Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

I'm afraid I didn't enjoy this relentlessly downbeat movie as much as some people did. Spain is a large country stretching from France almost to Africa, so it has pretty much every kind of scenery you can think of. But I've never seen this part of Spain in a film before, probably because it's the part least worth pointing a camera at. Mudflats as far as the eye can see, with only the occasional ramshackle house to relieve the monotony. The sodden tedium of their environment seems to have affected the minds of the locals, causing most of them to sink into a dull apathetic stupor. In most movies set in isolated communities with a guilty secret, such as "The Wicker Man" or "Bad Day At Black Rock", there's an extremely compelling reason why nobody will talk to outsiders. But this lot simply couldn't be bothered telling the police that their daughters kept vanishing until two girls disappeared at once!

Another odd thing about the film is that much of the plot almost seems to happen backwards. "The Silence Of The Lambs" involved a serial killer whose identity and bizarre motive we knew long before the FBI did, and a kidnapped woman whose impending fate we were constantly reminded of. In this movie, the killer appears so late in the film that he's a complete nonentity whose only character trait (apart from the obvious) is that he wears a hat, and the race against time to save an abducted girl is introduced so late on, and so perfunctorily, that I actually forgot about her and wondered why the heroes were too stupid to wait for back-up. Strangest of all is the sub-plot about the older of the two detectives maybe having done things for the recently abolished fascist dictatorship that his idealistic young colleague doesn't approve of at all. This literally happens backwards! Instead of causing tension between them at the start which has to be resolved if they're going to work together, this is another thing that's only mentioned very late in the movie, so the tension suddenly appears and then increases as the end approaches, by which time it doesn't matter.

The two leads are quite good, but their characters are the stereotypes we've seen in practically every other film about two detectives in a mismatched partnership. Almost everybody else is a cardboard cutout, and most of them care so little about anything that I didn't care about them either. And in a medium as visual as film, it helps if the environment in which the entire movie takes place isn't boring to look at. In this era of relentlessly identical production-line blockbusters, you can't fault a film for trying to be different, but I'd have preferred this one to look less drab and feel less wearily fatalistic. I'd give it two and a half stars if that was possible because that's how much I liked it, but I'll go up to three because I'd feel mean giving it only two when it tried so hard.

This is the story of what was probably the worst film studio ever to inexplicably make huge amounts of money. Menahem Golan, a director/producer who seems to have combined in one person the worst character traits of Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, Roger Corman and Ed Wood, along with the determination to make films of all of them combined (he doesn't appear in this documentary except in archive footage), with the help of his cousin Yoram Globus, a less outrageous character who fades into the background but seems to have provided a much-needed voice of reason, made a ridiculous number of movies, just about all of which were unbelievably bad, and which usually combined outrageous violence with gratuitous female nudity. What's not to like?

Well, obviously Golan himself, who seems to have been an appalling human being, even if you don't believe the story of how he persuaded an exhausted actor to keep working by threatening him with a machine-gun! And yet this tenth-rate studio ended up making wannabe blockbusters like the fourth Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, and even the occasional sumptuous art-house Shakespeare opera film. But of course they were far more likely to give us an hour and a half of Chuck Norris blowing up Arabs. Oh, and they single-handedly invented the ninja movie, for which we're all no doubt grateful.

What makes this documentary worth seeing is the footage from all those ludicrous films Cannon made, some of which I'd never even heard of because they sank without trace the moment they were released. But the most ambitious of their movies, almost all of which were dismal flops, had outrageously bizarre plots, often mashing up two obviously incompatible genres - "Lawrence Of Arabia" meets "Wacky Races", for example - or assumed that if you combine hostile extraterrestrials, vampires, and gratuitously nude gorgeous women not just in the same movie but in the same character, hire a cult director, and throw immense amounts of money at it, it can't possibly fail to be a massive hit. Though strangely, "Lifeforce" wasn't.

You'll end up wanting to see quite a few of the misbegotten cinematic monstrosities whose existence this documentary reminds you of, probably for the first time. Not all of them are available on DVD, but of those that are, even once you've discounted all the very dated soft porn and anything "starring" Chuck Norris, there are many, many hours of sublime silliness to check out - aerobics instructors possessed by undead ninjas, for instance. I almost wish Cannon had succeeded in making their version of "Spiderman", in which Dolph Lundgren would have played the Green Goblin. Almost.

