 
Anne Billson on Film 2010

collected columns from the Guardian, 2010

Copyright 2012 Anne Billson

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Foreword

This is my second collection of film columns written for the _Guardian_ 's Film & Music section. The first collection was of columns first published in 2009; all the columns in the following selection were originally published in 2010. I am hoping it won't occur to you that, instead of coughing up $0.99, you could have gone straight to the _Guardian_ 's website to read them all there, but just in case it does, I've been trying to think of all the reasons why you shouldn't mind paying those 99 cents.

Firstly, by buying this ebook it means I have already done all the hunting and gathering for you, and am presenting the raw, bloodied pelts to you here without the distraction of adverts, creative subediting or cuts made necessary by increased advertising or reduced space.

But as a sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection an article about the Alien films, published in British _GQ_ to tie in with the release of _Alien 3_ in 1992 and not, as far as I know, available anywhere online (unless, of course, somebody has pirated it without my knowledge). It's an overview of the franchise up to that point, rather than a critique, but it does contain a couple of original comments by Sigourney Weaver, to whom I talked on the telephone.

I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Alejandro, Erzsebert and the Paris Peripherique.

In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.

Anne Billson, 2012

Chapter 1: Nerdy Girls

Sandra Bullock has starred in some turkeys in her time, but lately she has been getting some of the worst reviews of her career for _All About Steve_ , in which she plays a dysfunctional cruciverbalist who becomes obsessed with a TV news cameraman. "Seriously annoying", wrote Roger Ebert in the _Chicago Sun-Times_. "Unwatchable, unbearably unfunny," said Peter Travers in _Rolling Stone_. "Grimly unfunny," was Manohla Dargis' verdict in the _New York Times_. All the reviewers like Bullock; you know they do, because they're always saying so. But they hate _All About Steve_.

I have yet to read a review which acknowledges that the film, for all its faults, is unique among mainstream rom-coms in concluding that geeky girls don't need boyfriends. This, for me, is a radical proposition and one that merits attention. So what if Bullock's character is annoying, with stalkerish tendencies and a sort of social Asperger's which makes her babble and wear inappropriate clothing? In the movies, it seems, women can be geeky only if they're also adorable, perhaps with mildly eccentric fashion sense, nothing that can't be corrected with make-up, a personal shopper and the solid affection of a studly male. They're not supposed to lurch around in shiny red boots, being loud and embarrassing.

Bullock has played geeks before, though in _While You Were Sleeping_ she was self-effacing and sweet. In _The Net_ she was a computer nerd. _Miss Conviviality_ and its sequel were dismissed as fluff, yet they peddled the message, still pretty unusual for Hollywood, that a) women don't necessarily need men to rescue them and b) they usually look better before rather than after their Barbie Doll makeovers. So, in her own way, she's been doing her bit for the sisterhood for years now, even if the films weren't slapped with a feminist label. If she's prepared to push her geekiness to uncomfortable extremes, as she does in _All About Steve_ , I think she deserves a pat on the back instead of all this grumbling that she's not playing her usual charming self.

Because while nerdy guys like Seth Rogen and Shia LaBeouf are all over the place these days, their female counterparts are still barely to be glimpsed. In every genre other than the shopping-and-weddings rom-com, women are little more than decoration, trophies or spoilsports whose function is to remind the guys it's time they faced up to adult responsibility instead of smoking pot/watching _Star Wars_ /putting their albums into alphabetical order. So shouldn't we be treasuring those rare female characters who don't conform to these stereotypes? Even the annoying ones?

Bullock recently became the first female star to single-handedly power a film past the $200 million mark at the US box-office - not _All About Steve_ , alas, but the dismal inspirational true-life sporting yarn _The Blind Side_. She and a handful of other actresses, such as Drew Barrymore (who recently made her directing debut with the adorable roller-derby girl-fest _Whip It!_ ) wield a certain amount of clout through their own production companies, and are constantly being exhorted to make not so much movies as some sort of Enriching Female Experience, that sliver of legendary cinematic gold which will somehow bridge the gap between the populist _Mamma Mia!_ and artier, more rarified fare such as _Frozen River_ or _Bright Star_ \- a miraculous all-purpose artefact which women can enjoy but which will also provide nourishment for their souls.

Well, bollocks to that. Male directors don't come under this kind of pressure - they make the sort of films they want to make, or that the studios want them to make, and they don't get berated for letting their entire gender down if they make mistakes. They're not being urged to make Enriching Male Cinematic Experiences all the time. Occasionally they do, more often they don't, but the films that enrich your soul are not necessarily the ones that deliberately set out to do so.

Nor am I looking forward to this mythical Enriching Female Cinematic Experience, which looms dreadfully in my consciousness like a sort of _Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants_ as reimagined by Sally Potter. I'm all for more leading roles for women, but the only thing we should exhort female film-makers to do is make more films.

Chapter 2: Verse Case Scenario

_Invictus_ , Clint Eastwood's new film, is named after a poem by William Ernest Henley, who wrote it in 1875 to jiff up his spirits after his leg was amputated. Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) quotes the lines, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" as a source of uplift and inspiration, and it's just a shame for everyone concerned that the very same poem was chosen as a pre-execution statement by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Henley's not the only Victorian poet whose work has provided memorable but, to the uninitiated, slightly baffling titles. Even if you've never heard of Ernest Dowson, you'll be familiar with at least two of the phrases from his work: _Gone with the Wind_ and _Days of Wine and Roses_. Dipping even further back into literary history, _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ is borrowed from Alexander Pope's poem about Eloise wishing she could forget Abelard. The enduring popularity of Rudyard Kipling's _If_ -, voted Britain's Favourite Poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll, must be at least partly due to its having been adopted, with the dash replaced by an ellipsis, as a title for Lindsay Anderson's subversive school fantasy, though one imagines Anderson was being ironic; he reportedly loathed the poem and all it stood for.

I'm wary of poetry in the cinema, the same way I'm wary of poetry in general; I find it faintly embarrassing. I pretend to like it so no-one will think me a Philistine, but in reality the only volume of poetry I ever read from cover to cover was Baudelaire's _Les fleurs du mal_ , and then only because some of the poems had vampires in them. When I hear poetry in films, I automatically assume the screenwriter is co-opting someone else's words because they're too lazy to come up with their own. Easier for Richard Curtis to have John Hannah deliver WH Auden's _Funeral Blues_ in _Four Weddings and a Funeral_ than to write his own eulogy to a dead companion.

Meanwhile, characters quoting verse at one another is a sure way of making my toes curl; there's a particularly excruciating example in the duff thriller _Half Moon Street_ , when Michael Caine says, "Let us go now, you and I," and Sigourney Weaver (playing an academic who moonlights as a call-girl) replies, "When the evening is spread out against the sky". Soulmates, you see.

You'd be entitled to ask for your money back if you didn't hear a bit of declaiming in poet-pics such as _Bright Star_ or _Howl_ (and if Allen Ginsberg looked anything like James Franco, who plays him, I'll eat my Pocket Poets edition, which incidentally I only bought because it featured as a gag in the werewolf movie _The Howling_ ). And you expect to hear poetry in a film called _Dead Poets Society_ , which means Walt Whitman's _O Captain! My Captain!_ (written in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln's assassination) will now forever be associated with standing on desks.

Nor are you surprised to come across it in the work of an inveterate intellectual name-dropper like Woody Allen, whose _Another Woman_ features a scene, either breathtakingly poignant or cringe-makingly pretentious depending on your point of view, in which Gena Rowlands finds a line in a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke ("You must change your life now") stained by her dead mother's teardrops, the emo equivalent of a fluorescent highlighter.

But I'm not totally anti-poem. I like the way Christina Rossetti's _Remember Me_ keeps cropping up in _Kiss Me Deadly_ , where its context, sandwiched between torture with a pair of pliers and The Manhattan Project, makes it haunting rather than twee. Lines from John Donne's first _Holy Sonnet_ ("I run to death, and death meets me as fast") add the finishing touch of suicidal gloom to the downbeat B-movie thriller _The Seventh Victim_ , while Rodney Dangerfield's rendition of _Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night_ is all the more moving for its popping up unexpectedly in the rumbustious comedy _Back to School_.

Otherwise, I feel safer sticking with John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet, whose _Pointy Birds_ is quoted in _The Man With Two Brains_ : "O pointy birds, O pointy pointy, Anoint my head, Anointy-nointy."

Chapter 3: Heavenly Features

"It's heaven!" says a dead girl as she drifts through one of the Weta-generated landscapes in Peter Jackson's _The Lovely Bones_. To which you feel like replying, "Duh, no. It's a field of corn." What is it about fields of corn? There was one in the afterlife in Steven Spielberg's _Always_ as well, though at least that had Audrey Hepburn in it.

You wouldn't catch me dead in a cornfield, which I'd worry was just waiting for creepy children, crows or crop-dusting planes to roll up. Jackson hedges his bets by piling on dozens of other backdrops, ranging from Caspar David Friedrich to _The Sound of Music_ , but like most film-makers' visions of the beyond, they're all corny. It's as though their imaginations have got stuck at Bosch's triptychs.

Movie heavens tend to be rural, because everyone's been brainwashed into thinking cornfields are preferable to, say, Paris or Berlin. But do they have to be so boring? They're like illustrations of those Talking Heads lyrics: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens". The benchmark for bonkers representation of the afterlife is _What Dreams May Come_ , which manages to combine Maxfield Parrish, Robin Williams and a couple of extras on penny-farthings into kitsch on a terrifying scale.

The same film's hell looks more like somewhere you could conceivably live, providing you didn't object to grey decor. It has a library! And an upside-down cathedral! What's not to like? Or I could see myself knocking back Tequila in Woody Allen's _Deconstructing Harry_ hell, which looks like a lively S & M nightclub with hot tubs, or negotiating the unnatural gravity of Cocteau's underworld in _Orphée_ , preferably hand in hand with Death's sidekick Heurtebise, on whom I've always had a crush.

The subjective nature of hell is emphasised in _Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey_, where a boot camp colonel yells, "Get down and give me infinity!" at Bill, while Ted is tormented by the Easter Bunny. But as Milton wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." The title of the Hong Kong thriller _Infernal Affairs_ points to the bent cop's future in a Buddhist hell of perpetual suffering, while in _High Plains Drifter_ Clint Eastwood paints the town red, literally, and renames it Hell.

Trends in movie afterlives come and go. The way-station where Warren Beatty finds himself in _Heaven Can Wait_ consists of clouds up to the ankles and Concorde, which one imagines would have to be revised were the film to be remade again now, in the wake of the 2000 crash. But I daresay it's no coincidence that my three favourite afterlife movies all envision posthumous existence as some sort of civil service. It's as though man's desire to impose paperwork on the chaos of existence is so strong that it even extends beyond death.

That goes double for wartime. In _A Matter of Life and Death_ , Kathleen Byron plays an angelic receptionist-in-chief who says, "Everyone on earth has a file," and, when a new arrival demurs, gently reminds him, "There are millions of people on earth who would think it heaven to be a clerk." The clerks in _Beetle Juice_ , meanwhile, are less content, since an eternity of office-work is their punishment for having comitted suicide. "If I knew then what I knew now" says the flame-haired, green-skinned receptionist, holding up her slit wrists, "I wouldn't have had my little 'accident'."

Even better is Hirokazu Koreeda's _Afterlife_ , which depicts a week in the tranquil routine of another of those way-stations between life and heaven, where dead people are given three days to choose their single happiest or most meaningful memory. Once they've done that, they can move on, persumably to a higher plane.

Koreeda's masterstroke is to dispense with CGI cornfields and kitsch _Sound of Music_ mountains. In fact, he dispenses with special effects altogether. _Afterlife_ takes place in a disused school. When the staff create their clients' memories for one last photo, it's with basic props such as cotton wool and electric fans. It's the idea that counts, you see, and an awareness that heaven, like Bill & Ted's hell, is all in the mind.

Chapter 4: We'll Always Have Paris

As if to atone for the absurdly warm-hued, nostalgic vision of Montmartre he gave us in _Amelie_ , Jean-Pierre Jeunet has set _Micmacs_ , his latest film, in parts of the Parisian banlieue I usually try to avoid after dark. A friend of mine lives there, and he double-locks not just his front door, but his garden gate, which is about ten feet tall, with spikes on it.

But fear not; though Jeunet wrangles corporate amorality and society's rejects into a semi-silent version of _Mission: Impossible_ , he still manages to make the suburbs of Paris, where much of the 2005 rioting took place, look, yes, absurdly warm-hued and nostalgic. Gee, you think, maybe I'll buy a nice little pad there after all.

Jeunet's vision of the banlieue almost makes Luc Besson look like Ken Loach. Besson, godfather of new French action cinema, wrote and produced the two _District 13_ films, set in the near future, in which the suburban district in question is so dangerous it has been walled off. His latest production is _From Paris with Love_ , in which John Travolta, in one of the brief intervals when he's not gunning down everyone in sight, fires a rocket-launcher on the _Peripherique_ , the ringroad which acts as a rampart between agreeable central Paris and its less agreeable surrounds.

In the same film, there's an explosive sequence in an HLM (the French equivalent of a council block, pronounced "ash-el-em"). Besson and his director, Pierre Morel, started off filming in Montfermeil, to the east of Paris, but while they were blowing up cars for the film, 10 of their production vehicles were torched for real. The film promptly decamped to a less volatile suburb. Meanwhile, Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher set their new zombie movie _La horde_ almost entirely within an HLM in Seine-Saint-Denis, with cops and gangsters beseiged by the undead while Paris centreville can be seen going up in smoke in the distance.

Not every suburb is a war zone. When I moved to France 10 years ago, I looked forward to sipping aperitifs on a terrace overlooking the Eiffel Tower, like I'd seen in movies. But I soon fond that none of my new friends could afford to live in St-Germain or Le Marais. Married couples had already upped sticks to some of the more child-friendly faubourgs. "Paris is a theme park for tourists, like Disneyland," said one chum who preferred living an hour away by train, in a house with a garden, to squeezing into a flat the size of a pantry. You can probably still buy a maids' attic room in central Paris for less than €100,000 - if you don't mind sharing a toilet.

The social gulf between the magical City of Light, still a frequent backdrop for French movies about the chattering classes, and the bleaker outlying areas, is nowhere better illustrated than in Mathieu Kassovitz's _La haine_ , when the young protagonists from the banlieue find themselves hopelessly out of their depth after they crash a gallery opening and try to chat up high-tone chicks. More recently, Michael Haneke's _Cache_ showed Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil ensconced in a nifty little house on the Rive Gauche, while the poor Algerian boy from Auteuil's past has ended up in a shabby HLM in the eastern suburb of Romainville.

It wasn't always thus. But the quartier around Canal St-Martin so vividly depicted in Marcel Carne's _Hotel du Nord_ has been gentrified and would now be hopelessly beyond the pockets of the working-class characters in that film. Even the Pigalle of Jean-Pierre Melville's _Bob le flambeur_ is steadily being invaded by the bourgeoisie, who, despite the sprinkling of sex shops and strip clubs, are unwittingly continuing the social clearances initiated in the 19th century by Baron Haussmann when he deliberately ploughed his boulevards through all the most notorious hotbeds of proletarian ferment.

If films do show picturesque working-class Paris nowadays, it's likely to be courtesy of CGI. For me, the highlight of Jeunet's _A Very Long Engagement_ was seeing Les Halles market before it got replaced by a shopping mall. And now I'm looking forward to Besson's _Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec_ \- not because of its pterodactyl (though there is that) but for the recreation of olde Paris, circa 1911.

Chapter 5: Twist the Night Away

Martin Scorsese's latest film has a twist ending. That's all I'm going to write about _Shutter Island_ , because I try to avoid spoilers... of recent releases. But I reckon older films are fair game, as are films so stupid they're impossible to spoil, which is why I'm issuing a Spoiler Warning here. If you've been away on Mars, you might want to stop reading now.

François Truffaut once said the key to a great film ending was to create a combination of Spectacle and Truth, and there was a time when audiences would have been satisfied with that. Today, though, we expect the rug to be pulled from beneath our feet as well.

Agatha Christie made a career out of wrongfooting readers; the killer in _Ten Little Indians_ was someone we'd assumed was dead, while _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ is mother to all those stories in which the hero or heroine is revealed as the guilty party. A couple of film noirs really caught me off guard in this respect (which is why I'm not revealing their titles). But the screenwriters in, say, _Perfect Stranger_ or _Righteous Kill_ are so busy strewing red herrings they forget to develop the sort of characters or situations which might help their twist make sense, while the actor's performance is dictated not by character but by the outlandish demands of the screenplay.

Alfred Hitchcock's most audacious twist came only 48 minutes into _Psycho_ , when he prematurely bumped off his heroine, but the film's final reveal that Norman Bates and his "mother" were the same person has become a cliche, since recycled in _Dressed to Kill_ , _Fight Club_ and _Identity_ , with the split personality conceit also echoing Edgar Allan Poe's story _William Wilson_. Hitch anticipated another narrative trick in _Stage Fright_ \- the Unreliable Narrator. In 1950, there was controversy about the way he flouted convention with a false flashback. Forty-five years later, there was nothing but praise for the way _The Usual Suspects_ took that idea and ran with it.

