matthewmercy

A good little Hammer / Exclusive B-movie from 1954, THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE is essentially a Home Counties-set variation on the DOUBLE INDEMNITY / THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE theme, with Alex Nicol's 'not a bad bloke really' American writer ending up in a bit of a pickle when he (somewhat illogically) ends up in a destructive affair with Hillary Brooke, a high maintenance, high-end slapper married to terminally ill businessman Sidney James...

By far the best thing about the film, James is uncharacteristically sombre as an unhappy man who knows his wife is a selfish, knicker-dropping horrorshow but is simply too worn out and resigned to the situation to do anything about it. Brooke's character, meanwhile, is such a venal, serial-cheating 'penis flytrap' that it actually damages the plot of the movie; despite his self-proclaimed 'weakness for women', it doesn't convince that Nicol would chuck away his genuine friendship with James just to get his leg over with the consistently nasty Brooke, let alone stick by her when the truly dangerous aspects of her character start to show through. CARRY ON NURSE's Susan Stephen has a sympathetic supporting part as James' appalled daughter, whilst the usually brilliant Alan Wheatley gets far too little to work with in the obligatory 'John Williams in DIAL M FOR MURDER' snooping police inspector role. Largely well scripted from director Ken Hughes' own novel, it perhaps could have used a bit more 'oomph' at the close, whilst the ridiculous portrayal of the neighbouring Yahoos is from the "What-ho!" / "By Jove!" / "Jolly good show!" PG Wodehouse school and feels about 20 years out-of-date; but for some excellent directorial flourishes and James' top-notch performance it is well worth seeing.

Thought to be a lost film for a good few decades, this apparently acquired an underground reputation as a minor gem of 1960s' British cinema, but now it has been re-discovered and made available, it appears as though its 'sight unseen' reputation has evaporated. An ASDA Smart Price reworking of Key Largo, it's the tale of a happily honeymooning couple who run into trouble when they fetch up at the same rural cottage a group of thugs are using for a hideout, and it's pretty bloody awful. Various characters stagger around in the dark being shot at over a stash of cash, the smoking hot Zena 'Dr. No' Marshall's gangster's moll somehow loses the attention of her meal ticket to the chunkier Jill Adams, lots of slaps look like they really hurt, Bill Nagy annoys so much you can't wait for him to die, and finally a plane blows up.

Crosstrap was directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, and has a body count comparable to that of the Peter Cushing death-fest Corruption (1968), even though it's nothing like as explicit. And Laurence 'Vampire Circus' Payne is amusingly miscast, as his eyebrow-raising playboy routine transposed onto a crime boss-cum-sex pest called Duke ends up feeling like a 'dark side of the moon' version of Roger Moore, which is just as weirdly off-balance as it sounds.

Well-known to the actor's fans as one of Christopher Lee's first starring roles, but not particularly widely seen, this threadbare Danziger Productions thriller is pretty awful stuff, even by its' makers' very low standards. Lee plays a standoffish businessman and WWII veteran who fetches up in a small Home Counties industrial town and starts investing in failing factories, and is before long accepted as a leading member of the community and prospective husband for local beauty Betta St. John. Unfortunately, he turns out to have a pretty murky past, which only comes to light when he's probed by Alexander Knox's psychoanalyst...

From the description above you'd be forgiven for thinking this might be a worthy British variation on Shadow of a Doubt, but you'd be wrong. It is not only crummily made and largely badly acted (this is the most mid-Atlantic sounding English village I've ever heard of, as the Canadian Knox, as well as the American St. John and some useless pinhead called Peter Grant as her disgruntled ex-suitor, all make no attempt to sound British, whilst Lee himself for some reason adopts an American accent of his own that is far less polished than the one he managed for The City of the Dead a few years later - and let's not even get started on Patrick Holt's attempt to sound French), it makes hardly any sense, and describing it as a thriller is actually a massive cheat. Lee might be a disturbed murderer, but aside from losing his rag a bit with a waiter and being a dick with several other people a la Franklyn Marsh, he doesn't actually do anything hugely unpleasant before voluntarily wandering into Knox's office and pretty straightforwardly revealing everything; certainly there's no indication that St. John is ever in any physical danger from him - he never even raises his voice to her. Even the final twist falls flat because though it was presumably meant to have some kind of Outer Limits-style ambiguity to it, it just seems badly scripted and inexplicable. Also, the YouTube version I watched was in terrible shape; very blurry and crackly, it looked and sounded like someone had spent decades using the reels for makeshift dustpans in the basement of the BFI, and I'm not sure if a better print is even available these days.

Horror fans may want to check this out because Lee is of course worth watching in one of his earliest starring roles, trying hard to be a compelling on-screen presence even though you can see the film draining in the life out of him with each subsequent scene. Quatermass 2's Lomax, John Longden, gives easily the best performance as St. John's father, but as he's surrounded by almost complete ineptitude on every side that isn't saying much.

For a long time the 'holy grail' of 1960s' low-budget British genre movies that I longed to see appear as an official DVD or Blu-ray release was the Edward Judd sci-fi oddity Invasion (1966), but that was finally issued by StudioCanal in 2014. Since then, another film from the same period has taken its place on my 'must have' list - Gerry Levy's little-seen and much underrated debut b-movie Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? (1964); the full cut of this film has played a handful of times on Talking Pictures TV over the last year or two, though it still shows no signs of a DVD release on the associated Renown label.

The tale of four nominally 'juvenile' delinquent lads who break into a fairground supplies shop in pursuit of vicious kicks, only to receive a chilling comeuppance at the hands of Warren Mitchell's troubled magician, it mainly resembles a prototype episode of Tales of the Unexpected (complete with a creepy twist ending not unlike something from novelist Roald Dahl's The Witches). Despite some obvious padding included to bring it up to the usual one-hour second feature running time and thus qualify the film for the Eady Levy, it remains a compact little 'short story' that benefits from a genuine sense of mystery and from Mitchell's committed (if not always totally convincing) lead performance.

The quartet of youths are three ne'er-do-well Cockneys and a 'posh nosh' hanger-on, who bully courting couples and pick fights with nightclub bouncers before deciding to give Mitchell's 'The Great Dinelli' a lot of trouble for no reason other than their own boredom and mean-spiritedness. Though Mitchell initially appears cringingly terrified of the boys, he's actually the guardian to some seriously powerful supernatural forces, and it is of unleashing them that he is actually most wary. In this way, the film almost invites the audience to enjoy the eventual fate of the 'boys', which isn't really difficult given that they are well-characterised as genuine assholes, despite being very 'weak beer' by modern standards (remember the days when ASBO kids wore ties and jumpers? Eden Lake this ain't), and the perhaps slightly lacking casting. John Malcolm, who plays the titular gang leader Mickey, was around twenty-seven when the film was made but with his dopey trilby and chronically receding hairline he looks nearer forty (Malcolm continually calling Mitchell 'Pop' seems silly because the two men appear to be the same age - Mitchell was in his late thirties and despite playing a feeble codger, he doesn't really look any older than that). Other members of the gang will be familiar to Tom Baker-era Doctor Who fans; Christopher Robbie was the Cyberleader in Revenge of the Cybermen, whilst John Challis more notably played the nasty Scorby in The Seeds of Doom, although he's obviously much better known as Boycie from Only Fools and Horses.

