Reviews

This series passes the time, but is full of predictable, and implausible things. The last half hour, in particular, is a ticklist of bad film/TV cliches. It is set in Cornwall but filmed in Ireland, and the makers are careless with background detail and accents that betray that fact. Characterisation is mostly two dimensional, and acting mediocre. Actions taken by several characters are often some combination of stupid, implausible or self-contradictory as to their motives. Channel 5 have commissioned several series like this, and they all suffer from the same faults. For all this, it's watchable if your expectations are not high.

Imagine the worst ever story in an earthbound edition of Doctor Who, mixed in with every ill-fitting and irrelevant cliche of bad low budget sci-fi you can think of. Compound this mess with almost nothing anyone says or sees making any sense at all, or in any way leading on from the previous scene. Expect nothing to be explained properly, as all you get to see is a few repellent teenagers going around a small town in a torturously slow non-story occasionally coming across something nonsensical. Watching this had me half wondering if the pages of the script had been randomly shuffled after being mixed in with other totally different series!

The acting and production values of this series is good, but it is let down by a convoluted plot that contains many implausible motivations, actions, and coincidences.

I have followed motorsport closely since childhood (i.e. The sixties and seventies), and I have become conscious over the years of how racing history is subsequently used by those who wish to tell stories rather than relate objective accounts. I remember Willy T Ribbs being covered by Autosport and other publications, and I can recall no reports of racism being an obstacle to his career. In fact, his skin colour was if anything a useful 'sales gimmick' that got him attention and sponsorship. His driving ability was competent, but far from top ranking, and no better than many others in the upper levels of the sport. Yet this film tries to paint a picture of how much better he was than his rivals, and how he had to overcome racially motivated opposition to progress his career. In reality, the obstacles he faced were just those faced by any driver, and if anything, he was promoted beyond his ability. The things that went wrong with his career were often a product of his arrogance, boastfulness, blindness his own failings, and inability to be a team player. However, that truth does not make a good drama. Much as the film 'Senna' told a distorted story, so does 'Uppity'. The film is skilfully made, and racing fans will certainly enjoy it, but it should not be mistaken for the truth.

This series is incredible.....in the proper sense of the word. Nothing that happens is remotely believable, and much is plain impossible. Characters have obvious flaws that would have precluded them from ever being considered for such a mission. For half the series there are instantaneous two way phone conversations with no lag, despite the craft already being several light minutes from Earth. A large amount of superfluous junk is on board, such as a big heavy chess set and tinsel! The crew distil hooch vodka! The ship has cavernous empty spaces! Characters are a tick list of Hollywood liberal PC bores, with a few stereotypes thrown in. Most of the series is about their excruciatingly uninteresting personal lives. We stuck it out for seven episodes hoping for an improvement, but it got even worse, so we gave up. Let us all hope no second series is commissioned.

....but I was daft enough to chase my losses and see it through to the end. There is no resolution, no payoff, and the film just dissolves more and more into complete babble. It is an utter waste of your time. It's only achievement is to make you think of ending your Netflix subscription.

This short-lived spoof news show was abysmally unfunny. Many years later The Day Today showed Beneath The News how it should have been done. BTN appears to have been wiped, so it will not rear its unfunny head again.

This film has so many ridiculous plot holes that it would be too much work to list them. Almost nothing makes any sense. It is so bad, it will make you laugh out loud in places. We had to pause the film for 30 seconds at one point to guffaw at the scene in the internet cafe where the news story describes a murder as having taken place on June 31th!

This film is extremely slow moving from start to finish, and gradually introduces what seem to be plot points. However, they are never brought together into any coherent story at all. The entire film is therefore nonsensical, and just ends with nothing explained or resolved. It is puzzling how rubbish like this gets filmed. Why did nobody read the script and say, 'Hang on, this is just babble. Let's not proceed.'?

The acting is wooden, the film recycles every dull horror cliché in the book, and the story makes no sense from beginning to end. The dialogue is completely implausible, and the only reason to watch this dog of a film is to laugh at its ineptitude. I would have no hesitation in including this film in a top ten of the worst I have seen in the past decade.

I saw this series when it first came out in 1988. For whatever reason, it seems never to have been repeated. It is highly enjoyable, despite many things happening that are implausible. The story involves a managing director of a successful games company being forced into playing a series of deadly games by someone from his past.'The Game' starring Michael Douglas is clearly copied from The One Game, though the makers of The Game never appear to have admitted it. The story and title are very similar: even the main character's name is similar! The One Game is darker takes itself a little more seriously than The Game. The One Game is very much of its time, and that has added to its attraction over the years, set during a period when computer games are beginning to eclipse traditional games. But as we see in the drama, there is still room for games don't play on a computer screen...

This film is very enjoyable, and may appear to be like no other story. However, viewers should be aware that there are striking similarities to a British TV mini-series from the late 1980's called The One Game. The makers of The Game do not appear to have acknowledged this in their credits. The plot of both is very similar, as is the relationship between the main character and his tormentor. Even the main character's name is similar! Both the film and the TV series are well worth seeing, though both have flaws in the plot, and rather stretch credulity! Compared with The One Game, The Game is less dark and takes itself a little less seriously.

