Bolero (1984)

OK, let’s talk about Bo Derek and Bolero (released in 1984). Critics at the time and almost all online reviewers today will tell you that it’s an awful movie and that she was a terrible actress.

In fact the critics were wrong as usual and sadly most online reviewers assume that this is a bad movie before seeing it. They had already decided that this was an opportunity to indulge in some cheap snark.

The fact is that Bolero is an erotic fantasy romance. This is a kind of movie that frightens mainstream audiences and by the 80s mainstream critics (who praised such movies to the skies in the 70s) had decided that they strongly disapproved of such movies. If you want to enjoy Bolero you have to accept that yes it is an erotic movie.

I shared most of these prejudices before deciding that perhaps I should take another look at the film. I also shared the disdain for Bo Derek until I saw her in Tarzan the Ape Man (1981). Watching her in that I found myself realising that she was actually pretty good. She was giving exactly the performance that was required. It was also the performance that her director, John Dekek (who was also her husband, something else that enraged critics), wanted. She was doing what actresses get paid to do.

Bo Derek is just one in the long line of actresses from the 70s to the 90s who were targeted for career destruction by critics.

Which brings us to Bolero. It is the 1920s. Ayre MacGillvary (Bo Derek) has just graduated from college and has inherited an immense fortune. Now she wants adventure. The first step is to lose her virginity. But she’s a romantic girl and she has seen all of Rudolph Valentino’s movies and she wants the experience to be special. She wants Valentino as the Sheikh to carry her off into the sands of the desert on his horse.

Reality doesn’t always match our dreams. She finds her sheikh and he is handsome and he is a real sheikh but he’s a poetry-writing Oxford graduate and carrying her off on his horse is a problem. He isn’t good with horses. He’s scared of them.

Next up she decides to go to Spain to find a handsome matador. Like Valentino in Blood and Sand.

She finds her matador, Angel Sacristan (Andrea Occhipinti), but he’s also not quite what one might expect. He’s the least popular matador in the country because he never kills the bull. So if you’re worried there’s going to be animal cruelty in this movie I can set your mind at rest. There isn’t any. No bulls are killed. No bulls are injured. For Angel bullfighting is simply a test of skill and courage.

Ayre may have found her dream but there’s Angel’s crazy gypsy girlfriend who vows to kill any woman who steals her man.

And then there’s an accident. Not a fatal one, but it’s a blow to poor Ayre’s dreams.

Among other things this is a movie about women’s sexual fantasies and being a woman Ayre’s fantasies are as much about love as they are about sex. This is a very very romantic movie.

It’s also an homage to silent cinema. Ayre doesn’t just want a man. She wants the kind of romantic hero she has seen in the movies.

It also features sex scenes that are quite explicit for a mainstream Hollywood movie, and a lot of nudity. This was reason enough for many critics to dismiss it out of hand.

It is an erotic movie but it’s an erotic romance movie and it’s a slightly offbeat movie as well.

Don’t worry about whether it gets any of the period details right. This is a total fantasy, inspired by the world of silent cinema rather than the actual world of the 1920s. For the same reason don’t fret too much about any implausibilities in the plot.

I enjoyed Bolero quite a bit and I highly recommend it as pure romantic fantasy.

I saw this movie on a very poor quality DVD years ago. Seeing it now on Blu-Ray is a revelation. It looks great.

Angel’s Egg (1985)

Angel’s Egg is a 1985 anime OVA written and directed by Mamoru Oshii. 

It was devised by Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano.

Whether it’s fantasy or horror or science fiction I can’t tell you because I don’t know. Maybe it's all three.

Or maybe it's something else entirely. 

It could certainly be described as art-house anime.

It was not a financial success and it stalled Oshii’s career for several years.

It begins with a young girl and a large egg. She feels that she must protect the egg.

She wanders through an apparently deserted city. It looks like a medieval European city but we will soon come to have doubts about the nature of this city. It may have been subjected to some calamity, possibly war or a plague.

