The Good Children and the Bad (1970)

D. Piers Haggard
Colour

It’s interesting to imagine how horror films would have been made in different eras. Obviously there are remakes that allow you to see a more modern take of a classic film, but then ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and even that travesty of Nicholas Cage’s ‘The Wicker Man’ retain substantial DNA of the original. No, what I’m talking about is taking a film, one that was strange and innovative and daring in its time and imagining how it would be done today. If there had been no ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ or ‘The Wicker Man’ in the 1970s, how would some young, ambitious and original filmmaker tackle them now? How would he or she make them distinctive and yet still give them a flavour of the modern world?

That thought occurred while watching ‘The Good Children and the Bad’, one of the English pastoral shockers of the 1970s. The sunlight, the dreamy shots of corn, the blonde hair of heroine make this one of the more aesthetically pleasing of English horror films, but surely the subject matter is what we would now know as torture porn.

It’s ‘Celebration Day’ in a lovely English village, which seems to be somewhere in the West Country. Possibly the most beautiful place in the West Country, every shot glows with luminous light, like the world’s best Flake advert. If you’ve ever been an English country fete you’ll know the kind of thing to expect; there are coconut shies, a local dignitary in stocks, various bobbing games and a maypole. However this is more sinister than your average cakes and tombola village fete. Towards the end of the day some of the younger children in the local school, the ones who have been naughty, are led to the maypole. There they are tortured by the good older children. The idea being that after such treatment, they’ll never be naughty again.

Only this year local teacher, Ingrid Pitt, decides she isn’t going to stand for this and attacks the older children – and then anyone who gets in her way – with a truly huge machete.

What follows is good gory fun, which at the time was an emulation of the American work of Hershell Gordon Lewis, but now looks more Eli Roth. The kids go down one by one, and when the locals react badly to this disruption of their local traditions, they are brutalised too. The only person to stand with the teacher is her lover, David Prowse, who makes full use of his West Country brogue. They are the good couple who are railing against the old orders, radical and righteous youth rising up to challenge the stifling conservatism of tradition. The film is unabashedly on their side and we as an audience is supposed to root for them, though their morality of their stand is somewhat sullied by the mayhem of their killing spree. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would never have looked so cool as Bonnie & Clyde if they’d kicked proceedings off by murdering twenty kids.

It’s a minor film, one which deserves to stand a little behind the likes of ‘The Witchfinder General’, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ and the original ‘The Wicker Man’ (not the Nicholas Cage travesty). However, I cannot imagine how it would look if it was made today. The air of reactionary rebellion, the very white Englishness of the village fete and the body painting that’s indulged in during Pitt’s obligatory nude scene all mark this down as a film of the age of Aquarius. A film whose air of menace and atmosphere of rebellion seems almost impossible to transport to modern cinema. And that’s before we get to the violence. The violence is extreme and nasty. And it heavily features children. As such, if it was made today, Mumsnet would scream outrage and demand we all have our eyes washed with soap; The Guardian would write long hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed articles about how it deplored censorship, but the violence of this film means that with a heavy heart it should be banned and all copies tossed into a landfill; while Paul Dacre of The Daily Mail would no doubt be so filled with rage and fury he’d no doubt immolate himself outside Northcliffe House as a final cry of despair against a country which could produce such a filth.

The fact is that this country did produce such filth, but in a different time so that it is now seen as a forgotten gem, rather than a full-on, screaming, naked assault on everything that is good and decent in this sceptred isle.

Three Cheers for Captain England (1978)

D. Joseph Losey
Colour


Henry Cavill as Superman. Christian Bale as Batman. Andrew Garfield as Spiderman. Aaron Johnson as Kick-Ass. But who amongst us really remembers either Michael Crawford as Condorman, or Dirk Bogarde as Captain England? Yes, British actors have been playing superheroes for quite some time, it’s just that the heroes have got bigger.


