MOVIEJOURNAL 2016 (PART ONE)

[smogo]

What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.

Index
*** Aaaaaaaah!
*** Amy
**** Barney Thomson [aka The Legend of Barney Thomson]
** A Bigger Splash
** Café Flesh
** Cannibal
** The Carrier
*** Chancers: The Great Gangster Film Fraud
*** Il Cinico, l'Infame, il Violento (The Cyncial, the Infamous, the Violent) [aka The Cynic, the Rat & the Fist]
* Circle
** Cobra
*** Come Cani Arrabbiati (Like Rabid Dogs)
*** Corruption
*** Daughters of Darkness [aka Blood on the Lips]
*** A Day of Violence
** Deadfall
*** Death Smiles at Murder [aka Death Smiles on a Murderer]
*** Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals [aka Track Them and Kill Them]
** Enter the Ninja
** Étoile [aka Ballet]
*** Extrasensorial [aka The Link]
*** 42nd Street Memories: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Notorious Street
** Gretta [aka Death Wish Club]
* Isn't Anyone Alive
*** Kotoko
**** Love
*** Luton
*** Maléfique (Malificent)
** La Meute (The Pack)
*** Necrophobia
** Night Train to Terror [aka Shiver]
* I Nostri Ragazzi (Our Kids) [aka The Dinner]
**** Phantom of Death [aka Off Balance]
*** Queen of Black Magic [aka Black Magic 3]
*** Roar
*** Der Samurai (The Samurai)
*** Seeding of a Ghost [aka Black Magic 5]
*** Seven Blood-Stained Orchids
*** Sie Tötete in Ekstase (She Killed in Ecstasy)
* "Sorry, Wrong Number"
*** Suffragette
*** Tales of Mystery and Imagination [aka Powers of Evil]
*** The Telephone Book
*** La Traque (The Track)
** Trainwreck
*** Tucker and Dale vs Evil
*** Vertige (Vertigo) [aka High Lane]
* The Washing Machine

All reviews


LA MEUTE (The Pack) (France/Belgium 2010 / Franck Richard)
**
An unenjoyably bleak, humourless and dreary backwoods horror with nary an original bone in its body. Seriously, I'd be quite happy if the genre never ventured into the countryside ever again; the stories set there are always the same. And so we meet Charlotte, a young woman with no backstory, who picks up a hitchhiker and then finds herself tied up and locked in a cage by a mad bar owner and her obedient son. On a happier note, Gallic exploitation favourite Philippe Nahon pops up as the ineffectual and morally dubious local cop, always wearing a t-shirt that reads "I fuck on the first date". Cheeky Philippe Nahon, there. The script does do a good job of keeping you guessing who the titular "pack" is, initially appearing to refer to the rape-happy biker gang that is the first to attack Charlotte, before a group of zombie-like creatures emerge from the ground with no warning or explanation 50 minutes in. And because, as is already abundantly clear, this film is unafraid to recycle tired old tropes, the rest of the film involves our heroine and, predictably enough, the bikers, fending off the zombies from within a small farmhouse.

"SORRY, WRONG NUMBER" (USA 1948 / Anatole Litvak)
*
In this noirish melodrama, Barbara Stanwyck gives good panic as a bed-bound woman who, on attempting to locate her husband who hasn't come home from work, gets a crossed line and overhears a conversation about a murder plot. And as she finds out more about this plot, she comes to believe that she's the intended victim. A bit of an unlikely coincidence, but that's drama for you. Adapted from a radio play, it's perhaps not surprising that this is a dialogue-heavy movie, with very little action, but that's not its main problem. The real issue is that Stanwyck is given nothing to do except sit in bed and listen on the phone as a series of characters impart information to her via the medium of lengthy flashbacks. Her character has no agency in the story whatsoever, the result being that watching this film is like listening to several narrators telling a story. There's no excitement, suspense only comes into play in the final couple of minutes, and the conspiracy that unfolds isn't that interesting anyway. A bonus point for the cruelty of the ending, perhaps, but this isn't how cinema should be done.

SUFFRAGETTE (UK 2015 / Sarah Gavron)
***
If you didn't know that the colours of women's suffrage were purple, white and green, you could be forgiven for thinking they were brown, cream and another brown after watching this colour-muted, sober dramatisation of events in 1912-13 leading up to the famous death of Emily Davison. Carey Mulligan is good as a typically downtrodden laundry worker who eventually joins the movement, though only after she's lost everything else thanks to the patriarchy - the men in this film are almost universally sexist, feckless, rapists or thugs. The cameo by Meryl Streep as chief suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst feels like a cinematic in-joke at odds with the sombre tone of the film, while Brendan Gleeson is head-scratching casting as a SuperCop (always in the right place at the right time, his omnipresence becomes almost comical) who's written as an unlikable bastard, because if there's one thing Gleeson can't play, it's unlikable. Still, it's an easy watch without becoming a crowd-pleasing irritant like, say, Matthew Warchus's similarly-themed Pride, though it's equally straightforward and predictable.

I NOSTRI RAGAZZI (Our Kids) [aka The Dinner] (Italy 2014 / Ivano De Matteo)
*
A dull middle-class drama about two rival brothers - one a doctor, the other a lawyer - and their wives, who clash over what action to take when their respective teenage children beat to death a homeless woman in an out-of-character drunken frenzy. Actually, the lawyer's daughter wasn't even drunk, which makes it even more unbelievable; the script implies that they were driven to it mainly by violent clips on the internet! The film is reminiscent of Roman Polanski's Carnage, also an adaptation of existing material, though without that film's funny histrionics or vomit fetishism. Instead, the four adults bicker in circles around the subject, the kids confess to absolutely no dramatic effect, and the movie comes to a sudden, screeching halt without any resolution whatsoever. I'm not really sure what anyone's meant to get out of this at all; perhaps if you're a successful doctor or a lawyer then it's a frightening tale of how your perfect life could fall apart at any moment. But for the average viewer, it's just a bunch of boring rich people discovering that teenagers can be a pain in the arse.

