Reviews

If you expect an action-packed monster horror movie, don't watch this. You won't like it. It's terrible.

If, on the other hand, you are a connoisseur of really bad movies, this one is right up your street.

Imagine Jaws VIII, Godzilla VI, and E.T. IV mixed up together. The only thing wrong with this film is that it wasn't directed by Edward D Wood, Jr.

Gregory Peck is a scientist. He is sent on a mysterious mission to China, where it turns out a scientist has developed an amazingly beneficial enzyme, and thinks Peck is the only man who can work out how to duplicate it for mass production, cure all known diseases, etc. Peck and said scientist are idealists who want to share it with the world, while the US and Chinese governments just want it for themselves. And, to make the whole thing more credible, Peck is equipped with a micro-transmitter in his brain which monitors his physical status and bugs his every conversation, including the one he has after playing table tennis with Chairman Mao.

It sounds silly, and, frankly, it is, but the espionage and the attempts to detect it are fairly tense, and Gregory Peck indulges in a fair number of good old humanitarian rants which suggest that Chinese totalitarianism and US militarism aren't necessarily wonderful things either.

I rather enjoyed it.

That this film was a propaganda effort is not in doubt. As a morale-boosting call to the British people to do their bit uncomplainingly, with the whole country, high and low, all in it together, it was a remarkably well-made movie.

For an audience which did not have to suffer the Blitz or rationing, it is only a piece of history.

As a window on how the British were in the early part of WW2, it's an excellent document, but as cinema entertainment, it is simply a way of passing time harmlessly.

This is more a comment on one of the previous comments: to wit, that the lines about the CEA and FBR sounded dubbed.

They probably were.

With the movie virtually in the can, Coburn and Flicker were summoned by a studio exec. The studio exec presented the representative of the FBI, who was objecting to the movie being made. They pointed out that it had already been shot, so it was basically impossible. So the FBI demanded that it make no reference to the FBI or CIA. So Flicker and Coburn and the rest changed all the names.

This film lays it on with a trowel. By the end of it, you will admit that:

i) the B-52 is the most fantastic bomber ever ii) every man in the Air Force is utterly dedicated to the safety of the United States iii) the mechanics are extremely important, despite not being officers iv) everyone in or around the Air Force is a fine example of good American decency

The plot on which the pictures of the B-52 are hung is very silly indeed, as well as entirely predictable.

This is a cinematic realisation of the lavish Arabian Nights storybooks you read as a child. They don't put a foot wrong: it's all very predictable and undemanding, and everyone plays their appointed parts very satisfactorily. Enjoyable nonsense.

It must have seemed a good idea at the time, Omar Sharif as the charismatic leader of the Mongol Horde, uniting the tribes and being generally heroic.

But this really is unwatchable dross for the most part.

The only good bits are the unintentionally funny ones, in which James Mason plays the chief courtier to Robert Morley's Chinese Emperor. They don't quite manage to be successful caricatures, however hard the script writer tried to make them so, but they do have the immense advantage of being horribly miscast.

Michael Winner's films aren't complete without a lot of blood, and this one has enough to fill a bucket or two.

James Coburn is the retired hitman who comes back in to kidnap a certain Karl Stegner, a mysterious and very wealthy man wanted by the IRS and various other federal agencies.

Coburn teams up mainly with OJ Simpson, with some dubious assistance from Sophia Loren, and we have a 70s high-tech sort of caper. Lots of gadgetry, most of it explosive, large quantities of double-crossing and shooting, plenty of pretty shots of the Caribbean from floating gin palaces, and a plot of such ludicrous over-complexity that it's silly.

It was obviously immense fun to make: several very large houses get burned down, bulldozed and otherwise trashed. As do various means of transportation. With lots of explosions and shooting.

It's implausible and it's almost impossible to understand why anyone would do what these people do, but apparently this is what they do. Bullets fly and things blow up.

There is an awful lot of frenetic activity, constantly accompanied by the sound of gunfire with regular scenes of conflagration.

Did I mention that there's a lot of shooting and explosions in this? In case I didn't, there is, as well as a very confusing plot.

It's not a very good movie.

We have Dirk Bogarde doing his gentle, sensible young doctor character again. He has a polite, gentle romance with Samantha Eggar amidst the medical high jinks.

