From Borehamwood to Budleigh Moor to Freedonia to Vegas to outer space to Brixton.

80	Psychomania Low-budget 1971 British film about a "sinister and menacing" (albeit middle-class) motorcycle gang called 'The Living Dead' who terrorise and wreak early 70's havoc in the countryside and brand new concrete precincts of Borehamwood (mini skirt-wearing young Mums pushing Silver Cross prams are sent flying). The frog-loving bikers, convinced by their leader that in so doing they will have eternal life, kill themselves one by one, making for unforgettable viewing. A high point is the funeral of their leader, buried whilst still sitting, rigid, in leathers on his bike. During this odd spectacle, one of the gang members forgets that he's meant to be a hard biker type, plays his acoustic guitar and sings a folk ditty about the temporarily deceased ("...and the world never knew his name/But the chosen few knew of his fame/Come join his company/Riding free...") Not long afterwards, the roar of the "deceased"'s bike engine and shifting of overlaid turf indeed signify that eternal life is his... but for how long? Nicky Henson leads, Beryl Reid plays his weird occult-loving Mum who lives in an amazing gothic-type house with splashes of early 70's decor, George Sanders plays her scary butler, June Brown has a cameo as the grieving mum of one of the "deceased" gang members, herself the real-life sister of Vicki 'Allo Allo' Michelle. Fantastic Moog-funk soundtrack from John 'Kes' Cameron, too.
79	Duck Soup From the veil this was nominated to the list by Spike Milligan (well, Jane Milligan told us it was his favourite) and seconded by many of the congregation, so here it is. One of two Marx Bros entries this particular one deserves special mention as it doesn’t feature much of Zeppo but loads of Margaret Dumont. And the mirror routine of course. There’s not much of this sort of thing on the list, no WC Fields or Laurel and Hardy (for shame!), so we’re glad that Groucho and the family are here to hold the banner for them all. It would have been nice to have had Way Out West or The Bank Dick, though. Ah, well, maybe next time…
78	Holiday On The Buses We don’t like Star trek much. Next Generation is alright but the rest is not much cop, we feel. We do, however, like Star Trek films and here is where we can make the hitherto overlooked connection between Star Trek and On The Buses, which we never much liked on the telly either. But the films are a different matter. On the face of it, it falls squarely into the greatest sitcom/feature transfer trap of them all and, like the bloody awful Are You Being Served? film, relocates the entire shebang to a holiday location. But unlike that aforementioned offence to nature there is at least a reasonably cogent explanation for this and in any case, the holiday camp they make for befits the situation far better than some fictional Spanish resort with a comedy name. Everyone is present and correct, from Blakey to Olive, and the entire adventure is such a time capsule of ‘70s holiday life in Britain that it should be housed in the British Museum and shown to tourists and school children. By force if necessary.
77	The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer A very deep breath, as we run down this '70s satire's highly complex plot - Peter Cook's titular pollster arrives from nowhere at Dennis Price's hopeless marketing agency, staffed by assorted goof-offs including John Cleese and a skiving, Valerie Leon-ogling Arthur Lowe, whom he quickly replaces, putting the company on the map with a raunchy ad for Graham Chapman's humbugs, conducting a high-profile Kinseyesque sex survey, getting on Harold Pinter's chat show, poaching rival pollster Denholm Elliott, and mounting a campaign to disgrace fireside-chatting, horoscope-obsessed, pipe-smoking Harold Wilson-alike PM George A. Cooper via a botched party political broadcast, while boosting adenoidal, seafaring, piano-playing Edward Heath-alike Tory leader Ronald Fraser with a staged left wing riot. And that's just the first half! The original idea was David Frost's and conceptually it's bang on the money. Writers Cleese, Chapman and Cook cheekily turn Rimmer into a surreptitious hatchet job on Frostie himself. Cook acts as if off autocue, appropriate considering the dry aloofness of his character, but the oddly detached atmosphere doesn't stop there. Director Kevin Billington drops the usual comedy close-ups for loads of highly composed long shots, tricksy reflections and expansive landscapes, and the sets (from the crumbling, echoey Masonic temple used for the Fairburn building to the swinging modernism of Frost - sorry - Rimmer's plush pad) dwarf the actors, sitting oddly with the small-scale sketch comedy, which is, of course, why we love it. Plus it's got a spoof election night broadcast and an excellent '60s intrigue-y theme from John 'Psychomania' Cameron (although this, too, is deployed hilariously inappropriately - the most bombastic part of the opening tune plays over scenes of Cleese washing his hands in the gents). Flawed in many ways, but unique in so many others.
76	Black Joy It seems South London has forever existed on screen as a "gritty", downbeat and generally pity-garnering backdrop for tales of poverty, crime and generally wasted life. Not so with this Brixton-based comedy, in which an innocent Nigerian immigrant pitches up in the neighbourhood and, after a distinctly rude awakening to the trials everyday British urban life (not least an encounter with Vivian Stanshall (slight return) as a creepily predatory priest in a youth hostel), hitches up with a street-smart mentor. Unfortunately, that mentor happens to be all-round dodgy geezer Dave, played by Norman Beaton in full-on JA wide-boy mode, who has trouble enough dealing with his girlfriend (a surprisingly tough turn from Floella Benjamin), with no prospect of any rasclaat rest. Amongst the squalid hostels, bedsits and dole offices (plus a lavish windswept trip to Margate to see The Playboys), however, there's a refreshingly upbeat plot, and the whole thing's played out with a natural charm that's thin on the ground these days. The perfect antidote to both earnest "housing estate hell" melodrama and the blaxploitation bandwagon, with a great reggae/soul saturated soundtrack of its own, available - where else? - on Ronco records and tapes.
75	The Boy Who Turned Yellow Michael Powell, who shows his head several times here with vastly different pictures, tried his hand with childrens' films during his post-Peeping Tom patch when he was Persona Non Grata with the big studios. The Children's Film Foundation of all people took him up, and he duly gave them one of their weirdest features, this quasi-educational story of a young boy's electromagnetic epiphany on a tube train. As well as style on a budget, there's a lesson in humility here - while this would obviously count as hack work to the director of Colonel Blimp, there's no apparent sense of "will this do?" - every frame is total Powell. You can still find it on video if you look hard enough, or alternatively in the OED under "charming".
74	The Stuntman Most films that rely heavily on stunts don't provide much of interest in between the airbag falls and vehicle pile-ups - Hooper, Cannonball Run, The Blues Brothers and their ilk being prime examples, and even the revered likes of Bullitt tend to sag a bit when the protagonists get out of the car. Fortunately this overlooked gem manages to mix stops-out stunt sequences with a borderline-pretentious paranoia plot to cover all bases with ease. Jobbing greenhorn Steve Railsback gets a job in the stunt team of Peter O'Toole's director's World War One action romance, falls for the leading lady, has his every waking moment interrupted by O'Toole on an ace crane-mounted director's chair, and finally takes on the escape from a sinking car stunt that killed his predecessor. There's plenty of O-level symbolism thrown at it (O'Toole's messianic character is called Eli Cross, in true ramming-the-point-home style), and the whole "What is reality after all? Eh? Think about it" ethos of the film won't impress everyone, but it's all done with a light touch, and you really won't see anything like this anywhere else, and the set-pieces, particularly the rooftop gun battle and aerial dogfight, are brilliantly staged. A curio that's been buried for too long, we say.
73	Diamonds Are Forever Connery's comeback caper, easily the best 'non-serious' Bond of the lot. It's endearingly daft without being offensively stupid (yes, Moonraker, we're looking at you), goes all over the place without getting tedious, and features the great more-than-just-a-dodgy-stereotype sub-villains Kidd and Wint. OK, so Charles Gray is a disappointingly avuncular Blofeld, Jill 'Tiffany Case' St. John and Lana 'Plenty O'Toole' Wood don't do much, and the theme song's by Shirley bleedin' Bassey again, but what a plot! Directionless, profligate, vulgar and wantonly episodic, just how Bond should be. You can imagine the scene - with only weeks to go until shooting starts, round the big conference table a hundred harried writers nervously pitch their little bits of business - "OK, so there's this robotic pipe-welder, right..." "There's a bomb hidden in a big fake trifle..." "Bond fights two feisty kung fu ladies in bikinis!" "How about we have Q playing the fruit machines?" "... and so the car goes up on two wheels..." "... he sticks the marching band cassette down her pants..." "... false fingerprints..." "... TWO Blofelds..." "... a moon buggy!!" - and Good Old Cubby, at head of table, holds up his hand for silence, takes a drag on his cigar, leans forward and says, "Fellas... we'll shoot 'em all!" And we're so glad he did.
72	Solaris Russian answer to 2001, and much better than Kubrick's overpraised sketch show, to boot, we say. Three cosmonauts orbit a sentient watery planet, which slowly turns them insane with tactile hallucinations from their past. Slowly being the operative word, as this takes the same "glacial" pace as Ol' Stanley (in one heavily solarised sequence - it was the seventies, colour separation - our hero takes all of five minutes to drive down the road), but here that makes for an atmosphere of claustrophobia and apprehension, rather than of "that's a nice model - when's Leonard Rossiter on, then?" Plus, where 2001 resembled an extended Tomorrow's World "we'll all be living here in twenty years" feature circa 1968, the motheaten Russian space gear in this looks more like the studio equipment used to film one. Plus it's based on a proper story by a proper writer, with a proper ending.
71	The Kremlin Letter The spy thriller wasn't a genre that excited much interest amongst the congregation but this number from John Huston managed to sneak in and how glad we are that it has. One of Huston's least well known films – we might have expected to receive commendations for the likes of The African Queen and The Maltese Falcon but didn't – it is nonetheless a good great example of the Cold War espionage movie but with none of its better known companions' more irritating features (i.e. Michael Caine). Spies here are not the government licensed civil servants of Ipcress, Bond or the like but morally bankrupt mercenaries motivated by cash. Equally the baddies are not the flint faced commies one might expect, indeed they are at each other's throats as much as anyone. This is indeed a complex film and it's difficult to distinguish the goodies at all – if there actually are any – but it's the none the worse for it and the cast is a superb one with Nigel Bond, Orson Welles, a junior blond Max von Sydow, Richard Boone (and it's interesting to notice just how much in technique, gestures etc how much Boone is like Gene Hackman, or vice versa – well, interesting to us, anyhow) and dear old Cyril Shaps even turning up at one point. We would also venture to suggest that any film that had George Sanders as a homosexual knitting spy in drag deserves to be recognised. With a neat little voice over/subtitle-avoiding trick and pitch black ending this is a film that deserves to be brought in from the cold. Arf.

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