AMY (UK 2015 / Asif Kapadia)
***
Not just celebrity tittle-tattle about Amy Winehouse's descent into drink 'n' drugs hell and, ultimately, her death at just 27 (though it is largely that), but a solid potted history of her entire career. Of course, said descent took up the majority of that career, and therefore most of this documentary too. In essence it's an oft-told story: that of an addict's rise and fall and, for added cinematic and dramatic value, it's the story of a talented and famous addict's rise and fall, with all the added pressure from paparazzi, vested interests and the press that comes with that. But this film is notable for copping interviews with pretty much every player you could think of, even the ones who come out really badly (dad Mitch Winehouse and husband Blake Fielder in particular). What keeps the movie from being unbearably grim is its broad and entertaining range of archive footage, from fun camcorder footage shot by friends, to TV and concert appearances, all of which variously show off Amy's brilliant vocals and vivacious character, at least until the tail end of her life, at which point they begin to show the exact opposite. It's a terrible shamey.

NECROPHOBIA (Netherlands 1995 / Frank van Geloven & Edwin Visser)
***
A young woman, Rebecca, dies suddenly, leaving her husband Mark distraught. But who's this woman digging up Rebecca's body, strapping a dildo onto it, and climbing on top? And what does she want with Mark? And why is her psychiatrist making her do these things anyway? Necrophobia is a slight but fun shocker, clearly influenced mainly by Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik movies, but with elements of Lucio Fulci's Nightmare Concert and perhaps certain Hong Kong horrors in the mix too; the set design and lighting of the necrophile's dungeon is certainly reminiscent of similarly-themed Cat III flicks such as Dr Lamb and The Peeping Tom. At only an hour long, the film has neither the time nor the inclination to dig deep into the psychology of any of its characters except Mark, meaning that some of those questions I posed earlier get left unanswered, but the running time too feels like a nod to Nekromantik, and it's a decent enough homage, full of sex, gore, mysterious beautiful women and chainsaws.

TRAINWRECK (USA 2015 / Judd Apatow)
**
This rom-com starts out so well, but soon tests the viewer's patience with a long, slow descent into sentimentality before drowning in outright mawkishness, in a film that's at least 45 minutes too long. (The fact that several jokes pop up twice suggests that something went wrong in the editing process.) As her ropey TV sketch show Inside Amy Schumer demonstrates, Schumer is likeable even when her material's weak, with a comedy persona that clearly draws on British comedy's darkest ideas. Her character here even works for an amoral, exploitative magazine called S'nuff which is patently a copy of SugarApe from the east London sitcom Nathan Barley. But no UK comic would drag their character through the kind of redemptive, conservative storyline that Schumer and director Judd Apatow have given hers. So it's funny when she's dating John Cena's closeted bodybuilder (one of far too many sport-based in-jokes), but less so when she moves onto Bill "this is my comedy face" Hader's nice-guy surgeon, turns her back on hedonism and learns to love the hits of Billy Joel.

QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC [aka Black Magic 3] (Indonesia 1979 / Liliek Sudjio)
***
The great thing about Far Eastern black magic movies is that the events therein are limited only by the filmmakers' imaginations (and budget, I suppose). The Indonesian/Japanese co-production Queen of Black Magic is a fine example, if a little slow to start with a good 25 minutes or so expended in setting up the very simple premise: a young woman, Murni, is accused of being a witch by the villagers who attempt to kill her. But she survives their attack and decides to take revenge by... becoming a witch. And so the menfolk soon meet their ends in a variety of gruesome ways, with veins exploding, snakes attacking, and in the film's undoubted highlight, a head being pulled off and taking on a life of its own. Because you can do this sort of thing when there are no rules! It's a good-looking film too, making great use of a limited colour palate and dramatic geography, and there's a nice line in dirty humour as Murni's magic guru is obsessed with using voodoo dolls to remotely manipulate sexual situations.

DER SAMURAI (The Samurai) (Germany 2014 / Till Kleinert)
***
A striking, original and unique horror-thriller with a dark fantasy edge, in which Jakob, a uniformed policeman who essentially looks after a small town single-handedly, is trying to track down a wolf that's causing problems for the area. But instead of an animal, the "lone wolf" who appears to him is a man; specifically a cross-dressing gay man with a samurai sword and a personality disorder. As the night goes on, this nightdress-wearing psycho intensifies his spree of mayhem, escalating into mass murder but all the while trying to seduce the single and lonely (but as far as we're aware, straight) cop. It's a slow-paced film, allowing the numerous beautifully-lit and carefully-composed compositions to penetrate the viewer's eyes, to the extent that the strange storyline is almost a distraction from the deep, warm visuals. Cinematographer Martin Hanslmayr is definitely one to watch, though I'm not entirely convinced that director Till Kleinert has quite mastered the transition from short films to feature-length just yet. However, he does use his Brandenburg locations well; one confrontation on a canal lock is particularly stunning.

A DAY OF VIOLENCE (UK 2009 / Darren Ward)
***
This Southampton gangster thriller is awful in every way: cheap, amateurish, badly acted and contains some of the shittest, most overly sweary dialogue ever. But it's hilarious. The main reason it's hilarious is because of that incessant effing and jeffing: virtually every single character says "fuck" and "cunt" like it's going out of fashion, and yet virtually every single actor sounds like the sixth former in an edgy school play who's been allowed to say a rude word on stage and wants to make the most of it. But, in this case, ten times a minute. Funniest of all is the gang boss played by Victor D Thorn, because he looks like a teddy bear, can't act for shit, and speaks as though he's on a local radio commercial advertising an unusually foul-mouthed discount carpet store. And then there's the titular violence, which is gloriously brutal, explicit and over-the-top. The plot, as if it matters, concerns Mitchell, a fat goon who's ordered to pay a visit to Hopper, a stoner with a £100k debt. The problem is, Mitchell already killed him and stole the cash just days earlier. Hopper is played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, so there's that too.

THE CARRIER (USA 1987 / Nathan J White)
**
The 1980s was full of Aids allegories disguised as vampire movies, but The Carrier does something a bit different, putting its disease in the outside world rather than within the body. To prevent infection, therefore, its characters have to wrap themselves in plastic, as though they were condommed dicks. The disease here causes people to melt on contact with a contaminated object, and its source is a Bigfoot-like creature known as "the black thing" that's been terrorising the small, backwards, religious town of Sleepy Rock. A local outcast is attacked by the black thing (after which point it's never mentioned again) and inadvertently begins contaminating everything he touches. And so everyone wraps themselves up until they look variously like nuns, Mujahideen or scientists in hazmat suits, but unfortunately this makes it hard to remember who's who, and consequently care about them. It all gets admirably chaotic, while the ambitious script alludes to the stigmatisation of HIV patients, ignorant witch hunts and more, but the half-horror/half-parable tone doesn't quite work.

