Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

This excellent Italian horror film has one howling defect, and that's the incredibly silly title the English language version ended up with. This isn't a slasher movie about a psycho nympho bimbo or anything remotely resembling one. It's a ghost story spiced up with vampire movie clichés, which it uses with far more ingenuity than you'd expect to find in a lurid tale of superstitious villagers being picked off by something that won't stay dead until a square-jawed level-headed hero arrives to save them.

Mario Bava, a very clever man who made films in rather stupid genres, has tremendous fun setting things up to play out just as we expect them to because we've seen a hundred movies just like this, then doing something completely different. When we meet the aforementioned handsome, brave, and incurably rational hero, along with such stock characters as the sinister shaven-headed burgomeister, the sexy raven-haired witch-woman, and of course the surly locals who instantly go very quiet when a stranger walks into the tavern - a moment this movie exaggerates so much it becomes a deadpan joke - we know what they're all here for.

Except that they aren't. The villagers may cling to useless superstitions, but modern science is just as powerless in the face of a breakdown of consensus reality as nightmarish as the oddest scenes in "The Shining", which I suspect was influenced quite a lot by this obscure and modestly budgeted film. It's somewhat gory in places, but it mainly achieves its scares by putting the increasingly bewildered hero in a literally nightmarish situation where everyone's terrified all the time, the closer he gets to solving the mystery the less sense it makes, and although it's all sorted out at the end because it has to be, some of what happens along the way makes no sense whatsoever. And the movie is all the better for it.

Bava knew perfectly well that his sets were often too cheap to convince anyone they were really outdoors or made of solid stone, so if he abandoned realism and bathed everything in garish lighting that often borders on psychedelic, audiences would be accept this unashamedly fake world better than they would a poor copy of the real one. Roger Corman's Poe pictures starring Vincent Price and many Hammer films used the same trick, but Bava was especially good at it, partly because he understood that once you've crossed that line you might as well turn it up to 11.

It's not a perfect film. Some of the acting is terrible, even if you watch it with subtitles rather than dubbed. The designated hero's almost total helplessness adds to the eerie feeling that you're watching somebody else's nightmare, but it also makes him literally a waste of space, especially as he's not a great actor. And some of the scenes in which supernatural forces give it all they've got are compromised by the low budget and end up being a bit ghost-train-ish, or save even more money by conveying paranormal disorientation with footage of a spiral staircase shot from unusual angles that we see a little too much of. But as films of this type from this era go, it's one of the best, and it has enough imagination to prevent the viewer from guessing exactly what's going on long before the characters do.

I think this is the very first Scary Little Ghost Girl movie, and it puts its seemingly harmless apparition to genuinely disquieting use. For its time, it's as good as all but the very best Hollywood could achieve on far bigger budgets, and because it's not from the USA or Britain, it dares to be a bit nastier than you might expect. It's little-known these days, perhaps due to the absence of "cult" actors, and I don't suppose that idiotic title helped, but if you're a fan of the genre it's well worth an hour and a half of your time.

This site's rating system is letting me down again! If two stars is almost good, and one star is barrel-scraping putridity, I ought to give this feeble effort one and a half stars for doing the best it can with minimal resources and just managing to drag itself over the finish-line. Tod Slaughter was already a veteran of the stage when in the early 1930s, at an age when most actors would be starting to slow down, he suddenly became Britain's most popular horror movie star, apart from the unsurpassable Karloff. Then Hitler happened, and by the time that was over, Slaughter's hammy histrionics, already old-fashioned a decade earlier but still daftly enjoyable, seemed as out of date as the ageing star himself. It wouldn't be long before Hammer changed everything and the public forgot all about poor old Tod. Looking at his late films such as this one, you can see why.

In case you're wondering, the Curse of the Wraydons is insanity. Every now and then a member of this thoroughly respectable English family develops socially unacceptable habits such as strangling women, and has to be discreetly locked up in a loony bin which, to be on the safe side, is so far away it's in France. Tod Slaughter plays a sinister and apparently nameless French spy with an English accent whose hobbies include strangling women, and who for some unexplained reason hates the Wraydons. Golly gosh, I think perhaps the film might just possibly be trying to set up a huge plot twist that's meant to surprise us!

There's a perfectly good historical horror melodrama in here somewhere struggling to get out, but sadly it can't, due mainly to the budget being almost non-existent. Adapted from a play, this movie might as well still be one, because theatrical techniques are used whenever cinematic methods would cost more. Why bother with flashbacks when you can get the same information across by having people talk about it? Not to mention the two characters who are supposed to have mysterious athletic superpowers but, since the budget doesn't run to luxuries like special effects or stunt-work, never actually use them.

In the end this threadbare film amounts to little more than a few people in fancy dress overacting badly at each other while they, and we, wait for something to happen. It does liven up a bit eventually, but the action is almost as sparse as the horror. If there's one thing Tod Slaughter could do, it was overact, and he doesn't disappoint, but there are long stretches he's not in at all, and when he struts his villainous stuff it's hopelessly obsolete even for 1946. In a couple of decades it would become fashionable again, but only for cartoon characters. He's not really credible as a live-action threat to anyone who isn't a Smurf, except in one brief scene, though even here his Bad Craziness is compromised by being filmed so artlessly it brings to mind those shots of Bela Lugosi walking towards the camera in "Plan 9 From Outer Space". I can imagine him in pantomime drag as a very convincing wicked stepmother, but it's hard to accept grown men quaking in terror of the tubby old creep, who at the time was over 60 and looks it.

