The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Blu-Ray review

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was released in 1972. It was torn to shreds by Australian film critics (who wanted worthy earnest Australian films) and proceeded to make a fortune at the box office. It was the newly revived Australian film industry’s first smash hit.

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was shot partly in Australia and partly in London.

Barry McKenzie (Barry Crocker) is a young Australian who has just inherited some money, but the condition is that he has to use it to travel to Britain. His aunt Mrs Edna Everage (Barry Humphries) decides to accompany him.

Bazza’s problems (he is known to his friends as Bazza) start at Heathrow. He gets ripped off by the customs inspector but worst of all his supply of Fosters Lager is confiscated. Bazza is worried he won’t be able to buy Fosters in London.

Bazza has a series of outrageous adventures. He is recruited as an advertising model. He falls in with crooked hippies who plan to launch him as an Aussie folk-singing sensation. He encounters a middle-aged Englishman (played by the great Dennis Price) who wants Bazza to cane him. He falls into the hands of a crazy psychiatrist. He looks up a childhood friend, Gaylene (Mary Anne Severne), unaware that she is now a lesbian. Gaylene’s ex-husband Dominic (Peter Bentley), a TV producer, persuades Bazza to be interviewed on television.

All these adventures seem to end with wild fist-fights, chaos and in one memorable scene with Bazza throwing up over the psychiatrist’s head. Thousands of gallons of Fosters Lager are consumed. Bazza makes desperate attempts to persuade a variety of young females to go to bed with him, with a striking lack of success.

Bazza could easily have come across as obnoxious but Barry Crocker, giving a terrific performance, avoids that pitfall. He manages to persuade us that underneath the crude exterior Bazza is really quite vulnerable. Bazza just doesn’t understand anything that is happening to him. He’s a virgin and he’s terrified of women. His uncouthness is a defence. He’s really rather scared. If the audience hated Bazza the film would not have worked at all but Crocker is able to get us on Bazza’s side.

Barry Humphries had the Edna Everage schtick ticking along nicely by this time. He plays two other roles as well, including the hapless psychiatrist.

There are some notable British comedy figures in the guest cast, including Peter Cook and Spike Milligan.

To appreciate this movie fully you have to have some historical background. The 1950s had been the era of Cultural Cringe in Australia, a period in which Australians took it for granted that everything about Australian culture was inferior to British culture. By the late 60s a reaction was happening with the rise of the “new nationalism” which aimed to establish a distinctive cultural identity in both high culture and pop culture. The resuscitation of the long-dead Australian film industry was a part of this. And The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was the movie that proved that Australian movies could be commercially viable.

It’s also necessary to place Barry Humphries in the context of what was happening in British comedy in the 60s. This was the golden age of satire and at the forefront was Peter Cook. Barry Humphries was very part of this scene. He and Peter Cook were good friends and in 1964 Cook asked Humphries to write a comic strip (which became The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie) for his satirical magazine, the legendary Private Eye. Both Peter Cook and Barry Humphries favoured a deliberately provocative style of comedy. They wanted to provoke howls of outrage, and they did.

And no-one could provoke howls of outrage more effectively than Barry Humphries. When the Barry McKenzie comic strip was published in book form it was promptly banned by the Australian Government. This of course was exactly the kind of reaction Humphries wanted.

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is very much a movie that seeks to provoke and outrage. When Australian critics savaged the movie Humphries was delighted - if so many people whom he despised hated it he figured he was on the right track.

This movie is of course dated, offensive and problematic, but only in parts. I’d estimate that only 112 of its 114 minutes are dated, offensive and problematic. Of course it was intended at the time to be offensive. Nobody used the term problematic at the time but if the term had been used then Humphries would certainly have aimed to be as problematic as possible. It should be pointed out that the movie sets out to mock and offend absolutely everybody. It’s actually very offensive in a non-offensive way. You’re not supposed to take it even a tiny bit seriously.

It’s also crude and vulgar, and deliberately so. Again Humphries is gleefully setting out to provoke and outrage.

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie has a couple of flaws that are almost certainly a reflection of inexperience. Bruce Beresford had never made a feature film. Neither Beresford nor Barry Humphries (who co-wrote the script between them) had ever written a feature film. The movie is a bit too long. It’s also very episodic. On the other hand this is an adaptation of a comic strip, not a novel. Its episodic quality can be seen as both a flaw and a virtue.

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is a unique cinematic experience. I enjoyed ever moment of it. Highly recommended.

Sirens (1994)

Sirens is a 1994 Anglo-Australian production written and directed by John Duigan dealing with Australian artist and writer Norman Lindsay. I personally consider Lindsay to be the only great painter Australia has ever produced, and also the greatest erotic painter of the 20th century. So any movie about him is going to pique my interest. I did in fact see this movie some years ago but I’m now getting the chance to see it on Blu-Ray.

While it deals with a real person the story is entirely fiction.

As the film opens (presumably some time in the 1930s) church leaders are in a panic about a new exhibition of Australian painting. Given that is the country’s most celebrated painter Norman Lindsay (played in the film by Sam Neill) could hardly be excluded but the paintings the artist has chosen to represent his work are giving churchmen and society’s moral watchdogs heart failure. The paintings are highly erotic and possibly even blasphemous. Somehow Lindsay has to be persuaded to substitute more respectable paintings for these shocking canvases. Which may be a challenge, since Lindsay doesn’t paint respectable paintings.

