Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Just about every spaghetti western that isn't absolutely terrible has some claim to be a "cult movie", especially the odd ones. This is definitely a spaghetti western, it's undeniably odd, and Alex Cox (remember him?) thinks it deserves a cult following, so I suppose it must have one. The only problem is, it isn't very good.

Nothing ruins everybody's fun like too much politics, "correct" or not, and that's one of the main things wrong with this movie. For some reason a disproportionate number of Italians who directed westerns were passionate left-wingers, so a lot of films in this genre range from vaguely revolutionary to downright Marxist, but that's not a problem if the speeches don't get in the way of the action. Here, unfortunately, they do, in a bizarrely ham-fisted way. The bad guy, who is shown very convincingly indeed to be a spectacularly dreadful person before we even get as far as the opening credits, gives speeches of the "I am the poster boy for capitalism, therefore I wish they'd hurry up and invent Nazis so I could be one" variety every 20 minutes in case we haven't got the point yet, while the arthouse movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who definitely should have stayed on the other side of the camera, woodenly trots out the case for left-wingers being much better people even if they're much worse actors.

Stranded in the middle of this speechifying is the bewildered nitwit occupying the space where the hero should be. There are plenty of fine westerns, spaghetti and otherwise, in which a naïve young man has to transform himself into a ruthless avenger, but this poor schmuck is so naïve he actually seems brain-damaged. Which, since he doesn't even figure out who he's supposed to be avenging until three-quarters of the way through the film due to amnesia caused by a head-wound, he may in fact be. He wins gunfights, survives ambushes, and generally does everything a hero is meant to almost entirely thanks to coincidences so enormous that they're heavily implied to be literal acts of God, or the timely intervention of Mexican revolutionaries who keep claiming they need his help while proving themselves far better at solving their own problems than he is. All of which leads up to the most anticlimactic final showdown I've ever seen in a western, a gunfight so underwhelming that one of the other characters comments on it.

The whole film's a dreadful stylistic muddle, with odd lurches in tone from near-comedy to tub-thumping political tragedy as if they kept changing the script as they went along, made worse by the director's inability to give the action the split-second timing a proper spaghetti shootout needs. And why is the bad guy made up to look as though he's terminally ill when there's not one reference to his illness in the entire movie? Perhaps in an early draft he was a vampire, by way of an even clumsier critique of capitalism than the one they ended up with? Which would explain why in his last scene he's dressed as Dracula.

Makeup is also a problem for the hero, who is so heavily caked in greasepaint that he never looks quite normal. Why, of all the actors in Italy, did they cast the fair-skinned, blond-haired Lou Castel as a Mexican? You can see in the photo above that his blue eyes don't match the rest of him. Presumably it was on the strength of his performance the previous year as the baby-faced killer in "A Bullet For The General", a movie quite similar to this one but much better. So maybe you'd be better off renting that instead of this.

When you mention spaghetti westerns, everybody thinks of a tiny handful of movies, usually the Dollars Trilogy, "Once Upon a Time in the West", and maybe "Django", though they're probably thinking more of the peculiar Tarantino remake than the cheap, unpretentious, gleefully blood-soaked original. But there are a huge number of lesser-known films in the genre, some of them well worth a couple of hours of your time. However, deciding which to bother with can be tricky, since a great many of them have approximately the same casts but vary enormously in quality. In particular, Lee Van Cleef was in so many that his name in the credits is no guarantee of a high standard, and some of his lesser outings are downright embarrassing - looking at you, "God's Gun"!

Fortunately, this film is among the very best of the ones you probably haven't heard of. Giuliano Gemma, who was in a lot of B-list spaghettis, and even starred in his own franchise as Man With No Name clone Johnny Ringo, is excellent as the despised illegitimate outcast with the worst job in town (it says "street cleaner" in the synopsis, but what he actually does is empty outside lavatories) who becomes the pupil and eventually partner of the wise old master gunfighter, in a story arc at times so similar to a grittier, nastier version of "Star Wars" that I kept imagining how much better Gemma would have been as Luke Skywalker than Mark Hamill ever was.

Lee Van Cleef is of course the same beady-eyed, hawk-nosed badass you never, ever mess with that he nearly always was, and although he sleepwalked through some of his lesser shoot-em-ups, he gives one of his best performances here, helped greatly by the fact that he obviously gets on well with Gemma. It also helps that his character, unlike the terrifying but one-dimensional Angel-Eyes in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", is so morally ambiguous that for about three-quarters of the film you genuinely don't know which side he'll be on in the final showdown. As for Gemma, while he's obviously a nice kid who will do the right thing when the chips are down, his horrendous treatment by the townspeople before he unexpectedly turns out to be the fastest gun in the west makes his flirtation with the Dark Side both inevitable and excusable.

