted from.

At the end of the day, the visually-impressive emotional climax to the movie does not resonate as dramatically as it should because we just don't care about the characters in their travails. Rather, we're left waiting for it all to end, aided-and-abetted by the fact that the DVD version is shorter than both the Blu-ray or the 4K one and is, therefore, much to be preferred.

Director Paul VERHOEVEN does not have enough genuine feeling for women to make this movie work well much beyond its sexual-exploitation content despite decent performances and glossy production-values.

"Showgirls" should have been made by a woman (as Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple" [1985] should have) since that would almost certainly have meant less focus on the sexually-exploitive nature of Las Vegas and more on exploring the reasons for said exploitation; eg, Nevada as a metaphor for the generally-exploitive nature of White culture, for gynophobia and misogyny & for treating sex as a commodity rather than as a pleasure.

Elizabeth BERKLEY is a fine actress with a fierce, abrasive energy giving an often-angry performance but she, and every other performer, is somewhat lost in a typically un-empathetic script from Joe ESZTERHAS: Riddled with melodramatic clichés and a dislike for women which taints the entire enterprise. Yet, it's hard to think of anyone else with the requisite acting ability, well-honed dancing skills, looks good naked, has the sheer guts and, perhaps, desperation to even attempt the role.

"Showgirls" garnered star BERKLEY much vilification, bullying & blame for its controversial nature despite director VERHOEVEN taking responsibility for directing BERKLEY 'that way'. For a time, she faced total resistance from most film-makers and casting directors; reflecting the fact that the film deals with show-business sexism honestly; revealing the very Hollywood seaminess that the film tries to critique.

Moreover, the film's actual lack of eroticism is precisely the point being made about sexual exploitation: It's only erotic for the sexually-jaded. And it is to be lauded for that despite the director repeating the point with nudity that crosses-the-line between exploring exploitation and being just another example of it. The DVD version of this film is shorn of 17 seconds by the British film-censor (the Blu-ray is uncut); revealing the problem with the film's emphatic nudity: Sexual exploitation is the film's subject but ended-up becoming its main selling-point. In such a context, the sadistic gang-rape of the only sympathetic character in the film is sensationalised rather than being shown as tragically inevitable. The British censor had a point: Film directors need a tightrope-walker's skill to successfully-tread the fine-line between prurience and artistic endeavour - and VERHOEVEN partly failed here.

Although intended as a satire on the social propaganda of the American-dream, the screenwriter has no talent for comedy and the director somehow lost his sense of humour after his much better satirical work: "De Vierde Man" (1983), "RoboCop" (1987) & "Starship Troopers" (1997). The deliberate campness doesn't add much amusement unlike, say, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970) and the clever idea of having Elizabeth BERKLEY over-act as someone pulling out all of the stops for the fame at which the actress, herself, was trying to aim is drowned-out by the weakness of the satire on an entertainment-world populated by so many character-less ghouls and sexual parasites. Unfortunately, all of this leaves actress BERKLEY looking, herself, as morally-shallow as the character she is playing. A shame because she's actually rather good in a role that she clearly related-to on a personal level.

A mostly superficially-entertainment that would have been much better done as an old-fashioned, self-reflexive Hollywood musical - melodramatic, unsubtle & with better music; eg, "Singin' in the Rain" (1952). It would then have stood on much firmer serio-comic ground as a satire on Western patriarchy and the falsity of the American Dream that it clearly wanted to be, rather than the somewhat mediocre mélange of dramatic indecisiveness, soft-porn & execrable dialogue that it actually is.

A sort-of-smart but a little over-long ghost story which only part-successfully deals with fundamental issues in Western culture. A) The decline of the extended family into more-isolated nuclear ones; resulting in a reduced psychological-support network for the remaining nuclear families. B) The descent into madness precipitated by having nothing to feel good about in the form of either spiritual nor material success. C) The abusive psychological-addictions which can result from never having dealt adequately with the past - which continues to haunt the father-figure here, albeit for no well-dramatised reason.

The fictional and shut-down-for-the-winter Overlook Hotel which both the film and the temporary caretaker-family inhabits for most of its length is an excellent metaphor for the alienation of modern Western-lifestyles: Its cavernous size helps physically-depict the internal, unfulfilled mental-states which the characters attempt to evade.

