The Head (1959)

A very strange science horror film, obviously involving heads!

Professor Abel (Michel Simon) has developed a serum that can keep the severed head of a dog alive. He recruits a new assistant Dr Ood (Horst Frank). 

Abel dies of a heart attack but Ood takes the opportunity to remove the professor's head and keep it alive with the serum. Ood forces the professor to assist him with a bizarre experiment to give a hunch backed nurse a new body from a stripper...

A very strange film with a ton of atmosphere, though at times a little too odd however the film is certainly compelling enough to keep you interested. The soundtrack is particularly good and eerie. 

The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969)

The last of five Fu Manchu films starring Christopher Lee in the 1960s, but really a step too far.

Evil Fu Manchu (Lee) has forced a scientist to develop a new fiendish machine which can freeze water en masse, he demonstrates it by freezing the seas around an ocean liner (and definitely not re-using footage from a Titanic movie...) Of course, Fu Manchu wants a lot of cash from the world government in return for not using his new weapon.

The British send their top agent Nayland Smith (Richard Greene) to stop Manchu, who is holed up in a Turkish castle he has stolen...

By now the Fu Manchu series was a bit tired and bereft of ideas, Christopher Lee and Tsai Chin (Fu Manchu's daughter) are always a good turn and very watchable but everything else is rather cheap and dreary. The film is also padded out with irrelevant scenes which drag the story down. Campy and schlocky, which is fun at times, but overall that isn't quite enough.

Chariots of the Gods (1970)

The work of Erich von Daniken, who proposed that mankind has been visited by ancient aliens and who even may have started human civilisation, was very popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this documentary explore theses theories with much fascinating footage.

The documentary travels at break-neck speed, exploring unusual artifacts and ancient writing. The narrative jumps around a little too much though and at times you would like a little more depth. Though if that happened then maybe you would realise that the evidence has been a little too well chosen to fit the narrative...

This is interesting to watch and nothing else and shouldn't be taken that seriously, if you read more deeply into the subject then you know what von Daniken was notorious for doing with the "evidence"! The footage especially of things like a cargo cult in the Pacific is brilliant though.

Touch and Die (1992)

A complicated if not very exciting thriller.

Frank Magenta (Martin Sheen) is a investigative reporter who is looking into the candidacy of presidential hopeful Scanzano (David Birney). Scanzano is doing well in the polls but is running out of money. 

Magenta discovers that stolen plutonium is being used to raise funds for the campaign, a deadly conspiracy which leaves a trail of dead bodies behind (some due to radiation poisoning and other quicker methods). Magenta and his family including his daughter Emma (Renée Estevez) are also in the firing line...

This is a long drawn out TV movie and could have done with some editing. The story is fine and certainly well travelled taking in Rome, Paris, NY and ..er.. Africa. The story is interesting but too long winded to maintain much level of excitement. 

The Handmaid's Tale (1990)

A dark dystrophia, that in the thirty odd years since release doesn't seem quite so far fetched any more.

We are in the near future and it's dark times. America has fallen, replaced by the religious fundamentalist Gilead (though a civil war seems to be raging so not everywhere is under Gilead's control it seems). Pollution has wiped out much of human fertility, those women who can still give birth are now a valuable commodity, not that they see any of that value themselves of course. Women like Kate (Natasha Richardson) are trained to become obedient "handmaids", basically given to rich families to bear their children for them. 

Kate is given to the Commander (Robert Duvall) and his wife Serena (Faye Dunaway). Rough unpleasant sex with religious ceremonial overtones follows. Kate also strikes up a friendship with the Commander's driver Nick (Aiden Quinn). There is more to Nick than it at first seems, indeed more to Gilead's supposedly strict religious society than it at first seems too...

The world of Gilead is monstrous, especially because of so much that goes unexplained as much as what we see. Hypocrisy and violence is of course at the centre of the society which is well portrayed here. An excellent film.

Bounty Tracker (1993)

A film about a bounty tracker, which is basically a bounty hunter but with a different title.

Jonathan (Lorenzo Lamas) is a bounty hunter tracker heads out west to visit his brother in LA. Unfortunately brother Paul (Paul Regina) and his firm of lawyers is mixed up in a murky crime boss trial. When Paul's law firm is literally wiped out by a gang led by Gauss (Matthias Hues), Paul gets police protection. However, that doesn't save him from Gauss and his top hit woman Jewels (Cyndi Pass)...

Jonathan wants revenge against Gauss and enters the LA underworld to try and track him down, including a rather strange fight scene at an Indonesian martial arts dojo. Jonathan ends up getting some help from a bunch of kids.