This is one of those films that matters in ways unconnected with the qualities films are normally judged by, therefore film critics automatically give it five stars, but ordinary viewers won't see what all the fuss is about. It's based on a book highly critical of Nazis that was illegally printed and distributed in Nazi-occupied France, so many people, including the author, risked their lives in connection with this book to inspire the French public. Which was very noble of them, but that doesn't make it great literature. And as for most of the movie being shot in the house where the book was written, so what? You wouldn't know that from watching the film, so it's irrelevant.

A German officer is billeted in a large house occupied by an elderly Frenchman and his niece, who, by way of passive resistance, pretend he isn't there, even though he insists on wandering into their living-room every evening and talking about various lofty cultural topics to prove that most Germans are decent people and their invasion of France is really the best thing for both countries. Of course, however honorable and well-meaning he is, he's also incredibly naïve. And then one day he finds out that being a "good Nazi" is a contradiction in terms; either the twisted ideology corrupts you, or you eventually realize that Naziism is totally evil.

This is all very well, but when almost the entire film consists of one of the three significant characters delivering monologues while the other two sit in silence ignoring him, it's inevitably going to be a wee bit one-paced. And while it's an interesting change for wartime anti-Nazi propaganda not to portray all Germans as one-dimensional monsters (though we do meet a few of those later on), and instead show us a good German who supports the Nazis for good reasons but is actually making a tragic mistake he eventually admits, this film isn't what you could honestly call action-packed. So little happens that almost the entire plot could have been condensed into a lecture entitled "Why I Voted For Hitler And Why I Was Wrong".

However, credit has to be given to Howard Vernon, who supplies about 90% of the acting in the entire movie, and does it very well, convincingly portraying a deeply conflicted man trying to persuade himself he's doing the right thing when all along he fears he might not be. Devotees of schlock will be very familiar indeed with Howard Vernon, thanks to all those Jesús Franco movies he appeared in, and his performance here is good enough for it to be a complete mystery why he spent so much of his career working for the worst director who ever lived, and appearing in garbage like "The Erotic Rites Of Frankenstein".

As with nearly all films that achieved cult status simply because for a long time it was almost impossible to actually see them, this one is slightly overrated. But only slightly. Tyrone Power is superb as the young man whose deprived upbringing has made him determined to be successful, famous, and above all, rich, no matter what it takes, and we almost immediately learn that he has no qualms about seducing a slightly past-it older woman for personal gain. However, he's not completely amoral, as we soon find out when he ironically gets his big break by accidentally doing something which would have been truly evil if he'd done it on purpose, and he's absolutely horrified by what he did, even though he didn't mean to. So we know our anti-hero does have a heart in there somewhere, even if it's buried under several tons of cynicism.

The film's biggest weakness is that its central character is too ambitious to remain with the seedy carnival where he starts out, soon progresses to Broadway stardom, and is even briefly the head of his own church. Had he simply become the boss of the carnival, we could have spent the entire film in the fascinatingly bizarre world of the carnies, but instead he moves on to greater things and far less interesting environments. This allows the movie to comment, very daringly for 1947, on how little difference there is between the crude fakery of a fairground fortune-teller and a certain kind of religion, but unfortunately we see far more of "The Great Stanton" doing his not terribly impressive nightclub act than we do of his fake mediumship. Nevertheless, all of this makes an interesting change from the usual people and places you'll see in almost every other film noir.

It's also genuinely subversive, explicitly telling us that psychoanalysis is just as much of a con game as dressing up as a gypsy and peering into a crystal ball, only far less excusable, and implicitly that many, perhaps all religions fall into the same category. Also, although, this being a film made in 1947, the anti-hero's downfall is inevitable because sin must be seen to be punished, it manages to sneak in a thoroughly evil character who suffers no retribution at all and actually makes a huge profit. Though I was puzzled that, in a movie where every other manifestation of the supernatural is shown to be a cheap trick, tarot cards seem to work just fine.

It's no masterpiece, but it's both a very good and a very unusual example of the noir genre that doesn't pull its punches, and Tyrone Power is perfectly cast as a not quite irredeemable but monstrously selfish man who can be utterly charming at the drop of a hat. Definitely worth seeing if you don't mind the fact that it was made 70 years ago. Talking of which, some movies that old look decidedly the worse for wear, but this digitally restored print is almost perfect.

