Nemesis - Review

****

Screenplay by Adam Stephen Kelly

Story by Jonathan Sothcott and Adam Stephen Kelly

Directed by James Crow

Billy Murray

Nemesis is the latest offering from producer Jonathan Sothcott. Evidencing his canny eye for today’s zeitgeist, Sothcott’s picture delivers 90 minutes of unpretentious, thinly-plotted movie brilliance that’s guaranteed to cheer-up a locked down evening!

Character hardman Billy Murray, he of The Bill and EastEnders fame but with a string of cockney credits in TV and film stretching back to the 1960s, is London gangster John Morgan, recently exiled to Turkey. Flying in from his sun-drenched villa accompanied by moll/wife Sadie (ably performed by Sothcott’s real-life missus, Jeanine Nerissa), Morgan’s trip to London is ostensibly for he and Sadie to be introduced to Zoe (played by Lucy Aarden), the girlfriend of their daughter Kate (newcomer Ambra Moore). Of course as the plot spins out one learns that there is much more to this long-term villain, together with his nearest and dearest, than meets the eye.

Sothcott has assembled a cracking cast to flesh out his story’s deliciously two-dimensional characters, with family vengeances proving to be a recurrent theme. Nick Moran plays second-generation copper Frank Conway, an alcoholic who blames Morgan for his father’s death. And giving what turns out to be a very brutal twist on sibling rivalry, Frank Harper puts in a grisly performance as Morgan’s brother Richard, transforming a family get together around the dinner table into a charnel house of slaughter that would make Titus Andronicus blush. James Crow deftly directs and with a hint of 21st century noir thrown in, the story makes for a ripping (literally at times) yarn.  

Some of Nemesis' photography captures London in those heady pre-pandemic days (was it barely a year ago?) when the city’s streets teemed with activity, double-decker buses bustled and London was just, well, London. One can only pray for those days to return….

Until then, Nemesis will have to remain a home-viewed thrill. And with pop up cameos from the venerable and always classy Julian Glover, together with the Capital’s original Flying Eye Russ Kane, what’s not to love about this blood-drenched treat of a movie.

Available on DVD and digital download from 29th March

The Night Of The Iguana - Review

Noël Coward Theatre, London

*****

Written by Tennessee Williams

Directed by James Macdonald

The play's company

Set in a rundown hotel in 1940, atop the cliffs of Mexico’s Pacific coast ,  Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana offers up a glimpse of troubled lives in a dramatic cocktail that proves as intoxicating as a well mixed rum coco. The play was inspired by Williams’ own 1940 Mexican travels and his evident love for both time and place – and all set in a period before America had been sucked into the maelstrom of World War 2 – are evident. 

Clive Owen plays the Rev Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked minister now banished from the USA and reduced to leading guided tours around the world’s less glamorous regions. Shannon has led a reluctant party of Texan schoolgirls and their teacher (Finty Williams as a wonderfully Southern Baptist Judith Fellowes) to the hotel - a stop not included on the published itinerary - and their apparent entrapment at the remote location only heightens aspects of the story’s tension. We learn that Shannon has committed statutory rape (sex with minors) and as the evening unfolds we witness this priapic priest barely able to control his lust. Owen (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jeremy Clarkson) is on stage throughout most of the play, and his delivery of this strangely, vilely, complex role is a tour de force.

Playing Maxine Faulk, the wise and recently widowed hotelier, is Anna Gunn. There is evidently a complex history to Faulk and Shannon. She knows him inside out, replete with all his failings and yet is passionately drawn to the deeply damaged man. Gunn’s work is masterful – sassy yet vulnerable, and hinting at an absolutely fascinating back story.

And then arriving at the hotel are the penniless Hannah Jelkes played by Lia Williams, a middle-aged (con) artist accompanied by her nonagenarian poet grandfather, delightfully fleshed out by Julian Glover. Williams lays down yet further sadness as Jelkes outlines her back story of a woman who has seen love pass her by, save for two seedy encounters over many decades - and a childhood that she hints at as having been traumatised by profound emotional and sexual abuse. 