They've Been Dead All Along, a popular horror twist showcased by _Jacob's Ladder_ and _The Sixth Sense_ but prefigured by _Carnival of Souls_ , harks back to Ambrose Bierce's story _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_ , beautifully filmed in 1962 by Robert Enrico. Even more prevalent, because it straddles several genres, is the Reality is a Construct twist, pioneered not just in Philip K Dick novels such as _Ubik_ and _Time Out of Joint_ but by _The Big Con_ , David Maurer's seminal 1940 study of confidence tricksters.

Directly or indirectly, Maurer's book has provided inspiration for _The Sting_ , _The Game_ , _The Truman Show_ and most of the oeuvre of David Mamet. Dickian variations include _Dark City_ , _The Matrix_ , and any other sci-fi scenario in which all the world turns out to be a stage, and all the men and women merely players. It's a set-up which appeals to the conspiracy theorist in us all, and perhaps to the narcissist as well - yes, I _am_ the centre of the universe, and all this _is_ for my benefit.

But it's becoming harder to hoodwink audiences, who can now spot a twist from a mile away. Back in 1985, it was shocking when Jeff Bridges was unmasked as the killer in _Jagged Edge_ ; we'd assumed his innocence simply because he'd been Suspect Number One all along. Nowadays this wouldn't be enough; only seven years later, the same screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, was one-upping himself with the double-twist ending of _Basic Instinct_. Six years later, and _Wild Things_ was giving us the triple-whammy. Film-makers are now tying themselves in narrative knots trying to keep one step ahead, but odds are that seasoned filmgoers will still guess what they're up to.

But we _want_ to be fooled. Our desire for a juicy twist is surely related to the our pleasure in being misled by a magician's masterful sleight of hand. The best twists are the ones which make everything fall into place; my favourites are in _The Prestige_ and the Korean horror movie _A Tale of Two Sisters_ , and there's a doozy at the end of the otherwise unexceptional _The Book of Eli_. In retrospect it's obvious, and I should have seen it coming. But I didn't.

Chapter 6: Anime Chicks

Last week I watched films in which chicks snog each other before being hacked to pieces ( _Lesbian Vampire Killers_ ), women are kidnapped ( _The Punisher: War Zone_ ) or relegated to naked non-speaking extras ( _Valhalla Rising_ ), and Oscar-winning actresses are reduced to the slutty denizens of one man's harem ( _Nine_ ). I've also watched or rewatched a lot of Japanese _anime_ , in which girls pilot giant robots, hunt down vampires or learn ninja skills. I think you can see what I'm getting at here.

For years I avoided _anime_ because I was put off by the big saucer eyes. Then it dawned on me the faces and figures were no more stylised than in the prints of, say, Utamaro or Hokusai. It's just a way of looking at the world. The film which truly converted me, however, was Hayao Miyazaki's _Spirited Away_ , in which a ten-year-old girl has the oddest, most captivating adventure since _Alice in Wonderland_.

In the films of Studio Ghibli, co-headed by Miyazaki, girls and women aren't also-rans, as they are in 99 per cent of Hollywood output, but fly gliders, run with wolves or design seaplanes. Even ordinary schoolgirls lead lives of quiet enchantment, like 14-year-old Shizuku in Yoshifumi Kondo's sublime _Whisper of the Heart_ (written by Miyazaki) who discovers first love and a talent for storytelling in a Tokyo setting which manages to be simultaneously realistic and magical. Where were these heroines when I was growing up? I had to make do with Lady Penelope from _Thunderbirds_.

Beyond Ghibli, even male-centric _anime_ such as the junior-ninjas-in-training _Naruto_ feature gutsy girls such as pink-haired Sakura, who starts off drippy but toughens up as the series progresses. "Girls need to be strong to survive," she says.

As far as I'm aware, all the _anime_ I've ever seen have been written and directed by men. With sexism even more deeply ingrained in Japanese society than our own, it's perhaps not surprising so many female characters in adult-orientated anime are objectified. Major Kusanagi, the big-bosomed bionic heroine of Mamoru Oshii's mesmerising _Ghost in the Shell_ (one of the inspirations for _The Matrix_ and a plot I'm still unable to fathom, even after repeated viewings) is frequently nude or leaping around in a form-fitting bodysuit which makes her look naked. Maybe she is a male fetish object but hey, I dig her too.

Faye Valentine, the gambler in the sci-fi noir-western anime series _Cowboy Bebop_ (almost a dry run for Joss Whedon's _Firefly_ ) wears va-va-voom hotpants and crop-top, not the most practical gear for slumming around a spaceship, though it doesn't stop her being funny and feisty. More ambiguous is the sexual presentation of _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ 's Misato Katsuragi, a strict lady scientist with a shambolic party-animal domestic life, who frequently thrusts bosom or bottom at Shinji, the schoolboy selected to pilot a giant robot to protect the remains of civilisation from other giant robots; but these glimpses of Misato are Shinji's point of view, and she's just one of a line-up in which girl robot-pilots and female scientists outnumber their male counterparts.

In the case of Satoshi Kon's _Perfect Blue_ (J-pop noir thriller in the style of Dario Argento), the hallucinatory sexual violence is as much commentary of the objectification of young female celebrities as a part of its protoganist's mental journey. Kon evidently adjusts his style to suit the material since his follow-up, _Millennium Actress_ , couldn't have been more chaste with its tale of unrequited love played out via the history of Japanese cinema and a central character clearly inspired by the actress Setsuko Hara, who worked with Ozu, Kurosawa and Naruse, all of whose directing styles Kon subtly references.

If I had a small daughter, I would try to wean her away from Edward Cullen and Miley Cyrus and gently point her towards _anime_ series like the thrilling steampunk saga _Nadia: Secret of Blue Water_ \- inspired by Jules Verne, conceived by Miyazaki and featuring a 14-year-old lion tamer and acrobat who teams up with a young inventor in 1889 Paris to discover her true identity. And then I would quickly teach my daughter to read subtitles, so she wouldn't have to settle for the naff dubbed version. You want strong female role models? _Anime_ 's got them in spades.

Chapter 7: First Person Singular

After the discovery of an abandoned car on a ferry and a shot of its driver's corpse washed up on a beach, Ewan McGregor is present in every scene of _The Ghost_ , Roman Polanski's new film. He's the film's eyes and ears, our surrogate in the story, our entry-point into this world. The only point at which we're privy to information McGregor doesn't have is in the film's final shot.

Polanski has always excelled at this form of storytelling. _Repulsion_ , _Rosemary's Baby_ , _Chinatown_ , _The Tenant_ , _The Ninth Gate_ and _The Pianist_ are each filmed from their protagonists' point of view, so seamlessly that we might as well be inside their heads. It's as near as a film can get to the first-person voice of written fiction without resorting to voice-over narration.

Alfred Hitchcock was another master of first person. We watch _Rear Window_ from the viewpoint of James Stewart, who is himself watching from the apartment where he's laid up with a broken leg. In _Vertigo_ and _North by Northwest_ , we tag along with James Stewart or Cary Grant, just as mystified as they are, until, almost grudgingly, the director cuts to another point of view to explain what's going on. Part of the shock effect of _Psycho_ , of course, is that our point of view is abruptly yanked away when our heroine takes a shower, forcing viewers to transfer allegiance to the nearest person at hand. Who just happens to be Norman Bates.

Naturally, when we're seeing events through a protagonist's eyes we're also prone to making their mistakes. Or hearing with a protagonist's ears, in the case of surveillance expert Gene Hackman in _The Conversation_ , where like him we're nudged by sound editor Walter Murch into realising too late we've misinterpreted a vital line of dialogue.

But whether we're exploring Pandora with Sam Worthington or _Shutter Island_ with Leonardo DiCaprio, we're now so familiar with the conventions of the first person viewpoint we take it for granted; whenever there's a close-up of a character looking at something, we assume the next shot will be of whatever they're looking at, and so on. Subjective camera which extends beyond a few moments, on the other hand, can still feel gimmicky or even physically disturbing. We've got used to the camera standing in for slasher-movie psychokillers stalking their victims, a device used to such creepy effect by John Carpenter in _Halloween_. But the impressionistic blur of the first reel of _The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly_ traps the viewer in Jean-Dominique Bauby's locked-in syndrome so successfully that, at the screening I attended, one stricken filmgoer had to be helped from the cinema.

Even more troubling are the SQUID virtual reality sequences in Kathryn Bigelow's _Strange Days_ , a film which now looks startlingly prescient in view of today's voyeuristic YouTube culture. But subjective camera can also work nicely in comedy; I love the shocked reactions to the unseen Jerry Lewis in _The Nutty Professor_ as he strolls along the street after drinking his potion - all leading up to the reveal that he's not the hideous Hyde-like monster you've been expecting, but an ultra-smooth Dean Martin-esque lounge lizard in a snazzy suit.

To date, the only commercial movie to use a subjective viewpoint throughout is _Lady in the Lake_ , seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe (played by the director, Robert Montgomery, who can occasionally be glimpsed in mirrors) and in which the camera gets punched, blows cigarette smoke into a cop's face or turns to ogle a dame. "You play the starring role!" trumpeted the trailer in a foreshadowing of today's interactive video games. The only memorable sequence in _Doom_ is when the ho-hum action temporarily switches to the sort of first-person shooter on which the film was based, but so far, no-one has dared to extend this conceit to 90 minutes. Or maybe they've just concluded that gamers would rather play than watch.

But what with HD and IMAX attempting to suck the viewer into the action as never before, and everyone already having to watch blockbusters through 3-D specs, you can be sure that someone, somewhere is scheming to replace the subtle first-person techniques of Polanski and Hitchcock with SQUID headsets.

Chapter 8: Extremist Prejudice

I love films in which men wear short shirts, hack at each other with swords or say things like, "Did you know, my dear, that this golden web was spun from the beards of shellfish?" (That's an actual line from _The Ten Commandments_ , by the way.) So when I heard Alejandro Amenabar's _Agora_ was set in Alexandria circa 391AD, I went galloping off to see it, expecting dumb dialogue and peplums aplenty in a sort of arthouse variation on _Clash of the Titans_.

Oh dear. I should have known Amenabar was too smart to wallow in classical kitsch. Instead of laughing my ass off, I spent most of the film peeking through my fingers and whimpering. At one point I got so upset I accidentally stabbed myself in the thigh with a felt-tip. Because _Agora_ pressed my big phobia button. And we're not talking about piddling little phobias like my fear of snakes, which made me probably the only person in the world to squeal all the way through _Anaconda_.

No, my biggest fear is religious extremism, a phobia so deeply ingrained I can barely bring myself to write about it, in case my enemies read this and use it against me by, say, engineering a situation in which I'm cast into a snake-pit by zealots. And when combined - as it is to devastating effect in _Agora_ \- with mob violence, I'm reduced to a gibbering jelly. It makes me realise it's not so much fear of God as fear of God's more fanatical followers which has kept the masses in line through the ages.

Come to think of it, many of the horror films that have most preyed on my mind over the years have contained strong elements of religious fanaticism, and they all end badly: _Witchfinder General_ , _The Wicker Man_ , _The Devils_. It's probably also at the root of my antipathy towards _The Passion of the Christ_ and the films of Carl Dreyer, or indeed anything to do with Joan of Arc; even Luc Besson's intermittently hilarious _The Messenger_ takes a turn for the horrifying at the end when Milla Jovovich gets chargrilled by the English. Show me a stake, a pile of faggots and a bunch of characters muttering about witchcraft, and I start squirming like a fish on a hook.

But it's not just horror. No matter how many times you see _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ , it still makes you laugh, right? But I always lapse into nervous silence when the mob yells, "We've found a witch! May we burn her?" Whenever women in films are accused of sorcery ( _The Last Valley_ and _Twins of Evil_ spring to mind) it makes me antsy, probably because, had I lived in the Middle Ages and survived childbirth and the Black Death, I would have ended up collecting herbs in my dotage and been denounced as a witch for sure.

There's nothing more frightening than villains who reckon they have the high moral ground, particularly if they imagine that torturing or burning you to death would be in your own best interest. Give me run-of-the-mill megalomaniacs trying to take over the world any day. Carrie may wreak telekinetic havoc, but it's her mad mom who always freaked me out. It's not the giant bugs materialising out of _The Mist_ which terrify me half as much as Marcia Gay Harden as the hateful Mrs Carmody whipping her followers into a sacrificial frenzy. I would rather face a thousand Krakens than that rabble-rousing religious loony in _Clash of the Titans_.

Why do these depictions of full-blooded fervour make me so anxious? Probably because religious extremism is as prevalent as ever, and whittling away at the things I hold dear, such as tolerance, reason, free speech and taking the piss. Whether it's Harry Potter banned from libraries in America or elderly Iranian clerics blaming earthquakes on women who wear revealing clothing (by which he presumably means anything that isn't a burkha) it's clear this is a phobia with foundation. Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, meet Margaret White and Mrs Carmody. Before you know it know they'll be ganging up and pitching me into the crater of Eyjafjallajokull to appease the volcano gods.

Chapter 9: The Technicolor Yawn

You might not want to read this over breakfast. Not long ago, in the course of a single day, I watched four films. The first three featured projectile vomiting, while the fourth showed a woman throwing up into a toilet bowl, after which she had to fish her mobile phone out of the puke. And, as an afterthought, her chewing gum as well.

Vomit has become such a recurring motif in today's cinema that it has almost ceased to make an impact, unless it comes with a gimmick, like the turbo-powered, Pepto-Bismol-coloured puke in _Gentlemen Broncos_ , or someone being sick on a squirrel in _Hot Tub Time Machine_.

At what point did vomiting cease to be a movie taboo? The first instance of explicit vomiting I could find was in _The Wages of Fear_ (1953), though even there it was more a case of aural than visual effects when Charles Vanel overdoes the liquor at the start of his voyage into hell.

John Waters called Ingmar Bergman "the king of puke", and it's true Ingrid Thulin retches repeatedly and painfully in _The Silence_. Then again, Bergman never actually shows us what she's regurgitating, though I'm sure that if he had, cinematographer Sven Nykvist would have lit it beautifully. Waters, clearly an authority in this area, wrote in _Film Comment_ that Mai Zetterling's _Night Games_ was "one of the first Swedish films to feature incredibly realistic vomiting", though I have yet to track down a DVD to see it for myself.

In the 1970s the barf gates opened, with the pope of trash himself in the vanguard with _Pink Flamingos_. It was "the cheapest special effect ever", he told David Hochman of _Entertainment Weekly_. "A can of creamed corn, and presto!" In the same year, _The Adventures of Barry McKenzie_ introduced the world to an Australian variation, the Technicolor Yawn. Dustin Hoffman puked in _Papillon_. There's chucking up in _La grande bouffe_ , though it gets a bit lost amid all the farting and incontinence. And _The Exorcist_ put an entire generation of filmgoers off pea soup for life.

After that, it was gastrointestinal regurgitation a-go-go. The six main causes of vomiting are pregnancy, inebriation, illness (including poison-induced), gluttony, shock and demonic possession, with bulimia a recent addition. The gross-out bar was set high in the 1980s by Mr Creosote's one wafer-thin mint too many in _Monty Python's The Meaning of Life_ , challenged only by Lardass's blueberry pies in _Stand By Me_ , until _Team America: World Police_ gave us the drunken puppet puke-a-thon.

Novelty upchucking includes cherry stones ( _The Witches of Eastwick_ ), over doughnuts ( _The Fly_ ), parasitic dairy dessert ( _The Stuff_ ), gourmet nosh for aliens ( _Bad Taste_ ) and entrails ( _City of the Living Dead_ ). Honourable mentions are due to invisible Chevy Chase regurgitating a Chinese takeaway in _Memoirs of an Invisible Man_ , Bill Paxton spewing in zero gravity in _Apollo 13_ and Hugh Grant's vomit-encrusted jacket in _An Awfully Big Adventure_.

In 1998 Waters remarked to Hochman: "Vomit hasn't been done to death in the movies." But his observation no longer applies; nowadays it's rare to encounter a film in which someone doesn't blow chunks. And they nearly always make it look unfeasibly quick and easy. Thulin in _The Silence_ conveyed all the debilitating awfulness of vomiting. Admittedly, that was Bergman, who specialised in the debilitating awfulness of life in general, but more common today is the cheerful chunder of comedies such as _Date Night_ , where Steve Carell pauses to vomit almost casually before picking up where he left off. I'm afraid the next stage is inevitable: it's only a matter of time before someone throws up in 3D.*

* _ETA: No sooner written than seen._ Piranha 3D _and_ Jackass 3D _both featured 3D vomiting._

Chapter 10: Re-make/Re-model

This week it's _Bad Lieutenant_. Next week it's _Rec 2_ , _Sex and the City 2_ , _Space Chimps 2_. Heavens to Betsy, will you look at all these remakes and sequels! Are there no original ideas any more.

Maybe not. According to Christopher Booker or Ronald Tobias or William Foster-Harris, there are only seven or 20 or three basic plots, so with the number of films churned out over the past 100 years, it's no wonder they were all used up long ago. _Avatar_ was neither remake nor sequel, yet every one of its narrative developments was as familiar as an old pair of socks.

And what is a remake anyway? Should we count, say, an adaptation of a book which has been adapted before, such as Michael Winterbottom's _The Killer Inside Me_ , from a novel by Jim Thompson already filmed by Burt Kennedy in 1976? Films featuring iconic figures such as Dracula or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond aren't usually classified as remakes or sequels, even though the stories invariably trundle along preordained lines. And is Todd Solondz's _Life During Wartime_ a sequel to the same director's _Happiness_ , featuring many of the same characters? Or since the film's a bit arty and those characters are played by different set of actors, is it a Creative Experiment?