Levy had a lengthy career in the movies, eventually working as a production manager on 1980s' A-pictures like Out of Africa and Cry Freedom. His only other movie as a director, however, was the Tigon stinkbomb The Body Stealers (1969), a film as lame-brained, unpersuasive and un-scary as Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? is quietly compelling and eerie. Another plus is Ottilie Patterson belting out a great little title track, but unfortunately, Where Has Poor Mickey Gone? didn't see immediate release following its completion and apparently only went out as support to Polanski's Cul-De-Sac in 1966, before vanishing from circulation for over thirty years. Now that it is back doing the rounds, if it turns up I'd advise that you try to catch it.

Don't go near this. The UK release is actually a re-branding of a US TV movie called JL Family Ranch which appears to have been the pilot film for a proposed show that never went anywhere. It sets up lots of conventional, boringly-done threads of family drama (feuds, money worries, mother-daughter disputes, problems with alcoholism and gambling etc), which go almost nowhere because the whole thing is over in an hour and a half, all left unresolved pending the follow-up series that never came. Even the central plot about property ownership fraud isn't closed off properly.

What this is definitely not is what it has been promoted as in non-US markets; the UK DVD artwork (featuring a rifle-toting Jon Voight standing amongst squad cars and armed police officers) and replacement title of Texas Blood peg it as some kind of mash-up of Lonely Are the Brave, First Blood, and Harry Brown, with an old-time cowboy resorting to violent resistance in the face of persecution by his enemies and corrupt authorities. Just so you know - there are two gunshots in the whole thing, when fatherly rancher Voight scares some wolves off his land at the very start. The rest is tedious, uninvolving talk, with Teri Polo pulling emotive faces, a plastic-surgery ravaged Melanie Griffith unrecognisable (if not for her name in the credits I wouldn't have known it was her), and an ancient James Caan looking like he was going to bust every blood vessel in his head at any second.

As a lead-in for a TV series it is lacking, and you can see why the show didn't get picked up. As a movie...well, this isn't a movie. The earlier reviewer called 'BaronessFC-209-7408351' is having an absolute laugh raving so much about this thing; one can only assume they are related to / friends with those who made it, or else have some financial interest in it themselves.

One the most vicious, bloody, and downbeat of the Hammer horrors, 1972's Vampire Circus is these days held in relatively high regard by fans, but despite its attempts to differ from the Hammer norm in many respects, it displays the scars of its relatively troubled production quite plainly and is by no means the mini-masterpiece it is often hailed as.

Telling the story of a plague-ridden Central European village visited by the Ray Bradbury-influenced Circus of Nights, a vengeance-fuelled carnival troupe of child-murdering, animalistic, and randier-than-normal blood-drinkers, it is both intriguingly offbeat and at the same time very typical of the standard early-1970s' Hammer output in terms of its setting, locations, and visual style. By 1972, the usual mock-Transylvanian hinterland of castles, inns, cleavage and a ridiculous number of men named 'Hans' as seen in the vast majority of their period horror flicks was practically a parody of itself; though several of the company's later movies attempted to shake things up with some extra violence, nudity, and a much less 'conservative' storyline than had previously been the case, they were still limited by the rigid conventions of their brand of period Gothic, and as such Hammer struggled to move with the times as quickly and easily as they should have, which Vampire Circus illustrates all too well.

Everything about the movie, in fact, is a game of two halves. Some of the action is intense and satisfyingly full-on (such as the villagers' initial encounter with Robert Tayman's ludicrous-looking Count Mitterhaus, who resembles not a decadent aristocrat from the previous century but rather a rakish Chelsea pimp), whilst other scenes are baggy and poorly-edited (particularly true of the climax). Internal logic is unclear, as for a village as terrified of the supernatural as this vampire-haunted hamlet professes to be, they have an awful lot of tolerance (at first anyway) for the Circus of Nights, whose performers are visibly capable of genuinely impossible feats like turning into animals before the audience's eyes, but to which this set of dolts just laugh and clap; also, what amounts to a live sex show between a man with a whip and a naked woman painted like a tiger is greeted with quiet acceptance by the assembled throng of parents and children (!), which makes their subsequent pious wittering and gripping of crucifixes when people start turning up dead (a tedious horror cliché at the best of times) appear somewhat out-of-character.

The performances are a mixture of the good, the bad, and the OTT. Adrienne Corri and Laurence Payne are both relatively strong, as is Anthony 'Higgins' Corlan as the nastiest of the vampiric gypos, whilst good old Dave Prowse and little Skip Martin from The Masque of the Red Death (1964) at least bring something different to the party. However, juvenile lead John Moulder-Brown (Deep End) is very wooden, the various young females are interchangeable, and Thorley Walters, a favourite at Hammer who blighted many a horror film with his deliberately buffoonish 'comic' turns, is only marginally less annoying than usual.

You can see where the money ran out, too (Hammer boss Michael Carreras pulled the plug on director Robert Young after a six-week shooting schedule left several scenes unfinished); most notably, a supposedly horrific massacre of a dormitory full of students is referred to in quite matter-of-fact terms, but nothing of it is seen. Despite some wholly unrealistic but still disturbing gore imagery and the fragmented nature of the piece giving it a suitably nightmarish effect, it feels as though Vampire Circus isn't all it could have been; mind you, everything is relative – it looks like Let the Right One In (2008) when compared to rubbish like its original US release co-feature, Peter Sasdy's witless Ingrid Pitt vehicle Countess Dracula.