This secluded hotel offers the characters few engaging distractions and, thus, forces its inhabitants - both dead and alive - to confront themselves as they actually are. The wife and mother keeps herself busy with real household chores; the sole child solaces his loneliness with an imaginary friend; &, the husband and father solaces his writers' block with non-existent bourbon. ("Burnt Offerings" [1976] offers a similar story, which handles the family's emotional problems better, set in a country house rented for the summer by a writer whose household then proceeds to psychologically destruct as that film progresses.)

Oddly, for a horror movie, there are few cliché jump-scares, darkened rooms, creaking doors or cobwebs (except a few in the longer American version). The film is brightly-lit for the most part as if a searchlight is being shone upon basic human fears of career failure, past personal errors & the crippling-weight of some unexpressed historical trauma.

Although clairvoyance is a major theme here it is not meaningfully explored. The supernatural "shining" ability thus comes across as a mere plot-device to denote the young son's empathy - an empathy typical of a childhood-innocence which sees the adult world as it appears to be, but does not yet fully comprehend any underlying meaning.

Fundamentally, as always with director Stanley Kubrick, this movie is about his belief that there is something intrinsically-wrong with human nature. Yet, he provides no evidence for this belief; resulting in the visual distractions of continuity errors and lazy film-making which are jarringly-atypical for this usually-meticulous movie-maker.

All of these deliberate visual disorientation-tactics conspire to confuse the audience in a fun game, but to limited dramatic or thematic purpose; indicating that this film marked the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's decline as a commercial film-director of substance. (Perhaps because Kubrick's previous film "Barry Lyndon" [1975] was a commercial disappointment, while "The Exorcist" [1973] - which he refused to direct - broke box-office records around the world: The director needed to adapt a successful novel into a similarly-successful movie to enable his own films to continue being funded.)

At the end of the day, this film's characters are gripped by forces largely beyond their control which are slowly, compellingly & suspensefully rendered by virtue of the excellent acting performances from all concerned. This dearth of moral agency resulting from being mostly-controlled by ghosts-as-memories makes the film's director the real monster of the story much more than the central antagonist. This is what makes Kubrick's films so fascinating and so annoying at the same time (much like Alfred Hitchcock's work): He is always the star of every movie he makes - the actors mere pawns.

An uneasy mix of humour and thrills makes this movie an unsuccessful attempt to simultaneously parody and then to update a junk American tv-show of the same name from the 1980s.

We are constantly being reminded that we are watching a movie - with jokey on-screen references to the cheesiness of proceedings - because the writers don't know how to create an emotionally-involving drama, so are effectively parodying their own inadequacy by drawing attention to it.

The male writers don't know what to do with the female characters so they don't come across as anything more than decorative. This undermines the film's alleged theme of effective teamwork as the males then dominate proceedings to render the ladies somewhat peripheral.

The characters are all bland, lifeless clones of one another whom are poorly differentiated such that they speak alike; making any pretence at dramatic characterisation pointlessly-ineffective. Despite some genuinely-funny moments, a good cast is wasted trying to make this poorly-written dreck entertaining.

The characters in "We're the Millers" are not like real people with real emotions - they merely exist to spout mildly-comic, pseudo-experienced life-coach dialogue. Unlike, say, the fake (also assumed to be incestuous) family in "The Joneses" (2009), one never feels any true affinity for any of the characters on display here since the actors have very little characterisation to work with from the feeble screenwriters.

This lack of psychological verisimilitude betrays a film-maker's dearth of genuine insight into the worsening predicament into which his characters place themselves; namely, their pretending to be something that they are not and never could be - a loving, natural & healthy nuclear-family. They are animated zombies in dead-end jobs going nowhere fast; albeit infesting a non-zombie movie.

There is also an odd, wish-fulfillment aspect to this serio-comic escapade which tries to suggest that entirely-incompatible people can learn to emotionally bond. But this violates the rule of human nature that "birds of a feather flock together". And all comedy has to be deeply-rooted in objective-reality otherwise there is no real basis for the humour. The idea that people form close relationships through shared adversity only ever really makes sense if the aftermath of the adversity is equally-positive for all concerned. And it isn't here.

The only good thing about this unconvincing fake-family saga is Jennifer Aniston - whom is as funny as anyone could be with the weak material she is given to play.

Pointless, over-long & weakly-dramatised film that doesn't overtly-explain a complex conflict like the Second World War; while suggesting dramatic-subtlety in claiming that two wars were being fought - an overt and a covert one.

However, this war drama does not really deal with covert issues - specifically the race-war aspect of the conflict - while pretending it's trying to do just that. Nazi Germany is seen as both anti-Semitic and White supremacist, while the inherent racism and anti-Semitism of the British Empire ostensibly fighting it is completely ignored. The free world being defended here is just for the sole benefit of Anglo-Saxons.