It feels like a fantasy movie but then fairly on the machines arrive. Assuming that they’re machines.

The girl encounters a young man. He might be a wandering soldier or even a wandering knight. He seems determined to be her protector. He carries a weapon which looks slightly machine-like.

The girl is unsure about him but he has become her shadow.

He tells her about a bird he once saw. He asks her what is in the egg. She either won’t tell him or doesn’t know.

There is very little dialogue in this movie and very little plot. It’s a succession of images and moods.Striking, moody, disturbing images but disturbing in a subtle way. Everything is slightly off-kilter.

There are no clear delineations. Where does the water end and the city begin? Is this a city of the living or the dead? There are ruins, or are they skeletal remains of creatures or of machines, or even of gods? Is the man’s weapon a gun or a sword? Is he the girl’s protector or her enemy? Is he human or non-human? Are the girl and the man alive or dead? Are they real? And the fishes. What on earth are they?

Is this a dream or a vision? Is this another planet, or some distorted version of Earth or an entirely imaginary non-real world?

The egg might be the egg of a living creature or of a god or it might be something else entirely.

Asking what this movie means is probably to miss the point. It’s almost as if Mamoru Oshii has conjured up a movie from his dreamworld and is now asking the viewer what it means because he isn’t sure either.

This sounds very arty and very philosophical and possibly mystical and it is all of those things. It has been interpreted as having some Christian significance since many people believe that Oshii was at one time training to be a Christian priest. This appears to be a misunderstanding. He has stated that he had a considerable interest in Christianity but never was training to be a priest. He does know his Bible but he is also interested in religion and mythology in general. Perhaps in Angel’s Egg he is trying to create his own personal mythology.

As for the ending, you’ll have to decide for yourself about that.

The images are as stunning and extraordinary as you would expect given the involvement of Yoshitaka Amano.

Umbrella’s Blu-Ray release (the 4K disc is included as well) looks terrific.

Angel’s Egg is hypnotic and puzzling and if you like plot or character-driven stories this may not be for you. But if you hypnotic and puzzling stories then it’s highly recommended.

Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension was released in 1984. It was a spectacular box-office flop. It’s not hard to see why. It’s uber-geeky in a way that gave it no appeal whatsoever to mainstream audiences. It tries so hard to be cool and hip and edgy and clever that it becomes embarrassing. 

It wasn’t based on a comic book but it tries very hard to look like it was.

It’s an example of a film that was clearly made without any thought as to what the target audience was going to be. The budget was $17 million which was ridiculous for a movie that was only ever going to appeal to a tiny cult audience.

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a kind of 80s Doc Savage - an all-round genius and superhero. He’s a top neurosurgeon and a brilliant particle physicist and he’s just incredibly good at everything.

The plot is complicated. Buckaroo Banzai has designed a jet car with which he wants to break the dimension barrier. He succeeds, after driving the car straight through a mountain.

There are space aliens from another planet or maybe they’re from another dimension. There are two warring factions among the aliens.

The saga really began in the 1930s, with an earlier attempt to break the dimension barrier. And with space aliens landing in New Jersey where they brainwashed Orson Welles.

There’s a mad scientist, Dr Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) locked up in a mental hospital but he escapes and is out for revenge and he also wants to break the dimension barrier.

All of the aliens are named John.

Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin) gets mixed up in all this when she catches Buckaroo’s nightclub act. Yes, he has a band as well. They’re musicians and also scientists and junior-grade super-heroes. Penny reminds Buckaroo of his late wife.

Penny ends up in lots of trouble with the aliens and of course she ends up being held captive. There’s lots of running around. There are fistfights and gunfights. The aliens look human unless you have a special device that allows you to see their true form. Buckaroo has of course invented such a device.

The plot spins more and more out of control.

That’s not necessarily a huge problem. This is trying to be madcap comic book-style science fiction adventure romp and it doesn’t need to make any actual sense.