Hilariously, profoundly awful, The Man Without a Body (1957) really does need to be seen to be believed. A cheap-as-can-be sci-fi / horror B-movie, produced in Britain but certainly bearing marks of American-made drive-in flick influences, it stars George Coulouris as a volatile, bad-tempered industrial mogul who discovers he has a malignant brain tumour; consulting with experimental scientist Robert Hutton, he discovers the only way to save his own life is to undergo a brain transplant, so with an admirable 'aim high' mentality, he decides the only brain that will do the job is that of the four hundred years-dead French seer Nostradamus. Following a spot of grave-robbing and an unclear laboratory process whereby the long-decayed tissues of Nostradamus' head are totally re-generated ready for grafting onto Coulouris' shoulders, the lusty carryings-on of his unfaithful mistress (From Russia With Love's Nadja Regin) and the crafty disembodied head's own plan to bankrupt the businessman result in the death of Hutton's assistant Sheldon Lawrence, after which his body becomes the recipient of the psychic's bonce and goes on perhaps the most uneventful monster rampage in film history. Nostradamus might have been able to see into the future, but I bet even he didn't predict his eventual fate would be to have his severed noodle swinging from the bell ropes of a Twickenham church tower…

One of the first attempts by a different production company to capitalise on the nascent UK horror boom spearheaded by Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), this totally barmy film has far more in common with US-made trash like Frankenstein's Daughter (1958), in that it is completely impossible to take seriously. Written by somebody called William Grote (given that this individual has no other credits at all, I would assume the name is an alias of some collection of random contributors) and supposedly co-directed by Billy Wilder's brother W. Lee and the unsung Charles Saunders (Tawny Pipit), the legend is that Saunders actually had no hand in this mess at all, and was merely hired to be present on set to satisfy quota regulations ensuring a certain number of films made in the UK were actually employing Brits. Coulouris, a respected actor and colleague of Orson Welles who had appeared in Citizen Kane (1941) and whose filmography contains a sprinkling of other classics, must have wondered what the hell he had got involved in with this shocker; in terms of special effects and scare-value it makes its sister film Womaneater (1958), from the same stable and again starring Coulouris, look like The Thing (1982) by comparison. The veteran actor gives it his all, and Regin's nympho routine is convincing enough, but they were never going to carry the film; I mean Raging Bull-era DeNiro couldn't have made this insanity fly all by himself.

This is well worth a watch if you want to pee yourself laughing, though; The Man Without a Body is unsurprisingly not available on DVD, though it is on YouTube in a poor-quality upload.

Obnoxiously misconceived and carelessly delivered, Guy Richie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) is a terrible film; badly written, largely uninspiringly acted, tonally inconsistent, and clearly hacked to pieces in the editing room in an effort to bring the (still too long) running time down, it is a total dumpster fire.

So much about the movie is wrong it is hard to know where to start, but I'll have a go; firstly, the charmless Charlie Hunnam's cocky, granite-abs 'Arfur' is about as appealing as fishing cat turds out of your guttering. Whilst his 'Londinium' accent has improved slightly since he gave us a train-wreck impersonation of a Cockney geezer in the atrocious Green Street (2005), here his swaggering, hipster-bearded smart arse totally fails as an attractive focal point for the film. Jude Law is curiously muted as the cookie-cutter bad guy, his archetypal character right up there with Christopher Eccleston's Malekith and Oscar Issac's Apocalypse in the useless blockbuster villain stakes, whilst Djimon Hounsou and Aiden Gillen (wheeling out that curious Game of Thrones accent again) just look bored. The females are similarly listless, as Peaky Blinders' wet-eyed Annabelle Wallis obviously suffers from her role being cut to pieces, whilst Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey gives a performance typical of a French actress-model; essentially, she just pouts her way through the entire film. Only the characteristically excellent Neil Maskell manages to make an impact, but purely in his later scenes; early in the film he's just another of the line-up of Hunnam's tediously motor-mouthed mates.

The movie is astonishingly choppy and incoherent. Some characters' backstories are truncated to the point where we know nothing about them, whilst others (such as Game of Thrones' Michael McElhatton and Cucumber's Freddie Fox) are introduced and then vanish well before the end without any explanation. Key scenes are rushed and thus lose any impact; for instance the central 'sword in the stone' set-piece crashes and burns due to inexplicable character actions (I have no idea what Hunnam's 'sod this' and haste to get to the front of the queue was supposed to be about), and a supremely useless gimmick appearance by David Beckham, which might have looked 'Britannia Cool' back in 1999 but in 2017 just seems stupid. There is no element of suspense or excitement, whilst the humour feels totally artificial; there are numerous irritating attempts to spice the film up with unexpected visuals (such as about four seconds' worth of shoulder-mounted 'shakeycam' during a chase scene, or Richie's own pointless cameo appearance – Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver he is not), the impact of the special effects is lost due to incompetent composition (the climax is visually incomprehensible), and the last couple of scenes ('it's a table; it's round, so me and all me mates can sit at it whilst we have a pint and talk about the football, oy-oy!') made me want to vomit in cringing frustration.

A wet fart of a film that did what I thought impossible in that it stopped me ranking Assassin's Creed as the worst movie of the year, this is the most deserving big-budget box office bomb since 2015's Fantastic Four. All human life should avoid this disaster.

Written by later British horror movie regular John Gilling, A Gunman Has Escaped is a tatty time-waster dating from 1948, though technically it certainly feels as though it was made significantly earlier than that. Obviously 'inspired' by such films as Odd Man Out and Brighton Rock (both 1947), it is a real oddity in that the cast seems to lack any recognisable faces, the story is essentially devoid of incident, and the acting comes across as real repertory theatre-standard stuff. Lead John Harvey gives a music hall-style impersonation of a 'cockney geezer' as a thuggish crook who accidentally shoots a member of the public during a robbery, and has to go on the run with a pair of accomplices; fleeing to the countryside 'somewhere up north', the trio's cover is blown by a salt-of-the-earth farmer in record time (mainly down to the fact that they seem to try and behave as shiftily as possible), before Harvey's moronic ringleader heads back to London for a showdown with the gang boss he thinks has grassed him up...

I didn't recognise Harvey at all when I was watching the movie, though a quick glance at his filmography shows that he actually had minor parts in Hitchcock thrillers (Stage Fright), Hammer flicks (X the Unknown, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), comedies (Private's Progress, Double Bunk), and a whole host of UK TV shows in a career lasting over forty years. Though not helped here by the somewhat dodgy editing and ropey sound quality, his performance certainly feels artificial (I'm no expert, but I'm certain murderous London gangsters wouldn't have been any more likely to use the word 'perisher' in 1948 as they are in 2016), and it is by no means the worst or most incongruous one in the picture. As posh boy army deserter Sinclair, John Fitzgerald seems to be trying to channel Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest, his performance consisting of nothing but florid, inappropriate Shakespeare quotes and defeatist wisecracks, whilst the rest of the cast are mainly forgettable (that said though, a bit-part player called Frank Hawkins isn't bad as the canny farmer).

The work of a director named Richard M. Grey, who appears to have made hardly anything else, this minor effort's fate as having gone unseen for several decades is not particularly surprising. A museum piece from British cinema's archives that endures only for the academic interest it might hold for film scholars, there is essentially no entertainment value here for the casual viewer of today.

A long-unseen comedy-chiller from 1964, The Horror of It All holds the dubious distinction of being one of Hammer horror doyen Terence Fisher's most obscure movies; certainly, amongst the post-1957 filmography that contains all of his most famous and influential directorial credits, it is matched only by the dead-on-arrival, German-produced Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) in terms of all-round pointlessness. Both films, in fact, came at the midpoint in Fisher's run as British cinema's number one 'horror man', as after his initial run of trailblazing Gothic chillers that put Hammer on the international map, he appears to have been given a forced sabbatical from the fold following the box office failure of his weak-tea take on The Phantom of the Opera (1962); this resulted in him taking several 'director for hire' type assignments over the next few years, which he eventually started to slot in around his later Hammer efforts.