This being 1940, (and the play having been written in 1961) Williams also cheekily lobs in a family of raucous Germans to his “Mexican Berchtesgaden”, Nazis fleeing Europe and using Mexico either as a gateway to South America or a back-door to the States. 

The play’s themes are as complex as they are ultimately simple - but what stands out from this three hour opus is that it was written at a time when literary craftsmanship was at its finest. Williams touches upon some of the most painful and intimate aspects of humanity - sex, love, loneliness and abuse – but does so throughout with a beautiful and carefully worded prose that displays a complete absence of profanity. The strength of The Night Of The Iguana rests upon a sensational cast bringing the most sensitive of images into relief, via their spoken word. As they perform, the most moving and painful vignettes play out in our minds’ eyes - and it makes for a truly rare event to see theatre that is so richly created and performed.

James Macdonald has assembled a masterful team of creatives. Rae Smith’s mountainous Latin mountaintop convinces on its own – but accompanied by Max Pappenheim’s exquisite soundscape, the suspension of our disbelief is complete. The Night Of The Iguana is world class theatre.


Runs until 28th September

Photo credit: Brinkhoff Moegenburg

Brash Young Turks - Review

***

Certificate 15


Written by Paul Danquah, Ash Mahmood and Naeem Mahmood
Directed by Naeem Mahmood and Ash Mahmood

Melissa Latouche and Paul Chiedozie

Brash Young Turks marks an impressive feature debut from brothers Naeem and Ash Mahmood. It’s a gritty gripping thriller that tells of a journey into adulthood, set against the cut throat worlds of London’s estate agents and rip-off salesmen.

We are introduced to Dave and Terrell as kids forging a powerful bond of loyalty – before the movie fast forwards the pair ten years where as young men Paul Chiedozie and Charlie MacGechan turn in performances that balance impeccable style, with just enough menace and swagger.

Visually the film is a blast, with locations including Sushi Samba’s glass elevator placing the yarn firmly in the London of today. If the action is occasionally a little far-fetched, the acting is classy. In a cleverly crafted role, Melissa Latouche (who along with Chiedozie also produces) plays Mia a damaged young girl in the care of social services, who is desperate to be loved. 

There is a scene where the mixed-race Mia (living, desperately, in a children’s home where she’s sexually abused by staff) is visited by her white mum. When the visit ends and her mum just ups and leaves we see Mia, distraught, as she watches her mother hug her white husband and kids who are waiting in a car outside. In that briefest of moments Mia’s pain and back-story are brilliantly relayed via minimal dialog and exceptional performance. Genius filmmaking from the Mahmoods. 

Kimberley Marren is Shaz, the long term “moll” of Dave and Terrell and she does well in a role that needed just a little bit more from the writers. Richard Shelton puts in a convincing bad-guy as millionaire property man/the young turks’ nemesis Holmes. Elsewhere the venerable Julian Glover gives a lovingly played turn (even if his dialog is as corny as hell) as a cynically ripped-off pensioner and listen out too for Julian’s missus, Isla Blair as a radio newsreader.

D Double E’s music gives the film a thrilling pulse and Inspire - Hackney's Education and Business Partnership also deserve a shout out for the vision they've shown in getting behind the production. A bold and ballsy movie, Brash Young Turks is much of what young London in 2015 is all about.

Julian Glover's Beowulf - Review

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare's Globe, London


*****

Adapted by Julian Glover from the translations by Michael Alexander and Edwin Morgan and from the Bristol Old Vic production directed by John David and John Elvery

Julian Glover

Beowulf is an Old English (possibly the oldest English) poem. Known to have been written in the tenth century, but with probable older origins, it's verses tell of a time of dragons, sea monsters, smoking swords and throughout it all wassail and riotous assembly in cavernous mead halls.