I have a soft spot for this almost forgotten actor, who at his best really was so bad he was good. But this isn't his best, and mostly it's just plain bad, so unless you're the world's last surviving Tod Slaughter completist I'd give this one a miss. The films he made in the thirties were, apart from a few clunkers, far better showcases for his unique talent. And happily you can rent most of them here.

This often hilarious but weirdly disjointed film came about almost by accident, since "The Pink Panther" was meant to be about an upper-class crook called The Phantom, featuring Inspector Clouseau as comic relief. I can't think of another example of a supporting character stealing a film so completely. Poor old David Niven. Even the opening credits ended up getting their own TV series!

Peter Sellers' next film was originally going to be a screen adaptation of a risqué Broadway farce in which an out-of-his-depth French policeman (played on stage by William Shatner!) has to solve a murder case where everybody is guilty of something or other, except of course the cheerfully amoral oversexed bimbo in danger of being framed for everything. When the studio caught on how popular Clouseau was, since one funny French cop is near-as-dammit the same as any other, the script was hastily rewritten as a lighter and sillier Clouseau vehicle , with the sex and violence watered down as much as it could be without the plot disappearing altogether, though there's enough of it still left for William Peter Blatty, author of "The Exorcist", to get a screenwriting credit.

Clouseau is Laurel and Hardy rolled into one, combining Ollie's perpetually wounded dignity with Stan's inability to interact with anything in any way without laying waste to the surrounding area. Sellers' performance as a man at war with the furniture, his own clothes, and the laws of probability is a masterpiece of clowning, but it's such a poor fit with the more serious elements of the plot that the crimes Clouseau is supposed to be investigating are increasingly shoved into the background, allowing him to spend most of the film stumbling into predicaments which often have very little to do with his being a policeman. By the time the surviving suspects are assembled at the end to hear Clouseau's triumphant (he hopes) solution to the mystery, we've forgotten who most of them are.

But the flaw which almost ruins the whole movie is the introduction of Herbert Lom's Chief Inspector Dreyfus, who would reappear in another six sequels, long outlasting Inspector Clouseau in his own franchise. I can't imagine why, because Lom is absolutely dreadful. Obviously a clumsy plot device to allow the fairly realistic villain played by a largely wasted George Sanders to be sidelined as much as possible in favour of a more appropriate nemesis for a nincompoop like Clouseau, Lom's grotesquely overacted descent into insanity is embarrassingly unfunny. It also constantly begs the question why, if Clouseau is worse than useless at his job and his boss hates him so much it's literally driving him mad, he wasn't fired years ago.

It's a muddled and patchy movie that's superb whenever Sellers is simply being funny, lousy during Herbert Lom's attempts to convey that he's going a bit mental, which he does far more often than is strictly necessary, and somewhere in between the rest of the time depending on how well Sellers is interacting with his supporting cast. Elke Sommer isn't much of an actress but she's cute and gamely joins in the silliness, though George Sanders sometimes looks as if he's not quite sure he's in the right movie. But a special mention has to go to Burt Kwouk's Cato, who may be a one-joke character (and politically incorrect by today's standards), but seldom has one joke been told with such enthusiasm!

Admittedly the routine was wearing a bit thin by the time he reprised it for the last time, but that was another six movies later, when the entire franchise was well past its humanely-kill-by date, and Peter Sellers had actually died quite some time ago. In 1964 it was still fresh, and this, the first true Inspector Clouseau film in which he was the main character, is probably the best of the lot, despite the mismatch between its hapless hero and some parts of a script originally written for a less defective detective.

Don't be fooled by the synopsis on the previous page, obviously quoted from back of the DVD box. Brooke Shields disguising herself as a man to take part in a men-only car race? That sounds hilarious, but having turned Brooke into a "man" only marginally more convincing than Barbara Windsor in "Carry On Jack", the scriptwriters somehow can't think of anything funny or interesting to do with the concept, and it's very quickly dropped never to be mentioned again. That's the problem with the entire film. "With more peddle (sic) to the metal, edge of the seat madness than anyone could possibly ask for", it says here. Which, alas, is no truer than the claim that this tedious box-office bomb, hated by critics and audiences alike, is a "classic".

It initially looks as though this movie is going to be a live-action "Wacky Races" with Penelope Pitstop in male drag versus a German Dick Dastardly in a weaponised Mercedes. No such luck! For three-quarters of the runtime, the race is almost completely forgotten about. Instead we're treaded to a sort of low-budget quasi-feminist remake of "Lawrence Of Arabia" mashed up with that once-notorious Rudolf Valentino silent "The Sheik", in which villainous Arabs inflict predictable indignities upon our plucky proto-ladette, mostly involving attempted rape, though sometimes for a change she gets flogged, shot at with machine-guns, or thrown to the leopards (spoiler: sadly they don't eat her).

