Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

Along with four other young guests at her home, Sharon Tate Polanski was murdered shortly after midnight on the 8th of August 1969, two weeks from full term in her pregnancy with film director Roman Polanski’s son, and for no immediately discernible reason. The five had been, in fact, the victims of Charles Manson’s “Family”, as part of the cult’s plot to seed social mayhem and subsequently inherit the Earth. The incident is infamous not just for the sheer horror of what happened – especially in Tate’s case – or for the light it shed on the post-“Summer of Love” attitude to free thinking, but also because of certain changes in American victims’ rights legislation that were later brought about thanks to pressure from Tate’s mother.

 

We tell you this because, other than in the form of a handful of caption slides at the end of the film, Wolves at the Door doesn’t bother explaining any of the background to or consequences of the events it portrays. With the Tate murders evidently something of a passion of director Leonetti, this is a very professionally executed but extremely shallow presentation of the incident – shallow enough it makes you wonder why he bothered. There is without question a very interesting drama to be made about the night of August 8th – about how Polanski had been delayed in London preventing him from being present, about how Tate’s sisters might have easily also become victims of the crime, and of course about Manson and his acolytes’ motivations and intentions – but Leonetti’s film is a very singular vision, almost literally restricting itself to placing four people in a building and terrorising the hell out of them.

 

By choosing to show none of the perpetrators except in shadow and silhouette, the only clue an uninformed audience can glean about the coming horrors is from a brief but effective prologue concerning the spate of inexplicable break-ins plaguing Los Angeles during the summer of 1969. Once a state of imbalance has been established, Leonetti shamefully briefly introduces his protagonists and almost immediately has them under attack.

 

What follows is impressively shot, edited and scored, but demonstrates not only a lapse in judgement about what makes the incident interesting, but also a lapse in taste about what makes a film worthwhile. In making the Family members an empty space and by giving Tate and her friends little in the way of backstory, Leonetti essentially creates a video game scenario, wherein the viewer is invited to hunt the pregnant woman down and cruelly murder both her and her child, as well as her four companions. This is the worst kind of terror pornography, betraying Leonetti’s fascination with the murders as superficial and troubling.

WOLVES AT THE DOOR / CERT: 15 (TBC) / DIRECTOR: JOHN R. LEONETTI / SCREENPLAY: GARY DAUBERMAN / STARRING: KATIE CASSIDY, ELIZABETH HENSTRIDGE, ADAM CAMPBELL, MILES FISHER / RELEASE DATE: 24TH JULY

Christian Marnham is neither one of the most known of British directors nor one of the most prolific, having only one full feature and a few shorts to his name. The aim of the BFI’s Flipside label, however, is to find obscure and unusual British films and bring them back to public attention; their latest Blu-ray/DVD release gives us a new high quality edition of The Orchard End Murder, his fifty-minute ‘long short feature’ which acted as a cinema programme filler in 1981, as well as a 25-minute documentary short, The Showman.

 

The Orchard End Murder begins with young Pauline (Hyde) bored of watching her new boyfriend play cricket in a Kent countryside village (we can’t blame her). She wanders off to explore and meets an oddly welcoming stationmaster (Wallis) with a gnome-like hunch, beard and hat, as well as his brutish, half-witted friend (Mantle). It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Pauline gets herself murdered very early on in the film, and the focus then shifts onto this strange duo as they try to cover up what’s occurred.

 

The first thing to say about The Orchard End Murder is that it’s a strange, strange movie, willing to take completely unexpected turns at any moment. You think you have a handle on its idyllically dull portrayal of village life, complete with lengthy small talk, and then suddenly someone slams a live rabbit into a fruitcake before ripping its innards out. And that’s just the first ten minutes.

 

Indeed, there are many odd decisions in this film’s story, and not all in a good way. Some scenes make little sense, such as the men’s decision to bury the body a few metres away from where the police are currently standing, and the way that the story ends couldn’t feel more forced. Nevertheless, it has an odd charm about it and never feels boring, perhaps due to a combination of just how unpredictable the whole thing is and Peter Jessop’s artful camerawork, which carefully juxtaposes the beautiful country landscapes with the much more sinister.

 

Also included on this release is The Showman, a short documentary from 1970 following Wally Shufflebottom, one of the last Wild West-style showmen operating in British fairgrounds. Giving in to cultural changes, he’s incorporated stripteasing young ladies into his knife-throwing act; a recording of the show is intercut with an interview with Shufflebottom and his wife.

