No.240 : The Baker (2007)

The Baker at the IMDb

I bought the DVD of this film out of a charity shop years ago and fell asleep before I could complete my viewing. I then lent it to someone in the office who never gave it back (Emma, maybe?) and I gave it up as lost. It did however present itself on Amazon Prime, so I thought I’d give it a look hoping for a rediscovered classic. Frankly I shouldn’t have bothered, but at least it closes a chapter!

Damian Lewis stars as the titled character Milo ‘The Baker’ Shakespeare. He’s a hit man in the employ of Michael Gambon, but not a very good one as he’s questioning the nature of his business. Things come to a head in the first ten minutes when he offers the target the chance to run but is discovered by rival hit man Jamie Lannister, who completes the contract and tries to take down Milo.

Milo escapes to a safe house in a small Welsh village which also happens to be a disused bakery. The locals assume he’s going to start baking and Milo decides to oblige. He buries his guns but is observed by a local nut job who enjoys exploding sheep and conspiracy theories. An exploding sheep knocks Brodie out, but he’s rescued by love interest Rhiannon who is the local vet and pub waitress.

Axe starts to bake but is rubbish at it. Meanwhile his former career is discovered by the locals, all of whom have a target they’d liked rubbed out themselves. A misunderstanding leads a dead wife being credited to Major Winters who then gets lots of orders for ‘cakes’ which he thinks are for baked goods, but the locals think are for hits. Also added to the mix is Jamie who doesn’t like loose ends and is keen to close the contract.

Will Axe get the girl and settle down or have the choices he made in the past determined his future?

This was a strange film tonally. The IMDb description has it down as an ‘action /comedy’ but it does look like the comedy element was an afterthought with the dafter elements only emerging after half an hour. You could argue that it lures you in but it just seemed a bit disjointed to me, with none of the comedy scenes really working. You had the bloke out of ‘The Flying Pickets’ running around in his pants and a terrible exploding sheep special effect that they used twice, no doubt to justify the expense, but that was it really.

I like Lewis but comedy isn’t his strong suit and his ‘fish out of water’ act didn’t  resonate or amuse in the slightest. A young Jamie Lannister was very poor with some swordsmanship on display that would have embarrassed someone with a metal hand.

There were a few familiar faces in the supporting cast but I didn’t buy into their murderous intent and the conspiracy nut sidekick was just plain annoying. The film ran a predictable course with the big showdown as inevitable as it was unearned. Gambon showed up for the pay cheque and lacked the usual ambivalence that he normally deals out effortlessly.

Some of the scenes, such as the cast breaking character to sing ‘Volarie’, were misjudged and done so much better in films like ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’. Overall it was all over the place and by the end I had no interest or investment in the wafer thin characters or in their faintly embarrassing escapades. The whole enterprise could have done with another hour in the script oven.

THE Tag Line : Half Baked  - 53%

 

No.205 : The Informers (2008)

The Informers at the IMDb

Based on a book by Bret Easton Ellis and boasting a stellar cast, I had high hopes for ‘The Informers’ but alas it was a bit of a mess, although a mess with a couple of decent ideas and scenes.

The film is set in L.A. in 1983. We open with a great looking party with everyone wearing neon and looking like escapees from the set of ‘Miami Vice’. The dreamy feelgood vibe lasts for all of two minutes as one attendee wanders out into the road and bleeds to death in his friend’s arms after being hit by a car.

The incident has a greater or lesser effect on a wide range of characters, and we follow seven separate stories, some of which intertwine, and others which barely reference the event at all.

I won’t go into intimate details of the plot as that would take all of the 100 minute run time to map out. The main events were a love triangle between Billy Bob Thornton , his wife (Kim Basinger) and the TV anchor he’s having an affair with played by Winona Ryder.

We also meet an English band who are jetting in for some concerts and to shoot a video. They are managed by a barely seen Rhys Ifans and have a lead singer who is a total nonce. There is also a plot involving a hotel worker whose uncle, Mickey Rourke, comes to stay and gets him involved in a kidnap plot, and a group of teens who all sleep with each other, often at the same time.

