A mind-numbingly unfunny and inept attempt at sketch comedy from the director responsible for the Psychotronic Man, and featuring Forrest Tucker in his final screen appearance - the poor man definitely deserved better. Interminable parodies of Donahue, low-budget horror films and late-night news programmes are interspersed with dreadful spoof advertisements, punchline-free quickies and abandoned sketch ideas trading in humour so remorselessly lowbrow and unambitious, even a slow ten-year-old would consider it an insult to his intelligence. The nadir is reached with a string quartet whose clothes are accidentally torn off as they screech and scrape their way through an arrangement of the film's (terrible) theme song, revealing some of the ugliest naked bodies ever committed to celluloid. If you enjoyed the Groove Tube, Tunnel Vision or the Kentucky Fried Movie, simply watch any of those films again - spare yourself the time and trouble of tracking down this deservedly obscure stinker.
Reviews
5 Reviews
Play Away
(1971–1984)
It really doesn't matter if it's raining or it's fine...
11 June 2017
Yes, that's an eight out of ten rating for a low-budget children's programme from the seventies and eighties which hasn't been repeated in over thirty years and huge chunks of which were wiped from the BBC's archives as recently as 1993. Am I wearing rose-tinted glasses, or (at the risk of mixing my optical metaphors) do I have a nostalgic blind spot as far as Play Away is concerned? Not a bit of it. Memories are nice, but facts are better. Several episodes of Play Away have made their way onto YouTube over the years courtesy of some lovely people who had the foresight to preserve them on home videotape at the time of their original broadcasts, and they've stood up extremely well. Everyone knows young children like nothing better than silly jokes and a bit of a sing-song, and Play Away - the slightly more grown-up sister programme to the most liberal learning establishment in England, the mighty Play School - offered this simple winning combination to the country's youngsters for a whopping thirteen years.
Play Away was apparently devised as a vehicle for the freewheeling talents of the likable Brian Cant, an engaging presence who, rather like his fellow Play School presenter Derek Griffiths, could create television gold almost at the drop of a hat. Give Griffiths a guitar and he'd give you a one man show; give Cant a cardboard tube and a paper hat and he was the happiest man alive. Cant was straight down the line, a trouper who gave you the laughs without speaking down to you. Along with Cant, several serious actors (including future Hollywood star Jeremy Irons), comedians (including Blackadder's Tony Robinson), musicians (Julie Covington of 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' fame), soap stars in waiting (Eastenders' Anita Dobson) and meat-and-potatoes light entertainment performers (including Floella Benjamin, then a veteran of West End musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, but now a Baroness with a seat in the House of Lords!) passed through Play Away's revolving door of cast members, the other mainstay being the pianist Jonathan Cohen, the leader of the versatile resident band who could play anything from nursery rhymes to pop songs and even instrumental jazz. At the time of writing, Cohen does an annual Christmas carol singalong concert at the Royal Albert Hall. I wonder if anyone has ever shouted out "Give us the Court of King Caractacus"?
Play Away was apparently devised as a vehicle for the freewheeling talents of the likable Brian Cant, an engaging presence who, rather like his fellow Play School presenter Derek Griffiths, could create television gold almost at the drop of a hat. Give Griffiths a guitar and he'd give you a one man show; give Cant a cardboard tube and a paper hat and he was the happiest man alive. Cant was straight down the line, a trouper who gave you the laughs without speaking down to you. Along with Cant, several serious actors (including future Hollywood star Jeremy Irons), comedians (including Blackadder's Tony Robinson), musicians (Julie Covington of 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' fame), soap stars in waiting (Eastenders' Anita Dobson) and meat-and-potatoes light entertainment performers (including Floella Benjamin, then a veteran of West End musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, but now a Baroness with a seat in the House of Lords!) passed through Play Away's revolving door of cast members, the other mainstay being the pianist Jonathan Cohen, the leader of the versatile resident band who could play anything from nursery rhymes to pop songs and even instrumental jazz. At the time of writing, Cohen does an annual Christmas carol singalong concert at the Royal Albert Hall. I wonder if anyone has ever shouted out "Give us the Court of King Caractacus"?
