Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 18/4/2019)

In 1988, Christine Edzard issued her six-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit as `Nobody's Fault' and `Little Dorrit's Story', while a decade ago, Jean-François Richet's Mesrine was released as `Killer Instinct' and `Public Enemy Number One' and Steven Soderbergh's Che (both 2008) was divided into `The Argentine' and `Guerilla'. But, while Peter Jackson broke down The Hobbit (2012-14) into `An Unexpected Journey', `The Desolation of Smaug' and `The Battle of the Five Armies', most producers in recent times have been content to follow Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976) rule of simply numbering the parts. Among those to so do are Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003-04), David Yates's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010-11), Bill Condon's The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (2011-12), Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013) and Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (2014-15). 

Given the success of the more commercial ventures, it beggars belief that the decision has been taken to not to release Paolo Sorrentino's Loro in the two parts he intended, but as an abridged single feature that most people who have seen the original agree is a ruinous bowdlerisation. Having demonstrated a mastery of multi-episode drama with The Young Pope (2016), Sorrentino clearly felt he needed a broad canvas for this fantasy on the later life of Italian media tycoon-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi. Thus, this follow-up to his scathing assault on Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) feels compromised and one can only hope that Curzon opt to make the original version available on disc later in the year. 

Following an opening sequence involving a sheep dropping dead in a chic villa from the combination of air-conditioning and daytime television, Taranto wheeler-dealer Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) celebrates winning a school meals contract by having sex with prostitute Candida (Carolina Binda), whose tattoo of Silvio Berlusconi's face convinces him that the time has come to move up a league. Wife Tamara (Euridice Axen) is as ambitious as Sergio and has no problems with his cocaine-sniffing methods or his plan to use Candida to seduce talent spotter-cum-pimp Fabrizio Sala (Roberto De Francesco). However, when Sergio makes the acquaintance of Kira (Kasia Smutniak) at a decadent soirée, he is warned that she takes no prisoners in protecting her connection to Berlusconi and his inner sanctum. 

Meanwhile, ex-minister Santino Recchia (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) tells power broker Cupa Caiafa (Anna Bonaiuto) that Berlusconi is a spent force and has made too many enemies to reclaim the prime ministership. He asks for her support to back his bid to become the leader of the Centre-Right and she agrees. However, he makes a fatal mistake by trying to force his attentions on Tamara, while Sergio is colluding with Kira to take a bevy of beauties to Villa Morena in Sardinia, which is overlooked by the retreat that Berlusconi (Toni Servillo) shares with his wife of 26 years, Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci). Despite her insistence that she would never stoop to sleeping with somebody as low as Sergio, Kira climbs on top of him while chatting to Berlusconi on the phone. Shortly afterwards, his motorcade passes Sergio, as he walks his harem through the darkened Roman streets and they gaze in astonishment as a bin lorry swerves to avoid a giant rat and flips over to land upside down in the Forum. 

As the rubbish flies through the air from the exploding truck, Sorrentino and editor Cristiano Travaglioli pull off an audacious match shot that shows cookies falling from the heavens, as Sergio and his bright young things party poolside in various states of undress under the influence of the so-called love drug, MDMA. While he enjoys the feast of gyrating flesh, Sergio is more interested in peering through his binoculars to see if he has piqued the interest of Signor Berlusconi. But he is busy dressing in a veiled bedlah in the hope of  getting a smile out of the less-than-amused Veronica. However, even his attempt to serenade her to the accompaniment of Mariano Apicella (Giovanni Esposito) fails to assuage her, as she is cross with her husband because of his liaison with Violetta Saba (Caroline Tillette) and warns him that she is tired of having her dignity diminished by his antics. 

Berlusconi bemoans his fate to confidante Paolo Spagnolo (Dario Cantarelli) and gives his grandson a valuable piece of advice about spin after treading in some poop on the terrace. However, he feels aggrieved when footballer Michel Martinez (Yann Gael) refuses his overtures to sign for AC Milan instead of rival Gianni Agnelli's Juventus and takes out his frustration on Recchia, when he comes to ask him to save his hide because he is being blackmailed by Tamara. Aware of his pact with Cupa, Berlusconi tells his onetime ally that he has pressed the self-destruct button and will spend his remaining days in the shade instead of the spotlight. 

Yet, he derives little satisfaction from exacting his revenge and is still trying to sweet talk Veronica on his yacht when he spots some of the girls from Villa Morena splashing around in the sea. Stranded on a jet ski, he confides in his wife that he needs a project to spark him back to life and she finally forgives him when they get caught in the rain and he has musician Fabio Concato perform their song while sheltering on a merry-go-round on the villa lawn. Feeling more positive, Berlusconi consults fellow billionaire Ennio Doris (also Toni Servillo), who tells him to launch his political comeback by finding six senators who willing to cross the floor and force a general election. Buoyed by the notion that altruism is the best form of selfishness, Berlusconi also agrees to refund some unhappy customers and thanks Doris for his cool-headed wisdom.

