It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (14 page)

I learned an important lesson too – when it comes to work, always find the door before they show it to you.

We agreed to muddle through until someone better could be found to handle listings cover, and I found myself spending more and more time in the
Time Out
office with little to do other than answer the phones and ‘help out’ in vague and frankly unspecified ways while filing the occasional film review and getting under Michael’s feet, which became my new favourite pastime. This suited me just fine, because I got to watch
real
journalists at work while making some great friends like Nigel floyd, with whom I would end up going to Russia with disastrous results (see Chapter Five).

I also got to review some films, generally low-rent genre stuff which (as before) provided my passport to ‘proper journalism’. You can say what you like about trash cinema – in terms of my career it has served me better than all the Oscar-winning art in the world. Any idiot can review an acclaimed mainstream blockbuster like
Gandhi
(which prompted my oft-repeated maxim about ‘SIR’ Ben Kingsley
that ‘when he’s good he’s
very
good but when he’s bad he’s Gandhi’) but it takes a special kind of idiot to get the measure of an underfunded piece of gory knock-off schlock, or indeed the
sequel
to an underfunded piece of gory knock-off schlock.

The problem with printed reviews, of course, is that there’s something horribly permanent about them, allowing gross misjudgements to be waved in your face years after the initial error has been committed. I have always tended to treat
everything
that appears in print as some kind of journal of record, and have never quite got my head around the idea that yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip papers. And indeed, in the age of the internet, it
isn’t
– as Julia Roberts so eloquently explains to Hugh Grant in Richard Curtis’ oddly enduring
Notting Hill
.

And so it is with a sense of trepidation that I now reach for the weighty
Time Out film Guide
which would become the ultimate resting place for all the blather that I and many others wrote for the mag in the pressure-cooker environment of that steam-driven office. I
know
that most of what I wrote for
City Life
wasn’t very good, but it also wasn’t very widely read and hasn’t been properly archived outside of Andy Spinoza’s filing cabinets. So, as long as we all felt good about it at the time, then that’s all that really matters. But those early
Time Out
reviews
are
still out there in the world, and are indeed accessible online as part of a frighteningly thorough archive of which none of us could have ever dreamed (and for which, therefore, most of us never got paid …).

But let’s stay with print. If memory serves, the first
review I ever had published in
Time Out
was for a cheapie schlocker entitled
Watchers
. All I can remember about it now is that (as the title suggests) there was a running motif about eyeballs – other than that, it was fairly unremarkable stuff. Now, the natural tendency when you start reviewing films is to resort immediately to hyperbole, declaring middle-of-the-road fodder to be somehow exceptional because from where you’re standing, frankly, it
is
. I was clearly guilty of this at
City Life
, and hadn’t entirely grown out of the habit by the time I arrived at Southampton Street. I remember, for example, declaring in
Time Out
’s sister magazine
20/20
that the Falklands War drama
Resurrected
was ‘the most important, and indeed difficult, film you will see this year’ – a brash claim which promptly wound up on the film’s poster. It has been to my infinite relief that this comparatively little-seen movie’s young director Paul Greengrass has subsequently blossomed into one of the most talented and imitated film-makers of his generation, helming the hit
Bourne
sequels, and picking up an Oscar nomination for the 9/11 drama
United 93
. The fact that Greengrass has had such remarkable success, becoming a film-maker who is bankable
and
credible on both sides of the Atlantic, makes my untrammelled praise for his debut feature seem uncannily prescient – indeed, I have never failed to remind Greengrass whenever I bump into him in Soho that I was there
first
and that therefore he owes his entire movie career to me. Yet the truth is that I just got lucky, and the fact that I was so bowled over by a movie which
happened
to herald a major new talent was more down to good fortune than good judgement.
Remember, I’m the guy who predicted (again in print) that in the race for muscle-bound superstardom, Dolph Lundgren would triumph over both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger because of the three of them he was the only one who could do a passable American accent.

Dolph and Jean-Claude were recently to be found re-teaming for the action franchise reboot
Universal Soldier: Regeneration
, having both served time in the hellish ‘straight- to-video’ market.

Arnold, meanwhile, runs California.

Good call, Kermode.