The Bishop of Sydney feels that it would be futile for any local churchman to try to persuade Lindsay. But possibly the Reverend Anthony Campion (Hugh Grant) might be able to do it. Tony Campion is a young English churchman with a reputation as a progressive, and as luck would have it he will be passing very close to Lindsay’s home in the Blue Mountains on his way to a new parish.

The artist offers to put Tony and his wife Estella (Tara Fitzgerald) up for the night. Lindsay is highly amused by the whole business.

Their stay in Lindsay’s eccentric household turns out to be rather longer than expected. Tony makes very little progress. Lindsay has dealt with puritans before. They don’t impress him.

The Lindsay household consists of Lindsay, his wife Rose (Pamela Rabe), their two children and three models - Sheela (Elle Macpherson), Pru (Kate Fischer) and Giddy (Portia de Rossi) although Giddy is not actually a professional artist’s model. There is also odd-job man Devlin (Mark Gerber) but he doesn’t live in the house. Devlin is almost blind.

Estella Campion feels very uncomfortable in this household. She’s rather straitlaced and respectable and she is deeply shocked by Sheela, Pru and Giddy. She thinks that Sheela and Pru are not respectable young women at all. And the erotically charged atmosphere in the household disturbs her a great deal. It awakens things in her the existence of which she had never suspected. Wicked erotic longings. Especially when she catches sight of Devin naked in the woods.

Tony is a little unsettled as well. Everywhere he goes there seem to be naked women.

Not everyone likes this movie. The mixed reaction to it may have something to do with he fact that it came out in 1994. At that time the Sexual Revolution seemed to have been won and the puritans appeared to have been routed. Society seemed to be becoming steadily more civilised, more sophisticated, more open-minded and more grown-up about sex. A movie that indulged in puritan-baiting seemed a bit gratuitous and unnecessary. A bit like putting the boot into an enemy who was already down and out. Today of course we know that the puritans were far from defeated and they’re on the offensive again, so the movie now has a bit more bite to it than it had in 1994.

And Duigan wisely did not fall for the temptation to make the clergyman a stereotypical fire-and-brimstone preacher obsessed with sin and guilt. Tony Campion is just a little bit of a prude but he tries very hard not to be, he really is fairly open-minded and he’s an easy-going very likeable young chap. Hugh Grant was rather inspired choice to play the young churchman and he does an excellent job.

In fact the two antagonists are both equally sympathetic. Sam Neill plays Lindsay as a strong-willed man who will not compromise on his beliefs but also as a loveable rogue and an eccentric with a certain rough charm.

These are two men who violently disagree, but neither would ever stoop to vindictiveness. There’s little doubt that the movie is on Lindsay’s side but it doesn’t try to bludgeon us into agreement.

Tara Fitzgerald is very good as Estella, a troubled woman trying to cope with newly awakened passions. The actresses playing the three models all do quite well. Elle Macpherson is fun as the uncouth free-spirited Sheela.

There is of course a fair bit of nudity. You could hardly make a movie about Norman Lindsay without naked women. That would be a betrayal of the artistic freedom in which he believed. And seeing Elle Macpherson nude isn’t exactly an ordeal.

While Sirens deals with some serious themes about artistic freedom, and deals with some serious emotional and sexual dramas, the overall tone is very lighthearted and there’s a great deal of comedy. Which is actually quite appropriate. If you read Norman Lindsay’s wonderful 1938 novel Age of Consent you’ll find a very similar mixture. It’s a story of an artist grappling with his art, desperately trying to find his artistic voice. There’s emotional and sexual drama. There’s a great deal of comedy, and a generally lighthearted tone. So Sirens does in many ways capture the spirit of Lindsay’s fiction.

The Australian Blu-Ray release from Umbrella provides an excellent transfer, there’s an audio commentary by the movie’s writer-director and the movie’s producer and a number of other extras.

Sirens is executed with a light and skilful touch and it works. Highly recommended.

Carry On Emmannuelle (1978)

Carry On Emmannuelle, released in 1978, was the last of the Carry On movies and it’s the most notorious and reviled of the entire series. It’s difficult to find anyone with a good word to say about it. It’s one of those movies that everybody knows is rubbish, because everybody says it’s rubbish. Critics thought so at the time. Most online reviews start with the reviewer proudly announcing that he already knew this movie was trash before seeing it, and seeing it merely confirmed his worst fears.

When you approach a movie expecting to hate it then more often than not you will that you do end up hating it. What you need to do with a movie like Carry On Emmannuelle is to approach it with an open mind. So, is Carry On Emmannuelle really that bad? We shall see.

The movie begins with its own version of the famous sex-on-an-aircraft scene from Emmanuelle, but played for laughs.

Emmannuelle Prevert (Suzanne Danielle) has just arrived in London, to rejoin her husband Emile (Kenneth Williams). Emile is the French Ambassador. He is obsessed by body-building although it doesn’t seem to have had much result.

Emmannuelle has been looking forward to a nice reunion bedroom romp with her husband but Emile will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid doing his husbandly duty.

