Cult Films

In selecting the greatest high school movie of all time, there are a number of different 'schools' from which to choose. We have the light-hearted nostalgia of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off; the awkward indie spirit of Napoleon Dynamite and Grosse Point Blank; the adolescent gross-out of Porky's and American Pie; and the twisted one-upmanship of Carrie and Heathers.

But while all of these entries are valid and have their own merits (even Porky's), they cannot hold a candle to the overall winner: a film which combines earthy black comedy with artistic flights of fantasy, and savage satire of the establishment with personal quandaries about sex, servitude, romance and rebellion. And, as a bonus, it is the film which launched the career of Malcolm McDowell. The film is If...., the director is Lindsay Anderson, and the result is one of the greatest films of the 1960s.

If.... might seem an odd choice for the greatest ever high school film when we consider the kind of schooling on which it focuses. Set in the fictional College School deep in the conservative heartlands of 1960s England, it explores the kind of education and school system which the vast majority of us will never have to endure. It's the kind of school that would serve as an ideal backdrop for a story like Goodbye Mr. Chips or The Browning Version: while capable of producing fine drama, it doesn't smack of rebellion, let alone revolution.

Fortunately, If.... has both qualities in spades, and it captures all the essential elements of adolescence that have been replicated in often putrid detail by its American progeny. It manages to be aware of the intelligence and sophistication of public school while overtly and sarcastically mocking everything it stands for. The very title is an act of thinly-veiled defiance: If... is a famous poem by the staunchly patriotic Rudyard Kipling, with the extra '.' in the ellipsis being an impudent revision of the way of life it encapsulates. The final scenes in particular give new meaning to the poem's penultimate line: "Yours is the earth, and everything that's in it."

Like many films of the counter-cultural period, If.... depicts the relationship between the older and younger generations as being one of bitter opposition. The older generation, embodied by the masters, parents and prefects, are entrenched in the pre-war, imperial mindset with an emphasis on serving one's country and knowing one's place. The younger boys, including Mick Travis, feel no attachment to these values, regarding them as irrelevant, out-dated, stuffy and dull.

But while there is this broad divide in outlooks between the generations, there are instances of crossover on both sides. Some of the teachers harbour relatively subversive thoughts and attempt to convey them, such as Graham Crowden's history teacher who cycles right into the classroom and then proceeds to outline his own peculiar take on key historical events. The headmaster is less successful in this, calling Travis into his office and repeating the phrase "I understand" to a point of desperation.

Just as not all of the teachers are straightforwardly stuffy and backward, so not all the students in If.... are didactic flag-wavers. The students who rebel are not politically motivated like their counterparts in Zabriskie Point; in the words of the headmaster, "You're not rebels. That would be too easy." Travis may have posters of Lenin and Che Guevara on his wall, but his monologues are more concerned with the beauty of freedom, and the need to live a truly meaningful and joyous life even in the shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust. He rejects and flouts all forms of authority, despising the very essence of anything which inhibits him from free expression and the passionate act of being himself.

One aspect of free expression on which If.... focuses is sexual liberation. In one of the film's more surreal segments, Travis and one of his friends steal a motorbike and drive some distance to a roadside café. Once there, they order coffee, Travis plays some classical music on the jukebox and, without any notice or questions asked, begins an affair with the waitress. In other section, a young boy spots Wallace training on the parallel bars, and they develop a homoerotic relationship. Anderson may not be encouraging free love in the now-clichéd manner of hippie movies, but he uses these scenes to reinforce his point about needing a society shaped by the people, rather than the other way around.

If.... is Anderson's stand against the traditional values of England - everything from duty and propriety to the barmy traditions of private clubs. The film is part of his continued attempt to destroy the post-war malaise of British cinema, just as his political heroes had tried to destroy it through guns and social democracy. Throughout the film we see bastions of the community attempting to drill their students with values of 'honour', 'duty' and 'fighting the good fight', only for these ideas to crumble into absurdity and insignificance when applied.

Two examples perfectly illustrate this point. The first comes at the three-quarter mark, where the chaplain gives a sermon on fighting for Christ, and how desertion or failure to fulfil duty is the greatest and most unforgivable of sins. But less than ten minutes later, he is cornered by Malcolm McDowell during the war games and becomes a quivering coward, terrified by the prospect of there being real bullets in Travis' gun. At the end of the film a visiting General gives a speech about how "the cynics" have nothing to replace the old values which they criticise. But what starts as convincing soon descends into the absurd: he speaks about discipline, only for his public to stumble into the aisles in blind panic while the stage beneath him goes up in flames.

The film is built around the central performance of Malcolm McDowell, who is little short of magnificent. It's a very close rival for his work in A Clockwork Orange, which could be described as the more cynical cousin of this film. Stanley Kubrick and Lindsay Anderson may direct in totally different ways, but they both use McDowell superbly, utilising those huge, puppy-dog eyes, perfect hair, curled lips and upstart demeanour. And then there is the voice, which is note-perfect when delivering his poetic musings and savage put-downs to the uptight prefects.

There is a further comparison with Kubrick in the idea of discipline and degradation being used by the establishment in a manner which ultimately destroys it. The brutal scene of Travis being caned repeatedly in the gym is like an artier, moodier version of the boot camp scenes in Full Metal Jacket. Travis may not take on the psychotic quality of Private Pile, but his experience of brutality makes him more determined than ever to fight against the system and reclaim his identity.

The visuals of If.... are distinctive in their combination of colour and monochrome cinematography. When the film was first released, people read into the black-and-white sections as having some deeper artistic meaning, with a variety of theories being posited. In fact, these sections exist for the simple reason that Anderson ran out of money - or, as in the chapels scenes, it was quicker and easier to light for monochrome on a tight production schedule. Whichever is the more true, the film benefits from its unique look - it's a happy accident which reinforces the artistic and personal tone even if it doesn't bring much in the way of meaning.

If.... remains as incendiary and as perfectly formed as it was over 40 years ago. Anderson's masterful yet understated direction gifts us with a series of properly believable performances, and his balanced of the natural and the surreal is effortless, particularly in the final shootout. While the revolutionary zeal and optimism surrounding it have long since faded, the film remains both a truthful product of its time and a work of timeless genius. It is an extraordinary piece of British cinema and is essential viewing.

When John Landis was being interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live for his new book Monsters at the Movies, he commented that zombies have become the main monsters of the early-21st century. From the re-tooling of Down of the Dead and political, 'infected' movies like 28 Days Later, to spoofs like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, zombies have become the go-to monster for popular horror. Zombies are cheap to create, easy to direct, and can be overladen with all manner of social commentary, or played for all kinds of laughs.

With this in mind, you might think that Night of the Living Dead could not hold up to modern expectations of a zombie movie. George A. Romero's low-budget debut effort, shot entirely in black-and-white, is not as slick or grossly shocking as either its sequels or modern-day equivalents. What it is, however, is a really terrifying, deeply unnerving film, whose substance still rings true and whose scares still deliver even after 44 years.

It's very difficult for us to imagine the kind of outcry Romero's film created the first time round. When it was first released, it played in matinee screenings alongside classic Hollywood horror movies such as James Whale's Frankenstein and Val Newton's The Curse of the Cat-People. Because the MPAA rating system was not in place until a month after it arrived, there were reports of young children going to see a fun old-fashioned horror film and coming out completely traumatised. After much public outcry, with Variety calling it an "unrelieved orgy of sadism", the film was pulled from mainstream theatres, only to find a second, more devoted audience on the midnight movie circuit.

Looking at the film today, its terror derives from two completely different sources. One is the same kind of fear or shock that greeted audiences in 1968, namely the shock of seeing monsters that looked exactly like them, preying upon innocent people and eating human flesh. The other kind comes from the continuing political resonance, with its themes of racism, revolution and the Vietnam War still striking a chord in today's society.

Up to Night of the Living Dead, popular horror had by and large externalised or marginalised its monsters or enemies. The War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body-Snatchers used alien invasions as a double for communist infiltration, depicting the enemy as something that was totally un-human, something that had to be eradicated rather than understood. Whether they were tripods or pod people, the aliens were so clearly different to our heroic American protagonists that the films were never quite as scary as they could have been.

Romero's film incorporates many classic B-movie elements into its storyline. There is the hapless heroine, the expository radio broadcast, the phone lines being completely down and alien radiation being blamed for what is unfolding. But none of these elements are ever allowed to become the centrepiece, pushing the zombies into the background for the sake of pulpy fun. Romero is too good to let that happen, and instead uses the B-movie riffs as a comfort zone to provide relief from an enemy that is like us in every detail. His "blue collar" monsters come at us head-on, relentlessly questioning our perceptions about our fellow man.

One of the creepiest scenes in Night of the Living Dead, which reinforces this technique, comes in the very first scene. Johnny (Russell Streiner) attempts to wind up Barbara (Judith O'Dea) by playing on her childhood fear of ghosts: he jumps around, pulling hokey faces and hollering: "They're coming to get you, Barbara!". While they are larking around, we see a strange man shambling around in the background; because he looks exactly like them, we assume he's a passing stranger and take no notice. Then, out of nowhere, the stranger attacks Johnny and Barbara: he gets his head smashed in, she runs for cover, and the ordinary has become the terrifying.

The film is on one level a brilliant examination of racism. It tackles the stereotypes associated with black people in American society, showing the tension and prejudice among the characters in a far more effective way than mainstream efforts like In The Heat of the Night. The interactions between Ben (Duane Jones) and Harry (Karl Hardman) belie a continuing distrust between blacks and whites, resulting in the latter's betrayal of the former in favour of base self-interest.

Much of the racial politics of Night of the Living Dead are rooted in the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Both the novel and its 1964 adaptation The Last Man on Earth were big influences on Romero, and while Matheson dismissed the film as "cornball" he bore Romero no ill will. Running through all three works is the theme of protagonists realising their inferior position, letting the old ways pass and submitting to the new order. But while John Neville becomes philosophical about his impending execution, Ben has no such choice. In an appropriately shocking and subversive ending, he survives the zombie onslaught, only to be mistaken for a zombie and is shot in cold blood by a white police officer.

Romero described Night of the Living Dead as a film principally about revolution. The idea of the dead no longer being dead is a huge challenge to the preconceptions of the main characters, with Romero playing for scares what Landis played for laughs in An American Werewolf in London. Less frivolously, the zombies are characterised as an unstoppable wave, a counter-culture of death descending on, quite literally, the old way of life. The traditional family unit is destroyed, first by Barbara and Johnny being separated and then the young daughter becoming undead. The creepy scene of the child killing its mother reflects both the rise of the young generation and the erosion of family bonds in favour of pure greed.

Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a few years later, Night of the Living Dead also touches on the impact of the Vietnam War. In this interpretation the zombies become the brain-dead soldiers returning home in their droves, being unable to reintegrate into polite society to the point where normal citizens feel the need to isolate themselves entirely and ignore the problem. Alternatively, they are the embodiment of war guilt, representing all the 'gooks' on the consciences of American troops, refusing to go away and tormenting the Americans to the point where they literally lose their minds.

What makes Night of the Living Dead so effective as a horror movie is how invasive it is. By confining the action to a few rooms, Romero achieves a natural sense of claustrophobia which is exacerbated by the intimate and intrusive camerawork. The recurring images of hands clawing through the barricades are akin to the hallucinations in Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve imagines thousands of male hands reaching out along a corridor to grope her. In both films the threat is breaking in rather than exploding out; the threat is endemic and yet is being concentrated in a manner which becomes thrillingly unbearable.

The performances in Night of the Living Dead are the key to cementing the level of tension achieved by both camerawork and allegory. Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea improvised much of their dialogue, adding another layer of chilling realism to an already unsettling picture. Karl Hardman's character may be the loudest and brashest in the building, but his performance is one of subtle shifts and gestures which perfectly convey his cowardice and frustration. But it's not just the heroes who are well-fleshed out. The zombies seem to take on personalities of their own, with make-up supervisor Marilyn Eastman making the best of the low-budget effects on offer.

Night of the Living Dead remains a huge horror milestone and as cracking a debut feature as you could possibly hope for. While its dialogue is occasionally repetitive and its female characters are never properly fleshed out, its political and social significance remains writ large and it can still scare every bit as well as its gorier cousins. Romero's later zombie movies would push the boundaries of what could be shown on screen, but if pure and simple terror is what you're after, the original is still the best.

Nobody makes cult films like the British. From the chilling horror of The Wicker Man to the high-camp lunacy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Britain has produced more than its fair share of cinematic oddities which were just too much for the mainstream. And no film is more emblematic of this particular brand of oddness than The Bed-Sitting Room, a film which makes even The Man Who Fell to Earth feel disciplined and coherent.

The Bed-Sitting Room began as a one-act play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, who had collaborated in the later years of The Goon Show. After a successful run at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, it was extended into a full-length play and ran in London to critical acclaim throughout 1963. After a successful revival four years later, Richard Lester entered into discussions about making a film version.

Although Lester became successful through his work with The Beatles, his career had been kick-started by Milligan; their eleven-minute short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, was Oscar-nominated in 1960. As the decade wore on, Lester's output became more blackly comic in tone, particularly with the 'anti-anti-war' satire How I Won the War. Under these circumstances, The Bed-Sitting Room seemed the ideal project for the budding director.

The presence of Milligan, both as a co-writer and in a supporting role, does lend comparisons to The Goon Show. Aside from its surreal, absurdist humour and madcap cast of characters, the plot is similar to an episode called 'The Nadger Plague', in which Eccles and Neddie Seagoon end up being turned into a gas stove and clock respectively. But in fact, the film is closer to Milligan's later work on the Q series, being every bit as visually outrageous and every bit as inconsistent.

This inconsistency derives mainly from the fact that there is no 'restraining device' on Milligan's humour - there is nothing to stop him or the plot wandering off on some stream of manic energy. In The Goon Show, having an audience meant that there was a cut-off point for the humour, either by laughter or by the 30-minute time limit. Even though The Bed-Sitting Room barely makes it to 90 minutes, bits of it feel much longer because there is no natural brake on proceedings. The lines come so quickly and the jokes from so far out of left-field, that we are given far too little time to stop, laugh and take it all in.

On top of this, Lester is not the most accomplished director when it comes to narrative. Like Nicholas Roeg after him, his films often contain very odd experiments with colour; there is one whole section in which the screen is bathed in a mixture of red and green light, for no apparent reason. And like The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film gives very little clue as to the passage of time. In place of pace, we have long, lingering shots of the devastation of London, which in some way foreshadow the junkyard scenes in Superman III. The film has so many characters and stories running around and it really struggles to bring them altogether, even for a couple of scenes.

Just as The Goon Show often poked fun at the army, health service and labour exchange, so The Bed-Sitting Room is a comedy about various British institutions. The film takes place after a "nuclear misunderstanding" which led to the shortest war in history - "two minutes, 28 seconds, including the signing of the peace treaty." All the institutions that made up mass society (the army, the postal service, the NHS and the church) are now being run by lone survivors. The film begins with a BBC newsreader moving from one abode to another, reading the last recorded bulletin before the bombs fell.

When questioned about the film's meaning, Milligan said it was a story of how, after the dust had settled, man would simply rebuild society and carry on as if nothing happened. Though it's a cliché, the film embodies the British spirit of 'keep calm and carry on'. One of the characters actually offers "we're British" as an explanation when asked why the survivors are carrying on, trying to live their lives as if nothing happened. Nobody ever talks about the bomb specifically, and the main advice of the police is just to "keep moving", never mind where to.

By having characters carrying on as if nothing had changed, The Bed-Sitting Room is making two very different points. Firstly, it demonstrates how impersonal most social institutions are: without masses of people working as cogs in the machine, they are little more than empty shells. It makes no sense to have the whole National Grid being powered by a man on a bicycle. Neither is it common sense to crown the Queen's tea lady as ruler of the British Empire. The Bed-Sitting Room is absurdist both in premise and in purpose: it is absurd to cling on to the past and the familiar when the world has so irrevocably changed.

But if the film attacks institutions, it is a lot kinder to the characters that inhabit them. Out of the myriad plot threads and episodic bouts of nonsense, there emerges a central story about a pregnant woman and her lover; in the manner of Children of Men, she is effectively carrying the future of humanity. The second message of the film is that even in the midst of all this chaos and clinging futilely to the past, there is some kind of hope for the future. The film ends with a parody of the second coming, as Roy Kinnear warns people to repent and Peter Cook descends from the sky and tells the survivors that everything will be alright.

Although The Bed-Sitting Room is designed to be a comedy, you won't spend an awful lot of time laughing. The film is not a failure because of that, since there are a great many comedies which don't provoke outright hilarity. You'd be hard-pressed, for instance, to find anyone who laughed during the montage of atomic explosions at the end of Dr. Strangelove. A number of moments will raise a chuckle, like Harold Wilson agreeing the rent of 10 Downing St. with Mao Zedong, or the scenes of Marty Feldman's mad nurse screaming down a zip wire and crashing into a tree. But the primary response to the film will be a mixture of sadness and bewilderment.

There is a huge vein of Beckett-esque pathos surrounding these characters - the play was once described as "Waiting for Godot with better jokes". Two characters in the film end up mutating into inanimate objects; Lord Fortnum becomes the bed-sitting room, and Mother becomes a wardrobe. A third character, played by Arthur Lowe, ends up as a parrot which is eaten for dinner. When these characters 'speak' in echoed sentences, it is like hearing the ghosts of the past - the people who inhabited this world and these rooms, both of which are now seemingly useless.

There is, equally, a copious amount of scenes which cause you to stare at the screen in total bafflement. Take Harry Secombe's character, who lives underground, staring at old film stock and ranting about 'Haig the butcher'. In one very odd scene, he asks Mother to be his wife, because a cut-out on the wall cannot satisfy him. Instead of a bawdy sex scene, she then starts throwing crockery at Secombe, who tries to explain that he wasn't having an affair. Such oddness is textbook Milligan, but it comes so far out of nowhere that we fail to understand its relevance, either in that moment or in the story as a whole.

The Bed-Sitting Room is a really ramshackle concoction and a bona fide cult film. It is absolutely a product of its time, and a classic example of a film which simply cannot be re-made. It's not as consistently funny as either The Goon Show or Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it does require an awful lot of patience. But there is some joy to be had both from its message and from watching an all-star cast of British eccentrics clearly having a ball. Recommend viewing for all who seek to be baffled.

Picking Stanley Kubrick's greatest film is like trying to choose between a series of perfectly formed diamonds. Every time you revisit one of his films, in whichever order and context, you gravitate towards that offering as a masterpiece - only to change your mind having seen the next one. Such is the master's skill in almost every genre that it is hard to pick one which either epitomises said skill or accurately represents his oeuvre.

But when push comes to shove for this reviewer, it isn't such a tough decision. For all the undeniable brilliance of Dr. Strangelove or Full Metal Jacket, the out-and-out winner is A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel is unparalleled in its time and ours, as a literary adaptation and in science fiction. It's been called everything from the first punk movie (Steven Spielberg) to right-wing propaganda (Roger Ebert), and is still as shocking, disturbing and satirically sharp as it was more than 40 years ago. Above all, it's a masterpiece of storytelling, substance and pure filmmaking, with Kubrick at the very peak of his powers.

If asked to sum up A Clockwork Orange in one word, the only one that would suffice is mesmerising. Watching Kubrick's film is a truly hypnotic experience: from the first haunting chord in the opening titles, we are pulled into the film as if in a trance, forgetting about any world that may exist outside of it. The first shot of Malcolm McDowell, staring at us with his head slightly down, is akin to that of a hypnotist as he sends his patient into a state of complete submission. Once under Kubrick's spell, it is physically impossible to look away.

The first key ingredient to this mesmerism is the soundtrack. Written by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos, who worked with Kubrick again on The Shining, it blends classical and electronic music to stunning effect. The dark, haunting synthesisers at the beginning serve as a murky counterpoint to the jolly and uplifting renditions of Beethoven, both in traditional orchestral recordings and the jazzy re-workings on harpsichord. The score riffs ironically on various military themes, which works particularly well during the Ludovico sequences.

Much like Blade Runner more than a decade later, the visual world of A Clockwork Orange is conceived as the future that might result if certain aspects of our present are extrapolated. With Ridley Scott's film, it is the threat of overpopulation, the environmental problems that result, the intensification of social hierarchies and the loss of humanity in a world dominated by machines. With Kubrick, it is the alienation of youth, the dehumanisation of mankind, and most chillingly the acceptance of the latter as a form of punishment or control.

Like all great dystopian science fiction, what matters is not the surface resemblance, but the reflection of underlying moral and social problems. It doesn't matter that young thugs now wear tracksuits and Burberry rather than jockstraps and bowler hats, just as Blade Runner isn't rendered irrelevant by the current absence of flying cars. The moral questions raised in this film are still controversial, and our society is no more enlightened or mature in its conceptions of justice, freedom or possible punishments.

While Kubrick's films have always been open to multiple interpretations, there are three general perspectives on A Clockwork Orange. The first sees it as a conservative work about youth, rebellion and the counter-culture. The film is either a reaction to the empowerment of young people, depicting them in entirely negative ways, or a call to arms of said young people which is darker, edgier and nastier than its hippie predecessors. Both views accuse the film of glorifying violence, with Roger Ebert calling it "a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning". Whatever the knee-jerk appeal of this view, it is, like Ebert, well wide of the mark.

The second interpretation, which carries more weight, sees the film is a warning against state power, and how the use of reconditioning can undermine individual freedom to such a point that the whole notion becomes irrelevant. The prominence of socialist architecture in the film, such as concrete tunnels and high-rise flats, indicate a society emerging from failed social engineering, with a rise in "the old ultra-violence" being part of the fallout. This theory is consolidated in the use of nadsat, the slang language invented by Burgess which is a mixture of English and Russian, which in turn gives the film an even more unique and timeless feel.

Throughout his career Kubrick was fascinated by the social and political mechanisms which conspired to dehumanise and imprison individuals. Dr. Strangelove explored the absurdity of Mutually Assured Destruction, in which nuclear deterrents put at greater risk the very people they were designed to protect. In Full Metal Jacket he explored the techniques by which humans are turned into killing machines, and how said machines can so often turn on their masters. A Clockwork Orange is the most subversive of these examinations, using a guilty, twisted and depraved protagonist to reinforce the importance of choice and free will.

Having undergone the Ludovico Technique, Alex becomes the clockwork orange of Burgess' title: fleshy on the outside, but fatally mechanical on the inside. He is incapable of crime, but also incapable of other human actions such as self-defence and appreciation of music. In order to prevent him from threatening society, the state have destroyed Alex's self. He contemplates suicide for the simple reason that he cannot choose whether to be good or bad.

This brings us on the third and most radical interpretation. Where both the previous views argue over which party is the moral one, this school holds that morality has nothing to do with it. In this relativistic, almost Foucauldian interpretation, all the relationships within the film are expressions of power, in which notions of right and wrong are invoked only to show who holds power over whom. The prison service, the Catholic priests, the doctors and Alex's droogs are all but sources of discourse, wrestling endlessly for the right to set the rules.

The force which Alex exerts (beating up gangs and beggars) is counterpointed by the mental and psychological forces exerted on him, from being spat on in custody to near-drowning by his former droogs. Kubrick went on record as saying that the Minister and the radical writer differ "only in their dogma", with both wanting to exert power over Alex and through him control the opinions and actions of the public. The film explores how certain human acts, such as sex, have incurred double standards in favour of the rich and intellectual. Where Alex's conception of sex as "a bit of the old in-out" is criminalised, the powers-that-be have no problem with doctors having it off in hospital, or the cat-lady's phallic sculptures.

Whichever interpretation one leans towards, there is no denying A Clockwork Orange's power as a black comedy. The 'Singing In The Rain' sequence is perfectly executed, so that it shocks the first time round but then draws you in on the joke. Whether it's Alex's deranged social worker, the fraught dinner table talk with Patrick Magee, or Alex's ramblings in the hospital, it is damned impossible not to erupt into laughter. But like Dr. Strangelove, it is laughter laced with fear and deep discomfort, lest any part of what we see become reality.

It is equally impossible to talk about A Clockwork Orange without mentioning Malcolm McDowell. Having excelled in Lindsay Anderson's If...., he was the natural choice for the part, and even without his immense reputation he is simply perfect for every second he is on screen. His snarling, boyish looks, precocious posture and fabulous voice are all immaculate, and once you have seen him in that iconic costume, no-one else can ever carry it off.

Kubrick's direction in A Clockwork Orange is superb, both in its technical invention and its brilliant storytelling. He was often accused of being cold and clinical, being more interested in ideas than the human beings who embodied them. But so many of the film's high points are moments where the technical skill combines with deep connections to humanity. A good example comes in the lakeside scene, where Alex beats up his droogs in slow motion. This, coupled with dolly shots and close-ups, exaggerates the expressions of the characters and pulls you right into their pain, anguish and triumph.

A Clockwork Orange is the greatest film of the 1970s and the high point of Kubrick's career. It mesmerises from start to finish, flooding us with style and substance, and reinventing science fiction as it goes along. Malcolm McDowell is nothing short of stunning in the lead role, and the film is a good example of star and director working in harmony at the top of the respective games. In the end it is impossible to summarise all its glories in such a short space. Suffice to say, it ranks only behind Blade Runner as the greatest film of all time.

So many of the films we now regard as classics were severely misunderstood when first released. Blade Runner received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office, with critics saying it was visually arresting but insubstantial (snigger). The Shawshank Redemption sank without a trace at the cinemas and was snubbed at the Oscars (but what do they know?). Both films have, through subsequent rehabilitation (and with Blade Runner, substantial revision), become recognised as the towering achievements they are.

In the same way, Get Carter was once lambasted as soulless, misogynistic garbage. Even fans of the film, like the American critic Pauline Kael, commented on the sense of moral emptiness at the heart of it. But nearly forty years on, Get Carter has survived the vitriol of critics (and a really rubbish remake) to take its place as one of the greatest British crime films of all time.

Get Carter is part of the 'Unholy Quadrilogy' of films released in 1971 which changed the landscape of what was acceptable on screen. The groundwork had been laid by the likes of The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy, but it was these films which truly blew away the rose-tinted looks of the late-1960s. The French Connection, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange took audiences in the dark underbellies of British and American society, showing sides to these countries which had been swept under the carpet in the age of peace and love.

Get Carter is a happy meeting point between these three films, taking the British setting and violent sexuality of A Clockwork Orange, the vigilante edge of Straw Dogs and the crime thriller aspects of The French Connection. It is a rough, edgy and endlessly tense film which manages to get beyond both its exploitation roots and the pulpy nature of its source novel, producing both a really solid crime film and a biting attack on British society.

The film begins very slowly, with the introduction of Jack Carter in a brief scene before he travels from London to Newcastle to attend the funeral of his brother Frank. This opening is the weakest part of the film, and in reality most of it could have been cut. We don't really need to establish Brit Ekland's character in any great depth; not only is she largely incidental, but the graphic phone call between her and Carter paints a vivid enough picture of their relationship. In any case, Carter's reason for heading north, along with the antagonism between him and the other gangs, is clearly established throughout the first half hour.

Roy Budd's jazzy soundtrack underscores the film, but after watching it a few times you realise that there is really very little incidental music. The thing which is making the biggest noise on screen is not the cars, or the guns, or the boats: it's the landscape. The images of Newcastle and Gateshead which Mike Hodges puts on screen speak volumes about the state of urban Britain -- not just the poverty but the sense of standardised despair and awkward silence which permeates through these communities. Early on we see the funeral cars driving down the cobbled street meeting every house - row upon row of faded brick, fading into the smoky distance like a dream slowly dying of old age. Throughout key sections of the film the only noise on the soundtrack is a hollow breeze, which adds a sense of starkness which threatens to shred ones nerves at any minute.

The film is brilliantly anchored by Michael Caine, who gives his finest performance as the ruthless Jack Carter. In a huge departure from his light-hearted 1960s work, Caine builds on his typical understatement and uses it as the driving force for uncontainable. terror. Carter is someone who is brutal, callous, sexist and rude, and yet charming, quick-witted and immensely cool. The sight of Caine in that black trench-coat, carrying a shotgun and a whisky bottle, is an iconic symbol of British criminals; like the Krays, Carter is hard as nails when he needs to be, but also understands the power and place of both family and dignity.

What makes Caine's performance and the character so remarkable is that Carter is never played as a straight-out heavy or meat-headed psychopath. It makes sense considering that he only finds out his brother's true fate during the last third of the film; while his methods have been forthright, if not shocking, they are not necessarily motivated by blood lust. When he does tip over the edge, he does so both out of a desire to avenge his brother and -- just as importantly -- to protect those whom he loves.

Despite its graphic sexual content, which seems gratuitous on first viewing, Get Carter is an oddly moral film. It is not moral because it suggests that what Carter is doing is 'right'; while it is established that what Eric did to Frank was 'wrong', it does not necessarily follow that vengeance will right that wrong. The ending is perfect because it encapsulates the ultimate futility of vengeance, and by extension love -- in the very moment when he thinks that he and his family will be safe, Carter's happiness is taken from him by as cruel and cold a method at that by which he lived.

Instead, the morality of Get Carter lies in its simultaneous documentation and criticism of society, particularly with regard to sex. Nearly all the female characters who appear on screen are either topless or in short skirts for any length of time, but with the possible exception of Ekland, these scenes are not there for our titillation. Instead they are on screen to make a point about how degraded and corrupted society has become, from the exaggerated fashions of ordinary women to Kinnear's den of vice at his country home.

Carter undergoes a kind of transformation late in the film, rejecting casual sex and the lifestyle which goes with it. Up until seeing the porn film, he has bedded women willy-nilly; but after seeing Doreen being exploited, he openly weeps and singularly resolves to take out the culprits. The fact that he chooses to ring the police and send the film to the vice squad before he kills Eric is a clear sign that the character has undergone some kind of moral shift. It doesn't make Eric's murder any easier to condone, but it does demonstrate the film's commitment to its subject matter.

Get Carter is also surprisingly twisty for a low-budget thriller. With so many different characters and named being batted around, we have to keep our eye on the ball if we are to follow every turn and understand every development. The dialogue in which key plot details are revealed is well-crafted, so that it doesn't just feel like exposition. The best scenes from this point of view are Carter interrogating Thorpey, the conversation on the top of the car park, and the fantastic final encounter between Carter and Eric on the beach.

Aside from its slow opening act and occasional moments of gratuity, Get Carter is a near-as-damnit perfect film. Caine's sterling performance is flanked by a cast of great supporting ones, the highlights being a young Alun Armstrong and a caddish John Osborne (whose seminal play Look Back in Anger hangs over whole sections of the film). The dialogue is perfectly pitched, the direction is strong, and the tension is brilliantly sustained right up to the final minute. It's a crackling crime thriller packed with subtle social commentary, and it deserves its ever-growing reputation.

Every so often a film's image in popular culture is defined by a moment completely out of character with the film as a whole. One could argue that this is true for the ending of The Wicker Man, or the lengthy fight sequence in They Live. But there can be no better example of this than Deliverance, whose five minutes of light-hearted duelling banjos masks a gruelling, harrowing and edgy thriller that will haunt you for days on end.

In another director's hands, James Dickey's novel about four wannabe "city boy" adventurers could have ended up as a very simple, nuts-and-bolts exploitation film: a clash of civilised and savages, townies versus hicks, and the last man standing wins. But in what remains his best film, John Boorman manages to take this limited narrative and turn it into both a frightening voyage of discovery and one of the best environmental films ever made.

Deliverance draws on a recurring theme in Boorman's work of man versus nature, or more precisely the unquantifiable power of the natural world compared to the humans who attempt to dominate it. In his later career, Boorman would make these kinds of points a lot more heavy-handedly: the sheer quantity of tree-hugging in The Emerald Forest makes Terrence Malick look like a gun-toting industrialist. Here, however, there is a very good balance between the film's political message and the drama of the characters through which such a message is communicated.

As the film begins, we are introduced to our four modern men - modern in the sense that they live over and above the landscape and are imposing their authority on it even by the act of going on the river. The local hicks warn the men that what they are doing is stupid, but they dismiss such comments as superstitious crazy talk and stick rigidly to their plans. The car journey to the river is intercut with scenes of bulldozers ferrying rock from a quarry and huge cliff walls being dynamited, as if every action of Man against his habitat is one of exploitation or destruction. They even invoke the great explorers of old having just safely barrelled through the rapids.

But although these men come from the same stock, we are slowly but surely introduced to little fissures in the group. Burt Reynolds' character seems to be more 'at one with nature' than the others, and feels genuinely sorry that the river will be flooded while the others are just there for the fun. Dru, played by Ronny Cox, is the most naïve and childlike of the four, bringing his guitar everywhere and spending the opening act riding through rapids with no life jacket and a beaming grin. Ned Beatty is overly cautious, being the most out of shape and reluctant to be ordered around, and Jon Voight has some pretentions towards being like Reynolds but is ultimately out of his depth; he carries a bow, but gets the shakes whenever he tries to use it.

Aside from a direct warning against exploiting one's surroundings, there is a more subtle thread in Deliverance about the character of modern Man and how He is more or less incapable of returning to 'the old way of life'. All four men, even Reynolds, are at heart white-collar workers, who feel at home in their busy offices with paper and coffee, or in their large homes with loving wives. Their affection for nature is entirely playful, since none of them would choose to give up what they have to live like a hunter-gatherer. They enjoy pretending to be wild when in fact they are nothing of the sort, and as long as their journey is filled with beauty and adrenaline, their experience of 'nature' fits in with their worldview.

But, as the darker, less merciful side of nature begins to rear its ugly head, these men quickly become overwhelmed by their surroundings, and we understand just how little they really know. If Reynolds et al are an expression of Man's desire for dominance of nature, mitigated by a faux fondness of its beauty, then the hicks or in-breds are a manifestation of nature itself: uncompromising, ruthless, set in its ways and not so much of a pushover. The crucial mistake of the gang is not being among nature of itself: their mistake is assuming that they are in control.

The famous rape scene, in which Ned Beatty is made to "squeal like a pig", is an ironic role reversal based upon one of the film's opening lines. Over some long aerial shots of the river, Reynolds remarks that in building the dam, people are "raping" the river and the surrounding countryside - and here we have nature raping man, not in self-defence or out of vindictiveness, but because that's the way it has always been. Boorman shoots these sequences very sensitively; his camera does not revel in Beatty's humiliation, with a clever combination of wide shots and close-ups on his face doing more than enough to terrify us.

Had Boorman not set up the themes of the story, and brought them out of the woodwork so accessibly (no pun intended), scenes like this would appear gratuitous or exploitative. But just like the ending of The Wicker Man, the brutality of Deliverance is justified because it vividly conveys the themes and ideas of the film. Scenes like this demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, visceral, gut-wrenching horror can say as much about a subject as a dozen boring conversations. As with The Wicker Man or Alien after it, the violence in Deliverance instinctively shocks but remains with you until its symbolic significance becomes clear.

Those who are unconvinced by this need only look at a scene just before the rape sequence, in which Jon Voight is crouched behind a tree trying to shoot a deer. There is nothing tense or threatening about his situation, save for the small matter of finding breakfast. But even so, he hesitates, his hand shudders and the arrow flies off into the trees causing the deer to flee. The set-up is the same as before: Man assumes he is in control, attempts to enact that control, and finds that he can't.

Deliverance is also a very well-directed piece of work and a lesson in great low-budget filmmaking. Although the film looks rough and ready in places, it also has a great drained-out beauty to it. This is achieved through Vilmos Zsigmund's trademark use of 'pre-fogging', in which the celluloid is partially exposed before shooting to create a muted colour palette. Because the budget was so low (around $2m), all the stunts are real, right down to Ronny Cox tumbling head-first into the rapids. Boorman's camerawork is inventive and precise, following the men above and below the water as they struggle to the surface and fight for breath.

Deliverance is also notable for its limited use of music. Aside from its duelling banjos at the start, there isn't really any soundtrack to speak of. The film is comparable with Get Carter, which introduces its jazzy theme in the opening minutes and then fleetingly revisits it at key moments to add tension or terror. The little banjo touches as the survivors float around the river are few and far between, and every time they pop up our eyes dart frantically to the trees, searching for further enemies who might spring out at any moment. Like any great Western, Deliverance knows how to use the stillness of the landscape to create tension, and its use of background noise like water rushing or birdsong will shred your nerves to breaking point.

Deliverance is a great film with exceptional performances from its cast: Voight is every bit as good as he was in Midnight Cowboy, and Reynolds has never better, carrying himself in several scenes like a young Marlon Brando. It also remains Boorman's best film, being more substantial than Point Blank or Hell in the Pacific but also much less indulgent than his later works. Like Get Carter it isn't quite flawless, as things take a while to get going and still feels rough around the edges. But that's a small price to pay for a top-notch thriller which is intensely terrifying and terrifyingly intense.

It's long been fashionable for film reviewers to slag off films for being sentimental. The problem is not so much the notion of sentimentality in and of itself, as the context and manner in which it is applied. Criticising Steven Spielberg for being sentimental is simultaneously apt and foolish - apt when it meddles with or cheapens a dark subject matter, as with Schindler's List, but foolish when it is complimentary and integral, as with E.T. or Close Encounters.

Silent Running's reputation has suffered from a similar stigma, namely that a grown-up science fiction film with serious thematic intentions cannot bow to something as feeble as human emotion. The clichéd view of 1970s science fiction, created by 2001 and cemented by Solaris, is one of a cold, clinical, existential world where any concession to audience emotion is strictly verboten. But while such an approach worked wonders for Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, Silent Running is still a damn fine film which proves that substance and sentimentality can go together.

Doug Trumball made Silent Running in direct response to the perceived coldness and clinical precision of 2001. Having created many of the special effects on Kubrick's film, including the iconic star-gate sequence, he sought to make a film about the future of humanity in which computers and apes were not the most human characters. Where Kubrick's films focussed on Mankind, Trumball wishes to look at people as individuals. And where Kubrick balanced Humanity's physical insignificance with its God-like potential, Trumball praises Man's capacity for compassion even in the face of insignificance, disinterest or despair.

If one was feel as cold and calculating as HAL, one could easily dismiss Silent Running as nothing more than 'hippies in space'. Being a product of the early-1970s, when America was experiencing the death throes of hippie culture, such connotations are to some extent inevitable. It is undoubtedly true that Bruce Dern's character conforms to popular, if cynical, stereotypes of hippies, from his loose-fitting clothing and drawling delivery to his obsession with nature which many (the crew included) would consider unhealthy.

One of the problems with Silent Running from this point of view is its questionable attitude towards mankind in the pursuit of pro-nature or 'hippie' ideals. The position towards technology is ambivalent; Dern yearns for a monastic existence where Man eats the fruits of His own labours, but it is ultimately the machines which sustain the forest. More problematic is the implication that preserving nature is more important than human life, to the point where murdering his crewmates appears to be justified. The film could be making the point that one has to go the hard yards in the name of one's principles, but it remains questionable whether in its content or its presentation.

But if we put this immediate concern to the back of our minds, Silent Running's ecological theme emerges as more than a simple choice between Nature and Man, or Man and Machine. It is more prominently a film about harmony, about how the march of progress has made humans overly dependent on technology. Technological progress, including the development of space travel, has increased the standard of living of the astronauts to such an extent that they take their resources for granted.