As everyone who has ever written anything knows, it's easier to rewrite or edit a text you prepared earlier, Valerie Singleton-style, than to make something up from scratch. The reason studios like remakes and sequels is obvious; the ratio of financial reward to hard slog is propitious, because the creative heavy lifting has already been done.

But sequels and remakes wouldn't be made if we didn't pay to see them. For all the griping about the lack of originality, a lot of people like to stick with imaginary worlds they know, rather than strike out into risky new territory. I'm always hearing people complain about the glut of sequels and remakes and then, in the next breath, start salivating with excitement over the prospect of _The Green Hornet_ or the new _Tron_. I'm just as bad; I dismissed the _Nightmare on Elm Street_ remake as a waste of time, but duly trotted off to see it anyway, just to gauge for myself exactly how _much_ of a waste of time it was. Yet everyone grumbles when Ridley Scott tries to do something a bit different with his _Robin Hood_ , instead of simply updating the Errol Flynn romp.

We should never forget that some films now regarded as classics - _The Wizard of Oz_ , _The Maltese Falcon_ , _Imitation of Life_ \- were themselves remakes. I often find sequels ( _Ghostbusters II_ , _The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Iron Man 2_ ) more fun than their originals, perhaps because neither film-makers nor I have overinflated expectations. No-one complains if a famous book or play is filmed repeatedly; two new versions of _The Three Musketeers_ and several _Hamlets_ are being prepped even as we speak. So why whinge when the source material is another movie? Agreed, many of the current rash of horror remakes are pointless, but no more so than many non-remakes, and I'm prepared to put up with them if it means an occasional new-model _Dawn of the Dead_ or _The Crazies_.

Fact is, the best remakes and sequels aren't remakes or sequels at all. John Carpenter's _The Thing_ isn't so much a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic as a return to elements in the novella which never made it into the Nyby/Hawks film. _Batman Returns_ , as far as I'm concerned, stands on its own. Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrara's updates of Jack Finney's _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ each wrung its own contemporary twist on Don Siegel's 1956 film - though maybe we'll draw a veil over Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2007 version, in which it wasn't always easy distinguishing Nicole Kidman from the aliens.

Malcontents are already groaning at news that George Romero is in negotiations to direct a remake of Dario Argento's giallo classic _Deep Red_ , but I say bring it on. If it's half as bonkers as Werner Herzog's _Bad Lieutenant_ , which bears as much resemblance to Abel Ferrara's original as _Winnie-the-Pooh_ does to _Grizzly Man_ , then we're in for a treat.

Chapter 11: Subtitle Envy

In _The Brothers Bloom_ , writer-director Rian Johnson bends over backwards to let us know how literary he is; not just with that Joycean title, but with references to Melville (Herman, not Jean-Pierre, alas) and Greek mythology. And then there are the chapter headings, as in "Bloom meets Penelope", preceding a sequence in which, yes, Bloom meets Penelope. Hey, why just show when you can show _and_ tell?

Melville's satirical allegory _The Confidence Man_ , acknowledged by Johnson as an inspiration for his movie, contains some amusingly prolix chapter headings, though mercifully Johnson is content to play with snappier captions such as "The Set-Up", perhaps in deference to that other conman tale _The Sting_ , in which the viewer is guided through each stage of the elaborate scam by headings such as "The Wire" or "The Shut-Out".

Chapter headings are a sign of directors who want to be taken seriously as auteurs - if not authors, such is their evident love of the printed word. I wonder if it's not a sort of subtitle envy. It's well known that subtitles are a signifier of an art movie in the English-speaking world, so for the Anglophone film-maker, who can't go that extra mile without making his film in Aramaic, adding some bits of writing is a surefire way of positioning one's film as arthouse nutrition rather than multiplex popcorn. Though I daresay it makes life easier for the planners of DVD menus as well.

Only last year, as if to compensate for the absence of subtitles, two eccentric Danish auteurs, Lars von Trier and Nicolas Winding Refn, both inserted chapter headings into their English-language films. The headings became increasingly ominous as the stories turned darker. You only have to read the words "Part V - Hell" to sense events in _Valhalla Rising_ are about to take a downward turn. As for _Antichrist_ 's "Chapter 4 - The Three Beggars", I haven't been so dismayed by a heading since the words "Circle of Shit" came up midway through Pasolini's _Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom_.

It's also a smart way for film-makers to align themselves with revered artists such as Jean-Luc Godard, whose _Vivre sa vie_ is a "film en douze tableaux". Other illustrious practitioners were Lindsay Anderson, who offers ironic counterpoint to _If..._ with captions such as "Crusaders", and carves up the nation into "West," "North" and "South" in _O Lucky Man!_ And Stanley Kubrick must have found chapter divisions a useful aid in reducing Thackeray's _The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq_ to plain old _Barry Lyndon_ , since he recycled the headings conceit in _The Shining_.

The only old Hollywood classic I could find with chapter headings was _Meet Me in St Louis_ , which divides into seasonal segments. I'm surprised I couldn't track down more examples, but they're a regular fixture of American indie productions nowadays. Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz and Quentin Tarantino have all used them more than once.

Sometimes, though, they're a bit of a cheat. Much as I enjoyed _Inglourious Basterds_ , I did wonder whether its division into chapters such as "Operation Kino" and "Revenge of the Giant Face" was just a way for Tarantino to paper over the fact that what he'd written wasn't so much a flowing narrative as a series of tenuously connected sketches strung together.

Chapter 12: Woody and His Women

Another year, another Woody Allen film. _Whatever Works_ is his 39th full-length feature. The 40th ( _You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger_ ) was screened a this year's Cannes festival, and he's already preparing his 41st. By the standards of modern Hollywood, that's a prodigious work rate, and not bad for a 74 year old.

In France, where The Woodster is still worshipped as a god, you could practically set your watch by the annual Allen release. No longer in the UK, though, where _Hollywood Ending_ and _Scoop_ went straight to DVD, and distributors are no longer as eager to snap up his offerings as they used to be. It's not exactly a minority view that, despite an occasional "return to form" such as _Vicki Cristina Barcelona_ , the quality of his work has plummeted since the early 1990s.

Of course this fall-off could be due to all but a very few film directors having shelf-lives, and Allen, like Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, may well have come to the end of his. On the other hand, his decline dates pretty obviously from the bust-up with Mia Farrow in 1992. Allen has always worked closely with the women in his life: Louise Lasser, his second wife, in the second half of the 1960s, Diane Keaton in the 1970s and Farrow in the 1980s. Could it be that his current wife, Soon-Yi Previn, just isn't cutting it as a muse?

I don't presume to know anything about Mr and Mrs Allen's private life and it's none of my business anyway. My only sighting of her was in _Wild Man Blues_ , Barbara Kopple's 1997 documentary about Allen, after which a male friend of mine observed that she was the one who "wore the trousers in that relationship." Unlike her predecessors, of course, she isn't an actress, so can hardly be expected to have a public influence on her husband's output, unless the recurring age discrepancy between his leading men and women (there's a 40 year gap between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in _Whatever Works_ ) is a reflection of the 38 year gap between the film-maker and his wife.

But what I do know is that in the 1970s and 1980s, Allen's films featured some of the funniest, most complicated and fully-rounded women's roles in modern cinema. _Annie Hall_ may have been a flake, but she was a magnificent, multi-faceted flake. One can't imagine the role being played by anyone but Keaton, who was palpably as vital to the film's genesis as the writing and directing. Farrow, who until she became a regular fixture in Allen's films was feted for her performance in _Rosemary's Baby_ and little else, blossomed into an uncommonly versatile actress as part of Allen's repertory cast in that incredible decade-long run which included _Broadway Danny Rose_ , _The Purple Rose of Cairo_ and _Hannah and Her Sisters_.

The decline in Allen's oeuvre also coincides with a marked deterioration in the depth of his female characters, who since 1994 have largely been a parade of dumb broads, grasping airheads and vulgar social climbers who owe whatever scant charm they may have to the personalities of the actresses incarnating them, but none whatsoever to the writing, which is frequently cruel and ungenerous. Frenchy (Tracy Ullman) in _Small Time Crooks_ is an ex-showgirl whose ignorance and crass attempts to better herself provide the film with much of its humour, but also saddle it with a sour and misogynistic tone. _Match Point_ 's Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) morphs from a cartoon femme fatale into a needy pain the neck, purely to service the ludicrous demands of the plot. The women in _Cassandra's Dream_ get expensive handbags as presents, or go shopping.

It's as though Allen's attitude to women has soured, or maybe he has simply lost interest in his female characters as people, so that nowadays they're little more than decorative pawns. It's true this is also the case with most Hollywood movies today, but compare these crude caricatures to Keaton in _Annie Hall_ , or Mariel Hemingway in _Manhattan_ , or Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest in _Hannah and Her Sisters_ , or Judy Davis in _Husbands and Wives_ , and you begin to get an idea of what we, along with Allen, have lost.

Chapter 13: Shock Treatment

The other day, midway through _Went the Day Well?_ , I felt an unfamiliar emotion stirring in my breast. This slice of wartime propaganda from Ealing, directed by the extraordinary Alberto Cavalcanti and adapted from a short story by Graham Greene, is very different from the comedies for which the studio is best known, though our introduction to the quaint English village of Bramley End, where it takes place, makes us think we're in store for an everyday story of country folk. But the emotion I felt wasn't amusement; it was shock. To be precise, I was shocked by the violence.

How can this be? How come I was shocked by a black and white film made in 1942, when I can sit through the likes of _Antichrist_ or _Martyrs_ without flinching? (Well, maybe a bit of squirming here and there, but no actual palpitations.) Those of you who have seen Cavalcanti's film will recall that Bramley End is infiltrated by German invaders, and that some of those loveable old Ealing characters - the vicar, for example - end up dying horribly, or doing horrible things to the invaders in their turn. Axes, bayonets and, oh my God, the postmistress! It's like _Passport to Pimlico_ reworked by Quentin Tarantino. And I realised it has been a long time since I last felt upset by the death of movie characters the way I was upset by the fate of some of those Bramley Enders.

The films which disturb us most are rarely the ones we'd predict, which makes a mockery out of well-meaning attempts to police children's viewing. I'll wager more young minds have been traumatised by _The Wizard of Oz_ or _Chitty Chitty Bang Bang_ than by _Dracula_ or _Frankenstein_. And I bet I wasn't the only kiddy to have nightmares after an accidental dose of British kitchen sink; I still shudder at the memory of Richard Harris crushing that spider in _This Sporting Life_.

Evidently, our susceptibility to shock is all to do with context and expectations. When I think back to the moments that upset me, they're rarely from horror films, where at least we're primed to expect some sort of unpleasantness and indeed would be within our rights to complain if it wasn't delivered. The moments that get to me, the ones that make me think, "Oh, I wish I could turn back time and NOT have seen that," are invariably smuggled past my defences under the cover of respectable entertainment, and thus catch me unawares.

In the 1970s, a decade in which I happily sat through everything David Cronenberg or George Romero or William Friedkin could throw at me, all the most shocking moments came out of left field: the slicing of the nose in _Chinatown_ , the twitching sheep-boy from _O Lucky Man!_ and, in _The Long Goodbye_ , gangster Marty Augustine disfiguring his girlfriend without warning, and for no other reason than to show Philip Marlowe what he was capable of. "Now _that's_ someone I love. And _you_ I don't even like!"

When Jim Brown bangs two girls' heads together in _Fingers_ it left me feeling ill and, 27 years later, pathetically grateful that Jacques Audiard left the incident out of his French remake, _The Beat That My Heart Skipped_. And in _The Silent Partner_ , what creepy psychopath Christopher Plummer does with a girl and a fishtank is so disturbing you'll never be able to look at _The Sound of Music_ in quite the same way again.

A perennial criticism of violence in films is that it's liable to desensitize the viewer. To which I say, thank God. _Of course_ we're desensitized! It's a defence mechanism. Can you imagine how inconvenient it would be for horror fans if we fainted away each time a head exploded? Forty years of watching the goriest, most violent movies, and I've passed out only twice, which I think, all things considered, is a pretty good record. I like film violence; it's one of those things the movies do well. But now that every routine action movie features impalings and decapitations and a body count in the zillions, there's no left field left for the violence to come out of. I can't help feeling sorry the currency has been devalued. I miss being shocked.

Chapter 14: Monster Mash-up

In _Splice_ there are a couple of genetically engineered creatures called Fred and Ginger which look a bit like penises. I daresay if they were chasing you down a dark alley it might be alarming, but in appearance they're not so much frightening as a bit yucky. For something to truly give you the creeps, I reckon, it needs to have some hint of human physiognomy. There's another creature in _Splice_ like that. Her name is Dren (try spelling it backwards) and she's a lot more disturbing than the penises. Her face and torso are more than vaguely human, even aesthetically beautiful, but she also has legs like a wading bird, and a tail, and that's just not _right_.

A lot of movie monsters are simply giant lizards or insects or arachnids, often the results of atomic tinkering, like _Godzilla_ or _Mothra_ or the ants in _Them!_ You would have good reason to avoid them - they'd probably try to squash or eat you - but they don't make your flesh crawl. There's something more fundamentally upsetting about the dog with the human face in the 1978 remake of _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ (1978), or the fly with the tiny human head screaming "Help meee!" in _The Fly_ (1958) or Seth Brundle, in the 1986 remake, fusing with a musca domestica at a molecular-genetic level.

These horrific mash-ups remind me of Max Ernst's surreal collage novel _Une semaine de bonté_ , in which stalking human figures have birds' heads or bats' wings. And the primal programming evidently harks way back to before the dawn of cinema, because the apocalyptic visions of Bosch and Breugel were teeming with fish-faced demons and bird-headed imps. Animal-human hybrids are nothing less than visions of hell.

The mother of all genetic splicing movies is _The Island of Lost Souls_ , based on HG Wells' _The Island of Dr Moreau_ , adapted several times for the cinema but never as nightmarishly as in 1932. Charles Laughton, simultanously underplaying and overacting in one of his most gloriously arrogant performances, fuses man and animal in The House of Pain to create a race of hairy hybrids ("Strange-looking natives you have here," remarks the unsuspecting hero) and says things like, "Do you know what it means to feel like God?", echoing Baron Frankenstein's, "Now I know what it feels like to be God!"

Such presumptuousness, even on the part of a fictional mad scientist, was enough to get the film frowned on in religious circles, which furthermore would have been unlikely to look kindly on suggestions that the boundary between man and animal was so flimsy. _The Island of Lost Souls_ was banned in the UK for 25 years on the grounds that it was against nature, to which Elsa Lanchester (Laughton's wife) riposted, "Of course it's against nature. So's Mickey Mouse." The joke's on her, though, since I've always found Mickey Mouse a bit creepy too. It's a mouse's head on a humanoid body, for Christ's sake! Wearing white gloves!

Talking of Mauschwitz (a popular derogatory nickname for Disney) mad genetic science can also prompt uncomfortable thoughts of Nazi-style eugenics. Man-made monsters and their creators invariably seem obsessed with sex as well, which raises the spectre of that classic Hollywood bugbear, miscegenation. Dr Moreau is indecently eager to see if his panther-woman Lota can mate with a human male. Poor Lota doesn't get to first base, though her feline origins are betrayed only by long fingernails which, ironically, wouldn't look out of place among the manicured claws in _Showgirls_.

The public's Barnum and Bailey-esque appetite for surgically engineered freaks of nature is still being fed. Latest exhibit is _The Human Centipede_ , in which a mad surgeon splices together the gastric systems of three luckless victims, though the centipede element is more metaphorical than arthropod. But the spectre _Splice_ evokes for me - more than eugenics, playing God or cruelty to human-animal hybrids - is that of cosmetic surgery. From certain angles, Dren's wide-set eyes are chillingly reminiscent of certain female actors who have subjected themselves to one facelift too many. Who needs Dr Moreau to rustle up a monster when women are transforming themselves into unnatural-looking creatures of their own free will?

Chapter 15: Cat Chaser

So you think women and ethnic minorites get a raw deal in the movies? That's nothing compared to how cinema discriminates against cats. Dogs are waggy-tailed good guys who save tots from drowning; cats are stuck-up, psychotic and about as trustworthy as a femme fatale in a 1940s film noir. _Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore_ is only the latest example of Hollywood's insidious anti-feline agenda. It's a slight advance on the first _Cats & Dogs_ film in that, this time, not _all_ the cats are evil. But the villain who wants to take over the world is a cat, and the psycho in Hannibal Lecter restraints is a cat. Film-makers love dogs, we all know that. But what have they got against cats?

It's true there's a sprinkling of films in which cats play heroic roles, but you have to forage hard for them. Courageous cats confront _The Mummy_ , save Drew Barrymore from a troll in _Cat's Eye_ , or stake out succubus Alice Krige in _Sleepwalkers_. They act cute and canny in _That Darn Cat!_ and _The Aristocats_ , but Disney undercuts its pro-pussy stance with those mean Siamese in _Lady and the Tramp_ and Lucifer in _Cinderella_ , one of countless kiddy-films in which rodents are depicted as preferable to cats. It's perfectly natural, not to mention hygienic in a household with a child in it, that Snowbell should want to eat _Stuart Little_ , but does he get any thanks for it? Does he heck.

