DVD Review: Wilfred – Season’s One and Two / Cert: 18 / Director: Tony Rogers / Screenplay: Jason Gann, Adam Zwar  / Starring: Jason Gann, Adam Zwar, Cindy Waddingham, Rachel Jessica Tan / Release Date: August 20th

If you’ve already watched the US remake of Wilfred, starring Elijah Wood, you might not see any need to check out the original Australian version featured in this four-disc boxset. But they’re actually very different beasts. Despite bouncing around for your attention and being a bit naughty, the US remake is quite a gentle, good-natured thing really. The original show, on the other hand, is what TV would be like if it hadn’t been house-trained.

The set-ups diverge in small but significant ways. In the US version, Ryan and Jenna are neighbours sharing a garden fence through which Wilfred comes lumbering with an axe. In the original, Adam (Adam Zwar) moves in with his new girlfriend Sarah (Cindy Waddingham), and this immediately puts him at odds with her possibly-homicidal dog (Jason Gann). The dog suit thing is also handled very differently. Ryan pops his eyes when he sees Wilfred smoking a bong, and there is a suggestion that he’s mentally fragile. With the Australian Wilfred, the dog suit is an absurdist premise that is never commented on or explained, it simply is (there are cats and raccoons in animal suits, too, and a hilarious cockatoo).

The Australian show counterbalances this absurdity with an awkward, stuttering naturalism and deftly underplayed performances. Zwar is wonderfully sympathetic as Adam, a sensitive guy forever racked with guilt and biting his lip, nursing a tragic backstory that he never gets to fully share because it makes everyone’s eyes glaze over. Waddingham is just as good as Sarah, who, even without Wilfred, would be a challenging girlfriend, whimsical, aloof and devastatingly observant when she wants to be.

The American Wilfred is essentially a long-eared, mischievous wellness coach. The Australian Wilfred is not remotely as wholesome. He’s one-sixteenth dingo, and it shows. He’s violent, greedy, stinky, and lecherous, his sexual predations extending beyond the local pooches to cats and even kangaroos. The early episodes centre on his attempts to lead the gullible and eager-to-please Adam into harm’s way. Later they work together to see off other intruding males, but there’s never much more than an uneasy truce between them.

Given that this is arguably a one-joke show, it’s impressive how skilfully the changes are rung by Zwar and Gann, who write as well as star. The second series opens out into a series of very funny road trips – to a ski resort, to Sarah’s nudist parents – and there’s a classic episode where Wilfred gets a part in a dog food commercial which plays out like a doggy version of Extras. Even if you didn’t care for the US Wilfred, you should give this boxset a sniff.

Special Features: Out-takes, Blooper Reel, Trailer, Scene Montage, Behind the Scenes, Making of, Wilfred Bites

DVD Review: Meridian / Cert: 15 / Director: Charles Band / Screenplay: Dennis Paoli / Starring: Sherilyn Fenn, Hilary Mason, Malcolm Jamieson, Charlie Spradling / Release Date: Out Now

After being raised in America, Catherine (Sherilyn Fenn), a sculptor of aristocratic birth, returns to Italy to take up residence in her family home. Meanwhile her friend, fellow arty type Gina (Charlie Spradling), becomes a picture restorer in a nearby town. But things turn strange when a travelling sideshow performs on Catherine’s estate and an after-show dinner grows far more wild and orgiastic than the girls had anticipated. The bewildered Catherine discovers that the troupe has been here before, and that their presence is linked to an ancient family curse.

People aware of director Charles Band only from his reputation as a purveyor of low-budget shockers may be surprised at how ambitious this 1990 movie is, and the kind of territory it stakes out. The mood is sumptuously fairytale-like and the screenplay (a typically literate one by Full Moon’s then go-to script guy Dennis Paoli) boldly knits together a beast-man story, good and evil twins, ghostly apparitions and erotic romance. As with several Full Moon films of this period, it was shot in Italy and makes good use of some stunning locations, including Bomarzo Monster Park, a haunting 16^th century playground of the rich which takes its name from the oversized statues of mythical creatures assembled there. The travelling sideshow, with its whip-wielding dwarf and masked strongman, provides another level of vivid grotesquerie.

