tomfarrellmedia

Oh Dear Oh Dear. Look what too much coke, too much hubris and too little homework can lead to. *Spoiler* Narrated Mr Kite (George Burns who does most of the talking) four callow lads from Heartland USA take up the mantle of the deceased Sergeant Pepper whose music ended two world wars and pulled America out of the Depression. No I'm not making this up. A greedy media mogul hears the music and signs them up, hoping to bleed them white while plotting world domination with the help of a mad scientist (Steve Martin) and an evil Future Villain Band (Aerosmith). Their slogan is 'We Hate Love. We Hate Joy. We Love Money' However, despite these machinations, the power of the music always prevails to the extent that Strawberry Fields is even risen from the dead and Frankie Howerd turned into the Pope. A challenge, when watching bizarre piece of 1970s kitsch is check how many times you find yourself saying 'What were they thinking?' Barry Gibb, apparently in all seriousness, told Rolling Stone magazine that this movie would lead to their covers becoming the definitive versions of the Lennon-McCartney works, because "the Beatles don't exist as a band now and they've never done Sergeant Pepper live anyway." He was talking about a movie in which the Fab's Bee Gee-Peter Frampton alter egos utter virtually no dialogue, something that puts a crimp on the Billy Shears-Strawberry Fields romance. (even the greatest actors can only resort to meaningful facial expressions for so long and neither are even passable actors). A movie in which Aerosmith, bleary eyed and powdery of nostril agreed to join so Steve Tyler could kill Frampton on screen, whom they hated. In 1978 a Sunday paper in Britain reported that George Harrison was considering suing over this movie. It's not hard to see why. Despite George Martin being on hand, respectable covers by Earth Wind and Fire and Aerosmith are the exception. The rule is the truly teeth grinding 'When I'm 64' by Howerd and Sandy Farina. If producer Robert Stigwood and director Michael Schultz had had their ears to the ground, they'd have known a few things. First off, the Hollywood musical was dead and buried. Yes, the 1970s might have had the likes of Bob Fosse's Cabaret but that relied on good acting and a compelling screenplay. Secondly, rock itself was moving away from the baroque and the lavish spectacle. Punk was only one manifestation of this shift. If the London based Stigwood had switched on Top of the Pops and seen Queen's video for the monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody he might have guessed that video and MTV were just a few short years away. Thirdly, the target audience for a movie that has no real script and bargain basement special effects despite an obvious hefty budget can tell the difference between the deliberately overblown before-its-time irony of Ken Russell's Tommy (1975) and campy kitsch.

Picture this: The year is 1983. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is drifting from the radio and Dynasty is on the TV. A wide-eyed child sits in the cinema, having been vowed by the two Superman epics of 1978 and 1980...the apocalyptic death of Krypton, the baby lifting the truck in Smallville, Clark's bumbling crush on Lois, General Zod's defiant screams at an emasculated Son of Jor-El, Metropolis a battleground...ahhhh, it was going to take some doing to top all that. But that child had faith in the people who made I and II. And then along comes a camp slapstick comedy to make a particularly corny episode of the Batman circa 1968 look like the work of an auteur. Yes, I was that child and this review is turning into a rant but by God, I was only one of many many wide eyed children. The first two movies made $100 million each, compared with around $59 million for this one. And yes, Superman IV probably grossed about $19.99 (about twice its budget) but the idea of Superman breaking his rule of non-interference in human history is a good premise, spoiled by lack of money and talent. Superman III, conceived as a comedy vehicle for Richard Pryor, was a bad idea that exactly lived up to its promise. Pryor plays Gus Gorman a man whose IQ is supposedly high enough for him to be able to do ridiculous like make the green and red man brawl on the traffic lights but exposes his wealth to the villain Ross (Vaughun) and shoots off the edge of the villains's skyscraper penthouse on skis (which he survives). Gus; computer skills get him in with Ross and his lover and sister who are plotting to use computers to control the world's wealth, something that Superman is constantly thwarting. For example, he puts out a fire in a chemical factory but blowing cold on a lake, lifting the huge chunk of ice and laying it down on the scene of the blaze...we can't imagine that doing good for the community that's been robbed of its lake. Using a shard of radioactive kryptonite, they manage to create an evil superman. "I hope you don't expect me to save you...cos I don't do that any more!" he tells the blonde bimbo sitting atop Liberty's crown. Never mind, he will have his way with her later on (I thought in SM II he had to be divested of his powers by the red rays of Krypton before an erection was possible?) Still we would imagine that an evil superman would do something like lazer ray the waste tanks open on a nuclear power plant and irradiate the whole west coast of America. Instead he goes into a bar and fires peanuts at the mirror..."What ya lookin' at?!" the drunk, dark-caped crusader, now sporting a jawline of stubble, slurs at the plebs in the street. He also does things like blow out the Olympic flame (whoa major league evilness here!) and beat up his goodie-goodie alter ego in a junkyard. As for Clark, he goes to Smallville and comes face to face with one time crush Lana and his bullying nemesis Brad, the movie's most bearable part. But at the end of the day, this is not so much Superman and Pryorman the Movie. And Pryor was always at his best when a foul-mouthed, taboo-busting stand up. No disrespect either to Robery Vaughun but as a screen villain, he has neither the wit of Gene 'Miss Tessmacher!' Hackman nor the menace of Terrence 'Kneel before Zod!' Stamp. Let us hope lessons have been learnt and we don't see Brandon Routh pared with Chris Rock next summer with the latter taking up half the movie...