As the nice Arab who looks a lot less Arabic than the nasty ones and is therefore an acceptable love-interest for Brooke, D-list hunk Lambert Wilson occupies space and that's about it. His subsequent career highlights included another film called "Sahara" which lost even more money than this one, and "Catwoman". Brooke Shields wasn't exactly A-list herself by 1983, already on the way down from her brief moment at the top because as soon as she started keeping her clothes on, audiences noticed that she couldn't act. By the way, this is supposed to be a stirring adventure for the whole family, so Brooke keeps her clothes on, thus defeating the object of her being in it. Rounding out this stellar cast is Horst Buchholz, who presumably had a far bigger part in the first draft of the script, but ended up being sidelined along with everything else to do with that race the film was supposed to be all about but couldn't afford to show us. Remember that young man who overacted so atrociously in the original version of "The Magnificent Seven"? That was Horst Buchholz, and he ended up playing bad guys in films like this. Somehow I'm not surprised.

Packed from start to finish with one-dimensional stereotypes and predictable clichés, starring an actress who can't act, and with a gaping hole where its entire reason to exist was supposed to be, as an action film it's as lacklustre as Ennio Morricone's mostly forgettable and occasionally horrible score, as a romance it's woefully unromantic, and as a screwball car-race comedy it's quite good for five minutes at the end, which only reminds you of what the previous 100 minutes failed to deliver. And because it can't make up its mind whether it's a comedy or a thriller, it ends up being neither. It doesn't even know how to make effective use of the Sahara Desert! The previous page claims this film has a "cult audience", but I honestly can't imagine that being true. Unless they mean there's a support group people who like it can attend until they get better?

Poor Tod Slaughter. Once upon a time he was Britain's second-greatest horror star, outclassed only by the mighty Karloff. But who remembers him now? "Tod Slaughter" is hard to beat as a name for a horror movie actor - eat your heart out, Rob Zombie! - but when was the last time you saw one of his films?

Well, now's your chance. Three of them, in fact. First, the bad news. This box-set from the unashamedly cheapskate and not altogether accurately-named Best Of British Collection includes two extremely minor Slaughter vehicles, one of which is so low-budget it has seven minutes of almost surreally irrelevant comedy by justly forgotten variety artists tacked on at the beginning to bring the runtime up to feature length, and the other is not only a tame affair that doesn't even involve any murders, the battered old print has a very annoying soundtrack fault throughout the film. These are both on Disc 2, so if you're merely curious to see what a Tod Slaughter movie is like, save a rental and just get Disc 1.

Which contains "The Face At The Window", an excellent introduction to Slaughter's unique acting style. I don't know if any of his films include a scene where he chains a screaming woman to railway tracks while cackling madly, but I'd be surprised if he didn't do that at least once, because he was the only true example of the classic silent movie villain to survive into the sound era. He's a live-action Hooded Claw who actually gets to kill people, and when he walks onto the set, the scenery curls up into a little ball and whimpers "please don't eat me..." This film is so out of date even for 1939 that the opening text crawl not only admits it's an old-fashioned melodrama using those exact words, but cheerfully tells the viewers that if the film provokes more laughter than fear, that's fine because all it's trying to do is entertain them however it can.

Such honesty is not only refreshing but necessary, since nobody over the age of five could take Slaughter's black-hearted bastard of a villain seriously, though since our eye-rolling moustache-twirling anti-hero is not only a serial killer but very heavily implied to be a rapist, and he certainly has unwholesome designs on the hero's girlfriend, I assume this film wasn't intended for kids. Nevertheless, as one-dimensional pantomime baddies with absolutely no redeeming features go, Slaughter really is in a class of his own!

The obscure and underwhelming supporting cast are only there to give the star someone to endanger, and the barking mad plot about 19th century Paris being terrorised by a knife-throwing werewolf is as daft as I've just made it sound, but who cares? This is the sort of movie in which the baddie's favourite pub is called The Blind Rat just so you know the regulars aren't nice people. No-one could honestly call it a good film. But it's a cracking good bad film that does precisely what it says on the tin without pretending for a second to be anything more than what it is. Why doesn't this man have a cult following yet?

Apparently this film is an example of "Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy". I can only assume that if the folks who come up with descriptions of films around here don't know whether something is a "classic" in any meaningful sense of the word because they haven't watched it, they drop the DVD on the floor and if it lands face up, it's a classic. Or maybe they ask the cat.

This movie is so mind-bogglingly dreadful that I feel a bit guilty about giving it one star, the way you would if you were honest about the artistic merits of a four-year-old's crayon drawing instead of sticking it on the fridge door and pretending it's a masterpiece because he did his best, bless him. But since all the people responsible for this woeful effort were old enough to cross the street by themselves and everything, I have to tell the truth and say it really is one of the worst films ever made. And I don't mean that in a good "Plan 9 From Outer Space" kind of way. It has none of the goofy charm that makes some dreadful movies weirdly enjoyable. It's truly painful to watch. And judging by the facial expressions of some of the cast, it was torture to actually be in.

