County Hospital (1932)

It's standard in the world of Laurel and Hardy that no good deed goes unpunished. In County Hospital, Olly is recovering from a broken leg, and Stan's attempts to cheer him up with a visit only make things worse. While it never really comes to life like one of their classics, it's certainly enjoyable and funny.

While it's wrong to say all Laurel and Hardy films are the same, the routines often follow many of the same structures. In this case, Stan means well, causes a problem, tries to fix it, and makes everything much worse. So, what starts as a spilled jug of water ends up with a doctor clinging for dear life out of a window and Olly being evicted from his hospital bed with his trousers and dignity in shreds. All because Stan came to visit as he "had nothing better to do."

After Stan sits on a hypodermic needle full of tranquiliser, his attempts to drive Olly home take a dizzying and surreal turn. The back projection of swerving traffic is completely unbelievable but is perhaps indicative of the state of Stan's head. Needless to say, it does not end well for the car.

The Great Gabbo (1929)

The Great Gabbo is one of the earliest appearances of the trope of the ventriloquist's dummy who becomes autonomous. But, despite a menacing turn by Erich Von Stroheim, any tension or creepiness fizzles out with a talky script and interminable padding from song and dance numbers.

"The Great Gabbo" (Stroheim), is a famous ventriloquist in a double act with his dummy "Otto", who can talk and sing while Gabbo himself smokes, drinks, eats and pulls flags from his mouth. Off stage, he is less popular, driving away his girlfriend and assistant Mary (Betty Compson) with a mix of megalomania, eccentric superstitions, and the inability to express any form of feeling or emotion without using Otto. This is not going to end well.

Stroheim has plenty of on-screen presence and it doesn't feel like playing an egoist with brutal streak is much of a stretch. The tone is that of humourless melodrama, although there is one hilarious scene in a restaurant with Otto the dummy entertaining the crowd while Gabbo eats dinner.

The film feels as though it had an ultra-low budget, particularly in any scenes of Gabbo's act, with shots of him intercut with stock shots of an audience, but never the two in the same frame.

Beyond that though, The Great Gabbo constantly grinds to a halt with endless song and dance numbers killing any creepy mood or tension. The film was made only two years after The Jazz Singer first introduced sound to the movies, so perhaps producers still thought that was enough of a novelty to keep people entertained.

Atom Age Vampire (1960)

The title Atom Age Vampire is only 50% correct, as atoms and radiation play a big part in the plot, but there is no sign of a vampire.

The plot borrows from both the mad surgeon part of Eyes Without a Face and man / monster elements of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. After a car accident leaves stripper Jeanette Moreneau (Susanne Loret) horribly scarred, a brilliant scientist Professor Alberto Levin (Albert Lupo) falls in love with her. Levin has created a treatment that uses radiation to restore her beauty, but to preserve it he must use glands taken from murdered women, for some reason. He can also only murder said women after taking a potion that turns him into a hideous monster, for some reason.

It's a mixed bag, with the flat lifeless direction draining any genuine horror or tension from scene after scene. But, the photography is surprisingly imaginative, with a use of shadows that gives the film a gloomy, creepy look.

The premise is a little confused, but the over the top twists and turns, coupled with low budget effects and make up (especially Levin's werewolf-like alter-ego) means enough trashy campy fun to make Atom Age Vampire worth a look.

The Day Time Ended (1979)

Not only does the title The Day Time Ended bear no relation to the events on screen, the events themselves often bear no relation to the other events in the film.

The plot, as far as I discern, sees a family moving into their new solar-powered home in the middles of the desert. The bad news is their house in right in the centre of some sort of time vortex. Beyond that, God only knows. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is clearly a big influence that the filmmakers were trying to cash in on, with cute kids, time travel, inexplicable events and alien abductions. The script feels like somebody wrote down every sci-fi trope they could think of, put them into a hat and drew them out one by one, regardless of how much sense they made.