That night, Berlusconi calls a woman at random in the phone book and poses as a property salesman offering the harassed divorcée the chance to start afresh in a luxury condo to prove to himself that he still has the old snake oil skills. He then bounces back from being given a lecture by a seemingly incorruptible politician to convert the half dozen he needs to cause trouble in the senate. But, just as he seems to have swung the deal, transcripts of tapped phone calls are published and Veronica is furious with her husband for promising plum roles to a well-known actress. Moreover, Cupa vows to have nothing more to do with him, as she feels betrayed as a woman by his infidelities. 

Yet Berlusconi refuses to buckle, as his turncoat senators have toppled the government and he enjoys being the centre of attention when he croons for the patrons at a nightclub. Kira introduces him to Sergio and he presents Tamara with one of his famous butterfly necklaces while they dance and he reminds her that Recchia is still in love with him. Berlusconi asks Sergio to organise a party with the girls from the villa and he promises to see what he can do about arranging a safe seat in the European Parliament as a reward. During the bunga-bunga bash, however, Berlusconi is rebuffed by aspiring actress Stella (Alice Pagani), who informs him that his breath smells like her grandfather's and that there is something sordid about a 70 year-old man thinking he can make a 20 year-old girl do whatever he tells her. 

Returning to the main room, Berlusconi almost dozes off as Kira cavorts on the dance floor with some of the younger women and he throws her a top to cover herself up. She feels old and foolish, as do Sergio and Tamara, who find themselves sitting alone on the floodlit carousel. A montage shows Bertlusconi posing for an official photograph with his cabinet. But he has scarcely got his feet back under his desk than the town of L'Aquila is hit by the 2009 earthquake and he comes to visit those in the tented village and uses the same dream-selling pitch he employed while posing as an estate agent on the phone in promising to build them new accommodation. 

However, the world is changing and Berlusconi is stung when he is ordered to follow a new code of conduct when meeting other world leaders. Moreover, Veronica returns from a trip to Cambodia to demand a divorce and she spits out home truths in a bitter exchange in which he chides her for turning a blind eye to his faults when it suited her and she was able to live in untroubled comfort. Retaining an air of civility, they trade insults and accusations with neither being willing to acknowledge their faults. 

Needing a friend, Berlusconi calls TV game show host Mike Bongiorno (Ugo Pagliai) and they reminisce about their days together on the cruise ships. Bongiorno urges Berlusconi to patch things up with Veronica and reminds him that he has always asked the impossible by seeking to become the most powerful man in Italy without making any enemies. Patting his pal on the shoulder, Berlusconi counters by lamenting that Bongiorno's head only contains memories, while his is full of ideas. As the film ends, a statue of the crucified Christ is winched out of the ruined church in L'Aquila, while the old woman Berlusconi had promised would be rehoused not only settles into her new apartment, but also finds a pair of dentures to replace the ones she had lost in the rubble. She smiles, while Berlusconi contemplates his next move, as quitting is simply not an option. 

With a title translating as `Them', this is as much a snapshot of a national mindset as it is a single portrait. Thus, while it contains echoes of Sorrentino's The Great Beauty (2013), this often feels as though Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) has been recast in the mould of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), with the sins of the flesh being paraded in all their tawdry DeMillean glory before being denounced in the final reel. Much has changed in the way cinema can depict such scenes, however, and Sorrentino is certain to face a #MeToo backlash, even though he can justifiably protest that he is merely telling it as it objectifyingly was back in 2006. 

As with Il Divo and Nanni Moretti's broadside against Berlusconi, Il Caiman (2006), non-Italian audiences will sometimes struggle to appreciate the nuances. But everyone will recognise the tongue-in-cheek nature of the opening disclaimer that the characters bear no resemblance to actual persons, especially as its instantly debunked by a caption carrying Giorgio Manganelli's maxim `Everything is documented. Everything is arbitrary.' Moreover, buried beneath Maurizio Silvi's wickedly artificial make-up design, Toni Servillo looks and sounds too much like Berlusconi for him to be playing anybody else. 

Radiating charismatic ferocity and self-serving insincerity, he meets his match in onetime actress Veronica Lario, who is brilliantly portrayed by Elena Sofia Ricci as a woman who seeks to humiliate him by reading intellectual tomes that highlight his coarse shallowness, but who also can't decide whether to blame herself for not realising the truth about the man she married or him for deceiving her from the moment they met.

By contrast, Sorrentino and co-scenarist Umberto Contarello use the trio played by Riccardo Scamarcio, Euridice Axen and Kasia Smutniak to demonstrate the addictive and aphrodisiac properties of power. But they are denied the kind of humanising aspects that Berlusconi is gifted, as Sorrentino invests him with the kind of genial roguishness that Shakespeare bestowed upon Richard III. He is also allowed to be the victim of the same overwhelming sadness that envelopes the nation in the aftermath of the L'Aquila tragedy, as Sorrentino (with the magnificent support of production designer Stefania Cella and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi) rings down the curtain on the faux glamour that Fellini mock-celebrated in La Dolce Vita by showing a very different statue of Christ being suspended from the end of a crane winch.