Julian Glover has been reciting the poem for nigh on thirty years, in a version that he has painstakingly laboured over. His editing of the verse has led to it being mainly recited in the contemporary idiom, with an occasional stanza of Old English and his helpful programme notes tell us of history having stressed that Beowulf "should not only be read to oneself, but spoken out loud". Thus it was, for two shows only last weekend, that Glover was to give his final performances of the poem in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe. 

The venue was enchanting. Lit mainly by flickering candles (supplemented by a floodlit yellow wash) the Playhouse offers an elegant Elizabethan intimacy and that it was packed on a pleasant spring afternoon speaks much for Julian Glover's reputation.

Glover's delivery is the work of a master. Such is the actor's genius that even when speaking in the ancient tongue, typically unintelligible to a modern audience, his rhythm enhanced by a perfect emphasis on the text's alliterative strengths made even the most incomprehensible language seem crystal clear.

Using minimal props (a tankard, sword and throne, all used only occasionally) and dressed in simple, sober modern blacks, Glover's recital, through perfectly honed inflection and nuance, was a step back in time. For what must be nigh on millennia, folk have been entertained by talented raconteurs telling stories and this is precisely the ambience that Glover achieved. A man as at home performing in a Broadway musical as he is mastering Shakespeare, this wonderful actor held the crowd in the palm of his hand.

This review covered the matinee performance. Later that evening Glover's son Jamie, an accomplished actor himself, was to inherit his father's mantle by concluding the recital and carrying on its oral tradition. 

Today’s writers, directors and dramaturgs would do well to attend the future recitals of Glover Junior. Simply staged and beautifully performed, the purest of theatre does not get better than this.

Then and Now - Review

***

Written by Matt Hookings and Bashford Twins

Directed by Bashford Twins

Julian Glover

Then and Now is a short film from Kyle and Liam Bashford, (the Bashford Twins) that sees Julian Glover as an elderly Englishman struggling to cope with bereavement some years after the 9/11 attacks on New York's Twin Towers.

Carefully photographed, the movie offers a touching and sensitive comment upon both age and grief. With the exception of Matt Hookings who (as well as having co-written and produced) briefly appears as a young relative of the old man, the short is very much a one-hander with Glover deploying his trademark depth and perception in the role. If the script has occasional irritations, the seasoned actor does a fine job in imbuing credibility to his character's pain

Worth catching to see one of our finest performers in action and lending his talent in support of a team of young filmmakers who display an attractive potential.

The Scottsboro Boys - Review

Garrick Theatre,  London

*****

Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

Book by David Thompson

Directed and choreography by Susan Stroman

MY FEATURE ARTICLE: BACKSTAGE WITH THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS

l-r  Colman Domingo, Julian Glover and Forrest McClendon

A year after it wowed the critics in its London debut at the Young Vic, (see my 2013 review below) The Scottsboro Boys returns to cross the Thames. With many of the 2013 cast reprising their roles at the Garrick, the show's West End opening offers a rare privilege to re-review this 5-star treat, last year's Critics' Circle choice as Best Musical.

The Scottsboro Boys is written around a true 1930's travesty of justice that defined the hateful ugliness of America's Deep South. Eight black men and a boy, all of African American heritage, were falsely accused of raping two white women as their train stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama. Their subsequent conviction and death sentences polarised the USA. As the South was still licking its wounds barely 70 years after the Civil War, the North mounted a defence campaign that was to see 8 of the nine boys paroled. Parole, by its very nature, demands an admission of guilt and amidst a bevy of standout performances, it is Brandon Victor Dixon's Haywood Patterson, a man whose conscience couldn't permit him to utter a lie and who, defiantly, was to spend his life wrongly incarcerated, upon whom the story's spotlight falls.

Dixon is a long-established Broadway talent and having spent the last year listening to his voice on my iPhone in the NY cast recording, it is a privilege to witness him live. Patterson's journey carries the show and he bears his principled stand with passion, poignancy and perfect performance. The brilliant jazz-hands irony of his softly sung Nothing as he pleads his innocence, echoes the sardonic lyric of Kander and Ebb's Mr Cellophane from Chicago. The observations are as sharp, but this time there's no comedy.

