Trio (1984)

D. Anthony de La Sewell
Colour

This one is going to be like a dog whistle to bad movie lovers.

Here we have Patsi Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony as a female pop group/super spies saving the world whilst also filming a music video and trying to get to Top of the Pops on time. Yes, I’ll say those names again Patsy Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony, three beautiful but limited actresses who scream the 1980s to Britons of a certain age. As with all deference to George Orwell, this is the most 1984 movie ever made. There’s the cast, the music, the hair, the shoulder pads, the cultural references which were supposed to make it hip and with it, but must have actually made it look aged and past it by January the First, 1985. You see the group here are clearly supposed to be Bananarama. In fact I’d be totally stunned if this wasn’t written with Bananarama in mind. Not only is there the sassy all good trio, adored stars of the British music scene, but the fact that when they perform the singing is actually Bananarama’s – taking on songs from the bottom of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman slush pile (and when you hear them you’ll realise that these songs must have been pressed right to the floorboards they were so far down). Why Bananarama themselves weren’t cast is open to debate. One can only guess that it’s because they weren’t really actors. Although when you see the performances Hurley, Anthony and Kensit give, you’ll realise that can’t possibly be the reason.

The plot starts in Thailand (for the music video shoot) before returning to London (for the Top of the Pops appearance), but in-between the wearing swimsuits and leggings and miming, the girls find that the spy agency they work for has been compromised and a list of agents is now in the wrong hands. It’s up to our mighty trio (the group is actually called ‘Trio’, such is the lack of inspiration) to juggle their priorities and get them back. Gradually the prime suspect emerges as former agent and 1970s pop superstar, Magdalena de Faith – and Trio have to stop her before she carries out the final part of her dastardly plan.


(Interestingly this would all seem to be much the same plot as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, so I guess that is an unofficial remake of this. That’s a film I’ve never managed to watch all the way through, as it’s awful. This is awful too, but in a more fun and haphazard way; Charlie’s Angels is awful in the most corporate, soulless way possible.)


Joanna Lumley plays Magdalena de Faith and is fantastic as the haughty European has-been, and thus totally wasted in this movie. Kensit is bad, Anthony equally so, but both look Rada trained next to Hurley, who can barely walk convincingly, let alone deliver lines. The songs are awful, the plot is obvious (with zero sense of pacing) and even though the crew was clearly flown out to Thailand for exteriors, the interiors couldn’t be any more shot on a cheap sitcom set in Elstree if Mrs Slocambe marched into shot. In short this is a bit of a disaster, but I’d thoroughly recommend it.

Wilde in Paris (1980)

D. Pierre de Franc
Colour

Michael Caine recently stated that he chose his movies on two criteria: whether it was going to make him a lot of money, or whether it was likely to win him an Oscar. So who the fuck knows what the explanation is for him appearing in the 1979 drugged up, fantasy thriller? As no sane observer would ever look at this and think it had Oscar glory etched right through it. So maybe French cinema in the early 1980s was bizarrely well remunerated, or perhaps it just suited Caine for tax purposes to hang out in Paris for a few months. Then again maybe he just read the script and thought it’d be a great wheeze to play Oscar Wilde.

Yes, here is Michael Caine as Oscar Wilde. An Oscar Wilde after the disgrace, who is now living in Paris and drinking too much and doing too many drugs, but his mind is still sharp and he has a murder mystery to solve.

For you see, as well as being a playwright, poet, novelist, raconteur and the world acknowledged wittiest man alive, Oscar Wilde was apparently also the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. So, get your bon mots and deer stalker ready, as this is Oscar Wilde, dipso great detective.

To be fair Caine does acquit himself admirably as Wilde. Wilde was a big man and so Caine immediately looks the part, but adds a certain prissy delicacy of tone. His voice manages to stay neutral accent-wise and that’s great as it would have been a cockney calamity if some Smithfield Market had slipped in. Christopher Plummer has the thankless Watson role as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assisting Wilde in his investigation, but being Christopher Plummer does a genius job with it; and Liza Minnelli does a good Liza Minnelli as the Moulin Rouge dancer who loves Wilde too tragically.

So the performances are good and the idea is certainly no worse than any other, so it’s frustrating how bad a film this is. Having a hero who is self-medicating is one thing, using it as an excuse to OD on addled weirdness is quite another. Animated angels appear to Welles and give him important clues before then seeming to perform fellatio on him off camera; our heroes hire a horse and cart, where the horse is driving and the man – naked with bridle jammed into his mouth – is pulling; while in a fake reveal the killer is revealed to be Wilde himself, which does let Michael Caine face off against Michael Caine – both of them absolutely astonished. Most surreally though, at the Moulin Rouge we get – for no apparent reason – to watch frock-coat wearing Bee-Gees performing a slowed down ‘Islands in the Stream’, while Pans People writhe in front of them. All of that makes it sound more fun than it actually is, as this an ill focused and frustrating film - to the point where having watched it I even now have no idea who the killer is.

So the question remains and it's probably a mystery the great Oscar Wilde himself couldn't solve, why did Sir Michael Caine make this movie?

Jack Malibu (1988)

D. Corey Dickshield
Colour

Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.

That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.

Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.

Yes, this is Jack Malibu.

Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.

The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.

The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.

Bonfire Man (1982)

D. Tommy Bond
Colour

Looking like one of those old health and safety cartoons that for some reason has been blown up into an actual movie (although with animation so unsophisticated it actually makes those creaky old ‘Bananaman’ cartoons seem like cutting edge Anime) we have a movie superhero who totally fails to ignite. The mighty Bernard Cribbins voices the not quite so mighty Bonfire Man, who dresses in a cape and tights (in an outfit so like Superman’s, the lawyers at DC must have been twitching in their crypts), but who has the strange but apparently mighty power of bonfires. It’s important to distinguish that from the power of fire which would of course make him The Human Torch, as although he has these incredible and amazing talents, he’s only able to use these incredible and amazing talents every November the 5th.

Why? You might ask. It’s a fair question and the film does try to answer but does so with such magical, mystical, science fiction mumbo jumbo that the answer might as well be blah blah blah.

Anyway just accept that we have a superhero who can only use his talents one day a year. Now mostly he uses these talents to start large bonfires. He stands on a podium in front of a screaming and braying crowd, and with a click of his fingers and a whoosh of his hands, he ignites the giant neighbourhood bonfire. As such he is a minor British celebrity, feted every time Guy Fawkes Night comes around. But he’s also a man who at the dawn of each November the 6th takes off his outfit and returns to his life as Arthur Stewart, the local fish and chip shop owner. His powers vanish, his muscles and chiselled jaw sink away, and he’s back to serving up saveloy and battered sausage.
But with Bonfire Night coming up this year, a criminal gang is planning to use the noise of the fireworks to rob the local bank. This year it seems that Bonfire Man may have to step out of his shell and use his powers for real and proper good.

Okay, one can see how blowing a bank vault on bonfire night would cause less attention than blowing it on, say, Easter Sunday. The plan makes sense from that point of view. But if in the town there is a superhero named Bonfire Man, who only has super powers one day a year, then maybe that day is not the best one on which to embark on a nefarious scheme. Wait until Chinese New Year, for god’s sake!

It’s a kids film so one shouldn’t be overly hard on the simplicity of its logic, but it’s a kids film with such low ambitions, it’s frankly quite depressing. One could make a really interesting film about what it would mean to have such ephemeral powers, about what it’s like to be a lonely man who is treated as a god for one day a year. Sadly this isn’t that film.

It’s worth watching though as the thing which really works in this movie is Cribbins voice work, which is truly brilliant – managing to distinguish Arthur Stewart from Bonfire Man, but keeping them recognisably the same person; as well as finding emotions and depth in lines that even the scriptwriter clearly thought were just throwaway crap. Everyone in the UK is genetically programmed to love Bernard Cribbins and this is yet another reason why.

The Trials and Tribulations of Mister Henry Church (1984)

D. Russ Maybery
Colour

1984 seems as good a time as any to hire Simon MacCorkindale to appear in a blatant rip-off of ‘The Saint’. MacCorkindale was definitely up to the task; he more than had the charm and arrogance to pull off the role and if given a proper chance would have been a Simon Templar to match Roger Moore (or a James Bond for that matter). MacCorkindale’s other US foray was a legendary mess named ‘Manimal’. This, for the uninitiated, saw him play a doctor who could shape-shift into any animal of prey and who used his talents to help police with their investigations. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Actually it was wildly mocked, but I’ll be honest I always rather enjoyed it as a small child. As such he needed a chance to get his career back on track, and it’s a shame it went nowhere as this is a role which fits him like a burglar’s glove.

The thing is though, MacCorkindale isn’t actually playing Simon Templar. Maybe there was a rights issue, or maybe Ian Ogilvy’s agent threw the mother of all hissy fits, but here MacCorkindale is Henry Church – a master thief, adventurer, charmer, a man about town and one of the most famous men of his age.

Except he isn’t in his age anymore, as well as all his other achievements, he’s become an inadvertent time traveller.

