Gobsmacking Cinema: THE BABY (1973)

Directed by Ted Post, who gave us the wonderful BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, and improved no end by a Gerald Fried score that is by turns ominous and unmistakably seventies, this thriller has to be seen to be believed. I almost called it a horror movie, but to be honest I don't know how to classify it.

The story, which borders on ridiculous from the off, centres around a grown man with the mind of a baby, his domineering mother and the kind-hearted social worker who takes a special interest in the case. So far, so daft.

It gets odder though. As if the sight of a grown man wearing a nappy and making baby noises isn't strange (and vaguely uncomfortable) enough, the real action is yet to come. How about a sexual advance on him by a babysitter? How about that same babysitter having the crap beaten out of her by the man's mother?

Still not doing it for you? Okay, lets throw in a trippy birthday party, hints of incest and the impromptu use of tasers.

If I've still not convinced you, well, first of all, what's wrong with you? And secondly, you should still see this film anyway. It's colourful, it's totally deranged and it's like nothing else you've seen. You'll spend the whole film wondering if you should feel amused or disturbed.

Best of all, the highlight is saved for last. I won't spoil it here, but let's just say that the expected sensible action of the social worker taking some kind of court action against the mother never quite materialises, and the final scene... well, I still don't know if it's amazingly downbeat or stupidly happy but it's certainly interesting.

With no big names attached to it and presumably many markets not knowing what to make of such a crazy film, it's understandable that it has faded into obscurity. I'm not about to proclaim it as a classic (well, actually, maybe I am, though a classic of what I'm not sure) but urge anyone with a chance to see it to do so. Love it or hate it, you certainly won't forget it.

Horrorthon'08: NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972)

Well what can I say about this "classic" 70s horror film? If I wasn't covering it as part of my Horrorthon stuff, it would almost certainly have made it in here in my Gobsmacking Cinema series of oddities. I just had to pick this one over the Irish horror film SEER which was on at the same time (and, I've heard, wasn't very good).

It's one of those nature-strikes-back films that were so popular in the 1970s, whether it be through classics like JAWS or insanely stupid (but simultaneously brilliant) trash like GRIZZLY.

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS definitely belongs in the latter category - like GRIZZLY at last year's Horrorthon, this definitely needs to be seen with a late night audience. If nothing else, the very concept is too barmy for words. Giant killer rabbits.

Yes, giant killer rabbits. This opens up the floodgates for all manner of classic exploitation moments, whether it be the rather unpleasant archive footage of a rabbit cull while a reporter tells us how much of a threat they are, or a combination of (unconvincing) trick photography and men in rabbit suits.

There's some great grizzly death-by-rabbit action but full marks must go to the human cast as well.

Boasting a cast that includes Rory Calhoun (MOTEL HELL), Janet Leigh (PSYCHO), STUART WHITMAN (lots of cult movies) and DeForest Kelley (Bones McCoy himself), it reads like a who's who of cult. What's so brilliant however is the utterly straight-faced way in which they perform despite being in the most ludicrous of movies.

The moment when NIGHT OF THE LEPUS's wonder is best summed up comes as a policeman gets out his megaphone at a packed drive-in and tells everyone to calmly drive away as there is a herd of killer rabbits heading their way. And they do it! No fuss, no argument! They just accept the fact, without question, that there is a herd of killer rabbits coming their way. Ask yourself how you would react in such a situation.

Totally mad, totally crap, and totally and undeniably a must-see cult classic.

Horrorthon coverage continues tomorrow night...

Gobsmacking Cinema: THE FIGHTING FISTS OF SHANGHAI JOE (1972)

It's been a while since I dipped into the world of gobsmacking cinema so it's about time I returned there (click on the link to see the previous entries). If nothing else, it'll be a bit of a change from gobsmackingly ill-informed Oscar predictions (although I see the SAG nominations were announced today so that'll probably be back soon).