"A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then that it is the year 10191. The Known Universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life, the spice expands consciousness, the spice is vital to space travel...." intones a pretty lady against a starry backdrop at the start of this movie. Right so we've that out of the way, let's get down to the actual movie. Ooooops back she comes " Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, the spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe, a desolate, dry planet with vast deserts. Hidden away within the rocks of these deserts are a people known as the Fremen, who have long held a prophecy, .. that a man would come, a messiah, who would lead them to true freedom. The planet is Arrakis,... also known as .. Dune." Are you still reading this??? Think what it must have been like for the poor souls in the cinemas back in 1984-5. Frank Herbert's Dune was an immense literary success back in 1965 with its visions of a galactic imperium that had moved beyond technology as our culture recognizes it and begun manipulating biology and space travel. Thousands of years before, something called the Butlerian Jihad had seen humanity revolt against controlling machines and establish an almost neo-feudal power structure wherein hereditary bodies such as the Bene Gesserit and Spacing Guild play off competing planetary dynasties against each other. Herbert's novel alluded to the Middle Eastern Oil crisis, the ecological movement, hallucinogenic drugs and was shrewd enough to predict the revival of Holy War as a political force. When he agreed to collaborate with David Lynch in the early 1980s to film all this a problem arose: would the big screen adaptation be true to the novel's esoteric intellectualism or would it simply be Star Wars with a knife-wielding Sting? In the end, they opted for a action-love story with space opera elements, but kept in enough 'weird stuff' to placate any sci-fi long-hairs who had read the novel in '65. And, surprise surprise, they ended up alienating the kids and the hippies. A number of problems doom Dune to damnation. Firstly, the woefully inept casting. Kyle McLachlan is a fine actor for sure, but as a messiah to the Fremen and a love interest to Chani (Sean Young) he just doesn't cut it. To be fair, he is given an appallingly dire script which at one point has him seeking 'closure' for his Dad's brutal murder by riding on a giant worm and bellowing into the desert night "Father...the sleeper has AWOKEN!!!!!!!!" That's to say nothing of the annoying voice overs that riddle the movie ("I will bend like a reed in the wind" while duelling with Sting or "Fear is the mind killer! while having his hand toasted in a box). Also, a slew of fine actors and actresses are given walk-ons that allow them to do little more than scowl and deliver turgid dialog. Jose Ferer looks like he about to burst out laughing while addresses a massive tadpole in a tank during a visit by the Spacing Guild. That said, there are some highly ridiculous performances too. On no account watch any part where the badly dubbed cute kid Alia speaks with food or drink in your mouth because you'll risk choking. Then there are the shoddy special effects that bely the fact that Dune had a then unprecedented $50 million budget. The part when the floating baron, screaming in agony is sent hurtling through a wall to be eaten by a giant phallic worm is truly hilarious. Speaking of which, the one half-effective sequence in the movie is set on the Harkonnen home world of Giedi Prime. Recalling Lynch's Eraserhead, it is all hissing pipes and mutation. Even here, the silly dialog is ubiquitous, as the Baron's mentat intones "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion." Huh??? Possibly no movie in history has capped Dune for silly names..Thufir Hawat, Irulan Corrino, Paul Usul Maud Dib, Feyd Rautha Harkonnen, Shadout Mapes, Gurney Halleck, Gom Jabbar, Kwitzatz Haderach.... When you see this dire effort, you will be yelling 'Chuk....saaaa!' at your DVD player in the hope that you too, like Paul Maud Dib, can make it explode.

