Howard The Duck - By James Ellaby

Nowadays, there's loads of movies based on Marvel Comics characters around, but did you know that the very first one released at cinemas was Howard The Duck? Not exactly an auspicious start, eh? Poor Howard has become a by-word for cinematic disasters and until now, must have been one of the very few big-budget Hollywood movies to not be released in any format over here, even on VHS. It came out in 1986, with a lot of hyped attached to it because of the presence of Star Wars creator George Lucas as Executive Director. When you consider that he had only recently completed the original trilogy and had worked on Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Temple Of Doom, it looked at that point that he could do little wrong, so clearly this duck film was going to be something special too. After all, it cost $37m, which was a pretty big budget in those days ($2m went on the duck suit) and how bad could a film about an alien talking duck actually be? Pretty bad. The main problem with Howard is that the film-makers didn't seem to know what to do with him or who this movie was being made for. The cartoon was hardly of mass appeal, being very dark and blackly comedic, so how would they convert this into something that millions of people all around the world would flock to and enjoy? Don't ask us, because they certainly didn't do that. Instead, they came up with a bizarre mish-mash of a big budget sci-fi action film with the occasional surreal touch, and this uncut DVD leaves nothing out, even the sight of a topless female duck-woman soaping herself in the bath. Disturbing doesn't even do it justice, and that's before you get to the scene where Lea Thompson (Marty McFly's mum in Back To The Future) is romping around half-naked on a bed with Howard and his erect feathers. With Jeffrey Jones and Tim Robbins also in the cast and the special effects about as good as you would get in any film from 1986, Howard The Duck certainly looks like a major film, it just doesn't feel like one. The story, such as it is, sees him dragged through space to Earth by a malfunctioning laser thing, which also brings a Dark Overlord of some kind, who wants to rule the world and stuff. And only Howard can stop him! What results is a quite remarkable film, just not for the reasons you would hope, and this DVD release is clearly targeted at the 'cult' market as it's mostly one of those films that is so bad that it's almost quite good. But the overriding question you have in your mind while you're watching it, and for hours afterwards is this: 'What the hell were they thinking?'

Anna M - By James Ellaby

The concept of a film about a crazy stalker woman is hardly new, and Anna M immediately draws comparisons with Fatal Attraction, but there really isn't that much similarity between them. While the American movie saw Michael Douglas have an affair with Glenn Close and suffer the consequences of her obsessive rage when he tries to break it off, Anna M is typically French in that it has a much slower pace and is a lot more thoughtful and thought-provoking. Anna is a mentally-unstable young woman, who lives with her mother and works in a library restoring old books, and she ends up in hospital after trying to get herself run over in a suicide attempt. While recovering from her injuries she falls in love with a Doctor Zanevsky, mistaking his simple kindness and medical duties for love in return, and she soon starts obsessively following him and trying to contact him. Unlike Douglas in Fatal Attraction, he does nothing to deserve anything that happens to him, it is simply a case of Anna suffering from erotomania (the delusional belief that someone is love with them). The film is split up into rather pretentious (hey, it is French after all) chapters with titles like 'Illumination', 'Hope', 'Disappointment' and 'Hatred' all clinical terms for stages of the condition, and this rather gives the impression that the film is a kind of casebook rather than a story. Luckily, the performance of Isabelle Carré as Anna is impressive enough to rid any sense of stuffiness or coldness from it, and she is electrifying throughout as well as genuinely scary at times. What is also unnerving about it is the complete lack of help or sympathy Zanevsky gets in a world where men are always the bad guys and women always the victims. Even when he is attacked by Anna, he is the one who gets arrested for beating her up when he has done nothing of the sort. Another massive diversion from the Fatal Attraction template is the ending, where there is no 'psychobith in the bathtub' moment, but a rather sad and again very thought-provoking slow finale that not only calls into question some of what has gone before, but also makes you reconsider Anna and what she has been through. While it's advertised as a psychological thriller and has definite elements of that, Anna M is much more intelligent than that and stays with you much longer than a run-of-the-mill bunny-boiler.

Fierce People - By James Ellaby

For most people, Griffin Dunne is the guy who gets killed by a werewolf on the Yorkshire moors and haunts his hiking pal in various states of decay in An American Werewolf In London. Of course, he's done other stuff, and he's also a director, but not much of that has had quite the same impact. His latest directorial movie, An Accidental Husband, is out now at cinemas, with Uma Thurman starring in it, but Fierce People is a world away from that kind of obvious romantic comedy. The problem is working out what exactly it is, and that's why it isn't entirely successful as a film. The first flaw is the rather unsubtle premise. Finn Earl (Anton Yelchin, currently filming as Chekov in the new Star Trek movie) is the son of an anthropologist he has never met, while his mother is a drug addict massage therapist. Finn's dad sends him videos of his work with the Yanomami tribe, also known as 'Fierce People' and the boy is supposed to be going to visit him when he gets busted with some of his mum's coke and is packed off with her to live on the massive estate of Donald Sutherland in New Jersey. There he encounters a whole new tribe of 'Fierce People'. Get it? Don't worry, if you don't, the film hammers home the message whenever it can, either through Finn's letters to his dad, or by showing clips of the Yanomi to remind us how similar they are to the American upper class presented here. Along with Sutherland and Yelchin, Diane Lane and Kristen Stewart help make up a pretty good cast, and the film is diverting enough in a rather cliched kind of way. Finn is the fish out of water amongst these people, and while he finds love with Sutherland's granddaughter Maya (Stewart) and initially makes friends with her brother Bryce (Chris Evans), there's always the feeling that it's going to go wrong for him and it does in a rather shocking way. Unfortunately, not many of the characters here, smart-ass Finn included, are particularly likeable, so it makes it rather hard to care what happens to any of them, which is never a good premise for a film. As it makes its point very early on, it's also got less of a plot and more of a load of vaguely interesting things that happen, which makes for an alright film, but not one that lives long in the memory or makes you want to watch it again.