Troll

Director: John Carl Buechler
Writer: Ed Naha
Producer: Albert Band
Cast: Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Jenny Beck, June Lockhart
Year of release: 1985
Country: USA/Italy
Reviewed from: UK rental tape (Entertainment in Video, 1986)

I can’t believe that this incredible movie has been sitting in my to-be-watched pile for years (despite my having interviewed both writer and director back in my SFX days).

SEE! Sonny Bono mutate into a giant maggot! COUNT! The stars from Battlestar Galactica, Lost in Space, Charlie’s Angels and V! HEAR! One of Hollywood’s top short actors recite The Faerie Queen! OGLE! A pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfus running around clad only in a few vine leaves! WATCH! A woman turn into her own daughter! STARE! At a short, fat, ugly, hairy monster reading Fangoria!

And to give it that extra sheen of retrospective surrealism, the young boy who saves the world from the powers of darkness is called... Harry Potter! Extraordinary!

The story starts with the Potter family moving into a San Francisco apartment building. Michael Moriarty (from the superb Q the Winged Serpent, and later in Law and Order and Psi Factor) is book-reviewer dad Harry Sr; sometime Angel Shelley Hack is mum Anne; 14-year-old Noah Hathaway (yes, Boxey from Battlestar) is son Harry Jr; and eleven-year-old Jenny Beck (young Elizabeth in V) is daughter Wendy, who wanders into the building’s basement, where she is zapped by a troll with a magic ring.

The troll is played by little person Phil Fondacaro (who has been in everything - Ghoulies II, Return of the Jedi, Decadent Evil - but whose most memorable role was possibly the tiny Dracula in The Creeps) in a full-body suit with a range of replaceable animatronic heads, each with a basic expression (smile, roar, etc) and a lot of additional movement. This was all created by director (and legendary special effects man) John Carl Buechler (it’s interesting to spot Howard Berger’s name in the credits too, years before he became the B in KNB FX). However, the troll transforms into a clone of Wendy which gives Beck full license to scream, growl, throw stuff around and contrast the mayhem nicely with the sweet, blonde thing she’s supposed to be. (There are many far worse child actors than Beck, who seems to have disappeared after about 1991 - wonder where she is now?)

Also in the building are lounge lizard Peter Dickinson (Sonny Bono: post-singer, pre-mayor), wannabe hunter Barry Taybor (daytime soap star Gary Sandy), actress Jeanette Cooper (Louis-Dreyfus, looking exactly like she did in Seinfeld), bone cancer-suffering literature professor Malcolm Malory (Fondacaro again, out of costume) and spooky old landlady Eunice St Clair (Lost in Space’s Lockhart). The troll, disguised as Wendy, infiltrates their apartments and takes them over: Dickinson becomes a disgusting giant maggot which then cracks open to reveal a dozen or so smaller troll-like beasties (vocalised by voice legend Frank Welker), Cooper becomes a wood-nymph, etc.

Young Harry Potter befriends Miss St Clair, who turns out to be a witch, protecting the world from the global domination plans of the fairies, as led by her former lover Tauroc, transformed into the troll. Unfortunately, the Potters moved into the building on Walpurgis Night, thereby setting Tauroc free. (St Clair has a strange mushroom-with-a-face called Galwyn and a painting of John Carl Buechler on her wall!) Transforming into a younger version of herself (played, in a simple yet brilliant bit of casting, by Lockhart’s daughter Anne), Miss St Clair goes up against Tauroc but is turned into a talking tree-stump. It’s up to Harry Potter to defeat the troll, rescue his sister and return the world to normal.

Troll was an original idea by Buechler, but the script was rewritten by former Fangoria editor Naha who receives sole credit. Harry has a poster for Buechler’s The Dungeonmaster on his wall and the troll/Wendy reads Fango in bed! The movie was made (over five and a half weeks, in Rome) by Empire Pictures, the straight-to-video company run by Albert and Charles Band before Charlie (credited here as executive producer) set up Full Moon. Watch for Band Jr and Sr in a couple of spoof clips from Pod People from the Planet Mars which Harry watches on TV.

This certainly isn’t the terrible picture that some people paint it, and if you’re a fan of prosthetic effects it’s a veritable smorgasbord - the troll costume itself is excellent. It’s good fun for kids, has some nice touches for adults, but mostly, it’s just bizarre, with the story giving the impression of having been pulled in various directions by different hands. It’s also a relic of a bygone era (17 or 18 years ago!) when this sort of movie could get made. If this is in your to-be-watched pile, slap it into your VCR tonight! (But beware the dire Italian rip-off Troll 2 which has no connection with this film.)

MJS rating: B

(This UK rental copy, incidentally, has barnstorming trailers for the utterly bonkers Eliminators, the deeply silly TerrorVision and the gobsmacking Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. Starchaser was of course the only feature-length animation ever released in true 3D - I saw a stereoscopic print at the NFT once and it was great! This trailer quotes a review which calls the film “better than Rainbow Brite and The Black Cauldron combined”!)

Star Crystal

Director: Lance Lindsay
Writer: Lance Lindsay
Producer: Eric Woster
Cast: C Jutson Campbell, Faye Bolt, John W Smith
Country: USA
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Words cannot begin to describe how awful Star Crystal is. Not hilariously bad, not shoddily amateur, just compulsively, mindblowingly terrible at every level and in almost every respect. It beggars belief that a large number of people could have worked on this film without realising what they were making or that the people ultimately responsible could have had any attitude except complete and utter cynicism, a belief (apparently justified) that in the mid-1980s anything more than 80 minutes long with a spaceship in it would sell to video distributors around the world and turn a profit.

In a way, this reminds me of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. No, wait, hear me out on this one. Stravinsky wrote that piece as an attempt at jazz music - except that, living in Russia as he did, he had never heard any jazz. He had met people who had heard jazz, he had read descriptions of it, so he had a go at emulating what he thought jazz was - and he ended up with something that is nothing at all like jazz. Well, Star Crystal is what one might get if people who had never, ever seen a sci-fi movie set out to make a sci-fi movie, based only on what they had heard and read about sci-fi movies. It has some of the recognisable iconography - spaceship, alien, talking computer - but none of it fits together the right way. More to the point, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and despite that it still manages to contradict itself at every opportunity.

Oh, I should just point out the one big difference between The Rite of Spring and Star Crystal. Stravinsky’s work is good, Star Crystal is shit. I wouldn’t want anyone to labour under a misapprehension.

We open with a couple of guys in spacesuits wandering across the surface of Mars in the year 2032 (not 2035 as the sleeve claims). This is shot using a red filter, the spacesuits aren’t too bad, it’s even slightly overcranked to make them move slowly. It’s a promising start. For no apparent reason, they dig at a particular spot and excavate a rock about the size of a beachball, which they take away with them.

