FILM / On Cinema

Most films you watch. Others you stare at. Films like The Chase (below), another mindless, joyless, mechanical road movie that doesn't even have the justification of crass commercial thinking to justify its existence (surely no one thought there was a lack of cars, guns and girls in modern mainstream cinema?). Yet there it is, hogging the screen and failing at the box office, despite a hit-and-run saturation release and a sizeable ad campaign in the national and local press. Good money after bad.

The Chase is a 'huh? flick. 'Huh? flicks are a trend. They go beyond miscalculation of the public mood or mere mediocrity or notions of so-bad-it's-good into a grey dimension of their own. 'Huh? celluloid has no purpose in being, has nothing to say, shouldn't exist.

Think about it. What possible reason could there be for, say, Guilty as Sin, with Don Johnson carrying on like some mad queen and Rebecca De Mornay standing around looking understandably aghast? Or for (melo)dramas like Scorchers, the sexually warped of the Deep South revisited some 30 years after their shag-by date. Or listless horror slop like The Premonition, neither bad enough to be trashy fun nor bizarre enough to suggest a twisted imagination at work. Or for 'comedies like Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, about as funny as necrotising fasciitis, though not nearly as attractive.

Yet all of these have been at a cinema near you. It's a true post-modern phenomenon - something that's there simply because it's there - but it provokes an old-fashioned response: why oh why oh why. . .?

(Photograph omitted)