Amicus Productions – Blood and Porridge

June 30, 2024July 7, 2024

One Donald I’m sad to see go

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone. I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland. Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself. His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland. Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry. He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director. No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch. He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in. To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric. Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast. In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee. Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven. This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled. Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island. There, the party start to be murdered one by one. As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers. And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen. I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone. Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies. Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it. Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement. He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.” I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill. Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status. I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well. Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time. Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen. But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work. Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter. The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both. Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well. But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy. With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image. This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people. The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal. This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too. The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good. Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too. But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

© Solofilm / United Artists

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star. His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken. And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem. I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again. He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder. Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991). He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks. Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985). He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know. This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…” It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work. I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

© EMI

August 31, 2023July 29, 2024

The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection. This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream film industry had previously thought impossible. Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later). Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius. Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s. That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV. My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice. The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland. The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in. Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances. I was at college and staying in a hall of residence. The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon. As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR. Definitely not a big-screen experience. Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all. For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988. They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.” Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999. At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25^th anniversary.

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy. I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing. Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay. That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty. Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted. He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb. And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre. The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too. And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising. This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men. I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film. Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M. The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex. In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community. Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component. It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller. Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt. This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad. She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of. Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods. (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.) The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend. About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.” The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk. It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it. However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant. His movie had to have a killer tree!

© Universal Pictures

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21^st century. This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts. First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing. For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’ Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name. This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy. A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it. An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe. “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick. Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy. When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to. I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee. The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films. I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops. He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges. He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom. He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice. Truly a man of many achievements.

© Voltage Pictures / LD Entertainment

May 31, 2023July 18, 2023

When novelists and films collide

From Wikipedia / © Antonio Monda

May 19^th saw the death of Martin Amis, reckoned by some to be the greatest British novelist of his generation. I have to say that’s not an opinion I shared, although I liked his 1984 novel Money and some of the stories in his 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters. Anyway, one thing I noticed about the lengthy obituaries of Amis I read after his passing – none of them mentioned the fact that he wrote the script for 1980’s science-fiction movie Saturn 3. This features a saucy robot, programmed with the libido of Harvey Keitel, pursuing Farah Fawcett around a base on one of Saturn’s moons. Why the omission? No doubt Amis’s obituarists declined to mention it out of respect. Saturn 3 was an embarrassment and Amis surely left it off his CV.

However, Amis and Saturn 3 do highlight how, over the decades, well-respected authors have been involved with the film industry – a world less interested in creative endeavour and excellence and more interested in giving the public what it wants, putting bums on seats and making a fast buck – and the results have frequently not been pretty.

Here are a few of my favourite examples of novelists and filmmakers colliding and the movies birthed by those collisions being, let’s say, memorable for the wrong reasons.

© Amicus Productions

John Brunner and The Terrornauts (1967)

The science-fiction author John Brunner was highly regarded in his day and won both the Hugo and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards for his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar. Also, his 1979 novel The Jagged Orbit netted another BSFA award and his pessimistic and prescient 1972 novel, The Sheep Look Up, about extreme pollution and environmental disaster, was much admired too. Though he’s not so well-remembered now, the BBC website did devote a feature to him in its Culture section a few years back.

Perplexingly, the only film script Brunner ever wrote was for the ultra-low-budget British sci-fi movie The Terrornauts (1967), which is about some astronomers contacting the remnants of an alien civilisation stowed away on an asteroid, being abducted and taken to that asteroid, and eventually having to fight off an invasion fleet that’s heading towards earth. Brunner’s script was based on a book called The Wailing Asteroid (1960) by another sci-fi writer, Murray Leinster. I saw The Terrornauts on late-night TV when I was 11 and even at that young age thought it was dreadful, with its poverty-row special effects, its cardboard sets, and the thuddingly incongruous presence of comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, inserted into the proceedings for alleged ‘comic relief’. Still, The Terrornauts was so terrible that it burned itself into my memory and I’ve never been able to forget the bloody thing since. For the filmmakers, I guess that was some sort of achievement.

