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.
Showing posts with label camp spectacular. Show all posts
Showing posts with label camp spectacular. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Atom-Man!!!
D. Stanley Kirby
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films
So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.
So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.
The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs
The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.
Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.
It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films
So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.
So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.
The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs
The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.
Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.
It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular (1966)
D. Ken Annakin
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Sunday, 13 October 2013
Liberace!!! (1955)
D.
George Sidney
Colour
Cole Porter also had a film made in his lifetime where he was portrayed as heterosexual and Hollywood conventional, but then while Cole Porter’s tunes were known, there was no real public persona. Liberace was a whole other matter. When this film was made Liberace was a very public presence, his TV show was still on air and he was a favourite of magazines. Later that year he would make his own film debut (also in a heterosexual role) in ‘Sincerely Yours’. It’s therefore particularly bizarre to watch him impersonated (again that’s totally the wrong word) by Robert Mitchum – a man who had his own very public, and truly different, persona. The results, as you can well imagine, are hilarious.
Mitchum makes no effort to pretend to be Liberace, merely adopting the coiffered hairstyle and the sparkly jackets, but giving no hint of anything which could be summed up as “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love” – a description of Liberace which appeared this very same year (although he did sue). This Liberace is a young man with a gift for the piano, who works his way up through the clubs, always dedicated to his craft. The ladies like him, but he’s shy and so just concentrates on tickling the ivories. Then one day he meets Tallulah, a chanteuse who blows him away. They begin a torrid affair which throws passion into both of their acts. Eventually though they can take it no longer and tearfully part, Liberace moving on to dedicate his life to his fans.
What we have then is utter fiction, and if the film was about a made up character named Ken Kiperace, one that would be utterly forgettable. However the lights, the glamour, the candelabras and the fact that this is supposed to be about the Liberace, just makes the whole thing a riot. Mitchum doesn’t even pretend to play the piano and just sings in his normal drawling tone. He obviously knows this is nonsense and so has determined to just get through it and pick up his pay cheque – which one imagines must have been sizeable. Russell however (in what is, to be fair, a completely fictional role) is a thirty foot high sex goddess, dancing and swinging her hips and showing her legs at every opportunity. Rarely did she sizzle more radiantly on the screen and – even with him being particularly languid and laid-back (to the point you wonder what kind of cigarettes he’s actually smoking) – the sparks are luminous in this Mitchum/Russell combination. It’s great viewing, all that heat and passion and lust, and then you remember this film is supposedly about Liberace.
Really, do such song titles as: “You’re the Woman for Me”; “Married in the Morning, Divorced by Noon”; and “The Best Looking Girl in Kansas” really have a place in a film purportedly about Lee Liberace?
I think, on balance, probably not.
Obviously it suffers in comparison to Michael Douglas in ‘Behind the Candelabra’, and is based on fact in the same way that ‘Star Wars’ is based on fact; but on its own giddy, eye popping terms, it’s a real treat.
Colour
One of the three Robert Mitchum/Jane Russell musicals made
by Columbia in the 1950s, but the one that really demands to be taken as a
screaming camp classic. A biopic (although I’m aware that’s totally the wrong
word) of ‘Lee’ Liberace and Tallulah: “the woman he loved and lost”.
Cole Porter also had a film made in his lifetime where he was portrayed as heterosexual and Hollywood conventional, but then while Cole Porter’s tunes were known, there was no real public persona. Liberace was a whole other matter. When this film was made Liberace was a very public presence, his TV show was still on air and he was a favourite of magazines. Later that year he would make his own film debut (also in a heterosexual role) in ‘Sincerely Yours’. It’s therefore particularly bizarre to watch him impersonated (again that’s totally the wrong word) by Robert Mitchum – a man who had his own very public, and truly different, persona. The results, as you can well imagine, are hilarious.
Mitchum makes no effort to pretend to be Liberace, merely adopting the coiffered hairstyle and the sparkly jackets, but giving no hint of anything which could be summed up as “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love” – a description of Liberace which appeared this very same year (although he did sue). This Liberace is a young man with a gift for the piano, who works his way up through the clubs, always dedicated to his craft. The ladies like him, but he’s shy and so just concentrates on tickling the ivories. Then one day he meets Tallulah, a chanteuse who blows him away. They begin a torrid affair which throws passion into both of their acts. Eventually though they can take it no longer and tearfully part, Liberace moving on to dedicate his life to his fans.
What we have then is utter fiction, and if the film was about a made up character named Ken Kiperace, one that would be utterly forgettable. However the lights, the glamour, the candelabras and the fact that this is supposed to be about the Liberace, just makes the whole thing a riot. Mitchum doesn’t even pretend to play the piano and just sings in his normal drawling tone. He obviously knows this is nonsense and so has determined to just get through it and pick up his pay cheque – which one imagines must have been sizeable. Russell however (in what is, to be fair, a completely fictional role) is a thirty foot high sex goddess, dancing and swinging her hips and showing her legs at every opportunity. Rarely did she sizzle more radiantly on the screen and – even with him being particularly languid and laid-back (to the point you wonder what kind of cigarettes he’s actually smoking) – the sparks are luminous in this Mitchum/Russell combination. It’s great viewing, all that heat and passion and lust, and then you remember this film is supposedly about Liberace.
Really, do such song titles as: “You’re the Woman for Me”; “Married in the Morning, Divorced by Noon”; and “The Best Looking Girl in Kansas” really have a place in a film purportedly about Lee Liberace?
I think, on balance, probably not.
Obviously it suffers in comparison to Michael Douglas in ‘Behind the Candelabra’, and is based on fact in the same way that ‘Star Wars’ is based on fact; but on its own giddy, eye popping terms, it’s a real treat.
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