Up With The Lark (1943)

This is a musical comedy starring Ethel Revnell and Gracie West (who made their name as radio comedians) as inept detectives who accidentally begin investigating a gang of black marketeers. Their investigation switches to the countryside where they pose as a pair of Land Army girls and much hilarity ensues (well quite a bit anyway though it does become rather corny at times).

What kind of film is this? It's the kind of film where a gangster dresses as a skeleton to scare people away from a ruined church (used as the black marketers' base) - a lot funnier than it sounds.

Don't expect a proper investigation, the detective pair bumble their way along and succeed in the end despite their best efforts.

Hard Ticket To Hawaii (1987)

An Andy Sidaris film that includes lots of breasts, guns, more breasts, a snake and even more breasts. It is unashamedly low-brow but also high-fun but mostly because it is so ridiculous.

The film stars a couple of obscure actors with all female roles played by Playboy Playmates. To be fair to some of the latter their acting is not as bad as it could have been (though it is bad). The plot is bad too, involving diamond smuggling and a contaminated snake, but forget the plot - it is not that important in a film like this! The film is really a sequence of often bizarre scenes and lots of violence and gratuitous nudity. And boy is there a lot of the latter. The female cast strip off with great regularity and for little apparently reason.

It is a film where a blow-up doll is blown up with a bazooka, a snake explodes out of a toilet and secret orders are hidden in a sandwich (which is then set on fire). The film is a cult classic and deservedly so.

The Killer Shrews (1959)

A typical 1950s US monster movie complete with mad scientists and terrible special effects. James Best (who later played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the Dukes of Hazzard) plays a ship captain who gets marooned on an island during a hurricane. There he discovers a small scientific community besieged by giant killer shrews...

The shrews (the result of an experiment gone wrong of course) have run out of other food and now are after human flesh. It's all very B-movie and low budget. The killer shrews are kept obscure for much of the movie probably because when they are finally shown they are completely ridiculous: basically barely disguised dogs.

All pretty formulaic and total nonsense but quite a lot of fun and at times quite scary. The human tank is genuinely innovative.

Free to Love (1925)

Clara Bow stars as a girl wrongly punished for a crime who then adopted and given a new life by the regretful judge who had once condemned her, assisted (and romanced) by minister Donald Keith. However she finds it hard to escape the rough life she has tried to leave behind.

A charming film as always with Clara though the plot is somewhat far fetched (the judge adopts Clara mere minutes after she pulled a gun on him!) The contrast between life at both ends of the social spectrum is quite illuminating. A rather compelling crime / melodrama. You know it will all end up happily for tea though... but how?

Kill (1971)

Quite simply the weirdest James Mason film I've ever seen. He plays an Interpol agent in this European co-production hunting down a rogue assassin who is killing heroin pushers. Well that sounds straight forward enough.

The thing is the film is rather eccentric, and suggests that copious amounts of recreational stimulants may have been involved in it's production...

The scenes in Pakistan especially involving Jean Seberg and Stephen Boyd score highly on the strange-o-meter. Especially as the latter wanders through Pakistani villages dressed head to toe in leather and no one bats an eyelid.

The film is odd and pretty surreal, and also very violent. Some of the action scenes are pretty good, especially the car-bike chase. But ultimately the film makes little sense and has rather a stereotyped view of life in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Definitely a film of it's time.

Crosstrap (1962)

Crosstrap is an interesting example of a 1960s British B-movie with a rather dark if ultimately a bit confusing storyline.

The film stars Gary Cockrell and Jill Adams as a couple who rent an isolated country cottage only to find there is a dead body in it!

Such things can usually ruin a holiday to be honest, especially when they find the cottage is being used as a hideout by a bunch of gangsters led by Lawrence Payne. Things turn even worse when a rival gang arrive and start shooting! Payne also plans for a different kind of "hit" on Adams.

The storyline is interesting and the film is a reasonable watch but is let down a bit by being somewhat confusing at times and also a bit silly at others. For curiosity and obscurity value it can't be beat though. The film was thought lost for a number of decades though a print was finally tracked down a few years ago.

Block-Heads (1938)

One of the later classic Laurel & Hardy films. They were the masters of comedy for sure. Few have ever approached their level of genius but their stars began to decline after this film which is maybe one of their last "great" films.

In "Block-Heads" they play a pair of World War One veterans, though Ollie has apparently not been told the war ended in 1918 and twenty years later was still at his guard post!

Finally relieved of duty he heads back over to the US and is reunited with his old comrade Stan, now in a rather fractious marriage, and then much mayhem ensues mostly in an apartment block with various gags and explosive antics (some literally).

Interestingly the film included quite a bit of recycling. Parts of the story were adapted from two 1920s Laurel & Hardy films and the WW1 battle scenes were taken from a number of earlier films including The Big Parade and Wings.