ahhh...dear old nineteen seventy four. The world's economy was crumbling under the impact of the oil shock, Richard Nixon's head was on the block and wars were raging in Vietnam, Ulster, Cyprus and Cambodia. If you were a randy adolescent, what better way to escape the madness than by slipping into a grotty pre-Multiplex era cinema, Barrat's sherbert fountain in hand, Pearl and Dean ads in your ears and explore the wonderful new world of the permissive society? The Joy of Sex had just been published, Aids was still many years away...what carnal delights could be had in those bell-bottomed, glammed up times? And if Confessions of a Window Cleaner's protagonist, young Timmy Lea, was at all typical, then being a demin-clad, rubber lipped minger was no barrier to scoring more hole-in-ones than Tiger Woods. Robin Askwith, previously a bit-part actor in Carry On Girls is introduced to us a what passes for an English stud in the days of Slade and three day weeks. He's no loser, the theme song assures us, he just 'doesn't ever win.' Scrubbing windows up and down Merrie England, he looks into a bedroom and sees a badly edited film of some nude girl oiling herself. His work puts him in contact with innumerable clapped out housewives whose 'botties' and 'beezers' are invariably popped out for the benefit of our (possibly clapped up) Cassanova. One wonders if the ever present threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union spurred these women into getting as much 'crumpet' as possible before the real big bang. Anyway, Timmy's brother-in-law, Sid (Tony Booth) is soon to be a father but that doesn't stop him from chasing the skirt. Timmy himself spouts sexist attempts at humour 'What a knocker factory!' with such aplomb, there is a certain weird genius to Askwith's performance. It takes skill to portray a leading character who is such an unbelievably charmless neanderthal. Timmy puts it about but he finds himself falling for the blond Liz (no English Bardot but still light years out of his league) who inevitably takes a dim view of her boyfriend eying up nude school girls and so forth. Elsewhere, casual homophobia and racism make you wonder if the script writers just decided to sit in on a National Front pub quiz. As for the sex...well in the unlikely event of a 40th anniversary DVD in 2014 may I suggest a tag-line? (putting the 'rot' into erotica). But if one thing does make Confessions interesting is that, away from the smut and the crass humour (the likes of which make the Carry Ons look like The Simpsons) Confessions offers a view of 1970s urban England to complete with the angriest Ken Loach movie in terms of its dystopian bleakness. Peeling flock wallpaper and horrid furniture surround Sid and Timmy Lea in their council house while the apartments of some of the 'birds' whose windows they scrub are resplendently ghastly. Maybe there was a surfeit of wild sex to be had in those far off times. Watch this movie and conclude that it was small consolidation.

Watching the 1980 disaster spoof Airplane! without having seen this movie is funny enough. But boy, does the sheer cheesiness of the genre get thrown into sharp relief when you see Airport 1975. (We've got to get these people to a hospital...A hospital! what is it?! It's big building with patients, but that's not important now)Even the title suggests the makers actually wanted the picture to live forever as a monument to the kitsch that shared the movie billboards with classics like Taxi Driver and The Godfather. OK,so we want a catchy title for our movie? I know...let's pick one that becomes dated on January 1st, 1976. Let us also imagine what might happen if The Loveboat were to sprout wings and take off for the city of The Mormons but in midair, a smaller aircraft causes an accident of such such infinite improbability, only Brian of Nazareth falling from a tower and being rescued by a passing spaceship comes close. And when the collision occurs, a blow-up dummy of the co-pilot gets sucked out of the hole in the flight cabin (are we seeing the Airplane! parrallels now?) The impact also leaves one of his colleagues (Eric Estrada, pre CHiPs) dead and the other (Efrem Zimablist) drenched in tomato sauce. Luckily, a descendant of Ben Hur, Captain Murdoch (Charlton Heston) is on the ground to help guide the stewardess (note the pre-PC terminology of the time...roar a bit louder Helen) played by Karen Black into piloting the 747 to safety. Now, we sadly don't get any flashbacks to Vietnam and Heston wooing Black in the Negombo Bar, as with Airplane's Ted Stryker, but the two are lovers. Back in 1975, Heston could still carry a male romantic lead. It is the assembly of passengers that make this stand out from the boring Airport 77 and the 'What the....?' jaw-dropping ridiculousness of Airport 79 The Concorde. We have Gloria Swanson as...Gloria Swanson,Myrna Loy as the dowager with the dog, the 70s 'hip dudes', a precious brat child, an unpleasant old man. There aren't any Hare Krishnas on board sadly, but they are two nuns played by Martha Scott and...Helen Reddy. Yes, Heddy Reddy. Yes, THAT Helen Reddy. Although she was raking in the dollars from hits like 'Angie Baby' and 'I am Woman' in 1975,it seems she wanted to act. But while Bowie, Jagger and even Ringo Starr went for intelligent roles, poor Helen had to don a nun's habit and play the guitar for Linda Blair, a poor kid who will die if the plane doesn't land in time. Apparently, during all that pea-soup vomiting, cursing-at-priests business during the previous year's hit, The Exorcist, little Linda brought up both her kidneys. Will the plane crash? Will it land? This reviewer cannot divulge. But tragically, at no point does Heston quip 'Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue' and end up floating from the control tower ceiling...