The very least of a glut of horror spoofs that appeared on UK screens in the 1960s (amongst them the excellent What A Carve Up and the legendary Carry On Screaming), The Horror of It All stars American singer-actor Pat Boone as a dopey everyman who turns up at the country home of his girlfriend Erica Rogers (yes, I'm drawing a blank too) intent on proposing, only to find out that not only are her family a decidedly odd bunch, but there's likely to be a murder there before very much longer as well...

Cheaply produced by Robert L. Lippert, whose stable would also be responsible for Fisher's The Earth Dies Screaming, this impoverished- looking quickie bears just about none of the classy hallmarks found in the director's better films. Certainly not at home with comedy, Fisher struggles to get anything at all funny out of the clichéd situations and very tired gags. The music (including a brief bit of singing by Boone in the middle of the picture) is nondescript, as are most of the supporting performances. The exceptions are reliable turns by Valentine Dyall and Dennis Price as two of the crackpot relatives; former alumni of the films of Powell and Pressburger, both actors would eventually slide much further down the movie industry totem pole than this, but that doesn't change the fact they are essentially wasted here.

Though unsurprisingly unavailable on DVD or any other home format, I finally managed to view The Horror of It All after some helpful individual put it up on YouTube, apparently recorded from an obscure Spanish TV channel (thankfully subtitled rather than dubbed), so if you are enough of a fan of Fisher's to want to see this misfire, you may still find it there.

As well as having producer Harry Allan Towers' previously profitable Fu Manchu series placed in his 'care' for the final two entries, The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969), director Jesus 'Jess' Franco also gave us a film based around the exploits of another Sax Rohmer character, the villainess Sumuru, at around the same. What all three of these films share, apart from a complete disrespect for Rohmer's writing, is the fact that they are all absolutely, pitifully awful, and show up the inexplicably prolific Franco for what he is: devoid of talent.

The follow-up to Towers' frankly-quite-bad-enough 1967 production The Million Eyes of Sumuru (director, Lindsay 'Devil Doll' Shonteff), 1969's The Girl from Rio (also known as The Seven Secrets of Sumuru, and several other alternative titles that are so witless they don't even bear noting here) is right down there with the second of Franco's Fu Manchu films as representing the absolute nadir of his movie efforts, and again features Goldfinger's iconic Shirley Eaton repeating the Sumuru role from the previous Towers flick; that the character has, through some unfortunate error in the dubbing process, been re-named 'Sunanda' (!) is the very least of this pathetic film's problems.

In quite possibly the most depressing 'how are the mighty fallen' movie appearance of all time, the legendary George Sanders of Foreign Correspondent, All About Eve, and The Jungle Book fame here stars as the head of a criminal syndicate at odds with Eaton's female army, and he looks visibly embarrassed every time he appears. Our protagonist is a supposedly smooth investigator played the barely-known Richard Wyler, who is meant to be lady-killing, karate-chopping, pistol-packing tough guy in the mold of James Bond, but who quite frankly makes 'Boysie' Oakes look like Jason Bourne by comparison.

I hate Franco's films, they are just rubbish. All the director's familiar trademarks are here; endless, pointless tracking shots designed to pad out the film's length, relentless looping of various characters' voices by the ubiquitous Robert Rietty, atrocious, unfit-for-purpose music, a big role for Towers' wife Maria Rohm, nonsensical, cheaply assembled action sequences, and an utterly confusing and inadequate 'climax'. After this, her very last movie role, Eaton retired from acting to raise a family, and one can't help but think that, coming just five years after the heights of Goldfinger, the fact that she was reduced to appearing in trash like this must have influenced her decision. Honestly, you'd have more fun de-lousing a goat than watching this garbage.

The first of two remakes of Mike Hodges' seminal 1971 British gangster movie Get Carter, Hit Man (1972) followed very close on the heels of the original; maximising payback on their own property, MGM put another film version of Ted Lewis' original novel into production just a year later, reworking the plot in a B-movie, Blaxploitation format. This adaptation features Bernie Casey in the Michael Caine role of an out-of-town mob enforcer (here called Tyrone Tackett) who travels to another city (in this case Los Angeles replaces Newcastle upon Tyne) to look into the circumstances of his brother's death, and becomes embroiled in a world of drugs, blackmail, and pornography.

Admittedly superior to the Sylvester Stallone abomination that followed in 2000, this still isn't a very good film. Directed by the sometime Hollywood workhorse George Armitage (Grosse Pointe Blank), it is certainly more explicit than the far superior original, with several very bloody scenes of violence (most notably the climactic invasion of the villain's mansion, originally a police raid but which here becomes a machine-gun massacre orchestrated by a rival group of thugs, and the ketchup sure does fly), whilst the sexual aspects are similarly amplified (though it must be stated that, in the porn star / hooker role, a frequently unclothed Pam Grier cuts an infinitely sexier figure than the pill-popping bike played by Geraldine Moffatt). Like most Blaxploitation films, it's quite chronically dated too, with Casey's 'power pimp' wardrobe particularly outrageous, and it is easy to see why it has been accused of excessive stereotyping by some critics. There are a couple of interesting pieces of innovation on the original's storyline (adding a note of ambiguity to the ending is a nice touch, and watch out for Die Hard's Paul Gleason as the assassin), whilst others just seem gratuitous (the method of Grier's exit seems to have been done purely for visceral effect); however, the theme song ("Hit Man, Hit Man, whatcha' gonna do 'bout the situation?") is absolutely dire, the tone is uncertain, the dog-fighting footage toward the start of the film is absolutely reprehensible, and the film's 'black power' pretensions finally irritate. For committed Blaxploitation aficionados only.

Alfred Shaughnessy's The Impersonator (1961) is one of those thought- forgotten little films that has seen its profile rise in the last few years, in this case because horror film experts like Kim Newman and Pete Walker have praised it and made it clear to their considerable fan followings that it is worth tracking down (for a comprehensive appraisal of the film, check out Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane's excellent book on the history of British B-movies). A lowly supporting feature from cheapjack outfit Bryanston Films, it stars in the lead role Hollywood also-ran John Crawford as a US Airforce sergeant who finds himself accused of murdering a local woman whilst stationed in a small English town. As he tries to clear his name with the help of a friendly schoolteacher (Jane Griffiths), the murdered woman's eight year-old son (John Dare) gradually reveals various snippets of information that will lead the police to the real killer, a psychopathic pantomime dame played by veteran character actor John Salew...