The company are excellent throughout, with fellow Broadway imports Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon defining the harshest of satires as minstrel jesters Messrs Bones and Tambo, their gags making a pastiche of Vaudevilke. Deliberately corny, the clown-like versatility of these men and Domingo's comedy-horror rictus grin seal the brilliance of the genre.

The jarring perversity of Kander & Ebb telling this history story via a minstrel show, only serves to underline the perversion of justice to which Alabama subjugated itself as its rednecks bayed for the Boys' blood. The minstrel show's Interlocutor, 79yo veteran Brit Julian Glover, gives a performance that subtly combines majesty with a brilliantly understated bumbling ineptness. A man who believes passionately in what he perceives to be justice, yet who has also learned his racist views from childhood, carrying a sincerely held belief that black people are worth less than white. Glover's is an acting masterclass.

Elsewhere, excellence drips from this show. Broadway talent James T Lane, resplendent in frock and hat as Ruby Bates, one of the perjurious white women, dances across the stage with a movement that has to be believed. Susan Stroman, who has remained with the show since it's emergence off-Broadway back in 2010 has envisioned the ghastly tale magnificently, never bettered than in the slickly-sickly tap routine Electric Chair. A mention too for the brilliantly delivered tour of Fred Ebb's take on the South's music, played under Phil Cornwell's baton.

First time around, this review failed to pay sufficient respect to the character of The Woman, played by Dawn Hope, onstage almost throughout and saying nothing until the final scene. Consider (or google) Rosa Parks in history and it becomes abundantly clear how much of a cornerstone in the USA's Civil Rights movement The Scottsboro Boys became.

The Scottsboro Boys is unmatched on any London stage. As both a history lesson as well as a display of world-class stagecraft it stands apart. More than unmissable, if you care for humanity and appreciate some of the finest song and dance around, this show has to be seen.

Runs at until Saturday 21st February 2015


Later this month I shall be touring Scottsboro, Alabama and visiting The Scottsboro Boys Museum.

Follow me on Twitter @MrJonathanBaz for my upcoming writing about this visit.

MY REVIEW OF THE 2013 YOUNG VIC PRODUCTION

Backstage with The Scottsboro Boys - Feature

The Young Vic Company

As the West End welcomes The Scottsboro Boys, I ventured backstage at London’s Garrick Theatre during final rehearsals to catch up with its inspirationally committed producer Catherine Schreiber, along with one of the production’s talented US imports actor James T Lane. I wanted to learn a little more about this remarkable minstrel show, that took the Young Vic by storm last December and went on to win the (UK’s most respected) Critics’ Circle award for Best Musical 2013. 

The Scottsboro Boys was to be the final collaboration of one of the greatest songwriting partnerships, that of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Kander and Ebb were masters of that rare art of studying man’s inhumanity to man and then being able to set the wickedness to toe-tapping tunes. Who else could have written Cabaret, a show about the rise of Nazism and the impending Holocaust, that was to give Liza Minelli such a career-defining belter of a title song. 

The start of the Scottsboro Boys’ true story may pre-date Hitler’s accession to the German Chancellorship by two years and by half a world, but history has taught us that evil respects no borders. With the Great Depression gripping the nation after the stock-market crash of 1929, people hopped freight trains to travel from one city to the next in search of work when a fight between blacks and whites broke out on a train in Jackson County on March 25, 1931. The train was brought to a halt at Scottsboro and trying to avoid arrest, two women on the train falsely accused nine black youths of raping them. It was an inflammatory allegation in the Jim-Crow South, where many whites were attempting to preserve supremacy just 66 years after the end of the Civil War and it did not take too much legal process for the accusations to be “proved” and for all nine to be sentenced to Alabama’s electric chair.