It’s partly for this reason that I tend not to revisit my own reviews – the sense of self-loathing and shame is just too much to bear (‘Sweet heavens, did I really say
that
?!’). But flicking through the
Time Out film Guide
I discover that I pronounced
Watchers
to be ‘good cheap nonsense’, an assessment by which I’ll stand. Elsewhere the remnants of my work in the
Guide
are marginally less harrowing than I had imagined – which says more about the quality of
TO
’s editors than it does about my writing. I did get to have a crack at a couple of mainstream movies, such as
Star Trek V: The final Frontier
(‘warped factor five’ – boom boom), but the two reviews I’m most proud of from this period are of solidly marginal fare:
Surf Nazis Must Die
, which I really hated; and
Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
, which I gave an enthusiastic thumbs up!

As I intimated previously, there’s really nothing remarkable about being able to identify a ‘proper’ film like
Schindler’s List
as an ‘important’ movie about the Holocaust
(although the true value of Spielberg’s movies is always inversely proportional to their seriousness – hence
War of the Worlds
is a better film than
Munich
in the same way that
Jaws
beats
Schindler’s
any day). But it’s quite another thing to be able to pass judgement on the similarly Third Reich-themed
Surf Nazis Must Die
, a film whose title announced that it was utter garbage, but which might actually have turned out to be brilliant by mistake (which it didn’t). Equally, while everyone quacked on endlessly about how important
The Accused
was in putting serious gender issues up there on screen, far fewer trumpeted the merits of
Piranha Women
which was widely imagined to be an unpolished turd but which was actually a very witty feminist satire with more to say on the sex war than most films of the eighties.

Things were made particularly complicated in this period by the rise of home video and the subsequent expansion of the knowingly trashy – and thus allegedly postmodern – genre market which threw up titles like
A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
(‘Where the prehistoric meets the prepubescent!’) and
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
(‘They charge an arm and a leg!’). Brand leaders in this area were Troma films, who had made a killing distributing the retitled cheapie sleaze-fest
Blood Sucking Freaks
(formerly
The Incredible Torture Show
) against which our old friends Women Against Pornography had campaigned in the US.

Capitalising on the negative publicity of their early success, Troma had cashed in on the burgeoning belief that some movies (like Ed Wood’s infamous
Plan 9 From Outer Space
) could be ‘so bad they’re brilliant’ and proceeded to
distribute a string of films whose titles suggested rancidly rotten delights aplenty. In some cases, they simply bought off-the-shelf grot and repackaged it for the ‘cult’ market’ – like
Rabid Grannies
whose protagonists, as Nigel floyd pointedly observed, were in fact ‘possessed aunties’. They were also Belgian (like JCVD, Plastic Bertrand, and Tintin) and were originally named
Les Mêmes Cannibales
. But more importantly they were rubbish. As was
Surf Nazis Must Die
, which I described in my characteristically temperate
Time Out
review as ‘Utter horse shit’. Even accounting for the lowered expectations engendered by Troma’s reputation for unwatchable dreck,
Surf Nazis
was a massive viewing disappointment, and I’m proud to have said so. By comparison
The Toxic Avenger
, in which a janitor falls into a vat of slime and becomes a mop-wielding melty-headed anti-hero, was almost bearable. Almost, but not quite. Yet to this day there are airheads who will tell you that
Surf Nazis Must Die
is a must-see ‘cult classic’, morons who were taken in by Troma’s extraordinary talent for hyping junk, and who still think there’s something hilariously rebellious about watching genuinely terrible films.

Part of the reason for Troma’s success was the fact that co-founder Lloyd Kaufman was actually a terrific talker who was great fun to be around – unlike his movies. When the NFT ran a somewhat misjudged Troma retrospective in the early nineties Kaufman tore the place up, his resemblance to Mel Brooks proving to be more than merely physical. The audience positively rocked with laughter which was only quelled when one of Lloyd’s bloody awful movies started
playing. I also had the strange pleasure of interviewing performance artiste and
Toxic Avenger
sequel star Phoebe Legere who tried harder than anyone I have ever met to appear zany, madcap and weird, thereby leaving me with the impression that she was fantastically ordinary and a bit dull. Our interview took place on the balcony of a waterfront hotel in Chelsea where Phoebe greeted me in electric pink leggings and a tutu, a large piano accordion strapped across her chest which she played whilst unsuccessfully attempting to affect an air of casual insouciance. To her credit, she didn’t appear to actually
like
(or even to have
seen
) the
Toxic Avenger
movies in which she featured, so maybe she was smarter than she seemed. Frankly, if
I
was promoting movies that bad,
I’d
take up playing the piano accordion.