One can only guess that Adam Ant’s success as an international popstar was enough for the producers to  throw the premise of Sixties time travel show ‘Adam Adamant Lives’ in there as well. Or perhaps no one could think of any reason for a dashing 1930s English adventurer type to suddenly appear in 1980s LA, unless he was some kind of nostalgia fetishist – and nostalgia fetishists are hardly likely to appeal to that key demographic: the kids. So we have a prologue where Church fights his main adversary The Hood (a prologue so stuffed with terrible expositional dialogue that you wonder if the script is credited to one G. Lucas) before Church falls into a tank of dry ice where he’s frozen for nearly fifty years. Then one day Henry Church awakes in the 1980s, a curious place where even his unflappable English charm will be put sorely to the test.

There’s a lot of promise in this scenario, essentially a dapper English gentleman with self-assurance beyond anything that modern man can reach makes his way in the modern world. He hooks up with investigative reporter. Erin Gray, and the sparks do fly between him and this 1980s girl. (Gray I also watched as a small child in ‘Buck Rogers’, where she introduced me to the whole concept of withering looks – she really does have a fine selection of them). But the fact that this is a back-door pilot means that a lot of what’s promising about this scenario is lost in handling a case of the week. So we see Henry Church amazed by big TV sets and dealing with skinheads in leather jackets who play their music too loud on huge speakers, but most of what makes this so promising is lost among the tropes of a generic American detective show.

A promising and intriguing idea then, but a waste of talent and effort – and the first part of that sentence is more than could be said about ‘Manimal’ at least.

Jungle Jim (1984)

D. Hackworth Hopes
Colour

Ah, Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan, who once the most famous period of his career was over, picked up a jungle suit and a paunch and became Jungle Jim on both film and TV. “Who’s Jungle Jim?” I hear you cry. Well, Jungle Jim was another character created by the same guy who dreamt up Flash Gordon and was kind of a fully dressed western version of Tarzan, but one who operated in Asia rather than Africa. So he’s a sanitised take on the great white hunter, suitable for kids of all ages – even if Weissmuller looked a bit too portly and the jungle couldn’t be any more fake if Johnny was just stood in front of a plain background with the words ‘Trees Go Here’ scrawled on it.

The same year that director Hugh Hudson gave us a truly self-serious version of Tarzan in ‘Greystoke’, we had the other side of the coin with a remake of ‘Jungle Jim’. Here was Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, tackling another of Alex Raymond’s creations and proving once again that he was born at completely the wrong time. If ever there was a one dimensional actor who was good at striking heroic poses in the face of all kinds of monster nonsense, it was Sam Jones. But he needed to either exist in the time of B movie madness or the kind of schlock the Sci-fi channel turns out week after week now. The 1980s were really no good for him.

Having been knocked out and dumped in the jungle, Jim awakes in the mythical country of Muthapetox wearing an outfit that makes him look like Indiana Jones just after he’s been to the dry cleaners. Ever the adventurer, it isn’t long before he’s earned the wrath of white jungle priestess, Barbara Carrera (another performer who screams the 1980s and another performer who wasn’t given proper chance to put her bad acting skills to good use), and then rescued damsel in distress, Emma Samms, and her incredible shrinking skirt. Samms and Jones bicker and fight and flirt and fall in love as they trek their way out of the jungle and towards ‘civilisation’. But Jim realises that the legendary lost city of Nig-taca is not far away and determines to visit it.

So we’re in the land of made up places with obviously made up names, but unlike the same year’s Tarzan movie, that means it doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Interestingly the film ends with an alien spaceship rising out of the lost city where it’s been buried for thousands of years. That’s of course the same ending as ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ and yet in this far more preposterous film such an occurrence doesn’t seem to so utterly preposterous. The Indiana Jones film spent its length stretching our credibility (fridges that survive nukes; Shia Le Bouef channelling Tarzan, the entire Shia Le Boeuf performance in fact) until it reached the point of tearing that credibility completely asunder. ‘Jungle Jim’ though doesn’t require any credibility, in fact it demands you leave your credibility at the door at the start, and it’s all the better for it.

Killer on Sunset Boulevard (1982)

D. Wayne Hopkin
Colour

Johnny Cash was a pious man. A Christian who put a lot of stake in his faith in God and recorded many gospel tracks – as well as, of all things, a Man in Black Christmas album. But there was also something sinister about Johnny Cash. You don’t bill yourself ‘The Man in Black’ if you want to be loved by everyone. Just as you don’t spend hours practicing a brooding sneer in front of the mirror as a teenager (we don’t think that look just arrived on his face, do we?) if you’re planning to make it as a happy-clappy, Christian entertainer. A faithful man Johnny Cash may have been, but he knew as sure as Alice Cooper knew, that darkness sells. That’s doubly true in films. You can go so far with being pious and Christian on a cinema screen, but you can do a hell of a lot more with sinister.