Apart from the leads, the acting is somewhat basic (if you've seen a lot of spaghetti westerns, many of the minor cast members will look very familiar indeed), but you may be pleased to learn that this beautifully remastered widescreen print gives you a choice between the usual badly dubbed English and the original Italian soundtrack. Gemma in particular is a far better actor when somebody else isn't speaking his lines for him in a foreign language. Although there aren't any huge battles or machine-gun massacres, the body-count is well into double figures, which in this kind of film is a must if you're going to get your money's worth. And the gaps between the gunfights are well filled by what is, for a genre where the hero tends to be a grim-faced enigma, an unusual amount of character development. It makes you wonder about all those other spaghetti gunslingers. Maybe even The Man With No Name was just a kid with no surname until the day he decided he'd rather carry a gun than a jobbie bucket?

Observant readers may have noticed that the breathless description riddled! with! exclamation! marks! of this film and how great it is on the General Info page was copypasted from the website of the company that manufactures the DVD, and would therefore quite like you to buy it even if it isn't very good, in the same way that this rental company labels it a "horror classic" because if they used a more accurate term fewer people would rent it. In fact, they near-as-dammit admit that it's a terrible movie, and they do quote the extremely negative opinion of it held by Freddie Francis. But what did he know? He was only the director.

This being the case, it should come as no surprise when I tell you that this is a very, very bad movie indeed. What saving graces it has are entirely thanks to its extraordinary cast, made possible by the dire state of the British film industry in 1974 (alas, we're still waiting for it to fully recover), which meant that a lot of actors who wouldn't normally have been seen dead in dreck like this were desperate for work and surprisingly affordable. If you've got nothing better to do, try googling the entire cast. You'll be amazed at how distinguished the careers of quite a few of them were, even those way down the cast-list. And of course, some of those veteran troupers knew full well what kind of movie they were in and didn't try to hide it. Hugh Griffith in particular, in the tiny part of the lawyer reading the dead aunt's will, gives a truly mind-boggling performance explicable only if somebody bet him a tidy sum that he couldn't make Jack Palance giggle on camera.

And then there's Jack Palance. Never the most restrained of actors, his portrayal of a rampantly heterosexual pot-smoking antique dealer who is secretly a barking mad gay satanist serial killer is subtle in the same way that this film is a classic. The insistence of the weirdly vindictive cop on the case that this bloke is the killer despite there being no evidence against him, which is probably meant to come across as a piece of brilliantly intuitive detective work, just seems like common sense when the way Palance plays him, this guy might as well have "I MURDER WOMEN FOR SATAN" tattooed on his forehead.

What stops it from being one of the mighty milestones of schlock cinema is that the truly excessive moments are in very short supply. It's the kind of film where if you've seen the trailer, you've already seen all the gore and most of the nudity. Chuko (or Chuku - the cast don't seem very sure how to pronounce it) the diabolical African idol is a memorable visual image, but he's also an inanimate object, despite Freddie Francis' attempts to make him seem a bit more lively through liberal use of the epileptic zoom lens technique so beloved of Jess Franco. And the midsection where Palance sets up a fiendishly cunning alibi for the murder he's about to commit, though actually quite good, is padding stretched as far as it can possibly go because it's cheaper to film than satanic orgies. As for that coven of devil worshippers, they're barely in the film, and serve no purpose other than providing some gratuitous nudity to spice up the trailer. They don't even know about the murders their leader is committing in the name of their ugly little wooden god!

In the end, though it does feature some hilariously bizarre performances, this is basically a very modest thriller with some extra murders and sleaze tacked on so that they can sell it as a horror movie, which throws the plot so completely out of whack that it's full of loose ends. I was particularly baffled by the main character's bisexuality, which the film keeps reminding us of as if it's really important but which has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Perhaps the scriptwriter was so homophobic that he thought worshipping satan, murdering women, and being gay were self-evidently all aspects of the same ghastly perversion?

This film has a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes??? Someone has blundered! Like the notorious "Gonks Go Beat", it starts with a song implying that the whole thing is going to be lots of fun, but from the moment the opening credits end it's downhill all the way. Mel Brooks is an extraordinarily hit-or-miss director, and this is, apart from one or two of the final films he made before admitting he'd completely lost the ability to be funny, his biggest miss.

Brooks' direction is so lackadaisical that at times I wondered if there was a director present at all. Inexplicably, some characters have heavy Russian accents while others don't. Since they're all supposed to be speaking their own language, none of them should really sound "foreign", but it seems to have been left entirely up to the individual actors whether they did or not. Frank Langella, whose sinister good looks resulted in his being typecast as charismatic baddies, including Count Dracula, would have been perfectly cast as the amoral antihero, except that his performance belongs in a very different and far better film. Unfortunately almost all his scenes pair him with Ron Moody, whose over-the-top performance lurches from children's TV wackiness to hammy pathos without ever being remotely believable. It doesn't help that Moody adopts a very thick accent while Langella has none at all, even though they're both supposed to be Russians speaking Russian.