The film is cogently cast too. The presence of retro-glamorous Sherilyn Fenn (presumably whisked off to Italy just before Twin Peaks catapulted her to fame) adds to the feeling of lush opulence, and more than a touch of class is brought to proceedings by the wonderful Hilary Mason (the eerie blind woman from Don’t Look Now) as Catherine’s all-wise nanny, Martha. A little-known Scottish actor, Malcolm Jamieson, gets a plum role as the Heathcliffian leader of the travelling sideshow, and he’s excellent in a lean, Rufus Sewell-ish way.

Meridian undoubtedly has its flaws – the ending is pure schmaltz, there’s rather too much slow-motion naked breast-fondling, the beast-man’s a little mangy and the Old Master Gina’s restoring, which holds the key to the exact nature of Catherine’s family curse, looks like an eight-year-old painted it with his fingers. But it also has considerable allure and, for most of the time, casts quite a spell. It’s hard to imagine who the target audience was when it was originally made, but these days its combination of shape-shifting magic and bodice-ripping eroticism should find a ready market among fans of the paranormal romance genre.

Special Features: Making of Documentary, Full Moon Trailer Park, Theatrical Trailer, Reversible Sleeve with Original Artwork

DVD Review: The Pit and the Pendulum / Cert: 18  / Director: Stuart Gordon / Screenplay: Dennis Paoli / Starring: Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Rona De Ricci / Release Date: Out Now

The Pit and the Pendulum (based on the famous tale by Edgar Allen Poe) is set in 15^th century Toledo during the time of the Spanish Inquisition (based on an idea by mad monk Torquemada, here played by Lance Henriksen). In what has to count as one of the worst money-making schemes in history, humble baker Antonio (Jonathan Fuller) comes up with the notion of selling bread to the crowds gathering for the auto-da-fé. But things go horribly wrong when his pretty young wife Maria (Rona De Ricci) intercedes to stop a small boy from being flogged. She’s seized and brought before Torquemada, who falls in lust, then accuses her of having cast a spell over him and has her hauled off to be tried as a witch. And, just to put the seal on a real bummer of a day, all of Antonio’s loaves get trampled underfoot in the mayhem…

A modern film adaptation would use grainy, desaturated stock, and have everyone up their knees in horse manure. But this version, made in 1991, goes with bright, colourful costumes and the clean-looking cinematography of Adolfo Bartoli, and everyone speaks in American accents. For this reason, it might at first glance seem a little dated and naïve, but in fact it manages its own kind of authenticity. The tone is set with a great opening scene wherein a dead nobleman is dragged from his tomb and posthumously found guilty of heresy. Torquemada rants at the withered cadaver, then sentences it to twenty lashes, a punishment that reduces it to a rubble of disarticulated bones. It’s a convincing depiction of the lunacy of a dreadful epoch.

The screenplay by Dennis Paoli (who wrote many excellent scripts for Charles Band’s Full Moon Features) bursts with highly imaginative touches. Sentenced to burn at the stake for witchcraft, an old woman gobbles gunpowder in the hope it will shorten her agony. Torquemada’s chief thug Mendoza (Mark Margolis) has stigmata on his hands where he was once crucified, and Torquemada plunges his fingers into the holes when he wants to make a point.

