The Good, The Bad and The Crocodiles

Although a love of Sean Pertwee is a wonderful thing, sometimes it can lead me to watch films that are not good. I don't mean films that are so bad they're good, or films that are just about okay if you like that kind of thing. Nope, sometimes I end up watching films that are just bad. This is what happened when I settled down for a viewing of U.F.O.

Here's what's good about U.F.O.:

• It has Sean Pertwee in it playing a religious nutter who has realised the truth about the aliens and is trying to communicate this to others by shouting bible passages in a confusing manner. Pertwee does crazy so well.
• It has Jean-Claude Van Damme in. What happens to his character in the end was the most entertaining moment of the whole film.
• It has Julian Glover in for about two minutes. He gets to be old and wise.
• It represents the efforts of a group of people getting together and trying to do something creative.

Here are some of the problems (other than the plot):

• The presence of Van Damme is so incongruous and badly written it gives a surreal tint to the film that it really doesn't need.
• The attempt to show how humanity would crumble in the face of an alien invasion is badly handled and just ends up being unpleasant, especially at the end.
• THERE AREN'T ANY UFO'S IN IT. Sorry for exploding into capitals there, but it's a pet peeve. There are no unidentified flying objects in this film, there are just a shit load of instantly recognised alien spaceships. Interestingly, the poster on IMDB has the title as Alien Uprising; they should've gone with that.
• There's not enough Pertwee.

So, that was a bit of a low, but has it damaged my Pertwee love? No, not one bit. Pertwee will always redeem himself. The other evening I randomly put on a documentary called Diving With Crocodiles about crazy scientist types following enormous crocodiles into dark and unexplored caves formed by papyrus on the Nile. At one point they were lost in this cave, with at least two huge crocs and only ten minutes of air left in their tanks. I honestly thought they were going to die, and had to remind myself I wasn't watching a found-footage horror flick. It was pretty exciting and made all the better for being narrated by the fabulous Mr Pertwee.

All is forgiven.