As the shuttlecraft SC-37 blasts away from the Red Planet, the two unnamed guys show the rock to the ship’s doctor (for some reason) and assure him that their equipment indicates that it’s full of electronic circuitry. When the three men leave the room, the rock cracks open to reveal a large crystal and a small amount of goop which drips onto the floor and starts to move slightly.

So no circuitry at all then.

Next thing we know, the ship’s computer is announcing that the oxygen supply has run out and we have a panning shot of various dead crew members.

Two months later the drifting ship is somehow picked up and docked with the L-5 space station (I assume it’s just a snappy name and not an indication that the station is orbiting the L5 Lagrange point). There’s a tall ‘Colonel’ - a youngish chap with a moustache, a bouffant hairdo and an eye for the ladies - who has to attend a meeting which, we are told from a computer read-out, is to discuss why the ‘nuetron reactors’ are malfunctioning. I would expect spelling mistakes in the I’ve-got-an-Amstrad-and-I’m-gonna-use-it computer displays if this had been made in Japan or Italy, but this is an American movie. That’s just monstrously sloppy.

Oh, and a secondary reason for the meeting is to consider why the entire crew of the SC-37 died. But that’s just an aside, really.

This meeting, between four men, is held in a dark room, around a small illuminated table. In other words, the production has saved money on a set by simply not having one. Meanwhile a computer operator named Campbell (C Jutson Campbell, usually misspelt ‘Juston’ in listings and just called ‘Jutson Campbell’ on the UK VHS sleeve) is trying to get the shuttlecraft’s computer to work while trading banter with a black guy (John Smith, credited as ‘John W Smith’ on the original poster but nowhere else) whose name - Cal - is mentioned I think once in the entire movie. Suddenly, the station and the ship are both rocked by an (unseen) explosion and there are a few shots of people running around, several of which are rather obviously in an office building rather than a space station. Two young women run onto the bridge of SC-37 and Campbell talks on the intercom to Billy, a previously unmentioned frizzy-haired, acerbic, female engineer in the ship’s engine room who successfully blasts the shuttlecraft away from L-5.

The two fellas and the two ladies in the control room sit and watch on the screen as L5 - eventually - blows up in possibly the worst thing-blowing-up-in-space model shot I have ever witnessed.

So now we have our main cast: Campbell, who assumes command of the ship; classy brunette Dr Adrienne Kimberley (Faye Bolt) whose antipathetic attitude towards Campbell ensures that they will eventually get together; blonde Sherrie Stevens (Taylor Kingsley), constantly referred to as Debbie despite the name-patch on her loosely buttoned jumpsuit, which incidentally identifies her as a nutritionist - so she is assigned to cooking duties; misanthropic Billy (Marcia Linn), who seems to be loosely modelled on Carla in Cheers; and funky, hip Cal, who has his eye on Sherrie. More to the point, we are only ten minutes into the film and we have already killed off two complete sets of characters.

There’s no attempt to explain why SC-37 was fuelled up and ready to leave at the drop of a hat, or why these two women ran on board (and nobody else did) or why L-5 blew up (those pesky ‘nuetron reactors’ I suppose). We also have to accept that since SC-37 was recovered, nobody has actually bothered having a look round to see if there is anything odd on board. You know, like a large crystal or some alien goop which is gradually growing into a sort of monster thing.

A word now about the layout and design of the SC-37, which from outside is a fairly straightforward, square-ish, roughly hammer-shaped vessel. In the fairly large control room, along with lots of control panels, a few computer screens and some chairs, is a device for showing where everyone is on the ship. Given that there are only five rooms and they’re all linked, plus they all have wall-mounted intercom telephone things, you do wonder why this machine is necessary.

The map of the ship on the screen shows four corridors fanning out from the bridge to four smaller rooms, which are labelled (using sticky tape!) as ‘Science lab’, ‘Sleeping quarters’, ‘Supply room’ and ‘Engine room.’ Halfway along each corridor is a junction with a fifth corridor, connecting them. Despite the map showing these corridors as short, straight and with a junction halfway along, the corridors that we see on screen are long, curving and junctionless. But the biggest problem is that they are not proper corridors at all (I slightly misled you, dear reader), they are dimly lit cylindrical tubes about three feet in diameter. So anyone passing along them has to go on hands and knees on a curved floor.

Remember: these are not ventilation ducts, they’re not emergency access tunnels, they are the main corridors linking the only five rooms on the ship. Unfortunately, the design of each room has a door which is rectangular, albeit about four feet high so still requiring even the relatively petite Sherrie/Debbie to stoop. This means that at the end of each tunnel is some sort of weird, pointless vestibule where the tiny round ‘corridor’ ends before the not-so-tiny rectangular entrance to the room.

Opening and closing the sliding door on the four-foot entrance in each room seems to be automatic but it can be locked, from inside only, by pressing some large, coloured buttons and turning a small wheel. This is clearly modeled on the wheels used to lock hatches in seafaring ships, except that it is on the wall, not the door itself. No-one ever turns it more than about ten degrees and when the crew want to be completely safe, keeping out any beastie that might be aboard, they tie the wheel up with a bit of string.

Are you starting to comprehend quite how mindboggling this film is now? Buckle up, because it gets worse.

The five survivors of the L-5 disaster make no attempt to call for help or investigate whether any other ships escaped the explosion or anything like that. They just swiftly calculate that it will take a year (or 18 months, depending on which character is talking) to reach Earth. This is because SC-37 is just a short-range shuttle-craft, not a long-range ship. Unfortunately they only have five months (or possibly two weeks) of food on board. However, there are two supply depots between their present position (presumably somewhere near Mars) and Earth, the nearest being Alpha 7 which can be reached in five days. So away they go. With an alien onboard.

To the film’s credit, for most of the movie we never get a good look at the alien. Instead we get close-ups of gelatinous stuff, close-ups of a large, blinking eye or shots of very long, snake-thin tendrils whizzing across the floor, occasionally ending in a three-fingered claw but usually not.

The first person to encounter the alien is Billy, down in the engine room (the ‘engine’ seems to consist of two laser beams, between two small devices about a metre apart). Billy finds some goop on the floor, goes behind the ‘engine’ to investigate and... well, that’s where it all gets confusing. We get a close-up of Billy’s arm, raising a spanner then whacking it down on something unseen, then there’s a shot of blood splattering up the wall, then the alien’s tendrils winding round Billy’s feet and hands (presumably shot in reverse). Billy is seen lying down but making no attempt to struggle, with tendrils around her head and body, then she is dragged away.

Was she hitting the alien with a spanner? Whose blood was that? I actually replayed the sequence to see if it made any sense but nope.