Since it has been a while, here's a quick refresher. The films I choose to cover here are something special, though not always for the right reasons. They're films that are either so bad, so offensive or so crazy that they can't help but merit the title of gobsmacking cinema. They're the films that just leave you wide-eyed in amazement, unable to believe what you've just witnessed - perhaps they're so bad you can't believe they were ever released on the unsuspecting public; maybe they conform to outmoded stereotypes that our modern politically correct age wouldn't allow; or perhaps they're just so mind-blowingly insane that you can't help but love them, even while you struggle to comprehend what you're watching.

Today I'm returning not just to gobsmacking cinema but also to my beloved spaghetti westerns as I open the vault door and unleash the whacked-out majesty of THE FIGHTING FISTS OF SHANGAI JOE. In many ways, it's a standard spaghetti western - a lone hero wanders into town, falls foul of the bad guys, cleans the place up, the end. However, the hero of this film is a Chinese immigrant played by Chen Lee, an immigrant who happens to be a dab hand at martial arts.

Spaghetti western. Martial arts. This combination alone is enough to afford it a place high in the upper echelons of celluloid brilliance. Two of the coolest genres in the history of cult cinema, in one film. You'd already think it couldn't get any better.

You'd be wrong though, because as much as the combination of spaghetti western and martial arts is a work of genius, it doesn't take into account the superb pseudo-Morricone score by Bruno Nicolai; it doesn't take into account the hilarious stunts involving reversed film and a man jumping through the air screaming a lot; it doesn't take into account the wonder of a typical spaghetti western showdown in a dusty street where the quick-draw gunslingers are replaced with two martial artists.

Nor does it take into account the killer moves, the bloody deaths, the hideous mutilations - or all three, in the case of the mesmerising scene in which Joe performs a flying eyeball-gouging punch.

Or how about the moment where Joe insults a villains sister, only for it to sound unintentionally hilarious as he's dubbed in a well-spoken American accent that makes the phrase "your slut of a sister" sound inappropriate and almost charming.

You know what else would be good? A string of villains played by cult movie favourites like peplum hero Gordon Mitchell or the maddest actor ever, Klaus Kinski, and possibly featuring a cannibal called Pedro. We could maybe throw a killer yo-yo in there too.

Of course we can't forget the dialogue either. It's hard to keep a straight face when you're listening to lines like "You've got seven lives, like a cat" or an exchange such as

"He's one of your race."
"You mean Chinese?"
"I don't know."

This little snippet only hints at the casual racism demonstrated by numerous characters in the film, a racism which is the garnish on a film that was already heading well into the gobsmacking cinema category.

The story has something to do with Mexicans or something, but to be honest it's almost irrelevant.

How about finishing with one last word from our hero before he walks off into the sunset?

"I'd give anything to stay here. If only I could... but my life belongs to the victims of injustice."

What a hero. Joe, I salute you.

Gobsmacking Cinema: KILLPOINT (1984)

FONGSPLOITATION LIVES!

I'd like to take this opportunity to offer a little heads-up for any of you in the UK with access to the digital TV channels Movies4men and Movies4men2. They show a lot of forgotten movies (some criminally so, but most justifiably so) and more often than not the late night schedules are filled with the kind of tosh that Channel 5 used to fill up their weekend late night schedules with before they suddenly tried to become respectable. The upshot however is that there are some real gems of cult cinema lurking in the schedules during the wee hours. From spaghetti westerns such as DJANGO, CALIFORNIA and VENGEANCE to classic Jess Franco Eurosleaze (VENUS IN FURS, 99 WOMEN) there's some real treasure there.

Obviously, being me, I want to talk about one of the trashiest of the trash though - a film so bad that the sole reason for it featuring in my semi-regular Gobsmacking Cinema series is its sheer lovable crapness. It's an 80s action flick which could loosely be described as a martial arts cop thriller. However, it could more accurately be described as a jaw-droppingly bad cauldron of insanity and violence. And poodles.

The film in question is the classic - okay, I lied, it's not classic at all, at least not in the sense of the word that normal people use - KILLPOINT.

Where does one begin to describe a vision of brilliance such as KILLPOINT? How about the cast...

