One Million Years B.C. (1966)

"Their laws are simple: the strong take everything."

Tonight I have learned a valuable lesson. A film may have great special effects, by no less a creator than the great Ray Harryhausen himself, showing his usual genius even within the consraints of what is clearly a lower budget than he's used to... and still be a terrible film. If you want Ray Harryhausen, watch The Valley of Gwangi. It's a much better film, and has cowboys in it to boot.

There are some awesome monsters in here- a family of pterosaurs; a giant tortoise, a saurapod, a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops being the highlights.They all interact with humans, so... yes, let's gloss over the histotical accuracy and move on to briefy praise the location filming. I suppose there's also amusement value at the start as we see Robert Brown, a future M to Roger Moore's James Bond, as a Palaeolithic chieftain. But that's literally all the positives.

Because this is an awful film. Other than some cringeworthy narration at the start there's no dialogue. The plot consist of M's son beng banished, encountering various monsters, joining another tribe where Raquel Welch's character likes him for some reason, being banished again, fighting more monsters at the end, and finishing off with a bit of natural disaster action. There's a lot of visual spectacle. The film looks good.

And yet... it's just dull. Without dialogue, it simply isn't possible for any of the characters to be interesting, or for us to care about them. And without charactesr to care about we have nothing to watch but empty spectacle.

Licence to Kill (1989)

"There's more to this than just your personal vendetta!"

Meh. After a good Bond film we get a very late '80s action thriller, all very War On Drugs and macho, very Arnie or Sly or Bruce but not awful, if pretty average for its type- and then James Bond is crowbarred into this genre he doesn't suit, and it all gets rather awkward.

Essentially, Bond is the best man at Felix Leiter's wedding, a drug lord has Leiter's bride murdered and leaves Leiter for dead, and Bond spends the film out for revenge, in spite of the official disapproval but unofficial help from Q, and even an unofficial "good luck" from M. The whole thing feels utterly out of character, which is a shame because Timothy Dalton is outstanding here. But the whole thing stinks of '80s antihero vigilantism and the sort of depressingly uncritical view of the WR on Drugs that you would expect from 1989. Still, Robert Davi is superbly menacing as Sanchez.

This isn't a bad film, per se; as a film of its type it's perfectly decent if not great. But as a Bond film it adds nothing to the character or the franchise. Vigilantism bad; law and order good. That goes right back to Aeschylus and Bond really should know better.

Octopussy (1983)

"You must be joking! 007 on an island populated exclusively by women? We won't see him till dawn...!"

Now that's more like it. Exotic locations, high stakes, great set pieces... the Bond franchise has got its mojo back. Well, unless you happen to be a coulrophobe, that is. Then you'd have problems.

It's the early '80s, the Raj is all the rage and Bond hasn't done India yet, so Octopussy gets a fantastic setting with Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and even a massive hunt riding elephants during which Bond meets a tiger. For a baddie we have Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince who, for some reason, is working with the Soviets, his natural enemies or so one would have thought, but it makes for a good film. The real baddie has a Cold War flavour for once in the shape of Steven Berkoff's nuke-happy Russian general, Orlov, although our old friend Gogol is around to stop things going too far. 1983 is a somewhat appropriate year to raise the spectre of nuclear annihilation, of course...

Roger Moore is 55 and looks it, but he just about gets away with it: his charisma and acting chops are as impressive as ever. Maud Adams is an ok Bond hgirl too, although for once the set pieces tend to outshine both the sex and the baddies.

This film is absolutely the least like the source material of any so far (the Fleming short story is actually about an octopus), but how can you dislike a film where Q turns up in a hot air balloon? After two duds, Bond is back on track.

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

"Perhaps we're the savages!"

So, an early Hammer film based on Nigel Kneale's lost TV drama The Creature: bound to be good, right? Well, actually no. It's a shame this film is the only version that exists because there are times you can almost see through to Kneale's original, intelligent vision. Alas, The Creature was never recorded and not even Philip Morris can find it now.

Peter Cushing is good. That hardly needs to be said. But the film is... dull. It can't quite commit to Kneale's pessimism about the human condition (apparently the yeti, with their wise faces, are superior hominids waiting for us to cop it in a nuclear holocaust, which is nice) but it doesn't really have the thrills and scares to cut it as the more lowbrow fare it's being pitched as: the amount of screen time the yeti has is shocking.

It's interesting to see Tibet being portrayed in a film dated before the invasion of communist China in 1959 , however vaguely racist this portrayal may be. It's interesting to see a Hammer horror (although said institution was just evolving in 1957) in monochrome. It's interesting to see a clear influence on a Doctor Who story set in a similar environment but without a Great Intelligence. But this film ain't half full. Eminently missable.