Sherrie/Debbie discovers Billy’s body, which is now a shriveled corpse and she runs off to Adrienne in the ship’s science lab. Or at least, she runs as far as the engine room door, climbs through it, runs a couple more steps to the tube and then crawls along it until she reaches the science lab.

Campbell and Cal, up on the bridge, have been drinking - and who can blame them? If I was on a spaceship that I had never flown before, trying to reach one small supply depot floating in the vastness of space somewhere between Martian and Earth orbits, with very limited amounts of food and drink on board, I think I would hit the bottle too. This drinking has no bearing on the characters or the plot and is forgotten pretty quickly. Like most things in this embarrassingly pisspoor movie, it’s an idea that somebody had which was never developed or followed up.

At this point I should mention Bernice, the computer. Like all computers in crappy sci-fi movies, this one talks. It also has a read-out screen although this is only ever seen in close-ups and there’s no actual sign of it on the set. The screen is mostly used for transmitting warnings about things like dangerously low oxygen which would seem to be more helpful if transmitted verbally. Oh, and Campbell has programmed the computer to only respond to his voice. There is no reason for him to have done this and there is every reason for him, given their current parlous situation, to reprogram Bernice to respond to his four colleagues (well, three now that Billy’s dead). But he doesn’t.

Adrienne also has a computer terminal in her lab (this one does have a screen, in fact it looks remarkably like an Amstrad PCW) into which she puts a sample of the goop from the engine room, which she removes from Sherrie/Debbie’s clothes. Bernice announces that the goop comes from an “unknown life form - its molecular structure does not require oxygen to live.” Wow, just from this slug trail-like discharge, the computer can say conclusively that the organism that produced the goop respires anaerobically. Nothing else can be determined, just the method of respiration. Intriguing.

Cal and Debbie die next although I can’t recall in what order. The map-of-the-ship doodad is used to show each of the victims being stalked by the alien, which shows up as a different coloured spot because it has a different heat signature, apparently. Odd how nobody noticed that there were originally six lifeforms on board. Debbie tips a beaker of acid on the alien before it gets her, a gloriously unmatched pair of shots showing the tentacles around her feet as she lies on her back, then dragging her away as she lies on her front. As with Billy’s death, the tentacles do not in any way match the goopy alien seen in close-up.

That leaves Campbell and Adrienne alone on the bridge, where they have slowly, one by one, closed the four doors. For the rest of the film they completely fail to generate any sexual tension despite being all alone together. They spend the night in a sleeping compartment leading directly off the bridge, which leaves one wondering what the previously identified ‘sleeping quarters’ were for. When the oxygen supply to the ship is cut off, Bernice does her usual trick of announcing this vital warning silently on a computer screen somewhere.

Having restored the supply, the two survivors find a ‘video laser’ recording of what happened when SC-37 visited Mars. This turns out to be footage of the two spacemen from the start of the film. I mean, it’s actual footage of them on the desolate surface of the Red Planet - so who filmed this? When Adrienne notices that there is 25 hours of this stuff to sit through, they speed up the tape and the resulting high-speed footage is accompanied, incredibly, by comedy ‘silent movie’ piano music!

While trying to get my head around how any film-maker could expect any viewer to watch this nonsensical farrago... another shuttle-craft appears. That’s right. Although they’re stranded out in deep space in a slow-moving short-range shuttle with no human constructions in range except the Alpha-7 supply depot and the smoking remains of the L-5 space station, nevertheless they are briefly accompanied on their journey by the SC-45 (which of course looks exactly like the SC-37, although I suppose that’s fair). Just as the ‘video laser’ recording of the Martian surface was footage that could not possibly exist unless a third person was present, so we now see on the SC-37’s screen footage of both shuttle-craft flying together - which obviously could not exist unless a third craft was present.

We’re not told where SC-45 is going or where it has come from. It’s just there because it’s expedient. Inconveniently, the SC-37’s radio can receive but not transmit so they can’t tell SC-45 their situation. The pilot of the other shuttle, realising that there may be communication problems, asks them to make a 30 degree turn if they’re okay. By now, that sneaky alien - whose crystal, Campbell and Adrienne decide, is both a computer and a power supply - is controlling the ship and executes this manoeuvre, so SC-45 goes off on its merry way.

And then it comes back, just long enough to warn SC-37 that there is “a meteor storm at twelve o’clock”. I tried to work out whether this meant time or direction and then realised that either concept was meaningless in space so it was equally stupid either way. But wait, the alien creates a force field around SC-37 and the meteors just bounce off. Maybe it’s not so bad after all.

‘Two days later’ says a caption but Campbell still only has about twelve hours of stubble so either beards grow slowly in outer space or he’s finding the time to shave regularly. Adrienne’s hair, of course, still looks gorgeous.

What happens next is, even by the plungingly low standards of this film, spectacularly stupid. Hold onto your seats, ladies and gentlemen, because you will not believe this bit.

The alien starts accessing the computer, leading to numerous close-ups of that Amstrad screen. ‘Evolution of the Human Race, Parts 1-20’ is the name of the series of files it investigates, starting (as one does) with ‘Part 5 - 15,000BC to 500AD’. Hmm, I don’t believe there has actually been much evolution in homo sapiens within the last 17,000 years. Really, this is more the history of the human race then, isn’t it? Within this time frame, the file has a menu (as we would now call it) of several directories (as we would now call them), each covering a different part of the globe. Quite brilliantly, one of these is ‘Antarctica’ because of course there was just so much human activity in Antarctica between those dates.

Working through the menus ( as we would now call them), the alien selects ‘Middle East’, then ‘Beliefs and Religions’ then ‘Christianity’. And then the computer reads out two specific verses from the New Testament, about doing unto others and so on. Yes, it’s true, I’m not making this up. The alien reads The Bible! The alien discovers religion!

Maybe, just maybe, if the alien had somehow absorbed the entirety of human knowledge (or at least as much as is routinely stored in the databanks of short-range shuttlecraft) and had noticed the teachings of Jesus in among all the other stuff, there might be some sense in this. But no, the extraterrestrial beastie which somehow has control of this computer zooms straight in to the New Testament.

I wracked my brains at this point (and indeed, after the movie - thankfully - finished), looking for any other element of religion within this motion picture. And I found none. This one solitary moment seems like it would fit neatly into a film with an intended Christian subtext - but it’s an isolated incident which sits so uncomfortably among the rest of this cut-price, sub-Alien rip-off that I’m amazed it doesn’t just stand up and walk away. Was this just an idea in passing which was never developed (like most of the film) or was it the intention of the picture, except that it took this long to appear and then is instantly forgotten? It’s just one of the weirdest, most out-of-context things I have ever come across in the plot of a piece-of-crap, third-rate, amateur hour sci-fi movie.