The Scottsboro Boys' plight gripped the nation, galvanising liberals in the North as their champions and proving a significant keystone in the foundations of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Their case lurched precariously through the Alabama justice system and whilst this article will not reveal how the story ends, the whole musical focusses acutely upon the key tenet on which justice and decent society depend. That of individuals telling the truth. 

l-r David Thompson, Susan Stroman, Catherine Schreiber, John Kander
photo credit Paul Kolnick

Together with London's Young Vic and fellow New Yorker Paula Marie Black, Schreiber is Lead Producing the Garrick show, but the passion for both telling this tale and championing its cause is clearly in Schreiber's DNA. Following The Scottsboro Boys' off-Broadway premier at New York’s Vineyard Theatre (a production that gave rise to the only currently available Cast Recording, though Schreiber hints, intriguingly, at a London recording possibly being released) she worked hard to bring the show to Broadway, where it only was to last a disappointingly short run. Away from the stage and at home, her lawyer husband shares her passion for racial equality. He served his training clerkship with Thurgood Marshall, the man who was to become the first USA Supreme Court justice of African American heritage

Today, Scottsboro's The Scottsboro Boys Museum is curated by Shelia Washington and Schreiber’s eyes welled up (and to be honest, so did mine) as she spoke of having worked alongside this formidable woman, as the Broadway show (and beyond) evolved. Washington has laboured tirelessly for the Boys’ guilty verdicts to be revoked by the State of Alabama and her efforts remind us not only of the power of human endeavour (hers) in fighting for a cause, but also of quite how frighteningly recent and contemporary this whole episode has remained. It was not until April 2013 (that’s last year!) that the Scottsboro Boys were all finally exonerated by Alabama at a ceremony where Schreiber, already honoured with the key to Scottsboro, gave the keynote address.

Sat next to Schreiber, and with the assuring air of a performer who knows his material inside out, James T Lane exudes a gorgeously relaxed yet finely balanced poise as we talk. No stranger to the trans-Atlantic showbiz commute, this gifted hoofer not only wowed the crowds at the Young Vic with The Scottsboro Boys’ London debut, he had already spent most of that year at the London Palladium playing Richie in the acclaimed revival of A Chorus Line. His extensive experience, both on Broadway and across the USA belies his youthful 36 years and I for one would have loved to have seen his Tyrone in Fame, as the man’s voice and movement are simply astonishing.

James T Lane

As an African-American, Lane brings his own experiences to the show. Our discussions range across the racial prejudices experienced on both sides of the Atlantic, though whilst Britain is a multi-cultural nation that is still in pursuit of a more harmonious society, this country has only welcomed significant numbers of non-white immigrants since the latter half of the 20th century. America’s Statue of Liberty may well represent the open arms of a melting pot too all, but the African-American legacy that pre-dates the Civil War and stretches back to periods of horrendous slavery, provides a far more complex, painful history. 

My opening paragraph referred to The Scottsboro Boys as a minstrel show, but remember that it was this black-slapped buffoonery that dominated America’s theatres during the 19th century, promoting its insidiously acceptable culture of acceptable racism. Shamefully, it was only as late as 1978 that the BBC were still broadcasting The Black And White Minstrel Show across Britain in a primetime Saturday night slot. That The Scottsboro Boys spectacularly lampoons the minstrel genre, with a beautifully weighted gravitas from British white veteran actor Julian Glover as the show’s Interlocutor (think of a Variety Hall’s Chairman) only adds to the show’s painful poignancy.

Lane also remarks on the joy, of instead of going “up against” his African- American competitors in auditions, often pursuing the same opportunity, how The Scottsboro Boys has provided an opportunity for him to work (brilliantly, I might add) with some of his closest friends in the business. 

But Lane is only one of a number of Americans who have travelled back to the UK with the production. As well as having performed his roles in the Broadway show (and he plays, with remarkable conviction, one of the falsely accusing white women, Ruby Bates) he is joined by other Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo, all three of whom created their roles way back in 2010 at the Vineyard. Dixon’s Hayward Patterson is the show’s lead character whose struggles with the abuse of truth prove to be the show’s emotional fulcrum, whilst McClendon and Domingo play the minstrel-show regulars of Mr Bones and Mr Tambo, adopting all manner of acutely observed satirical characterisations.