Elsewhere, cats are pressganged into service as anti-social signifiers: one kitten is cute, but a whole bunch of them is mad Michel Simon in _L'Atalante_ or Ron Perlman in _Hellboy_. Lone computer nerd Sandra Bullock has just a cat for company in _The Net_ , rogue bomber Sylvester Stallone identifies with his stray tom in _The Specialist_ , while Elliot Gould's cat in _The Long Goodbye_ summarily abandons him when he fails to serve the right moggynosh.

But more often than not, cats are squarely on the side of the bad guys. Who on earth decreed that fluffy white cats should be the ultimate incarnation of evil? There's an especially malicious one with flashing eyes in the bonkers Japanese horror movie _Hausu_. Cats nestle in the laps of Cardinal Richelieu in _The Three Musketeers_ (1948) or Blofeld in the Bond movies, though being a villain's pet does have its drawbacks; the cat in _You Only Live Twice_ is understandably unhappy when the underground HQ is exploding around him, and tries to squirm out of Donald Pleasence's arms.

When cats aren't being evil, they're victims. All around the world, and in independent sectors beyond the reach of the American Humane Society, felines are routinely subjected to the sort of horrible abuse no-one would dream of dishing out to dogs: crushed by Donald Sutherland's head in _Novecento_ , wrapped in cling-film in _Bad Boy Bubby_ , drowned in _Gummo_ , hanged in _A Short Film About Killing_ , shot in _Before the Rain_ , stabbed with pruning shears in _Dogtooth_.

And don't get me started on the mad scientists. In _The Fly_ (1958) a cat gets put through the teleportation machine and ends up as a disembodied miaow, while in _Re-animator_ , Jeffrey Combs reanimates a moggy with the snarky remark, "Don't expect it to tango, it has a broken back." In this context, one has nothing but sympathy for _The Incredible Shrinking Man_ 's cat when it tries to eat him, while in _Alien_ , you might almost suspect Jonesy of being in cahoots with the monster, the way crew members go wandering off to find him and end up impaled or cocooned. If it had been a dog on the Nostromo, you can be sure it would have barked at the alien and saved everyone's lives.

I suspect cats, like women and ethnic minorities, pose a threat to the complacency of the dog-loving white male status-quo that makes up the greater part of the film-making community. So they have to be put in their place. We can't have them being uppity, because then - according to _Cats & Dogs_ \- they'd try to rule the world. Which just goes to show how little film-makers know. Because cats rule the world already, and without even trying.

Chapter 16: Parodies Lost

Split-screen, saturated colour, ropey back projection, gratuitous zooms: _Black Dynamite_ is so on the money you could almost be watching genuine 1970s Blaxploitation instead of a 2009 spoof, custom-made to mimic the real McCoy. Michael Jai White has his martial moves down pat, and there's so much nunchuck-wielding the Trevelyan-era BBFC would probably have had to slash at least a third of the running-time. It's clearly been put together with care and affection. So why does watching it feel like such a pointless exercise.

Genres go in cycles, but the cycles invariably end in farce as the conventions become familiar to audiences and are replayed to comic effect. For years the spoof industry ambled along, an irreverent low-budget shadow of the mainstream cinema it was sending up, until the 1980s, when _Airplane!_ and _The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!_ cemented the spoof as a bona fide comic subgenre, and parody went into overdrive. Not coincidentally, this was around the time that post-moderism invaded popular culture and cinema began to eat itself, not just in reference-packed comedies like _Wayne's World_ , but in action films like _The Last Action Hero_ (so homage-happy it even packs in a nod to Kurosawa's _High and Low_ , which no-one but hardcore film buffs and know-it-all critics are likely to clock) or auteur offerings like _Wild at Heart_ , with its allusions to _Weekend_ , _Yojimbo_ and _The Wizard of Oz_.

Then there were the parodies of the parodies. The Austin Powers films satirise the 1960s spy genre, which was already a spoof of Cold War espionage movies. _Scary Movie_ sends up _Scream_ , which was already a po-mo riff on slasher films. But the best parodies are virtual _Gesamtkunstwerks_ of the genres they're spoofing: _Dance of the Vampires_ , _Young Frankenstein_ and _Galaxy Quest_ subvert the cliches, but have structures and characters strong enough to enable them to stand proudly as films in their own right. But _Date Movie_ , _Disaster Movie_ , _Dance Movie_ and a bunch of other spoofs which don't have "movie" in the title ( _Vampires Suck_ is currently looming on the horizon) can't even be bothered to pay homage to genre conventions, let alone subvert them.

Instead, they string together characters, scenes and catchphrases from any old blockbuster, and then add a sprinkling of lookalikes to namecheck whichever celebrities have been popping up in the gossip columns. Nor do they confine themselves to whichever genre they're purporting to spoof. _Scary Movie_ contains references to _The Matrix_ and _The Usual Suspects_ , while _Date Movie_ tips its hat to _Revenge of the Sith_ and _Kill Bill_. Whenever gags fall flat (which they invariably do) the film-makers simply fall back on those good old standbys of having someone break wind or get kicked in the gonads.

I'd like to show, say, _Epic Movie_ to an audience made up of people who hadn't watched a film for 20 years and see what they made of it. Would it make any sense at all if you hadn't seen the movies in question? Might it not come across as some surreal Bunuelesque exercise in non-sequitur? In some ways, my hypothetical audience would be getting the better end of the deal, since, occasionally, the throwaway parodies of _Da Vinci Code_ (David Carradine in a leopardskin thong), _The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe_ (Jennifer Coolidge as "The White Bitch") and _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ (Crispin Glover's Willy Wonka is _way_ creepier than Depp's) are arguably more diverting than the overinflated originals.

_Team America: World Police_ stuck it so comprehensively to the action movie you'd have thought no-one would dare put grief-stricken shouting at the sky or training montages on screen ever again, yet here are _The A-Team_ , _The Expendables_ and _Salt_ , recycling the exact same explosions and death-defying feats. But then today's audiences are so well versed in cliches they feel cheated when they're not all present and correct - witness the outrage in some quarters when the Coen brothers failed to provide a traditional shoot-out at the climax of _No Country for Old Men_. No thriller can be without its risible twist, no slasher movie without its indestructible psycho. So why bother with spoofs at all when so many of the originals are already parodies of their genres?

Chapter 17: Close-Up and Personal

Towards the end of _The Leopard_ , there's a 20 second close-up in which Burt Lancaster stares into a mirror and a tear runs down his cheek. And we feel his pain. It's of a different order to the close-ups in _The Expendables_ , where the beaten-up mugs of Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke have evidently known pain, but we don't share it. I, at any rate, was more preoccupied with trying to chart the strange, rugged topography of their faces.

Let us put aside for now the distinctions between medium close-up, close-up and extreme close-up, though I did recently stumble across the pleasing information that, in French, the medium shot is also known as the "Plan Americain" - so-called because in westerns it allows us to see the actor's gun in his holster - and that the extreme close-up is sometimes referred to as the "Cadrage Sergio Leone," in homage to the director who made an artform out of squinty eyes in a scope format. For the purposes of this article, "close-up" is a shot in which we can read the facial expression.

Everyone can cite, "All right Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," but I've always found it's Erich Von Stroheim, rather than Gloria Swanson, who gives the end of _Sunset Boulevard_ its emotional kick; her face screams madness, and not much else, whereas his is tinged with sadness, solicitude and an odd sort of pride. Likewise, many of the most famous close-ups are cappers at the film's end, where a longish take allows an actor to run the gamut of conflicting emotions - what I call the Sublime Extended Facial Shot - with an expression sometimes running counter to events to extract a smidgeon of triumph out of a seemingly hopeless situation.

I'm thinking of Barbara Stanwyck tearily watching her daughter's wedding through the window in _Stella Dallas_ , but then finding a spring in her step and a smile as she walks away, as if to say, "My work here is done." Or _The Long Good Friday_ as Bob Hoskins is chauffeured away to his doom, the camera staying on him long enough to register fear, anger, resignation and - the masterstroke - amusement. Or Mia Farrow, betrayed by her hero in _The Purple Rose of Cairo_ , expressing despair, helplessness, self-pity but finally joy as she watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing cheek to cheek.

Rouben Mamoulian reportedly told Greta Garbo to "think nothing" for her final close-up on the ship's prow in _Queen Christina_ , allowing audiences to project their feelings on to hers. We rarely see faces so close to us in everyday life, unless in moments of passion or on overcrowded trains. That sort of forced proximity can seem intrusive in the cinema as well; in _The Passion of Joan of Arc_ , the unrelenting close-ups of Maria Falconetti strike me not just voyeuristic, but verging on the sadistic.

But this is one of those areas in which cinema has the edge over theatre or literature; close-ups without dialogue are a demonstration of the maxim, "Show, don't tell". The fusillade at the end of _Bonnie and Clyde_ wouldn't have half the impact without that last shot of Faye Dunaway conveying a fleeting Liebestod of emotion. It's redundant for Ray Liotta's voice-over to tell us Robert De Niro has decided to whack his friends in _Goodfellas_ ; we've already seen it in his face as he stands at the bar.

There are few things animated films can't do, but I'm not sure animated characters could pull off nuances of expression in the way live actors can. And I fear for the future of close-ups with the proliferation of cosmetic surgery among actors of a certain age, which leaves one detecting traces of work instead of traces of feeling. The preternatural smoothness of Nicole Kidman's face nowadays makes you wonder if she retains the capacity to pull off a tour de force like her extraordinary two minute close-up in _Birth_. I've studied that shot many times, but it's such a cocktail of different emotions it defies verbal analysis. Is it all in the eyes, or are peripheral muscles involved? And will Botox end up freezing everyone's faces into emotionless masks?

Chapter 18: Elevator! Don't Cut Off My Head

All I know about _Devil_ is that it's about five people trapped in a lift, and one of them is, yes, the Devil. That alone makes me want to go and see it, though with M Night Shymalan getting a story credit one fears there will be a preposterous narrative twist tacked on, as if being stuck in an elevator with the Devil weren't enough. Place your bets. Perhaps all the characters are already dead and the lift is really an expressway to hell, like the ones in _Angel Heart_ and _The Vault of Horror_?

The classic template for low-budget movies, particularly from first-time directors, is a bunch of characters talking in a room; the results can be as diametrically different as, for example, _Sex, Lies, and Videotape_ and _Reservoir Dogs_. A bunch of characters trapped in a lift would be the reductio ad absurdum of this formula, though to my knowledge no mainstream full-length feature has ever been set _entirely_ in an elevator. Stuck-in-a-lift scenes are routinely interspersed with flashbacks, extra-lift activity or CCTV, as if film-makers fear audiences would go stir-crazy if they were trapped in a _huis clos_ for an unbroken 90 minutes.

Lifts feature in thousands of films, but it's the ones where things go horribly wrong that stick in our memories. Conveniently for horror movies or thrillers, elevators tap into two common phobias (fear of heights and fear of enclosed spaces) and then add the clincher - the guillotine effect. Plunging counterweights, whiplash cables or clamplike sliding doors are forever conspiring to slice lift passengers in half ( _Damien: Omen II_ was a pioneer in this regard) or sever heads ( _Final Destination 2_ , _Profondo Rosso_ , _De Lift_ and its Hollywood remake, _Down_ ) or limbs, as in _Total Recall_ or _Blackout_ , in which one of three people trapped in the lift turns out to be not the Devil, but a sadistic psychokiller.

Lifts help killers corner their victims in _Dressed to Kill_ or _The Untouchables_ , or provide opportunities for mad bombers to hold passengers to ransom; the first half hour of _Speed_ , set in and around an elevator, is arguably more viscerally thrilling than anything involving the 50 mph bus later on. Lifts are like fish-tanks, to be pumped full of water, like the one in the Rachel Nichols-in-peril movie _P2_ , or they can gush tsunamis of blood, like the hotel elevator in _The Shining_.

Or they can go into free-fall; _Earthquake_ is chiefly remembered in my house for one of the sloppiest special effects in cinema history - plummeting lift passengers screaming in unison while someone chucks red paint at the lens. Factor in the possibility of being impaled (like Emilio Estevez in _Mission: Impossible_ ) and you have the ultimate death-trap, the perfect multiple-jeopardy mechanism, and barely bigger than a coffin.

But movies rarely feature the things I hate most about lifts: horrible elevator muzak (never a cool Miles Davis soundtrack, like the one in _Lift to the Scaffold_ ) or the way that, when you're in a hurry, someone has pushed all the buttons so the damn thing stops at every floor. Nor are people trapped in movie elevators ever crammed shoulder to shoulder; there's always enough space for them to squint at each other suspiciously or have tantrums or knife fights. With claustrophobia and acrophobia already on the menu, perhaps it would be over-egging the pudding to add demophobia to the mix as well. And there are invariably trapdoors in floors and ceilings, enabling people to clamber out into the shaft and dangle from girders, which is one of the absolute requirements of a lift movie.

The lift in my block of flats is such an antique it has a wire grille and doors that open outwards, like the ones in _Lady in a Cage_ , enabling me to play pranks on visitors by pretending to be the little boy ghost from _Grudge_ and peering in at them as they trundle slowly past. Sometimes, when the lightbulb needs replacing, you have to ride up and down in the dark, which is when my thoughts return to that terrifying haunted lift scene from _The Eye_. It's at times like this that I've been known to take the stairs.

Chapter 19: Credit Rating

In _Enter the Void_ , Gaspard Noe shows us things we've never seen before, beginning with opening credits of a rare intensity: big throbbing letters in English and Japanese, pulsating so rapidly they're almost reduced to a stream of subliminal imagery. It's dazzlingly modern and in-your-face, even though it's essentially just a bunch of different typefaces. Noe has taken an intrinsically old-fashioned approach to credits and given it the ultimate makeover.

A lot of today's movies (particularly the more self-important "event" releases) dispense with opening credits altogether, which is a shame, because there's nothing like an exhilarating launchpad to give a film lift-off. Until the 1950s, the usual method was to present names and titles on cards, or against an unmoving backdrop, though prestige productions sometimes tinkered with the format; the titles of _Gone With the Wind_ , for example, play out over tranquil vistas of fields, flowers and cotton-picking slaves. More common were credits like the ones in _Casablanca_ , rolling out against a static map of Africa.

It was Otto Preminger who changed things by hiring Saul Bass to jiff up the credits of _Carmen Jones_ in 1954 with an animated flaming rose. The following year, Bass's credit sequence for _The Man with the Golden Arm_ played with a strong graphic image - white lines rearranging themselves into a junkie's twisted arm - which was carried over into the film's publicity, prefiguring the corporate identity approach of modern film advertising in which everything from _Twilight_ to _The A-Team_ has its own special logo.

Bass, who approached his commissions in the spirit of a problem-solving graphic designer, continued to take his lines for a walk for Alfred Hitchcock at the starts of _North by Northwest_ and _Psycho_ , with the lines morphing into a vortex of whirling spirals in the sublime opening credits of _Vertigo_. Bass's ascetic stretegy fell out of favour in the 1960s, when animated sequences went a bit bananas. The witty animation of _The Pink Panther_ and Maurice Binder's writhing Bond girls were in the vanguard of a riot of brashly exciting opening sequences, often virtually mini-films in their own right.

My favourite credits of the 1960s include the eight-minute music-free sequence at the start of _Once Upon a Time in the West_ , which riffs on exaggerated sound effects and fun-with-typography at a railroad stakeout, and Richard Williams's animated _Punch_ cartoons, fusing historical exposition and political satire with breathtaking economy for Tony Richardson's underrated _The Charge of the Light Brigade_ (1968). And Binder fans should check out his less familiar but no less terrific opening credits for _Billion Dollar Brain_ , set to Richard Rodney Bennet's pulse-quickening theme music. Jean-Luc Godard, meanwhile, had the opening credits to _Le mépris_ read out loud (some say the voice is Godard's own, though I have been unable to find conformation of this), a ploy repeated by Francois Truffaut in _Fahrenheit 451_ but which never caught on in the mainstream, making it still seem pretty avant-garde today.

Bass, like that other Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann, made a comeback courtesy of the 1970s Movie Brats, and went out with a bang - his last completed credits sequence (with his wife Elaine) was Robert de Niro blasted by car bomb through a raging inferno of Las Vegas neon at the start of _Casino_. "When his work comes on the screen," said Scorsese, "the movie itself truly begins." Or ends, he might have added, since the sequence is so stunning it casts the rest of the film into the shade. The same goes for _Watchmen_ 's history of modern America with added superheroes, and _Zombieland_ 's super-slo-mo list of survival rules.

Kyle Cooper's innovatory titles for Se7en sparked a trend for scritchy-scratchy credits which look as though they were cobbled together by maniacs with OCD (my favourite rip-off of this technique is _The House on Haunted Hill_ remake). Cooper is also at the forefront of titles trends such as the story-so-far credits of the franchise sequel ( _Spider-Man 3_ , lated copied by _The Final Destination_ ). Also notable is Brian De Palma semi-spoilering half the plot of _Mission: Impossible_ in the opening credits, a trick repeated in the trailer for _Femme Fatale_ , but hailed as radical only when Godard recycled the idea in his trailer for _Film Socialisme_.

So what's next for opening credits? Will _Enter the Void_ trigger a trend for flashing typography? Will Woody Allen continue to use his trademark plain Windsor font? And is the Pope Catholic?