IL CINICO, L'INFAME, IL VIOLENTO (The Cynical, the Infamous, the Violent) [aka The Cynic, the Rat & the Fist] (Italy 1977 / Umberto Lenzi)
***
The follow-up to Rome Armed to the Teeth sees Maurizio Merli return as the former Inspector Tanzi, now a civilian, who nonetheless continues to duff up criminals while laying low as a supposedly dead man. He's been shot and left for dead, you see, by a henchman of a gangster inexplicably known as the Chinaman, so that said crime lord can go about his business in peace. Enter a moustachioed John Saxon as the Chinaman's New York City equivalent, who partners up with the Chinaman until things inevitably turn sour and they're at each other's throats... all orchestrated by Tanzi, of course! There's plenty to enjoy here, from Tanzi's super-fast seduction of a hoodlum's girlfriend (essentially "Get your coat, you've pulled") to some rooftop cat-and-mouse. Best of all is the sequence in which Tanzi and his accomplice break into a building to rob a safe: director Umberto Lenzi manages to make it suspenseful despite the script neglecting to add much of a ticking timer to their mission, while the "crawling under the invisible lasers" bit is almost certainly intentionally silly. Sadly, the storyline is utterly forgettable.

CAFÉ FLESH (USA 1982 / Rinse Dream)
**
You have to feel sorry for anyone who saw this legendary high-camp porno in their formative years and can now only get off by dressing as a giant pencil while a naked secretary asks "Would you like me to type a memo?" over and over again. Set in a post-apocalyptic USA, it's about a cabaret sex club where members of the "sex positive" minority (able to screw) get it on for the morbid fascination and vicarious pleasure of the 99%, the "sex negatives" who can't get frisky without puking. Among the punters are long-term couple Nick & Lana, but the suspicion is that Lana is part of the 1%, not the 99% like she claims. You could actually cut out all the hardcore fucking from this film and still have a workable erotic sci-fi drama. It's not as though many of the sex scenes have what the occasionally witty script calls "something to make Uncle Foamy stand up and tap-dance"; they tend to look like cheap new-wave music videos, and at first it looks worryingly like director Rinse Dream has still got loads of ridiculous ideas left over from the previous year's Nightdreams, which he wrote. But it improves as it goes on.

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS [aka Blood on the Lips] (Belgium/France/West Germany 1971 / Harry Kümel)
***
In this film that assumes prior knowledge of her infamy, the centuries-old bloodsucker Elisabeth Bathory pitches up at a hotel in Ostend, and immediately into the lives of a pair of newlyweds who've evidently had a shotgun wedding without quite getting to know each other... or whether they even really like each other! Being the only other guests in the hotel (presumably for reasons of budget and atmosphere in equal amounts), they catch the eyes of Bathory and her valet (an attractive young woman of ceaselessly quivering sexuality), and so the vampiric duo try to engineer a weekend of hot, partner-swapping action. In other words, this is absolutely your typical 1970s European vampire-themed steamfest, all predatory lesbianism and blood-splattered bathrooms, though it errs towards the classier end of the spectrum, with more chat than bite and only one stand-out exploitation scene (that between the husband and the valet). Still, it's fun to imagine what high-minded fans of Last Year at Marienbad would make of star Delphine Seyrig ending up in this, particularly when it comes to her character's endearingly tacky fate.

EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS [aka Trap Them and Kill Them] (Italy 1977 / Joe d'Amato)
***
Shock endings are one thing, but Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals has a great shock opening: our ever-horny photojournalist heroine is working undercover in a mental hospital, when all of a sudden a topless nurse runs through the ward with a tit bitten off! And so begins the third of her four violence-themed adventures under director Joe d'Amato, and the first and best of several porno-horror crossovers he was to direct in exotic settings. Although in this instance, the exotic Amazon rainforest is played rather unconvincingly by the Rome countryside. The sex is frequently ridiculous: Emanuelle's preferred way of greeting other women is to start fingering them, and during one such moment d'Amato keeps cutting away to a comedy chimpanzee smoking a Marlboro. But at least those scenes are filmed and edited comparatively well; it's not until the last half-hour that d'Amato begins putting any care and attention into the scenes that don't involve vaginal close-ups. And yet, somehow, this is a pretty good entry in the Italian cannibal horror cycle, thanks in no small part to some really gruesome (if fleeting) gore.

LOVE (France/Belgium 2015 / Gaspar Noé)
****
For my money, the reverse chronology Gaspar Noé deploys to tell this story works better than it did in Irréversible. But the breakdown of young American-in-Paris Murphy's relationship with the adventurous Electra isn't what makes Love a great film. For it's a thin plot, but one told with real cinematic style, both formally remarkable and very playful. Noé's use of the centre of his wide frame and exploitation of the "cardboard cutout" effect of 3D photography are fascinating to process. When things are good, Murphy & Electra look like they're in their own lovely bubble. When things are bad, they seem alienated from the rest of the world. And the director makes it amusingly blatant that he's putting himself very much in the picture: Murphy's son is called Gaspar, Electra's ex is called Noé, Murphy keeps his drugs in a Seul Contre Tous VHS case, and his old bedroom is presumably a recreation of the filmmaker's - who else would have a Salò poster above their bed, or snort cocaine off a book about Ruggero Deodato? It's funny, it's sad, the music's great, it's perhaps a little too long... but this is Noé's best film since his debut.

SEEDING OF A GHOST [aka Black Magic 5] (Hong Kong 1983 / Chuan Yang)
***
A taxi driver runs over a black magic wizard, and consequently his family becomes cursed. Before long, his wife is having an affair, then gets raped and killed, while he's left crippled from a fight. And so he goes to see the wizard for help (surely a bit like going to see a pyromaniac for help when your house is burning down?), and the wizard eagerly unleashes mayhem on the wife's boyfriend and killers, with the help of her reanimated corpse of course! Seeding of a Ghost is typical of the Hong Kong black magic genre, in that events start out down-to-earth and relatable, but become increasingly wild once the sorcerer starts doing his thing, culminating in an absolutely barking mad climax. The regurgitation of worms is par for the course, but this film has an even more horrific gag up its sleeve in the shape of a backfiring toilet that vomits raw sewage all over a character's house... gross! But it's the finalé, which features a The Thing-inspired tentacle-sprouting disembodied head that the film is surely best remembered for. Appropriately enough, the film's recurring synth theme sounds like a John Carpenter rip-off too.