Emile is quite happy for Emmannuelle to find her carnal pleasures elsewhere. Which she does, but she wants carnal pleasures with her husband as well.

The movie has even less of a plot than most Carry On movies. Emmannuelle becomes obsessed by the idea that someone is going to try to assassinate her husband. Which provides an amusing sequence with Emmannuelle crawling around under the dinner table.

She then persuades the servants to recount their most outrageous sexual exploits, which is the weakest section of the movie.

And then the scandal breaks - the scandal being Emmannuelle’s sexual exploits revealed to the public, with Emmannuelle steadfastly refusing to apologise and then seducing her interviewer on camera.

The first half of this movie is quite good. It’s quite funny. It does lose steam a bit after that.

Making a kind of hybrid between a Carry On movie and the popular 70s British sex comedy genre was actually not such a terrible idea. By 1978 the Carry On formula was looking rather tame. Sexing up the formula a bit made sense. But in fact Carry On Emmannuelle doesn’t sex up the formula much at all. Maybe some of the sexual humour is marginally more risqué than in previous movies. There is however hardly any nudity at all in Carry On Emmannuelle. It actually doesn’t have much in common after all with the British sex comedies of that era. It’s really just a Carry On movie, made pretty much according to the established formula.

There were a lot of silly things said about this movie at the time. Critics pretty much accused producer Peter Rodgers of making a softcore porn movie. Which is wildly and ludicrously inaccurate. It’s only very very slightly sexier than the average Carry On movie of the 70s.

One of the many myths surrounding this movie is that Barbara Windsor stormed off the set in disgust. In fact she was never on the set. She was originally going to make an appearance but she was unavailable.

This movie includes quite a few of the Carry On regulars, with Kenneth Connors (as the ambassador’s sex-obsessed chauffeur) and Joan Sims (as the housekeeper) being in good form. Kenneth Williams is in good form as well, doing a typically outrageous French accent.

The movie’s trump card however is Suzanne Danielle as Emmannuelle. She’s funny and sexy and delightful.

It’s not a top-tier Carry On movie by any means but Carry On Emmannuelle really isn’t that bad. It’s a whole lot better than the preceding film in the series, Carry On England. I think it’s worth a look.

The ITV Studios DVD (part of their Carry On Ultimate Collection boxed set) offers a good anamorphic transfer. The extras include an excellent audio commentary featuring a couple of the cast members.

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

Most of the time I watch movies purely for entertainment. But occasionally I want a movie with a bit more substance and depth to it. Something a bit arty and intellectual. Which of course made Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity an ideal choice for tonight’s viewing.

This movie is one of countless movie adaptations of Richard Connell’s classic 1924 adventure thriller story The Most Dangerous Game.

The movie does indeed begin with two slave girls, Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal). They’re being held in a dungeon on a prison planet. But they don’t remain prisoners very long. They escape with ridiculous ease and steal a spaceship with even more ridiculous ease.

Sadly things go wrong and the girls crash-land on a remote uncharted planet. To be more specific, on an island on a remote planet.

The girls are unharmed and there’s a house on the island. Zed (Don Scribner) tells them they’re welcome to stay. Zed lives alone in the house with two robot servants but at the moment he was two other guests, Rik (Carl Honer) and his sister Shala (Brinke Stevens). Zed entertains his guest with hunting stories. He likes to hunt. He has lots of trophies.

If you’ve read Connell’s story or seen any of the multitude of movie and TV adaptations you’ll already have figured out that this is yet another version and you’ll know what it is that Zed likes to hunt.

Rik has his suspicions which he confides to out two heroines. There were four people on the ship in which he and his sister were wrecked. All four survived but two have since disappeared after joining Zed on hunting trips. Rik suspects that he’ll be next.

His suspicions are well founded. And then Daria and Tisa find themselves as Zed’s intended prey. He gives them a sporting chance. There’s a ruined temple containing a cache of sophisticated weaponry. If they can reach the temple the odds will shift in their favour. Zed likes a challenge, and he believes that women can be even more dangerous than men so he expects to enjoy that challenge.

The acting is what you expect. Don Scribner tries to play Zed as a charming psychopath, with some success. Elizabeth Kaitan and Cindy Beal can’t really act at all but they’re likeable.

There are several ways in which a movie such as this could have been approached. It could have been done as a gorefest, or as a sleazefest. I was rather expecting a sleazy women-in-prison movie but it contains absolutely none of the features that define that scuzzy but entertaining genre. This movie does not take any of these obvious approaches. The gore quotient is extremely low. There are a couple of brief topless scenes but that’s the extent of the nudity. There’s one sex scene but the guy keeps his trousers on and the girl keeps her panties on. The girls have some scary experiences but they’re not brutalised.

This is an extraordinarily tame movie. I can only surmise that the idea was to avoid an R rating at all costs.

Amazingly this ultra-tame movie aroused controversy in the U.S. Senate when it was shown on cable.

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity doesn’t offer buckets of blood or any more than very mild nudity and it doesn’t boast spectacular action sequences so what does it have to offer? Mostly it’s the sheer likeability of the two girls and the good-natured tongue-in-cheek cheerful silliness of the whole exercise.