‘Three Cheers for Captain England’ is a fascinating gem of a film, both for its searing portrayal of a certain type of Englishman, and for the way it predicts a lot that will come in more mainstream superhero adventures. At the time it was a barely released curio and maybe its influence is accidental (how many people have ever seen this after all?) but if not influential, it’s definitely prescient


Bogarde is Henry Davenport, who in the glorious 1950s fought for civilisation against chaos as Captain England. There he is: mocked up photos of the young Bogarde at the Coronation; at the Festival of Britain; and a very amusing (although not that well mocked up) snap of Captain England leading Guy Burgess and Donald McLean into custody – as if the entire spying farrago of the third man, fourth man and fifth man could have been stopped by just one super powerful and righteous Englishman. This is the kind hero Bulldog Drummond would have looked up to. This is the kind of hero James Bond would have looked up to. How he got his powers is never explained, nor really what his powers were. Clearly he could fly and was extremely strong, but we don’t know how fast he was or whether he had x-ray vision – while no lab accident or encounter with alien life is ever even hinted at. He was powerful in the same way that England was powerful and glorious. And he wasn’t alone. In the background of the fifties were other heroes – Major Tunbridge-Wells and The Cockney – but it was Captain England everyone cheered.


Now though Captain England has retired, grown into a graceful old age. Occasionally he makes chat-show appearances, but his time has gone; remembered as one of sepia, a better place when England was truly great. However he is about to gain himself a new foe, as a young man (Paul Nicholas) threatens to expose his homosexuality.


Clearly Bogarde is supposed to represent a certain type of Englishman. One who is complacent, conservative with a small c and has had rose-tinted glasses welded to his face. He is the Englishman who revels in the glorious past and doesn’t care about the present. One who knows that England is going down the toilet, but thinks there’s nothing he – even an individual as powerful as Captain England – can do about it.  Bogarde is brilliant in the role, beautifully capturing a sense of vainglorious disappointment.


Actually there are no slouches anywhere in the cast, with John Gielgud a particular hoot in his cameo as the now elderly Major Tunbridge-Wells; dressed in colonial garb and ranting at how everything these days “just isn’t on, old boy.”


And yet for all the swipes at the ruling class and middle aged and narrow minded of England, this is a superhero film. And in that brooding behind closed doors about the things he has done and what he was, we can see a lot of what Batman has become. In the cadre of costumed superheroes who have long since broken up, we see The Watchmen and The Incredibles. And in an impregnable hero with one fatal flaw, we surely substitute kryptonite for homosexuality and have a satire of Superman.


(How brilliant, though incredibly unlikely, would it be for Hollywood to fund a multi-million dollar superhero film where the hero is gay? That’s the way to reinvent your franchise right there! And no, Wonder Woman won't cut the mustard.)


This is a really perverse superhero film. One where the hero thinks decidedly small, lives in a dingy city (London has rarely looked dirtier or more provincial than this 1978 version does) and doesn’t use his powers until the end. And then we can see how much work Hollywood had to do the same year to get Christopher Reeve to fly properly as Superman. It’s not just the visible wires, it’s his shadow on the sky and the look on Bogarde’s face which seems to suggest that we all know he’s just an idiot hanging off a rig in a studio. So okay the effects don’t work, but this isn’t a film about effects. It’s a frequently brilliant superhero tale. A broken superhero, a faded superhero, an obsolete superhero, a superhero no longer that heroic or super. But a British superhero certainly, and maybe the only superhero film anywhere which doesn’t go out of its way to ape the Americans.

Tarzan in Madrid (1960)

D. Miguel Ferrera
Colour

Exhibit A in the case that satire does not work in the hands of fascists.

I’m not as well versed in the history of Spanish cinema as I should be, though I’m aware that even under Franco’s dictatorship various films were made which looked at the way society actually worked. Even within the system there were films which picked up and examined (even poked fun at) the system.

This is decidedly not one of them.

To say that ‘Tarzan in Madrid’ is heavy handed is to put it mildly. It is a jack booted, full-on, completely blinkered, pro-government, anti-everything else but the proper authorities, screed. The Tarzan tale is of course one highly malleable and can be used in so many different ways – which is odd, as unlike Robin Hood, say, it’s generally used in the same way. Here, as normal, Tarzan (Edson de Nascimento, a Portuguese actor and a good looking charisma void) is found by explorers in the jungle and brought to civilisation. Normally when Tarzan makes that journey he heads to England or New York. Here though he goes to Spain, and not just some crappy package holiday to the Costa Del Sol, instead he gets to wow and wonder at the marvel of Franco’s Madrid.