Even more than the other Monkees, Micky Dolenz clearly craved fame. If you think of the gurning comedy, or the mugging at camera while pretending to play the drums, then clearly this is a man desperate to be noticed. He stood out much more than Took or Nesmith, and made Davy Jones look like a blandly English ex-Coronation Street actor in comparison. There was in Dolenz, an all-round entertainer trying to get out, a counter- culture Sammy Davis Jr – but in reality all he really got to be was drummer in The Monkees.

Here Cash and Dolenz come together in ‘Killer on Sunset Boulevard’. Although, to be fair, it’s hardly a meeting brimming with the anticipation of a Newman/Redford, De Niro/Pacino or even Godzilla/ King Ghidorah.

It’s 1982 and neither of them is at the height of their careers (although Cash would later climb the summit again; Dolenz is no longer able to see it even with high powered binoculars). So it’s an odd combination in an odd film, but one which specifically plays to who they are. From the outside Johnny Cash and Micky Dolenz look odd casting, but on closer examination it’s difficult to think of anyone else playing these roles.

This is a movie which combines ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ with ‘Desperate Hours’. Dolenz is a Hollywood star, an actor and musician extraordinaire, one of the most famous people on the planet according to the oddly fawning news broadcast we see (even the E network would consider it a little uncritical). His character is clearly leading the life Micky Dolenz himself has always dreamt of. There’s a gorgeous wife and two daughters, but more importantly the adulation of the world – who could ask for more? Except, Dolenz also has a deranged fan. This fan takes the form of Johnny Cash, who on this bright sunny day invades Dolenz’s home and holds him and his family hostage. What follows is a tense siege where Dolenz gets more and more desperate for his and his family’s safety in the face of his totally implacable opponent.

I’ll be honest, this is not a great film. Dolenz in no way has the acting chops to pull this off, and comes over more a whining child in a playground rather than a husband and father strung out to the very end of his tether. But Cash is extraordinary, so still and dangerous, with eyes that have years of fear and hurt deep within. Cash – unlike a certain Sun Records colleague – is never thought to have made that much impression of a film, but here we have an embryonic Hannibal Lector and the template for a million other screen psychos to follow.

Marie Antoinette (1985)

D. David Spartan
Colour


Having started the week with Paul Muni inventing fire, we now come to another strange supposedly historical movie where actual history is totally unimportant. Those of you who’ve read deeply into the life of Marie Antoinette, or know something of the French revolution, avert your eyes now. As what we have is not strictly a portrayal of life in the court of Versailles, one that looks at the ins and outs of the bloody events of the 1790s, but instead Toyah Wilcox as ‘Marie Antoinette – Demon Bloodsucker’.


In the days of ‘Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter’, this probably makes a lot more sense. Back in the 1980s, though, it must have been a shock to see a pop star as a French queen stalking through the streets of Paris to suck the necks of children. What makes it more surprising is that there’s zero context for this. We start with what looks to be a standard historical biopic (well as standard an historical biopic as you can get with Toyah Wilcox as the lead), all stately homes, bodices and BBC accents; but before long we’re nicking ideas from old Universal and Hammer movies and she’s out on the grimy Parisian backstreets as the arch nocturnal huntress. Other musical luminaries – Adam Ant, Richard O’Brien, Lulu – appear with their tongues firmly placed firmly in their cheeks to either aid her or try to stop her, as this Austrian-French Queen (she was actually Austrian, but Toyah insists on playing her with a wandering accent that’s just this side of Inspector Clouseau) goes all Countess Bathory while wearing tight, heaving corsets. Then the French revolution comes along; the masses, tired of being oppressed and no doubt livid at having their blood sucked, rise up. It initially seems that the chaos will aid this vampire Queen but her fall isn’t far away.


In the background of this bright and shiny pop video, which for some reason has been stretched to feature length and inexplicably had all the songs left out, is – of course – the evil of Margaret Thatcher. At one point Toyah even tells her lady in waiting, who is concerned about the Queen’s nightly expeditions that “this lady is not for turning”. (It’s a pity that Thatcher didn’t say “There’s no such thing as society” until later, as the filmmakers would have salivated right down their chins at a line like that.) Obviously this is a project its makers felt passionate about, but in their passion and over-whelming hatred for the British Prime-Minister, what they’ve lost is any sense of subtlety. It’s a film which doesn’t just want to dislike Thatcher, it wants to state loud and proud that she actually feasts on the blood of the poor and the blood of their children. This is a literal demonization and that makes it – even if you’re broadly sympathetic to where the film is coming from – easy to not take seriously. Often within the echo chamber of the left or right, people just lose all sense of the wider world and convince themselves that all that exists is their passion and beliefs. Toyah Wilcox as Marie Antoinette sounds very, very silly and – even with a shouted political agenda – it is very, very silly.