ROAR (USA 1981 / Noel Marshall)
***
A hippie who lives alone on an African ranch with dozens of supposedly friendly lions, tigers, leopards and panthers, is too busy trying to stop a lynch mob from culling the animals to notice that his estranged wife and kids have turned up for a visit and found their lives in danger. The animal action is undeniably spectacular, but the thriller aspect is a real mess, partly due to choppy direction and editing (this was Noel Marshall's first and last film as director), though perhaps also because the film's spent the first 20 minutes demonstrating that boisterous big cats aren't necessarily dangerous. But the film's main problem is that you'll spend more time wondering how it was made than enjoying it. It took eleven years to film, Marshall was a Hollywood agent rather than an animal handler, and he cast himself and his real-life family (wife Tippi Hedren, stepdaughter Melanie Griffith and two non-actor sons) in the lead roles in this clearly incredibly risky project. Perhaps the most fascinating bad film ever made, it also features the world's most po-faced credits and an "evil" lion who was owned in real life by Anton LaVey!

ÉTOILE [aka Ballet] (Italy 1989 / Peter del Monte)
**
Although this is a supernatural movie set in a ballet school and starring Jennifer Connelly from Phenomena, it's not half as much fun as an 1980s Italian proto-Black Swan ought to be. Connelly plays Claire, an American girl who bottles out of auditioning for a place at a Budapest dance school, only for the school's weird owner to have her brought back and transformed into his long-lost lover Natalie, much to the confusion and consternation of her new beau Jason. Unfortunately, the comic relief side-plot with Charles Durning as Jason's eccentric horologist uncle is much more entertaining than the Claire/Natalie story, and it's a shame there isn't a whole film about him. Once he's been written out, the movie loses any sense of structure and just flails about in a half-hearted attempt to build towards a climax. That climax, when it comes, is actually quite good, particularly in the editing, as the events of Swan Lake play out simultaneously on-stage and backstage - plus, of course, there's no arguing with Tchaikovsky's iconic music. It's a frustrating film: there are loads of interesting ideas in it, but none of them really come to fruition.

MALÉFIQUE (Malificent) (France 2002 / Eric Valette)
***
An annoyingly uneven slow-burner, Maléfique starts out as a comedy-horror populated by eccentric characters, before becoming serious and meaningful to an extent it hasn't really earned for its final act. Those eccentrics are three prisoners - the film is set almost entirely within their jail cell - one an imbecile with a compulsion to eat inedible objects, one all-purpose sexual "deviant" (a bodybuilding transsexual rapist), and an older philosopher type who keeps his cards close to his chest. And then there's the new arrival, the man framed for fraud by his own wife, the normal guy who we're supposed to relate to. After several scenes depicting the awfulness of prison life, they find a book of black magic hidden in their cell wall and spend the rest of the film trying to figure out how to use it to escape... but this is a "be careful what you wish for" tale, with decent rubbery FX depicting their unfortunate fates. The whole thing is smothered in an unappealing brown, blue and grey colour scheme and, like many prison films, it's all very gruff and masculine in an off-putting way. But at least it's different, and it is enjoyable in parts.

COBRA (USA 1986 / George P Cosmatos)
**
This Sylvester Stallone vehicle is a totally dumb eighties action movie with the conservative, Death Wish-style message that criminals don't obey the law, so why should the police have to? That's the attitude of the cop known as Cobra (Stallone), a maverick so trigger-happy that the LAPD has had to hide him in their secret "Zombie Squad". He steps up to deal with a cultish militia who are randomly killing civilians, and spends the bulk of the film doing a really ropey job of protecting a witness played by an unrecognisable Brigitte Nielsen (unrecognisable in part because Stallone's high heels make her look the same height as his short ass!). Strictly for fans of explosive car chases (there is a pretty good one, admittedly), it's impossible not to get the impression that the MPAA butchered all the enjoyment out of the film, with the evil gang's murders all-too obviously censored off the screen. But even so, this is so stupid and so formulaic that it serves as a great reminder of why Paul Verhoeven had to happen. Indeed, at times this is like RoboCop, but without the gore, satire or self-awareness.

CORRUPTION (USA 1983 / Roger Watkins)
***
It's a, um, hard day at the office for a couple of businessmen caught up in some shady and obscure dealings, in this interesting attempt at a porno-but-with-a-story from Roger Watkins, director of the legendarily sleazy grindhouse horror The Last House on Dead End Street. The early scenes are particularly intriguing, as the first man works his way through a series of colour-coded sex rooms, because everything about the uneasy tone suggests that Watkins was aiming for a Cronenbergian Scanners/Videodrome vibe. And he succeeded, it's fair to say, though the coldness of that style doesn't make for particularly sexy sex (and it doesn't help that the women keep calling the man by his name, which is Alan). The second man is played by Jamie Gillis from The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Through the Looking Glass, a porn actor of great presence, but the story fails to develop and his encounters become increasingly indifferent. But as with Last House, everything seems to be left unexplained, which means there's a lingering sense that there's more going on here than meets the eye. Either that, or it's all just bollocks.

PHANTOM OF DEATH [aka Off Balance] (Italy 1988 / Ruggero Deodato)
****
Phantom of Death does a wonderful job of lulling you into thinking it's just another giallo, before hitting you with a belter of a double-whammy twist after just half an hour. Two women have been slashed to death in Perugia, and it's up to Inspector Datti, played by Donald Pleasence on top form, to solve the case. But as good as Pleasence is, the real star is his fellow English veteran Michael York, as a handsome, lusted-after concert pianist whose girlfriend is the second victim. After she's killed, he beds Edwige Fenech before disappearing to Venice for two months in what seems like a weird, inconsequential interlude. But he comes back a changed man: violent, physically deteriorating, and harbouring a dark secret. York is superb in the role of a man who ages 50 years over the course of the film's running time, and Pleasence is funny as the frustrated, exasperated detective whose quarry just keeps slipping through his fingers. And like all good gialli, there are a few bizarre little details that raise a smile, like Datti's daughter playing her flute in his earhole while he's on the phone, for no narratively useful reason.