An ultra violent film with a basic script which simply provides a skeleton for the violent set pieces to be hung off. Not very original or high art but entertaining if you like a high body count. The sort of film you would get from the video store as a teenager and loved all to death but nowadays cringe throughout if you watched it, well not me as i am still the teenager inside and loved it. There is plenty of early 1990s cheese on show as well. Great stuff!

First Spaceship on Venus (1960)

An East German science-fiction epic and it is equal parts amazing and weird.

An artefact from a meteorite strike is found to have come from Venus and contains a message. An international team of astronauts is sent off to Venus to discover what happened to the apparently advanced civilisation on the planet. Their mission soon runs into many hazards in outer space. When they reach Venus they discover the civilisation is in ruins, having destroyed themselves somehow while preparing to attack Earth. However, a super weapon is still aimed at Earth...

Although dubbed into English, this film stands out from other films of the period and genre with it's inventive set design and the thoughtful weighty plot. This isn't a space opera with all American heroes, in fact the film has a rather refreshing international feel about it. The film is pretty odd though, a lot of that is probably due to how the film was edited to fit the English dialogue. 

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

Rather low-rent horror with beautiful women on a tropical island... and spider men.

Gary (Alexander D'Arcy) and Georgia (Helga Franck) assemble a dance troupe of young women and takes them to Singapore... unfortunately their plane crashes in the Pacific. Joe and the survivors end up on a remote island. They discover that someone was living there but he is lying dead in a gigantic spider web!

A bizarre giant spider lives on the island. It attacks Joe who manages to kill it but it's venom turns him into a spider man. He then hunts the women... But then two guys turn up at the island and the women forget all about the spider threat until the end and the return of spider man for a final showdown...

A cheap horror romp, it doesn't make a lot of sense or have that much in the way of horror action though does show a lot of female flesh. Cheesy and vaguely exotic fun. The dubbing is sometimes hilariously bad.

The Girl from Rio (1969)

A bizarre crime action film. There are many films which make little sense, but this film makes none whatsoever.

The all-female queendom of Femina, under the rule of Sumitra (Shirley Eaton), wants to conquer the world. Jeff (Richard Wyler) has arrived in Rio with $10 million. The gangster Sir Masius (George Sanders), whose men drive around incognito in gaudy hearses, is after his money though his hoods are pretty useless in a fight. Sumitra also wants the cash as well and captures Jeff. Jeff is take to Femina and ends up in a glass cell along with Ulla (Marta Reeve) being tortured. We discover that Jeff is really here to rescue her. Though, he seems to pick up quite a harem along the way.

It's terrible campy nonsense really, but looks pretty funky. Sumitra's fortress is a concrete Brutalist marvel. Her tortures involve many strange early electronic noises. Her army of females are (of course) fairly scantily dressed. Well it was 1969, who needed acid when films like this were around?

The Apple (1980)

The year is 1994 and the world is controlled by BIM! BIM in fact being the highly addictive musical concoction of Mr Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal), who spends most of his time indulging with orgies with a whole host of freaks (and the rest of the time he wastes). 

Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmore) are naive kids from rural Canada who have a dream to sing songs, but Mr Boogalow wants to drag them into his showbiz machine...

He indeed does get Bibi to sign but Alphie resists and he cast adrift from the extremely camp Mad Max style cast of BIM. Bibi gets drawn into a life of drugs and sex while Alphie lounges around writing songs and groping his landlady. Finally, Bibi sees the light and flees, and is reunited with Alphie who by now is in a hippy commune but Mr Boogalow isn't finished yet...

Quite frankly this is one of the strangest films ever made. A sci-fi comedy religious allegory musical. Although the future portrayed is largely nonsense you could say that the dark future envisaged back in 1980 did come true in some ways, with popular culture under the thumb of big corporations controlling kids of dubious talent. Unfortunately we didn't get the Mad Max / Gary Glitter-esque future outfits and cars with extra fibreglass panels added to them. 

The music (of this musical) isn't that bad and the sheer weirdness and campness of this film makes this highly enjoyable and entertaining despite how awful the story and acting mostly is. 

Brilliant nonsense. It really is quite extraordinary.

The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism (1967)

A macabre but also campy horror, very Hammer-like and not just because of Christopher Lee. The sadistic Count Regula (Lee) is torn apart by wild horses as punishment for murdering twelve virgin maidens. Thirty five years later the lawyer Roger (Lex Barker) and piano teacher Baroness Lilian (Karin Dor) receive strange invites from the Count Regula. As they approach his castle, they find villagers recoiling in fear, though the priest - apparently - Fabian (Vladimir Medar) isn't afraid and joins them for the trip.