It’s a movie that offers mildly amusing mildly exciting fun which doesn’t make you feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. The two lead actresses do wear very skimpy costumes and they are pretty. Pretty in a natural way - there are no silicon-enhanced breasts in this movie.

The first significant film adaptation of Connell’s story was made in the pre-code era - The Most Dangerous Game (1932). Other versions which added varying degrees of trashiness (in a good way) are Bloodlust! (1961) and Seven Women for Satan (1976).

Full Moon’s DVD presentation offers a good anamorphic transfer. The only extra is a collection of snippets from Elizabeth Kaitan’s other movies. And Full Moon have released this movie on Blu-Ray as well!

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity is pretty mild stuff but it has a certain goofy charm. Plus Zed's robots and the cheesy special effects are fun. It’s entertaining if you’re in the mood. I was in the right mood so I enjoyed it. It will never make anybody’s greatest movies of all time list but I’m still going to recommend it.

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

Transylvania 6-5000 is a 1985 horror comedy that tries so very hard. It really pulls out all the stops in an effort to get laughs, with mostly disappointing results. It’s a movie I tried really hard to like. I’ve grown to like 80s comedy. It sounded like a worthwhile idea - a comedy set in Translvania in the present day with just about every Universal monster putting in an appearance. I like Jeff Goldblum a lot. I like Geena Davis a lot. But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t really warm to this movie.

I suspect that writer-director Rudy De Luca, having written movies for Mel Brooks, thought he was some kind of genius and that Transylvania 6-5000 was therefore going to be hilarious madcap fun. But the Mel Brooks movies he wrote were the less funny Mel Brooks movies. And when it comes to directing, well let’s just say that he doesn’t have Brooks’ comic instincts.

Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Ed Begley Jr.) are reporters for one of those National Enquirer-style trash tabloids. Their editor sends them to Transylvania with orders to come up with a story about monsters. The story will go to press under the headline Frankenstein Lives.

Jack hates his job. He wanted to be a real journalist, not a trash tabloid reporter. He spends most of his time tying to chat up pretty American single mother Elizabeth Ellison (Teresa Ganzel). Gil is keen to get the story. Especially when a beautiful mysterious vampire lady (played by Geena Davis) suddenly appears in his bedroom. That convinces him that he’s on to something.

The mayor and all the townspeople steadfastly deny that there are any monsters in their town but Jack and Gil soon discover that there most definitely are monsters there, and that the monsters have something to do with mad scientist Dr Malavaqua (Joseph Bologna).

Jack and Gil have to figure out what’s really going on in this town, and that’s pretty much it for the plot. Which is fine. With a movie such as this you don’t want to get too bogged down with plot.

There are good things in the movie. Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr makes a reasonably good comic team. When they’re together they’re amusing. It’s when the other cast members enter the picture that the movie starts to drag.

The first half of the movie is painful to watch. Things do improve in the second half, but it’s a movie which consistently fails to be as funny as it thinks it is.

So what went wrong? The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with writer-director Rudy De Luca which provides some clues. It appears that he just set up the camera and let the cast members improvise. The problem with that is that most comics think they’re geniuses when it comes to improvisation, but they aren’t. The worst offender is Michael Richards (later to find fame as Kramer on Seinfeld). He apparently improvised constantly and the results are excruciatingly unfunny.

Some of the cast members do have comic ability but they needed a director who would keep them on the rails and tell them when their efforts at improvisation were falling flat. That obviously didn’t happen.

A major problem is that Geena Davis is given hardly anything to do, which is a pity since she really is a talented comic actress, in fact she’s much better at comedy than most of the other cast members. Why have Geena Davis in the cast if you’re not going to make full use of her talents? She isn’t given a single really funny line. She does however make an incredibly sexy lady vampire and her costume is revealing to say the least. She’s at least very pleasant to watch. It's almost worth watching just for that reason.

The monster makeup isn’t overly impressive. Of course it’s a comedy so there’s no need for the monster makeup to be terrifying.

The movie was shot in Yugoslavia but it doesn’t make particularly good use of the locations. They found a castle but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. There’s also not much in the way of spooky atmosphere. Even a horror comedy needs a bit more spookiness.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray provides a good transfer. The aforementioned audio commentary is the only extra.

This movie does have a few amusing moments. There just aren’t enough of them. There are lots of gags, but not enough of them are truly funny.

Comedy is of course a very individual thing. Some people might think that Michael Richards slipping on a banana skin is hysterically funny. Perhaps this is just not the sort of comedy that works for me.

Transylvania 6-5000 is, sadly, a misfire. Even Geena Davis looking smokin’ hot as a female vampire isn’t a good enough reason to watch this movie.

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

Cinderella 2000 is a science fiction sex comedy directed by Al Adamson. So you know it’s going to be crazy and it’s going to be made on a budget of next to nothing.

The movie is set in the year 2047. It’s a future that seemed wildly improbable in 1977 but seems highly likely today. Everything that is fun has been outlawed.

Sex is strictly regulated. Sex is not permitted without a permit from the government. Anyone caught having unauthorised sex is arrested by an annoying robot named Roscoe. They are then wrapped in bubble-wrap (I have no idea why) and reduced to the size of a Barbie doll. Yes, this is a strange movie.