 

Notably absent are any interviews with the girls, and Marnham’s camerawork shows off the same uncomfortable predilection with women’s bodies that shows up in The Orchard End Murder’s more lurid scenes. On the other hand, Marnham’s interest in the Shufflebottoms’ lives and backstories gives us a fascinating insight into a very particular nook of British history.

 

Special Features: Interviews / Illustrated Booklet

THE ORCHARD END MURDER / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: CHRISTIAN MARNHAM / STARRING: BILL WALLIS, CLIVE MANTLE, TRACY HYDE / RELEASE DATE: JULY 24TH

Since it began back in 2000, the X-Men film series has become a mess. It has tried to juggle a huge amount of characters, and as well as the resultant continuity clusterfucks, instalments like Apocalypse have ended up as unfocused and dull CGI-heavy smash-ups, big on epic spectacle but low on character stakes.

 

This year’s Logan attempted to remedy that by focusing on a small number of characters and telling a different kind of story. In a near-future where mutants are on the brink of extinction, the man who was once Wolverine (Jackman) lives in an abandoned smelting plant in Mexico, caring for old Professor X (Stewart), whose great mind is long gone due to Alzheimer’s. One day, Logan is asked to escort a young girl, Laura (Keen), to safety from the biotechnological corporation on her trail – for she has the same powers as the legendary Wolverine.

 

This sets into motion a journey across America that uses the visual cues of the modern Western much more than those of the typical superhero movie. In Logan’s worn-down settings, fights are violent and bloody, and heroes need to be tough and brutal rather than stylishly super. It’s fair to say it’s at the top end of its 15 rating – so as much as cinephiles may love it, keep in mind that this is not a DVD to be bought for the very young superhero fans.

 

What’s important, though, is that Logan uses its grim aesthetic to serve poignant character stories, the strongest in the entire X-Men franchise. Xavier’s Alzheimer’s is a particularly clever use of the superhero genre to tell a human story; it’s not the most in-depth cinematic exploration of the disease, but it works so well because we’ve learned to know the character over the years, and because of the sad irony of the world’s greatest mind falling apart.

 

But this is Hugh Jackman’s movie, really, his send-off to the franchise that has defined his career. His performance here channels every hard-drinking, gruff-talking gunslinger you’ve ever seen, though greater depths are revealed when he comes to bond with Laura. The trope of the cynical old soldier given new hope by a young mentee allows an edge of optimism to the otherwise grim film, and shows off an astonishing performance from Keen, 11 at the time of filming.

 

Logan, then, is low on epic spectacle but high on character stakes – the opposite of the X-Men franchise at its worst. It’s a grim but gorgeous send-off to this iconic character.

 

The DVD comes with an audio commentary by Mangold as well as six short deleted scenes; highlights of these are a downbeat take on the awkward family dinner with Xavier remembering Jean Grey, the young Munson boy quizzing Logan about Sabretooth, and one of the young mutants from late in the film showing off his Puppet Master powers.

 

LOGAN / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: JAMES MANGOLD / SCREENPLAY: SCOTT FRANK, JAMES MANGOLD, MICHAEL GREEN / STARRING: HUGH JACKMAN, PATRICK STEWART, DAFNE KEEN, STEPHEN MERCHANT, RICHARD E. GRANT / RELEASE DATE: JULY 10TH

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse has retained a well-earned place atop “scariest movie” lists since its release in 2001. The Japanese hit, which was remade in 2006, stands out amidst now-classic features like The Ring and Dark Water, which defined contemporary J-Horror in the new millennium.

Without beating around the bush, Kurosawa’s existential breakdown is one of the finest encapsulations of techno-terror ever put to screen. Forget the bombastic, but entertaining, thrills of contemporary zombie apocalypses, viral outbreaks, and psychos; its Kurosawa’s study in alienation which strikes a chord amidst those millennial classics. In Pulse, technology itself is a tool for loneliness. The Internet has unwillingly become host, or at least gateway, to the souls of the recently deceased, slowly squashed from a crammed afterlife by over-population. Unlike Romero’s dead, who overflowed out of Hell to consume the living, Kurosawa’s ghosts have stumbled out of the afterlife to save everyone, kind of.