This lazy, schizoid quality is present throughout, and the overacting gets so out of hand that one minor character, a screamingly gay theatre manager who is meant to come across as outrageously camp, seems quite underplayed compared with most of the "normal" people. Dom DeLuise, as the not terribly devout priest whose rival quest for the treasure is even more farcical than that of the two main characters, is particularly horrendous, and mostly doesn't seem to be acting at all, just being a loud, annoying idiot, when he isn't getting into speeded-up chases and fights so reminiscent of Benny Hill that you expect "Yackety Sax" to start playing while scantily-clad women scurry about for no reason at all. Sadly, this doesn't happen. As for Mel Brooks, his performance is just as bad if not worse, but fortunately he isn't in the movie for long enough to become absolutely unbearable.

Exactly what Brooks was thinking of when he tried to add childish slapstick straight out of "Crackerjack!" to the plot of a darkly satirical novel satirising the failure of the post-revolutionary soviet regime to deal with basic human selfishness and greed will never be known, and your guess is as good as mine, but the end result is a desperately unfunny failure that tries to go full tilt in two directions at once and ends up flopping around like a stranded halibut. By the way, if you're familiar with the novel and you're wondering how a story which ends so grimly could possibly contain all the juvenile foolishness I've just described, of course it couldn't, so Brooks greatly watered down the ending, thus removing any point the film might have had.

Despite his iconic pop culture status, surprisingly few movies have been made about Aleister Crowley, and all the ones worth seeing are about characters loosely based on him rather than the man himself; for example, "The Black Cat" starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Perhaps that's because from a modern perspective he didn't really do very much to justify his notoriety. In the late 19th. and early 20th. centuries, experimenting with drugs, bisexuality and magic while loudly proclaiming yourself to be an amoral hedonist in league with the devil really did make you "the wickedest man in the world". Nowadays he'd be just another whining goth.

So it's not surprising that this movie, written by the lead singer of Iron Maiden and directed by the bloke who played the cop who put his hand over the camera lens at the end of "Monty Python And The Holy Grail", gets almost nothing about him right other than for once pronouncing his name correctly (it rhymes with ravioli). Aleister, it seems, was not only a genuine magician, but also a demented serial killer whose mostly female victims are murdered for no real reason other than to allow us to leer at their nude bodies before and after death. And when he wasn't managing to appear clever by quoting his own books he behaved like a rabid chimpanzee.

Simon Callow, a shameless ham who overacts so enthusiastically that a lot of people think he must be good, gives it all he's got as a mild-mannered professor of literature who, for reasons so inadequate that I've already forgotten what they were, does unwise things with computers and quantum physics and other subjects of which the makers of this film are blissfully ignorant, thus getting himself possessed by the spirit of Aleister Crowley. As you do. And soon he's lurching around spraying everyone and everything in sight with all available body fluids (and the occasional solid) while burbling quasi-profound pseudo-historical waffle blatantly ripped off from "The Da Vinci Code". The rest of the cast, as in so many cheap, pretentious horror movies, range from elderly character actors with familiar faces whose decades of experience enable them to bring some dignity to the proceedings, to handsome youngsters whose faces you probably won't see anywhere else - whoever that female lead girlie is is as wooden as the proverbial very wooden thing.

I suppose if you think John Carpenter's "Prince Of Darkness" is a masterpiece that perfectly blends plausible science with believable occultism, you may find this film perhaps as much as a quarter as good. And if you know anything at all about real science, you'll get a few giggles from the scenes where scientific geniuses explain the basic laws of physics to each other wrongly, almost as if they're quoting "Quantum Physics For Dummies" from memory. But overall it's an absurdly misconceived and often grossly disgusting low-budget attempt to combine sci-fi with supernatural horror that fails dismally on every level. Unless its real purpose was to discourage viewers from experimenting with sex magic by making it look less fun than cancer. In that respect it succeeds admirably.

I see the word "classic" is used no less than three times to categorise this movie, which on this site, with its very special idea of what constitutes a "classic", is seldom a good sign. And sure enough, this film is obscure for the very good reason that it's a bit rubbish, in that uniquely sixties Italian arthouse movie "all dressed up and no place to go" kind of way. It takes place in one of those dystopian near-futures that look exactly like the decade in which they were filmed, only the clothes are even sillier, computers are so advanced they can talk (but are still the size of a barn and use punch-cards), and the entire population of the world is obsessed with something so stupid that you expect Captain Kirk to beam down and explain why they're wrong by punching all the men, kissing all the women, and getting his shirt ripped. And I wish he had, because it would have livened things up considerably.

The backstory is that wars and other similar unpleasantnesses have been rendered obsolete by allowing anyone who feels like letting off steam in that way to join The Great Hunt, a media circus in which consenting adults become celebrities by attempting to murder each other. The twist is, they have to take turns as hunter and hunted. And only by surviving ten rounds, five of which put them at a severe disadvantage, can they win the jackpot and become superstars, something we are told only 15 people have ever achieved. There's a pretty good, perhaps even great movie to be made about that.

