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.

Frankenhooker (1990)

Frankenhooker, directed and co-written by Frank Henenlotter, sure is one crazyass movie. It’s very gory but it’s so silly that the gore isn’t really disturbing. It’s goofy and bizarre and it’s funny. And it came out in 1990 so it has that distinctive late 80/early 90s vibe.

This is the infamous exploding hookers movie.

Jeffrey Franken is a young man living in New Jersey with his mom. He’s engaged to a sweet girl, Elizabeth. Jeffrey is a failed med student who works for the power company and likes to tinker with gadgets. Gadgets such as a remote-controlled lawnmower which runs amok and slices Elizabeth into little pieces.

Most guys would go through a period of grieving after something like this. But not Jeffrey. He thinks he can fix her. OK, all he has to work with is her head but it’s a start.

He has his own mad scientist laboratory, which looks great because it looks exactly like the kind of mad scientist laboratory that a guy would build in his garage.

He’s going to need some female body parts. 

And he has a brainwave. Working girls. Hookers. They sell their whole bodies. Or rather they rent them out. If he could get hold of some hookers so that he would have a choice of body parts he could not only give Elizabeth a new body, it could be a perfect body. The best legs. The nicest hands. The best posterior. And the best breasts.

Jeffrey will need to be at his best to carry out some very advanced surgical techniques but he has found a way to enhance his intellectual skills, by means of drilling holes in his own skull.

To convince the hookers to co-operate he manufactures a large quantity of super-crack. This stuff is dynamite. Literally.

The hooker idea doesn’t work and then again it does work. He didn’t think there’d be such a mess but then he’s never seen girls explode before. But at least now he has lots of body parts.

Now we get a major homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie with the roof of the garage opening so that the electricity necessary to provide the vital spark of life can be provided by lightning.

There’s another homage to the 1931 movie, with a twist. In that movie things went wrong when the monster had a criminal’s brain implanted by mistake. In this case Jeffrey finds out that if you construct the perfect woman from hookers you’ll end up with a super-hooker. A Frankenhooker!

It’s a sleazy movie in very poor taste (with plenty of T&A) and it doesn’t care and if you can be offended by a movie as goofy as this you should seek professional help. And if you’re looking for ideological underpinnings here then it’s too late for professional help to do any good.

It’s also, in its own way, a sincere tribute to the great horror movie tradition. Henenlotter assumes you’ve seen and loved the 1931 movie and if you haven’t then you’ll miss many of Frankenhooker’s cleverest moments.

And it’s a love story. OK, a deranged love story, but you have to admire Jeffrey’s devotion. His girlfriend has been reduced to hamburger meat but that doesn’t stop him from loving her.

Given the movie’s tone there was no reason to agonise over getting the special effects to look realistic. Realistic special effects would have made this movie unpleasant instead of fun. And making even the slightest attempt to make the science stuff make sense would have spoilt things. Frankenhooker glories in its silliness.

I like James Lorinz as Jeffrey. He doesn’t go overboard but he has a wonderful intense crazed look. Patty Mullen is fun as both Elizabeth and Frankenhooker.

Frankenhooker is totally nuts and and absurdly outrageous and I enjoyed it a lot. Highly recommended.

I have the French Blu-Ray which looks great.

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.

Alien from L.A. (1988)

Alien from L.A. is, in a vague sort of way, a riff on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It’s a 1988 Cannon Group release directed and co-written by Albert Pyun.

Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland) is a California gal who has just been dumped by her hot surfer dude boyfriend. He dumped her because even though she’s cute she’s such a wet blanket and a dorkette and her whiney voice gets on his nerves.

Now she’s off to Africa to look for her missing explorer/archaeologist father. All she knows is that apparently he fell down a bottomless pit and hasn’t been seen since.

Inevitably Wanda falls down the same pit.

She finds herself in a huge hitherto unknown underground city known as Atlantis. In fact it’s a vast underground world. 

She gets rescued by a gruff hardbitten miner, Gus Edway (William R. Moses).

Atlantis is a dystopian totalitarian hellworld. And now she’s being hunted down as an alien. Anyone from the surface world is an alien. Amusingly the authorities tell the citizens to be on the lookout for an alien girl from the surface world while at the same time assuming them that aliens do not exist and that the surface world does not exist.

