Reviews

For my money the best of the Film Club trilogy about extraordinary characters doing mundane activities. A group of British wrestlers from its seventies/eighties heyday take the late night bus home in a gloomy town. Along the way they bicker and despite Big D's desire to "have no trouble" they are forced to battle various other wrestlers. I suspect the viewer needs to remember World of Sport or the scene to really enjoy this film. I loved the way the stage persona's of the wrestlers was recreated. Big D(addy)'s gruff but decent fatherly manner. Giant Haystacks' panto villain snarling. Kendo Nagsaki's silence and his relationship with his manager. The fights on the top of the bus were hilarious. But the best moment for me was Miranda Hart's cameo as Klondyke. The miserable nature of late night in a northern town was excellently captured. This film is the unexpected highlight on the Blake's Junction 7 DVD.

The last season of "The Twilight Zone" was plagued by anaemic story lines where little happened or the twist is obvious. This episode is sadly typical, with Sterling Holloway's brief, arch little cameo as the TV repairman being one of the few elements that lifts the story.

The plot is also something of a rehash of an earlier episode about a magical camera. However the way that the main character tries to redeem himself after learning a supernatural lesson, only for that very attempt to lead to tragedy, is unusual for the series. There is no forgiveness it would seem for wrong doing this week, making this an unusually misanthropic tale from the "Twilight Zone".

At first, when two rubbery rocks on a shelf start talking to each other like Pinky and The Brain, I thought this was going to be the wooden spoon episode of the season. But once the alien possession plot begins in earnest, this episode quickly improves. In fact the last act is quite frighteningly intense and comes to a bravely downbeat conclusion.

Salome Jens gives a terrific performance. The alien creatures true form may be an obvious puppet but thanks to its scuttling quick movement, its appearances are good shock moments. The film noir look is perfectly achieved and helps make this low budget TV series look a lot more cinematic and scary. Far from the weakest, this has become one of my favourites of the first season.

The first episode of The Outer Limits contains many elements which would reoccur throughout its run. A dedicated scientist who is obsessed with his work and neglects his emotional life until it's almost too late. A misunderstood alien visitor. A clash between high ideals of scholarship and the more venal concerns of commerce and greed. There are some minor differences between this pilot and later episodes, most notably a slightly longer title sequence which merges into the first scene of the story. But the strengths of the series are self-evident: intelligent writing, a well-realised alien creature and a terrific film noir look to it all, lots of stark shadows and a hard cold look to the picture. Cliff Robertson is ideal as the man reaching out to the stars, but missing the importance of people around him. A great template for the series.

It's interesting how often respectable drama TV writers come unstuck when it comes to writing out and out comedy. The likes of Nigel Kneale and J Michael Straczynski have demonstrated that it is a lot harder than it looks. So it is that Rod Serling's 'funny' episodes of "The Twilight Zone" are amongst his worst work.

"Cavender is Coming" is probably the weakest of the lot. No wonder it was not picked up for a series. It is a lumpen entry in the magical friend sub-genre, of which "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeanie" are the best known examples. Only Carol Burnett's endearing qualities make these twenty-two minutes bearable. The laugh-track is certainly annoying but even removing it doesn't improve matters much.

This definitely feels like the pilot for a TV series but none was forthcoming. Made well before "Touched by an Angel" or "Highway to Heaven", perhaps it was ahead of its time and if it had appeared during the late nineties' fresh interest in guardian angels it would have found an audience.

As it is, this TV movie is chiefly interesting for its cast. Tom Bell and Warren Clark were the most famous cast members at the time, but Alfred Molina was still a few years away from Hollywood success. James Purfoy, Louise Lombard and Nimah Cusack would also go on to greater heights. Nice to see Cathy Tyson playing someone other than a prostitute or ex-prostitute too.

The tone is whimsical and sentimental. The emphasis is on the small human dramas of the recently deceased, rather than the magical elements. Most of the tricky questions about life after death are ducked, whilst Limbo is portrayed as old-fashioned hotel lobby full of comfortable chairs and attentive staff. Of the three 'cases' for the angels, the best concerns Molina as a reporter whose friend dies instead of him as scheduled, causing problems for him and his now zombified pal.

An entertaining little piece from the days when British telefantasy was a rare sight.

There is nothing on the sleeve of the DVD to suggest this was other than standard soft porn fare. Whilst it's hardly great, the ingenuity with which the makers translate the Greek classic Odyssey deserves some praise.