KILLPOINT features Cameron Mitchell, star of many a dreadful-but-lovable exploitation movie, not least of which was the original version of THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (the old video nasty, not the awful Tobe Hooper remake), who portrays a crimeboss who is violently insane, mistreats women constantly and... has a pet poodle.

He's joined by heroic cop Richard Roundtree, who of course is famous for being a guest star in the TV series THE FRESH PRINCE OF... nah, just kidding, he was of course SHAFT. I mean the original SHAFT, not the pointless remake one. That one was some Jedi guy who talks about what French people call burgers, or something.

The star of the film however, and God alone knows why, is Leo Fong, a cop who never seems to crack a smile. This could be a result of the rape and murder of his wife (an ultimately irrelevant plot point that is delivered in a hilariously bad piece of dialogue between two non-actors also playing cops), or it might just be because he's such a terrible actor.

Fong can't act; he's got a really bad hairstyle; he just seems to mumble all the time; he's clearly too old to be the martial arts star that the movie needs, and in fact his only qualification for indulging in martial arts is the fact that he appears to be from the right ethnic background. Seriously, when he starts kicking ass, it's with all the balletic grace of your grandad dancing to Carl Douglas records after one two many glasses of port.

Fong and Roundtree are paired up to solve the problem of a group of criminals (working for Mitchell, of course) who are committing robberies but with a new twist. They don't want any witnesses but rather than wear masks, they choose the more interesting approach of shooting everyone in the building, leading to some wacky action sequences in which they shoot up the entire clientele of a Chinese restaurant and then repeat the stunt in a supermarket.

Actually, Fong and Roundtree may very well be partners in theory, but in truth they appear on screen together very rarely. Once, if I remember correctly. Still, that doesn't matter so much because you have other wonderful partnerships anyway, such as Mitchell's teaming up with Stack Pierce as the psychotic criminal Nighthawk, who seems hellbent on shooting pretty much anyone he meets. You've also got the two cops I mentioned earlier who spend most of the film talking to each other on the phone. Clearly not professional actors, one of them looks like he's never seen a movie camera before ("rabbit in headlights" springs to mind) while the other talks in a strangley muffled way that suggests he's had his jaw wired shut.

But there's so much more to enjoy than just bad acting. There's badly executed martial arts; mindnumbingly unconvincing stunts; the finest array of moustaches outside of the pantheons of 70s soft rock; there's the wonderful habit people have of flying up in the air in spectacular fashion when they get shot; there's the dancing of the least erotic strippers ever; there's the synthesiser score that sounds cheap even for the 80s; there's even, when Fong readies himself to make his final stand against the bad guys, a cop-in-training montage! Yep, that's right, TEAM AMERICA fans, a proper, honest-to-goodness, 80s-action-movie-cliche training montage!

It's difficult to emphasise how simultaneously terrible and magnificent this film is. It should be required viewing for anyone who ever wants to study film, if for no other reason than to provide a checklist of everything you shouldn't do, and yet it's just so much damn fun!

The best news of all? Fong and Mitchell also starred together in another 80s film (which I'm sure is just as much of a turkey as this one) entitled LOW BLOW. Joy of joys, it's also been aired on TV thanks to those good M4M folks so expect an appraisal of that one at some time in the near future too.

In the meantime, I believe this film turned up on a budget DVD somewhere so either pick it up or else keep checking the M4M listing for the next showing (it seems to be on every week). You will/won't regret it.

P.S. I should point out that I didn't come up with the name "fongsploitation". It was the work of Marty McKee, who writes the rather good Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot blog, which I urge you to check out, particularly as he's currently working his way through the wonderful FRIDAY THE 13TH series of films. I've always wanted to do a FRIDAY 13TH marathon here, but I'm too lazy.

Gobsmacking Cinema: 3 DEV ADAM (1973)

I'm not long back from my trip to the London Film Festival and I'm about to head out to Dublin for the next week for their Horrorthon festival (it is Halloween after all). So, no time to write up these festivals I've been at recently but just to keep things ticking over here's another entry in my neverending quest to expose all the normal people I know to somewhat less than normal cinema...

