The reason why I love the BFI’s Flipside series is their ability to unearth genuine nuggets of cinematic obscurities. Their latest find is the dark demented cinema of the 1960s fleapit filmmaker, Andy Milligan. Now, I have only ever heard of Milligan because he made pictures with luridly enticing titles like The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! and famously got one of his films, 1969’s The Ghastly Ones, branded a video nasty in the UK in the 1980s. But I have never seen any, until now.

While Milligan shot most of his bizarre bargain bin oddities on New York’s Staten Island, the director was invited to London around 1968 to weave his vagrant visual magic on five features, two of which appear on this BFI Flipside release.

Nightbirds (1970) is a disturbing black and white psychodrama about a possessive woman who shacks up with a naïve young homeless man in a dingy flat overlooking East London’s Spitalfields Market (it’s still there today), then subjects the poor lad to emotional and psychological abuse. The second feature is the ghoulish fun horror, The Body Beneath (1970), about a coven of vampires living on Hampstead Heath, who hatch a diabolical plan to ensure their survival for another century.

The two-hander Nightbirds is reminiscent of a fringe theatre play as shot by Warhol Factory favourite, Paul Morrissey. It’s rough and ready, but the raw emotion that the leads (Julie Shaw and Berwick Kaler) bring to the screen makes for compulsive viewing. The Body Beneath is much more comical affair – think Carry on Screaming fused with a Derek Jarman film. With its blue-faced vampires wafting around the elaborate gardens of a grand house in Hampstead, flouncy 70s fashions and a camp sermon-spouting Reverend (Gavin Reed), Milligan’s first foray into horror is a delicious treat. The film’s highlight is the bacchanalian orgy of the undead, that looks like it was styled by Alternative Miss World’s Andrew Logan.

These two releases are only seeing the light of day because of self-confessed Milligan fan, Nicolas Winding Refn – the British director of the über-cool noir thriller Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. The story of how he resurrected these underground obscurities is passionately detailed in the booklet that comes with the release.

Nightbirds and The Body Beneath are a Dual Format (Blu-ray and DVD) BFI release, available from 28 May

• Little Joe magazine presents Andy Milligan’s Vapors and Nightbirds, introduced by Stephen Thrower, on Tuesday 29 May, 7pm at The Cinema Museum in London. Click here for tickets.

DID YOU KNOW?
The house that appears in The Body Beneath was also used for the setting of the legendary Rolling Stones photo shoot for their Beggars Banquet album. Sarum Chase, at 23 West Heath Road, was once the home of artist Francis Owen Salisbury, and was used as a school before turning back into a private residence in 2009.

We’ve got Jubilee fever here at Movie Talk and to mark the occasion we’re waving our red, white and blue bunting and giving away three Blu-ray copies of the acclaimed film The Queen – starring Dame Helen Mirren as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – which gets its first ever release on Blu-ray on 28th May from Pathé Productions Ltd!

To join the party and be in with a chance to win just fill in the form below, answering the following question: In The Queen, set during the immediate aftermath to Princess Diana’s death in 1997, who co-stars as Prime Minister Tony Blair?

Competition closes at 2pm on Wednesday 6th June. Terms and conditions apply.

The Queen is released on Blu-ray by Pathé Productions Ltd on Monday 28th May 2012 and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.co.uk and Play.com

Desperate despot… Borat and Bruno star Sacha Baron Cohen mixes comedy and controversy again in his latest big-screen outing, this time as the tyrant Admiral General Aladeen.

Avengers Assemble

Team effort… Joss Whedon unites some of Marvel’s most noteworthy superheroes to save Earth from a deadly onslaught launched by Thor’s adoptive brother, Loki.

Dark Shadows

Grave tidings… Serial collaborators Tim Burton and Johnny Depp join forces again for this camp vamp fantasy about a 200-year-old bloodsucker and his dysfunctional descendants.

Last slice… Nine years on from their last big-screen outing, the original American Pie characters get together for a raucous school reunion. Expect sexual shenanigans and drunken debauchery.

The Raid

Fierce fighting… This manic martial arts action movie from Indonesia sees a SWAT team engage in a brutal battle with the henchmen of a drugs baron.

Beauty and the Beast

Tale as old as time… Disney’s beloved 1991 animation, charting the unlikely relationship between plucky Belle and the cursed Beast, returns to cinema screens in 3D.