Munich Murder (1985)

D. Otto Haus
Colour


Oh crumbs, there’s a World Cup on, isn’t there? And that probably means I should be topical and write about some of the strange and curious football related films out there. So let’s try this one on for size, shall we? A European/German movie about a grizzled, hard-bitten detective investigating the murder of the left back of a Munich football club. (The club in question is named Borussia Munich, although they obviously play in Bayern Munich’s stadium and in Bayern Munich’s kit. Quite why this name change happened is not made clear, but it’d be like making a film about a North London football club, which play in red and white at Highbury, and are named The Gun Factory.) In the German version – which I have not seen – the detective is played by Maximillian Schell. I have no idea of what Mr Schell’s take on the role is, but here we have Jon Voight giving us a performance of such aggressive, intense boredom that it’s worth tracking down just to see Mr Voight scowl through every scene and to greet every emotion he’s called on to play with a glower. It’s as if he couldn’t be bothered to learn anything about football, detective work, Germany and possibly the whole continent of Europe itself before the film was made, and so strides around distinctly pissed off that he’s being forced to fake an interest in them. Normally an actor so disengaged from the film around him is said to be Zen, but Mr Voight is clearly so livid at being there that peace and calm are clearly not attributes anyone would associate with him.


The other problem with Jon Voight playing the role and the film being made in English to accommodate him, is that the other parts in the film are all played by Germans. Performing in another language would be hard for trained actors, but this film further makes it much more difficult by hiring footballers to play – well – footballers. So amusingly we have Franz Beckenbauer playing the retired captain of the club with all the charm of a haughty, out of touch, autocratic, blue-blooded despot; while Jürgen Grabowski manages the incredible feat of looking even less happy to be there than Jon Voight. His character is minor, so minor in fact that there’s no chance of him being a suspect – although in any other movie he’d have been lead henchman at least, if not someone who went on a murderous rampage before the end. Very, very amusingly there is also a cameo from Mighty Mouse himself, Kevin Keegan (or Keggy Keegle, as he’s sometimes known in his home country) – where he manages to demonstrate even less talent than he did on ‘Head Over Heals in Love’


The film plods along in rhythm with Mr Voight’s pissed off stride, throwing in herrings of red, pink and purple shades, until the killer is revealed. And it becomes clear, the more Mr Voight hangs around the football club, that this film could easily have been made about any sport or indeed any industry. As by the end the film has clearly joined Mr Voight’s disinterest in football, football players, as well as any and all round balls. This could easily have been a movie about a murder of a foreman in a diamond mine, or a welder at a dockyard – both of which would no doubt have elicited no more interest on Mr Voight’s face than the contents of his handkerchief on a wet Thursday afternoon. At the very end Mr Voight trudges off, presumably for a lie down, I hope he enjoyed it more than he did this movie.

An American Gangster in Pall-Mall (1985)

D. Ted Kotcheff
Colour



Every so often Ernest Borgnine left his genial, bear-like presence behind and went back to being the tough guy of his younger days. (Have you seen ‘Bad Day at Black-Rock’? You really must.) He did old and grizzled in ‘The Wild Bunch’ and he did it before he died in ‘Red’. And here he does it in this bizarre 1980s British movie, as an American gangster, dressed in a pin stripe suit, fedora and with a toothpick constantly between his incisors – like a walking, out of time, homage to John Dillinger. His niece is dead in Mayfair, but Borgnine hasn’t come to London to avenge her, all he’s interested in are the jewels she was carrying. That’s what’s really got his attention. As next of kin the jewels are his, he reasons, and he is going to stomp around the West End – kicking ass and pancaking noses – until he gets them.


Like Robert Stark’s ‘Parker’, Borgnine’s unnamed character is an unfeeling machine. He doesn’t care who gets in his way or who he hurts, all he thinks about is the jewels. Now there are in the Parker series, entries where our lead character is a fish out of water, but he’s still in a locale that is very much America and he learns how to adapt quickly. Here though we have that same unstoppable and untouchable hard guy, but also a quirky ‘ain’t Brits strange’ London travelogue. It makes for an odd movie, with Borgnine’s toughness contrasting with comical cab drivers, unarmed policeman with whistles who can only run helplessly after any perpetrator and gangs of punk rockers lurking around most corners. (Seriously the similarly titled ‘An American Werewolf in London also has menacing punk rockers. Surely any punk rocker in London in 1985 would have felt like they belonged on the ‘Antique’s Roadshow’.) Most baffling is Prunella Scales as an incredibly posh, English divorcee Borgnine meets on the plane and who shows up to flirt with him every so often. Scales plays it with a certain comic charm, but in the face of which this hard as nails version of Borgnine looks actually panicked.