It is safe to say that Star Wars was THE big culture craze of the 1970s. The Sixities had Beatlemania, the Seventies had Star Wars-mania. And just to underscore the parallel, the Fab Four released a film 'The Magical Mystery Tour' which was shown on Christmas 1968 by the BBC in black and white. The movie was a critical and commercial disaster, regarded as painfully bad. Exactly a decade later, the Midas-touch of Star Wars also gave out when Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie ventured onto the small screen for this seasonal special. But while the 1968 TV fiasco at least gave us hits like 'I am the Walrus' and 'Fool on the Hill', the 1978 special has Carrie Fisher singing 'The Life Day Song' to the tune of the John Williams theme music! Yep..you read that right. Carrie Fisher, resplendent in her bedlinen-and 'donught' hairdo warbles a song... "A day that takes us through the darkness/A day that leads us to life/A day that leads us to celebrate/A lifeee/To live/To laugh/To dream/To grow/To know....!!!!" Anyone who thought 'Attack of the Clones' was a disappointment needs to check out this CBS 'family special' in which Han and Chewbacca are racing across the galaxy to get to Chewie's home planet in time for the Wookie's equivalent of Thanksgiving, Life Day. This being 'A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away' there can't be a Christmas, you see. The equivalent seems to involve lots of robed and hooded Wookies marching across the stars into the sun! Parts of 'Episode Four a New Hope' that ended up on the cutting room floor are slotted in for the space sequences. The Millennium Falcon is being pursued by some highly camp Imperials. Meanwhile, back on Chewbacca's planet we are introduced to his 'wife' (Malla) his cutsey proto-Ewok son (Lumpy) and his rather perverted father-in-law Itchy. Thus for about 10-15 minutes we have Malla in an apron making 'HHHAARPPPPHH!' and 'WHHHUUUUURRRRRRRKKK' noises at her son for not tidying up his room (it has stuffed Banthas). Without subtitles too... At intervals, Lumpy contacts some of the Star Wars Cast by videophone. Remember, this is the winter of 1978 when Carrie Fisher was having boyfriend trouble with Paul Simon and drug problems while Mark Hamill had recently been in a near-death car accident. In both cases, it really shows... Hamill, in particular, having recently undergone extensive facial reconstruction anticipates 'New Romantic' fashions by three years, appearing caked in make-up. Elsewhere, Art Carney and Bea Arthur appear in the Mos Eisley cantina where, having chatted to a giant hamster, launch into a musical number. Of course, being a Seventies Holiday Special, musical numbers abound. The viewer half expects Marie and Donny Osmond to start a musical debut on the Yavin rebel base but sadly, this never happens. Instead, Jefferson Starship turn up on some kind of hologrammic chessboard. But best of all, Itchy settles into an interactive video-machine and watches Diahann Carroll sing a 'lurve' song that causes him to become 'excited' in a way that must have at least some parents shielding their kids' eyes. What is fascinating about this 1978 TV Special is the way in which all involved have conspired to airbrush it from history. Carrie Fisher pretended not to know what the journalist was talking about in an interview some years later. The director Steve Binder is known for directing the 1968 Elvis 'Comeback' while writer Pat Profit later went on to script the 'Naked Gun' movies. The lesson would seem to be that while music and comedy have their place, they need to be kept to a minimum in a galactic epic. The 'musical' number in Jabba's palace was the least watchable part of the 'Special Edition' Return of the Jedi. Comic relief can be painful if not thought out properly (We're looking at you, Jar Jar Binks...)

Lucas, who gave the go ahead to the Thanksgiving Special is reported to have said he'd like to smash every every bootlegged VHS tape of this excruciating show...serves you right George for such a cynical attempt to grab the pre-Christmas toy market.