The wife of one of the British committee trying to deceive the Germans into believing that the inevitable Allied-invasion of Europe will come through Greece rather than through Italy (so that the Germans divert defensive-troops to Greece; making Italy an easier target) is Jewish - as is her husband. But she disappears after the film's first act to become merely an extra source of sexual jealousy in a would-be but-not-quite love triangle, rather than one of the real reasons the Nazis are being fought. This trivialises and distracts from the main theme: A ruse de guerre designed to help defeat Nazi Germany more efficiently, more effectively & much more quickly without violating the rules of war.

Also present is the political red-herring that one of the team might be a Russian spy; suggesting that the Soviet Union was merely an ally-of-convenience when it was, in fact, absolutely essential to Nazi Germany's defeat. This makes it difficult for the audience to ascertain whether it is only the film, itself, which is being absurdly anti-Communist in a time of national need - both in the United Kingdom and in the Soviet Union - or just some of its characters. This deliberate blurring of any possible distinction between the apparent anti-communism of the film-maker and the movie characters serves no dramatic purpose; while being oddly-ungrateful to Russia for its crucial role in defeating Adolf Hitler.

Essentially, this movie is the usual British war-drama which almost-always imply that Britain won the war mostly on its own: "The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II", as its subtitle suggests. "Enigma" (2001) also did this by not emphasizing the contributions of pre-war Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologists to Allied Enigma decryption efforts and is also the exact same problem which usually bedevils Hollywood versions of World War Two; eg, "U-571" (2000) - an entertaining but grossly-inaccurate war movie. And, without any believable historical-context, this film represents the usual historical-narcissism of Anglo-Saxon historiography: History written by the military victors, not by the available facts.

Additionally, according to wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' Indeed, but where is the historical truth here? Moreover, where does one's real moral duty lie: With one's conscience, country or with objective reality? These issues are raised but never meaningfully-debated in dramatic terms. And much like the underlying truth being allegedly-sheltered behind lies in a movie like "Capricorn One" (1977), the most convincing historical liars are the most self-deluded ones.

Ultimately, this film contradicts itself by being little more than political propaganda written too late after the war it pretends to commemorate for it to actually be of any value as political propaganda. And propaganda always makes poor drama because of its moral simplicity - as opposed to a serious dramatic exploration in a politically-, ethically- & emotionally-nuanced manner.

A sex-obsessed satire on the solace-of-religion - a solace designed for those whom are as scared of dying as they are of living. But because religion creates its own gods, the gods do not create religion, those whom do not understand this get side-tracked into imagining that the social control of others inherent in organised religion is somehow preferable to clear-sightedness, self-direction & personal choice.

"Sausage Party" contradicts itself by using romantic love as a foil to religious belief as if love were somehow more tangible than belief in an unprovable god. But the film does not define love, nor the specifically-sexual kind here, so it fails to find an adequate replacement for the gods it mocks.

Human self-esteem here is essentially a pretence wrapped-up in an imagined universal-love which the movie fails to adequately-depict - except sexually. It attempts to substitute a belief in the intangibles of religion with the intangibles of human relationships and comes-a-cropper on its semi-pornographic depiction of earthy passions - as if there were no higher aspirations or meaning in one's life.

Although this movie also attempts to visually-mock the family-friendly animations of Disney, DreamWorks & Pixar, it does this mostly through swearing; doing nothing more than simply reminding us of how much better than this those other companies' products usually are. It never manages to enter a truly adult world as does (mostly) the Central Intelligence Agency-funded "Animal Farm" (1954) or the best work of Ralph Bakshi; eg, "American Pop" (1981), "Fire and Ice" (1983) & "Heavy Traffic" (1973).

The best unintentional review of this movie comes from the British Board of Film Classification which I partially quote to represent the actual achievements of a movie with intellectual pretensions it cannot match:

'There is infrequent very strong language ('c**t') and frequent strong language ('f**k', 'c**ksucking', 'motherf**ker', 'donkey-f**ker'). Milder bad language includes uses of 'pussy', 'whore', 'bitch' and 'skank'.

There are strong, crude sex references throughout, which occur in the comic context of animated supermarket products exhibiting human behaviour. These include references to masturbation, ejaculation, oral sex and sexual organs. There is a scene in which food products take part in an 'orgy' during which various sexual activities are depicted, but in an unrealistic manner.'