Sadly this isn't it. Imagine a version of "A Clockwork Orange" in which two smugly handsome people chat each other up in that bar where they serve legal high milkshakes, or just stroll around admiring the scenery and flirting wittily, while every so often Alex and his droogs pop up in the background for a minute or two and give us a fleeting glimpse of this plastic utopia's dark side. Well, it's like that. The weirdest and by far the most famous scene, which of course features prominently on the packaging, comes about five minutes into the movie, and after that we see almost nothing of the ruthless manhunt the film's allegedly about, other than brief moments of mostly very clumsy black comedy in which the main characters randomly encounter anonymous extras trying to shoot each other in public places while everyone else ignores them.

The main problem is that the huntress trying to achieve the glory of becoming a "decathlete" kills her penultimate victim during the prologue, and is thus one pull of the trigger away from her goal with 90% of the movie still to go. Why does it take her so long to make her move? Because she wants to do it in a specific place where a camera crew are waiting to turn it into a commercial for, of all things, tea. As movie motivations go, that's almost as bad as that Bond villain who attempted to start World War III just to sell more newspapers! She'll be rich and famous the moment she pulls that trigger, so why risk her life for a few extra bucks? Because if she didn't, this movie would end an hour and a quarter before the credits are meant to roll, that's why.

Luis Buñuel only ended up in Mexico because in the fifties outspoken communists like him weren't especially welcome in Hollywood, and got an even frostier reception in his native Spain, which was at the time a fascist dictatorship. The films he made in those years were mostly lightweight low-budget potboilers he didn't much care about himself, until the studio rewarded him by finally letting him make the movie he really wanted to, the truly extraordinary "Los Olvidados". Though he did manage to make one other genuinely interesting Mexican film - this one.

Although cheaper and cruder than his future Oscar-winner "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", this film is an almost perfect mirror image of it, the difference being that in the later film a group of smug upper-class hypocrites are constantly frustrated in their attempts to have dinner together, whereas in this one, like the guests at the Mad Hatter's tea party, after the meal they're unable to leave. Why? No reason is ever given. And by the way, although supernatural forces are obviously at work, no Angel of Death ever puts in an appearance. Buñuel chose the title not because it's the slightest bit relevant, but because he couldn't think of a good one until a friend suggested "The Exterminating Angel" on the grounds that he'd go and see any film called that.

If you know the plot of "The Lord of the Flies" you'll have a pretty good idea how things will develop once these pampered snobs find themselves inexplicably unable to escape from a room with limited resources of food and an ever-worsening hygiene situation, not exactly helped by the Mexican climate and that inconvenient corpse in the closet. These supposed paragons of civilisation are soon reduced to primitive savagery, viciously squabbling over the dwindling supplies and in their desperation resorting to witchcraft, and when that doesn't work, turning on each other like a trapped animal gnawing its own leg off.

As an allegory about hypocrisy of people who consider themselves to be better than others because they have more money than most and can afford to dress elegantly and go to the opera while their servants do the actual work, it's overly simplistic, but as a weird movie it's one of the all-time classics. Buñuel's Surrealist background is much in evidence in the scenes of drug-induced delirium, crawling severed hands, and other weird details, such as the bear which just happens to be wandering around the house. And as a borderline horror movie, it brilliantly gets around its low budget by having its "monster" manifest itself not through costly special effects, but simply as an inexplicable compulsion not to step over a line on the floor. Jean-Paul Sartre's famous play "Huis Clos" has an almost identical premise of three people who can't stand each other trapped in a room they can never leave, but they're already dead and in Hell, so nothing's going to change. The protagonists in this movie, not all of whom are bad people even if they're grotesquely over-privileged, are in a much nastier predicament, because they're still alive so the worst has yet to happen. But if they can't figure something out, it soon will.

Although it's such a bizarre film, its target audience was the ordinary Mexican public, not the kind of people who only watch arthouse movies, so unlike many "weird" films it's neither pretentious nor incomprehensible, despite the total lack of explanation for what happens, which helps to make it a true classic of strange cinema. It's a pity the soundtrack is slightly defective, but when it comes to older films this rental company doesn't care which version they rent out, even if it's literally unwatchable, so I suppose we should all be thankful that the quality of this particular DVD is fairly poor rather than absolutely atrocious.

The Carry On series reached its high water mark in the late sixties, then as the seventies dawned and the Pythons rewrote the rules of comedy, all that "May I show you my credentials? Ooer missus!" business suddenly seemed terribly stale. The rot set in with this film, the first of a run of sub-par Carry Ons that nobody remembers because they weren't shown on telly anywhere near as often as the good ones. Ironically, a subplot in the film involves the legendary oozalum bird, a creature with the peculiar gift of being able to disappear up its own bottom. Over the course of the seventies, the Carry On franchise slowly but inexorably did that very thing.

