That's Dr Phibes Rides Again. As per my previous complaint, the guy was just in the way and Phibes set up this whole elaborate process.

As a fan of the original, I remember finding the sequel disappointing, with none of the style or flair of the original and with no real logic to the baroque murders. It just seemed that anybody who got in his way got the full Phibes Rube Goldberg death machine. Still, it does have John Thaw in it, as well as Robert…

I've been counting on that for many, many years.

I saw it when it was first broadcast and agree - it's slow, stylish tosh and trundles sluggishly along. Poliakoff seems to have lost all sense of dialogue, of pacing and speech rhythms and of how people actually speak to each other.

I remember seeing it a long time ago, and the summations here are accurate. It's actually quite cringe-making in places, especially those where Paul, painfully aware that the cameras are upon him, tries to be as diplomatic and cheerful as possible in the face of obvious scorn from John and George. I seem to remember…

"I Am A Camera" by Gentle Giant, a decent if uncharacteristic song from their final album..

I thought the exact thing after Abacab, to be honest.  Never regretted it.

As per my previous posts on this subject, he was a superb drummer, much in demand and highly respected.  As I posted earlier, I played a musician colleague of mine (hip, spikey-haired) some of Brand X's "Unorthodox Behaviour", which he loved, and he was stunned when I told him who the drummer was.  Which makes his…

There was also, as others have pointed out, the fact that he pared back his drumming style so much that it all his riffs began to sound familiar, from Agnetha's "Something Going On" to Gabriel's "Intruder" (apparently Collins was miffed he didn't get a songwriting credit for this).  It was as if he was afraid of being…

I may mis-remember this, but I'm sure that in different interviews, Collins listed Wot Gorilla as one of his favourite tracks and Banks as his least favourite, the latter admitting failings in his keyboard sounds.  I've actually always liked it, myself.

Totally agree, and the band did themselves no favours by going on chat shows like Merv Griffin to promote it.  I remember putting it on for the first time and being fairly horrified (did we really need two songs about the wild west?  Or a sad rehash of Fountain of Salmacis?) Yes, there are a couple of decent songs…

Duke was a great album, probably the last great one they did (yeah, IMHO) and I always thought there was a theme through the first few songs.  There was also a lot of suspicion that Guide Vocal was Gabriel himself — I was convinced of it, and several other people I spoke to believed it.  Would have been neat.

The scorn for Collins probably comes from him once being an excellent, jazz-tinged drummer and percussionist, respected and in demand, to being manufacturer of self-pitying MOR ballads, mainly about his latest divorce, and of dragging a once-intelligent band down with him.  He was also reported to have declared, in…

Whew — I was just about to post a smart-arse "Actually…." before I scrolled down and saw that they'd changed the photo.  I bought the vinyl when it came out.  It was the last Genesis release I bought, but that's another story…

Actually, I saw Princess Bride when it came out and was totally underwhelmed by it.  Real "Meh" stuff, and from everyone who came to see it with me.  I got the feeling that it thought it was a lot funnier than it really was, and was trying far too hard, and was just irritating me with its overplayed schtick.  Maybe…

The brilliant Sophie Okonedo (Dirty Pretty Things, Hotel Rwanda and..um, After Earth) also played Winnie in a TV film called "Mrs Mandela" with David Harewood (Homeland) as Nelson.  Really good, as Okonedo can switch from sweet to menacing/unbalanced at the drop of a hat.  Well worth checking out, for an alternate…

"Is there a worse cinematic punishment than a two-hander featuring dull, unsympathetic twits bickering for an hour and a half?"

I absolutely loved it — genuinely creepy with a hint of EC comics in it.  Mind you, I also really liked Saw — a simple but brilliant concept — and Saw II - not quite as good but still ingenious, while Saw III WAS torture porn, a phrase I was unaware of at the time, but kept thinking "Why are they DOING this to those…

Menswear — a Britpop band much-hyped by the music press who had one single, a duff album and then disappeared, and are the reason I don't read the music press over here any more.

Agree with everything here — I heard the Longpigs on a live radio session and thought, "Hey, there's something" but it was still ages before even "The Sun Is Often Out" actually emerged, and I found out later they had huge label problems from the start.  The second album was definitely underwhelming, but the first…