The city is ruled by the Controller. He thinks sex is dirty but like most self-appointed moral watchdogs he’s secretly obsessed with the subject. The Controller’s problem is that he’s never been able to get his rocks off, no matter how hard he tries. Since he can’t enjoy sex he’s determined that no-one else will either.

The only man allowed to have sex is Tom Prince. There’s a lengthy waiting list of ladies hoping to have authorised sex with him.

So where does Cinderella come into this? The fairy tale story is there. Cinderella (Catharine Erhardt) has a cruel stepmother and two nasty stepsisters. They’re all sexually frustrated. Everybody in this society is sexually frustrated. The stepsisters are determined that if the chance of sex ever comes along Cinderella isn’t going to get any.

The Controller is persuaded that his anti-sex policies are becoming unpopular. Tom Prince suggests to him that the Controller’s annual ball would be a good opportunity to increase his popularity and so the idea of the Controller’s Uncontrolled Ball is born. For at least one night sex will be legal.

Poor Cinderella is convinced she won’t get to go to the ball until her Fairy Godfather arrives in his spaceship(!) and manages to magic up an invitation, a beautiful ballgown and a futuristic car to take her there (it looks like a dune buggy that has done way too many steroids).

Cinderella goes to the ball and has wild sex with Tom Prince.

Tom is now obsessed. He want to find this girl again. The Controller takes pity on him. But how will Tom find the girl again? How will he recognise her? There is a way he will be able to recognise her for sure - if he sees her naked and has sex with her again. So Tom Prince has to have sex with every woman in the kingdom until he finds his dream girl.

Cinderella, her Fairy Godfather and Tom decide that something needs to be done to introduce the idea of free love and legal fornication to the city. There’s only one way to do this. Cinderella has to get the Controller’s rocks off for him. If she can do this she will blow his mind (and that isn’t all she’ll blow) and he’ll become a convert to free love.

At some stage, for no reason whatsoever, Snow White puts in an appearance, even though it’s explained to her that this isn’t her movie. Poor Snow White is so horny. She just can’t stand it. If only there was something the seven dwarfs could do to help the poor girl out. Eventually the dwarfs figure out that they can help her, which they proceed to do with enthusiasm. Snow White is now a very happy girl. This segment has nothing to do with the rest of the movie but in a movie as crazy as this it doesn’t matter. It is an amusing sequence.

It might sound like this movie makes a vague kind of crazy sense but this is an Al Adamson movie. The craziness level is off the charts. I haven’t mentioned the singing robots yet. This movie is deranged. But it’s deranged in an oddly appealing way. It doesn’t even try to be a sensible coherent movie. To enjoy it you just have to go with the craziness.

The budget was minuscule. The special effects are terrible. The sets and costumes are bizarre exercises in bad taste. The acting is awful. In any other movie these would be serious flaws but in an Al Adamson movie they just add to the fun.

There’s plenty of nudity and moderately graphic simulated sex.

This movie has had several DVD releases, of varying quality. The version I have is a German DVD which includes both German and English language options. There were apparently several different cuts of the movie. I assume the version on this DVD is the European cut. I have no idea if other cuts of the film are raunchier. The DVD version is definitely softcore.

You have to be in the mood for this one and you need to be the sort of person who enjoys movies that are insanely bad but in a good way. You also have to enjoy sex comedies. I liked it and I’m going to highly recommend it.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Al Adamson’s other movies - Nurse Sherri (1978) and Five Bloody Graves (1970). Nurse Sherri is a must-see.

Not of This Earth (1988)

One of Roger Corman’s notable early directorial efforts was his low-budget space vampire flick Not of This Earth (1957). Wearing his producer’s hat Corman decided to remake this movie in 1988, with the same title, with his protégé Jim Wynorski in the director’s chair this time.

To add some spice to the remake it was decided to feature the then-notorious Traci Lords as the star. It was a good decision and the remake was a major commercial success. It was a good decision for Lords also. Having faced persecution for her career in adult films she needed a break and Not of This Earth gave her the chance to pursue a more mainstream career which she went on to do with some success.

Jim Wynorski and R.J. Robertson based their screenplay very heavily on the Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna screenplay for Corman’s 1957 movie. It’s still more or less the same story.

Corman had made his movie at his usual breakneck pace with shooting completed in just twelve days. Wynorski made a bet with Corman that he could shoot his remake even faster and Wynorski won the bet. Shooting was completed in eleven-and-a-half days.

The movie starts with the landing of an alien spaceship. Then this strange guy (whom we will later learn calls himself Mr Johnson) who says very little and always wears dark glasses zaps a girl who was having sex with her boyfriend in the back seat of his car.

Mr Johnson then turns up at a blood clinic. He wants a transfusion, in fact he wants a whole series of blood transfusions. He persuades the doctor to agree to this. He also persuades the doctor that he’ll need his nurse, Nadine Story (Traci Lords), to be his live-in nurse. Nadine is suspicious but when Mr Johnson offers her two thousand bucks a week she’s happy to agree.

Once the doctor performs some blood tests he obviously realises that he’s dealing with someone who isn’t human but Mr Johnson uses his alien mind control powers to ensure that the doctor keeps his secret.