Pulse‘s power lies in how it builds tension; allowing pure cinematic terror to slip from screen to audience with insipid skill. Pulse takes place in the most mundane and domestic of locations, but never feels safe thanks to the omni-present threat of existential dread. Again and again the image of a scorched human outline- left by the recently deceased- becomes a literal black mark on previously safe lodgings. Red taped doors warn of terrifying spirits. A computer asks the simple question; ‘Would you like to see a ghost?’. The characters either strain to retain normalcy, or slowly fall victim to mounting supernatural pressure. People become increasingly detached, disappear, commit suicide in brutal ways, or become catatonic.

Jun’ichiro Hayashi’s drab cinematography builds an air of isolation, depressing the already cold clinical modern world, but retaining a jarring beauty in the darkest locations. Takefumi Haketa’s soundtrack slips between industrial ambience and the screeching choirs of old school ghost stories, further fusing those classic and contemporary influences into a steadily spiraling nightmare, the kind that spills out over the entire world thanks to the world wide web.

Kurosawa has the balls to take it all the way too. Global realisation, the revelation of the spirits, is an unforeseen door to human extinction or immortality. Few horror films can start so intimately and deservedly spiral so explosively. But then, rarely do horror films come as terrifying, bold, and far-reaching. Kurosawa has a detached kind of curiosity that allows the film to take its time with the scares and present stark horror without seeming over-dramatic. The result is a two-hour lesson in mood-crunching horror and pitch-perfect chills. The kind you don’t shake off.

PULSE (2001) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: KIYOSHI KUROSAWA / STARRING: KUMIKO ASO, HARUHIKO KATO, KOYUKI, KARUME ARISAKA / RELEASE DATE: 10TH JULY

If history is a whitewash, perhaps the cleverest aspect of Theodore Melfi’s film, adapted by Allison Schroeder and the director and produced in tandem with the Margot Lee Shetterly book that inspired it, is in the way it normalises the issues it raises for a mainstream audience. There’s no fancy editing, no artsy camerawork, no grandstanding performances. It presents a difficult subject as essentially an object to be overcome and is a story that anyone, therefore, can appreciate. Race might be the agenda but it’s the human-interest angle that carries the film – and if that means it gets the widest possible audience, that’s no bad thing.

 

Basically the meeting point between A Beautiful Mind and The Dish, Hidden Figures is the other side of The Right Stuff; as the subtitle of Shetterly’s book has it, The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. The film focusses primarily upon Katherine G. Johnson (Henson), a maths prodigy who finds herself promoted from a modest position in the “Colored Section” at NASA, to the very heart of America’s attempts to overtake Russia in the space race. It was Johnson’s calculations that helped put John Glenn into orbit around the Earth, and later two men on the moon. Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughn (Spencer) teaches herself how to programme a computer (of the mechanical kind, computer being the contemporaneous word for a person who computes things), becoming NASA’s principle IBM operative, and Mary Jackson (Monáe, of We Are Young fame) becomes the first black woman in an all-white school as she studies for the qualification she needs in order to become a female engineer.

 

The film is populated with the kind of characters you’d expect to see; Kirsten Dunst as a supervisor who doesn’t consider herself racist, The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons as a head engineer whose professional envy feeds his low-level bigotry, and Kevin Costner as the administrator of the project, a man who doesn’t care who does the job as long as it gets done, but begins the film having little time for the personalities under his auspices. The characters’ trajectories are predictable but played with enough subtlety not to stray into sentimentality, and the same is true of the three leads. This is not a film about histrionics or grand gestures, and the women achieve their goals through diligence and determination, and it’s because those goals are that much further from their grasp that it’s a story worth telling.

 

Hidden Figures wears its relevance lightly but without diminishing it, and while it’s not pushing any artistic boundaries that is perhaps the point; it’s a story we can all empathise with, regardless of colour.

 

Special Features: making of / deleted scenes / commentary / gallery

 

HIDDEN FIGURES / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: THEODORE MEFI / SCREENPLAY: ALLISON SCHROEDER, THEODORE MELFI / STARRING: TARAJI P. HENSON, OCTAVIA SPENCER, JANELLE MONÁE, KEVIN COSTNER, KIRSTEN DUNST, JIM PARSONS / RELEASE DATE: 3RD JULY 

When a film starts with a quote from notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, you know it’s not exactly going to be Minions 3. And so begins Nektromantik 2, Jӧrg Buttgereit’s sequel to his transgressive necrophilia romance (it’s all in the title see) Nekromantik, brought to blu-ray by Arrow.