Though hampered by its short running time, The Impersonator does feature some unexpected grace notes that set it at a level above most British B- movie fare; notably, the unpleasant inhabitants of the town in which the murder takes place are economically characterised by various bit-part players through just a few lines of dialogue, whilst the acting of Dare (giving surely one of the most underrated child performances in British film) and Salew (skin-crawlingly perverse as the 'dirty old man' killer) is in both cases excellent. Definitely one of the stronger second features that proliferated in British film during the 1950s and 60s.

Based on the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello, 2012's Hitchcock is a mildly diverting but ultimately undernourished attempt to put the 'Master of Suspense' under the biopic spotlight. As the eponymous director, Anthony Hopkins gives his best and most enthusiastic performance since 2005's The World's Fastest Indian, utilising his gift for impersonation to assume Hitchcock's speech patterns, gait, and (with the aid of some impressively invisible prosthetics) body shape. Even the fact that he's now in his mid-seventies and considerably older than Hitchcock is supposed to be here, this is his most spry and physically nimble screen appearance in years, especially when set against his phoned-in supporting roles in the likes of The Wolfman and Thor. Despite looking very little like their real-life counterparts, the female leads acquit themselves as well as they can. Helen Mirren gives the role of Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville a recognisable persona, but whilst it's by no means a bad performance, it finally amounts to little more than a reprisal of the 'ballsy wife' she's played dozens of times before. Though she's only five years younger than Janet Leigh was when she made Psycho, Scarlett Johansson fails to capture Leigh's fulsome, womanly bearing, and relies mainly on the script's affection for the actress to get her through, creating a sexy characterisation of a very sexy movie icon, whilst Jessica Biel (who also looks younger than the character she's playing, though in this case she's not) is effectively 'dressed down', not only highlighting the awful wardrobe and hairstyle of Psycho's Lila Crane, but also effectively disguising the fact that she's a considerably sexier actress than Vera Miles ever was. The actors playing the secondary male characters fare even less well; though he's playing Anthony Perkins, James D'Arcy actually channels Norman Bates instead, whilst Danny Huston has a throwaway role as horn-dog screenwriter Whitfield Cook, and does nothing with it (his character only seems to have been included in the film to give Mirren more scenes). There are also several missteps with the movie's storyline; the Ed Gein angle is over played, both in terms of its influence on Psycho the film, and Hitchcock the man. I find it hard to believe that even a figure as notoriously black-humoured as Hitchcock was supposed to be would have passed around ghastly photographs of a serial killer's victims at a movie launch party, especially in 1960 and given the rocky ride the film had to go on to get made. In any case, whilst the Gein murders clearly had some bearing on Robert Bloch's source novel, Anthony Perkins' portrayal of the clean-cut, acceptably dressed, boyishly oddball Norman Bates bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real-life Gein, who was by all accounts a shambling, scruffy, inarticulate, and far more obviously disturbed freak; if Hitchcock was as obsessed by him as he is supposed to be here, then the movie interpretation would surely have been far more accurate? What really irritated, however, is the appearance of Gein as a phantomlike figment of Hitchcock's imagination, who he empathises with and relates to as a friend on some level, in the same way that the 'imaginary friend' of Christian Slater's protagonist in True Romance (1993) is his hero Elvis Presley. For a start, I doubt that an artist as intelligent and successful as the 'Master of Suspense' would have been flattered by the idea that he found solace and comfort from his personal problems by relating them in any way to those of a bottom-feeding lunatic like the 'Ghoul of Wisconsin'; but even if you buy this, the notion of Gein appearing in ghostly form to Hitchcock is stupid since the real-life Gein was still very much alive when Psycho was being made (and if he was as interested in Gein as the movie makes him out to be, Hitchcock would have known this), indeed, he only died in 1984, several years after Hitchcock himself. Though it remains watchable thanks to likable stars and a relatively anaemic (indeed semi-comic) tone, Hitchcock finally feels very insubstantial in terms of what it set out to achieve. Whereas TV movie The Girl (also 2012) met with fans' scorn because of its rubbishing of Hitchcock's public persona and insistence that he was, at heart, a cruel pervert, this film is more affectionate but not necessarily more understanding, writing off his deep-seated psychological fixations as nothing more than harmless fetishes that influenced his work for the better and which, moreover, were nothing for his wife to worry about because glamorous young women with the world at their feet like Leigh, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak wouldn't have touched Hitchcock with a barge pole. Certainly no more impressive as a piece of filmmaking than The Girl was, this feels like it should have been produced for television too, and whilst it's reasonably diverting, it's not a film I'll be revisiting over and over again.

Righteous Kill was one of the biggest cinematic let-downs of 2008. Co-starring for the third and probably final time in their movie careers, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro starred in this hackneyed, confusing, third-rate thriller that is utterly unworthy of their talents. The fact that DeNiro and Pacino have been coasting for years now is well known; DeNiro's better performances over the last decade have been in broad comedies like Meet the Parents, whilst his big directorial project, The Good Shepherd, was a washout. Pacino, meanwhile, has seen his once mighty reputation evaporate, through his involvement in junk like 88 Minutes and Gigli. That the two, whose previous collaborations were the masterpiece crime dramas The Godfather Part II (1974) and Heat (1995), should have re-teamed in an effort to score another critical and box office hit is understandable. What is not understandable is why they should have picked such a weak, contrived script; why they should saddle themselves with such unattractive, confusingly motivated characters; and why they should chose a director (Jon Avnet) who simply cannot hope to compete with Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann. Of course, it does not help that the film is blighted by a peculiar piece of reverse casting; As a pair of detectives tracking a vigilante serial killer, DeNiro takes the kind of part Pacino used to be able to play in his sleep (a hot-headed, self-righteous bully loaded with sexual energy), whilst Pacino plays a part more obviously suited to DeNiro (quieter and more introspective, but hiding a dark side). The actors look uneasy treading on each other's toes (DeNiro showed far more natural chemistry with Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog and Meet the Fockers), and Pacino in particular is certainly starting to look his age; without their usual command of the screen, the film simply plods along towards a very obvious twist finale. The always sexy Carla Gugino (Spin City, Sin City) here has a distasteful role as DeNiro's kinky colleague, and Brian Dennehy is wasted; but Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo (who were impressive in the TV mini-series The Kill Point, in parts clearly modelled on the characters played by DeNiro and Pacino in Heat) are quite good as a rival pair of cops. Righteous Kill is a very bad film. It is not the worst film I've ever seen, but it is certainly one of the most disappointing, and in some ways, that is even worse. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, separately and together, gave us some of the greatest American films of the last few decades; that they should be reduced to flaccid pap like this in their twilight years is pretty pathetic.

