Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

The jukebox musical film, where existing songs are strung together to tell a story is not a new genre. Singin' in the Rain is perhaps the best and best-known example, but the film's reputation owes much to the distinctive directing style, witty script, strong story, and excellent approach to the music and the integration of the songs into the plotline. Sgt Pepper's Lonely-Hearts Club Band is the total antithesis of this, with crummy versions of great songs, shoehorned into a vague and confusing storyline, albeit starring a once in a lifetime cast.

The story revolves around the titular band, led by Billy Shears (Peter Frampton), and his friends the Hendersons (The Bee Gees), and some magical musical instruments that protect the town of Heartland. The band are lured away to Hollywood and the big time by their greedy manager (Paul Nicholas) and a sleazy record company executive (Donald Pleasance), who lure the naive musicians into a life of debauchery and mega stardom. Meanwhile along comes the villainous Mr Mustard (Frankie Howerd) to try and steal the magic instruments and then, I don't know, there is something about an evil scientist, Dr Maxwell (Steve Martin) and a cult leader, Father Sun (Alice Cooper). Oh, and George Burns is the mayor of Heartland. I won't lie, I lost track of and interest in the plot several times.

Musicals seem to be written in two ways. Either the story is written first, and the songs come second, and they, ideally, help drive the narrative forward, or the filmmakers are given a pool of songs to work with which they then must cobble together or shoehorn into a plot. With Singin' In the Rain the writers were given access to all the songs that Nacio Herb Brown had written for MGM musicals over a ten-year period, but these were used to add colour to scenes and move the story on. In Sgt Pepper, the characters are ill thought out and the situations lack any internal logic, with the likes of Mr Mustard and the Hendersons only included so that the corresponding song can be used, and with little in the way of dialogue, the lyrics are left to do a poor job of telling the confusing storyline.

Compounding the story problems is the terrible music, with the Bee Gees faring no better than they had on their previous attempts at covering Beatles songs for a film soundtrack, the bizarre All This and World War 2, (which suffered the opposite problem of trying to attach Beatles songs to an existing story, that of the Second World War), at best, adding nothing to the originals.

However, the film is not without merit, as Steve Martin delivers an entertaining version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer that is in keeping with his "Wild and Crazy Guy" persona of the time, and Aerosmith do a coolly menacing version of Come Together. If nothing else, the film provides an oddball insight into popular culture of the time, and where else are you going to get a cast like that?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Bleak, unsettling and relentlessly paranoid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes the premise of the source material, both film and short story, and gives it a gloomy, post-Watergate spin. The end result is a paean to all the things that make us human, and why we should never let those things go.

Donald Sutherland plays Matthew Bennell, a San Francisco public health inspector, who has his curiosity piqued when a colleague, Elizabeth Driscoll tells him that her husband has changed, almost overnight into a cold, distant man. Bennell's psychiatrist friend David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) tells him that several of his patients are starting to think that their husbands or wives are not who they seem to be. Just when Bennell is thinking he may have caught up in some kind of mass hysteria - two of his friends, Jack and Nancy Bellicec, find a partly formed corpse, part of an alien plot to replace the world’s population with emotionless clones.

Right from the start, director Phillip Kaufman draws us into an off-kilter world of mistrust and suspicion, mixing shots of normal life and slightly odd things and occurrences (a telephone cord, a priest on a swing, a man playing banjo) and seemingly imbuing them all with meaning – a classic trait of the paranoid. Cleverly, by moving the setting of the story from a small town to a big city, the idea of people behaving in a cold uncaring manner seems plausible and easier to dismiss as the consequences of “city living”.

However, despite the nationwide and global scale of the invaders plans, the script never loses sight of the human drama and the plight of the individual. Kaufman wisely chooses to balance the weirdness with characterisation, and he is helped by a first rate cast. Sutherland, eschewing any movie star trappings or mannerisms, is believable and sympathetic as the rational everyman, trying to make sense of the increasingly bewildering and unsettling situations.

The score it is the only cinematic effort by jazz musician (and psychiatrist) Denny Zeitlin is  eclectic, switching between ominous, sometimes discordant, orchestral cues, dark rumbling synth lines, and quieter, more reflective small jazz band pieces,

The special effects work is excellent, gooey and unpleasant, predating Cronenberg’s films The Brood and The Fly, or John Carpenter’s The Thing, linking the film to the sub-genre of Body horror.

One thing that this remake does not have that the original did is a clear political subtext. Instead the focus is more on emotions, feelings, the things that make us human, something that makes the final iconic scene as devastating as it is disturbing

Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978)

Zoltan, Hound of Dracula may have one of the goofiest premises for a vampire film, but it deserves credit on three points. Firstly, for trying something different with the mythology, secondly, for a couple of interesting cast choices, and thirdly, for being great trashy entertainment.

The story starts in 1970s Romania, where a group of Russian soldiers are carrying out excavation and demolition work. But despite their best efforts, they only succeed in unearthing and reviving two of Count Dracula's faithful and long dead servants, one two legged (Veidt Smith, played by the wonderfully sinister looking Reggie Nalder) and one four legged (Zoltan, the count's faithful mutt, played by, well, a dog). However, servants are no good without a master, so the pair set off to track down the only surviving member of the Dracula bloodline, a man living in Los Angeles, under the cleverly disguised name of Michael Drake. Can the enigmatic Inspector Branco (Jose Ferrer) get to him first? Moreover, can Drake trust his own four-legged friends to protect himself and his family?

The central premise, the idea of man’s best friend turning into man's worst enemy is actually a good one, and screenwriter Frank Ray Perrili, a veteran of low budget exploitation films has some fun with transferring human vampire behaviour to animals. Granted, the results, such as scenes of Zoltan biting other dogs to turn them into his vampire slaves are impossible to take seriously. However, there are two set pieces with Drake trapped in a house and a car respectively, under siege from the canines, desperately trying to hold out until sunrise, which are suspenseful.

The (human) star of the show is definitely Reggie Nalder, whose distinctive scarred face had helped him get work with the likes of Dario Argento (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Despite often doing nothing more than staring at the camera, he still manages to imbue the role with an unsettling, creepy quality.

Kudos too for casting Jose Ferrer as Inspector Branco, the Van Helsing type character tasked with explaining the back-story to the audience and characters. In a similar way that Peter Cushing does, he manages to bring a bit of gravitas to patently stupid situations and dialogue.

The film only really flags during the frequent, unnecessary and interminable scenes of people driving, scenes that last beyond the time needed to establish that people are going somewhere and quickly feel like the padding that they are. However, they are usually accompanied by a distinctive musical theme, so at least when you hear it start, you can go to the fridge and get a beer.