While Christian movies continue to do brisk business Stateside, the UK market remains largely resistant to the likes of Jon Gunn's The Case for Christ (2017) and Andrew and John Irwin's I Can Only Imagine (2018). The presence of Fox News commentator Sean Hannity has done much to boost the profile of Let There Be Light with God-fearing conservative audiences. But his name means much less on this side of the Pond and it's unlikely that actor-director Kevin Sorbo left a deep enough impression from his stint as TV's Hercules to have ageing fanboys flocking to catch this sincere, but remorselessly manipulative melodrama.

While promoting his new book, Aborting God, atheist academic Sol Harkens (Kevin Sorbo) mocks the beliefs of Dr Fornier (Gary Grubbs) during a town hall debate and urges the audience to put more faith in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than the deity who subjected his eight year-old son to terminal cancer. However, he goes home to an empty apartment and a bottle of vodka because he lives apart from Katy (Sam Sorbo) and their surviving sons, Gus and Conner (Braeden and Shane Sorbo), because they have remained Christians and disapprove of the fact he uses a family tragedy to help sell his books. 

Agent Norm (Daniel Roebuck) and publicist Tracee (Donielle Artese) are delighted with the controversy that Harkens has stirred up by comparing the church to Isis, although they both wish he would patch things up with Katy rather than hang out with like blonde bimbos like Vanessa (Olivia Fox), a Russian model with a gift for mangling the English language. While driving home drunk from a book launch, however, Harkens has a crash and, during the four minutes he is clinically dead, he has a reunion in a time tunnel with his lost boy, Davey (Ethan Jones), who implores him to spread the light.

Waking in hospital, Harkens is warned by Dr Shell (Joe Herrera) that he has a blood clot on the brain and needs to take things easy. But Norm and Tracee want him to exploit his return from a God-free afterlife and take the media by storm. At his next lecture, however, Harkens sees Katy in the audience and has a panic attack, during which he reveals that he saw Davey. While being checked at the hospital, Dr Patel (Leander Suleiman) assures him that near death experiences are nothing more than the imagination running wild. But Katy is convinced he made contact with their son and she ignores Gus's concerns about falling for his father's charm in order to spend increasing amounts of time with him, as she hopes she can guide him back to the right path. 

Norm arranges an interview with journalist Cat Ryerson (Walnette Marie Santiago), but he doesn't feel like answering her questions about his vision. With Norm warning him that he will blow his reputation if he starts doubting his own theories, Harkens seeks out Katy's pastor, Vinny (Michael Franzese), a former wise guy who found Jesus while in prison. He tells Harkens that God loves him so much that he sent his son to give him the message about shining a new light into people's lives and Harkens realises that he has been called. 

Summoning Cat, he gives her the exclusive on his conversion and is promptly fired by Norm, who hisses that their friendship was purely a business transaction. But Harkens doesn't have time to fret, as Katy has come up with a plan to counter the darkness spread by Isis by using an app to co-ordinate a global Christian show of faith by simultaneously shining their phone torches to create a band of light around the planet that can be photographed from space by NASA. She also suggests that each click on the app prompts a donation to a food bank and Harkens is delighted by the notion of feeding the needy physically and spiritually. 

Touched by Gus's assertion that Davey has saved his soul, Harkens invites Katy to dinner and she accepts his marriage proposal. However, the excitement causes a seizure and oncologist Dr Corey (Travis Tritt) delivers the news that she has an inoperable stage four brain tumour. Racing against time, they have Dionne Warwick sing at their wedding, which is interrupted by a call inviting them on to Sean Hannity's show to promote their light initiative. He commissions a three-hour Christmas Eve special that enables him to browbeat Iran and North Korea and app designer Sally (Mona Amein) to explain how Jesus rescued her from an honour killing in her native Pakistan. As friends and family sing `Silent Night' while shining their beams, Katy dies in heavenly peace.

There's no avoiding the mawkishness of the denouement and any hope that the project's good intentions will shine through in the climactic `selfie for God' are confounded by the final instance of the knee-jerk xenophobia that seethes throughout the action. As Sam Jenkins, Mrs Sorbo had played Serena alongside her future spouse in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-99). But she is now a popular radio personality and home-schooling advocate and shamelessly uses the script she has concocted with veteran writer Don Gordon to foist her pernicious political views on audiences who will mostly have bought a ticket to receive a little spiritual uplift. While one can just about tolerate the use of cinema as a prostelysing tool, its exploitation to disseminate Trumpist alarmism is less acceptable and Hannity's smug cameo only confirms the scarcely covert message this cynical picture is striving to convey. 

Playing an Alabama variation on Richard Dawkins, Kevin Sorbo is no more palatable, as he realises he would rather be playing house (of the Lord) in the suburbs than boozing and pill-popping in a downtown loft whose walls are covered with pastiche Warhol prints, book covers and a gormlessly jokey reference to his Herculean heyday. Coming after a pre-credit montage of assaults on homeland security, the `party on' mantra of the opening address gives way to the hectoring tone that Mrs S adopts, even while chiding her ex for quoting The Taming of the Shrew at her. But you can tell she has never really stopped loving him and the glistening gratitude in her eyes when he describes his experiences in the risibly cheap celestial portal would have drawn snickers from the least discriminating punters back in the 1930s. 

At least there would have been decent child actors around in those days, who would have avoided the woefully stiff delivery of the Sorbo siblings (presumably their sister refused to play ball). But there is a lower point in this grimly twee family entertainment, as reformed mobster Michael Franzese sums up the mysteries of Holy Week with this atrocious spiel: `Jesus gets whacked, right? They stick his body in a tomb. They seal it up tighter than a cement drum. What happens next? Bada-bing! The body disappears.' Joe Pesci couldn't have put it better.

Although it's rarely discussed, a fair number of detective fiction's most popular sleuths have an obsessive nature and Simon Fellows puts this observation to potentially intriguing use in his sixth feature, Steel Country. However, while it offers some cogent insights into daily life in the Trumpist Rust Belt, Brendan Higgins's screenplay fails entirely to convince as a whodunit, as it places far too much reliance on contrivance and character quirk in order to snap its ill-fitting pieces into place. 

Donny Devlin drives a bin lorry in the rundown former steel town of Harburgh, Pennsylvania. While on his rounds with Donna Reutzel (Bronagh Waugh), Donny notices that six year-old Tyler Zeigler (Nolan Cook) isn't at his window to wave as he does each week and he raises the matter with Wendy (Christa Beth Campbell), the 11 year-old daughter he fathered after a one-night stand with Linda Connolly (Denise Gough), who is embarrassed by their liaison because Donny has a former of Asperger syndrome. She is now dating Randy (Cory Scott Allen) and Donny is unhappy that he keeps buying things he can't afford to curry favour with Wendy. 

She gets cross with her dad when he hacks into her social media page to ask Tyler's older brother, Justin (Christian Finlayson), if his brother is okay, as she already gets teased at school for having two dads. However, when he hears that Tyler drowned in the creek, Donny is crushed and offers his condolences to the boy's mother, Patty (Kate Forbes), when he sees her smoking on the front step. She's puzzled why the cops seem to think he wandered into the woods when she knows he was a timid child who was afraid of his own shadow. But, when Donny mentions this to Sheriff Mooney (Michael Rose), he is warned to keep his nose out of other people's business and not draw attention to himself. 

Wheelchair-bound mother Betty (Sandra Ellis Lafferty) is also concerned about Donny's limited social awareness and fears that he might fall off the wagon after a period of being dry. But Patty's remark plays on his mind and he decides to conduct his own investigation. He asks his cop buddy Max Himmler (Griff Furst) why Mooney isn't taking the case seriously and is told that they were warned off digging too deeply to avoid upsetting the grieving family. So, when he next collects the trash from the house, Donny rootles through the bin bag and not only finds a nodding American footballer toy, but also torn-up phone records that reveal numerous calls to Dr Joel Pmorowski (Andrew Masset). 

Seeking solace in the felt pen collection he sorts in times of stress, Donny takes Donna into his confidence and, when he receives a note inviting him to a midnight rendezvous on the railway bridge, she offers to drive him. When two hooded figures try to force Donny into jumping on to a passing train, Donna shoots at them in the darkness and a terrified Donny wakes Max to ask why people are trying to kill him. Eager not to get involved, but aware a miscarriage of justice has taken place because Mooney didn't order an autopsy, Max tells Donny to seek out mutual school friend Bill Frankel (Eric Mendenhall) because he can provide him with the backstory that might contain some clues. 

Deciding to take a more direct route, Donny makes an appointment with Pomorowski to talk about Wendy and asks if he was having an affair with Patty. He also demands to know why the doctor didn't order an autopsy and he claims that Patty didn't want one in case it threw up evidence that her son had been abused by his father, Jerry (Jason Davis). Acting on this information, Donny threatens to crush Jerry with his car unless he confesses and he swears he would never harm his kid. On getting home, Donny finds the flap cap he wears to work pinned to the front door with a sharp knife. 

Donna suggests dropping the case and starting a romance with her. But Donny backs away when she tries to kiss him and offends her by mentioning the child she had to give up for adoption. Convinced he still has a shot with Linda, Donny meets her out of work and she tries to let him down gently before blurting out what she only slept with him because they were drunk and that she wants nothing to do with him. Having sorted out his pens, Donny goes to the cemetery and exhumes Tyler's body and drives it to the neighbouring city, where Frankel is a forensics expert. But he is mortified when Donny shows him the corpse in the back of his truck and asks him to examine it for evidence of abuse. 

Refusing to be intimidated by Mooney when he punches him in the face, Donny gets home to find Donna waiting for him with a press cutting about an abuse case involving George Atzerodt (Jared Bankens). He is now a mechanic in Pittsburgh and Donny drives to see him to ask about his ordeal and he gets back to Harburgh to learn from Max that Frankel has examined Tyler's body and ordered an investigation into his molestation. Driving to see the Zeiglers, Donny is told by a weeping Patty that she thought the doctor fancied her and allowed him to be alone with her son to please him. But, when she realised the truth, she was told by Mooney that she would go to prison for neglect if she informed on them. Aghast to discover that two such trusted residents could be so sordid, Donny calls on Wendy to tell her how much he loves her before killing Pomorowski with a crossbow and surrendering to Mooney and his posse in the tantalisingly unresolved denouement.

Having given such a deft performance in a challengingly sensitive role, one might have thought that an actor of Andrew Scott's standing would have argued with his director and screenwriter that the ending they had devised was so preposterous that it would sink an already leaky plot. However, he was made to enact a situation that would beggar belief if what had gone before hadn't been similarly riddled with improbabilities. Yet, despite the lurches in the plotline, the Irish actor best known for playing Moriarty in Sherlock (2010-17) and The Priest in Fleabag (2019) continues to make us believe in a spectrum misfit who walks with his feet at ten to two and whose inability to gauge the impact his inquiry is having makes him a target for those intent on keeping their dark secret hidden.

There's something of David Lynch's original series of Twin Peaks (1990-91) about the set-up and production designer Erik Rehl and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind do a decent job in turning Griffin, Georgia into a Pennsylvanian backwater pocked with telltale Trump/Pence election posters. But, while Fellows provides a reasonably acute outsider's impression of a community that seems unable to learn from past mistakes, he is seemingly content to go along with the flaws in the debuting Higgins's inexpert scenario, in which witnesses and suspects alike appear to have faulty filters and too much stress is placed on Donny's condition to justify inconceivable acts like digging up a body and meting out vigilante justice. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stories have been opening with the words `once upon a time' since 1380. Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm all used variations on the phrase to set the scene for their timeless fables and it's not surprising that film-makers have consistently returned to it since Harry Solter made Once Upon a Time in 1910. Among the numerous outings to share the title is a 1944 Alexander Hall comedy in which Cary Grant starred alongside a tap-dancing caterpillar. But, ever since Sergio Leone came up with Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984), the term has acquired connotations of epicness in setting films in China (Tsui Hark, 1991), Manila (Tony Reyes, 1994), China and America (Sammo Hung, 1997), Mexico (Robert Rodriguez, 2000), Mumbai (Milan Luthria, 2010), Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011) and Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019). 

Closer to home, we've had features located in the Midlands (Shane Meadows, 2002) and Dublin (Jason Figgis, 2009) and, now, we have Simon Rumley's Once Upon a Time in London, which seeks to present the capital's postwar underworld on a grand scale and a modest budget. That it doesn't entirely succeed is down more to a failure to emerge from the shadow of BritCrime than any lack of ability or ambition.

As a narrator informs us that London was becoming a dangerous place in 1936 under the White and Sabini families, a couple of chancers start to rise through the ranks. Jack `Spot' Comer (Terry Stone) makes a name for himself during the Battle of Cable Street, when the East End took exception to a march by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, while Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) comes to the notice of Charles Sabini (Adam Saint) and Alf White (Jamie Foreman) and his son, Harry (Justin Salinger), after he knocked over the same jewellery shop twice in a week. Comer also makes himself useful to Darky Mulley (Geoff Bell), who runs a string of racecourse bookmakers. But he has to take the odd reprisal beating at a time when fists and razors were used rather than guns because the death penalty was seen as a suitable deterrent. 

While a prison sentence interrupts Hill's romance with Aggie Vaux (Holly Earl) and Comer endures a short stint in the army before being discharged for being mentally unfit' to fight, the London scene changes dramatically during the Second World War, as the Sabinis are detained as enemy aliens and Comer joins forces with Mulley to challenge Harry White for the title of King of the Underworld after the death of his father. Meanwhile, Hill befriends `Mad' Frankie Fraser (Roland Manookian) while serving time for black marketeering and, having heard about Comer's unprecedented haul of ration coupons, he writes him a fan letter offering his services when he's released. 