This is my favourite of the Doctor In The House series, though, because it's the one which gives most screen time to James Robertson Justice as the impossible Professor Lancelot Spratt. He is, for most of the picture, a patient, and given how he behaves when he's a consultant surgeon, it is hardly surprising that he is the most unco-operative and demanding patient in the annals of medical science.

JRJ makes full use of the opportunities offered, playing every scene for all it is worth (but, thank goodness, *only* for what it is worth - he doesn't extravagantly overplay it) and with obvious relish.

The job of the rest of the movie is to provide the canvas for him to display on, so it's not as though it's anything difficult or consequential.

Enjoyable fare for a weekend afternoon.

The basic thing that's wrong with this movie is that it's too much of a good thing, and they don't know when to shut up.

It's not so much a plot which moves ahead scene by scene, but a series of sketches plonked next to each other in the hope that a coherent storyline will emerge.

Many of the sketches are very funny. There are some great pieces of observational comedy: you can always get a good laugh out of having a naif confront the idiocy of modern urban life.

But they milk every sketch until it's dry. If they'd cut 60 seconds off each one, the whole thing would have been a great deal tighter.

It's all very well done, but if they'd done a bit less, it would have been a lot more entertaining.

This is a very confusing comedy.

The main plot line revolves around Michael Redgrave, unhappily engaged to a society lady, who falls for a lingerie model played by Jessie Matthews and her overbite. Much to-ing and fro-ing, playing of masquerades lead to the conclusion everyone expects, but the alarms and excursions are strange indeed.

We have Alastair Sim doing a tremendous job as a poverty-stricken, bitter comic communist, but we also have a loony who is obsessed with opera-singing. His second appearance is completely inexplicable.

Enough of the original plot shows through for the storyline to just about hang together - even if only with the assistance of a suspension bridge for the disbelief - but there's an awful lot of "what the...?" likely from an attentive viewer.

Odd entertainment.

What amazes me about the previous comments made is that none of them mention Laurel and Hardy.

This movie is clearly a homage to L&H, or should that be "attempt at trying to imitate L&H"?

The scene in the square, where the fatter, moustached Smuntz brother waves the ends of his tie at the women across the way is a straight lift from Hardy, and there are many other places where the scene is, shall we say, uncannily like a Laurel and Hardy scene.

Since film-making has advanced a little since their day, there is the opportunity to have a lot more special effects, and the mouse which is the bane of the Smuntz brothers' lives can be filmed doing lots more interesting tricks. Actually, the mouse chases are more obviously copied from Tom & Jerry cartoons, but the ease with which they fit in makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that they'd have had those sequences in the Laurel and Hardy movies if they could.

The big difference between this and a L&H movie, though, is also a product of "progress". Because it is made with the child audience in mind, it is more crudely drawn and lacks finesse.

It's perhaps difficult these days to do slapstick with the same innocence that Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy managed, and so it inevitably seems disappointing, but Mouse Hunt makes a pretty good stab.

Set in modern Russia, the neo-Nazis, a Catholic monastery, and an American or two get embroiled in attempting to smuggle valuable icons.

The plot is extremely complicated and difficult to follow unless you concentrate. But it's worth concentrating, because its many twists and turns keep up a good level of suspense.

Martin Sheen is only a supporting actor, and the action is led by Chris Penn, who seems a little too cherubic for his character.

The setting is bleak: clearly the Russia where it takes place is lawless and dangerous. Improvisation, courage, and ingenuity are needed to survive.

It's a taut, exciting story, although there are a couple of leaps in the plot which demand a certain suspension of disbelief, but they're quickly forgotten.

Good, competent story-telling makes a good 90 minutes.

Errol Flynn is Edward, the Black Prince, appointed Duke of Aquitaine to protect the English gains in the 100 Years War.

The Count of Aquitaine doesn't accept English rule, and so we need to have a lot of scenes of knights in armour battling it out to decide who wins, and who gets the girl. (No prizes for guessing who.)

It's colourful enough, and the swashes get vigorously buckled at regular intervals, but you've probably seen it all before.

A previous reviewer has taken this film to pieces, and while many of his criticisms are well-made, I can't go along with the overall rating.