A small cast featuring fewer series regulars than usual, with Frankie Howerd standing in for Kenneth Williams as the extremely gay actor playing a rampant heterosexual, travel, for no particular reason, to Africa. Or rather, they travel to a small indoor sound-stage whose tatty shrubbery is rearranged in various ways to represent that entire continent. There's also another slightly larger studio containing a marginally more expensive village set, but it must have cost a lot more than the small one to hire by the day because it takes our heroes three-quarters of the film to find it. The final scene in a London street looks jarringly odd because in a movie which supposedly takes place almost entirely in the open air, it's the first (and last) time we're actually outdoors in a real place.

The African wildlife ought to provide plentiful opportunities for comedy, but since it's nearly all stock footage and the only animal the cast can directly interact with is a man in a very cheap gorilla suit, they mostly do exactly what they'd do if they weren't in Africa: leer at and sexually pester women whom they obsessively try to spy on in the shower, and mistake absolutely everything said by anyone about anything for a double entendre. The best joke by far is when, as part of a fertility rite involving various objects symbolising marriage, Sid James is given a very big banana, and for once even he is at a loss for words.

This is truly dismal stuff. The seldom accurate General Info page claims it's a TV movie, which it isn't, but I can understand why a lazy researcher might think so. At a casual glance its barrel-scraping production values make it look a lot like something made for early seventies low-budget TV, probably for kids. Persons of a politically correct bent, already foaming at the mouth from the relentless sexism, will be forced to switch off the moment they catch sight of Bernard Bresslaw in blackface, but strangely that nowadays unacceptable comedy trope doesn't come across as all that racist. The black man may be an idiot, but so is everybody else. At times he even seems to be marginally less stupid and useless than the white men, especially Terry Scott's Ugg, a sub-moronic Tarzan spoof who makes George of the Jungle (remember him?) look like... well, like Tarzan.

Oh, and there's a Lost Village Of Leather Bikini Women, but by the time you finally get there, you'll have long since stopped caring. "Wild Women Of Wongo" did it better, and looked as though it had a much higher budget. If you want some old-style unashamedly low-brow humour, almost any Carry On film made in 1969 or earlier will do the job far better than this feeble effort, and although none of the previous films were what you'd call big-budget, they weren't embarrassingly cheap. "Carry On Up The Khyber" may not have been able to afford to go to India, but at least it went as far as Wales. This one can't even afford to go outside.

Not being deaf, I didn't even notice that this DVD doesn't have subtitles, and I wasn't prevented by that technical flaw from fully appreciating the movie. Unfortunately I had a different problem with it. It's a completely unenjoyable movie. Though there are good things in it, the most notable and surprising being Steve Coogan's performance as a character who isn't funny in the slightest. He has of course done straight acting before in "Philomena", but this film confirms that even if he never cracks another joke in his life, he won't be short of work as a character actor specialising in men on the edge of a nervous breakdown, or as he is in this film, well over the edge. I never thought I'd see Steve Coogan act Richard Gere off the screen, but he wins the contest hands down.

Unfortunately his character, though more complex and interesting than anybody else in the film, isn't very likeable, except in comparison with the appalling people who surround him. Absolutely nobody comes out of it looking good, because the oddly structured narrative barely allows us to see any of them behaving normally or being pleasant to anyone, and when it does, we're already so accustomed to seeing them snapping at each other that we don't care. And why on earth is the story centred around the main characters having dinner in a ludicrously pretentious restaurant? Judging by some of his recent television work, it's starting to look as though Steve Coogan's contract stipulates that he must be served with obscenely expensive gourmet food on screen, no matter how little it has to do with the plot. In the context of this film, it's completely unbelievable that anyone, especially a man running for the US senate, would have the kind of conversation these people do, often very loudly, in a restaurant!

These aren't the only problems. The central underlying theme of mental illness is handled in a very dubious way, and Coogan's otherwise realistic portrayal of a man driven too far by a combination of a hereditary tendency to develop mental health issues and domestic problems that would put almost unendurable pressure on anyone is undermined by the nasty implication that people with any kind of mental illness, even a relatively minor one not requiring hospitalisation, are potentially capable of extreme violence. The question on the poster, "How far would you go to protect your children?", which sounds like a tag-line from the "Taken" franchise, turns out to refer to something altogether different, and so horrible that our sympathies aren't with the children at all. And that special chemistry Gere and Coogan need to come across convincingly as brothers simply isn't there. These aren't two closely related men who, though now estranged, grew up together. These are two blokes who have just met for the first time and wish they hadn't.

As for that ending, which seems to come out of nowhere and then doesn't quite know what to do with itself, without giving away any plot spoilers, I suspect it was rewritten at the last minute, thus rendering most of what has led up to it strangely pointless. As I said, the acting's good, especially that of Steve Coogan, but the characters are nasty, selfish people who don't even seem to like their closest relatives much, apart from their teenage sons, who turn out to be the least likeable characters of all. So why should we care what happens to any of them? I certainly didn't. Technically it's a good film, but I can't imagine anyone actually enjoying it. Though it did leave me looking forward to Steve Coogan's future rôles in movies which, though serious, aren't quite as miserable as this one.

