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Knights Electric (1980)
An oddity
A very hard film to categorise. The soundtrack is relentless and eclectic, taking in Madness, Martha & The Muffins, John Foxx and the Ruts. There's not much in the way of plot, and what there is is spread *very* thinly, but the visuals are genuinely impressive, making Great Yarmouth look a lot more thrilling that it probably was in reality at the time. It's full of big, wide-angle shots in blazing colour of the seafront basking in sunshine and amusement park rides lit up for the evening crowd. Polished, bright and glossy, it looks very different from what one would tend to expect from an independent British movie from 1980. A few of the actors went on to build careers for themselves, but it's genuinely surprising that almost nobody involved on the production side seems to have had any significant further involvement in film-making.
Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas (2018)
An absolute ordeal
It takes some doing to make a film that is literally unwatchable but here we are. Everything else - the unintelligible soundtrack, the incomprehensible narrative, the sheer technical ineptitude on every level - seems to have been covered pretty well in other reviews, so I thought I'd just draw attention to the fact that in a film created almost entirely by one person, ten minutes of the 60-minute running time are devoted to the end credits.
Requiem for a Village (1975)
Lovely bit of east Anglian pastoralism but...
I recently checked this out on the recommendations of the other two reviewers here. I'd agree to a greater of lesser extent with both of them; it's a remarkable film, quite unlike anything else but with definitely hints of other influences, such as Stanley Spencer's Cookham paintings. It's quirky, whimsical, bucolic and unutterably English (and even specifically east Anglian).
However, these descriptions of the film left me entirely unprepared for a sequence towards the end involving a series of rapes. It's a fairly long chunk of the film, about five or six minutes, and it's deeply disturbing to watch. Just to be absolutely clear on this, I don't think that this makes it a bad film, or that the scenes shouldn't have been included; but I do think people have a right to know that there's more rape in this than in some films actually about rape.
Scene at 6:30: It's So Far Out, It's Straight Down! (1967)
Fascinating historical curio
This was a short film produced by Granada Television, based in the English midlands, about the then-nascent underground scene in London. It's quite hard to track down in its entirety - although clips regularly turn up on nostalgia shows and music documentaries - but it's well worth seeking out, mainly for its rare glimpse into the British underground well before it descended into a vast and pointless love-in.
Broadcast in March 1967, the film thus predates the Summer of Love by several months, so we're treated to the sight of earnest young men in suits and glasses cutting a rug to a live set from Pink Floyd at the legendary UFO club - which turns out to closely resemble the cramped basement it then was.
Plenty of countercultural legends contribute, including Paul McCartney (as a talking head in the studio), Allen Ginsberg, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins and Burroughs biographer Barry 'Miles' Miles, but the real interest for most viewers has to be the VERY early concert footage of Pink Floyd, along with a rough version of the band's "Matilda Mother" (then known as "Percy The Ratcatcher") on the soundtrack. This is among their earliest recordings, never mind their first appearance in a documentary, as the film's broadcast more-or-less coincided with the release of their first single.
It also does a nice job of giving the lie to the Blow Up/Austin Powers image of 'Swinging London' that has since become the accepted version of the era.
Creep (2004)
Cockfosters
This was a real ordeal, for all the wrong reasons. It's incoherent, bitty, and as plenty of other users have pointed out, starts to flail hopelessly after a promising opening. On one hand, it could probably have done with a much more explicit exposition of the killer's back story; on the other, it's already so much like watching someone else play a video game (a duff "Silent Hill" knock-off, in this case) that it doesn't really matter.
There's no tension after the first few minutes, and not only are there no characters you can bring yourself to care about, there are no actual characters to speak of. George the sewage worker is barely even one-dimensional, and the homeless couple are like something Nathan Barley would have come up with.
And as for the last scene, with a commuter (and who commutes *out* of Charing Cross in a suit on the first train?) mistaking Kate for a homeless person herself - is this supposed to be some sort of social commentary? If so, what on earth is it supposed to mean? That you should always be nice to homeless people in case they're actually respectable German ladies who've spent the night being chased around the tube network by mutant cannibals?
The Last Yellow (1999)
No, no, no, no
I think it's funny that the director claims the press ruined this movie, because the point where I gave up on it was roughly the point where I noticed that the supposed northern locations have London Evening Standard signs scattered about the place... I'm guessing that "KAM2" below was part of the production crew or was paid to write the review because I really can't imagine *any* other reason someone would claim that this deserves ten stars. It's hard to single out exactly what makes this such a miserable slab of offal, but if I had to plump for one thing, it's the 'big red London bus' montage where Addy and Creed-Miles ride around central London on an open-top tourist bus. It's almost as if the producers felt they needed a bit in the middle they could hack stuff out of or pad out as needed without affecting the actual plot in any way.