tommyrosscomix's Reviews

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978)

5/10

It's not great, but at the same time, I can't hate it

29 December 2017

Peter Cook summed up the problems with this would-be-outrageous parody of the Sherlock Holmes stories during an interview with comedy historian Roger Wilmut. In short, Paul Morrissey - best known for his occasionally engaging collaborations with Andy Warhol - was a big fan of British comedy, and apparently enjoyed cordial relationships with most of the performers on the set, but asking him to actually direct a British comedy was like asking Cook to direct an improvised film about homeless junkies in Los Angeles - not at all compatible. In his posthumously published diaries, Kenneth Williams reveals that he apparently had a fun time on the set of this film (and he turns in one of his most subtle, least characteristic performances in the progress), but was hugely disappointed by the end result - what seemed hilarious on paper came across as forced and laboured on the screen, and to be fair, you can see his point. ('And they led me by the point to the police station', as Dudley Moore might have added...)

In short, the film is a mess. Cook plays Holmes with a muted Jewish accent, Moore plays Watson with a slightly amusing Welsh accent, and the rest of the cast are left to fend for themselves. But what a cast it is! In fact, it's worth persevering with this one just to see Terry-Thomas, Spike Milligan, Joan Greenwood, Hugh Griffith, Henry Woolf and all the other lovely old comedians and character actors who seem to pop up in cameo roles every few minutes. Plus, there's the voluptuous Dana Gillespie who has an enjoyable scene with Moore and Griffith. Hamish, the donkey-sized Irish Wolfhound who almost stole the show from his human co-stars in 1975's Carry On Behind, puts in a memorable appearance too. Fans of Cook and Moore's Derek and Clive tapes will be amused to hear Moore using his seedy pervert voice from the 'Members Only' sketch during the otherwise baffling inclusion of the 'One Leg Too Few' sketch.

Technically, the film isn't too shabby. The widescreen photography gives it a lavish look, the lighting is fine, the sets and costumes are often impressive and Moore's soundtrack score is as good as you'd expect from an accomplished pianist and composer. It's hardly laugh-a-minute stuff, but there are worse ways of spending ninety minutes. Those who are claiming it to be the nadir of British comedy obviously haven't seen some of the real stinkers that emerged at around the same time, such as What's Up Superdoc (1978) - and the less said about more recent, yet infinitely more woeful offering such as the Harry Hill, Keith Lemon and Mrs Brown's Boys films, the better!

In conclusion, then... a decent-looking film full of good actors and familiar faces, lumbered by a dodgy script and an unsuitable director, yet it still manages to be a fun and undemanding watch. Try it, you might like it!

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Spaced Out (1979)

6/10

A low-budget tale of boobs, prudes, idiots, shenanigans and space rats!

22 September 2017

A friend of mine, who's something of an authority on low-budget British sex films, once told me 'as far as I'm concerned, there's Eskimo Nell, and then there's everything else'. After seeing this entertainingly wacky soft-core sci-fi spoof, with its jukebox / computer combo, special effects cribbed from the Gerry Anderson archives, end-of-the-pier revue-standard gags and an unlikely super- stud in the form of a spotty nerd who we first see masturbating frantically over a copy of the delightfully titled 'Bouncers' magazine, I'd say 'as far as I'm concerned, there's Spaced Out, and then there's everything else'.

Consider this for a moment. Does Eskimo Nell have the most gloriously seventies collection of analogue technology hardware since Graeme Garden's computers (with their enormous tape spools) in the Goodies? Does Eskimo Nell have Glory Annen doing numerous costume changes, one of which is a sexy Beefeater on roller skates? Does Eskimo Nell have the very cute and busty Ava Cadell as an insatiable space nympho? Does Eskimo Nell have a computer with a prissy Anthony Daniels as CP30- type voice, or a snarky electronic psychiatrist housed inside a Wurlitzer jukebox which basically advises henpecked boyfriends to rape their fiancees to show 'em who's boss? Does Eskimo Nell have a jarringly out-of-place downbeat finale that reminds everyone in the cinema that they're watching a film from the director of Satan's Slave and Terror? Does Eskimo Nell have a spacecraft whose interior looks like a combined leftover set from the Tomorrow People and a swinging bachelor pad? Does Eskimo Nell have a Clouseau-style fight scene where the injured party's exclamations are doused in enough echo to make the viewer feel like he's stoned, even if he's on nothing stronger than orange squash? Does Eskimo Nell have a special chair that performs sodomy by stealth on the unfortunate fool who sits on it?