But – and here is where if I was the barrister for the prosecution, I’d speak in my firmest voice – this is where things get decidedly strange. Rather than just marvelling at tall buildings and cars and indoor plumbing, none of which this noble savage has never seen, Tarzan instead goes to war against a socialist cell which is determined to bring down Spain. True, he does briefly flirt with their message, but after a stiff telling off from Juana (the Jane of the story), he becomes righteously pro-government and charges across the city dealing out fists and lectures, before tying up the insurgents with vine he always keeps around his person. Subtly is nowhere in the production’s vocabulary.

The message of this movie is that by even a primitive-like Tarzan can see that communists are evil cretins. Tarzan is forever referred to as ‘The Primitive’, to the point even he looks tired of it. There is also a running joke that everybody he speaks to thinks he sounds French (despite the actor clearly having a Portuguese accent) and apparently sounding French is a sign of mental negligibility. So this primitive from the deepest, darkest jungle, who speaks like a Frenchman for crying out loud, is able to see how ridiculous and against everybody’s interest communism is.

And if Tarzan can see it, certainly someone as bright as YOU can see it.

That’s not the end of the message though. The satire (if that's the right word) takes a further broad turn when a kidnapped Cheetah finds himself elected leader of the communist cell.

So the great hero Tarzan sees off the communists and rescues Spain and is feted as a hero at the end. And one has to wonder what the point of all this is. Clearly there’s an element of warning the audience against the dangers of socialism/communism (the two terms were interchangeable in the subtitles of the version I saw), but then the socialists/communists on screen are made to appear so ridiculous that they find themselves led by a chimpanzee. Their characters are never developed, their ideas are set up to be easily mocked and totally ridiculous, and of course it’s nonsense that anyone would ever follow them. Communism/socialism is bad and evil and everyone of the left is a complete idiot who deserves either a smack from a jungle ‘primitive’ or for a chimpanzee to fart in their face.

Except, of course, that all this overkill inevitably leads to another reading: one which suggests that a totalitarian government will see fit to hire any muscled, bully boy (even when he wears a loin cloth and supposedly sounds French) to throw his weight around and give beatings to those who disagree with it.

 

I think that second reading is entirely accidental however, but it makes me smile that it doesn’t stretch too much of the imagination to find it there.

Apparently Franco loved this film and laughed his head off each time he saw it. So at least ‘Tarzan in Madrid’ appealed to its target audience.

The Man from Over the Pond (1958)

D, Charles Crichton
Colour

Let’s be honest, there are a lot of John Wayne films. Flicking around the TV over the last bank holiday weekend, I glimpsed him constructing a bridge, running a circus and indulging in a saloon fight alongside Stewart Granger. (Saloon fights, much like death on Ingmar Bergman films, are thematically important in John Wayne’s oeuvre). All those films I skipped past, but if ‘The Man from Over the Pond’ shows up on BBC2 on a wet Sunday afternoon, please do give it the time of day.

 

John Wayne plays a former conman trying to make a new start for himself in Victorian England. Without a doubt it’s lack of reputation has to do with its similarity to the much better ‘The Quiet Man’ (and possibly because the other John Wayne in England film people recall is the substantially more violent ‘Brannigan’), but for anyone British – or who has immersed themselves in British culture – then this is a giddily surreal film. A sweet and charming English comedy with a honking great American star in the middle

 

There’s John Wayne bickering friendly with his landlady, Thora Hird; there’s him being stood a drink in the pub by Peter Sellers, before stopping to chat with a tiny Arthur Askey; here he’s playing poker with Sid James, Kenneth Connor and (briefly) Bernard Bresslaw; before romancing singer with a bad reputation, Diana Dors, who’s best friend is Joan Sims; he enjoys a  running joke with exasperated tobacconist Tony Hancock; is measured for a suit by the over the top camp pairing of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry; and  – in perhaps one of the most remarkable images ever committed to celluloid – he is dragged onto stage to sing and dance next to a ukulele playing George Formby.

 

It’s like a whistle-stop tour of 1950’s light entertainment, with John Wayne as your guide.