The hedonistic and seamy lifestyles we look in on slowly start to unravel and  as they play out we have to wonder if we really care what happens to these privileged and hedonistic assholes.

As you can imagine, there is a lot going on here and it’s a difficult balancing act to keep all of the balls in the air, and it's one the director fails to manage. The main love triangle plot was dull whereas I could have done with a lot more about the kidnapping. Chris Izzak and his son looked like they had fun in Hawaii but I missed the point and the rock star plot didn’t go anywhere.

I think that this was supposed to be an essay on 80’s culture and excess but it just came across as a bunch of rich folk with too much time on their hands. I guess the ‘informers’ of the title is a suggestion that they are each informing us of a flawed element of society. That, or it was just a load of good looking people having sex and taking drugs?

Reading the details of this production, I see that it suffered in the edit with a vampire plot from the book excised from the movie. That’s a shame as the film could have done with an extra element, supernatural or otherwise, to take it away from the self-indulgent mess that we ended up with.

There is a star name in nearly every scene but Thornton and Basinger were well off their Oscar form and only dear Amber Heard appeared to put everything into her role. I wouldn’t write it off as a complete waste of time, but the film certainly represents a wasted opportunity.

THE Tag Line :The 80’s Without the Fun  53%

No.196 : The Signal (2007)

The Signal at the IMDb

There is another ‘The Signal’ out there dating from 2014 which has three times more votes than this one on the IMDb. We didn’t get where we are by being popular, so it’s the less seen one for us.

I went into this cold and thought it was a tonal mess. It was only when reading up on the film I see that the three segments or ‘transmissions’ were filmed by three different directors using different genres to tell their part of the story. I’m not sure what this approach added to the project, apart from confusion, as it was grating to see the film jump about the place with an in-cohesive narrative.

Anyway, we open with our heroine, Mya, getting out of bed. She keeps her bra on in bed but takes her knickers off. Fair enough. Mya is having an affair and is worried that she can’t get though to her husband to spin her lies due to a strange signal on her phone. The TV also displays strobing patterns and we suspect that this is ‘the signal’ of the title. And we’re right!

Mya heads home and meets up with her suspicious and controlling husband and his two friends. They are all pissed off that the can’t watch the game due to ‘the signal’ and tempers start to fray. Before long random people, including the husband's friend who happens to have a baseball bat, become homicidal maniacs and the killing begins.

Mya gets away but hooks up with a neighbour and the two head out to find that the city is aflame with murders happening all over.

The seconds transmission sees a couple setting up for a New Year’s party. Bodies have already begun to stack up with the wife either mental or in denial. This section is played for laughs and doesn’t sit well alongside the first which was straight out horror. This one goes on too long and there is too much farce on show with comedy clubbings, Vic and Bob Style.

The last section charts Mya’s journey to the station where she had agreed to meet her lover before the chaos started. Will she make it? Will ‘the signal’ be explained? And how come that disembodied head is talking?

This was a cheap looking, horror satire that overextended itself in terms of ambition and effects. Some bits were decent with others just looking plain daft. One chap gets his head cut off and it’s later reanimated so it can be interrogated. Good science! This was in the comedy section but it just looked daft.

If they had kept to the tone of the first section throughout this could have been a serviceable survival post apocalyptic thriller. Instead you were taken out of the action with the slapstick of chapter two and you also lose sight of your main character for 30 minutes which is never going to be satisfying.

You won’t know anyone in the cast but they were mostly serviceable and I liked Anessa Ramsey in the lead, despite thinking she was the waitress out of ‘Always Sunny’ for most of the film.

You could say this was a brave experiment in mixing genres but to me it was just a mess and a waste of time. A couple of good kills and getting hit by a frying pan is never going to sustain a 100 minute film.

The Tag Line : 3 Directors? More is less, 53%

No.160 : The Witches (1966)

The Witches at the IMDb

After our last offering of The Witch we now meet the plural offering in the shape of this 1966 Hammer frightener. Where as The Witch was set in 1620 this has a contemporary setting - so which witch is best? The other one!

This effort starts well and there was a really good film to be had. Sadly the big denouement lets this one down with it being more ridiculous than anything else.