Needing a loyal lieutenant to help him clean up in Soho, Comer takes Hill under his wing and introduces him to Gypsy Riley (Kate Braithwaite), who becomes his mistress in the same way that Tiger Lilly (Shereen Ball) becomes Comer's moll. However, he threatens to ditch the newcomer after White smashes up one of the clubs on Hill's patch and he's only restored to favour when Fraser discovers Whilte's whereabouts by throwing darts into the skull of one of his oppos. Always ready for a punch-up, Comer wades into the White mob to the accompaniment of `I Love Those Cheeky Chaps From the East of London'. But the episode proves to Hill that Comer can't be trusted and he begins making plans to go solo.

Separated from Aggie, Hill slashes the face of the pimp who slaps Gypsy around and Comer is less than amused at having to pay him off to stop him going to the police (who have also started demanding bigger bungs to turn a blind eye to Comer's operations). Annoyed at being reprimanded in public, Hill exploits a gambling debt that a postman has run up at one of Comer's clubs to get inside information on a delivery route and blags £287,000 from the Eastcastle Street postal van heist. When Comer comes to collect his cut, Hill contemptuously throws banknotes at him and a montage follows showing Comer's empire crumble under attack from Hill and new racecourse maven, Albert Dimes (Doug Allen). Nettled after getting it in the ear from pregnant Irish wife Rita (Nadia Forde) about Dimes calling him at home, Comer sparks a vicious street brawl. Yet, when the case comes to court, the gangster's code means that neither man can recognise his assailant. 

Riding high, Hill hires journalist Duncan Webb (Simon Munnery) to ghost write his autobiography, Boss of Britain's Underworld, which he launches with a lavish party. Enraged at the revelations about himself, Comer convinces three young thugs to murder Hill. But their prattle is overheard by a pub landlady and they are tortured by Fraser into squealing on Comer, who is attacked outside his Paddington home. Despite Hill offering a truce if Comer plays the game, Rita refuses buckle and testifies against Fraser and Bobby Warren (JJ Hamblett), who receive seven-year sentences. As Comer opens a pub, Hill welcomes Reggie (Kerim Hassan) and Ronnie Kray (Ken Croft) into his ranks before the narrator winds things up by informing us that Hill quit while he was ahead and ran a nightclub in Tangier before passing peacefully in 1984, while Comer slipped into poverty before dying in poverty in 1996. 

Packing plenty of plot (and a few too many digressions) into its 111 minutes, this falls some way behind Peaky Blinders (2013-) in its evocation of a time and place. But Rumley is a canny director and there's an edge to the bad lad nostalgia that sets it apart from glossy reconstructions like Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007). He's splendidly served by production designer Anna Mould and costumier Michelle May, while Tom Parsons makes a tidy job of editing Milton Kam's astute camerawork, which slowly allows colour to seep into proceedings as the action moves away from the bleak days of the 1930s. Glamour is kept on a leash, however, as Rumley offers unflinching insights into the brutality of gangland life and the curious conventions that prevented rivalries from descending into bloodbaths. 

Leo Gregory and Terry Stone offer hints into the psychotic psyche, but the characterisation is more serviceable than inspired. Indeed, with the exception of Justin Salinger's amusing portrayal of serial loser Harry White, the secondary figures are little more than ciphers who know when to laugh at the boss's joke and throw a punch to defend his manor. The WAGs are also sketchily drawn, although Nadia Forde makes the most of her day in court and the hospital sequence in which she urges Comer and Hill to stop behaving like overgrown schoolboys. In many ways, her analysis is spot on, as the Stan and Ollie-like hospital visiting scene (with its gag about a bunch of grapes) seems to imply. But these were dangerous days, as Rumley conveys by having this gangland game of thrones tap into the spirit the Boulting brothers' adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and St John Legh Clowes's take on James Hadley Chase's No Orchids For Miss Blandish (both 1948).

Horror fans will be delighted to see the name of Fangoria among the production credits on Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund's Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich, as the magazine has been the bible of gorehounds since 1979. Indeed, it was around when Charles Band launched the original franchise, which has racked up a dozen titles between Puppet Master (1989) to Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017). Yet, despite boasting a screenplay by S. Craig Zahler - the director of Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged Across Concrete (which just happens to go on general release this week) - this non-canonical reboot falls flat on its smug face in striving to push the buttons of those who might not see the funny side of a slasher about Nazi automata going on a killing spree in an America whose president flatly refuses to distance himself sufficiently from the white supremacists who cheered his election to the echo. 

The action opens in Postville, Texas in 1989, as André Toulon (Udo Kier) makes a clumsy attempt to chat up Nancy (Betsy Holt) and her bartender girlfriend, Candace (Victoria Hande), only to be repulsed by the fact they are lesbians. As they drive home discussing motherhood, they are killed when Toulon leaps out in front of their vehicle and barricades himself in a secret room in his mansion after whispering instructions to his minions to stay out in the shadows and out of sight until the time comes for their reunion. 