Ulysse is a truck driver who gets lost in the desert after his middle-aged co-driver is lured away by a mirage of beautiful women (The Sirens). They are rescued by a beautiful woman who lives by an oasis (Calypso) who falls in lust with Ulysse and keeps him with her for weeks. Meanwhile Ullyss' wife Pamela (Penelope) finds her restaurant gradually filling up with bachelor truckers who think Ulysse is dead and fancy claiming his wife and his business. The plot alternates between Ulysse trying to make the difficult journey home, encountering a one-eyed ogreish woman (the Cyclops), whilst back at the café the suitors and local whores stage drunken sex games and circle around the resourceful Pamela.

All the women, Cyclops excepted, are beautiful and sexy, whilst the men are generally hairy and rather gnomic looking. If you can get past that, this is a bawdy romp with a bizarre musical soundtrack of poor cover versions of sixties and seventies pop songs. The sun constantly shines on the lovely French countryside and film is pretty professionally made. The dubbing is haphazard on the English version but even with that obstacle, Elizabeth Turner gives an elegant, sensuous performance as Pamela, making her a woman well worth crossing a desert for.

It may seem odd to describe a hard core sex movie with words like warm and playful but this entertaining eighties porn movie is a sexy, fun diversion. It may not be art but it is not too far from "Porky's" either.

At a private school for 'girls', the seniors are dreading their finals and using a variety of schemes to pass, hardly any of which involve studying. Sleeping with the class maths geek, tempting their teachers or just stealing the questions are more their line. This leads to a set of entertaining sexual vignettes, often leavened with a fair amount of humour.

One of the best selling points of the flick is the attractive but natural looking cast. These girls are pretty and sexy, but in a varied, imperfect girl-next door kind of way, rather than a set of perfectly sculptured and shaved set of Barbie clones. Also unlike many a high school plot, there are no really bitchy characters. What pranks there are a rather mild. Instead everyone seems to be having fun and generally liking each other. Okay so this is a extremely unlikely film but it makes the sex more fun when the actors seem to be enjoying themselves. For example I half expected the princess of the year to pull a trick on the maths wizard but she sticks to her promise and gives herself to him for the night.

The makers even put a bit of imagination into the structure with a few enjoyable fantasy episodes. The opening sequence is the best, set in a white void where a gawky but good looking brunette graduate steps out of her robes and into a giant certificate, before doing some enthusiastic horizontal jogging with a man she's found in there. It turns out this is a doodle a frustrated teacher has been drawing on a white piece of paper. A neat touch.

Good humoured porn that's better than it's derivative title would suggest.

A low key mixture of mystery and romance with supernatural overtones. Amanda Redman is excellent as a lonely geography teacher whose quiet life is disrupted by a frightening encounter with a strange man in a Welsh bed and breakfast - a man who vanishes into thin air. Back home she is shocked to find that the new drama teacher at her school looks the same as that stranger. A tentative romance begins, but that moment in Wales always remains in the back of her mind.

The mystery is really a plot driver for the real message of the story, which is about the difficulty, yet importance, of trusting another person. Especially when love is involved. Michael Maloney is fine as the charming, quirky man who tries to woo her. John Nettleton enjoys a fruity cameo as the bread-making landlord of The Loreilei. Chilly Wales also performs well, with its impressive mountains and pretty villages. This is a modern day fairytale with an ambiguous conclusion.

This is a story aimed at any young SF/fantasy fan who's got monster models in their bedroom and a library of cinema magazines on the shelves. Apparently it was inspired by all the letters which the Jim Henson Creature Shop receive from young fans wanting to work for them. Adapted from the book by Nicholas Fisk, it actually improves on the original by taking the villains of the piece out of the hero's school class and putting them into his troubled family, creating an extra moral dilemma. Harry Dean Stanton is impressive in a rare starring role as the renown, dour, slightly manipulative special effects expert and Kieran O'Brien handles the lead part with a realistic performance. The gigantic dragon is an impressive creation and it is only a shame it is not on screen for longer. This pleasant little tale about growing up and having a dream makes a clever companion piece to "The Storyteller" and "Labyrinth".

A strange little offshoot of the Shadow mythos. Definitely the better of the two Shadow movies starring Rod La Rocque. This time, Lamont Cranston is a crusading crime journalist who writes a daily column entitled "The Shadow"! He does not wear the famous cloak and slouch hat, has no mind powers and everybody knows that he is the Shadow. His assistant is Phoebe Lane, who is cute and dizzy and not much relation to the superior Margo Lane at all. The film is based on the wise-cracking style of "The Thin Man" and occasionally delivers a genuinely funny moment. But for the most part this is a pretty dull murder mystery involving foreign agents. Completely lacking in the film noir, supernatural atmosphere of the radio series and the magazine. A curiosity but hardly The Shadow we know and love.

