VHS Heroes: Michael Douglas

Hollywood Stooge or Inside Man? The ERHQ Star Chamber reconsiders the career of the movie star that divides audiences deeper than a sportive pair...

RGB: Stone Trek

ERH has got to get organisised: entire star clusters of internet goodness are birthing and dying before we've had a chance to be high-handed and snarky about them! Luckily we've just about caught the comet tails of this web-nugget that takes two of the ERH Coaxial Desk's favourite things - intergalactic bri-nylon Sixties derring-doer 'Star Trek' and Paleolithic 'Simpsons' forbear 'The Flintstones' - and mashes them up into chunks of legally dubious space-rock starring Leonard Alloy (?) as Mr. Spock and William Shatrock (!) as priapic boy-scout Jim Kirk. Set Phasers for stoned!

See more here...

RGB: Muppet Seinfeld Babies

"You've got your Muppet Babies all over my Seinfeld!"

There's very little you can add to that...

Rewind: Krull (1983)

 About as enjoyable as a naked donkey ride to hell - in a sandpaper saddle...

The I-Say Team!

Ever wondered what a sepia-tinged post-War British village green version of 'The A-Team' might be like? Neither had we until we came across this slice of raffish insouciance from YouTube bounder and corduroy-coloured cad dbroon1. Sounds like a Jocko to us, but no matter, what?

ERH ditches the movies to indulge in a spot of naked nostalgia with this ribald skit that sees Hannibal and the boys whisked away from their weekly barneys with sweaty rednecks, lisping drug lords and pan-fried gangbangers to a sepia-tinged world of gentility, reserve and powdered egg; where pratfalls have replaced RPGs and problems are solved not with high speed car chases and cabbage-firing bazookas but with a stern open letter to The Times.

Carry on!

Genre Specific: 'John Bull on the Moon!'

Genre Specific - voyager on the eggshell rim of cinema's event horizon - splashes down in the shallow sea of films that planted a Union Jack on the moon and Plucky Little England at the heart of the space race. Come with us as we take one small step for a gentleman, one giant leap for gentlemankind...

Rewind: Two Idiots In Hollywood (1988)

... a celluloid two-step in which the fourth wall is nothing but a whirling disco ball into which the cast and crew pontificate, proselytise and plead for forgiveness...

Hawaiian Punch!

The ERH Shit You Could Have Easily Found On Youtube By Yourself Desk 'brings you' 129 carats of 80s advertising gold that bejewel that cosy, familiar Reagan-era line between the stiflingly snug and the sexually over-aggressive. The Pac-Man cartoon, 'American Bandstand', a brand of mints called 'Certs' that seem to perform as a kind of quick-release fresh-breath date-rape drug and Joanie still loves Chachi? ERH is in ERHeaven...

Rewind: Caveman (1981)

Ringo Starr - for it is he - grunts, tokes and bongos through that elephant’s graveyard of a genre - the comedy caveman caper.

Photo Archive: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Do they make films like this these days? Aerosmith, Lurch from The Addams Family and end-of-the-pier pervert Frankie Howerd mugging their way through The Beatles' 'Come Together'? What would be the modern iteration of this - U2, a CGI Mr Snuffleupagus and Jimmy Carr belting through through 'Champagne Supernova' (note to self: that actually sounds rather quite diverting)?

Our trawl through the flood-damaged basement that houses the ERH filing system - as well as our deepest, darkest cinematic peccadilloes - brings us to Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood's flabbergasting Beatle-free 1978 rock opera Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Starring Peter Frampton as the one and only Billy Shears, it's a motley grab-bag of re-recorded Beatles tunes strung together by turns from the The Bee Gees, Alice Cooper, Dame Edna, and peaks with an unglued version of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' delivered by a top-form Steve Martin in full-on Wild & Crazy Guy mode.

Click through for more walrus weirdness...

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Review

'Murder by Man-Cycle'? Yep, that just about sums it up. Not even ERH's all-consuming Cage fetish can keep our Little White Lies review from burning some heavy, heavy rubber all over this gummy, flaccid BMX-ecrable sequel.

Rhyl to Reel - Celluloid Cymru

St. David's Day is here again, providing a perfect excuse for the Taffy that dwells at the molten core of ERH to reword a few Wikipedia entries and let rip with a rundown of our Hollywood-meets-Hollyhead silver screen heroes...

Merry Christmas From ERH (and Talking Heads)...