The film stars Joan Fontaine, who won the Oscar in 1941 for ‘Suspicion’. She must have been on her uppers 25 years later as this British production will be a footnote to her illustrious CV at best.

The film opens in Africa where Fontaine’s ‘Joan Mayfield’ is working as a missionary teacher. Her classes haven’t gone down well as the natives are in revolt and she’s packing up. Her two terrified helpers, including Rudolph Walker off ‘Eastenders’, dive out the window as the local witch doctor is at the door. Joan takes a faint when a massive tribal head, which looks like surplus stock from ‘It’s a Knockout’ bursts in.

Joan wakes up back in England and has an interview with a vicar for a new job, teaching in the small village of Heddaby. She freaks out when recounting her African experiences but gets the gig anyway.

She arrives in the idyllic village to become headmistress in the school and is met by ‘Oooh Betty’ actress Michelle Dotice. She settles in but learns the vicar isn’t really a vicar as he  failed the exam - and that the town’s church was destroyed in unspecified circumstances 200 years ago. These minor issues don’t set off any alarm bells and she makes a friend in the fake vicar’s sister, Stephanie.

She starts to tutor a boy called Ronnie, who sports a Mr Logic haircut, and tries to adopt a black cat that follows her around. Ronnie’s studies go well but he’s distracted by a well developed 14 year Linda (the actress being 19 at the time) and soon falls ill. Joan finds a doll with pins in it and wonders if the boy is under a spell? Stephanie cautions against removing the pins however as that would show she actually believed in witchcraft.

After some more meddling Joan opens the door to find the massive voodoo head coming from her and promptly faints. She wakes up, seemingly a year later in the care of Rigsby off ‘Rising Damp’. Is Joan really nuts or is there a coven of witches in the village who got rid of the boy as he had designs on the girl, and they need a virgin for their unholy sacrifice? Second one sounds the more exciting option, but it’s totally not!

The first hour of this film is really good. It’s well paced and there are a lot of pointers that things aren’t what they seem. I always like scenes were everyone, apart from the hero, is in on a nefarious plan and Joan did well bumbling about in her twin set.

Things fall apart however as soon as Rigsby appears. There is never really any doubt that Joan’s suspicions are correct and, given the title, the viewer is in little doubt either. The film does however go down a mental path, with the lead witch’s identity being no surprise whatsoever. The preparing of the girl for the sacrifice was done so much better in ‘The Wicker Man’ with there being no sense of danger here at all. ‘The satanic rite’ and ‘orgy’ were laughable and looked more like a failed audition for the ‘Thriller’ video.

The salvation and resolution were handled cack handedly, with the last two minutes looking tacked on to convince the thickies in the audience that this was indeed a happy ending.

One to avoid or at least to excuse yourself from after an hour.

THE Tag line : The Worst Witch  53%

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.142 : The Festival (2018)

The Festival at the IMDb

Here’s a Film 4 film starting Simon out of ‘The Inbetweeners’ and directed by one of the creators of ‘The Inbetweeners’ so it’s bound to be something different - no way will it be a lazy cash in using the same characters and jokes will it? Well yes. It would be the work of a lazy reviewer to keep referencing the obvious connections, so let’s do that then.

Simon plays ‘Nick’ who is really just Simon but with a different haircut. Instead of playing a schoolboy whilst in his early 30’s, the now 35 year old Simon plays a young man just graduating from university. He has range, you have to give him that! The film opens with him having sex with his dull girlfriend, Caitlin. She’s played by Simon’s real life partner so that’s a bit creepy especially as they have no chemistry whatsoever. To be fair, they may be great actors, because the plot is that she’s about to dump him.

Before we get to the plot the film nails it’s colours firmly to the mast when Simon’s ejaculate goes over his graduation gown, meaning we get a lovely scene of his mother scratching it off and licking her fingers. Caitlin tells Simon they are finished, and after embarrassing himself at the graduation, when he begs for her to come back, he goes into a downward spiral.