Although it says 'Adults Only' on the box art, "Sausage Party" is strictly a comedy for adolescents possessing as much sexual longing as they do existential angst. Sexual intercourse does not eradicate the fear-of-death so prevalent here - self-esteem and unaided adult-achievement does.

(It's also worth pointing out that for all of the film's love-talk, all of the film's animators were told that they would be blacklisted if they refused to work overtime without pay. In March 2019, the British Columbia Employment Standards Branch ruled that they were entitled to overtime pay for their work on the film. Very fair especially since the film made a profit of some USD$50,000,000.)

A gentle and often farcical epitaph for the local British cinemas of the past before the soulless multiplexes arrived to replace them; leaving us with only the occasional art-house venue to indulge our love of the seventh art. In this case, the "Bijou Kinema" - an 'electric theatre'.

The plot is light and mostly a collection of sight gags about what going to the pictures used to be like: Snogging in the back row, rushing to get-out of the cinema when the national anthem played at the end of the day, girls selling choc-ices from trays wrapped around their necks, cinema commissionaires, etc.

Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna play the married, collective straight-man of this comedy while Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford & Bernard Miles play the mostly-warring character parts - all as old and as decrepit as the fleapit that they love. These three performers render absurdity and pathos indistinguishable by making their distinct characters and their distinctive acting-styles work perfectly together. They are, in fact, the main reason for watching this movie.

A scene summing-up the film's essence occurs when the three elderly-staff watch an old silent-movie, after hours, with one playing piano accompaniment - as affecting a scene as anything to be felt in "Cinema Paradiso" (1988). (The film they watch is "Comin' Thro the Rye" (1923), starring Alma Taylor, who makes an uncredited appearance here as a patron of the competitor cinema.)

Although wreathed in nostalgia, the film's realistic ending betrays the realisation that bigger businesses will almost always inevitably be swallowed-up by the smaller ones, although it does this via the commission of a serious, imprisonable & aggravated criminal-offence!

The film does not waste any of its brief runtime on soppy love-stories since the romance depicted here is for the far-less-messy love of film, itself.

Cleopatra is one of the largest epic-films ever made. But the presentation of thinking, living people against a background of splendid production-values fails to fully-engage in a way that a film director like David Lean would never have allowed. This movie lacks the necessary vitality that would have made it a classic like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - the latter film simultaneously being both more vast and more intimate than this one.

Cleopatra is a physically-opulent movie but possesses a not-literate-enough cinematic recreation of an historical epoch - similar to the aesthetic failings of the movie The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). As drama, the movie never really sweeps the audience up into its story; just generally bumping from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition.

Rex Harrison's brilliantly-quizzical Julius Caesar, the best-written role in Joseph Mankiewicz's erratic script, is haunted by Richard Burton's tragic Mark Antony - the latter of which is an actor's triumph over a writer's sometime-mediocrity. Cleopatra is necessarily focused upon Elizabeth Taylor, oddly out-of-her-depth as a petulant Cleopatra - only partly saved by the obvious sexual-chemistry between herself and Burton. However, the supporting players are uniformly-excellent

especially Hume Cronyn, Martin Landau & Roddy McDowell.

The director does try to make this a film about people and their emotions rather than just a spectacular slide-show. But for this ambition to hold-up over the film's four-hour length, he needed a visual style which would be more than merely illustrative; with dialogue really worth speaking and not mostly just exposition.

As the movie sets become more and more grandiose so, progressively, the actors dwindle. The screen is so wide that any concentration on character results in a strangely-static epic in which the overblown close-ups are only ever interrupted by a pageant, a dance, a march or a battle. A lush, ostentatious epic which sags and almost collapses from its over-length - a colossus of the analogue era of special effects.

Director Mankiewicz made a bad decision to take-over directing this troubled production from film director Rouben Mamoulian since it's not one of his usual smaller-scale movies such as A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950) or Sleuth (1972). And his writing and producing it as well as directing did not leave him enough time to improve it while shooting, so that the dialogue sounds somewhat-unpolished throughout.

Cleopatra is most-often a verbose and a muddled affair that is not even all-that-entertaining as a star vehicle for Taylor and Burton. The film is a stately spectacle that is sometimes lumbering, but still strangely-watchable thanks to its psychological ambition, prodigious size & undeniable glamour.

The film does improve as it proceeds (because it was shot in chronological order) but by the third act it's a little too late to really care enough. Cleopatra is not a great movie, it is primarily a vast, popular entertainment which side-steps total greatness for broader audience-appeal: A huge and disappointingly-superficial film.