Flashing forward three decades, fortysomething comic-book artist Edgar Easton (Thomas Lennon) finds himself moving in with parents Tom (James Healy, Jr.) and Suzanne (Laurie Guzda) after his divorce. His stern cop father thoroughly disapproves of Edgar's lifestyle choices and the fact he is serving behind the counter at a comic-book store owned by ageing slacker, Markowitz (Nelson Franklin). Moreover, he despairs at his son's fascination with the ghoulish Toulon puppet that his deceased brother brought back from a sleepaway camp years before. Despite cutting himself on the blade and hook hidden in the doll's hands, Edgar is keen to attend the fan-con marking the 30th anniversary of the Postville slayings and he invites half-his-age neighbour Ashley Summers (Jenny Pellicer) along for the ride. 

Untroubled by the prospect of playing gooseberry, Markowitz also invites himself on the trip and they check into The Brass Buckle hotel, where the desk clerk, Howie (Alex Beli), upsets Markowitz by alluding to the fact he is Jewish. As part of the convention, the trio go on a tour of Toulon's mansion, which has been left unaltered. Conducting proceedings is Carol Doreski (Barbara Crampton), who was one of the cops who found the dead girls and raided the house on the night Toulon was killed. She regales us with details of his French childhood and puppeteering prime in Nazi Germany before he fled Stateside when the war began to turn, with a wife who jumped off the liner rather than spend another day in his company. 

Showing off Toulon's memorabilia, including books from the library of Adolf Eichmann (the architect of the Final Solution), Doreski takes the party past a torture chamber (where Toulon had brutalised some Jewish women) into the workshop where the maniac made his dolls and allowed himself to be gunned down. Edgar gets a chill on seeing Toulon's mausoleum in the grounds, but it more unnerved to discover that the puppet he was planning to sell has been stolen from his room and, when he calls reception to report the theft, Ashley hears a sinister voice utter `Remain in the Shadows' in French. 

Meanwhile, Jewish couple Jason (Stephen Brodie) and Rachel Gottlieb (Mary Katherine O'Donnell) return to their room to find their Kaiser puppet under the bed. No sooner has Jason retrieved it than the doll's eyes burn red and it drops the glove from one of its hands to turn its arm into a flamethrower to frazzle the Gottliebs in a trice. Nearby, Richard (Serafin Falcon) and his pneumatic trophy girlfriend, Goldie (Kennedy Summers), are stabbed to death by Edgar's puppet, while Hezekiah Buckland (John D. Pszyk) gets to urinate on his own severed head after being attacked by a flying samurai robot. 

While Markowitz gets to know bartender Cuddly Bear (Skeeta Jenkins) and waitress Nerissa (Charlyne Yi), Detective Brown (Michael Paré) comes to investigate the theft of Edgar's doll, only to learn that Hedwig Wagner (Anne Beyer) has had all five of hers taken. She survives to tell the tale, unlike Christian (Seth Martin Canterbury), who has barely finished lying to his mother over the phone about beating the booze before he is eviscerated by another blade-wielding doll. Meanwhile, Betsy (Tina Parker) finds her lesbian lover Anne (Ryan Rae) floating in her own blood in the bathtub, while a heavily pregnant woman (Deanne Lauvin) wakes to find a murderous marionette has invaded her womb and emerges through her bump with her baby. 

When the first bodies are found, Brown ignores Edgar's suggestion that they are dealing with hate crimes and orders the guests to meet in the lobby. Annoyed at being disturbed while discussing superheroes with Nerissa, Markowitz is puzzled why there's a doll in his room. But inter-racial couple Strommelson (Matthias Hues) and Princess (Amber Shana Williams) are even more bemused, as she is butchered, while he has his spine ripped open so that one of the puppets can climb inside and turn him into a human marionette. 

Panic sets in when the power fails and a whole bunch of people are massacred while trying to escape. Locking themselves in the bar, the survivors ask Markowitz to act as bait so they can capture one of the puppets and take it apart to see how it works. A cop has his arm ripped off while trying to protect Doreski, but they succeed in disabling one of the puppets. Moreover, when an infant Führer clambers out of Strommelson, Ashley guns it down and Markowitz (who claims to be an avenger for the six million) tosses it in an oven to see how he likes it. He doesn't survive long after this atrocious wisecrack, as Doreski orders everyone to barricade themselves inside rooms and Markowitz is drilled through the back by a puppet that drops in through a hole in the ceiling. 

Nerissa also perishes when she mistimes a jump into a dumpster beneath the window. But Edgar and Ashley make it in one piece and head to the old Toulon place to destroy the puppets at source. After confiding their feelings for one another, they ram the mausoleum and jolt Toulon's rotting skeleton into life. However, the puppets lose their energy and drop off their victims back at the hotel. Rising from his casket, Toulon grabs Ashley by the throat, only for Edgar to belt him with a tyre iron. Staggering back to the vault, Toulon finds an old Nazi pistol and shoots Ashley dead before lumbering off into the woods, as the sirens of out-of-town reinforcements can be heard in the distance. 