Have you ever heard of the Mexican hero Santo? If not, he was the masked star of a string of Mexican wrestling movies in the 60s and 70s. Yes, there really was such a genre of movie, and I guess it inspired the recent Jack Black film NACHO LIBRE. Which I won't be seeing, by the way. It looks awful. But I digress.

I've watched a few Mexican wrestling movies (a couple of Santo films and the excellently-titled NEUTRON VS THE DEATH ROBOTS) and enjoyed them a lot (usually they involve a hero fighting some outlandish criminals such as mad scientists or aliens and winning by carrying out some great wrestling moves), but I didn't think for one moment that they would possibly be popular enough for someone to actually rip them off.

And yet Santo does make what I assume is a totally unauthorised appearance in the mad Turkish film 3 DEV ADAM (translated as 3 MIGHTY MEN or something like that). But that's not the worst of it. The film also rips off music from other films - I recognised snippets from the scores to SHAFT, something else that I think was by Ennio Morricone but I couldn't remember which film, and what I thought might have been DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

And yet that still isn't the cheekiest aspect of it all. Check this out for a concept.

Santo and his best mate Captain America - yes, that's right, the Marvel superhero, here played by a dark-haired Turk in what can only be described as a slight departure from his comic book image - are sent on a mission to fight an evil supervillain who is flooding the economy with fake currency, torturing and killing people and also laughing in a really maniacal way.

Oh, did I mention that the villain happens to be called the Spider, and bears a not insignificant similarity to a certain wall-crawling Marvel superhero? Imagine Spider-man was a really nasty guy with an evil laugh, his costume was more homemade looking (and slightly green) and he liked torturing people in really amusing ways... and you have an idea what the villain in question looks like. Also, he has long hair which pokes out from the eye holes in his mask, giving the impression of having huge, comical eyebrows.

This shameless blend of stolen material all comes together in a no-budget kaleidoscope of badly dubbed dialogue, poorly-choreographed and unconvincing fight scenes and other such eye-popping crapness as a scene in which a man is tortured by having a big tube held up to his face with a couple of rats entering from the other side.

There are some scenes that transcend the crapness to become something truly special however. The finale in particular has Captain America seeing off several men who all wear the aforementioned cheapo Spider-man costume, only for a new one to pop up, laughing menacingly, every time one is felled. This might be annoying in a more serious film, but here it becomes side-splittingly hilarious, and sets up the rather bizarre closing scene of the film.

Turkish cinema of the 70s and 80s is a wacky world of rip-offs and weirdness and this is a great place to start off. After all, in which other movie could you see both Santo fighting a bunch of Karate experts AND Spider-man strangling a woman in the shower? Unless Sam Raimi has been doing an awful lot of drugs on the set of SPIDER-MAN 3, I suspect 3 DEV ADAM is probably the only candidate.

Gobsmacking Cinema: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972)

Sometimes I like a good science fiction movie; sometimes it's a western; occasionally a comedy; I might even be in the mood for a romance; or maybe a good thriller.

Then again, sometimes I just find myself in the mood for a man in a two-headed gorilla costume trashing a supermarket.

A little while back I was chatting about Ray Milland in AIP's PANIC IN YEAR ZERO. Well, just a few days ago I decided to dig out another Milland-starring AIP drive-in classic, and perfect candidate for the return of my gobsmacking cinema series, THE THING WITH TWO HEADS. In case you're thinking that the titular thing is the aforementioned gorilla, it's not. The gorilla is just the warm up act - the main event is even more fun.

Milland plays a top surgeon who, while undoubtedly brilliant, happens to be a white, racist bigot. An unfortunate chain of events involving his latest experiments and a terminal illness results in him having his head removed and grafted onto the body of a black convict on death row ("Rosey" Grier). Seriously.

I can't begin to describe how much fun this is, but it's a film that could only have come from the 70s. It's the ultimate decade for exploitational trash that filled the drive-ins and grindhouse cinemas despite being either rubbish, ludicrous or both. This film is a classic example of an insanely brilliant high-concept, low-budget movie with little in the way of "star" names - the kind of film that can't get a cinema release anymore.