This obscure, little-seen second sequel to "The Fly" killed off a franchise which was already struggling with the problem of the same absurdly specific accident having to somehow happen repeatedly. Which, this time round, it doesn't, the third generation of the ill-fated Delambre family having finally learned to be really, really careful NOT to teleport yourself and a fly at the same time! Though of course they're still suicidally reckless about every other aspect of doing hazardous experiments with machines that can turn you into a human centipede if you press the wrong button.

Anyway, according to the muddled continuity, which mixes up events from the previous two films and makes no mention of the fact that one character has aged so much since the first film that this one must take place round about 1990, the son and grandsons of the ill-fated André Delambre are still trying to perfect that far-more-trouble-than-it's-worth teleporter, with predictably horrendous results, most of which happened before the movie started, as did a lot of other backstory which sounds much more interesting than the events we actually get to see. In fact, the amount of time the movie spends on the subplot about a newly married woman gradually uncovering the awful truth about what really happened to her husband's supposedly dead first wife almost makes it more of a sequel to "Jane Eyre" than either of those two movies about people getting mixed up with insects!

Instead of the iconic giant fly's head which symbolises the whole franchise, the makeup effects this time around amount to not much more than the victims of failed experiments having a bit of wax or latex daubed on them to make them look partially melted, and the ultimate horror that results when two people are teleported simultaneously is barely glimpsed. To modern sensibilities, the most horrific sight in the film is the "Chinese" character played by a very non-Chinese actress, especially since her husband is played by the genuinely Asian Burt Kwouk, and whenever he's in shot with her she looks even more fake than she already did.

Worst of all, the maddest of the Delambre clan is played by that talentless drunken slob Brian Donlevy, who ruined quite a number of films, including the first two-thirds of Hammer's Quatermass Trilogy, by inexplicably becoming the go-to actor whenever you needed someone to play a scientific genius. Visibly hung over and sometimes audibly slurring his lines, he's as deeply unpleasant in character as he apparently was in real life. As for Vincent Price, by 1965 he was a lot more famous and expensive than he had been when the franchise began, so this movie quietly forgets that his character in the previous two films ever existed.

Like almost all the films this site labels "classics" because they think it just means "old", this is a deservedly forgotten low-budget obscurity in which the subplot about a young bride doubting her sanity but eventually finding out that she's perfectly sane, and it's her new husband and his nice friendly dad who need locking up, is better written, better acted, and far more interesting than the stuff about mad scientists turning people into murderous monsters that's supposed to be the entire point of the movie. The final shot is a teaser implying that we might get a fourth Fly film, possibly with an actual fly in it this time. But it would take 21 years before we met the Fly again, in what, thanks to David Cronenberg's unique view of the world, was a very different kind of movie indeed.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... Once again this rental company has demonstrated that when it comes to older movies, they just grab the first copy they see and don't give a hoot about its quality. Unless of course they deliberately buy the cheapest one. Either way, it's all about making money by renting you a DVD which can technically be said to have the film you wanted on it, and who cares if it's of such poor quality that having the cheek to rent it out shows utter contempt for both the paying customers and movies in general.

This DVD looks like, and quite possibly is, a tenth-generation copy of a VHS home video taped off the telly a very long time ago. You'd do better, or certainly no worse, to save yourself the price of a rental and watch it on youtube. If you think I'm making too much fuss because those screenshots above look perfectly OK, they're not taken from the film you actually get. They're not even in the same aspect ratio. I couldn't bring myself to sit through what might be a pretty good film because every frame is a washed-out degraded mess. And they don't even have the excuse that this is such an incredibly obscure movie that good copies are impossible to find. Budd Boetticher is considered to be one of the great western directors. It's true that this is one of his less famous movies, but even so, if they can't find a better copy than this, they aren't trying very hard. Shame on you, Cinema Paradiso!

Note to all customers: on the general info page, where it says "Studio", that's not actually the studio that made the film, or indeed a studio at all, but the company that manufactured the DVD. If you see certain names, don't rent the film, the worst offender by far being the truly execrable Elstree Hill, many of whose unwatchably hideous DVDs this company unfortunately possesses. 23rd Century seems to be another name which guarantees a grossly substandard viewing experience.

Firstly, an unfortunate technical note. I'd have awarded this disc another star if the quality of both sound and vision wasn't so lousy. Possibly it was the best available DVD of these extremely obscure movies, but given the couldn't-care-less attitude this rental company's buyer has when it comes to old but extremely well-known films of which numerous DVD releases exist, they probably went for the cheapest one without giving a thought to whether there might be a very good reason why it ended up in the bargain bin.

Anyway, leaving aside the fact that the DVD itself is fourth-rate (though better than some this company rents out!), the films on it are both terrible yet interesting in that odd way B-movies sometimes are. "The Track Of The Vampire" is the odder of the two by far. Although Roger Corman didn't direct or produce, it's one of his films in all but name - he even has a bit-part in it. Edited together by Corman from a horror film he didn't release because he simply didn't like it, another unrelated box-office flop, and footage shot later with some of the same actors in an attempt to tie up all the loose ends, it's a chaotically mismatched Frankenstein monster of a movie which tries desperately to pretend that the entire story happens in the same place, despite the actual location randomly switching between California and Yugoslavia!