After her boyfriend’s suicide, which is a literal bloody climax except it’s at the start of the film, necrophiliac Monika (Monika M.) digs up his body and brings it home to indulge in her sexual perversion. When she gets a new boyfriend, Mark (Mark Reeder) she struggles have a normal relationship while hiding her real sexual desires.

What’s clear from the start of Nekromantik 2 is that Jӧrg Buttgereit has improved as a director. The film is slicker than the original and he is more at ease letting the visuals tell the story, to the point where great swathes of the film are dialogue free. There’s even a brief musical interlude. This, however, does add to the films bloated running time, and isn’t really to its benefit as it’s a film which doesn’t have particular depth.

The title itself is completely self-explanatory because this is kind of a romantic movie but about a necrophiliac. It’s not your run of the mill romantic movie, the boy dubs pornography and the girl has sex with corpses, but it is concerned with their burgeoning relationship and the difficulties that this includes, even if they aren’t your usual problems. Katherine Heigel would probably turn it down, though with her current career trajectory, perhaps not, but it can be a considered a romance film.

The plot does lend itself to some dark (very dark) comedy, like how Monika puts the severed corpse genitals on a plate and covers them with cling film, like leftovers, stored to be used another day, but it’s never really funny enough to be classed as a comedy. It’s a shame because more could have been made of this ludicrous scenario.

All it’s really concerned with is being shocking and provocative, which it does, to an extent, succeed in doing. It’s a film whose interest lies purely in curiosity and gross-out rather than anything genuinely interesting or groundbreaking.

The effects are suitably stomach churning and moist, though they don’t really hold as realistic, especially in the dismemberment scene. You never really get used to the site of someone kissing the blackened, rotting head of a corpse. It’s not a film to be watched while you eat your dinner. Nekromantik 2 also contains a scene of graphic, real life animal skinning, as did the first film, which some viewers will no doubt find off-putting.

Nekromantik 2 wants to be repulsive, and not a lot more. It squanders what could have been an entertaining premise and doesn’t give you much else to hold on to.

NEKROMANTIK 2 / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JÖRG BUTTGEREIT / SCREENPLAY: JÖRG BUTTGEREIT, FRANZ RODENKIRCHEN / STARRING: MONIKA M., MARK REEDER, CAROLA EWERS / RELEASE DATE: 3RD JULY

When a film starts with a quote from notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, you know it’s not exactly going to be Minions 3. And so begins Nektromantik 2, Jӧrg Buttgereit’s sequel to his transgressive necrophilia romance (it’s all in the title see) Nekromantik, brought to blu-ray by Arrow.

After her boyfriend’s suicide, which is a literal bloody climax except it’s at the start of the film, necrophiliac Monika (Monika M.) digs up his body and brings it home to indulge in her sexual perversion. When she gets a new boyfriend, Mark (Mark Reeder) she struggles have a normal relationship while hiding her real sexual desires.

What’s clear from the start of Nekromantik 2 is that Jӧrg Buttgereit has improved as a director. The film is slicker than the original and he is more at ease letting the visuals tell the story, to the point where great swathes of the film are dialogue free. There’s even a brief musical interlude. This, however, does add to the films bloated running time, and isn’t really to its benefit as it’s a film which doesn’t have particular depth.

The title itself is completely self-explanatory because this is kind of a romantic movie but about a necrophiliac. It’s not your run of the mill romantic movie, the boy dubs pornography and the girl has sex with corpses, but it is concerned with their burgeoning relationship and the difficulties that this includes, even if they aren’t your usual problems. Katherine Heigel would probably turn it down, though with her current career trajectory, perhaps not, but it can be a considered a romance film.

The plot does lend itself to some dark (very dark) comedy, like how Monika puts the severed corpse genitals on a plate and covers them with cling film, like leftovers, stored to be used another day, but it’s never really funny enough to be classed as a comedy. It’s a shame because more could have been made of this ludicrous scenario.

All it’s really concerned with is being shocking and provocative, which it does, to an extent, succeed in doing. It’s a film whose interest lies purely in curiosity and gross-out rather than anything genuinely interesting or groundbreaking.

The effects are suitably stomach churning and moist, though they don’t really hold as realistic, especially in the dismemberment scene. You never really get used to the site of someone kissing the blackened, rotting head of a corpse. It’s not a film to be watched while you eat your dinner. Nekromantik 2 also contains a scene of graphic, real life animal skinning, as did the first film, which some viewers will no doubt find off-putting.