The Young Vic Production

Whilst a five-star show has to deliver perfect performances from its actors, it is the creative talent behind the show that inspires the excellence and the pedigree of The Scottsboro Boys' team is faultless. As well as Kander and Ebb’s compositions that are structured around David Thompson’s book, it is Susan Stroman, the wunder-talent of recent years in musical theatre who has remained the director and choreographer of the show from the Vineyard to the Garrick. Hers is a remarkable commitment, for on the simplest of stages (this show has no techno-gimmicks whatsoever) the movement that she extracts from her company has to be seen to be believed.

Only on for 20 weeks The Scottsboro Boys will make you laugh and cry and the West End reviews will be out soon. Until then, these are my thoughts on the Young Vic production. The show truly is unmissable. See it and be humbled and amazed.

Runs at the Garrick Theatre until Saturday 21st February 2015

The Scottsboro Boys

Young Vic Theatre,  London

*****

Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

Book by David Thompson

Directed and choreography by Susan Stroman

Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon look down on Kyle Scatliffe

The legendary Broadway partnership of John Kander and Fred Ebb achieved their final collaboration with The Scottsboro Boys, a glorious treatment of an infamous chapter in the history of the American South. Kander and Ebb don’t do easy. Their view of the world is always through a sharply skewed prism, they strip away facades and revel in exposing the frailties that lie beneath. So it was that around the end of the 20th century, when these two wily writers scanned the history books for inspiration, their gaze settled upon the travesty of an injustice that befell nine innocent black men.

Riding the rails from Georgia in 1931, the train these nine had hopped stopped suddenly in Scottsboro, Alabama following a fight on board (that had not involved them). Two white women then falsely accused the nine of rape and they were summarily arrested, convicted and were to spend many years and endure countless appeals and retrials as death sentences were repeatedly pronounced and adjourned. For a time, the Scottsboro Boys were a cause celebre, polarising the USA across very old divisions. The South wanted them executed whilst the liberal North sought their liberty. That those Boys who were eventually paroled, were only freed after having had to falsely “admit” their guilt, only added to the cruel irony of the shameful saga. One man Haywood Patterson (a tour de force performance from American actor Kyle Scatliffe) could not bring himself to confess to a crime he hadn't committed and some twenty years later, was to die in jail.

Its grim material for a show, but that’s where Kander and Ebb are at their finest. Where their Chicago was scenes from Death Row staged as a series of Vaudeville numbers and Cabaret played out in a sleazy Berlin bar, so The Scottsboro Boys is told through the vehicle of a traditional minstrel show. Nine men play the Boys, whilst two other actors play the traditional minstrel roles of Mr Tambo and Mr Bones. Overseeing the whole on stage performance is the white-man authority figure of the minstrel show’s Interlocutor. 

Ebb died in 2004, some 6 years before Susan Stroman was to bring the show firstly to Broadway and now to London. Stroman extracts theatrical gold from her UK company, who include (amongst other Broadway performers, over on an Equity swap) Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo reprising the extreme satirists Tambo and Bones that they created in New York. In white suit and top hat, veteran brit Julian Glover is the evening’s Interlocutor, presenting a chillingly benign face of the all too acceptable racism that built the South. Drawing on ragtime, blues and spirituals for inspiration, the songs are all pointed. Go Back Home in particular, being a mournfully despairing blues number sung by Patterson and the youngest boy, Eugene. (And made all the more special on the Broadway cast recording by being sung by John Kander himself, solo, as an album extra. Buy it!)

The tale makes much of the importance of truth. The Alabama women lie whilst the Scottsboro Boys who are freed, only obtain liberty through a false confession. The song Make Friends With The Truth is possibly one of Kander and Ebb's best, telling the tale of a fictional black boy Billy, who after being lynched confesses his crimes to St Peter. Whilst Billy's honest confession gains him entry to Heaven, the last laugh is on him as he finds the pearly gates barred and discovers that even the afterlife is segregated, where a black man has to enter via the back door. 

Other memorable numbers are the false accusations made by the Alabama Ladies in the song of that title. Forrest McClendon’s That’s Not The Way We Do Things, sees him play a New York defence lawyer in a goggle eyed performance that suggests the mania of Cabaret’s Emcee, whilst Haywood’s beautifully defiant final number You Can’t Do Me, echoes the soft yet sinister, harsh staccato sound that Kander and Ebb deployed so masterfully in Cabaret’s Finale.

Stroman’s vision eschews fancy sets, relying instead on simple chairs, planks and the outstanding singing, dancing and acting of her troupe. In a year that has seen this show together with The Amen Corner and The Color Purple all staged within the creative powerhouse that is London's SE1 postal district, the capital has witnessed some truly astonishing theatre based around stories of the 20th century African American heritage. The Scottsboro Boys is an ugly story, beautifully told. As with Chicago and Cabaret, it could also, one day, make for a wonderful movie.

The Broadway original cast recording of The Scottsboro Boys is available to download from iTunes.

Airborne - DVD Review

Certificate 18

***

Directed by Dominic Burns
Written by Paul Chronnel

Mark Hamill

A storm is setting in, all flights are cancelled with the exception of this one, the tired air traffic controller is on the eve of retirement and the movie’s cast is crammed full of top notch B- listers. What more could anyone want from a british horror / thriller popcorn fest ? Well, apart that is from a decent storyline and script.

Airborne is a 3 star piece of hokum. It reminds one of a Hammer horror movie of the 1970s, updated to reflect the 21^st century, where instead of the haunted house or Dracula’s castle, the action takes place on a virtually deserted 747 hurtling across the Atlantic. Throw in a handful of beautiful women, scantily clad as the situation demands, and a storyline that is as cheesy as it is implausible, and you are in for a lively flight.

Good low budget horror is common place these days, and the genre thrives. With a budget in excess of $1,000,000 Airborne has probably had more cash to play with than many of its contemporaries, however director Dominic Burns was not going to let a bundle of cash stand in the way of making the movie look like it was put together on a shoestring. The air traffic control room appeared decidedly unconvincing and in an unfortunate cinematic mishap, the movie which is set aboard a jumbo jet, famously known ( and shown ) as a four engined craft, cut early on to a stock-footage shot of a twin-engined plane banking off course into a dark and foreboding sunset. And don’t even ask about the quality of the footage of the fighter jets scrambled to intercept this flying house of horror.

But these criticisms are petty,  for in the tradition of the good scary movie, it is the cast that make this film watchable. Alan Ford, the ultimate cockney diamond-geezer, reprises his well worn London gangster caricature with relish. And whilst nearly every other line of his dialogue appears to include the “F” word, at least his character is spared having to utter the pricelessly awful line uttered by one of his henchmen: “You may be the big dick on the ground, but you are flaccid up here”. Flying with Ford is Julian Glover, a veteran English actor of distinction, playing an American Indiana Jones type character who is transporting an ancient vase that may contain evil forces within it.

Mark Hamill, yes that one, the original Luke Skywalker, heavily plugged as the film’s star name, is the controller on the ground. He’s aged a bit since Star Wars, but his voice is delicious and it is fun seeing him on screen again this time old enough to actually be Luke’s father. Billy Murray, legend of The Bill and EastEnders, who is one of the movie’s producers, appears in a cameo trotting out his “non-caring hard-man” persona as the man we love to hate.

Of course, the vase’s supernatural powers develop through the flight, evil deeds occur and the body count grows in pleasingly bloody fashion to take in most of the cast. To reveal too much more would be to spoil the story. Suffice to say, Ford being momentarily suicidal and Glover contemplating his own mortality, do add spice to the movie’s melodramatic moments of terror.

This DVD accompanied by a beer or several, and a tasty take-away will make for a good evening’s entertainment, watching some old familiar faces play out a modern day ghost story.

@jaybeegee63