Mr Johnson is from a distant planet, a world ravaged by nuclear war. The inhabitants of that planet are dying because their blood is no longer viable. They need a source of fresh blood. Mr Johnson is therefore a kind of vampire, but an interesting and original kind of vampire. The 1957 movie had been possibly the first space vampire movie and the remake is certainly a space vampire movie.

Nurse Nadine doesn’t know of any of this. She just thinks Mr Johnson is a bit weird but for two thousand bucks a week she doesn’t mind having a weird employer. Her cop boyfriend Harry (Roger Lodge) is a bit suspicious. Mr Johnson’s hired hand Jeremy (Lenny Juliano) knows that something very strange is going on in Mr Johnson’s house but he wants to keep his job.

The cops are concerned that corpses drained of blood have started showing up.

Wynorski serves up some horror, some cheesy special effects and plenty of humour. The intention was clearly to make a movie that would be pure fun. There’s some engaging goofiness (as when Mr Johnson receive a strip-o-gram and when he picks up three hookers who get more than they bargained for). It doesn’t descend into mere silliness - there’s still a solid enough sci-fi/horror plot here.

The big question that would have occurred to most people at the time was - can Traci Lords actually act? The answer is yes. She might not be the world’s greatest actress but she’s cute, sexy, likeable and funny. She makes Nadine a heroine we can care about.

This movie features Lords’ last-ever nude scenes. Not surprisingly she looks stunning but they’re fun rather innocent nude scenes.

There is of course plenty of nudity from other actresses as well. This movie adheres to the Corman formula of the 80s - plenty of skin, a few thrills, cheap but effective special effects, fast pacing and lots of entertainment value. All done on a ridiculously small budget. Wynorski uses footage from other 80s Corman movies which was realistically the only way to get the movie made on such a tight budget. Wynorski does at least integrate this footage into his movie with considerable skill.

Shout! Factory’s DVD provides a very good anamorphic transfer and there are plenty of extras. These include two audio commentaries. The first, done early in the DVD era, features director Wynorski and it’s fun and informative. The second, done a few years later, features Wynorski and Traci Lords and it focuses as much on Traci Lords as on the movie. There’s also an interview with Lords.

Not of This Earth manages to be every bit as entertaining as Corman’s 1957 version. It offers everything you could want in an 80s Roger Corman movie. It was directed by Jim Wynorski, a guy who understands Corman’s movie-making philosophy perfectly and is totally in tune with it. And having learnt his movie-making skills from Corman he knows how to make a pretty decent-looking movie with virtually no money and he knows how to make such a movie fast-moving, slick, action-packed and sleazy.

Not of This Earth is terrific fun. Highly recommended.

I reviewed the Roger Corman version, Not of This Earth 1957), a while back.

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

It’s a shocking admission to have to make but I had never seen Earth Girls Are Easy. I know, one of the most culturally significant motion pictures of the 80s has somehow passed me by. Until now.

Valerie (Geena Davis) is a manicurist. She lives in the Valley. She is facing a huge personal crisis. She and her doctor boyfriend Ted haven’t had sex for two weeks. Two whole weeks. Two long long weeks. Valerie is frantic. Especially given that they’re about to get married.

Her friend Candy (Julie Brown) has the answer - a makeover. To Candy a makeover is the answer to every problem. Valerie goes blonde, she looks absolutely gorgeous and she pus on some very sexy lingerie. If this doesn’t break her sex drought nothing will. Unfortunately it all goes horribly wrong. Valerie is all set for some steamy times with Ted but Ted (who doesn’t know she’s home) arrives home with another woman. Will all the silliness in this movie the most implausible thing is that a man who has Geena Davis ready to rip his trousers off would chase other women.

Valerie is devastated but the following day something happens that gives her something else to think about. Three furry aliens crash-land their spaceship in her swimming pool. The three aliens had been heading to Earth in search of women. They’ve been in space a long time. They’re suffering as much as Valerie from a sex drought.

Valerie handles the situation pretty well. Compared to finding Ted with another woman having aliens land in her pool seems to her like a minor crisis. And they’re very friendly aliens. They’re kinda sweet.

But there is one thing she’s going to have to do. She’s going to have to make them look human. She’ll need Candy’s help. These aliens are going to need heavy-duty makeovers but fortunately Candy is equal to the task. The aliens now look quite human so Candy figures it would be cool to take them nightclubbing. The trouble is that the aliens look human but they don’t behave like humans. They’re also incredibly horny so once they catch sight of a nightclub full of girls they won’t be easy to control.

They get more and more out of control and much craziness ensues. Valerie finally breaks her sex drought. OK, it was with an alien, but when a girl needs some loving what can she do? And she certainly enjoys it.

She can’t quite get Ted out of her mind. Maybe she should forgive him? A weird romantic triangle is developing between Valerie, Ted and the alien leader Mac (Jeff Goldblum). Meanwhile the other two aliens, Wiploc and Zeebo, head off to the beach with the zonked-out surfer dude pool guy Woody (Valerie has to have her swimming pool drained because there’s a spaceship in it). Woody has told them that there are lots of girls at the beach. They naturally cause mayhem.

This is not just a science fiction comedy, it’s a science fiction comedy romance musical. The music is of course very 80s but if you love 80s music you’ll be totally blissed out. I certainly enjoyed the music.