Right from the opening credits, which precisely mimic the crude animations seen at the start of all three films in Clint Eastwood's "Dollars" trilogy, and are accompanied by music which desperately tries (without success) to sound like the work of Ennio Morricone, it's clear that this movie is doing its best to recreate the gleeful mayhem of the classic spaghetti westerns. Alas, it fails dismally.

Director Ti West has absolutely no idea how to capture the over-the-top cartoon carnage of the films he's so obviously inspired by. At almost no point does anything violent happen without a lengthy preamble revealing exactly what's about to occur long before it does, allowing one or more characters to beg for their lives at considerable length, appeal for everybody else to be reasonable, or simply ramble on about something utterly irrelevant. When, very early on, the baddest of the bad guys insists on having a fight with the hero for no particular reason, it takes such an absurdly long time for what turns out to be the most underwhelming fist-fight you'll ever see to actually start that even the character trying to start it becomes aware that something really should have happened by now. I almost expected the townspeople to go all Monty Python and shout in chorus: "Get on with it!"

Numerous western tropes are dropped into the mix and horribly misused. John Travolta, who has shown in other recent films what a splendidly menacing character actor he can be, phones it in as that tired old cliché, the patriarch who rules the town a little too sternly and has a son who's absolutely rotten. When he stares into the muzzle of a gun and pleads for his son's life, he sounds like a sitcom dad trying to persuade a sulky adolescent brat to tidy his bedroom. But by that time, the viewer will be no more engaged in the painfully listless "action" than he is.

Ti West has noticed that spaghetti westerns often featured comedy, therefore the cast includes an extremely well-trained dog which performs various zany bits of business, appears to understand English perfectly, and is probably the smartest character in the movie. And then, because spaghetti westerns were sometimes very violent indeed, we're treated to an explicit close-up of blood spurting from severed neck arteries. What West fails to grasp is that although these two things could both plausibly appear in spaghetti westerns, they should never both be in the same one. This woefully misguided attitude, along with West's total ineptitude at directing action, and a hero so angst-ridden and reluctant to do anything that he might as well be called Hamlet, dooms this to be the sort of film in which the hero drones on endlessly about how killing people is wrong, and then shoots someone in the head. And worst of all, it's rather dull.

This seven-and-a-half-hour documentary was made as a cinematic feature. Yes, you really are supposed to watch it all in one sitting, though you're allowed a few minutes every three hours to go to the toilet. At those cinema screenings, I bet there wasn't one person who, after enduring the whole thing, wasn't secretly thinking "Phew, I'm glad that's over!", no matter how loudly they applauded.

This is an ordeal. In particular, it takes three hours to get to the murders. So 40% of this absurdly long film is devoted to establishing that a) blacks living in Los Angeles thoroughly distrusted the justice system in general and the LAPD in particular for lots of reasons, notably the Rodney King incident, and b) OJ Simpson was very famous and popular indeed before his downfall. These facts are important to the story, but they're pretty simple, especially OJ's fame. We don't need to see him running with a football while vast crowds cheer all that many times to get the point, and what else did he do? Acted badly in a few movies, made a Hertz commercial that's shown so many times it almost seems like horribly misjudged product placement, and after that he was famous for being famous. And then he killed his wife.

Many of OJ's friends get lots and lots of screen-time, but they're not particularly interesting people, and most of them haven't really got much more to say than: "OJ is such a charismatic guy you can't help liking him, but even of course I always sort of knew there was something wrong with him." Well, in hindsight, they would say that, wouldn't they? As for the celebrities prominently listed among the cast, second-billed Muhammad Ali appears in less than a minute of barely relevant archive footage, and most of the others aren't on screen for much longer.

The peculiar allocation of screen time given to people who are both still alive and willing to talk is harder to explain. For instance, there's quite a lot of interview footage featuring the transgender person who piloted the news helicopter that followed the infamous slow-speed white Bronco chase, but Detective Mark Furhman is on screen for less time than this extremely peripheral character, even though he's arguably the most significant person in the story other than OJ himself, and there are so many questions still unanswered about him that we should have been given a much clearer idea of why he said and did certain extremely strange things.

But it's in their treatment of OJ that the film-makers make their biggest and weirdest blunder. On the third disk as an extra there's a 45-minute interview with OJ in which the presenter interrupts very little and just lets him talk. In one-tenth the duration of the documentary, we understand perfectly that OJ is an immensely vain and utterly selfish man who blames everyone except himself for everything bad he's ever done, and he has no more idea of right and wrong or consideration for other people than a cat. If he'd taken the stand in his own defense, he'd have been toast! At one point he literally compares his sufferings to those of Jesus Christ!