This is a movie that really isn’t sure what it’s trying to do. Is it trying to be a spoof? Maybe a spoof of geek culture? In any case it isn’t the least bit funny.

A major weakness is the casting. Peter Weller simply does not have the necessary charisma. The supporting cast includes Jeff Goldblum who would have been a far better choice to play Buckaroo.

John Lithgow yells and babbles a lot. It becomes very tiresome very quickly.

Ellen Barkin is OK but her part is disastrously underwritten and she and Peter Weller have no chemistry at all.

The special effects are very crude but almost certainly deliberately so and deliberately meant to be jokey. This film is pushing very hard for a comic-strip feel and it does succeed in that aim. The visuals are crazy and goofy but fun and they’re what I like most.

Despite its egregious flaws I couldn’t bring myself to actively dislike it. It fails in an entertaining very 80s way. It’s an oddity but if you have copious quantities of beer and popcorn on hand you might enjoy it. Imagine Earth Girls Are Easy without the laughs.

It looks nice on Blu-Ray.

Leviathan (1989)

Leviathan, directed by George P. Cosmatos and released in 1989, was part of the “terror in the deep” science fiction-horror sub-genre that flourished briefly around that time. 

It came out the same year as DeepStar Six (1989) and it has to be said that DeepStar Six is by far the better movie.

Leviathan is an Alien rip-off and it doesn’t even pretend to be anything else. If you’ve always wanted to see an Alien rip-off but set underwater then this is your movie. OK, there are elements borrowed from other movies such as The Thing but the core of this movie is Alien.

Leviathan was an Italo-American co-production, shot mostly in Italy.

The action takes place in a mining facility known as Shack 7, deep beneath the sea. Really deep. As in 16,000 feet deep.

Geologist Steven Beck (Peter Weller) is in charge. He’s not sure if he’s suited to being in command and his crew isn’t sure either. The crew of eight is the collection of misfits you expect in a movie like this. They have three days of a three-month contract to go and they really are fed up and there is some tension.

They have super high tech diving suits that are more like miniature diving vessels than conventional diving suits.

One crew members falls off an underwater cliff. He survives, and makes an extraordinary discovery. It’s a wrecked ship. The name of the ship is Leviathan and it’s obviously Russian. He salvages a chest from the wreck and that turns out to be a big mistake.

The surprise comes when the crew of Shack 7 do a computer check. The Russians are adamant that the Leviathan has not been lost at sea, and in fact there should be no wrecked ships of any kind in this vicinity.

There’s something else odd that suggests something surprising about the ship’s fate.

Of course there is something very very bad aboard that wrecked ship.

Beck has been in contact with his boss on the surface. We know as soon as she opens her mouth that we are dealing with an Evil Girlboss who would sell her own mother down the river to advance her career.

Soon the crew of Shack 7 find themselves confronting unthinkable horrors, and being trapped in an undersea complex with unthinkable horrors is no fun at all.

While, unlike Alien, it doesn’t have the input of the visual genius of H.R. Giger it still looks reasonably impressive. The undersea mining complex looks high tech but just a bit grungy. Wisely this is not overdone. Shack 7 doesn’t look like a scrap heap, it just looks like a place where people actually live and work. It’s not brightly lit but the shadows and darkness are not overdone.

The special effects are serviceable enough. The diving suits are very cool.

It’s meant to be exciting and scary, and it is. It’s a scary movie where people are trapped and cannot escape and that’s usually an effective trope. And they don’t fully comprehend the nature and extent of the threat.

It’s generally well-executed and well-acted. Leviathan is more of an old-fashioned drive-in movie than an 80s blockbuster and perhaps critics expected too much of it. It does what it sets out to do and does it pretty well. And personally I love underwater adventures and thrillers. Recommended.

Leviathan looks good on Blu-Ray.

I’ve also reviewed DeepStar Six (1989).

I’ve reviewed other George P. Cosmatos movies and they’re a mixed bag but generally enjoyable. The Cassandra Crossing (1976) and Escape to Athena (1979) have an off-kilter charm and Cobra (1986) is of course a masterpiece.

The Key (La chiave, 1983)

The Key (La chiave) is a 1983 erotic/romantic drama written and directed by Tinto Brass.

After his nightmarish experiences in the 70s with Salon Kitty and Caligula Brass decided simply to go his own way. He made the movies he wanted to make and he made them the way he wanted to make them. The movies he wanted to make were erotic movies and as a result he has never received the critical respect he deserves. 

And of course critics in the English-speaking world find it impossible to comprehend that erotic movies can be real movies.

A pity, since Tinto Brass made fascinating intelligent perceptive erotic movies with some real emotional depth.

It is Venice in 1939. Nino Rolfe (Frank Finlay) is an art historian. He has been married to Teresa (Stefania Sandrelli) for twenty years. They have a daughter, Lisa (Barbara Cupisti). Lisa has a boyfriend, Laszlo (Franco Branciaroli).

Much to Nino’s dismay Teresa has always been sexually inhibited.

Nino keeps a diary, recording his sexual obsessions. He leaves the key where Teresa will find it. He wants her to read it, and she does.

Teresa begins keeping a diary as well. She wants Nino to read it, which he does.

There is adultery in this movie but what drives the plot is the thought of adultery. Nino knows that there is an attraction between Teresa and Laszlo. He imagines them together. The thought excites him. Teresa knows that this excites Nino and this in turn excites her.

Nino’s jealousy arouses him. This also in turn excites Teresa.

Nino takes nude photographs of Teresa while she sleeps and gets Laszlo to develop and print them. He makes sure that Teresa discovers the photographs.

Lisa knows that these things are going on. Nino, Teresa, Lisa and Laszlo are all complicit in a complex game of deceptions and betrayals and jealousies and suspicions. They are all to some extent willing participants in this game.

Nino earns extra money by issuing phoney authentications for fake paintings - another layer of deception.

Voyeurism is a vey obvious theme in this movie, made more obvious by Brass’s love of mirror shots and sometimes mirror shots within mirror shots. Everything is a reflection of a reflection of reality and maybe what seems to be the reality is a deception as well.

The reading of each other’s diaries by Nino and Teresa is another form of voyeurism.

It’s also a movie about fantasies, and about the way the things we imagine are more exciting than the things we see.

These are people who behave badly but they have their reasons. They are trying to understand their desires and their emotions. In the process people can get hurt but this is not a movie that sees sex as a destructive force. It also doesn’t present voyeurism as destructive.

This is a softcore movie but it goes way beyond anything you would get away with in an American softcore movie. It’s a movie for grown-ups. Tinto Brass made erotic movies that take human erotic desires seriously.

Brass’s movies are very Italian. He has a great love for Italian culture but he has always been relatively uninterested in the Rome of the Swinging 60s or the Milan of the decadent glamorous 80s. He loves the old Italy. This movie takes place just before the outbreak of the war, a war that would destroy the world as it then existed or at least transform it into something unrecognisable. This adds a touch of poignancy which is found in so many of his movies.

The Key is Brass in top form. Highly recommended. It looks great on Blu-Ray.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of his movies. Monella (1998) is my favourite but Miranda (1985) and The Voyeur (1994) are also highly recommended.

They're Playing with Fire (1984)

They're Playing with Fire is a 1984 erotic thriller directed and co-written by Howard Avedis. 

Its biggest selling point is unquestionably its star, Sybil Danning.

Jay Richard (Eric Brown) is a typical college student who has a major crush on his sexy English professor, Mrs Stevens (Sybil Danning). He is thrilled when she wants to hire him to do some work on her boat (a huge pleasure cruiser). She’s very friendly and tells him to call her Diane). He polishes the woodwork but she wants more than her woodwork polished. Before he knows what’s happening she’s got his trousers off and they’re having wild passionate sex.

