John Landis directs John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fisher in this musical comedy about two jailbird brothers trying to get their blues band back together to save an orphanage. 

Indulgent, meandering, excessive. Yet the music is great… numbers from Aretha, Ray Charles, James Brown, John Lee Hooker and Cab Calloway, all absolutely rock. The Blues Brothers performances themselves have a magic. So the comedy that coddles all this gold is hit and miss… when Belushi and Aykroyd actually have a funny set piece to work with you can see what might have been. “How much for the little girl?”

7

 

Bill Douglas directs Robin Soans, Keith Allen and Alex Norton in this epic recreation of the Tolpuddle martyrs story. 

A very beautiful, very patient and very pure movie. Douglas chooses a slow rhythm, a relaxed wave of almost painterly tableauxs, to allow the historical tragedy to unfold. He presents the social and economic situation where a family’s work is undervalued to unliveable prices. Where the hierarchy conspire together so that any discussion of wage increase is stunted, muted or retaliated to punitively. He presents the positive unifying of the men in the village to take non violent, non disruptive action to improve their plight. He lingers on their punishment (transportation to Australia) and eventual redemption. These recreations have the same visually seductive and period accurate detailing of any impressive literary adaptation you care to mention. But his visual style makes this world of less than two centuries ago seem strange and alien. A world without rights or welfare infrastructure feels prehistoric to modern viewers (and it is a world the Tories and Trump want to erode us back into one privatisation at a time). By the time we reach Australia we may as well be exploring a fantasy dream world. Yet the risk and consequences feel tangible, brutal even. It is not all darkness and didactic polemic though. The martyrs have a warmth and humour to them that holds our hand over their mistreatment. And Douglas follows Alex Norton through a series of roles from travelling magic lantern gypsy to early hermit photographer. Via this sidebar of cameos, the pair essay a mini history of the birth of cinema. Comrades is a complex and triumphant work, ripe for rediscovery as a modern classic. I probably would have missed out on it if it wasn’t for a trip with my family to The Tolpuddle Martyrs museum in Dorset occurring in close proximity with the Edinburgh Filmhouse showing it as part of their 40th anniversary retrospective. The shot of the doomed men arriving in good faith to negotiate a modest pay rise,  only to be offered to sit on a set of chairs they failed to secure a fair price on earlier still lingers with me over a month later.

9

Jon Turteltaub directs Jason Statham, Li Bingbing and Ruby Rose in this monster comedy about a dormant prehistoric shark released on the modern day ocean. 

Not quite as OTT wackado as it needs to be nor a gleefully terrible as it could have been. This delivers on what you expect from a Stath versus Shark movie made predominantly for the unsophisticated Chinese cinema going market. But equally doesn’t feature enough moments where our Jase calls the mega predator a toilet or dropkicks its teeth out. Mayhem ensues, just not enough to make this a cult experience.

5

Peyton Reed directs Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas in this sequel to the Marvel size shifting action comedy. 

So this is how uninspired an Ant-Man movie looks when they don’t have Edgar Wright’s pre-production storyboards to crib from. Could easily be three episodes of a 90s teatime sci-fi serial shown in sequence. Biggest sin of all, Paul Rudd feels lost in the mix. That man is built for stealing scenes and here he is supposed to be the star.

4

Brian Helgeland directs Mel Gibson, Gregg Henry and Maria Bello in this adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, a book where a low level crim is left for dead and takes on a syndicate to get what’s owed to him; $70,000.

The Hunter is one of the greatest crime thrillers ever published. Parker (or Porter as he’s called here) is the genre’s finest anti-hero. Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, Chow Yun-Fat and Jason Statham have all played successful variations of him. Hell, his DNA is in Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul’s Mike Ehrmantraut and Fargo the TV series’ Lorne Malvo. Career criminal, forward thinker and yet in the moment improviser, warped moral code, broken and beaten look hiding a steely focus and resolve to win. You can see what attracted Mel to the part at the height of his box office reign. He is great in the lead role. The nonchalance with which he delivers the line “Forgot my cigarettes” when returning to rescue Bello from a sticky situation is a thing of hard boiled beauty. And Payback is a very watchable Gibson vehicle. His crumpled smart suit, his bone crunching solutions to anyone who hinders him, his fatalist romantic streak – he is as gritty as unfixed asphalt. With its jazzy score keeping you up with the pace and bleach bypass colour scheme (it is a world of blues and greys like it stars eyes and hair are the defining palette), Payback should be a crime classic. But the tone is wobbly as fuck.There are too many broad comedy villians (Lucy Liu’s dominatrix triad being the key offender) and the reshoots to soften the end product are obvious. That silvery almost monochrome look is abandoned in later scenes, the archness of the dialogue vanishes. I’ve not yet seen the now available version of Payback that remains true to Helgeland’s original vision. In that version allegedly the dog dies, the head of the syndicate remains unseen, Gibson is brute to his treacherous wife. What we got served up at cinemas in 1999 is fun enough. Payback is the kinda movie whose errors become background flaws a few days after watching. The good stuff sticks in the long term memory, the concept is far stronger than the delivery. And Gibson all but in name revisited Parker / Porter in How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Will we get a third rough and tough adventure… fingers crossed.