The fundamental problem with this movie is that it deals with relatively-privileged White Americans whom are badly-raised only to serve their parents needs and interests. The resulting cultural anomie, ennui & malaise leaves the good actors here rather lumbered in playing characters with nihilistic, uninvolving & mask-like facial expressions: The characters are as boring as they are bored.

That this cultural vacuity is not explored dramatically leaves the film trapped in a middle-class culture from which neither it nor its protagonists can ever escape to find both self-understanding and an objective and a realistic perspective on their psychological plight.

The film attempts to escape its own amorality with the humour of intercutting between the actors and the actual people involved. But the movie never really wants to critique the culture which spawned both it and the people it presents by never answering any pertinent questions about why anyone would live lives so lacking in ethical depth that they would seek escape via the superficial excitement of criminality. Are they seeking revenge against their parents for lacklustre upbringings? We'll never really know from watching this movie.

The film does not glamorise the crimes shown but it also does not explain nor offer insights into a middle-class culture which, on its face, should not produce much criminality at all. If the criminals here come from good families, as this movie asserts, then the families can't actually be all that good.

The docudrama aspect to the movie reminds the audience, throughout, that we are witnessing a re-enactment of a true story. But the film-maker is not looking at his own culture squarely in the face, so this aspect of the movie fails to provide additional understanding as to the true motivations of those shown on screen since they have no more insight into themselves than the movie, itself, does.

Nevertheless, this is a good movie about people making bad decisions; resulting from always-corrosive unearned social-entitlement as the already-fortunate seek their fortune through desperate stabs at asserting an identity that they were never raised to possess.

Despite the film failing to deal at-all-well with its weighty social-themes regarding White culture, it still manages to deliver a queasily-compelling true-crime heist thriller and slowly-but-surely involves its audience as it moves along. The film palpably conveys the group's misgivings, their jangling nerves, the fool-hardy resignation pushing them on despite themselves - a White-American male identity-crisis caused by pretending that happiness never comes from finding your true self from within.

The parents here act surprised and upset that their children turned-out badly because that would mean having to face themselves as honestly as this film also does not. It remains stubbornly unable to explain how such a society could exist if it regularly produces such weak offspring - and how it could ever sustain its existence, as a result, in the long run.

Intricately-plotted by John Cleese and Connie Booth (whom also star), superbly-timed by every performer & a very-funny revelation of the many emotional hang-ups of White-British culture.

Basil Fawlty, the shows hotelier antagonist, is the revealed internal-hurricane at the centre of an attempted external-calm whom never fails to display his contempt for most of the hotel's guests. From those whom happen not to be upper-class; to those whom are not White; &, then on to those whom are - for him - frighteningly female, all are subject to his inveterate snobbery.

Mr Fawlty is a man desperately seeking relevance and importance in a world that stubbornly refuses to see him as either relevant or important. Secretly, he seems to know full well that he's the third wheel on a bicycle and that Fawlty Towers is a hostelry that would function just as well, if not better, without him around.

Perhaps it's to avoid personally-confronting the very possibility of his irrelevance that Basil Fawlty constantly attempts to impose his repressive Victorian-morality onto others; endlessly makes mostly-false assumptions about them based upon superficial judgements; &, incessantly pokes his nose into the guests' private affairs. All the while vainly trying to conceal the fact that he is actually doing these very things - only to then make it supremely obvious that he's lying about this in the very absurdity of his denials when he's inevitably caught-out.

The only real problem with this tv series is that - unlike, for example, the contemporaneous Rising Damp (1974-78) and its snobbish landlord - the psychological basis for Basil Fawlty's awfulness is never explained in terms of the wider White community. His rabid erotophobia & mother-fixated gynophobia; self-destructive class-consciousness; &, his instinctive Negrophobia are never comedically-explored in a way that shows him as an inevitable product of his culture rather than just as a social aberration.

Fawlty Towers' dishonest aversion-to-wider-political-issues via its tacit denial of a larger social-context makes it little more than an above-average exercise in technically-precise farce, violent slapstick & mild cultural-satire.

This science-fiction movie is set seven-years-on from the time it was made and is broadly reminiscent of the 1933 White House Putsch: "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot". Although an above-averagely well-acted and well-written Hollywood movie, it still fails to fully explore its global themes of the dangers of nuclear war, along with the inherent fascism of Western countries - fascism necessitated by its need to justify exorbitant military-spending in order to deter nuclear attack. It prefers, instead, to claim that America is in danger of becoming the fascist dictatorship it always was-designed-to-be, springing from among the even-more-totalitarian members of its own military forces.