She wants him to do another little job for her. And for her husband Michael (Andrew Prine). It’s a harmless prank they want him to play on Michael’s mother and grandmother. All he has to do is break into their mansion and scare them.

What Jay doesn’t know is that Diane and Michael don’t have a penny of their own. Michael’s mother and grandmother are fabulously rich. Diane and Michael want that money and they want it now and they have a plan to get it. 

Unfortunately Jay doesn’t know that he is part of that plan.

The plot does rely on Jay being incredibly gullible but it’s perfectly plausible - he’s young and I don’t think any male would be thinking straight after a steamy bedroom romp with Sybil Danning, especially if he figures there’s a chance she might want her woodwork waxed again in the future.

There’s murder and Jay is uncomfortably aware that he’s likely to be a suspect. He’s left footprints and fingerprints behind at the murder scene.

We, the audience, do not know exactly what happened. We have our suspicions but we can’t be sure. All we know for certain is that Jay didn’t do it. Jay also doesn’t know exactly what happened. He has his suspicions as well but no evidence.

Jay would like to trust Diane, because he’s obsessed by her. But he’s far from sure that he really can trust her. He also has at least some awareness that his lust for Diane might be clouding his judgment.

The plot has fairly decent twists and some good misdirection. It keeps us guessing.

The action finale is OK but probably needed just a bit more energy and imagination.

This was obviously a low-budget movie but the mansion and the yacht give it reasonably high production values.

The acting is pretty good. Andrew Prine is low-key menacing but with a touch of ambiguity. Eric Brown is very good as Jay - it’s a convincing picture of a young guy who cannot believe his luck that this amazingly hot babe wants his body. But he doesn’t make Jay too pathetic or stupid. Or annoying.

But the movie’s biggest asset is of course Sybil Danning and she also effectively keeps us  guessing about Diane. Is she the unscrupulous schemer she appears to be? Has she actually fallen for Jay? She admits that she’s not getting any bedroom action from her husband - maybe the hot sex with Jay is including her judgment as well. It’s a very fine performance. And Miss Danning takes her clothes off frequently and there are moderately steamy sex scenes. 

There’s not a huge amount violence but what there is is quite graphic. Despite what some people claim this is not really a slasher film but the rising popularity of that genre made it commercially advisable to add some moderately graphic stuff to other genres.

This is an erotic thriller, and an erotic thriller that is actually erotic.

Iraq-born Howard Avedis is usually dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. Which is quite unfair. He did make mostly drive-in movies but they were often extremely interesting and rather offbeat. The Stepmother (1972) is an erotic thriller with an inverted mystery structure and it’s not bad. The Teacher (1974) is also an erotic thriller and it’s deliciously crazy and weird. The Fifth Floor (1978) is a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rip-off and it’s top-tier psychiatric horror.

They're Playing with Fire is solid entertainment and Sybil Danning is reason enough to make this one highly recommended. And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

DeepStar Six (1989)

At the tail end of the 80s suddenly everybody was making “terror beneath the sea” science fiction horror movies. Sean S. Cunningham’s 1989 DeepStar Six falls into that category. And it has a slight Alien vibe. 

Cunningham is of course best known as the director of the original Friday the 13th.

None of these movies did particularly well. Even James Cameron’s The Abyss lost a stack of money (due to its $70 million budget). DeepStar Six was made on a much more modest budget of $8 million and lost money.

So what went wrong with DeepStar Six? In my view nothing really went particularly wrong. This is a perfectly decent if not dazzlingy original sci-fi horror B-movie.

The setup is solid enough. The US Navy is building a missile base on the ocean floor. The crew of the undersea habitat DeepStar Six is responsible for the construction and to give the project some respectability and make it appear less sinister there’s a marine biologist with the team (you can’t have an underwater adventure without a marine biologist). The Navy can now claim that this is a scientific research project.