For some reason, Campbell now goes to the engine room, crawling through the tubes with a home-made flame thrower held dangerously in front of him. Adrienne stays on the bridge and urges caution, apparently able to be heard through some previously unmentioned communications system which doesn’t require the wall-mounted handsets previously used for this purpose. And ultimately, somehow, Campell befriends the alien, which looks like a slug with the head of ET, is about the size of a large dog and has No Tentacles Whatsoever! (It is also completely devoid of teeth, despite what the poster shows.)

A lengthy montage shows the two humans and the alien - which can now talk and is called ‘Gar’ - living together and having fun. Eventually they make it to the supply depot which Gar says he can convert into a spaceship to get him home. And that, apart from an insipid song called ‘Crystal of a Star’, is pretty much it. Just to put the final nail of unbelievability into this film’s coffin, the singer/lyricist, credited as ‘Stefani Christopherson (aka Indira)’ was the original voice of Daphne in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?!

Dear Christ in Heaven, I have seen some shit. I have sat through The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical, Incubus, Belcebu - Take Me, I’m Your Whore from Hell, Hellgate, The Pumpkin Karver and two Camp Blood films. But I’ve never seen anything like Star Crystal.

So come on, own up. Where did this rubbish come from? Writer-director Lance Lindsay has one other credit, a few years later - an action picture called Real Bullets about a group of stuntmen who take on a criminal gang. Marcia Linn and C Jutson Campbell were both in that too, along with - good gravy! - Martin Landau. Apart from that, I can find nothing on the guy whatsoever. Producer Eric Woster, who shares a story credit with Lindsay - as well as directing the second unit, editing the picture and doing some of the make-up effects - was also far from prolific, although he has an excuse. According to the Inaccurate Movie Database (and believe me, I’ve looked everywhere else) he wrote, directed and starred in a 1992 horror film called Sandman, with Dedee Pfeiffer in the cast. He seems to have been a pal of Tommy Chong, working as a production assistant on three early ‘80s Cheech and Chong movies and as DP on Far Out Man. He also allegedly lit another ultra-cheapie scifi embarrassment, Space Chase. According to some non-IMDB sources, Woster died on the set of Sandman, just before completing the film, from a congenital heart condition. He was in his early thirties. Poor bastard.

There are three Associate Producers and two Executive Producers. Apart from one who produced Sandman and another who worked on Far Out Man, none of them seem to have bothered with the film industry before or since.

Of the cast, none of whom were ever going to trouble the Oscars and most of whom never stepped in front of a camera before or after this (at least, not using these names), the only one with credits is somebody called Emily Longstreth. There’s no credited cast list on screen so she’s either the voice of Bernice or a female officer who has one line in the prologue. She was in Hardbodies, Pretty in Pink, The Big Picture and Booby Trap. Our five main actors are all bad but, as so often, the worst ones play the survivors. Billy, Debbie/Sherrie and Cal at least had some degree of characterisation - angry chick, bimbo and skirt-chaser respectively - but Campbell and Adrienne are bland non-characters, a situation exacerbated by the wooden acting of C Jutson Campbell and Faye Bolt. For a leading man, Campbell has no charisma or discernible personality whatsoever - and it’s fortunate that actor and character share the same name so I don’t have to type that twice, it being equally applicable to both of ‘em.

One thing that really stands out when watching Star Crystal is the number of reaction shots. Every time something happens - like a space station exploding or a dead body being discovered - the people in question just stare blankly while the cruel, cruel camera refuses to cut away. I’ve never seen so many reaction shots featuring actors who either don’t know how to react or weren’t told what they were reacting to (or both).

On the technical side - dear Lord, this just gets better and better - cinematographer Robert Carameco worked on Spawn of the Slithis, Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, Blackenstein, Octaman, Journey to the Centre of Time, The Cremators, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, Boss Nigga and Orgy of the Dead! He passed away in 1997 aged 64 but boy, what a career. (Oh, and his surname was Camarico so this film manages to spell his name wrong...)

A special mention now for composer Doug Katsaros who gets himself an ‘All sound effects programmed and synthesized by’ credit. He’s a big name on Broadway (or possibly just off it) having orchestrated The Rocky Horror Show, arranged Footloose and written shows based on Moby Dick and Great Expectations. He also wrote the music for the animated version of The Tick. Unfortunately Star Crystal seems to have been one of his early credits and it must be said that his tuneless, electronic doodlings never bloody stop. Action scenes, tense moments, effects shots, over dialogue - it sounds like the man is tuning up his synthesiser for 90 minutes. (Trivia fans should note that Katsaros and the Daphne-voice woman were both members of an improv comedy troupe in the late 1980s called Noo Yawk Tawk.)

Production designer Steve Sardanis (who is also dead - what, is there a ‘Curse of Star Crystal’?) was assistant art director on The Towering Inferno and art director on Snowbeast. Costume designer MaryAnn Bozek seems to have gone into hiding after this film but recently resurfaced on Reno 911! and Balls of Fury. Script supervisor Nancy Hansen worked on Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Toolbox Murders, Airplane!, Back to the Future, Turner and Hooch and Lethal Weapon 2. Sound mixer Clyde Sorensen did his schtick on episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.

Okay, what of the ‘special visual effects’? Step forward one Lewis Abernathy who also - get this - directed House IV, wrote DeepStar Six (and one of the many unproduced versions of Freddy vs Jason) and acted in Titanic. Apparently, Abernathy is a Titanic nut who met Cameron on a diving expedition and suggested to him that he should make a film about the ship. Abernathy inspired the character of Lewis Bodine, the guy in the prologue who shows the computer simulation of how the ship sank, and when Cameron couldn’t find anyone to play the part - he gave it to Abernathy. But wait, there’s more. Abernathy is also a jobbing inventor and he inspired the characters of Walter (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski and Agent Abernathy in Jason Goes to Hell. Next time you watch Titanic, just pause the DVD at that point near the start and think: ‘Twelve years earlier, that man was in charge of special effects on Star Crystal.”

There are a lot of people credited with effects on this film, considering those effects are pretty much limited to shots of the SC-37/45 flying through space and a quick look at the L-5 blowing up. I suppose there’s the crystal itself and the goop, but ‘Gar’ has his own crew with no fewer than 21 people involved in building and operating him/it. To be fair, they did have to do not only the giant slug-thing but also the tendrils that the slug-thing doesn’t have and the three-finger tendril claws that aren’t on the end of the tendrils. But 21 people? And that’s not including ‘The Gling’ who is credited with providing the creature‘s voice.