The film is at its best when its lead character is punching people. First off its his niece’s foppish boyfriend, who is forced to abandon his grieving of drinking and enjoying prostitutes to have his face bashed in until he starts spilling the secret life about the dead girl; then it’s onto her drug dealer, who makes the horrible mistake of calling Borgnine “an old fart” and receives a cricket bat repeatedly to his own personal cricket balls; then the drug supplier, who has to be dropped out of a window and through the windscreen of his pride and joy Jag before he’ll cooperate, and on and on. The look on Borgnine’s face says he’s having the time of his life, that all this violence is so much fun. Of course for the film the danger is that all that face-slapping, head-butting and knee-kicking might become a bit unremitting, which is no doubt why it has Scales show up every so often – although the scenes have such a jarringly different tone, they’re amongst the most disturbing here.







So far, so late night Channel 5. But what really elevates it, what takes it above so many other violent films of the 80s, is the final scenes – when Borgnine reaches the top of this criminal empire. And who does he finds there? None other than Lord bloody Olivier. That’s right darling Larry Is lying back on a chez lounge, looking so elderly and weak, but clearly relishing every line of villainous dialogue. And here these two older Oscar winning actors (the 1948 and 1955 vintages, if you’re interested) size each other up, pad around each other, recognise each other’s distinct styles and then play an elaborate game of acting one-upmanship.  They’re really tense and delicious scenes that ensures the film builds to a tense and beautifully written ending it in no way deserves.

Hot Cross Bunny (1985)

D. Tim Delingpole
Colour


A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.


Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.


Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.


I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.

Shadows of the Aliens (1984)

D. Phillippe Noir
Colour


It’s sad that this French science fiction film didn’t garner a bigger audience, as it’s a visually innovative, sharply political, gripping thriller. Whether one would describe it as enjoyable is a question we’ll throw into the air with little heed to its safety, as there are car crashes which are less bleak. But how often do you get to pick up a croissant and a glass of red wine and sit down to a science fiction movie which has something to say and is saying it in a French accent?


Our setting, as the opening caption tells us is the future, although very little is done to indicate the future. The cars, the buildings, the haircuts all scream the 1980s, so that is where we are. (Clearly Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’ is an influence.) Our setting then is the present, but not quite the present. Jean Poiret, pulling on his policeman’s overcoat, is a government sanctioned hunter. He stalks the streets of Paris hunting down aliens, who are then rounded up and taken to who knows where. Of course this being science fiction, these aliens are humanoids from outer space (recognised by their two sets of eyelids and no toes) rather than immigrants. But for the social message of the film, these are one and the same. The aliens are not wanted by France, they have never been invited in and now they have to leave.


The first half of the film then is chasing these aliens (they are never given a name) around Paris, trying to catch them but sometimes being forced to terminate them with maximum force. In the first half hour alone we have a creature thrown off a tall building into the path of a juggernaut; and one dropped into a vat of handily placed acid (of the kind which only ever exist in the movies). Poiret seems to be the type of investigator Napoleon would like, as whenever an act of violence needs to be committed, a luckily placed fire-axe or lift-shaft is nearby.


Some movies would have been content with this cat and mouse, this human and humanoid alien, some movies would have left their ambition there. But ‘Shadows of the Aliens’ decides to push things much further.


Halfway through a giant spaceship arrives on Earth, or more precisely in Paris. (The film is French, therefore Paris is the centre of the world and quite probably the universe). These are the Vervoids, a powerful alien race which hates the original aliens as much as the French do. Initially we only see the Vervoid leader, a giant and sweaty ball of rippling flesh, unable to express the simplest emotion without its entire body rippling. Realised with the aid of a puppet, this is an alien leader who is striking and menacing and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older Orson Welles. The Vervoids are hailed as saviours. (The fact that these first aliens are never named may cause problems in this review, but not in the film. We simply have The Humans, The Vervoids and – lastly – the aliens). With the French government’s approval – in the form of uber-efficient administrator, Gerard Depardieu – they take over Paris and work together to rid these aliens on a more industrial scale. Suddenly we have gone from problems of immigration to the Vichy government and everything has turned terrifying and strange.


There is no US/British allied force to the rescue this time (this isn’t ‘Adrienne and the Astronaut’ though, such creatures as Americans do still exist). We’re told that worried phone calls have been made by the President and Prime Minister, although the tone of Depardieu’s voice makes it seem like they’re easy to ignore. Instead the Vervoids and the humans are allowed in win. Indeed at the conclusion, with most of the original aliens dead, it’s clear how much the Vervoids and humans now look like each other. They are one and the same.