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR [aka Shiver] (USA 1985 / Jay Schlossberg-Cohen)
**
Producer-director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen brings the art of recycling to horror in this anthology movie chopped together using highlights from three existing films, added splatter, and his own dire wraparound in which God and "Mr" Satan discuss the fates of their fellow train passengers while the world's worst pop band repeatedly perform their one song to camera. 20 minutes of haphazardly-edited clips from the then-unfinished body-harvesting tale HARRY provide the incomprehensible first segment, but there's enough nudity and gore to keep things watchable and in some ways the sheer weirdness of this cut-down version make it the bizarre highlight of the anthology. But really the strongest segment comes from GRETTA, with its Russian roulette-inspired death cult, a handy voiceover filling us in about the missing scenes, and a brilliantly gruesome death by electric chair. The final section, from Satan-on-Earth movie CATACLYSM, is a huge step up in quality, with name actors including Cameron Mitchell, but at nearly 40 minutes it goes on too long, despite excellent demon makeup design and hilariously bad miniature work.

AAAAAAAAH! (UK 2015 / Steve Oram)
***
Presumably Steve Oram spent some time at a zoo, watching the chimpanzees or gorillas, and wondered what it would be like if humans had developed without our language or social skills. And so, in his directorial debut, everyone grunts and screeches and openly pisses, shits, wanks and fucks, but they live in a normal suburban south London home. Oram plays a recently single man who cops off with a woman who looks like a young Gina McKee at an anarchic house party, while Julian Barrett is dealing with his own breakup in a less constructive way. Had Aaaaaaaah! been made in the pre-video age, when money and effort were needed to make a film, it would've felt really subversive. This still manages to feel a bit subversive, if only because Toyah Willcox is one of the stars, and she used to present Songs of Praise! I wonder if this will be Oram's only movie as director, just as Nil by Mouth was Gary Oldman's and The War Zone was Tim Roth's: as they did, with his debut he's summed up the British condition as he's seen it, and done a great job of it. Very funny (for about an hour anyway), weird as fuck, and unique.

GRETTA [aka Death Wish Club] (USA 1984 / John Carr)
**
There's genuinely a scene in this film where a psychiatrist advises the lead character to rape his girlfriend while she's asleep to cure her of her psychosis. To be fair, the girlfriend herself later recommends the same thing. She is Gretta, well played by Meredith Haze, a popcorn seller turned porn star turned cabaret pianist turned (for some reason) womanising young man(!!!). Her besotted boyfriend's efforts to keep hold of her and, eventually, to turn her back into the woman she was, take him to some strange places, most notably a suicidal death cult that plays Russian roulette-style games with a deadly insect, electric chairs and a wrecking ball, making this probably the weirdest romance ever filmed. Most viewers will come to this off the back of horror anthology Night Train to Terror, in which parts of this film made it into the 17-minute middle segment, but there's none of the gore from that film here, nor the stop-motion wasp, and nor the talking computer for that matter. Oh, and as for that rape I mentioned earlier? "Hilariously", he accidentally sticks it up the wrong girl, and she loves it. Like I said: the weirdest romance ever.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK (USA 1971 / Nelson Lyon)
***
In its early stages, this erotic comedy's debts to the more avant-garde side of the French new wave and America's post-Hair obsession with naked writhing hippies can be a bit wearisome, dating the film badly. But it gets better and funnier as it becomes more daring. It's about Alice, a chirpy 18 year-old (although she does admit to regular suicidal thoughts at one stage, just for some added darkness) who receives a dirty phone call from one John Smith, and loves it. In trying to find him, she encounters a number of other sex-obsessed men, while the drama is occasionally interrupted by "real" obscene callers confessing their misdemeanors directly to the audience; these provide some of the biggest laughs of the film. The final half-hour, in which Alice finds Smith and he delivers an incredibly long monologue about his sexual history, is a bit dull, and the climactic, sexually aggressive cartoon lacks the good-natured humour of Robert Crumb's similar work. But Sarah Kennedy's Alice is a lot of fun to spend time with, and there's plenty of clever editing and amusing use of library footage in place of explicit imagery.

LA TRAQUE (The Track) (France/Italy 1975 / Serge R Leroy)
***
Everything about La Traque suggests a rape-revenge movie: there's a woodland, a lone woman, a group of men, and an assault. But instead of victim Helen rising up against her attacker(s) - although initially she does try that too - she spends most of the film just running away, a surprising action for the character played by the top-billed star (Mimsy Farmer). Unfortunately for her, the men aren't happy to let her just run away, and due to a set of mostly obscure shared secrets, debts and favours between them, even the innocent members of the group get involved in hunting her down just as they'd been tracking rabbits and wild boar minutes earlier. So we stay mainly with that unsympathetic lot, only very occasionally catching up with Helen's efforts to get out of the woods, and it really gets under your skin just how desperate her situation is, and what a tragic figure this distressed woman cuts. It's a great performance by Farmer, especially given how little dialogue she has. Clearly this is deliberately unpleasant viewing, to an extent. But it's a tad underpowered, and the lack of cathartic violence is frustrating.

42ND STREET MEMORIES: THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS STREET (UK 2015 / Calum Waddell)
***
A cheap and cheerful talking heads documentary about the mecca for exploitation movie fans that was New York City's sleaziest street. Any lover of grindhouse cinema will envy the fact that Calum Waddell's interviewees were actually there when 42nd Street was lined on both sides by dozens of theatres with matching marquees advertising screenings of Cannibal Ferox, Pieces and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, along with a ton of porn and filth. Waddell isn't seen or heard at any point, with all the talking done mainly by film directors whose flicks played those cinemas - William Lustig, Frank Henenlotter, Lloyd Kaufman, etc - and a nod to gender balance provided by the likes of scream queen Debbie Rochon and prolific porn star Veronica Hart. We see clips from a very small selection of exploitation movies filmed on 42nd, and several newspaper ads, but I'd loved to have seen a lot more of that kind of first-hand evidence popping up; as it is, the film could've done with a bigger research team and more dynamic editing. Whoever shot the present-day footage of the street needs to see a doctor about their Parkinson's.

