Remember when Jon Finch was a movie star? It wasn't for long but in the early 1970s he got to play leads for Polanski, Hitchcock and here Robert Fuest, coming off The Abominable Dr Phibes. This was not a box office success, but has developed a cult, as a long of ambitious-but-not-very-well-executed-sci-fi tends to do.
It's based on a novel by Michael Moorcock, which I've never read - he's done a bunch of them about a secret agent/adventurer Jerry Cornelius. The film opens with the funeral of Cornelius' father who was a scientist working on some top secret program. Other scientists want to get their hands on it and enlist Cornelius to help.
That brief synopsis makes the movie sound easier to follow than it actually is : for the most part this is very confusing, and I kept having to refer to websites to get my head around what I was watching. There's a bisexual scientist, some other scientists, Finch's sweeter-than-thou sister and dirtbag brother, and Finch and Runacre combining into a caveman. The look of the film is fascinating - it's slightly futuristic a la Clockwork Orange, with some way out sets and costumes: there's mud wrestling, wacky nightclubs.
Jenny Runacre is a lot of fun as Miss Brunner, Finch is a lot more lively here than in many of his other films, and there's some choice support from the likes of Patrick Magee, Sterling Hayden and Hugh Griffith. And while it's confusion at least it tries to be smart. I found it more interesting than I thought it would be if only because it was so insane. David Puttnam was executive producer and this is completely unlike anything else he ever made.
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