Post Star Wars there were a lot of science fiction films which didn’t really want to say anything, they just wanted to entertain with their brilliant light shows. This one though is desperate to say things, it wants to shout them from the rooftops, and is happy to bring in juggernauts, acid vats and rubbery Orson Welles just to get some attention. Maybe the end result is too dark to grab a huge audience, but this is undeniably a tense and thought provoking film.


And, really, where else are you going to see a giant rippling Orson Welles dominate Gerard Depardieu?

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!

Advertisement (1981)

D. Malcolm McClaren
Colour and B&W


I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?


This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.


Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.


That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.


Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.


It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.


‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.

Remember, Remember (1985)

D. Tom Warmby
Colour


Maybe the casting notes got muddled up, or maybe the actors names were fed into a tombola and the roles were allocated by simple chance. Or perhaps this was the director’s attempt to take something that had ‘bog-standard thriller’ stamped right the way through it, and turn it into a film slightly more interesting. As let’s be fair, if this film was cast the way it should be cast, there’s no way that this blog would give it a moment’s glance. It would just be another generic 80s British thriller with tough cops and brassy birds, all predictably culminating in a shoot-out in the building site that was then the London Docklands. It would have shown up in video stores with scowling men on the front cover, posing in front of explosions. Okay, that’s almost exactly how the cover appeared when it was leaked out like a bad smell, but if you took a moment to read the blurb then you’d  have realised it was pushing with all its might against its assigned box.


‘Remember, Remember’ is a duel between two complete opposites. In our corner we have the suave, sexy, super-agent who is working for British interests. In the other we have the asexual, sinister foreign saboteur, looking to succeed where Guy Fawkes failed and blow up The Houses of Parliament. It’s a tense race against time, a high-wire game of guns and explosions which only one man can win. And if I told you that our two leads were Donald Pleasence and Martin Shaw, you’d know exactly who was playing whom. It’s so obvious, scribble the script down on the back of an envelope, shoot it in the most formulaic style possible and consider the job done. Next!


But, of course, as you’ve no doubt guessed by now, Martin Shaw is here cast as the villain and Donald Pleasence is the charming and handsome good guy.


How this happened I have no idea (the film is too obscure to have any behind the scenes featurettes). Maybe Shaw thought that the hero as written was too close to Brodie in ‘The Professionals’, perhaps this was his attempt to stretch his acting muscles. Clearly he enjoying himself, adding a demonic glow to his eyes and speaking every line with vague Germanic relish. He’s entertaining in a part which is unlike anything else he’s ever played.


Imagine though, waking up one morning and looking like Donald Pleasence – bald, tubby and now over the hill, yet cast as a charismatic sex symbol. He must have danced his way to the set each and every morning. And to be fair he does mostly sell it, there’s an aura to him, an invincibility, a definite twinkle. He can almost pass as man of action with a plan for every eventuality. It nearly works. The place it falls apart is in his desirability to the opposite sex. No matter how good an actor (and Donald Pleasence was a really good actor), he cannot sell the notion that he is cat-nip to the ladies. It seems incredible unlikely that he and the svelte and lovely Fiona Fullerton would be in an intense on/off relationship; it’s equally absurd that sexy foreign spy, the tantalising Glynis Barber, would lick her lips so excitedly in his presence and change sides to be with him; just as the notion that busty and perky Nicola Bryant would willingly play his Moneypenny and flirt so outrageously is really rather odd and disturbing. Even the most generously minded Donald Pleasence fan will think it looks ridiculous, the kind of thing that happens to Woody Allen in later Woody Allen films, but to no one else. Of course Pleasence enjoys himself, it must be highly flattering to him, but there’s nothing he can do to make himself sexier. If bald, overweight and aging men were actually considered the height of attractiveness, Eric Pickles would be one of the biggest stars in the world right now. They’re not and he isn’t.


And so we have a film which should be dull, and to be honest often is dull, but is enlivened by the casting. The sad problem is that a pedestrian script and bog-standard action scenes cannot be spruced up no matter how ludicrous your leading man. It’s well worth watching just for the performances, but don’t expect any more depth than one would associate with the modern day straight to video equivalent – the Vinnie Jones film.


Pleasence and Shaw are both great: Shaw enjoying his time as a Blofeld knock-off; Pleasence delighted not to be doing Blofeld again. And if you’re wondering who the actress playing Martin Shaw’s ultra-loyal secretary is – then, yes, that is John Hurt in drag. Inspiration did strike more than once while making this film then, but if only it had been more fulsome.