 

And that’s what I truly love about this film, all these people are not altering their act to fit into a John Wayne movie, they are doing what they do and John Wayne seems to be having a ball watching them do it. Indeed there’s a grin on his face (a slightly befuddled one, but a definite beam) when he finds himself with the over the top, swishingly unabashed, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry. A scene which may hold the record for the most single, double and triple entendres ever crammed into four minutes. While elsewhere there’s a real chemistry between him and Thora Hird, a warmth and bright eyed affection which maybe suggests they played together as children or flirted as teens. I’m not joking, the sparks almost seems sexual at points and one can’t help thinking that if Thora had been just that little bit better looking they could have made one of those great, sizzling on-screen partnerships. She could have replaced Janet Leigh as the love interest in ‘Jet Pilot’, or Sophia Loren in ‘Legend of the Lost’; alternatively Wayne could have wound down his career playing Wesley in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

What’s truly remarkable about ‘The Man From Over the Pond is that it’s taken me six paragraphs to mention that Alec Guinness is in it, playing the mark who Wayne eventually forms a friendship with. But then compared to everything else, the pairing of Alec Guinness and John Wayne is made to feel a bit run of the mill. The rest of the film is so colourful and incongruous, a bizarrely and magnificently enjoyable romp – especially in the scene where George Formby forces Wayne to speak “like a cockney does”. A watching Dick Van Dyke would have scoffed that if the chance ever arrived, he’d do a far better job.

Poison Penmanship (1972)

D. Jack Gold
Colour


Five minutes before he was James Bond, Roger Moore starred in this odd, bizarre, decidedly peculiar, yet without a doubt entertaining thriller. The set-up is thus: a man with terrible hand writing can't decipher the mysterious notes he leaves for himself in his sleep. Clearly there is a danger coming and he and his wife (Susan George) attempt to solve the mystery of the notes before stopping an awful crime.


A discerning viewer will no doubt spot a number of flaws to this plot; not least why would someone assume that indecipherable nocturnal scribbles are in anyway related to some awful event to come? I have, in my writing career, woken up more than once with words scrawled in notepads that I can’t possibly fathom. Very rarely have I contacted the police about them. (The film does make clear the ridiculousness of that particular course of action though. At the police station Detective Inspector Anton Rogers’ dialogue may be sympathetic, but his face is definitely set to sceptical.) The whole thing is ultimately explained – and I guess this is as good a spot for a SPOILER ALERT as any – because of Moore’s exposure to group therapy and hypnosis. Okay, so any group therapy session which includes Donald Pleasance, Joanna Lumley, Wilfrid Brambell, David Essex and Lulu – and is run by a pouting Lee Remick – may be a little on the unusual side, but the explanation itself is done in such a half-hearted and slack way, that even the most alert and mystery-attuned audience member will just keep scratching the top of their head in confusion.


It’s a film with all the signs of a contemporary British horror film of 1972. A remote house surrounded by creepy trees through which a wind blows, the kind of deserted road up to that house which even a Ford Anglia looks creepy driving down, the villain spinning a circle of paper to create a wagon wheel effect, that wagon wheel effect being filmed in a red light to look doubly spooky and unsettling, the female lead running frantically into the trees even though the bricks and mortar of the house are clearly safer, a lot of rain. You’ve seen it all before and you’ll see it all again here. British horror films of the age were often cut from the same cookie mould.


So far I haven’t really sold this film, but what makes it so entertaining – and some will be amazed by this – is Moore’s performance. Or, to be more specific, it’s his hair’s performance. His barnet is not as sleek or firmly coiffeured as we remember from The Saint or know later from Bond. And wild hair definitely makes Roger Moore look decidedly unhinged. In my last viewing I counted three whole emotions that Roger and his hair managed to pull off – extreme bafflement (side parting askew), rage (pushed back and spiky), and despair (drenched flat to the head by rain water). Yes, by the end his hair is back to normal and he’s smiling Roger Moore again – but before that it’s Moore’s, and his hair’s, emotional state that the audience clings to.


London looks as wet and dreary as it always does in British films in 1972, (did we export every atom of the swinging sixties along with The Rolling Stones?), but Moore adds that touch of class and Susan George – as so often – is decoratively lovely in a poorly written role. The five minute exposition scene she performs in just a see through negligee is now described in detail in the dictionary entry for ‘gratuitous’.

Daleks - The Chase through Time (1967)

D. Gordon Flemyng
Colour (of the bright and shiny 60s variety)

Thanks to complex rights issues, apart from the first two of Peter Cushing’s Doctor Who vs Daleks films (big favourites on Sunday afternoon with both BBC2 and Channel 4), the rest are lost in a complex legal process whose paperwork would probably fill up the Tardis. At the moment, Jerry Lewis's 'The Day the Clown Cried' appears more likely to be spat out screaming into the world. That’s a shame as these films form a nice counterpoint to the series, initially following the same lines before heading off in wild and weird directions.

 

‘Daleks – The Chase through Time’ is, like the first two films, based on episodes of the TV show. Indeed Terry Nation seems to have written these episodes with the express intention of turning them into a Peter Cushing film. There’s The Empire State Building! There’s The Marie Celeste! There’s Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster! And making their film debut, there’s Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich! Everything is bigger and far more fantastic than the BBC could realistically conjure up, sadly though Amicus Pictures isn’t up to the spectacle either.

 

Even in glorious Technicolor, Doctor Who (never forget that that is, in these films, his actual title and surname – he is the well studied son of parents with the unlikely name of Mr and Mrs Who) and his companions are clearly not at The Empire State Building. The studio can use as many stock shots of NYC as they like, but they can’t disguise a mock up. Similarly that Marie Celeste they land on is not in the middle of the ocean. In fact the background couldn’t be any more obviously cardboard unless Kenneth Connor fell through it.

 

As for the Universal/Hammer monsters (part of a horror theme park our heroes visit), didn’t Amicus Pictures develop a good reputation for horror? Shouldn’t they know how to do this stuff? So why is Graham Stark’s Dracula so camp and pouty? (Was Liberace really the inspiration?) And why is David Prowse’s Frankenstein’s Monster so powder puff? Why is the Monster pictured at one point having a break, sitting down in a comfy chair and drinking a couple of tea? It’s all very strange; an attempt at comedy which didn’t work on TV and is played much, much, much broader on film – but doesn’t work there either.

 

The highlight of this potpourri of destinations is undoubtedly is Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tith. Doctor Who and his companions find themselves in the band’s house and chill out listening to the futuristically titled ‘Zabadak’ – a song which manages to sound both adventurous and strangely banal. Here the comedy works in a rather sweet fashion, with a lone Dalek scout pushed around and mocked by the band as they play. I’m always impressed that the Dalek, with its pepperpot shape, manages to slalom and bounce around the dance floor in time to the beat. Underneath that metal shell he has a nice sense of rhythm.

 

What’s truly interesting about that sequence, however, is that the producers allegedly bent over backwards in an attempt to get The Beatles to be the musical cameo. A photo does exist online of John Lennon larking around with a dalek, so clearly it must have seemed a possibility. One can only imagine though what magic the Fab Four and the Scary Scaro-ians would have produced if they’d reached their third big screen outing together. The mind boggles at the psychedelic, transcendent explosion of far-out spectacle which would have been unfolded if these uber-colourful Daleks had met The Beatles in their resplendent Sgt Pepper garb.

 

Okay, the plot: having thwarted two of their plans, the Daleks decide to remove Doctor Who with the use of their own time machine. Realising the danger he’s in, Doctor Who runs through time in an attempt to escape them – along with his grand-daughters, Susan and Louise (Roberta Torvey and Jill Curzon, returning from the last film) and stowaway teacher, Graham (Kenneth Connor, moon faced and lovely through most of the running time, but too comic relief to be a love interest to the noticeably younger Curzon).

 

There are a couple of flaws here. Firstly, why don’t the Daleks just arrive at the location five minutes before Doctor Who and eliminate him that way? (But then that flaw in logic is a problem in the TV show as well). Secondly, Doctor Who on screen isn’t the mythical creation The Doctor is on television; in fact he’s just a man. As such the film gives the impression that this advanced race of super aliens has harnessed all their energy, intelligence and will-power to eliminate one bloke. An incredibly bright bloke, yes, but still one bloke. It seems a truly lop-sided battle, not made less so when Doctor Who actually wins. Perhaps, given this film’s success in America, one is tempted to imagine that Hanna-Barbara used it as the inspiration for ‘Stop the Pigeon’.

