Out On Blue Six : The B-52's

The second episode of Reginald D Hunter's excellent music documentary and travelogue, Songs of the South saw him visit Alabama and Georgia on BBC2 tonight and catch up with Cindy Wilson of the B-52's. The conversation naturally turned to this, their biggest most durable hit...

End Transmission

A World Apart (1988)

A World Apart is a 1988 film based on the life of Ruth First, the South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar who was one of 156 Congress Alliance members found guilty in the treason trials of the late 1950s and early 60s. She became the first white woman detained under the 90 day detention law, serving a total of 117 days in isolation and without charge. Following her release, she went into exile, initially in the UK, before taking a university post in Mozambique, where she was  killed by a parcel bomb addressed specifically to her in 1982.

The real Ruth First, 

re-enacting her incarceration for Jack Gold's BBC film 90 Days

The film was written by First's daughter Shawn Slovo and is an autobiographical account from her point of view, depicting a thinly fictionalised First as Diana Roth (played by Barbara Hershey) and Slovo herself as the eldest daughter Molly (a remarkable debut from the young Jodhi May)

Mixing the personal and the political, debut director Chris Menges (cinematographer on Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields and The Mission) delivers a film that in some ways is reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird. Young Molly's life is depicted as an affluent but open minded as befits her upbringing; she attends ballet classes, a good school and does not see race as an issue. She visibly baulks at one of her young friend's demands for a servant's attention with the loaded cry of "Boy!" and is quick to point out that that is not his name and she is shown to treat the families own servants as friends. In focusing largely from Molly's point of view, the film depicts her parents 'treasonous' activities as something that slowly impacts on her life - friends start to shun her, invites to parties don't reach her, she becomes targeted at school. It is these subtle changes that show how perversely placid life in the horrors of Apartheid could actually be. Granted, in telling the story from a white perspective the film may - like many of its contemporaries from the time - sideline the potential to depict first hand the actual hardships and intolerance of such a brutal regime from the eyes of its black characters, but it still manages to pack a surprisingly hefty punch from its 'smaller' perspective, aided immeasurably by May's talented beyond her years performance in which hurt and rejection is all too palpably depicted upon her fresh young face.

In depicting her mother, Solvo paints a picture of someone who was dutiful but occasionally lacking in the necessary maternal focus expected towards children. This is a woman for whom the injustices around her came first, perhaps to the sometime detriment of her home life, and Barbara Hershey delivers a strong performance that is both hard and angry yet at the same time deeply vulnerable.

Rounding out the rest of the cast are the familiar faces of Paul Freeman, David Suchet, Jeroen Krabbé and a young Tim Roth and Adrian Dunbar. The soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer and is similar tonally to his work on Rain Man which is fitting as I believe the director of that film, Barry Levinson, hired Zimmer based on what he heard here.

A World Apart is available to view in full on YouTube.

Hanging On The Telephone

RIP Leonard Nimoy

Sad news, Leonard Nimoy has passed away at the age of 83.

Actor, film director, poet, musician, presenter and photographer, Nimoy will forever be known for his performance as Spock, the half human/half Vulcan space explorer in the original series of Star Trek, the animated series, two episodes of The Next Generation series and several films including the two most recent JJ Abrams reboots.

He also starred in two seasons of Mission: Impossible and guested on Columbo as well as appearing in films Baffled! the western Catlow and The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. He also appeared on the stage in productions of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Oliver! Camelot, Sherlock Holmes, Fiddler On The Roof, Caligula, The Man In The Glass Booth, Twelfth Night and Equus

As a director he was responsible for the Star Trek films The Search For Spock and The Voyage Home as well as Three Men and a Baby. He released several albums of music, with standard folk and country material as well as songs he penned himself and was an avid photographer, having studied at UCLA in between Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. He owned a camera he rebuilt himself at the age of thirteen for the rest of his life and his work (many capturing Rubenesque women in the nude) was exhibited in Massachusetts.

He certainly lived long and prospered.

RIP

Rubbish, Shite and Bollocks Too!

The trouble with living in a small town means there's very little in the way of entertainment of an evening. Having lived here all my life, I'm rather used to it. What's worse is when they actually try and rectify matters. As you can see here with the latest production at St Helens Theatre Royal...

Now, I love Andrea Dunbar's Rita Sue and Bob Too and I wouldn't mind seeing a stage production of it. But seriously, the washed up teenybopper that is Lee from Steps is no one's idea of Bob!

Bless the naivety (or arrogance) of what he says here;

"I'm really excited to take on the character of Bob and join the cast of this fantastic production. This gives me an opportunity to flex my acting muscles and I hope the audience will enjoy seeing a very different Lee on stage as opposed to the pop star they are used to in Steps"

Acting muscles?! Pah!

Elsewhere there's Emily Fleeshman, sister of former Corrie star Richard, most recently seen in Still Open All Hours, someone who is referred to as ''Merseyside's'' Olivia Sloyan, a former LIPA student who has apparently previously appeared in a Halfords commercial and Crissy Rock (Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird and TV's Benidorm) and a Scouse comic called Micky Finn, two performers who seem to be on the Theatre Royal every season along with Joe Longthorne, Freddie Star, Ken Dodd, the faded stars of Brookside and Shameless and any number of TV psychics.

Rita Sue and Bob Too concludes tomorrow night. I'll give it a miss, thanks.

Common Sense Prevails!

Blogger had intended to make private all blogs with adult content by the end of next month in a bid to deter a minority commercial porn spammers (as previously blogged about here)

But common sense has prevailed!

They have decided, thanks to much criticism and complaints, to overturn their original decision. Read all about it here

Traitor (1971)

This week saw BBC2's Newsnight broadcast 'the holy grail' of espionage aficionados; the discovery of a long forgotten interview with Guy Burgess of the Cambridge spy ring in Moscow (see link here) For someone like myself, who used to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Blunt being given the unexpected chance to see and hear Burgess speak was a real treat. It's fitting therefore that following that surprise I decided to watch Dennis Potter's 1971 play Traitor which saw a BAFTA award winning turn from John Le Mesurier as a fictionalised defector to the USSR from the dreaming spires and the ruling classes of England.

Traitor is a claustrophobic piece that sees a party of Western journalists visit the Moscow flat of the notorious traitor of the title, Adrian Harris (Le Mesurier), to secure the rare scoop of interviewing the former MI6 controller and Soviet double agent.

Much like the pieces concerning Philby that appeared in the newspapers in the late 60s, Traitor's main set - Harris' Moscow flat - is depicted as a bare and minimal room save for just a couple of chairs and a table with the obligatory bottle(s) of spirits ready to hand. Even in exile, Philby remained nostalgic for 'his' England and Harris also shares this sentiment as witnessed by the metaphorical landscape portrait of rural England that adorns the wall of his flat, sticking out like a sore thumb.

Like the best autobiographers and journalists who concerned themselves with the Cambridge spies, Potter explores the dichotomy inherent in the notion of treason. For the reporters and indeed much of the outside world, Harris betrayed his country by becoming a committed communist who passed on vital information to the KGB that cost people their lives. But as the deeply troubled and slowly intoxicated Harris continues to maintain, it was not his country which he betrayed but rather his class. Potter himself discussed “the misstatement that someone could politically betray their country and be presumed not to love it” and via his trademark flashbacks we began to understand and empathise with Harris' point of view; his upbringing was one of an aloof father and a strict, violent boarding school regime where he was physically slapped by the headmaster for having a stutter and therefore proving incapable of reciting Blake (quotations feature heavy in Traitor and the present day Harris seems to seek solace in his ability to say them now just as much as he takes solace in the bottle) As a result it's easy to see why someone would not feel loyal to such a lifestyle and, in one of the most satisfying moments of the play, when we see footage of the Jarrow Marches, the general strike and the back to back penury of the working classes of the 1920s and '30s accompanied by that traditional paean to England, Jerusalem, we become aware of a very different and more important England that Harris both believes in and wanted to fight for. “There is another England, you know?" he cries out to the reporters at one point "And you can paint it in blood and tears and sweat and slime and shit!"

As with many of Potter's works there is more going on with Traitor than initially meets the eye. A double agent is of course a wholly unreliable narrator and duplicitous figure and this ultimately bleeds into the play itself when, in the final scene, we suddenly flashback to the beginning and a replay of Harris awaiting the journalists. Except this time we are privy to something Potter did not reveal at the start -  Harris discovering that the KGB has bugged his flat in preparation for the meeting. “Remember the microphones and be careful… For God’s sake remember the microphone!” we hear Harris say in his head as he opens the door to greet the reporters. So what is this? Is it a straightforward flashback in which it is revealed that Harris knew he was bugged and has just lied to his Western audience by putting on an act?  Or does this flashback suggest that the entire play has been in Harris’s mind -  that the journalists have only just arrived and everything we have witnessed is Harris imagining what is likely to happen next? Either is possible as witnessed by his description of “home” as “a journey you take inside your head” or his references to the likes of Nellie Dean, the equally unreliable narrator of Wuthering Heights. Either way, Harris is continuing to be the master of deceit and is lying to someone, be it the journalists, the KGB, or even just to himself. 

Traitor is an extremely dialogue heavy static piece which despite its brilliance does occasionally make it heavy going. That it was later remade for radio is particularly telling. Nevertheless it benefits greatly here from the performance by Le Mesurier for whom Nancy Banks-Smith said "cursed with so Hamlet-like a face, he seems to have been coerced into comedy. This, is Hamlet, was worth waiting for" Le Mesurier was by then a household name thanks to Dad's Army and his arrival to the role says much about Potter's intentions to cast comedic actors against type (some of his first choices included Tony Hancock for Jack Hay in Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton - previously reviewed here - Spike Milligan in Pennies from Heaven and Max Wall and Jimmy Jewel for Blade on the Feather) The actor was extremely hesitant in accepting the role, nervous about the long speeches and swearing and scared that he would not be able to ''pull it off''. In the end his fears were unfounded and he won the BAFTA for Best TV Actor that year. It was said that Le Mesurier, not a great believer in awards, used the statuette to prop open his bedroom door! 

To get the BBC to consider repeating some of these classic Play for Today's please sign the petition I started here

Out On Blue Six : Clean Bandit ft. Stylo G

I must admit to finding cellist Grace Chatto rather striking

End Transmission

Double Dare (1976)

For me, Double Dare is possibly Dennis Potter's first bona fide masterpiece. It takes the theme of the relationship between reality and fantasy previously explored in his 1972 TV play Follow The Yellow Brick Road (reviewed here) and his novel Hide and Seek, as well as prefiguring the concept of the fantasy bleeding out into real life that he would later effectively use in The Singing Detective and Karaoke.

The play tells the story of blocked and ill TV playwright Martin Ellis (Alan Dobie, channeling Potter's own circumstances) who arranges to meet a young actress called Helen (Kika Markham) in a hotel to discuss a loose idea for a play he has in mind involving a meeting between a prostitute and her client, which he imagines will be fraught with sexual tension and bartering. As their own meeting goes on, it soon becomes clear that the same kind of game is being played between the writer and the actress.

The most interesting thing about this particular exploration of the blurring of fact and fiction is that the play was based on a real life hotel meeting between Potter and Markham. 

As Kika Markham herself said, Potter seemed fascinated about "what it meant to act a part - he was confused as to whether you were what you were acting. I'm sure that was very central to him - he had trouble with the boundaries of reality." 

Potter's belief, she believed, was that all performers are in effect whores; willing to reveal the most personal aspects of themselves to -  and discard their principles for - an audience in order to gain a good part. He sought to examine this willing exploitation by casting Markham in the dual role of Helen the actress and Carol, the call girl who is playing a seemingly dangerous game with the profusely perspiring sexually frustrated businessman played by Malcolm Terris - in a performance that for once actually benefits from his loud, egregious style.

Perhaps naturally this was not a belief shared by Markham herself and, in the meeting that inspired the tale, she recalls she gave as good as she got defending her art by challenging and rebuking his theories and views, which ultimately made its way into the fiction itself; "I gave him half his lines in that play, because I really did argue back. And he kept that in, though I think my answers didn't always please him - and even that is incorporated!"

The symbiotic nature of the play and the two couples is further complicated by Martin's increasingly disturbed and panicked frame of mind as he starts to believe that the client and the prostitute are the characters in his mind brought into being and that the violent fate he has in mind to conclude his play will occur for real during the course of the evening. As the evening progresses and Martin's mind becomes further disturbed he begins to fear that he is even controlling Helen, as much as he would become her puppet master for the purposes of the play itself.

The reflexiveness has extra weight when you consider how fascinated and disgusted Martin is by Helen's previous nude scenes which in turn Potter positions Markham into doing for the play itself and ultimately, how Potter naturally has total control over his vision; "In a way, he won, in the play" Markham related.

The links between creativity and sexuality is a beguiling and disconcerting mix which I feel was the last real time Potter gave his women a genuine mouthpiece, thanks to the original meeting he had with Markham, who was very much an independent, late 20th century artiste with intelligence and principles - being active in the Workers Revolutionary Party. He continued to explore the nature of exploitation towards women and his own difficult coming to terms with female sexuality, but never quite with the same sensitivity or intelligence as he perhaps shows here, even if he does rather get his own way in the end as Markham alludes to. 

To get the BBC to consider repeating some of these classic Play For Today's please sign the petition I started here

Last Night's Tele : Critical

Jed Mercurio, creator of Line of Duty, Bodies and Cardiac Arrest, returned to the medical drama last night with Sky One's Critical and soundly pronounced the likes of Casualty and Holby City dead.

I'd been looking forward to this ever since it was announced last year and the opening episode did not disappoint. Set in real time, Critical explores the crucial 'golden hour' of emergency medicine, the first sixty minutes that means life or death for the poor unfortunate on the Resus trolley.

And this really was a poor unfortunate. Unlike the soapy, long in the tooth and unrealistic Casualty and Holby City, we learnt nothing about the man our determined team fought to keep alive, we just knew about the serious injuries he had received...and we saw them, and the surgical procedures to combat them, in graphic gory detail.

Focusing firmly on the nitty gritty, former doctor Mercurio turned in another scarily accurate depiction of medicine that focused on the procedures and only suggested just the slightest hint of what occurred around it, such as the lives and personalities of the staff and the back stabbing hospital politics. 

Set in a state of the art major trauma unit, this often felt and looked like science fiction but it's reassuring to know - should we ever be unlucky enough to find ourselves in such a Resus - it is all fact. Whizzily filmed around an almost Kubrick like set and choc-full of tensely uttered jargon being spat over grimly realistic CGI body organs I felt like I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen and the cast, including Neve McIntosh (Bodies) Emma Fryer, Catherine Walker, Claire Skinner, Kimberley Nixon and (only briefly seen in the debut episode) the show's lead Lennie James certainly helped to hold our attention too.

Tuesdays, Sky One, 9pm.

Wordless Wednesday : Bus Stop

Heller In Pink Tights

Just some stunning publicity shots for Heller in Pink Tights, George Cukor's 1960 glorious technicolour adaptation of Louis L'Amor's western novel Heller With a Gun, featuring the beautiful Sophia Loren and the lavish costumes of Edith Head.

Out On Blue Six : Wreckless Eric

End Transmission

The War Zone (1999)

The War Zone is about a London family consisting of a pregnant mother, her husband and their two teenage children Tom and Jessie, who relocate to rural Devon.  Tom is bored and lonely but nothing can prepare him from the revelatory secret relationship he uncovers between his father and sister. Isolated and confused, he slowly becomes determined to tell the horrible truth. 

Tim Roth's sole directorial effort (to date) bears all the indelible hallmarks of a director who captured one of Roth's finest and first performances in the TV play Made In Britain; Alan Clarke. As well as the technical influence and the same courage to explore dark subject matter, Roth also takes Clarke's belief in nurturing and in turn capturing totally naturalistic and authentic turns from inexperienced young actors, in this case Freddie Cunliffe (no relation to me!) and Lara Belmont who are both rare finds. 

The young actors are placed head first opposite two heavyweights, Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton as their parents, and it is to their credit that they hold their own. For Winstone, this is an incredibly dark role - perhaps even darker than his turn in actor turned director Gary Oldman's film Nil By Mouth - but he pulls it off brilliantly by clearly having great trust in Roth, despite his very understandable reservations regarding the nature of the storyline which he is on record as discussing claiming "the little girl (ie Lara, the novice 17 year old actress making her debut) looked after me". This role, like so many of Winstone's other performances in the 90s, is light years ahead of the 'geeza' stereotype he has all too comfortably settled into in recent years. I defy anyone to watch this and say he cannot act or that he always plays the same part.

Roth takes Alexander Stuart's screenplay (adapted from his own novel) and presents a harrowing and deeply unpleasant tale told in both bleak and oblique, elusive terms, refusing to provide answers to the painful, abusive and disturbing situation because he knows full well that somethings cannot ever be explained. It's a bold gamble, especially for one's first movie in the chair, and - despite winning several prestigious awards - it was enough to stymie many critics who found it abhorrent, perhaps having expected a more simplistic morality tale than what is ultimately on offer. Their reviews damaged the film's reputation at the box office and as a result, Roth hasn't made a film of his own since. Shame on them say I. However, to his credit, Roth appeared in person before audiences at several festivals to discuss and defend his film which is where this telling exchange comes from;

Audience member (who worked with sexual abuse survivors): "What made you interested in tackling such a really difficult subject?"

Tim Roth: "Well, all I can say to you is draw your own conclusions..."

Audience member: "I've a feeling I might know..."

Roth: "OK, gotcha babe"

The Times They Are A-Changing

Looks like Blogger gone all prudent and will no longer allow sexually explicit content or nudity on public access blogs from March 23rd.

Read all about it here

Obviously this will affect my blog. I'm told I can either mark it as private for followers now or, I presume I'm right in thinking, leave it and Blogger will automatically set it to private from March 23rd for you.

What a bum deal!

Different For Girls (1996)

I hadn't seen Different For Girls since the late 90s and had fond memories of it. Rewatching it, I may have realised I remembered it a little more fondly than it perhaps deserves, but that isn't to say that Tony Marchant's sensitive and well-intentioned film isn't a good movie. 

Marchant's script  follows the time-honored conventions of the romantic comedy movie genre, introducing two characters for whom opposites clearly attract. Paul is a hotheaded dispatch driver who, at 34, still largely lives like the punk obsessed teenager he was back in 1976. Kim is conservative and demure to the point of being painfully introverted. 

So far, so so...except Kim is a post operative transsexual and Paul was once his protection from the bullies back at school. 

A chance meeting in London one morning places the pair in an unusual relationship that neither can immediately get their heads around and numerous obstacles are put before them along the way to their happy ending.

Much of the film's success depends upon Steven Mackintosh's portrayal of the transsexual, Kim. So it's a relief to find that he is brilliant, hitting all the right notes of quiet determination, hard fought for privacy and shyness. It's a mark of his performance here that I actually forgot I was watching Steven Mackintosh, an actor I am very familiar with from other productions. He was simply Kim. 

As Paul, Rupert Graves gives a wonderfully swashbuckling turn inhabiting both the character's loutish recklessness as well as his obviously good heart. Unfortunately, Marchant's script makes the cardinal error of not getting under his character's skin as well as it ought to have done, which means the dynamics of the attraction he feels for someone he once knew to be a boy are sadly ill-explained. There's a great opportunity here to explore how certain Kim is of herself now and how still in the dark about himself and barely mature Paul is, but Marchant muffs it. Instead he offers us an unnecessary subplot concerning Kim's sister (Saskia Reeves) and her squaddie husband (Neil Dudgeon) who, it is revealed, is infertile. It's clear the message here is that it takes more to be a man than the ability to reproduce, but this is an obvious point you would hope we all know by now and, in the end, it is a diversion from the real heart of the tale (which is Paul and Kim, and what Paul sees in Kim) that wastes Dudgeon and Reeves, two excellent actors who appear to have been pushed centre stage like last minute subs in a game of football.

One of the things I fondly remembered about Different For Girls is the beautiful soundtrack of the punk and post punk/new wave music that Paul so loves. The film is choc-full of greats from the likes of Wreckless Eric, The Buzzcocks (who appear as themselves on stage when Paul takes Kim along to a gig) The Only Ones and Joe Jackson, whose 1979 hit gives the film its title. Keeping this late 70s vibe, the film also includes appearances from several notable figures from punk including Ian Dury as a bailiff, Edward Tudor-Pole as a solicitor and Graham Fellows aka Jilted John as the dispatch manager alongside the more traditional supporting cast that includes familiar faces such as Miriam Margolyes, the late Charlotte Coleman, Phil Davis and Robert Pugh.

Flawed and uneven it may be, but Different For Girls needs to be applauded for taking the first bold step in representing transsexualism on screen. Almost twenty years on, it is still an area that remains overlooked and that's the biggest flaw of all here.

Specs Appeal

Kate Hardie in Mike Hodges' 1998 film, Croupier

Skyscraper (1996)

A couple of years back when I watched and reviewed several 'classic' 1970s British sexploitation movies I used to rate them on Letterboxd in two distinctive ways - Film Rating and Sexploitation Film Rating - because it's almost impossible to rate this genre of film making using the same system  one would rate a 'real' film, such as Citizen Kane say.

So, Skyscraper

Film Rating: a half star
Sexploitation Film Rating: 2 stars


Back in the 1990s, the battle of the boobs existed between Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. Anderson, busting out from Baywatch, reached the big screen in 1996's Barb Wire. Anna Nicole had beaten her to it by a year with her starring role in action 'thriller' To The Limit. It seemed everyone wanted to see a pair of tits running around with guns back in the mid 90s. Not to be outdone, in the year Pammy brought out Barb Wire, Anna Nicole returned to the action genre with Skyscraper which could perhaps best be described as the Lidl's own brand of Die Hard and could truthfully be described as a film that *ahem* 'helped' me through my teen years.

The actual plot, such as it is, beggars belief. Anna Nicole plays Carrie Wink, a beautiful and voluptuous helicopter pilot whose job it is to charter high level clients across LA. One of her clients turns out to be a ruthless African terrorist called Fairfax (Charles M Huber, who seems to be genuinely amused by how appalling the material he is working on is) who routinely quotes Shakespeare to show the audience that he is a clever, intelligent and educated man and therefore - to the average American Joe's eyes, remember think McClane v Gruber here - not to be trusted; though check out the unintentionally hilarious moment which shows Anna Nicole correctly guessing one quote as belonging to Henry IV! 

Carrie has inadvertently taken him and his goons to the 86 floors of the Zitex building, the titular skyscraper. Hey maybe they settled on 86 floors to commemorate the age Anna's husband was when they first met, wouldn't that have been neat?

Interestingly, Fairfax's goons all seem to be well oiled muscle bound and scantily dressed for reasons that would surely not adhere themselves to international terrorism but would work out pretty well if the female audience want something to whack off to whilst their fellas are salivating over Anna Nicole. Before you can say twin towers, they arrive at Zitex and proceed to dole out bloody carnage, taking several hostages whilst Fairfax reveals his plan which consists of interlocking four electronic devices that will somehow "shift the balance of power in the world." It's a mark of Skyscraper's script and the film overall that quite how this will be achieved is never ever explained.

Cold blooded murder, hostages and a plot to take over the world you say? Well, who you gonna call....

Why Anna Nicole Smith of course.

Bruce Willis was busy/too expensive/bald.

Needless to say, Anna Nicole Smith is no one's idea of an action hero(ine) and this isn't helped by the fact that she clearly cannot act and was painfully out of her depth and under the influence throughout this shoot, as this compilation of tragically proves.  

Her globes may be impressive, but she'll never have succeeded at the Golden Globes. She is useless, but she is also beautiful. This alone marks the only disagreement I could possibly have with William Morris who said "Nothing useless can be truly beautiful" 

There, bet you didn't expect a William Morris quote in a review of a softcore straight to video action flick now did you?

To balance the fatal flaw of her acting inability, Anna Nicole is placed on much safer ground in a serious of utterly gratuitous sex scenes which prove to be the only reason to watch - and certainly the fifteen/sixteen year old me agreed. There's a shower scene earlier on which, given that her previous film To The Limit employed similar moments, implies that Anna Nicole only truly finds immersing herself with hot water (and 80 something wheelchair bound billionaires) a turn on. 

Her shower is interrupted by a man who we soon learn is her husband, LAPD officer Gordy Wink (Richard Seinmentz, saddled with both a character name that sounds like a symptom from an eye ailment and zero talent) and he quickly takes her to the bedroom for some slo mo action accompanied by a rather sweet song from Victoria Levy. 

Later, in the middle of the action, Anna takes time out to hazily recall getting fucked at a picnic by her husband, as you do when the body count is rising all around you, again accompanied by another song from Victoria Levy. Less tastefully, there's also a scene involving her being raped at gunpoint.

A turkey of epic proportions it's hard to think who the makers of Skyscraper had in mind as their intended audience. It's blatant rip off of Die Hard with stunts produced on a significantly smaller budget would surely not endear it to action junkies, whilst equally those who just want to see Anna's guns rather than Anna with a gun would surely just fast forward through much of the film. Then again, maybe Skyscraper, with its tale of a Texan big boobed blonde bombshell taking out terrorists, was simply ahead of its time....I could certainly see this as the kind of film ole Dubya would wank off too.

Laughably bad to the point were it is soooo terrible it's almost good, Skyscraper is available to watch in full on YouTube, if you dare! Sexploitation wise, it gets two stars...for Anna's two stars, obviously.