In truth, despite what the fans will tell you, movies which are actually ‘so bad they’re brilliant’ are rarer than hens’ teeth, and are almost
never
the result of someone setting out to make a cult movie in the first place. Cross-dressing cult hero Edward D. Wood Jr, now widely hailed as the world’s worst film-maker, seems to have genuinely believed that both
Glen or Glenda
and
Plan 9 From Outer Space
were going to be decent shoestring-budget movies and would have been appalled by his posthumous elevation to world-beating crap status. That’s what makes Tim Burton’s affectionate biopic
Ed Wood
such a monochrome delight – the fact that its subject (energetically played by Johnny Depp in one of his finest screen roles) is a wild-eyed dreamer rather than a cynical old hack.

In the best scene from
Ed Wood
, Depp’s titular anti-hero
storms off the set of his latest low-budget disaster because the financiers are interfering with his vision, but his sour mood turns to elation when he spies his hero, Orson Welles, drinking quietly in the darkened corner of a nearby bar. Still attired in full Angora-sweatered drag, Wood strides over to shake Welles’ hand and share his troubles, and rather than laughing at him Welles offers a sympathetic ear. His own career, the maestro admits, was dogged by studio interference, with
Citizen Kane
(which critics now regularly label The Greatest Film Ever Made) being the only film on which Orson got final cut. But, Welles tells Wood, it is important not to give up – never to abandon your dream or lose sight of your vision. Wood is so fired up by his idol’s wise words that he gets straight up and storms back into the studio to make what would become the winner of the Golden Turkey Award for Worst film Ever.’This is the one!’ beams Depp’s Wood with glee.’This is the one I’ll be remembered for …’

The only example I can think of in recent years of a film that is genuinely ‘so bad it’s brilliant’ is
Mamma Mia!
, the screen adaptation of the surprise hit stage play in which a collection of Abba songs are clumsily arranged around a hideously literal narrative to perversely crowd-pleasing effect. I never saw the stage show, although a close friend whose judgement I trust told me after opening night that it was worse than
Carrie: The Musical
, a horror-film adaptation (via Stephen King’s novel) in which showering high-school girls threw tampons at each other while chanting ‘Plug it up! Plug it up!’ to a toe-tapping beat.
Carrie: The Musical
was so
legendarily terrible that it spawned the catchphrase ‘Not since
Carrie
…’ although my friend assured me that this would now be superseded by ‘Not since
Mamma Mia!
...’

But it was not to be. Despite some stinky reviews
Mamma Mia!
became a smash hit stage play on both sides of the Atlantic, attracting the great and the good with its unique feel-good mix of indescribably bad scriptwriting and indestructibly good pop songs. Meryl Streep has publicly declared that the play helped her to get over the trauma of 9/11, its relentlessly escapist optimism proving the perfect antidote to the horrible realities of modern international terrorism – apparently. Indeed, it was as a result of her writing to the producers to tell them how much she had enjoyed the show that she wound up starring in the godforsaken film adaptation which has gone on to become the most successful British-backed movie
ever
.

Now, only a certifiable maniac could claim that the film of
Mamma Mia!
is actually any good. It isn’t – it’s knee-tremblingly terrible in every conceivable respect. The plot, if one may call it such, goes like this: a former Chiquitita-turned-ageing-Dancing-Queen faces her Waterloo when her Nina Pretty Ballerina daughter discovers that her Mamma Mia
doesn’t
know which Man After Midnight Gave her Gave her Gave her a child. After sending out an SOS to her Honey Honey, the Angel Eyed kid decides to Take a Chance on three potential suitors to prove their possible parentage, with the Winner Taking It All up the aisle at her impending nuptials. Voulez-Vous? Not ’arf, pop-pickers.