Harry Hathorne and T Lindsay built the model spacecraft; Hathorne later co-wrote a fantastic and extensive article on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Cinefantastique magazine. Model construction supervisor John Coats coincidentally worked on William Mesa’s 1995 Brigitte Nielsen-starrer Terminal Force which was released in Japan as... Star Crystal. He followed this picture with visual effects work on UHF, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Talos the Mummy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and a whole load of other movies of distinctly variable quality. Construction of the L-5 space station is specifically credited to young Mr Abernathy and Justin Segal. Could he be the LA-based illustrator/designer and author of The American Sign Language Puzzle Book? On this movie, anything is possible.

There are five visual effects assistants including Greg Huebner (now a location manager) and the distinctively named Tazzilo Baur who, as Tassilo Baur (and we have already seen how untrustworthy the spellings in these credits are) also worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street, House, Witchboard, DeepStar Six and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Annette Buehre (now Annette Buehre-Nickerson) was in charge of ‘OPTICAM motion control photography’. Opticam was a company founded by Buehre and her husband in 1976 which provided both animation camera and optical printer services. Over the years she worked on innumerable commercials as well as TV projects such as Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos.

I can’t claim to know precisely what ‘animation touch-up’ involves but it was done by Dan Kuenster who went on to co-direct Rock-a-Doodle and All Dogs Go to Heaven and also worked on An American Tail and The Land Before Time. I’m guessing he was related to Luke Kuenster (Delta Force II) who handled second unit cinematography. Matte paintings (not that I noticed any, but there must have been at least one) were provided by Dave Goetz, later art director for Disney on The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis: The Lost Continent. Vince Prentice (Piranha, The Capture of Bigfoot, Total Recall, Legend) gets the glorious credit ‘special effects make-up (dead bodies)’. His other claim to fame is making up Keanu Reeves for his uncredited role as Ortiz the Dogboy in Freaked.

Lou Lazzara - ‘make-up/hair’ - has worked on various instalments of the Friday, Elm Street and Halloween franchises as well as such titles as Mutant, Teen Wolf Too, Face/Off and Terminator 3, plus episodes of Angel and seaQuest and two Weird Al videos! Also credited with make-up and hair are Blake Shephard (probably the Blake Shepard who later worked on Buffy) and Kathy Tessalone, who worked in make-up for 15 years before moving into real estate and teaching; she was last heard of trying to get an animated series called The Welbys off the ground.

Overseeing all this was ‘visual effects consultant’ Chuck Comisky - yes, the same guy who wrote and directed The Evil Beneath Loch Ness. His other effects credits include Battle Beyond the Stars, Strange Invaders, The Addams Family, The Crow, Dungeons and Dragons and Blade.

Apologies if this is turning into a list of credits (hey, how do you think I feel having to italicise all these titles?) but there were just so many extraordinary people working on this, ahem, unique movie. Do we think that 1st AD Eric Weston could be the guy who, five years earlier, wrote, directed and produced Evilspeak? I wouldn’t be surprised.

When critiquing a film this bad overall it’s very easy to get carried away and claim that everything about it is The Worst Ever. But let’s give it its due. The spacecraft models aren’t bad and the motion control used to photograph them works well. The acting is poor, that’s no doubt, but I’ve seen far, far worse. The alien is actually an imaginative design (or rather, two or three imaginative designs which don’t match). What plunges this film to the bottom of the cinematic barrel where even scraping for it seems thankless is the sheer haphazard nonsense that passes for a plot, the absolutely paper-thin characterisation (although it’s still not as bad as Incubus) and the jaw-droppingly pisspoor production design.

Above all, I think it’s those tunnels that will haunt me to my grave. I know that cast and crew often refrain from criticising shoddy productions like this because, hey, it’s work. But can’t you just imagine them, in the evenings, when Lance Lindsay and Eric Woster weren’t around, saying to each other: “What’s with those tunnels, man? I mean, who would design a spaceship where you had to go from one room to another on your hands and knees? Was the ship design to be crewed by three-year-olds? Or just designed by three-year-olds? Sh! Sh! Here they come. Hi Lance, hi Eric!”

There is so much insanity and inanity in Star Crystal that I can’t do justice to it all, even in a review of more than 5,000 words. A quick google will reveal other reviews around the net, some of them based on a 2003 R1 DVD release by Anchor Bay and many of them dwelling on different details to me. It’s worth reading them all as they vie with each other to find new superlatives for how awful the movie is. Given time, I would not be surprised to find this film established as an icon of awfulness, if not to Plan 9 levels of infamy, at least up there with Troll 2. (Or, for an example of how tolerant some people can be of even the worst shite, check out some of the user comments on the IMDB.)

MJS rating: D

Lorca and the Outlaws

Director: Roger Christian
Writer: Roger Christian, Matthew Jacobs
Producer: Michael Guest
Cast: John Tarrant, Donogh Rees, Deep Roy
Country: UK/Australia
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK VHS

Dear Lord, this is poor. This is really, really bad. What’s worse, it’s British. Oh, the national shame. A pisspoor, sub-sub-Star Wars piece of semi-juvenile rubbish which is nothing more than a scrappily assembled mishmash of clichés and lazy film-making.

I didn’t enjoy it. No, sir.

Right from the start, we know we’re in trouble because the very first shot is of a communications satellite which has the words ‘Communications Satellite’ painted in big red letters on the side. A caption tells us this is ‘El Jadida - The 21st Century’ but what is El Jadida? One would naturally assume, since we are looking at a planet, that it is the name of said planet.

However, we then get a very brief aerial shot of a settlement at night and another caption: ‘A mining station on the planet Ordessa.’ So if the planet is called Ordessa, what is El Jadida? Is it the town? Why have we got a caption telling us the town’s name on a shot of the planet and a caption of the planet’s name on a shot of the town?

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

Despite the word being plainly spelled ‘Ordessa’ with an R, an incoming spaceship which identifies itself in a voice-over radio communication as ‘Police Transport Zebra’ speaks to a ground controller called ‘Odessa 5.’ So is it Odessa or Ordessa? Who knows? Who cares? What is more interesting is that the spaceship looks very much like the one from Nightflyers. I don’t know if it’s the same model or a revamped model or just my memory playing tricks, but it doesn’t half look similar.

Captain Jowitt (Ralph Cotterill, one of the few British actors in the cast, though he has evidently been based in Australia for some time, where he has appeared in the Australian Ultraman series and Howling III: The Marsupials) has come to quash a rebellion on behalf of the ‘Droid Government’ using squads of robot soldiers or ‘droids’, one of whom asks another what Jowitt is like and is told: “He’s more like one of us than human.”