This film says little about David Berkowitz, other than to repeat as the truth his lies about the supposed insanity that drove him to kill. In reality he was in full control of his faculties, and just got a sexual thrill out of his crimes. Instead, the film tells us uninteresting stories about various repulsive characters about whom we care nothing. The movie meanders boringly for over two hours, with not enough material for even forty minutes. It is hard to imagine how this film got made: who was it aimed at? Who could possibly enjoy it? If Berkowitz had turned up and shot some of the main characters early in the film it would have been a relief!

I remember seeing Thriller back in the mid-1970's when I was about ten. I found it the most terrifying TV series I have seen before or since! It had a memorable creepy theme tune accompanied by fish-eye lens shots of the locations used in that week's story, with a blood red surround. You never knew what to expect from an episode, some being supernatural, others being real world whodunits or Hitchcock style dramas. Some of the mysteries are very intriguing, and the direction is always good. Thriller can be criticised as being of its time in some negative ways, such as being slow moving, having a lot of stock characters, being predictable, and having plot holes. Also, the great clunking fist of Lord Grade appears frequently in the form of many characters being irrelevantly American to please ABC, who reportedly paid $100,000 per episode! But when you look at almost any good TV series many years later you see these sort of faults, and Thriller is inventive, frightening and enjoyable enough to brush its bad points aside. A few years after its first showing, the series was broken up into stand alone TV films with rubbish music/credits replacing the classic theme with the fish-eye lens shots. This made the episodes easier to repeat, as they were no longer officially a series, but it meant subsequent generations of viewers have been less aware of this fine series, and it would have been forgotten were it not for online fan-sites creating demand for the superb 16 disc boxed DVD set of all 43 episodes.

This horror film is typical of those produced in large numbers in early 1970's Britain. It has a tiny cast and budget, and stretches its limited resources far too thinly. It is very slowly paced, and could easily be compressed into 30 minutes. There is almost no plot development, and what there is is 100% telegraphed right from the start. It ticks such boxes as having a couple of star actors (Donald Pleasance would never turn a film down, however bad!), an irrelevantly American character to help get the film distributed Stateside, and a simple tagline and title designed to get the punters in. The plot is essentially the legend of Sawney Bean transplanted to the London Underground in 1973! This makes no sense at all! For all that it passes the time, and is perfectly watchable if your expectations are not too high.

This film works tremendously on all levels. It is a highly intelligent story about what is or is not real, while at the same time it is a fast-moving and spectacular stuntfest, with much clever and funny dialogue. Steve Railsback plays Cameron, who pretends to be a deceased stuntman who was a stand-in for an actor playing a First World War pilot. So one man (Railsback) is playing another (Cameron) playing another (deceased stuntman) playing another (actor in WW1 film) playing another (WW1 pilot): no wonder that in the world of the film set Cameron has trouble working out what is or not real! I have seen this film probably ten times, and every time I see something I missed before. It is absolutely enthralling, and though it has always had good reviews, it somehow always gets missed when lists of all-time great films are compiled. It is one of those movies which has many fans, and I always recommend it as a must-see, but most people just don't seem to 'get' this film, so it has not got as much recognition as it deserves.

Peter Greenaway originally intended this film to be over three hours long, but he was eventually made to edit it down to 103 minutes. Well, maybe the three hour version would have made some sort of sense, but the shorter version makes none! There are all kinds of elements essential to understanding the story which do not appear in the film, and which you will only know about from reviews which undoubtedly themselves were dependant on explanations by the film makers. This is an example of pretentious nonsense being lavishly praised by weak minds afraid to call the emperor naked. It is best to see this film without having read what it is supposed to be about, as that is an objective state of mind. No film should require to be explained to reasonably intelligent people. This is art-house drivel.

This film is aimed purely at the motorsport fan. As such it is often described as boring by those who do not follow the sport, as it contains little of interest to them. But for those of us who love motorsport, this film presses all the right buttons. It skilfully mixes real footage from the 1970 race with the fictitious shots to give the illusion of reality. It has no real plot, as it does not need one: the ebb and flow of the 24 hour race itself is the story, as in real life. The real stars of the movie are the Porsche 917, Ferrari 512, Lola T70 etc. One of the finest periods of sportscar racing is thus immortalised. One can also see the Le Mans circuit in action before it was radically altered with the construction of the Porsche curves in 1971 and the addition of the chicanes over the next twenty years. I have watched this film probably 20 times over the past 35 years, and I love it every time.

You're Dead is an indescribably awful attempt at a British gangster film. It has not got a single original idea in it, being an atrocious copy of various elements of Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, The Usual Suspects and Pulp Fiction. The acting and dialogue are absolutely excruciating, the plot is ludicrous and utterly predictable despite constant attempts at plot twists, and contains nothing but one dimensional stock characters and clichés. It has some good actors in it, but they are off-form, and unable to do anything much with the dreadful material they are working with. It is absolute torture to sit through this drivel.