Way back in 1953, a modestly-budgeted B-movie called "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" was a huge hit, entirely thanks to the legendary Ray Harryhausen's superb stop-motion monster. The following year, a Japanese semi-remake/rip-off called "Godzilla" was an even bigger hit, and the rest is history. "Reptilicus" is a much more faithful remake of "Beast" than any of The Big G's outings, but strangely it wasn't a hit. Apparently the world wasn't ready for the surreal spectacle of Denmark being invaded by a giant prehistoric muppet. Even though great care is taken to prevent us seeing all of Reptilicus at once, it's obvious that the puppeteers can't quite control the unwieldy marionette, resulting in a strange lopsided lurching motion which, together with its constant projectile vomiting, gives the impression that the poor thing isn't at all well. The miniature scenery in which this pathetic rampage takes place is even worse, especially the horrendous mismatch between footage of the real Copenhagen and replicas of the same buildings that look like, and probably were, cornflake packets painted brown. In terms of Doctor Who special effects over the years, we're talking about Patrick Troughton on a bad day.

Which would actually be hilariously, if only the many scenes not involving Reptilicus weren't such an ordeal. Obscure Danish actors, many of them strangely ugly, give dismal performances further worsened by American dubbing that wouldn't even get a pass in a spaghetti western. The irrelevant romance that always clutters up films of this type turns into a ham-fisted excuse to pause the action while they show us a holiday commercial, complete with a terrible song about the joys of dining out in Copenhagen. At least the Danish army seem to be enjoying themselves as they merrily trundle their tanks around the countryside, blaze away at the conveniently offscreen monster, and set up field-guns next to the Little Mermaid statue to prove they aren't stock footage. Audiences were less enthusiastic, and the sequel set up by the ambiguous ending never happened. Apparently this is the second English language cut, the first being deemed unreleasable because it was even worse. I honestly can't imagine how it could have been.

This is a film which could only have seemed like a good idea in the early seventies, when the late sixties zeitgeist wasn't quite dead, but the psychedelic sundae had gone horribly sour, and the cherry on top was Charles Manson. Resembling a cross between "Night Of The Living Dead" and the underrated Monkees mindblower "Head", this is one of the druggiest movies ever made, despite having no overt drug references other than one scene in which a couple of doomed minor characters smoke a joint to make it seem at least semi-plausible that they wouldn't notice the screamingly obvious wrongness of the situation they're in.

Which is almost the only concession to logic in the entire movie. The enthusiastic but unashamedly amateur cast, the only one of whom you'll have seen anywhere else is little person Hervé Villechaize from "The Man With The Golden Gun" and "Fantasy Island", blunder into a dilapidated funfair which is no fun at all, because as soon as the sun sets, or sometimes in broad daylight, hippy vampire Malatesta and his extended family of retarded cannibal ghouls, assisted by their not at all suspiciously named front man Mr. Blood, emerge from their labyrinthine underworld and eat anyone they find on the premises who isn't one of them. Though sometimes they play weird games with their victims first, or do completely random things while their hapless prey wander through what I think is meant to be the carnival's giant secret digestive tract, though the budget is so low it's impossible to tell what all that pink bubble-wrap is supposed to represent, if anything.

The terrible acting, minimal production values and non-existent plot sometimes make this film a chore to watch, especially the scenes in which the heroine stumbles through dark rooms full of plastic sheeting for way too long, presumably because it was cheap to film and they'd run out of ideas, but then something totally unexpected will happen which has nothing to do with anything, but certainly gets your attention! Basically this is a bad acid trip in which everyone and everything is out go get you in freaky ways for no reason at all. It's the kind of film in which the inevitable dream sequence is less weird than the parts that are meant to be real. Although it's sometimes very violent, though far less than the title implies, the inept bargain-basement gore effects and total lack of connection with reality make these scenes no more unsettling than the dismemberment of the Black Knight in "Monty Python And The Holy Grail", apart from one genuine one "ouch!" moment when a syringe draws blood from somebody's arm for real.

It's not so much a conventional horror movie as an irrationally unsettling Surrealist nightmare which could not unfairly be described as Ed Wood on acid. But compared with the lazy cynicism of today's straight-to-video gore bores, the obvious enthusiasm of the people behind this mutant freak of a movie makes it strangely loveable despite its huge failings in almost every department, and a must-see for devotees of truly weird cinema.

Peter Walker wasn't far off being Britain's answer to Herschell Gordon Lewis: an unashamed purveyor of brand of sleaze famed, indeed notorious, as a director of horror that was surprisingly nasty for its time, but just as happy, if not more so, giving the punters pretty girls taking their clothes off if that was what floated their boat. Like Lewis, Walker's horror was far better than his sexploitation, and this film contains a considerable amount of the latter but disappointingly little of the former. The very first thing that happens is a pretty girl (Luan Peters, best known for playing the Australian tourist accidentally groped by Basil Fawlty) being awakened in the wee small hours by an unknown person knocking frantically at her door for an unknown reason. So naturally she answers the door stark naked. As you do. This sets the tone for quite a lot of the movie, though fortunately not all of it.

The plot concerns a gaggle of middle-class hippies fresh out of drama school who are hired by a mysterious man whom their agent has never actually met to camp out in a semi-derelict theatre at the end of an abandoned pier on the pretext of rehearsing a stage-show which has a title (I'm sure you can guess what it is), but no script, theme, or any other content whatsoever. So they'll have to improvise it all, and whatever they come up with after randomly mucking about for a few days will go on tour and doubtless be a smash hit. Somehow the youngsters fail to notice anything odd about any of this. Talk about lambs to the slaughter...

