Film Reviews by Frank Talker™

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.

The usual Hollywood America-wins-a-war-against-aliens for the benefit of the entire human race movie - just as bad as the frequent American claims that America won World War 2.

A preposterous plot of sending untrained soldiers into the future to fight a war with aliens resulting in the inevitable demise of most of them is reminiscent of currently sending poorly-trained troops to the front lines in the Russo-Ukraine War.

This film compounds its idiocy with a soap-opera concern for the relationship between the hero and his daughter. This tells us nothing about such relationships and merely serves up cloying sentimentality, while actors flounder with awful expository dialogue; revealing little of character.

The aliens are the usual identity-less horde whom consume humans as food. Yet there is no explanation as to what they are likely to do when they render their own source of nourishment extinct. These evolutionary misfits merely serve to symbolise all of the fears of White culture: Mass migration, ongoing global-warfare, declining birth-rates, economic stagnation, rising crime, social collapse, etc.

Götterdämmerung was never so silly nor so easily solved. This is all good solacing entertainment, but you just can't kill what you fear with imaginary solutions because the problems, themselves, are just as imaginary. An impossibly-limitless supply of bullets won't help here, either, nor will the highly-derivative nature of the plotting - especially as regards the movie "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014).

Ultimately, the movie leaves-out answering the question as to what the goals of these soldiers really are. What civilisational, cultural, social, familial & personal goals are to be achieved here? What is the point of surviving and winning when there is nothing to live for afterwards. Survival for its own sake does not make much of a compelling narrative.

These fundamental existential issues are not explored in favour of a movie that is little more than a re-creation of the mindless destruction and brutal exploitation of colonialism; this time presenting White people as its most obvious victims - a hidden-in-plain-sight confession that what they have done to others can just as effectively be done to them.

Only the supporting players offer any of the only real special-effect in any movie - the quality of the acting - but they are not on screen enough for the audience to ever really care about them. Jasmine MATTHEWS and Sam RICHARDSON are particularly effective here, while Chris PRATT shows just how mediocre an actor he is in a straight drama.

...FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING

The usual snobbish fear and hatred which the White middle-class possess for the poor. Here, modern-day pickup- and truck-drivers are all resentful rednecks, police officers honest and helpful & the middle-class hard-working and emotionally-vacant.

The married couple here are poorly-dramatised and Kathleen QUINLAN is shamefully wasted in a nothing part which centres largely on Kurt RUSSELL's husband role. This makes him appear to be in love with the idea of passionate married-love, itself, rather than with his actual, flesh-and-blood wife.

Without any clear definition of the true nature of sexual love, this movie flounders around in the same thematic wilderness as the desert-bound characters, trying to convince us that over-acting and an increasingly-improbable plot are valid substitutes: Sensationally-entertaining, certainly, but essentially vapid.

The worst aspect of this movie is the self-created class-war between members of the same race. This makes the characters little more than symbols of their respective and enforced roles in White society, with no in-depth characterisation to explain their mutual, divide-&-conquer plight: A class-based paranoid/schizophrenia which keeps them from working together against their real class-enemies, the materially-wealthy and the politically-powerful.

The overwhelming feeling here is that, like the Hollywood movie Deliverance (1972) or the European folk-tale Dick Whittington (1600s), the countryside is a forbidden zone as far as the rich and the affluent are concerned, inhabited only by - and for - poverty-stricken rural failures; while urban areas are populated by a better kind of person in the form of sophisticated city-folk.

In this movie, the near-car-accident plot-catalyst is the fault of both road users, yet they each lack the adult maturity to admit this to themselves - or to each other; inevitably leading to fatal consequences since they then choose to revert to their ingrained socially-stereotypical roles rather than just doing the most sensible thing and avoiding each other.

There is no-one to root-for here as there was, say, in the movie The Ruling Class (1972) because there is no proper dramatic exploration of the actual purpose of being class-conscious.

A load of old rubbish, really - but good, old-fashioned entertainment.

The acting is excellent throughout, the script is weak & the characterisation thin.

Character motivations play second-fiddle to heart-pounding action in the run-up to an almost-impossible "The Dam Busters" (1955) styled military-bombing mission. The supporting characters do not get enough time to shine, dramatically, and there are just too many of them to produce sharp narrative foci.

The love interest is feeble and underwritten with no real sense of emotional danger or sexual passion.

Oddly, the enemy planes in evidence here are not named (Su57s) because these Russian aircraft are actually superior to American F35s which are, in any case, supplanted in this film in favour of older and inferior F18s.

This airplane-technology issue hints at the most obvious problem with the film in its almost-complete dissociation from real-world geo-politics. All that remains is the usual racist arrogance that non-Anglo-Saxons (in this case Iran, since they are the only other country to operate F14s) must have their technological progress deliberately-retarded in order to maintain White supremacy. All the while Russian Slavs, whom engage in defence co-operation with Iran, must also be dissuaded from such collaboration. All of this is presented without offering the slightest evidence for the impliedly-innate cultural-superiority of the Western world or that progress and development in the East is an actual threat to the West.

Director Paul VERHOEVEN does not have enough genuine feeling for women to make this odd movie work at all well much beyond its glossy sexual-exploitation.