The plot, insofar as it makes any sense at all, concerns a brilliant but tortured artist whose disturbingly realistic paintings of murdered women... well, you can guess the rest, can't you? It's all down to his mad medieval ancestor, who sometimes causes him to turn into a vampire for no apparent reason, though only sometimes because that didn't happen in the original cut of the film. The absurdly pretentious beatnik painters who seem to have escaped from Corman's earlier horror comedy "A Bucket Of Blood" are totally out of place, adding to the mismatched feel of the entire movie, but are much funnier than ill-advised comic relief characters tend to be. This is shameless exploitation cinema at its daftest, and deserves a reputation as one of the great bad movies. I just wish the DVD had been of good enough quality to make it pleasanter to watch and listen to.

"Nightmare Castle" is far more generic but considerably gorier, as Italian horror films from that era tend to be. The weirdly beautiful Barbara Steele basically goes through the same paces as she did a few years previously in Mario Bava's masterpiece "Black Sunday" for a lesser director, right down to playing the dual rôles of an imperilled innocent and her homicidal undead lookalike relative. Combining elements of Edgar Allan Poe, "Les Yeux Sans Visage", and every film you've ever seen in which the villain tries to drive his wife mad to gain control of her inheritance, the slow stretches in the middle, the flat direction, and the terrible acting (apart from the iconic Ms. Steele of course) are made bearable by regular dollops of torture, possession, mad science, and all the usual gothic loopiness you expect from this sort of movie. What a pity the grainy, murky, sometimes unfocused picture and terrible soundtrack, which has a slight but noticeable echo all the way through, of this poorly-produced don't-give-a-damn cheapo DVD make it less fun to watch than it should be.

Yes, it's yet another obscure movie this rental company describes as a "classic" because they can't say its obscurity is thoroughly deserved or you won't rent it, so they call it a "classic" because lots of genuine classic movies were made quite a while ago and so was this, so maybe it is one, though of course there's a 99% chance it's the exact opposite.

Especially if it's a pseudo-spaghetti western made by a mostly non-Italian cast and crew trying to jump on the bandwagon a couple of years after its wheels fell off. The director is remembered today for "The Italian Job" and not much else. The two B-list stars were well past their prime by 1973, and neither of them looks terribly enthusiastic. The supporting cast are mostly horrendous, and don't even have the usual spaghetti western excuse of being dubbed. The biggest genre name in the credits is Luis Bacalov, the guy you went to for spaghetti western music if Ennio Morricone was too expensive. In places it looks very much as though the film was made purely to use decaying sets left over from previous westerns (you might recognise the fort from "El Condor") before they fell into total ruin. This wasn't quite the very last gasp of the spaghetti genre, but there was precious little life left in it.

The story starts with the hero getting one of those movie head-wounds that make you completely forget who you are, and by the time he at long last finds out, the audience don't care, because in the meantime extraordinarily little has happened. The first proper gunfight occurs exactly halfway through the film, and involves some random nobodies who suddenly come out of nowhere for no good reason, as if the director had just remembered it was supposed to be an action movie. Several people are built up as important characters and constantly talked about, but appear on screen very briefly or not at all. And the hero's backstory, when we finally learn what it is, sounds as though it would have made a far better film than the one we're watching.

It's not so horrible it deserves one star, but it doesn't really merit the two I had to give it because of this site's clumsy rating system. Mainly it just seems tired. The action is as lacklustre as the central performances, and there's very little of it until the final showdown. Long stretches of the film are needlessly murky thanks to day-for-night photography so inept you wonder why they bothered, and even the weather gets into the spirit of things by suddenly turning all damp and dreary, resulting in large amounts of smoke having to be added to subsequent scenes in a doomed attempt to make it look as though they're taking place on the same day. And if you can keep track of the subplot about some bloke who's dead and therefore not in the movie hiding all his money just to give the people who are in the movie a McGuffin to shoot each other over, you're doing better than me!

Spanish locations, extreme close-ups of faces, and more blood than you normally get in a John Wayne movie don't add up to a spaghetti western. It's a pity no-one explained that to Peter Collinson before he tried to make one.

There have been a number of cinematic adaptations of Henry James' classic psychological horror story "The Turn Of The Screw", ranging from the "The Innocents" (1961), by far the best and most faithful thus far, to "The Nightcomers" (1971), Michael Winner's hilariously misguided prequel in which Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beecham explored fifty shades of watered-down early seventies grey. And later this year we'll get to another one, currently being shot in Ireland by Steven Spielberg. With that kind of competition, this version was unlikely to be either the best or the worst, and sure enough, it's neither.

