I’m mopping up the Clive Barker: Last year, I read a bunch of Barker-based comics, and the year before that, I watched all of the Hellraiser movies. So now I’m watching the other movies he directed… and this is the final one anybody allowed him to make?

Nightbreed wasn’t very good, so my expectations here are very low indeed…

And it totally bombed at the box office, which explains why nobody wanted him to make any further movies, I guess.

Well, that’s not a pose you see very often in movies.

This is kinda hokey… but it’s really really weird, and I like that. It’s got the marks of a filmmaker who doesn’t give a fuck any more, but just wants to do what he wants to do, while Nightbreed was like a committee had been fucking with it.

And suddenly! It’s that guy who isn’t Captain Kirk!

Yeah… dialogue scenes…:

On seeing Barker’s cut of the film, MGM decided that it was too long and there was too much time spent on dialogue scenes that occur in-between scenes involving death or horror elements.

I assume that this is euphemism for “MGM saw all the gay stuff and freaked out”.

Dance!

This is a quite bad movie — the pacing is so wonky that it destroys most of the tension — but it’s quite original, so you have to give it kudos for that.

Lords of Illusions. Clive Barker. 1995. ⚂

Hey! It’s Cary Grant! Steering a car with his feet!

I think this is the best start to a movie ever.

This is so much fun… but these two screwballs aren’t Topper — it’s the staid bank guy. Grant and Constance Bennett play the perfect dream team: They’re rich, they’re funny, they’re drunk. They’re perfect!

And then they’re dead! DEAD! Half an hour into the movie! WHAT IS THIS!

Ghosts, that is.

OOPS SPOILERS

I like the little touches like bringing back the bell hop Topper had gotten fired (inadvertently) from his previous job. But these are the 30s…

So the main gag here is that the ghosts are invisible much of the time, so you have scenes like this, where there’s an invisible Bennett in the shower. These gags are well made! So I totally understand that the audiences at the time were amused… as I am now.

The plot, though. Oy vey. It’s basically Topper getting un-emasculated… Masculated? Hm. Because his wife is a bitch, but then she learns to be less bitchy over the movie, and it’s just a bit … eww?

But it’s funny.

Topper. Norman Z. McLeod. 1937. ⚄

The thing is, when I was a teenager, I didn’t like Pet Shop Boys. I had a friend who was totally into them, and they were on MTV all the time, so I got their music by osmosis…

It wasn’t until the mid-90s that I started listening to them and discovered they were geniuses.

But this is Pet Shop Boys, in their imperial phase, where they could do no wrong: Every single they released went to number one, and so why not make a movie?

It’s been unavailable for more than three decades, but the BFI made a 2K release recently, and that’s what I’m watching now.

So I’m wondering, of course: Can it be as awful as they all say it was?

Hm…

Rough trade alert.

English breakfast.

The thing about Pet Shop Boys is that they’ll get artists they like to do certain things (videos, set designs, costumes), and then they’ll be apparently totally hands off — or at least that’s my impression. That results in things like the Home And Dry video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ossii9Ipiv4]

This has absolutely zero potential to be shown on any video clip show, so you really have to admire them for sticking to their guns and letting the people they’ve chosen to do their thing.

So I’m assuming that’s what happened here, too. Because… what’s happening here doesn’t really seem to line up much with what anybody would want to see in a Pet Shop Boys movie.

And it doesn’t look super cheaply made, either. I hope the record company footed the bill.

OK, they got a music video out of this, at least…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDe60CbIagg]

Well, Joss Ackland is having fun at least.

…

This is really bad. Really bad.

This edition comes with a nice booklet. At this point I’m really more interested in reading that booklet — because perhaps it can explain how this movie happened? What went wrong?

I notice that it took a long, long time before the director got to make another movie after this one… but then again, he didn’t make a lot of them before this movie, either.

I think they’re going for a The Bed Sitting Room vibe (the late-60s movie)… and I didn’t really like that movie, either. So perhaps it’s totally brilliant! It’s possible.

I like the tunes. The rest is mostly a miss for me.

It couldn’t happen here. Jack Bond. 1987. ⚁

Oh my god, there’s an hour of extras here.

… ok…

That’s fine!