No.147 : The Key (1983)

The Key at the IMDb

Frank Finlay, best known for playing the annoying Irish priest in ‘The Wild Geese’, stars in this 1983 film directed by smut auteur Tinto Brass.

It is listed in some places as pornography but if that’s your thing don’t bother - ‘The Benny Hill Show’  is far racier.

We open at a  New Year’s party for 1940 in Venice. The fascists are on the rise, and so no slow viewers fail to follow this plot point, the party is attended by Mussolini himself. Frank is more interested in the booze however, and playing grab ass with his shapely, but slightly frigid, wife. She doesn’t like his public displays of affection and insists on being taken home. She’s not so shy however when she is caught short and raises the level of the canals with a street piss that would make a race horse blush.

Frank is quite excited by this and gets all affectionate when they get home. An efficient lover, Frank is five pumps and done. Elsewhere Frank’s daughter is joining the Fascists and her fiancé  is having designs on Franks wife, a situation that turns Frank on, and makes him jealous at the same time.

Too shy to talk of such matters Frank starts to write a diary about all his seedy thoughts and leaves the key to his desk lying about so the wife can have a look. Of course she does and soon she is losing her inhibitions as she acts out Filthy Frank’s fantasies. Frank also gets hold of the world’s first Instamatic camera and, after drugging his wife, he gets lots of candid shots of her for his diary. The beast.

The wife is horrified by this invasion but also happy that he’s using the photographic skills of her daughter’s fiancé to develop the photos - that instant camera film was seemingly too expensive for Frank. The wife starts to take control and writes her own diary which Frank laps up, amongst other things.

All the excitement is causing Frank medical issues and his doctor says he needs to knock off the sex and drinking. Poor Frank he’s a ten a day man - and he likes a drink too! Unfortunately for Frank his wife’s blossoming is almost complete and, when she starts ordering him to wear her underwear we know things aren’t going to end well for  him. Probably took the mortician half an hour to get the smile off his face though!

This was a strange film and you have to wonder what market it is designed for. Clearly the marketing is for those who like their erotica but it’s really tame stuff. I also doubt that those who want to watch a nuanced film about a woman’s sexual awaking set against the backdrop of war aren’t going to be reaching to the top shelf.

The dialogue is half in English and half in Italian so a lot of the time you have no idea what’s going on. You do get helpful narration from Frank but it’s hard to take that filthy bastard seriously - especially when he dons the suspenders.

The setting of Venice is well used and you see a lot of  the city and people pissing on it. There are no familiar faces in the cast apart from Frank and it’s hard to tell if anyone is any good given they are all horrendously dubbed.

It may be the version on Amazon Prime is heavily cut but if it saved me half an hour of my life I’m grateful to them - plenty of other places to find your smut without having to listen to earnest dialogue about feelings. So I’ve heard.

Overall it was a worthless piece of whimsy trying to be something meaningful and failing badly. That said, it rumbled along fine with a few unintentional laughs to keep you entertained.

THE Tag Line : Frank Finlay Does Rocky Horror 53%

No.97 : The Runaways (2010)

 The Runaways at the IMDb

Rock bio-pic time now as the little known band ‘The Runaways’ get the Hollywood treatment in this by the numbers effort.

It’s the seventies in Los Angeles and punk is taking off. Joan Jett is keen to get in on the action and harasses record producer Kim Fowley for a deal. He’s hesitant at first but when he spots 16 year old Cherie Currie he starts to put together the band. As you’d expect the band start out rubbish, get a bit better and into drugs before jealousy and musical differences break them up.

The two leads played by Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning don’t convince as the trailer trash bad girls they are meant to be and although they make a good effort I didn’t buy into either. Michael Shannon who is great in ‘Boardwalk Empire’ is miscast as the producer and his mad eyes and dominant presence are shamefully underused.

I did like the grungy 70s vibe and some of the music was good although not that of the band, which was a total racket.  The characters were thinly drawn with troubles at home and being an outsider the usual suspects when a bit of depth was sought. Some bits like Joan pissing on some guitars didn’t add to the appeal of the film  and the whole rites of passage idea was rushed and unconvincing.

The three acts were well defined with the ‘rise to stardom’ bit overlong. Basically you get an hour of them fighting and singing in a caravan before ten minutes of modest success and drug use before a half an hour autopsy of what might have been. The formula will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a rock film and you knew the writing was on the wall as soon as Dakota got a solo photo shoot.

There will be a certain dirty old man element who’ll love this film with lots of shots of the teen girls dancing around in their pants. There was also a strong lesbian vibe too with Joan in her leather pants quite keen on the pre-pubescent Fanning. I found some of it more creepy than sexy and I doubt it was coincidence that Gary Glitter featured on the soundtrack.

I read that the girls played their own instruments and did their own singing and that would certainly suggest they made the right choice in acting over music! The only decent song was ‘Cherry Bomb’ and even that’s down to the hook alone. I see that the band never had any real hits and you have to wonder why they merited a bio-pic given their story was so run of the mill. In ‘Wayne’s World’ terms ; they’re not worthy!

As the film draws to a close there is the inevitable fall out and the band starts to splinter. Joan forms her own band and has a hit with ‘I love rock and roll’ the only familiar song from the whole enterprise. As they go in different directions and have the odd awkward reunion you have to wonder why you should be interested and by the time the film ends you certainly won’t be.

 THE Tag Line - Runaway From This One!  53%

No.71 : The Swarm (1978)

The Swarm at IMDb

The 1970s saw a spate of disaster movies, but none can be more disastrous than ‘The Swarm’.

Producer Irwin Allen attempted to use his tried and tested formula of having a heap of famous faces running around and getting killed but sadly he got stung on this outing.