It is a great tragedy that both Richard Harris and John Derek are no longer with us. But that shouldn't blind anybody to the fact that in 1981, a pretty ugly blotch appears on both men's CVs. No doubt John Derek conceived this movie doing for his wife what 'Some Like it Hot' and 'One Million Years BC' did for Maryln Monroe and Raquel Welsh respectively, creating an iconic sex symbol for the new decade. Having run to embrace Dudley Moore on the beach in '10' Bo's reputation, an all-star cast and location filming in Sri Lanka meant that nothing could go wrong. Alas, as they say, Mortals plan and God laughs. It is said that when this film premiered in 1981, the Edgar Rice Burrows estate tried to take legal action against it. Bo Derek plays Jane Parker who sets off into turn-of-the century Africa to be reunited with her boozy, abusive Dad, Richard Harris. Daddy Parker is an explorer who has set out to find 'the Great Inland Sea' the stuff of local legend, whose existence has been poo-pooed by conventional wisdom. Harris is worth watching for a wonderfully hammy, tanked -up performance which includes singing an Irish ditty at an Indian elephant that somehow found its way into Africa (did it arrive at the same time as the Orang-Utan from Sumatra???) Furthermore, although Jane professes to despise Parker, Bo and Rich's relationship is creepily incestuous, testimony perhaps to the effects of the tropical heat. Before long, however, local legends start to circulate about a 'Great White Ape' and Jane hears the famous yodel. This is the movie's cue for Miles O'Keefe, a future B-Movie star, making a rather odd debut as the loin-clothed Lord of the Jungle. Unlike Johnny Weismuller with his pidgin English or Ron Ely who speaks the language fluently, the O'Keefe Tarzan is mute. Given some of Bo and Richie's dialog, though, this is probably not a bad thing. Harris and his caravan eventually reaches the Great Inland Sea, located atop a gigantic plateau that seems to run halfway across Africa....hang on, aren't seas, lakes and other watery places generally located in low-lying areas?? Nevermind, it is just one of many anomalies in the John Derek universe. The crew attempt to mount the cliffs and when the ropes snap, Harris roars echoing abuse at the hapless men who have plummeted to their deaths. On another occasion, Jane decides to take a nude swim by the Inland Sea, giving another occasion to see some gratuitous nudity. Out of nowhere a single male lion appears. Now lions usually travel in prides and never go near beaches but later on, Tarzan will be wrestling with a (venomous) boa constrictor. Zoology doesn't seem to have been one of John Derek's strong points..... This being a Tarzan movie, Jane becomes enchanted with the Lord of the Jungle and resolves to take his virginity. But having seen his closeness to some of those chimps, you do have to wonder...Speaking of which, it's not only the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate could have sued. It is highly probable that certain primates were on the phone to their lawyers: the chimps here make you miss Cheeta badly. Especially when they do ridiculous things like ride on the backs of elephants and clap their hands when Tarzan and Jane finally get it on! The climax of this film has Bo and Harris captured by some rather stereotypical cannibals who paint our heroine and prepare to sacrifice/eat/execute her. Suffice is to say that The Great Wooden Ape gets his girl and *SPOILER* Harris gets himself impaled on a huge elephant tusk! This doesn't stop the dying Parker from delivering a rambling monologue to Jane. As far as I am aware, the law suit from the Rice Burrows estate never materialized but 'Tarzan the Ape Man' was crucified at the box office (no kidding?) A pity. John Derek could have directed 'Tarzan the Ape Man 2' with Bo Derek and Miles O'Keefe living in domestic bliss and Dudley Moore as 'Boy.'

In 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws had the effect of emptying beaches all over America. Two years later this Italian-US effort by one Ovidio G Assonitis had the effect of emptying cinemas all over the world.

Tentacoli avoids the great white shark and resurrects the old 'Kraken' legend of medieval Scandanavia: the giant squid 'Architeutis Dux' that appears in old Swedish woodcuts destroying ships. Except it's not about a squid. The monster is a man-eating octopus that looks like a floating mop in the water and the monster in Edward D Wood's 'Bride of the Atom' out of it. A 'monster from the deep' theme should in theory make for a movie that's scary at a very primal level. The ocean represents the unknown and unknowable, a metaphor for the unconscious mind and the beast representative of the repressed anxieties and...oh enough of the sub Freudian twaddle. If the good doctor Sigmund had to sit through this cheapo rip-off he'd be in therapy for a long, long time. What is astounding about the film is that respectable actors like John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda (yes Henry Fonda) read the lame script and didn't just phone Steven Spielberg and tell him to consult his lawyer. Apparently, Fonda's company Trojan Incorporated are building an underwater tunnel and the 'illegal frequency' of its seismometers have so enraged the local cephalopod that 'an octopus' garden in the shade' is the last place you'd like to be.