The answers to all these questions and more is NO!

I'm not going to sugar coat it, you have to be a certain type of viewer to get a kick out of Spaced Out. It's a film aimed at people who like cheapskate exploitation films, big boobs, dumb jokes and plots that play out like a live action Tijuana Bible. It also has a surprisingly excellent soundtrack. After years - no, decades - in obscurity, Spaced Out has received a welcome (if bare-bones) DVD release in the UK from Odeon, and it's well worth tracking down if you're in the mood for something that will make you laugh, make you wince, and make you feel a bit randy. And deep down, you know that's what you want.

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Prey (1977)

7/10

Uncle Norman's theatre of cruelty visits Shepperton studios

22 September 2017

You know the big house in the Omen (1976), the secluded stately pile in the English countryside where Ambassador Thorn and his wife intended to raise young Damien before they found out the hard way that he was the Anti-Christ? Well, that big old house was on the grounds of the now-defunct Shepperton Studios, and when cult director Norman J. Warren (fresh from a surprise hit with the slow- burning shocker Satan's Slave) found out it was free for ten days in 1977, he gathered a tiny group of actors (who wore their own clothes on camera) and technicians, and set about making a feature film in little over a week with a largely improvised piecemeal script. Actually, the story behind the making of Prey is a little more complicated than that, but this potted version of events simply underlines the freewheeling, anything-goes state of British cinema in the seventies, when apparently anyone with a few quid to spare and nerves of steel could shoot a film on loose change and have it playing in the Odeons and ABCs alongside the latest blockbusters from America in a matter of weeks. The fact that a turf accountant is mentioned in the credits for Prey tells you all you need to know, really.

There's not much of a plot here - a half-man, half-canine alien called Kator / Anders lands in the British countryside on a fact- finding mission and is adopted by a lesbian couple - one slightly butch and prone to possessive hysterics, the other more feminine and submissive. Things very quickly go awry as it becomes clear that Anders / Kator isn't all he seems, chickens are killed, policeman investigating the gruesome disappearance of a motorist are butchered, a fox is found half-eaten, and it's only a matter of time before the awful truth comes out. You've probably guessed the twist already, which is understandable because the title kind of gives it away, but not only are the man-dog-alien thing's alien brethren going to kill us all, but eat us as well. Yikes!

Norman J. Warren has been referred to in some quarters as the nearest British cinema's ever come to its very own Fred Olen Ray, but that pat description manages to belittle both parties. Warren was a knowledgeable craftsman and canny director, capable of performing minor miracles on the tightest of budgets, and stands nicely alongside his closest contemporary Pete Walker as one of the true 'wide boys' of seventies exploitation. If Walker offered the public unsentimental tales, however, Warren could be downright misanthropic, presenting a very dim view of humanity with his endlessly shrill and argumentative characters, skew-whiff pocket universes where an attempted rape, a bloody murder or a Suspiria- referencing set-piece lurked around every corner, and happy endings were for wimps and ten-year-old girls. He may have looked like a personable supply teacher, but there's a solid core of pitch-black nastiness at the heart of Warren's best films, and Prey is no exception. Relationships are open wounds, conversations are punctuated by recriminations and hysterics, blood (and vomit) pours off the screen and nobody emerges with any real credit. Throw in some hilariously awkward transvestism, skid row special effects, a commendably gloomy atmosphere of infinite foreboding and you've got a unique, if undeniably flawed little oddity that should please anyone with a taste for the forgotten avenues of schlock horror.