The film opens with a special forces unit advancing on an underground base. The first five minutes is a dialogue free as the tension is ratcheted up - what will they find? Eventually they descend to find, as you’d expect, bodies everywhere. The cause is unclear but soon Michael Caine resplendent in green turtle neck and safari suit falls out a cupboard and offers some much needed exposition.

Cain plays Brad an entomologist who was tracking some bees and decided to have a look in case they visited the secret base. Of course they did but that didn’t explain how Caine could Waltz in while the special forces team had to use Ids and key codes.

Blustery General Richard Widmark splutters in disbelief but soon the president has given Caine a free pass to combat the threat. He calls in reinforcements in the shape of ‘bad boy’ bee man Richard Chamberlain and Katharine Ross who inexplicably falls for Caine and his turtle neck.

Hopefully things will not escalate, but wait! The local town is having a flower festival just as the bees move in! After an initial skirmish were a family get stung to death the surviving boy plots his revenge with petrol bombs - HUGE mistake. The pissed off bees immediately head to the flower festival to sting the crap out of anyone they find - and their stings are the slow motion kind - surely the worst of all?

After a laughable attack on a toy train set, that sees the deaths of both Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland, Michael deploys his poison pellets. Widmark’s plan to gas the lot was shouted down by Caine who gave a triumphant speech in praise of the good old American bee. But alas the bees are too smart to eat the poison - they prefer poignant lollypops held by vunerable kiddies.

Back at base, Henry Fonda the crippled poisons guru, is injecting himself with venom to try and discover an antidote - better watch out or laughable bee hallucinations will bee coming your way! With the swarm heading to a nuclear plant and then onto Houston how many more deaths will Caine’s vidi-printer report before they realise a big pot of jam would solve the problem just fine?

This is a truly dreadful film with performances and dialogue that have to be seen to be believed. The bee attack effects are OK in close up but apart from that the model work and slow motion deaths are the worst you will see.

The main culprit is Caine, who although just in it for the paycheque, is never worse than the quick to anger but still loveable bee specialist who has a taste for sunflower seeds. Next up is Fonda who was shameful as the crippled Doc who takes the venom to save the day. If they were playing for laughs it’d have been no less believable.

Down the cast we get Katharine Ross who despite being high up in the military goes all girly for Caine and his orange van. Also good for a chortle is Dr Kildare who keeps a straight face while asking a nuclear power station manager “Have you made any provision against an attack of killer bees?”.

I know this review may make it sound like a bit of fun but beware it’s two and a half hours of cringe making shite that I had to watch in chunks, lest I go and stick my head in a beehive myself.

Best Bit : “Those are my poison pellets goddamn it ” 31%

No.36 : The Box (2009)

The Box at the IMDb

It’s 1976 and the Voyager space probes have been launched. Cameron Diaz is married to Cyclops out of ‘X-Men’ and is about to get a delivery. The couple find a box on their door step with a message saying that the delivery man will call the next day - maybe the sender hadn’t put enough stamps on it.

The next day the box delivery man arrives in the shape of Richard Nixon himself, Frank Langella, complete with a CGI covered half face. He tells the couple in a matter of fact fashion that if they press the button on the device inside the box someone they don’t know will die and they’ll get a million bucks. Rather than just smack the button down and demand the cash they have a restless night pondering the dilemma before Cameron presses the button. Huge mistake.

Frank returns to collect his box and delivers the cash. As he leaves he tells them the box will now go to someone else who will be made the same offer - the implication being that Cameron and Cyclops may be the victims of a future button press. Understandably upset they try to weasel out of the deal but are undone at every turn as the box distribution people have confederates on every corner - usually identified by a bleeding nose.

Things start getting a bit weird as legions of seemingly mind controlled people start chasing Cyclops around a library before he is sent home via a big block of water. Meanwhile we see some panicked souls at Langley who know that Frank was killed by lightening shortly after the Voyager probe took off, before being returned to life. They now know that he is in the box and money distribution business but to what end?

Slowly we start to gather the threads together and learn that the whole box set up is a test by persons unknown to gauge the moral value of society and of humanity in general. With Frank back at Cameron’s house he offers an impossible dilemma and the identity of the unknown person who must die in exchange for the cash may not be so unfamiliar after all.

When I saw the first half hour of this film I was wondering why it was called the ‘The Box’ rather than ‘The Button’. As the film progresses however you realise that the button isn’t important and that the box referred to isn’t the container but the restrictions by which we live our lives. At first the dilemma seems a no brainer but then the film cleverly wrong foots you to the point where you think any button pressing would definitely be a bad thing.

I liked the general air of menace and unease that permeates through the film and the idea that everyone is in on this massive conspiracy was a fun if slightly unoriginal one. The first hour of the movie is like a 70s melodrama with a ‘what would you do?’ type narrative before it heads off into totally unexpected places. The CGI of the suspended blocks of water look a bit out of place in the beige 70’s setting but are unnerving and sinister all the same.

The film doesn’t fully explain what was afoot or the motivations behind those involved but I liked that it made you think and subverted your original expectations.

The three leads all do serviceable turns with Diaz possibly the weakest with her varying Southern drawl. I liked how her character was fleshed out with stories of how she lost her toes and it was a brave move to take on an offbeat film like this complete with unflattering fashions. Langella exuded quiet menace throughout and James Marsden did OK with a limited role that mostly involved looking a bit confused.

I’d imagine a lot of Saturday night cinema audience would have left ‘The Box’ with a ‘WTF’ attitude but I enjoyed it’s weirdness and thought provoking subject matter. It was maybe a bit long at two hours but over all it’s well worth taking delivery of ‘The Box’.

THE Tag Line : Box Tops! 78%