After a number of bizarre killings take place involving fake rubber cadavers and stock footage of a normal octopus with miniature props, freelance journalist (Huston) and oceanographer Bo Hopkins join forces to take on the monster. Hopkin's wife is killed by the creature and a regatta is massacred. Finally a pair of friendly killer whales are let loose, well a pair of friendly glove puppets in a fish tank are let loose, and the monster is slain. Reviewing Tentacles/Tentacoli, it's effort not to keep referring to Jaws but this film is so nakedly derivative, I am left with no choice. And from the word go, its inferiority is not just down to a low budget, though that is painfully obvious all the way through. The movie starts off with an inexplicably long shot of a car radio seen through a window, followed by a legs-only shot of some one with white trousers and brothel creepers unsteadily stepping out of the car and limping off..who is this? We never find out. Compare that with the opening of Jaws where the sexually loose hippy beach party leads on to the first shark attack. Atmosphere and menace are built up at once and a clever little point is made about America in 1975: the 60s hippy dream is dying, represented the death of the flower girl, Christine Watkins. It gets worse.

In another scene, a mother is chatting with a friend while her baby is left in his buggy on the other side of the road, overlooking the ocean. A bus stops in front of the camera, blocking the audience view. When it pulls off the baby and buggy are gone. This takes place in broad daylight...didn't anyone on the bus see the eponymous 'tentacles' grab the kid? Compare that with the shark killing Alex Kintner...he was condemned to death because the Amity Mayor didn't want the revenues from the beaches cut down by shark stories. The scene where a black-veiled Mrs Kintner whacks Brody across the face is shocking: the death of innocence and an indictment of the capitalists who only care for profit. It also ensures Brody has no choice but to follow Hooper and Quint abroad the Orca. But after the baby is grabbed, we hear no more about him or his grieving mother: it's a cheap, very exploitative tactic and gets repeated some scenes later.

We see a regatta at Solana Beach being attacked en masse by the giant mop. Lots of boats are capsized and pulled under by each time, the creature apparently ignores the juicy kids floating in the water so it can knock some more boats over. Since the regatta is taking place on (when else?) July 4th, we can only surmise that the beast is combining dinner with some belated anti-Vietnam War protest. When the surviving kids are deposited on the shore by the coast guard, Shelley Winters searches for her son Tommy, the obligatory 'cute' kid who went out with his friend Jamie. Tension builds up. Tommy is still alive! Then we simply see Jamie's mother, who didn't make it back staring tearfully at the sea...another character is introduced just to be killed off and the director hasn't the guts to take on the emotional consequences.

The basic premise of the movie, that seismometers (and it later turns out by way of explaining the long opening shot of a car radio) radio waves have driven the octopus psycho begs the observation. Animals are not vindictive. They kill to live. If the octopus was 'enraged' by the radio waves, why won't he simply piss off to another quieter part of the Pacific Ocean? That seismometers and underwater drilling drew him to Solana Beach in the first place implies that Trojan is building something absolutely huge down there. Shouldn't there be hundreds of insane octopi rioting off the coast? The end of Tentacles has the creature being killed by two killer whales that Hopkins has kept in his cage...the natural enemy of giant squid is the sperm whale but we'll ignore that. The message of Jaws was that you can't take on nature and win. But in Tentacles, even while Hopkins/Huston berate Trojan for their contempt for nature, they end up using nature to keep nature at bay...a bit hypocritical? Oh well. Suffice is to say that Jaws may but you off going to the beach for a while. Tentacles will only make you snigger the next time fried calamari is served on your plate.