Dern's colleagues no longer care about the forest or the food they eat because they have been living in a world where their every want is met. They behave almost like spoilt children, spending their time racing around the cargo bay and joking around. Dern's position is similar to that of the 19th-century Arcadians like John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau, writers who warned against the increasing luxury and apathy brought on by mechanical progress. Dern is the Arcadian among the lackadaisical industrialists, still able to enjoy himself but ever watchful of the consequences of progress, and mindful of the alternative which could soon cease to exist.

When WALL-E was released three years ago, numerous critics compared the opening section to Silent Running. There is an obvious parallel in the role of robots tending to the Earth (or what is left of it), and in the loneliness of this occupation both practically and philosophically. Like WALL-E, Dern and his droids are going against the grain to do what they believe is right, and both have developed eccentricities through isolation which has caused them to deviate from their original 'programming'. With WALL-E, it is his bizarre passion for Hello Dolly!; with Dern, it is his desire to teach droids how to play poker.

Although WALL-E could not have existed without Silent Running, it remains the superior of the two films. Although one of the longer PIXAR efforts, it feels tightly structured and well-paced, while there are long sections of Silent Running which feel superfluous or needlessly slow. This may be down to the involvement of Michael Cimino at a script level; his first writing credit in Hollywood contains the same flaws in pace and emphasis which would scupper him as a director. The poker scene, for instance, feels like it shouldn't be there, or at least like it should be a lot shorter.

Parts of Silent Running have also dated quite badly. Peter Schickele's soundtrack has stood the test of time rather well, but Joan Baez' warblings are a distinctly Marmite experience. Some of the dialogue is preachy, with Dern going over many of the same arguments to the point of exhaustion. But to be fair, it is very difficult to sustain a story with a limited number of locations and characters without the luxury of extended dream sequences (Solaris) or multiple versions of the characters (Moon). Trumball may be no Kubrick, but all in all he has done a reasonable job.

One aspect which hasn't dated, however, is the special effects. When Trumball was interviewed recently for the Blu-Ray release, he commented that organic, miniature or optical effects date better than CG visuals because they are more "photo-realistically impressive", i.e. have weight and tactility. The external shots of the Valley Forge are shot from the correct perspective so that we aren't conscious of them being model shots, and the explosions look and feel both realistic and custom-built.

The most illuminating special effect, however, is the three drones which Dern uses to tend to the forests after commandeering the Valley Forge. The drones, inspired by characters in Tod Browning's Freaks, were created by double amputees walking on their hands. This and the facial structures of the drones create a human-like movement which we can recognise and use as a starting point for empathy.

What makes Silent Running remarkable, and ultimately successful, is the strength of its emotional pull. The tactility of the special effects, the honesty of the script and the tender nature of the final act has the same effect that the ending of E. T. does; you feel as though you have earned the right to blub your eyes out because of how well the characters have been formed and how much you have enjoyed their company. Much like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the emotional weight of the characters allows us to overlook or forgive any narrative shortcomings and enjoy having our hearts broken.

Silent Running remains an underrated and underappreciated science fiction film. It's not without its flaws, whether narrative or otherwise, and it has to take a back seat to 2001 both in ambition and in execution. But what it lacks in awe and spectacle it makes up for in heartache, coupled with a good-natured and welcome intelligence. WALL-E may have since surpassed it, but it remains compelling viewing.

It's very difficult to look at Don't Look Now without being aware either of its reputation or of its influence. Whether in the opening movement of Anticrhist, Peters' death in Event Horizon, or the girl in red in Schindler's List, it's hard to think of a horror film involving children which does not owe at least something to the work of Nicolas Roeg. That does not mean, however, that the film is a masterpiece; indeed there are many things which prevent it from being even close to perfect. But much like its counterpart The Wicker Man -- which was released with it as a double feature -- the imperfections running through the film add to its impact, creating a viewing experience which is flawed but deeply affecting.

Don't Look Now is a film about grief, about how love and loss can affect our perception of reality, to the extent that time seems to run out of order and the mere sight of a colour can send one's memory into overdrive. It's a film in which the most rational and sceptical character ends up being the most impulsive and erratic, in which the role and intentions of the spirit world are called into question, and in which much of what transpires remains partially or wholly unexplained. The film is a bizarre mix of horror and crime thriller in the giallo tradition, and is anchored by a central romance which ends up collapsing under their combined strength and weight.

Roeg began his career as a cinematographer, and his roots seep through into the direction of Don't Look Now. This means on the one hand that we get stunning visuals, with beautiful colours and some really interesting compositions which present everyday encounters in a different light. However, this also means that Roeg gets bogged down in composition when he should be moving the plot forward. Often he seems more interested in creating interesting shots than in telling the story, as seen by his persistent use of mirror shots and unnecessary multiple camera angles which muddle the simpler scenes. We don't need the camera cutting up and down over Julie Christie when she's breaking down in the toilet; her emotion and the sisters' dialogue is already enough to disorientate us, if indeed that was their intention. This jumpy approach makes the first half in particular feel slower and more languid than it needs to be.

Another problem is that the secondary characters around the central relationship are very underdeveloped. We get the two sisters just fine, but the bishop, the chief of police and the hotel manager pop up from time to time without any real deepening of their characters. This may have been deliberate on the part of Roeg, insofar as the lack of empathy we have for these characters keeps us focussed on the search for the girl. Certainly one of the film's central themes is that of paranoia, of seeing people for a fleeting moment and not being sure whether to trust them. In the later parts of the film, once Mrs. Baxter has left Venice, this works absolutely fine, but otherwise it's just more head-scratching which actually take our eyes off the main story.

Eventually, after much head-scratching and hand-wringing, the film does finally shift into top gear and produce genuine nail-biting tension. You stop feeling as if you should be focussing on the people in the background and actually start doing it of your own accord; you get inside the mind of John Baxter and you keep looking warily for people wearing red in the crowds. As more bodies are dragged out of the Venice canals, and the murder aspect of the story becomes steadily more prominent, you do get the sense of genuine terror as all the different aspects and ideas combine. The last 15 minutes are fantastically tense, and the death of John Baxter is a real nerve-shredding, heart-in-mouth experience. But even as you sit there, heart-in-mouth, you can't help wishing that the rest of the film had been this tense.

In all the years since the film's release, two sequences have caused greater controversy than any other. One is the love scene, in which Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland make intimate love in their hotel room, intercut with them getting dressed for dinner afterwards. The intercutting is a clever touch by Roeg. Initially it prevents the scene from being gratuitous; regardless of whether or not the actors actually had sex, there are clearly two people on screen who are doing this because they love each other, not for our pleasure.

More than that though, it gives the audience a means to unlock the film's peculiar relationship with time. We are presented with a series of images which do not make sense when accepted in their existing order. We have to see what happens when and think about what we see, rather than just allow ourselves to be titillated. It's as if Roeg is offering us this scene as a trial run for the rest of the film; if we can handle time jumping around during something pleasant, we'll be able to make sense of it when things turn nasty.

The other sequence is the death of John Baxter at the hands of the serial killer. After chasing a small figure in a red coat through the back streets of Venice, Sutherland winds up in a church and finds the figure crying in a corner. He asks her to turn around, only to find it is not his daughter but a dwarf, who promptly cuts his neck open with a knife. On paper, this revelation could come as an anticlimax, but once again its double meanings prevent it from seeming this way on screen.

Once again, the scene is a reference to the confusion between past, present and future; only in the moment before he is killed does Sutherland recognise the figure from the photograph at the beginning of the film. The rapid montage of images which follows represents his life flashing before his eyes, with everything only making sense when it is too late. It is also a chilling warning about the power of grief and the extent to which it can destroy someone's life. Baxter projects his grief onto this figure so that whoever is in that coat becomes his daughter, and whatever 'his daughter' does to him is the judgement on whether he was right to do so. Christie's character survives becomes she works to make peace with her daughter, atoning for the loss so she may care for those still living. Sutherland fails to deal with his grief until it consumes him, abandoning the living and leaving him dead inside, even before we realise it is the killer.

Don't Look Now is a deeply affecting film, at turns creepy, uncompromising, thought-provoking and strange. It is also deeply flawed, both in its initial pace and in aspects of its direction. It doesn't have the same narrative discipline as Roeg's later films like The Man Who Fell To Earth, and as a Du Maurier adaptation, it has to take second fiddle to both Rebecca and The Birds. There are times when Roeg's visuals overwhelm the story and threaten to overwhelm the themes. But there is more than enough of both to make watching it a memorable and ultimately rewarding experience. The Wicker Man remains the superior film, but this is still well worth a look.

Beneath the glittering skin of their acclaim, many of our most celebrated films have a dark underbelly, a troubled history or strange aura surrounding them which may explain or undermine their status. Sometimes such knowledge can render a film like Smaug the Dragon: spectacular and threatening at first glance, but ultimately vulnerable to attack. But with The Wicker Man, these tall tales and strange stories are just the clues we need in attempting to discover which makes this film so great.

Any film which gets branded "the Citizen Kane of horror movies" has an awful lot to live up to. Quite apart from the blinding hyperbole in this statement, it's also an odd description considering that The Wicker Man for the most part isn't a horror movie at all. It has a loose connection with the giallo tradition of pulpy horror-thrillers, having been paired with Don't Look Now when first released. But The Wicker Man's visuals are much more downbeat and naturalistic, and the horror comes less from expression than from suggestion, cultivating a sense of creeping, shapeless dread which threatens to engulf everything.

At its heart, The Wicker Man is a mystery film, with some of the more introspective elements of film noir but very little of that genre's visual style. Its low-budget aesthetic and initial focus on police procedure mean that it could pass off as an extended episode of Z-Cars, and Edward Woodward's character is a classic old-fashioned copper in the mould of Dixon of Dock Green. He is a pillar of the community with entrenched moral values, quick to make his opinions known and never taking 'no' for an answer.

But the film to which The Wicker Man owes the greatest debt, structurally speaking, is the Powell and Pressburger romantic drama I Know Where I'm Going!. Both films begin with the premise of our central character taking a journey to a mysterious place with a very clear purpose - Joan Webster to get married, Sergeant Howie to find the missing girl. And the central plot of both films is essentially a McGuffin, designed to keep said characters in one place so that their environment and the characters that populate it can trigger an important change.

That is not to say that The Wicker Man doesn't work as a mystery in and of itself. On the contrary, it has to work. Because it doesn't romanticise Scotland in the manner of Powell's film, the plot has to be twisty and murky enough to keep Howie on the island out of his own curiosity. Although there are large mythical elements to the plot, these are not invoked in a broadly fantastical way, and so it simply would not be enough for the weather to be the only thing preventing Howie from going home. As he interviews the locals, gathering conflicting information, we become more engaged with what is going on, partly on an intellectual level as we try to figure it out, but also on an emotional level as we see Howie being utterly repulsed by the entire culture of Summerisle.

Using the device of a police officer gathering information to solve a crime, The Wicker Man slowly reveals itself as a compelling and intelligent examination of a clash between two cultures, each being deeply entrenched but also seeming out of place with the real world. Howie's puritanical brand of Christianity is every bit as extreme and farcical as Lord Summerisle's praise for fire-jumping rituals, not to mention the May Day celebrations involving dressing up as Punch and decapitation. The 'paganism' practised by the inhabitants of Summerisle seems archaic and bizarre to our 'enlightened' eyes, but we do not embrace Howie's devoutness as an antidote to this. This is not a film which seeks to discredit paganism in favour of Christianity, or indeed the other way around. Its central purpose is to explore the flaws of both belief systems and their relationship with culture and human nature.

Anthony Shaffer wrote The Wicker Man is an examination of different sides of human nature represented by Christianity and paganism. Shaffer's previous screenplay, Sleuth, had explored the idea of class warfare under the pretext that the different classes in the end need each other, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. It is much the same with The Wicker Man, with paganism standing in for the animalistic side of humanity, which is primal and at one with nature to the point of worshipping it, and Christianity posing as civilisation, with mankind as the dominant force and the bearers of both morality and rationality.

Because this symbolism is explored so intelligently, we can forgive the film for not being an entirely accurate depiction of pagan religion. The various rituals and myths in the film are cobbled together from ancient British folklore and scholarship which has long since come into question. But in the end it doesn't really matter that pagan communities don't necessary burn people as offerings to sun gods. What matters is the imagery this conveys, of the animalistic past of mankind lurking deep within each of us and finally exploding forth in a powerful but ultimately pyrrhic gesture.

The final sequence with the titular wicker man remains terrifying, not just because of what we see on screen but because of what it conveys symbolically. Seeing a man being burned to death is frightening; the close-ups on Edward Woodward's face as he commits his spirit into God's hands are deeply chilling. This sensation is compounded by the choice of music: while Lord Summerisle leads his followers in a full-blown rendition of 'Sumer Is Icumen In', Howie screams the opening of Psalm 23 as the two deeply opposed belief systems continue to lock horns even in defeat. But as with Christ's death upon the cross, even in defeat there is a twist. If the sacrifice does not work, if the devil's plans do not come off, the people will turn on the devil himself and all that he has worked for will be undone.

The music of The Wicker Man hints at what makes has made the film so compelling for so long. Although there are sections of suspense, or intrigue, or outright horror, the primary mood of the film is one of total oddness. Halfway through the production, Robin Hardy announced to the surprise of everyone that the film was going to be a musical, with Paul Giovanni supplying both original score and several re-workings of English folk songs and nursery rhymes. The songs, coupled with the peculiar colour palette, make The Wicker Man border on the ridiculous, with the tone moving from the bawdy comedy of 'The Landlord's Daughter' to spiritual soul-searching as Howie attempts to pray. Christopher Lee may sing very well, but trying to take the fire-dancing song seriously will get you nowhere.

This disparity between the subject and its presentation is what makes The Wicker Man so unusual and so memorable. But it also alludes to the difficult birth it had, in which Hardy's decision to add the songs was the least of its problems. The director, art director and producer fell out constantly, leading the latter to describe the film as being directed "in spite of Robin Hardy" rather than by him. Britt Ekland was incensed that her dialogue had been dubbed and that her nude dancing had been replaced by, in her words, "a big-butted body double". After the film was completed, its distributors cut and lost whole sections of the film, with Christopher Lee accusing British Lion boss Michael Deeley of burying the negatives in motorway landfill. The whole film had an aura of ill will surrounding it which makes it a small miracle that, in its 'director's cut' version (the best that survives), it works as well as it does.

The Wicker Man remains a flawed but fascinating cult film which still has the ability to terrify after all these years. Woodward and Lee give excellent performances and the film is a smart and agile examination of sexual, cultural and religious tension, which sustains our interest through both the central mystery and the all-encompassing oddness of how it plays out. While not quite the masterpiece that it is often hailed to be, it remains a triumph of British filmmaking and a career high point for all concerned.

People always complain about film adaptations of books never living up to the source material, and yet when novelists turn to filmmaking the results are hardly extraordinary. The problem is often that novelists are so attentive to verbal content that they neglect the visual characteristics of great cinema. Stephen King's adaptation of The Shining may follow the original story more closely, but it isn't half as scary or discomforting as the Stanley Kubrick version.

With Westworld, the task is made doubly difficult by the sheer number of genres involved. Michael Crichton's first film contains elements of pretty much every genre apart from rom-com, musical and gothic horror. It's an odd little number, shifting rapidly from western and action-adventure elements into conspiracy thriller territory, borrowing from horror as it goes along. While it never quite comes through with the goods in the way that we would like, it remains an interesting debut effort and a decent 1970s cult film.

The first thing in Westworld's favour is its achievements on a technical level. It was famously the first film to utilise pixelated graphics, showing certain short sections of the action from the androids' point of view. Original footage shot on celluloid was scanned into a computer and processed digitally, creating a blurred and distorted image which makes Yul Brynner's killings seem all the more merciless.

The old-fashioned effects are pretty good as well. To create the effect of acid being thrown into Brynner's face, the production team mixed ground-up indigestion tablets into his make-up; when water was thrown at it, it would fizz to give the impression of skin being dissolved. The make-up and prop-making in general is impressive, particularly when it comes to the robots themselves. Brynner's face mask is very life-like, and seeing his charred body stagger into close-up without a face is quite creepy.

Westworld's chief significance, however, is in its influence on subsequent thrillers. Crichton would rework the central premise of an elaborate amusement park gone wrong for Jurassic Park, one of Steven Spielberg's biggest and best blockbusters. Yul Brynner's Gunslinger was the Terminator of its day, with the same jerky, mechanical posture and relentless desire to kill. And there is some discussion about robots being indistinguishable from humans and being used as "sex models", subjects which would later be tackled in Blade Runner.

The various worlds of the Delos complex allow Westworld to dip in and out of various genres, picking and choosing as it sees fit. It only becomes a conspiracy thriller in its third act, with the duel between Yul Brynner and Richard Benjamin becoming the driving force of the plot against a background of total chaos. In fact, one of the weaknesses of Westworld is that it dabbles a little too much. It gets so distracted by the various sub-plots - for instance, the knights duelling in Mediaeval World - that when all hell breaks loose, you don't feel quite so threatened by it.

The film attempts to address a number of ideas which have become archetypal of low-budget 1970s cinema. Most obviously, it deals with the idea of a perfect machine going wrong, and by extension how mankind's increasing dependence upon technology will eventually come back to haunt them. But whereas Kubrick approached this idea from a conceptual or philosophical platform in both Dr. Strangelove and 2001, Crichton is more interested in the mechanics of such a rebellion. It is not so much a case of discussing morality as predicting the course of destruction that would occur, with Crichton steering closer to the work of Arthur C. Clarke in his matter-of-fact treatment of technology.

The Delos complex functions like the robots which populate it. On the surface it may appear incredibly sophisticated and refined, but it is ultimately a very fragile creature, reliant on constant input and highly sensitive to changes in its surroundings. Long sections of the film focus on the scientists surrounded by computer banks, endlessly checking temperatures and humidity levels, tweaking the system to respond to individual needs and weeding out any renegades. The repair sessions which take place at night resemble the A&E ward of a hospital, with doctors working against the clock just to maintain the status quo.

Westworld also tackles the idea of mankind's nostalgia for the past. Like Deliverance a year earlier, its characters make the trip to experience an alternative to their carefully ordered, incredibly dull lives. There is the same desire to 'be at one with nature' or live in the past, while at the same time romanticising it. If, as Alfred Hitchcock said, drama is reality with all the dull bits cut out, then Westworld contains all that is fun and jolly about the American West without any of the drawbacks - disease, death, boredom or hard work.

Within this there is also a comment about the compartmentalisation of violence, and the difference between the simulated world and the reality. Part of what attracts our heroes to Westworld is the ability to get away with murder on a daily basis. They can go around firing off guns without fear of getting killed or being thrown out; when Richard Benjamin is thrown in jail, it is merely the set-up for the jokey stunt that gets him out. Yet when things turn nasty and reality intervenes, Benjamin runs instead of confronting Brynner; even though the latter is still a robot, our hero cannot bring himself to practice what he has preached up until that point.

While all of these ideas are enticing, they are somewhat undercut by the film's execution. Crichton, for all his skill as a writer, is not a brilliant director, at least when it comes to sustaining and building tension. Because the film was shot using anamorphic lenses on MGM's sound stages, it looks a lot more professional than something equally ideas-driven like The Clonus Horror. But the tone remains uneven, so that even when it works really well you can't help wishing the whole film had been as good. This is exemplified by Fred Karlin's erratic soundtrack, which dithers between subtle underplay and energetic bursts in the manner of Bernard Hermann.

The performances in Westworld vary from the intensely memorable to the completely forgettable. Brynner is great, sending up his role in The Magnificent Seven right down to wearing the same costume. He exudes menace and tenacity, and his delivery manages to sound stilted without tipping over into comedy. His co-stars, however, fare less well. James Brolin - father of Josh - is decent but has little in the way of character development, and Peter Morgan is not charismatic enough to carry the final section on his own. Without the Gunslinger constantly hunting him, the film would fall completely flat.

Westworld is an entertaining and insightful film hamstrung only by its uneven execution. Its campy visual style may have dated, and it isn't constructed half as consistently as many would have liked. But when it does pull itself together, it meets all the requirements of a decent 90-minute thriller, giving us enough in the way of both ideas and suspense to sustain our attention. A decent start to Crichton's career in film, which would culminate twenty years later.

John Carpenter has earned a reputation as a director who constantly breaks the rules of Hollywood cinema. From the unexplained serial killing of Hallowe'en to the gory paranoia of The Thing, his work has constantly challenged what is acceptable to put on screen. This tendency to push boundaries has made him the most accidental of pioneers, with the films which he created to pay the bills now among the most revered of cult hits. Dark Star, his debut feature, is fitting company to these works, bridging the gap between the old school and new wave in mainstream sci-fi filmmaking.

It is this unintentional mix of old and new which make Dark Star a lot more interesting than other sci-fi comedies such as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest. The film is primarily a parody of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, with references scattered throughout both the plot and the visuals. We still have some oddly-designed spacesuits and a man floating off in space, only this time HAL is a self-aware bomb (just as destructive but in a different way), and the monolith has been replaced by the Phoenix Asteroids. That said, the film can't quite make up its mind as to whether we should hear the ship's engines. In 2001 we don't, since there is no air in space and therefore no sound; in this we start off quiet and become noisier as we go on.

There are also more subtle and comedic references to other great dystopian works. Early on the film, Talby and Doolittle meet in the observation dome and talk about what they miss most about life on Earth. In a tongue-in-cheek nod to Solaris -- in which the central character misses his family -- Doolittle says that he misses surfing more than anything else, and wishes he had a board there with him even if he could only wax it. It's a poignant exchange which is typical of both the offbeat, goofy nature of the characters and the affectionate level of parody present throughout.

Equally interesting, however, is the extent to which Dark Star has influenced later sci-fi works, for good or ill. The connections with Alien are writ large -- not only does it feature Dan O'Bannon, who would write the screenplay, but the subplot involving the beach ball-like 'ship's mascot' could be read as a shorter, more comedic version of Ridley Scott's masterpiece. John Carpenter's subsequent sci-fi ventures, like The Thing and They Live, owe a lot to this film in their grungy visual edge, and there are traces of Hallowe'en in the use of synthesisers to create tension, just as Kubrick did in A Clockwork Orange. Most disturbingly, so much of Dark Star seems to have ended up in Star Wars. Not only does it share a plot point (a ship designed to blow up planets), but much of the art direction is reminiscent of the original trilogy, right down to the look of the ship.

Leaving aside the film's place in history, it is perfectly possible to enjoy Dark Star as a goofy if uneven low-budget comedy. The comedy is grounded in a number of well-rounded, believable characters, and like John Carpenter films there is no clunky back-story to distract us from what they are doing on screen. This emphasis on characters rather than simply flagging up the references a la Tarantino, means that after a while we don't worry about or even notice the creaky effects. Many sci-fi films made today seem to take the opposite approach, dazzling us with mind-bending effects and CGI to take our minds of slightly creaky characters, and watching this you can't help feeling that modern filmmakers are missing something.

The performances are all pretty decent, though Dan O'Bannon's is the standout, largely because he has the most screen time. Pinback is the most interesting member of the crew, being anxious, talkative and self-conscious. The scene of him playing extracts from his electronic diary is one of the film's highlights; you watch him alternating paranoid anger with childlike hysteria and you can't stop yourself from creasing up. The running joke about the lift is also inspired: the stunts look real and the different sequences are well-edited into the rest of the story so that it stays funny all the way through.

Sadly, Pinback's witty routines illuminate one of the central flaws with Dark Star, which is its sound design. Much of the longer sections of dialogue are picked up poorly, so that we can't quite make out certain jokes or instructions. This is particularly a shame during Pinback's lengthy anecdote about impersonating another officer. The joke is that the story isn't funny, but it's executed in such a way that we are meant to listen intently for each little twist of the story. When we get cracking instead of dialogue, or fuzz from the actors being too loud, we lose the comic momentum of the scene.

The film is undoubtedly funny, but the script is also undeniably patchy. On the one hand, there are several individual sequences which work superbly, such as Pinback's long and battle with the alien, or the diary scene; on the other hand, there is the ending, which seems too simple and rather more cavalier than is necessary. Somewhere in-between these two extremes is the scene of Doolittle negotiating with the Bomb not to detonate, and indeed the previous scene with Commander Powell being cryogenically frozen. The film suddenly in these scene decides it wants to be intellectual, which in itself is not a bad thing. But there is too little build-up or fade-out to these discussions of phenomenology to pull an audience in completely, or to make them realise its validity.

Dark Star remains an interesting and important science fiction film and a testament to the virtues of low-budget filmmaking. The film manages to overcome obstacles relating to both the script and its technical execution, and can still make for an enjoyable 90 minutes. It is by no means perfect, consistent, or Carpenter's best work, but its influence is assured through its continuing potential for mirth and its impact on Carpenter's sensibility. If all else fails, there is enough off-beat humour hidden within to keep any sci-fi fan chuckling warmly.

"What's the best horror-comedy rock musical of the 1970s?" It's not a question that comes up very often, and the answer seems so obvious that it seems even less likely to come up. But just before everyone starts rushing towards The Rocky Horror Picture Show (good as that may be), it's worth taking a gander at its close cousin, Phantom of the Paradise. Brian De Palma's early effort may be ramshackle, uneven and rough around the edges (as was Rocky Horror), but it's also bounding with enthusiasm and in places is really rather good.

There are of course many similarities between this film and Rocky Horror. Both were made and released around the same time, even sharing a double bill on American college campuses in late-1975. Both are essentially collections of horror, sci-fi or other B-movie references, bundled together into an outlandish plot with even more outlandish characters. Neither of the films take themselves very seriously, and both have seen their tongue-in-cheek nature rewarded by large cult followings. Perhaps the relative recognition of Rocky Horror lies more in the continued success of the stage show than any real cinematic merit.

De Palma's films, and especially his thrillers, have always been unashamed in their references to other films or directors. Dressed to Kill and Body Double drop in Hitchcock motifs like there's no tomorrow, while the train station scene in The Untouchables is a very conscious homage to the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Occasionally these references have been so overt that he has been accused of having no real style of his own, but with an early effort like this, when he was still learning his craft, this can be easily forgiven.

Phantom of the Paradise, as the title suggests, is primarily a reworking of The Phantom of the Opera. The touchstones of Gaston LeRoux's novel are plain to see: the central character (played by De Palma regular William Finley) is a composer whose work is stolen by a jealous impresario (Paul Williams), and in trying to recover what is rightfully his, the composer is horribly disfigured. The Phantom, as he now is, becomes infatuated with the young lady who performs his music (Jessica Harper), and struggles to balance these new-found feelings of love with a murky desire for vengeance and redemption.

In the later stages of the film, De Palma draws on the archetypes of Faust and The Portrait of Dorian Gray to flesh out the enigmatic character of Swan. The character is interesting in that he exhibits aspects of both Faustus and Mephistopheles: he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth (hence Dorian Gray), but he also acts in a diabolical fashion towards all who sign his contracts. There are also fleeting references to Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the stage show, and a very witty restaging of the shower scene from Psycho: the Phantom corners Beef in the shower, cuts through the shower curtain... and then shoves a toilet plunger over his mouth to prevent him from talking.

What distinguishes Phantom of the Paradise from Rocky Horror is the purpose to which these horror references are put. In Rocky Horror, the B-movie dialogue and horror imagery was largely a celebration of scary movies of the past, and by extension the pleasure and entertainment that comes from being scared. The plot eventually became secondary to "giving oneself over to absolute pleasure", with the film's unique identity coming from the extent of its madness rather than a conscious attempt to retune these conventions into something more modern.

Phantom of the Paradise, on the other hand, takes all these horror conventions on board and gives them a 1970s sensibility. It recognises the moral lessons and warnings in these stories, and re-moulds them into some kind of analysis of the music industry in general and rock music in particular. Some of De Palma's re-mouldings are witty or make a crazy kind of sense: if Dorian Gray had been pouring out his narcissism today, he would have made a video recording of himself rather than gone to the trouble of painting a portrait. While the original Phantom's mask was rather modest, this Phantom's mask is as ostentatious as the costumes of the rock stars performing his music.

The film is a fairly scathing depiction of the music industry, with the executives and management coming under fire from all sides. Swan is clearly inspired by Phil Spector, the enigmatic producer who created the 'wall of sound' recording technique and produced some of the biggest hits of the 1960s. The film takes the concept of 'selling one's soul' to another level, characterising the industry as the embodiment of evil, pilfering other's creativity to keep the gravy train rolling. Considering that Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was released not long after, one can't help wondering what would have happened had the two collaborated.

Phantom of the Paradise also sheds light on the excesses of 1970s music, both on and off the stage. Swan spends much of his screen time in the company of beautiful women, many of whom he has promised fame in exchange for satisfying him. Phoenix becomes a victim of this dark world after covering for Beef; Swan gets her drunk and seduces her, promising her the world if only she will give him her voice. The excess is also present in the sets used for the rock shows: the elaborate costumes and incorporation of theatre recall the kind of unconscious pomposity that would be sent up so brilliantly in This Is Spinal Tap.

The music of De Palma's film is both a big strength and a telling weakness. In recreating or capturing a period in time or particular genre, Paul Williams' score is very good indeed. The opening number, 'Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye', is a very convincing recreation of 1950s greaseball pop, while 'Upholstery' has the same tinny, irritating quality that the Beach Boys had. But with the possible exception of 'Old Souls', sung mournfully by Harper, the songs are not as memorable as those in Rocky Horror or even its sequel Shock Treatment. Because the songs are there for context rather than for breathing life into the characters, they can feel like well-written wallpaper as opposed to anything more personal.

The real unmitigated strength of Phantom of the Paradise lies in its technical aspects. De Palma's penchant for camera trickery, and split-screen in particular, has often compromised his films by causing us to lose focus, but on this occasion the creative decisions pay off. We see via split screen the Phantom put a bomb inside the boot of a prop car, and then watch it ticking down as the number goes on, blowing up the stage and the various reactions thereafter. Hitchcock famously said that the key to creating tension was giving the audience information that the characters don't have. The split-screen works because we know what we are looking for, whereas in the pig-blood scene in Carrie we do not.

There are other impressive technical features too. One of the Phantom's first scenes, as he walks through the Paradise planning his vengeance, is shot on a combination of crane and dolly. We see the corridors of the Paradise from the Phantom's POV, and look up with him as his vision round 360 degress rises up the spiral staircase, leading to the box from which he will observe the carnage. Later on we have further impressive shots of him fleeing down a corridor, the intensity and speed of which recall Ripley's later scenes in Alien.

The film has any number of moments which are purely and simply weird. Beef's entrance, coming out of a coffin standing up on the runway of an airport, ranks among the strangest in cinema. His entire character is a compelling bundle of eccentricity, from his diva-like complaints about the score to his shocking demise (pun intended). The final scene sees all the horror references come together in a car-crash of make-up, madness, fake blood and scantily-clad backing singers. The film eventually runs out of steam, collapsing into a horror-ridden heap in place of a proper ending.

Phantom of the Paradise is an interesting if heavily flawed oddity which finds Brian De Palma rummaging around for the kind of film he was truly brilliant at making. The perfomers give their all, with Paul Williams excelling as Swan and 'the Queen of Cult Films' Jessica Harper setting herself up nicely for her subsequent brilliance in Suspiria. While Rocky Horror is funnier and has much better songs, it scores over Rocky Horror as a piece of narrative, if only because its references are so clear that you always know roughly where it's going. But in the end both are lovably bonkers and will reward the attention of any film fan.

Whenever classic films are poorly remade, they have the side effect of putting audiences off seeing the originals. Many who saw Frank Oz's ghastly remake of The Stepford Wives would have been so bored or enraged that they would have steered well clear of the original, believing it to be no better. It would be a shame if many came to this conclusion, since they would be depriving themselves of a smart and suspenseful film, which is still chilling and unnerving more than 35 years on.

While the remake boasted an all-star cast and was directed by a muppet (in more ways than one), the pedigree of the original Stepford Wives is mainly to be found behind the camera. It is based on the novel by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil. Levin was a master at taking a contemporary subject (in this case the male backlash against feminism) and playing it for a mainstream audience through smart and subtle allegory.

Levin's novel is adapted for the screen by William Goldman, who would win an Oscar the following year for his work on All The President's Men. He approaches the source material and subject matter with intelligence, acknowledging the need to play certain scenes with a straight face while leaving room for humour to emerge naturally. And the film is helmed by Bryan Forbes, best known for producing The Railway Children and directing Whistle Down The Wind. This film sees Forbes refining the thriller techniques of Séance on a Wet Afternoon, and returning to the theme of female manipulation that he first explored in The L-Shaped Room.

When The Stepford Wives was first released, many critics complained about its slow pacing; there was, they believed, not enough in the novel to fill out two hours, and by drawing out the action the final act was not as tense as it should be. In fact, the gentle pacing of the film is one of its most distinctive features compared to other thrillers, and one of its greatest strengths. We are drawn in very slowly, almost unconsciously, so that our plight mirrors that of the female characters. The only difference is that we emerged with our minds intact, and our spines more than a little tingled.

Forbes' intention with this film was to make "a thriller in sunlight." While Chinatown found inspiration in the smoke and shadows of film noir, The Stepford Wives is a close precursor to David Lynch in its all-too-perfect imagining of American suburbia. Stepford embodies the American Dream to such an extent that it cannot possibly be right: every house has its mailbox and white picket fence, and the children go to school on bright yellow buses.

By shooting the majority of the action in bright daylight, Forbes makes us second-guess about our expectations of Stepford. Even as we pick up on all the chocolate box features that would repulse us or put us on alert, we are bit by bit won over by the seeming goodwill of the town's inhabitants. As the film moves on and the creeping sense of dread grows, both we and Joanna are torn between dismissing our feelings as paranoia and believing them to be the truth. It only becomes an edgy horror movie in its last 20 minutes, and even then there is an unnerving reserve to it: there is only one tiny bit of blood, and no explosions or pyrotechnics when Bobby starts to go wrong.

The Stepford Wives is at its heart a dark satirical allegory of the male backlash against feminism. The Men's Association, both as an institution and in its activities, is a reaction to the political and social freedom that women have demanded and increasingly enjoyed since the early-20th century. The men's response is one of cowardice; rather than embracing women's new-found freedom, they look on them as an inferior species, whose independence should be controlled, and whose purpose should be restricted to cooking, cleaning, gossiping and sexual pleasure.

Whilst its allegorical device may be both extreme and bizarre, it would be wrong to dismiss The Stepford Wives as heavy-handed. Rather than characterise misogyny or sexism as something distant or extreme, the film attacks the extent to which the inferior position of women has been normalised. Joanna's husband joins the Men's Association with the very best intentions, wanting to get involved in the local community. The majority of scenes featuring women are set in kitchens, dining rooms or other purely domestic settings; we are challenged to explain why we expect such conversations to be staged in this way. The fact that so many (male) critics denounced the film as "chauvinistic" shows how much it touched a nerve when first released.

From another angle, The Stepford Wives examines the pressures surrounding women to confirm to male expectations in society. Joanna and Bobby find it difficult recruiting women to their cause because the women have their expectations of life shaped by those of their husbands. Even without its famous twist, the film convincingly conveys how so much of the social order has been shaped by the expectations of men. This is most grotesquely demonstrated by the nature of the wives' replacements; not only have their personalities been diluted, but their physical attributes have been considerably enhanced.

An illustration of both these themes is found in the role of photography. Joanna is introduced as a photographer, an activity which requires creativity, independence and ambition to succeed. In the opening scene, she takes a photo of a man crossing the street with a blow-up sex doll just before her husband gets in the car. What seems like an innocuous non-sequitur takes on an eerie quality as things moves on. As Joanna's independence is stifled in Stepford, so too is her art, as she is unable to sell her prints to a dealer during a brief return to New York.

Like many low-budget sci-fi or horror efforts, The Stepford Wives benefits from not having too many famous faces in its cast. Katherine Ross is terrific as Joanna, having just enough presence and charisma to be commanding without overpowering. Paula Prentiss is a good match for her as Bobby, channelling Diane Keaton's performances with Woody Allen in her quirky, fun-loving attitude. There is also good support from Nanette Newman, whose mechanical repetition of "I'll just die if I can't get this recipe" rivals anything in Westworld.

The one real problem with The Stepford Wives is its final act, in which Joanna infiltrates the Men's Association. Having spent so long creating unease through subtle diversions from reality, the film turns to classic horror tropes to really Hammer things home (pun intended). Joanna arrives at the Men's Association in the middle of a storm, complete with cheap lightning effects and heavy rain. The building itself is like an old-school gothic spook-house, with dark corridors and moments with mirror that wouldn't look out of place in The Haunting.

Normally this ready a reversion to horror convention would spoil a film's good work. But you find yourself wanting to forgive The Stepford Wives because of how hard it has worked to get to this point. Crucially, even when surrounded by all these clichés, the film doesn't lose sight of its substance for the sake of a few cheap shocks. The revelation of Joanna's pulchritudinous, dead-eyed double is terrifying whatever its surroundings.

The Stepford Wives is a really great film whose message has lost none of its chill or bite. Forbes brings the substance of Levin's novel to life with respect for the audience's intelligence, allowing us to question everything we see and unnerve ourselves in the process. The unsettling atmosphere thus created is enhanced by great performances and naturalistic acting, particularly by Katherine Ross. It's not perfect, nor is it Forbes' finest work, but it remains essential viewing for sci-fi & horror fans.

Ever since Star Trek first arrived on our screens, it's been almost fashionable to dismiss science fiction as little more than enjoyable pantomime hogwash. Whatever interesting ideas the series tried to raise, more often than not the ideas would take a back seat to silly fighting, hammy acting and increasingly bizarre costumes. Coming a year before Star Wars rewrote the sci-fi rulebook, Logan's Run is a kindred spirit to the original Star Trek: campy, silly and utterly escapist, yet still passingly entertaining.

One of the initial disappointments of Logan's Run is how little of the original novel survives in the screenplay. The novel, written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, used the counter-culture and youth movements of the mid-1960s as a platform for a story about eugenics and social engineering, predicting a society where the power of youth was so great that ageing beyond 21 was forbidden. But in the screenplay for Logan's Run, written by Straw Dogs scribe David Zelag Goodman, this fascinating premise is compressed into an old-fashioned action-adventure story, with most of the political undercurrents being taken out.

Logan's Run still has an interesting premise in spite of this - people can only live to 30 before they are elaborately executed - but in both its execution and its place within the sci-fi canon, it is much more old-fashioned than its source material. The film is directed by Michael Anderson, who had reached his peak in the 1950s with The Dambusters and the Oscar-winning Around the World in Eighty Days. He approaches Logan's Run in the same way as his classic work: as a star vehicle with a lot of locations and fun-packed action, and not much room for the darker, more political aspects of science fiction.

Logan's Run contains many references to other sci-fi works, some classic, some contemporary. The idea of a totalitarian society in which people live only for pleasure can be traced back to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's extraordinary novel which predicted (amongst other things) anti-depressants, test tube babies, and interactive media with the 'feelies', where you could see, hear and touch what was happening on screen. The Carrousel scenes are like more elaborate versions of the funeral from Soylent Green, while the general camp tone nods towards Planet of the Apes and its sequels.