This documentary makes such a powerful statement about racial prejudice and social injustice, and the bizarre consequences this can have, such as a murderer going free for reasons that ultimately have nothing to do with whether or not he committed the crime, that it has to be praised on some level. But it's so repetitive that there's no justification for its excessive length, and it takes absolutely forever to make very simple points, such as: "OJ Simpson is so self-centered there must be something wrong with him", when you can get the same information from OJ's own mouth just by letting him ramble on about himself for five minutes. If a really good editor ruthlessly pruned this lumbering diplodocus of a film down to a size that fitted comfortably on one disk, they wouldn't have to lose anything that genuinely mattered. And it would be a far better film.

One of several genuine classics from the directing and producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the most enduring and successful partnership of its kind prior to Joel & Ethan Coen, this extraordinarily beautiful film is of course a bit dated, as 70-year-old movies tend to be. Modern viewers may wince at the number of white actors in brownface playing Nepalese characters, some of whom are portrayed in a patronizing way that's meant to be funny, and although Sabu is in it because he's the biggest star they could find who was genuinely Indian, they might have been better off with a browned-up white actor who could act. Certain things can only be hinted at, in particular whether Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) has more than a theoretical knowledge of what her vow of chastity prevents her from even thinking of doing. And inevitably it's a bit slow.

But it has a great deal to recommend it. In particular, although the nuns are so out of place in their new home surrounded by cheerful highly-sexed pagans that you almost expect the locals to start building a wicker man, at no point is it ever implied that Christianity is superior to what the natives get up to. Indeed, the awkward presence a holy man in a permanent trance in their back garden reminds both the nuns and the audience that when they really want to, these sinful unbelievers can renounce the pleasures of the flesh far more successfully than the increasingly frazzled sisters have a hope of doing.

Kathleen Byron stands out as the nun who, right from the start, is half-crazy and getting crazier by the minute; the loopiest nun other than Glenda Jackson in Ken Russell's "The Devils" was obviously based on her performance here. And perhaps because she never has to speak, Jean Simmons is very convincing as a 17-year-old native girl so uninhibitedly sexy that at one point she near-as-dammit does Britt Ekland's "Wicker Man" dance. This is a situation that can't possibly end well, and inevitably it doesn't. Michael Powell loved to present his audiences with interestingly twisted characters they weren't expecting, such as the angel in "A Matter of Life and Death" who was nowhere near as honest as you'd expect an angel to be, and of course the serial-killing pervert in "Peeping Tom" who was actually a rather nice man gone horribly wrong through no fault of his own. Here he gives us a movie in which the focus throughout is on pure and saintly women who devote their lives to God, not one of whom is either pure or saintly, though some fake it better than others. Nobody else in the film has these qualities either, but they care very little or not at all, and in the end, the characters who finish up happiest are the ones who simply did what came naturally. Here endeth the lesson. Amen.

Unexpected bonus: a commentary track by Michael Powell and, of all people, Martin Scorcese!

Like almost everything else Harold Pinter wrote, this weird, nightmarish movie is about an uneasy relationship between men that changes in peculiar ways as it becomes an overt power-struggle, the motive for which is never entirely clear. Does Barrett, the "gentleman's gentleman" who's really no gentleman at all, just want weak upper-class alcoholic Tony's money? Although what appears to be a bog-standard blackmail plot is obviously and clumsily set up, it turns out to be nowhere near that simple. As the master/servant dynamic shifts, very subtly at first but with increasing momentum, their relationship goes through every possible permutation, including moments when they might almost be a quarrelsome old married couple and/or tenderly in love, despite both of them being apparently heterosexual. And then the next minute they're two grown men squabbling like little boys over who won a dodgeball game.

James Fox, whose blond hair makes him oddly resemble David Bowie before such a person existed, gets his cinematic career off to a fine start as the pathetic Tony, who is perfectly balanced between being arrogant and spoilt enough to deserve what he gets, and yet not so awful that we don't feel sorry for him when he completely loses control of his life. But it's Dirk Bogarde who easily walks away with the movie. Right from the start, when he appears to be the perfect self-effacing, utterly obedient, super-competent manservant, there's just a hint that he's not telling his master everything, which grows and grows until you can't take your eyes off him because he'll suddenly be a different person the second his employer isn't looking straight at him. There's something demonic about him; this film is almost an alternative version of "The Shining" in which it's the ghostly bartender who becomes a grinning madman as he sucks the life out of an increasingly pitiful Jack Nicholson - I have one scene in particular in mind, which I'm sure Stanley Kubrick had in mind too.