Hugo Review

Mad Marty lays the pixie dust on with a trowel in a charm free, audience neutral, crassly indulgent PBS lecture on early cinema and - tee-hee, kiddies! - film preservation, in Hugo.

Click through for ERH's Little White Lies review of the film - a review that has already been compared to 'an oily dump in the swimming pool of cinematic perfection' by one eloquent colleague...

Muppet Marriage

Cute and fuzzy (felt) anthropomorphism or cruel and hideous perversion of nature? You decide...

ERH kicks on into the festive season with a bewildering still of Muppet matrimony that is only marginally less strange than this recent Muppetary-Industrial alliance...

"Rutger Hauer Has Never Been To Texas!"

Eye-wateringly dull/stilted Rutger Hauer interview conducted by a flagrantly insular Texan dowager armed with a list of questions that could strip the paint off a Jackson Pollock.

Ostensibly there to promote Blade Runner, the somewhat 'bleary-eyed' Dutch acting titan spends an unusual amount of time defending an entire continent of self-defeating, spineless, syphilitic Europeans for not being born corn-fed, flag-waving Americans.

Odd in other ways, and no less a crime against fashion is this jaunty but slightly ill-tempered Letterman interview from 1990.

Trailer Time: Dr. Goldfoot & the Girl Bombs

Whilst trudging around Youtube looking for the definitive rushed, drunken, atonal fancy-dress rendition of the 'Afternoon Delight' scene from Anchorman, ERH stumbled upon this sumptuously odd trailer for Vincent Price's sexy '66 spy spoof Dr. Goldfoot & the Girl Bombs.

Released in its native Italy as The Spy Show Came In From The Custard (fact!), it recalls a bygone age when the viewing public was more inclined to tolerate 'tongue-in-cheek' terrorists like Dr. Goldfoot and his vast harem/army of gamine fembots who are armed to the teeth with go-go boots and - gulp! - 'thermo-nuclear navels'. It might never have reached the lunatic heights of '64's Dr. G & the Bikini Machine, but what could, dear reader? What could..?

And while you're still in the mood, check this chilling pearl of underwater puppet-mastery from an episode of sub-aquatic 'Star Trek' precursor 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' that has since come to be known simply as 'Vincent Price's Deadly Dolls'...

Photo Archive: Brewster McCloud (1970)

Sometimes you just can't beat the best, so with apologies to Wikipedia, we're just going to have to bow down and reprint this sublime synopsis for the delectation of those who have yet to have the pleasure of Robert Altman's 1970 fairy-dusted fantasy, Brewster McCloud...

"Brewster McCloud is a 1970 movie, directed by Robert Altman, about a young recluse who lives in a fallout shelter of the Houston Astrodome, where he is building a pair of wings so he can fly. He is helped in this by his Fairy Godmother played by Sally Kellerman."

Lovely stuff, no? And after having recently put the boot into Altman's Wild West folly, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, we thought we'd balance the books with a dizzying clutch of stills from Brewster - a film memorably described by critic Artie Stanshall of the Houston Proclaimer as something akin to "... being force-fed velvet chicken-wire."

Click on Brewster for more flighty frolics.

Production Notes: Condorman

At the risk of incurring the full-bore legal wrath Uncle Walt's litigious minions - ERH has seen 'The Simpsons' and knows how this shit goes down - we offer up this pristine set of production notes for 1981's Condorman that we found whilst rooting around the basement looking for misfiled bongo.

An ironic, plasticky, underfunded, Mittel-European superhero dud starring a gormless English sitcom star? What could go wrong...?

Caption Comp #4: Congo

In the wake of lunchbox-friendly monster mash Jurassic Park, polymath author Michael Crichton's novels were very much the hot Hollywood ticket. What it took the Burbank brain trust a good decade to realise, however, is that most of these thundering best sellers were no more than overly-contrived, underplotted airport novels with a few still-warm ideas ripped from the letters pages of Scientific American. Anyone who has had the piteous misfortune to sit through either Michael Douglas's skull-brained internet-based nork-fest Disclosure or the withering idiocy of Timeline can attest to as much.

Then there's Congo. Congo is 4/10 Crichton - not as good as Sphere, not as bad as Runaway - and tiffs along with a certain amiable idiocy until a goofy, unconvincing last reel queers the pitch. What it also has is this boffo production still, which is just begging for a a caption...

The usual prize to the winning entry.