A note on the performances, in particular Barry Stokes's turn as the androgynous, almost catatonic alien. Having previously hammed it up in no-budget sex comedies (something he'd do again in the Warren- directed 1979 soft-core science fiction spoof Spaced Out), Stokes proves here that he's just as comfortable with the opposite side of the exploitation coin, and he's hauntingly effective in his role. Sally Faulkner is memorable, if occasionally a touch overpowering, as the dominant half of the partnership, and the late Glory Annen (who would be reunited with Stokes in Spaced Out two years later) should, by rights, have become a legitimate film star - she certainly had the charisma, the acting chops and the looks for it, but it seems she never got the right breaks. Ivor Slaney provides the pulsating electronic score which is appropriately other-worldly and disconcerting, particularly during the genuinely nauseating scene where the three leads thrash around in a heavily polluted river in glorious slow motion - to be honest, in spite of the plentiful blood and viscera on show in certain other scenes, that's the part of Prey most likely to turn the average viewer's stomach.

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The Brute (1977)

6/10

Forty years on, this seldom-seen shocker remains powerful enough to be worth a look.

22 September 2017

The British film industry in the seventies was in a very strange place, which ironically paved the way for a number of films you just can't imagine being made in any other decade, or under any other circumstances. With the wealthy American backers out of the picture and the home video boom lurking just around the corner, the seventies remains perhaps British cinema's most insane and strangely compulsive decade, where bona-fide cult classics such as the Wicker Man and Get Carter rub alongside dirt-cheap sex flicks like 1972's the Love Box and Derren Nesbitt's ill-fated the Amorous Milkman, and big budget Bond films and Lew Grade-sponsored splashy blockbusters flickered onto fleapit screens only recently vacated by the 'moral obscenities' of the bad boys of British horror, Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren.

The Brute, with its uneasy combination of gloss and glamour, sordid violence and kitchen-sink realism, dingy location filming and titles apparently rendered in transfer lettering, is seventies Britain to its toenails, although the introduction from a psychiatrist seems to hark back to the 'white coat' sex films of the previous decade, where narration from a practising doctor was a crafty way of getting nudity and naughty bits past the ever-vigilant censor. Other concessions to contemporary trends are apparent in a bit of pro- feminist black power arse-kicking doled out to a serial abuser, the overall appearance of Bruce 'Withnail and I' Robinson's sympathetic hippy photographer, and the inevitable spacious house apparently in the middle of nowhere, which (as anyone who's seen A Clockwork Orange or Straw Dogs will readily testify) was seventies cinema shorthand both for comfortable living, and the nagging feeling that something horrible was about to happen.

The biggest problem with the film is that it's not really sure what it wants to be, and as a result, the mood of the piece is all over the place, swinging wildly from shadowy, Gothic-horror theatricals to quasi-documentary bleakness and back again, buoyed by the largely fine performances. Some sensible points are made, there's food for thought to spare and we are never once asked (or allowed) to be sympathetic toward the abusers, but the plot feels strangely tacked on and the denouement lamentably botched.

The Brute opened briefly in early 1977 to a storm of protests and accusations of bad taste and quickly vanished, though it did receive a video release in the early eighties on the Brent Walker label and a region one DVD release seems to be doing the rounds in collector's circles. It's a difficult film to enjoy - it's frequently a difficult film to watch - but fans of obscure British cinema with a taste for the offbeat should definitely track it down and remind themselves just how eclectic (if decidedly strapped for cash) the domestic film industry really was in that most conflicted of decades.

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Skool Daze (1985 Video Game)

8/10

"Four hundred lines Eric! Don't try my patience, boy!"

29 June 2017

Skool Daze was really the pioneer of the now-familiar genre of 'sandbox' games. That's right, long before the likes of the Sims, we had the misadventures of Eric, a permanently disgraced schoolboy whose report card is so bad he's afraid to show it to his parents - so he has to get the combination for the school safe, swipe his report card, change his grades and put it back before anyone's any the wiser. How does he intend to do this? Well, this is a computer game aimed at teenage boys, so Eric has to use a fair amount of brute force - punching swots, firing missiles from his trusty catapult, knocking smaller children onto the floor so he can use them as human stepladders to get at things that would usually be out of his reach, knocking his teachers flat on their bums and generally making a right old nuisance of himself. Then, in order to complete his task, he has to do it all again. As well as the school bully, Angelface, a tearaway called Boy Wander and the insufferable tell- tale school boffin Einstein, Eric has to avoid getting lines from his teachers, who include the implacable Mr Wacker, the senile Mr Creak, the easy-going Mr Rockitt and the laid-back Mr Withit. You also have to avoid catching mumps! Should you manage to pull it off, there's little in the way of a reward - you simply move up to the next school year and the game starts again, only this time it's slightly harder. (Remember, this was the mid- eighties!)

