Time Bandits

 Year of Release:  1981

Director:  Terry Gilliam

Screenplay:  Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin

Starring:  John Cleese, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Ralph Richardson, Peter Vaughan, David Warner, Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Tiny Ross 

Running Time:  113 minutes

Genre:  Fantasy, comedy

Young Kevin (Warnock) lives in an average house in middle-class suburban England, with his normal parents.  One night Kevin is woken up by a knight in full armour on horseback bursting out of his wardrobe and running through his bedroom wall.  This heralds the start of a bizarre adventure when he encounters a gang of quarrelling dwarves who have stolen a map revealing the locations of holes in space and time, which they plan to use to commit a series of robberies throughout history.  They encounter Napoleon (Holm) who is obsessed with his own height, a frightfully posh Robin Hood (Cleese), the Ancient Greek warrior Agamemnon (Connery), take a trip aboard the RMS Titanic, and become unwittingly embroiled in the age-old battle between Good (Richardson) and Evil (Warner).

This is a delightfully dark comic fantasy which shows director Terry Gilliam at his very best.  Co-written with fellow Monty Python alumni Michael Palin, who also appears along with fellow Python John Cleese, this has a real Pythonesque feel to it, and feels like a low-budget British take on the American blockbuster.  There is a distinctly British feel to the film, despite Terry Gilliam being American, with the minutiae of everyday mundanity existing cheek-by-jowl with fantastic wonders, and characters being adrift in a chaotic and hostile universe.  Working on a limited budget the filmmakers work wonders with some impressive special effects and memorable images (for example a large old sailing ship turns out to be a giant's hat).  Almost every frame is packed with detail, and there is a real chaotic feel to the film and you do feel like anything could happen.  As Kevin, the film's anchor role, young Craig Warnock doesn't really have much to do except look wide-eyed, but the dwarves have well-defined personalities and their constant bickering with each other is very funny ("I can't stand people who are right!"  "That must be how you get on with yourself so well").  Otherwise you have famous faces appearing in small funny roles, with the late, great Sean Connery giving real gravitas to the part of Agamemnon, even if his Scottish accent doesn't sound quite right for an Ancient Greek hero, and Ian Holm as the mercurial Napoleon, give to drunken rants about the heights of famous historical people.  David Warner relishing every second as Evil, and Ralph Richardson as a querulous Supreme Being ("Dead, eh?  That's no excuse for slacking off work").  There is also a very early appearance by Jim Broadbent as a game show host.  The film has some still quite pointed satire, and a surprisingly bleak conclusion.  It was co-produced by former Beatle George Harrison who provides the closing theme song "Dream Away", some of the lyrics of which were apparently inspired by his notes to Gilliam during the film's production.  

David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Malcolm Dixon, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds and Tiny Ross are Time Bandits 

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse

Year:  2005
Director:  Steve Bendelack
Screenplay:  Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton
Starring:  Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, Michael Sheen, Emily Woof, David Warner
Running Time:  91 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

This is the feature-film spin off of the popular British comedy television series The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002), which starred Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton and was created and written by Gatiss, Shearsmith and Pemberton with Jeremy Dyson.  The show was very much a  dark comedy and  had a very strong horror influence.  It involved the various grotesque inhabitants of the weird little town of Royston Vasey in the north of England. 

In this feature film version, Royston Vasey is threatened with destruction by a bizarre series of natural disasters.  The local vicar, Bernice (Shearsmith), discovers that they exist in a fictional world and that their creators have decided to abandon them, thereby erasing their existence.  Teams have been sent from Royston Vasey to try to contact their creators, however the first team consisting of some of the more bizarre characters, only succeeded in accidentally causing Jeremy Dyson (Sheen) to fall off a cliff.  A second team, consisting of muderous butcher Hilary Briss (Gatiss), outrageously camp German schoolteacher Herr Lipp (Pemberton), and bitter, failed office worker Geoff Tipps (Shearsmith) are brought into the "real" world and ordered to contact the rest of their creators (Gatiss, Shearsmith and Pemberton playing versions of themselves).  They succeed in kidnapping Pemberton and stealing his computer where Hilary and Geoff discover that the League are writing a new historical comedy horror film called The King's Evil, while Herr Lipp poses as Pemberton.  The situation for the Royston Vasey characters soon becomes even more complex as they are forced to deal with the fact that they are little more than one note puns and gags in a fictional universe. 

The film is imaginative and will certainly appeal to fans of the series, although newcomers to the world of Rooyston Vasey may find themselves bewildered by the whole thing.  The film takes in three different worlds:  The world of the Royston Vasey characters, the "real" world of the creators of the show and the world of the King's Evil script (which is very much in the spirit of old style Hammer Horror).  Although the film focuses on two of the lesser known League of Gentlemen characters, most of the best known ones appear in small cameos.  The members of the League do well perfoming a multitude of chracters, including deeply unpleasant verisons of themselves (the one exception is the non-acting Jeremy Dyson who is played by Michael Sheen).  Fans of British comedy will also recognise well-known faces such as Victoria Wood, Simon Pegg and Peter Kay in cameo roles.  The film features a number of fun, retro style special-effects, including a number of stop-motion animated creatures.

A must see for fans of the series, this may be a little too bizarre and macabre for those unfamiliar with the world of the League of Gentlemen, and the humour is very much an acquired taste, but it is inventive and entertaining enough to hold the attention.

Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss enter a strange world in The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse