The Yuletide Yamaha Takedown (1982)

D. Ted Kileke
Colour

Let’s check if this has all the requisites of an early Eighties raucous comedy. 

• Does it give every impression of being written by an over-excitable 14 year old boy? Check.
• Is it shot in an overly well-lit and broad style? Check.
• Does it concern supposed wild men who are essentially loveable and meek? Check.
• Do they look a little bit too clean cut to be riding the motorbikes they use? Check.
• Does a pair of breasts jiggle at the forefront of the screen at one point? Check.
• Is Steve Guttenberg in it? Check.
• Is Adrian Zmed in it? Check.
• Is Tom Hanks in it? Check.

Yes, that’s right, the two time Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks used to make his crust from bawdy comedies. We may now remember ‘Splash’ and ‘Big’, but there was also this and ‘The Bachelor Party’. He may have turned himself into the new James Stewart, but there aren’t many Jimmy Stewart films where he sees a busty woman stood in front of some mountains and comments that he’d “like to do more than just climb those foothills!” As for Steve Guttenberg, well of course he made films like this. There he is debuting next to Lord Olivier in ‘The Boys From Brazil’, but before long he’s kneedeep in Police Academy movies. He has a certain amount of charm and will try to make a joke fly no matter how poor it is, and so I suppose the real question for him is: why isn’t he still in these movies? Surely he should have a part as an uncle/father figure in a Judd Apatow film, or else one of those Friedberg/Seltzer films? (He might actually be a bit over-qualified for the latter). What’s happening, Steve? You should really talk to your agent; or get The Stonecutters to do their thing. As for Adrian Zmed, who knows? There was a brief period at the start of the 1980s – with a few films and T.J. Hooker – where he must have thought life was really fucking wonderful. Since then, I guess that feeling has dissipated somewhat. These days he’s probably so short of paying work that if I wanted him to come over and perform at my birthday party, I’m sure he’d take my call.


The film itself clearly had a great deal of assistance from the Yamaha corporation, featuring as it does heroes on Yamaha motorcycles liberating Yamaha Synthesisers from a warehouse to give to the local orphanage for Christmas. (The evil owner has brought them to be museum pieces in the future, rather than use them.) So it’s sentimental and it’s cloying, but around that is wrapped a great deal of lewdness and bawdiness and jokes that 14 year old boys would find incredibly funny. Curiously, given that star power is already apparent here, it’s Guttenberg who is the lead rather than Hanks. Guttenberg gets to romance teacher, Kirstie Alley, while Hanks hangs around at the side making wisecracks. (Zmed is the more loose-cannon character, and the best that can be said about his performance is that his hair looks nice). Maybe Hanks was bothered at playing second fiddle at the time, but I’m sure he’s got over it now.


Any film that purports to be a comedy should be funnier than this, every film should be smarter than this, and really there is a certain quality threshold that all films should aspire to. But if you want a Christmas film that screams the early 80s direct into your face - then sling your synth around your shoulders, get on your motorcycle, and go out and find a copy, dude!

Shakin’ Around the Christmas Tree (1984)

D. Davey Rice
Colour


Shakin Stevens, the leading Welsh Elvis throwback entertainer of the 1980s (or indeed, if we’re fair, any decade), is a good man. We can see that in the opening shots of this film, where on Christmas Eve, Shaky – as he’s known to his fans – is seen carrying his guitar into the children’s ward of the local hospital and serenading angelic blonde haired, sick kids with carols. There is a sincerity to his performance, a caring in his eyes, which shows what a decent person is. Yes, like a proto-Noel Edmonds (or a latter day Jesus, take your pick), Shaky is determined to give up his Christmas pleasure to help out people less fortunate than himself. And he just keeps on giving, as after visiting the hospital, his manager calls him to tell him that he will be playing a gig for veterans that very evening – right until the chimes of midnight themselves. The problem is that Shaky is currently in Cardiff, while the gig is hundreds of miles away in Newcastle. The race is on.


History is a distorting lens. Just because they were cool we remember bands of the 1980s who achieved moderate commercial success, but don’t recall the biggest selling British male star of that decade with the same clarity. Shakin Stevens was that man, for a few years a never ending hit factory which made him much bigger than say The Clash, The Specials or The Human League. You would never believe that from the amount which is written about them these days, but the chart placings don’t lie. You’ll also find it difficult to believe from this film, released at the height of his commercial success, designed to cement his place in the pantheon and reap the rewards, but maybe starting his soon to be unstoppable downward slide. Essentially it should have been a perfect vehicle, string together specially filmed footage of Shaky singing his greatest hits – ‘This Old House’; ‘Green Door’, ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ (which actually came from this film’s soundtrack) – wrap it up in a bit of plot and the money should just roll in. The problem is that the songs are ones we’ve heard before and, in the MTV/Top of the Pops age, have seen before too. And in Shakin Stevens we really do not have any kind of leading man. Much like Clint Eastwood, Shaky seems to have decided that he’s much better at staring than at dialogue. That however is the only comparison it’s ever going to be possible to make between Shaky and Clint. Shaky has no charisma, clearly hates every line he’s given and moves through the film as if waiting for it to end. It’s a sensation the audience well knows.


And that’s before we get to the comic relief.


If we take The Krankies at face value, then for some reason Shaky’s Scottish tour manager, Ian, has decided to bring along his young son, Jimmy, to help organise the gig. Even though it’s Christmas Eve, Jimmy is still inexplicably dressed in his school uniform. More detrimental is that Jimmy clearly does not know how to behave and cheeks everyone he comes in contact with and causes a great deal of mischief. Obviously Jimmy is an asbo waiting to happen, but in 1984 terms that translates to Jimmy needs a clip around the ear. Of course, if we take them as what they actually are, then Ian has brought his wife, Jeanette, along and she has decided to pretend to be one of the naughtiest ten year old boys in the world. Why she is doing this is never explained. What’s clear though is that their broad comic slapstick provides some of the most excruciating moments ever seen in cinema. Yes, even more excruciating than watching Shaky act.


So a lumped together film starring people who were starting to look stale in 1984 and which has very little in the way of redeeming features. Why then am I bothering with it? Well, because in the part of Neville, the Shaky super fan who uses every available form of public transport to follow his hero all the way from Cardiff to Newcastle, we have Daniel Day-Lewis. Yes, that Daniel Day-Lewis – only a year or two before he became a proper leading man himself. And he’s brilliant at it, carrying off the over-eager smile and the looks of slightly unhinged adoration - all adding up to full-on worship of his idol. it’s totally brilliant and totally unbalances the film to the point where it pretty much capsizes, but it’s a shining and distinctly creepy light in this otherwise turgid sea of crap and mediocrity.


Merry Christmas, Everyone indeed!

Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World (1999)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”


Noted rock critic T.S.Eliot understood the path of the rebellious rock phenomenon. Be you Elvis Presley or The Rolling Stones or The Sex Pistols or Madonna or some sexy goth girls, you start your career as an affront to everything decent and good, but end up a respectable shadow of what you once were.  It’s a fixed and unalterable law – a rule which is true in nature, physics and life. Some processes are faster than others. Elvis was singing to an actual hound dog on The Steve Allen Show within a year of his breakthrough, and the Sexy Goth Girls were appearing in ‘Sexy Goth Girls Take on the World’ within two and a half years of the first film’s release.


Let’s begin at the beginning. The first Sexy Goth Girls film was a plucky little indie with the skimpiest of plots, that just revelled in hanging out with some really sexy goth girls. Yes, there was a murder at some point, but it wasn’t trying to be a crime drama, it was something totally different; a film that luxuriated in life, that was quirky, fun, alternative and – yes – sexy. The sequel arrived surprisingly quickly and already a change was noticeable. Suddenly murder plots were something the sexy goth girls did. In fact they were sanctioned to fight crime and help the innocent. They were super heroes now, there to save the world. It was all very strange. Clearly the sexy goth girls had lurched towards the mainstream, and the mainstream wasn’t a place that suited the sexy goth girls. So in the third film that lurch would be corrected, right? The sexy goth girls would return to the alternative, quirky style we all loved?


Well, the short answer is no. This is a film decidedly intent on the mainstream. Indeed it is knocking the mainstream over in the street and binding it with a leather muzzle and harness and making the mainstream its bitch. (Actually, no, that’s far too weird an image. It’s actually walking up to the mainstream and giving it a nice big  cuddle and saying that if you look past all that goth stuff, these girls are just as lovely as you – only a bit more sexy). This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your grandmother to see. This is a sexy goth girls film you could take your children to see. Do you have a maiden aunt and would like to show her some sexy goth girls without making her cover her eyes and issue frightened squeaks about what passes as decent entertainment these days? Well, come right this way.


Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the sexy goth girls Christmas movie.


Here’s the plot: the President of the United States (Robert Vaughan) is kidnapped by right-wing Christian fundamentalists (led by Randy Quaid) who are disturbed by the decline of morality in today’s America. Government agent Mr Lazarus (Quentin Tarantino, in what is little more than a cameo) gets his operatives, the sexy goth girls – led by Liddy D’Eath – on the case. They team up with the President’s twelve year old daughter to track down the President and rescue him using their sexy goth girl skills (which consist, as far as I can see, of black leather weapons and feminine wiles) and various adventures, escapades, and scrapes ensue. Suffice to say there is a lot of running about in dangerous looking heals. The President’s daughter is suspicious of her new companions at first, but eventually learns that the key lesson of being a sexy goth girl is (apparently) to be yourself. And by being herself she helps them rescue her father and they’re all together for Christmas. Hip-hip Hooray!


It’s hard to put into words how crushing a disappointment this film is. It’s hard to put into words how wrongheaded a film this is. It’s totally different in tone to the previous entries, with none of the slow-motion leering or perviness, but also none of the smart and sassy dialogue. Instead this is a full blown assault on the mainstream, and like all self-conscious attempts to get in good with the mainstream it aims for the lowest common denominator. It’s obvious, sentimental, silly and often quite boring. But it still in no way belongs in that sunny, bland locale they call the mainsteam. Who after all would make a family friendly film with the words ‘sexy goth girls’ in the title? Who would create a kid friendly bunch of superheroes and dress them in suspenders with their cleavages all a-go-go? (Although I suppose we’re inured to not seeing Batman and Superman as the fetishists they so obviously are when they wander around in their nice, shiny tights). Who would really imagine that ending a film with a bunch of goth girl stood in the oval office with their leader’s arm around the President’s daughter wishing the audience a very Merry Christmas was in anyway an appropriate or good idea? It’s not, instead it’s ever so weird, on many levels – and none of them good weird.


So overall this trilogy is a tale of a group of girls who were there to be sexy and perved over, to have funny and foul-mouthed conversations, to be the epitome of rebellion. They were stars for a group of fans who didn’t want to see normal types of films, who wanted to fall in love with a different type of heroine. But their decline was quick and before long that quirky, fuck you, independence had been totally blown away, and without changing their clothes or even altering their make-up, the sexy goth girls were smiling big American smiles as they appeared in anodyne crap designed supposedly for the whole family.


This film was as successful on video as the other two (sexy goth girls fans are clearly not very discerning), but – really - where did it all go wrong?

Sexy Goth Girls Get the **** Out! (1998)

D. Otto Von De Mille
Colour


It’s amazing that the Sexy Goth Girls films are so tightly grouped together. Surely the first movie was cult, barely seen on release and in the normal course of things taking some years for the groundswell of support and goodwill for it (or in more brutal commercial terms, to give the impression there were enough suckers out there willing to pay good, hard money to see a sequel) to take the story forward. And yet a year after the original one limped into the cinema on a broken pair of six inch high heels, here was the second part. The Sexy Goth Girls were back and still looking sexy.


How could this be? How could this sequel have come so fast?


Well, firstly it’s still quite cheap. Noticeably the production values are not much higher than they are on the first Sexy Goth Girls movie. Much like ‘The Evil Dead 2’, this is a sequel/remake, but then Sam Rami’s film looked a damn sight better than his cheap original. Here we have the same flaws repeated all over again – the boom shows up in shot, there’s often no real sense as to where to put the camera and the acting has not improved one iota. However in amongst the various returning Sexy Goth Girls, there’s one actor who – while he doesn’t improve the quality of the performances by a single atom – does explain how exactly this film got made.


Step forward the big Q himself, Mr Quentin Tarantino.


I talked in my write-up of the first film of the debt it had to Quentin. Indeed the only thing that stopped it being a fetishists wet-dream (oh, all that naked young flesh, all that leather) was the Tarantino-esque ear for dialogue and love for the minutiae of culture and life. Clearly Quentin thought so too, as here he is in the key role of Mr Lucifer – a friend to the Sexy Goth Girls. It must have been a great thrill for Von De Mille (I’ve hunted online to see whether that is actually his real name, it’s inconclusive so far but my money is on probably not) when Quentin agreed to come on board. It was a blessing, an anointment that the first film did things right. But he’s also the biggest symbol of where this film is going wrong.


The aesthetic of the first movie remains, the whole Russ Meyer look of things. So we get Liddy D’Eath (very much the star here, rather than just one of the ensemble) in tight black shorts and a sheer top covering a studded bra. We get other girls with their cleavages crammed into the kind of leather bodices likely to suffocate, a group of girls bending over a pool table while shooting the breeze (and badly shooting pool), and two girls interrupted entwined together in what looks like a heavy canoodling session (or a money shot). Again it’s all very pervy, all very seedy. But what held together the first film – the very Quentin-ness of it – is more muted here. That’s odd as surely that was the thing Quentin liked and approved of the first time around, but here all that is much more in passing. Instead the murder plot that was an afterthought crammed into the end of the first film, is front and centre and the motor of the thing. As such it becomes a completely different animal, a thriller, with most of the cast in tight clothes and ripped suspenders with the occasional flash of great dialogue. It’s like the presence of the media star Quentin Tarantino (rather than director, Quentin Tarantino) gave Von De Mille the opportunity to aim at the mainstream, and he wasn’t going to pass it up. And the mainstream likes murder plots, not weird little pervy films which nevertheless revel in bizarre but hilarious dialogue.


And ironically there’s no bigger sign of this change of focus than the role Quentin is playing. He is Charlie to their Angels, Mother to their Emma Peel. He’s the one who tells them what’s happening, suggests what they should do, makes sure they have the equipment to do it. But hang on a second, aren’t goths a subculture? They’re not part of the mainstream, are they? Certainly they’re not part of some quasi-government agency tasked with fighting crime. In the first film they were just girls hanging out, but here they are almost super-heroes. Worse, they are officially approved super-heroes: Sexy Goth Girls who have the right licenses and papers. It’s all so depressing. As if Marlon Brando had shown up in ‘The Wild Ones’ with his Hells Angels licence stamped and counter-stamped.


It’s odd that someone would make a film with the phrase “Sexy Goth Girls” in the title and aim for the mainstream, but that’s what’s happening here.


And it will just get worse, as we’ll see next time.

The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois (1968)

D. Victor Hill
Colour


There was always something so worthy about The Children’s Film Foundation. For the uninitiated (who never saw their body of work repeated ad nauseam on kid’s TV through the early 1980s) it was a body set up by the British government to make films for children. However with government money and civil service oversight, it was a body that never ever felt the need to take risks. Its product was as safe as it was twee as it was bland. In a way it was what the BBC would have become if it hadn’t been hijacked by enterprising talents who wanted to do something unique with television. In the Children’s Film Foundation there was very little striving for originality (unless you count casting Keith Chegwin as a teen Robin Hood, which is pretty original), there was just safe play by the numbers and tick all the right boxes.


That’s not to say their work is completely lacking the odd curiosity though.


What, for example, are we to make of ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petit Pois’? One of the few animations the foundation ever produced. On first blush you’d think that any animated film made in 1968 that concerned two big, round, green peas wandering through a wild jungle would be a LSD, surrealist treat. You’d think it was the kind of film made for stoners to stare at and find newer and stranger meanings each and every time. And yet with the best will in the world, making films for the counter-culture wasn’t really in the Children’s Film Foundation’s remit. And besides, for all the madness of its set-up, the film is just so bloody tame. All the characters speak in very pucker, received pronunciation – with the exception, of course, of Petit Pois who talks in comedy French. And when I say it’s a wild jungle, it’s the most harmless and child appropriate wild jungle ever committed to celluloid. The kind of wild jungle specifically created not to scare the three year olds. On their travels, Little Pea and Petits Pois meet El Rico, a grain of rice who speaks and sings in a Spanish accent and is desperate for Petits Pois and Little Pea to join his gang (some peas coming together with a  Spanish grain of rice, it does feel like a subliminal paella recipe). They meet a lettuce called Hans who travels with them while talking and singing of his childhood in Dusseldorf; then they hang out with a bouncing orange bean named Victor who duets long and loud with them in the most over the top Dutch accent seen on screen until ‘Goldmember’; before they picnic with some brussel sprouts from – well – Brussels.  It’s all so utterly bizarre, all so unspeakably surreal – and yet still so totally bland. And that’s the really incredible thing about this film: it takes all these amazing concepts and makes them so utterly safe and anodyne. It’s 1960s counter culture reimagined as an advert for your greens. It’s the avant grade as seen through the eyes of a civil servant.


So, what the hell is all this about?


Maybe its meaning is something to do with better cooperation with our European cousins. Here we have a British pea and a French pea who walk hand in hand and get along oh so well. Along the way they meet Spanish, German, Dutch and Belgium vegetables and have fun with them (there is no conflict in this movie, no antagonist. It is 72 minutes of getting along, which may partly explain why it’s so strange and stultifying). It’s brotherly love in produce form. But even more than that, with the exception of Spain, these food substances are all members of the new EEC. Is this then a plea that Britain should join up with the Commonmarket? Obviously Spain wasn’t yet a member, but then the Spanish accent on display is quite funny (and camp, unbelievably camp – the campest Spanish grain of rice I have ever witnessed) and maybe that’s why he’s included.


But then did The Children’s Film Foundation ever do politics, even in the form of cartoons? I think possibly not. So that brings us back to what the bloody hell is this film for? A surreal food substance romp which manages to null most of its surrealness and is just too sedate to be all that rompy; a wild and psychedelic ride which manages to be neither that wild or that psychedelic (and making a film about anthropomorphic vegetables in a wood and not making it psychedelic is quite a feat); a truly bizarre and weird film which is made even more bizarre and weird by the fact that clearly there were civil servants in the background doing their utmost best not to make it look bizarre and weird.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you ‘The Adventures of Little Pea and Petits Pois’ – one of the strangest, most middle of the road, head-spinningly, safe pieces entertainment you will ever see.

Le Long Au Revoir (1978)

D. Claude Chabrol
Colour


In cinema terms, the French are much cooler than the British, aren’t they? If you look at how grand and romantic Paris appears on the cinema screen, and then contrast it with how dingy and provincial London looks, you have to – and it pains me to admit this - say that France wins. It’s by far the most cinematic country with a much grander film tradition and many more great films. Of course as a citizen of these isles I will not admit French superiority in any other matter (our cheeses are much better than theirs, goddamnit!), to do so would see my British passport revoked and my bruised and battered body dumped off The White Cliffs of Dover. But when it comes to cinema, I feel I am on safer ground – they have the lead on us. Damn them!


A case in point, in the same year Robert Mitchum was playing an aged Philip Marlowe on the dank streets of London, Stéphane Audran was essaying a more original and yet still recognisable version of Marlowe on the lush and golden streets of Paris.


But whereas one was directed by the dread hand of Michael Winner, the other was being helmed by the French Hitchcock himself – the great and equally balding, Claude Chabrol.


Audran is Michelle, a socialite who it’s hinted has some kind of scandalous past. Outside a nightclub one evening (where she has pushed away the attentions of a particularly hirsute date – like that bloke from ‘The Joy of Sex’ made flesh), she encounters Veronique, an old acquaintance. The two of them share a cab home and say goodbye with a Parisian kiss on the cheek and a lingering embrace. Maybe the encounter would never have meant anything, but the following morning Veronique arrives at Michelle’s apartment and asks to be driven to Charles de Gaulle airport. Michelle senses that something is wrong, but does it anyway. It turns out that Veronique’s boyfriend is lying dead in their house, and having aided the main suspect’s escape, Michelle is questioned as an accessory. Once the police free her though, this one time party girl becomes Philip Marlowe in a tailored skirt and kitten heels, and starts to investigate. She gets to know Veronique’s neighbours, Henri Robery and his wife Sevine, and develops a flirtatious relationship with both – but also starts to get nearer to what really happened that fateful night.


‘The Long Goodbye’ is the only Chandler novel in which Marlowe manages to get his end away, for all the crackling dialogue and wanton women in the other books, he always somehow resists. It therefore seems appropriate that it was turned into the sexist and most sizzling Marlowe adaptation of them all. (I like the Robert Altman version as well, but without question Stéphane Audran is sexier than Elliot Gould.) There’s just something so French about it all – the careless flirtations and the passion of the affairs – which just suits this material so well. Paris in this film is a city where cross and double cross seem a matter of course, just like infidelity and wild homicidal passion – that’s the way of the world. The mystery therefore plays out against a background where there are a dozen similar mysteries taking place every day.


And Stéphane Audran makes a superb, if unorthodox, version of Marlowe. The gender swap may be controversial, but it works – having a sexy and somewhat mature woman ask these questions just adds a whole other frisson to the piece. And despite her wild past and how sexy she looks with her eyebrow raised, there is still a moral certainty to her that Chandler would have been proud of. A moral authority and an inner steel, and those are the essential ingredients every big screen Philip Marlowe needs.

Vengeance Man (1970)

D. Henry Levin
Colour


I’m guessing that most people when they think of Tom Jones in the context of cinema, recall his not terribly good turn as himself in Tim Burton’s ‘Mars Attacks’. It’s an odd and deeply awkward performance, which gives the impression that the magnetic performer Tom Jones just isn’t very comfortable in his own skin. (It’s also so unusual that Tom would feel the need to specify that he saw a fight in “Cardiff, Wales” – are there any other well-known Cardiffs? Any other well-known Cardiffs that legendary Welshman Tom Jones would feel the need to differentiate his capital city from?) This is a shame, as ‘Mars Attacks’ is only the late echo of Tom’s big screen career. In the early seventies, at the height of his fame, he made three private detective films. If we’re honest at the outset, none of them are brilliant, all of them are cheap and cheerful and come pre-packed with some clunking moments. But Tom, although one would struggle to describe him as actively good, is certainly a lot more adequate than he was in ‘Mars Attacks’.


Really Tom Jones should be playing himself in these films as well. The image he portrays is entirely the medallion man, the lounge lizard – all chest hair, tight trousers and white smile. He‘s no different from his public persona at the time, no different from the clips you see of him in his TV show. Yes he’s a private detective now and he has an office with a sassy black secretary, but really he is still Tom Jones. And the film should have had the courage of its convictions and claimed that he was actually just playing himself. That in between concerts, recording sessions, TV shows and having lacy knickers thrown at his grinning face, Tom also ran his own detective agency and got into the most incredible adventures. That would have made a head-spinningly cool film, that would have ensured it was remembered. But instead we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales, solving crimes in downtown Los Angeles – and I suppose that’s fairly cool itself.


Here’s the plot. An old friend of Wayne’s is found dead, the coroner determines suicide but Wayne doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate. It isn’t long before Wayne has uncovered murky depths, with a model agency and a criminal gang acting as a blackmail trap which threatens to ensnare the most powerful people in the city.


So far, so Mike Hammer knock-off. But let’s be honest, Tom Jones being a private detective investigating crimes at a model agency makes the whole thing sound a lot more fun than any generic private eye set-up has the right to be. The last time I watched this I did wonder how sexist a film it is. After all it’s loaded with dozens of nubile babes in bikinis, there to be ogled and lusted after by both leading man and camera. (One called Delilah, who our hero makes clear – with a wink – that he’s staying away from this time). Clearly it’s more than a little exploitative. But then none of these girls ever get topless and the only nipples we see have a matt of ruggish Welsh chest hair. Yes, this is all about Tom. There he is pouting and posing and showing off. There he is wooing the ladies (he has more conquests than a randy, sex starved James Bond would have whilst on Viagra) and punching out henchman and having car chases and generally being the ultimate heroic action man.


And he does, well, okay in this role. One would hardly call the performance dazzling. He fails to get impact from some of his dialogue and a number of scenes fall flatter than he probably would like, as for all his dynamism he just isn’t an experienced enough actor. But he has a certain charm, a twinkle in his eye and a wide smile which lets you carry him through. Okay he’s playing Wayne Wales, but really he’s being Tom Jones and if you think of it as a film where Tom Jones is a private eye who has amazing and sexy adventures in downtown LA, then you won’t be disappointed.

The Voodoo Lady of Texas (1945)

D. Otto Preminger
B&W


The moon is high and yet it’s still an eerily dark night. The prairie plain seems desolate, what we would now liken to a moonscape. Only the odd cactus leads you to acknowledge there is any life whatsoever, and even then it doesn’t look comforting. There’s no sound (apart from the distant whirr of the projector) and that’s incredibly spooky as well; so much so that you’d welcome even the howl of a distant jackal, but none comes. Even though it’s just an image projected on a screen you can see that it’s a cold place, so freezing and airless in the darkness that even your bones start to shiver. This is a place of death, a vision of what hell must look like, and you are all alone within it – no comfort in sight. But wait, there’s movement. From somewhere deep in the prairie plain a figure is appearing, shambling and stumbling forward as if not fully in control of its limbs. You look closer and see that it’s a man, a cowboy dressed in full garb, but looking so bruised and beaten. He almost seems like a dead cowboy. He stumbles towards the camera, his head down, as if weeping or needing every ounce of strength to make one foot move in front of the other. His arm is wounded and there is blood on his shirt, but still he keeps coming – staggering his way towards you. And then as he is almost upon the camera he finally raises his head to let you see his dazed eyes, and – oh my god! – is that John Wayne?


And so begins one of the strangest movies The Duke ever participated in. His only horror and one of the few horror westerns I’ve found. Clearly influenced by the likes of Jacques Tournier’s ‘The Cat People’, this is a master class of dark shadows, suspense and things not being quite what they should be. Wayne plays Ellis Bob, a widower with a sick child. We join him out in the desert, mid-way through his quest to find the strange voodoo princess who lives just beyond the mountains. This voodoo lady, when he finds her, sets him several quests. She is arch, she seems foreign; she is the unmistakably exotic and dazzling form of Marlene Dietrich.


A virtual two hander, Dietrich purrs her lines and sets Wayne his challenge of fire, ice, air and earth and when he succeeds in each task gives him a bit more of the information he’ll need to save his son’s life. It is spooky, it is atmospheric. It’s dark and claustrophobic and also terrifying. Okay, with her accent it’s difficult to really believe that Dietrich grew up from a small child practicing New Orleans voodoo (although to be fair, she doesn’t even try to make a haphazard stab at the Louisiana accent), but her presence is so alien and exotic that you end up believing virtually everything of her. While Wayne is great at playing not too intelligent, superb as a slow and dutiful father who can only believe the evidence of his own eyes. It’s a great pairing, and the scenes between them are a hungry and smiling cat playing with a dim-witted toy mouse. This is a taut and claustrophobic western horror, which is definitely worth traipsing across a bleak landscape for.

