It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (15 page)

If you think the plot sounds ropey, try getting your head
around a cast which pairs up stalwart Scandinavian thespian Stellan Skarsgård (in a role reportedly turned down by Bill Nighy) with rumbustious British treasure Julie Walters who (according to legend) triumphed over an equally well-known comedian who was told at the auditions that the role was hers unless she sang ‘like a cow in labour’ – which, it seems, she did. Oddly, the bovine procreation rule doesn’t appear to have been extended to Pierce Brosnan who is without doubt the worst ‘singer’ ever heard in a sound motion picture,
ever
– and I’m including in that hallowed list Charles ‘no neck’ Gray in
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and Peter Boyle’s monster-clumping massacre of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from
Young Frankenstein
. Is that the
QE2
docking – or Pierce ‘Any Key Will Do’ Brosnan searching for a middle C? The moment in
Mamma Mia!
when I realised that Pierce was actually going to take a running jump at ‘SOS’ sent me quite literally (as opposed to metaphorically) into the head-between-the-knees-thank-you-for-flying-air-atonal brace position.’Sooo weeeheeen yrrrrrrrr nrrrrrrrrrrrrrr meeeeeee,’ screeched Pierce at the top of his paint-peeling voice, ‘da-ha-haaarrrrlin cayant ya hrrrrrrrrrrrr me ESSSSS OOOOOO ESSSSS!’ Duck and cover! Run for the hills! Hide under tables and keep your face away from the screen for fear that your ears will be melted off by the buttock-clenching squonk-fest that is Brosnan’s singing. Screw nuclear weapons, if North Korea or Iran ever start to get antsy again we could just drop Pierce behind enemy lines to sing a few bars of ‘I Have a Dream’ and surrender would surely follow apace. Also, he could prove a useful deterrent
against global warming because the temperature of the screening room I was in dropped about a million degrees the minute Brosnan took a deep breath and let fly. The iceberg lettuce in my sandwiches stayed crunchy fresh for a week.

While Pierce was taking it upon himself to redefine the parameters of the popularly accepted rules of musical engagement, Muriel, Her Majesty Mrs Strepsil, was going at the works of Benny and Björn as if they were the outpourings of the Bard himself. Her interpretation of ‘The Winner Takes it All’ owed more to the murder scene from
Macbeth
than to the pure pop traditions of Eurovision. When Muriel said/sang that ‘I don’t wanna talk …’ you understood that she
really did not want to talk
. At all. Ever.
EVER
. Agog, I waited for her Shakespearean take on Abba’s worst Scando-English lyric ‘A big thing, or a small’ and was not disappointed. By the time the song was finished the palms of my hands were bleeding, my uncut nails having dug into them in a fever of pseudo-stigmatic ecstasy.

To be clear, the film is awful. And yet, and yet, and yet …

Somehow, in the middle of all that awfulness, something wonderful happened. As the tidal wave of poop crashed over my head, the world seemed to perform a peculiar axis-altering tilt whereby north became south, black became white, pleasure became pain, and (against all the odds) good became bad – and vice versa. Even as every critical faculty I possessed told me to run screaming from the theatre
right now
, I felt my heart swelling, my eyes welling up, my pulse starting to jump, and my general aura going all pink and cuddly. I presume this is what it is like taking heroin – really
bad, but in a way which is strangely appealing at the time. I say ‘I presume’ because all I know about heroin is what I learned from Lou Reed and
Trainspotting
, namely that the soundtrack is nice but you end up screaming in a pool of vomit while swivel-headed dead babies march across the ceiling, or chasing cack-encrusted suppositories round the U-bend of an Edinburgh public toilet. Neither of which sound great.

But
Mamma Mia!
, for all its hideous flaws, had miraculously started to sound absolutely
brilliant
. It is a fitting testament to the power of Benny and Björn’s songwriting that their work appears to be unassailable even when James Bond himself has been licensed to kill their songs. When you do this sort of thing to the Beatles’ back catalogue you wind up with William Shatner gaily massacring ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, leaving Lennon and McCartney looking every bit as stupid as Captain Kirk. But the Abba songbook is made of sterner stuff, and no amount of inappropriate celebrity honking can dispel the magic of those pure pop classics. By the time La Strepsil started rhapsodising that her daughter was ‘Slipping Through My fingers’ I was in floods of tears – tears of laughter, tears of joy, tears of (let’s be honest)
shame
, but tears nonetheless. And as I looked around the darkened auditorium at my fellow cowering critics, I realised that I was not alone, although several of my wet-faced comrades would thrice deny their uncontrollable physical responses as the cockerel’s crow heralded the arrival of their crucifying reviews in the morning papers.