There’s a difference of opinion about what to do with her when she’s caught but security chief General Rykov (Janie du Plessis) favours extreme measures.

Wanda gets into countless scrapes and has countless narrow escapes. And eventually finds out something extraordinary about the city.

I was expecting this to be a very low budget affair but clearly the budget was reasonably generous. It has the grungy post-apocalyptic wasteland look that one finds in so many movies of this era. This is the film’s first fault - it doesn’t have quite enough of a distinctive flavour.

Albert Pyun has said that he was trying to make a fairy tale movie aimed at a family audience. There’s nothing wrong with that except that as a result the villains are not sufficiently evil and scary to be really memorable and we don’t have enough of a sense that Wanda is in real danger.

The third problem is that Gus Edway is a very bland hero.

A fourth and bigger problem is that there’s no real romance subplot. There is obviously zero attraction between Wanda and Gus. An action/adventure movie works better when the hero and the heroine care enough about each other to take risks for each other, and when we, the viewers, are desperately hoping that they’ll end up together. Another character is introduced very late who might have potential as a love interest for Wanda but this subplot doesn’t go anywhere.

The final problem is that the extraordinary revelation about the city isn’t exploited. We expect it to lead to something but it doesn’t.

The power struggle within Atlantis could also have been developed a bit more.

For some people Kathy Ireland as Wanda is an issue, especially her high-pitched little girl voice. I don’t have a problem with her. Wanda is supposed to be whiney and to irritate people. That’s why her boyfriend dumped her and that’s how the whole adventure began. I think however that she comes across as fairly likeable and sympathetic.

Alien from L.A. has some major flaws but it’s not as bad as it reputation would suggest. If you don’t set you expectations too high it’s a reasonably enjoyable sci-fi adventure flick. Tentatively recommended.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent.

Mr Vampire (1985)

Mr Vampire is a 1985 horror comedy released by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest studio.

I have to be upfront here - I really dislike horror comedies in general. This is a very crazy movie, which is a good thing, but for my tastes it’s just too silly. I enjoy silliness, but this is too much silliness for me. 

And the comedy is mainly slapstick, my least favourite form of comedy.

It begins with the reburial of the father of a prominent citizen, Master Yam. The family had buried the father after taking advice from a feng shui master but the advice was bad and has caused the family twenty years of bad luck.

The corpse is dug up and taken to the mortuary where it is discovered that the old man is turning into a vampire.

The priest and his two hapless assistants take what they hope are the necessary steps to prevent the transformation from being completed.

Their efforts are in vain. And one of the assistants is bitten by the vampire.

The other assistants is waylaid by a pretty female ghost. They have a nice time in bed together but the young man is now bewitched.

So the priest has to save one of his assistants from being turned into a vampire and save the other from the attentions of a very horny lady ghost.

At one stage the priest is locked up on suspicion of murder by Master Yam’s unbelievably stupid policeman nephew.

All of which gives rise to countless comedic kung fu action scenes.

The humour is mostly lame. One of the few genuinely funny moments is the misunderstanding in the shop where one of the priest’s assistants is employed - he thinks Master Yam’s very respectable daughter works in the brothel across the road. This is witty verbal humour and it works.

What makes the movie worth seeing is the fascinating wealth of vampire and ghost lore, much of it based at least to some degree on actual Chinese folklore. Chinese ghosts are corporeal and actually can and do have sex and lady ghosts do seduce men. And Chinese ghosts are not necessarily evil. Having sex with a ghost can lead to unfortunate consequences but this is not always the case.

And then there are the hopping vampires, and vampire-like hopping undead creatures do figure in Chinese folklore. They add a very bizarre touch.

The steps that need to be taken to combat vampires are insanely complicated. If you’re up against vampires you will need a great deal of glutinous rice, plenty of black ink and a lot of string. You’ll need advanced martial arts skills.

You’ll also need a good deal of luck. These vampires are near-unstoppable. You cannot afford mistakes.

Mr Vampire has its attractions and it’s certainly different. It was a huge commercial success and kicked off an entire genre.

The performances and the comedy are very very broad. Your enjoyment of the movie will depend very heavily on how much you like ultra-zany goofy slapstick humour.

If you do enjoy this type of comedy you’ll enjoy the movie much more than I did.

The Eureka Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer with some extras.

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.