In light of Anderson's track record, the film to which Logan's Run most closely aspires is The Time Machine, directed by The War of the Worlds producer George Pal. The whole of Logan's Run is comparable to the final act of The Time Machine, in which a docile, hedonistic and ignorant society are held captive by evil forces - respectively morlocks and time itself. But in its overly frequent use of model shots and strange collection of weapons, Logan's Run is much less George Pal than Gerry Anderson. The wide shots of the domed city are closely reminiscent of Thunderbirds or Stingray, while the costumes are akin to Anderson's contemporary venture, Space: 1999.

Logan's Run is clearly a product of its time, particularly where sets and costumes are concerned. While the men get to wear full-length uniforms or jumpsuits, the women are paraded around in a series of dresses and skirts which leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. When we first meet Jenny Agutter, she doesn't appear to be wearing any underwear - something which is confirmed on no less than two separate occasions. Despite having a budget of $9m (around the same as Star Wars), the film looks like it was made on the cheap and in a hurry. Whole sections of the domed city look like the inside of a shopping mall (which it is), with seemingly little time being spent on set-dressing.

For most of its running time, Logan's Run is a very silly film. We quickly forget that Logan 5 is infiltrating the runners with the intention of finding and destroying Sanctuary - we forget, in other words, that he is a government puppet whose lifeclock has been artificially accelerated. After Logan initially defeats Francis, the plot descends into a series of set-pieces in increasingly elaborate sets until Peter Ustinov turns up to help us get a grip.

The tone of these set-pieces is generally light-hearted, with our heroes surviving seemingly implausible scenarios while managing to maintain their perfect hair and make-up. But in the midst of this frivolity there are little pockets of creepiness, such as their encounter with Box. He trundles into shot like a bargain basement Dalek and starts spouting off about plankton and sea greens, all of which seems completely harmless. But then he leads Logan and Jessica to a corridor of runners frozen in ice: Box implies that they are now being used for food, pulls out two guns and laughs wickedly. While still silly at heart, it's as though we had accidentally wandered into Soylent Green.

The silly, campy tone of Logan's Run is consolidated by the acting. Michael York manages to keep his dignity for the most part: his unique voice gives him an air of authority while keeping his more sensitive moments believable. Jenny Agutter makes the very best of a duff role: she spends a lot of her opening scenes wandering around open-mouthed in next to nothing, but she eventually gets into her stride. But aside from the leads the acting is very wooden, and while no-one comes close to the 'quality' of Charlton Heston or William Shatner, it's difficult not to snigger at how straight-laced everything is. The film lacks the knowing deftness of Flash Gordon, with only a small fraction of the cast being in on the joke.

But in spite of its copious flaws, Logan's Run eventually emerges as a passingly enjoyable slice of science fiction. The irony is that once we have given up trying to take it seriously, the film begins to get off the ground and say the things that it really wants to say. The later sections of the film, while still a little ridiculous, make up for the loose, baggy opening act and do raise a couple of interesting issues around the central theme.

A big part of this transition is down to Peter Ustinov. Gene Siskel, who once called this the worst film he'd ever seen, wrote that Ustinov's cameo was unduly extended because he was the only decent thing in the whole film. While few would share Siskel's view, his performance is by far and away the best, and his character is the most interesting. He plays a seemingly senile old man who is found by Logan and Jessica wandering around the ruined House of Representatives. The film never states exactly why he is still alive; perhaps, like J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner, he was too old to leave the old ways behind.

Like Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov has immense screen presence. He is able to take the most ridiculous or stupid line, and deliver it in such a way that it gains great weight or feels deeply important. He might be rambling on about cats having three different names, but his mannerisms feel more developed than the other characters, and his dithering manner works as a means of reaction to Logan and Jessica, who have no concept of age or decay.

In its later sections, Logan's Run also takes on a Biblical quality, with undertones emerging in the attitude and development of the characters. Logan and Jessica's escape from the domed city is akin to the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden - although, in line with the conspiracy element of the film, Eden is too good to be true in the first place. The ending of the film is also rooted in the Old Testament, with Ustinov emerging like a nervous Moses, ready (unexpectedly) to lead his people out of Egypt.

The film is also prophetic in predicting the increased social role for cosmetic surgery. In an age where breast implants, tummy tucks and facelifts have become both cheap and fashionable, it isn't too far-fetched to believe that, in the near-future, you could change your entire appearance through just a few quick flicks of a laser. The fight between Logan and the doctor (played by Michael Anderson Jr.) is one of the better action scenes, taking the laser sequence in Goldfinger to its natural conclusion.

There is much about Logan's Run which would be good cause to dismiss it. Its production values have dated badly, the ideas are compromised by a generic adventure story, and both its plot and execution are preposterous. But it just about manages to pass muster in the end, being consistently entertaining and getting a grip on things in the final act. It succeeds where so many of the Star Trek movies failed, and while it never reaches the heights of Flash Gordon, it passes the time rather nicely.

Philip Ridley once said that ?watching a film has always been both an experience and a process; we experience it first and we spend the rest of our lives processing it.? Each of us can cite examples of films which were memorable experiences to watch and which have dogged our imaginations since that fateful first viewing. Sometimes the film is so perfect we embrace it and analyse it ad infinitum; sometimes it is so hideous that we are repulsed and vow to avoid that area forever. And sometimes, as with The Man Who Fell to Earth, the experience is just so strange that we don?t know what to think.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a notable meeting point in many interesting careers. It was maverick director Nicolas Roeg?s follow-up to Don?t Look Now, a flawed but fascinating Gothic tale of grief and the supernatural. It was produced by Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley, who would later win Oscars for their work on The Deer Hunter. And it marked David Bowie?s first foray into film, having failed to get an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four off the ground.

More than any of that, it is also one of the strangest, oddest and most baffling films ever to have come out of Britain ? quite something for the country which gave us The Wicker Man. Roeg?s experimentation with colour, composition and narrative structure takes a relatively straightforward science fiction story and distorts it ruthlessly, creating something which is incoherent and indulgent, but utterly memorable.

Based on a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth is something of a bridge between the drug-induced hippie culture of the late-1960s and the post-Altamont paranoia of the 1970s. Its visual style is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni, particularly The Passenger and Zabriskie Point. Both films rely on long slow scenes with lengthy takes, and the camera is as much in love with the landscape as it is with the characters dotted around it.

There are also hints of Andrei Tarkovsky in Roeg?s work. Like The Mirror, The Man Who Fell to Earth plays out like a stream of consciousness with no particular interest in narrative. And as with Solaris, part of what story there is includes a man wanting to rejoin his family on a distant planet. We watch David Bowie?s mind conjure up images of a strange desert world, and are not sure whether we are seeing what is real or illusion, the future or the past.

One of the distinctive features of The Man Who Fell to Earth is its complete disregard for the passage time. Characters physically age, but there is no clue as to how much they age by or how long it has taken Bowie to accumulate all his wealth and power. Roeg deliberately sought to remove the ?crutch of time? from his audience, a decision which makes the film deeply incoherent. Couple that with the generally slow pace of the film, which runs to two-and-a-half hours when fully uncut, and you would expect the whole project to collapse into a soupy heap.

This is avoided by Roeg?s striking visuals which pull us into the world of the film and keep us totally engrossed (if freaked out) by what is going on. Like Ken Russell before him and David Lynch shortly after, Roeg puts images on screen which are so horrifically beautiful that we can be fixated by what is happening even if we have no idea what is going on. The scenes of Bowie?s home planet, inhabited by hairless creatures with air packs and yellow eyes, is up there with the acid queen sequence in Tommy.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a deeply druggy film, right down to Bowie?s entrance which resembles footage of Syd Barrett (allegedly) tripping on mushrooms in a quarry. This psychedelic feel spilt over into the production, since the film was made at the height of Bowie?s cocaine addiction. Perhaps the only way to rationally understand the film is to liken it to an acid trip or lengthy state of drunkenness, in which little makes sense and one has little control over events playing out before you.

It?s therefore hard to know whether the film?s indulges with both time and content are deliberately intended to reinforce this effect or are simply a case of poor discipline. By and large Roeg is well-behaved behind the camera, choosing his angles for their propriety rather than to show off his skills as an editor. His use of zooms, while repetitive, does enhance the film, mimicking our wandering minds that focus on something on a whim for no good reason. That said, we do have to put up with the gratuitous shot of Candy Clark urinating in fear, in which the camera focuses tight on her underwear in a really uncomfortable manner.

Being an X certificate film, The Man Who Fell to Earth also has its fair share of nudity and graphic sex. We get full frontal scenes of Clark and Bowie, and scenes of Clark and Rip Torn making love in a manner which resembles a mugging. Although none of these scenes are exploitative, they are far removed from the famously delicate love scene in Don?t Look Now. We also have to put up with a parade of teenagers staring at Torn?s genitals and remarking: ?you don?t look anything like my father?.

But beneath all its incoherence and excess, The Man Who Fell to Earth is an insightful and powerful film about the destructive effects of wealth and the lifestyle that goes with it. Beyond the obvious irony of the story (a man sent to find water ends up becoming a drunk), the film demonstrates how someone of seemingly noble intentions can end up as a bankrupt vessel of decay. Thomas Jerome Newton begins with no emotions and a singular focus on his mission, setting up World Enterprises with the express purpose of helping his planet. But the longer he stays on Earth, the more Newton absorbs the lifestyle and values of our planet until he loses all desire to help anyone.

Just as Charles Foster Kane was based on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, so there are shades of real life enigmas in Bowie?s performance. The most obvious comparison, aside from Hearst, would be with Howard Hughes. Both individuals are obsessive by nature, with the ability to conjure up wealth and power out of nothing. Like Hughes, Newton entertains the possibility of travel by seemingly unrealistic means. And like Hughes, Newton becomes a recluse who is both tormented and fascinated by film and television. Think of Newton as Kane?s mentally deranged, druggy half-brother ? and even then, you?re only halfway there.

Much has been written about Bowie?s performance, which is the best of his erratic acting career. Bowie literally inhabits Newton to the extent that he lived the lifestyle of the character long after the film had wrapped. The covers of Station To Station and Low are stills from the film, and Bowie?s persona of The Thin White Duke was in some respects a perversion of Newton?s mental state. His performance is the mainstay of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the touchstone which sustains our attention and prevents us from being completely alienated. His pathos-ridden delivery and unusual beauty pulls us hypnotically into the world of Newton and his various pleasures, and the heartbreak is genuine as he slowly but inevitably falls apart.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a remarkable feat of science fiction which finds Roeg at the height of his powers. It can?t be called a masterpiece, because of its blatant disregard for anything resembling discipline or coherency. But it is a deeply cinematic experience with a sense of ambition and scope which is rare in filmmaking, even for the period in which it was conceived. It holds up both as a bona fide cult film and as the document of a bygone age, in filmmaking and in Western society. It?s baffling, bizarre and utterly bonkers, but never anything less than unforgettable.

The 1970s were the golden age of the conspiracy thriller. Cold War paranoia, the OPEC crisis and the long-term fallout from Watergate created a heightened public interest in the workings of government and big corporations, which filtered through into a series of classic films. But although conspiracy theories will always enjoy a certain amount of popularity, there is no guarantee that the films which entertain such theories will stand the test of time. Some of them, like All The President's Men, still hold up after more than 30 years; others, such as Capricorn One, do not.

Despite the shared presence of Hal Holbrook, Capricorn One is structurally much closer to The Fog than to All The President's Men. Like John Carpenter's film it starts very well, with an intriguing and spooky premise; Holbrook's briefing of the astronauts is like the campfire scene where John Houseman tells the dark tale of the Elizabeth Dane. Then there is a long middle section full of boring soap opera dialogue and people wandering around in the desert, akin to the scenes in Antonio Bay before the fog comes in. Finally, the film picks up with the plane chase, which ends things on a high without quite making us forget our disappointment.

Capricorn One does have an interesting idea at the heart of it - namely that, in the near future, the US government would fake landing on Mars to maintain public interest in the space programme. Holbrook talks about needing to recapture the imagination of the American public, who have become disengaged and cynical. He remarks that when Apollo 17 landed on the Moon, more people complained about re-runs of I Love Lucy being cancelled than actually watching the landing. These discussions precede similar ones included in Apollo 13, although it must be said that Ron Howard's film handles the subject in a way which is more dramatically engaging (in other words, by not having it all come out in big speeches).

The story of Capricorn One is a classic conspiracy theory premise which taps into many big issues in 1970s culture. Although it was made six years after the last Apollo mission, theories that the Moon landings were faked were still hot currency. The Flat Earth Society went so far as to claim that the landings were shot on a Disney soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, with Neil Armstrong's dialogue being written by Arthur C. Clarke. The US was still reeling from both Watergate and the back end of the Vietnam War, two events which made blaming or being suspicious of the government both very easy and very popular. The icing on the cake is the casting of Holbrook; having played Deep Throat in All The President's Men, we instinctively know that he's up to no good.

Not only is the plot a conspiracy theorist's wet dream, but whole sections of Capricorn One's dialogue feels like it was written by such theorists. There are a lot of frankly anal conversations about readouts between the technicians - conversations which labour the points and go round and round in circles, restating the same arguments without really engaging us. Proof of this lack of dramatic engagement is found in our attitude to Robert Waldon, who first notices a problem with the telemetry. Even while we are on his side, agreeing with everything he says, the main thing that interests us is his more-than-passing resemblance to Roman Polanski.

This middle section is where the film slowly but surely starts to droop. Because it takes longer to get to Mars than to the Moon (obviously), there is a lot more time to be filled in before we get towards the money shot of them landing - time that cannot just be filled with routine checks and news broadcasts. But for whatever reason, Peter Hyams' script can't come up with anything interesting or relevant to justify taking so long. The central question is this: considering they have so much time to play with, why isn't Caulfield or anyone else doing more to follow up the strange goings-on, including the sudden disappearance of his friend?

Comparing this film to All The President's Men makes its issues with narrative all the more apparent. All The President's Men had a clear objective and endpoint, but it kept feeding us information so that we could build up a picture of the Watergate scandal with the added tension of the short timescale. It's like watching a guy going to visit his girlfriend, but stopping on every street corner to buy her a present; we know where he's going, but when he gets there the reward will be greater. Capricorn One is like a guy blowing all his money on one big present, but having to walk to her house because he has no change left for the bus. We have to watch him trudge along the same route at a slower pace, almost begging him to get on with it.

The various attempts to grab our attention through character development fail to make any kind of lasting impression. Elliott Gould spends most of his time wandering around looking glum or grumpy, moaning about how hard is it being a journalist to the point at which we just want to slap him. The romantic banter with his female colleague, played by Karen Black, is entertaining in passing but never really goes anywhere. And Gould's conversations with his assignment editor (David Doyle, who looks like Bob Hope) have their moments, but equally feel like we have wandered into an episode of Abbott and Costello.

The film has the same dramatic problem as a great many whodunnits. Like an episode of Columbo, in which we know from the start who the killer is, we already know that the American government is behind what has happened. There is no immediate tension in the events involving the astronauts, because regardless of what happens to them we know who was responsible. Like The Paradine Case, the characters are so clearly drawn that there is precious little dramatic irony to be had, and therefore little reason to stick around.

In terms of its direction, Capricorn One has moments of accomplishment. The Martian scenes themselves are well thought-out; we are introduced to the film set with a long rising shot of the craft, and when Caulfield stumbles upon the warehouse he is first seen as a speck in the background compared to the swathes of dusty red sand on the floor. Hyams adds a nice touch of showing the producers deliberately use slow-motion at certain key points, to simulate the effect of there being less gravity.

This is all well and good, but there are an equal number of scenes in Capricorn One which fail to make the grade. Some of these are a case of the film dating poorly: the model shots of Sam Waterston climbing up the mountain side do feel a little bit Thunderbirds, as do some of the closer shots of the helicopters. But others are utterly silly and have no place being in the film. The silliest comes when Caulfield's car is tampered with: while driving along, his brakes stop working and he starts rapidly accelerating. Hyams then cuts to a camera mounting on the front of his car which spools forward in fast motion, as if we have suddenly wandered into the beginning of Naked Gun.

The performances in Capricorn One are also a mixed bag. Gould is a decent actor but he's not a leading man by nature, having neither the charisma nor the likeability to carry the film in its quieter moments. OJ Simpson (who was later in Naked Gun) is very wooden and stilted, only becoming convincing when he's delirious. And Sam Waterston, who later starred in The Killing Fields, feels underdeveloped. Out of the three astronauts only James Brolin gets the development he needs, who kind of gives away that he will survive.

In its final section, Capricorn One does pick up a little bit, delivering on spectacle where it cannot excel on substance. When Gould uncovers the conspiracy, the plot begins to move up through the gears, culminating in a very good plane and helicopter chase. Telly Savalas provides great comic relief as the crop-dusting pilot, who calls everyone he distrusts a "pervert" and keeps telling Gould to "put your goddamn head down!". The distant shots of the helicopters have a creepy quality, and the film gets away with the cheesy use of slow-motion at the end.

Capricorn One is a watchable but disappointing conspiracy thriller. It has an interesting idea at its heart, but this idea is executed in a jobbing fashion, without the sense of imagination or creativity needed to bring its substance to the fore. In its end its multiple flaws are fairly easy to overlook, insofar as you never feel offended or incensed enough to make it worth holding a grudge. But considering that the conspiracy thriller is meant to provoke debate, perhaps being forgetting is a worse crime to commit.

In my review of Dark Star, I referred to John Carpenter as "the most accidental of pioneers", since the films which he created simply to get by have since become widely recognised as innovative and culturally significant. Just as Dark Star bridged the gap between old-school sci-fi and space opera, so Hallowe'en is a cinematic bridge from Psycho and Black Christmas to full-on, nuts-and-bolts slashers like Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine. But even taken outside of its legacy, it remains a memorably terrifying film, and the high point of Carpenter's career.

Contrary to popular belief, Hallowe'en is not the first slasher film. To some extent that title belongs to Psycho, which is also one of the classiest considering its strong psychological underpinning. The serial killer motifs therein were taken up by Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which explored serial killings within a context of complete moral nihilism; no explanation was ever offered for what Leatherface did, or the way in which he did it.

Hallowe'en takes the sexual elements of Psycho, blends it with the motiveless excesses of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and serves it up with Carpenter's unique sense of rhythm and love of the unknown. If Psycho was the film which made serial killing an art form (a tradition proudly continued by Dario Argento), Hallowe'en was the film that helped to take it into the mainstream. It made the slasher sexual again, setting the template for most of what followed until Wes Craven retuned things in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

So much modern horror, including the Hallowe'en 're-imaginings', try to explain everything to their audience; they feel the need to find a reason for every aspect of the killer, and no back-story must be left incomplete. Doing this often neglects the elements of uncertainty and menace which are essential parts of being scared; Alien wouldn't be half as scary if we had a complete psychological profile of the creature.

What makes Hallowe'en so special, and so brilliant, is its ruthless and brutal simplicity. There are no sadistic, lingering deaths, no confusing subplots, no unnecessary gore and no gratuitous nudity -- just genuine fear and genuine terror. Michael Myers doesn't need his motives explaining -- the fact that he is so singular makes it more terrifying.

Hallowe'en was designed as a drive-in movie, an exploitation film made on the cheap that would play for two weeks and then disappear. Under these circumstances they couldn't be any indulgences, whether creatively or financially. But like all the best low-budget films, it manages to get beyond its limitations and be innovative in the process. It takes several elements which on paper seem completely hokey and somehow makes them scary again. There have been dozens of horror films involving escaped mental patients, ignorant parents, or a police force which doesn't believe our hero or heroine. But the atmosphere which Carpenter creates, and the precise way in which the encounters are handled, conspire to give us the creeps.

Running through the whole film is an undercurrent about how the notion of being scared has become instititionalised. Laurie Strode comforts the child she is babysitting by telling him the bogeyman can only come out on Hallowe'en night. The fact that Hallowe'en is so widely observed and its practices so commonplace have taken the edge off it; it is no longer associated as a night of evil spirits preying on the weak, but as an excuse for the kids to have fun, the adults to go out and everyone in-between to have sex. This trend is even bound up in the production of the film, which was originally titled The Babysitter Murders.

Carpenter seeks to redress this balance, proving there are still things to be scared of which cannot be confined artificially to a single day. The children Laurie babysits are never scared by the films they watch on TV (including The Thing from Another World, which Carpenter would later remake) and so assume that there is nothing to be scared of. But as soon as the boy catches a glimpse of Myers, he starts screaming hysterically and fearing for his life.

The fear of the unknown is present in Hallowe'en right from the opening shot. As the camera approaches the house and we move inside, we have no idea from whose perspective we are seeing the events. The repeated use of a steadicam (or pana-glide, as it was originally called) gives the impression of seeing events from a first-person viewpoint, and the film keeps shifting so you are never sure whether or not you are seeing things through the eyes of the killer. This, coupled with the fantastic synthesizer score played in 5/4 time, creates an unmatched level of unease, predating Stanley Kubrick's work on The Shining by two whole years.

The fear of the unknown manifests itself in the character of Michael Myers, described by Dr. Loomis as "purely and simply... evil". Although Myers appears to be human in appearance and movement, there is something supernatural about him, demonstrated by his inability to be killed and his way of appearing and disappearing with great speed. There is no emotion with Myers, no sense of pleasure in his killings; he kills for no other reason other than that is what he does. Like Dr. Loomis, we spend time trying to understand him but eventually conclude that the only thing we can do is contain him. He is an archetypal bogeyman onto whom individuals project their own fears; the blank face masks serve as a canvas, a mirror in which we look and see our deepest fears.

Much has been made of Hallowe'en being a twisted morality tale, which borrows from the old 'tale of the hook' to warn people about the perils of having sex. Proponents of this view do have a point, considering that all of Myers' victims are people who are doing what they shouldn't be doing, and the only teenager who manages to stand up to him is a virgin. But Carpenter has long downplayed this view, claiming that the film is more about temptation and repression than the physical role of sex. While her classmates are content to drink under-age and tease each other about boys, Laurie is quiet and introverted. She is also the most intelligent of the group, and is the first to be aware of Myers' presence; hence she is better-equipped to deal with him, regardless of her sexual status.

It's easy to look at the ending of Hallowe'en as an excuse for a sequel, but this does pre-suppose that such a thing was intended. Unlike today, where many sequels are green-lit before the original has made its money back, this was intended as a stand-alone piece; Carpenter refused to direct Hallowe'en II despite a massive increase in the budget. As it stands, the ending is brilliant, with Donald Pleasance's facial reactions perfectly conveying the final chill: that Myers is still out there, and remains unstoppable. The film then puts the icing on the cake with a montage backed by Myers' heavy breathing, indicating that now he could be anywhere, and that we could be next.

Hallowe'en remains a masterpiece of horror, tapping into archetypal fears and scaring us to death with brilliant efficiency. The central performances by Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis are note-perfect, the camerawork is superb, and Carpenter shoots the entire film with the perfect balance of shock value and suspense. None of the sequels, knock-offs or remakes have dented it reputation, and thirty years from now it will still be as scary as ever. A triumph of low-budget cinema and a real must-see.

From the sadistic Amon Goeth in Schindler's List to the pantomime Gestapo in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Nazis have consistently proven themselves to be Hollywood's most reliable villains. The costumes, accents and mannerisms are so easy to recognise and replicate that a wide range of characters can be created. Nazis on film can be cold, ruthless and heartless, or scenery-chewing cannon fodder - the enemies of democracy, or something more playful and harmless.

Coming three years before Raiders, The Boys from Brazil attempts to have the best of both worlds. It attempts to explore serious ideas about history repeating itself and the dangers of scientific progress, within the confines of a pulpy plot and a great deal of hammy acting. In the end it does veer sharply towards the silly end of things, but even if it can't compete with Steven Spielberg, there is still much to cherish and enjoy.

Considering the context in which it was made, it's fair to assume that The Boys from Brazil carried a great deal more weight than would appear immediately obvious. Coming only 16 years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann, it was still faintly credible to believe that there were dozens of ex-Nazis hiding out in South America, harbouring bitterness and plotting to 'put things right'. Likewise this was nearly 20 years before Dolly the Sheep was created; cloning was still the stuff of science fiction, and the lack of palpable examples in nature made the prospect of a Fourth Reich all the more terrifying.

This feeling of weight is compounded by the talent on both sides of the camera. The film is based on a novel by Ira Levin, whose previous works, Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, had captivated the public both in print and on the big screen. Franklin J. Schaffner had demonstrated his ability to combine politics and populist entertainment in both the original version of Planet of the Apes and the Oscar-winning Patton. And then we have the two male leads, one a beloved Hollywood veteran, the other hailed as the greatest actor ever to grace the English stage.

With the bar set so high, you could be forgiven for reacting badly to the finished film. There is a conflict between the serious talent involved and the essentially pulpy, trashy nature of the story, which means the film has neither has the grace or poise to be a truly 'serious' work, nor the knowingness needed to take it into Flash Gordon territory. Some of the sillier moments of the film may produce the same belly-laughs and face-splitting grins that Mike Hodges achieved, but for the most part it is sadly unintentional.

Part of this silliness, as has been mentioned, comes from innate contrivances in the plot. While there is great potential in the idea of old Nazis cloning Hitler to bring back their great empire and enslave the world all over again, the idea falters when the actual technology is examined. We are asked to believe that the cloning technology we see on screen is both cutting-edge - according to Bruno Ganz - and would have been available some 25 years ago, so that Gregory Peck's Dr. Mengele could have come up with such a scheme in the first place.

If you manage to get beyond this initial trifle, there are various other contrivances and plot holes surrounding the mystery element of the film. Even if Ezra Lieberman were the most highly-skilled Nazi hunter in the world, it seems unfeasible that he could pick up the trail so quickly simply by sorting through newspaper clippings of civil servants. Furthermore, if Mengele's plan is to condition the young Hitler clones, why does said conditioning start with the fathers being murdered? Surely to be properly effective, the boys would have to be encouraged to be artistic rather than just assuming that they would be genetically? Finally, there is the small matter of the money - for all the stories about Nazi gold hidden in Swiss bank accounts, it's hard to imagine James Mason and his associates living quite so lavishly without detection.

Then there are the performances to consider. Peck had recently returned to public prominence through his role in The Omen, which avoided becoming preposterous by the gravity and subtly of his performance. In this, however, he is hamming it for all his worth, scowling at the camera, chewing the scenery and spitting out his lines in a German accent which, to be kind, comes and goes. Laurence Olivier is equally ripe, although his accent is more ridiculous and wanders more obviously. The fact that he was Oscar-nominated for his performance is proof that the film, and perhaps the Academy, had gotten sillier with age.

In a way, though, the performances hold the key to enjoying or understanding the film. Once you accept the hammy tone both Peck and Olivier are going for, your opinion slowly adjusts from one of mild disappointment to embracing the film as a piece of trashy fun. From this point of view the two leads are enjoying themselves, and in their final confrontation much of that enjoyment rubs off on us. Considering that both actors were well over 60 (and Olivier was recovering from kidney surgery), it's a thrill that they could actually do the fight scene, let alone do it so well.

If the fight scene is a case of 'spot the stunt double', then the supporting cast is one of 'spot the famous face'. One of the murdered fathers is played by Michael Gough (Batman's butler), and his wife is Prunella Scales, best known for playing Sybil in Fawlty Towers. Walter Gotell, famous for his role as a Soviet agent in the Bond films, makes an appearance as one of Mengele's oldest allies. He gets one of the funniest lines in the film early on, when he remarks: "And by killing this old mailman I will be fulfilling the destiny of the Aryan race?".

Bruno Ganz, who would ironically play Hitler in Downfall years later, shows up later on as a professor specialising in cloning. He makes the most of what is essentially the Basil Exposition role: his job is to explain how cloning works so we and Olivier can join the dots and unleash the twist. There is also a very good performance by Jeremy Black, who goes through a multitude of accents and one very bad haircut to convincingly play all the different clones of Hitler.

The film also has its fair share of B-movie special effects which somehow make it more endearing. Aside from fairly standard acts, like a dummy being thrown off a dam and Bobby's dad falling strangely after being shot, we have the sequence of Peck being mauled to death by several Alsatians. Here we get false arms dangling off Peck's body, obvious make-up (with scars that are raised up off his forehead) and bucketloads of giallo-red blood.

Within these final scenes The Boys from Brazil attempts - and partially succeeds - to touch on the serious issue at the heart of its story. It explores the danger of fascism or other tyranny returning if people forget about it; Mengele's experiment is possible because even those charged with bringing Nazis to justice have lost faith in their cause. There is also an argument about pre-emptive justice, i.e. should the clones be killed for what they may become, or should they be left to develop and choose their own destinies. The film does well in showing both sides of the argument; Lieberman destroys the list of the 94 boys, but then in a classic Levin twist, we see Bobby Wheelock in his dark room, staring with a morbid fascination at Mengele being ripped to shreds...

The Boys from Brazil is an interesting and enjoyable if completely silly film, which brings several interesting issues to the fore while providing ample in the way of entertainment. It's not as successful as Rosemary's Baby or The Stepford Wives, either as an adaptation of Levin's work or as a deeply disconcerting piece of filmmaking. But once we have embraced its hammy exterior, and forgiven its more obvious shortcomings, it emerges as something with bombast, brio, and just a little bite.

In the years since Monty Python slowly drifted apart, Eric Idle has gained a reputation for being the most cynical and money-minded member of the group. Whatever the individual merits of Spamalot or He's Not the Messiah!, their very existence gives off the air of a man living on past glories, no longer capable of producing anything new or even being funny. It's a reputation which Idle himself has played on, through his recent Greedy Bastard tour and his contributions to the Pythons' YouTube channel.

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash can be viewed as the point where the funny, creative and inventive Eric Idle started to be replaced by a lazier writer, who would string out a single joke not until it wasn't funny, but for as long as the budget allowed. The story of the Prefab Four, whose career mirrors that of The Beatles, may have worked well as a short, snappy gag on Rutland Weekend Television or Saturday Night Live. Looking at the feature-length version, it's massively dated, not funny and really quite boring.

The first criticism that could be laid at The Rutles' door is that it is not cinematic, or at least not cinematic enough to hold up to the others Pythons' ventures into filmmaking. This would, however, be a fallacy since The Rutles is by its very nature a product of TV. Not only did the characters start out on Rutland Weekend Television, but the film was made with the backing of NBC. Moreover, there are many made-for-TV films which can stand up to their big-screen counterparts, and some can even better them. The 1988 TV film of Jack the Ripper, starring Michael Caine, is tighter and more dramatic than, say, Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger.

The problem with The Rutles is not that it is a TV film. The problem is that it very quickly exhausts itself, both aesthetically and in terms of the material. The sketch in the original series worked because the series was playing on the cheap-and-cheerful nature of local news and current affairs coverage in Britain. It was believable that the Prefab Four (as they were called) could exist as a band, and could have had something of a Beatles career in miniature. Stripped of this context, the conceit quickly runs out of steam and the parody looks all too simple.

The Rutles' script is very weak and aimless, with much of it feeling like reheated leftovers of Monty Python. When the Pythons were scripting their TV series, sketches were run past the group by individual members who wrote separately, with the only rule being that if it wasn't funny, it didn't get in. Idle famously wrote on his own among the Pythons, and both this and aspects of Rutland Weekend Television feel like old sketchbooks, crammed full of all the material he had written which wasn't funny enough to get past his colleagues.

The Rutles takes us through the career of the Prefab Four, comprising Dirk McQuickly (Idle), Barry Wom (John Halsey), Stig O'Hara (Ricky Fataar) and Ron Nasty (Neil Innes). Their career mirrors that of The Beatles almost exactly, as the interviewer character (Idle) takes all through the various milestones and examines all the highs and lows. There's the early gigs at the Cavern Club and in Hamburg, along with the group attempting to crack America with various gigs and an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

There's a restaging of the "bigger than Jesus" fiasco, with Ron Nasty being misquoted as saying the Rutles were "bigger than God", when in fact all he had said was "bigger than Rod " (Stewart). Instead of experimenting with LSD, the group fall under the influence of tea, and rather than marrying a Japanese artist with hippie tendencies, Ron Nasty meets a German artist named Chastity, who likes to dress up as a Nazi. Every Beatles release is pastiched and parodied to the hilt - The Magical Mystery Tour becomes The Tragical History Tour, Let It Be becomes Let It Rot, and 'Love Me Do' becomes 'Rut Me Do'.

Many of these jokes are passingly witty in their own way, and to give the filmmakers credit, they have recreated the look of The Beatles very well. The costumes are pretty immaculate, particularly for the psychedelic period around 'I Am The Walrus'. The animated section copies Yellow Submarine so closely that you would swear you were watching deleted scenes from the original. And no-one can doubt the talent of Neil Innes, whose compositions mimic The Beatles from the lyrics right down to the chord progressions.

But despite the impressive production values in places, the film is still essentially a collection of bits. It is a hotch-potch of jokes delivered in the style of Idle's Python material which will produce the odd knowing snigger or wry chuckle among Beatles fans or Python aficionados. For those with little or no experience of either, there is no way in to the central conceit, and it can feel at times like two schoolboys giggling and making up silly names to take the mick out of each other's heroes. If anything it will make you end up hating The Beatles even more than you thought was possible.

Comparisons have naturally been drawn between The Rutles and This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner's fantastic mockumentary which premiered eight years later. Fans will argue 'til the cows come home over which film truly created the mockumentary, or over the potential influence that Idle's work had over Reiner's. But the fact remains that Spinal Tap is the superior film, for one simple reason: we believed that the band could be real.

Spinal Tap worked, both as a film and as a comic conceit, because it had a plot and characters that you cared about. It wasn't just a string of random jokes or jibes at rock'n'roll, it was about the people in the middle of that who were too lovably stupid to realise how much of a joke they were. The more time you spent with David St. Hubbins or Nigel Tufnell, the more lovable and believable their idiocy became.

The Rutles mirror The Beatles so closely that the band never takes on a life of their own. While both bands eventually became real, Tap felt like a bona fide rock band while The Rutles still felt like cardboard cut-outs. This is consolidated by the different styles of the films. The Rutles feels self-contained, like a highly choreographed sketch (which it is), while Spinal Tap is freeform and free-flowing, and doesn't feel like people reading lines. Idle may not have had the money or perhaps even the talent that Reiner managed to obtain on Spinal Tap, but you can't help feeling that he should have experimented more.

The best scene by far in The Rutles ironically involves none of the actual band. It takes place outside Rutles Corps HQ, where George Harrison (in a cameo appearance) is interviewing the band's lawyer, Eric Manchester (Michael Palin). Manchester is denying that Rutles Corps has been subject to pilfering or looting, while dozens of people pour in and out of the building helping themselves to office equipment, plants and memorabilia. It's a well-paced gag with roots in reality, which works because we never feel that the actors are in on the joke (even though they are). It's also a timely reminder of how The Beatles and Monty Python frequently crossed paths: it was Harrison who would stump up the money needed to make Life of Brian shortly after.

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash is a massive disappointment. Even to those who have never been exposed to either Monty Python or Spinal Tap, it will come across as flat and tired, squandering quality song-writing and production by always going for the obvious joke. Cameos from the likes of Paul Simon and Mick Jagger are largely wasted, and the main performers don't have the timing or charm to carry the jokes. The only thing The Rutles really needs is a proper script and some imagination.

Mad Max is a high-octane, fuel-injected, supercharged powerhouse of a movie, which comes at you without patience or compromise and assaults your senses over a blistering 90 minutes. Part punk western, part exploitation film, part rough-and-ready horror movie, Mad Max brilliantly combines a strong thesis about energy and social collapse with spectacular action scenes and some of the best car chases in existence. George Miller's directorial debut is a remarkable piece of work, which remains every bit as powerful and gripping at it did when first released.

Just as Dark Star helped to bridge the gap between old-school sci-fi and post-Star Wars space fantasy, so Mad Max takes the great westerns of John Ford and Sergio Leone, and kicks them up the backside into the future. It takes the talismanic features of films as diverse as The Wild One, Badlands and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and imposes its own unique vision on the archetypes these films created. What results is the first ever punk western, in which leather-clad rebels without a cause take to the desolate highways and commit acts of unspeakable, motiveless horror.

In this desperate and aggressive world, the horses and covered wagons have been replaced by whining motorbikes and thundering patrol cars. The noise made by the vehicles is a soundtrack unto itself, at least to the petrol-heads among us. As with the climactic chase in Bullitt, the composer Brian May (no, not that one) rightfully avoids adding anything to this already symphonic roar. For all the technological advances, however, the surroundings remain desolate and inhospitable; if you didn't know better, you'd swear you were in the Mid-West rather than near the Australian coast.

For all its exploitation trappings, and its very low budget, Mad Max has an intelligence running all the way through it which neither hampers the money shots nor allows us to get lost in the more sadistic scenes. The film was made partly as a response to the OPEC crisis of 1973-74, in which the world's oil producers sharply reduced oil production. The price of petrol quickly quadrupled and remained high in Australia throughout the 1970s.

Miller's central thesis in the film is that humanity will become more savage and extreme as the resources it relies on become scarce. To our environmentally conscious minds, a supercharged V8 muscle car is the last thing you want to drive in a world running out of oil. But when you're up against psychotic bikers who rape, pillage and burn, you won't stand much chance in a Toyota Prius.

The lack of oil and other key resources -- caused by goodness knows what -- has caused a social collapse, and both the bikers and their pursuers have retreated to a more animalistic state of being. Much of the bikers' dialogue is screams and howls, and the officers of the Main Force Patrol are no easier to understand. This is not because of their thick Australian accents (which were badly overdubbed on the theatrical release), but because of their ruthless pursuit of the bikers at the expense of personal morality. Take the scene of Goose and the stuttering mechanic showing Max "the last of the V8 Interceptors" -- they crowd around the engine and holler like a pack of hyenas, turned on by the power they have created and the thought of using it to hunt these people down.

Following on from this idea is Max's fear that he could so easily tip over into savagery. Both the bikers and the patrol groups wear black leather (or what appears to be leather; in reality only Mel Gibson is wearing the real thing). At one point Max remarks to his boss that "any longer out on that road and I'm one of them, a terminal psychotic, except that I've got this bronze badge that says that I'm one of the good guys." There is a genuine warning in these scenes over the lengths seemingly normal people will go to in the name of what seems right, so that eventually the idea remains but the person is completely destroyed.

Outside of its western elements, Mad Max is also pretty effective as a horror film, with several scenes recalling films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. When the bikers attack the couple's car and tear it to pieces, the camera films it like a murder scene. There are shades of Psycho in the rapid cutting of close-ups as bits of the car's 'flesh' is torn off, and the leaking petrol is shot like blood oozing from a gaping wound. The scenes of Fifi running through the wood to escape her pursuers is expertly tense, and the individual shocks involving charred and severed hands of two of the characters are handled very well indeed.