Don’t get me wrong –
Mamma Mia!
is rubbish. But rubbish the likes of which we shall not see again for some time. And rubbish which somehow left in its wake a trail of resplendent joy and bonhomie which would have satisfied Morecambe and Wise’s oft-sung request that we bring them fun, sunshine, and love, and leave Ken Dodd thanking the Lord that he’d been blessed with more than his share of happiness.

Mamma Mia!
went on to become the fastest selling DVD ever in the UK, although I remain convinced that in order to appreciate it fully you had to see it with an audience. We were on holiday in Cornwall when
Mamma Mia!
came out, so Linda and our daughter went to see it at the fabulous Screen Seven of the Regal Cinema in Redruth (tag line ‘Stairway to Seven’) and had a ball. Meanwhile I endured
Transformers
with our son who enjoyed the robots hitting each other but couldn’t understand what useful role was served by Megan Fox. I tried to explain to him that the film was directed by Michael Bay who is, in his father’s twisted opinion, the Antichrist and Enemy of Cinema, but he still wanted to own it on DVD the day it came out. Hey-ho.

Back to Southampton Street, and
Time Out
, and
Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
. In case you don’t know (and there’s little reason why you would)
Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
was actually a UK retitling of an American movie called
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
. The film had undergone its subtle name change in order to circumvent the peculiar prejudices of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) who, in the
mid-eighties, had acquired the state-legislated power to rate, cut, and ban all videos released in the UK. Unfortunately, during the pre-regulated ‘video nasties’ scare, a number of titles including the word ‘cannibal’ had been seized by the police and prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act – titles such as
Cannibal Holocaust
,
Cannibal Ferox
,
Cannibal Apocalypse
, and the immortal
Prisoner of the Cannibal God
which starred bonafide screen legend Ursula Andress. Under the iron rule of the ever vigilant James Ferman, the BBFC had been given instructions to look very carefully at anything which invoked the spectre of the ‘video nasty’, and apparently this jumpiness extended to
any
movie – no matter how innocuous – which sounded even vaguely disreputable, particularly if their titles contained a tabloid-baiting buzzword like ‘cannibal’. Thus Colourbox, an independent company who had picked up the rights to
Cannibal Women
cannily changed the title to
Piranha Women
in order to ease the video’s progress through the censors’ offices.

The other word that our censors got a bee in their bonnet about was ‘chainsaw’, thanks to the notoriety of
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and its variously banned sequels. This led to one of the maddest pieces of video retitling (again by Colourbox) for Fred Olen Ray’s harmless splatter spoof
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
which had the actual word ‘chainsaw’ taken out of its title and then replaced by a small outline drawing of (you guessed it) a chainsaw! Thus, although the cover art featured a small silhouette of a chainsaw and a gaudy picture of scream-queen Michelle Bauer in underwear and heels brandishing a bloody huge
chainsaw, technically the
word
‘chainsaw’ never actually appeared anywhere so the video didn’t get banned. Stupider still, the film was now officially called
Hollywood
*****
Hookers
which made it sound like a porn flick, although I’d love to see someone attempting to ‘relax’ in a gentleman’s way to a film in which anything that comes up comes
off
– if you see what I mean.