Chief among those filmmakers was producer Milton Subotsky, who ran Amicus Productions with Max J. Rosenberg during the 1960s and 1970s and was better known for making horror movies. I read an interview with Brunner once and he confessed to writing The Terrornauts as a favour to Subotsky, who was a friend of his. Subotsky and Rosenberg, incidentally, had form in getting literary folk to pen their screenplays. They drew at various times on Robert Bloch, Margaret Drabble, Harold Pinter and Clive James, the latter for a film that never got off the drawing board. And for their 1974 lost world / dinosaur epic The Land That Time Forgot, they hired another esteemed science-fiction writer, Michael Moorcock. The low-budget dinosaurs in The Land That Time Forgot are rubbery and a bit laughable by today’s standards, but Moorcock was gracious enough to describe the film as ‘a workmanlike piece of crap.’

And speaking of dinosaurs…

© Hammer Films

J.G. Ballard and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969)

Ballard is one of my all-time favourite writers. While a few filmmakers have come close to successfully translating his disturbing, dystopian and hallucinogenic literary visions into celluloid, such as David Cronenberg did with Crash (1996) and Ben Wheatley with High–Rise (2015), the pulpy When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was, weirdly, the only film that Ballard himself scripted. This was a sequel by Hammer Films – like Subotsky and Rosenberg’s Amicus, a British company best known for making horror movies – to its 1965 epic One Million Years BC, featuring Raquel Welch as a fur-bikini-clad cavewoman and with splendid stop-motion-animation dinosaurs courtesy of special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen.

While One Million Years BC is a movie to watch and enjoy with your brain set at low gear, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is one where you need to switch your brain off altogether. Aside from the obvious scientific absurdity of human beings and dinosaurs being shown to exist at the same time, when they’d really missed each other by 65 million years, the film ends with a natural cataclysm so violent that part of the earth breaks off and creates the moon. But somehow, its main characters survive the carnage. The dinosaurs this time were animated by Jim Danforth and, though not up to Harryhausen’s standard, they’re good fun.

How, you wonder, did Ballard get emmeshed in such hokum? In his 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, he gives an amusing account of meeting Hammer producers Aida Young and Tony Hinds when they were trying to brainstorm ideas for the film. The meeting had not gone well, but then Ballard rather desperately suggested that the big cataclysm at the end contain not a tidal wave crashing in, but one surging out from the shoreline. This would reveal “’…All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology… There was silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door… ‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’”

Fay Weldon and Killer’s Moon (1978)

Here’s the most mind-boggling collaboration on this list. On one hand, we have the feminist author Fay Weldon, who in works like The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) strove to “write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media.” On the other, we have Alan Birkinshaw’s bonkers, grubby, low-budget horror effort Killer’s Moon, which seems the last thing Weldon would get involved with. Yet, uncredited, she rewrote the film’s dialogue.

Killer’s Moon has a quartet of escaped lunatics (wearing bowler hats like the Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange) stalking the Lake District and terrorising some teenaged girls on a school trip whose coach has broken down. The loonies’ psychiatric treatment has included being dosed with LSD and now, mistakenly, they believe themselves to be dreaming. This makes them think they’re free to indulge without any repercussions in their darkest fantasies, which consist of rape, murder and animal mutilation. But don’t worry, animal-lovers. The dog that loses a limb early on, and spends the rest of the film hobbling about on three legs, was three-legged in real life. According to Killer’s Moon’s Wikipedia entry, she “was originally a pub dog who had lost a leg as the result of a shotgun wound sustained during an armed robbery. She was later awarded the doggy Victoria Cross award for bravery.”

Weldon’s involvement was for a familial reason. Director Birkinshaw was none other than her brother. She grumbled that by working on Killer’s Moon, she’d turned it into a ‘cult film’, but that’s exaggerating things a bit. Seen in 2023, Killer’s Moon is no cult film. It’s still daft, badly-made tat, and the bits of it that once seemed shocking just seem funny today.

Martin Amis and Saturn 3 (1980)

And now the movie that inspired this entry, the dire Saturn 3. Amis’s script was based on a story by John Barry – not the composer most famous for his work on the James Bond films, but John Barry the set designer on Star Wars (1977), who died of meningitis the year before Saturn 3 was released. Horror writer Stephen Gallagher was assigned the job of writing Saturn 3’s tie-in novelisation and once said of it: “The script was terrible. I thought it was bad then but in retrospect, and with experience, I can see how truly inept it was.” Gallagher added that this may not have been Amis’s fault and the script could have fallen victim to the film industry’s penchant for endless re-writing. He heard later that “every script-doctor in town had taken an uncredited swing at it, so it’s impossible to say if it was stillborn or had been gangbanged to death.”

Supposedly, Amis based some of his novel Money on his experiences with Saturn 3. It’s even said that one of Money’s characters, the ageing movie star Lorne Guyland, who’s convinced of his enduring youth and virility and isn’t afraid to disrobe and flaunt his body in an effort to prove it, was inspired by Saturn 3’s star Kirk Douglas. Years later, Amis remarked: “When actors get old they get obsessed with wanting to be nude… And Kirk wanted to be naked.”

Norman Mailer and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

Three years after the publication of his crime-noir pastiche Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer got the chance to turn the book into a film starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney and Wings Hauser. The venerable American novelist was both co-scripter and director. I wrote extensively about Tough Guys Don’t Dance-the-movie a couple of months ago, so I won’t repeat here too much of what I said. It was, I wrote, “a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness”, where the cast visibly struggle “as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness. At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, ‘make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr Five.’ Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument. ‘I made you come 16 times – in a night.’ ‘And none of them was any good!’”

And of course, there’s the scene where hero Ryan O’Neal “finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – ‘Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!’ – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.”

Cormac McCarthy and The Counselor (2013)

Also not having much success with sexy dialogue was legendary American author Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the script for the Ridley Scott-directed movie The Counselor. At one point in The Counselor, we get an auto-erotic scene – that’s ‘auto’ as in ‘involving automobiles’ – where Cameron Diaz makes out with Javier Bardem’s sports car. While grinding against the windscreen on her way to a climax, and flashing a certain part of her anatomy at Bardem on the other side of the glass, he likens the sight to “one of those catfish things, one of the bottom-feeders you see go up the side of the fish tank.”

Most critics panned The Counselor, presumably because they’d hoped that it would combine the intensity of McCarthy’s celebrated ultra-violent Western novel Blood Meridan (1985) with the intensity of Scott’s darkly-perverse space-horror movie Alien (1980). What they got, though, was a bewildering crime thriller about drug cartels that, to quote Mark Kermode in the Observer, “gets an A-list cast to recite B-movie dialogue with C-minus results.”

Michel Houellebecq and the KIRAC arthouse porn movie (2023)

Many writers have turned up in films as actors, usually in supporting or cameo roles – Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie and, indeed, Norman Mailer and Martin Amis (who as a blond 13-year-old starred in 1965’s A High Wind in Jamaica). I doubt, though, if any of these have generated as much noise as French author Michel Houellebecq’s recent, er, performance in a film production from radical Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics). I haven’t managed to find the title of the film — which sounds like it belongs to the ‘arthouse porn’ category — in the news reports about it.

Houellebecq, it transpires, agreed to be filmed having sex in the movie and signed a waiver saying that the only restriction on his participation was that his face and his ‘block and tackle’ didn’t appear together in the same shot. KIRAC didn’t even extend an invitation to him originally. It was Qianyun Lysis, Houellebecq’s better half, who suggested they use her husband – and no, it’s not her, but another woman who appears in bed with Houellebecq in the film. Now anyone who’s read his sex-filled and provocative novels, such as Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001), would assume this sort of thing is right up Houellebecq’s street. However, he lost his enthusiasm for the project after a few days of filming (and after the deed had been captured on camera). He then denounced the production and has since been trying, and failing, to stop KIRAC releasing the film in France and Netherlands.

If I was crass and prurient, I would roll my eyes at this and give a little cry of “Oh là là!” But I’m not. So, I won’t.