Henriksen plays the sadistic friar in a latex bald-cap narrowly fringed with hair, a tuft of bristles in the centre of his forehead, his eyes wildly dilated, his hands groping and jumping like snakes – a monster of twisted appetites. You have to go back to Jacobean tragedy to find a heroine more sorely abused than Maria, and Rona De Ricci’s performance radiantly combines outward vulnerability with inward resolve (it’s astonishing that IMDb lists only two credits for this accomplished actress). Director Stuart Gordon drives the film along with unfussy skill, blending together black comedy, melodrama, gory horror and rollicking adventure into a satisfying whole. When you compare it with dreariness and repetition of so much modern horror, The Pit and the Pendulum only seems to get better with age, more entertaining, more energetic and more full of ideas. It’s definitely worth swinging by the shops for a copy.

Special Features: None

DVD Review: Dark Mirror / Cert: 15  / Director: Pablo Proenza / Screenplay: Pablo Proenza, Matthew Reynolds / Starring: Lisa Vidal, Joshua Pelegrin, David Chisum / Release Date: September 3rd

In this low-key spooker, Jim (David Chisum) is intent on relocating his wife Debbie (Lisa Vidal) and son Ian (Joshua Pelegrin) to sunny Southern California, but Debbie is unimpressed by the real estate on offer until they happen upon a house with unusually elaborate windows (“specially imported from China”) and a distinguished pedigree, in that it once belonged to a famous artist. She has to have it. Bad mistake. No sooner have they settled in than Debbie, a keen photographer, takes a self-portrait in the bathroom mirror and is thrown backwards by an eerie flash. Woops, wouldn’t you know it, she’s only gone and roused an evil spirit that has been trapped in the house’s maze of glass. The spirit enters her camera, and over the coming days and weeks, she begins to realize that anyone she photographs disappears, with signs of having made a violent exit from this world.

A camera of death – alright, yes, it’s the sort of notion that gives horror movies a bad name, but director Pablo Proenza makes a surprisingly good fist of it. His script, co-written with Matthew Reynolds, keeps various plot threads nicely on the boil – a lurking, hooded figure on the house perimeter, the backstory concerning the artist, who’s gone mysteriously missing and is believed to have murdered his wife, a growing sense that those pretty Chinese windows are distorting the world that Debbie sees and feeding her lies – so there’s no way of knowing how all the pieces fit other than by watching until the end. Proenza’s helped by a cast which is unstarry but very watchable. Vidal delivers an impressively anguished performance as Debbie, and it’s refreshing that the lead is a mature, womanly character, with cares and responsibilities, rather than some vapid co-ed. David Farkas catches the eye as a leering heel who refuses Debbie work but talks within earshot about how much he would like to have sex with her, and Christine Lakin twinkles as the narcissistically strutting, bikini-clad blonde next door.

This is a good-looking movie, too, thanks to cinematographer Armando Salas, who bathes everything in the magnolia glow of a Dulux commercial. It feels like it could have done with being opened out a bit, though. The Keifer Sutherland vehicle, Mirrors, which was made around the same time, gets to play with a similar vitreous horror theme on a much larger scale. For that reason, it’s tempting to dismiss Dark Mirror as an also-ran. But it’s a well-crafted piece of work with some subtle scares, a range of lively and committed performances and an intriguingly dream-like ambience.

Special Features: None

DVD Review: Castle Freak / Cert: 18 / Director: Stuart Gordon / Screenplay: Dennis Paoli / Starring: Jefrey Combs, Barbara Compton, Jonathan Fuller / Release Date: Out Now

The strange three-way collaboration between director Stuart Gordon, producer Charles Band and long-dead writer H.P. Lovecraft resulted in several bona fide cult classics, of which Castle Freak (1995) is arguably the subtlest and most haunting. Based on the short story The Outsider, it starts with an unforgettable pre-title sequence wherein a seedy old lady, a duchess as we later discover, shuffles down through the labyrinthine passageways of an Italian castle to a gloomy dungeon. Having exhausted herself by flogging the prisoner cowering inside, she drops dead on her bed, where she lays undiscovered, slowly becoming encrusted in mould.