Skool Daze was an unusual and imaginative game that was sufficiently ahead of its time to cause quite a few ripples in the industry - even spawning a sequel, Back to Skool, which was decent enough but made the mistake of going down the 'bigger is better' route by adding new playing areas and expanding Eric's tasks, making the game almost impossible to complete. I actually played Back to Skool first and liked it just fine, but when I discovered the original, I was well and truly hooked. It's still around, courtesy of numerous ZX Spectrum simulator websites, and it's still entertaining - although time hasn't been kind to the screechy tunes that play at various points during the proceedings!

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Run for Your Wife (2012)

1/10

Not quite as bad as it was made out to be, but sadly, that's not saying much

25 March 2017

2012 turned out to be something of a banner year for terrible comedies, with the all-star embarrassment Movie 43 opening to a chorus of disapproval and howls of "worst comedy ever" - only for those very same easily-offended critics to eat their words a matter of weeks later when this ill-advised big-screen version of Ray Cooney's redoubtable stage farce opened, very briefly in a handful of cinemas, before distributors pulled the plug. The word was out - Run For Your Wife set a new benchmark in terms of gob-smacking wretchedness. It was Sex Lives of the Potato Men all over again, the benighted British film industry apparently having failed to learn the valuable lessons of the vile Viz spin-off Fat Slags (2004) or the barrel-scraping Bottom spin-off Guest House Paradiso.

There's no denying that Run For Your Wife is indeed awful, but does it really deserve the vitriol that was spewed all over it, causing it to disintegrate like one of Seth Brundle's doughnuts in the Fly (1986)? Well, Danny Dyer - now safely ensconced in EastEnders, but at the time negotiating a tricky image change after the public and critics alike decided they'd had quite enough of him playing a foul-mouthed Cockney geezer - didn't do too badly in the pivotal role of John Smith, a bigamist taxi driver trying to juggle two marriages. Ray Cooney's enduring and endearing love for the city of London shines through several of the more engaging, less hectic sequences, particularly the opening titles which look like a spinning rack of tourist-friendly postcards come to life (though the appearance of the soon-to-be-jailed celebrity paedophile Rolf Harris might have to be cautiously edited out, should the film ever receive a television airing). There's certainly fun to be had in spotting the ridiculous number of cameos from Cooney's showbiz chums - Jeffrey Holland! Russ Abbot! Brian Murphy! Derek Griffiths! Bernard Cribbins! Nicky Henson! Maureen Lipman! Prunella Scales! Donald Sinden! Richard Briers! You get the idea. It's as if Dyer lives in a world entirely populated by British celebrities from the seventies and eighties. Bags of fun for people like me, who don't have much of a life.

Sadly, these disparate elements are powerless to save the film from itself, and what worked beautifully on stage for the best part of a decade transfers to the screen looking more like a hideous, primary- coloured Chuckle Brothers romp with a slightly higher budget than what the unfortunate Mr Dyer rashly described as 'the ultimate British comedy'. For the first half, it's mostly inoffensive, broadly played slapstick, yet from the moment Christopher Biggins and Lionel Blair's staggeringly stereotypical pair of ageing queens are introduced, leading to an apparently endless sequence in which they try to clear up their flooded apartment, the film becomes an endurance test, a chore to sit through unleavened by some unpleasant homophobia and Denise Van Outen's subtlety-free and increasingly fever-pitched performance.

Yes, Denise Van Outen is in this - the former 'geezerbird' television presenter and lad's mag favourite, alongside former Girls Aloud performer Sarah Harding. Neither of whom are noted exponents of theatrical farce, of course, which begs the question - what are they doing here? They probably asked themselves that throughout the entire shoot. The remainder of the comic heavy lifting is left to Neil Morrissey, who by 2012 had long ceased to resemble the puppy-eyed lad- about-town familiar from Men Behaving Badly and had started to look as if he was suffering from the disorientating effects of early onset Alzheimer's - a situation not helped by the fact that his big comedy set-piece involves sitting on a large chocolate cake. All those accomplished comedy actors hamming it up on the sidelines, and the main four roles went to Dyer, Van Outen, Harding and Morrissey. There's no justice.