The Vampire Witch of St Albans Way (2004)

D. Simon Olson
Colour


Someone should turn Kelly Brook’s life story into a movie. An enterprising filmmaker should take the phenomenon that is Kelly Brook and forensically examine just what the hell is going on. Why is it that this pretty girl with large breasts has been taken into the collective hearts of the British public? There are after all so many other pretty girls with large breasts, so many other pretty girls with large breasts who strip to their underwear for newspapers and magazines and would die for this kind of public adulation, but would never in their finest dreams get a whiff of it. (Okay, there was Jordan, but her relationship with the British public is a lot more – how should I put this? - estranged these days). What’s more Kelly Brook has managed to retain this affection even though her limitations have been exposed again and again and again. She is a terrible TV presenter, there are hours and hours of footage to attest this. She is a godawful actress, there are masses of both cinematic and televisual evidence to this effect. Furthermore there’s plenty of written testimony as to how poor she has been in her stage roles. She isn’t getting better, there are no lost gems, she just stays the same abysmal level and fails time after time. And the thing is she is never chastised for this, she seemingly never loses the public’s affection. Of course, you will say, the tabloids love her because she is a pretty girl with large breasts who is frequently seen in her underwear, but then there are lots of pretty girls with large breasts who are frequently seen in their underwear, and none of the others are treated like this. How is this happening? Is she some kind of modern day Helen of Troy who bewitches all around her with her heavenly beauty? Well, maybe – but then there are other girls prettier than her, who also have large breasts. Is it then some mass hypnosis she is working on the masses? Bending our minds so that we forget her many failings and instead love her always as that pretty girl with the large breasts who looks so fetching in her underwear shots. Or maybe – and I’m thinking way outside the box here – is it some extra-terrestrial plot to lull us into complacent acceptance of mediocrity and soften us up for ultimate invasion? I honestly don’t know the answer and outlandish and insane theories are the best I can come up with. I’ve no idea how this particular pretty girl with large breasts, who is really at her best posing in her undies in still photographs for calendars each year, has managed to create this on-going career, to achieve this level of fame. It truly baffles me. And that’s why some enterprising director/producer/screenwriter combo has to get to work to explain how this phenomenon is happening. But of course if ‘The Kelly Brook Story’ was filmed, you’d have to find another actress to play the lead part, as I guarantee that if she plays herself we’re in for a very stilted performance.


This modern day Hammer Horror knock-off (bright red blood in the Home Counties) really amplifies Kelly Brook’s flaws as an actress. Here she is essentially asked to play two parts, when most films realise that she is stretched in one. Firstly she is a virginal school teacher (for virginal, see wears a cardigan, a buttoned up shirt and unflattering glasses); then – thanks to being possessed by her ancient witch ancestor – she becomes a bloodsucker in a leather swimsuit and cape. It’s that part, with the curves, the naked legs and the cleavage that’s supposed to bring in the paying punters. Kelly Brook does know that her best assets have to be front and centre. Unfortunately she fails to be even remotely convincing in either role. As a schoolteacher her performance consists solely of a worried look and the occasional frown of frustrated disappointment. While as a vampire she does little more than – well – vamp. There is a lot of standing with her hands on her hips, her thighs slightly apart, pouting at the camera with a wind machine behind her – as if this was a Halloween themed shot for October in this year’s calendar. None of this adds up to acting, none of it adds up to much more than decoratively posing.


Around her the cast of drama school grads runs about and acts scared and gets killed, and its either the case that none of them are any good either or they’ve lowered their level of performance to fit in with the star. There are attempted shocks and thrills, gore by the bucketload, but only the occasional hint of nudity – as clearly the pretty girl with the large breasts wasn’t ready for that at this point in her career, and if the main draw won’t get down to her drawers, then what’s the point?


So the question remains….


How does Kelly Brook’s career survive terrible and almost unwatchable films like this and stand pert and untarnished to this day?

The phenomena needs to be investigated and we must be told the truth.