Just check out some of the amazing lines that Milland has to say, while keeping a straight face:

"If you cut off my head, that'll be murder!"

"They've transplanted my head onto your body."

"That is not the gorilla's original head."

How can you read stuff like that and not think that modern cinema audiences are being deprived? Here at the Freakpit I'm always on a crusade to spread the word about barmy films that deserve more exposure and this one fits the bill perfectly.

My lesson is a simple one - next time you happen to see a film listed in your TV guide from the 50s, 60s or 70s that you've never heard of, looks insane and would clearly never get past the door of a studio these days, set your video. You might just get a treat that will outshine anything at your local multiplex.

Romantic comedy with Hugh Grant? Or a decapitated racist being double-crossed by a black convict out to clear his name? The choice is yours!

Gobsmacking Cinema: THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938)

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at this meeting:

"Okay, so you want funding for your movie. What's the story?"

"It's a tale of good versus evil, love and revenge, and it's set in the wild, wild west."

"You mean it's a western?"

"Well, yes."

"Been there, done that. Isn't there anything original about it?"

"Well, yes, this will be a musical western."

"A musical western? And you call that original?"

"Um... did I mention that it's a musical western with an all-midget cast?"

By way of a disclaimer I should say that the above conversation probably never took place - but you have to wonder, given that we still ended up with the cowboy craziness that is THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN.

The story is a simple one - villain terrorises town and rustles animals while useless sheriff does nothing until a brave cowboy comes along to save the day, falling in love and mending family ties while he does it. It's the stuff of western legend, albeit usually taking place a couple of feet further from the ground.

The film is truly awful - the acting is uniformly terrible and the few songs in the picture are even worse. But just as gobsmacking is the very notion that someone thought there was a market for a western comprised entirely of little people.

It would be nice to think that the people responsible for this film were making it as a way of securing work for actors who ordinarily might have struggled to get such roles. Unfortunately I find it difficult to accept this notion since several factors all point to it being purely for the purposes of exploitation - the way the film was promoted; the idea that the entire cast had to be midgets; the fact that the same mind that gave us this had already churned out the equally gimmicky HARLEM ON THE PRAIRIE (the first all-black western); and on top of all that there's an opening scene featuring the two leads and the only appearance of a non-midget which adopts an obviously patronising tone towards the cast.

Perhaps the most enjoyable factor of the film is the black-clad villain of the piece who, when not riding around with his gang on their little ponies, is busy trying to all manner of villainous things while looking about as scary as Wee Jimmy Krankie.

Actually, the more I think of Wee Jimmy Krankie, the more I think that a grown woman making a career out of dressing as a schoolboy is pretty scary after all... But I still wouldn't cast her in a western.

Gobsmacking Cinema: FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY (1979)

Stay with me, this is all going somewhere, honest. It all began in a video rental place in Harrogate many years ago. I was but a young lad and had wandered in to see what delights they had on their shelves. I wasn't a member of said establishment (living hundreds of miles away, it would have been a bit silly) but they were closing down and selling off all their remaining tapes. My browsing didn't take too long as they'd sold almost everything but I did pick up a couple of old VHS tapes - one of which was WHEELS OF FIRE.

WHEELS OF FIRE was a film made in the early 1980s in the Philipines and is a low-budget post-apocalyptic affair that amounts to nothing more than a very bad rip-off of MAD MAX 2 [aka THE ROAD WARRIOR if you're reading this in America]. I bought it because I've always loved anything with a post-apocalyptic flavour to it, and it ended up being a purchase that has had a massive (though some might say not entirely healthy, or even understandable) impact on my movie watching habits.

You see, it began my love of two aspects of cinema. The first is the string of MAD MAX 2 and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK impersonators (mainly Italian) that littered the video stores of the 1980s - you wouldn't believe how many there are and, sadder still, you wouldn't believe how many of them I've managed to collect over the years.