In its final third, Mad Max also becomes an intelligent revenge thriller; after his family are murdered, Max becomes obsessed with avenging them and drives off in the Pursuit Special to hunt down every last member of the Toe-Cutter's gang. As in Death Wish, the film intrinsically acknowledges that this quest for revenge will lead to the destruction of the central character, whether by their choice or inadvertently. But where Death Wish delights in the violence and hurries the character development to get there, Mad Max takes its time. Max only becomes mad in the last 20 minutes, and we see the evolution of his mental and physical collapse evolve and progress on screen.

The action sequences in Mad Max are brilliantly choreographed, with great and authentic stunts which keep things brutal, rough and gritty but never gratuitous. We do get certain scenes of gratuity, such as the brief encounter between Goose and the singer in the almost non-existent skirt, but the film wisely keeps its eyes on the prize and the actual 'encounter' does not take place on screen. The atmosphere created by the opening chase scene is really something, and sets the scene for future badlands horror movies like The Hitcher.

Mel Gibson's performance as Max is really great. For everything that's been written about him since, with varying degrees of truth, one cannot deny the intensity and charisma he brings to the screen. The film relies almost entirely on his character's transformation being believable, and Gibson rises amply to the challenge. Steve Bisley is enjoyable as Goose and Hugh Keays-Byrne is deliciously over-the-top as the Toe-Cutter. He's the only person who can wear a ponytail on his forehead and still be intimidating.

Mad Max is not quite a perfect film. The soundtrack, when it can get a word in edgeways, is a little too Thunderbirds at certain points, and the film does occasionally tip over into pantomime. But these are mere trifles in an otherwise fantastic film. The acting is solid, the writing is simple but effective, the camerawork is technically accomplished and the film is constantly gripping. Fans will argue 'til the apocalypse about which the best film in the trilogy, but none of them will deny the powerful and violent originality present in this cult classic. A real must-see.

As the 1970s wore on The Who increasingly turned their attention from music to filmmaking. Following Ken Russell's Oscar-nominated adaptation of Tommy, the band gained a stake in Shepperton Studios. Here they filmed the final scene of The Kids Are Alright, in what turned out to be Keith Moon's last live performance. After production wrapped on The Kids Are Alright, the group pressed on with adapting their other rock opera, Quadrophenia.

In bringing Quadrophenia to the big screen, the band and first-time director Franc Roddam took a completely different approach than they had for Tommy. Ken Russell had a deep-seated interest in opera and classical music: he treated the material as an opera which just happened to have been written by a rock band. The finished product was a divisive mixed bag: amidst some striking imagery and memorable characterisation, there was a lot of bad singing, over-indulgence and naff pomposity.

Quadrophenia is more like a coming-of-age film which documents the rise and fall of the original mods. Its storyline interweaves elements of the rock opera out of album order, and its soundtrack balances The Who with other mod favourites like The Kinks, The Ronettes and The Crystals. The film is around 40 minutes longer than the album even with several songs cut out, taking its time to set up the mods' aims, culture and modus operandi.

To understand the reasons for this approach, we have to consider the changing circumstances of the band. When Tommy was made, The Who were at the height of their power as a live group; they had both the money and the fame to be a little over-exuberant. Four years later, punk had moved in and swallowed up the younger generation, leaving The Who in a no-man's-land between circus-act obsolescence and risky reinvention. After the death of Keith Moon, the band lost some of its live firepower, so that even if they had wanted to recapture the old ground, they could no longer drown out their rivals.

Much of Quadrophenia is about The Who trying to justify their continued existence by examining the foundations of the culture which launched them. Just as The Who were (retrospectively) described as the original punk rock band, so there is an attempt to portray the mods as the direct predecessors of the punks. There is some similarity in their characterisation, as gangs of young people with a unique dress sense, who eschew all authority and are generally unpleasant to anyone outside their inner circle. Roddam even screen-tested Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten for the lead role, but he was dropped because no-one would insure him.

Despite this earnest desire to justify themselves, the approach of The Who's surviving members is decidedly hands-off. Unlike Tommy, the band do not appear in person, either as themselves or in character (for instance, Keith Moon playing Uncle Ernie with a worrying amount of relish). We are therefore spared the prospect of Pete Townshend et al playing themselves aged 21, in the manner of Mariah Carey's excremental Glitter. There are only two occasions in which we see the band: once on a poster of Pete Townshend next to Jimmy's bed, the other in an early TV performance from Ready, Steady, Go!.

This strange sense of modesty is further reflected in the soundtrack, which was overseen by bassist John Entwistle. In Quadrophenia the songs are mixed right down to serve as background, rather than being the driving force for the action. When 'My Generation' gets played at the house party, you quickly get the mods shouting over it until Roger Daltrey's delivery becomes totally lost. The film is emphasising the effect which this music had rather than the band that created it; we have to focus on Jimmy as a character rather than as a vessel for different aspects of the group.

Although this approach may disgruntle purists, the music in Quadrophenia is still of a high quality. Of the seventeen album tracks, ten survive in either their original form or with very slight alterations - for instance, the new bass part and more definitive ending of 'The Real Me', which plays out over the opening credits. The three original compositions which Townshend penned are also up to snuff: they may be more deliberately incidental, but they still feel like Who songs, and the oft-maligned Kenney Jones manages to at least partially replicate Keith Moon's drumming style.

Quadrophenia is a character study of a confused young man, who attaches himself to the mods as a means of identity, but starts to go to pieces when they desert him. Early on in the film he meets his childhood friend Kevin (a young Ray Winstone), who has just returned from a spell in the army. Jimmy has a warm bond with Kevin, but whenever his friends turn up he changes his tune and runs with the pack - right down to him fleeing the scene when Kevin is beaten up for being a rocker.

The central idea of Quadrophenia is that of youth-led revolution. The mods were the first genuinely post-war teenagers; having no real attachment to the world or values of their parents, they saw no reason to accept the old way of life. The scenes of the Brighton riots are edgy and visceral, showing the gang mentality of both mods and rockers, and the cluelessness of the police who simply don't know how to respond t to a generation that doesn't care. When the magistrate orders him to pay a fine, the Ace Face (played unconvincingly by Sting) responds by getting out his chequebook, causing the whole court to erupt with laughter.

But rather than simply glorify the mods, Quadrophenia highlights the dangers of identifying with such a culture too closely. Just as The Who only became truly successful after the mods died away, so Jimmy only gets to see 'the real me' when the scales have fallen from his eyes. Having been thrown out of home, jilted by Lesley Ash and his prized scooter wrecked by a lorry, he decides to return to Brighton. After a drug-fuelled train journey ("out of my brain on the 5:15"), he finds the mods gone and the Ace Face working as a bell boy at the hotel they smashed up. Alienated and depressed, Jimmy throws Ace's scooter off Beachy Head. The scooter, like the mods, is smashed beyond repair, while the fate of Jimmy remains unknown.

There are a number of flaws with Quadrophenia. Despite the impressive choreography during the riots, Franc Roddam's direction is not great - the choice of camera angles is rather jobbing and the sequence on the cliffs could have used a couple of big edits. The first hour feels padded out, taking too long to get to Brighton and dragging narratively: there are only so many parties, bars and cafes we need to visit to understand how mod culture works. One scene in particular, of Jimmy and his friends raiding a pharmacy, wanders rather too close to Animal House in its jokes about pills and condoms.

Like so many cult films, Quadrophenia is rough around the edges and approaches its subject matter in a manner which is not entirely successful. But as an examination of mod culture it manages to be comprehensive and genuine without totally falling in love with its subject, and it manages to do justice to the album, albeit in a roundabout way. Though Russell is by far the better director, this work had dated much better than Tommy, and it remains a highly influential work of 1970s cinema.

With the decline of the theatrical double bill and the rise of multi-million-dollar movie marketing, the term 'B-movie' has become derogatory shorthand used to dismiss a film's content or production values. This is a shame when you consider both the innate ropey charm of certain B-movies and in many cases their ability to explore more interesting and edgy ideas than many of their mainstream competitors. The Clonus Horror (a.k.a. Parts or Clonus) is a good illustration of both arguments.

The Clonus Horror is part of a wave of low-budget dystopian sci-fi films which reached their peak in the 1970s. Like Soylent Green it depicts a future in which mankind literally feeds on itself to survive, shrouding the modern equivalents of cannibalism behind a veil of scientific endeavour and an appeal to old-fashioned values. There are also nods to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the perfect nature of the compound monitored by constant surveillance, and the ear tags worn by the clones are similar to those in George Lucas' debut, THX 1138.

But by far the film's closest cousin is The Stepford Wives. The clones are conceived as perfect specimens of men and women both physically and mentally. They are regularly tested to ensure their development and are instilled with the values of the American dream - only instead of serving their husbands both domestically and sexually, they are insanely ambitious and go all wide-eyed at the very mention of America. As a bonus, the very stilted delivery that we would expect from this unique conditioning helps to disguise any real deficiencies in the acting department.

Other problems with The Clonus Horror, however, are far more noticeable and less easy to forgive. The production values are very low - as with Gregory's Girl, it looks like a film in which everyone was asked to bring their own clothes to use as costumes. The film is shot on low-quality stock and the director, Robert S. Fiveson, resorts to a lot of exterior shooting, presumably to save time and money on interior set-ups.

While this decision on its own might make sense, it also results in a number of visual shortcomings. The film is not well-directed by any means, and the abundance of exterior shoots leads to a multitude of unnecessary lens-flares or distracting light changes. The composition of certain shots is ramshackle to the point of being unintentionally funny - for instance, the scene of the woman sitting in front of the campfire in such a way that her backside looks like it is smoking. And there are lots of cheap 1970s shots of women's chests and short shorts, coupled with a typically unnecessary sex scene.

The plot of The Clonus Horror also has a number of shortcomings, with a story which is lacking in nuance and very contrived. We buy the idea of Richard breaking into 'America' to try and find out what is going on, but with all the cameras around he surely would have been discovered sooner. Certainly he wouldn't have had nearly enough time to read through all the files and watch a promotional tape about the Clonus project. Likewise it's strangely fortunate that the first person Richard runs into the real world just happens to be a friendly journalist who genuinely wants to help.

Not only is the film contrived, it is also frequently silly. Part of this silliness comes from bad continuity - in one scene Richard goes from limping down a street, having been shot in the leg and the shoulder, to riding full-pelt on a child's bicycle to outrun a guard on a motorbike. The conversations between the retired journalist and his wife unintentionally wander into Dark Star territory, as if this is what Sergeant Pinback would have ended up doing had he made it safely back to Earth. And then there is the sequence in which said characters are dispatched - not by shooting, or being arrested, but by their entire house being suddenly blown up, for no apparent reason.

In additional to these issues, the film is on one level very televisual. Its story is slim enough to have been handled easily as a one-hour mystery drama or an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. The repeated use of monitors and computer screens give the film a small-screen feel, and there are hints of the work of Gerry Anderson in both the visuals and the characters; the drop-down microphones used by the guards wouldn't look out of place in an episode of Captain Scarlet.

All that has been said so far makes out that The Clonus Horror is an abject failure in filmmaking. But in spite of its myriad flaws, the film manages to be sustained by its commitment to the ideas it explores, ideas which have subsequently formed the basis of Michael Bay's The Island and most recently Never Let Me Go. But unlike the former, The Clonus Horror could never be accused to allowing its ideas to get lost in favour of popcorn-pleasing spectacle.

This is confirmed by the film's somewhat misleading title. Despite its 18 certificate (downgraded to 15 in some territories) there is very little actual horror involved, whether gory or chilling. There is a certain amount of blood in the lobotomy scene, and the sequence of the clone being wrapped in plastic and screaming on the operating table, but that aside it's less The Clonus Horror than The Clonus Mystery. The creepiest scene finds Richard wandering into the underground freezer along the lines of plastic-covered clones, which both nods to the ending of The Stepford Wives and foreshadows David's revelation in the middle of AI.

The central idea of The Clonus Horror is that people have been cloned, sometimes against their will, to provide a steady supply of replacement organs that will allow the political elite to all but live forever. The film satirises the concept of the American dream by equating 'America' with ordinary people unwittingly and unwillingly giving up their lives to benefit the wealthy and powerful. And unlike Soylent Green, the beneficiaries of this scheme are far from faceless, with Peter Graves' up-and-coming politician carrying himself like an elderly JFK.

There are numerous scenes in the film which address the ethics of cloning, with long conversations about whether the practice of cloning is moral and whether or not clones are human. Graves argues that cloning as a means of immortality would lead to many great world leaders being able to continue doing good: his brother argues the same could apply for Hitler and Stalin. The treatment of clones as second-class citizens, people who are capable of free will and emotion but viewed purely as a physical accessory, foreshadows the examination of replicants in Blade Runner.

There are other interesting ideas which the film touches on. As part of their weekly programme, the clones go to 'confession', whereby they ask questions to a computer about things they don't understand. The computer's responses are carefully filtered by the powers-that-be to reassure the clones - an action which depicts organised religion is something which uses ignorance to manipulate ordinary people. Likewise there are the legions of doctors on whose every word the clones hang without question. The film is hinting at the privileged position of doctors and medicine in our society, who have taken over from priests as the main source of societal guidance which is never questioned and consistently held up as trustworthy.

The Clonus Horror is a good example of a film which works mainly if not solely because of the strength of its convictions. For all the things that are wrong with it - and there is an awful lot - its ideas are interesting and intriguing enough to just about carry it through 90 minutes. It's not as in-depth an examination as Blade Runner, and it can't hold a candle to The Stepford Wives, but its constant commitment to its core ideas makes it more than the sum of its parts.

The Long Good Friday is part of a fascinating breed of films which are simultaneously of their time and completely ahead of the curve. It is the near-perfect marriage of the crime thriller conventions of the 1970s, as pioneered by Get Carter and The French Connection, with an enticing political subtext about the 'Me Generation' and the government of Margaret Thatcher. It's hard to watch it thirty-one years on without it seeming prophetic in terms of the political and social change which swept through Britain in the 1980s. But neither has its lost any of the charm or shock value which made it such a hit the first time round.

The comparison with Get Carter is more than justified, since it is probably fair to say that without Mike Hodges' powerful film, The Long Good Friday would not exist. Both films are low-budget, gritty crime thrillers which are carried by the riveting performances of their respective leads, Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. Both in lesser hands would have been nuts-and-bolts revenge movies, but they survive thanks to the quality of their scripts and the relevance of their substance.

What they also share, more unfortunately, is a slow and incoherent opening. The first 20 minutes introduce us to a whole host of characters in a very disparate fashion, something which is only partly accidental. Director John Mackenzie had always intended the initial scenes to be distracting, to make the world of Harold Shand appear more complex. He originally envisaged a very ambitious opening, with location shots following the briefcase of money over the Alps, but producer Barry Henson thought this detracted from the film's focus on London. All the threads are eventually tied up, but even in its existing form the opening is too long, to the point at which you consider giving up.

Things pick up permanently however, with the first sight of Shand, played by Bob Hoskins. The opening shot of him striding through Heathrow airport, backed by Francis Monkman's brilliant soundtrack, perfectly captures the confidence and arrogance of the man with the whole of London at his feet. This is a man who has kept the peace for ten years through influence and intimidation, even when his underlings were "out of order". It's a well-judged and ironic introduction, since this is the happiest we will ever see the character be.

The character of Harold Shand conveys the central theme of the film, namely the decline and fall of an empire through a potent mix of outside pressure and personal tragedy. As in Shakespeare's King Lear, we first see the kingdom (or 'corporation') in good health, with the deal with America standing in for Lear dividing his kingdom among his daughters. Shand is Lear-like in that he is so self-confident, so certain that he is right, that he is blind to where his real enemies lie; and much like Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, everything makes sense only when it is too late.

Within this there are two separate subtexts. The more obvious of these is the threat of the IRA, in particular to the traditional structures of crime. The original title of Barry Keefe's screenplay was 'The Paddy Factor', and the film's eventual title refers not refers not just to the period of time which passes, but in a twisted way to the shadow the IRA casts -- 'the long Good Friday' could be a synonym for the Troubles or 'long war'. What The Long Good Friday does so well is to explore the nature of this organisation and show how its existence is a very real threat to the existing order. Many films about the Northern Irish conflict, like Michael Collins, have kept the war at arms' length from Britain, portraying the IRA as 'them lot over there'. Here they are not distant warriors but cunning infiltrators, an enemy which neither the police nor the criminal underworld can understand, let along contain.

The other, more unintentional undercurrent is about the resurgence of free-market capitalism and the legacy of Thatcher. Shand refers to his empire as 'the corporation' rather than any kind of 'gang', and the film draws an analogy between the dismantling of socialism and the violent takeover of London, both by Shand and the IRA. When Shand delivers his big speeches at either end of the film, they are conveyed with maximum irony; he exudes that very 1980s mix of endearing ambition and selective xenophobia, both of which are smashed in the final scene. Subsequent films like Wall Street and American Psycho have handled 1980s greed in more upfront ways, but both lack the sense of self-reflexive subtlety at the heart of this film.

Much like American Psycho, The Long Good Friday also has a very real sense of humour. The script is gritty and intense but has a succession of corking one-liners which consolidate the dark setting while humanising the characters. Most of these are Shand's lines, and Hoskins delivers them brilliantly in what is still his finest performance. While on the top deck of his yacht waiting for Charlie to arrive, he remarks that "the Yanks love snobbery. They feel they've really arrived in England if the upper classes treat 'em like shit." Later, finding out about the car bomb, he exclaims: "You can't go crucifying people outside a church, not on Good Friday!" -- a line which really captures the mood of the whole film.

She may not have as many killer lines as Hoskins, but Helen Mirren's performance as Victoria is every bit as captivating. Her character is the brains and dignity to Harold's muscle and rough, hands-on style. The power he possesses is a natural aphrodisiac, and yet she is not simply an air-headed bimbo who constantly requires his aid. At several key moments her intelligence saves his life, and yet she remains as vulnerable as anyone on screen.

The film is also visceral and incredibly violent at times. In the first half hour we have a car bomb and a man being stabbed in a shower by a very young Pearce Brosnan (his first film). Later we have a man being literally crucified and nailed to a floor, and Hoskins smashing in a young man's neck with a bottle. But despite these outbursts, The Long Good Friday is not a film which relies on the violence to do the hard work, either by making us enjoy it or using it to pad out the plot. Its best scenes are those which are dialogue-heavy, in which egos clash and the sparks come not from the guns but from the level of tension hardwired into the script.

The Long Good Friday is a near-perfect gangster film which looks more prophetic and intelligent with every viewing. It is a great slice of late-1970s cinema which together with Life of Brian helped to establish Handmade Films as a great low-budget film company. Despite the slow opening and the occasional scene which now seems clichéd, it follows through with its ideas and intentions, giving us plenty to chew on while we take in this dark world. It has survived all subsequent imitations, right down to the worst work of Guy Ritchie, and its influence is assured for the next thirty years. When all other British crime films let you down, this is where you should turn.

It's often the case that films we loved in our childhood don't hold up half as well when viewed again as an adult. Likewise it's very common to rediscover a film we hated in our teenage years, only to find that we were completely wrong and that said pariah is actually a masterpiece.

Flash Gordon is a more complicated example of this prolonged change of heart. As a boy under the age of 10, you can't believe your luck - bright colours, big action sequences, scary villains and a chisel-jawed hero. As a teenager who desperately wants to be cool, it's deeply embarrassing - dodgy special effects, hammy acting, a nonsensical plot and Max von Sydow dressing up as Fu Manchu. It's only after this difficult period has passed that the film reveals itself for what it really is - one of the most deliberately and thrillingly silly films gave to grace the screen.

If one were to sum up Flash Gordon in a sentence, one could describe it as a remake of the 1936 film, with the added benefits of colour, a better soundtrack (just) and (in Britain at least) more famous actors. For those of us with some knowledge of British character actors and eccentrics, the film contains a number of irresistible one-offs. Where else could you see future Bond Timothy Dalton in green spandex, or ex-I, Claudius emperor Brian Blessed in wings and a leather tunic, or Rocky Horror's Richard O'Brien as a double-crossing pipe-player?

There is also some enjoyment to be derived from the fact that the film is helmed by the same man who made Get Carter, a film as far removed from comics as you can get. Flash Gordon was Mike Hodges' first completed film in six years, after he was sacked from Damien: Omen II three weeks into filming. And for all its technical shortcomings (more on those later), Hodges does direct very well; his compositions are good, the stunts and fights are well-choreographed, the characterisation is memorable and - most importantly - he captures the spirit of the original comics.

The reason that Flash Gordon works so well, both as a comic adaptation and a film in general, is that it is aware of the limitations of both its source material and the level of spectacle its budget allows. The original Flash Gordon comics were classic boys'-own adventure tales: stories of adventure on faraway worlds where ordinary heroes battle evil villains, save the world and get the girl. The film updates the characters a little, so that Flash becomes an American footballer and Dale Arden is a travel agent, but otherwise the story plays out in exactly the same kind of romping, rapid-fire style of the original stories.

If we attempt to take Flash Gordon seriously, watching it as a 'proper' science fiction film and looking for deeper meanings in its talkier scenes, we'd last about five minutes before either giving up or bursting out laughing. The plot is totally ludicrous, requiring us to accept a load of unbelievable coincidences. For instance, how lucky that Flash and Dale's plane happened to crash land right in front of Dr. Hans Zarkov's laboratory, just as he was about to launch the rocket?

Ming the Merciless' evil plan for defeating the Earth is staple science faction fantasy; we're used to films with ray guns and magnetic shields, and so we don't question that he has the ability to move the Moon using a ray. But we still have to contend with a number of cavalier inconsistencies in the plot. The process of brainwashing Zarkov is built up and up into something quite unnerving. But five minutes later, he's back to his old self, having survived it by remembering fragments of the Talmud. In another scene, Princess Aura and Dale catfight for the best part of a minute, and then quickly become friends as if nothing happened. And why, oh why, did Ming choose to stay standing exactly where he was when the spaceship was clearly heading straight for him?

It's true that evolutions in technology take time to filter down through the various echelons of filmmaking; just because Industrial Light and Magic existed in 1980 doesn't mean that everyone could afford them. The art direction in Flash Gordon (which was BAFTA-nominated) makes the clouds resemble a marbling kit, and the special effects themselves make Thunderbirds look slick. Take the early shots of the rocket entering Ming's universe, in which one can clearly see the image on a piece of acetate being moved across the background. And then we have Gilbert Taylor's cinematography, which bathes everything in so much red that it's like watching the whole film through a vat of claret.

And you know what? None of this matters, and here's why. If this storyline had been played even faintly seriously, the film would have been a naff, self-important turkey like Xanadu (or maybe Dune, considering the presence of Dino De Laurentiis). You simply couldn't treat Flash Gordon like Batman or Superman because it's not designed to be taken seriously or to have allegorical connotations. The closest it ever comes to having any kind of message is in the big final showdown, with all the various people uniting against the evil emperor. Considering the comic's origins in the 1930s, one could argue it was making a political message about fascism, but even that's stretching a point.

By playing everything for the fans and getting knowing laughs, Flash Gordon is a triumph - or as close to one as we could expect. The fact that we laugh at it so lovingly is no accident. The screenplay comes from Lorenzo Simple, Jr., who wrote the Batman TV series and manages to tap into the inherent silliness of the plot. The soundtrack by Queen and Howard Blake sounds mediocre on its own, but when you've got big battle scenes with camp choreography, it makes sense to have stunts being backed by kick-ass guitar solos and pounding drums. In any case, Brian May's take on the wedding march is genuinely cool and really brings out the best in that scene.

From an historical point of view, the film also illuminates much about the original Star Wars trilogy. It's well-documented that Star Wars had its origins in the matinee idols and Saturday morning westerns of George Lucas' youth. But the influence of Flash Gordon goes beyond that, with this version containing many scenes which seem to eerily foreshadow Return of the Jedi. Both films feature a forest planet with tribal communities living in the treetops, and both have a giant monster with a beak and tentacles that tries to swallow people up. One could certainly argue that Krylus was the Darth Vader of his day, albeit with a voice which is much more Jeremy Irons than James Earl Jones.

On top of everything, Flash Gordon is simply great fun. Despite the various fallings-out that happened in post-production, you get the sense watching it that the cast and crew had great fun making it. Brian Blessed and Timothy Dalton are clearly having a ball, judging their lines perfectly and relishing the stunts; one can see in Dalton's performance the same kind of ferocious intensity that would serve him well during his tenure as Bond. Max von Sydow relishes his part, playing pantomime villain complete with curled lips and clipped pronunciation. Cinema fans should also keep an eye out for very brief cameos from Robbie Coltrane (at the airfield) and Deep Roy, who would later play all the Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It would be very easy to view Flash Gordon with disdain or contempt. Just as Airplane! eventually led to Epic Movie and Disaster Movie, so one could hold Flash Gordon to task for giving us Batman and Robin. But this would be deeply unfair considering how well the finished product holds up after thirty years. The film is directed with wit and intelligence, the script does justice to the comics while retaining a sense of humour, and above all it's virtually faultless as a slice of pure entertainment. For all its faults (and there are many), Flash Gordon is a triumph of both the sublime and the ridiculous. It's incredibly silly from start to finish - and you simply won't care.

In my review of Westworld, I argued that novelists who become filmmakers often lack the visual creativity to balance out the verbal richness of a given work. While certainly true of Michael Crichton's debut, this can also be applied to literary adaptations in general; the often-prolific use of voiceover and frequency of long speeches belie an unhelpfully literal approach to adaptation.

Sir Henry at Rawlinson End proves the same can be true for spoken word albums. Vivian Stanshall's 1978 LP, culled from his stints on Radio 1 covering for John Peel, remains an irresistible slice of whimsical absurdity with wordplay which is utterly to die for. But in the hands of first-time director Steve Roberts, most of the charm and quality of Stanshall's work is eroded or withered away, resulting in a crushing disappointment.

Sir Henry at Rawlinson End has been called everything from "the cinematic equivalent of cheese before bedtime" (The Big Issue) to "the missing link between Monty Python and Withnail & I" (Time Out). Set in and around the fictional English country manor of Rawlinson End, it follows a day in the life of Sir Henry Rawlinson (Trevor Howard), Great Aunt Florie (Sheila Reid) and various other eccentrics who inhabit or visit the estate. The film version extends the plot of the album, adding both the activities of a morose priest Slodden (Patrick Magee) and Sir Henry's attempts to exorcise the ghost of his brother, accidentally killed during a drunken fishing trip.

The best way to understand the film is found in the words of Peter Sellers. When interviewed in 1972 just before a one-off Goon Show to mark 50 years of the BBC, he made the comparison between The Goons and Monty Python in terms of visual imagination on the part of the audience. Watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, you had a starting point for what the various characters could look like: in Sellers' words, "John Cleese always looks like John Cleese". Listening to the Goons, on the other hand, you had to create pictures of what the various characters looked like without much visual assistance, even from Spike Milligan's own drawings.

The great joy of Sir Henry as a record was Stanshall's skill with voices, accents and verbal acrobatics. Every sinew of the storyline was crammed full with wit and wordplay, with Stanshall's metaphors and imagery being up there with the best bits of Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas would have smiled favourably on corkers such as this: "A pale sun poked impudent marmalade fingers through the grizzled lattice glass, and sent the shadows scurrying, like convent girls menaced by a tramp."

Like Under Milk Wood, the story of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is secondary to the characters inhabiting it, whose every tic and foible is captured in superb detail by the rich language. With Thomas, it is the grotesquery of Mr. and Mrs. Pew, the melancholy of Polly Garter or the grief of the blind sea captain. With Stanshall, it is the absurdity and sheer lunacy of English aristocrats, from Sir Henry's simpleton son Hubert, "in his mid-40s, and still unusual", to walking encyclopaedia Reg Smeeton, who obsesses over the fact that there is no proper name for the back of the knees.

As delightfully hilarious as all of this sounds, it was always going to be difficult to capture the innate anarchy of Stanshall's unique mind. The very effect of adding a visual dimension takes away from the imagination of the record, offering a standardised version of events which, much like the Tele-Goons, will inevitably fall short of one's expectations. One could blame this on the director's inexperience or lack of talent: Roberts would later carve a niche for himself penning TV series based on successful Disney films. But Stanshall's close involvement, both at a script level and in a supporting role, leads one to conclude that it was simply a bad idea for anyone to attempt it.

In adapting the album for the big screen, there has been a certain amount of plot- shuffling - understandable enough, and just about excusable considering the consistent quality of the material. But some of the best bits of the album are inexplicably missing. At only 73 minutes long, it is unlikely that they were cut for time, and more unlikely still that they were lost for lack of making sense. Most tragic is the omission of Sir Henry's monologue about Professor Molebottom, who in his mind "put the bounce in the bouncing bomb".

The new additions to the story are poorly integrated, giving the distinct impression that the film would have been fine without them. Patrick Magee is a burning screen presence, as evidenced by his work with Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. But for all his charisma his character seems curiously pointless; his priest plots and glowers on the side-lines, but nothing ever comes of him being there. Harry Fowler's winkle-pickered Cockney is an obvious bum note, a pale imitation of Walker from Dad's Army. And the ghost exorcism plot is badly handled, arriving with some hokey special effects and being palmed off pretty quickly.

There have been a number of strange British cult films which have passed muster in spite of their shambolic narratives. Think of Richard Lester's The Bed-Sitting Room, co-written by Spike Milligan, or The Magic Christian starring Peter Sellers. But what saw these films through their short running times and perplexing turns of plot was a constant feeling that they were about something, even if they weren't going anywhere.

Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, on the other hand, feels totally and indulgently aimless. It feels like the cast and crew were given a big house to play around in for a week - they shot everything they could, making it up as they went along and then tried to stitch it all together in the editing room. While the album may not have finished in an entirely satisfying way, it at least had the common decency to quiet while it was ahead. This hangs around for at least 20 minutes too long, ending with someone bungee-jumping off the battlements for no good reason.

In amongst its disastrous execution, there are individual moments in the film which at the very least make it memorable. There is some pleasure in seeing Trevor Howard sending himself up so mercilessly; one can almost picture this is what his character in Battle of Britain might have become had he been given a peerage. He gets a number of pretty juicy lines which showcase his insanity - the best being, "I never met a man I didn't mutilate" - and his prisoner-of-war camp banter is quite fun.

Some of the visual decisions are also notable. Where The Bed-Sitting Room found Lester manipulating colour like his contemporary Nicolas Roeg, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End is shot entirely in sepia monochrome, reinforcing its amateurish, parochial feel. If one was feeling generous, one could call this a descendent of the early surrealist films, taking its place in the canon as a late-blooming English take on Luis Bunuel.

In the end, however, there is precious little about Sir Henry at Rawlinson End that makes one feel anything like as charitable. It is a crushing disappointment for fans of the spoken word album, whose bizarrely annoying tone leaves no way in either for fans of English whimsy or for the casual viewer. The pockets of familiar bliss or tongue-twisting delight are padded out by incoherence, indulgence and irritation. In short, it proves that audience imagination is key to making these kinds of stories work, and that as a result, some things are best left unseen.

Long before he unleashed his particular brand of filmmaking on an unsuspecting Hollywood, Paul Verhoeven was kicking up a fuss in his native Netherlands with a series of playfully provocative films. Having won acclaim for period dramas Katie Tippel and Soldier of Orange, Spetters was the film which set the tone for his later career: lambasted in the press but loved by audiences, and with Verhoeven always having the last laugh.

Spetters is a coming of age film set in and around Rotterdam, which follows the stories of three young men aiming to become motocross racing champions. In the manner of all Verhoeven films, it marries full-on sex, violence and strong language with subtle and often intelligent insights into the human condition. The title epitomises this, being both slang for pretty young men and a word meaning 'splatters' - the sound the chip pan fat makes when the female lead tips it down the naked chest of a leather-clad thug.

Spetters is what you would get if you put The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause and Saturday Night Fever in a blender, and then inhaled the contents in the middle of a drunken rave. The latter is most evident in the cocky attitude of the male characters, along with a scene early on of the mechanic Eef showing off in the disco, only to be outclassed by an unnamed rival. The costumes take on elements from all these films, with Eef's penchant for leather nodding towards Marlon Brando and Rutger Hauer's perfect silver hair rivalling anything that John Travolta could produce.

As you would expect from a coming of age film, much of Spetters is concerned with our male protagonists trying to score with women and coming away with a little more than bruised egos. And coming in the middle of the gross-out wave of Animal House, Porky's and Lemon Popsicle, it's only natural to anticipate that such scenes would leave a sour, guilty taste in the mouth. But such scenes are also a showcase for Verhoeven at his best: setting up a given situation, allowing things to turn a little seedy, and then defying our expectations with a cracking punch-line.

Two examples in Spetters illustrate this ability. The first comes in the disco when one of the men starts chatting up a black woman. He buys her a beer and starts to stroke her leg, flirting with her in a typically unsubtle way. Despite her protestations, he puts his hand under her dress - and brings it out with a strange yellow gunk on his fingers. We grimace in disgust, only to burst into raucous laughter when the woman lifts up her dress to reveal a jar of mustard between her legs. Talk about taking precautions.

The second such instance comes soon after, when two of the bikers and their respective girlfriends have snuck onto a building site to have sex. Having chosen their spots, one of the girls reveals that she is on her period - which the boyfriend grossly demonstrates by bringing up two bloody fingers. Hearing his friend moaning and panting next door, he asks the girl to fake having sex with him, and together they try to out-moan their friend. Having assumed that the other couple are having great sex, Verhoeven then cuts to a wide shot which shows said couple doing exactly the same!

But the wild antics of these men are not confined to the bedroom. The racing sequences in Spetters are shot with real energy and panache: Verhoeven gets his camera in close and uses long takes, so that when the spectacular crashes happen, we think that people are genuinely getting hurt. The sense of youthful vigour present in these scenes prevents them from becoming gratuitous: Verhoeven clearly identifies with the drives and urges of these young men, and has sought to communicate this in the most natural way he knows.

Having taken its time in setting up the three main characters, Spetters really gets into gear when the main love interest arrives in the shape of Fientje, played with feisty abandon by Renée Soutendijk. She arrives inauspiciously with her brother in tow to run a fast food van in the centre of town, but over the course of the film she seduces all three men, ruining the life of Rien and Eef and changing Hans' destiny forever.

The film sets up Fientje as a dangerous outsider whom the community does not accept. The only reason the police allow her and her brother to stay is because she gives the officer a 'cup of coffee' (in other words, a sexual favour). Eef's father, who is a devout Calvinist, goes so far as to brand her a "whore of Babylon". But as with Verhoeven's subsequent works, particularly The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct, the role of 'evil women' is not quite as clear cut as would first seem.

Spetters, like all Verhoeven's best work, calls characters' identities into question and leaves us confused as to whom we are really rooting for. The device of seduction is employed to show just how much there is to becoming a man - in other words, there is more to finding out who you are than losing your virginity, or scoring with the best woman in town. Fientje's own motivations are up for debate: she starts as a serial maneater, a femme fatale who wants Rien's riches for a new fur coat. But in the end she is confused as the others, unsure of herself and of her fate.

There is some kind of moral point in the fate of the three men. Rien is seduced by the money Fientje gets him through sponsorship, but he ends up losing the only woman he really loved. When he finally gets the chance to express it, he is unable to do so: the accident has claimed not only his ability to perform sexually, but all his accompanying confidence and self-esteem.

Eef desperately wants to seduce Fientje, but the more time he spends with her, the more he becomes convinced that he is deceiving himself - a conviction which culminates in him coming out as gay and hooking up with her brother. It's an odd way to find yourself, but the end point, the realisation of identity, is the same. Meanwhile Hans, the best-endowed of the group, should be first in line to claim Fientje as his own. But being too shy and inept to pull her, he ends up making something of himself and wins her heart by seeing her as something more than a possible conquest.

Naturally, all this seduction results in a lot of nudity. Sometimes the flesh-bearing is funny, such as an early sequence of Rien, Eef and Hans in the garage measuring their manhoods with a spanner. But others are deeply uncomfortable, like the very tough sequence of Eef being gang-raped in the subway after stealing from a gigolo. Even for long-term Verhoeven fans, who are used to this kind of thing, you will start to lose patience as the film tips further into lazy soft-core territory.

Alongside its rampant nudity, Spetters pulls no punches when it has to get violent. Outside of the dangerous racing early in the film, there is one particularly wince-inducing moment where Rien suffers an accident that will leave him crippled. Having been hit in the face by a bag of orange peel, Rien goes flying from his bike, rolls down the verge and (in tight close up) catches his leg on a stone pillar. Having made us squirm and then laugh before, Verhoeven turns that approach on its head to effectively show the demise of this character. The end comes with Rien trundling his electric wheelchair back to the motorway to kill himself - a scene made all the more harrowing by the fact that actor Hans von Tongeren took his own life two years later.

Spetters is a visceral and often hilarious comedy-drama which offers plenty in the way of thrills and spills. Like a lot of coming of age stories, its plot is far too thin, and it resorts to a few too many gross-out moments to keep us interested. But in the sections when it works, it finds Verhoeven firing on all cylinders, delivering substance in the midst of violent sleaze. It's not up there with The Fourth Man or his early work in Hollywood, but it remains good, guilty-pleasure fun.

Having caught the public's imagination with Hallowe'en, John Carpenter needed another big hit to cement his position as an ascendant low-budget filmmaker. After the release of Hallowe'en in October 1978, he began his working relationship with Kurt Russell on the Elvis TV-movie, which famously beat a re-run of Gone With the Wind in the American ratings.

The Fog is the kind of film that Hallowe'en would have been if Carpenter were not so adept at marrying storytelling to special effects. It contains a number of technically impressive set-pieces which foreshadow more expensive mainstream films, along with all Carpenter's directorial trademarks including a very good score. But although the story is as brutally simple as its predecessor, the film ultimately fails to make the most of it and ends up surprisingly dull.

Like Prince of Darkness after it, The Fog is on one level Carpenter's tribute to one of his favourite horror writers - in this case Edgar Allan Poe rather than H. P. Lovecraft. The film begins with a quote from Poe and a spooky prologue in which John Houseman sets the scene. This scene is very well-played, not only in creating the mood but in the level of horror it orchestrates. The fact that there are children present leads us to believe that the story is just another old wives' tale to stop people going out at night. But Houseman's delivery is so precise and dolorous that we can't help wondering whether we're mistaken.

Sadly, the suspense created in these first five minutes is completely undone by the following forty. With the exception of the prologue the first half of The Fog is very dull, with very little going on that is engaging or threatening in any way. Carpenter sets up a host of different characters who begin interacting in various ways, but none of these encounters on their own are enough to sustain our interest. Our emotional responses vary from annoyance directed at Janet Leigh to confusion as to how Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis ended up sleeping together so quickly.

Such shortcomings in the characters undercut the film's ability to truly frighten us. Until the sequence in the lighthouse with the burning driftwood, The Fog simply isn't scary, and its attempts to rectify this are desperately obvious. The scene of Father Malone reading from Blake's diary is so hokey that all we can do is smirk, and elsewhere all Carpenter comes up with is a few loud bangs in broad daylight. Even the elaborate opening involving clinking glass and car alarms contains nothing which is capable of generating a sustained level of terror.