Of course things go wrong. One of the things this movie gets criticised for is that we have a long wait to see the monster. Personally I think that’s one of the movie’s strengths. The monster you don’t see is always scarier than the monster you do see. Until very late in the proceedings the members of the team have absolutely no idea what they’re up against. Is it something natural or man-made? They’re not even sure that it is a creature. If it is then what motivates its actions - is it hunger or a lust for killing or fear?

So the emphasis is on the effects on the crew of an unseen and inexplicable menace. Not knowing the nature of the threat means that they have no clue how to counter it. And they don’t know how much real danger they’re in. The fear builds slowly, which makes it all the more effective.

The pacing is pleasingly brisk. There’s a reasonable amount of action, there’s decent suspense and there is a sense of menace.

The special effects are old school (these were the pre-CGI days) and they look good. The miniatures are excellent. The interiors look good - DeepStar Six looks like a place where people live and work and it looks suitably claustrophobic. Obviously an undersea habitat is not going to be spacious.

The monster is not one of the great movie monsters but it’s OK.

The movie never looks cheap. It looks like some real effort was put into it.

I suspect that the big reason for its box-office failure was the lack of star power. The cast members are all perfectly competent but they’re basically solid character actors. Miguel Ferrer is particularly good.

A second reason might have been the lack of a human villain. There is one character who lets the side down but that’s the result of cracking under extreme psychological pressure rather than evil machinations. I like the fact that these are all people just doing their best but audiences love larger-than-life super-villains.

It might also have benefitted commercially from a bit more sexiness.

This movie isn’t perfect but it’s thoroughly enjoyable. It was treated harshly by critics at the time and still gets unfairly dismissed by online reviewers. It’s a B-movie and it isn’t trying to be profound. You just need to approach it with an open mind. And any movie with submarines and undersea action is inherently cool.

DeepStar Six is highly recommended as a beer and popcorn movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks lovely and they’ve included three (!!) audio commentaries.

On the subject of underwater sci-fi I've also reviewed Leviathan (1989).

Legend (1985)

Legend is a 1985 fantasy film directed by Ridley Scott and it seems to be almost a forgotten movie. 

This is old school fantasy, not just in terms of special effects but in terms of overall feel. It has more of an affinity with movies like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth than with more recent fantasy films.

This is a fairy tale movie without any noticeable comic-book influence.

It was a box-office flop and critics were unimpressed.

The central characters are Princess Lili (Mia Sara) and Jack (Tom Cruise). This is definitely the Realm of Faerie, a world of magic with goblins and unicorns and all manner of fantastic creatures, but it appears that Lili and Jack are human. Jack lives in the forest. Perhaps he was raised by the fairies? He does speak the language of the animals. 

Lili and Jack are madly in love and although Jack does not seem to have the usual qualifications one needs in order to marry a princess it is clear that Lili has chosen him.

These two young lovebirds then make two serious mistakes. They do two forbidden things. Firstly Jack allows Lili to touch a unicorn, something no mortal is permitted to do. And then Lili exercises her prerogative as a princess to set Jack a quest. She tosses the ring that signifies their betrothal into the lake. Jack must retrieve it, which proves impossible.

Unfortunately these mistakes aid the magical plans of the Lords of Darkness. He detests the sunshine and plans to create a world of perpetual night. To achieve this he must destroy the forest’s two unicorns and he must corrupt innocence. And Lili is clearly an innocent.

The corruption of Lili began with her impetuous urge to touch the unicorn.

The forest has now been plunged into permanent winter.

Jack is not exactly obvious hero material. He’s a naïve good-natured child of the forest. But now he will have to become a hero. 

Yes, there’s a hero’s journey here and Jack has a Destiny.

He has a small band of fairies to help him. They don’t seem like much of an army but they are devoted to Lili. And the elf Gump will be a useful lieutenant.