If Bogarde's a devil, then Sarah Miles is a succubus, outrageously sexy in a very early sixties kind of way, and much more comfortable in hot environments, whereas Wendy Craig's "good girl" doesn't even notice when it's snowing, which around her it usually is. No wonder she can't compete! That's one of the less subtle symbolic details, but just about everything that's visible or audible becomes horribly important, the way trivial little things do in bad dreams you can't wake yourself up from. I can't think of any other film in which a dripping tap is erotic! And Barrett's growing dominance is measured by the progressively more important rooms in which he displays an unbelievably bad painting he seems to treasure. Despite the lack of overt horror, the utter helplessness of the "hero" in the face of an apparently motiveless intruder who tears his whole reality apart put me in mind of poor doomed Henry in "Eraserhead".

This extremely odd movie builds the tension very slowly at first, but once it gets going it's absolutely relentless, and every time something predictable happens, it's topped by something much weirder that you didn't see coming. And Dirk Bogarde's gradual transformation from obsequious lackey to Mephistophelean tormentor has to be seen to be believed! As for James Fox, although he's inevitably overshadowed by Bogarde, he deserves a special mention for possessing the very rare acting skill of being able to convince us that he really is drunk. It's not quite a masterpiece, but it's an extraordinary and unique film that's utterly fascinating in the manner of one of those dreams where nothing happens but you know it's going to, and when it does, it's not what you expected at all.

I'm really not sure what this film is trying to be: a mashup of "Mean Streets" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", perhaps? Judging by the trailer, they tried to market it as a feelgood buddy comedy, yet there's almost nothing in it that would make anyone in their right mind laugh. The central joke appears to be the notion that smooth, super-cool wise guy Charlie (Mickey Rourke) not only puts up with his immature, irresponsible, obnoxious, and altogether worthless third cousin Paulie (Eric Roberts), but goes along with all his harebrained schemes and excuses their inevitable failure without ever becoming more than temporarily annoyed because Italians are genetically compelled to behave like this. Or something. It's as funny as it sounds.

Mickey Rourke is actually pretty good as the decent guy with an ego bigger than the Bronx who's not quite as smart as he thinks he is. The problem is Eric Roberts. Almost every second he's on screen, he's incredibly annoying. From the very start, not only everyone in the audience but everyone in the movie knows he's a total waste of space, and Eric Roberts never ceases to remind us of this by overacting in a way that'll have you grating your teeth at five-minute intervals. He seems to be at least borderline retarded, he has no redeeming features whatsoever, and Eric Roberts' performance is so weird I often couldn't figure out whether or not Paulie was supposed to come across as screamingly gay (apparently not). Seriously, as soon as the instantly unbearable Paulie appeared and was established to be somebody Charlie reluctantly loved because he was family, I assumed he'd be killed about ten minutes in, and the plot would revolve around Charlie's revenge. Sadly not - Paulie's in the whole damn movie!

The uneasy mix of feeble humor and watered-down grittiness never works at all. One minute we're supposed to roar with laughter at a very contrived gag involving powerful laxatives, the next people are getting body-parts cut off. And since the focus throughout is firmly on two men, the supporting cast are wasted, including Daryl Hannah, whose character might as well have been named Eye Candy. Still, I suppose if somebody had to spend most of their screen-time doing aerobics in a leotard, better her than Eric Roberts.

You know you're in trouble when the very first credit reveals that the movie was picked up for video distribution by Troma, meaning that it's an absolute piece of shit, but they could get it cheap and maybe the name "Burt Reynolds" would fool people into thinking it might be good. Not even Burt Reynolds thought it was good, judging by the way he sleepwalks through the film.

This is obviously a poor-quality video transfer from a bad print, with a grainy picture in television aspect ratio, washed-out color, and badly distorted sound. From the opening scene in which a diver swims around for quite some time, occasionally appearing in the same shot as a very small and totally disinterested shark, but mostly being menaced by stock footage, before we suddenly get some blurred and unconvincing close-ups of sharks biting what looks like a wetsuit stuffed with fish (it doesn't help that in this crummy print, the blood is yellow), you'll guess how bad the rest of the movie is going to be. And you'll be right.