This is an 80s movie on steroids. I suppose you could see it as a gentle satire on the shallowness of American culture but it’s all done in a very light and good-natured way. It might be send up 80s pop culture but it’s doing it with love. Mostly it’s just a movie that wants to have fun.

The musical interludes are fun, with the ’Cause I’m a Blonde number being a highlight.

Geena Davis is gorgeous and bubbly and adorable, and she’s very funny. Jeff Goldblum is good if rather restrained as the alien spaceship commander Mac. He’s the only member of the alien trio who has any sense of responsibility. Goldblum and Geena Davis have to do at least a little bit of serious acting as well as being funny and they manage it extremely well.

I find that a little bit of Jim Carrey goes a long way but his comedic style is well suited to the material here. Add Damon Wayams and you’ve got three likeable if troublesome aliens. Michael McKean almost steals the picture as the surfer pool guy Woody.

Earth Girls Are Easy was a box office flop at the time. I guess it was just too relentlessly quirky. Since then it’s built up a definite cult following. Apart from its other attractions it offers 80s nostalgia overload. Surprisingly it hasn’t had a Blu-Ry release. This needs to happen. It does however look quite OK on DVD, in a perfectly acceptable 16:9 enhanced transfer. There’s not a lot in the way of extras.

This is a very very silly very goofy movie but it’s genuinely funny and it has plenty of charm and it’s romantic in an offbeat way. Comedy is always a matter of taste and it’s a movie you’ll either love or hate. I loved it. Highly recommended.

Striptease (1996)

I firmly believe that it’s futile and foolish to try to review a movie unless you approach it with an open mind. Even if it has a poor reputation, even if it got savaged by the critics, even if it’s regarded as a so-bad-it’s-good movie or a camp classic, even if it attracts lots sneers from online reviewers, it should still be approached with an open mind. Which is what I’m going to try to do with the somewhat notorious 1996 Striptease starring Demi Moore.

Striptease suffered a similar fate to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, made the previous year. Both were movies about strippers (Nomi in Showgirls ends up a showgirl but starts out as a stripper). In both cases the critics were gunning for these movies before even seeing them. Once a few bad reviews appeared the rest of the critics, as always, fell into line and were ready with the snark.

Demi Moore plays Erin Grant. She’s working as a stripper (in the Eager Beaver Club) to accumulate enough money to fight a custody battle with her ex-husband.

Erin works in a strip club but this is Hollywood so it’s a strip club where the girls don’t take all their clothes off.

There’s some trouble at the club and the trouble involves Congressman David Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds). Then a dead body shows up miles away. The victim seems to be linked in some way to Congressman Dilbeck and to the the Eager Beaver Club. That brings Homicide Lieutenant Al Garcia (Armand Assante) to the club and he’s anxious to talk to Erin. He thinks she saw something important.

Erin’s life turns into a nightmare as the custody battle with her husband gets nastier and she gets drawn into the shady world of Congressman Dilbeck. The congressman has become infatuated with her and when Dilbeck wants to sleep with a woman he expects to get what he wants.

This is several different movies at the same time. It’s obvious that Burt Reynolds and Demi Moore were not making the same movie.

There’s a political satire which is occasionally amusing although Reynolds perhaps pushes his performance just a bit too far. There’s also an erotic thriller movie. Which was probably intended to be semi-comedic lighthearted fun.

The problem with Striptease as an erotic thriller is that it’s one of the least erotic movies ever made. It’s certainly the most un-erotic move ever made about a stripper. And this was the unrated version I saw. If the unrated version is this tame and this sexless how tame must the U.S. theatrical release have been? The mind boggles.

It does seem clear that either Bergman or someone else involved in the production side had decided that this was going to be a totally sexless movie. None of the striptease routines are sexy. Erin’s routine would scarcely have raised eyebrows at a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the local Baptist Church. We do got plenty of bare breasts but this movie manages the extraordinarily difficult trick of making boobs totally unexciting. We get a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Demi Moore’s bottom. That’s it.

It’s possible that Bergman waned Erin to be a sympathetic character and had decided that sexy women are Bad Women so she had to be unsexy.

But that is out of sync with the oddest thing about this movie, which is that it takes an amazingly sympathetic view of strippers. All of the strippers are really nice girls and they’re all cheerful and well-adjusted. The manager of the Eager Beaver treats them with affectionate indulgence. This positive view of stripping is refreshing (and incredibly surprising in a Hollywood movie). So why does the movie make stripping so un-erotic? Perhaps Andrew Bergman is just a director with no idea how to handle erotic subject matter. This movie did pretty much end his career as a director, which doesn’t surprise me.

The strip routines would hardly raise an eyebrow at a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the local Baptist Church. And this is the unrated version I’m watching. If the unrated version is this tame how tame was the theatrical release? The mind boggles.

Striptease is also a movie that tries too hard to be tasteful. It’s trying too hard to be wholesome. Verhoeven in Showgirls wasn’t afraid to be vulgar. Bergman seems to be terrified of showing even a hint of vulgarity.

