imdb-duke_nukem

This must be a (deliberate?) contender for the worst film ever, up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space (to which it owes something) and Manos : The Hands of Fate. The title alone told me it was going to be so bad that it must be worth watching. It didn't disappoint.

It's bonkers. Basically a spoof on Startrek (the spaceship has a steering wheel), but other spoofs are contained within it - spoofs on gays and what we now call MGTOW, LBGT, BLM, feminism etc. Or maybe it is spoofing the spoofs, it is hard to tell.

The plot is purile and the screenplay could have been written by a dirty-minded 12 year-old. The main characters are black males, and the only women appear briefly and are either hookers, bitchy or both. There is a lot of crudity about gays and I don't know how any of this gets past any censors (does it?), even the title.

The technical quality is appalling. Most of it is in low resolution black and white, so ill-lit that the black actors blur into it. I cannot help feeling the low quality was deliberate because it would be hard to be this bad otherwise.

Could be the worst film ever, but it is hard to choose. The title is a winner though.

I like stories like this based on hazardous journeys, from the Odyssey onwards. The scenery of the "front" is amazingly well done, and the characters realistic - ordinary guys, not John Waynes. I was gripped by the menace all through.

However there were some very unrealistic moments. He falls in a river that looks like the Anduin in the Lord of The Rings and goes down a high waterfall like the Falls of Rauros - in Northern France? More likely a sluggish stinking canal.

Then he comes across a guy singing to soldiers who are so attentive and motionless that at first I really thought they were dead men propped up. Squaddies? Seriously?

And then our messenger, needing to get through, argues like a nutter with everyone and their dog that "The attack must be stopped!!" when all he needed to say, and would say, was that he carried orders from HQ - that would have been perfectly customary.

A Bond clone, complete with the hero British spy having the rank of naval commander (well played by a younger Anthony Hopkins), an "M" figure (over-acted by Robert Morley), underwater fight scenes, and a megalomaniac villain (well played by Jack Hawkins) with a luxury yacht and an ambivalent mistress. Lower budget and a bit more realistic than Bond, with nothing like the extreme and exagerated action of the later Bonds. There is too much under water action and fighting in the dark - it gets hard to see what is going on at times. There are some weak attempts at comedy, but I did laugh when Morley's "M" type character slated Calvert (Hopkins with his trademark Welsh accent) as "from a northern grammar school", but I think that humour was unintentional.