Worst of all, a sequel is optimistically promised (or rather threatened) in the end credit roll, this time based on another Cooney stage hit, Caught in the Act - which apparently takes place eighteen years after Run For Your Wife. If, by some fluke of chance, that one actually gets the green light, brace yourself for a fresh spate of "worst comedy ever!" reviews circa 2030.

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Come Play with Me (1977)

1/10

An invitation best avoided

25 March 2017

A diminutive, baby-faced pornographer by the name of David Sullivan had become one of Britain's youngest millionaires by the mid-seventies as the publisher of a handful of top-shelf magazines which were as strong as the censorious values of the day would allow (one of which was called Whitehouse, simply to annoy the self-appointed media watchdog Mary Whitehouse, which should give you some idea of where Sullivan was shooting from) and the owner of a nationwide chain of sex shops. One of his star discoveries was Mary Millington, a bisexual blonde butcher's wife from Dorking whose enthusiastic performances in underground hardcore porn loops made her the closest thing Britain had to its very own Linda Lovelace, who had become an unlikely global star after the success of the notorious Deep Throat. Understandably, Sullivan was casting around for fresh arenas to conquer, and cinema seemed the next logical step - after all, even though they were uniformly dire, the Confessions... and Adventures... series of modest low-budget sex comedies had all turned a healthy profit. With the right vehicle for his protégé, Sullivan could make a fortune.

Enter George Harrison Marks, a nude photographer and purveyor of 8mm pornographic reels with a beatnik beard, a lively imagination and a taste for booze that would eventually cost him his life. Marks was no stranger to the cinema, either, having scored an unlikely hit with 1970's Nine Ages of Nakedness, and had written Come Play With Me as a prospective sequel - but his fondness for the bottle, an obscenity trial and bankruptcy meant it had to be abandoned. Meantime, Marks found steady work providing photo sets for Sullivan's magazines, and he took the opportunity to pitch his screenplay to his new employer. Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Sullivan rushed the film into production and cooked up a series of extravagantly dishonest advertising campaigns which hoodwinked the public into thinking Come Play With Me would make Deep Throat look like kids' stuff.

As it turned out, however, Come Play With Me was a simple musical comedy with its roots in music hall, end-of-the-pier farce, seedy strip club revue and naughty seaside postcards, an over-extended Benny Hill sketch bereft of Hill's trademark inventive wordplay, visual flourishes and any last remnant of comic timing. With a few judicious trims here and there, there's no reason why it shouldn't be shown on BBC1 on a Sunday afternoon - unless, of course, being absolutely terrible counts as a reason. Don't allow the number of familiar faces and old favourites in the cast to lead you to think you'll be able to salvage anything worthwhile from this paltry shambles - as director and co- star, Marks repeatedly failed to get the best out of his motley crew of old troupers (witness former Dad's Army and Survivors star Talfryn Thomas visibly laughing in the middle of a take, for example) and Irene Handl was left to idly improvise most of her lines. Dear old Alfie Bass later told horror stories about Marks being drunk most of the time, and fans of Mary Millington were left disappointed by her skimpy amount of screen time, most of which finds her indulging in a hammy approximation of intercourse with a middle-aged client and a brief lesbian tryst with Penny Chisholm. (Millington's army of admirers would be much better served by Sullivan's next film, 1978's the Playbirds.) Still, Come Play With Me - surely one of the most unsavoury contributions to Royal Jubilee year - was an enormous hit, running constantly in one West End cinema for a whopping four years and spawning a stage revue which featured Bob Grant from TV's On the Buses as well as several unofficial sequels. Seen today, one wonders what all the fuss was about, of course, but then we'll probably be saying the same thing about Mrs Brown's Boys forty years from now.