Tom Cruise is surprisingly effective as a sweet-natured hapless lad trying desperately hard to do the hero thing. And he’s very likeable. He’s the one cast member who gets it just right.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Tim Curry is incredibly hammy as the Lord of Darkness.

Lili is the problem. But that depends on which ending you choose. Yes, this is a Ridley Scott movie so there are three different cuts of the movie each with a radically different ending which changes the whole movie, and which will totally change your feelings about Lili. Either way the fact remains that Mia Sara just didn’t have the necessary star quality or warmth or depth to make us really care about Lili.

This was 1985, long before CGI. But by this time old school special effects and makeup effects had become extraordinarily sophisticated and effective. Legend is a demonstration of just how stunning pre-CGI movies could be.

Ridley Scott’s greatest asset has always been his aesthetic vision and his ability to assemble teams of talented people who can put his vision on the screen. His best movies are largely exercises in aesthetic vision and when he sticks to that he makes superb movies. When he makes movies that require storytelling skill and complex characterisation  the results can be very disappointing (Someone To Watch Over Me being a prime example). I think each of the endings of Legend has its pluses and minuses.

Legend has a few problems but they’re outweighed by its strengths. Recommended.

Gothic (1986)

Ken Russell’s Gothic, released in 1986, is based on the famous real-life events of a three-day period in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati Near lake Geneva when Lord Byron, his mistress Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley and his mistress (and soon-to-be bride) Mary Godwin and Byron’s personal physician Dr John Polidori amused themselves by reading ghost stories and decided, as a contest, that each of them would write a ghost story. As a result the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Polidori wrote The Vampyre, two of the most influential literary works in history.

With Frankenstein Mary Shelly invented science fiction (in this case with major gothic overtones) and with The Vampyre Polidori invented modern vampire fiction.

It was subject matter that was always going to appeal to Ken Russell. He was fascinated by artistic genius and explored the theme in countless movies. Russell was not interested in worshipful biopics. He was more interested in things like genius as madness, genius thwarted (Savage Messiah), genius betrayed (The Music Lovers) and genius as a self-destructive force (Isadora, Mahler, Dante’s Inferno).

It’s obvious from the start that Russell is going to great lengths to avoid the look and feel of BBC-TV costume dramas and the Merchant-Ivory movies and that he did not want cast members who looked like they belonged in any of those productions. Russell wanted something much wilder and crazier and he wasn’t worried about getting all the period details correct. Claire Clairmont in this movie looks like she’s on the way to a 1980s nightclub.

Percy Shelley is too often imagined as a sensitive, gentle, pallid aesthete. In this movie he’s a complete nutter and much more like the real Shelley - an unstable overgrown selfish spoilt child.

Byron was the first rock star. He lived the rock star lifestyle. Sex, drugs and Romantic poetry.

Wth five neurotic unstable drug-addled individuals stuck indoors with wild storms raging outside, reading too many ghost stories and doing too many drugs they quickly become even crazier than they were to begin with. Their personal demons are soon getting the better of them.

It doesn’t help that Byron is growing bored with Claire. Or that Percy Shelley had had an affair with Claire. There’s a whole web of interlocking jealousies and obsessions.

Claire is getting seriously weird and Shelley is becoming unhinged. They’re both experiencing hallucinations. Pretty soon they’re all experiencing hallucinations.

This movie is Ken Russell excess at its most excessive. Lots of wild off-kilter camera angles and disturbing lighting and then there are the automatons.

This is Ken Russell remorselessly picking apart the dark side of genius, and the Byron-Shelley circle was ideal material. Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were advocates of anarchism, feminism and free love which had predictably catastrophic effects on Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and on Percy Shelley. These were particularly dangerous ideas for a mind as feeble as Shelley’s. Percy Shelley’s embrace of these doctrines drove his first wife to suicide.

Not only can creative geniuses be profoundly unpleasant people, they can also be profoundly stupid.