Herbie Goes to East Berlin (1981)

D. Vincent McEveety
Colour

I’m not sure a knockabout farce involving an anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle is the best way to tackle the rights and wrongs of communism. But then on the flip-side I’m equally not sure that a knockabout farce involving an anthropomorphic Volkswagen Beetle is the best way to advertise Reagan-era American capitalism. From top to bottom there’s something amazingly off-kilter about ‘Herbie Goes to East Berlin’. It’s bright and gaudy, empty headed and crass, and amazingly untroubled by any doubts about its own brilliance.

In the days before Gorbachov and Glastnost, it probably seemed that the best way to take on the communist East was with a cute Volkswagen beetle. After all the grey, stiffness of communist bureaucrats was something which had never been done by Hollywood before and some broad satire was long overdue. So to begin with we have Madeline Khan doing her best German accent, with a performance that’s like a softer Rosa Krebb. I say softer in the sense that her clothes are more fetching and she doesn’t actually kill anyone. We have Christopher Lee’s stern eyebrows. Sir Chris is an actor I like a great deal, but it’s noticeable that in that long stretch where he couldn’t get work which matched his talent, he often let his eyebrows do the heavy-lifting. And below them we have numerous young men and women ground down by the drudge of work, when all they really want to do is listen to rock’n’roll. East Berlin a place of greyness, a city of repression, a haven of stern and no  fun adults – and what it really needs is some Americans to arrive who’ll shake things up.

The inevitable culture clash comes by way of the East Germans trying to show off their superiority. They invite the winner of The Coast to Coast race in the States to take on their champion car, a black Trabant – which no amount of camera tricks can make look fast or intimidating. So out go Larry Wilcox, from TV’s ‘CHiPS’, playing the nephew of Dean Jones’s character from The Love Bug (but obviously a different nephew from the one in ‘Herbie Goes Bananas’), and girlfriend Catherine Bach, from TV’s ‘The Duke of Hazards’. They arrive in East Berlin as honoured guests with the challenge to race Lee and comedy sidekick Dom Deluise. At stake is not only cultural honour, but which system is better – communism or capitalism.

You just know the kind of Wacky Races style high jinks which will follow.

The problem is that although in the context of the film, the US of A is proved to be best – the good guys are just so brash and bellicose, that they’re much more unbearable than the communists. Herbie and his team’s arrival is loud to the point of boorish and interrupts a rather sombre parade – this is seen as the bright fun of the Americans destroying the grey dullness of the Russians (yes, it’s actually Germans, but I think we can all see the real targets). But if you think about it, wouldn’t just crashing in and destroying all the hard work your hosts have clearly put into a party to greet you, be the pinnacle of bad manners? Surely people who do that are not really people to admire.

Then (unusual for a film in 1981, but perhaps not so unusual for a Disney film), there is – what can only be described – as a shit-load of product placement: Coca-Cola, Hershey, Atari and even Budweiser all have lovingly long shots. These shiny things are supposed to be envied, but come off looking the height of crass consumerism. The girls in their dowdy grey dresses are contrasted with Catherine Bach in her tight racing leathers, somehow looking even more voluptuous and naked than she did in her Daisy Dukes. But because these girls appear so modest and demure next to her, she can’t help but resemble a corn-fed stripper. Our heroes fly a stars and stripes behind their car, tell their hotel manager ‘Fritz’ to take a hike and demand that the local bar plays Chuck Berry records (because that’s really down with the kids in 1981). As such they look like the most obnoxious brats, jumped-up bullies who’ll slap the face of anyone who disagrees with them.

And that’s really what I like about this film. Ostensibly it’s dull and repressive commie-land = bad; free and capitalist America = good. Yet it’s done with such an alarming lack of subtlety, such an amazing over confidence that it almost makes the opposite point. The East Germans are restrained people who get on with their jobs and live their lives (what kind of message is it really that it’s better to dance to rock’n’roll than work in a factory? Okay, the kids in question seem to be working in a very grey looking factory – but even so…); while the Americans are loud, self-absorbed and intolerant of other people’s points of view. This myopia is there to such an extent that the film has East German locals marvelling at the American wonder that is Herbie. The Volkswagen Beetle, lest we forget, is a German car.

I like to think that behind the scenes there was someone, perhaps the director or the screenwriter, who decided to add another layer of satire to the very broad front satire. Much like Gore Vidal being told not to let Chuck Heston into the secret of the gay subtext in ‘Ben Hur’, the cast weren’t to know, the studio weren’t to know and most of the audience would never realise – but there it is, peeking out from behind Herbie and smirking.