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.

Bandits Three (1973)

D. Marco De Freitas
Colour

Even ignoring the obvious, cannibalism was big in Italian cinema in the 1970s

Here, for example, is Italian cinema strapping on a big napkin and cannibalising itself. Where one genius visionary took ideas from American cinema, made them his own and created cinema gold and his own genre, here is another much less talented Italian director taking those ideas second hand from the genius and just making pretty much the same film – but cheaper and far less good. Yes, just as real spaghetti begets pasta shapes in tins in supermarkets, so spaghetti westerns begets the kind of low grade-horse operas that spaghetti westerns were supposed to blow away.*

Actually in the 1970s, thanks to Sergio Leone’s success, Italian westerns were two a lira. This one is different though. This one is actually an unofficial remake of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’.
By ‘unofficial remake’. I mean it uses exactly the same story, exactly the same beats and even some of the exact same shots.

Only this one has English actors (and one Anglo-Australian) as the leads, English actors who only make a half-hearted attempt at the accent and are clearly so under invested it’s amazing they don’t check their anachronistic wrist watches to see how long it’s going to be before each scene ends.
We have George Lazenby (The Good), Stewart Grainger (The Bad) and Kenneth Moore (The Ugly), all wandering around the Spanish countryside in search of buried treasure. Yes, that’s as weird a combination as it sounds on paper. If Clint Eastwood thought he was low down the list of actors for ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, Lord knows what this list looked like.

‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ itself seems to take place in a dreamlike version of America, ‘Three Bandits’ however barely pretends to be America at all. The accents don’t help, with Moore all but giving up on his after about two scenes to be a creepy public school boy (of the minor type) wandering incongruously around the dessert, Granger is supposed to be from Tennessee but clearly sees the whole thing as far below him, and Lazenby skips between Chelsea and Canberra while trying to be hard arsed and charismatic and failing completely. There are crosses and double crosses, buried treasure, stock footage of a bridge blowing up (which looks alarmingly like it is the very footage from ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ – which is just cheeky) and a final graveyard Mexican stand-off where the cheap, tinkling score tries to find some way in which it can soar.

It’s in no way a great film, but it’s perversely interesting to watch what happens when similar ingredients go into the mix and cinematic alchemy triumphantly fails to happen.


* I know I’ve moved from a cannibalism metaphor to a spaghetti shaped metaphor in the space of one paragraph. They’re both food based though so I think I can get away with it. Suffice to say that this warmed up and stodgy rubbish, and I know from bitter experience that both human flesh and spaghetti lose their flavour after being whacked in the microwave.

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?

Angels in Los Angeles (1975)

D. Ted Grimley
Colour

The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.

But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.

As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.

And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.

The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.

The Gentleman in the Pub (1947)

D. Arnold Pouter
B&W

That rarest of things: an English Boris Karlofff movie.

Boris Karloff just seems such an international figure. Even though his career was predominantly American, the name he took and that sinister screen persona made it seem like he was from some strange forgotten land. Bela Lugosi had a similar name, but he had an accent which gave away that he was from a fixed Eastern European locale. Karloff with his more mid-Atlantic tones was just impossible to place (and you certainly wouldn't have imagined he was from Catford in South East London. Somehow I can’t imagine Karloff on a Cockney fruit stall). No, Boris Karloff the star of scary movies hailed from some mysterious isle, maybe the same one as King Kong, and no doubt he hatched from an egg fully grown as the dapper, sinister and yet vulnerable gentleman we know.

Here he is back home, in that version of England which existed in a film studio’s polite and ordered mind, as a man who occupies the corner stool of a saloon bar and tells eerie tales. (In many ways like P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner, without the jokes, but with a surprising amount of horror and death.) Karloff relates these stories with a sinister smile on his face, his voice rumbling with menace, his hand forever stroking a scary, one-eyed black dog. Indeed what gives away that this pub isn't quite normal is the fact that everyone else in the pub just accepts Boris as one of them and don't run a mile from him – while in reality his presence would make any pint of warm ale feel uncomfortably chilled.

On a stormy night a charisma void of an actor, Robert Wainwright, stops by this country pub for a gin and water and a relief from his long drive. Boris has already embarked on that evening’s tales and the young man is drawn into listening, and so begins a portmanteau of stories - one about a young man breaking his father's heart by running away and the comeuppance that falls upon him; one is an act of cowardice in the war which has terrible consequences, and one is a man who breaks his fiancée’s heart in a tale which leads to murder and destruction. The realisation slowly dawns on this young visitor to the pub that all of these are all sinister twists on events which have happened in his own life.

The confrontation between him and Karloff swiftly escalates beyond all reasonable disbelief, and the (SPOILER ALERT) revelation that its Karloff's dog who is the sinister force is too silly for words, but in the main this is a scary and tense film where Karloff comes gloriously home, purring at his most superbly sinister in an unmistakably British setting.

At the end the young man runs into the darkness and the pub goes back to how it was, presumably before a name change and a visit from those poor young lads in ‘An American Werewolf in London’.

Mummy in Manhattan (1936)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.

Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.

Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!

This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.

When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.

It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?

At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.

The Sexy Goth Girl in the Lake (2004)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour (although the sex scenes are in black & white, so we can pretend they’re art)

The first Sexy Goth Detective film was like an episode of ‘Columbo’, but the second one is like the weirdest episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ you’ll ever see. There’s the small town where everyone knows each other, the dramatic discovery of a body, a cavalcade of suspects, and one lone woman who is prying into everyone’s lives, rustling feathers and generally making sure she’s irritating as hell in her quest for the truth. But what differentiates this from Jessica Fletcher (or Jane Marple) is that this film screams modern.

And sexy.

Sexy and wild in a way that Jessica Fletcher never ever was.

 (Well, maybe in her younger days).

The corpse of a 22 year old goth girl is pulled from the lake in the charmingly named town of Girdle. She was an outsider so her death isn’t investigated as thoroughly as it might be by the chief of police, but she has a friend driving to town determined that justice must be done. Enter Liddy D’Eath as the sexy goth detective – there to turn heads and cause discomfort in every way she can.

It really is a tour de force for both her and Von De Mille’s dialogue. All those scenes we’ve seen so many times before: the tense interrogation in the booth of a cafeteria; the leaning on a post office counter to interrogate a witness who is cagy as hell; the car chase on the dark country lanes outside the town;  the screaming confrontation with the relative of the deceased who doesn’t think the detective is doing her right. All of that is here and all of it crackles. It of course helps that Liddy has gone full on goth for this, with every harsh line of make-up and elegantly torn piece of clothing screaming that she is part of an alternative culture.

Okay, this may sound tame as hell. “What happened to the edgy promise of the original sexy goth girls film?” you may ask. Well, to counter balance the softness we do have a small town femme fatale who Liddy falls hard for her and goes skinny dipping in the lake with before a long soft-focus sex scene. Those expecting  a movie to watch over their cocoa will no doubt choke on their marshmallows at this point. It sticks out as much as a full blown S&M scene would in the middle of Cabot Cove. I’ve always said De Mille would be happier making porn and now he has.

The other characters aren’t well drawn and the plot has not only run away from the director by the end, but gone and hidden, yet thanks to a classy performance by the heroine this is a much watch.