So long as the essential facts of the undemocratic essence of the United States (US) and of Western culture, in general, are ignored (corporations disguised as countries), the film works just fine as a dramatised battle between the forces of light and those of darkness - albeit one in which the forces of light can only pretend to be somewhat better than those of darkness.

This false dramatic-contest mirrors the pseudo-polarised politics of White countries in their continually-presenting those allowed-to-vote with a Hobson's Choice at the ballot box; all the while ensuring that underlying political-policies are kept intact in order to hypocritically maintain a status quo at home, while funding coups d'état abroad which perpetuate the very authoritarianism being critiqued here; proving that, in the West, it doesn't really matter whom you vote for.

Similarly, the theme of a lack of any genuine political-choice - which this movie evades - gives the audience no-one to really root-for because both sides are just as bad as the other in one side spouting morally-platitudinous pieties about the flawed-by-design sanctity of the US Constitution, while the other claims that nationalism, patriotism & political loyalty permits sedition and treason against any democratically-elected politicians that one happens to disagree with. And this very Constitution was, in fact, used to spread death-and-destruction around the Earth; eg, South Korea in 1948, Iran in 1953 & Vietnam in 1963.

Boy’s Own adventure that treats its natives as genetic equals; while suggesting that the British Empire was essentially a mistake through the lives lost defending a pointless military-position.

The story is also very much a part of so-called Black History as well as White – a tacit assumption rare in White-made movies (ironic, given that the film was shot in apartheid South Africa.)

The Zulu here never experience the White-supremacist stereotyping found in, for example, most Hollywood Westerns regarding Native-Americans. There is not only drama between the Whites, but also between Blacks and Whites; effectively doubling the dramatic possibilities.

This is both a subtle exploration of the whys and the wherefores of British imperial failure in being not only anti-war, but also in being as non-White supremacist as it is pro-Welsh.

This superb war movie mixes violent action with subtle comments on the English class-system in the initially-nitpicking relationship between stars Stanley BAKER and Michael CAINE. All beautifully played-out through the high quality of the acting and the solid writing of the fully-realised characters.

Ultimately, the film suggests that the mutual respect of equals in battle can finally trump the need for any kind of conflict at all - both within and between communities. Hopelessly idealistic, of course, but jolly-good fun.

An overlong thriller with, unfortunately, no red herrings to distract us from the rather obvious twist-ending.

Robert De Niro excels in a small part in which he practically winks knowingly at the audience that he knows full-well that he is asking Mickey Rourke's private detective to find someone that the latter actually knows personally very well, indeed.

This kind of death-fixated mystery (eg, Mr Arkadin [1955], Point Blank [1967] & The Sixth Sense [1999]) with supernatural overtones has been done too often to be fully-engaging. Only the strong sense-of-atmosphere and the high quality of the performances from all involved gets us to the finale in more-or-less one piece. Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet are particularly fine with the good personal chemistry necessary to make their romance convincing.

Fun movie which works as a kind of sequel to Dr. Strangelove (1964) - with a dash of the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes (1968) and a little Mad Max 2 (1981) vibe. This movie even lifts lines of dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and a repeated "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" musical cue from Dr. Strangelove.

Moreover, the plot of rescuing women from the villain's harem is similar to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). It's almost as if the Mad Max movie refashioned a plot from the older movie which they thought nobody had ever heard-of and, so, could get away with copying one which had partly-copied an earlier entry in the Mad Max franchise. Or maybe the producers of the latter thought: Sauce for the goose...

The post-apocalyptic world presented here wants to re-populate itself after the nuclear holocaust by utilising the sexiest women to ensure that the few remaining fertile-men are aroused enough to engage in energetic, regular & polygynous procreation.

The saving grace of this film is that it does not take itself too seriously so that the audience doesn't have to. Sandahl BERGMAN, Roddy PIPER, Julius LEFLORE, Cec VERRELL & Rory CALHOUN work-well together and they understand full-well that they are in a B-movie with lots of absurd humour and action, not a Shakespeare production. Additionally, the frog creature-effects are excellent for such a low-budget movie: USD$1.5 million.

Ultimately, however, it's difficult to figure-out how film-studio executives ever greenlighted this movie, unless they had just snorted an entire line of cocaine before the business meeting where it was pitched. Whomever sold it must have been the greatest movie-idea salesman in film history. And I'm sure glad that they were.