Which is, alas, where the movie short-changes us. If for every shot of a girl taking her clothes off there was an equivalent scene of bloody horror, this film would be an orgy of gory mayhem with frequent pauses for some dim-witted chick to get naked for no reason at all between murders. Unfortunately, as teens-in-peril slasher movies go, it's one of the mildest I've seen that wasn't made for TV.

Although the dismalness of a British seaside resort in Winter and the eery atmosphere of a once-grand pier rotting into obsolescence (which also features prominently in that surreal oddity "Carnival of Souls") are used quite effectively, I had the distinct feeling that the film's contrived plot uncomfortably mirrored real life, and having the actors improvise in character was an attempt to disguise the fact that they really were making it up as they went along. The shapelessness of the story, the gratuitous and pointless nude scenes which give the audience regular fixes of "adult content" far easier to film than a complicated stalk-and-slash sequence, and several moments when the cast clearly don't quite know their lines certainly give that impression.

Which is a pity, because there's a good story in there somewhere trying to get out, and the young cast are quite engaging once they catch on how much danger they're in and stop spending every waking moment trying to sleep with and/or annoy each other. And it really is such a superb location that I'm puzzled why so few British horror movies were shot in similar places. But it's a pale shadow of Walker's masterpiece "Frightmare", and the pointless gimmick of shooting the black-and-white flashback sequence near the end in 3D (included as a DVD extra, but you have to supply your own red and green glasses) implies that even Peter Walker didn't think his film was good enough to succeed purely on its own merits. I'm afraid he was right.

If this is one of Al Adamson's most popular films, I dread to think what the unpopular ones must be like! Actually I've seen several of them, which makes me wonder why I ever put this on my rental list. I think I must have mistaken it for one of a thousand other trashy horror films with similar titles, most of which at least manage to be better than this woeful gobbler. Seriously, watch it back to back with "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and you'll realise that, contrary to popular belief, the notorious Edward D. Wood Jr. was actually quite talented. Because this movie really, truly looks like something scripted by a very disturbed ten-year-old and directed by a cat.

There simply isn't room to list everything that's terrible about this Frankensteinish monstrosity cobbled together from whatever mismatched bits and pieces Al Adamson happened to have lying around, but its worst problem is that it's actually two completely unrelated movies randomly combined, one of which is a sub-Star Trek voyage to a distant planet starring a very old and not very happy-looking John Carradine, several actors you definitely won't have heard of, and Vicki Volante, whose "acting" is so bad that asking her to play a human being was a serious piece of miscasting.

The other is a gleefully ultra-violent load of nonsense which I assume from the cast's facial features to be of Philippine origin, involving a war between two prehistoric tribes, one of whom appear to be neanderthal vampire orcs (or something), and featuring a menagerie of cheap and cheerful monsters ranging from dinosaurs and lobster people to a mammoth played by a real elephant wearing a fur coat. Inconveniently, the space epic is in colour while the caveman capers are in black and white, but the joins are cunningly disguised by a mysterious property of the alien planet's atmosphere which causes everything to be only one colour at a time. Of course, the astronauts can't interact with the monsters or cavemen apart from a few extras and one cave-lady who miraculously manages to be in both films by turning into two different actresses. But they can point off-screen and then sit back and relax while the film ignores them completely for a while. During one especially long caveman interlude they even take the opportunity to have a cigarette break. Literally.

And then there's the totally irrelevant futuristic sex scene between two waste-of-space characters which is presumably meant to show us what "Barbarella" would have looked like if its budget had been five bucks, the irritating electronic bleeps and bloops accompanying the sci-fi scenes in case we're having trouble telling the difference between spacemen and cavemen, and of course the bizarre prologue which seems to promise us a parody of a Dracula movie written for and by small children, but turns out to have nothing to do with anything, and is obviously there to provide enough footage to create a trailer so misleading it might fool people into thinking this was something they might want to see. And...

Enough already! This movie is so bad that you assume nobody involved with it in any capacity can possibly have been even slightly talented, unless you're paying attention to the opening credits and notice that the director of photography was Vilmos Zsigmond, who had the same job on a modest little film called "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". And even he can't provide this dismal mess with the tiniest spark of competence, let alone quality. Or maybe after he read the script he simply couldn't be bothered. Which is exactly how anyone who isn't a visual masochist should feel about renting it.

This is not a review of the movie itself, but of the dismally poor version of it Cinema Paradiso believes its paying customers deserve. Elstree Hill Entertainment is a DVD manufacturer not in any way connected with the famous Elstree Studios or the production of this or any other film, which churns out abysmally substandard don't-give-a-monkey's DVDs of old movies they can obtain worn-out prints of for peanuts. The end result looks like, and quite possibly is, a fifth-generation copy of something taped off the telly on VHS. At best. Some of their DVDs are even worse than that.