In the right hands - or even the wrong hands - this sort of approach can work, with a delirious energy meaning never a dull moment for the viewer. Director John "Bud" Cardos had previously made some low budget exploitation gems such as nature-on-the-rampage classic Kingdom of the Spiders, but he can't make this mess come to life. The special effects are cheap and cheesy, especially the stop-motion aliens, and at least provide a distraction from the wooden human characters.

The finale is left open-ended and if anything feels like this is a pilot for a TV show that, thankfully, never went anywhere.

The Strange World of Planet X (1958)

An unremarkable low budget British Sci-fi B-movie, The Strange World of Planet X lumbers along through an hour of talky cliched script before bursting into life with some stupid special effects.

In a laboratory in rural England, archetypal mad scientist Dr Laird is carrying out experiments involving ultra-powerful magnetic fields. His American assistant Gilbert Graham (Forrest Tucker) is having some doubts about the work, as are the government backers. After a freak storm hits the country, giant mutant insects appear in the village forest. Are they linked to Laird's laboratory? And who is the mysterious Mr Smith, who seems to know a lot about both Laird's work, and some recent UFO sightings?

The film staggers on for an interminable talky hour, with little in the way of interesting character development or even cheap thrills. It's sustained by the charisma of Tucker, the cringe-worthy sexism of the scientists towards a female colleague (they don't believe she can do "highly skilled work"), and the mysterious Smith character, who, with his interest in dangerous science, turns out to be a rip off from Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Oh, and there's a subplot about a tramp who gets turned into a serial killer by the storm, but that soon fizzles out.

After that, the giant insects arrive. Of course, when I say giant insects, I mean normal insects filmed extremely closeup, which is exactly what they look like.

It's worth watching for the cheap laughs at the climax, but it is a hard slog to get there.

Heavens Above (1963)

Heavens Above is the high point of the several collaborations between  Peter Sellers and the British film making duo of Roy and John Boulting. The film takes on two most sacred of cows, organised religion and Christian beliefs (particularly how they work in the real world), with a brilliant, straight performance by Sellers, undermined by a ridiculous and unnecessary climax.

Sellers plays John Smallwood, a good hearted but naive prison chaplain, assigned as vicar to a small and prosperous English country town after a clerical error.

Smallwood's brand of Christianity runs on charity and forgiveness, the polar opposite of his congregation, who are outraged when he takes on a black man as his churchwarden, lets a gypsy family live in the vicarage, and talks the local landowner Lady Despard into giving free food for the church to distribute to the locals.

The cinematic legacy of Peter Sellers rests on his comic creations such as Inspector Clouseau and Dr Strangelove, but with Smallwood he gives us a character who is both vulnerable and believable, even resisting the urge to make his Brummie accent comically broad.

The writing, directing and producing team of Roy and John Boulting had worked with Sellers on the industrial relations satire I'm Alright Jack, where they mocked both the power-crazed unions and the greedy boardrooms. Here they take a similar approach, laying into the hypocritical church leaders and their congregation, but also Smallwood's guileless and easily exploited Christianity, and his betrayal by both his bosses and the people he tried to help is heart breaking.

Then, from out of nowhere, the story takes an unexpected diversion, abandoning village life to focus on a frightened astronaut and a new job for Smallwood. The comedy becomes broad and wacky, the polar opposite of everything we've seen up to then.  Jarring and pointless, this switch nearly derails the rest of the film.

Shocking Dark (1989)

An astonishing piece of work, even by the standards of 70s/80s Italian ripoff cinema, and a must see for schlock fans, Shocking Dark (AKA Alienators, AKA Terminator 2(!), AKA Death in Venice 2: The Deathening) pilfers from not one but two classics of James Cameron's filmography.