VERTIGE (Vertigo) [aka High Lane] (France 2009 / Abel Ferry)
***
With its typical group of 20-something friends venturing into the wilderness, longing glances between secret lovers, and the obligatory close-up of a mobile phone with no signal, Vertige initially seems like yet another routine slasher. But it has a trick up its sleeve in the form of a thrilling first act that's all about rock climbing. Cinematically, Vertigo is a title associated with Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, but it's okay because these scenes are hella suspenseful too. Some of the camera placements, as the group scales and traverses a series of sheer rock faces, are remarkable, and though I don't usually care for the kind of recreational daring depicted in films like Touching the Void and The Descent, director Abel Ferry manages to make rock climbing look so exciting that even a lazy lump like me thinks it actually looks appealing! That's the first half hour, anyway, and then it's business as usual as a woodland hunter starts picking the kids off and chaining them up in his torture cave. But although the horror section is generic and instantly forgettable, Ferry continues to demonstrate a real adeptness for thrilling action scenes.

CHANCERS: THE GREAT GANGSTER FILM FRAUD (UK 2015 / Ben Lewis)
***
The true story of a pair of British amateur film producers who claimed to have secured nearly £20million for their debut feature in order to claim £800,000 in tax credits, with their eyes on a further £2m in unwarranted VAT rebates. That's the official line anyway, and what they were convicted of, yet this documentary isn't especially persuasive in showing that that was their plan from the start. That said, it's clear that following their arrests, their effort to actually make the film - on a miniscule budget, complete with a "foreign location" shoot that was nothing of the sort - was a blatant attempt to hoodwink the taxman. What's surprising is that, despite some really dodgy screen tests, their movie A Landscape of Lies doesn't actually look that bad! It's got recognisable actors in the lead roles, the cinematography is professional, and a quarry in Essex even makes for an acceptable Middle Eastern desert, by low-budget standards. Chancers has a somewhat irritating narration by a (probably fictitious) London gangster character, and takes a while to get to the meat, but tells an interesting tale.

SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS (Italy/West Germany 1972 / Umberto Lenzi)
***
Two women are killed by a serial killer, but the third is only wounded and her demise is faked by the police to protect her from the maniac who, due to his trademark of leaving a crescent moon-shaped talisman with each victim, is dubbed the, erm, Half Moon Killer. The dead-but-not-really woman and her boyfriend take it upon themselves to investigate, discovering a connection between all the victims, and hoping to prevent more deaths. Umberto Lenzi's giallo is very typical of the genre, in that it contains most of the elements that, even by 1972, were starting to look overused, though it does boast a classic theme for clarinet and harpsichord by the great Riz Ortolani. Uschi Glas and Antonio Sabato are very likeable as the amateur sleuths, and the story nips along at a decent pace, but there aren't really any fireworks, not even at the soggy climax. I'm not convinced that the killer's identity is figure out-able - it seems to hinge on a piece of information that's entirely hidden until the final sequence, and that's not fair. Still, this kind of generic giallo has a warm familiarity about it that makes it a nice comfy watch for fans.

COME CANI ARRABBIATI (Like Rabid Dogs) (Italy 1976 / Mario Imperoli)
***
A savage crime thriller about a trio of young armed robbers, cop killers and general wrong'uns who, for some reason, dress in a uniform of matching white sports jackets and blue jeans when out doing their deeds. Poor Inspector Muzi knows their identities but has no evidence to connect them to their crimes, but you know he'll get them in the end. It's all a bit silly despite the violence: the gang members' motives are bewildering at times, though maybe that's deliberate to demonstrate just how psychotic they are; Muzi and his uniformed junior Germana seem to be only cops in all of Rome who are interested in the case; and it's unbelievable that the crims haven't left a scrap of evidence anywhere. Meanwhile, in "You couldn't do that today" Corner, Muzi's having trouble getting the apparently frigid Germana into bed, so he sends her undercover as a hooker, allows her to come within a hair's breadth of being raped, and then persuades her that the experience has turned her on so much that she immediately sleeps with him. Also: lots of full frontal female nudity throughout.

CIRCLE (USA 2014 / Aaron Hann & Mario Miscione)
*
Like a big game of The Weakest Link, 50 people wake up in a circular room, presumably having been abducted by aliens, having to vote for who gets zapped into oblivion next. Lasting nearly an hour and a half, this would be a weak idea for a gameshow, but as a thriller it's disastrous, at least with a screenplay this unintelligent. Essentially, it's a balloon debate, in which the "contestants" have to justify why they should survive, or why others should be voted out. But with a vote taking place every couple of minutes, there's no time for any big monologues or even nuance, so it all comes down to heavy-handed points about social conflicts in America (over race, religion, sexuality, immigration, etc) with no attempts to subvert any stereotypes. So one Mexican guy is indeed fat and in the USA illegally, and the other wears a bandana and is a thug, while the first person to volunteer to die is an emo kid. Before long it just becomes a tedious shouting match with huge amounts of swearing. Astonishingly, no one ever suggests that maybe the "winner" may actually have to spend the rest of their life being bummed by aliens.

THE WASHING MACHINE (Italy/France/Hungary 1993 / Ruggero Deodato)
*
There's quite a cool shot early in this laughable attempt at an erotic giallo, in which the three central characters - sisters living together - are posed and framed in such a way that somehow implies that they may be witches. It's a nice way of planting a seed in the viewer's mind that perhaps this film's explanations won't all make rational sense. Well, you can say that again, but that one shot isn't worthy of this movie, which is really bad. One morning the sisters report the death of their (it turns out) mutual boyfriend, whose chopped-up body has turned up in their washing machine. Except when the cops arrive, there's no corpse. At the end there's some sort of closure to this mystery, but in between it's just a case of watching the detective cop off with each sister in turn, against his better judgement. There's a lot of sex here, but it's all ridiculous (hanging off the inside of a fridge door, anyone?), with a strictly-enforced copulation dress code of topless (ladies) / smart casual with trousers (gents). Typically for a 90s exploitation flick shot in Budapest, the sets are nice but the production values are otherwise lacking.

ENTER THE NINJA (USA 1981 / Menahem Golan)
**
The best thing about Menahem Golan's attempt to bring a Japanese action genre to Hollywood is, oddly enough, the very English Susan George, whose performance as Marianne, a woman living in the Philippines with a desirable plot of land and an alcoholic husband feels way too good for this film. Her naturalistic, believable acting contrasts with that of an unusually camp Christopher George as the lead villain, Constantine Gregory's chirpy Victorian urchin in the body of a balding middle-aged man, and Zachi Noy's secondary baddie, a cartoonish, hook-handed German. And then there's Franco Nero as the hero, with all the visual cool of a 20th century Django, but dubbed by an American actor whose voice is set permanently to "heroic". He plays an apparently regular joe who's actually highly trained in ninjitsu, and who thinks nothing of killing several henchmen a day in the course of defending Marianne's property and her honour, until one day shit gets real and he has to dress up as a beekeeper to fight a Japanese guy he went to ninja school with. Incredibly daft, but only occasionally in an amusing way.