They find themselves in a terrifying castle, the guest of Anatol (Carl Lange). He brings Count Regula back to life. The Count reveals that Roger is the last member of his executioner's family and Roger must die to complete his revenge. Lillian will be the thirteenth maiden to die by his hand, this will enable him to complete his twisted experiments and create an elixir of eternal life...

Not the most original of horror films, it seems to take many elements of well-known horror tropes, including a pendulum pit and iron maidens and mixes everything up in a fairly psychedelic and very grotesque romp. Christopher Lee gives a great turn as the evil count (but of course you would expect nothing less!) 

Contamination (1980)

A genuine "video nasty" from the 1980s and you can see why as it had plenty of exploding abdomens. A freighter arrives at New York with a dead crew, and they have died in an incredibly gruesome manner. The police discover some mysterious green eggs, one proceeds to explode covering the cops in goo... the cops then die horribly by giving their innards some air.

Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau) is investigating for the US government, enlisting the help of police man (and only survivor of the earlier gore fest) Tony Aris (Marino Masé). After some experiments in the lab (including blowing up a rat) they think the eggs and the goo have an extraterrestrial origin... from Mars to be exact. Holmes tracks down ex-astronaut Hubbard (Ian McCulloch) who went off the rails following his mission. He indeed did see the eggs on Mars though his fellow astronaut Hamilton (Siegfried Rauch) denied there was anything there. Pity he died in a plane crash... or did he?

Complete nonsense of course, obviously influenced by Alien though not a complete rip-off. A fun film if approached in the right way, and that right way is to have a laugh at the ridiculous alien monster and exploding bellies. Entertaining rubbish. The film was apparently funded by Columbian drug barons, perfect!

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

A fine meaty role for the peerless Louise Brooks. 

She plays Thymian, daughter of a chemist (Josef Rovensky), who is raped by her father's assistant (Fritz Rasp). She becomes pregnant and is sent to a tough reform school (and her baby taken away from her) as she won't marry her rapist. Thymian eventually escapes and ends up working in a brothel. There is a way for Thymian to escape her dark life with the help of a Count (Andre Roanne) but will she be able to take it? Or will she be always haunted by her past?

This is a tough film which Brooks brings a lot of emotion into (but let's face it she is put through a lot). The film portrays upper and middle class society as moral free, sadistic and hypocritical. 

This is a melodrama for sure but so artfully and skill fully done. Louise Brooks is mesmerising. 

Enemy Mine (1985)

One of the better science-fiction films from the 1980s, it starts off all laser guns blazing as a bit of passable space opera nonsense but when Davidge (Dennis Quaid) is marooned on a hostile planet the film changes (and improves) dramatically. He sets off in search of the Drac enemy he shot down though tables are soon turned when he ends up the prisoner of Jeriba (Louis Gossett Jr).

However, to survive on the planet the two must work together and friendship blossoms as they struggle against meteorite storms and vile predatory creatures. They learn each other's language and culture, though Jeriba seems to think Mickey Mouse is a prominent Human philosopher. Maybe he was?

Jeriba gives birth and dies, Dravidge brings up the child (Bumper Robinson) as his nephew. Then a slaver ship led by the brutal Stubbs (Brion James) lands on the planet...

Although the film is bookended by sci-fi action, the bulk of the film is an intelligent exploration of what really makes a person and how two enemies can have more in common than different. The film had a troubled start, the director being changed during filming, the new director starting again from scratch! Despite this, the film has some magic to it.

Bloodline (1979)

Quite possibly the worst film ever made, a hideous film in so many ways, and of course very watchable because of that. 

After the owner of a pharmaceutical company is killed (he is climbing a mountain dressed in what looks like a Spiderman outfit and his rope is cut), his daughter and heir Elizabeth (Audrey Hepburn) is under pressure to sell the company by the board members (a host of stars including James Mason and Omar Sharif) who all have their own money troubles.

Elizabeth decides to not sell and she is now in danger. She manages to survive a number of botched murder attempts. Meanwhile, a detective (Gert Frobe) investigates the death of Elizabeth's father - mostly by talking to a computer (which speaks back of course with a wonderfully retro synthesised voice). There is also a strange snuff-video subplot which doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the main plot...

The film is a car crash (and also includes a number of car crashes). It is incredibly trashy and shoddy. A perfect adaptation of a Sidney Sheldon book then. The dialogue is banal, the editing rough, the plot makes little sense. Quite why such a great cast wanted to be involved with this is the true mystery. Like the board members in the film they obviously needed the money. 