The eventual beneficiary of her demise is John Reilly (Jeffrey Combs), an American who is her only living descendant. Hoping to sell the title and the estate as quickly as possible, he visits the castle with his wife Susan (Barbara Compton) and daughter Rebecca (Jessica Dollarhide). But it’s far from being a happy holiday. Susan has never stopped blaming John for a drink-driving accident which cost Rebecca her sight and their five-year-old son JJ his life. Tortured beyond endurance by her hostility and his own sense of guilt, John consoles himself with a fumble with the local prostitute and a bottle from the castle’s well-stocked wine cellar. But meanwhile, the duchess’s prisoner has escaped and is prowling the corridors…

Covered from head to toe in scar tissue and trailing manacles, the castle freak is one of the most disturbing of Charles Band’s monsters, because he’s human, but humanity reduced to the status of bare forked animal. He’s ferocious and grotesque but also pitiable, since it is nurture rather than nature that has made him as he is. Jonathan Fuller plays him with brilliant exactness, lapping water from the leaky dungeon walls (the pathos being you know this is how he has had to slake his thirst for years) and ducking and diving almost balletically around the castle in a cape and mask made out of a dustsheet.

The movie was shot in a real castle in Giove, Italy, and Gordon makes the most of its crumbling splendour and long, shadowy vistas. His directorial style is notable for its spareness and sense of urgency, and never more so than here, where every swoop and lurch of the camera points a beat in the developing storyline. You don’t get the belly laughs and anarchic sense of fun of his earlier cult favourite Re-Animator (1985), but he brings out the dry, mordant humour of what is a very taut and well-crafted script by his regular screenwriter, Dennis Paoli. This is lean, mean filmmaking without an ounce of fat on it, and that’s why it has lasted. New DVD label 88 Films are currently giving many of the classic movies directed or produced by Charles Band a very welcome re-release. If you’re tempted and looking for a place to start, you can’t do better than Castle Freak.

Special Features: Making Of Documentary, Theatrical Trailer, Full Moon Trailer Park, Reversible Sleeve With Original Artwork

DVD Review: Sector 7 / Cert: TBC / Director: Kim Ji-Hun / Screenplay: Yoon Je-kyoon / Starring: Ha Ji-Won, Ahn Sung-ki, Oh Ji-ho / Release Date: TBC

The success of The Host in 2006 made us all sit up and take notice of Korean horror/monster cinema and this explosive new sea monster movie, not yet scheduled for Region 2 release but worth tracking down if you’ve got multi-region playback capability, is a leaner, more traditional and much less rambling effort than Bong Joon-ho‘s box-office blockbuster classic.

Sector 7 is a good old fashioned man-vs-monster romp set on an oil rig in the storm lashed seas off Jeju Island. A protracted search for oil has proved fruitless despite the suspicion that billions of gallons of untapped reserves are hidden beneath the sea floor. The rig’s operation is ordered to wind down but when headstrong engineer Hae-Jun’s (Ji-won) uncle Ahn Jung-man (Sung-ki) arrives on the rig they decide to give the operation one last try. The fact that they get lucky and the oil starts flowing is quickly tempered by the realisation that there’s something else out there, lurking in the sea and prowling the dank corridors of the rig. Then the killings start…

Sector 7 takes its cues from Western favourites such as Alien (Hae-Jun evolves into Korea’s answer to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley) and in many ways the whole movie is an homage to (or rip-off of, depending on your viewpoint) Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi horror with the oil rig replacing the Nostromo and the rig’s crew serving much the same purpose as the xenomorph fodder of Alien. Sector 7 loses points for its sketchy characterisation and thin dialogue; the first half-hour of the film busies itself trying to flesh out the riggers but they’re pretty much little more than a bunch of stereotypes – a rather ineffectual doctor, a tough rigger, a boasting rigger, the slightly weird coward – and by the time the cull starts we don’t really know or care too much about them. Relationships and character beats aren’t developed enough to make them interesting but fortunately the monster action of the second half of the film makes up for its inadequacies in the human interest department.

Sector 7 has the dubious honour of being the first Korean 3D movie and it’s clear that it’s the monster action where 3D aficionados will get their kicks. The creature – nicely realised in CGI and revealed in full fairly early once its presence is known – is a big racing slug-like thing with a roaring, gaping maw, waving fronds and a whiplash tongue-like proboscis with which it grabs its victims before hurling them against walls or else slicing through their skulls. It’s a charmer and it’s pretty much indestructible – gunfire has no effect (and no, I’ve no idea why oil-riggers would be equipped with rifles and machine guns), its skin seems super-resilient and its only real weakness is a susceptibility to fire. The creature itself has an intriguing origin, being largely man-made and with bodily fluids which can burn for thirty hours or more, making it potentially of huge importance in the race to find new sustainable sources of fuel and it’s refreshing to see a movie monster which isn’t just some inexplicable thing from space or from the depths of the sea.

The last half-hour is exciting stuff as the rig survivors battle against a seemingly unstoppable monster but there’s no escaping the feeling that, competent as this is, we’ve seen it all before and probably done a bit better. Sector 7 ultimately offers nothing new and it tells us a story we’ve been told time and time again in monster cinema. But it’s colourful, energetic stuff, entertainingly derivative and will easily pass the time if you just fancy a bit of reliable creature carnage.

Special Features: English subtitles, (badly) dubbed soundtrack, making of feature.

DVD Review: Zombies – A Living History / Director: David V. Nicholson / Writer: Andre Abramowitz / Starring: Peter Outerbridge (Narrator), Josh Ford, Rachael Platt / Release date: July 23rd

Since the launch of Military History in 1999, The History Channel (or History as it is now known) has no longer been able to fill its schedules with endless documentaries on the Second World War. While some of us might think it reasonable to believe that this still leaves rather a lot of history to fill your airtime, History has taken the somewhat unconventional view that what the armchair historian really wants to see are programmes about aliens and similarly non-historical subjects. History make more money than me so they must know what they’re doing and playing so fast and loose with the word ‘history’ does at least throw some of their output into the domain of a Starburst review.

So, with this in mind, we review the DVD release of Zombies: A Living History, a ninety minute cultural history of the zombie (and you can stop sniggering at the back there). If you’re wondering quite how you fill ninety minutes when the only movie clips you have are from the out of copyright Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Der Golem (1920), then watch and learn; this is low-brow documentary making at its most questionably creative. The main screen-filler is, of course, History’s very own dramatisation of a zombie apocalypse. There is no ‘this is a dramatisation’ tag on screen but, unless I missed a pretty big news story recently, it’s safe to assume that’s what we’re watching and, to be fair, it’s quite well done. But the real skill of this kind of thing is finding just how many angles you can get on such a one-trick pony; much like zombie filmmakers and novelists have been doing for the last ten years or so. After the inevitable intro that tells us why zombies are so scary (well, duh) we are given a brief history of the zombie, going right back to the dubious revelation that they first appear in The Epic of Gilgamesh (tenuous, to say the least) and an international parade of the undead, none of which are actually zombies as we understand them. In fact, if I’m going to be pedantic (and I am), in Arabic culture, ghouls are not even the undead; just to prove the point, some were converted to Islam in one of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights (thank you, Wikipedia). Mind you, I was amused by William of Newburgh (who chronicled revenants in the 12^th century) being described as history’s first zombie hunter as if this is now a respected occupation. Zombies even manages to flirt with the genuinely interesting when it gets onto customs and beliefs concerning the afterlife from around the world and how we generally like to make sure the dead don’t come back. But the section on the social mores of cannibalism brings it all right back to the depths as we are told that eating people is not only a ‘deal-breaker’ but (quote of the documentary) ‘cannibalism cannot be tolerated; especially when it comes to members of your own family’. Well, quite. They even manage to contradict this by telling us how, in some cultures, there could sometimes be no better way of honouring friends and enemies than by eating them.

We then have an inexplicable World War II interlude where we are told that the Eastern Front was more like a zombie war than the Western Front. No, really. But at least they got some Nazis in and this just wouldn’t be History without Nazis. Oh, and the Mongol hoard was not like a zombie apocalypse. I don’t care who they ate. I’m just saying.

But having dispensed with bothersome history and acknowledging that the modern zombie was invented by George Romero in 1968 (assuming that you entirely forget about Hammer’s inconveniently still-in-copyright Plague of Zombies two years earlier), Zombies gets stuck in with interviews with the experts and what we’d do in the event of a real zombie apocalypse. The ‘experts’ are an odd lot with Daniel Drezner (author of the semi-humorous Theories of International Politics and Zombies) adopting a tone that leaves us in doubt as to whether he thinks he should be taking this documentary seriously at all; while acknowledging that a zombie apocalypse is incredibly unlikely, we should still ‘prepare for the inevitable’, he tells us with a fairly straight face. Meanwhile, survivalist and zombie novelist J L Bourne offers some rather counter-intuitive advice that makes me think he’d be the last person you’d want around in the unlikely event of the real thing. Bourne even believes that the military would adopt an evasion strategy rather than engage the zombies directly. Far be it for me to argue strategy and tactics in the face of an undead hoard (not having the relevant experience), I can’t help but think he’s been playing too many computer games. No wonder the living get so frequently boned by the dead in his novels. Far more helpful are the regular appearances of The Zombie Combat Manual author, Roger Ma, who definitely isn’t taking this seriously. He gives us useful tips on the implements best suited for braining a zombie with handy pointers like ‘a spear needs a precise thrust which may be difficult when facing the undead’. That’s far more like it; J L Bourne, take note.

And what about that actual outbreak? Mathematical models produced by people who really ought to have something better to do apparently tell us that zombies would have the run of things pretty quickly. Well I don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun here but a disease that is spread by biting and where it is OK to shoot its slow moving host is extremely unlikely to take hold even without the intervention of the military. In fact, just to make it clear that zombies would have no chance in certain parts of the world, there is a section on ‘four firearms you could use in a zombie apocalypse’. The M41A comes highly recommended, although you may have a problem concealing it. Quite why this would be a problem is left unexplained.

But this touches on what Zombies should have been about: Why are zombies so popular right now? The best they could come up with was the fact that we all think the world is about to end. The problem with that thesis is that throughout history, people have always thought the world is about to end; it’s just the method of our demise that changes. But those firearm tips should provide the clue; it’s the ultimate empowerment fantasy. The government have let you down and now it’s up to you to save yourself by scoring as many headshots as you can. The rise of the PC game in the last twenty years is no coincidence. Zombies are the shoot ‘em up enemy of choice, appearing in limitless numbers with easy to program AI routines. A zombie apocalypse just means you can carry on playing your games while getting some fresh air. All this is missed in Zombies, despite the programme’s experts claiming that such events would give rise to ‘charismatic leaders’. Somewhat worryingly, they even manage to make that particular part of the empowerment fantasy sound like a good thing.

In the end, Zombies: A Living History doesn’t really know what it is other than another piece of TV fodder to appeal to anyone with an interest in zombies and access to cable. It certainly can’t be described as quality history programming but I’m not sure it wants to be. Ultimately, it’s difficult to tell how far its slobbering tongue is thrust into its decaying cheek. Fun? Possibly. Informative? Not really. History? You’ve got to be kidding…

John Knott has a BA in History from the University of Bristol.

He has no recognised qualifications in the field of zombies or other undead.

 

DVD Review: Monster Brawl / Cert: 18 / Director: Jesse Thomas Cook /  Screenplay: Jesse Thomas Cook / Starring: Dave Foley, Art Hindle, Jimmy Hart, Robert Maillet, Lance Henriksen / Release Date: August 20th

A mix of classic monster characters and American wrestling should be a shoo-in for a cult hit, but, while not quite a heavyweight, it is just short of a knock out.