Quite why anyone thought that the movie-going public needed another low budget zombie-themed comedy I don't know, but that is exactly what we have with 2012's Cockneys vs. Zombies, a simplistic and intermittently funny film, albeit one that is so derivative of other, far better efforts that it's chiefly memorable for so often drawing attention to its own pointlessness. It's a cliché already, given the numerous references made in the other reviews posted here, but it really does feel as though someone took a look at Shaun of the Dead and Snatch and thought 'I know, a film mashing these two hits up would make a ton of cash!', and set about doing just that. It is an unfocused film, at its most bearable when it is directly ripping off it's 'inspirations', though there is nothing here to match the inspired verbal sparring in Guy Ritchie's gangland corkscrew thrillers or the relentless in-jokes of the Simon Pegg-starring 'zom-rom-com'. With its protagonists a group of novice bank robbers, the film is able to both focus on the supposedly fertile ground of East London's criminal element, and at the same time, heavily arm them in readiness for the zombie attacks that dominate the second half of the movie. There are a couple of standout bits of black comedy that give you a jolt because they are in such bad taste (the zombie baby, for instance), but these are offset with far too many other scenes which descend into tedious melodrama. As to the cast, they are largely ineffectual, and quite what potential Richard Briers, one of our most respected actors, saw in either the film or his part is unclear; his doddering old duffer barely makes an impression and his one supposedly hilarious comic set-piece falls flat because it is so poorly paced (perhaps he thought that since his old Ever Decreasing Circles co-star Penelope Wilton turned up in Shaun, he had to do something similar?). Snatch's Alan Ford is clearly the 'marquee' actor in the film, as his screen persona pretty much personifies the vision of East London the movie is supposedly built around; however, despite Ford swearing in his distinctive accent, there really isn't anything else to bed the story into East London at all – it could just as easily have been called 'Scousers vs. Zombies' and been set on the Wirral with Ricky Tomlinson in Ford's role. Whilst definitely a charismatic and screen-dominating figure (and nobody else in the film has half as much to do), Ford is such a one-note actor that he makes Ray Winstone look like Alec Guinness by comparison. Honor Blackman also barely registers, whilst former Eastender Michelle Ryan's entire tedious performance and appearance (would-be bad-ass putting wimpy males to shame) are just ripping-off the genuinely talented Emma Stone's turn in the infinitely superior US effort Zombieland. Don't bother, really.

Pasquale Festa Campanile's Hitch-Hike (1977) is not a movie that will be familiar to many viewers in the UK. It is an Italian-produced piece of drive-in drivel featuring European megastar Franco Nero as a drunken, bitter journalist touring the US with his gorgeous young wife Corinne Clery (best known to British audiences for her role in Moonraker); a dysfunctional couple at best, the flaws in their relationship are well and truly exposed when they pick up a stranded motorist who unfortunately turns out to be a psychopathic bank robber on the lam (played by mop-topped David Hess, reprising his patented 'complete scumbag' routine familiar from Wes Craven's highly unpleasant 1972 D-movie dog turd The Last House on the Left)... At best a film of two halves, Hitch-Hike is quite accomplished technically (an action scene in which Hess guns down two dopey cops is shot with Peckinpah-like style, whilst the several stunt sequences involving speeding vehicles are also pretty decent), and largely well-acted (Nero is particularly good), but the film is nevertheless undone by the mostly unimaginative script (the dialogue, of which there is a lot, is inane in the extreme, never more so than when Hess tries to persuade Nero to write a book about him, treating him to several deeply uninteresting anecdotes from his childhood, whilst the early scene in a campsite must be one of the worst-written, and most ineptly post-synched, pieces of film I've ever seen), the seedy emphasis on threats of impending sexual assault against the shapely Clery, and the many dumbly illogical things it requires the characters to do to drive the plot forward. Look at the scene in which Nero first realises Hess is a nutcase and gets the drop on him; after stunning him with a blow to the face and dragging him out of the back seat, common sense would dictate that Nero immediately get back into the car and tell his wife to floor it before the criminal recovers, but instead, Nero saunters down into a roadside ditch and stupidly continues whaling on Hess, with the result that the maniac is able to pull a pistol on the couple and take them hostage. Whilst the lusty emphasis on the female star's (often nude) body might well be typical of an exploitation movie of this vintage (and her style of 'trim' certainly is), it doesn't stop it from being distasteful. Clery's character very quickly becomes aware that their captor is a leering pervert who is going to defile her the first chance he gets, yet she never tries to take his mind off her shapely form by putting a few more clothes on, and instead continues wearing the same very provocative split-skirt-and-unbuttoned-blouse combo throughout the film, even after his first (failed) attempt at raping her. This angle leads to the disturbing scene in which Hess finally succeeds in having his way with Clery, whilst the hog-tied Nero watches in horror, which is incredibly crass as it portrays the wife as actually enjoying the act (a conceit in itself that might account for the flick's obscurity, as it would generally result in any film getting an instant red card from censors). The last quarter of Hitch-Hike admittedly drags it out of the ordinary (and out of the gutter), as it skilfully sketches the Nero character's final moral collapse, and ends the film on a considerable (and logical) downer. Also Ennio Morricone's incidental music, whilst a far cry from his best work, is nonetheless much more accomplished than this film deserves (I wish the same could be said of the atrocious happy-clappy campfire ditty repeated again and again at inappropriate points during the running time; I challenge you not to have it stuck in your head for hours after the film ends). However, overall this is sleazy, cheesy, cheap viewing, and not a film I would recommend.

1981's Halloween II was, like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), one of those sequels to a mega-grossing box office hit that was pushed into production despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the key creative forces behind the initial film. In much the same way that actor Charlton Heston was tempted back to continue the story of his classic original by the promise of reduced involvement in the follow-up's creation, an almost sure-fire guarantee of further box office success, and an opportunity to bring his previously open-ended saga to an (apparently) irrevocable conclusion, original Halloween director John Carpenter agreed to supervise production and provide a screenplay for this sequel to his 1978 hit, even if he left the actual helming duties to the unknown Rick Rosenthal (and then, dissatisfied with the results, ended up shooting some additional sequences for the film himself anyway). Picking up at the exact point the first Halloween left off, the sequel follows the continuing pursuit of near-supernatural stalk-and-slash maniac Michael Myers by both the police and the determined Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), whilst the injured and traumatised Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken away to recover in a local hospital. However, Myers' near-indestructible nature, coupled with an unexpected new plot revelation, ensures that he hasn't yet quite finished with Laurie... Halloween II is not a particularly well-made or memorable movie, and certainly lacks the atmosphere of terror and expertly-handled scares of the first film; in keeping with the times, and the flood of killer-on-the-loose cack that proliferated in the wake of Carpenter's initial low budget hit, the sequel goes for a gorier, less subtle approach to the theme (though ironically, this was largely down to Carpenter's input, rather than Rosenthal's). Curtis, who, like Carpenter, wasn't keen on returning to the story, isn't as effective here as she was in the original, but at least her continuing presence assists with the continuity, as does that of the wonderful Pleasence, who is excellent in a significantly-expanded encore as the obsessive Loomis. But, without wanting to give anything away to those who haven't seen it, there is no doubt that this second go-round for Michael Myers should have been the last we heard of him (especially given the sequel's seemingly very conclusive ending); unfortunately, the 'low cost, big profit' nature of this kind of horror movie meant that there were no fewer than six more sequels of wildly varying quality to come (including three starring Pleasence and two more featuring Curtis), plus a 2007 remake, and a sequel to that (!). Not bad for a movie madman a lot of people haven't been able to take seriously since Wayne's World (1992) came out...