In the absence of either engaging characters or proper scares, all we have left to admire in this section of The Fog are the special effects - which, as it turns out, are quite impressive. The low budget meant there simply weren't the resources to fill entire streets with artificial fog, let alone make it move in a certain way. To get around this all the wide shots of the coast and Antonio Bay's streets are done with scale models shrouded in black cloth, something you wouldn't notice unless you had studied the production in detail.

As for the fog itself, it's real fog. In contrast to the blatant CGI used in the remake, Carpenter used machines known as mole foggers to generate the sepulchral clouds and then guide them as best he could with carefully positioned fans. Dean Cundey, Carpenter's long-time cinematographer, lights the fog to get the greatest amount of menace out of what is essentially an inanimate object. When it's coming in off the sea, it shimmers with an iridescent blue, while in the boy's house it is the same lurid combination of red and green of 1950s Hammer.

Fittingly, it is one particular special effect which finally kicks The Fog into life (and no, it's not the TV turning itself on in the manner of Poltergeist). It comes when Adrianne Barbeau is in the radio station testing some pre-recorded demo tapes near the piece of driftwood her son found on the beach. While her back is turned, the wood begins to drip with water, until it works its way into the tape machine and garbles the sound. Barbeau turns round to find the writing on the plank has changed from 'Dane' to '6 will die', and then the whole thing bursts into flames.

Quite apart from its technical proficiency, this sequence is the first time in the film where we have both a real sense of tension and a provable physical threat. The execution of this scene conveys the supernatural elements of the story - water catching on fire - while retaining the physical grounding of the film's villains. And because the action happens so close to us on screen, we feel the beginnings of a connection to these characters and their rapidly darkening predicaments.

But again there is a problem. As the screen time accorded to the ghosts increases, we begin to ask questions about how they function on a physical level. Blending a supernatural force with natural elements (i.e. ghosts in fog) is a hard act to pull off, and as the film rolls on more inconsistencies come to light. Perhaps this is a result of the various production problems, which necessitated reshooting a third of the footage.

The Fog never sets out any kind of parameters in which the fog or the ghosts operate, and yet every time we try to impose our logic on it, it very quickly defies it. We assume that the fog has no power of its own - until it creeps of its own accord into the boat's generator. We accept that the ghosts cannot have influence without the fog - until the driftwood gets soaked. And we embrace the fact that the ghosts are physical, having to knock on doors rather than walk through them - except at the end, when they magically re-materialise in the church. Errors like this not only make the film confusing but work against our desire to become involved in the story and our desire to be scared by it.

Fortunately, there is just enough in the way of atmosphere created in the last half hour to prevent The Fog from completely collapsing. Carpenter's dynamic score is well-matched to the ominous shots of the fog creeping in off the coast, and several of the set-pieces work pretty well. The scene of Jamie Lee Curtis being attacked by the reanimated corpse is pretty creepy, as is the final confrontation in the church involving Father Malone and the shimmering cross.

The performances in The Fog are also pretty decent. Adrianne Barbeau, who was then married to Carpenter, gives a convincing performance as a local radio DJ, even if she does spend a little too much time screaming out repetitive instructions. Hal Holbrook brings a brooding presence to Father Malone, turning his few lines into something which seems more significant. And Janet Leigh gives her all in her last film role, sharing scenes with two graduates of Hallowe'en - one being Nancy Loomis, the other her real-life daughter Jamie Lee Curtis.

The Fog is a disappointing follow-up to Carpenter's greatest work. Its special effects, score and performances are just about enough to carry it through its running time, and there is some appeal in seeing a cutting-edge horror filmmaker re-approach an old-fashioned ghost story. But while technically interesting, it's also narratively inept, coming nowhere near the heights of its predecessors or Carpenter's subsequent greatness on Starman and The Thing.

Up until the early-1980s, 'horror comedies' were ropey, nuts-and-bolts parodies of old horror movies or conventions. This trend was present throughout American cinema, from the Abbott and Costello movies of the 1940s and 1950s to exploitation films like Little Shops of Horrors and Please Don't Eat My Mother. But in 1981, the face of horror comedy was irrevocably changed by two striking, challenging and terrifying films. One was The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's classic shocker which became a bête noire of the British censors and scared the living daylights out of critics and audiences alike. The other was An American Werewolf in London.

John Landis was no real stranger to horror comedy. Way before he made his name as a comedy director, he had directed and starred in Schlock, a no-budget goofy spoof of old B-movies about the 'missing link' between apes and man. Landis loved old horror films but frequently despaired at the unbelievable look of the monsters. Schlock was his first encounter with Rick Baker, a make-up and effects designer of such skill and quality that the Academy Award for Visual Effects was created specifically to recognise his work. Following the box office success of Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House and The Blues Brothers, Landis was finally in a position to make the film just the way he wanted.

Although The Evil Dead and Werewolf came out in the same year, their approaches to 'horror comedy' are totally different. In The Evil Dead, the scares and shocks are funny all the way through; Raimi described it as "a Three Stooges movie, with blood and guts standing in for custard pies." When Bruce Campbell brandishes the chainsaw over the eponymous dead, we get all the gore and guts needed to make us scared and shocked, but the deaths are executed in such an inventive and goofy way that we also laugh a little, beholding the unusual deaths of these seemingly normal people.

Werewolf, on the other hand, begins as a comedy and steadily brings in more and more horror elements until the two successfully mesh together in the last half-hour. The opening sequences of David and Jack walking over the moors and discussing their conquests is very similar to Animal House, albeit in subject matter rather than tone. The horror elements do begin to encroach, but even when we first see Jack as a corpse it's still more comedy than horror because the sight of him is more ridiculous than scary. We have to wait until the final third, for the car crashes in Piccadilly Circus and David talking to his victims in the porno theatre, for the film to be simultaneously scary and funny, rather than alternately so.

This alternation does however aid the build-up of the film, allowing Landis to withhold the transformation and the resulting havoc until the last half-hour, relaxing his audience only to unleash urban hell. It also allows some of the best jokes in the script to be worked to their natural conclusion -- 'the Famous Balloon Thief' wouldn't have worked half as well if it also had to be scary. But there are several instances in the build-up to the transformation which are, shall we say, unexpected. The most left-field of these is the nightmare sequence, in which storm-troopers break into David's family home and cut his throat. Sure it's scary, but there is no connection made between this and the earlier dreams which relate more closely to David's transformation.

This problem aside, the film is very close to being a masterpiece. It is perfectly paced with a consistently funny script, and every development of this simple but fascinating story is readily accepted. We buy into David's relationship with Nurse Price played by Jenny Agutter, even given the slightly gratuitous sex scene set to Van Morrison's 'Moondance'. We understand the neurotic paranoia of the locals in the Slaughter Lamb and the divisions between them; their scenes are staged as abruptly and awkwardly comic, taking an approach that Ricky Gervais has used for his entire career. Even when the victims of the werewolf turn out to be British beyond stereotype (suited, snooty and upper-middle-class), we go with it because the tension is sustained to a brilliant level.

Much ink has been spilt over the transformation sequence, with reviewers consistently praising Rick Baker's visual effects and the tour de force performance of David Naughton. One might say that it is the 1980s equivalent of the chest-burster scene from Alien, in terms of the attention and admiration that it has garnered from cinephiles. All the things which were impressive about it then remain impressive now -- you can't see the joins in the make-up, the changes are well-paced, and the whole sequence is simultaneously scary and strangely funny. In fact, the Alien comparison is not entirely facetious, since the virtue of both these sequences is that we keep caring about the characters even when the effects are at their most elaborate.

Naughton's performance is the best in the film, but he is very evenly matched by Griffin Dunne. Much like Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dunne succeeds because he is completely blasé about his current state of being. He doesn't bring the film to a grinding halt every five seconds by remarking on how strange it is to be dead; he just accepts it and delivers his lines in the same droll manner that they did in life. Jenny Agutter is good as Nurse Price,handling her character with suitable aplomb and managing to make a lot out of what could be a very small part. There are also some entertaining turns in the supporting cast, which includes Rik Mayall before The Young Ones and Brian Glover, who would later play Superintendent Andrews in Alien 3.

An American Werewolf in London may not be a masterpiece, but it manages to be both a full-blooded horror movie and a very funny comic take on a well-worn story. It may not be quite as radical or as shocking as The Evil Dead, even in the nightmare scenes, but it joins the company of Young Frankenstein as a great and hilarious horror comedy, which simultaneously pays tribute to the clichés of a genre while savagely sending them up. Its reputation is assured and deserved, and its visuals are instantly recognisable. One thing is for sure, Burke and Hare will have to be really something to dislodge this as Landis' best film.

Making a sequel that's as good as the original is tough, especially when that original happens to be Mad Max. George Miller's electrifying punk western was a huge hit outside of America, giving audiences a thrill ride fuel-injected with warnings about humanity descending into chaos. With a larger budget and big expectations, you'd be forgiven for being a little nervous about Mad Max 2. Fortunately you needn't have worried, since Miller serves up a feast of a sequel, departing heavily from the conventions of the first film to create a fascinating blend of action and philosophy.

Mad Max 2 (re-titled The Road Warrior in the US) is a very different film from the first instalment. Where Mad Max was an all-guns-blazing action horror, Mad Max 2 is more thoughtful and considered. And while the first film began with a car chase, here we begin with a narrated section which fleshes out the nature of the apocalypse and how Max's story fits into all this. At first glance this is a shame, since one of the great thrills about Mad Max was that very little about the culture was explained; the huge engines roared into view and we simply went with it, being dragged head first into the story.

But once you stop being annoyed by the presence of back-story and start to listen to the narration, you begin to get the idea of what we are dealing with. The narration talks about a futuristic war between "two great warrior tribes" in a time when the world was "powered by the black fuel" -- all set against black-and-white stock footage from what resembles the two World Wars.

This sequence is clever for two reasons. Firstly, it consolidates and extends the thesis of the first film, giving us continuity of theme as well as plot. It takes the idea that man will turn to violence when resources are scarce, and uses footage of the wars to suggest that this is innate and unavoidable rather than historically specific to the future. Miller is clearly warning audiences that history will repeat itself in a more drastic form if we are not able to control our more primitive sides.

Secondly, the opening sequence sets the tone for the film. It gets the gear change over with so that we don't sit there disappointed waiting for the action to happen (which it does, as soon as the narrator stops talking). The sequence is a message that things have changed, and in order to understand this new world, we will have to change with it; we have had our action with a little substance, now we have to think a little harder. The character of Max has changed as well, moving closer towards that of Charles Bronson; the character doesn't talk as much anymore, but he retains a presence which drowns out all the words of the Humungous.

Because it is more thought-provoking and -- dare I say it -- quieter than the original, Mad Max 2 does not seem so striking on an aesthetic level. There are several scenes which seem inspired by better known films, though not necessarily in a bad way. Certain moments in the oil refinery at night remind you of the ice base scenes from The Empire Strikes Back, especially in the similar designs of the clothes and guns. There are also hints in both the score and the visuals of Sorcerer, William Friedkin's remake of The Wages of Fear. Underneath his more conventional pieces, Brian May scores a deep rumble to echo the sound of the engines; and as Max crawls away from the burning wreck of his car, his perspective jump cuts in a way similar to Roy Scheider in the rocky maze.

The closest comparison, however, is with Raiders of the Lost Ark, since both boast an elaborate and thrilling truck chase. Given the choice, however, Mad Max 2 wins the day over Stephen Spielberg's historical romp, because its action sequences feel like more than matinee idol fun. Spielberg specifically designed Raiders to be a B-movie pastiche with pantomime villains, so that we aren't worried about how many Nazis Harrison Ford runs over. Here, everything and everyone is at stake, with Miller making us care about Max and his allies while also giving the villains personality. The action sequences feel like a continuation of the story rather than set-pieces to which the story was leading; they carry the tension and the themes of the dialogue very well, something which is often underappreciated.

Central to Mad Max 2 is a debate about the survival of humanity. If humanity is to survive, what form will it take -- both in terms of how it will be organised and how it will be defined? The characters are divided into three groups and represent the three options for the future. The Humungous and his cohorts are brutal and animalistic; the Humungous is a fascist leader who commands obedience through a mixture of hypnotic eloquence and ruthless force. However, the ramshackle and impulsive nature of his men indicates that his rule is not as infallible as might appear.

The humans at the oil refinery are the upholders of justice and democracy, as shown by their emphasis on "contracts" and their leader calling Max "an honourable man". They are civilised and organised, but lack the ruthless edge which has consumed the Humungous -- they lack the capability to fight beyond self-defence. This is where the third group comes in, embodied by Max and the Gyro Captain. Both begin the film as outsiders, loners with the same singular desire for fuel. Max is dressed in the same leather the bikers wear, showing he could easily tip over into darkness. But like the Gyro Captain, Max is eventually able to overcome his grief and regain his humanity. These characters are the balancing act between animal and man, and both are eventually idolised by the survivors.

As in the first film, Mel Gibson's performance is brilliant. The opening shot of him at the wheel behind that giant supercharger is one of the coolest entrances in 1980s cinema, and throughout the film he sustains a burning intensity which makes us fear the character even as we grow to accept him. Bruce Spence is a good match for him as the Gyro Captain, resisting the urge to just play wacky and becoming memorable, even if we doubt his ability to survive all those crashes. Of the villains, the most memorable performances are Vernon Wells as Wez and Max Phipps as the calamitous Toadie. He plays him like a jokey version of Ron Lacey's Gestapo officer in Raiders, and the scene of his fingers being cut off is something of a nod to that character.

Mad Max 2 is every bit as brilliant as the original, combining frenetic action sequences with a basic but meaty storyline and a whole lot of subtext on which to chew. It does a really great job of fleshing out both the nature of the apocalypse and the character of Max without seeming slow or clunky, and when judged purely as a spectacle it is gripping and riveting. In place of overt horror, it offers up the same brooding sense of dread at the heart of all great westerns, and its ending is suitably open-ended and suspenseful. Above all, it is proof that the best action movies don't have to be all fluff and explosions; when done this well, they can tackle politics and human nature as well as anything drama. A true classic which deserves your full attention.

The only thing more foolish than remaking a cult film is making a sequel to one. This idea becomes worse still when that cult film happens to be The Rocky Horror Picture Show: no matter how many of the original cast return, it wouldn't be humanly possible for lightning to strike twice. For all its initial promise and moments of hilarity, Shock Treatment is a failure both as a sequel and in its own right.

Shock Treatment could be called the middle instalment of an unfinished Rocky Horror trilogy. The unproduced third instalment, Revenge of the Old Queen, would have been set on the planet of Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, with Frank N. Furter's mother (the Old Queen of the title) seeking revenge on Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff. While Brad Majors has become a Las Vegas go-go dancer and died from falling off a trapeze, Janet has become a mother through her night of passion with Frank in the first film, and brings their new-born child to this strange and twisted planet.

Neither Shock Treatment nor Revenge of the Old Queen are direct sequels, retaining much of the same cast but playing different roles. Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn are still playing brother and sister, with Riff Raff and Magenta becoming Doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley. Nell Campbell trades in Columbia for Nurse Ansalong, and Charles Gray's Criminologist becomes Judge Oliver Wright. They are joined by Barry Humphries, playing a Dr. Strangelove knock-off called Bert Schnick, and a pre-Young Ones Rik Mayall as 'Rest Home' Ricky. And in classic B-movie fashion, the main characters from the first film are played by different actors, with Cliff De Young taking over as Brad and Janet being played by Suspiria star Jessica Harper.

Shock Treatment does attempt to tackle a number of interesting ideas surrounding the nature of television, using musical conventions to raise serious questions in a light-hearted way. To some extent it is about how advertising has come to dominate television and influence its content at the expense of serious programming. This is shown in Charles Gray's first scene, in which almost every word of his 'interview' is talked over by promo people and his disinterested host, played by Ruby Wax.

The look of Shock Treatment is deliberately tacky and plastic. Everything within the TV station looks like an advert, with fake pinball smiles, garish 1950s colours and women who all resemble either air hostesses or fashion models. One song is set in a gallery of all the clichés of the American dream - the white picket fence, the perfectly sheared hedge and the man with his lawnmower. And there is the association of fast food consumption with being sane, which resembles a non-ironic mix of Monty Python's Appeal for Sanity with the New Seekers adverts for Coke.

There is also an undercurrent in Shock Treatment about reality television. The population of Denton have given up their lives to become the permanent studio audience of this 24-hour TV station. Their entire existence is based around watching the lives of others, observing and obsessing over every last detail of relationships. The nature of the TV programmes such as Dentonvale reflect this voyeuristic desire; characters are committed to the asylum so that people can watch them go to pieces, all for the sake of entertainment.

Sadly, all these interesting ideas end up getting lost as the film moves on. For all the subversive intelligence of O'Brien's ideas, his script and songs cannot convey them in a way which is meaningful, coherent or narratively sound. The result is a total mess which resembles channel surfing through a mixture of MTV and late-night game shows.

The first and biggest problem with Shock Treatment is its story. In the case of Rocky Horror, the plot was assembled from different bits of B-movies and pushed forward by the songs: the familiarity of the references always gave you some idea of where it was going, or at least that it was going somewhere. Shock Treatment doesn't have those traditions to fall back on, and its existing plot is far too thin to stand on its own.

Because the central story is so simple (Brad and Janet fall out, split and get back together), the film has to keep chucking different things into the mix to appear more sophisticated, until staying on top of it becomes as difficult as herding cats. There are too many characters on whom to focus, with both Rik Mayall and Nell Campbell being largely superfluous, and the rest are barely developed beyond suggestions of odd sexual preferences. In any case, the idea of real people being caught up in a lethal TV game show was handled better in The Running Man six years later.

A related problem is that there is no strong central performance. In Rocky Horror, Tim Curry stole every scene that he was in, so that even if what was going on made no sense at all, there was a magnetism in the finished product which kept you interested. There is no such tent-pole in Shock Treatment: Cliff De Young is no Tim Curry, and he doesn't get enough screen time in either of his roles to build himself up. There is also no narrator who can come in to steer the ship: Charles Gray is shoved into the background and becomes a subplot with little bearing on events until the trite final revelation surrounding Brad and Farley.

When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 came out, Kim Newman wrote that it seemed to have been directed by someone who not only didn't make the first film, but who never actually saw it. And for all the good work that Jim Sharman did on Rocky Horror, there is a similar feeling with this film. Despite its deliberately tacky edges and madcap colour schemes, there is precious little of Rocky Horror's distinctive style remaining here. In fact, with all its 1980s fashion and emphasis on glamour, it begins to feel like a series of videos for The Human League or Michael Jackson.

Then there are the musical numbers to worry about. The cast sing well enough, especially Jessica Harper in her musical debut. And there are one or two tracks which pass muster: the title track is catchy and 'Bitchin' In The Kitchen' is quite witty in combining marital frustration with household appliances. But the rest are just plain forgettable, with none of the syllable-stretching wit of O'Brien's earlier work. 'Little Black Dress' feels like an off-cut from Grease (and not in a good way), while 'Thank God I'm A Man' finds O'Brien ripping off Frank N. Furter's song from the first film.

Worst of all, Shock Treatment is really quite dull. The cast clearly had a ball making it, but next to none of that fun rubs off on the people watching it. The story is too incoherent, the characters too uninvolvingly madcap, and after a while the deliberately plastic conversations between the presenters and audience becomes repetitive and tiresome. Even the prospect of Charles Gray singing and dancing - one of the highlights of the first film - isn't enough to rouse us: the sight of it just makes us wish that such an entertaining actor hadn't been so obviously wasted.

Shock Treatment is a deeply disappointing misfire from Sharman and O'Brien. It was never going to match Rocky Horror on any level, and the creators deserve some credit for wanting to make something that could stand on its own and have something to say. But in the end all their efforts are in vain, with all that was magical and distinctive about Rocky Horror being mostly absent this time around. You won't need treatment after watching it, but to quote Rocky himself, it's a pretty big downer.

There comes a point in the life of any true-blooded film reviewer when they must plant a flag in the sand and argue their case for the greatest film of all time. It's a daunting task, since the films which we most revere often take on an 'untouchable' quality. They resonate so strongly with us and are so perfect in construction, that we almost daren't approach them, lest our feeble words and platitudes fail to convey their majesty.

Blade Runner is everything you could want from a film, and so much more. It straddles genres ably, incorporating elements of science fiction, gothic horror, film noir and action-adventure. It achieves a perfect balance between style and substance, allowing for a bittersweet examination of complicated ideas amidst a vivid landscape of light and colour. It has the scientific head and cold surroundings of a perfect dystopia, but genuine characters and a heavy human heart. And once experienced in its fully-realised Final Cut, nothing will ever come close again.

A quick glance at the production history, however, shows that things could have turned out very differently. The original screenwriter, Hampton Fancher, fell out with both director Ridley Scott and author Philip K. Dick, who resented the very idea of a Hollywood adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Scott had only come to the project because of the pre-production delays on Dune. He took the job to rid him of that burden and to take his mind off the recent death of his brother.

Scott arrived in Hollywood expecting a free rein after the critical success of The Duellists and the ample box office of Alien. What he got instead was a heavy-handed studio and a very difficult Harrison Ford, who had just cemented his megastar status with Raiders of the Lost Ark. What followed were many miserable months of night shoots, funding issues and voiceover recordings, as the studio re-cut Scott's footage and made Ford record endless voiceovers in case the punters didn't get the plot. This disjointed and expository original cut received mixed reviews and underperformed commercially, and that, it seemed, was that.

It has taken a long time for the true version of Blade Runner to come to the surface. But with every passing year, and every new cut that has come along, more of the true nature of this extraordinary work has come to light. Now we have the Final Cut, the only cut over which Scott had full creative control. It is Blade Runner at its most personal, complete and immaculate. Scott believes it to be his best and most personal film; on the basis of this cut, that's not about to change.

Most of the critics who praised Blade Runner the first time round were quick to dismiss the film is visually beautifully but lacking narratively. They were half-right. No-one could deny that the film is breathtakingly beautiful, with every shot perfectly composed and a score of both scenes and images which take one's breath away. The opening shots of the Los Angeles skyline are mesmerising, as is the image of a tower of flame arcing and reflecting in the eye of a nameless observer. These scenes embody what is so special about the film - its ability to take the vast, the mechanical and the dystopian, and find the personal, the hopeful and in human in everything we see.

The film has been appropriately described as a neo-noir, since it takes the conventions of classic noirs like The Third Man and retunes them to better suit its own particular choices in terms of themes and character development. Scott clearly has great affection for the various noir motifs, filling his scenes with carefully chosen shadows and beautifully lit cigarette smoke. His visual decisions with both lighting and colour really bring out the sense of mystery and ambiguity which is at the heart of all great noirs. Even without the voiceovers, Deckard is a born natural in the role of unreliable narrator.

But there is so much more to Blade Runner than pretty experiments with light and shade. The true strength of the film lies in its myriad themes and complex exploration of ideas, ranging from man's environmental impact and the nature of advanced urban society, to the spiritual and existential quest for self-knowledge and the boundary between what is human and what is not. Scott's greatest trick is to bring out these ideas through the most subtle and intelligent of visual touches; his background in advertising allows him to offer us multi-layered imagery as a guide in place of dry philosophical meanderings.

The most prophetic message of Blade Runner is that the future is far bleaker than we could have imagined. The society presented to us in Blade Runner is akin to our own in one key aspect: we are living with the consequences of what has gone before and are uncertain of where to proceed from here. In this Los Angeles, there is social decay, uneasy multiculturalism, widespread crime, prominent sexuality, massive inequality and an intelligent but emasculated underclass, both in our midst and 'off-world'. The predominant mood is one of gloom, struggle and pathos, embodied by the fact that it is nearly always raining.

The replicants in Blade Runner make up this underclass, and are symbolic of both the persistence of slavery and the dangers of technological advancement. The twist is that their status as second-class citizens was not forced upon them by circumstances but preconceived before their creation. Just as all the newborns in Brave New World have their class and intelligence predetermined, so replicants are created with varying levels of intelligence and capabilities, and are all given a four-year lifespan - a failsafe against them 'developing their own emotions' and turning on their creators.

Roy Batty's rebellion against his 'father', Dr. Eldon Tyrell, is both the monster turning on his master in the manner of Frankenstein and a powerful religious allegory of the distant relationship between God and Man. Roy, played with terrifying presence by Rutger Hauer, is the Prodigal Son whose intelligence and desire for consciousness lead him to his creator (whether literal or metaphorical). Tyrell is both a benevolent father and some form of monster, showing compassion and understanding while never properly accepting his 'son'. 'Man' rejects 'God', doing literally what Nietzsche described symbolically, and condemns Himself to a short life of loneliness and fear.

But that is not the end, for one of the greatest themes of Blade Runner is salvation and redemption. Deckard's encounters between both Roy and Rachael are steeped in the idea that, in the midst of all this uncertainly and terrible injustice, hope can thrive and the true goodness of people can come through. The big question at the heart of the film is this: what does it mean to be human? How can we define what is human and what is not? And - perhaps more importantly - does it matter if we cannot?

So much ink has been spilled over whether or not Deckard is a replicant, and there are strong arguments on both sides; Scott believes that he is, Ford believes that he isn't. Perhaps the real answer lies in a third explanation, namely that the boundaries between human and non-human are now so blurred that definitions of what counts as 'human' are little more than irrelevant expressions of power. The concept of being 'human' is so complicated, so ambiguous and so multi-faceted, that to exclude or demarcate any one body from another through codes, whether moral or political, is pointless. In this situation the only thing that triumphs is love - whether the brotherly love of Roy sparing Deckard's life or the romantic love between Deckard and Rachael.

Both these relationships begin with the lines between human and replicant clearly drawn; Deckard is down Roy, and the first time Rachael visits him he dismisses her fondest memories as "implants". But eventually both Roy and Rachael prove a certain kind of devotion toward Deckard, saving his life on one occasion each. These acts of compassion render Deckard's preconceptions obsolete. He undergoes the same act of soul-searching and reaches the same conclusion with both parties; replicant or not, so long as there is love, there is meaning. Both the tender love scene with Rachael and the heartbreaking 'tears in rain' sequence with Roy are the consummations of this revelation; as the dove flies into the sky, Deckard puts his old ways behind him, and surrenders himself to the only thing that matters.

Blade Runner is by far and away the greatest film ever made. Every aspect of it from the acting to the Vangelis soundtrack is flawless, both in design and execution. The performances of Harrison Ford and Sean Young are mesmerising, and remain the highlights of their respective careers. It is also Scott's best film by a county mile; for all his great work on Alien and Gladiator, he has never bettered this. Most of all, Blade Runner is an extraordinary odyssey through the human psyche, taking characters in the gutter and using them to focus on the stars. It is, quite simply, perfection.

In the 1950s and 1960s Lindsay Anderson was hailed as a visionary, with If... receiving the Palme d'Or and widespread critical acclaim. In the 1970s, he was regarded as intelligent but indulgent, with O Lucky Man! dividing critical opinion upon its release. By the 1980s, he was branded obsolete, with Britannia Hospital receiving the worst notices and lowest box office of his career. In hindsight that is a crying shame, since the film is both a return to form from O Lucky Man! and one of the most underrated films of the early-1980s.

Britannia Hospital is the third and final instalment of the Mick Travis trilogy, coming nearly nine years after O Lucky Man!. Having been the centrepiece of the last two films, Travis (played by Malcolm McDowell) takes only a peripheral role here - he has risen from schoolboy revolutionary to coffee salesman and filmstar, only to wind up as a muckraking reporter with two stoned technicians. We can see through the trilogy a shift in semi-autobiographical emphasis from Anderson (If....) to McDowell (O Lucky Man!) and finally the nation as a whole.

The film's biggest improvement on O Lucky Man! is the quality and integrity of its narrative. O Lucky Man! had so much to do, and so many stories to tell, that it ended up spreading itself too thin to achieve a knockout blow: it resembled pouring a pint of stout onto a very wide saucer. By confining itself to the events of a single day, in a single location, Britannia Hospital is more readily focussed. Even though it looks at many different groups of people, it succeeds as a microcosm of Britain in the same way that If.... did, and manages to be more universal even when it drifts into outright horror or fantasy.

Britannia Hospital is also a very unusual and interesting mix of genres. It is on one level a farce, albeit one with a great deal more sophistication and ambition than the Carry On series or the work of Blake Edwards. On another level, it is a political drama, in which the organised and politicised working classes take on both the middle-class managers and the upper class establishment embodied by the private patients and 'HRH'. On a further level, it is a full-blooded horror movie which draws on the traditions of Hammer and grand guignol. Leonard Rossiter's snarling and repressed manager is in stark contrast to Graham Crowden's Rotwang-like mad scientist, in a performance reminiscent of Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood.

Britannia Hospital is primarily a lament or requiem of modern Britain. By comparing the state of the nation to that of a hospital constantly facing a crisis, Anderson is lambasting both the old guard and the post-war governments which attempted to brush them aside. Where O Lucky Man! skirted around the notion of champagne socialists and the corruption of politicians and lawmakers, Britannia Hospital launches a vitriolic attack on all sides from all fronts, showing how much the post-war dream has been eroded by self-interest and misjudgement on the part of everyone.

In light of Anderson's life-long association with the British Left, you would expect such a thesis to treat the treat union movement with a certain amount of sympathy. But Anderson is merciless, almost to the point of bitterness, in pointing out the duplicity of the union movement with regard to the aims of the people it claims to defend. The film begins with an absurdist vignette of an old man with hypothermia. The ambulance drivers barter their way past the picket line, only for the manto be left on a stretcher in the corridor because both the nurses and porters have clocked off for the night. As Rossiter's name appears he breaths his last; through little more than pedantry and selfishness, the health service is prevented from doing the one thing it was set up to do.

Britannia Hospital finds the public and the private co-existing uneasily in the new welfare state. The plight of ordinary patients, for whom the NHS is a matter of life or death, is contrasted with the attitudes of the VIP patients in the private ward, who demand to be treated like royalty. Their number includes a child-eating dictator (a further nod to O Lucky Man!) who has taken up residence in his own private ward. When the catering staff go on strike, matron is forced to offer the private patients oranges for breakfast; her efforts are met with anger, disgust and racial epithets, with one general remarking: "I didn't spend forty years in India to end up with a lot of wogs!".

The Britain depicted in Britannia Hospital is a country which is deeply fractured, being torn apart by violence, injustice, inequality and the threat of revolution. But again, Anderson doesn't just fall into the trap of making propaganda, turning out his own private Battleship Potemkin. He characterises Britain as a nation about to turn its back not merely on socialism and the achievements of the welfare state, but on idealism and intelligence as a whole in favour of the simplicity of brute force and tribal warfare. The riot scenes are kinetic and frightening, but they also have a heart-breaking quality, summed up by an image of a protester offering a riot policeman a flower, only to get her head smashed in with his baton.

The film also has very little time for the media, with both sets of film crews coming in for a lot of stick. Mick's technicians (one of whom is played by Mark Hamill) are portrayed as sensationalist and lazy: while Mick is crawling around the hospital sticking his neck out to get the footage, they get stoned and laugh themselves stupid watching documentaries about battery hens. The BBC fare no better, coming over as sycophants who fabricate events around Dr. Millar to inflate his ego and make him feel more like a God.

Despite Anderson's depression about this state of affairs, the film manages to tackle these pertinent and vital political issues without ever slipping into self-pity. Anderson's sense of righteous anger at what is unfolding is matched by fear on his part for the future of the country his loves, and by a feeling of pathos on the part of the characters. The humour is satirically vainglorious - for instance on the soundtrack, where Alan Price plays 'Rule Britannia' very slowly for maximum irony.

There is a comparison between Britannia Hospital and the work of Pink Floyd around the same period, namely The Wall, the subsequent film helmed by Alan Parker, and The Final Cut which was accompanied by a 20-minute short. Britannia Hospital itself shares certain features with The Fletcher Memorial Home: it is a bastion for a bygone age based upon privilege and order, which has since been eroded and rendered all-but-obsolete. Running through all these projects is a theme of missed chances and regret, which will echo through the plight of future generations.

Britannia Hospital is also an attack on positivism, showing the march of scientific progress continuing at the expense of mankind. One of the core themes of modernist art is Man feeling lost in a world which is constantly evolving, and which He at best struggles and at worst fails to control. In this case we have Dr. Millar, up to his old tricks again, as the maverick private pioneer being sponsored by (but not controlled by) the state.

Where O Lucky Man! felt in places like The Island of Dr. Moreau, the horror elements of Britannia Hospital are a retuning of Frankenstein. It takes a story about humans trying to live forever, leaves in Mary Shelley's warnings about the dangers of progress, and adds disturbing allegories for social engineering. What begins with Travis finding foetuses in jars or freezers full of limbs culminates in a terrifying sequence where his head is grafted onto Millar's monster - it comes to life, only to attack its creator and disintegrate. The gore in these scenes is worthy of anything in Sweeney Todd or Lucio Fulci, coming virtually out of nowhere and being terrifying gruesome.

But by far the highlight of Britannia Hospital is its final scene. With a cross-section of society gathered, from royalty to revolutionaries, Millar gives a passionate speech about humanity's need to reinvent itself and the inherent injustices of the status quo. He concludes by revealing 'Genesis', a giant brain which begins to recite from Hamlet before repeating the line 'How like a God'. It's a wonderfully judged paean complimented by creepy special effects and Crowden as his absolute best.

There are flaws with Britannia Hospital. Some of the broader, more farcical comedy doesn't work, such as the clichéd sequence of Travis crawling out of the mass of people. And its sexual politics have not dated all that well: the random sex scene with the nurse feels jarring and unnecessary. But as both a plea for intelligence in a time of crisis and a savage social satire, it still holds up both on its own and as a fine conclusion to the trilogy. It's a twisted tale of compassion and caustic humour, and remains a hidden gem of British cinema.

Pink Floyd -- The Wall does something which very few musicals can do -- it can really, really scare you. Discounting Sweeney Todd and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which scare in completely different ways), it is the only musical film I have ever come across which is closer to horror than family-friendly entertainment. It's a chilling, heady, terrifying mix of war, politics, sex and self-loathing, all drawn together by the powerful combination of Pink Floyd's music and Alan Parker's direction.

Filmmakers who learnt their trade making adverts are noted for their versatility, particularly in their ability to take any subject matter and turn it into a unique artistic vision. Like his contemporary Ridley Scott, Parker is a stunning visual artist with an eye for colour and composition, who understands how much can be said by an image. There is almost no dialogue in Pink Floyd -- The Wall, and there doesn't really need to be, because the images that Parker creates are so rich and multi-layered that they don't need the actors to fill in the blanks by talking.

On a purely visual level, Pink Floyd -- The Wall is fantastic. Parker beautifully captures the pale blues and khaki of WWII Britain, and then injects it with deep bloody reds and stark, haunting black as the fears and nightmares of Pink begin to unfold. The visual sensibility of the film, and the style in which it is put together, is reminiscent of Dario Argento's Suspiria, which is similarly graphic and yet wonderful to behold. The entire 'Thin Ice' sequence, in which Bob Geldof begins to drown in a pool which slowly turns to blood, is straight out of Argento; the visuals hypnotise you in such a way that the most graphic and gruesome scenes are also the most beautiful.

Because the film is so visually stunning, it is tempting to view it as a triumph of style over substance, like the later works of Brian De Palma. It is definitely the case that the film is not a literal or straightforward adaptation of Pink Floyd's rock opera, preferring instead to be a collection of surrealistic images which coalesce into a confusing but captivating character study. If you're a purist of the album, you'll find yourself frustrated by songs appearing in the wrong order and stopping halfway through. On the other hand, if you're not a Floyd fan at all, you'll just be a little confused and wondering where all this is leading.

However, this approach actually aids the film as a complete piece, even if individual scenes fall short along the way. By having the film jumping around in time, it allows us to see Pink's psychological collapse as something homogenous and deeply ingrained. If the film had been strictly linear, it would have felt like a series of contrived explorations of social excesses, making Pink's transformation seem less believable. But by cutting back and forth between Pink's past experiences and his current state in the locked hotel room, we gain a more layered understanding of the madness of the character, and share in his profound sense of alienation.

Despite this device paying off, the film does feel at points like it is pulling in different directions. Because of the production battles between Parker and Waters, and between Waters and the rest of the band, certain sections feel like an underwhelming compromise to keep things moving forward. The fascist rally in the final third is beautifully shot, but is spoiled by some bad choreography which just looks like... well, bad choreography. There are several annoying inconsistencies which remain overlooked. For instance, why does Bob Geldof only sing a few of the songs, and the rest are done by Roger Waters? If they're meant to be the same character, why not have the same person doing all the lines? The film would have had a better thread and point of focus if one of the two (probably Geldof) had stepped aside.

For all the striking images that Parker puts on screen, the best sections of the film are Gerald Scarfe's terrifying animations. Scarfe has always had an eye for the macabre, and never pulls his punches. The best of these include the famous marching hammers, which pop up in 'Waiting For The Worms'; the entire of 'Empty Spaces', with the Freudian flowers and the man transforming into a gun; and the whole of 'Goodbye Blue Sky', in which a dove is torn open to reveal a dark eagle and the Union Jack disintegrates into a bleeding cross. All of these images stick in your mind both because they are striking and because they tap into the heart of the story; they reflect the sense of disaffection and loss which runs through the whole project.

Alienation is at the heart of The Wall, both as an album and a film; both are about the walls we build between each other to keep us safe, but which end up driving us insane. Compare the opening shots, of the hotel corridor and Pink slumped in his chair, with the action surrounding the first number. Whereas the latter is frenetic and graphic, the former is creepy and chilling. The opening scenes seem slow on first viewing, but they do a good job of establishing just how distant Pink is from all other human activity. The shot of the cigarette burned right down to the knuckles is a clear indication of what kind of burnt-out shell we are dealing with.

Throughout the film there are subsequent references to this distance Pink feels, from his loneliness in the park as a child to the way he ignores his girlfriend as she strips in front of him. This self-imposed isolation comes back to haunt him, to the point at which he eventually snaps and puts himself on trial. Much like the album, the ending is left ambiguous as to whether or not Pink has survived the experience of tearing down the wall. Considering the prolonged scream (done by Waters), it seems to suggest that Pink is dead, but the images that follow of the young boys in the rubble hint at a more optimistic outcome, if not for Pink, then for the rest of us behind our respective walls.

Pink Floyd -- The Wall is not a perfect film by any means. The little inconsistencies in the storytelling and the nature by which the ideas are explored can seem alienating on first viewing, particularly to people who aren't fans of the Floyd. But as a tonal piece, about isolation, distance and madness, it is a very fine achievement indeed. Nearly thirty years on it never fails to chill you, and it clearly rewards repeat viewing. Its relentless and uncompromising style work to its advantage to create a highly memorable experience, for better or worse. Most of all, it manages somehow to do justice to one of the greatest albums in the history of rock and roll.

Here's a quick question to kick us off: what do The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Shawshank Redemption, Harold and Maude and The Thing all have in common?

The answer: they are all films which underperformed at the box office but have since become widely regarded as classics, thanks to video, DVD and word-of-mouth. And just as Shawshank has become something of a poster child of Christianity (not that I'm complaining), there are few true sci-fi fans who do not bow their heads reverentially at the mention of John Carpenter. Having made us chortle during Dark Star and entertained us with Escape from New York, he now proceeds with scare us to the point of madness with The Thing.