Nekromantik 2 wants to be repulsive, and not a lot more. It squanders what could have been an entertaining premise and doesn’t give you much else to hold on to.

NEKROMANTIK 2 / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JÖRG BUTTGEREIT / SCREENPLAY: JÖRG BUTTGEREIT, FRANZ RODENKIRCHEN / STARRING: MONIKA M., MARK REEDER, CAROLA EWERS / RELEASE DATE: 3RD JULY

Some movies hide their genius. Some movies look ridiculous but when you dig deeper you find something remarkable and worthwhile under the layers of bad direction and terrible acting. Z-list celeb vehicle Dangerous Game is not one of those movies. Peel away the layers of crud and you unveil a secret gateway, one that leads you to so much more crap. An infinite fountain of awfulness.

 

Dangerous Game is, in theory, a football thriller. The plot involves a nice but dim premiership football player who, due to a series of unlikely events, starts committing armed robbery to pay off the Russian mob. The movie opens with a daring heist as two men in David Beckham and Wayne Roonie masks hold up a security van. This opening scene is the highlight of the movie, and it’s pretty bland. The rest is a journey into incomprehensible editing, boring plot twists and terrible acting.

 

Our not very bright football superstar is played by Calum Best, a chap known mostly for being footballer George Best’s son, and for appearing on a great many reality TV shows. He’s assisted in his efforts with other barely famous types, such as Darren Day as a Russian mobster and the likes of Lucy Pinder and Jess Impiazzi as forgettable female characters. All of these people are apparently famous for, well, we aren’t really sure. They can’t act. Best spends most of his time two seconds away from asking someone for a prompt. These celebrities are assisted by a solid supporting cast of British low-budget movie actors, who easily perform the likes of Best and Day off the screen, whilst trying really hard not to.

 

The few not-boring bits are accidental. There’s a heist in a shoe-shop which is sort of funny. Darren Day’s Russian accent is a case-study on why you shouldn’t use cartoon show Rocky and Bullwinkle as a voice coach. Some of the direction is truly abysmal and we get the feeling the camera operators had more fun shooting b-roll. We have camera angles so bad that they could be used as examples of things to never do with a camera. We wonder what was left on the cutting room floor, and shudder with horror that out there, somewhere, a worse edit of this movie exists. This isn’t a horror movie, it’s just a horrible movie.

 

Starburst Magazine’s mission is to seek out Cult Entertainment and tell the world about it. The term cult often means that we have to step off the beaten path to find things that are a little bit different and ignored by the mainstream. But sometimes, those things should be ignored with good cause. Avoid at all costs.

 

A DANGEROUS GAME / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: RICHARD COLTON / STARRING: CALUM BEST, DARREN DAY, LUCY PINDER, JESS IMPIAZZI, ALEX REID / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

We’ve lost count of the number of Clint Eastwood box sets that have been released over the years. This new set claims to be ‘the definitive 40-film, 40-disc set’ and it is definitely the best offering so far, although, because it only contains the movies Eastwood made during his Warner Brothers years, there are some frustrating omissions. Surely no Clint Eastwood set can claim to be ‘definitive’ unless it includes The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, The Man with No Name Trilogy and even (ahem) Paint Your Wagon? But, despite those gaps, this is still a pleasingly comprehensive overview of the actor/director’s remarkable movie career.

 

The discs are neatly arranged in four cardboard folders within a sturdy, good-looking box (don’t you just hate when they put DVD’s inside cardboard folders?) and each folder covers its own particular era: 1968-1980 gives us Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Any Which Way You Can, and Bronco Billy. 1982-1989 contains Honkytonk Man, Firefox, Sudden Impact, Tightrope, City Heat, Pale Rider, Heartbreak Ridge, Bird, The Dead Pool, and Pink Cadillac. 1990-2002: The Rookie, White Hunter Black Heart, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County, Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, True Crime, Space Cowboys, Blood Work. 2003-2016: Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, Invictus, Hereafter, J. Edgar, American Sniper, Jersey Boys and Sully.

 

All the films are in fine shape, although many of the offerings in the first two folders suffer from noticeable image softness, no doubt due to their age. It certainly doesn’t look as if any of the movies in this set have been remastered. But the most recent movies look terrific, with strong detail and great sound.