In an abandoned cemetery the ultimate ‘fight of the living dead’ is taking place, where all manner of fabled monsters are slugging it out for the title of supreme monster. Overseen by commentators Buzz Chambers (Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley) and Sasquatch Sid Tucker (cult favourite Art Hindle), as well as WWE star Jimmy Hart and in voice only, Lance Henrikson, the film plays out in the format of a pay per view wrestling event, with cut away segments to introduce the monsters that are taking to the ring. Among the contenders are Werewolf, Frankenstein (and yes, it is pointed out that it was the Doctor’s name not the creation “if you want to be a dick about it”), Lady Vampire, Cyclops and Swamp Gut, a sort of cross between the Gillman and Swamp Thing. As the rumbles commence, heads are squashed, eyes gouged and much blood is spilt.

On paper this is all exciting, and it could have been another Monster Squad, amping up those old Universal Monster team-ups, but just fails to pull it off satisfactorily. At least, though, it’s not as disappointing as Van Helsing. The wrestling matches are not exciting enough to pull you in, and some of the gags tend to fall a little flat. That is not to say there isn’t a lot of fun to be had – Foley, with his Howard Cosell drawl and Hindle’s world weary former champ are great, giving play by play commentary and sardonic insight to the ghoulish grapplefest at the Hillside Necropolis Arena. Fans of the pantomime sport will enjoy appearances from Hart, Kevin Nash (who also played Odin in The Almighty Thor) and UFC referee Herb Dean. Monster fans may get a smile out of the match preambles, which are much more entertaining than the actual bouts, but the film really lacks a narrative, which is a big draw back of the PPV format.

Writer/director Jess T. Cook has made the most of his limited budget, and should be commended for that. There is a little gore on display, but nothing to warrant the 18 certificate it has received, especially with it being in a tongue in cheek context, and at no point is the film actually scary.

Your personal enjoyment may well depend on how much you enjoy American wrestling, rather than horror films, though. 

Extras: Monster Brawl – Beyond The Grave / Tales from The Hart: Jimmy Hart Outtakes / Trailer

Review: The 25th Reich / Cert: 15 / Director: Stephen Amis / Screenplay: Stephen Amis, Serge De Nardo, David Richardson / Starring: Dan Balcaban, Serge De Nardo, Jim Knobeloch, Angelo Salamanca, Jak Wyld, Lisa-Skye Goodes, Chris Goodes / Release Date: July 16th

There are times when you cut a movie a lot of slack. In this reviewers case, a low-budget attempt at a pulp war story with time travelling GIs battling Nazi flying saucers is one of those occasions that I have more slack to give than is proper. Throw in the financial backers pulling the plug and the filmmakers using their own money to keep their labour of love going and you’ve got something I’m going to find it hard to be mean about. Which makes The 25th Reich (2012) such a surprising disappointment.

From the pre-title scene of war comic caricatured GIs unashamedly hamming it up to the rather brilliantly stylised credit animations, I really was ready to get carried away with this film. Unfortunately, the first half of the film consists of nothing but our five soldier chums wandering through the (rather lovely) Australian outback in search of two escaped pumas (or ‘poomas’, as they amusingly refer to them) with a big radio. I believe that we are supposed to experience some form of tension during this extended National Geographic travelogue but as it’s so hard to imagine tooled-up US soldiers who have been trained to fight determined Japanese in the confined theatres of the Pacific being particularly threatened by a couple of unarmed animals, what we experience turns out to be tedium and a prolonged chance to observe the shortcomings of the budget.