Missile X: Tehran Incident (1979)

Unintentionally hilarious sub-Bond nonsense. A peace summit is due to be held in the Persian Gulf but the Baron (Curt Jurgens) seeks to attack it using a stolen Russian nuclear missile (which so obviously looks like it has been made out of cardboard). CIA agent Franklin (Peter Graves) is sent to Iran where he meets up with his Soviet counterpart Senyonov (Michael Dante) to find out whats going on.

Quite what their plan is remains a mystery as they seem to aimlessly move from one fight to the other, including a formless brawl in a casino. Luckily for our heroes the Baron's men are low-rent thugs including a man with a metal arm that can project spikes. They all share a lack of ability to fight and shoot straight in scene after scene. 

Franklin meanwhile sleeps with women young enough to be his daughter (at least). As the film progresses you get the impression he might be a little too old to be throwing himself around an Iranian backyard. It probably would have been a decent role for Graves about fifteen years earlier into his career.

It is a fun (if approached in the right manner) if nonsensical film. The film does have a great funk soundtrack, though most of the time it rather jars with the action, sometimes drowning out the dialogue too. This adds to the "joy" of the film of course. The view of Iran just before the revolution is also fascinating and revealing.

Ten Little Indians (1974)

A lush Agatha Christie adaptation. A group of strangers are mysteriously assembled to a remote hotel in the Iranian desert by U.N. Owen (Orson Welles), the strangers who include Charles Aznavour (who of course gives us a song), Richard Attenborough, Herbert Lom, Adolfo Celi and Oliver Reed - all discover they have been bought together under false pretenses by U.N. Owen (or Unknown).

Then a tape is played where Owen's voice rings out, he tells them all they have gotten away with murder. Then the guests begin dying one by one. Who is the murderer? Is it one of the guests? Will any of them survive?

Although not the best version of this story, a bit slow at times, the sheer amount of star power and the surroundings especially the Persian architecture makes this film highly watchable and enjoyable. It is dark and suspenseful as such a situation should be.

Laser Mission (1989)

Incomprehensible low-budget action nonsense. Michael Gold (Brandon Lee) is a mercenary sent to recruit Professor Braun (Ernest Borgnine) who is an expert on lasers. The CIA want to keep his knowledge safe and stop terrorists blowing airliners out of the sky with lasers (obviously the CIA want to be able to do that themselves)...

Gold is sent to... well who really knows... it could be Africa, it could be Latin America it could be a film set which oddly mixes both. There are plenty of Cubans and Russians around but none of them can shoot straight, except Colonel Kalishnakov (Grahem Clarke). Gold meets up with Alissa (Debi Monahan) who is supposed to be Braun's daughter but also seems incredibly handy in a fight. Endless shoot outs and chase scenes across the desert thus follow...

It is terrible but strangely compelling at the same time. The fight scenes are so bad that the cannon fodder bad guys often drop dead even before the heroes start firing. The meagre plot is stretched so thinly that half a dozen pointless action scenes had to be inserted to fill the film out. Oh and the dialogue is frequently awful. And this is why it is brilliant obviously.

Circus of Fear (1966)

A gang steal money from a van but in the confusion a guard is shot. The shooter Mason (Victor Madden) is sent packing to a circus (where he is summarily dispatched by a knife man). Inspector Elliot (Leo Genn) tracks Mason down to the circus and finds many mysterious things...

Including Gregor (Christopher Lee) in a black mask, a lion tamer who apparently was horribly scarred. Gregor is training Natasha (Suzy Kendall) but has a secret which the ringmaster Carl (Heinz Drache) is determined to find out. Meanwhile Gina (Margaret Lee) is in a tempestuous relationship with knife-thrower Mario (Maurice Kaufmann) and is found dead with a knife in her back...

After a high energy opening the film does bog down a bit when it reaches the circus but the various sub-plots and red herrings make for a very enjoyable film. One of Christopher Lee's more unusual roles. The identity of Mr Big who organised the robbery and performed various killings is a genuine surprise.

Five Golden Dragons (1967)

Late 60s crime cheese, greatly enlivened by the setting of Hong Kong. The film would have been much less watchable if it had been set in say Hull or Southend-on-Sea.

Bob (Robert Cummings) is an ageing American playboy who gets dragged into the world of international crime and a mysterious gang the Five Golden Dragons who evilly control gold smuggling across the world...

Assisted by comely sisters Maria Rohm and Maria Perschy he finds himself in various perils across the territory. Police Rupert Davies and Roy Chiao are also trying to find out what exactly is going on, the viewer will also be frequently bemused.

The dragons themselves, which include Christopher Lee, unfortunately only appear fleeting.

It is fluffy and at times a bit of a mess but a lot of fun. It shouldn't be taken very seriously just enjoyed for what is it, a gorgeous looking film in a gorgeous looking location.