I've wanted to see this series for years and finally a kind friend provided me a copy. Written by Russell T Davies before everyone knew his name thanks to "Queer As Folk". Starring Kate Winslet long before "Titanic" but already demonstrating star quality.

I came to the series with heightened expectations and after a while I realized that I had to remember that this is a superior children's TV series, rather than a major peak-time adult drama. Yet as the serial unwrapped itself across its six 25 minute episodes, it revealed unusual and cliche busting depths. The three young heroes are personable without being bratty whilst their teacher ally, a marvelous performance by Brigit Forsythe, emerges as a drily amusing, complicated woman trying to do her best, rather than a caricature. These are people who rarely appear in SF drama. "Dark Season" is a satisfying British programme in its attitudes. It doesn't feel the need to compete with US fantasies; instead it draws direct from the works of John Christopher, HG Wells and John Wyndham, filtering them through the then popular theories of millennium angst. It's exciting, subversive and just a bit weird.

Another uniquely British touch is its main heroine Marcie, sharply played by Victoria Lambert. It's hard to imagine a plain, bossy, abrasive and cynical fourteen year old being the lead in a US series. They'd have probably wanted a kooky Melissa Joan Hart type or would have relegated her to a sidekick and made Kate Winslet's Reet character the star. But here we have a deeply flawed character who nevertheless wins through thanks to her intelligence and honesty. Marcie doesn't like the world, she thinks everyone else is stupid and the place is a mess, and yet she fights to save the Earth. It's touches like that give the storyline its poignancy and shades of grey.

It's great to see Jacqueline Pearce back in action as the evil Miss Pendragon, camping it up like a good'un. But she's matched sneer for sneer by Max Headroom-alike Eldritch played by Grant Parsons, who seems to have stepped straight out of a Japanese anime. He's a great melodramatic villain.

The cliffhangers are terrific, particularly the emergence of Behemouth and its here that the series recalls the "Doctor Who" spirit the most. Davies' dialogue is smart and vinegary whilst his ideas are hugely entertaining. The only frustration is that the series finishes after two mini adventures when there was clearly plenty of potential for more. Certainly there are hints of a greater plotline unfolding whilst the characters and their relationships had lots of mileage left in them. It would be a good series for someone to release on DVD, alongside its stablemate "Century Falls". Recommended.

One of Dennis Potter's final pieces, this is sadly a mediocre entry in his writing CV. Lots of his hallmarks are here, a blurring of fantasy and reality, a story about the way people can be imprisoned by their past and boiling desires held in check by English restraint until they grow poisonous. But ultimately the film has little more to say than that middle aged single men are often sexually frustrated. A good cast and glossy direction lend the film more weight than it really deserves. Strangely the film feels more like another writer trying to 'do a Potter' than a work by the man himself.

The blurb on the box claims that this is a story for the generation of former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It goes on to say that this is one of the greatest anime films. In both cases this is something of an overstatement.

However "Grey" is a literate SF story which owes a lot to "The Twilight Zone" and "Logan's Run" and is far more worthwhile than many of the animes which have been released in the West. The messages such as the pointless of war and the untrustworthiness of authority are pretty obvious but always worth saying. It's a shame therefore that despite the script's ambitions, the plot is ultimately resolved with a massive gunfight, plenty of deaths and purest melodrama. Animation is fair, in that familiar early eighties "Battle of the Planets" style. Its a diverting 78 minutes but unlikely to rock your world. One tip, make sure you watch it right to the end of the credits for the final image.

Hard to kill? He's impossible to kill! Yes thousands of bullets fly about but not one so much as ruffles Mr Segal's hair. (Mind you with all the gel I'm not surprised.) On the other hand his many assailants are all too easy to kill. As the years go by it gets harder to see why Segal was once a hot box office property. His acting is non-existent, every line, be it a quip or a pledge, is delivered in a flat, inflection free monotone. His martial arts skills are no more exceptional than many other screen heroes. His ego is simply enormous The ultra-serious tone of his films, no matter how inane the plots only make them more ridiculous. Kelly Le Brock actually manages to match his woodeness, rendering their scenes together excruciating. The right-wing morals of the film are somewhat basic too. Never more so than the scene where Segal snaps a man's neck in front of his son, only for the kid to run up and give his dad a big hug as if he had just been given a Christmas present. And these are supposed to be the nice guys?

An odd little film which anticipates "E.T." with its story of a friendly alien who is hunted by the local law enforcers but befriended by two children who help him repair his flying saucer. This slight story is bolstered by plenty of shots of people driving around on snowmobiles and shots of the snowy landscape which means the film often resembles a tourist travelogue. Still it is one of the only SF films made in the French Canadian region which gives it a slight curiosity value.

