Steve

Not Tonight, Darling

2026-11-01 by Steve

Not Tonight, Darling is on a list headed “British Smut 1959-1979” on the website of arthouse streamer Mubi. Fair enough: the film is British, it’s from 1971 and the smut quotient is high. Though it does make claims to be more than just a movie for the “dirty mac” brigade, as the furtive masturbators in the UK’s suburban cinemas were called, with themes of voyeurism and alienation tucked inside a poignant drama about a failing marriage. Though strip out the nudity and is there anything much left at all? Another claim to fame is that it’s the cinematic debut of Fiona Richmond, who became something of a fixture in Britporn of the 1970s … Read more

Reversible Reality

2026-10-31 by Steve

Sci-fi from Russia starts with a certain advantage if you’re not from there. The Cyrillic script adds an alien frisson, and expectations are raised because of its proud heritage. Could Obratimaya Realnost (or Обратимая Реалность, to be precise) aka Reversible Reality be another Stalker or Solaris, a Kin-dza-dza! or Inquest of Pilot Pirx? To bring things crashing down to earth, no is the answer, though there is a lot to like here. It’s a story about a contested future where most people are happy to live out their lives subsumed in virtual-reality scenarios, while a refusenik band of “Antivirts” seek to overthrow the New Life corporation running everything. To infiltrate the rebels, in … Read more

Legend of the Witches

2026-10-30 by Steve

“Cult of witchcraft today… Their secret rituals exposed…” teased the lobby posters for Legend of the Witches when it came out in 1970. Also on the posters – silhouettes of naked young women in full cavort. You get a lot more of the former – the rituals – than the cavorting (though there’s still plenty) in this oddity from Michael Leigh, a thoughtful and not disrespectful documentary about witchcraft ancient and modern, its lore and rituals. See it as a companion piece to The Wicker Man, maybe, which came along three years later. Its director, Robin Hardy, and writer Anthony Shaffer, had surely watched Leigh’s film as they were researching their own. It starts … Read more

It Ends

2026-10-29 by Steve

Chalk up another success to the University of YouTube. Alexander Ullom shot (and reshot and reshot) It Ends with the intention of debuting it on the world’s biggest video-sharing platform, though in the end a more traditional distributor stepped up for his ingeniously conceived “hangout horror”. Now, Ullom finds himself being talked about in the same breath as YouTube graduates like Curry Barker (Obsession), Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms). Not a bad cohort. The basic set-up for Ullom’s film is dead simple. A group of old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while pile into a car and set off on the long drive home. As time goes … Read more

The Nudist Story

2026-10-282026-10-28 by Steve

I believe that no less an authority than The Guardian called The Nudist Story “the Citizen Kane of nudist films”. This 1960 British cheapie goes by a variety of other titles, some more sniggery than others. In order of ascending levels of smut, alongside the sober-sounding Five Acres, there is the titillating Pussycats Paradise and, taking the prize for innuendo, For Members Only. Take your pick. Made in conjunction with the British Sunbathing Association (now there’s a valiant and hopeful name) and the Sunlanders Youth Group, it’s an advert for naturism sold as a drama about a nudist camp under threat from the developers. A “save the orphanage” drama, with breasts. The action … Read more

Super Troopers 3

2026-10-27 by Steve

Farva with clenched fist, bared teeth and an epi-pen sticking out of his neck

So, Super Troopers 3, the third film in 25 years about cops who like to dick about, by Broken Lizard, a comedy troupe who met at college in 1989 and have stuck together ever since, dicking about. First things first, it’s funny. Not coherently funny, not relentlessly funny and not ever knowingly intellectually funny. In fact it’s regularly funny in ways you’ll possibly not be proud of later. But I sat in a darkened preview screening and chortled away repeatedly. Actually surprising myself. Since it’s number three and the distributor was selling it hard (pizza and drinks!), I was primed for a barrel-scraping and, yes, there was a bit of that going on. … Read more

Die Katze aka The Cat

2026-10-262026-10-26 by Steve

Lovers of a cool, well-planned heist, and a cool well-planned heist movie could do a lot worse than looking up Die Katze (The Cat), a big hit in Germany in 1988 which failed to ripple much elsewhere. More fool elsewhere. It’s stylish too, and slightly offbeat, starting with opening credits featuring a man and woman indulging in languid lovemaking to Eric Burdon singing the film’s theme song – Good Times (“When I think of all the good times that I’ve wasted having good times”). Titles over and ejaculation achieved, the man immediately moves to pick up his shirt. His female partner is obviously unfulfilled. We’ve met our antihero – a guy who hasn’t … Read more

Someone Dies!

2026-10-252026-10-25 by Steve

As genres go, sci-fi is a hard one to pull off on a low budget. Not as tough as historical drama maybe, but tough all the same. Someone Dies! is proof it can be done. Highly ingenious, it’s one of those no-fi movies where everyone has 12 jobs, a real sense of chaos prevails and there’s the constant impression that things could all fall apart at any minute. Time travel is the sub-genre. And if the first questions you’d ask if you went time-travelling for real would be “Where am I?” and “Who are these people?”, that’s exactly what Justin Petty’s film does, and keeps doing, pretty much all the way to the … Read more

Emil and the Detectives

2026-10-242026-10-24 by Steve

Though Erich Kästner’s 1929 novel has never been out of print, this first of many adaptations of Emil and the Detectives is chiefly remembered these days as a vehicle for Billy (here billed as Billie) Wilder. He’s the only writer listed on screen, though the IMDb includes Kästner himself as well as Emerich Pressburger as collaborators. It’s a story about children being thrillingly set free to roam unimpeded in the world of adults, seen though the eyes of Emil, maybe 11 or so, who is packed off alone on a train to Berlin by his poor, struggling mother. She’s given him 140 Marks – maybe a month’s income – to give to his … Read more

The Flesh People

2026-10-232026-10-23 by Steve

Weird and matter of fact, gory and yet sweet, The Flesh People has a unique vibe, mixing satire and gonzo comedy, a touch of Mel Brooks – Young Frankenstein era – with hallucinogenic fancy, and a strange, odd-couple pairing at its centre that’s inspired in terms of casting and playing. It’s the bizarro adventure of two people thrown together by economic circumstance. Ricky (Jorge Carrión Álvarez) is a failed medical student who moves in with Geraldine (Louise Heller), an actress whose glory days at the very fringes of Broadway are long behind her and who now survives by letting out a room in her filthy New York apartment. Now, in her anecdotage, Geraldine spends … Read more

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