Since the Elstree Hill version of this movie appears to be the only one Cinema Paradiso have on offer, don't rent this film from this site because the lousy sound and picture quality will ruin it for you. Watch it properly anywhere but here. The same naturally goes for any other film this site lists on the general info page as having allegedly been made by a non-existent studio called Elstree Hill Entertainment. Though movies made by the real and illustrious Elstree Studios are a different matter entirely.

If the Cinema Paradiso quality control team read these reviews, maybe they'll take the hint and actually watch a few of Elstree Hill's horrible DVDs before buying any more of them, and perhaps even replace those they already have with versions that don't resemble the dodgiest of bootlegs in every way apart from not being illegal. To the best of my knowledge every film in their catalogue is easily available elsewhere, and you're doing your customers and your reputation a disservice by offering substandard garbage like this for rental. Yes, I know Elstree Hill undercut the prices of almost all their competitors, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for. And if you don't care, shame on you, because some of your customers do!

Oh dear. This "classic comedy" doesn't quite deserve absolute one-star condemnation, but if this site allowed half-stars I'd give it one and a half. Actually, I'd give it one, because then the lowest score merited only by irredeemable stinkers would be half a star. In other words, I didn't laugh much.

In 1970 Benny Hill (remember him?) was one of the most popular comedians in Britain (how times change!), and it looks very much as though Ronnie Barker thought he might increase his own popularity by stealing some of Benny's trademark gags. Basically this film is the wordless speeded-up slapstick sequence that featured in every Benny Hill show, only done at normal speed (except for one scene), not accompanied by that oh-so-zany "Yackety Sax" tune, and stretched to 47 minutes. An obsession with sleazy middle-aged men leering at nubile young women in a state of undress dominates the proceedings, and a huge proportion of the jokes rely on the assumption that anything remotely connected with sex is automatically hilarious.

The best jokes are the ones which take fullest advantage of the unusual non-speaking but non-silent format and use sound-effects instead of speech, such as the scene where a hungover Ronnie Barker finds ordinary noises painfully loud, or the surreal moment when a fat cook in a frilly apron and two junior maidservants are transformed purely by creative use of sound into a mother hen and her chicks. But far too much of the humour involves the numerous attempts by a lecherous butler (a bizarrely miscast Michael Hordern) to see a buxom young house-guest naked, to which end he spies on her from behind bushes and steals her clothes. It's true that political correctness was in its infancy in 1970, but even so, this is creepy rather than funny.

Another strange flaw, possibly caused by Ronnie Barker being more used to writing sketches whose participants were allowed to talk, is the lack of punchlines. Sight-gags are painstakingly set up, the joke builds for a while, and then it fizzles out or just stops. Even when there is a punchline it isn't always worth the wait. For instance, a lot of effort goes into setting up a very contrived situation where a woman is shocked to see Ronnie Barker sniffing her underwear, the joke being that we know he's doing it unintentionally but she doesn't. Even if you find that hilarious, you won't laugh because you'll be too busy trying to recall the convoluted chain of events whereby Colonel Futtock ended up accidentally sticking his nose in a pair of knickers in front of their owner.

Like one of the lesser Carry On films, it seems to be trying to appeal to broad-minded adults and small children at the same time, and the result is the worst of both worlds. It's actually not a bad concept, but the crude execution lets it down. All the same, I suspect it may have inspired a similar but much more extreme movie called "Aaaaaaaah!" which those Mighty Boosh fellows made in 2015, and which isn't very funny either. Somewhat ironically, this wordless film has a commentary track, but despite its brief running time I couldn't be bothered to watch it again on the off-chance that hearing somebody talking over the jokes would improve my viewing experience. Which would probably have been slightly better on a smaller and cheaper screen than the one I've got, because high definition this ain't! In fact, it looks as though the videotape the BBC used half a century ago was closely akin to sellotape.

This movie has been praised to the skies, but does it live up to the hype? I had my doubts whether it would. Some of the reasons it's hailed as a masterpiece are so strange they're almost desperate. The first movie about a female superhero directed by a woman? So what! I can only think of three others directed by anybody, and one of them's "Catwoman"! Well, the good news is it's not bad. The bad news is it only looks like a masterpiece in comparison with the sheer dismalness of everything else the DC Cinematic Universe has coiled out. And I think that has less to do with director Patty Jenkins being a woman than the slightly more specific fact that she isn't Zack Snyder, though unfortunately he is the writer and producer; and if you compare this movie with Ms. Jenkins' only other cinematic feature, "Monster" way back in 2003, it becomes apparent that she isn't yet a big enough name to control a Hollywood blockbuster without The System at least partly controlling her.

The plot is simplistic even for a film about a scantily-clad escapee from Greek mythology who can fly and throw tanks at people by magic. It's the kind of movie where the main character thinks she can literally solve all the world's problems by finding one specific bad guy and kicking his ass, and her Great Big Profound Learning Experience consists of eventually discovering it isn't that simple. This is explicitly spelled out several times, and just for good measure we're also told that love is better than hate and war is a bad thing. Essentially this is Tony Stark's character development arc, which wasn't particularly profound in the first place, dumbed down.