Unfortunately it's a lot closer to the unintentionally absurd high camp of "The Nightcomers" than the insidiously mounting desperation of "The Innocents". Antoni Aloy, whose directorial career seems to have pretty much begun and ended with this lavish misfire, completely misses the point of the source novel, which is that the ghosts may not exist outside the mind of the narrator. Or maybe they do. Literary critics have been arguing about it since the book was published in 1898, and they still haven't made their minds up. Writing a story with that perfectly-pitched level of ambiguity isn't easy, and portraying it on screen is even harder, but I don't think Aloy was even trying. The implicit sexual hang-ups of the narrator are clumsily made explicit by turning the repressed governess into a victim of horrendous molestation by her late father, because there's absolutely no other way a single woman living in the Victorian era would be hung up about sex, is there?

There are some enormous problems with this approach. If the deceased servants who may be haunting the children deliberately involved them in their sex-games instead of letting them see and hear grown-up things through sheer carelessness, that's a whole raft of backstory you can't possibly show. And if you can't show something central to the plot because it would be so controversial it might not even be legal, why are you making a movie? Another problem arises with the ghosts. Since they were originally written as almost subliminal presences who are very choosy about who they allow to see them and may not exist at all, they don't actually do much, and what little they do in this version, such as hovering over the swimming-pool in the blazing sunshine like something out of an eighties Kate Bush video, is a bit silly. It doesn't help that one of them bears a presumably unintentional resemblance to Ozzy Osborne. And why shift the action to Spain, when the stuffy repression of late Victorian England is so essential to the plot?

It all looks gorgeous, and the two child actors are better than most, but Sadie Frost is barely adequate as the troubled governess. She's nowhere near in the same league as Deborah Kerr in the 1961 version, and she has far less screen presence than the 75-year-old Lauren Bacall. As for Harvey Keitel, he's on screen for about two minutes. This movie tries terribly hard but fails completely because it's so busy looking pretty it forgets to be subtle. The source novel's ambiguity depends on the narrator not really knowing what happened before she arrived. Since in this version the psychological aspects of the situation are so oversimplified that hardly any uncertainty remains, we end up watching a movie which seems to be mostly over by the time it starts, and which doesn't have all that much plot left to show us. Consequently, not a lot happens.

This is a very minor film on every level. Despite its age, "The Innocents" still works far better as a profoundly creepy psychological ghost story that may not be about ghosts. And if it's a version with nudity you want, "The Nightcomers" is a lot funnier.

This barking mad martial arts movie, made in the gleeful anything-goes style of earlier neo-traditional oriental nonsense like "The Water Margin" and "Monkey" with a hint of early Terry Gilliam, comes close to being a true genre classic. What prevents it from quite achieving those heights is the chaotically cluttered and frequently incomprehensible plot, which I thought while watching it must have been the result of some immensely long and convoluted legendary narrative that really needed the runtime of the entire "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy to do it justice being squeezed into an hour and a half. Apparently not. It isn't based on anything, it's just one of those movies in which stuff happens until there's enough stuff to make a movie out of and then they let the audience figure it out.

Our hero is a soldier in one of those colourful wars where dozens of screaming men with huge pointy weapons somehow slaughter each other without any blood being shed (though in a neat bit of genre subversion, it turns out that many of the supposedly dead soldiers are faking it). He gets into some farcical bother which results in absolutely everybody attacking him including his own side, but thus far everything makes sense. Then, ten minutes into the story, he literally falls out of that plot into another one, and suddenly he's being attacked by flying mummies. And then it gets sillier.

It honestly feels as if the script was written by a roomful of small children taking turns to say what happens next. Bizarre characters wander into the story, deliver yet another dollop of increasingly baffling plot exposition, and are promptly forgotten about. Given a 49-day deadline to save the Universe, the heroes get sidetracked and forget all about it for a month, though to be fair, by the time they remember, the audience has forgotten about it too, having spent the previous hour trying to follow incomprehensible nonsense accompanied by action scenes that often look less like fights than a very energetic Surrealist ballet performed in zero gravity.

This is the kind of film where even the characters notice how wildly illogical their own storyline is and complain about it to no-one in particular. As well they might, seeing as they're in a movie where everything that happens is nuts, in a breathless non-stop fashion that gets a bit tiring to watch after a while. For example, there's a scene in which two people flirt awkwardly while chasing each other round a very large room mounted on hovering life-size stone sculptures of elephants. Which in most movies would get your attention, but by the time it happens in this one, something equally bonkers has happened every five minutes for the last hour and we just don't care any more, because our brains are still trying to process that guy who does kung fu with his eyebrows. Yes, really.

I don't think anyone could honestly call this a good film, because it's such a confusing mess that I think it must have been savagely cut down from a much longer version which has never been released. But as outlandish curiosities go it's enjoyable in a "Starcrash" sort of way. Though perhaps it should be watched more as a series of outlandish abstract images than a story which makes any kind of sense. It's also a wee bit careless about historical accuracy, unless of course the Chinese really did have bubblewrap in 500 AD.