Chapter 20: Follow the Money

Topical or what? _Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps_ opened the day after rogue trader Jerome Kerviel was jailed for three years and ordered to pay €4.9 billion in damages for almost bringing down my old French bank, _Societe Generale_. But about 20 minutes into Oliver Stone's laboriously self-important drama, I realised I'd stopped caring what Shia LaBeouf and Michael Douglas were up to, mainly because I was distracted by their swanky apartments with panoramic views of a Manhattan lit by the rich glow of permanent Magic Hour. Gee, I thought, why don't I live in a flat like that?

And then I remembered, oh yes, it's because whenever I hear the words insider trading, subprimes or hedge funds, my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about hats, or miniature dachsunds. And that's the problem with money in the movies. Each time you look forward to being privy to the inner workings of the global roulette which is sending all our lives into a tailspin, the system pulls off a dazzling feat of prestidigitation and shazzam! you start admiring Carey Mulligan's earrings instead.

Money can't be _that_ hard to understand; some of the dimmest people I've ever met have been accountants or merchant bankers, but I suppose it's not surprising that cinema colludes in the great game of economic smoke and mirrors, given the budget of your average Hollywood blockbuster nowadays could probably bankroll a small third world country. It seems to me the main difficulty for films about money is no-one can decide what genre they should belong to. Yes, there are documentaries such as _Capitalism: A Love Story_ , or _Cleveland Versus Wall Street_ , but they're designed to be pedagogical without being particularly illuminating.

Alan J Pakula probably had the right idea with _Rollover_ , a 1981 conspiracy thriller in the same vein as his _The Parallax View_ , which ends in scenes of social disorder which one suspects will soon be played out for real on the world stage. I still couldn't tell you what the people shouting into phones were shouting _about_ (shouting into phones is a recurring motif of the fiscal pic) but the moment when Kris Kristofferson surveys a roomful of the waltzing wealthy and says, "I was just thinking about the illusion of safety" is far more chilling than Stone's diamond-encrusted charity banquet set to the hurdy-gurdy theme from _Carousel_.

Tom Tykwer's _The International_ was a more recent attempt at the financial conspiracy thriller, inspired by the dodgy exploits of a real bank, though Clive Owen's attempts to bring down it down are undermined by audience awareness that financial institutions don't actually _need_ to dabble in arms dealing, terrorism and murder to be thoroughly evil. The story of Kerviel's predecessor, Nick Leeson, should have been a gift to film-makers, but _Rogue Trader_ ended up as little more than a duff biopic essayed with that clunky literalness which invariably characterises British attempts to dramatise sexy headlines. I'll wager economic dunces like me learnt more about finance from _It's a Wonderful Life_ or _Trading Places_. "Buy low, sell high!" Isn't that all we need to know?

Perhaps black comedy would be a more pertinent genre - God knows the story of Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi schemes has a Pythonesque surrealism. Or possibly it calls for a microcosmic approach, like that of Robert Bresson, who in _L'argent_ relates how a forged banknote ruins innocent lives. _L'argent_ updated a Tolstoy short story, but it's a shame no-one has recently tried to adapt Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart novel of the same name, in which a now all too familiar yarn of stock market fraud and collapsing banks is woven into a rollicking social tapestry.

Perhaps the subject is simply too vast to be encompassed by a single movie, when what we need is the banking equivalent of _The Wire_ , with money taking the place of drugs as a key element in the panoramic vision. Or perhaps, since economic meltdown is vying with ecological catastrophe as the trigger for the end of civilisation as we know it, the most logical genre to depict the world of banking is the disaster movie. What we need is the fiscal equivalent of _The Day After Tomorrow_.

Chapter 21: In Praise of Older Women

_The Kids Are All Right_ has several things going for it. Close behind Mark Ruffalo at his most adorably Ruffalo-esque, Julianne Moore's scrumptious rump and the title being _The Kids Are All Right_ and not _The Kids Are Alright_ , is the rare but pleasurable spectacle of a woman my age up on screen in big close-up. We haven't seen much of Annette Bening of late, and apparently she's been too busy rearing children to worry about getting lifted or Botoxed, because she looks older. Well, hurrah for that! That's what _my_ neck looks like too!

There are, of course, inevitable online comments by wet-eared oiks who sneer, "She's beginning to look like the Crypt Keeper." But this is what fiftysomething females look like, tykes, so get over it. The perennial whine is that men age better than women, but I honestly don't think that's true - it's all down to conditioning, and the fact that lived-in female faces are so absent from approved commercial images that we haven't learned to appreciate them by adjusting our aesthetic expectations accordingly. Cosmetic surgery has been queering the pitch as well; personally, I'd rather look like the Crypt Keeper than a mad clown in a wind tunnel with an allergy which has made my lips swell up like sausages.

Sixtysomething Helen Mirren currently seems to be cornering the market in surgically unaltered broads of a certain age, and it'll be hard not to get a kick out of seeing her firing a Browning M2HB in _Red_. It's not that I want to see women wielding rocket-launchers all the time, but it's more fun than seeing them as the wittering old biddies of _Driving Miss Daisy_ or _Ladies in Lavender_. Hollywood has always been ageist, and it still shocks me to look at _All About Eve_ and realise Margo Channing is a has-been at 40, that _Sunset Boulevard_ 's Norma Desmond is a crazy old bat at 50, and that Davis and Crawford were only in their fifties when they went full-on grotesque for _Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?_

Yet there are types of older woman that Hollywood used to do rather well, and who nowadays seem almost extinct. I'm talking about the wisecracking broads with attitude, as incarnated by the likes of Joan Blondell, Thelma Ritter, Kay Thompson or Eve Arden, only 36 when she played Cornelia "Stonewall" Jackson in _Cover Girl_ , but who went on to play variations of that character for the rest of her career.

My generation's first exposure to Agnes Moorehead wasn't her work for Orson Welles, but when she was well into her sixties and perfecting the waspish put-down of her daughter's attempts at domesticity on a weekly basis in _Bewitched_. Instead of the abominable big-screen version with Nicole Kidman, Nora Ephron should have given us _Endora - the Movie_. No, scratch that thought - Ephron shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it.

I wish there were more leading ladies like Margaret Rutherford, who did her best screen work after the age of 50, including four outings as Miss Marple, who declares, "I may be what is termed a spinster, but I do know the difference between horseplay and murder!" in between bouts of undercover snooping and - at the age of 71 in _Murder at the Gallop_ \- doing the twist. But I'm not fussy; I'll take harpies from hell as well. I'll wager I'm not the only one who thinks it a crying shame Rosa Klebb (as played by Lotte Lenya, 65) bought a bullet at the end of _From Russia with Love_ instead of popping up with Blofeld-like regularity to liven up some of the lesser Bond films with her butch haircut and sensible but deadly shoes.

Just in case there are any questing producers reading this, may I put in a plea for one of them to make a film of ETA Hoffman's _Mademoiselle de Scudery_ , in which a spry and still glamorous 73-year-old lady novelist and poet at the court of Louis XIV single-handedly solves a case of multiple murder and saves an innocent man from the guillotine. Judi Dench (75)? Eileen Atkins (76)? Susannah York (71)? You can bet they'd all be up for it.

ETA: A few months after this column was published I was saddened to hear Susannah York had passed away. I considered removing her name from this texte, but then thought no, I'm leaving it in. She was always an interesting and slightly unorthodox film presence, and would have been truly wonderful as Mademoiselle Scudery. RIP Susannah.

Chapter 22: Tooth Hurty

There's a gag in _Jackass 3-D_ called "Lamborghini Tooth Pull" and I think we all know what that means. For all the scatological tomfoolery and "Ow, my balls!" genital mistreatment on view, I bet this is the stunt which will make us wince the most, particularly as the film opens the same week as a _Daily Mail_ report that increasing numbers of people are trying to avoid exorbitant dental fees by pulling their own teeth out.

If you don't have a Lamborghini you could always try the ice-skate option, like Tom Hanks in _Cast Away_. Or you could splice your genes with those of a housefly, like Jeff Goldblum in _The Fly_ , who subsequently finds it easy to extract a tooth using just his fingers. Or, if you were really desperate, you could get _Oldboy_ 's Choi Min-sik to tape you to a chair and pull out your teeth with a claw-hammer - which makes _Marathon Man_ 's Laurence Olivier demanding, "Is it safe?" while drilling into Dustin Hoffman's cavities without anaesthetic seem like very small beer indeed.

I once had a dentist who would regularly rebuke me about the way his profession was misrepresented in the movies, as though it were my fault. "It's no wonder people associate dentists with pain," he complained after seeing the _Little Shop of Horrors_ musical remake, and since I had my mouth stuffed with Cronenbergian instruments of torture I was unable to tell him that Steve Martin's sadistic behaviour was a walk in the park next to Corbin Bernsen in _The Dentist_ , or to Doug "Pinhead" Bradley in _On Edge_ , adapted from a particularly horrible short story about a dentist by Christopher Fowler.

But it's true you don't often see movie dentists who are regular guys. When they're not psychos, they're played for laughs, like Bob Monkhouse in _Dentist in the Chair_ or Norman Wisdom in _A Stitch in Time_. The mere fact of someone being a dentist is often assumed to be comedy gold in itself; witness Ricky Gervais in _Ghost Town_ , Matthew Perry in _The Whole Nine Yards_ or their predecessor, Bob Hope as cowardly "Painless Potter" ("Brave men run in my family") in _The Paleface_.

One wonders if Frank Tashlin and Edmund Hartmann, who wrote the screenplay, took their cue from what would have probably have been the greatest dentist-related film of all time, if only a janitor hadn't thrown 32 of its 42 reels into an incinerator. In Erich Von Stroheim's _Greed_ , there's an itinerant dentist called, yes, "Painless Potter", who travels around with a big gold molar dangling from his wagon. Later, when McTeague starts his own dental practice, his wife buys him his very own big gold molar to hang outside his surgery.

But tooth-watching in the movies can be a rewarding pastime. It's always amusing to spot mediaeval peasants or Columbus-era sailors with mouths full of impeccable Hollywood orthodontology, though I'll allow that Burt Lancaster's teeth are expressive in any era, and I get a kick out of watching Julia Roberts say words like "guaranteed" because it forces her to expose all nearly all her teeth at once.

If you get bored with _The Crucible_ , as I did, there's diversion to be had in keeping an eye on Daniel Day-Lewis's mouth and the fastest-developing case of gingivitis in film history. Even duff family fare like _Dennis_ ( _Dennis the Menace_ in the US, but retitled for the UK market so as not to confuse fans of _The Beano_ ) has a memorable moment of DIY dentistry when the eponymous scamp replaces the teeth in Walter Matthau's dentures with pieces of Chiclet gum.

Dreaming about teeth, apparently, can symbolise both attack and defence, but I reckon the reason so many of us have nightmares about them is they're also one of the most brutal signifiers of ageing and bodily decay. In this respect, the most heartstopping dental moment is not your _Deep Red_ psycho smashing a victim's teeth against the edge of a mantlepiece, nasty though that is, but in the American indie drama _Guinevere_ , when Stephen Rea's bridgework crumbles away while he's eating. As someone who once lost a tooth while chewing daintily on a croissant, I know just how he feels.

Chapter 23: Apartment Horror

In _Dream Home_ , the owners of the flat on which Josie Ho is about to exchange contracts suddenly jack the price up beyond her reach, so she goes on a killing spree in the apartment block. And who can blame her. As anyone who has ever been gazumped, gazundered or gaziddled can attest, being cheated out of the property on which you've set your heart is enough to make anyone think bad thoughts, though I'd like to believe not many of us would go as far as Josie in the disembowelling and penis-severing stakes.

I'm surprised there aren't more slasher movies set in blocks of flats. Tenants or flatmates can bring out the psycho in all of us simply by using electric drills in the middle of the night (Michael Keaton in _Pacific Heights_ ) or by doctoring our phone messages and stealing our hairstyles (Jennifer Jason Leigh in _Single White Female_ ). It's almost an afterthought when Keaton and Leigh up the ante by brandishing nail-guns or pushing puppies out of windows; the damage has already been done.

When we think of real estate in horror movies, our thoughts naturally turn to old dark houses, possibly built over ancient Native American burial grounds, or more modern though no less haunted homes like the one in _Paranormal Activity_. But I contend that flats can be even spookier than houses. Living in a flat means never being more than a few yards away from the neighbour you can't see, but whom you can all too often hear loud and clear, to maddening effect.

And of course, if there's one thing worse than being disturbed by neighbour noise, it's being disturbed by neighbour noise and then being told that you don't _have_ neighbours, which is what happens to poor Cristina Raines in _The Sentinel_ , a Michael Winner film which looks battier with each passing year. Raines plays a supermodel who rents, for the sort of piffling sum which ought to have made her suspicious, a magnificent apartment in Brooklyn Heights, only to discover there's more to her fellow tenants than meets the eye. Which is saying something since they include John Carradine as a blind priest, Burgess Meredith throwing birthday parties for his cat, and Sylvia Miles and Beverly D'Angelo as evil lesbians in leotards who, when asked what they do for a living, say, "We fondle each other." This movie is surely ripe for a remake with Kate Moss in the leading role.

It's bad enough hearing footsteps over your head, as Raines does, or seeing spreading damp patches on your ceiling, like Hotomi Kuroki in _Dark Water_ , even before such phenomena are revealed to be of supernatural provenance. Another way in which flats can be scarier than houses is they can all be mysteriously linked via their bathroom cabinets, like the ones in _Candyman_ , which provide portals through which hook-handed bogeymen can gain access to your home, though I do think the architect has some serious explaining to do there.

In the worst case scenario, you could find yourself the sole remaining resident of your luxury block of flats who hasn't been turned by parasites into a sex-crazed zombie, which is what happens to the occupants of the Starliner complex in David Cronenberg's _Shivers_. Or, like estate agent Carmen Maura in _La Comunidad_ , who takes a shine to one of the flats she's supposed to be selling, you could end up with everyone in the building ganging up against you and baying for your blood.

The king of apartment horror has to be Roman Polanski, who has given us the ultimate flat-dweller's nightmare trilogy. Anyone who has lived on their own and forgotten to throw away food past its sell-by date will find Catherine Deneuve's mental disintegration in _Repulsion_ too close for comfort. Anyone whose privacy has been breached by busybodies can relate all too easily to Mia Farrow's predicament in _Rosemary's Baby_ \- and that's even _before_ the satanic chanting starts up next door. And Polanski's degenerating relationship with his neighbours in _The Tenant_ \- surely the masterpiece of apartment horror - is liable to bring anyone out in a cold sweat. Hell isn't old dark houses - it's the folk in the flat next door.

Chapter 24: Running a Bathory

Deep within the preposterous Europudding that is _Bathory_ , there lurks a would-be revisionist account of the woman cited in the _Guinness Book of Records_ for having killed, "The Most Number [650] of Victims Attributed to One Murderess". In between Anna Friel's mad wigs, a babel of accents and a parade of indistinguishable Magyars, Juraj Jakubisko's film suggests Erzsebert Bathory was a sort of Renaissance Florence Nightingale figure who had an affair with Caravaggio. She didn't mean to stab her hairdresser with a pair of scissors! Those bathtubs of virgins' blood were nothing but water tinted red by herbs! She was framed!

Since 1970, Bathory has been portrayed on film some 30 times, has lent her name to a Swedish black metal band and, since she could almost be the patron saint of torture-porn, has also been granted the dubious honour of guesting, in name at least, in _Hostel: Part II_. Her story (or myth, since it's a moot point as to how much of it is true and how much calumny cooked up by the Catholic church) offers a film-friendly mix of lust, power, murder and the quest for eternal youth, with an added dash of lesbianism. No wonder the subject appealed to erotic auteur Walerian Borowcyk, who turned her story into one of his _Immoral Tales_ , featuring Paloma Picasso and a chamberful of prettily photographed naked wenches.

As indicated by the title of Hammer's _Countess Dracula_ , there's also a hint of vampirism, with Bathory cast as the female equivalent of Vlad Tepes in bloodsucker lore. The 1971 film provided the late Ingrid Pitt with one of her signature roles as a sort of prototype cougar who tries, with some success, to pass herself off as her own daughter before succumbing to accelerated senescence at her own wedding to a younger man. A more explicitly vampiric incarnation of the character can be found in Harry Kumel's glorious _Daughters of Darkness_ , in which arthouse diva Delphine Seyrig swans around like a centuries-old Marlene Dietrich in red chiffon or silver sequins, and preys on a honeymooning couple in off-season Ostend. As in _Countess Dracula_ , the quest for eternal youth appears to have succeeded pretty well, albeit on a temporary basis.

There's a vogue for putting the case for villainesses such as the Wicked Witch of the West (in Gregory Maguire's _Wicked_ ), Milady de Winter (in Arturo Perez-Reverte's _The Dumas Club_ ), or _The Sleeping Beauty_ 's Maleficent, about whom Disney is currently developing a live-action film - all of whose motto might as well be Jessica Rabbit's line from _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ : "I'm not bad - I'm just _drawn_ that way." Erzsebert Bathory ought to be a shoo-in for this sort of treatment, yet both Jakubisko's and another recent film, Julie Delpy's _The Countess_ , fudge the issue by failing to fix on any one genre and instead attempting to wrangle a coherent narrative out of incompatible chunks of historical epic, romance, politics, horror and half-baked feminist revisionism.