As Edgar signs copies of his graphic account of the encounter, a nerdy fanboy asks if he is going to do any more and a cheesy `To Be Continued' caption fills the screen. Given that Charles Band is among the executive producers of this retool, it seems entirely likely that the two franchises could co-exist in parallel, as the original series has long been defying the law of diminishing returns. One thing's for sure, any sequel almost certainly won't have Zahler as its screenwriter (which is perhaps as well, as the `plot' is merely a feeble pretext for getting the victims into the slaughterhouse, while the characterisation is non-existent), although Laguna and Wiklund, who had previously produced Wither (2012) and Animalistic (2013) in their native Sweden, would presumably bite the hand off anyone offering them another crack at creating such gory mayhem.

Providing they can forgive the decision to turn Toulon from a Holocaust survivor into a genocidal Nazi, genre freaks will probably be purring at the presence of Re-Animator (1985) star Barbara Crampton, while commending the contributions of SFX specialist Tate Steinsiek and composer Fabio Frizzi, who is celebrated for his association with Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci. But this is a deeply unpleasant piece of work that invites us to be appalled by the odd slaying and guffaw with postmodernist knowingness at the rest. However, there's nothing big or clever about such self-satisfied manipulation, which dares viewers to surrender to the onslaught and laugh at the unpardonable. 

It's perhaps no accident that the original video nasty boom coincided with the surge to the right swept Ronald Reagan to power and this preeningly provocative and garishly unnecessary remake certainly reeks of Trumpist bravura. Adherents will doubtless claim that the makers have their tongues firmly in their cheeks. But not everyone who watches this reprehensibly faux transgressive trash will be in on the joke.

Finally, those still getting over their encounter with a bright yellow racing car voiced by Peter André in David Stoten's Thomas & Friends Big World! Big Adventures! The Movie (2018) would be advised to steer well clear of Carl Mendez's CGI animation, Wheely: Fast & Hilarious. Shamelessly borrowing its look and tone from John Lasseter's underwhelming Pixar outing, Cars (2006), this is strictly a last resort for those arriving at the multiplex for an Easter treat only to discover that all the other kidpix are already sold out. 

A year after his hubris had cost him the chance to beat rival motor Joe Flo (Khairil Mokhzani Bahar) in the last race of the season, Wheely O'Wheels (Ogie Banks) is still haunted by the fact that he had skidded into the path of an oncoming train and was bounced into the harbour because a buck-toothed fast-food Vespa named Putt Putt (Gavin Yap) had blocked the way while trying to deliver the order he had placed to celebrate his victory. However, he is determined to help Mama (Tamyka White) do up her rundown garage-cum-diner on the outskirts of Gasket City by working as a taxi. 

While out on a job, Wheely bumps into Joe and winds up gatecrashing a photo shoot and gets to meet his dream girl, Bella Di Monetti (Frances Lee), a model who is promoting a new brand of oil. Having saved her from falling filming equipment, however, he is arrested for illegal racing by Sergeant Street (Barbara Goodson) and has to be bailed out of prison by his mother. Despite promising to keep out of trouble, Wheely falls foul of Bella's sneering British beau, Ben Hub-Bonnet (Thomas Pang), while returning her dropped phone and he frames him for an illegal street race. 

With Bella tempted by a movie offer from Hollywood, all seems lost with Wheely behind bars. But, when Putt Putt sees Bella get car-jacked by a sinister German chop-shop truck called Kaiser (Brock Powell) and his Hispanic sidekicks, Rumble (Armando Valez) and Parmo (Raymond Orta), he busts Wheely out of jail and they head to Torque Town in time to prevent Bella from being stolen away aboard a Jamaican-accented cargo ship named Crank (Chris Jai Alex). Helped by a friendly cab called Amy (Diong Chae Lian), Wheely rides to the rescue at the docks, while Putt Putt joins forces with Frank (Jay Sheldon), the `cardiologist' who treated Wheely after his crash and who has found a new axle that will enable him to race again. 

For about three minutes at the waterfront, as Kaiser uses a crane to bean Wheely with some flying containers, this almost gets exciting. However, for much of the time, this is tiresomely brash and noisy, as the vocal talent bellows the dismal dialogue concocted by Keith Brumpton, Yusry Abd Halim and Peter Hynes in a variety of accents that frequently teeter on the brink of racial caricature. The Indian taxi that takes exception to Wheely in Torque Town is particularly poorly judged, but the patois-spouting Crank  will have accompanying adults wincing with embarrassment. 

Tinies who haven't seen Cars (of which there will be few) might just enjoy the ride and petrolheads might get a kick out of trying to identify the models being ripped off. The graphics are also solid (particularly during the crudely animated Car Wars sequence at the movie drive-in), while Izuann Jamalle's editing is pretty slick. But the storyline and characterisation are woefully derivative, while the endless stream of bad puns is excruciating.