In Wrong Side of Town (a film that deserves some kind of award for having the most bogus and misleading DVD artwork in recent memory) ex-WWE wrestler Rob Van Dam plays a family man who gets in hot water with a vengeful crime boss, and has to battle his way out of it. Luckily, Van Dam's character happens to be an former Navy SEAL...

Look, this film is terrible. I mean, truly awful. For a start, the DVD cover features prominently WWE big gun David 'Batista' Bautista, but as Van Dam's old Navy buddy, he only turns up in a couple of scenes, and majestically unconvincing ones they are at that. Mind you, even Bautista has more screen presence and charisma that the woeful RVD, who, in terms of acting ability, makes his nearly-namesake Jean-Claude Van Damme (Van Dam originally adopted the ring name because he vaguely resembles the 'Muscles from Brussels') look like Robert Mitchum by comparison.

Featuring a shockingly amateurish script, softly-softly fight scenes that just don't cut it, and lots of appalling acting (even from the non-wrestlers), this film sucks on every level. It's the kind of film in which a man can get shot in the leg, only for the police to send him home in a taxi rather than ordering him to hospital. It's the kind of film in which the leading man arms himself with lots of guns and knives, and dresses in black for the final showdown with the villains, and slips on his sunglasses...even though it's the middle of the night. It's the kind of film in which, after beating up a load of street trash, one ex-military tough guy says to another 'Just like old times...' It's also full of odd gambits that left me scratching my head, like the bizarre James Bond-inspired opening credits, a lingering shot of topless adult film star Stormy Daniels, and rapper Ja Rule turning up in a cameo part that should have led him to fire his agent; any day-player could have took the small role of the generic dirtbag 'gangsta' he plays here. Even in the largely worthless pantheon of dodgy genre pics that attempt to showcase wrestling stars in the lead roles, Wrong Side of Town hits a new low. Avoid, and then some.

If it had been made ten years ago, Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest would have been a major critical hit, a box office smash, and would probably have taken home a couple of Oscars. But in 2010, after a decade of 'cops are evil' films and TV dramas largely initiated by Fuqua's own Training Day (2001), Brooklyn's Finest comes across as far too clichéd to be anything more than just another David Ayer-flavoured piece of 'popo' bashing. This is admittedly a shame, as the film features committed performances from its leads, who are in no way to blame for the predictable storyline and unimaginative roles in which they have been cast. Richard Gere turns in his best performance in years here, in a terribly hackneyed 'old timer with a week to retirement' part that channels everything from Morgan Freeman in Seven to Robert Duvall in both Colors and Falling Down. Don Cheadle plays another cop movie staple, the 'in so deep he might not be able to come back' undercover operative, terrified he is going to be found out, and strung along by uncaring and disinterested superiors; if this all sounds familiar, that's because Leonardo DiCaprio did it so much better in The Departed. As Cheadle's target, Wesley Snipes gives us a 'twenty years later' take on his Nino Brown character from New Jack City (in which he shared an almost identical relationship with an undercover cop, there Ice-T), and Will Patton takes the boss role played by in The Departed by Martin Sheen (with Ellen Barkin, obviously looking for something to get her teeth into, in the Mark Wahlberg part). Ethan Hawke, meanwhile, who played the clean-cut rookie in Training Day, here panics and sweats a lot as a worn-out narc forced to steal drugs and cash to provide for his wife and about a dozen kids. Hawke, sympathetic actor though he generally is, comes across here as impossible to relate to, saddled with a character who whines endlessly about his tiny house and terrible luck, and yet is apparently too stupid to simply buy a packet of condoms. Personally, I enjoyed Brooklyn's Finest, and viewed in isolation, Fuqua's film can be regarded as a well-acted ensemble drama; a cops-only Boogie Nights or Magnolia, as it were. But if you've seen Training Day, Dark Blue, The Departed, Street Kings, and especially TV's The Shield, you will not fail to be struck by the utter lack of originality on display here. The actors' efforts are enough to recommend that you see Brooklyn's Finest, but the screenwriter's reliance on other, better movies for inspiration may make you wish you hadn't bothered.

Inspired by the spoof trailer included in both the US and UK releases of the two Grindhouse movies, Robert Rodriguez' Machete is a stupid, misconceived excuse for a film that doesn't raise half the laughs the original trailer did and tries its audience's patience to breaking point. I refuse to give Rodriguez the benefit of the doubt by assuming that Machete is 'meant to be' a bad film – it just is one, end of story. Or at least it would be the end of the story if there was a story in the first place.

Basically a succession of gory set pieces and bad jokes, the film lacks anything approaching suspense, wit, relevance, or even a clear understanding of the dodgy B-movies it is meant to be spoofing. The deliberately bad edits, scratches and dirt, and incomprehensible changes in film stock that at least lent Death Proof and Planet of Terror some moronic charm are here totally absent. The useless 'plot' manages to the unique trick of being both idiotically simple and confusingly fractured, and the film lacks a single likable character or performance.

Perennial supporting actor Danny Trejo, recognisable from his minor roles in great films like Con Air and Heat, appeared as the titular title character in the trailer precisely because it was, within Grindhouse, another minor supporting role. He here 'reprises' that role as ex-Federale and all-round hard nut Machete, and shows exactly why he is not a leading man in Hollywood; monolithic, humourless, and as ugly as Bosnian dog, Trejo definitely cannot carry a film himself.

As the 'hero' Machete, Trejo finds himself up against no less than four villains, all played by recognisable US actors with varying degrees of talent. Robert DeNiro hammers what is, for me at least, the final nail into his reputation's coffin with a competent but totally uninspired performance as a cartoonish Senator. This from the man who gave us Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Jimmy Conway, and Max Cady; DeNiro should be utterly ashamed of what he has become. Don Johnson unattractively and distastefully plays a right-wing whackjob, Jeff Fahey has a bizarre role as a gun-toting super killer, overprotective father, vicious sadist, and sleazy political operator all rolled into one, and Steven Seagal, looking very different from his Under Siege glory days, turns up as (I think) an autocratic Mexican crime boss. Clearly chuffed to be back in a Hollywood A-picture after more than a decade of making direct-to-DVD dross, Seagal ignores the limits of his useless 'character' and gives the most enthusiastic performance in the film anyway.

As for the women, Jessica Alba, who was starting to mature as an actress via the complex likes of The Killer Inside Me, here takes a massive career step back with a sub-'Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight' cop role that requires her to do nothing but look good (hence the totally gratuitous shot of her in the shower); perhaps she felt obligated to accept the part for Rodriguez, whose Sin City got her noticed in the first place. Michelle Rodriguez plays another of her patented, yet tedious, 'good looking girl with a gun' parts (a la Resident Evil), whilst Lindsay Lohan takes the role of a nymphomaniac wannabe adult film star, and then gutlessly relies on a body double for all the nude shots (when you can see Lohan's face, her hair appears to be glued to her breasts, and when you can see 'her' breasts, 'her' hair obscures 'her' face).

The aspect of Machete that most irritates when watching it is that one can't credit the pointlessness of it all; seldom has so much effort been put into something that will prove so unappealing to so many people. I felt the same way after watching both episodes of Tarantino's Kill Bill, which, like Machete, appeared to be made primarily for its own director's amusement. But Kill Bill, with its tedious plot and obscure appeal to mainstream audiences, at least showed a certain sense of style, something Machete definitely lacks. Very possibly the worst film of 2010, Machete makes Stallone's dire The Expendables look like The Wild Bunch by comparison.

In his second leading movie role, former WWE legend Stone Cold Steve Austin plays John Brickner, an ex-convict whose attempts to live a quiet life on the outside are thrown into jeopardy when he is forced into the shadowy world of illegal fighting. Though his acting skills are somewhat limited, Austin is perfectly adequate as the star of this low-key action drama; just don't expect anything groundbreaking from the execution or basic set-up. Like Austin's previous vehicle (WWE Films' The Condemned), this basically just adheres to an established action movie template (this time the 'inspiration' is the old Jean-Claude Van Damme effort AWOL), and goes through the motions of its familiar plot in an unfussy and unsurprising way. The direction is unspectacular, the fight scenes efficient but not particularly brutal, and the final result is a film that is nowhere near bad enough to despise, but nowhere near good enough to be memorable. The supporting performances are largely anonymous, though Walton Goggins (sporting the same ghastly brown leather jacket he wore as Shane Vendrell across all seven seasons of The Shield) makes the best of a badly-written part as Brickner's debt-ridden manager.

A wonderful British caper comedy from 1959, this film, along with School for Scoundrels (made the same year), probably stands as the most perfect vehicle for the caddish comic talent of Terry-Thomas. He plays wide boy entrepreneur Billy Gordon, who is targeted by the incompetent Fingers, or 'Mr X' (George Cole) and his criminal gang. When robbing the safe at Gordon's office proves unsuccessful, Fingers instead decides to kidnap Gordon's daughter, but things don't go according to plan... Too Many Crooks is a hilarious film, stylishly directed by Mario Zampi and featuring a wonderful script from Michael Pertwee. But it is the performances that really make it work, none more so than Terry-Thomas, who is a full-on tornado of one-liners, indignant snorts, impatient outbursts, and caddish cackles. Cole is also brilliant as a sort of proto-Arthur Daley, a bumbling no-mark with a taste for the lifestyle of a criminal mastermind, but almost no idea how to make it a reality. Further down the cast list, Bernard Bresslaw is memorably gormless as ex-wrestler Snowdrop (I love his Spike Milligan-style line 'I never heard of anything more precious than money. Except dollars.'), whilst Sidney James (a year away from achieving leading-man status with his first Carry On film) is as good as always as the frustrated professional crook fed up with Cole's fiascos; as is usual with James, his character is of course called Sid. The stunning Vera Day (who also appeared with Sidney James in the classic thriller Hell Drivers and Hammer's movie adaptation of the TV serial Quatermass II) plays Fingers' moll (or his 'nice little bit of X-certificate'), whilst such familiar faces as John Le Mesurier, Sidney Tafler, and Terry Scott have very funny cameos. About the only performance that doesn't quite work is that of Brenda De Banzie as Gordon's wife; a actress more noted for her dramatic turns in films like Hobson's Choice and The Entertainer, De Banzie does a good job as the meek housewife in the early scenes, but quite fails to convince as the re-invented crime boss and glamour puss later on; she plays these later scenes totally straight, and oddly, the script doesn't give her a single funny line. My favourite scene in the film has to be the one in which Fingers and Sid go to Gordon's office in the guise of police officers, which includes Cole's truly insane comic line 'A nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse. That's an old Latin quotation and it means 'is this your old woman's nightie?'', as well as Gordon's incandescent rage when the real police subsequently turn up and Gordon accuses the entire force of trying to blackmail him. The film is full of such wonderful episodes (the first attempted robbery and Gordon's appearance in court are also stand-outs), and it is a great reminder of a time when Britain used to make better comedy movies than any other country in the world.

A charming, gentle sitcom from the mid-1990s, My Good Friend starred George Cole as Peter, a lonely old man living with his daughter and her husband, and all too aware that his presence in their house was an unwelcome irritation for them. Feeling very lonely and at a permanent loose end, he meets the similarly melancholy Harry (Richard Pearson), with whom he strikes up a tentative friendship. Then the two of them encounter young single mother Ellie (Minnie Driver), and her son, with whom the two old gents start to spend their days; as time goes on, the three main characters find themselves fulfilling the various gaps in each others' lives…

My Good Friend is a very little known, low budget ITV programme that has totally slipped into obscurity over the last few years, and undeservedly so; a thoughtful, realistic sitcom (albeit one rightly devoid of a laughter track) that showed wit in its writing but was more remarkable for its touchingly realistic look at a couple of very lonely old pensioners. Cole and the lesser-known character actor Pearson were both splendidly natural in the lead parts, but the show's first season was especially notable in that it featured Minnie Driver in one of her earliest starring roles, only a year before she decamped to the US and started to hit it big in Hollywood with films like Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting. Driver was wonderful in My Good Friend, and, as a dreamy teenager, I fell in love with her warm, kind-hearted single mother character, a young woman (Driver was only in her early twenties when the show was made) with the weight of the world on her shoulders, but one who also manages to find the time to provide care and friendship for two very lonely old men.

Unfortunately, with Driver unavailable for the second series, she was replaced as Ellie by the considerably older Lesley Vickerage, whose more conventional mid-thirties take on the single mother character made the show much less interesting, and an already slow-paced and mercurial sitcom started to seem quite pointless. Unsurprisingly, the second series was also the last. Like Ben Chaplin's performance as agoraphobic sociopath Matt Malone in the first series of the foul-mouthed flat-share sitcom Game On (produced in Britain at around at the same time), Driver's performance was the main reason My Good Friend was interesting enough to watch, and without her, the show lost its sparkle, in the same way that Game On lost its edge when Chaplin went to the US to star in a The Truth About Cats And Dogs with Uma Thurman, and was replaced in his part by the horrid, charmless Neil Stuke.

My Good Friend sadly isn't available on DVD, but if you should ever get the chance to see series one of the sitcom, try and catch it, if only for Driver's star-making turn.