 

What’s episodic on TV remains episodic on the cinema screen. When plotting cinema domination, Nation clearly thought more in terms of spectacle than plot. But what’s truly interesting is that on the television The Doctor is now Patrick Troughton, but on film it’s still Peter Cushing. And rather than being part of some alien race who can change their faces, it’s made clear more than once that Cushing is human. Even when using the same stories, the lines of deviation between TV and film are hardening.

 

Still the Daleks are bright and shiny, as is The Tardis. Peter Cushing remains a great presence to hang a film around and is really creating his own version of the character. There are some scary and gooey scenes which predate some gooier scenes and scarier films in the offing; but equally in the sequence of the mutant Dalek who is less bright than the rest, we have a little sign of other things to come...

Hamlet (1960)

D. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

B&W

It’s frequently forgotten that every year of his cinematic career, Elvis turned out his version of a literary classic. As the biographies tell us, they were an attempt to keep up his pretence of being a serious actor, and – because they were made so cheaply and all Elvis product made money – were not a bad little investment. However, much like everything else in the realm of Graceland at this time, ‘quality control’ was an unknown phrase and an alien concept. As such these adaptations reside in an odd place even in fans’ minds. They generally aren’t good enough to stand earnestly in their own right, but lack the brio and campy sunshine of Elvis’s best films. Indeed, some of them are downright awful. As such they stand apart as neglected orphans.

 

This blog exists to put its arm around neglected orphans.

 

First off, remove that sneer from your face and ask yourself: is Elvis as The Prince of Denmark such a terrible idea? At the time he had the requisite youth and callowness for the part, looked striking in doublet and hose and was guaranteed to attack the role with great sincerity. What’s more, a few years’ earlier another very American performer, Marlon Brando, had given us his Shakespeare for the same director in ‘Julius Caesar’. And yet, from the moment Elvis’s Memphis drawl drags out his first line: “The air bites shrewdly, Horatio, and it is mighty cold” a sinking feeling will seize at the spine of even the truest believer.

 

It’s Elvis’s inability (or unwillingness, apparently) to even stab at the accent which makes for a truly jarring viewing experience. Whereas John Gielgud (Claudius), Deborah Kerr (Gertrude) and Claire Bloom (Ophelia) lead the audience to believe that the Danes of Elsinore speak in a very received pronunciation, BBC way; the presence of Elvis makes us wonder where on Earth The Prince went to University to pick up that accent. I love Elvis, but even I find it a tortuous experience. Imagine some enthusiastic American teen on stage at the RSC, making no effort to marry his performance to that of the great English actor next to him, or grasp the rhythm of cadences of the language, or understand that when performing Shakespeare you’re supposed to have some kind of idea as to what these lines actually mean. Whether you’re thinking of Elvis as Hamlet or, say, Justin Bieber as Hal next to Michael Gambon’s Falstaff in some mad hypothetical production – none of it works together, none of it gels, none of it makes any sense whilst sober.

 

And that’s before we get to the fact that no Elvis film can exist without a musical number. To be fair, when Mankiewicz had his brainwave and decided that the way to deal with this need for songs was to insert them organically, it probably seemed like the best available idea. However, when watching Elvis deliver ‘To Be or Not To Be’ staccato while wiggling his hips to a salsa beat, the average viewer begins to wonder whether there are such things as good ideas. Although this may be unique in Hamlet adaptations in introducing a second ghost, as surely that spectral bongo player who appears behind Elvis’s left shoulder as he sings isn’t in Shakespeare’s text.

So what we have is a film Elvis felt embarrassed by, and rightly so. Everyone connected with this film should feel embarrassed. Those who watch it certainly do. And yet it’s a film in which you can see Elvis trying, a gifted performer struggling against his own limitations and the wrong-headed ideas of those around him. To see the wide eyed, full of repressed hurt, way he delivers: “O! that this too solid flesh would melt; Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter!” one can only wish that someone had taken the care and time to make this whole mad enterprise – somehow and against all probability – actually work.

Introduction

Some films just fall through the cracks.

Some films are fated to be forgotten.

There are some films that are great but for whatever reason have been lost. Some films which are awful, but there’s a glint of genius that means they shouldn’t be completely neglected. And there are some films blandly mediocre, but there’s a spark apparent to show that in other circumstances they could have been something magnificent.

This blog is for those films.