 

As you can see from the list, there are arguably more than a few turkeys within this selection. No matter how many times they re-issue Bronco Billy and the Honkytonk Man, we’ll never be convinced that either of those films are worth your time of day, and Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can are definitely movies of their time. Eastwood is a fine actor, but he’s not a natural comedian, and when a star of his stature is upstaged by a gurning orangutan it’s not a pretty sight. Still, those two films are worth watching for the wonderful Ruth Gordon (Rosemary’s Baby) who steals every scene she’s in, and there’s a kind of daffy charm to the whole affair. Beware the theme song to Every Which Way But Loose, though. It’s a mindworm and you won’t get it out of your head for days. And while we’re on the subject of Eastwood films that don’t quite make the grade, can we please include City Heat and Pink Cadillac, both of which wear out their welcome pretty quickly.

 

But that still leaves about 85% of this collection to enjoy. The uber-violent (for their time) Dirty Harry movies are still fantastic entertainment, and as a continuing series there’s hardly a bad apple in the bunch (unlike similar franchises like the awful Death Wish films) and Pale Rider and Unforgiven never cease to be magnificent. It’s also pleasing to see the collection takes us right up to date with the Eastwood-directed Sully, which really deserved to do better at the box office, although UK fans have paid a heavy price for its inclusion. The US version of this set omits Sully and Jersey Boys but contains Million Dollar Baby, the underrated gem Trouble with the Curve, and two fantastic documentaries – the Eastwood Factor and Eastwood Directs: The Untold Story – which it would have been very nice to see on this side of the pond. Maybe there were licensing issues, but why oh why do UK viewers always seem to come out worse when it comes to DVD and blu-ray specs? Maybe Dirty Harry Callahan should get on the case…

 

CLINT EASTWOOD 40 FILM COLLECTION / CERT: 18 / DIRECTORS: VARIOUS / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: CLINT EASTWOOD, VARIOUS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Steve Martin built a huge following as a stand-up in the ‘70s, before transferring via TV to film. He then spent much of the ‘80s making movies with an enviable hit-rate and what is now a catalogue of work that remain comedy classics to this day. Like a few of his contemporaries, the ‘90s were not so smooth. Despite a reasonable number of films that either made money or were received relatively well by critics, there was a perception that Martin’s films were just not as good. Maybe it was films like Father of the Bride that started a slow creep of heavy sentimentality, or just that the good roles had all been exhausted. Which leads us to Sgt. Bilko, Martin’s mid-decade attempt at riding the goodwill attached to a well-loved television property in the search for another hit.

 

Based on the classic television series The Phil Silvers Show, it followed the basic template of Master Sergeant Ernest Bilko (Martin), the officer in charge of Fort Baxter’s motor pool. Supported by his company, Bilko is a scammer, a grifter always on the hunt for the next hustle to make some extra cash. First new Private Wally Holbrook arrives as the audience surrogate and is shocked by the lack of discipline (unless it involves making money). Then Major Thorn (Phil Hartman), a man with a reason to hate Bilko, arrives at the base to inspect it and it seems like the party is over for the Sgt.

 

The reason for Sgt. Bilko tanking at the box office is clear. It’s neither very good nor very bad, it’s just unremarkably there. The movie has some problems that it struggles to surmount. Bilko is a rampantly selfish character that Silvers imbued with charm despite it all. Martin is a highly accomplished actor but here his Bilko either falls flat, feels like a pale Silvers imitation or is just plain irritating. The tone of the films flips between laboured attempts at manic japery, surreal gags and massively broad comedy to little effect. The movie hopes we’ll find Bilko and his cohorts charming and cool in their tiresome unprofessionalism but they more often come across as simply immature and tedious.

 

Still, it has a range of talented performers who do their best with the substandard material. Hartman was a gifted actor who always gave his all and his ‘villain’ is reliably good value. Ultimately there’s just little point to this endeavour, no real reason for this to exist. It’s nothing you’re going to hate, but unless you’re a Martin completist we can’t imagine why you would pick this up, especially considering the lack of extras of any kind.

 

SGT. BILKO (1996) / CERT: PG / DIRECTOR: JONATHAN LYNN / SCREENPLAY: ANDY BRECKMAN / STARRING: STEVE MARTIN, DAN AYKROYD, PHIL HARTMAN, GLENNE HEADLY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW