Worst films ever

One of the recent highlights on the Talking Pictures TV channel was Konga (1961), the tale of Dr Charles Decker, a mad scientist played by Michael Gough at his most fiendish.

He employs a growth serum on a chimpanzee, transforming his simian friend into a stunt performer wearing a gorilla costume. Unfortunately, the doctor is also given to shooting his pets, ranting, ‘You fool! Do you think I want the biggest experiment of my life menaced by a cat? Even those few drops might have made Tabby swell up to huge proportions!’

Konga was produced by Herman Cohen, the genius behind I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1975). He claimed the cost of his British masterpiece was $1 million and that it boasted the new SpectaMation trick-photography system.

The result was a picture that posed many questions to its audience. What became of the remaining $999,450 of the budget, to judge by the finished product? Why does central London resemble Merton Park? Finally, how could Scotland Yard protect the capital with only three Wolseley 6/90s?

Above all, Konga fulfilled the principal rules for an awful British picture. First, it must risibly fail to live up to its manifesto. Secondly, the concept should be utterly ill-conceived.

The Cuckoo Patrol (1967) was a vehicle for Freddie and the Dreamers, with the band as short-trousered boy scouts, an idea Werner Herzog might have rejected for being ‘too bizarre’.

In 1966, The Ghost Goes Gear, a B film starring the Spencer Davis Group, Nicholas Parsons, Jack Haig and several mortified-looking musicians, had a plot involving a castle haunted by a folksinging ghost.

Nor should we forget Dracula AD 1972 (1972), Hammer’s doomed attempt to be ‘hip’ in which Johnny Alucard, the

Triumph Stag-driving vampire, urges the 28-year-old ‘teenagers’ to ‘Dig the music, kids’.

With bad films, a low budget is less important than the producers’ failure to use their funds with any degree of wisdom. The Body Stealers (1969) stars Patrick Allen as a cardigan-wearing Lothario saving the world from miniskirted alien invaders. Assisting him in this noble quest is Neil ‘brother of Sean’ Connery. The special effects appear to have cost five shillings and still look worth all of 2/6d on the screen.

By contrast, the 1967 version of

Casino Royale employed five directors and three studios but has all the comedic appeal of a runaway juggernaut.

Three years later, the cinematic non-sensation was Toomorrow, the alien civilisation/flower-power musical starring Olivia Newton-John. Sample dialogue: ‘Yeah, I dig it!’

1963’s The Cool Mikado – a twist version of Gilbert and Sullivan directed by a young Michael Winner and guest starring Mike and Bernie Winters –seems, at first glance, the worst musical in cinema history.

However, Gonks Go Beat escaped into the community just two years later. Someone in Wardour Street mistakenly thought the combination of some Decca recording artists – those zany tearaways Kenneth Connor, Frank Thornton and Terry Scott – and various gonk puppets would have audiences queuing at their local Odeon.

Predictable excuses from directors and producers accompany masterpieces like this:

(i) ‘We did not make it for the critics’ actually means ‘My film was solely responsible for turning 200 picture houses into bingo halls. In later years, it will haunt the Betamax section of video libraries and the career of a now-famous minor cast member.’

(ii) ‘This is for the ordinary cinemagoer’ means ‘The peasants are so desperate for entertainment they will actually pay to see this.’

(iii) ‘It is a bawdy romp’ means ‘Two glum-looking bit actresses will remove their clothes in a motel room where the wallpaper takes revenge on society.

Meanwhile, a formerly well-known character actor will make vain attempts to look jovially lascivious while sporting a nylon cravat.’

Some names are often a guarantee of lack of quality. Take Lindsay Shonteff, whose Bond spoof/utter rip-off Licensed to Love and Kill (1979) has all the verve of an advertisement for a discount carpet warehouse. Harry Lee and Edward J Danziger were brothers synonymous with second features that seem to revel in their unremitting cheapness, with scripts written around props they acquired second-hand.

In 1954, to make use of ten left-over days of studio space, the Danzigers made the world’s finest alien-dominatrix epic – Devil Girl from Mars

The reviewer from the Monthly Film Bulletin was mesmerised: ‘There is really no fault in this film that one would like to see eliminated. Everything, in its way, is quite perfect.’

Devil Girl does immeasurably benefit from the tongue-in-cheek performance of Patricia Laffan as the eponymous villainess, clad in a latex outfit courtesy of the brothers’ deal with a British clothes supplier.

Nicky Henson’s straight-faced aplomb dominates Psychomania (1973), an everyday story of zombie bikers, voodoo, toad-worshipping, hippie funeral songs and supermarket invasions.

Some works at least have the merit of enthusiasm. The DJ Mike Raven stars in two independent horror films. His attempts at acting in the 1972 epic Disciple of Death consist mainly of his pointing his beard of evil at the other cast members and pulling faces.

You can’t fault Mr Raven’s zeal when his Stranger bellows, ‘No doubt we all shall meet again – in Hell!’ with his face apparently daubed in Homepride.

In other pictures, there is a sadness in seeing a former star name in reduced circumstances. Diana Dors was paid £425 in cash to avoid the taxman’s attention for her appearance in Adventures of a Private Eye (1977).

Heading the cast of 1969’s Zeta One, a ‘space-age-strip-girlie-thriller’ made for £60,000, was a visibly dispirited James Robertson Justice, who had recently suffered a stroke.

That same year, wise cinemagoers fled The Haunted House of Horror, with Dennis Price slumping in a mock-up of a police inspector’s office.

Joan Crawford ended her cinematic career as the anthropologist Dr Brockton in the H Cohen production Trog (1970). Pot-holers exploring Ivinghoe Beacon discover a cave-dweller, played by the stuntman Joe Cornelius in an ape mask. The doctor attempts to tame him via the power of light jazz, but he escapes to cause havoc in Cookham by throwing greengrocers with Ray Davies hairstyles through shop windows.

If Trog has a redeeming feature, it is that Mr Gough plays the villainous Sam Murdock, who is utterly opposed to the ‘slimy hell-beast’. Gough regarded ‘Put me down, Konga!’ as ‘one of my great lines’. When he was starring in a play in New York, Tim Burton was in the audience and, according to legend, exclaimed, ‘That’s the guy from all those terrible movies! He is our Alfred [Batman’s butler]!’

It was thanks to such epics as Konga and Trog that Gough (1916-2011) then appeared in four Batman films.

Still, none of them contains lines of such wit as this one in Konga: ‘Fantastic! There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!’