"Showgirls" is a clear example of a movie that most definitely should have been made by a woman since that would almost certainly have meant less exploitation of the sexually-exploitive nature of Las Vegas and more focus on exploring the reasons for said exploitation; eg, Las Vegas as a metaphor for the generally-exploitive nature of White culture, a metaphor for Caucasian gynophobia and misogyny, etc.

Elizabeth BERKLEY is a fine actress with a fierce abrasive energy, but she and everyone else is somewhat lost-at-sea in an un-empathetic script, which hurt her career, from the usually-mediocre Joe ESZTERHAS: It is riddled with melodramatic clichés and a dislike for women which taints the entire enterprise. It's hard to think of anyone else with the requisite acting and dancing skills and whom also looks good naked, whom would also have had the ability, the sheer guts &, perhaps, the desperation to even attempt this. And she gives of it her best.

The films 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 so much nudity that the movie starts crossing-the-line between exploring exploitation and being just another part of it. One needs a tightrope-walkers skill to tread such a fine line successfully and VERHOEVEN has partly failed here.

Although intended as a satire on the American-dream social propaganda, the writer has no talent for comedy and the director somehow lost his after the better satires he directed such as RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997). The deliberate campness does not add anything amusing nor entertaining as it did with such movies as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and the clever idea of having Elizabeth BERKLEY over-act someone pulling out all the stops for fame at which the actress, herself, was trying to shoot, is drowned-out by the weakness of the satire on a White entertainment-world populated by so many ghouls and parasites. Unfortunately, this leaves BERKLEY looking exactly like the character she is playing.

Because this movie, ultimately, is as shallow and as superficial as the seamy side of the show-business being exposed, it would've been much better constructed as an old-fashioned MGM Hollywood musical - melodramatic, unsubtle & with better music; eg, Singin' in the Rain (1952). Then it could have been on much firmer ground as a social satire on Western patriarchy and the falsity of the American Dream that it clearly wanted to be.

Dramatically-thin but great driving scenes.

Attractive actors with uneven acting abilities fill-out the melodrama between exciting action-scenes of cars moving at high-speed and then often crashing in slow-motion.

The masochistic stupidity of the two main characters here is so annoying that it is difficult to empathise with them, since the life-threatening situation that they are in is largely avoidable and mostly of their own making.

It is an eternal oddity of horror films made in the West that White characters are somehow ineluctably-desirous of putting themselves into obvious danger, rather than doing the sensible thing and getting away from the obvious danger as fast as possible.

And the obvious danger here is so obvious that a blind person could easily see it: A strange man, in the middle of a sunny day, next to a main highway, disposing of human corpses. Yet they decide to investigate first before contacting the local police.

(Having said that, the first act of Jeepers Creepers is actually based on the true story of a 1990 murderer, Dennis DePUE, in which a married couple actually investigated an obvious murder before thinking to call the police!)

The overall effect of the two-dimensional characterisation and lapses-of-logic is to introduce plot contrivances which reduce any tension or suspense since the main characters are not trapped by the demonic villain, but by their own need to fulfil out-of-date horror tropes, contrivances & genre-movie clichés; eg, three times their old car won't go forward when their lives are in the greatest danger.

Horror is difficult to do well. And a clear decision of the filmmaker must be made at the outset: Allegory, realism or humour; eg, the better, respectively, The Innocents (1961), Psycho (1960) or Evil Dead II (1987). If you try to mix-&-match, as this movie does, the result is a hodge-podge: Is the villain a demon, human or smirking at our deepest fears? We can't tell and, so, don't really care. And without a consistent tone, no solidly-spooky atmosphere is ever created.

This emotional flatness is exacerbated by dialogue which does not reflect the fears of the central characters but, rather, the would-be cleverness of the screenwriter. It's as if these characters are trying-to-be-cool teenagers talking about a horror film that they are watching rather than the one that they are actually in.

This metafictional narrative-technique only serves to emotionally-distance us from the unfolding drama; without offering any of the pleasures of watching the stereotypes that we enjoy so much being lampooned by metafiction; eg, 'You know the part in scary movies where somebody does something really stupid and everyone hates them for it?'

Technically, the film is good-looking with decent special-effects and some nice visual ideas; eg, a one-way mirror in a police interrogation-room into which the heroine stares while not being able to see the threatening villain on the other side. Yet, the movie is undone by the fact that the actors do not inhabit their roles sufficiently to convince us that they are in any real danger. The ending underwhelms presumably because of the low budget and, like the rest of the movie, leaves us feeling distinctly emotionally-unsatisfied.

Ultimately, this movie is not genuinely psychologically-resonant, genuinely scary nor genuinely funny-enough to distract us from its sheer vapidity; making it a horror film written by children for those very same children.

NB: This movie was directed by a registered sex-offender which may explain its odd and thematically-irrelevant fixation upon genital functions and the sniffing of used male underwear. These could have been the basis for a better film, but here they are merely self-indulgent details.

Millie PERKINS is really the only good thing in this dire, low-budget movie and she comes across as a mean, hard-hitting assassin extremely well.

The lead, Lola FALANA, is a far better singer than she is an actress and she comes across here as shrill and unlikeable.