Both films try to take Erzsebet's corner, but at the same time are loath to do away entirely with the story's sensational selling points: the slaughter of innocents, the sanguinary facials and nude bathing. In both films she's depicted as victim, trapped by 16th and 17th century definitions of a woman's role and persecuted by male peers wanting to get their hands on her assets. (In Delpy's film, at least, the persecution comes across as somewhat justified when she starts slicing up peasant girls in the delusion that their blood is some form of early Botox.) Both films abandon the supernatural angle, but fail to convince at a basic psychological level.

But never mind, because there's another Bathory-fest in pre-production which, on paper at least, blows all other recent efforts out of the water. Ulrike Ottinger is set to direct _The Bloody Countess_ from her own screenplay, co-written by Elfriede Jelinek of _The Piano Teacher_ fame. The cast features Isabelle Huppert, Udo Kier and erstwhile Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann, with none other than Tilda Swinton in the title role. With a barking mad line-up like that, I don't care what genre this one turns out to be; I just hope and pray it gets made.

Chapter 25: Faking It

"Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie," says Orson Welles in _F For Fake_. That goes double for soi-disant documentaries which test the viewer's credulity. _Exit Through the Giftshop_ , _I'm Still Here_ and _Catfish_ leave you wondering exactly who is fooling whom. Unless the film-makers themselves fess up, it's hard to spot where fact ends and fiction begins, but the resulting debate generates column inches, which is gold-dust for a film without a big marketing budget.

Such documentaries are playing on a long tradition of juggling degrees of truth, or weighting it for propaganda purposes. Robert Flaherty was restrospectively criticised for having faked elements of _Nanook of the North_ (Nanook's two "wives", for example, were played by the film-maker's own girlfriends) but in the 1920s it was accepted practice for documentarians to stage or recreate scenes.

While it's not as simple as cooking up the sort of literary hoax perpetrated by Thomas Chatterton, Boris Vian or James Frey, the techniques of cinema might have been designed to encourage deceit; events which appear to be shot in one place are often filmed elsewhere, while dubbed sound, editing and special effects are routinely used to manipulate the raw material. Documentaries, like historical epics and biopics, are often faulted for twisting the facts, but it's hard to define facts anyway in a medium which requires its practitioners to make creative choices and impose structure in order to make a film watchable.

Welles, of course, became one of the godfathers of modern sham in 1938, with The Mercury Theatre's radio adaptation of _The War of the Worlds_ dramatised as a series of simulated news bulletins; he flirted with the truth again in _F For Fake_ , which itself was part hoax, part true story. The legend "Based on a true story" is an established convention of fictional drama, from _The Amityville Horror_ to _The Social Network_ , but the vogue for mockumentary, from _Zelig_ onwards, and faux-found-footage, prefigured in _Cannibal Holocaust_ and _Snuff_ , went into overdrive with the increased affordability of camcorders, since this is a type of storytelling that positively thrives on amateurish production values. The spread of internet access further muddied the waters by enabling the makers of, for example, _The Blair Witch Project_ to drop pre-release hints that their horror story was not a figment of the imagination, but really _did_ happen.

All the world loves a hoax, and today's pop cultural con-men are acclaimed rather than condemned: Paul Kaye, Chris Morris, Sacha Baron Cohen have all assumed aliases to make chumps out of interviewees in post-modern variations on _Candid Camera_. It's but a short step to the faux-or-not doc; though if the French-born film-maker featured in _Exit through the Gift Shop_ is a fictional character, as some believe, it would have taken years of meticulous planning to establish his back story, a process which begins to smack of David Maurer's "Long Con" and echoes the rubber realities depicted in _The Matrix_ or _The Truman Show_ , in which life itself is exposed as a fraud.

Fakery is now so engrained in popular culture that we've become suspicious of anything claiming to present truth. The French documentary _Oceans_ was full of astonishing images of long and winding seasnakes, or trillions of tiny fish arranging themselves into shimmering spheres. Yet when, at the end of the credits, one reads that footage of a shark getting its fins cut off and being flung back into the ocean to die was "reconstitue", it makes us question everything else we've seen.

Likewise, we're continually questioning the authenticity of what happens in a film like _Catfish_. But now we've started using those same bullshit detectors to look at everything, whether it's TV talent shows with rigged results, or news items about Germans castrating their daughters' boyfriends in towns which may or may not exist. At its most extreme, suspicion can tip over into paranoid conspiracy theorising, but it also encourages us to look at events like the royal engagement with a sceptical eye, and ask how much is being stage-managed to divert attention from more important news stories. Of course, that just leaves us with the problem of working out which of those news stories are "Based on a true story", and which are mockumentaries.

Chapter 26: Alien Nation

This is the perfect organism. It responds to the hostile environment of a competitive box office by shedding its outer cells and recreating itself, again and again. It's the ultimate frightmare, a monster among money-spinners, designed to reduce you to a gibbering jelly.

What is it? It's _Alien_ \- Parts One, Two and Three.

Let us prod this creature, and see what it's made of.

In Space No-One Can Hear You Scream

The beginnings of the life cycle coincided with the end of the 70s. Genre movies had come out of the closet and changed the face of cinema. Gloop and gore had gone mainstream. Linda Blair vomited pea-soup all over _The Exorcist_ and David Warner was decapitated by a pane of glass in _The Omen_. B-movie content merged with A-movie production values, and the result was a box office jamboree. The rubber monsters of 50s science fiction had been replaced by the state-of-the-art magic of _Star Wars_ and _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_. Meanwhile, _Jaws_ and _Halloween_ ushered in a horde of flesh-ripping creatures and homicidal maniacs. And, in Canada, David Cronenberg was exploring the radical new territory of body horror, dreaming up mind-boggling anatomical deviations in _Shivers_ , _Rabid_ and _The Brood_.

Director Ridley Scott prepped the cast of his new film by screening one of the most relentless shockfests of the decade - _The Texas Chain Saw Massacre_. Scott was plotting a shockfest of his own, one that would tap into every single pulse of the late 70s and unite them into a single scream machine - a horror film in sci-fi trappings which would combine gore, body horror, extra-special effects and an indestructible flesh-ripping monster. And Scott, art school graduate and advertising alumnus, would add an element of his own - a visual panache different to almost everything that had come before it, and so simultaneously alluring and authentic-seeming that _Alien_ would set the standard by which all designer sci-fi of the Eighties would be judged.

"The script was short and very specific," Scott said, "and unbelievably violent." The writer was Dan O'Bannon, who in 1974 had co-scripted John Carpenter's debut feature, _Dark Star_ \- an inventive shoestring sci-fi comedy-thriller featuring a cosmos-weary space crew, a bloody-minded talking bomb, and a rampaging alien shaped like a large beach ball. The _Alien_ plot was a more conventional reworking of 50s monster movies, a rehash of _It! The Terror from Beyond Space_ , in which a blood-sucking Martian sneaks onto a spaceship and picks off its crew. But this in turn was not so different from the comedy-chiller _The Old Dark House_ , or the numerous screen adaptations of Agatha Christie's _Ten Little Indians_. Trapping your characters in a claustrophobic environment, and then picking them off one by one, is Basic Genre Plot Number One.

_Alien_ spun a few innovative twists, but the story took second place to The Look. Whereas the future according to _2001: A Space Odyssey_ was all hi-tech, gleaming and streamlined, the space-tug in Alien (designed by Ron Cobb) was a labyrinth of steam pipes, ventilation ducts and customised scrap metal. Science provided air-tight automatic doors and an all-powerful computer called "Mother", but the impression remained of the crew being trapped in the entrails of something like an old-fashioned galleon.

But the film's biggest coup was the design of the Alien itself. It was the brainchild of visionary Swiss artist HR Giger (rhymes with "eager") whose work might best be described as an unholy amalgamation of Odilon Redon, Hans Bellmer and Allen Jones. Giger had already produced a volume of illustrations called _HR Giger's Necronomicon_ , inspired by the work of 30s horror writer HP Lovecraft, who in his seminal short story _The Call of Cthulhu_ had described a creature simultaneously resembling an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, whose "pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body". Giger gave visual form to such imaginings, fusing flesh and metal in an orgy of polymorphic penetration.

O'Bannon passed a copy of Giger's _Necronomicon_ on to Scott, whose eye was immediately caught by "a painting of a demon with a jutting face and long, extended, phallic-shaped head. It was the most frightening thing I'd ever seen. I knew immediately that here was our creature."

Scott's feature debut had been _The Duellists_ , adapted from a short story by Joseph Conrad, and the space-tug in _Alien_ was named Nostromo, after one of the author's novels. Despite Scott's insistence that there was "nothing very intellectual about _Alien_ ", sharp-eyed critics spotted other literary antecedents: particularly Lewis Carroll's elusive, baker-snatching Snark, and Jabberwocky - "The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!".

The casting was astute: no budget-stretching major-league stars, but a line-up of talented character actors, each a distinct physical type, who somehow managed to fashion real people from the sparse dialogue. Tom Skerritt, who played the Nostromo's captain, had been in _M*A*S*H._ Harry Dean Stanton had yet to become the cult icon of _Paris, Texas_. Ian Holm and John Hurt were hard-working regulars in British TV and films, and Veronica Cartwright had got off to a screamer of a start as Rod Taylor's kid sister in Hitchcock's _The Birds_. The nearest thing to a name was Yaphet Kotto, who had played Bond villain Mr Big in _Live and Let Die_. But it was 5'10" Sigourney Weaver who emerged from _Alien_ , her big screen debut, as a star. As Warrant Officer Ripley, a role originally intended for a male actor, she provided the film with its human face - and sole survivor.

That two members of the Nostromo's crew were women created a stir. Science fiction had a tradition of female leads who did little but scream and be scooped up by men in monster suits. Ripley changed all that, and paved the way for the gun-toting heroines of _The Silence of the Lambs_ , _Thelma & Louise_ and _Terminator 2: Judgment Day_ , though cheesecake-starved audiences were still given an eyeful of her stripping down to her scanties at the end of the film. _Alien_ was also remarkable for avoiding the kissy interludes that many film-makers think necessary to justify female presence in a working environment. Scott did shoot a scene suggesting a more intimate relationship between Weaver and Skerritt's characters, but cut it for reasons of pace.

The genius of Giger's Alien design was that it covered all the bases. We first glimpse it when three of the Nostromo's crew venture into a derelict spaceship on the windswept planet LV-426, and the Face-Hugger leaps out of an Alien egg to clamp itself around John Hurt's head. Back on the Nostromo, the Hugger expires and Hurt apparently makes a full recovery. But the next stage of the creature's life cycle is illustrated in the film's most notorious scene: the unfortunate Hurt has been implanted with an Alien embryo, resembling a penis with teeth, which now bursts out through his chest in a sort of DIY Caesarean. The other crew members' horrified reaction is genuine - Scott had deliberately kept his actors in the dark about what the SPFX department had up its sleeve.

From here on, the Alien seems to change shape each time we glimpse it. Giger's designs were based on real bones and latex flesh. Sometimes the creature looks humanoid - here it was played by lanky Nigerian actor Bolaji Badejo. Sometimes it's like a piece of machinery. Other times it's like an insect or lizard, with a proboscis combining the attributes of vagina dentata and deadly porksword, all dripping with goo. Birth, death, penetration, suffocation - and slimy stuff. Rare the subconscious that is not jangled by at least one of the Freudian nightmares lurking in the Nostromo's nether regions.

But, as with all the best genre movies, there are subtexts to spare. The weariness of the crew - the deep space equivalent of long-distance lorry drivers - anchors the outlandish premise in a familiar context; these people are not heroic pioneers, but simply doing a job - towing an oil refinery back to earth. The conglomerate that owns the Nostromo has programmed "Mother" so that alien life forms will be recovered for analysis. "All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable." The workers get fucked over, as usual. In the film's second Big Shock scene, Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) turns out to be an android who has been programmed, like "Mother", to protect The Company's interests.

"Not just a brilliantly made film," enthused the critic from _Socialist Challenge_ , "but also splendidly subversive!"

_Alien_ -fever gripped the press and public. Like _The Exorcist_ , it was a horror movie which burst its generic banks, appealing to buffs and mainstream audiences alike. It became the "must-see" rite-of-passage of the summer of '79 - squeamish folk could pat themselves on the back for having made it through the chest-bursting without throwing up.

By _Star Wars_ standards, it was not a humungous box office hit, but 20th Century Fox recouped its $15 million investment in just 26 days. This achievement is all the more extraordinary when one considers that the film's adults-only certificate barred it to those age-groups which make up the bulk of the blockbuster audience.

If anyone had ever been in any doubt, _Alien_ 's classic status was assured in 1987, when Mel Brooks spoofed it in _Spaceballs_. This time, the creature that emerged from John Hurt's stomach was a top-hatted, tap-dancing frog.

This Time It's War

The beauty of the perfect organism is its adaptibility. "The most obvious problem is, how do you beat a classic?" asked James Cameron, who in 1983 was approached to write and direct the follow-up, _Aliens_. It was Cameron's third encounter with a sequel; he had co-written _Rambo - First Blood II_ ("The politics are Stallone's, the action's mine") and made his directing debut with _Piranha II: Flying Killers_.

"I feel like I know now the balance between homage and genuine creativity," Cameron explained to _The Guardian_. "You've got to give people enough references to the first film to be satisfying, but then you have to go well beyond that." His method was to recycle Basic Genre Plot Number One as a different sort of genre - a war movie.

The Alien was transformed into an army of killing machines as unstoppable as the android played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in _The Terminator_ , Cameron's second feature. While Scott's forte had been visual, Cameron's was kinetic. The fearsome beauty of Giger's original design was lost in a flurry of action, but the pace was so relentless that audiences were given no time to mourn.

Carried over from _Alien_ were Weaver as Ripley, Jones the cat (who had provided one possible way of sneaking the Alien into the sequel) and The Company, now identified as Weyland-Yutani. _Aliens_ begins where its predecessor left off, with Ripley and Jones cryogenically suspended in deep space. But some 57 years have passed between the end of the first film and the beginning of the sequel, in which they are picked up by a passing scavenger vessel.

The Company is sceptical about Ripley's report, and concludes she has needlessly destroyed an M-class star freighter worth 42 million in adjusted dollars. (With all we know about Weyland-Yutani now, it's probably miffed that she blasted their prize alien organism out into space as well.) As a result, she is demoted to a manual job in the cargo docks. It is only when all contact is lost with colonists on LV-426 (now known as Acheron) that she is asked to return to the planet with a detachment of marines.

Still plagued by chest-bursting nightmares, Ripley reluctantly agrees to go, hoping to exorcise her bogeyman once and for all. Or bogeywoman, as it turns out, since Cameron's chief contribution to the Alien life cycle is the Alien Queen.

The _Alien_ policy of tough women continues in the sequel with a number of female marines who are so gritty they make Ripley look like a Playboy Bunny.

The characters are dropped straight into a Marie Celeste situation: the sole surviving colonist on the planet turns out to be a small girl nicknamed Newt, who stirs Ripley's maternal instincts. Many firefights and explosions later, our heroine finds herself in what amounts to an all-female showdown, punching it out against the Alien Queen with Newt as the prize. Ripley evens the odds in this cat-fight by strapping herself into a power-loader, and weighs in with the immortal line, "Leave her alone, you bitch!"

Feminist critical reaction was split between approval of a woman triumphant, and alarm that she was able to win only by transforming herself into a piece of hardware.

Also along for the ride is Lance Henriksen, making up for Ian Holm's treachery by playing a gentler, kinder android. The slimeball in this line-up is Paul Reiser's Company Man, who tries to implant Aliens in Ripley and Newt so he can sneak them past earth quarantine. Only one marine, Corporal Hicks, played by Michael Biehn, makes it through to the final curtain, albeit too damaged to be of much immediate use.

Best of the rest are Jenette Goldstein as a pint-sized Valkyrie, and Bill Paxton as the snivelling coward who goes down yelling "Motherfucker!" The others are there simply as cannon fodder, fated to be crunched, fried or cocooned. One of the original Alien characteristics which came into its own in the sequel was the creature's acid blood; here it spurts out all over the combatants, leading to an incredible amount of shrieking and sizzling burn make-up.

Cameron took up where Scott left off in his use of CCTV and computer graphics to add both clarity and immediacy to action sequences. And, while the Aliens are shown in less detail, he goes to town on the hardware, most of which was customised from existing weaponry. The "Smart Gun" was an MG-42 machine-gun attached to a Steadicam harness and used with a helicopter pilot's helmet-mounted sights. And Hicks shows Ripley how to work the A41A pulse rifle - "ten-millimetre, with over-and-under 30-millimetre pump-action grenade launcher." Weaver later said she found these scenes difficult. "I would stand there thinking, 'Here I am, a member of the Gun Control Lobby, in a picture where I do nothing but shoot guns.'"

Engineering and defence systems contractors such as Ferranti, Marconi, Barr and Stroud all chipped in with advice and support, while British Aerospace donated a Mantis Laser Range-Finder identical to one that had seen service in the Falklands. The politics of _Rambo: First Blood II_ may have been Stallone's, but Cameron still had a soft spot for the toys of war. The reviewer from _New Socialist_ reluctantly decided that _Aliens_ was a military showcase and wrote: "Nice picture... shame about the politics."

_Aliens_ was as enormous a hit as its predecessor. And Sigourney Weaver became the first science-fiction heroine ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.