Love 'em or loath 'em, a certain indefineable Englishness could always be distilled from the Carry Ons, even the ones set in Ancient Rome or The Wild West. They started out in black and white, stable mates to Norman Wisdom and assorted Ealing comedies and wound down two decades later when the permissive society has made their nudging winking humour obsolete. Through the years, the same actors kept resurfacing parodies of silly suburban Englishness: the leathery lecher Sid James, the squeaky blonde Babs Windsor along with demure Charlie Hawtrey, bulgy eyed Kenneth Williams, repressed matron Hattie Jacques and sharp faced nag Joan Sims. It was the repetition and safeness we cherished, the over the top boooiings! and deliberately crass innuendos, Babs' bra flying off amid stretching exercises and hitting a horror-struck Williams in the face: "Oooh! Matron! take them away!" Far from being 'sex comedies', the Carry Ons are also childishly innocent. None of the villains e.g. Bernard Bresslaw as Bunghit Din in 'Up the Kyber' are genuinely bad. Sid's ear is forever being grabbed by Sims before he can do anything with Babs. All of these elements are absent from Emmanuelle and the result is painful and repulsive. Rogers' dire payment of his actors meant they had little choice but to return time and time again to Rothwell's scripts. By 1978, Sid James was dead, Charles Hawtrey sacked and Jacques (along with Windsor Davies and Terry Scott) committed to better-paying BBC sitcoms. Barbara Windsor reportedly walked out on this one and it's puzzling that her close friend Williams didn't do likewise as he'd already been burnt by the wretched 'Hound of the Baskervilles.' Peter Butterworth, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor chip in but you know a movie is in trouble when Benny Hill's straight man (Henry McGee) is brought along to make up the numbers. Attempting to capitalise on the success of the French 'Emmanuelle' movies, the old pre-feminist and pre-pill approach to sex is junked in favour of a movie where the elderly Williams is shown copulating with Suzanne Danielle. In her role as Emmanuelle Prevert (pervert get it...? Swiftian wit,we think) Danielle attempts to find satisfaction after Williams was castrated in a nude hand-gliding incident by bedding innumerable men, while a rubbish 'disco' number plays. Meanwhile, shy mother's boy Theodore falls for Danielle and the servants recall their own lamentably unsexy brushes with the permissive society. By the time of this movie's release, the Carry Ons were already dinosaurs and the 1974 effort 'Carry on Dick' was when the series should have been wound up. Other comedies of the time 'Confessions of a...' or 'Percy' have not dated well, but the sea side bawdiness of the 1960s Carry Ons will just about make them watchable on a Sunday afternoon. Not this effort, interesting only as a cruddy little snapshot of post-sixties, pre-Aids views on sex. With Emmanuelle, the Carry Ons died although the stake had to be sharpened one last time in 1992 when the even worse 'Carry on Columbus' rose from the coffin.

Looking at today's conveyor belt of mind-numbing remakes of old shows, idiot teen comedies and action fests that have great special effects but little else, it's easy to get very nostalgic about the 1970s. But the decade of Coppola, Scorcese, Altman, Malik, Bogdanovic etc produced its fair share of cow pats and what an 'Annis Mirablis' 1978 was for truly wretched cinema. Hot on the heals of 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (with the Bee Gees), 'Carry on Emmanuelle' and 'Renaldo and Clara' (a Bob Dylan vehicle..don't ask), came this fetid attempt to satire Holmes and Watson. First off, it has to said that the Cook-Moore contribution to postwar British comedy is immeasurable and would probably fit in third place after the Pythons and Goons. But even the greats have their off days and Pete and Dud were well off when they agreed to let Paul Morrisey direct a comedy that manages to bungle every comic moment. The falsetto Welsh accent of Watson (Moore) and the stage Jewish accent of Holmes (Cook) simply irritate and a very strong cast is completely wasted. Why, for example, is Spike Milligan only afforded a 'fleeting appearance'? Others do their best with lamentable gags. The urinating dog of Denholm Elliot isn't funny, simply disgusting and Roy Kinnear's flasher could have been funny but simply falls flat. Morrisey doesn't know whether to be clever and satiric, akin to 'Life of Brian', or cheerfully bawdy like a Carry On movie. The result is a movie that's neither seaside postcard humour nor the anarchistic satire that Pete and Dud had presented so well a decade before. A truly washed out Kenneth Williams, fresh off 'Emmanuelle' (Jesus wept) is slotted in, his usual flared-nostril, bulgy eyed caricature demolishing the myth that he was a great actor trapped by the Carry Ons. Better artistes like Henry 'Arthur Sultan' Woolf and Prunella 'Sybil' Scales simply have walk ons. Meanwhile, the look of the movie is cheap and stagey while Moore's piano score is out of place in a comedy. Given that he and Cook were successfully belting out the punk humour of Derek and Clive at the same time, this dog can't be explained by the fact that Cook was by then alcoholic and depressed. Perhaps Morrisey was really Moriarty in disguise.