The Lucky One

Good fortune… Taylor Schilling is the object of Zac Efron’s affection in this romantic drama about a US marine searching for the woman he believes was his good luck charm during his tour of duty in Iraq.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Novel approach… Paul Torday’s novel about a fisheries expert asked to find a way of introducing fly-fishing to the desert gets a big screen reworking with Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

Plunderful animation… Desperate to win the coveted Pirate of the Year Award, Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) leads his crew on a mission to bag more booty than his rivals Black Bellamy and Cutlass Liz.

Safe

Handle with care… Action film staple Jason Statham packs a punch in this high-octane thriller as a former cage fighter tasked with protecting a prized math prodigy from the Triads, the Russian mob and corrupt NYPD cops.

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A decade on from their last screen outing, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones’s slickly dressed, Ray-Ban-wearing agents J and K are back for Men in Black 3.

But after such a long absence, are they still up to the task of protecting the Earth from the scum of the universe? And, more importantly, is the goofy MIB formula – a mix of deadpan acting cool and eye-popping creature effects – still funny? Happily, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s ingenious sequel proves the answer is yes.

The new story finds Smith’s wisecracking J sent back in time to 1969 by new boss O (Emma Thompson stepping into Rip Torn’s shoes) to prevent bad-ass alien Boris the Animal (an OTT role for Flight of the Conchords’ Jemain Clement) from killing the young K and thereby dooming the human race. (Don’t worry; it more or less makes sense while you’re watching.)

Reaching 1969 via a stomach-lurching time jump from the top of New York’s Chrysler building, J encounters the youthful K, who is brilliantly played by Josh Brolin as a not-so craggy, not-so cranky version of Jones’s sourpuss. (Brolin’s uncanny impersonation is so good that critics came out of the preview screening debating whether in fact we’d been hearing Jones’s dubbed voice.) From here, it’s a race against time to thwart Boris, with all concerned hurtling towards a date with destiny at the July 15th Cape Canaveral launch of moon-bound Apollo 11.

Once again, though, it’s not so much the plot that sustains our interest as the bickering byplay between the chalk-and-cheese agents and the fleeting visual jokes going on at the edges of the action. If the film doesn’t make as much of its 1969 setting as it might have, there is at least a neat twist on the series’ famous-people-as-aliens running gag when J and K roll into the late-60s freak-show that is Andy Warhol’s Factory and encounter its weirder-than-weird habitués.

Rick Baker’s alien make-up effects are fabulous, as we’ve come to expect, but the film’s most memorable extraterrestrial is actually Michael Stuhlbarg’s ordinary-looking Griffin, a gentle alien who can see multiple possible versions of the future simultaneously. Whether or not he can see a further Men in Black sequel remains for the Box Office to decide.

On general release from Friday 25th May.

To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.

Thanks to everyone who entered our Underworld competition.

The Kenneth Branagh movie that kicked off Kate Beckinsale’s career was of course Much Ado About Nothing.

And the two lucky winners, drawn at random, are Melanie Crumpton and Graeme Denman.

Congratulations to you both – look out for an email from Movie Talk!

After a gestation period far outdoing anything the animal kingdom can offer, Hollywood has turned a quarter-of-a-century-old self-help guide – Heidi Murkoff’s bestselling 1984 pregnancy manual What to Expect When You’re Expecting – into a slick comedy-drama that’s strictly by the book when it comes to wringing laughs, sighs and tears from a contrived set-up.

If you’ve seen those vapid ensemble showcases Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve, you’ll know the formula: a film following a diverse bunch of characters through a series of loosely interlinked stories. Here, it’s five expectant couples going through the trials and joys of impending parenthood in present-day Atlanta.

Cameron Diaz’s TV fitness guru Jules and her celebrity dance show partner Evan (Glee actor Matthew Morrison looking like the runner-up in a Justin Timberlake lookalike competition) get taken by surprise by pregnancy, as do food-truck-owning rivals Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford) following a one-night stand.

Then there’s Elizabeth Banks’s baby expert Wendy, a first-time mom-to-be whose rosy view of pregnancy doesn’t match the hormonal reality; and her tubby, timid dentist husband Gary (Ben Falcone), forever trying to emerge from the shadow of his ultra-competitive dad, Dennis Quaid’s ex-racing driver Ramsey. Just to underscore his alpha-male superiority, Ramsey’s trophy wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker) is expecting twins.