After a vaguely described apocalyptic apocalyptic event (something to do with mutant seaweed sucking the oxygen out of the water - not sure how this affects humans, but never mind) Venice is an abandoned, desolate shell, with a few survivors hiding in secure facilities deep underground. They're not alone though, as a gruesome mutant is roaming the city’s maze of tunnels. A team of soldiers, the Mega Force, go to dispatch it, along with civilian scientist Dr Sara Drumbull and Samuel Fuller (!), a representative of a company called the Tubular Corporation, who is as muscle-bound as he is mysterious.

Throw in a cyborg with half of his face torn off and already you can see some similarities with the work of Cameron. Italian exploitation cinema has a long and noble history of helping itself to ideas and plots from genre hits and writer Claudio Fragasso (the man who brought us the legendary Troll 2) and director Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead, Rats: Night of Terror), don't merely take the vibe or plotline of Terminator and Aliens, but lift whole scenes and lines of dialogue, shoehorning them in regardless of relevancy or coherence.

The few original elements make no more sense. Venice has been ruined so that property and art prices would (somehow) rocket in value. By the time a plot twist involving a time machine turns up, your brain has been pummelled into submission and will accept anything.

Halloween (2018)

The Halloween film series, just like main antagonist Michael Myers, refuses to stay dead. The eleventh outing has an excellent turn from original star Jamie Lee Curtis but fails to bring much else new or exciting.

Wisely ignoring the sequels (both old and new), the story starts Michael with locked up in an asylum, forty years after the events of the first film. The object of his stalking, Laurie Strode (Curtis) has spent the time suffering PTSD, which has cost her two marriages and the relationship with her daughter. One day she gets the news that she has been dreading - Myers is being transferred to a new facility, giving him the opportunity to escape and finish what he started.

It's always great to see Jamie Lee Curtis in anything, and here she brings a great mix of vulnerability and toughness to her character. The other characters are mostly forgettable, but that is not unusual for the genre. Kudos also to John Carpenter who, with his son Cody and Daniel Davies, has crafted a score that is as discomfiting and driving as his work for the original.

The film is competently made but never answers the question "What's the point of this?". Director David Gordon Green reverently copies many of the shots and tropes of the original, but misses the main thing that made the original work so well. The original’s director John Carpenter stripped nearly everything back to the bare minimum, from the story, to the score, to the fleeting appearances of Myers in tracking shots.

Green takes the opposite approach, overloading the film with themes and topics, (best represented by the two podcasters trying to re-examine Myers story and turn him into an object of fascination) and the inevitable throwbacks to the original film. All this does is remind you how lean and efficient the original was.

Mother Riley Meets The Vampire (1952)

One for the Bela Lugosi (or Mother Riley) completists, Mother Riley meets the Vampire is a strange hybrid of English Music Hall and American low budget mad scientist movies.

Arthur Lucan had been playing Mother Riley, an Irish washer woman who gets herself into assorted scrapes and adventures, on stage and screen since the 1930s, but, possibly due to the parochial nature of the character, the films had not really caught on internationally had much success outside of the UK. Enter Bela Lugosi, who had travelled to the UK for a stage version of Dracula that flopped, leaving him penniless and desperately needing money to get back to the US. Producer George Minter must have seen him, even in the twilight of his career, as a big enough name to drum up some business at the American box office.

The sinister Von Housen (Lugosi) has two notable character traits: he is hellbent on seeks dominating the world with an army of 50,000 radar-controlled nuclear-powered robots. He also reckons he's a vampire and has several young women abducted, including one who has a map to a uranium mine that he needs for his robot army. Granted, his army is currently 49,999 short, and to make matters worse, his only functioning robot has been shipped to Mother Riley's store by mistake.

The result is two different film styles that don't really gel together, but it's more entertaining than not. Lugosi seems to be enjoying himself, and, as always, is great fun to watch. Lucan brings a sense of knockabout slapstick and some well delivered occasional salty quips ("May the saints shower you with sailors on shore leave!"), but his constantly shrill delivery means a little goes a long way. Modern audiences may mostly be reminded of comedy character Arthur Atkinson from the Fast Show, with comparable baffling catchphrases and contemporary references.