The movie is certainly a horror movie. Five awful people descend further and further into a drug-fuelled gothic fiction nightmare world of madness and horror, a nightmare world they have themselves created. They can no longer distinguish between nightmare and reality.

Do creative geniuses need to be mad? Probably not, but there’s no question that many creative geniuses have been trainwrecks as human beings and they’re the geniuses Ken Russell was interested in. The film suggests that it was three days of deranged but talented people tearing themselves apart in an orgy of insanity and excess that gave the world two unquestioned masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Maybe it was worth it from the world’s point of view.

Russell is trying to tie in the crazy goings-on at the Villa with the creation of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. These two works are gradually taking shape in the minds of Mary and Polidori. The five think they’re created a monster that’s haunting them but in fact they’re assisting in the birth of two literary masterpieces (and there is plenty of procreation and child-birth symbolism).

The performances could not be described as good in a conventional sense but they’re the crazed off-the-wall performances that Ken Russell wanted.

Gothic may not quite be top-tier Ken Russell but it deserves a much better reputation. Fascinating and highly recommended.

I have the German Blu-Ray which provides an excellent transfer and offers both English and German language options.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989)

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is a goofy 1989 spoof of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The U.S. Government is concerned about a nefarious foreign plot to cut off the nations supply of avocados. This will lead to a guacamole crisis which will be the prelude to complete societal collapse. 

As everyone knows almost all of America’s avocados come from the savage unexplored jungles of southern California. 

Those jungles are the home of the much-feared Piranha Women who eat their men after mating with them. 

The Government sends a feminist ethnographer, Dr Kurtz (Adrienne Barbeau), to persuade the Piranha Women to move to a government reservation. Actually it’s a condo in Malibu.

But Dr Kurtz has vanished.

The U.S. Army sent a Special Forces team to rescue her but they were wiped out. The Army has decided that more drastic action is needed. They are going to send a Women’s Studies professor this time. They have selected Dr Margo Hunt (Shannon Tweed). She’s well qualified for the mission, being cute and blonde.

One of her students, Bunny (Karen Mistal), insists on going along. Bunny is a Valley Girl but she’s keen.

They will need a guide. Jim (Bill Maher) gets the job because he’s cheap. He’s also Margo’s ex-boyfriend, well sort of.

They set off downriver, braving the typical southern California hazards such as hippos.

They will discover that there’s something much more vital than avocados at stake.

In their tent at night Margo and Bunny get into some girl talk, confiding their hopes and dreams to each. Margo dreams of a world of equality and respect between the sexes. Bunny dreams of finding a man who will tie her up and spank her.

A common problem with low-budget movies (and this one is very low-budget) is pacing but that’s no problem here. There’s also the tendency to rely purely on goofy ideas but writer J.F. Lawton (who went on to write Pretty Woman) understands that you need actual gags as well and they have to be funny. And he wrote a genuinely very funny script.

I like Shannon Tweed and consider her to be underrated as an actress but the big revelation here is that she’s so good at comedy. She has a wonderfully sly deadpan comic delivery.

Bill Maher and Karen Mistal have totally different approaches to comedy but the three leads work together extremely well.

Adrienne Barbeau makes a good scary villainess - when ethnographers go bad they go really bad.

There’s satire here but it’s directed at just about everyone and everything. Men get mocked, and so do feminists. And Valley Girls. And the military. And academics. But it’s actually rather good-natured. For all his posturing Jim is a pretty nice guy. For all her feminist seriousness Margo is a nice lady. And maybe Bunny is a bimbo but she’s cute and sweet.

This is also a rom-com. When male and female characters snipe at each constantly we suspect that they’re crazy in love with each other.

And then the movie throws in a couple of unexpected twists at the end. It’s as if J.F. Lawton (who directed the picture as well as writing it) decided not to be predictable and to surprise us a little. I approve of that and I think the ending is perfect.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is very funny in a fairly clever way. It’s a much better movie than you expect it to be and it’s highly recommended.

Full Moon’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.