7

Joe Alves directs Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong and Lea Thompson in this shark sequel where Cheif Brody’s grown up boys face down a great white at SeaWorld.

Bleakly rote and forgettable. Only the ropey 3D fx catch the eye, due to the visual joins being so glaringly obvious. Allegedly Quaid was coked up out of eyeballs making this. At least someone had fun. Avoids a 1 rating as it has Lea Thompson in a bikini for a few scenes. I’m only human.

2

 

Marc Abrahams directs Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen and Cherry Jones in this musical biopic of the Hank Williams story. 

He can’t sing, the accent is shaky, so making Hiddleston the undoctored voice of Hank Williams is hubris of the highest order. This gaping flaw aside… it is all just boring and turgid. The miserable prelude to death in particular is a cinematic fumble that derails a ride you were waiting to get off of far earlier. An excuse for bland superhero actors to dress up as authentic alcoholic paupers and stand on the shoulders of long passed true stars.

2

Mike Hodges directs Sam Jones, Melody Anderson and Max Von Sydow in this sci-fi rock opera where an American football hero takes down an intergalactic dictator threatening to destroy Earth. 

The sauciest space adventure my generation ever got warped by. Even the ink spill vortexes, penis shaped rocket ships and drifting backing tracks have the slow hump seductiveness of a kinky night in a themed hotel. All the sex slave imagery and barely concealed flesh passed me by as a child. Back then it was a more colourful (gold and crimson and primary neon dominate), more gung-ho, less hippy dippy Star Wars. I couldn’t see that this was less well crafted, just like Star Wars is less thrilling. That Queen soundtrack pumps you up and keep you stomping, that cast of British cult actors ham it up shamelessly. Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford both looked down on their biggest hit, whereas the Flash Gordon gang seem to be having the time of their life. The fantasy pantomime is infectious. You get ensnared by the camaraderie of the goodies, gripped by the ticking clock and cheer when an impaled baddie melts or dematerialises. There are iconic moments… Brian Blessed bellowing every line, Topol’s experimental montage brainwipe (one of the most daring cinematic sequences to be hidden in a kid’s blockbuster) and the BDSM execution of Flash. There are daft moments… the gridiron brawl in the throne room, the bland romance, Flash’s triumphant leap at the camera when they don’t know how to end it. But they do know how to end it. A cackling cliffhanger for a sequel that never came; see also Doc Savage and Masters of the Universe. Forget Marvel and Aquaman, this is one of the purest, greatest, unabashed comic book movies ever made. “Just a man, with a man’s courage.”

10

John Lemont directs Herbert Lom, Sean Connery and Alfred Marks in this early British gangster flick where the gangs of London decide to join forces to streamline their protection rackets. 

A bit too tame to really grip, this still fills an afternoon neatly. There’s some grit, some hard boiled romance, Connery proves why he got that Bond job (the suaveness and self awareness didn’t come with the 007 casting, it was already here) and there are some lovely shots of old Soho.

5

 

David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams direct Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty and Leslie Nielsen in this spoof of the disaster movie, packed with relentless gags. 

A fixture of my childhood… most of the jokes are so simple even an immature sense of humour can understand the mechanics behind them and they all come so thick and fast that a child is never bored. As an adult, nostalgic affection aside, it is a little too dumb. I chuckled and smiled a lot during my last few viewings but the magic was gone. The absence of belly laughs was felt. The Naked Gun still gets me… they sophisticated the formula a little more by that point. Maybe I’m dead inside. I remember Julie Hagerty’s voice being squeakier, the nonce pilot joke being more developed, Lloyd Bridge air traffic controller becoming more and more depraved. It is all still there just not quite as powerful as my memories convinced me it all was. My only fresh take home from this revisit was just how much Otto the Inflatable Autopilot looks like Jon Hamm when he is bemused in Mad Men.

7