getcater Reviews

Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008)

Telstar? One star. No, make that none...

[1/10 · 23 January 2012]

If he's up there, looking down on the world at forty five revolutions per minute, Joe Meek will undoubtedly have seen this horrible film. Knowing Joe, he probably burst into tears. In fact, it's surprising he didn't manage to engineer a shower of satellite debris to fall upon the collective heads of everyone involved in it.

Let's start from the known facts: Joe Meek was a genius. He was also a wayward personality, deeply troubled, a complex and infinitely intriguing human being. That's a tall order for even a decent actor to essay. For a ham like Con O'Neill it's asking way too much. It's hard to believe that there is anyone alive who could look, act and speak less like the vital lead character of this movie. Okay, so one doesn't necessarily expect a perfect Meek lookalike, but some facet of his personality has to come across. Con O'Neill misses his target by a country mile. There is nothing of the real Joe Meek here, just a badly-realised cartoon performance, one-note, manic, utterly shallow.

We know from the preserved film and audio of Meek in person that the reality was far more subtle than the brash, shouting, bungling oaf of this movie. The Meek who comes across in the extant archive clips is an apparently mild-mannered, gently spoken individual who betrays no outward sign of the violent emotion of which he was capable. O'Neill plays him as a pilled-up lunatic, hectoring his performers and frantically twiddling knobs in the hope of engineering some audio accident. Sure, Meek had his moments of mania, but to interpret this as his entire personality is a complete misunderstanding of the man. And he was not Welsh. Newent, Meeks' birthplace, is not in Wales. It's in Gloucestershire. So why the Welsh lilt? O' Neill looks and sounds like someone doing a really, really bad impersonation of Rob Brydon. Oh, and Meek would never have said 'whoop-de-doo.' Neither would anyone else back then. It's far too recent. At least he didn't punch the air and shout 'yes' but he might as well have done.

This being the central performance, and the entire raison d'être for the movie, it's hard to see past O'Neill's sheer awfulness, and the movie's better aspects are easily overshadowed by this towering piece of monumental miscasting. Any of the other actors here would have made a better Meek. Even, at a pinch, Kevin Spacey, whose performance in The Shipping News was probably a lot closer to the reality of Joe Meek. Spacey is amusing to watch - evidently having been briefed that the movie was a comedy - but better by a long, long way than anyone else on show here is JJ Feild as Heinz Burt. Voice, appearance and demeanour all agree exactly with what we know of Heinz from the archive. James Corden won't disappoint, if you're expecting his standard fat, charmless git. He can't do anything else, evidently. And he looks nothing like Clem Cattini, either.

After all this awfulness, the film's period atmosphere is surprisingly good, with Meek's studio flat realised in fine detail, and the contemporary footage integrates almost seamlessly with the new material. One might quibble at anachronisms like a 1970s Gretsch guitar, but generally the production design is top notch and really captures the feel of early 60s Britain. But all this effort is reduced to mere window dressing, turd-polish on a film that's deficient in so many other departments.

If Joe Meek were given a copy of this film on DVD, he'd smash it with a hammer. Then he'd throw the director, and Con O'Neill down the stairs. Meek's is a great story, shot through with incident, intrigue, emotion and genuine human drama. Telstar the movie is a bit like Joe's original off-key demo of his classic instrumental: a wayward shot at something that could be done much, much better.

One star - and that's ten stars too many.

Outcasts (2010–2011)

The worst thing the BBC has wasted my money on to date

[1/10 · 16 February 2011]

This is how the modern, corporate-driven BBC approaches making a drama:

A cast is assembled, a premise concocted and a script is cobbled together in haste. The cast line up before the cameras. 'Okay,' the director says, 'all you have to do here, guys, is speak the lines. Don't bother to actually ACT. Just read the lines, nothing more. Don't worry about emotion. We'll add that later when we do the music track.'

Actor one: 'What's this series supposed to be about?'

Producer: 'It's about selling BBC product to America.'

Outcasts is a prime example of this process in operation, but it can be seen time and time again in the BBC's output.

Responding to the show's atrophying ratings, the BBC's drama commissioning controller issued this risible statement: "BBC1 and BBC Drama support creative risk. Sometimes this means that talented people make shows that don't engage enough of the audience."

This is a laughable piece of management spin. Talented people don't turn out flat, lifeless dramas. The BBC should stop making lame excuses for lame creativity and more to the point, stop wasting license payer's money on such poor stuff as Outcasts.

Play It Cool (1962)

"It's all right, dear, it's only a commercial – for Billy Fury."

[5/10 · 23 November 2009]

Michael Winner might well have felt like insuring his nascent directing career when he received the script for this pop exploitation flick. Feebly constructed as a vehicle for Billy Fury, the agenda underlying Play it Cool is painfully obvious from the outset – Fury was being groomed as a British Elvis and the movie career was just one more box to be ticked. There's no doubt he had the looks and the voice, if not, perhaps, songs of sufficiently high quality (there's only one truly memorable number on offer here). He just can't act. Not even a little, little bit. Fury fans should simply skip the plot and go straight to the musical numbers. Sorry, did I say 'plot'? My mistake.

