Eldorado: first thoughts

My copy of Eldorado finally turned up from Amazon this morning and this evening I sat down to watch it. I'll need to rewatch it before writing a full review but my initial thought is that it is neither as incoherent nor as entertaining as Evil Calls. It is, nevertheless, utterly shit in almost every respect. Here are a few things worth noting:

• Brigitte Nielsen, Caroline Munro and Sylvester McCoy all get their names spelled wrong in the credit block on the sleeve. Nielsen and McCoy also get misspelled in the end credits, but differently in both cases. Poor old ex-Mrs Stallone had her name spelled a third wrong way in the trailer - that's impressive.
• Numerous other cast and crew members' names are also misspelled. I'll try and compile a full list.
• Although the film contains an enormous amount of bad acting, Richard 'Steven Craine' Driscoll himself blows everyone else away, playing the only Chicago native with a Welsh accent.
• Narrator Peter O'Toole, who looks like he has been freshly dug up, has clearly been given no previous look at the 'script' he is reading from.
• Michael Barber, as the giggling, chainsaw-wielding psycho has way, way too much screen time. He sounds like Bluebottle, can't act for toffee and has brought to an end Joe (Stag Night of the Dead) Rainbow's short-lived reign as 'most irritating character in a British horror movie'. It's clear now why he had no lines in Ashes to Ashes.
• Despite being ostensibly 'for horror fans' there is probably no more than five or six minutes of the film that would qualify as 'horror'. Still, that's more than would qualify as 'comedy'.
• The disc has no extras, not even scene selection.
• The sleeve says it's 158 minutes but it's actually 1 hour 58 minutes.
• Daryl Hannah's 'character' is meaningless and she is clearly taking the money and running, as are most of the other name cast.
• David Carradine's 'character' is even more meaningless and consists of stock footage from the 2008 TV movie Kung Fu Killer. Far from being 'his last film', he made at least 20 more films after that one.
• Most of the theatre scenes were obviously done with the 'act' shot completely separately to the 'audience', a technique that looked awful in The Comic and looks just as awful here.
• The 'audience' obviously consists of crew members and their half-hearted clapping and clicking of fingers is cringingly terrible.
• The best actor in the film is probably Celina Jennings (seriously!). It says a lot about the movie that she has about three lines and was actually the camera operator.
• Rik Mayall mimes to an operatic aria (in Italian) and has a pointless post-credits bit. With Evil Calls and Just for the Record, he has now been in three of the very worst British films ever made.
• Apart from Mayall's aria, all the songs sound like what they are: mediocre cover versions by club singers.
• The whole film shamelessly rips off everything about The Blues Brothers, including characters, songs etc. A legalese caption near the end about copyright doesn't look to me like it would actually deflect a law-suit if any of the rights owners could be arsed to sue.
• The bits that don't rip off The Blues Bothers mostly rip off Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.
• The departure of Rebecca Linley midway through shooting has clearly caused a lot of problems with the story.
• Despite being set in America, many of the cars are right-hand drive.

With half-term coming up it could be a while before I write a full review. I don't expect it to be 22,000 words again, but it will be detailed and accurate.