Zombie
(1979)
In defence of Lucio Fulci
1 October 2012
Italian journeyman director Lucio Fulci was the bete-noire of the British Board of Film Classification's James Ferman. Not content with hacking virtually all of his films to pieces, Ferman banned Fulci's A Cat In the Brain (1990) and the New York Ripper (1982) outright, even ordering the print of the latter film presented to the board to be removed from the country under police escort. What Ferman had failed to take into account was that Fulci, like Alfred Hitchcock before him, was having a laugh. By the time he embarked on his brief career as a horror director, Fulci had worked on all kinds of films from thrillers to slapstick comedy, from westerns to historical dramas - and he understood the language of cinema inside and out. What better time than this to turn subversive prankster? Above all else, Fulci was interested in fantasy, and the horror genre gave him all the freedom he wanted to be as outrageous, as incoherent, as bizarre and as flamboyant as he liked. As a consequence, if you come to Zombie Flesh Eaters (or City of the Living Dead, the Beyond or House By the Cemetery, for that matter) expecting "a real movie", you'll probably be disappointed. Character development, plot, dialogue, motivation and other petty concerns fall by the wayside in favour of increasingly outlandish set-pieces, flesh-crawling atmosphere and a child-like desire to overwhelm the audience's senses with full-tilt, high-camp carnage, usually culminating in a shatteringly bleak and cynical finalé.
Critics and viewers alike seem hell-bent on comparing George A.Romero and Lucio Fulci in an attempt to decide the ultimate zombie movie-maker. It's a shame this happens so often, as they were coming from very different places. Romero's films were about social commentary and black humour; Fulci's existed solely to entertain those who enjoyed being shocked and appalled. Another well-worn argument is that Fulci's films are "boring". Yes, if you've never watched anything other than MTV-influenced contemporary horror films where everything is shot in sludgy tones of green and blue and every violation of flesh and bone is accompanied by a deafening burst of thrash metal, Fulci's films doubtless seem to move at a stately pace. But it's worth remembering that his inspiration (for Zombie Flesh Eaters, at any rate) came not from Romero but from I Walked With A Zombie and White Zombie - both films from the 1940s. Equally tiresome are comments accusing his films of being technically poor. Again, if your only exposure to Fulci's work has been courtesy of nth-generation bootleg videotapes, you could be forgiven, but even a cursory viewing of a good-quality widescreen DVD of his best work is proof enough that the maestro was no hack. (Sergio Salvati's shimmering photography is particularly impressive here.) Yes, the dubbing can occasionally be distracting, but it's worth remembering he was working with Italian actors who couldn't speak English, or if they could, it was with a heavy accent. These films had to be sold around the world, so it made sense to have the performers dubbed. (Audiences in English-speaking countries remain notoriously resilient to subtitled offerings.) Poor acting? Point taken, but surely nobody goes to see a film with a title like Zombie Flesh Eaters expecting to see performances on a par with DeNiro at his peak? You go expecting to see zombies eating flesh! It's common sense! For what my opinion's worth, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson do good work here, as do Tisa Farrow (establishing Fulci's fascination with high-cheek-boned, clear-eyed blonds as later embodied by Catriona MacColl) Olga Karlatos (who falls victim to a memorably obscene bit of eyeball violation) and Italian character actor Al Cliver. But let's be honest, the actors take second place to the creative bloodletting - throats torn open, eyeballs punctured, a crusty underwater zombie battles a shark (this scene remains impressive decades later), heads are blasted, broken and split wide open, a horde of undead monsters feast on a corpse and there's a Night Of the Living Dead-influenced finale that takes place inside a burning hospital. It may not be art, but it's done with such infectious panache and energy you can't help but be won over.