Another weakness is the lack of any romance angle. Lieutenant Garcia and Erin become quite friendly but he makes it clear that he’s happily married and that he isn’t going to make a pass at her and she obviously has no romantic interest in him. The trouble is that the movie needed a romance angle to make Erin more interesting and to give us some reason to feel sympathetic towards her. It was needed in order to make her a living breathing human being with human emotions. But it isn’t there and it’s part of the reason Erin is such an uninteresting character. Maybe Bergman thought that mothers shouldn’t have emotional lives. Weird.

The movie does have a few strengths. Ving Rhames is fun as the Eager Beaver’s bouncer, Shad. He’s the most interesting and colourful character in the movie. Shad isn’t very honest but he is fiercely protective of the girls at the Eager Beaver and Rhames gets this across without making him too much of a Boy Scout.

Striptease’s biggest problem is Demi Moore. She was horribly and disastrously miscast. She isn’t funny and she isn’t sexy. She plays things absolutely straight which is really jarring when she’s playing scenes with actors (like Reynolds). And she delivers the least sexy performance in the history of motion pictures. Maybe writer-director Andrew Bergman told her to give the least sexy performance she could or maybe Demi Moore just doesn’t know how to convey eroticism. Judging by this movie she doesn’t know how to convey any human emotions either. With the right actress Striptease might have worked. Erin is the centre of the movie. She has to grab our attention. We have to relate to her and we have to care about her and we have to be interested in her. The movie needed an actress with energy and charisma and with an engaging personality, an actress who wasn’t afraid to be sexy. It needed an actress who could make Erin believable and interesting and fun. Demi Moore gives the impression she just turned up to collect her $12 million dollar pay cheque.

Striptease did have potential. The idea was by no means terrible. But Demi Moore’s performance sinks it.

Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974)

There has never been a genre so thoroughly reviled and detested by critics as the 1970s British sex comedy. They were enormously popular, which enraged British critics even further. Unlike other once-reviled genres British sex comedies have never quite managed to overcome the effects of that critical disdain. And of all the British sex comedies the ones that contemporary critics loathed most were the Confessions movies, beginning with Confessions of a Window Cleaner in 1974.

Some historical context is needed here. In the 70s the British film industry was in a lot of trouble. A way had to be found to entice audiences into cinemas. The obvious answer was to offer something that television could not offer, and one thing television couldn’t offer was wall-to-wall nudity. What was also needed was something to make it appear that British film-makers were not offering mere softcore pornography. The solution was to make comedies with wall-to-wall nudity.

The comedy would clearly need to be pretty broad. Ideally it needed to be in the Benny Hill style but more risqué.

Thus was the British sex comedy born. And it worked. Confessions of a Window Cleaner was the highest grossing movie in Britain in 1974, and was followed by three sequels and a number of imitators.

The movies were based on a very popular series of salacious novels.

The premise of Confessions of a Window Cleaner is that the job of a window cleaner is not to clean windows but to keep the female customers of the window cleaning business happy, and that the way to do that is to provide them with sexual satisfaction. Apparently all the clients of the window-cleaning business run by Sid Noggett (Anthony Booth) are bored sex-crazed housewives. He does his best to satisfy them all but there’s only so much one man can do so he brings his brother-in-law Timmy (Robin Askwith) into his business.

The problem is that while Timmy is certainly interested in sex he’s a virgin. So the first step has to be to do something about his sexual education. Sid’s stripper friend should be able to do this, but things don’t quite work out.

Fortunately one of Sid’s lady customers is able to successfully complete Timmy’s sexual initiation.

Now young Timothy is off and running and he soon has lots of satisfied customers. Timmy is however very accident-probe and as a result of one of his mishaps he meets a very pretty and charming young woman police constable, Elizabeth Radlett (Linda Hayden). Love blossoms and Timmy proposes marriage. But getting married turns out to be a rather difficult thing to do.

The plot of course is just an excuse for a lot of sexual jokes and a lot of nudity (including plenty of female frontal nudity).

The jokes are obvious and corny. They’re even more obvious and corny than the jokes in the Carry On movies but the Carry On movies had comic geniuses like Kenneth Williams, Sid James and Barbara Windsor who could make corny obvious jokes screamingly funny. This movie doesn’t have that sort of talent on which to draw. It doesn’t really matter too much - its the corniness and obviousness of the jokes that give British sex comedies their charm. If you groan at some of the jokes that means the film is working. It’s not supposed to be sophisticated humour.

These movies made Robin Askwith a star and he does have a goofy likeability.

It goes without saying that this movie is very very politically incorrect in a very 1970s way. That also doesn’t matter. If you’re worried about political correctness you’re not likely to be watching Confessions of a Window Cleaner in the first place, and it is a refreshing reminder of an era in which comedy was totally and wildly unconstrained by politics. If there was a chance of getting a laugh then the writers would go for it.

Val Guest (with a varied and distinguished career behind him) directed and co-wrote the screenplay.

Personally I think that if you want to dip your toe into the sea of 1970s British sex comedies then Val Guest’s earlier Au Pair Girls (from 1972) is a better choice, largely because it has some stronger comedic talent among its cast.

Confessions of a Window Cleaner might be a bit disreputable but it doesn’t care. The aim is to provide some sexy fun and some laughs and to a considerable extent it succeeds. It’s enjoyable enough in its cheekily trashy way and unlike later attempts at sex comedies it’s remarkably good-natured. Worth a look.