Fury's acting skills may be wanting, but worse by far is the sight of British comedy stalwart Richard Wattis mugging it up as Billy's ever-so-slightly camp manager. Good fortune intervenes and removes Wattis' utterly resistible character from the plot after about twenty minutes. By coincidence, that's the point at which the storyline seizes up. Ah yes, the storyline. That needn't detain us long. Fury (as the plausibly-named Billy Universe) and his band are en route to a pop music contest in Europe. They get no further than the airport where they become involved in some lightweight shenanigans involving an heiress who's aiming to give daddy (Dennis Price) the slip and marry no-good pop louse Larry Grainger (Maurice Kaufmann). That's about the sum of it. From Gatwick Airport, our heroes decamp to a barely recognisable Soho where begins an interminable run of sequences as Fury and co pursue Grainger through various nightclubs – a thinly disguised excuse for some mimed performances by the likes of Helen Shapiro, Shane Fenton and Bobby (Rubber Ball) Vee. And of course, Fury himself, whose best moments are when he's in his rock 'n' roll comfort zone.

Badly executed though it may be, it's hard to cultivate any genuine dislike for this movie as it's all so well-intentioned, and Fury fans will rightly appreciate it as the best surviving film document of a true British rock and roll icon.

Maniac (1963)

A Hammer film that's more than the usual blunt instrument

[7/10 · 23 November 2009]

As a Hammer film, Maniac comes as something of a surprise. One normally associates the brand with studio-based horror films of average to low quality, typical Brit-flick production values and a home-grown cast of stolid, reliable faces. If that's what you've come to expect from Hammer, Maniac will either disappoint or delight.

Shot extensively on location in the Camargue, in high contrast black and white 2.35:1 widescreen, the movie makes effective use of some startlingly dramatic scenery that's exploited to the full by a clearly above average director of photography. The film noir mood and atmosphere are reminiscent of 1962's Cape Fear, and whilst Maniac fails to match that film's pitch of sustained suspense and repressed anger, it's a creditable attempt by Hammer to do something a bit darker and more mature than usual.

The acting is efficient, if somewhat underplayed, and it's a surprise to see an actor of the calibre of Donald Houston being dubbed (it sounds like Roger Delgado – any offers?) Thriller fans will be disappointed at the lack of any truly scary moments, and the plot has a few more twists than are absolutely necessary; but if you appreciate good black and white photography and films that don't slavishly tick all the predictable boxes, Maniac has much to recommend it. A good restoration would certainly find an audience on DVD.

Female Fiends (1958)

Strange? Indeed – I woke up and found the film hadn't finished.

[1/10 · 23 November 2009]

With films like this to his credit, it's surprising the name Montgomery Tully isn't better known. On the evidence of this and several others of his movies (Master Spy and Out of the Fog), Tully deserves to be ranked just marginally higher than the notorious Edward D. Wood. There's one important difference, though. Wood's films were so bad they're hilarious. Tully's are just bad.

Tully specialised in the cheap 'quota quickies' that did so much to damage the reputation of the British film industry, and Strange Awakening serves to illustrate exactly how that damage was done. It's dull, predictable, stagy, wordy, badly scripted and poorly realised in just about every department.

The film begins in France (oops, there goes the budget) where a man (Lex Barker) is saying his farewells to a woman in a preposterous hat (Monica Grey). Driving back from the airfield, Barker gives a lift to a hitchhiker (Richard Molinas) who subsequently attempts to steal his car. A struggle ensues and Barker rolls downhill, bumping his head on a tree and knocking himself out (this needs to be seen to be believed).

When he comes to, Barker's character is suffering from amnesia. He is in a luxurious house, where several women and a doctor (Peter Dyneley) are on hand to fill in the gaps in his missing memory. Barker is, it would appear, missing heir Gordy Friend, a well-known lush whose poet father is a leading figure in a temperance-styled society. Friend senior having recently died, 'Gordy' is required to sign a document and recite a piece of his father's intolerant verse in order to complete the transfer of the Friend estate. Ah, if only it were that simple...

To add further plot detail would be at the risk of 'spoiling' the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it (though it could be argued that Tully did a good enough job of spoiling the film himself, which consists mostly of protracted exposition and tortured plot contrivances). Whatever the merits of Hugh Wheeler's original novel (and I suspect they are few), Strange Awakening does not impress as a movie and would probably have been better left in out-of-print obscurity. Still, it's not likely to be bothering the TV schedules or DVD labels anytime soon, so you're unlikely to find your sleep disturbed by this turkey.

The House in the Woods (1957)

"He's probably waiting out there until he thinks we've eaten the mushrooms!"

[1/10 · 9 February 2009]

This ludicrous, no-budget thriller is so bad it's laugh-out-loud funny. (That's a genuine line of dialogue quoted in the summary). Highlights include a fight on top of a gramophone and a Siamese cat who miaows right through one scene and then reacts perfectly on cue to a line of Howard's dialogue. (It also miraculously appears and disappears on a shelf during a struggle between Gough and Howard).

The plot strains disbelief beyond breaking point, beginning with a ridiculous encounter in the Carter's flat where their comic stereotype neighbours are holding a 'perpetual party' much to the annoyance of novelist Geoffrey Carter (Gough). When a neighbour calls round to borrow the vacuum cleaner, it's the last straw for Carter who looks for a lonely cottage to rent.

At the cottage, Carter begins to harbour suspicions concerning his new landlord, tortured artist Spencer Rowland, whose eccentricities extend to wearing a Siamese cat like a scarf and continually playing a Larry Adler record, which finally annoys Carter as much as the audience.

Don't be under any illusions about this movie: it is not some lost genre classic, or even a decent period piece. If, however, you appreciate the kind of pastiche movie skits of Harry Enfield or Peter Serafinowicz, there are some priceless, if unintentional comic moments to be found here, and some of the funniest dialogue you'll hear in a long time ("Mushrooms and toadstools should be allowed to live together")