Things soon look up however when his chunky friend Shane reminds them that they have tickets for a music festival. Simon doesn’t want to go as Caitlin will be there. ‘Don’t worry we won’t see her’ says his friend ‘There are 100,000 people there’. Of course they meet up before 30 minutes have passed. Before that great moment we get some treats as our heroes try to get on the train using children’s tickets - it’s not like Simon has made a career out of pretending to be young is it?! On the way they meet Amy, an annoying yet lonely Australian festival regular. Hope she gets a nice character arc as she seems a bit sad.

At the festival our heroes immediately meet up with Caitlin as well as her friends - the rich one, the ditzy one who doesn’t remember names and the stoner. They also meet ‘The Pirate’ who is so called as he has one leg. The Pirate has designs on Caitlin so is immediately the boo hiss bad guy despite being far more likeable than Simon.

Various festival adventures follow such as those old standards of a bestiality druid ceremony and a drug bender with a Smurf. The climax promises to be great - what celebrity will be revealed to be the mask wearing DJ Hammerhead? Will our friends find love and will drug use, goat sex, disabled abuse and vandalism ever be acceptable in a mainstream film? You big square!

It would be churlish to be too harsh on this film. It doesn’t set out to be great art and is instead a celebration of freedom and having a good time. As a 49 year old misery it was hard to get invested! I didn’t like any of the characters and Simon’s journey from being a dick to being a slightly lesser dick gave me no warm feelings whatsoever. Annoying Amy was just that, and her fledgling romance with black man mountain Shane didn’t ring true at all.

There were a couple of minor cameos with Nick Frost showing up as a tattooist in one scene. The reveal of the famous DJ’s secret identity was seriously underwhelming and the whole subplot with the druids was just weird.

Simon’s night of love was OK but as a car owner who had someone once sleep in his Fiesta I have to call foul on that behaviour. I did quite like the scene of him imagining a life with the Smurf girl through marriage, kids and divorce but I think I liked it better when I first saw Harold & Kumar do it with a big bag of weed.

The film could easily have been retooled as an ‘Inbetweeners’ episode and it really only served to confirm that the parts of that group are less than the sum of the whole. Hee-hee I said ‘parts’ and ‘whole’ - they should have had me scripting this film!

Not many laughs are to be had at ‘The Festival’ but it was easy going, offensive fun.

Pass marks but only just.

THE Tag Line - Life With A Smurf Can Be Fun. 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.89 : The Kentuckian (1955)

The Kentuckian at the IMDb

Burt Lancaster starred and directed this 1955 undemanding but overlong western.

He plays Big Eli, a frontiersman who feels civilisation has encroached too much onto his world and takes his son off on a quest to make a life in Texas where land is measured by your eye, not a rope and chain. Sadly this is easier said than done as low cost airlines are still some time away. Burt has saved up $215 to pay his passage and to secure some land. His boy is at the precocious age of being most annoying and Burt tells him he won’t be a man until he can blow a horn - don’t ask.

The pair soon encounter some small minded townsfolk who dislike Burt’s penchant for dog fighting. They slam him in the jail and he has to rely on a nice local lass for vitals. The girl, Hannah, is a kind of slave who is in servitude to her boss, who happens to be an abusive dick. She manages to free Burt, but his faithful dog leads the baddies to their campfire. Burt agrees to spend his whole bankroll on freeing the woman but even then still it seems cheap!

Burt arrives at his brother in law’s home and not surprisingly his hosts aren’t too impressed with his new purchase. The brother in law dislikes Burt’s lifestyle and presumably the coonskin cap he’s wearing, that no doubt stinks to high heaven. He tries to talk Burt out of his Texan dream and sets him up in a fancy suit and tries to teach him his tobacco selling business.

Burt however is more keen on Sophie, the local school teacher who is slightly hotter than Hannah but does come with the baggage of a crippled mother whom we only hear from up the stairs; and believe me she sounds a total nightmare. The boy however prefers Hannah and soon his own life is getting tougher as Dad’s mess ups cause him no end of high school hassles. Burt you see, has made a tit of himself as a freshwater pearl he found and sent to the President turns out to be worthless and send the whole town into fits of giggles.