The Bitch is Back

It would be six years before the Perfect Organism recreated itself in another sequel. In the meantime, some of its cells broke free and adopted a variety of intriguing new forms. The Alien joined The Thing and The Predator as a fully paid-up cult monster: you could read the comic, make the kit, even wear the 3-D chest-burster T-shirt.

To the standard videos of _Alien_ and _Aliens_ were added _Alien - The Special Widescreen Edition_ and _Aliens - Special Edition_ , with 23 minutes of previously unseen footage.* This included a scene in which Ripley learns that while she has been floating around in deep space for 57 years, her daughter back on earth has grown up and died - which makes her mother-daughter bonding with Newt all the more poignant. And a forthcoming laser-disc of _Alien_ is said to include a scene, excised from the original, in which Weaver finds Skerritt imprisoned in an Alien cocoon and cuts short his agony by killing him.

But, in January 1991, principal photography began on _Alien 3_. The third part of the trilogy went through more gestatory stages than the Alien itself. The first writer hired was cyberpunk novelist William ( _Neuromancer_ ) Gibson. Ridley Scott's name was bandied about. Eric Red, who scripted the psycho-road-movie _The Hitcher_ and vampire-Western _Near Dark_ , was brought in to do a rewrite for Finnish director Renny Harlin, whose version was to be set on a Soviet space station. Then there was genetic splicing. David Twohy, who had scripted _Warlock_ , set his version in a penal colony, left out Ripley, but wrote her back in at the request of the new head of 20th Century Fox. Meanwhile, Walter Hill had brought in New Zealander Vincent Ward, director of the medieval time-travelling fantasy _The Navigator_ , who set his version on a planet made entirely of wood and populated by monks. At least four other writers, not to mention producers Hill and David Giler, turned out further rewrites. In the final version, Ward gets a story credit; Giler, Hill and Larry Ferguson are credited with the screenplay.

Helming honours eventually went to 27-year-old David Fincher, whose CV included TV ads for Nike and Pepsi, and promo-videos for Paula Abdul and Madonna. _Alien 3_ is his feature film debut, and it's his moody visual sense which sustains the film. That, and an unrelenting grimness of tone which these days is rare. _Alien 3_ has sealed off the generic circle that was ripped open by _Alien_ ; this is not a mainstream movie by any means - it's a straight-up, take-no-prisoners horror flick.

Weaver, who has a co-producer credit, insisted on two conditions: "I didn't want to do a film that used a lot of guns, and I did want it to be my last film as Ripley." Basic Genre Plot Number One is wheeled out again: this time it's a prison movie with shades of religious epic. Ripley crashlands on a penal colony planet, populated soley by guys with double Y chromosomes: inmates include Charles Dance and Paul McGann. Newt doesn't survive the opening sequence, nor does Corporal Hicks, but - guess what? - the Alien does.

"The star of these films is the director," Weaver says, but it's Ripley's film - it's her quest for absolution. The Ripley of Arc connotations are underlined by the Skinhead Number One hairdo - the planet is infested with lice, so heads are shaved. "It's a great image," says Weaver. "All those vulnerable heads, like eggs."

The beauty of the _Alien_ films, like the Alien itself, is that they yield whatever one wants them to yield in the way of subtexts and allegories. But, if the trilogy has been "about" anything at all, it's about what it means to be human as opposed to alien, or android, or machine. Androids and machines are in the pay of The Company. Only humans are capable of loyalty to each other. Only humans would risk their lives for a little girl or be damn fool enough to wander around an Alien-infested spaceship looking for their cat. If certain humans are prepared to sacrifice others for personal gain, it makes them less than human, perhaps even less than Alien.

At the start of _Alien 3_ , Ripley has lost everyone - friends, children, and her chance to live a normal life. After two films' worth of ducking, weaving and fighting, is it enough for her merely to survive? At what point does the struggle for survival turn a person into a machine? As Weaver says: "This is about the quality of life. At what point do you say existence _per se_ is not worth it? What is it that makes life worth living and fighting for?"

This is what Ripley must find out in the course of _Alien 3_. To paraphrase the severed, still-talking head of Science Officer Ash in the original _Alien_ movie - we can't lie about her chances. But she has our sympathies.

* _ETA: This article was written before the advent of DVDs. Since 1992, of course, we have seen not only a fourth Alien film (_ Alien: Resurrection _) but a full complement of Triple and Quadruple Packs, Collector's Sets, Director's Cuts, Anniversary Editions, Quadrilogies, Spin-Offs, computer games, Makings Of, rumours about a fifth Alien film and Ridley Scott's_ Prometheus _, originally intended as an_ Alien _prequel. In order words, The Perfect Organism continues to recreate itself._

Afterword

These film columns were first published in the Guardian newspaper from January to December of 2010. Thanks are due to Michael Hann and Andrew Pulver, for commissioning them and also for having given me freedom to write pretty much whatever I wanted, so long as it was vaguely topical.

Thanks are also due to Angus MacKinnon at British _GQ_ for commissioning the Alien article.

Read the first six chapters of Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Parts 2 1995-2001 by Anne Billson:
Chapter 1: Interview with the Vampire

The film year has barely got into its stride, and yet there is already evidence of a recurring motif. In _Shallow Grave_ , _La Reine Margot_ and a host of other recent offerings, the predominant colour has been that of blood. And we're not talking tasteful crimson driblets here, but gore by the gallon, splurging all over the screen in ever-spreading pools. Blame it on these _fang-de-siecle_ times, because there's plenty more blood on tap in _Interview with the Vampire_. I do not use the term 'on tap' lightly; more than once the stuff is decanted like alcohol. In one memorable instance, Tom Cruise rips a rat's throat out with his teeth and squeezes a glassful of what one might call _Chateauneuf-du-Rat_. This, I believe, is the point at which Oprah Winfrey walked out.

Anne Rice's screenplay adheres closely to her own novel, with its framing device set in present-day San Francisco. Two hundred-year-old Brad Pitt is telling reporter Christian Slater the story of his life, or - more accurately - death. He relates how he was initiated into vampirehood by an amoral hedonist called Lestat, how he embarked on a journey into everlasting night (sorry, but the film's cod romantic vocabulary is infectious) and meandered from New Orleans to Paris, where he encountered a troupe of Euro-vampires led by Spanish heart-throb Antonio Banderas.

The choice of squeaky-clean Cruise to play the wicked Lestat provoked an outcry from fans of the novel and from Rice herself, who said they might as well have cast Huckleberry Finn. After seeing the film, she recanted in spectacular fashion, praised Cruise's performance and took out a full-page ad in _Variety_ urging her readers to 'see this film, guys'. I wondered for a long time about that 'guys'. Nowadays the word is sometimes used to address both sexes, but, for a screenplay penned by a woman, _Interview with the Vampire_ is conspicuously lacking in strong female roles. The women are the sort of scantily clad, bosom-heaving victims one more readily associates with Hammer horror, and the only female vampire with more than just a walk-on role is trapped in the body of a pre-pubescent girl (a character reportedly inspired by the memory of Rice's own daughter, who died of leukaemia at the age of five). Eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst does a suitably spooky turn as this Shirley Temple from Hell.

But it is for the 'guys' that Rice reserves all the glamour and romance. There is no overt sex, but the sight of Cruise hovering lasciviously over Pitt's neck is probably one of the more explicit images of homoeroticism ever served up by a major star. One wonders whether he would have dared had not fangs been involved.

Mainstream Hollywood this undoubtedly is - _Interview_ has chalked up more than $100 million at the US box office - but it's a blockbuster with the sensibility of a European art movie. And like _Wolf_ or _Mary Shelley's Frankenstein_ , it's more concerned with upmarket production values than with the nuts and bolts of being a horror story. There is far too much chit-chat and internecine bitching, and the pace is sometimes leisurely to the point of standstill. The bloodletting is langorous rather than violent, but the story is told from the point of view of the predators, and their victims are dispatched with a sadistic relish some viewers may find upsetting.

But the fear factor is missing. Before Rice's novel was published in 1976, vampires were straight-up bad guys. Now, all too often, they're romantic anti-heroes decked out in black velvet and turtle necks. Even worse, they've lost much of their bite; in Rice's _Vampire Chronicles_ series (of which _Interview_ is the first volume) they tend to sit around and witter endlessly, often sounding more like grannies in a knitting-circle than the evil dead.

But Cruise, camping it up like a psychopathic fop, is clearly having a whale of a time; here's a chance to witness megawatt star-power effortlessly wiping everyone else off the screen. Next to him, poor old Pitt looks like so much dead wood. It's not entirely Brad's fault - his character is such a whingeing bore who mopes round being sullen and self righteous that you wonder why Lestat bothered to bite him in the first place.

Only 24 hours after seeing this film, my lingering impression is of a vaguely remembered dream. The story may be short on narrative thrust, but it's dripping with dark and smoky atmosphere, and the attempt to create what is effecively a parallel universe populated by the walking undead is almost entirely successful, thanks to ultra-classy photography by Philippe Rousselot, costume and production design. One should also mention Stan Winston's unearthly but seductive vampire make-up: white skin shot through with a tracery of blue veins. Neil Jordan, faced with this embarrassment of visual riches, wisely opts to direct with minimal fuss, though he might have made more of an effort to reel his audience in.

You may be wondering how it has come to pass that the activities of such depraved creatures are being offered up as entertainment. But of course, the vampire is as much a symbol of our age as James Bond was an icon of the 1960s; a supernatural serial-killer is right at home in these decadent times. One suspects that many people, given the choice, would leap at the chance of becoming vampires, if only because it would save them a fortune in dental fees.

One of the most intriguing moments in _Interview_ is when Pitt finds himself blending seamlessly into the 20th century, and discovers that the new-fangled invention of cinema has enabled that which he would never have thought possible - it allows him to watch the sun rise for the first time in 200 years. Cinema enables us to live, or die, vicariously; it also allows us to gawp at all that blood without getting our feet wet.

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1995)

Chapter 2: Natural Born Killers + Quiz Show

Hollywood has spent the past few years recycling old TV shows as new movies, but how does it repay its debt to TV? It sinks its teeth into the hand that has been feeding it. For every jolly _Flintstones_ or _Maverick_ , there is a film-maker-cum-social-commentator who can't wait to remind us that television is the root of all evil. It's not films, you understand, that are turning society into mush. It's _telly_.

Both of this week's big releases are witnesses for the prosecution, but they couldn't be more different in approach and tone. First up on the stand, dragging the baggage of notoriety behind it, is _Natural Born Killers_ , screened without fuss throughout the rest of the western world, but delayed in the UK for three months while our nannies confirmed that no, it hasn't inspired copycat killings after all.

_Natural Born Killers_ \- henceforth I shall be referring to it as _NBK_ , not least because this sounds amusingly like an American TV network - was co-written and directed by Oliver 'Subtlety is my Middle Name' Stone from a story by Quentin Tarantino. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play white trash thrill-killers called Mickey and Mallory Knox. They're ruthless, amoral and not very bright, but Woody looks good in shades and Juliette looks even better in hotpants, and before you can say 'Charlie Manson', this latterday Bonnie and Clyde are being turned into pop icons by a barrage of media attention as they slice, dice and blast their way through America's redneck South.

Hot on their trail are Robert Downey Jr (with Rolf Harris accent) as the ruthless, amoral host of a tabloid TVshow called _American Maniacs_ , and Tom Sizemore as a celebrity cop almost as ruthless and amoral as the killers themselves. Tommy Lee Jones delivers his most demented piece of overacting to date as the Flash Harry governor of the prison to which Mickey and Mallory are eventually consigned. And yes, he's ruthless and amoral too.

When I say Stone's middle name is 'Subtlety', I am, of course, trying to be ironic. His film-making has always been about as subtle as a Black & Decker to the brain, but with _NBK_ it's as though he has launched everything in the toolshed at our heads. _Kerrash!_ The picture flips from colour to black-and-white, video to Super-8, back projection to animation, wildlife footage, movie clips. It has more silly camera angles than _Top of the Pops_ , looks as though it was edited with an Uzi, and leans heavily on what is undoubtedly one of the best rock 'n' roll soundtracks of all time. After five minutes of this, you're either slapping your thigh at the ludicrous overkill, or wishing someone would give the man a Valium. But it goes on and on. One hour later, when Mickey and Mallory are bitten by rattlesnakes and start to hallucinate, and then half an hour after that, when the prison erupts into a full-scale riot, your reaction is likely to be the Dorothy Parkerism, 'Yes, but how can you _tell_?'

Stone is apparently trying to reproduce the effect of TV channel-surfing by remote control. I've tried this at home with my own 80-odd cable channels and believe me, the effect is more soporific than stimulating, but then Oliver Stone is a person of whom one would dearly like to ask: 'Excuse me, but who died and made _you_ spokesman for my generation?' His view of life, let alone his view of TV, is evidently very different from mine. Nor does he neglect an opportunity to sock it to us. Mallory's past, for example, is portrayed in flashback as a sitcom-from-hell, starring Rodney Dangerfield as a grotesque paterfamilias cracking obscene jokes about incest in between bouts of sexual abuse and canned laughter. You can see what Stone is aiming at, but as a parody it misses by a mile. _NBK_ , alas, is a satire on the media made by someone with absolutely no sense of humour. And not a lot of self-awareness either; television and the press come in for plenty of flak, but Stone never acknowledges that his film is a part of the media too.

His _modus operandi_ is to treat everyone with the same contempt, whether they're murderers or victims, law enforcers or the general public, though Harrelson and Lewis at least manage to stand out from the crowd as more interesting specimens. This wall-to-wall disdain leaves you with the suspicion that the host of _American Maniacs_ isn't the only one who thinks of his viewers as 'those nitwits out there in zombieland'. Even the dimmest of those nitwits, however, would be hard-pressed to miss the message - that America's ongoing love affair with crime is leading it dangerously close to the edge. You can hardly overlook it when it's hammered home with clips of the Menendez brothers, Tonya Harding and O.J. Simpson, though this commit-a-crime-and-get-famous theme is not exactly hot off the press. Martin Scorsese dealt with it over a decade ago, much more creepily - and with the physical violence limited to a sock to the jaw - in _King of Comedy_.

Having said all that, I must admit I've been playing the soundtrack CD non-stop and can now quote all the bits of dialogue sampled on it. Since I first saw _NBK_ three months ago, my responsible grown-up side has been going round telling everyone it's a preposterous load of tosh, but my naughty adolescent side couldn't help sneaking back last week for a second helping. Like it or not,it's one big shot of adrenalin, not to mention a dazzling, disturbing glimpse into the psyche of a seriously deranged individual. I am referring, of course, to Mickey, but nevertheless we should all feel relief that Oliver Stone is out there making films instead of being, well, just out there.

If _NBK_ isn't to your taste, don't fret - you can still get a high-quality dose of anti-telly sentiment from _Quiz Show_ , which is everything _NBK_ is not - sober, restrained and rather drab-looking, but filled with superb actors giving multi-dimensional, subtly shaded performances. It's so obviously an actors' film it comes as no surprise to learn the director was Robert Redford.

Redford seemed to feel affinity for screenplays offering roles that he himself might once have played. In _A River Runs Through It_ the golden boy was the Brad Pitt character; here it's Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes), a personable Columbia professor who in the mid-1950s became a national celebrity on the TV quiz show _Twenty-One_ before an ambitious young lawyer discovered that the game was rigged.

John Turturro plays poor, disgruntled Herbie Stempel, the nebbish Jewish contestant from Queens who is forced to take a dive because the network and its sponsor don't consider him sufficiently telegenic. But Paul Attanasio's gripping, intelligent screenplay is not a cut-and-dried case of heroes and villains, and Stempel is no innocent victim. Nor is Van Doren a bad guy, though Fiennes manages to hint at more than a little weakness behind that shining veneer. Even so, you end up wanting to be his friend, and you're not the only one. The ambitious lawyer (Rob Morrow) is Jewish, like Stempel, but is drawn towards Charles because he represents the WASP ideal, son of a poet (Paul Scofield on Oscar nominated form) and scion of a Connecticut family dripping with academic glamour and distinction.

Oliver Stone maintains that American lost its innocence somewhere between _JFK_ and _Platoon_ , but according to _Quiz Show_ , the rot set in at an earlier date. The film kicks off with the observation that 'all is not well with America', and ends with the prediction that 'television is going to get us.' In between, it suggests that the birth of the box was the beginning of the end of integrity and truth.

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1995)

Chapter 3: Ed Wood

Way back before the dawn of video, in the days when repertory cinemas allowed all sorts of smoking in their auditoria, there were three films, in particular, which never failed to amuse the reprobates who frequented midnight screenings. _Reefer Madness_ and _Cocaine Fiends_ , a dire brace of anti-drug warnings from the 1930s, were sources of much hilarity to we 1970s sophisticates, but most side-splitting of all was a tacky little item called _Glen or Glenda_ , also known as _I Changed My Sex_. The nominal star of this heartfelt docudrama was faded horror icon Bela Lugosi, whose apocalyptic rantings of 'Bevare ze big green dragon zat sitz on your doorstep' were interwoven with stock footage of stampeding buffalo. But the real star was Edward D. Wood Jr. Not only did he produce, write and direct this farrago, he also played Glen, the rather beefy individual with an unhealthy fixation on his fiancee's angora sweater.