El Jadida, if that is the town’s name, is represented by various graffiti-covered alleys down which wander a lot of extras in awful 1980s fashions. Someone with a loudhailer starts chanting pro-human, anti-droid slogans and this is taken up by the crowd, led by a young blonde lady who is named, we shall discover, Abbie (Donogh Rees, who played three different roles in various episodes of Xena and Hercules). Lorca himself is a young chap who isn’t actually blonde, he just has blonde highlights in his hair - so it’s good to know that this remote mining colony still has functioning hair salons. He is woodenly played by the astoundingly uncharismatic John Tarrant from Aussie soap A Country Practice.

Beyond the basic principle of ‘human rebels’ there is very little attempt to explain what is actually going on, either politically or personally. There is no indication of whether this ‘rebellion’ is some sort of organised movement or just a simmering discontent. If there is actually a rebel organisation, where do Lorca and Abbie fit into it? How do they know each other? Do the authorities know about them? In what way are humans actually being oppressed? Who or what is the Droid Government? Where does Ordessa fit into the galactic economy? Who is Captain Jowitt? None of this is explained, none of these basic questions are answered.

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

This is a chaotic and inept movie which seems to think that in a science fiction film it’s enough to say people are ‘rebels’ without indicating what they are rebelling against. Badly lit scenes are cobbled together in an almost random order and we never learn anything at all about our protagonists or their situation. For example, early on there is a scene in which ‘the children’ are hidden anyway. But who are these children (and whose are these children) and why must they be hidden? Where are they hidden? Why are they never seen or referred to again?

The children are being told stories about Earth by a short robot named Grid, played by Indian midget actor Deep Roy. He is Lorca’s sidekick though it is puzzling quite what use a midget robot would be to anyone - Lorca is constantly having to lift him up to reach things. Roy occasionally remembers to exhibit a slight stiffness to his movements but for the most part he just looks like a midget in a helmet.

Let me pause here to describe the expensive special effects techniques which are used to bring both Grid and the Droid Police to life. Each of the police wears a jumpsuit and a crash helmet and has, over his face, an immobile human mask, a creepy black metal mask apparently modelled on a black man (which gives the film an intriguing subtext). They look like dolls, frankly - Grid even more so since his mask is more cherubic and hence more creepy. Aside from their immobile faces, no attempt at all is made to give them any sort of robotic appearance. They don’t even carry ray guns, being armed instead with M16 automatic rifles, which are obviously still a popular weapon in the spacefaring 21st century.

I’m not saying that these are the crappiest, cheapest, stupidest robots in cinematic history. But they certainly rank up there with the worst.

Anyway, stuff happens but it is impossible to tell what or why, partly because everything is really badly lit but mostly because this was obviously made from a script where a lot of explanation was in the stage directions, leaving those of us with nothing to go on except dialogue and action scratching our heads. About half an hour in I wondered whether it was just me. Was I being thick and not following a simple plot? No, it really was a nonsensical jumble of ideas and scenes. I challenge anyone to work out what is happening without first reading a plot synopsis. (I didn’t even read the back of the video box - I wanted to come to this story with an open mind.)

Somehow - don’t ask me how - Lorca and Grid end up at a big open-cast mine with giant lorries, the sort that have tyres 20 feet in diameter. This futuristic setting with its futuristic vehicles is represented by a big open-cast mine with giant lorries, the sort that have tyres 20 feet in diameter. There is no attempt whatsoever to disguise this cool but badly-used location.

For some reason, Lorca’s mother is here. How? Why? Christ only knows. There has been some talk of Lorca’s father who may have been a rebel leader or something. Anyway, from behind a giant lorry Lorca sees some Droid Police shoot his mother. He responds by lobbing a hand grenade. The resulting explosion very impressively reduces to neat piles of cloth and metal about a dozen droids standing around over an area of 40 or 50 square metres, while leaving his mother’s body entirely untouched. Lorca puts his mother - and another body, whose identity escaped me - into the back of a normal-sized truck and takes them into the desert where he buries them.

On returning, he is captured by Danny (Hugh Keays-Byrne: Mad Max, Les Patterson Saves the World, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars and the 1999 version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth), a grimacing, unkempt bounty hunter employed by Captain Jowitt (tick another cliché box, folks; heck, tick a bunch of them) who has already captured Grid and uses him as bait. The two rebels are thrown into the back of a giant truck with a single droid guard who is easily overcome. There follows a deeply unthrilling ‘fight’ between Lorca and Danny which ends with the truck rolling gently into a wall of earth with a small explosion to suggest that it has crashed in some way (they couldn’t actually damage the thing of course, on account of how much those trucks cost). Danny is thrown into the earthbank but we later see his hand emerge so he’s - gasp - not dead. Lorca repairs Grid, whose head has come off.

Back in El Jadida, Abbie (whom Lorca believes to be dead, for some reason) has hooked up with a cute brunette room-mate named Suzi (Home and Away actress Cassandra Webb, who gets an ‘And introducing’ credit). After the sequence in the open-cast mine, which was rubbish but at least could be followed, the scenes back in the township plunge us once again into random actions by unidentified characters. Lorca and Grid come back to town, Lorca meets Suzi who hides him by stripping to her undies and pretending to snog him in some sort of sex cubicle when the Droid Police come looking for him. There is also a girl with very blonde hair (blonder than Abbie) and a red leather jacket who is a friend or comrade of Abbie and/or Suzi but I don't know who she is or what she does.

For some reason, Abbie and co have to get aboard a spaceship called the Redwing which looks like the one from the start of the film (Police Transport Zebra) but that may just be the production saving on effects footage. This used to belong to Lorca’s father (I think) but the significance of this ship, though clearly important, is never explained.

Because this film is a big stinking pile of crap.

Grid has his own little adventures, frequently being referred to as a ‘Nissan model’ (well, that’s what it sounds like) and we learn very late in the day that he is an SDU, a Sentinel Defence Unit, designed to protect a spaceship while the pilot is away doing other stuff.

Lorca, Abbie, Grid and Suzi somehow get aboard the Redwing, although Suzi isn’t in the actual boarding scenes, she just magically appears when they’re on the bridge. Then it turns out that there is another SDU aboard, also played by Roy, who kills Abbie. Let me stress that everything I’m writing here should be taken with a great big dose of ‘I think this is it but I can’t tell.’ Abbie’s death scene is not shown, only Suzi screaming from behind a window in a door, which she makes no attempt to open, and frankly it looks at first like it’s Suzi being attacked.

Grid stands over Abbie’s body, covered in blood, while the other SDU seems to be completely spotless - which is confusing. but no more confusing than anything else in this plotless, sci-fi-by-numbers mess - and he begs Suzi to activate his attack mode. This evidently involves tapping a five-digit code into a previously unmentioned keypad on the side of his head. We then have the extraordinary spectacle of two midgets in crash helmets and doll masks throwing each other around a spaceship corridor. In fact, they throw each other through various walls, which are clearly made from painted sheets of expanded polystyrene and then they throw each other through the floor! What sort of spaceship has walls and floors that flimsy?