LUTON (Greece/Germany 2013 / Michalis Konstantatos)
***
Not actually a film about Bedfordshire's most racist town (although that is where one of the characters leaves for at the end), Luton is one of those slow-moving European observational-realist films in which we learn a limited amount about a group of apparently unconnected people through the medium of long takes with sparse dialogue. The three we focus on are a 50-something married male shopkeeper, a male high school student with divorced parents, and most intriguingly, Mary, a woman of around 40 who, we will discover, is in an open relationship and feeling conflicted about whether she likes it. The highlights tend to be sexual, notably a middle-aged shag on the dining table that has a funny/sad punchline, and Mary getting overly turned on trying on some lingerie in a fitting room. Just as the film threatens to remain aimless to the end, we suddenly find that the three do in fact know each other, and what's more, are extremely horrible people. It would've been nice to know a bit more about their friendship and their horrific nights out, but I suppose that might've lessened the shock value.

KOTOKO (Japan 2011 / Shinya Tsukamoto)
***
An unexpected change of direction for Shinya Tsukamoto, but coming after the awful Tetsuo III, a very welcome one. It could be described as his Dancer in the Dark, featuring as it does a remarkably emotional performance by a famous musician in the role of a single mother whose life is falling apart through no fault of her own, and finds respite through singing. Singer-songwriter Cocco, in her acting debut, stars as Kotoko, a mentally fragile woman who often sees people in duplicate, one instance of whom often appears to be an immediate and dangerous threat. These horror-inspired sequences are far and away the best bits in the movie. Kotoko also self-harms, but successful author Tanaka (played by the director) falls for her and allows her to violently take out her frustrations on him instead. Tsukamoto uses his trademark frenetic camerawork - and loud sound effects - to do a great job of intensifying Kotoko's moments of crisis, though when she's with Tanaka, she - and therefore the film - is calmer, and a bit meandering, and even a tad dull. Lars von Trier would never have allowed her such long periods of happiness.

ISN'T ANYONE ALIVE (Japan 2012 / Gakuryû Ishii)
*
A way too leisurely-paced absurdist fantasy set at a university hospital campus, where students start randomly keeling over and dying, soon after news breaks of two separate train disasters nearby. As we learn in one of many rambling, overlong dialogue scenes between the university's youngsters, it's rumoured that the campus secretly hosts an American military biological warfare programme, and so the suspicion is that that's to blame. Whether it is or not is neither here nor there really; what this film is interested in seems to be the sheer oddity of a situation in which it looks like the population is being wiped out one person at a time. Reactions are strange and unlikely as students from different cliques come together to die with each other. Apparently this is supposed to be a comedy. It's not funny though, just repetitive and slightly surreal. It's not clear whether there's supposed to be any sort of point, or whether it's just meant to be a laugh. The final, apocalyptic montage is well constructed though, I'll give it that.

DEADFALL (USA 1993 / Christopher Coppola)
**
One can only imagine how Dracula's Widow director Christopher Coppola managed to assemble such an impressive cast for his second movie. Oh - he's Francis Ford's nephew? Ah, that'll explain why James Coburn, Charlie Sheen, Peter Fonda, and his brother Nicolas Cage signed up to this less than spectacular comedy crime thriller. Michael Biehn stars as a gangster who accidentally kills his own dad (Coburn) in a scam, and flees to LA to meet the uncle (Coburn again) he never knew he had, only to get tangled up in yet more dodgy shenanigans. With the "help" of taglines "Trust no one" and "The ultimate con", it's obvious early on that all is not what it seems, but fortunately Cage is on hand to liven things up. He obviously decided that his part of a conman and debt collector wasn't interesting enough on its own (and indeed the film spends an inordinately long time demonstrating one of the most well-known cons in the book), so he plays him as a wild-accented, strung-out, bewigged weirdo, recalling his incredible turn in Vampire's Kiss, and single-handedly makes the film worth a look. Good, Herrmann-esque score too.

DEATH SMILES AT MURDER [aka Death Smiles on a Murderer] (Italy 1973 / Joe d'Amato)
***
The very first horror credit for the extraordinarily prolific Joe d'Amato is a period gothic piece which, as you'd expect, is all about sex and death, but with some smart Poe references on top. Opening with a man mourning the death of his sister and lover Greta, the action quickly relocates to a classic gothic horror village where a carriage has toppled over, leaving the girl with a spot of amnesia. She's taken into the care of a rich married couple, but their maid starts suffering Greta-based scares and tries to leave. Only, with a killer on the prowl, it's not that easy. Klaus Kinski gets high billing as a particularly sinister doctor, the sort of GP from whom "Please get undressed" will always sound like a threat. He's not in it long (the production couldn't afford him for long!) but he's pivotal to the plot, and it's cool when his actions make you realise that the apparent clumsy double-flashback at the start was in fact no such thing. There's lots of unrealistic but grisly gore, and while I often struggle to enjoy those cold, quiet 19th century settings, Death Smiles at Murder eventually penetrated its thick castle walls and had me smiling at it.

TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL (Canada/USA/India/UK 2010 / Eli Craig)
***
A one-joke slasher spoof in which the usual group of pot-smoking, beer-guzzling college kids go camping in the woods and get spooked by a pair of hillbillies who live in a run-down cabin, not unreasonably given that one of them, Dale, looks like Buddy Bacon from Slaughterhouse. The thing is, Dale is charming and harmless, while his best friend is short-tempered but certainly no killer. But they just keep getting into situations where it looks as though they've been slaughtering the kids who, in fact, just keep having fatal accidents! This does eventually start becoming quite funny, as the body count mounts in a ludicrous way, and jokes that were set up earlier finally pay off, but the first half is a tiresome yomp through the kind of campsite slasher clichés that have been beyond parody for decades now, and the Instagrammy "vintage" filtered photography adds nothing: that's not how 1980s slashers ever looked, guys! Also, there's too much hugging-and-learning for my tastes, but it is nonetheless a fun and undemanding watch, thanks largely to Canadian comedian Tyler Labine's adorable performance as Dale.