All anyone knew about Ed Wood in those days was that he had stormed the beach at Iwo Jima wearing women's undies beneath his US Marine's uniform, but a few years later he was voted Worst Film Director of All Time in a book called _The Golden Turkey Awards_. This was unfair, and not just because some of us reckon this sobriquet could more justifiably be pinned on someone like Wim Wenders or Oliver Stone. Wood had a vision, and he was sincere, which is more that can be said for a lot of film-makers.

Now I feel rather ashamed for having laughed at _Glen or Glenda_. I made up for it by weeping copiously through long stretches of _Ed Wood_ , Tim Burton's accomplished and affectionate biopic of the legendary director. Made in black-and-white, it clocked up less than $10 million at the US box office, making it the closest thing Burton has had to a flop, though it's funny, sweet and sad in almost equal measure, and critics have loved it to bits. Like the director's other films, from _Pee-Wee's Big Adventure_ to _Edward Scissorhands_ , it's a freak show from the freak's point of view. Johnny Depp, demonstrating once again that he is one of the most interesting leading men in Hollywood, fills the title role with aplomb, though probably looks prettier in angora than Wood himself ever did.

So dogged is Wood's optimism that his voice virtually cracks beneath the strain - 'Perfect!' he announces after each and every take, even when the actors have crashed, _Crossroads_ -style, into the scenery - but his sunny outlook is complemented by generosity and a refusal to judge. He is the only film-maker in Hollywood prepared to employ a washed up horror star with a drug problem. Even more admirably, he allows himself to be summoned from his bed at the dead of night whenever the morphine-addled Lugosi needs a shoulder to lean on.

With the help of Rick Baker's make-up, Martin Landau's Lugosi is a heart-rending performance that deservedly won an Oscar. He is by no means unaware he is out of his time, but even when required to wrestle a rubber octopus he retains his formidable presence and professionalism. It's a sad comment on the nature of a business that chews people up and spits them out, without a pension, as soon as their 15 minutes of fame are up.

The other supporting roles in Wood's extended family of misfits are filled just as astutely. Bill Murray is endearing as would-be transexual Bunny Breckinridge; Jeffrey Jones pomps it up as the hopeless psychic Criswell; Lisa Marie shows off a 16-inch waist as the TV presenter Vampira; Patricia Arquette, as Wood's wife, uncomplainingly paints up paper plates so they can be passed off as flying saucers in front of the camera. Howard Shore's soundtrack revives the long-neglected theremin - the electronic musical instrument which made the spooky _ooh-whee-ooh_ noise in 1950s science fiction movies. And, for the most part, Burton and his screenwriters (Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski) show Wood cheerfully cobbling together such meisterwerks as _Bride of the Monster_ , or squeezing finance from such unlikely sources as the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills.

But in one of the film's two most obviously fictional sequences, Wood bumps into another film-maker with a producer-writer-director-actor credit - Orson Welles (Vincent D'Onofrio). Before you can say _Citizen Kane_ , they're whingeing to each other about the trials of making films. Though the men are from opposite ends of the critical spectrum, it's clear they have more in common than we might have supposed.

The second obviously fictional sequence is the upbeat ending, which I found ten times more poignant than the reality would have been; a discreet curtain is drawn over the alcoholism and obscurity of Wood's later years (he died in 1978, round about the time I was sniggering at his movies). Instead he is shown at a fantasy premiere of _Plan 9 From Outer Space_ , being given the rapturous reception he was never accorded in real life. Hell, the man's films have entertained several generations of snotty little potheads - surely we can grant him a round of fantasy applause, at the very least.

Whether _Ed Wood_ will appeal to anyone other than film buffs remains to be seen, but the film is far from being merely a celebration of bad cinema. It's also a celebration of oddball friendship, and of an awesome determination to realise a personal dream despite financial obstacles and a complete lack of talent.

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1995)

_2008 addendum: It seems incredible now that I could propose_ Wim Wenders _and_ Oliver Stone _as Worst Film Directors of All Time, even as a joke. Though neither is my favourite film-maker by a long chalk, I can only imagine it must have been delayed reaction to_ Faraway, So Close!, _Wenders's utterly dreadful sequel to his_ Wings of Desire _, or perhaps all-round sensory indigestion brought on by excessive exposure to_ Natural Born Killers _._

Nowadays, I daresay it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows if I were to propose Michael Bay or Joel Schumacher in lieu.

Chapter 4: Braveheart

Warning. You are about to enter an end-of-story zone. Those of you who wish to remain ignorant of the ending of this week's big film should proceed with caution.

On the other hand, anyone who knows anything about Scottish history will already be aware that Sir William Wallace came to a sticky end at the hands of the dastardly English, and will therefore be prepared - perhaps even eager - to see Mel Gibson disembowelled at the end of _Braveheart_.

On the _other_ other hand, the film takes so many liberties with history that even historians may be surprised by some of the twists in Randall Wallace's screenplay. Edward I died two years after Wallace's execution and not, as the film would have it, on the same day. Moreover, the future Edward III was born a further five years after that and not, as the screenplay suggests, nine months after Wallace sneaks into the English camp to give Princess Isabelle (the delectable Sophie Marceau) the full-blooded rogering she can't get from her limp-wristed husband, the future Edward II.

But we're jumping ahead. In the tradition of avenging heroes from Charles Bronson to Sylvester Stallone, all Wallace _really_ wants is to marry a nice girl so he can dwell peacefully in his croft, in a village populated by grubby-faced Highlanders carrying baskets of cabbage leaves or doing obscure things to pelts. Alas, the fair maiden is swiftly dispatched by the Obligatory English Villains. This makes our Mel _really_ mad.

But it also leaves him free to indulge in the sort of male bonding that is depicted as a lot more exciting than mere backlit heterosexual heavy-petting in the moonlight. Make no mistake: there's bad love between men, as epitomised by the faggoty English (Gibson obviously subscribes to the Edith Cresson school of thought) but there is also good, clean (spiritually if not facially) _manly_ love between men, as represented by Wallace and his prototype Tartan Army. They may wear skirts, they may dance like girlies, they may betray each other like wounded lovers (Wallace exchanges yearning glances with Robert the Bruce) but the only comradeship worth having is of the kind that is shoulder-to-shoulder hacking and cleaving, plus one or two my-rock-is-bigger than-your-rock contests. In case the effeminate English still don't get the point, they are faced by the entire Highland contingent lifting its kilts at the Battle of Stirling to show the enemy what real men are made of. This is the only instance I can recall of a Hollywood epic paying homage to _Carry On Up the Khyber_.

_Braveheart_ is Gibson's second outing as director, but whereas _Man Without a Face_ , his first, was a smalltown drama, here he commands a cast of thousands. Like a general of old, he leads from the front, face daubed with blue woad, biceps bulging like melons, plaited hair extensions all aswirl. Indeed, there is barely a Scotsman who doesn't have at least a couple of plaits dangling in latterday Traveller-style from a tragic bird's-nest hair-do.

Where _Braveheart_ really scores is in those scenes of manly hacking and cleaving, which communicate all the chaos and horror of combat without sacrificing a jot of clarity. In the battles of Stirling and Falkirk, you can always tell which army is being sliced, hewn or bashed to bits. It would be churlish, in these circumstances, to point out that Stirling was actually fought on a bridge across the Forth, rather than on the grassy field we see here. Let us just be thankful that someone has mustered enough extras (including half the Irish army) to give these scenes a scale and sweep that has been missing from the cinema for decades.

And so what if the production shifted from Scotland to Ireland because the Irish offered better facilities? It's Celts - any old Celts - in cahoots against the English. To rub it home, there's even a token loony Irish freedom-fighter who throws his lot in with the Scots. _Braveheart_ repeatedly declares itself to be about the quest for freedom - or, one assumes, as much freedom as you're likely to get in a feudal society. As history, it may be on dodgy ground, but then when have Hollywood epics ever been models of historical accuracy?

But, for tosh-watchers, the film comes up trumps time and again. Who can resist Ian Bannen as the leprous elder Bruce, whose extremities seem to be falling off even as he preaches duplicitous compromise to his troubled son? Or Patrick McGoohan, attacking his role as evil Edward I with a lip-smacking relish that makes you wonder why he hasn't been cast as a villain more often?

At 177 minutes, it's a long haul, made even longer by a surfeit of slo-mo, but it's not every day you see a Hollywood movie that ends with its star being hung, drawn and quartered, even if Gibson's lingering on his own Christlike martyrdom does strike one as just a teensy bit self-indulgent.

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1995)

_2008 addendum: Just what is it about Mel Gibson and torture?_ Lethal Weapon, Conspiracy Theory, Payback _, to name just three films in which he has starred, all have scenes in which he gets electrocuted or dunked or has toes chopped off. I can only imagine his disappointment that, by the time he had the clout to direct_ The Passion of the Christ _, he was obliged to hand over those two hours of non-stop suffering to a younger actor, James (or Jim, as I prefer tocall him) Caviezel._

Chapter 5: GoldenEye

James Bond felt pleased with himself. He'd had makeovers before, but none as successful as the one they were calling _GoldenEye_. According to the pundits, it ranked somewhere between _Thunderball_ and _On Her Majesty's Secret Service_ on the Bond scale. Not bad going, for a new guy.

He checked his reflection in the mirror; handsome, debonair, and no need for a toupee this time. It had been a smart move to opt for the Pierce Brosnan look. He flexed his jaw - still a little stiff, perhaps, but no doubt he would relax into his new features once he'd downed a couple of Vodka Martinis, uttered an ironic quip or two and dispatched a filmload of villains.

Ah yes, the villains. He recalled what M had told him at his last briefing. 'Don't think that just because the Soviet empire has collapsed we won't be able to conjure some adversaries out of the rubble.' Not to mention, Bond thought, a kitsch credit sequence in the style of the late, great Maurice Binder, featuring scantily clad cuties doing suggestive things around statues of Stalin to one of those lung-busting theme songs, this time belted out by Tina Turner.

Bond frowned. He'd seen his pal 006 getting bumped off by the Russkies in the first reel, but he'd also studied the credits and noticed that the actor who played 006 - Sean Bean - had second billing. It didn't add up. Unless... He tried desperately to recall the contents of a recent dossier about the Obligatory British Villain and scanned the cast list again; here were British actors Robbie Coltrane and Alan Cumming playing _Russians_. Bond didn't know whom to trust. He'd gone to M for enlightenment, but in vain. 'We're sticking to the same old formula, 007,' she had announced, 'but with one or two post-modernist twists so you can hold your own amongst today's Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies.'

But Bond was still coming to terms with the fact that M was a woman (Judi Dench) and that the formerly compliant Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond, no relation) now made ominous rumblings about sexual harassment every time he injected a little harmless innuendo into the conversation. He wasn't used to being pussy-whipped, unless of course by a luscious villainess like Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who crushed men to death with her thighs (probably one of the most effective anti-cellulite exercises ever devised) and whose unambiguously orgasmic approach to bloodshed made him wonder how _GoldenEye_ had got away with a 12 certificate when the comparatively innocuous _Crimson Tide_ had ended up with a 15.

Even the standard-issue Bond girl had attitude nowadays; his latest squeeze was a Russian computer operator who wouldn't stand for any macho nonsense, though he did manage to get her into a bikini - some things never changed. He'd also been rigorous about providing the traditional trimmings, kicking off with an eye-popping, stunt-laden pre-credits sequence and climaxing with the bad guy's subterranean HQ being blasted to smithereens.

In between, Bond had had more fun than he'd had in ages, especially since he could once again run up and down stairs without needing a stuntman. He'd raced his Aston Martin around hairpin bends, swanned around the casinos of Monte Carlo, knocked down half of St Petersburg with a tank and sunned his chest hair on a Caribbean beach. He'd even enjoyed the requisite session with Q and his absurd exploding Biros.

Director Martin Campbell had served up a spiffing action romp to stand with the best of them, though Bond still sulked when he recalled how he'd been forced to give up cigarettes. But he had to admit that after all these years, it gave him a patriotic tingle to hear a villain threatening to unleash his super-duper satellite weapon, not on Los Angeles nor on New York, but on _Greater London_.

Never mind the Obligatory British Villain - the Great British Hero was back, saving the world, but especially the Home Counties. Perhaps, like the mini-skirt, the healthy Bond film was a harbinger of cultural renaissance, a change of government and an upwardly-mobile economy. Still, Bond sighed, wouldn't it be nice if one day someone were to do a faithful remake of, say, _Casino Royale_ as a 1950s period piece, so he could drink and smoke and womanise to his heart's content?

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1995)

Chapter 6: Showgirls

I thought lap-dancing was something they did in Lapland until I discovered _Showgirls_. This is the first Hollywood film to comply with a controversial ruling that writers, rather than producers, should get second-billing in the credits. This means Joe Eszterhas is up there, _mano a mano_ with his director, Paul Verhoeven, putting his name to a film currently being advertised in the adolescent humour magazine _Viz_ with the words, 'Phwoooaarr! Zips down, tissues out – it's chocca with high quality fluff!'

How can I possibly recommend this squalid tosh to the sensible readers of a respectable family newspaper? I can't. And yet _Showgirls_ is the most fun I've had at the movies in ages. Every backstage musical cliche from _42nd Street_ to _All About Eve_ is given a vulgar new twist in this tale of the not so-innocent Nomi Malone, who claws her way up the Las Vegas ladder from a sleazy bump-and-grind joint, where the girls prance around in G-strings, to a high-class erotic cabaret where they prance around in, er, G-strings.

American critics were unanimous in voicing their disgust at this tawdry spectacle from the makers of the only marginally less tawdry _Basic Instinct_. Trust the puritanical Americans to get steamed up over a few nipples (oh, all right, lots and lots of nipples), which we here in Britain can see in our upmarket telly serials any time we like. Verhoeven hasn't helped matters by asserting that his film is 'a glimpse of the dark side of the American Dream', but clued-up audiences will recognise that it's not just a bitterly ironic commentary on the bitch-eat-bitch world of showbiz, but a virtual primer for modern womanhood - the Verhoeven and Eszterhas version.

I expected make-up and grooming tips and, reader, I got them. Never wear pale lipstick without first applying dark lip-liner. Grow your nails so long they could get you arrested for possession of offensive weapons, and then cover them with pink and purple harlequin patterns. Always bare your teeth in a snarl. And never ever perform Sylvie Guillem-type leg manoeuvres in a G-string unless you have first applied napalm to your bikini line.

Critics have been especially harsh about Elizabeth Berkley, who plays Nomi. It's true she looks as though she could also be playing characters called Dopey and Sleazy, but then we are talking about a girl whose main ambition in life is to emerge topless from an imitation volcano. I can't think of another actress who could have fitted the role so perfectly. I also found myself warming to Gina Gershon as Cristal – a sort of topless Margo Channing, who gets Nomi tipsy and then tries to seduce her with the lines, 'I like nice tits,' to which Nomi replies, 'I like having nice tits.' Golly, you'd think Eszterhas was a woman himself, the way he's nailed the way we girls talk to one another.

It's hard to decide which of the men gives the most rib-tickling performance. Could it be an embarrassed-looking Kyle MacLachlan as the entertainments director who teaches Nomi how to pronounce 'Versace' before having sex with her in a swimming-pool? Or how about _LA Law_ 's Alan Rachins, who in the big audition scene hands out ice-cubes with the words, 'I gotta topless show for Chrissake, lemme see your tits'? Or how about Glenn Plummer as a dreadlocked choreographer who is supposed to be the voice of artistic integrity, even though his arty dance looks the same as all the others except that the girls are wearing bodystockings instead of G-strings?

The production numbers are every bit as tacky as anything one could see in Vegas for real, with costumes ranging from classic Crazy Horse to early _Star Trek_. As if all this were not more than enough for one bopsical, we also have two catfights, several acts of bitchy sabotage (one of them involving diamante), a chimpanzee alert in the dressing room, and a gratuitous gang rape which might have been offensive had its context borne any relation to life as we know it.

_Showgirls_ is kitsch so thick you'd need a chain saw to slice it, but if I had to take just one bit with me on to a desert island it would be a sample of the choreography. Adventurous readers might like to have a go at the rudimentary showgirl routine which I have been perfecting at home, especially for people who can't be bothered to get up out of their chairs. _Spread_ those fingernails in front of your face. _Clutch_ that brow as though you've got a throbbing headache. And _snarl_.

(First published in the Sunday Telegraph, 1996)

Click here to buy Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Parts 2 1995-2001 by Anne Billson

About the Author

Anne Billson, who was born in Southport in 1954, is a film critic, novelist and photographer whose work has been widely published.

Her books include studies of John Carpenter's _The Thing_ and Tomas Alfredson's _Let the Right One In_ , as well as horror novels _Suckers_ , _Stiff Lips_ and _The Ex_. In 1993 she was named one of Granta's "Best Young British Novelists".

She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Brussels.

Anne Billson on Smashwords

also available:

Suckers _\- a novel_

The Ex _\- a novel_

Stiff Lips _\- a novel_

The Secret World of the Sex Witches _\- an erotic novella_

Anne Billson on Film: collected columns from The Guardian 2009

Anne Billson on Film: collected columns from The Guardian 2011

Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 1 1989-1995

Spoilers: Selected Film Reviews Part 2 1995-2001

Coming Soon to Smashwords

The Coming Thing

Vampire City

Connect with Anne Billson online

Anne Billson is on Twitter as AnneBillson

Multiglom: The Billson Blog.

Cats on Film: Anne Billson's blog about cats. On film.

Minicrix: Anne Billson's film review database, compiled from short reviews written for the TV pages of the _Sunday Telegraph_.