Rather than lose face Burt decides to restore his bankroll and in an almost slapstick scene hustles some river boat gamblers by pretending to be a sucker with a large bag marked ‘$’. With his money now restored Burt has the choice of the ladies and of a life as a tobacco baron or as a Texan rancher. But wait! Walter Matthau and his handy whip may still have a part to play as will the boy’s horn.

This was an OK western but at approaching two hours it didn’t have enough meat on the bones to sustain the journey. Burt is a Daniel Boone type character rallying against the advancements society has made while he’s been rolling about in the dirt. His sage wisdom grated and his annoying son did nothing to help the viewer’s affections towards the pair. The women were mere chattels that Burt could pick and choose while they looked on with pathetic hopefulness. His big choice at the end was based on the burden of the mother in law more than the affection he felt for either woman, which makes him a stand up dude.

I did enjoy some aspects especially Walter Matthau’s character who was a sadistic bastard who was handy with the whip and the riverboat scene was good fun although totally out of kilter with the rest of the film.

All things considered the film wasn’t a hit but it did have enough elements to suggest a look if there’s nothing else on and your DVD player is broken.

THE Tag Line - Whip It Real Good
53%

No.33 : The Majestic (2001)

The Majestic at the IMDb

Jim Carrey stars in this bloated pile of sentimental crap that sucks up two and a half hours of your life and leaves you feeling that bit stupider for having fallen for its obvious pitfalls. But it starts with a ‘The’ so at least I’ve got an excuse.

The file opens with Carrey’s 1950s Hollywood screenwriter agreeing to all the mental changes to his script suggested by the studio. This shows he has no integrity but he has a sexy broad on his arm and a nice set of wheels so who’s to worry? His first film gets a decent reception and things are looking good until a teenage indiscretion brings him to the attention of the Committee for Un-American Activities . With his next flick cancelled he hits the bottle and goes for a drive - HUGE mistake.

A well trained opossum, which for some reason is crossing the middle of a long bridge, causes him to lose control and crash into the water. He washes up in a small town and as you’d guess the bump on the head has caused total amnesia - the movie kind, not the massive head trauma kind that most accidents accidentally cause.

He’s found by Brookes out of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and taken into town where he’s recognised as a long lost son of the town feared dead in World War Two. Carrey doesn’t know who he is but is soon cosying up to the dead man’s squeeze and Martin Landau, the local cinema owner father of the dead boy. Months soon pass and the father and not son start to bond as they do up the titular picture house.

Meanwhile the nasty commie chasers are on our man’s tail and when his car washes up they close the net and bring him back to LA to face the music. Will his now restored memory reignite his asshole persona or will his months with the simple towns people colour his outlook and give him some of the spirit and courage of his assumed dead soldier’s character? Go on, two guesses!

I didn’t fancy this film when it came out, thinking it would be some sentimental twaddle about the goodness of small town America and a love letter to a bygone age. As with all presumptions it turned out that I was correct. The film is directed by Frank Darabont and on this evidence he should stick to Stephen King penned prison stories. The emotional music cues and overlong heartfelt speeches are all present and correct, but outside the prison environment they seem a bit unnecessary and overbearing.

Carrey’s character arc is really thin, as is that of the towns folk who go from love to hate to big love in 20 minutes. The cast is pretty good with a lot of familiar faces popping up such as the guy from Kruger Industrial Smoothage and Bob Balaban playing his usual weasely character. The story, as it is, is too slight, with the miraculous and selective amnesia which turns on and off as the story requires a plot device too far.

The film is book ended with scenes of Carrey discussing changes to a proposed film plot and you could argue that the whole thing is meant to be a fantasy of a better time that never really existed. I’m not buying that, and saw the whole things as lazy, sentimental schmaltz.

There were a couple of positives such as Bruce Campbell showing up in Carrey’s ‘B’ flick as well as Indiana Jones’ golden idol but for the most part this was just an idle jab at the commie witch hunts 50 years too late. Running at 150 minutes I’d be surprised if you take a trip to ‘The Majestic’ dear reader especially when you realise it’s got enough plot for the first hour at most. Basically when Martin Landau shuts off so should you!

THE Tag Line : Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pish 53%