The second effect the film had was similar to the first, but slightly more wide-ranging. It kickstarted a love of the entire idea of low-budget, craply-made, foreign rip-offs of well known films. The Italians were particularly good at it, but other countries got in on the act too (some of Turkey's attempts are incredible and actually go as far as stealing scenes and music directly from other films). But it was a Filipino film that started my love of such trash, and it is to the Philipines I return today, to look at the gobsmacking epic that is FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY (sic).

A shameless rip-off of the James Bond franchise, FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY features a chap by the name of Weng Weng as Agent 00, who gets involved in fighting a crimelord after saving a young woman from an assassin's bullet. I'm not entirely sure which is funnier - the inept staging of the rescue scene or the woman's calm, deadpan revelation that she gets shot at every week, as if it's the sort of thing that happens to young ladies all the time.

So our adventure begins and we are treated to such sights as Agent 00 practicing his unique brand of martial arts (most of it centres around kicking men in the balls), flying through the air on a jetpack that is clearly suspended on wires, and indulging in all kinds of death-defying and laughably executed action sequences.

There's also the poorly-disguised rip-off of the James Bond theme tune; the atrocious acting; the cringe-inducing dialogue, which for example frequently sees the bad guys refer to themselves as "the forces of evil" and such like; the Bond-style gadgets that include X-ray specs (which Weng Weng obviously has to try out on a couple of women) and a radio-controlled flying hat; and then there's the dubbing. The dubbing is one of the funniest aspects of the film because as if the dialogue and acting weren't already bad enough we have the sight of Asian actors being dubbed in accents ranging from New York to upper-class English. Absolutely brilliant.

Now I know what you're thinking - it sounds like a really bad movie (so bad it is absolutely hilarious, I assure you) but what's so gobsmacking about it? Well, there's one extra special ingredient that takes it into the upper echelons of jaw-on-the-floor exploitation cinema. Go back and read the last few paragraphs again, this time armed with the knowledge that Weng Weng is a 3-feet-tall Filipino midget...

Gobsmacking Cinema: THE RISE & FALL OF IDI AMIN (1981)

Some mad numpty from the army overthrowing the government and taking over a country has been a fairly regular occurrence in post-colonial Africa but that doesn't stop it being a ripe subject for adaptation into a movie. And if someone like Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg had tackled it, who knows what we might have ended up with?

But no. Produced and directed by Sharad Patel (who?) and starring Joseph Olita (who?) and a bunch of other unknowns, THE RISE AND FALL OF IDI AMIN is pure bad-taste cinema.

There is undoubtedly a great story waiting to be told about this madman and his gradual ruin of Uganda. That story is still waiting to be filmed. This movie seems interested purely in the violent side of things and little else. There's no attempt to justify his actions, explain his decisions or give any kind of insight into his character, other than to paint him as a raving lunatic with a thirst for blood. Okay, so that's not far off the mark in truth, but that doesn't make this film any less morally dubious.

With little in the way of story, we are simply treated to incident after incident showing what a nutter Amin was (or Big Daddy as he liked to refer to himself) in gruesome detail. This kind of thing might be acceptable (well, almost) in a comical portrayal of some pantomime style villain but this guy was real, and disturbed. And that is what we are shown repeatedly in this hour and a half of exploitative nonsense based on a nation's real-life suffering.

There's Amin's visit to a witch doctor; his eating the flesh of a dead rival; murder of any who oppose him; constant ranting about "eshans" (that's Asians by the way - it's difficult to convey a Ugandan accent through typing). We laugh as he boasts, while bedding two women simultaneously, that he's the "sex champion", or as he hides in a cupboard during the battle with Tanzania. We stop laughing as he sends people before the firing squad. And then there are moments where I had no idea whether I should be laughing or not - the extreme nature of the scenes is rather disturbing, but the whole film is so badly conceived and badly acted (Olita is presumably cast purely for his physical resemblance to the fat belligerant tossbag rather than any acting prowess) that you can't help but laugh as he accidentally shoots an archbishop, or as he invites his children in to see the corpse of one of his wives... a corpse which he has just dismembered so that he can proudly declare that "this is what happens to bad mothers" before letting out a little chuckle as if he's just played a harmless practical joke.

