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.

Kiss Me Dangerous (1972)

D. Henry Levin
Colour
 

So here’s a question: why isn’t a series of film starring the one and only Tom Jones as an ultra-cool private detective in The City of Angels an almighty camp-fest? Those Matt Helm films made in the 1960s are far camper. Batman the TV series was off the scale campness compared to this, and that didn’t even have the added value of a singer smugly strutting his way through the lead part. Here we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales – but really just playing Tom Jones as a private detective – tackling crime in downtown Los Angeles, punching bad guys, showing off nifty gadgets, and even in this film sporting a brand new catchphrase (“Not bad for a lad from Ponty”) and yet it isn’t total over the top camp of the campest fashion.


Why, oh why, is this?


Partly I think the answer is because it’s made in the 1970s. Matt Helm, ‘The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular’ and all those other Bond knock-offs were shot in the bright shades of the 1960s, which was very much the in-palate back then; while these films have more 1970s hues which don’t lend themselves to sheer campness. (Try and imagine a camp comedy that looks like ‘The Conversation’. Not easy is it.) But more than that, we have as the star the ultimate macho-man; the muscled, hairy Welsh love god. A lad from Ponty made very good. Yes, Tom itself keeps it from being camp. In fact, if you were to tell this good boyo from the valleys – now apparently a private detective in LA – that he was camp, he’d probably punch you in the nose.
 

In much the same vein as ‘Vengeance Man’, Tom tours around LA, sorts out bad guys, foils an evil plot and gets it on with lots of nubile young nymphettes who are waiting like moist peaches for him to pluck. When Italian nuclear physicist, Claudia Cardinale, (not the most likely of nuclear physicists, I agree, but still doing a much better job than Denise Richards in ‘The World is not Enough’) is kidnapped on an LA stopover it’s up to Tom to spring into action and save the day before the knowledge inside her head is harnessed to create a new super weapon. His best source of information is bored party girl, Pamela Tiffin (still best known for dancing in a bikini in ‘Harper’), who Tom has the predictable frosty relationship with right until he seduces her. Along the way there are fistfights, gunfight, car-chases, more than one helicopter explosion and smooch after smooch after smooch. Until at the end when the gorgeous Claudia (in what is really a cameo) is so grateful for being rescued she makes her way to Tom’s bed. Of course she does.
 

The bad guy’s representative on Earth is played by Barry Nelson (himself a one-time James Bond), but what’s really interesting is who he seems to work for. We see this Mr Big in Las Vegas, in a distinctive rhinestone jumpsuit and barking orders in an unmistakable drawl. There’s big rings, the glimpsed side of an enormous pair of sunglasses and a medallion with the legend ‘TBC’. We never see his face and that’s led to some writers believing it isn’t really him – but no, this is Elvis, in his very last acting role, playing the supervillain against Tom Jones’s superhero.
 

So the ultimate boy’s adventure, getting it on with Claudia Cardinale, amongst many other gorgeous ladies, and to top it all, having Elvis fucking Presley in a guest appearance – not bad for a lad from Ponty indeed.

Pont-y-Clun (2004)

D. Lee Edwards
Grainy and gritty colour, tinged by relentless Welsh rain


A teenager is hiding out in the woods. We open with him sat high in a tree, close to the bark, his eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. Before long a couple pass by underneath, a young man and younger woman. The man is leading her by hand and doing all the talking. His voice is light and fruity, it is posh, it is English. Seriously, it is English beyond the point of parody, the kind of English voice Bertie Wooster would deem a bit ‘plummy’. The teenager crouches close to the branches as they go past. It’s not long before the couple stop and the man lays her back, he is still talking, still impressing her with his accent and his breeding. He talks and talks, even when he is taking her clothes off. She only says one word and that is “Diolch”, Welsh for ‘Thank you’. Clearly it’s a signal, as the teenager leaps from the tree and expertly slits the man’s throat. The girl smiles at him the whole time, moving swiftly from coquettish to really turned on.


And so begins ‘Pont-Y-Clun’ a Welsh horror/thriller/love story: the tale of two murderous young lovers, ‘Badlands’ with an asbo and acting lessons from ‘Pobol-Y-Cwm’. Gwilliam is a young lad with a bad reputation, one who has been driven out of his local town (unnamed in the film, but presumably the small South Wales town of Pont-y-Clun – home to a pub called ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, which is the only thing I know about it). However even though he is despised and loathed by the townsfolk, so much so that even his parents spit to the ground when they refer to him, he is loved by one person. Nubile and lovely young Delyth Parry, who helps him make ends meet, by luring young English tourists into the nearby woods so that Gwilliam can kill them, steal their clothes, take their money and – gulp – it’s hinted, eat them. Eventually the pile of bones of dead Englishmen gets so high that even the Welsh police have to investigate.


(Interestingly, Gwilliam, with his shock of red-hair and NHS glasses, looks like a grown up Norman Price from Welsh TV’s ‘Fireman Sam’. Given how naughty Norman Price is in ‘Fireman Sam’, maybe this film serves as a warning from the future. Unless Norman is taken in hand, his hometown of Ponty-Pandy will also find itself piled high with the corpses of dead computer generated Englishmen.)


There’s a very amusing moment, when local Detective Inspector Owen Teale (appearing on this blog for the second time this week) sighs and says that six dead Englishmen is just too many. It gives the impression that three or four dead Englishmen would be well within acceptable levels, but really Gwilliam is being greedy by going for half a dozen. I like this film, it’s taut and well made, and really understands the trick that suggested violence is the most horrific – but the anti-English flavour of it means that it was never going to travel easily over the border. Gwilliam even makes it clear he would never kill real people, ie. the Welsh; while Delyth ponders how weird it would be to have actual sex with an Englishman. (The film also isn’t helped by the fact that – in the version I saw – some of the Welsh language scenes aren’t subtitled, making it seem like some strange private joke against English speakers). So even though I like this movie, it sums up one of the main things I dislike about Welsh culture: namely, the incredibly chippy need to punch upwards. It’s an attitude that exists in TV, films, local news and even just talking to people on the street or in the pub, that identification as the poor, trodden down underdog who has to hit out at the big bully, even though that particular big bully has long since stopped paying attention. A little bit of nationalistic banter is fine, but Welsh nationalism – certainly as far as the English are concerned – has a real aggrieved nastiness to it that never seems particularly justified. Let’s be fair, the good people of Llantrisant, Llanelli and Llandaff may hate the English; but the good people of Leeds, Leicester and Luton are more likely to be baffled by it than share the animosity.

By the time the police enter the woods we are in Rambo territory, with do and die for the two young lovers, desperate to hang onto each other even as their murderous world falls apart. This is a film like its central character, it’s rude, overly aggressive and suffers from alarming xenophobia, but like redheaded Gwilliam it’s not totally impossible for someone to love – or at least, appreciate – it.

The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities (1994)

D. Marco Webber
Colour

So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’, ‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles (most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee again.

 

Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.

 

We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones. Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post ‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work. (Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.

 

If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter, performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes – Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.

 

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.