Sam Fuller made some very interesting films, but this isn't one of them. It's a formulaic piece of crap obviously shot in North Africa because everything's a lot cheaper over there, plus you can pad the film with location footage. Burt Reynolds plays a listless version of his default charming rogue, and Fuller directs as though the only thing about the movie that interested him was his paycheck. The locals in minor parts succeed in looking much more interested than the stars because hey, they're in a movie, and they have no idea how bad it is, but of course, none of them can act. There's a pretty girl who can't act very well but manages to look vaguely interested in Burt Reynolds, an irritating little kid who can't act at all, comical bits of business that go on forever and involve lots of fruit stalls falling over because that never ceases to amuse, and...

Oh, who cares! I didn't watch the whole sorry mess because it was painful rather than entertaining. Maybe it gets really exciting for five minutes at the end, but I simply couldn't be bothered to find out. Though I did see enough to understand why nobody ever points out that a movie about people being attacked by sharks came out a whole six years before "Jaws". If anybody actually saw this in 1969, they soon forgot about it, and quite right too.

Strangely enough, despite being a fan of old horror movies (the good ones, anyway - and the bad ones if they're fun), I'd never gotten around to seeing this until now. It didn't seem to be on TV as often as all the other "classics". I've just found out why: it's bloody awful! The opening credits (inexplicably accompanied by an excerpt from, of all things, "Swan Lake"!) announce that it's adapted from a stage play, and that's painfully apparent throughout. The camera seems to be rooted to the spot, which perhaps it was, since early sound cameras were extremely bulky, and many things that might be tricky to show in a cinematic context are described rather than shown, sometimes by people reading from newspapers or literally pointing offscreen. Likewise, nothing the slightest bit nasty is directly shown; this has to be the only version of "Dracula" in which the poor Count doesn't even have fangs! Which is especially wimpy when you consider the feral dentition Max Shreck was equipped with in 1922's "Nosferatu".

There are no genuinely good performances whatsoever, and that includes Bela Lugosi. Think about this for a moment. The iconic Frankenstein Monster will always be the pitiful man-child with bolts in his neck who doesn't know his own strength played by Boris Karloff, and not even Robert DeNiro could steal it from Boris, because those old Universal Frankenstein movies (well, the first two at least) still pack a punch today. But Lugosi's Dracula? Nowadays he's the template for the wacky comedy vampire with the hammy Hungarian accent who wouldn't scare anyone over the age of five. Now, Christopher Lee's Dracula, on the other hand...

The scariest moments in this incredibly tame and leadenly directed "horror" film, as well as the least worst acting, are provided by Dwight Frye's Renfield, who's supposed to be a minor supporting character. I think Jack Nicholson may have been thinking of him when he starred in "The Shining". But those moments are few and far between. As for Lugosi, depending on which source you believe, he may or may not have been entirely fluent in English when he made this movie, but judging by his performance, I'd say there were definitely times when he forgot what his lines meant and memorised them phonetically. By the way, the trick used here of making Lugosi's eyes glow by pointing a floodlight at his face and interposing a sheet of cardboard with two perfectly placed pinholes was later used by Ed Wood, after Lugosi explained to him how it was done. The interesting thing is that Ed Wood, allegedly the world's worst director, understood that the two spots of light were supposed to line up with Bela's eyes. Tod Browning seems to have either failed to grasp this incredibly basic point, or simply couldn't be bothered.

Seriously, I'd give this feeble heap of armadillo faeces one star if it wasn't a cinematic landmark in its own half-assed way. But if you want to see Bela Lugosi at his best, you'd be far better off renting "White Zombie".

This extremely strange film handicaps itself from the outset by attempting to combine gritty social realism with screwball comedy, and the result is inevitably schizoid. The whole idea of a very rich man playing at being poor so that he can understand poverty well enough to make a movie about it is absurd, and one of the film's strengths is the way it frequently comments on its own absurdities. The hero's butler very frankly tells him that what he's about to do is both an insult to genuinely poor people who can't stop being poor the moment they get tired of rôle-playing, and incredibly stupid because he hasn't a clue what he's getting into and he could easily end up dead. And the moment we first see Veronica Lake in male drag, she points out the utter futility of her trying to pass for a boy.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly Veronica Lake's wisecracking cynic with a soft heart, who falls for our hero when she thinks he's down and out and doesn't like him so well as a smug, pampered rich man. And it's a great running gag to have the relatively tiny Veronica Lake constantly remind the towering Joel McCrea that he won't last ten minutes on the street if she's not there to protect him. But although she effortlessly steals every scene she's in for most of the film, towards the end she goes very quiet, and for quite a long stretch she disappears altogether, because the hero's learning experience gets so serious that her witty remarks are no longer appropriate. And when events spiral nightmarishly out of control, things get so dark that the movie switches genres and most of the supporting cast no longer belong in it.