The combination of real life nastiness, no hint of a moral anchor and the ludicrously over the top performances from its dreadful cast ensure that this woefully misjudged turkey is actually a lot of fun to watch (if, like me, you have no shame), even if you do spend the entire film wondering who thought it was a good idea.

Thankfully we now live in more enlightened times. The good news is that such an ill-advised act of folly showing a despotic tyrant and his evil acts in such an exploitative and laughable light would never be commissioned by any film studio today.

The flipside however is that, no matter how much time I've spent polishing it, I just can't find a buyer anywhere for my debut screenplay, MUGABE VS THE LOVEBUG: HERBIE GOES TO ZIMBABWE.

Gobsmacking Cinema: THE DUCKTATORS (1942)

Have you ever watched a film that is so bad, so weird or so offensive that you just can't believe what you're watching? For most people, it happens every once in a while. For me, it's a regular occurrence, but that's because I deliberately seek out such oddities.

I have a love of what I refer to as "gobsmacking cinema" - films that leave you staring blank faced at the screen, jaw on the floor, wondering what the hell just happened, why it happened and indeed how the hell it happened.

It could be that something is just so bad it's great (INSEMINOID anyone?); perhaps it's just an appallingly cheeky rip-off of some other film (I could write all day about such things, with Italians and Turks being the undisputed kings of rip-off cinema); maybe it just deliberately goes out of its way to offend (that'll be me talking about the video nasties again); then again maybe it's a once-innocent film that now seems offensive by modern standards (just about any film from the early days of Hollywood that features a minority character); perhaps something that must have seemed like a good idea at the time but just goes wrong on every level (try searching the web for THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL and you'll find something that makes ATTACK OF THE CLONES look like CITIZEN KANE in comparison); or occasionally it's just so strange you can't help but be engrossed by its all-encompassing weirdness (if you ever meet Sean Connery, please ask him what he was thinking when he made ZARDOZ).

I'm not talking about films that are so bad you can't enjoy them on any level (INDEPENDENCE DAY and SUPERMAN III to name but two) but rather what some people would term guilty pleasures. I don't think that's a strong enough term though - many films in my collection are guilty pleasures, but it takes something truly special to leave you so stunned that you're convinced you've just imagined the whole thing.

Naturally, I feel it's my duty to share such cinematic joy with you, which is why I now proudly present the first film in my "gobsmacking cinema" appraisal.

THE DUCKTATORS is a short Warner Bros cartoon from the early 40s featuring, of course, the vocal talents of Mel Blanc. Being a piece of WW2 propoganda you expect a degree of unpleasantness towards other nations but in this modern politically correct world where the same old cartoons are constantly trotted out on the telly while the less PC efforts languish in a vault somewhere, coming across something like this can really knock you for six.

We begin on a farm, where a couple of ducks are awaiting the birth of their child. Rather ominously, the egg is black. Shattering open the egg with some gusto, a white duck with a windswept tuft of black hair and a short black moustache raises an (armband-wearing) arm and cries "SIEG HEIL". Uh-oh.

After a brief glimpse of this rather familiar looking animal giving an animated speech (in German) to other gullible members of the farmyard, we then get introduced to a fat, shaven-headed bird waffling away in a mock-Italian accent to a (literally) captive audience of one (his speech is a lot of nonsense using random Italian phrases like "tutti frutti") and then finally along comes the Japanese bird who not only has slit-like eyes and big buck teeth but also says "very sorry" a lot. At this point it's difficult to say which is more disturbing, the bizarre cartoon treatment of the three enemy leaders or the shameful racial stereotypes.

Eventually the trio are thwarted by another large bird whom one assumes is supposed to be the mighty USA but by the time it's all over it's difficult to ponder what the meaning behind it all is, because you're too busy wondering who actually thought this all up anyway. It's not that an animal retelling of World War 2 is even that bad an idea, it's just the lack of subtlety that's a little disconcerting for a modern audience. I appreciate the sentiment and undoubtedly the filmmakers' hearts were in the right places but really...

It would be easy to end with a casual "they don't make them like this anymore" but in this modern PC world, I'm not entirely sure they're allowed to either.