Critics and viewers alike seem hell-bent on comparing George A.Romero and Lucio Fulci in an attempt to decide the ultimate zombie movie-maker. It's a shame this happens so often, as they were coming from very different places. Romero's films were about social commentary and black humour; Fulci's existed solely to entertain those who enjoyed being shocked and appalled. Another well-worn argument is that Fulci's films are "boring". Yes, if you've never watched anything other than MTV-influenced contemporary horror films where everything is shot in sludgy tones of green and blue and every violation of flesh and bone is accompanied by a deafening burst of thrash metal, Fulci's films doubtless seem to move at a stately pace. But it's worth remembering that his inspiration (for Zombie Flesh Eaters, at any rate) came not from Romero but from I Walked With A Zombie and White Zombie - both films from the 1940s. Equally tiresome are comments accusing his films of being technically poor. Again, if your only exposure to Fulci's work has been courtesy of nth-generation bootleg videotapes, you could be forgiven, but even a cursory viewing of a good-quality widescreen DVD of his best work is proof enough that the maestro was no hack. (Sergio Salvati's shimmering photography is particularly impressive here.) Yes, the dubbing can occasionally be distracting, but it's worth remembering he was working with Italian actors who couldn't speak English, or if they could, it was with a heavy accent. These films had to be sold around the world, so it made sense to have the performers dubbed. (Audiences in English-speaking countries remain notoriously resilient to subtitled offerings.) Poor acting? Point taken, but surely nobody goes to see a film with a title like Zombie Flesh Eaters expecting to see performances on a par with DeNiro at his peak? You go expecting to see zombies eating flesh! It's common sense! For what my opinion's worth, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson do good work here, as do Tisa Farrow (establishing Fulci's fascination with high-cheek-boned, clear-eyed blonds as later embodied by Catriona MacColl) Olga Karlatos (who falls victim to a memorably obscene bit of eyeball violation) and Italian character actor Al Cliver. But let's be honest, the actors take second place to the creative bloodletting - throats torn open, eyeballs punctured, a crusty underwater zombie battles a shark (this scene remains impressive decades later), heads are blasted, broken and split wide open, a horde of undead monsters feast on a corpse and there's a Night Of the Living Dead-influenced finale that takes place inside a burning hospital. It may not be art, but it's done with such infectious panache and energy you can't help but be won over.
Cold Light of Day
(1990)
A little-known but extremely disturbing chiller, based on a notorious true story
3 May 2012
Between 1978 and 1983, Dennis Nilsen - an outwardly unremarkable former soldier and police officer turned civil servant - killed at least fifteen men and boys (most of them students or homeless) in gruesome circumstances, allegedly retaining the corpses for sex acts before disposing of the butchered remains by hiding them in cupboards, under the floorboards, or simply by flushing them down the toilet. This grimy, clammy, little-seen independent film is a lightly fictionalised account of Nilsen's hideous deeds, with a standout performance from Bob Flag as the milquetoast murderer, here renamed Jorden March.
Fhiona Louise's film, clearly made on a shoestring budget, steers clear of exploitation tactics, choosing instead to cast its characters adrift in a singularly bleak, uncaring and desolate world of tatty pubs, squalid bed-sits, greasy cafés and grubby bathrooms. The police interrogation of March is inter-cut with flashbacks that reveal not just his crimes (a living room disembowelment and the discovery of what's blocking the drains will send a shiver down the spines of even the hardiest souls) but also provide a window of understanding into what has tipped the apparently kindly loner over the edge. Louise's direction is unobtrusive and detached, allowing the lengthy exchanges between the characters to play out in several lengthy takes, but it's this cold, flat, cinema-verité style that affords the proceedings much of their chilling power, conveying the sense that such horrors really could be unfolding in the street, or even the house, just around the corner.
It's an easy film to admire - it won several awards - but it's not an easy film to watch, let alone enjoy. As a fitting footnote, a caption card dedicates the preceding horrors to "those too sensitive for this world" - which, in his own perverse and twisted way, Nilsen surely was.