As for
Piranha Women
, the actual content of the film (sex, nudity, violence, flesh-eating, etc.) was solidly tame. In fact, the movie had very little to delight either the gore-hounds or the hand-shandy brigade, despite leading lady Shannon Tweed’s centrefold status. What it
did
have was a really decent screenplay by writer/director ‘J. D. Athens’ who later turned out to be J. F. Lawton under a pseudonym. Lawton would go on to write a darkly interesting script entitled
3000
about a rich man who hires a prostitute to pretend to be his girlfriend for the titular fistful of dollars. The premise smacked of
Pygmalion
(and therefore of
My Fair Lady
) although Lawton’s story ended with the hooker going back to her downbeat street life rather than joining the rich man in his vacuously extravagant champagne lifestyle. After various rewrites which effectively removed all the unpalatable rough edges,
3000
finally made it to the screen as
Pretty Woman
– one of the biggest money-spinning blockbusters of the decade. Lawton would subsequently pick up writing credits on movies starring everyone from Steven Seagal, Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman to Martin Landau and Robert De Niro. But that was all in the future – back in the late eighties he was just another goofy pseudonymous B-movie chancer, with nothing
to distinguish him from the terrible Troma pack other than the fact that his movie was actually pretty good.

The story of
Piranha Women
goes like this – following a Vietnam-style military debacle, ethno-historian Dr Margot Hunt is sent by the CIA into the avocado jungle in search of eminent renegade feminist Dr Irma Kurtz, a former chat-show stalwart turned man-eating Piranha Woman who has ‘gone native’. Accompanying Hunt on her quest is bozo guide Jim, played with gusto (and luxurious mullet) by Bill Maher, and pneumatic airhead student Bunny (Karen Mistal). As they journey into the heart of darkness, Hunt and her colleagues encounter a tribe of emasculated males named the Donahues, and a splinter radical feminist tribe who have declared war on the Piranhas following a dispute over which sauce best accompanies freshly peeled man (they favour clam dip over the Piranha’s dressing of choice, guacamole). After various shake-and-bake shenanigans, Dr Kurtz refuses to return to civilisation, recalling ‘the horror, the horror’ of appearing on the David Letterman show.

For anyone who had witnessed the breast-beating infighting of radical eighties gender politics first-hand,
Piranha Women
’s central condiment conceit was pretty funny, unlike all the
Surf Nazis
and
Rabid Grannies
of this world whose only jokes were their titles. I laughed pretty consistently at
Piranha Women
and went on to say so in print in
Time Out
, after which I thought no more about it.

Until, a couple of weeks later, I met a feisty young woman named Cass who worked for Colourbox video in the role of press-officer-cum-general-Ms-fixit. I’d been receiving press
releases from her for a few months, and because I like to put names to faces we had agreed to meet up for a drink in Wardour Street, just across the road from Colourbox’s fantastically unglamorous office. Cass arrived bearing a bag of VHS preview tapes (this was in the days before DVD, remember, when videos were still considered to be handily compact) of forthcoming straight-to-video releases including the abysmal
Oversexed Rugsuckers From Mars
which turned out to be so utterly rotten that even Colourbox didn’t much fancy releasing it. We talked about the company’s battles with the censors over titles like
Intruder
(a mild store-bound slasher that had been hacked up by the BBFC) and she promised to slip me an uncut preview tape if she could find one. Then, as we were finishing our drinks, she said in an off-hand manner: ‘The funny thing is, ever since that
Piranha Women
review came out I’ve had people asking what strings I had to pull to get a good review in
Time Out
. It’s hilarious. I told them I had nothing to do with it – that some bloke called Mark Kermode just apparently really liked the film. I told them I’d never even met you.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘They said, “Good thing too. You don’t want to be hanging around with the kind of bloke whose idea of a really good movie is
Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
.” Ha ha ha!’

Over the next few years I came to know, respect, and really
like
Cass (or ‘Cassie’, as she was better known). She was terrifically energetic, always good-natured (not easy when your job involves dealing with journalists, who are
generally miserable gits) and most importantly, refreshingly honest. She worked hard at her job, and in all the time I knew her she never once tried to spin me a line about how great a movie was – she simply alerted me to its existence and imminent release (or non-release in the case of
Oversexed Rugsuckers From Mars
) and left it at that. She was great. And then she died, quite suddenly, of an undetected condition, at a shockingly young age. I always think of Cass whenever the subject of
Piranha Women
comes up, which it does with increasing frequency. There’s something strangely poignant about the fact that its key players went on to have such stellar careers, and it reassures me to think of Cass laughing heartily in that pub about the inherent ridiculousness of the movie business.