If you're looking for plausibility, then this is certainly one of the worst movies of all time, but it wasn't actually intended as a documentary, unless I miss my guess completely.

This is a silly action adventure, mostly set in North Africa. There are good guys and bad guys, and they have personalities rather than well-rounded characters. There's some slapstick humour. Danny de Vito is cutely irritating, Michael Douglas is brave and rugged. We even have a scene in a tribal village compete with tribal dancing.

In other words, it's an updated version of the Stewart Granger/Rod Taylor African adventure type movies.

What makes this film worth watching, though, are the chase-type scenes, the specific likes of which I'd not seen before. Suffice to say that they're unusual.

If you can accept a plot with more holes than a tuna net and just let it flow by, this is a fairly jolly way to spend a couple of hours.

Made in 1942, a film about patriotism is necessarily going to be a pro-Union all-American affair, as this B movie undoubtedly is.

Played by Robert Stack, Barry Conovan, a newspaperman, is sent to Texas some years after the death of Sam Houston, with the aim of getting the real skinny on the grand old man. He unearths some facts which make Houston more heroic than had been thought up North before, and then gets involved, and ultimately held hostage by Broderick Crawford's Henry Clay Jackson,.

Jackson is a Texan rebel, but Conovan discovers that he is no noble freedom-fighter, opting instead for robbing banks to fill his own pockets rather than for the greater glory of Texas.

The drums of patriotism beat loudly throughout the rather leaden script, which is flairlessly uttered by the second class actors.

Unless you happen to be a rabid Texas chauvinist who still thinks the Lone Star State is illegally occupied, the film is wholly inoffensive and passes the time. But it really is very ordinary.

Director Andrew Kotting, his 90 year old grandmother, and his 9 year old daughter (who has cerebral palsy or something like it) take a trip around the coast of Great Britain.

As a story, it's not dramatic: all it does is to give some vague hint of a narrative thread to what is basically a cinematic essay.

It is beautiful to look at, at times, even though it was shot on 8mm. It shows little which would be familiar to, or visited by, a tourist.

There is a constant sense of the past being lost; some footage from an earlier period is intercut, but many of the interviews with the very real people the crew meets on their travels also reminisce.

This is an engaging piece of a reflective, contemplative nature.

This is one of the best of the low-budget Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Seven men, the "Good Comrades" have formed a club, and they all live together in a castle on the North coast of Scotland. They all have life insurance policies of high value, the beneficiaries being the surviving members of the club. Holmes is called in by the insurers when two of them die violently in quick succession.

It all takes place in the castle, and more of the Comrades meet an end, so it's Ten Little Indians territory.

Rathbone and Bruce, with the cheerful support of Dennis Hoey as Lestrade, do their usual number with a fairly intricate plot, and a jolly good time is had by all.

The direction is pacy, and it rattles along very satisfactorily; the production values are pretty low, but we're only looking at story-telling than brilliant cinematography.

Enjoyable stuff.

There's a genre of spy thriller which involves Presidents, Prime Ministers and other heads of government, top police and spymasters, an assassin like Carlos the Jackal, and the imminent outbreak of WWIII. Whoops Apocalypse is one of those.

Just as Airplane is a disaster movie.

Not that Whoops Apocalypse is as funny as Airplane - there are too many scenes when the plot advances in a reasonably pointful fashion for that - but there are some inspired spoof scenes. There's a beautiful one when the Navy Officer gets his orders to report to his ship by nightfall - there are reasons why this isn't quite as poignant as the similar scenes in b&w 1942 movies.

Some bits of it may well seem inexplicable unless you remember that it was made in Britain in 1986, with the Falklands War still fairly fresh in people's minds, Di-mania a-booming, and Margaret Thatcher still running the country in demented fashion.

The highlight of the film is Peter Cook's portrayal of Prime Minister Sir Mortimer Chris: a high-powered Sir Bufton Tufton, fearfully right-wing and, as we discover, stark staring bonkers. Loretta Swit plays the US President a la Carol Channing, and a number of others kick in with decent cameos.

I'd like to see it again, to find out whether I got all the jokes the first time round - Airplane must have taken a dozen viewings before I'd spotted some of the really subtle touches. I suspect there is less to discover in this second and third time round, but it's not a bad attempt, overall.