There are huge lifts from several other Marvel movies, especially the first Captain America film, as if they were trying to fix a broken formula by copying a similar one that works. Which of course they were, and to be fair, it's a big improvement on Zack Snyder's grimy nihilism. But original it ain't! One lengthy sequence is so blatantly stolen from a certain very successful franchise that I kept expecting the baddie to say "Luke, I am your father". I think they even pinched a bit from "Krull"! As for the acting, I got the feeling some of the supporting cast were chosen mainly to make Gal Gadot look like a better actress than she really is. One man's performance would win the Jar Jar Binks Award for Services to Ethnic Stereotyping if there was such a thing, but he's white so you can't accuse this film of racism. Unless you're Scottish. And the less said about Etta Candy, the better... I know she was in the comics back in the day, but what seemed hilarious in 1941 isn't necessarily quite so funny nowadays. If this movie was truly faithful to the spirit of forties humour, the Scottish guy would have been black.

Yes, it's fun, WW is a far more appealing superhero than some (good luck trying to sell us Aquaman, and does anybody really give a hoot about Cyborg?), and the action, when they get around to it, is well-handled, although the movie suffers from that problem so common in this type of film: underwhelming villains who don't put up much of a fight until the very end, then somehow a monster appears and buildings explode. But Zack Snyder's on a relatively short leash so that part doesn't go on and on and on until you never want to see a robot smashing anything ever again. And although the magical island of Themyscira is gorgeous to look at, most of the action happens elsewhere, and the "real" world, which consists mainly of an oddly unconvincing 1918 London and First World War battlefields they show have us very carefully if they want to keep that 12 certificate, suffers by comparison. To be brutally honest, for a DC film this is very good indeed, but if it was Marvel it would be so-so. By the way, there's no teaser at the end of the credits, so don't bother sitting through them unless you really like credits and/or horrible pop songs.

Edward G. Ulmer was a decidedly mediocre B-list director who in the course of his long and prolific career made two standout films; "Detour" (1945) and this one. Although they're in different genres, they share a common theme of putting their protagonists in literally nightmarish situations where everyone and everything seems to have it in for them for no reason at all. "The Black Cat" is also notable for its "hero", a thoroughly boring young man the movie is obliged to include but obviously doesn't care about, being almost as helpless as his equally stereotypical damsel-in-distress bride, and when he does take action, either failing to accomplish anything or doing something wrong and useless ("Detour" bases its plot entirely around this idea, which it takes much further).

In actuality, Bela Lugosi's creepy, tormented Dr. Vitus Werdegast is the film's real hero, mainly because Boris Karloff's spectacularly atrocious Hjalmar Poelzig would make anyone in the same room as him who wasn't Adolf Hitler seem quite nice. This film was made in an era when anything really nasty or connected in any way with sex couldn't possibly be shown, merely hinted at. Which is just as well, because if every unpleasant event that happens slightly off-screen or is left entirely to our imagination was shown explicitly, "The Black Cat" would be the first torture porn movie! If Dr. Werdegast's revenge happened on-camera it would be almost unwatchable. As for Poelzig, worshiping Satan is the least of his sins. In addition to being a sadistic serial-killing traitor responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, it's repeatedly implied as heavily as it can be without actually saying so that he's a necrophiliac.

Hjalmar Poelzig is one of the great obscure movie villains, and in the first of their many screen partnerships, Karloff effortlessly steals the show from Lugosi, despite his ludicrous Dracula/Frankenstein combo hairstyle (the original "fright wig"?). If any one-off character deserved a sequel, or indeed a franchise, it was Hjalmar Poelzig, and these days he'd get one, probably in direct competition with the less interesting and much nicer Hannibal Lecter. Or maybe he'd be the Joker's dad? There's a moment when Karloff suddenly looks just like an elderly version of Mr. J...

Like Lugosi's "White Zombie", this is one of the most unfairly neglected horror movies from the early sound era. It doesn't get the recognition it deserves because it doesn't feature a famous monster like Dracula or Frankenstein, but it's as good as all but the very best of the rest, and considerably better than many so-called classics, especially "Dracula". It's by no means perfect. The young couple in peril are a waste of space, the thankfully brief appearance of the comical foreign policemen is simply embarrassing, and the plot doesn't make a lick of sense, though that contributes to the nightmarish atmosphere. But it's packed with bizarre details and outrageous developments, and its brief running-time means it never has a chance to slow down for long enough to drag.

If you're wondering what all this has to do with Edgar Allan Poe, the answer is, nothing whatsoever, apart from a totally irrelevant subplot involving a black cat which was obviously shoehorned in at the last minute to justify the title. It was actually based, very loosely indeed, on the life and legend of Aleister Crowley. And it has no connection either with the 1941 movie "The Black Cat", although Bela Lugosi's in both of them. By the way, old-time horror movie buffs should pay attention to the Luciferian coven scene; the Satanist playing the organ is John Carradine before he was famous.

Poor Quiller. Four years after James Bond hit the big screen, and one year after Michael Caine's considerably more realistic Harry Palmer gave us an alternative to Bond and the inevitable glut of Bond ripoffs and parodies, Quiller, who, by the way, is too butch to have a first name, tried to combine James Bond's glamour with Harry Palmer's realism. Bond is still with us, and Harry Palmer got a couple of sequels and might have had more if Ken Russell hadn't missed the point entirely and suffocated him under a mountain of the very silliness he was supposed to be an antidote to, but as for Quiller, his movie franchise began and ended with this film.