EXTRASENSORIAL [aka The Link] (West Germany 1982 / Alberto de Martino)
***
A multi award-winning actor he might be, but Michael Moriarty is so boring in this movie as American doctor Craig, delivering all his lines in an airy monotone, that it's very difficult at first to get excited about the plot. But he also plays Craig's Germany-based evil twin, Keith, and he's far more compelling in that role - chillingly sadistic, in fact. So suffer through those unpromising first 25 minutes, because once the action relocates to Europe, director Alberto de Martino starts to deliver a rather sleazy little thriller. The story begins when Craig starts seeing images of what Keith's up to, thousands of miles away. And what he's mainly up to is stabbing prostitutes, presumably in frustration at his impotence. In an effort to prevent any more crimes, Craig heads first to Hamburg, and then Berlin, where he eventually meets his brother, but instead of stopping his spree this only seems to result in more rapes, murders and gratuitous nudity, culminating in a horribly uncomfortable final confrontation between Craig's girlfriend and Keith, with the film ending on an impressively horrible, downbeat note.

TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION [aka Powers of Evil] (France/Italy 1968 / Roger Vadim/Louis Malle/Federico Fellini)
***
A trio of Edgar Allan Poe tales that go for atmosphere over story. In METZENGERSTEIN, a countess who loves orgies and animals (not at the same time) accidentally has her mysterious cousin killed, and then develops an unusually close bond with the horse that survived the fatal fire. Director Roger Vadim, star Jane Fonda and, crucially, costume designer Jacques Fonteray ensure that this is a good-looking medieval companion piece to Barbarella, but the thin plot goes nowhere. Louis Malle's WILLIAM WILSON features Brigitte Bardot being flogged (if that's of any interest to you), and a man whose guilty conscience takes the form of an annoying doppelganger, but feels dominated by an inordinately long and boring card game. Lastly, Fellini's TOBY DAMMIT has a booze-soaked famous English actor invited to Rome (his arrival, drenched in orange lighting, is wonderfully unsettling), only to find himself in a series of surreal situations populated by oddballs, dummies and cardboard cut-outs. It sags a bit in the middle but it's generally pretty good... much like this anthology as a whole.

SIE TÖTETE IN EKSTASE (She Killed in Ecstasy) (West Germany 1970 / Jesús Franco)
***
One of those occasional movies that prove Jesús Franco could be a good filmmaker when he put his mind to it, although even here you can tell when he's not feeling particularly inspired by a scene, because he reverts to his usual technique of zooming in on random bits of scenery. It's good scenery though, this German-language, German-funded film being shot for some reason in the seaside town of Calpe on Spain's Balearic coast. There, a medical researcher is struck off for his controversial experiments that use human embryo tissue, and following his suicide his wife takes revenge on the members of the panel that ruined him. This she does by seducing them one by one and killing them when they're at their most vulnerable. She doesn't have to get naked and give them that final thrill, of course, but this is sexploitation, she's the comely Soledad Miranda, and so that's what happens. The director appears as an additional victim, whose scenes feel like they were added later to extend what is still a modest running time. But even in a good Franco film, you don't expect perfection.

CANNIBAL (Germany 2006 / Marian Dora)
**
Although only inspired by the 2001 case of sexually-motivated killer Armin Meiwes, rather than an accurate reconstruction, Marian Dora's shot-on-video exploitation film sticks so closely to the basic facts that it's frustrating that we learn next to nothing about the instigator, who as per Meiwes, meets up with a series of men he's contacted online until he finds one who's suicidal and willing to be eaten. The only moment of real plot development or conflict comes when he discovers that it's surprisingly difficult to bite his volunteer's erect cock off, almost putting a premature halt to their plans. When he does eventually sever it, it's horribly realistic, and with the added icky detail of the victim pissing out of his stump with relief. That moment is given rousing music and even culminates with the sound of a champagne cork being popped, and heralds half an hour of graphic butchery which, unfortunately, becomes less interesting as it goes on. But Dora's a boundary-pusher, and is worthy of admiration for his commitment to gross-out gore and unpleasant bodily functions, even if his writing hampers this, his first feature.

A BIGGER SPLASH (Italy 2015 / Luca Guadagnino)
**
Ralph Fiennes is fantastically annoying as the over-exuberant, far-too-talkative dirty old man and record producer Harry in this Italian remake of 1969's La Piscine. He invites himself and his long-lost daughter to the Sicilian villa where his ex, world-famous singer Marianne is spending some time with her partner Paul while recovering from throat surgery. But Harry's none-too hidden agenda is to try and rekindle things with Marianne and steal her away from Paul. In the final half hour of this drama that runs an overlong two hours, a police investigation begins and ends, and I can't help feel that the story would've worked better with the investigation as a framing device for a series of flashbacks. As it is, we just get a predictable 90 minutes of various love triangles, punctuated by vaguely comedic incidents, followed by a too-short twisty-turny crime thriller with an ironic and politically nicely-judged conclusion. Tilda Swinton is brilliant as the hoarse Marianne (I'm not sure how it's even possible to put on a hoarse voice!), but then you wouldn't expect anything less from her.

BARNEY THOMSON [aka The Legend of Barney Thomson] (UK/Canada 2015 / Robert Carlyle)
****
You'd think that a comedy film with the acting talents of Robert Carlyle, Emma Thompson, Ashley Jensen, Ray Winstone and Tom Courtenay couldn't fail, but plenty of British movies have assembled similarly esteemed casts and nevertheless been weak. But Barney Thomson has a very funny script behind it, to give the stars a lot to sink their teeth into. Carlyle (who also directs with a nice eye for composition) plays the titular barber, who in a great build-him-up/knock-him-down gag at the start, is in his mind a legend because of his no-shit attitude to hairstyles, banter and professionalism: exactly the things that, it turns out, cause him to be continually demoted down the pecking order at work. When his boss dies in a suspicious accident, two rival cops - Winstone (as Winstoneish as ever) and Jensen (aggression levels permanently dialled up to 11) - try to figure out if Barney's connected to an ongoing serial killer case. It's a film marked out by hilarious Glaswegian verbal sparring, larger-than-life characters, severed body parts, and a slightly too silly climax that doesn't even really involve our hero. Should've been a big hit.