A spaceship in a film which is a big stinking pile of crap.

The massive overhead doors of the docking bay where the Redwing was parked are locked, but Lorca and friends break out by repeatedly banging their spaceship against the doors until they break open. They then fly off, just as another spaceship is coming in. Some sort of bomb is activated and there is a series of explosions, culminating in aerial shots of mining blasts at the previously seen open cast mine. Wait a minute, are we expected to think that blasts in an open cast mine are actually a township, complete with massive spaceship docking bays, blowing up? Quite possibly. Nothing about this piece of crap can surprise me any more.

Grid tells Lorca and Suzi that Abbie did not die in vain and a radio voice from somewhere says that Abbie’s mission has been accomplished and all that is needed now is a transport, but it looks like the inhabitants of El Jadida - if any of them survived those explosions - are out of luck because the Redwing is heading off into space.

I don’t think I have ever been so relieved to see the words ‘The End’ appear.

So who was responsible for this pile of dross which is badly directed and staggeringly badly written with pathetic production design and laughable special effects (although the spaceship shots aren’t bad)? Step forward, Roger Christian. This chap is sometimes referred to as ‘Academy Award winner Roger Christian' but don’t let that fool you. He was part of the team which received the Oscar for Best Set Design for Star Wars; he hasn’t won any awards for his direction apart from a big fat Razzie which he won for Battlefield Earth. Oh yes, it’s that Roger Christian. (There is another one, a musician, who released a few records in the early 1990s. He was the brother of the guys who were actually in The Christians.) This Roger Christian also directed Second Unit on The Phantom Menace, which possibly says even more about him than Battlefield Earth.

Co-writer Matthew Jacobs hasn’t got much to be proud of either, his greatest hit being the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, which he also co-produced. To be fair, he also wrote Paperhouse, the enjoyable Jim Henson TV special Monster Maker, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove and a number of episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. But let’s face it, if somebody asked you to imagine a sci-fi movie directed by the guy who made Battlefield Earth, written by the guy who wrote the Paul McGann Doctor Who movie, what sort of film would you conjure up?

A big stinking pile of crap?

Also in the cast are Rod Zuanic (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) as ‘Lorca’s friend’, Tylor Copin (Mad Max 2, Peter Benchley’s The Beast) as a ‘Detective Droid’, Rebekah Elamaloglou (Home and Away, Paradise Beach, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) as one of the children and John Rees (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sky Bandits) as a holographic priest. But among all the soap actors and Mad Max bit parts the only interesting member of the cast is Deep Roy.

Roy is one of those incredibly busy short actors, like Warwick Davis or Phil Fondacaro, who seems to turn up everywhere. He was Droopy McCool in Return of the Jedi, the Tin Man in Return to Oz, Princess Aura’s pet in Flash Gordon and all the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In fact he has become part of Tim Burton’s rep company, appearing in Big Fish and the dire Planet of the Apes remake and even lending his voice to one of the characters in Corpse Bride. He has also acted, or performed stunts, in Freaked, The Grinch, Howling VI, Alien from LA, Greystoke, The Dark Crystal, Poltergeist II, Van Helsing,Matilda, the brilliant Retroactive, Hook and Leprechaun. He is certainly not the only person to have appeared in both Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 but he could well be the only person to have done both those shows and The X-Files.

Reading this review back, I may have been unfairly harsh to a relatively harmless little film, but the hell with it. This is an inept piece of movie-making and if Roger Christian’s career had been nipped in the bud he would never have inflicted Battlefield Earth on us. There’s a lesson there for us all. It’s not even clear who this is aimed at. The packaging makes it look like a kids’ film but there’s no entertainment value to it that might interest kids: no whooshing spaceships, no zapping ray-guns, no chases and only one really, really crap fight (between two doll-faced midgets surrounded by polystyrene walls).

I really doubt that producer Michael Guest is the actor from the 1960s and 1970s who appeared in Doctor Who, Dixon of Dock Green and Pathfinders in Space, but I suppose he could be. He has produced a few other films including Codename: Kyril and recent British horror flick The Toybox. Effects man John Cox, now the creator of animatronic monsters for films like The Host, Pitch Black and Rogue, worked on this film when he was just starting out.

Many sites list Tony Banks (from Genesis) as composer of the score for this film. Although Banks did contribute some music, the main composer is actually Craig Huxley, who started out as a child actor - he was in two episodes of Star Trek - before becoming a composer (he invented a massive musical device called the Blaster Beam which allegedly caused women in the audience to have spontaneous orgasms and which was used for the sound of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture). But the score by a Star Trek child actor who gave women orgasms with a musical instrument isn't the oddest thing about this film's soundtrack. The oddest thing is a holographic music video machine on the street of El Jadida; at one point this plays a Peter Gabriel video and on another occasion a Toyah video is briefly seen. Wow, their careers must have really taken off over the decades...

(Apparently, Banks did indeed record a soundtrack for this film, using music from his rejected score from 2010. The Lorca music and his score for another film called Quicksilver were released on an album imaginatively titled Soundtracks. The odd nature of the film credits here would suggest that Banks' music was removed at a very late stage. My thanks to Insiders director Steve Lawson for this information.)

This pile of tosh is also variously known as 2084 and Starship. Quite hilariously, the movie’s page at the Inaccurate Movie Database is illustrated with a video sleeve featuring the rock band Starship! However, even the IMDB cannot be blamed for the extraordinary cock-up in the film credits, where the character of Grid is listed as ‘Kid’ (or possibly Xid, as the video transfer is abysmal - no, I think it’s ‘Kid’).

That sums up perfectly, for me, this awful piece of junk. There really is almost nothing to recommend here. I’ll try, I really will. The spaceship effects aren’t bad and Cassandra Webb is quite cute (and can act, which is a rarity among this cast). But these plus points are not enough to make up for one of the most amateurish, hopeless scripts ever filmed, awful direction, crappy production design, those staggeringly rubbish robots and a wooden leading man. And frankly the inclusion of a Peter Gabriel music video is the final nail in the coffin.

MJS rating: D-

13th November 2005

The Comic

Director: Richard Driscoll
Writer: Richard Driscoll
Producer: Richard Driscoll
Cast: Steve Munroe, Berdia Timimi, Vass Anderson
Country: UK
Year of release: 1985
Reviewed from: UK DVD (23rd Century)

I am about to damn this movie with fainter praise than has ever existed in the history of film criticism: The Comic is not as bad as Kannibal.

That is not to say it’s any good, or even adequate. It is, in point of fact, shite. It is boring, pretentious, completely incomprehensible, poorly acted and packed with godawful 1980s haircuts. In short, it’s like watching an amateur remake of a Spandau Ballet video.