The alien resembles a circus clown whose make up was devised by Andy Warhol. He indulges in some lame slapstick and low key alien behaviour which confuses the local adults and delights their children. This film has a warm fuzzy feel to it which stops me being particularly vitriolic about it, but I can't seriously recommend it to anyone either due to the rather slow pace and predictability of the whole affair.

The pleasure of the horror anthology is that of brevity. No story can really out-stay its welcome or be forced into unnecessary padding. And if one episode fails to work, never mind, there will be another one along in a minute.

James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif are both excellent as the contrasting storytellers and make the linking storyline into a highlight itself. Their tales are a mixed bunch. The opener about an Indian curse is rather slight. However the second tale about a helpful young man and a mysterious pregnant girl finishes on such a disturbing, horrific note that the viewer might not recover for the rest of the film! Especially if they're male. Definitely it is the moment that will be talked about afterwards. Deliberately, the third story concerns a more cerebal horror. A girl discovers a shocking truth about the father she idolises. Yet it emerges as probably the most satisfying tale of the night with a haunting punchline. Finally the concluding tale of vengeance beyond the grave is fair, its highlight being an animated nightmare sequence.

The Western trappings bring a welcome original atmosphere to these Tales from the Crypt refugees, making this a worthwhile diversion for the jaded horror fan.

It's hard to actively dislike this adaptation but compared to the funny and grotesque novel by Roald Dahl, there's a definitely a lack of energy to the film. It's all very well scrubbed and nicely behaved, lacking the bite that the best versions of his children's books have, such as "Matilda" or "The Witches". The film was originally made for TV and sadly the animation has a decidedly flat look. There's no real sense of danger, even when the brutish man eating giants are on screen. Vocal work is effective but no one stands out. A pity because the Cosgrove Hall company has produced some of the funniest, most iconoclastic cartoons ever put on UK TV. So watch some Count Duckula or Dangermouse instead to appreciate their talents.

While this film is not as teeth gratingly bad as "The Treasure of Manhattan Island", this straight to video story hopefully marks the end of the Fieval franchise. Without the luxurious artwork or star vocals of the cinema films, the blandness of the regulars is all too obvious. There's a small respite for older viewers in the newspaper office scenes because they are based on films such as "His Girl Friday" but the wit isn't sharp enough to cut mozzorella. Oh yes, most of the characters are named after cheeses (ho ho!) As with all video sequels to cartoons, the songs are hopeless pastiches of the Disney formula and I was forgetting them mid-song. The mystery of the title manages to be sub Scooby Doo in its simplicity. In short, only watch this film if its a choice between this or its predecessor.

Mr Sim is ideally cast as a seemingly mild but actually ruthless assassin. His perfect comic timing, expressive features and ability to switch on a sense of genuine menace are well used in this sprightly farce. George Cole is admirable as the well meaning young hero while Jill Adams is a radiantly beautiful and desirable heroine. As indisputably English as Wimbledon but much more fun!

A splendid, energetic version of one the classics of children's literature which benefits from a stellar cast of British acting talent. Aside from nearly every Python appearing to good effect, we have a touching performance from Steve Coogan as the downtrodden Mole, Anthony Sher as a hissable Chief Weasel and... well to many famous faces to mention.

What makes this version stand out is the stunning costume and production design by James Acherson. This is a caricartured version of olde England, with the animals played by cartoonish humans rather than anthromorphosised animals. The sun always shines, everything is polished and colourful. There's some subtle satire about the class system going on in the background but director Jones doesn't let that get in the way. Only the factory subplot strikes a wrong note, tending to clutter up the last half of the film but not seriously. Genuinely for children of all ages.

Sadly, despite a whole host of reliable British comedy actors in the cast list and some well known names behind the scenes (Terry Nation and John Barry) this is a pretty dreadful movie. Even by the low standards of pop star film vehicles, this is a yawn inducing non-event. Dull jokes about people misunderstanding each other, the heroines' clothes 'accidentally' coming off and stereotypical Scots rhubarbing in the background. Only for nostalgic Adam Faith fans I'm afraid or possibly "Carry On" fans wanting to catch Sid James and Charles Hawtry in their typical guises.

A splendid satire on the Olympic industry and TV sports programmes. Plenty of recognisable types amongst the furry cast from the gushing bimbo interviewer to an intense USSR gymnast to a deadpan turtle anchorman. The animation is above average for TV but lacks the richness of Bluth or Disney. However that hardly matters because the real pleasure lies in the smart script, engaging vocal performances and first rate character design. Quite a lot of the more adult humour will sail over the heads of the young but older viewers can watch this movie again and again to pick up on the jokes they missed last time. An extremely underrated cartoon gem.