The depictions of grinding poverty are extremely realistic - many of the extras seem to be genuine homeless people - and the predicament our sadder and wiser hero eventually gets himself into is truly awful. The trouble is that this film starts out by showing us zany stereotypes exchanging wacky banter and a completely irrelevant car-chase so cartoonish you expect Dick Dastardly to join in, and ends up portraying squalor, misery and real violence with serious consequences, by which time you'll probably have noticed that you haven't laughed for quite a while. Ironically, the hero eventually concludes that making comedies and cheering people up is better than depressing them by showing them how much suffering there is out there. It's almost as if he's been watching himself starring in this movie and he didn't like the direction it took in the second half.

George Romero deserves full credit for doing his best not to become a one-note cliché. After inventing zombies as we now know them in his very first feature, his next two films were a romantic comedy, and this only marginally horrific feminist allegory. Unfortunately, "There's Always Vanilla" was a dismal flop even George Romero would prefer to forget, and "Season of the Witch" isn't much better.

The early seventies, that curious era when the drug-fueled idealism of the swinging sixties had fizzled out into selfish hedonism, everyone wore incredibly terrible clothes, and casual sexism was perfectly normal, are perhaps the only time in which this peculiar tale of a frustrated housewife who empowers herself in a very literal sense by taking up witchcraft could have been set. The trouble is, its most interesting element, the ambiguity as to whether the central character can actually perform magic or is just using the belief that she can as an excuse to misbehave, is handled very badly indeed. If you want to see how badly, compare the same director's later and greatly superior film "Martin", which involves a young man with a similarly ambiguous lifestyle: is he a centuries-old vampire, or just a very sick boy whose bizarre delusion is a weird excuse for being a serial killer?

The concept of women secretly having supernatural powers that allow them to get their own back on sexist males isn't a bad one ("The Witches of Eastwick" had a lot of fun with it), and neither is the idea that belief in magic is at least as important as whether or not it really works, but "The Wicker Man" this ain't! Apart from Jan White in the lead rôle, who comes fairly close to saving the movie but can't quite manage it, nobody acts well, and some of the cast don't seem to be acting at all. The only two men who matter are crudely unsympathetic stereotypes, too many of the women are shallow idiots, and everybody gets to ramble on in a strangely flat way for much, much too long. The direction is also extremely flat, except in a few nightmare scenes which prove conclusively that if George Romero isn't directing a very specific kind of horror film, he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's doing.

This is undoubtedly a very dated movie indeed, but that's not what makes it a bad movie. Other films were made in the same year that have stood the test of time, and unless a film is blatantly racist in a truly unacceptable way, we shouldn't blame the directors of old movies for not having clairvoyant powers that allow them to know what sort of content will be desirable many decades later. It's a bad movie because it's slow, boring, poorly directed, mostly very poorly acted indeed, and altogether feeble in ways that allow you to notice everything that's dated about it in ways that you wouldn't if the story was genuinely involving. And this story is often so uninvolving that at times I was paying less attention to what the characters were saying than how horrendous their wallpaper was.

On a technical note, it's not a very good print, though since it's an obscure and unloved film, I accept that this was the best print they could find. But I'm a little skeptical about the claim that it's been digitally restored, given the number of shots in which a very prominent hair is trapped in the camera on the left side of the screen. If something that obvious hasn't been digitally removed, what exactly have they bothered to do?

Len Deighton, best known for creating the very un-Bond-like secret agent Harry Palmer portrayed on screen by Michael Caine, wrote his "What if Hitler had won?" novel at a time when the concept hadn't been done to death yet, so he didn't have to use outrageous gimmicks to make his book different from all the others. Therefore this TV adaptation features no Nazi flying saucers on the Moon.

