Three Films Make A Post: Don't meddle with the devil.

Saturday Morning Mystery aka Saturday Morning Massacre (2012): This low budget horror comedy by Spencer Parsons posits an edgy version of the Scooby Doo cast with filed-off numbers visiting a supposedly haunted house that does end in a bit of a massacre for them.

This isn’t really my kind of humour: “just imagine the gang having sex while on LSD”, “let’s kill the dog!” just doesn’t do much for me as jokes go, particularly since the movie doesn’t do terribly much with the set-up. To be fair, the gory bits are nicely realized and staged.

Moonfall (2022): This Amazonbuster mixes Roland Emmerich’s main interests as a director: big dumb fun science fiction, big dumb unfun disaster movies, and not giving talented actors much to do. Well, I’m unfair about the third point, for the lead is played by Patrick Wilson, who is just his usual voidal self and is probably not playing below his possibilities there.

Whenever the film stays in the big dumb SF area – with a bit of idiot conspiracy theories and a cameo by Donald Sutherland – and makes a drinking game out of the word “megastructure”, it is actually a lot of brainless fun. Alas, whenever the disaster movie parts turn up, particularly in the otherwise wonderfully bonkers second half of the film, it’s the usual drag of Emmerich disaster types going through the Emmerich disaster movie motions. Though the film gets bonus points for squeezing a completely out of leftfield Fast and Furious CG car chase in.

Sweeney! (1977): Sweeney was a very popular ITV series that turned up the amount of sex and the violence allowed for a British TV show of the time. It was popular enough for two movie spin-offs which dial up the sex a bit and the violence even a lot more when compared with what the producers could just get away with on the TV. This first one, directed by David Wickes, does a version of the Profumo affair – a bit of an evergreen in the UK – but with rather a lot more murders to hush the affair up, and even more loathing for the political class than you’d expect going in.

Everybody is ugly, brutish and not terribly clever, London looks ugly, grimy and unpleasant, and our hero (John Thaw) eventually wins the day with an act of astonishing amorality. So, even if you’re like me and have seen not a single episode of the series, this is probably going to be a whole lot of fun as a nasty little bit of 70s crime/conspiracy cinema.