The Thing is ostensibly a remake of the 1952 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, although Carpenter's version is much closer to the 1930s source novel, Who Goes There?. Carpenter was a huge fun of the original, but complained that the film's limited budget had taken the edge off the creature; it remained scary, but it was closer to Frankenstein's monster than any kind of imitating life form. With a budget of $15m, The Thing was Carpenter's most expensive film to date, allowing him to fully address this central problem.

The most obvious aspect of The Thing is its brilliant special effects, created by Rob Bottin under the supervision of Stan Winston, who would later do the special effects for the Terminator films. It sits happily alongside An American Werewolf in London and The Howling as one of the first horror films to properly utilise animatronics and developments in latex rubber. The designs of the Thing in whichever form it takes are genuinely scary -- the twisted skulls are like real-life versions of Gerald Scarfe drawings crossed with the paintings of Edvard Munch. And the multiple effects shots, like the jaws appearing in the chest or the head-spider scuttling across the floor, are shot with a great sense of rhythm so that you can never rest long enough to try and spot the joins.

There has been much comparison between The Thing and Alien, and there are some obvious similarities. Both are based on the idea of a creature emerging after thousands of years, feeding on human flesh to survive and being defeated by incineration. And both films were groundbreaking in their effects design; both H. R. Giger's alien and the head-spider are instantly recognisable. But there are two crucial differences between the films to do with the creature, namely what it represents and the way in which it is presented to us.

In Alien, the creature is profoundly sexual, with its phallic head and inner set of teeth which 'rape', 'penetrate' and 'impregnate' the human hosts. The film is a thesis on the male fear of pregnancy and the more general fear of our bodies being invaded or violated. In The Thing, the creature is a physicalisation of paranoia; it represents and reflects the natural suspicion we have of others who are different to ourselves, and takes that feeling of mistrust to the extreme. The film has a racial undercurrent in this regard since the crew come from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds; early on one of the white members of the crew complains over the intercom about one of the black men playing a Stevie Wonder record. Though it is stretching a point, The Thing could be presented on one level as an allegory for race relations in 1980s America.

With regards to the presentation of the creature, Alien's fear comes from withholding it. The sense of intense claustrophobia and paranoia (which The Thing never quite matches) come from only showing glimpses of the horror, and letting the audience's imagination do the rest; the nightmare escalates and gets projected onto the reality, leading both characters and audience to be hysterical when they finally see the alien. The Thing goes the other way, breaking the Hollywood convention of withholding the monster and hence defying what was deemed acceptable. This, together with the success of E.T. the same summer, might help to explain the film's poor box office.

Because the designs of the creature are so twisted and shocking, the film draws on the believability of the characters to keep things grounded in reality. If the monster were simply picking off cardboard cut-out teenagers running around in their underwear, there would be no sense of threat either with regard to the characters or that such creatures could actually harm us. Instead, Carpenter carefully shoots the more expository scenes to have a heightened sense of terror; when the computer predicts how many would be infected if the Thing got off Antartica, we shudder in fright at what kind of devastation that entails. The score combines Ennio Morricone's strings with Carpenter's signature synthesisers to create a very threatening mood.

Because of its emphasis on paranoia and trickery, The Thing is closer to Philip Kaufman's (superior) remake of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (appropriate, since Carpenter would later direct They Live which is closely modelled on Body-Snatchers). There is something about the Thing's imitations which seem like pod people: they have a sense of distance to them, and like the pod people they have a defence mechanism which they use when threatened by humans.

The film brilliantly keeps throwing you off the scent; because there are so many characters you are never completely sure whom you should be watching. MacReady acts like a private eye for a lot of the film, and as in many film noirs he is an unreliable narrator who receives conflicting information. On at least two occasions the people we suspect through and through of being infected turn out to be clean, and vice versa. Carpenter shoots the base like a grittier version of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining; the recurring use of a steadicam in the corridors recreate the feeling of unease in that film and reinforce the non-existence of trust. As Macready quips sarcastically to Blair, when there is no-one left to trust, "why don't you just trust in the Lord?".

The ending of The Thing remains a bone of contention among film fans. Some found it too dark and nihilistic, even for the extreme circumstances; others thought it was too abrupt and felt tacked-on in the absence of something more conclusive. An alternative ending was shot in which Kurt Russell was rescued and tested negative for the Thing, but this was never previewed. Much like The Shining or The Blob (another film Carpenter admires), the inconclusive ending is perfect for The Thing. It conveys both the desperation and futility of the characters' predicament, and is deep-rooted in the fear that one of them is the Thing. You sit there expecting a last-minute twist, namely that one of them will start to transform as in Body-Snatchers. But any such twist is withheld, leaving only icy fear mixed with a sense of sadness for these two men.

The Thing is not quite a masterpiece. There are occasional moments, particularly in the exterior shots, where it feels like scenes are dragging, and when the explosions start happening in quick succession you do begin to lose interest. But it is on a par with Kaufman's Body-Snatchers as a chilling, thrilling horror movie which comes stuffed to the gills with substance and visual innovation. Carpenter's best film remains Hallowe'en, and The Thing does take second place to Alien in the pantheon of sci-fi horrors. But it is a very honourable second, and it remains a must-see.

In my review of Moon a couple of years ago, I talked about the strange mystique surrounding debut features. The first effort of a budding filmmaker can come to define their entire career - something which is a blessing if it leads to future success and a curse if it turns out to be their only work of any note. While Rob Reiner has continued to produce great work, with a run of form that lasted well into the 1990s, he has never topped his work on This Is Spinal Tap, a film which created the modern mockumentary and remains one of the funniest comedies of the 1980s.

The cult status that Spinal Tap has enjoyed for so long is evident by how many of its lines have entered into our everyday lexicon. Whenever a TV presenter talks about the effort levels of sportsmen or the atmosphere at a gig, you can put your house on the phrase "turned up to 11" being in there somewhere. Nigel Tufnell's remark about there being "a fine line between stupid and clever" is frequently used by reviewers, particularly when reviewing comedies. Even lesser lines, about D Minor being "the saddest of all keys" and Tufnell's comments about the album cover ("How much more black could it be?... None more black") have become instantly recognisable.

From a filmmaking point of view, Spinal Tap is an editing masterclass. Where subsequent spoofs like Wayne's World were constructed from a script, Reiner's was created out of dozens of hours of improvisation in front of camera. The cast and Reiner filmed themselves, keeping the cameras rolling to capture anything interesting or funny that came out. Reiner then edited down this mountain of footage to a lean, taut running time of 82 minutes (a 4 1/2-hour bootleg also exists, and some die-hard fans would hold this to be the proper version).

As well as demonstrating Reiner's directorial discipline, there are two positive side effects to this approach. Because the cameras were rolling pretty much all the time, there is never any sense of the jokes being staged or choreographed. The humour flows freely - so freely in fact that you may not pick up on every joke the first time round. The other positive side effect lies in the camerawork. Because no-one ever knew where the next joke would be coming from, the crew had to be on their toes and get close to the actors. There is an intimacy to Spinal Tap which you don't get either in Wayne's World or in earlier efforts like The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash.

The secret of Spinal Tap's success as a mockumentary is the balance between naturalism and absurdity. Even though what the band are doing is clearly pompous, preposterous and egomaniacal in the extreme, they feel like real people rather than puppets of a didactic director. The intimacy of the camerawork, coupled with the comic timing of the performers, gives the impression that everyone involved on camera believes in the stories the characters are telling and the music they are playing.

Unlike The Rutles, where Eric Idle was constantly winking at the audience, there is never a moment where the performers break the fourth wall and try to bring the audience in on the joke. Even when Rob Reiner appears on screen as the 'director' of the 'film', the perfect little bubble surrounding the characters is never punctured. The performers are confident enough in their abilities and the strength of the material that the audience will pick up on the joke, rather than being told that it's a joke. Ultimately this wasn't entirely the case, with early audiences believing that the band was real, and with Spinal Tap eventually going out on the road as a bona fide rock band.

Spinal Tap is a satire on heavy metal and the rock industry as it was in the 1980s. It shows how the trends in 1980s metal that we recognise had grown out of both the more pompous, self-absorbed end of prog rock and the harsher side of glam. The long hair, guitar-shredding, lengthy solos and elaborate entrances successfully convey how bloated and theatrical big-bucks rock music has become. The levels of ego and stupidity present on the tour for Smell the Glove are enough to send anyone running to buy up The Smiths' back catalogue.

The film is replete with references to rock stars and iconic rock images. The blank black cover to Smell the Glove (put out as a compromise with the record company) is a nod to both The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) and the external, 'bin-liner' cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. There are further Beatles references in the character of Jeanine: she is the Yoko Ono who comes in and breaks up the group, turning the song-writing pair against each other through her peculiar artsy taste.

The musical numbers in Spinal Tap are brilliantly smart send-ups of songs from the era, with no genre from the 1970s and 1980s being left unscathed. 'Stonehenge' is a welcome piss-take of Yes with their hugely ambitious sets, while 'Jazz Odyssey' looks towards the noodling of Stanley Clarke's 'Dream Suite' or King Crimson's 'Moonchild'. The performances combine the tongue-poking of Kiss with the schoolboy cheek of AC/DC, and because all the performers are playing their own instruments (another plus over The Rutles), we really believe someone could genuinely be stupid enough to not only write these songs but play them with passion.

Although the satire in Spinal Tap is clear, it is also deeply affectionate. This is demonstrated not just by the musicianship of the actors, but the amount of effort that clearly went into writing these songs in the first place. Had they gone the easy way, writing 'so-bad-they're-bad' songs to get cheap, mean-spirited laughs, the gag would have worn off in 5 minutes and we wouldn't care about the men behind the egos. The fact that Spinal Tap went on to have a legitimate pop career is testament to this effort - they knew how to write so-bad-they're-good songs and play them with a straight face (well, sort of).

The film also delves into other issues surrounding rock and roll. The band's arguments with their manager, akin to those which inspired the Queen song 'Death On Two Legs', tap into claims about the record industry ruining the creativity of artists by their desire for commercial success. The arguments over Smell the Glove find their incompetent manager Ian Faith trying to persuade the band that the change from their intended cover is in fact a bold artistic choice. The theme of artistic mismanagement continues in promoter Artie Fufkin, a possible reference to Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy.

There are also discussions raised about whether it is possible to be a rock star in your 40s, the homoerotic undertones of rock (Tap play largely to young male audiences), and whether being 'big in Japan' is no bad thing. But outside of its acerbic observations about rock, the film is also a convincing piss-take of the rock doc format. Some of the best scenes in This Is Spinal Tap are its recreations of earlier periods of music, akin to The Rutles' reimagining of The Ed Sullivan Show. The performance of Spinal Tap's early hit, 'Listen To The Flower People', perfectly recreates the kind of TV performances The Beatles and The Who used to do, with the band on different levels on the stage and random dancers alongside for no reason.

This Is Spinal Tap remains one of the funniest films of the 1980s and the peak of Rob Reiner's much-lauded career. It takes a little while to get going, and the romantic twist at the end may seem contrived to some, but the vast majority of the charm and the humour remains intact. The Stonehenge sequence in particular, with an 18-inch model descending behind Nigel Tufnell, will still have you in hysterics. When everything is said and done, it still stands as the definitive mockumentary of this and any era, and as far as Reiner is concerned, there's none more funny.

When it comes to 1980s fantasy, there are three broad categories into which films can fall. There are those like Flesh & Blood, which get the balance between substance and silliness spot on, marrying Machiavellian mercenaries to grin-inducing battle scenes. There are those like Excalibur, which take themselves so seriously that they're fatally dull. And there are those that are totally, utterly, and enjoyably silly - and into that category goes Ladyhawke.

Ladyhawke is of historical interest due to its place in Richard Donner's career. The fiasco surrounding Superman II, on which he was replaced mid-shoot by Richard Lester, had thrown Donner's career off-course: he had to watch Superman II and III take huge amounts of money while he delivered flops like Inside Movies and The Toy. But either side of this film, he found himself very much in mainstream favour again, first with The Goonies and later with Lethal Weapon. It is interesting that a director whose place in history has been defined by blockbusters (including, of course, The Omen) should be capable of making something so delightfully odd in the midst of two more rounded and confident efforts.

Like many 1980s fantasies, there are aspects of Ladyhawke to which time has not been kind. The most obvious of these is Andrew Powell's soundtrack, which was nominated for a Saturn award in 1985 but has since become regarded in some quarters as one of the worst ever composed. After Toto's contributions to Dune, it became more common for pop groups or composers to score films, due to the selling potential of the groups and the relatively cheap cost of synthesised music. But Powell's efforts go just too far even to be enjoyed ironically, with its overproduction and bouncy pop timbre frequently jarring with the quieter moments.

The score is one aspect of Ladyhawke which confirms its inherent silliness, even before we get to the meat of the story. Another such aspect is its visuals, which manage to look lavish and professional while still feeling ropey and cheap. The film is shot by Vittorio Storaro, who famously shot Apocalypse Now - something which is evident in the multitude of blood-red, beautiful sunsets which are central to the plot. But in amongst the terrific scenes of frozen lakes, dark forests and crisp skylines, there are numerous scenes which look like they were filmed in a hurry, treading unintentionally close to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

This feeling of cutting corners is reinforced by the paucity of special effects. For a film in which people metamorphose into animals on a daily basis, the special effects of Ladyhawke are coy to say the least. Apart from a few shots where Michelle Pfeiffer's eyes change shape in close-up, all the big transitions happen off-screen; on several occasions Matthew Broderick leaves the room just beforehand, as though the actors had to go off-stage to change costumes. While Donner wouldn't have had access to the CG wizardry we take for granted, there was plenty of scope in the physical effects of the time to achieve something a little more palpable. Only four years earlier Rick Baker produced the definitive werewolf transformation for John Landis, in a film with half of Ladyhawke's total budget.

Added to this shortcoming we have a number of plot holes which either confuse or produce unwanted tittering. First there is the problem of clothes: Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer keep the same outfits throughout, but there's not much effort to keep the clothes together when one of the pair is in animal form. Then there is the question of memory. The film borrows the horror device of the person having no memory of what they did as a beast - so how come the hawk remembers to stay with her master, or the wolf not to eat his mistress? Finally, there are several blatant continuity errors. We are told that Pfeiffer appears as an eagle whenever it is daylight, and yet there are at least two scenes where it's daylight and yet she is still there. At least when Shrek half-inched the plot, it was consistent throughout.

But in spite of these problems, Ladyhawke is a consistently entertaining little romp. Like Logan's Run nine years earlier, it's only when you stop trying to take it seriously that its ideas and emotional impact bubble to the surface. And like Logan's Run, this transition is cemented via a dominant performance by a great actor - not Peter Ustinov, but Leo McKern.

Most famous for playing Horace Rumpole in the long-running TV series Rumpole of the Bailey, McKern had courted cult status at various points in his career: as veteran reporter Bill McGuire in The Day The Earth Caught Fire, as a recurring Number 2 in The Prisoner, and in his previous outing with Donner as a mad archaeologist in The Omen. But whereas that last appearance was a silly cameo in an otherwise seriously creepy film, here McKern brings weight and gumption to an otherwise facile concoction. Like Ustinov before him, he puts a brake on excessive silliness, if only for a moment, in order to steer the viewer towards the emotional heart of the film.

Not only is McKern's delivery well-suited to disguising exposition, but he illuminates some cracking lines in the script. Most of the wisecracks go to Broderick, who is on very fine form; his soliloquys with God about telling the truth and resisting temptation are guaranteed to raise a smile. But McKern's timing is note-perfect, as he waits for a knight to fall right through the drawbridge before quipping: "Always walk on the left side!". Best of all comes when Broderick brings him the hawk after it has been wounded by an arrow. Having been told that he can't eat it, McKern bellows: "What? Is it Lent again already?!"

While McKern's performance is the icing on the cake, the other major players are also firing on all cylinders. Rutger Hauer seems naturally suited to the historical romp, whether as a heroic figure here or as an antihero in Flesh & Blood. His typically brilliant screen presence, being equally charming and threatening, suits the personality of Navarre as a knight tormented by the woman he loves but cannot have. And while Michelle Pfeiffer's hair may be straight out of a pop video, she too fits her character very nicely. Her beauty conveys both the innate sense of mystery about Isabeau and the vulnerability of her predicament. She's so convincing, in fact, that you keep recognising her facial features in those of the hawk.

Having these two charismatic performances goes some way in making the romance at the heart of the film feel believable. Somehow the grandiosity of the setting gives the relationship more weight, making it feel like there is more at stake than with similarly inseparable lovers in more mainstream rom-coms. The story is an interesting variation on the age-old tale of two people destined to be together but cursed to be apart, and for all the ridiculous elements within the central conceit it does end up pulling you in.

This emotional pull is most evident in two scenes towards the end. The first occurs when Philippe finds Navarre lying next to Isabeau as a wolf. The sun begins to rise, Isabeau begins to change, and for a split second both see each other with human eyes. Navarre reaches out to touch Isabeau, only for her to change and fly away, leaving him beating the earth in frustrated rage. The other comes during the solar eclipse where the two are reunited and the curse is broken. The slow pacing and distance between them prior to their first real contact reinforces the strength of the bond between them.

Ladyhawke also has its fair share of good action. Considering Donner's bad feelings towards Richard Lester (who can blame him?), it is ironic that his action sequences, in this film at least, take after Lester's finest work in The Three and Four Musketeers. The fight scenes have some pretty inventive slapstick and Broderick doing all manner of acrobatics, while Hauer gets to swashbuckle and head-butt to his heart's content. The highlight comes in the climactic fight in the church, ending with Hauer throwing his huge sword over several yards right into the heart of John Wood's scenery-chewing Bishop.

Ladyhawke may not have aged as well as Flesh & Blood or Legend, but it remains a definite guilty pleasure and a bona fide cult film. Its flaws are all in plain sight - the soundtrack, the silly plot, the special effects - and yet none of them can completely eclipse the sheer enjoyment that it brings. If anything these flaws serve to make it more endearing, and more fun than mainstream fare like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Donner would make more consistent features after this, but for pure and simple fun it takes some beating.

When it comes to making a threequel, three outcomes are possible. Firstly, as in Prisoner of Azkaban or Return of the Jedi, they are the best of the bunch, expanding the themes and characters in ways which are both faithful and original. Secondly, as with Last Crusade and Die Hard with a Vengeance, they match the quality of the first film and bring balance to the franchise, refining what has gone before. Or thirdly, and commonly, they are a big disappointment, sacrificing quality for mainstream appeal. Spiderman 3, Superman III and Army of Darkness all went down the road to goofiness, and none returned with their dignity intact.

Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome definitely belongs in the third category, though it is not an abject failure like the other examples. There are interesting ideas in it, and on a technical level it is the most accomplished of the trilogy films. But each of its successes belies an equal and opposite failure, making it a frustrating experience for fans and only a reluctant success in its own right.

The first interesting idea which the film attempts to address is the nature of how post-apocalyptic society would function. There are hundreds of films about humans descending into chaos in a crisis, from The Dark Knight to The Thing and everything in between. But there are very few non-dystopian works which address in detail how society might be rebuilt or restructured.

Bartertown is an intriguing vision because it appears so radically different on the surface but actually runs in a scarily similar way to our own society. When Max first enters, everything seems orderly and civilised, at least compared to the highways and deserts of his past. There is peaceful trading, a reliable energy supply, and conflicts are resolved through one-on-one gladiatorial combat in the Thunderdome. In fact, the real power lies with those who control the energy, the brutal criminal underclass run by the methane magnate-cum-mobster known as Master. And for all its claimed civility, there is still something macabre and degenerate about the Thunderdome; the weapons may be more advanced, but the crowd are still tribal, baying for blood and taking animalistic pleasure in the carnage.

There is great potential within these ideas, and in the hands of George Miller you would expect the same combination of substance and subtlety which drove the first two films. Unfortunately, Miller is not behind the camera for any of the scenes between Max's arrival in Bartertown and the clash in the Thunderdome. Miller lost interest in the project after his producer and close friend Byron Kennedy died in a helicopter crash. He eventually agreed to direct the action sequences, while TV director George Ogilvie took the rest.

The result is a film which is pulling in different directions, with a visual style which is steadily less original. Although certain sections of Mad Max 2 felt similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, you still felt it was directed by an individual who wasn't just interested in copying Hollywood for commercial reasons. Mad Max 3, on the other hand, is strikingly similar to Temple of Doom; you almost expect someone to shout 'Kali mar!' and pull out Mel Gibson's heart. There is more dialogue in this instalment, and considering the sheer volume of characters there needs to be. But for every great section, like Edwin Hodgeman's speech before the fight, there are three or four which seem laboured, over-long or -- most damningly -- ponderous.

The film often trips over Steven Spielberg territory because of its emphasis on children and its increasingly goofy sensibility. Although the film predates the insufferable Hook by six whole years, you can see hints of that film in the middle third, where Max is rescued by the tribe of children who believe him to be their saviour. (There is, oddly enough, an in-joke here which refers to Ken Russell's Tommy: the tribe's saviour is called Captain Walker, who shares his name with Tommy's father, and both films starred Tina Turner).

Again, there is something inherently interesting about a post-apocalyptic society involving children. The script does address issues of how history is remembered, and puts forward the idea that the 'promised land' of many religions is nothing more than a skewed memory of the past combined with ignorance about the outside world. That in itself is a shocking and radical idea, but it and others like it get lost in the manner of storytelling. The middle of the film does feel like a rip-off of Peter Pan and neither Miller nor Ogilvie completely mesh it together with the events in Bartertown. In any case, the fact that a new generation would live on is no great surprise, since that was explained in the closing narration of Mad Max 2.

When it comes to the action sequences, with Miller behind the camera, we get all the excitement and frenetic energy which made the first two films such a joy to watch. The Thunderdome fight is really great, being a highly original take on the classic duel. Roger Ebert went so far as to praise it as "one of the great creative action scenes in the movies.". It is well-paced, well-shot and the performances are very good, particularly from Gibson. Elsewhere in the film he can seem lost, but when his life is threatened he still exudes the same frightening charisma that he had before.

The problem, however, is that the action sequences are no longer seamless continuations of the plot. For all the inventiveness of the Thunderdome sequence or the thrills of the train chase, they feel like set-pieces, like components of an edgier, spikier film trying to escape from a mainstream vehicle. That said, even the train chase is not as exciting as the climax of previous films because of the goofy direction in which the series had moved. In Mad Max 1 and 2, you genuinely thought that people would get hurt; when there were head-on collisions between vehicles, people really died. Here, the head-on collision results in Ironbar's hair being caught on a pole, forcing him to jump over obstacles like hurdles; and when Max pulls a spear out of the driver's leg, it's treated like a comedy sequence and so packs much less of a punch.

The best way to describe Mad Max 3 is an enjoyable disappointment. Despite its very obvious flaws, and its all-too-close resemblance to Spielberg, it is a perfectly decent action movie which attempts to address a lot of complicated issues. It is the most ambitious of the Max films, in attempting to broaden out the universe beyond a solitary loner and focus on the future of the human race. But it is never genuinely successful in this task, and in acquiring a greater scope it sacrifices much of the nihilistic intensity and tension from before. For all its moments of genius, and its remarkable action, the film is neither coherent enough nor dark enough to hold together in a completely satisfying way. As a passing amusement it's fine, but it won't be so fondly remembered.

One of the ironies of being in the film business is that when you finally get the chance to make your dream project, it often ends up being your worst film. In 1985 John Carpenter was on a roll, enjoying both the commercial success of Christine and the Oscar buzz for Starman. Having long dreamed of making a martial arts movie, he leapt at the chance to direct Big Trouble in Little China - a decision which ended his relationship with Hollywood, and ultimately resulted in one of his weakest films.

As with Prince of Darkness, Carpenter's subsequent failure, there is something inherently interesting in the central concept of this film. It aims to do for martial arts movies what Indiana Jones did for matinee idols: take all the clichés and conventions of those films, restage them with the budgets they deserved, and pay tribute to the aspects that worked while sending up those that didn't. The twist with Big Trouble is that this story does not have a period setting, with Carpenter attempting to marry ancient Chinese mythology to the technology and social attitudes of the 1980s.

Carpenter may not have Steven Spielberg's track record when it comes to blockbusters, but he had shown his knack for directing action movies on Assault on Precinct 13 and, to a lesser extent, Escape from New York. And to give credit where it's due, the design elements of Big Trouble are pretty good. Dean Cundey, Carpenter's long-time cinematographer, gives the film a grainy B-movie look while utilising anamorphic lenses (another Carpenter trademark) to make the action feel very modern. The stunt choreography by James Lew is balletic but playful, creating stunts which are cartoonish without prompting us to look where all the wires or trampolines are hidden.

Unfortunately all the good work of Carpenter and his colleagues comes to nothing. After a pretty decent opening, Big Trouble in Little China slowly descends into the very formulas it was trying to send up, resulting in a film which is repetitive, uninvolving and lacking in narrative direction.

The central problem lies in a further comparison to Indiana Jones, namely in the business of being tongue-in-cheek. Although Raiders of the Lost Ark was clearly motivated by a desire to send up its subject matter, Spielberg understood that it wasn't enough to simply stand around making fun of old film clichés. In order to sell the film to an audience, it had to be entertaining in its own right, with enough in the way of pace and punchy action to wow an audience who hadn't grown up on John Ford or Howard Hawks.

One of the great successes of Raiders - in fact, of all the original trilogy - was its combination of pace and narrative; the story was pulpy enough to be gripping when married to the action, but even if you weren't that interested in what was going on, you could just sit back and enjoy the spectacle in blissful ignorance. Big Trouble in Little China doesn't have this perfect pacing: it barrels along so quickly that the story keeps getting lost, with characters having to stop and explain the plot to each other in an increasingly incoherent manner.

Because the film keeps losing its narrative thread (what there is of it), its ability to work as an affectionate pastiche or parody begins to gradually desert it. Certain elements remain faintly subversive, such as Dennis Dun's character, whose resourcefulness and intelligence sends up Indie and Short Round in Temple of Doom. But elsewhere the film bears an uncanny resemblance to The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, Peter Sellers' final film which attempted (unsuccessfully) to send up similar stereotypes. The film forgets about its desire to be ironic as soon as it becomes convenient, settling for spectacle where we expect to see so much more.

Even if we attempt to enjoy Big Trouble as empty-headed entertainment, we still don't get very far. One of the pleasures of classic martial arts films was the scale of the fights and the seamless way in which they were filmed. Bruce Lee's fight scenes would be filmed like Gene Kelly's dancing, in long continuous shots which created a natural sense of scale and continuity. A lot of both Lee and Kelly's film work was somewhat lacking narratively, but again it didn't matter because of the inherent physicality and tactility of their fighting and dancing respectively.

Big Trouble, on the other hand, has precious little in the way of physicality. The fight sequences may be inventively choreographed, but they are shot from such odd angles and edited so rapidly that you can't tell what's going on or who is fighting whom. Then there are the cheesy special effects, which include beams of light coming out of people's mouths or characters conjuring up lightning like Emperor Palpatine. These effects were created by Boss Films, who did the effects for Ghostbusters, and as with that film the characters become lost in a lot of uninvolving visual trickery.

In most cases, the special effects in Big Trouble are there to pad out the action rather than contribute to the story. The laser beam fight between Victor Wong and James Hong, in which imaginary warriors are conjured from rings and battle it out, is like watching a boring video game and breaks up the more interesting duel involving Dennis Dun. Even the old-fashioned monsters are no good, with neither the wookie-like creature nor the floating head with many eyes getting anything like the screen time they need to set them up as sustained and believable threats to the characters.

On top of all that, the film is populated by a cast of characters which are poorly drawn and unlikeable. Kurt Russell, who has never topped his performance in The Thing, spends most of his time mugging at the camera. While his Clint Eastwood impression in Escape from New York had a certain amount of appeal, his John Wayne impression in this film is off-putting and obnoxious. Kim Cattrall is equally annoying and largely wooden, and the film only seems properly interested in her when she's been dolled up in buckets of rouge. Dennis Dun's character is underdeveloped beyond his one-liners with Jack, and Victor Wong is as criminally underused here as he was in Prince of Darkness.

One factor that might mitigate Big Trouble's poor execution is the conditions under which it was made. The film went into production around the same time as the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Golden Child; Carpenter was hired because he could work fast, enabling the studio to get their film out first. Certainly one cannot accuse Carpenter of bottling it in the presence of more money; as his 1990s output shows, he was capable of making bad films regardless of how much they cost. But even with the rushed production schedule, you would have expected someone of his mettle and genre experience to come through with the goods.

Big Trouble in Little China resembles a dumb mix of Indiana Jones and Year of the Dragon, albeit without the overt racism of the latter. It disappoints as empty action and as an attempted subversion of martial arts clichés. It still has pockets of humour, whether intentional or otherwise, which keep it from being either depressing or Carpenter's worst film. But it simply doesn't cut the mustard either as a Carpenter film or on its own terms - it's no fun, and nothing but trouble.

David Lynch's career up until Blue Velvet seemed to be a steady progression from surreal outsider to failed mainstream director. Eraserhead remains one of the strangest horror films ever made, something which could only have come from the slightly insane mind of an auteur. The Elephant Man is a strong but peculiar hybrid of this imagery with the normal conventions of a biopic; the result is interesting but not entirely satisfying. And then we have Dune, which is more than enjoyable as a guilty pleasure sci-fi, but even after 25 years its look and its narrative remain a mess. In 1984 it seemed that David Lynch's career as a director was over. But that was before Blue Velvet came along.

It's hard to believe that Dune and Blue Velvet were made by the same director, let alone released within two years of each other. Where Dune is rambling, muddled and lacks a solid creative drive, Blue Velvet is intense, mesmeric, and truly frightening. Where Dune is purely a space fantasy which does little justice to its multi-layered source material, Blue Velvet manages to be a murder mystery, an erotic thriller, a social satire and a horror film all at the same time. Lynch is a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick, and like Kubrick's work this is a film which requires your full attention to really appreciate it. But once it has your attention, it will never let you go. Just as the final scene of Eraserhead leaves you staring at the screen wondering what the hell just happened, so Blue Velvet will hold you in a trance as you simultaneously flinch and marvel at what occurs on screen.

The references to Kubrick are apparent from the start. The film owes a great deal to The Shining in its eeriness and near-constant suspense. From the first shot after the credits, you're certain that something isn't right, and even the happiest scenes underscore this un-real feeling to the world Lynch puts on screen. In The Shining, the opening 15 minutes are slow-moving and relatively naturalistic; there is still a staged quality to them, but they served as both set-up and contrast to the madness that follows. With Blue Velvet, it's almost as though someone put on The Shining and skipped the introduction; the eerie and all-too-perfect Overlook Hotel looms large over Lynch's Lumberton.

There are also references to Barry Lyndon in Blue Velvet's cinematography. Frederick Elmes said in interviews that Lynch wanted to see how dark they could make the sets, to utilise the potential of shadows and natural light to create tension. Some of the scenes in Dorothy's apartment are seemingly filmed in only natural light, and the multiple staircase scenes have a film noir quality which deepens the sense of murky terror lurking at the heart of the film.

But although Blue Velvet spans genres, at heart it is a film about voyeurism. The crime thriller aspect of it as a metaphor for individuals' desire to dig deeper and discover what lies beneath, even if -- or perhaps because -- they know they will get hurt in the process. Just before Jeffrey sneaks into the apartment, Sandy remarks, "I don't know if you're a detective or a pervert." In Lynch's mind, they are clearly one and the same.

It would have been very easy to take this premise and run with it either as a straightforward erotic thriller or an exploitation film; the result would have been a trashy but enjoyable 90 minutes. But Lynch is too clever for that. Just as Kubrick did in Eyes Wide Shut over a decade later, so Lynch offers the audience sexual titillation and then turns it against us to expose one of our deepest flaws. The theme and experience of voyeurism are present not only in the events unfolding, but in the way you watch them. You watch Isabelli Rossellini undress and the terrifying Dennis Hopper assault her as a voyeur, and throughout the film you have a strange, twisted feeling in your heart and stomach. You're feeling guilty for being there, and yet a strange, animalistic thrill prevents you from leaving or looking away.

One complaint that critics made about Blue Velvet was that in this world there are no shades of grey. But that's the whole point. Again, it would have been easy to have made this film as a more simple genre piece, in this case either as a thriller in which the good outsider stops the bad guys, or as a conspiracy piece about police corruption. But Lynch sticks to his guns, showing that no matter how normal or law-abiding things seem on the surface, once you move behind the picket fence all manner of dark and strange things can occur.

The central point of Blue Velvet is that all those on screen are guilty; all have become corrupted by their desires, and some -- in the case of Frank -- have even been deranged by them. Much like C. Thomas Howell's character in The Hitcher, Jeffrey Beaumont may start out as the hero (so to speak), but as the film progresses his naivety falls away in the face of the evil around him, so that in the end he is as much in the slough of despond as Dorothy Vallens or Frank Booth. The moment that Jeffrey beats Dorothy to calm her down is analogous to the final scene of The Hitcher where Howell shoots Rutger Hauer. In that moment both characters have crossed to the dark side.

As all of this plays out, however, Blue Velvet becomes an oddly moral film insofar as it tackles how one should deal with the guilt and shame. Jeffrey's responses in the second half are admirable in that he tries to bring down and expose Frank, while working on a relationship with Sandy based upon love rather than on using her. As unlikely as it may seem or look on paper, the film has a happy ending, with order seemingly restored and love (and robins) in the air. But knowing Lynch, it may not be that simple. This little battle may be over, but the war may carry on for a long time.

Blue Velvet is a mesmerising masterpiece, albeit one which is not easy to sit through. It's uncomfortable, disturbing, surreal and strange, all of which means that it will stay with you, for better or worse, for all time. The film contains some wonderful performances, from the understated work of Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern to the chillingly psychotic Dennis Hopper and the highly strung Isabella Rossellini (note, incidentally, the subversion of the Hitchcockian stereotype; here the blonde is the hero's salvation and the brunette his downfall). The film is beautifully shot, masterfully directed and possesses a script which is both relaxing and razor-sharp; one wishes David Mamet could have written a script like this when he came to write The Untouchables. A truly strange and terrifying film, one of the best of the 1980s and a must-see for all film fans.

Having made his name in the 1970s through Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, the 1980s saw Jim Henson move into darker territory with a recurring interest in fairy tales. After steering The Great Muppet Caper to box-office success, he directed The Dark Crystal, a Tolkien-esque fantasy featuring ground-breaking animatronics. In the late-1980s he created The Storyteller TV series starring John Hurt, which retold Greek myths and European folk tales through a mixture of puppetry and live action.

Sandwiched between these two accomplishments is Labyrinth, Henson's last theatrical film before his tragic and untimely death in 1990. Its commercial failure drove Henson to despair, but it has rightfully attained cult status, spawning a series of manga spin-offs, a spiritual sequel called MirrorMask, reams of fan fiction, and even an annual two-day masked ball held in Hollywood. Looking at the film in isolation of its following, it has more than its share of problems, but like much of Henson's work the flaws end up making it all the more endearing.

Labyrinth does have a fair amount of creative pedigree. Aside from Henson's direct involvement, it boasts a screenplay by ex-Python and medievalist Terry Jones, who shares Henson's fascination with fairy tales. There is also a production credit for George Lucas, who collaboration with Henson in the creation of Yoda on The Empire Strikes Back. This is an example of Lucas doing what he does best - using his financial clout and army of toys to give those with real creative talent what they need. Lucas would subsequently work in a similar capacity on Ron Howard's Willow two years later.

Labyrinth is clearly the product of people who understand fairy tales - and in particular, understand them to be more than silly stories told to children. The most superficial indication of this is an early shot of Sarah's bookshelf, which features everything from Alice in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz. But there is also clear fairy tale imagery in the film's cast of characters. Sarah, played by Jennifer Connelly, is the classic dark-haired heroine with a 'wicked' stepmother; she stands in for Snow White, with Jareth's peach taking the place of the poisoned apple.

Alongside the frequent references to Snow White, there are tenuous connections to Sleeping Beauty: rather than the prince riding to rescue the princess, the gender roles are reversed and Jareth stands in for Maleficent. There are also nods to Alice in Wonderland in the maze sequence (which features prominently in the Disney version), and to The Wizard of Oz in the make-up of the companions: Sarah, like Dorothy, is joined by three companions and a dog.

It is therefore ironic that a film of such literary richness should be so all at sea narratively. The premise of Labyrinth is simple: a spoilt child has 13 hours to get her brother back, before he turns into a goblin. It is difficult to sustain such a premise over 90 minutes, and there are loads of random scenes which make no sense or have no right to be there. Some of these are quite witty in their own right - for instance, the worm who persistently offers Sarah cups of tea and asks her to meet his family. But other are just bizarrely surreal (the soldiers beating Ludo like a piñata) or somewhat misjudged (the talking knockers - more on them later).

The 'Chilly Down' sequence is Labyrinth is one of the best examples of a 'Big-Lipped Alligator moment'. This term, derived by Nostalgia Chick Lindsay Ellis, refers to a random musical sequence which comes out of nowhere, has little or no bearing on the plot, is ridiculously over-the-top, and after it happens is never spoken of again. This scene fits each of these criteria, and is also the most dated aspect of the film: the obvious blue-screen is a possible indication that, even in their infancy, digital effects date quicker than organic ones.

The special effects in Labyrinth are a complete mixed bag. The work of Industrial Light and Magic was perhaps impressive for the day but feels all too obvious after 26 years. The use of matte paintings, a common feature in fantasy filmmaking, also hasn't stood the test of time; the first shot of the labyrinth will prompt widespread cries of "it's only a model". But the puppets remain endearing proof of Henson's brilliance. His creatures come in all shapes and sizes, but all of them have a personality and a physicality which pulls us into their world.

That said, some of the characters are rather annoying. It's unfair to pick on child actors, who are still learning their craft, but Sarah is not an entirely likeable protagonist; not only is she spoilt and childish, but her intelligence seems to vary according to the nearest plot point. More problematic is Sir Didymus, a Don Quixote-style knight, who has a dog called Ambrosius for a steed, and who bring the plot to a grinding halt. To draw on Monty Python a second time, his introduction is somewhere between the Black Knight and the Bridge of Death, but without any of the laughs (or the violence).

In addition to all the non-sequiturs and plot diversions, Labyrinth has several moments which are either misjudged or downright disturbing. The script is rife with innuendo ("search me, we're just the knockers") or phallic imagery (obelisks and Jareth's, erm, balls). David Bowie manages to avoid looking ridiculous, but his tight trousers leave nothing to the imagination. Most disturbing is a scene where Sarah falls down a shaft full of wandering hands. It's an inventive and clever use of puppetry, but treads far too close for comfort to Repulsion.

One scene which is effective, however, is the dream sequence. After Sarah eats the peach, she descends into a deep sleep and imagines herself dancing with Jareth at a masked ball. The awkward dancing and shifting camerawork conveys their mixed feelings towards each other, both platonic and romantic. It is also the scene which highlights something rare - an 1980s electronic soundtrack that hasn't dated badly. Bowie's contributions gel nicely with Trevor Jones' instrumentals, and 'As The World Falls Down' is one of the film's highlights.