"What the Hell is this...is this an actual movie?" says Mr Feldman of Warners after Johnny Depp leaves in his 'little opus' after far more promising titles (The Vampire's Tomb, The Ghoul Goes West, Dr Acula) were given the brush off. We will never know how much Tim Burton's 1994 depiction of 'Glen or Glenda's' open-mouthed reception at Warners' matched the reality, but probably it wasn't too far off. And may the suits be forever despised for their narrow minded lack of vision. It was in 1953, as the guns of Korea fell silent and America got ready for sex, courtesy of Monroe, Dean and Presley. Into this changing world came the pencil-moustacheod, angora-wearing figure of Edward D Wood Junior, a proto John Waters and all American hero who had parachutted onto the beaches of Normandy wearing a brassiere, aware that his bravery would have meant nothing in the face of the dishonourable discharge that would have been automatic had his secret been unveiled. Glen or Glenda was his statement to the world: be tolerant, a few TVs wearing womens' garments at home won't usher in the end of civillisation. We start with a decrept Bela Lugosi warning us to 'bevare of the big Green Dragon..he eats little boys!' Then we find a police officer and shrink chatting over the recent suicide of a transvestite...long-winded dialogue commences before our hero is introduced, Glen. He's engaged to Barbara 'a lovely intelligent girl' but he's got a problem..his other self 'Glenda' Should he tell Barbara (Delores Fuller)? After all, "Glen is NOT a homosexual, he is a transvestite but he NOT a homosexual" Wood's stream of consciousness, admittedly in better form in 'Plan 9' babbles on like stream, taking in ruminations about human nature, western civilization and mental illness, at times simply illustrated by stock footage of streets and factories! Fans of Burton's Ed Wood will know that Screen Classics boss Georgie Weiss originally wanted a 'sex change flick' for 'those repressed Okies' but Wood's script was pretty lop-sided, not being about that til 5 pages near the end. "The rest is about some schmuck who likes Angora sweaters!" The film is a sad reflection of how low Lugosi had sunk at the end and it does make you wonder how accurate was the Depp-Landau portrayal of Wood as a nice, if talentless guy who just wanted to help out his idol. By the standards of 1952, parts of Glen's nightmare scene are a bit saucy and does hint at where Wood eventually went, in the direction of soft porn. It is a pity that he died in 1978. The special effects boom and gender-bending fashions of the 1980s could have let him direct 'Dr Acula' with aplomb.

Looking at today's conveyor belt of mind-numbing remakes of old shows, idiot teen comedies and action fests that have great special effects but little else, it's easy to get very nostalgic about the 1970s. But the decade of Coppola, Scorcese, Altman, Malik, Bogdanovic etc produced its fair share of cow pats and what an 'Annis Mirablis' 1978 was for truly wretched cinema. Hot on the heals of 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (with the Bee Gees), 'Carry on Emmanuelle' and 'Renaldo and Clara' (a Bob Dylan vehicle..don't ask), came this fetid attempt to satire Holmes and Watson. First off, it has to said that the Cook-Moore contribution to postwar British comedy is immeasurable and would probably fit in third place after the Pythons and Goons. But even the greats have their off days and Pete and Dud were well off when they agreed to let Paul Morrisey direct a comedy that manages to bungle every comic moment. The falsetto Welsh accent of Watson (Moore) and the stage Jewish accent of Holmes (Cook) simply irritate and a very strong cast is completely wasted. Why, for example, is Spike Milligan only afforded a 'fleeting appearance'? Others do their best with lamentable gags. The urinating dog of Denholm Elliot isn't funny, simply disgusting and Roy Kinnear's flasher could have been funny but simply falls flat. Morrisey doesn't know whether to be clever and satiric, akin to 'Life of Brian', or cheerfully bawdy like a Carry On movie. The result is a movie that's neither seaside postcard humour nor the anarchistic satire that Pete and Dud had presented so well a decade before. A truly washed out Kenneth Williams, fresh off 'Emmanuelle' (Jesus wept) is slotted in, his usual flared-nostril, bulgy eyed caricature demolishing the myth that he was a great actor trapped by the Carry Ons. Better artistes like Henry 'Arthur Sultan' Woolf and Prunella 'Sybil' Scales simply have walk ons. Meanwhile, the look of the movie is cheap and stagey while Moore's piano score is out of place in a comedy. Given that he and Cook were successfully belting out the punk humour of Derek and Clive at the same time, this dog can't be explained by the fact that Cook was by then alcoholic and depressed. Perhaps Morrisey was really Moriarty in disguise.