Fhiona Louise's film, clearly made on a shoestring budget, steers clear of exploitation tactics, choosing instead to cast its characters adrift in a singularly bleak, uncaring and desolate world of tatty pubs, squalid bed-sits, greasy cafés and grubby bathrooms. The police interrogation of March is inter-cut with flashbacks that reveal not just his crimes (a living room disembowelment and the discovery of what's blocking the drains will send a shiver down the spines of even the hardiest souls) but also provide a window of understanding into what has tipped the apparently kindly loner over the edge. Louise's direction is unobtrusive and detached, allowing the lengthy exchanges between the characters to play out in several lengthy takes, but it's this cold, flat, cinema-verité style that affords the proceedings much of their chilling power, conveying the sense that such horrors really could be unfolding in the street, or even the house, just around the corner.
It's an easy film to admire - it won several awards - but it's not an easy film to watch, let alone enjoy. As a fitting footnote, a caption card dedicates the preceding horrors to "those too sensitive for this world" - which, in his own perverse and twisted way, Nilsen surely was.
"That's that, then!"
3 May 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Undoubtedly one of the very best early Steptoe and Son programmes, this episode started the series properly a full six months after the well-received pilot episode 'the Offer', and you can hear right from the beginning how delighted the studio audience were to see the grubby, down-to-earth Albert and his ambitious, permanently disgusted son Harold back in action.
Harold has just completed another day on the rounds and is preparing to go out for the evening whilst Albert warms up dead torch batteries in the oven, claiming "you get a few extra hours out of 'em that way". When Harold reveals that he is meeting his new girlfriend, Albert suggests bringing her back to the house for dinner. After going to a great deal of trouble (at least, by the Steptoes' standards), Harold's girlfriend turns up an hour late and is sent packing - except someone's been tampering with the clock...
A very densely packed and tightly written episode, The Bird fleshes out the characters and lays bare their dysfunctional relationship. The short sequence that alludes to Albert being a violent father remains something of a shock - it's difficult to imagine the burly Harold ever being frightened of his scrawny, diminutive father, but clearly the emotional scars run deeper than the physical. But this is nothing compared to the lengths that Albert will go to to make sure that things stay exactly as they are, with Harold - the grafter, the breadwinner - permanently under his thumb and at his beck and call. In what would become a Steptoe trademark, the lead characters' endless sparring and bickering is nothing more than a vainglorious attempt at camouflaging the very real love and co-dependence they feel for each other.
There are plenty of laughs here as well, most notably Harold holding his "dirty old man" face down over the sink whilst scrubbing his neck with scouring powder, and Albert's impromptu rendition of Chubby Checker's 'Let's Twist Again' that comes to a grinding halt when his knee gives way. A full five decades later, Galton and Simpson's priceless characters - thanks in no small part to the towering performances of Corbett and Brambell - still has the power to make us laugh, make us cry, and - most importantly - make us think.
Harold has just completed another day on the rounds and is preparing to go out for the evening whilst Albert warms up dead torch batteries in the oven, claiming "you get a few extra hours out of 'em that way". When Harold reveals that he is meeting his new girlfriend, Albert suggests bringing her back to the house for dinner. After going to a great deal of trouble (at least, by the Steptoes' standards), Harold's girlfriend turns up an hour late and is sent packing - except someone's been tampering with the clock...
A very densely packed and tightly written episode, The Bird fleshes out the characters and lays bare their dysfunctional relationship. The short sequence that alludes to Albert being a violent father remains something of a shock - it's difficult to imagine the burly Harold ever being frightened of his scrawny, diminutive father, but clearly the emotional scars run deeper than the physical. But this is nothing compared to the lengths that Albert will go to to make sure that things stay exactly as they are, with Harold - the grafter, the breadwinner - permanently under his thumb and at his beck and call. In what would become a Steptoe trademark, the lead characters' endless sparring and bickering is nothing more than a vainglorious attempt at camouflaging the very real love and co-dependence they feel for each other.
There are plenty of laughs here as well, most notably Harold holding his "dirty old man" face down over the sink whilst scrubbing his neck with scouring powder, and Albert's impromptu rendition of Chubby Checker's 'Let's Twist Again' that comes to a grinding halt when his knee gives way. A full five decades later, Galton and Simpson's priceless characters - thanks in no small part to the towering performances of Corbett and Brambell - still has the power to make us laugh, make us cry, and - most importantly - make us think.
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