What it does feature is an astonishingly meticulous recreation of wartime Britain with added swastikas, and a largely character-driven plot in which figuring out who the good guys are isn't quite as easy as you'd think under the circumstances. In a few scenes the use of CGI is rather too obvious, but otherwise the BBC do a remarkable job of portraying dingy, ravaged London on a budget that would just make Hollywood snigger contemptuously. Also, in contrast to Hollywood in general and Disney in particular's over-the-top political correctness, everyone smokes so much that in the one scene where an adult is shown to be a non-smoker, you'll think "Plot point!", and you'll be right. Though I was puzzled by how seldom the Nazis did the Nazi salute or said "Heil Hitler", as if the BBC thought these two things were somehow more offensive than all the other Nazi imagery we're constantly shown.

Where it falls down a bit is the contrived plot, which involves at least one absurdly enormous coincidence. The not particularly long source novel doesn't really contain five hours' worth of material, hence the blatant attempt to turn the latter half of the story into "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Hitler", with characters we've seen very little of turning out to have fiendishly complex cunning plans that are hastily explained at the end, and a peculiar subplot involving King George VI, who is portrayed as such a physical wreck that they don't bother telling us what's supposed to be wrong with him because if you've got a real illness that bad you're obviously going to die almost immediately. Also watch how, right at the start, our hero finds an object he can't identify at a murder scene and conceals that one bit of evidence for no reason at all, as if he magically knows that later on it'll be very important. And it's a howling example of bad historical research to assume that in 1941 everybody knew what an atom bomb was!

I also had a bit of a problem with Sam Riley's acting. Look at that picture up there. That's his facial expression for 99% of his screen time. He's so emotionless that two hours in, a Nazi makes a joke about it. I know these are hard times and he's having a particularly hard time himself, but his relentless repressed misery is actually depressing to watch, to the point where I found myself wishing for more scenes with the Nazis because they're more fun to be around. It's true that not all of the Nazis are completely bad, but when the hero is in any way less appealing than the SS, something has clearly gone wrong.

If you're amused by that peculiar MST3K style of comedy where the obvious failings of terrible films are mocked by people who can't even fake being funny unless they've got an easy target to mercilessly bully, this should be just your cup of tea. Have some friends round so you can all laugh ironically while that guy who thinks he's a comedian (there's always one) shows how witty he is by pointing out the numerous aspects of this movie that aren't very good and saying "that's awesome, dude!" every few seconds. If you're stoned and/or drunk enough and you have a mental age of 13, it should be quite a party.

If, on the other hand, you're an adult who prefers movies to be good on in some way, however debatable, this is simply a bloody awful waste of celluloid. Whose brilliant idea was it to make a cheap rip-off of the dreadful and completely unnecessary 1976 remake of "King Kong"? Yes, Danny Lee is "iconic" because he was in some splendidly demented John Woo movies alongside Chow Yun Fat, but that doesn't make him a good actor, and he's got a lot less to work with here. The female Tarzan is played by some lady I don't recall seeing in anything else (though if I collected old girlie magazines I expect I'd recognize her), but I assume she was cast on the basis that she was the least worst actress they could find who a) looked good in a rawhide bikini, and b) was willing to happily prance about in slow motion with a fully-grown leopard balanced on her shoulders.

If I've just made this pile of rabid porcupine diarrhea sound interesting, my apologies. That's one of the very few moments so loopy it genuinely gets your attention. And by the way, the leopard looks a lot more relaxed than it does on the poster! Otherwise, it's painfully predictable (remember, this is Asian King Kong, so the plot is almost identical), and the special effects are so dire that the 1933 version looks like "Avatar" by comparison, especially the numerous scenes in which terrified extras pretend to be in the same movie as a poorly back-projected man in a very cheap gorilla suit.

Worst of all, it's boring. The rampages of Mighty Peking Man are almost entirely forgotten about during the bloated midsection in which our hero falls in love with Scantily Clad Jungle Girl in slow motion accompanied by awful early seventies music, and when we finally get to the apocalyptic climax where the monster stomps an unconvincing model of Hong Kong while being shot at by very obvious toy armored cars, it lumbers on for ages without being the slightest bit exciting in any way. I'm pretty sure this is the only film whose soundtrack includes both Dionne Warwick's "The Look Of Love" and the entire last movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, and if it was filled with schizoid details like that it would perhaps be a perverse kind of anti-classic, but unfortunately it's exactly what it appears to be at first glance: an exceptionally bad Asian monster movie ripping off an American film which was lousy in the first place, but looks pretty good compared to this.