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Steptoe & Son (1972)

Sadly indicative of the poor state of the British film industry at the time

25 March 2017

Warning: Spoilers

The seventies marked the beginning of a long, slow decline for the British film industry, a sorry state of affairs that continues to this day. The once-proud Hammer studios, which had once flooded both the domestic and overseas markets with a steady supply of richly atmospheric horror films, had unwisely branched out into cheapskate big-screen spin-offs of previously popular sitcoms. The mighty Rank studios merged with Xerox, a company better known for making photocopiers, and the legendary EMI shortly followed suit, merging with Thorn, a company that manufactured light bulbs and fire extinguishers. Curiously enough, this sudden and irreversible decline in the fortunes of the heavy hitters paved the way for a short-lived golden age of British exploitation cinema, with the likes of Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren pushing the envelope in terms of gory violence and soft core sex as far as they dare under the baleful gaze of the censor, and fly- by-night operators churning out endless variations on the tried-and- tested Carry On formula with the added attractions of simulated sex, full-frontal nudity and scores of familiar faces from the television looking mightily embarrassed in cameo roles.

Which brings us to the first of two big-screen outings for England's favourite rag and bone men, the inimitable Albert Steptoe and his long- suffering son Harold. Steptoe and Son first made their mark at the BBC back in 1962 in a one-off Comedy Playhouse instalment called the Offer; the episode made such an impact that the BBC commissioned a full series shortly thereafter. Between 1962 and 1965, there were four series of Steptoe and Son before the series' creators, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, decided they'd exhausted its possibilities and moved on to pastures new. However, the characters of Harold and Albert were too good to be left to the tender mercies of the public's brief attention span, so a further four series were commissioned between 1970 and 1974, this time in glorious colour (though, true to form, only about half of the colour episodes actually exist in this format; the rest were wiped and the only copies left in the BBC archives are off-air black and white video recordings). The first Steptoe and Son film premiered in the same year as the seventh television series, regarded by many fans as the high watermark of the entire run, thanks to memorable episodes like 'Men of Letters', 'Divided we Stand', 'Oh What a Beautiful Mourning' and 'the Desperate Hours', so expectations for the feature were understandably high.

Unfortunately, what cinema audiences got was a crude, half-hearted piece of work, long on bathos but painfully short on comedy, with a more-than-usually neutered and psychologically crippled Harold, a far less sympathetic Albert and a non-starter of a central plot in which Harold marries a stripper named Zita. As you might expect, the first half-hour or so of the film doesn't stray too far from the series' origins, and it also contains many of the film's stingy quota of highlights - most notoriously, Albert taking a bath in the kitchen sink. The scenes in the football team's social club offer a convincingly seedy glimpse of a long vanished world, and the scene where Harold and Zita meet for the first time is nicely played and actually rather touching.

After this, though, repetition and coarseness begin to set in, and the screenplay contains more padding than a cheap settee - the endlessly delayed wedding and the doomed honeymoon in Spain (something of a missed opportunity, since effectively all that happens is that Albert succumbs to food poisoning, ruins his son's wedding and has to be returned home - whereupon he naturally makes a speedy recovery) find the supply of laughs slowly drying up, and by the time the film reaches the halfway mark all but the staunchest Steptoe fans will be feeling bewildered and cheated by the sudden gearshift into unsubtle maudlin sentimentality from which the film never really recovers. Some scenes feel more like a precursor to the reliably depressing EastEnders than a lighthearted (if gritty) situation comedy.

Technically, the film is pretty shoddy also, with poorly recorded sound, some shocking dubbing - particularly during Mike Reid's stand-up routine, where the audience laughter seems to be coming from a different room entirely - and some very iffy continuity to contend with. Cliff Owen's direction is functional at best, though as other critics have noted, the scene in which Harold is beaten up in a rugby club has a horribly botched, half-finished feel to it, hardly helped by the sad fact that such an incident was horribly misjudged in the first place - genuine violence or malice seldom made it into the Steptoe world on television. Luckily, Galton and Simpson were offered a second chance at transferring their iconic characters to the cinema with 1973's Steptoe and Son Ride Again, a far superior film which manages to keep the laughs coming throughout and feels more faithful to the series as a result.

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