This scene also introduces the core theme of Labyrinth. The film is about learning to putting childish things to one side, not so much to leave them behind but to realise that everything has its place. This theme is approached gently and playfully, but it is there throughout the stronger second half. The most evocative example comes in the junkyard scene, where Sarah is confronted by an old woman carrying a burden of useless junk. The woman represents what Sarah will become if she cannot assert her adult self and move on from childhood.

Sarah manages to defeat Jareth and retrieve her brother by realising that he has no power over her. As persuasive and seductive as he is, he is still a fantasy of hers: she can control his destiny, not the other way around. The final scene, where all the characters descend upon her room, is a reminder that our memories and fantasies of childhood never really leave us. We draw on them when needed, but we needn't fear them (hence Jareth's absence).

The film picks up quite significantly in its last half hour, when our protagonists finally enter the goblin city. The fight that ensues is pretty aimless, but includes a good self-deprecating gag on Lucas' part: the multitude of boulders summoned by Ludo takes a certain scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark to its silliest possible conclusion. The scenes with Jareth inside the castle are very impressive, with another good song ('Within You') and an elaborate set which replicates the work of MC Escher.

Discounting the parents, Labyrinth only has two human performances of note. Connelly's delivery is off the mark at times, but she is generally okay and eventually manages to become likeable. Bowie is clearly enjoying himself: only someone of his charisma and sex appeal could wear that outfit with any dignity, and his odd delivery is suited to the character. Elsewhere there is good work all round from the puppeteers, particularly Jim Henson's son Brian who provides the voice of Hoggle.

Labyrinth remains a decent film and a definite guilty pleasure. It's riddled with flaws and inconsistencies which lessen its dramatic impact, but the charm of Henson's craft lift the experience of watching it. In the moments when it comes together, it is an original and intriguing exploration of a theme or eventuality often avoided in children's films. If nothing else, it cements Henson's position as high king of puppetry and emperor of the lovably weird.

Whenever Handmade Films comes up in conversation, most people think of the company which saved Monty Python?s Life of Brian after EMI pulled out. But there is so much more to this once-great company, which produced some of the most important British cult films of the 1980s. Within the space of six years, George Harrison and his associates gave us John McKenzie?s visceral masterpiece The Long Good Friday, Terry Gilliam?s brilliantly absurd Time Bandits, and Alan Bennett?s wonderfully repressed A Private Function. And then there is Withnail & I, a bleak and bittersweet comedy from writer-director Bruce Robinson about acting, alcoholism, and the end of an era.

The great success of Withnail & I is that is manages to be a film about the nature of actors and acting without every descending into outright pretension. This is remarkable when we realise that the film is largely autobiographical, with ?I? being Robinson and Withnail being Vivian MacKerrell, a young actor who died of throat cancer a few years after its release. The film manages to achieve this through a very strong balance of the arty and the gritty, marrying flamboyant characters with dark circumstances and bleak, often poignant humour.

The script is a bizarre and beautiful balance of ornate theatrical jokes and street slang, silver-tongued metaphors and toilet humour. One moment Richard E. Grant ?demands to have some booze? and downs lighter fluid when none can be found; the next sees Richard Griffiths babbling on about Eton and describing roses as ?prostitutes for the bees?. This means that the characters and their way with words are never allowed to escape their grim realities, and hence we continue to care about them even in their most arty moments. We aren?t turned off, for instance, by Withnail?s blatant and obnoxious snobbery; we feel sorry for him throughout the film, and the closing speech (in which he recites from Hamlet) is truly brilliant.

Likewise, the film has some really simple and gritty visuals with effective camera work, which allow the story to effectively tell itself. The look of the film is very similar to A Private Function, in that they are both period pieces about individuals on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The actors? faces are dimly lit and grimy, the walls are yellowing, the rooms are musty and hidden by carefully placed shadows ? the whole landscape has an air of decay to it which takes you into the heart of the story. Much like the tumble-down back streets in The French Connection or the coal fields in Get Carter, you feel like you?re really in the pubs, in the houses, among the social turmoil. You feel, in other words, like you?re in a world which is dying.

In many ways, Withnail & I is about the passing of an age. Monty quips that he and the boys are the last of a breed, as actors at any rate. The drug dealer gets high while explaining that the 1960s is over and that the young have ?failed to paint it black?. As the film carries on both the hedonistic optimism of Withnail and the self-delusion of ?I? die very slowly; the former is left despondently in the rain, while the latter moves on to a better and more ordered life. The fact that the film is able to tackle these subjects without being either rose-tinted or overly sentimental is testament to Robinson?s honesty as a writer and a filmmaker.

What is equally impressive is the level of humour sustained throughout the piece, so that it manages to be simultaneously elegiac and hilarious. There are several brilliant set-pieces, such as Withnail attempting to catch fish with a shotgun, or the scene in the tea room where he demands ?the finest wines in all humanity?, or indeed his deadpan antics driving the Jag back to London. But just as important, and as funny, is the comic interplay in the dialogue. The conversations between Grant and McGann range from the stupidity of Manchester to the perils of being an understudy, and they are all executed with dry, acerbic wit and panache from the performers.

Richard E. Grant gives his all in the film, putting in a tour de force performance which he has yet to top, for all his great work in The Scarlet Pimpernel and Gosford Park. Grant famously was (and is) tee-total ? to simulate the experience of Withnail he was taken on an all-night binge by the crew, and in the lighter fluid scene he was forced to drink vinegar during the take. McGann?s performance is just as compelling; his reading of the graffiti in the pub toilets will simultaneously shred your nerves and make you laugh out loud. And Richard Griffiths is on very good form, to the point at which he is simultaneously creepy and endearing. His Monty represents what Withnail will most likely grow into ? a self-pitying, repressed has-been, yearning for past glories which don?t really exist.

The problems with Withnail & I are unusual for such a low-budget personal work. It is slightly too long, feeling the need to introduce a lot more secondary characters than is perhaps necessary. The poacher, the farmer and the drug dealer all make for interesting comic diversions, but their extended presence is not really developed and unfortunately means that Withnail is sidelined for a lot of the middle third. There are also quite a lot of similar scenes, usually of the two eating intercut with their meetings with the locals. They?re well staged, but as more examples come along you wonder as to the cumulative effect they are having on the plot. Many of the fleeting conversations could have been inserted in any order to much the same effect, meaning the intense weekend in Monty?s cottage loses some of its intensity.

These quibbles aside, there is no doubt that Withnail & I remains an important cult film which is funny, poignant, meaningful and very well-executed. The central performances are great, and are complimented by solid if rough direction which more than does justice to the source. It is a shame that the careers of neither the main actors nor the director have completely flourished as a result ? for all McGann?s subsequent work, including an underrated turn as Doctor Who, he has yet to top this. One hopes that Robinson?s new film, The Rum Diary, will be a return to form for him. Based on the strengths of this, he deserves another hit late in his career.

In a bid to escape being typecast as a horror director, John Carpenter sought to broaden his palette after Christine and experimented with a number of different genres. But while Starman still holds up as a moving romantic drama, Big Trouble in Little China resembles a dumb mix of Indiana Jones and Year of the Dragon. After the subsequent failure of Prince of Darkness, Carpenter needed something special to revive his career.

They Live is Carpenter?s best film since The Thing, and is to date the last great film of his career. It takes the alien invasion premise of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, mixes it with some clever insights on American politics and mass media, and then turns the heat up by injecting the plot with on-screen violence reminiscent of Robocop. Although uneven in places, it is an entertaining piece of filmmaking from one of modern horror?s most important directors.

Despite having elements of both science fiction and action movies, They Live doesn?t start out feeling like either of these. The first half hour plays out more like a Western: it?s quiet, slow-moving and focussed around the everyday goings-on of small town folk, or in this case the homeless. The residents of the makeshift camp speak their mind and go about their business like they have been doing it their whole lives, much like the inhabitants of a small town in the cattle kingdom. Our protagonist has an air of the Man with No Name about him: he doesn?t talk much, and seems physically out of place.

In this first half hour, we focus on the characters in the camp and gain an understanding of their social status. Most of them are hard-working, salt-of-the-earth types who won?t take state handouts as a matter of principle. Carpenter?s score contains bluesy elements to reinforce the trustworthy, blue-collar nature of these scenes, whether in the harmonica Roddy Piper plays at night or the double bass riff that follows him around. We empathise with them to such an extent that the goings-on at the church seem incredibly suspicious; when the police turn up and burn both church and camp, we feel sad but accept that something had to be done.

In doing all this, the film cleverly manages to pull the wool over our eyes. When we first see the blind preacher pontificating in the street, we pay no attention to him; we?ve heard it all before, and it seems either off-putting or irrelevant. The same is true for the TV broadcasts; we?re not interested in listening to some intellectual ?lick his nuts?. We identify so clearly with the homeless characters that we become suspicious of anyone who seems vaguely intellectual. Hence when the sunglasses go on and the screen shifts to black-and-white, it comes as a very real shock.

Carpenter?s decision to shoot ?reality? in black-and-white is an interesting one. On an historical level, it makes everything look like a 1950s B-movie, complete with aliens who look every bit like humans in unconvincing rubber masks. One of the underground broadcasts described how greenhouse gases have risen since 1958, which would imply the aliens have been among us for a generation. Although it may seem odd that an invasion force would look so old hat, it does make logical sense: if you conquer races by being invisible, you don?t have to worry about updating your look to keep with the times.

Carpenter uses this visual technique to expose the shallow nature of consumerism and make a point about subliminal advertising. The world in colour is an ordinary 1980s American city; there is nothing stylised about the dialogue its citizens speak, and the advertising style is familiar. We are so used to advertising being a part of our lives that we don?t stop to give any of the billboards a second glance. When Piper puts the glasses on, he is literally seeing the world in black-and-white; all the flashy marketing is stripped away to reveal basic and cynical instructions about how we should live our lives.

Like Aldous Huxley?s Brave New World and Neil Postman?s Amusing Ourselves to Death, They Live examines how people willingly give up their individuality out of a desire for wealth, pleasure, status or acceptance. Whether these desires are conscious or unconscious is hard to say, since the messages conveyed in the media are more or less the same ? people need to own the latest cars and gadgets so they can look like people on TV. The film is in its very essence deeply critical of television; Carpenter shot it so that much of the action takes place at the extreme ends of the frame, making it hard to show the film on the small screen.

The Body-Snatchers elements of They Live are conveyed through an indictment of America?s social structure. Rather than simply being invaders, here the aliens are part of the rich elite, exploiting the underclass and squeezing the middle class. Everyone is getting poorer, but people keep buying into the system because all the information they receive promotes aspiration and consumerism. There is a running mention of the aliens treating the human race as its own third world; we buy into their ideals just as the poor of Africa come to believe they can work their way out of poverty. In other words, we consume as we are about to be consumed.

For action movie fans, They Live has largely been remembered for two scenes. The first is where Piper inadvertently wanders into a bank with a shotgun to escape the police. Staring at the aliens in front of him, he quips: ?I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass? and I?m all out of bubblegum.? It?s still one of the coolest and funniest lines of the 1980s, superbly capturing the tone of the film.

The other is the lengthy fight sequence, which was famously parodied almost shot-for-shot in the South Park episode ?Cripple Fight?. Piper and Keith David beat the living daylights out of each other as Piper tries to convince David to put on the sunglasses. Like so much 1980s action, what once seemed brutal and realistic now looks quite ridiculous, especially in an age where comic book violence has become the norm. We may believe that the characters are getting hurt, but the fact that they keep getting up so many times pushes credibility to the limit.

The biggest problem with They Live is that it is incredibly uneven. It has the same kind of structural flaws as Dark Star, with different scenes being played for different effect. Sometimes it wants it to be an action movie, so the characters fire guns with bottomless magazines and manage to kill dozens of guards without getting hit. Sometimes it wants to be scary, so we get scenes of emotionless police officers beating people to death. Sometimes it wants to be funny, such as the bubblegum scene or the final shot which features an alien with a naked woman in a hotel. The film is always entertaining, but we?re never sure quite where things are heading, and because the style and genre keep changing, it is not as tense or claustrophobic as it could be.

They Live is not Carpenter?s finest work by quite some stretch. Aside from its uneven keel, the characters are not as well-drawn as they are in his earlier work. Certainly Meg Foster is an odd choice for a love interest; her reptilian eyes and icy demeanour seem to give away her allegiances far too early. But aside from these problems, They Live is an entertaining action-comedy-thriller with a good compromise between substance and spectacle. It is wittily constructed and Roddy Piper carries himself well, being more talented and less annoying than Hulk Hogan. After so long in the wilderness, one hopes Carpenter?s new project will be just as enticing.

When it comes to American high school films, the 1980s belonged to John Hughes. Through Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Hughes perfected a sweet, light-hearted and nostalgic look at adolescence which touched the hearts of a generation. But like many trendsetters before him, it wasn't long before the master's work was widely imitated and devalued until it became an out-of-touch caricature. Such efforts were often enjoyable, but we never believed that we were seeing real teenagers on screen - and in the case of Hughes' later works, that was very often true.

In the midst of all this pastel-shaded gaiety, Heathers comes at you like a fizzling flask of vitriol, burning through those pleasant but deceptive veils to reveal the dark and bitchy underbelly of high school life. To this day it remains one of the darkest, funniest and edgiest comedies of the 1980s, which will make you howl with laughter even as you squirm in discomfort. While not an easy watch, it has lost none of its potency in 23 years, and is perhaps second only to Lindsay Anderson's If.... as the greatest high school film of all time.

While the John Hughes stable of films were often accused of being conservative, Heathers' production history suggests a work of great artistic ambition. Daniel Waters wrote the script with the intention of Stanley Kubrick directing it - a huge ambition for a first-time screenwriter. Waters believed that Kubrick was the only director who could get away with a three-hour film, and the only person who could make the definitive high school film, to go with the definitive sci-fi film in 2001.

First-time director Michael Lehmann, who had made a splash on the cult circuit with his short film Beaver Gets A Boner, got the gig of directing Heathers through his friendship with producer Denise di Novi. Di Novi was hot property in Hollywood in the late-1980s, having worked with Tim Burton on his hit comedy Beetlejuice, starring Winona Ryder. Ryder was offered the part after the success of Beetlejuice, proclaiming it to be the best script she had ever read. The rest, as they say, is history.

The look of Heathers is a very conscious departure from the John Hughes stable. The opening scenes, where the Heathers and Veronica are introduced, are a clear parody of Hughes, with bright and welcoming pastel shades which become darker as things move on. There is a dreamy feel to the opening act with soft focus around the edges of the screen, with Lehmann seeking to achieve the same hypnotic, discomforting effect that David Lynch did in Blue Velvet. Little by little the colours grow harsher and darker, culminating in a dream sequence which rivals Suspiria in its luridness; the prominent use of red and Ryder's passing resemblance to Jessica Harper put these sections aesthetically close to Dario Argento.

The visuals of Heathers play an important part in the film's dismantling of preconceptions that high school is the happiest time of your life. It depicts the various cliques at Westerburg High (the jocks, the nerds and of course the Heathers) with the perfect balance of the real and the extreme. Even if the bullies or the bitches we encountered weren't quite so hideous or self-absorbed, there is more than enough truth in their characterisations to make us shudder and recoil. The uptight, immaculate look of the Heathers perfectly encapsulates all those teenage girls who played on the affections and fears of others to hide their own insecurities.

The script of Heathers is nothing short of terrific, with scenes and sequences that are as good, if not slightly better, than anything Quentin Tarantino was turning out in the same period. Many of its one-liners have entered into cinema history, such as Heather Chandler's sarcastic retort, "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw", when Veronica suggests they hang out with different kinds of people. Some of the lines are hilariously surreal, like Ram's father exclaiming "I love my dead gay son" as Ram lies in an open coffin in his American football kit. But others are so scabrous that they make even hardened pros wince - for instance, JD's comment that "Kurt and Ram had nothing left to offer the school except for date rapes and AIDS jokes."

The best lines in Heathers are those which tap right into the teenage angst and low self-esteem of the characters. Early on in the film, the Heathers are chatting in the girls' toilets. Heather Duke, who suffers from bulimia, is teased by the girls with phrases like "don't you feel the urge to purge?" When she finally gives in and starts throwing her guts up, Heather Chandler rolls her eyes and remarks dismissively: "bulimia is so 1987". Later on in the film, Veronica writes a long passage in her diary which begins "My teen angst bullshit has a body count" and concludes: "Are we going to prom or to hell?". Lines like these are stupendously inventive in conveying the pressures of high school and the hypocrisies of the in-crowd.

The film is utterly merciless towards its characters and the audience. Every time you think the film has reached its limits, and drawn a line in the sand, it takes a full stride over that line and pulls you over head first. It doesn't take long to adjust to the tone of Heathers in and of itself, but the jokes become darker and more inventive with every turn. One of the best examples of this comes when JD and Veronica are slumped in the car having just killed Kurt and Ram. Veronica takes the cigarette lighter and applies it to her hand in self-flagellation; JD stops her, before leaning over to light his cigarette from her smouldering palm.

Just as Monty Python's Life of Brian is a film about blasphemy rather than a blasphemous film, so Heathers is a film which mocks the media presentation of teenage suicide rather than teenage suicide itself. It handles the subject with a ruthless intelligence, showing how the act of suicide can produce bizarre psychological reactions, turning enemies into martyrs and uniting completely different kinds of people. It also shows how parents and the media approach the issue in a way which is ultimately irrelevant or ineffective to the needs of the children. In its handling of a difficult and complex subject matter in a way which is both visceral and stimulating, Heathers is on a par with We Need To Talk About Kevin - and on that front, there is no higher praise.

Although it seems odd to say it, Heathers comes across as quite a moral film. The film entertains the fantasy of all frustrated or bullied teenagers, namely wishing death upon their enemies, and shows the central character coming through triumphant by being true to herself and asserting her own way of treating people. It is a coming-of-age film insofar as Veronica endures by reaching a point of maturity, where she need no longer entertain such evil desires.

From this perspective, JD is the physicalisation of Veronica's desires or temptations. He acts like the little devil on her shoulder who is at once repulsive and irresistible. JD gives her what she wants in terms of affection and satisfaction, but at the cost of losing control of her own destiny, and Veronica's eventual defeat of JD is her recognition that she doesn't have to be a bitch or a psycho to survive in life. There is a comparison with Let The Right One In in how the film uses an outsider character to represent the burgeoning, adolescent aggression of the characters, with similarly destructive results.

There has been some debate over the ending of Heathers since the film was first released. The ending Lehmann originally envisioned involved Veronica blowing up the entire school and the cast re-uniting in heaven at a massive prom. In hindsight this would have been a little fanciful, treading too close to the 'Christmas in Heaven' sequence from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The ending as it stands is perfect, completing Veronica's defeat of both her demons and the Heathers, ushering in a new phase of her life.

Heathers is a terrifically dark comedy which remains unrivalled in the pantheon of American high school films. The performances are first-class, with Winona Ryder in terrific form as Veronica and Christian Slater channelling Jack Nicholson from The Witches of Eastwick. Their great work is complimented with Waters' outstanding script and Lehmann's sharp direction, all of which conspires to create a true, dark-hearted masterpiece. One thing is for certain - after seeing Heathers, you'll never look at high school the same way again.

Well before the 'abstinence porn' of Twilight began to hit our screens, a whole wave of vampire films in the 1990s returned to the deep well of sex which had become the lifeblood of vampire fiction. We had Anne Rice's AIDS allegory Interview with a Vampire, John Landis' uneven crime drama Innocent Blood, and of course Francis Ford Coppola's bonkers version of Dracula.

But in the midst of these hypersexual offerings, a small Mexican film from a first-time director was helping to radically reshape the genre. Cronos, the debut by Guillermo Del Toro, demonstrated that vampire fiction could explore themes far more varied than sex, such as the fear of death, the loneliness of old age and the relationship between Mexico and the USA. A hugely influential work of horror cinema, it is every bit as striking and significant as Let The Right One In.

When I reviewed The Usual Suspects, I remarked that one test of a good filmmaker is being able to take a hackneyed series of conventions, and create something which is both memorable and mindful of its genre origins. On this level alone Cronos is a triumph, since it is able to fulfil all the requirements of being a bona fide vampire film which approaching all the key plot points and characters arcs from distinctively unusual angles.

Cronos may have a backstory about the origins of the vampire, followed by the introduction of our protagonists to said bloodsucker which results in quite a lot of gore. But Del Toro manages to achieve this while removing from the story all connotations of sex or lust. In place of Hammer's heaving bosoms and phallic fangs, he gives us skin peeling like wallpaper and the intricate clockwork of the Cronos device. The closest the film comes to anything sexual is a scene of Federico Luppi licking a nosebleed off a bathroom floor, which is shot with such clinical precision that there can be no room for erotic thoughts.

By refocusing the story around ageing and the fear of death, Cronos hits on the central dilemma in vampire fiction: would you rather live forever but lose your soul, or stay pure and human but live in constant fear of death? Both the elderly characters in the film choose the former, albeit for different motives and by entirely different means. Dieter, the dying businessman, makes a conscious decision to pursue the device: he owns the manual needed to operate it and believes it is the only thing that can keep him and his empire alive (and out of his nephew's hands).

Jesus, on the other hand, is 'bitten' accidentally, and only comes to use the device frequently through observing its physical benefits. His desire, in the form of addiction to blood, is every bit as strong as Dieter's desire to possess the device himself, but it is not motivated by selfishness or a desire for power. Like Dracula, Jesus becomes weary of eternal life: he is worn down not by an army of brides, but by the constant torment of those who are jealous of his powers. In the end his remaining sense of self triumphs over the vampire he has become, and he sacrifices himself to protect his beloved granddaughter.

The theme of ageing is also conveyed in the visuals of Cronos. Guillermo Navarro's cinematography is very washed-out, with dark woods and fading reds to indicate how everything around the characters is very slowly dying or decaying. Even the brightest scenes in the film, like the New Year's party, are filled with pale colours and make use of shadows wherever possible.

Beyond its direct connections with the vampire genre, Cronos is connected to other key figures in horror. The design of the Cronos device itself, with its peculiar blend of biology and mechanics, resembles the work of Clive Barker: its design as is intricate as the puzzle box in Hellraiser and there is the same suggestion of great evil being contained in or brought forth from something of great beauty.

There are also connections with John Carpenter in the film's elaborate and highly convincing make-up. Del Toro's training under make-up artist Dick Smith shines through in his pursuit of organic, physical terror, and the work of his make-up artist M. Carrajal rivals anything which Rob Bottin achieved on The Thing. There is a further connection with Carpenter contained in a line where the device is dismissed as "just a toy". Like Carpenter in Hallowe'en, Del Toro is taking an aspect of horror which had become institutionalised and accepted, and proving that it could still scare you to death.

Cronos is a deeply religious film, in its use of iconography and its exploration of the meanings to both life and death. Again, this is drawing on a classic trait in vampire fiction, namely that the act of being or becoming a vampire is a rebellion against the laws of nature (including death), which it was believed were set in stone by God. Though there is no scene of Jesus declaring war on heaven, as happens in the Coppola version, his faith is counterpointed by his growing dependence on the device, as demonstrated by him reciting the Lord's Prayer while allowing it to stab him a second time.

There are other indications of these religious themes as well. The Cronos device was created by an alchemist, someone who brought the material and spiritual worlds together, using what became the scientific method to find the divine substance which could cure all disease and prolong life. The images of cockroaches bursting out of angels, or the device being hidden in said statues, hints at the threat which such a device poses to Christianity. By removing the certainty of death, it undermines the corresponding fear of death and damnation, and therefore makes it less necessary either to repent or to live a moral life.

To add to its theological wrangling, Cronos also has political connotations. The film is a rich allegory for US-Mexican relations, in which America is the bloodsucker which takes without asking and refuses to yield. Dieter, the American, is determined not to let the Mexicans (in the shape of Jesus) get one over on them - the second they come up with something useful, the Americans want it for themselves and won't take no for an answer. There is a contrast between Federico Luppi's sympathetic, caring grandfather and Ron Perlman's aggressive and ambitious nephew. Perlman may slip in and out of Luppi's language, but he is only interested in himself - it is not communication, only giving orders in a language he thinks they can understand.

The performances in Cronos are mostly of a high quality. Luppi is a great screen presence, seeming frail and vulnerable while coming across as a strong and determined character. Perlman, in his first of several collaborations with Del Toro, is a very fine match for him. His versatility with language is matched only by his desire to throw himself physically into the role. The only weak link is the young girl, played by Tamara Shanath. It isn't so much her performance as the limited extent of her character's development; we don't feel as strongly connected to her as we do with her counterparts in The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth.

Cronos is a great debut feature from one of horror's greatest directors. While not as perfectly formed as Pan's Labyrinth, it contains all the hallmarks of Del Toro's genius, from its powerfully unique visuals to its constant invention and intelligence even in the most trivial of moments. It's a top-notch chiller and a welcome shot in the arm for vampire fiction, proving that the genre is still able to stimulate as well as scare. It's not Let The Right One In, but it should be welcomed into anyone's collection.

The history of cinema is like that of a two-headed beast running simultaneously in opposite directions. One head aims for the gutter and embraces the trashy origins of cinema, pointing to the commercial novelty of the nickelodeon and the use of early photography for pornographic purposes. The other head, in a mixture of maturity and self-denial, strives for the stars, seeing cinema as an art form which can stimulate the senses, improve the mind and fundamentally enrich one as a human being.

Nowhere is this quarrel between art and trash more prominent than in Australian cinema, a quarrel highlighted by the commercial success of Aussie efforts beginning in the 1970s and exploding in the 1990s. Films made Down Under in this period encapsulate every aspect of cinema history, from rough-and-ready exploitation (Mad Max) to fabulist fantasy (Moulin Rouge!), and from the mega-blockbuster (Crocodile Dundee) to the cult classic.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Priscilla from hereon in) is one of the brasher instalments of the 1990s wave, which began with the likes of Muriel's Wedding and Baz Lurrman's debut, Strictly Ballroom. These films retained the rough-edged charm of Crocodile Dundee and its sequels while setting the record straight about the depiction and characterisation of Australians. While not without its problems, it remains an important and highly entertaining film, as an entry in the Aussie film canon and a classic in its own right.

For those uninitiated with either gay culture or the drag scene, it would be tempting to reduce Priscilla down to the novelty value of seeing three great actors prancing around in women's clothing. While neither Guy Pearce nor Hugo Weaving were big stars at this point, it does raise an eyebrow to find the future Edward VIII or Agent Smith camping it up so readily in that much mascara. And that's not to mention Terence Stamp, whose reputation as a straight-laced hard man overshadows his high camp General Zod in Superman I and II.

There are a great many films which would be amply sustained by the charm or novelty of three thesps playing against type, and getting away with saying outrageous things. But to Priscilla's credit, it never plays this novelty for any more than it is worth, and it quickly wears off as we become genuinely intrigued by and interested in the characters. After a while we stop seeing the garish make-up, flamboyant colours and the elaborate, Oscar-winning costumes, and only notice the people underneath.

Priscilla has long been recognised for its role in the promotion of gay rights and the LGBT agenda. It brings ideas about gay behaviour, culture and identity to a mainstream audience without ramming the themes of respect and tolerance down their throats. Its message is simple but significant: that being gay, transsexual or a drag queen is not only acceptable, it's perfectly normal, or at least should be seen that way.

The significance lies in the film's departure from the conventional depiction of homosexuals, either as shallow wet blankets with hinged wrists or repressed public schoolboys. It's a cliché to characterise Aussies as easy-going, but in this case such an attitude works to the subject's advantage; all three of the drag queens come across as normal people who just happen to wear woman's clothing to make their way. In American hands, the characters would have been showier and less believable, and the themes would have been clumsily conveyed. If you want proof, look no further than Priscilla's State-side rip-off, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar.

Although Priscilla's character execution contains very little that is American, the film does owe a great debt to the tradition of American road movies. The most obvious reference point is Easy Rider, due to the film's low-budget, independent spirit and relationship to the desolate landscape in which the characters spend most of their time. The film also includes a number of references to musicals, including a bitchy put-down of Xanadu, featuring fellow Aussie Olivia Newton-John.

Priscilla is in possession of a corking script, with most of the best lines going to Stamp. Speaking in his natural British accent (which is never explained), he brings flair and erudition to an otherwise broad and brash environment. In one scene he is confronted by a burly woman in an out-of-town bar, who refuses to serve his friends in full costume. He turns to her and says, quite calmly: "Now listen here you mullet. Why don't you just light your tampon, and blow your box apart? Because it's the only bang you're ever gonna get, sweetheart!"

While lines like this are immensely memorable, there are also more uncomfortable moments when the darker humour comes out. The best example comes halfway in when Adam (Guy Pearce) recounts a childhood memory involving his paedophile uncle. We see said uncle in the bath, asking Adam to put his hand under the water and "pull very gently" on what he finds. We expect the worst, but our expectations are confounded by Adam pulling out the plug; his uncle writhes in agony as his "ping-pongs" get caught in the drain, and we can to the adult Adam and Tick joining us in laughing our heads off.

As Roger Ebert observed, Priscilla is not really about drag queens at all. It is about middle-aged men who are all tired of being stuck in the same place, feeling that they have been treated a certain way long enough. Tick and Bernadette (don't call her Ralph) bicker with Adam so much because they see themselves in him - they fear for him growing old and bitter, losing all the joie de vivre which, while often irritating, inspires and sustains the group in bad moments.

In the manner of old romances, all three characters find solace or contentment in men. Tick and Adam bond with Tick's son, with the former accepting his identity as both a drag queen and a father. He is no longer governed by fear or regret, and is able to be a father knowing that his son won't be damaged by who he is. Bernadette finds in Bob a man on whom she can genuinely depend. They care deeply for each other, not out of physical lust or fleeting fancy, but from a shared appreciation of being a gentleman.

There are a couple of problems with Priscilla. Conforming as it does to road movie conventions, there are long sections which feel slow and threaten to become repetitive. Once the characters are stranded in the outback things get bogged down, and there are one too many scenes of dance rehearsals or performances which highlight rather than distract from this fact.

More obvious, and problematic, is the racist depiction of Filipinos. Bob's wife is a former Filipino hooker who speaks in broken English, swears rampantly, and seems addicted to both alcohol and sex. One of the most memorable scenes (for all the wrong reasons) sees her turning up a bar to perform her party piece - shooting table tennis balls out of her love tunnel. She's not in the film for very long, but the five minutes devoted to her character threaten to sour the whole experience.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert remains both a sterling piece of entertainment and an important chapter in the history of Aussie cinema. Stephan Elliott directs competently and intelligently, the above flaws notwithstanding, and the performances are generally excellent. Whatever the merits of the musical it spawned, there can be no substitute for the original, whether as a camp classic, an off-the-wall road movie, or a rough-edged, warm-hearted drama.

When a film critic describes a film as â??admirableâ??, it is usually a polite way of saying that the film is disappointing. You have to admire Steven Spielberg for making Schindlerâ??s List, or Terry Gilliam for finishing The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But all the good feeling and intentions in the world do not make these good films; often oneâ??s admiration for one aspect of a film is quickly followed by a damning attack on the rest.

You would imagine that Savage Grace would fall into the same camp. Itâ??s certainly admirable in its intentions; the story of Barbara Daly Baekeland remains a bizarre open secret, shocking in its time but long since forgotten. And there is no doubt that in its execution and structure, it is not an unconditional success. Savage Grace is a twisted and difficult film, and at times it is very hard to feel involved in what is unfolding. But for those who would endure its unusual approach and overlook its weaknesses, it is a thought-provoking and shocking story anchored by a brilliant central performance.

Itâ??s easy to make a film about rich, successful people having problems; Ishmael Merchant and James Ivory made a career out of it. Itâ??s much harder to make us care about such people, whose problems often have little direct bearing on our own lives. Savage Grace makes this task harder because of the way in which its subject is presented. Tom Kalinâ??s direction is unflinchingly cool; he never wimps out during the graphic or disturbing scenes, but it often feels like youâ??re watching the film through a series of murky windows. The characters are very difficult to get a handle on; unlike Lolita, there is no central figure with whom we emotionally identify.

In other films, this distance would irritate us to the point at which we give up. But if you compare this to the similarly glacial Public Enemies, you begin to understand Kalinâ??s reasoning. Public Enemies attempted to paint a nostalgic picture of 1930s America, with John Dillinger as both its greatest hero and biggest criminal. But the ultra-modern hand-held shooting style was at odds with this nostalgia, meaning that audiences simply could not bond with the characters. Savage Grace is not in the least bit nostalgic for either the period or its social graces; its stately camera work allows us to dissect the period through the tragic central story. We learn to accept the characters as products of a lifestyle, rather than as a series of irritating bores.

Savage Grace takes the Baekelandsâ?? story and uses it as the prism for an examination of success. It argues that such insane levels of wealth and luxury breed deep-rooted mental insecurity, and much like American Psycho it paints a picture of material success as something morally empty and vacuous. The central lines of the film are spoken by Tony in the narration: â??One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.â?? It is quite clear from the events which follow, and in the manner in which they play out, that both Tony and Kalin disagree.

The film is centrally about the suffocating influence of wealth and family. This is on one level literally true, since at the end of the film we are told that Tony died by suffocating himself with a plastic bag (an ironic death, since his family made their fortune in plastics). But it is conveyed on a deeper level by the relationship between Tony and his mother. This begins safely enough; Barbara is presented as someone who is flamboyant, provocative and occasionally outspoken, but generally concerned with improving her husbandâ??s image. But after he begins an affair, she steadily transforms into a far more twisted and bizarre creature. Her protective attitude towards Tony becomes even more marked; she treats her son like a surrogate husband, consummating their incest and despising the thought of him having gay lovers.

The film rises and falls on the performance of Julianne Moore, who is on startling, spellbinding form. Itâ??s very hard to think of anybody else who could pull off such a complex role. Mooreâ??s beauty has an old-fashioned elegance to it which is perfect for the character, and the script offers her many juicy lines in several different languages. But itâ??s her outbursts which brilliantly reveal the monster inside; someone who is spiteful, vicious, overprotective and self-loathing. Moore really taps into the character, playing her as essentially a tragic figure who silently craves affection.

The central scene of Savage Grace comes when Barbara goes to the airport to meet her husband. She finds him with his mistress, a girl who only minutes earlier was her sonâ??s girlfriend. She unleashes a carefully choreographed hell, calling him a coward and the girl a whore, followed by a blistering tirade about his penchant for anal sex. Having said all she can but to no avail, she walks outside and slowly disintegrates. This is the moment at which Barbara begins the irreversible decline into mental illness and sexual waywardness. Her dress, which looks blood-spattered, is a possible reference to the pig-blood scene in Carrie: both instances are the first time the characters are able to direct their rage and use it for destructive purposes.

Eventually, the film shifts and becomes more about the madness of Tony, which eventually leads him to murder his mother with a kitchen knife. There is very little exploration as to the precise cause of his madness; their relationship is not strictly oedipal, since Tony does not hate his father. There are comparisons with Psycho in the way in which Barbara dominates Tonyâ??s life, and the narration does suggest that her death was what such domination would eventually cause. The biggest clue comes in the killer line as Tony is led away: â??I have so much in my head, which to let it out would surely kill me. Nevertheless, I feel better now.â??

The problems with Savage Grace are to be found in little oddities in Kalinâ??s approach. A lot of his decisions donâ??t make sense until the very end of the film, in particular the narration. At the end it works wonders once we realise we are listening to the cracked mind of a killer, and we wonder just how long he has been crazy. But up until that point, it irons out many potentially dramatic scenes, reducing them to bland exposition.

The significance of the dog collar is never explained; it is brought up occasionally and used as a trigger for the murder, but its actual meaning is never properly explored. Much like Donâ??t Look Now, many of the visual devices simply donâ??t work early on. Reversing the film to show Tony writing backwards is a really cheap trick, and is shot in a way which feels closer to The Time Machine than to psychosexual drama.

Savage Graceâ??s flaws are clear for all to see. It is a film to be admired rather than enjoyed â?" certainly itâ??s not the sort of thing youâ??d kick back to after a long day. But buried beneath its problems and unusual style is a shocking story which deserved to be told and which has been handled in the most honest way possible. Many scenes are very difficult to watch and the whole film has a really creepy tone in the best possible way. Above all it is a damning and frightening indictment of inherited wealth and the resulting moral vacuum, exemplified by Julianne Moore in her best performance since The Hours. Kalin may make better, more accessible films, but this is an interesting effort which gives American Psycho a run for its money.

Many of the industry's most successful filmmakers cut their teeth on obscure, low-budget horror films. Robert Wise began by directing Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher, and ended up winning Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Francis Ford Coppola first came to the attention of big studios after the success of Dementia 13, and the rest is filmmaking history. Even James Cameron, who doesn't know the meaning of 'low budget', started out with Roger Corman on Piranha II.

It's hard to know if Mitchell Lichtenstein's career will follow the same kind of path. Although Teeth is an impressive and memorable debut, it is not quite as accomplished or satirically on-the-money as many have claimed. It has several prominent flaws which are fortunately balanced by its high level of squirm-inducing scares and genuinely creepy moments, which add up to an interesting calling card for its director.

Although Teeth is nominally a horror comedy, its close counterpart is neither the gross-out splatter of The Evil Dead or the homage-ridden antics of John Landis. There is a touch of homage in the film's references to 1950s B-movies. A couple of old black-and-white horror films are seen briefly on the mother's TV, and the location of Dawn's house near two giant nuclear cooling towers is a nod to all those old films about radiation causing mutation. But neither of these are substantially developed; certainly the latter is never used directly as an explanation for Dawn's... 'adaptation'.

The closest companion to Teeth is Hard Candy, since both are twisted feminist tales about teenage women with dark secrets. Both are also divisive along gender lines; in the case of Teeth, men will struggle to laugh as opposed to shudder in fear during scenes which are near the bone(r). Some of the more brutal and gory scenes feature realistic prosthetics and old-fashioned theatrical blood, making the acts of mutilation feel far more physical and frightening than any kind of CGI torture porn.

The film is a satire of the American celibacy movement, embodied here by a group called 'The Promise' for which our lead character is a vocal spokesperson. It starts very strongly with Dawn giving one of her talks to an assembly of young students, all of whom give shouted responses which sound very tightly choreographed. You feel like you're witness to some kind of brainwashing exercise, with Dawn as its poster child. Jess Weixler gives a fine performance which captures that familiar look of blinkered determination, that preachy but ultimately shallow conviction that she is right.

But the manipulation of truth, by the state or by religious organisations like The Promise, doesn't end with the assembly hall. In a biology class later on in the film, diagrams of the female genitalia have been covered by stickers by state law; and later on there is a brief debate about the evolution of the rattlesnake (no innuendo intended).
But while the film is clear about precisely who and what it is attacking -- and for all the right reasons -- there is a sense that it could have been more savage still. Although it sets up the level to which kids are indoctrinated with anti-sex propaganda, there is little focus on how this indoctrination affects Dawn after her initial 'accident' with Tobey. Her torment is taken for granted, when what we want is for the film to go deeper.