The 1942-43 Holmes/Watson films are often pathetic nonsense involving Nazi spies and have Holmes dashing all over the place firing guns at all and sundry, which doesn't work at all.

Yes, this is wartime, and the targets in the fairground shooting gallery are Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, but this is a proper detective story about mysterious murders.

It's an amalgam of Conan Doyle's original stories The Sign of Four and The Final Problem rather than a farrago of cod secret agents, and it works pretty well as a mystery.

Gale Sondergaard makes a marvellous villain, and plays excellently opposite Rathbone's Holmes.

Well worth while

A mature, intelligent thriller, in which Newman recreates Lew Harper. It takes place around New Orleans and involves public corruption and an intricate web of deceit.

The style is fairly laid-back, though it doesn't actually lag - even though it sometimes seems it's about to. The characters are all sharply delineated and complex, and there is a lot of very good acting going on.

Thoroughly watchable, with some tension and suspense, but only sporadic action.

This is as dire a movie as Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce made as Holmes and Watson. Holmes as counter-intelligence agent isn't half as much fun as Holmes the detective. Making Moriarty the stock villain doesn't improve matters.

It's worth a look by Rathbone/Bruce fans, but it's really pretty silly stuff. They're obviously having fun, though, so why not let them get on with it?

Visually, an utterly stunning film. Spielberg mounts a fantastic cinematographic display, every shot beautifully composed. There's a sweeping score too, huge crowd scenes, dream sequences, the works.

And there's a fine story of a boy's loss of innocence, of how a

pampered rich kid learns to survive, becoming a wheeler-dealer who knows how many cigarettes will buy a potato or cabbage. Though not quite as brutal as military POW camps, surviving the Japanese civilian prison camps required courage and resourcefulness, and young Jim acquires and uses these qualities in abundance.

The whole trouble with this movie is that the story and the presentation simply don't match up. We have a little story of a young boy's determined little struggle against adversity projected on to the broadest of canvases. We don't need every scene to be a spectacular, to have a huge score to take every hint of emotion to absurd heights, to be invested with emblematic significance. Pairs of shoes, battered suitcases, bicycles - these objects are far too mundane to be the leitmotivs of Wagnerian opera, which is the epic scale on which Spielberg has built his edifice.

Spielberg can make good little films about boys - see ET, for example - but placing his little story in such a grand setting obscures the tale and devalues the majesty of the filming.

This is much less than the sum of its parts, and it could well irritate you beyond belief. During the last third of the movie, I

found myself snorting or expostulating at each yet more overblown set-piece purporting to be deeply significant unfolded.

The Empire falls resoundingly between two stools (one made of plain wood and the other richly decorated and upholstered in regal style).

Many of Philip Roth's novels plough the same furrow. A sane, rational, sensible Jewish man has a difficult life because of oppressive Jewish society amongst well-off New Yorkers, in which women are capricious, malevolent, and obsessed with frippery and social position. This one is an example.

Richard Benjamin, often looking remarkably like Rowan Atkinson, plays Philip Roth (under the name of Neil Klugman), opposite Ali McGraw in her first cinema role. She's a Jewish-American Princess - and this was probably the movie which exposed this species to the world outside New York State.

Everybody except Roth is incredibly shallow and boneheaded, although the father, nicely played by Jack Klugman, is allowed a certain rough honest grace and decency.

The main message one gets from the film is that the wealthy of Westchester County are unpleasant people, Jewish-American Princesses especially so, but even they pale in comparison with their ghastly mothers.

In the book, Roth's ability as a writer enlivens the proceedings, but his verbal felicity isn't translated into the visuals of the screenplay, and the film is laboured.

Peter Rogers produces, Gerald Thomas directs, it's got Sid James and Kenneth Williams in it, but it's not a Carry On.

It's got James Robertson Justice as the irascible professor who disguises his real opinions of his students by being offensive.

So it's a Doctor In The House movie, except that it's set in a music college (which happens to look immensely like University College London on the outside, and which has a dead ringer for the Conway Hall as its main theatre).

JRJ is fun to watch, but this is very drab fare indeed.