Abbott & Costello In The Foreign Legion (1950)

The movie starts with Bud and Lou playing a couple of guys choreographing some wrestling practice. It's going to be a great moneyspinner and they want everything to go smoothly. Mere moments later, the whole plan is in disarray when their main draw (Abdullah, played by William 'Wee Willie' Davis) decides that he's had enough and heads back home to Algeria. The guys, out of a sense of self-preservation, go after Abdullah, determined to get him back to America and wrestling for them but once in Algeria they find themselves, as usual, in the wrong place at the wrong time and circumstances lead to them taking shelter with, as you may have guessed, the Foreign Legion.

There's nothing here to get excited about even if the movie isn't a complete bore. The direction by Charles Barton is competent but the script by John Grant, Martin Ragaway and Leonard Stern is far from the best that the two leads have ever worked with. They do okay with the material, and one or two moments are very enjoyable (especially a scene involving various mirages), but this is undeniably lesser fare.

Sadly, the cast also feels like "lesser fare" to those who have enjoyed many other A & C adventures. The leads do their usual stuff, though Bud is a bit less harsh to Lou in this outing (which may make this one more enjoyable for some viewers), and William Davis does fine with his limited screentime but Patricia Medina isn't all that captivating in the one leading female role while Walter Slezak, Douglass Dumbrille, Leon Belasco and the others in the cast don't make much of an impression either.

One interesting aspect of the movie nowadays is seeing Tor Johnson in one of his many small roles he took before becoming best known years later for his work with Ed Wood but it's just a shame that there's nothing else worth singling out for attention in a film that most firmly resides in the arena of the average.

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Abbott-Costello-Foreign-Legion-Keystone/dp/B000H5V9H6/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1337701783&sr=1-1

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

If you haven't heard of this movie then you've led a very sheltered life. Plan 9 From Outer Space is often referred to as "the worst movie ever made" and when you watch the thing you can't help but think of that title. It makes it hard to take the movie seriously and yet it also makes it hard to hate.

The story is standard b-movie fare in some ways - aliens come down to Earth in flying saucers, fly around scaring folks and also reanimate corpses to . . . . . . . scare more folks. The real laughs come when you find out the motivation for all of this and see/hear the plot developments during the second half. It's so preposterous that I properly laughed out loud on a couple of occasions.

The man behind this cinematic lowpoint is, as many of you will already know, Edward D. Wood Jr. AKA Ed Wood. He directed the thing, and shows some tiny iota of competence despite the cheap design, all-too-fake props, bad acting and lack of continuity, but he also wrote the thing, which helps to overshadow that one tiny iota of competence. I've seen a LOT of bad movies (and, for the record, I don't think this is the worst thing I've ever watched) but I can't think of any that have suffered from such a poor script. When the events aren't being narrated as they occur onscreen we get some of the most inane conversations that you'll ever hear outside of any live Big Brother coverage.

The cast includes the brilliantly-monikered Dudley Manlove, the lumbering giant known as Tor Johnson, an old and frail Bela Lugosi, the lady known as Vampira and a selection of other people, some of whom at least try to work with the absurd material and some of them who don't even seem to do that.

The special effects look like they've been made by someone who couldn't even win a Blue Peter badge for themselves, the actions of the characters are almost as bad as the lines of dialogue given to each, Tom Mason is a terrible stand-in for Bela Lugosi and the material bookending the main storyline is ridiculous. I'm sure there are people who could easily nominate this as the worst movie that they've ever seen but I'm not one of them. I was never bored and I couldn't help having some affection for this filmed failure. I still have to say that it's very, very bad though. Just not the worst.

3/10.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plan-From-Outer-Space-DVD/dp/B00005KH0Y