But this debut feature from the man who might reasonably described as the British Ed Wood scores over his later picture in a few important ways. It is at least an original idea rather than a shameless rip-off of two successful Hollywood movies. The music isn’t bad (but, as they say, you don’t come out of the cinema whistling the - oh, hang on, that doesn’t work here, does it?). Most impressively, Driscoll himself stays behind the camera in this one and there is no sign of Lucien Morgan, the officially recognised Worst Actor in the World.

Nevertheless, this is a bad film.

Steve Munroe, a wooden actor saddled with a ginger mullet so unappealing that it suggests he was really bad in a previous life, stars as Sam Coex, a wannabe comedian (Munroe followed this with bit parts in Robin of Sherwood, Casualty and The Bill and a role in the Driscoll-produced serial killer biopic Cold Light of Day). But the local club already has a regular comedian on its books, Joey Myers (Jeff Pirie, who had recently spent two years as Eddie/Dr Scott in The Rocky Horror Show; he is credited as Jeff Perrier in the closing credits and Jeff Pine on the sleeve of the DVD). Frustrated, Coex kills Myers late one night and buries his body. Then, when the comedian fails to show the next night, Coex goes on instead and is a hit.

He becomes involved with a prostitute, Anne (the surely anagrammatical Berdia Timimi), who has some sort of secret agenda although it’s never made clear what that is. He also gets picked up by Joey Myers’ old agent Stan (Bernard Plant), who charges a staggering 80% fee for booking him into various dives. As his career progresses, Coex is haunted by visions, often involving the zombified return of Joey Myers.

Now here’s the odd thing: this all happens in a dystopian near-future even though this has no relevance to the plot whatsoever. Our only clue is an opening narration by a blonde woman, to camera, which seems to be based on the opening of Dune. This actress (who is presumably the Kim/Kym Stone credited in the opening titles but not at the end) tells us that in this world “people don’t live, they merely ... exist.” We then have a shot of a soup kitchen where a small squad of goose-stepping, jackbooted soldiers/cops march in and beat up a man - apparently for daring to crouch under a table.

The DVD sleeve tells us: “In a fascist near future Britain has become an oppressive police state, the drugged population is entertained by ‘the Comics’ who keep a smile on their faces while everything gets worse.” Precisely none of this comes across in the movie, even if you have read the sleeve and are actively looking for this stuff.

Instead, we get Sam’s rise to fame and a highly speeded up social life. When Anne tells him she is pregnant he asks her to marry him, on condition that she gives up the drink and drugs, although there has been no suggestion up to that point that she indulges in either. They have a little girl - there is a hilarious silhouette shot of a nurse holding an obvious doll up by its leg and smacking it - and before you know it his daughter is three and his wife is looking for work.

“But how can I help?” asks Stan when Sam asks him for a favour in this regard. “I’m an agent - I just find jobs for people.” Actually, Bernard Plant has several unintentionally great lines, my other favourite being “This is a hell of a place to meet,” as he settles down next to Sam in what appears to be a relatively quaint English pub.

The nightclubs themselves are mostly just collections of tables with people sitting at them; there is no attempt to integrate audience shots with shots of Sam, Joey or anyone else on stage which were very obviously filmed separately. Even the very limited laughter and applause (the paucity of which matches the material on offer, though I don’t think that’s intentional) doesn’t connect in any way with the ‘performance’ footage.

Despite what it says on the sleeve, the people in the audiences appear relatively affluent, rather than being a subjugated lower class kept in their place by cheap entertainment. There is no suggestion that the people in the soup kitchen ever get to visit a club. I get the impression that the combination of cabaret and stark class division is meant as an allegory for Weimar Germany but I could be wrong. Had The Comic been any good it could actually have served as a strangely prophetic look at Britain 20 years later, with a populace kept distracted by mindless entertainment while a right-wing regime dismantles democracy around them. But it’s shit so it doesn’t.

There is also some sort of subplot about a local bigshot named George Ellington (Vass Anderson, who was also in Kannibal) who waltzes off with Anne, who is some sort of gold-digger. Also, for some reason, everyone travels around in vintage cars (or in one instance, a horse-drawn carriage). ‘For some reason’ is a phrase that seems appropriate to most aspects of this film, although not as appropriate as ‘for no reason whatsoever’.

Sam’s nightmares are some of the worst-written, worst-directed, just plain worst parts of the film, although towards the end it’s difficult to tell one thing from another (though not in a good, enigmatic way; more in a bad, incompetent way). He even says to someone at one point, “It was all a really bad dream.” Ah, but if only it was... There is a particularly funny sequence not too far into the film where Sam appears as a sort of demon, body-painted green and with enormous furry eyebrows matching his carrot-coloured thatch.

It is absolutely impossible to follow what is meant to be going on in The Comic. Better minds than mine have tried and failed. Perhaps Richard Driscoll knew what he was trying to do but he completely failed to communicate that to the viewer. Which is in contrast to Kannibal, where we could all see precisely not only what he was trying to do but also how incredibly badly he was doing it

So, apart from Driscoll, who else has this film on their CV as a guilty secret? The cast includes Bob Flag, who was Dennis Nilsen in Cold Light of Day and was also in Calendar Girls, 1984 and Eat the Rich; Gary Twomey, who was in Robin of Sherwood and Taggart; Joy Lale, who subsequently became script editor on All Creatures Great and Small, then producer on Between the Lines and Ballykissangel and then died in a car crash aged 30; and Eddie Blackstone, who is now half a cabaret act called Tjay and the Bear. Simon Davies (surely not the Blue Peter presenter?) is quite dreadful as the club compere.

Cinematographer Alan Trow started as a stills photographer and went on to a busy career as DP on such movies as Xtro II, Project Shadowchaser I and II, Monolith, Cyberjack, Grim and Dragonworld. Special effects are credited to Chris Tucker who previously worked on Star Wars, The Boys from Brazil, The Elephant Man, Dune, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and the unjustly under-rated vampire picture Barry McKenzie Holds His Own.

The Comic was famously booed off-screen at its one British theatrical outing and subsequently surfaced very briefly on video. Twenty years later it surfaced on DVD courtesy of 23rd Century, a ‘company’ whose extensive range of bootleg films was on sale from pound shops across the land. Normally I deplore the purchase of bootlegs but in this instance my feelings are different. Given that out of my quid has to come a profit for the retailer plus distribution and manufacture costs, the people behind 23rd Century must make about tuppence ha’penny from my purchase. More to the point, I think that Richard Driscoll films are ones which can be bought on bootleg with a clean conscience because if any money went to the film-maker it might encourage him to make more of his rotten films.

MJS rating: D

review originally posted around 2005