It's painfully obvious why. The acid test for an actor playing James Bond is whether you believe he would kill you, and George Segal's Quiller doesn't look ruthless enough to eat live yoghurt. Looks, of course, can be deceptive. In Quiller's case, they aren't. I couldn't shake the feeling that he'd only become a spy after being kicked out of a boy band for being too old. Segal's puppy-like "please love me!" demeanour seems more appropriate for a copycat Cliff Richard than a bootleg Bond. Though it could have been worse. Apparently the part was written for Charlton Heston.

Which brings me to the screenplay. Harold Pinter is a very good writer indeed, but no writer handles all genres equally well, and if you're familiar with Pinter's plays, you're probably wondering who in their right mind would hire him to script an action-packed spy thriller. The results were predicatably odd. To quote the IMDb, Pinter "...altered the emphasis of the book to be less a spy thriller and more a meditation on the human condition". Which John le Carré had already done in 1963 with "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", filmed in 1965 with Richard Burton. Is there nobody Quiller isn't ripping off?

Not that it matters, since Pinter's weird take on the character is the most inadequate hero you'll ever see in any spy movie that isn't a spoof. It's true he eventually turns out to be slightly less of a fool than we thought, but, as in Robert Altman's bizarrely misjudged reimagining of "The Long Goodbye", this revelation comes so late that we don't believe it. By turns annoyingly cocky, hopelessly naïve and just plain inept, our half-baked hero provides the only suspense in the entire film when, having just gotten himself out of mortal danger, he puts himself straight back into it by mistake. The action is bordering on non-existent, the baddies aren't properly established to be a threat to anyone who isn't specifically trying to put them all in jail, several major plot points make no sense, and in the most memorable scene, Alec Guinness, who deserves far more screen time than he gets because he can act a darn sight better than the bouffant-haired Boy Wonder, explains the situation to our hero as if he's talking to a special needs child, using fairy cakes as visual aids. Seriously.

There's a shedload of talent involved in this movie, but it's underused, misapplied, or both. Harold Pinter's script throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and substitutes a Pinteresque scenario in which somebody who happens to be a spy wanders around looking confused and achieving very little, and where the movie's heart and soul ought to be there's an irritating fresh-faced simpleton who resembles a secret agent about as much as Burt Ward resembled a superhero. It's one of those films that tries to do something different because the people involved honestly think it's a good idea, but it isn't.

Yes, it's another of those movies this site labels "classics" because they haven't the slightest idea what the word means, but people sometimes use it when talking about movies so with a bit of luck it applies to this one. Alas, as usual, it doesn't, unless you believe "classic" to mean "half-assed third-rate garbage". Then again, this DVD is part of what somebody has decided is "The Best of British Collection", so perhaps there are at least two people out there who honestly think it's a classic. If so, neither of them is me.

Though I have to admit that, in a strange way, I enjoyed it. Making movies is very difficult and expensive, and not all studios have enough money or talent to adequately realise their visions. Planet Film Productions are so obscure I had to look them up, and I was surprised to find that I was familiar with two of their films, "Island of Terror" and "Night of the Big Heat", both made after this one, and for both of which they borrowed so many people from Hammer that I'd always assumed they were slightly-below-par Hammer, whereas in fact they were Planet doing their very best and nearly getting it right, thanks to a lot of help from a cast and crew who knew what they were doing.

Which those responsible for this laughable excuse for a horror movie clearly didn't. None of the cast can act well, and most of them are appalling, in the finest "Of course I'm French! Why do you think I have this outrrrraaaaageous accent?" Monty Python tradition. Many of the characters are indeed supposed to be French, in the same way that many of the scenes are supposed to take place at night, but the day-for-night photography is so bad the characters have to keep telling each other it's dark in case the audience haven't noticed. When I used the word "laughable", I meant it literally. If almost any scene in this film was randomly inserted into a comedy sketch show, it would be quite a while before the viewers realised it wasn't meant to be funny.

So if you watch it in the right frame of mind, you'll be genuinely entertained, though for reasons unintended by its makers. And I'm sure the humour really is unintentional; these second, third and tenth-rate actors are obviously giving it all they've got, which only makes it funnier. But if it's horror you're after, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. Given the almost complete lack of gore and the total absence of sex or nudity, I assume the censor imposed a 15 certificate due to a brief shot of somebody smoking a joint, without which it's barely even a 12A. The pot-smoking scene is part of a hilarious subplot involving Satanist hippies, but since it's only 1965 and most people aren't quite sure what hippies are yet, this lot are mostly middle-aged middle-class beatnik antique dealers who secretly belong to a cult that worships a French vampire. As you do. I think some of them may also be lesbians. Oh my, the things those beatniks got up to!

All in all, it's a terrible film which nevertheless sort of works as an accidental parody of itself, and it deserves some kind of recognition for achieving even that much, given the number of allegedly "so bad they're good" movies with no real entertainment value whatsoever. Though if you want proper sixties horror, you'd do better to rent almost anything starring actors like Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee or Vincent Price whom you've actually heard of.