Things sort of pick up just past the halfway point as the time travelling starts and we finally find a flying saucer but only ‘sort of’; I think it may have just been relief that the film was finally delivering on the advertised premise. Nobody can really hold the low quality nature of the saucer against the film at this stage but it is terribly unexciting, nevertheless. When the GIs find themselves in a distant future dominated by Nazi robot spiders, a smile can at least be raised by the sheer micro-budget audacity of it all, but even that is over-shadowed by a pointless scene of Nazi-spider-robot anal rape (which is not a sentence you type very often). If this is an attempt at some kind of Deliverance-style horror then it fails as it just comes across as schoolboy’s failed attempt at shock. It might help if it served a plot point but it doesn’t. The 25th Reich then abruptly ends with an amusingly gung-ho speech from the survivors leader about how they’ll carry on the fight and a ‘to be continued’ trailer set in space. Wishful thinking, I suspect. What’s odd is that the small amount of coverage this film has so far had has been quite favourable with reviewers embracing the whole pulpy silliness of the premise. I tried to join the party but I failed. It would seem I simply don’t have enough slack to give.

DVD Review: Mission Impossible ’88 / Director: Various / Teleplay: Various / Starring: Peter Graves, Greg Morris, Thaao Penghlis, Antony Hamilton, Jane Badler, Phil Morris / Release Date: July 23rd

Fifteen years after the original show was cancelled, Mission: Impossible returned for two seasons in 1988-90. This 5 disc boxset brings together the 19 episodes of the 1988 season, which sees Jim Phelps (Graves) coming out of retirement to lead an all-new Impossible Mission task force, who roll up their sleeves to tackle crime and corruption. Wait, what am I saying? This is the Eighties, their sleeves are already rolled up…

The team consists of rugged charmer Max Harte (Hamilton, whom connoisseurs of bad Eighties TV may remember from Cover Up, where a fashion photographer and her models moonlight as secret agents), master of disguise Nicholas Black (Thaao Penglis) and Grant Collier (Phil Morris,) a science whiz (whose technical mumbo-jumbo now seems rather dated and patronising, witness the priceless moment when he explains to his teammates that a computer virus isn’t harmful to humans but only to other computers, just in case they were reaching for their gas masks). Oh, and there’s a token girl, Casey Randall (Terry Markwell,) “international designer”. She doesn’t get to play with any of the toys, though, and her role quickly dwindles to making beds and straightening the boys’ lapel mikes, until she ends up getting bumped off, and has to be replaced by Shannon Reed (Jane Badler,) “with a background in investigative journalism,” who shows more cleavage and gets to drive a speedboat but spends most of her time watching what everyone else is doing through powerful binoculars.

The series was shot in Australia, with Oz standing in for Honolulu, the Himalayas, Hong Kong and, in one uncanny instance (an episode where an aborigine is killed with a rocket launcher) itself. The missions all follow the same formula. An evil dictator, corrupt official, drug baron or what you will has to be prevented from doing something very, very nefarious, and this involves ensnaring him in an elaborate sting operation, and/or turning a key underling against him in a classic divide-and-conquer gambit. To this end, the IMF team use all manner of trickery, including holograms combined with hallucinogenic drugs, and cunning latex face masks that enable them to impersonate the baddies (although these only work, presumably, if the character you’re impersonating happens to be exactly the same height as you. Luckily, that always seems to be the case in the world of Mission: Impossible). 

You can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the villains, who include 1970s Spider-Man, Nicholas Hammond, and Bond girl Maud Adams; by and large they go quite meekly to their fate. But there’s still a degree of tension, akin to first night jitters, as you watch the team rushing to complete the various parts of their demanding charade on schedule. Yes, it can get a bit repetitive, but in a way that’s soothing rather than irritating. The tone, playful and witty but never straying into camp, complements the amusing puzzle element of the stories. There’s also something totally mesmerising about Peter Graves. This is very much his show, even though by late Eighties he already looked older than God, and you might well reflect that a white-haired giant with a face like a kindly iguana is hardly ideal material for undercover work. Even when you tire of the smoke and mirrors, his presence makes Mission: Impossible ’88 a retro delight.