Finally, Jennifer Lopez’s photographer Holly, unable to conceive, is going down the adopt-an-African-child route, prompting cold-footed husband Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) to seek guidance from the ‘Dudes Group’, a support group of frazzled, hen-pecked dads led by motor-mouth Chris Rock.

The cast perform with gusto, with Banks the best of the bunch, but the material they’ve been given is bland and predictable. As rom-coms go, this one is definitely stillborn.

On general release from Friday 25th May.

To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.

Who is this mystery star, and more’s to the point, what is she doing?

Any ideas?

Did you guess the identity last week’s mystery Martini drinker?

Yeah of course you did. But anyhow, the birthday boy is pictured here in full.

Discuss these chests on our Movie Talk Facebook page or Movie Talk Twitter stream

Nazis on the moon! What could be more brilliantly bonkers than the lunatic premise of satirical sci-fi action comedy Iron Sky?

Sadly, having kept movie geeks atwitter during the six years his film was in production, Finnish director Timo Vuorensola fails to make the most of his conceit.

The set-up is inspired, all the same. In 1945 fleeing Nazis escaped from Germany in a flying saucer and set up a colony on the dark side of the moon. There they’ve lain hidden, until in 2018 a US spacecraft gets sent to the moon by (gulp!) President Sarah Palin and uncovers the Nazis’ base, shaped like a swastika, of course. In short order, the Nazis capture one of the astronauts and use the computing power in his mobile phone to send a craft to Earth as a prelude to launching a full-scale attack.

And it’s here that things really get crazy. The astronaut, who’s black, gets turned into an albino and falls for a naïve Nazi Fräulein, while her evil fiancé hooks up with the US president’s cynical campaign manager and teaches her the propaganda value of Nazi chic.

Made for a fraction of the budgets commanded by Hollywood blockbusters, Iron Sky certainly looks impressive. The Nazis’ lunar base is spectacular and so is their zeppelin-like space battleship, the Götterdämmerung. But the story is all over the place, the performances are over the top and the scattershot gags miss the target almost as often as they hit home. Destined to be a future cult film, nevertheless.

On cinema release from Wednesday 23rd May. And available on Blu-ray, DVD and on demand from Monday 28th May.

In Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan, a small team of US soldiers is sent to find and rescue a young private whose three brothers have been killed in action.

To prepare for the movie, all the principal actors went through several tough days of gruelling army training.

All the actors, that is, except Matt Damon, who plays Private Ryan. He didn’t have to endure this training ordeal.

You see, by sparing Damon, the filmmakers craftily made the other actors resent him and they consequently conveyed that resentment in their performances.

Clever.

Saving Private Ryan is showing tonight – Tuesday 22nd May – on Film 4 at 9pm.

Discuss this film on our Movie Talk Facebook page or Movie Talk Twitter stream

War Horse

Emotional hurdles… Steven Spielberg holds the reins of this war epic, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel of the same name, which charts the bond between a man and the horse he tamed and trained.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

Secret service… Tom Cruise scales dizzying heights in the latest instalment of his action franchise, this time directed by The Incredibles helmer Brad Bird.

The Iron Lady

Political maneuvering… Meryl Streep gets under the skin of former British PM Margaret Thatcher in this Phyllida Lloyd-directed biopic.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Page to screen… Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s bestselling crime thriller gets a second adaptation, with central characters Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander this time played by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

Bridesmaids

Wedding belles… Asked to be her best friend’s maid of honor, Annie attempts to lead her ragtag group of fellow bridesmaids through a series of pre-wedding rituals with disasterous – and hilarious – results.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Holding out for a hero… Chris Evans goes from zero to hero in this action adventure, which pits the titular Marvel Avenger against the evil head of a Nazi research department during World War II.

Johnny English Reborn

Secret service… Rowan Atkinson’s hapless spy gets a second feature-length outing in this action comedy, which sees the titular secret agent tasked with preventing the assassination of the Chinese premier.

Thor

Holding out for hero… Chris Hemsworth gets to flex his pecs as the titular hammer-weilding superhero in this Kenneth Branagh comic book adaptation.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Secrets and lies… John le Carre’s classic spy novel gets a slow-burn big screen adaptation with an all-star cast, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy and Kathy Burke.

Paul

Space race… Simon Pegg and Nick Frost head the cast of this sci-fi comedy about two British comic book nerds who encounter a wise-cracking alien as they journey across the U.S.

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