The film's examination of dentata (the 'teeth' of the title) allows for a multi-layered examination into feminism and sexual liberation. The female genitalia has traditionally been portrayed in Western societies as something innately passive and unthreatening. To give this organ teeth and make its owner an attractive teenager, wrestling with budding sexual urges, is a powerful combination because it almost completely reverses this stereotype and exposes the inherent weaknesses of the male. The film has a brilliantly creepy tone; even before the first castration you sense that something really bad is going to happen, so that when it does, it's all the more chilling and alarming.

Depending upon which school of feminism one is partial to, this transformation is either a sign of women triumphing over men, or a cautionary tale about the need to treat women equally. The film begins with the latter and gradually tiptoes into the former. At first Dawn is simply horrified by what has happened; in both the cave and at the gynaecologist's office, the attacks happen out of panic and she has no control over her new set of jaws. By the time she has managed intercourse without mishap, she seems to have undergone a moral shift and become more vengeful towards men.

This transformation is one of the central problems with Teeth: it cannot decide whether it is pro-women or simply anti-men, and Lichtenstein often confuses the two via comedy. The first time Dawn's teeth come into play, it really freaks you out, even with the old-fashioned, over-the-top screaming. But by the third time, the film is playing it deliberately for gross-out laughs, which seems less honest or compelling. The moment where the dog eats Dawn's brother's member will both makes you squirm and try your patience. The film eventually ends up as a bizarre hybrid of Fatal Attraction and Baise-Moi, more concerned with painting Dawn as some kind of avenging angel than making a more interesting point about controlling sexual desire.

The performances in Teeth are largely unremarkable aside from Weixler, who really nails her character early on and plays her with both a childlike naivety and knowledge beyond her years. Lichtenstein's direction is interesting and fairly accomplished, and he generally resists the temptation to exploit his young lead for the sake of bringing in the American Pie crowd. There are a number of gratuitous sexual scenes, like the male nudity in the locker room or Dawn's brother shagging while his adoptive mother lies unconscious on the floor. But these are compensated overall by a sensitivity towards Weixler; aside from one topless scene, she is suitably clothed for most of the film, and her fantasy sequence is cut short at an appropriate stage, both for the film's subject and its internal credibility.

Overall Teeth is an interesting and creepy calling card for its young director and star. It isn't a completely seamless project, and in the final third it does become hazy about its true symbolic intentions. But if nothing else it should be praised for its sense of humour and its desire to tackle interesting and difficult subject matter. At a time when mainstream horror is looking back to the old slasher conventions, with its scantily clad and dim-witted female characters, Teeth offers a refreshing antidote in the shape of a female lead with conviction who uses her beauty for more powerful if disagreeable ends. It's not a masterpiece, and isn't as well-made as Hard Candy, but it's an enjoyable chiller which hints at future promise.

With the exception of John Landis, Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, there are few directors who can go more than ten years between films and still deliver the magic. But now Philip Ridley can be added to that illustrious list with Heartless, which comes fifteen years after his mesmerising fairy tale, The Passion of Darkly Noon.

It doesn't take long to realise that Heartless is something very special. Its visuals are superb, capturing the East End of London as something both gritty and fantastical - think Michael Powell meets Kidulthood by way of Guillermo Del Toro. The familiar shots of council estates, graffiti and street lamps are married to eerie backstreets, dark alleyways and a blood-red sunrise, as if the natural and the supernatural were intertwined in a dance of death. But it's not just the streets that ripple with the unreal: Papa B's flat in a disused tower block resembles the Pale Man's dining room in Pan's Labyrinth.

Heartless is a film in which fantasy and reality violently collide, in which demons and the forces of evil are not just coexisting with real life, but infiltrating and manipulating it. The film owes a great debt to the story of Faustus, with Joseph Mawle's sepulchral Papa B standing in for the Devil and a dead-pan, no-nonsense Eddy Marsden channelling Mephistopheles as Weapons Man.

But although it shares the central premise and morals of Faustus - you can do anything you like, but be careful what you wish for - the film departs from the legend in the precise relationship between the Devil and his eventual prey. Jamie, played brilliantly by Jim Sturgess, does not inherit or possess any of the palpable magic that Faustus does when he signs over his soul. In fact, he gets much more of a rum deal, becoming as much a victim as everyone around him. Rather than being able to channel demonic power to live his life the way he wants, his life is at the mercy of chaos, and through his life the Devil's aim of greater horror and panic becomes reality.

Heartless is suffused with Ridley's trademark blend of religious allegory and fairy tales, a combination that is every bit as seamless as the visual marriage of magic and grittiness. As a genre piece, the film is an interesting pairing of the streetwise dialogue of Kidulthood (a fair comparison considering the presence of Noel Clarke) with the more poetic sensibilities of Guillermo Del Toro or Clive Barker. It begins unevenly as all these unlikely elements struggle to weave together, but it doesn't take long for the effect to become hypnotic.

Because of its links to horror artists and directors, Heartless references a number of individual horror films; Ridley takes the various touches which crop up and re-forges them into something new. The character of She, a heavily tattooed gangster with a claw for one hand, hints back to the killer in Candyman: as in both Clive Barker's story and the film by Bernard Rose, the character is either the physical vessel of some supernatural evil or one of the keys to determine where the characters' sanity lies. There are also strong references to A Nightmare on Elm Street, particularly the Freddie Krueger slashes across AJ's chest and the scenes of Jamie being hurled violently against the ceiling by an unseen evil.

But by far the closest companion to Heartless is Ridley's previous film, The Passion of Darkly Noon. Both revolve around central characters with a deeply warped view of the world: Darkly Noon is a young man indoctrinated into a fundamentalist Christian cult, and Jamie is implied to have a history of mental illness. Christian imagery is prominent in both films: Jamie's house is full of icons belonging to his late mother, and in Papa B's flat the lampshades on the walls cast shadows resembling the shape of a cross.

Both Heartless and The Passion of Darkly Noon begin on relatively realistic ground and then pull us headlong into a terrifying world which is equal parts fairy tale, horror and fantasy. In the case of Darkly Noon (featuring a career-best performance by Brendan Fraser), what starts off as a story about indoctrination and a blinkered worldview that stunts development turns into a Grimm's fairy tale about sex, witchcraft and a climactic clash of ideals which is worthy of The Wicker Man. We begin believing that one side is deluded, then the other side, until eventually we don't know who to trust and have to just lose ourselves in it.

While Heartless never quite reaches the levels of transcendent, euphoric terror which Ridley achieved there, Jamie doesn't exactly make it easy for us. There are any number of terrifying, earth-shattering moments which will make even the seasoned horror fun curl into the foetal position and pray for it to end.

The most terrifying of these comes where Jamie has to stab a male prostitute and cut out his heart while he is still alive. Having chosen his victim and brought him back to his flat, Jamie reluctantly wraps him in cling-film in what his victim perceives to be an elaborate homosexual ritual. When Jim Sturgess pulls out the knife and we hear the hooker's muffled screams, we are thrust right into the horror that character is experiencing; we tense up and start to panic, desperate to escape and yet knowing we can't look away.

Scenes like this are cleverly counterpointed by imagery which occurs earlier in the film. The precise demands placed upon Jamie regarding the nature of the murder are a symbol of his own status: he must cut out the heart of another, for he no longer has a heart himself. While he is more than capable of physical or erotic love, his desire for friendship and platonic love is ebbing away. The cling-filming is counterpointed by the beautiful moment of Jamie emerging from the cocoon of his own burnt flesh, with his heart-shaped birthmark nowhere to be seen.

One of the key images in Heartless is that of fire and immolation. Ridley shoots flame like another character, with its own personality and powers. Just as there is a double meaning to hearts in the film, so fire is the means of both our hero's transformation and destruction. When Papa B hands him the Molotov cocktail and Jamie sets himself alight, the fire is cleansing him of his old self, like a furnace removing impurities from metal. But in the final scene, fire becomes the means to briefly reunite with his dead father - only in destruction does Jamie realise what he truly wanted and whom he truly loved.

The one real flaw with Heartless is its big final twist, in which we are shown what was real and what was not. On the one hand, it works brilliantly, with all the different parties corresponding to figures in the real world, and it does deliver a sucker punch as we realise what Jamie has actually done. But there's still something unsatisfying about it in the same way that Shutter Island was unsatisfying. Because of the way the film is played, it has to come down on one side or the other, when as with Scorsese's work the more radical and haunting choice would have been to leave us hanging.

Despite this quibble, Heartless is a truly great film and a welcome return to the big screen for Philip Ridley. While it never quite lives up to The Passion of Darkly Noon, it is a really stunning piece of work with haunting visuals and brilliant performances. Jim Sturgess excels in the central role, amply supported by gripping turns from Noel Clarke and Joseph Mawle, whose scene together on the rooftop is really harrowing. One only hopes we don't have to wait another 15 years for Ridley to return to our screens.

Comic book adaptations come in a cycle of 'light' and 'dark' phases. Every period of films which takes its characters and settings seriously is eventually followed by a camper, sillier phase, and vice versa. Batman went from a camp TV series to the dark and edgy Tim Burton films, then back to high camp with Joel Schumacher, and is now firmly rooted in darkness under the guidance of Christopher Nolan.

Kick-Ass, however, breaks this cycle, marrying the dark, moody and intense side of comics with a knowing earthiness and its tongue firmly in its cheek. These conflicting elements are held together by memorable performances and Matthew Vaughn's striking visuals, creating a film which truly and madly lives up to its name.

In the space of ten years, Matthew Vaughn has gone from a nameless, also-ran producer to one of the most exciting directors working today. Having cut his teeth producing Guy Ritchie's first films, he made his directorial debut with Layer Cake, a flashy but ultimately empty-headed gangster film. Having dropped out of directing the third X-Men film, he really found his feet with Stardust, a genuinely great family fantasy which didn't take itself too seriously. And now we have Kick-Ass¸ a feisty oddball of a film which is without question his best work to date.

Where some adaptations have simply lifted out the characters and put them awkwardly into the real world, Kick-Ass lives and breathes the comic-book universe. The film is dripping with pastiches or parodies of superheroes, and no character is left either unscathed or un-subverted. On the one hand, we have overt discussions about different characters- for instance, Dave's monologue about the difference between Spiderman and Peter Parker ("Spiderman gets the girl" - or not). On the other hand, we have the extended sequence of Nic Cage donning the Big Daddy outfit. The scene of him painting black make-up over his eyes is a crafty nod towards Tim Burton's Batman, since Michael Keaton underwent the same procedure when putting on the batsuit.

But although it's a film with such an encyclopaedic knowledge of comic books, you don't have to be Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino to enjoy Kick-Ass. What makes the film so refreshing is its total refusal to take itself too seriously. It offers enough darkness and substance to satisfy the Nolan-ites and Burton-ians, but it never risks becoming alienating or self-absorbed in a manner that encumbered Sin City. The action sequences are shot with great alacrity and are inventively choreographed, being every bit as exciting as the battle scenes in a Zhang Zimou film.

If there is a phrase to sum up Kick-Ass, that phrase would be: 'knowing fun'. The familiar elements of both the plot and the characters are clear to see up on the screen; we've lost count of the number of films about gangsters being taken on by masked vigilantes. The film is clearly aware of the power and prestige of the best comic-book works, but it also knows how hard it is to get those films right.

There is a real sense of relish in the way that the film tackles the clichés of the superhero film and completely subverts and twists them for its own amusement. If the film had been made by Frank Miller or Zack Snyder, the central premise of ordinary people trying to become superheroes would have been treated so portentously it would have been dull. Vaughn cuts through all their pseudo-intellectual claptrap, providing us with simple, laugh-out-loud answers to the central character's questions. Put simply, you wouldn't dress up in a suit and go out and fight crime, not because it's morally ambiguous, but because you'd look ridiculous and get your ass kicked.

The film situates the superhero story in a completely contemporary parallel universe, and brings the different components of these stories bang up to date. Why would you waste your time running around answering distress calls from people in the street, when it's much easier for said people to send you emails? Why would you drive a massively conspicuous Batmobile, when a souped-up Mustang will do just as well? Touches like this are the nub of what Kick-Ass is: an affectionately savage satire of all things comic-book, with a dark but playful sense of humour.

There is a natural comparison between Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, since both films were developed at the same time as the comics which spawned them. Both films are visually outstanding, and both take a familiar romantic storyline and inject new life into it through a number of bold creative decisions. But in terms of their purpose, they couldn't be more different. Where Scott Pilgrim sought to charm you and make you chuckle at what unfolds, Kick-Ass asks a lot more of its audience, and the laughter comes tinged with a number of tough scenes.

There are a number of scenes in Kick-Ass which are difficult to sit through, even for people who are well-versed in comic-book violence. For the most part the violent scenes are decidedly tongue-in-cheek, and the film doesn't linger unduly on any of the violent acts dealt towards the characters. That said, the scenes of Kick-Ass and Big-Daddy being tied to a chair and beaten to within an inch of their lives is very full-on. These scenes take the Joker's videotape in The Dark Knight and take it to the next level through a few gallons of blood and interesting camerawork.

The film has caused controversy because to its violence and foul language, including a now-infamous section of Chloe Moretz' character saying the 'c' word. As before, most of the violence is clearly comic-book: characters can get hurt and do die, but the film does not ask its audience to enjoy their pain, nor does it rely upon this level of engagement to make the lighter parts work. The violence towards Hit-Girl is carefully choreographed with all the power in the suggestion rather than the action; like Psycho and Alien before it, Kick-Ass works by making us think something has happened and then letting the emotional response play out.

As for the language, that is largely indicative of the film's bad taste sensibility; Peter Bradshaw memorably described it as "an explosion in a bad-taste factory". The film makes no bones about its less politically correct scenes, mainly involving Nic Cage and his obsession with weaponry. Because the film was financed independently, it can get away with scenes that would never survive the test screenings of a modern blockbuster. The opening scene, which parodies the Spiderman series, sets the tone for the rest of the film, and there is no attempt made to sanitise Kick-Ass' circumstances for the sake of broader appeal. Even if the end result is not entirely to our liking, the film at least deserves some praise for having the balls to attempt such scenes in the first place.

Moreover, the full-on and bloodier scenes in Kick-Ass are counterbalanced by the development of the central character. Like Scott Pilgrim the film is on one level a coming-of-age story; where the 1980s had John Hughes, our generation has comics. The central romance between Dave and Katie feels genuine, as do Dave's circle of friends who derive endless pleasure from Katie's misunderstands about his sexuality. The near-pantomime performances of Nic Cage and Mark Strong are balanced out by solid turns from Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is also enjoyable, so much so that we almost forgive him for Superbad.

Kick-Ass is one of the best films of 2010 and is destined, like Scott Pilgrim, for cult status. Its uncompromising approach to both content and characters is refreshing in an age where so many similarly-styled films are unfairly watered-down. Its visuals are striking, its action is superb, its dialogue is witty and it's immensely good fun. Only time will tell as to its overall impact on trends in comic book adaptations, but it has laid down the gauntlet for The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. Until then, it should be embraced as a dark-humoured celebration of comics which is a jagged-edged joy to behold.

When I reviewed Gregory?s Girl (1981), I argued that coming-of-age movies are both thin on substance and have a limited lifespan. Films as varied as American Graffiti and Dirty Dancing revolve around the same old stories of young love and heartbreak; the ones that last are not just those that evoke their period, but which contain some form of deeper truth about the process of growing up.

Being a young man still very much within the coming-of-age bracket, it is hard to me to say how good Scott Pilgrim vs. the World will look in ten years? time, when the gaming world has moved on and young people no longer talk like extras from Juno. It may well be that, like Edgar Wright?s previous films, it will get better with age, at least to those who saw it the first time round. All that can be said right now is that this is one of the best coming-of-age comedies in a long, long time.

For starters, Wright has managed to make a film about video games which doesn?t feel like a video game adaptation. The plot on paper does seem like a video game; defeat a series of bosses to win points and end up with the girl. But unlike, for instance, Tomb Raider, the film doesn?t feel like you are watching someone else playing a game and expecting you to be interested. The fight sequences feel like natural continuations of the story, and the character development in-between is a damn sight more complex and insightful than the swathes of exposition in something like Silent Hill.

The film has an extraordinary visual style which is somewhere between Tron and Sin City. Like Tron, you feel at moments like you are inside a video game rather than just a spectator. And as in Sin City, the film retains a very literal comic book structure, albeit without the dull pomposity of Robert Rodriguez? film. The video game elements in both the design and the content of the battles are used to compliment and enhance the conflict; the powers gained and used by Scott and his foes do not become distracting goals unto themselves.

Like the comic it is based upon, Scott Pilgrim jumps from one form of reality to another without warning. There are many flights of fantasy which are either poignant or hilarious, and the film explores issues of love and death with a fascinating alacrity. It makes no bones about its comic book violence, shooting the battles in a playful and entertaining manner with minimal focus on any lingering amount of pain. We still believe the characters are in danger, but as in Christopher Nolan?s Batman movies there is no real need to demonstrate their danger beyond stylised forms of suggestion.

Several moments in the film really stick in one?s mind. Towards the end, Pilgrim is ?killed? by Gideon, the last of the evil exes played brilliantly by Jason Schwartzman. He finds himself in some kind of desert, identical to the dream in which he first saw Ramona. He then uses the ?life? he had gained before to replay all the previous events and finally defeat Gideon. Having the exes shatter into piles of coins when defeated is ingenious, as is the spectacle of sound waves forming into two dragons and taking on a giant aural gorilla during the battle of the bands.

Despite its large quantities of geeky references to video games and the like, the film gets away with it for the simple reason that it doesn?t take itself too seriously. So many other films with video game elements fail as much from being po-faced as they do from being plot-less. For all its visual style, Silent Hill is not scary, and for all its seeming intensity, Max Payne is not exciting. Scott Pilgrim, on the other hand, has an incredible and knowing lightness of touch. It drifts like its central character from one scene to another, paying enough attention to follow what?s going on while still finding time to escape into fantasy and have fun.

The film is laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, with jokes coming so thick and fast that you struggle to keep up or breathe. The humour comes in all shapes and sizes, from physical slapstick to witty one-liners. We have Wallace, Scott?s gay roommate, who hits on everyone?s boyfriends and can seemingly text Scott?s overprotective sister even whilst slipping into unconsciousness. We have Todd, the third evil ex, whose status as an arrogant vegan has given him psychic powers. We have the Japanese twins, who look like a bizarre marriage between Kraftwerk and Siegfried & Roy. And we have all of Scott?s embarrassing verbal slip-ups, such as confusing ?love? for ?lesbians? and asking Ramona if she?s into drugs.

Jokes like this drift very close to the more putrid adolescent comedies, like Animal House, Porkies or Superbad. But despite all the moments where we cringe at the characters? actions, Scott Pilgrim is not out to make us wriggle uncomfortably in our seats. The more intimate scenes, including those of Ramona in her underwear, are shot with an underlying sense of respect. The film treats its female characters on a level playing field, not just by demonstrating they can fight as well as the men, but by refusing to fall into the trap of laughing at their misfortune during the break-up scenes.

In the midst of all the belly laughs and eye-popping visuals, Scott Pilgrim is a very tender treatment of young love, demonstrating not just how to get the girl but how to deal with the baggage that goes with all relationships. Both Scott and Ramona have issues with commitment, with the latter admitting that she went through a phase of being a total bitch. And like in Gregory?s Girl, there is the faint suggestion that the girl Scott falls for may not be the one he is destined to be with. In the original draft of the screenplay, which preceded the final comics, he ends up with Knives instead.

In defeating the evil exes, Pilgrim is not just standing up to other people?s demons but also confronting his own insecurities, and in going so gaining self-respect. The film genuinely conveys the sense of heartbreak on both sides which comes at the end of a relationship, and it doesn?t pretend that our heroes are perfectly compatible and therefore destined to be together. Ramona?s changing hair colour and tendency to withdraw both represents the fragile nature of love and encapsulates the modern age of complicated relationships and how hard communication can be despite (or perhaps because of) new technology.

The performances in Scott Pilgrim are all of a high calibre. Michael Cera, who can often be annoying, puts in his best performance since Juno, taking his familiar dweeby character and refining it to make Scott genuinely empathetic rather than simply pitiful. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is terrific as Ramona, possessing a sense of mystery while being completely natural and down-to-earth. Kieran Cullin is hilarious as Wallace, and Brandon Routh is very good as Todd, turning in a performance which is a million times more charismatic than his work in Superman Returns.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is one of the best films of the year and is destined to be a cult classic. It isn?t quite a masterpiece, being slightly too long and feeling somewhat rough around the edges. It takes time to adjust to its peculiar execution, and I woul be hard-pushed to say it was Wright?s best film. But as a document of teenage love and insecurity, it is up there with Juno, and is therefore essential viewing for anyone in their early-20s.

It's fast becoming a cliché of my reviews to say that a sign of a promising filmmaker is their ability to retune generic conventions to create something both unique and conscious of its place. Like Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos some 18 years before it, Kill List is a triumph on these terms, moving between distinct genres in a smooth and disturbing manner. And while it never entirely live up to the hype, Ben Wheatley's second film is nonetheless a nuanced, brutal and remarkable thriller.

Kill List's relationship with genre is such that it can move between the territories of three completely different films in a way which is totally seamless. It begins very much in the verité, kitchen-sink style: the dinner party scenes are shot with intimate hand-held cameras, and contain the same level of repressed, explosive tension which is present in the work of Mike Leigh. In its middle act it moves firmly into hitman thriller territory, showing our two male characters going about their business and struggling to pass the time in between jobs. Finally it moves into full-blooded supernatural horror, with an ending which, while somewhat incoherent, is strange and terrifying.

The film's relationship with horror is anchored in two particular films. The first is Angel Heart, Alan Parker's stylish and graphic re-telling of Faust which retools the conventions of film noir. There is the same feeling of the world, or perhaps the devil, slowly closing in on our troubled central protagonist. Like Harry Angel, Jay unknowingly refuses every offer of help and disregards any chance of salvation. While Harry turns down an egg, saying that he has a thing about chickens, Jay threatens the leader of the Christian group at the hotel, saying he will make him swallow a plate if he doesn't stop playing his guitar.

The other horror reference point for Kill List is The Wicker Man (although, as I mentioned in my review, its status as a horror film could be disputed). The main comparison is in the role of a pagan or supernatural cult, drawing our protagonist to a certain place and time where he will, to coin a phrase, cast off his former nature. There is a subversion of The Wicker Man's climax in the ending of Kill List: rather than being sacrificed by the cult, he is subversively accepted, with the murder of his final victims being an initiation. But the film utilises pagan-esque imagery through, particularly in the recurring image of the three-pronged gallows.

In terms of its contribution to the horror and thriller genres, the film attempts to do what Dead Man's Shoes did for the revenge thriller. Shane Meadows' gripping film, perhaps the best of its kind since Get Carter, pushes the revenge conventions as far as it can, and then pulls the rug out from under us with an ending which shows the deep humanity which has been destroyed by what has unfolded. Kill List doesn't quite achieve that level of power, but it still manages to find the human suffering in amongst the brutal violence and generic conventions, and for that it deserves to be praised.

In its opening sections, Kill List examines the mental and psychological state of soldiers returning home after military action. Jay loves his family but is unable to readapt to the demands of modern life. When his son asks for a bedtime story, he recalls a mission in the Middle East, changing the place to 'Baghdadistan' in a vague attempt to claim it wasn't real. Even something as simple as doing the shopping is beyond him; at the beginning of the film his partner berates him for coming back with nothing but tins of tuna and wine. These scenes tread close to the closing section of The Hurt Locker (amongst others), but they don't feel half as choreographed or forced.

The film, and its opening section in particular, hangs on the brilliant central performance of Neil Maskell. Having worked solidly in small supporting roles - including an appearance in Basic Instinct 2 - this could be the performance which brings him the attention he deserves. Jay is a complex ball of violent energy, being equally well-meaning and sociopathic, and displaying the same impulsive passion for violence as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. You spend the film trying to figure him out, wondering exactly what happened in Kiev, while all the time being terrified that if he looks at you the wrong way, you could be next.

When it becomes a thriller, Kill List uses the various killings of Jay and Gal to hold up a mirror on society's attitude to violence. There is an implication that the targets are involved in creating or distributing extreme forms of pornography; although we never see the evidence, we come to believe that children are involved. The film is a snapshot of public outrage at sex scandals and paedophilia, with each of the people on the list being associated with such acts: one is a priest, one a librarian, and one an MP. Jay is the expression of the public's anger, the embodiment of all those vitriolic texts and letters to tabloid newspapers. By having him go so far to achieve his goal, the film demonstrates that, if provoked in a particular way, we are capable of acting without any concept of mercy, morality or restraint.

When Ben Wheatley was interviewed about Kill List, he compared it to the Arthurian legends, particularly the stories of various knights proving their worth to join the Round Table. This would explain the connection with witchcraft and ties in further with The Wicker Man, with Jay's actions being one elaborate ruse to bring him into a demonic cult. The brutal nature of Jay's murders, coupled with the shocking death of his final victim(s), subvert whatever moral implications his actions had. In going so far in the name of what he thought was right, he has sunk further into the darkness; he has proved his worth, and been left a broken shell.

There are subtle hints throughout the film that Jay may be the mark in this elaborate and macabre operation. When we first meet Gal, we find him likeable and jovial enough, but during the scenes in the hotel we begin to suspect that he may be more deeply involved. The meetings in the hotel, where Struan Rodger pays Jay and Gal for the killings, are akin to the scenes in Angel Heart where Louis Cyphre engages the services of Harry Angel. Finally, all of Jay's victims to heard to say "thank you" before he kills them - something which has drawn criticism because of its relationship to the violence.

Kill List's biggest asset is its amazing sense of atmosphere. Its brilliant sense design, masterminded by Martin Pavey, creates an almost Lynchian level of unease. The film is deeply unnerving and intensely claustrophobic, and the recurrence of bells in Jim Williams' soundtrack hints at both the death knolls of the victims and the slow death of Jay and Gal as they journey deeper into the abyss. The moments of humour in the film, such as Gal explaining why they use an Astra rather than a BMW, are both brief moments of relief and every bit as awkward as the events around them.

Even for seasoned horror fans, the violence in Kill List is incredibly brutal. It is perhaps the most brutal depiction of violence since Irreversible, which starts with someone getting their head smashed in with a fire extinguisher. The argument for the violence in Kill List is the same as it was 9 years ago: it is brutal and repulsive because there is nothing about these actions that are justifiable. One's tolerance of the violence will depend on the strength of one's stomach, something reinforced by the unflinching nature of Wheatley's camera. The knee-capping sequence is the real test, and many will regard this as being over-the-top.

The more unsatisfying element of Kill List is its ending. In terms of narrative and genre, it adds up; there is nothing nonsensical or absurd about what happens to Jay and Gal. But this is also the point where the camerawork becomes deficient, and the film threatens to tip over into the more histrionic and boring end of found-footage. The tunnel sequence is really, really terrifying, but by the time we get to the fight it has started to drag, and the constant cutting to black does become annoying.

Kill List is a remarkable second feature which is destined for cult status among horror fans. It fulfils the promise of Down Terrace as a film which is mindful of its place in genre but which also has thematic and character ambitions beyond that. It isn't quite the masterpiece that critics have claimed: the ending is a little incoherent, and many people will struggle to sit through the brutal violence. But there can be no denying its worth as a socially pertinent and deeply scary horror film, which at its best gives Angel Heart a run for its money.

Cult films are by their very nature divisive. They often fail commercially because they divided audiences or were impossible to sell to the mainstream. For however many cult films we reviewers embrace, using our personal preference to somehow cement their status, there are plenty of others which meet all the criteria of cult status regardless of our opinions.

In the last few months I've highlighted several films which meet all the cult film criteria but fail to personally make the grade - films like Shock Treatment, Big Trouble in Little China, and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. The latest addition to this list is Super, a film which will leave you completely schizophrenic. You will tie yourself up in knots trying to work out whether or not you like it, whether or not it means anything, and ultimately whether or not it works. The answers I have settled on, at least thus far, are: not really, possibly, and no.

Comparisons have been drawn between Super and Kick-Ass, with the former being perceived as a rip-off of the latter when first released. Both films explore the idea of ordinary people deciding to become superheroes, and struggling to compensate for their lack of powers. Both have distinctive visual styles, which take the comic book format to different kinds of violent and sexually charged extremes. And both, as you might expect, didn't exactly flatten the box office (though Kick-Ass did take money).

It's often the case in filmmaking that two similar projects will be developed at the same time, and with Super and Kick-Ass this is no exception. Mark Millar, creator of the Kick-Ass comics, has publicly defended James Gunn from accusations of plagiarism, going so far as to screen Super at the Kapow! comic convention in London. It is likely that Kick-Ass got better distribution because of the credentials of its production team: the selling power of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, who collaborated on Stardust, outweighs that of a Troma graduate who directed Slither.

You have to applaud Super and Gunn for the sheer alacrity of its vision. It may not sound like the greatest compliment, but this film could only have been made by someone who was slightly deranged. No-one could accuse Gunn of chickening out or softening the edges, either in plot details or the extent of the violence. Where Kick-Ass was a top-end 15, depicting comic-book violence in a dark setting, Super is an 18 through and through, being much more realistic and much more brutal.

For the gorehounds among us, there is enough head-cracking violence in Super to satisfy anyone. While Kick-Ass had many moments of wince-inducing pain, this rivals Kill List as one of the most explicitly violent films in recent memory. Gunn's Troma background is evident in the use of old-fashioned make-up and prosthetics (to good effect), and the extremes to which he takes the action: if someone gets hit in the head with a monkey wrench, it's likely that their head will split in two. Gunn goes way over-the-top, but you have to applaud him for at least having the guts to go that far.

But while Super may tick all the boxes in terms of violent spectacle, it falls short of the standards set by Kick-Ass for one simple reason. Kick-Ass knew from the start what it wanted to be and stuck with it. It still managed to be a fun, blackly comic and damn exciting film, but you felt grounded in Vaughn and Millar's creative vision. Super constantly unseats you, lurching in tone from scene to scene, so you don't know whether you're watching a college humour parody with good production values, an exercise in moral hypocrisy on a par with Cecil B. De Mille, or a dark and subversive comedy about real people dealing with jealousy.

There are individual images in Super which seem completely misjudged, in isolation or in whatever context they find themselves. Early on there is a hentai sequence on TV of a young girl being sexually assaulted by a giant squid... I could make a joke about whatever floats one's boat, but frankly that just doesn't seem right. Later on our main character imagines the prospect of going to jail - and pictures being raped in the showers by a fat elderly man.

Oddest of all is the scene where Frank (Rainn Wilson) throws up in the toilet, and the vomit reforms into the face of his kidnapped wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) whom he has sworn to rescue. Scenes like this have a similar effect to the cut-away jokes in Family Guy: occasionally they are funny, or amusingly bizarre, but they have no narrative coherence and end up throwing what little plot there is completely off-balance.

When I reviewed Bad Lieutenant some months ago, I spoke in detail about the ethics of depicting rape in such a full-on manner. Abel Ferrara gets it right, if such a phrase is remotely appropriate, by characterising rape as something utterly hideous and repulsive. Assuming that Gunn agrees with this - and we have no reason to doubt him - he hasn't mastered giving this impression in his films. Of the two rape scenes in Super (discounting the shower scene), only one has the desired effect of repulsing the viewer. With Boltie's rape of the Crimson Bolt, we're uncertain whether we should be turned on, repulsed or confused, and so we end up with an unsettling mix of all three.

All of which brings us back to the central question with Super: does it really know what it is doing? It is a deeply conflicted film, with even the meaning of its title up for grabs. Sometimes it wants to be taken literally - 'super' as a realistic glorification of the life a super-hero could lead if he or she had a sufficiently warped moral compass. Sometimes it wants to be ironic - 'super' as the life of a vigilante being anything but, taking the glamorised comic version of events and showing how awful life would be if they was replicated. I'd like to think the latter was mostly true, but somehow this feels like I am giving Gunn more credit than he deserves.

The dubious morality of Super is a big problem, which cannot be entirely solved by Kick-Ass' arguments about violence and satire. The early scenes which poke fun at Christian comics are fair game, even if it is a rather soft target. But then Super does a complete volte-face, as Frank's crime-fighting becomes a serious spiritual calling. The satirical intentions are in there somewhere, but the film ends up like the Biblical epics of Cecil B. De Mille, condoning all manner of horrible things on the grounds that God will turn up at the end to deliver the moral. Whether you're offended or enticed by Gunn's views on religion, the ending is a mawkish disappointment.

The cast of Super do their best and manage to convince within the world of the film. Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is that everyone involved believes in the project, even if they are unsure exactly what they believe in. It may seem inconceivable that Rainn Wilson could have married Liv Tyler, but both are plausible characters in their own right, even if the latter has little to do. Kevin Bacon chews the scenery as Jacques, delivering a performance every bit as seedy as his work on Where The Truth Lies. And Ellen Page proves her determination not to be pigeonholed, turning in another scene-stealing performance (if often for the wrong reasons).

There are so many contradictions within Super, which even after much dissection remains a psychotic little bundle of a film. There is so much to admire or appreciate that all its flaws prey on one's mind - and yet so many obvious problems that its positives feel like oases of brilliance in a desert of misjudgement. The only sensible conclusion is that the film just doesn't work, and that the only reason which can be agreed upon is its rampantly uneven tone. The need to defend it remains, but is at least tempered by recognition of its failings.

The revival of the Hammer brand is a cause for triumph and tribulation amongst horror fans. Nostalgia notwithstanding, the rebirth of Hammer in and of itself indicates some kind of bright future for British horror filmmaking. But with this there is the risk that the new output cannot live up to the past, either in quality or in the precise, easy-to-identify trademarks which made the originals so endearing.

Whatever the merits of Let Me In, the Hammer-backed remake of Let The Right One In, it lacked the essential visual and structural qualities which we associate with Hammer: the slightly creaky, strikingly-coloured blend of Hollywood studio convention and European grand guignol, delivered in a distinctively British way via several buckets of blood. But there is no such trepidation with Wake Wood, which is Hammer through and through.

The stable name may be from another era, but Wake Wood feels like a product of the 21st century. This is not the output of a single studio, churning out films like a factory, but a series of smaller, more disparate production companies who can use the brand to get the distribution they deserve. The opening credits of Wake Wood list more than a dozen companies before we reach the title, a sign of how thinly spread the funding is and the price we have to pay nowadays for interesting low-budget films.

In terms of its place in horror, Wake Wood prominently references a number of films and texts which are held in high regard. The central story about a couple grieving for their dead daughter is a clear nod to Don't Look Now, as is the mention of red in the girl's vision and the images of her wandering the woods in the (yellow) raincoat. An d there are huge hints of The Wicker Man in this couple's status as outsiders chancing upon a 'pagan' community. It's as though the film was written by someone who saw both films on a double bill, forgot that they were two separate entities and wrote their own version of what they perceived to be a single story.

Outside of these prominent references, the film also tips its hat to W. W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw and Stephen King's Cujo in the more graphic scenes with the dog. But although it's situated deep in a particular area of horror, Wake Wood does gradually gain its own identity. As the various genre elements begin to play out, they afford the director a chance to experiment while having the security of knowing the outcome.

That said, the first 45 minutes are very slow-burning and deeply generic. This is the section of the film which most reflects the modesty of the production. The visuals are washed-out with very standard camerawork and simple editing, and there isn't a great deal in the dialogue to pull you in. As with a lot of genre filmmaking, there is some pleasure to be had from seeing all the pieces fit together. But by the time we have reached the halfway mark, we begin to feel like something's missing.

For a film situated so strongly in the more emotive, 'lost child' end of horror, Wake Wood has a surprising amount of gore. There are pockets of blood and guts throughout the running time, with some being designed to shock and others being used to contextualise the events - for instance, Patrick's work as a veterinarian which leads him to befriend and work for Arthur. The most memorable example involves one of Arthur's farm assistants being crushed to death by the back end of a bull as it is being moved into a metal pen.

As well as testing the audience's mettle, the gory parts of Wake Wood convey one of the main ideas of the film. The cycle of birth, life and death (and re-birth) is presented as one with immense agony at both ends and a chance for happiness or peace in-between. Both the cow calves and the resurrected version of Alice emerge from highly painful births - the former requires a Caesarian section on the cow, the latter a corpse being mangled and crushed, like Burke and Hare without the jokes.

After the initial agony of childbirth, whether personal or by proxy, the time shared by Alice and her parents is one of sheer joy. In contrast to the macabre and gruesome ceremony which brings Alice into the world, these scenes are shot in almost glaring sunlight with permanent smiles on the parents' faces. It's a moment of immense catharsis for Patrick and Louise, albeit one which slowly returns to grief and then fear as Alice's fate begins to unfold.

At the centre of Wake Wood is the story of a couple struggling to come to terms with grief and being unable to let go of their daughter on a spiritual level. The film uses the language of horror - blood, guts, pagan rituals and strange goings-on in woods - to approach the issue of grief in a manner which feels a great deal more honest, brutal and genuine than any number of more mainstream, 'sensible' films. Compare this film to Rabbit Hole, in which all the grief feels choreographed and sanitised, and it's easy to see which approach is more effective at cutting to the emotional heart.

This asset is confirmed in the performances of Aiden Gillen and Eva Birthistle, which are very naturalistic and feel genuine even in the most absurd moments of the film. Birthistle has something of Julie Christie's torment about her performance, refusing to constantly break down and having some kind of relationship with her child which stretches beyond the boundaries of this world. Gillen, on the other hand, has Donald Sutherland's stubbornness, having a desire to move on and occupy himself (with cows instead of churches) while also wanting to do what is best for his wife.

The supporting performances, however, are more of a mixed bag. Timothy Spall brings much in the way of presence as Arthur, but his Irish accent comes and goes as he drifts back into his natural brogue. The elderly locals who oversee the ceremony are given small speaking parts, but these mostly end up like the women with the second sight in Don't Look Now: there's no awkward clutching of chests, but some of their comments border on the ridiculous. And the scenes of the pagan ritual are both creepy and a little bit snigger-inducing: fans of Hot Fuzz will almost expect the characters to start mumbling about "the greater good".

The final third of the film, in which Alice's return to the grave goes horribly wrong, is where Wake Wood finally gets into its stride and starts to deliver the nail-biting thrills that we had been hankering for. The film takes the ending of Don't Look Now and marries it to the opening of Hallowe'en, so the symbol of the parent's grief is not only a murderous force but a seemingly unstoppable one. This section is spoiled somewhat by Alice dragging her mother down to the grave with her, a la Sleepy Hollow - there is nothing the mother had done which would have made her deserve such a fate. But this is partially mitigated by the final scene involving Patrick reviving his dead wife, who is pregnant with a second child...

Wake Wood is a modest but solidly made film which is destined for minor cult status. Despite being so deeply embedded in generic conventions, it manages to take on its own identity through some decent performances and an overall feeling of unease generated by what unfolds. It isn't perfect, with all the shortcomings of a low budget being in plain sight. But as a self-contained, 90-minute horror film, it bodes well for the return of Hammer, and sets the bar in place for The Woman in Black.