Eldorado (2012)

 

Director: Richard Driscoll

Screenplay: Richard Driscoll

Cast: Darren Morgan as Stan Rosenblum, Richard Driscoll as Ollie Rosenblum, Daryl Hannah as The Stranger, David Carradine as The Spirit Guide, Peter O'Toole as The Narrator, Jeff Fahey as "Doc" Martin, Michael Madsen as Ted, Patrick Bergin as Roy, Brigitte Nielsen as Angel, Steve Guttenberg as J.J., Kerry Washington as Tamara, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, Sylvester McCoy as General Zwick, Caroline Munro as Lilly, Robin Askwith as Mick, Tyrese Gibson as David, Bill Moseley as Lemma, Robert Llewellyn as "Meat", Buster Bloodvessel as the Sheriff

Ephemeral Waves

 

Opening Eldorado, the late Peter O'Toole literally has to appear onscreen, as the narrator, to explain that he is hired to clarify the events of the film we will be seeing, which will be a first for me to witness in any production. Eldorado is not very well known, and my prior knowledge of British filmmaker Richard Driscoll is entirely based on The Comic (1985), his very odd little debut which got dug up by Arrow Films for Blu Ray restoration and release, the kind of cool trait of theirs to rediscover some oddball films like that particular one. His career at some point beyond this transformed into what Eldorado became, the curious results of when known actors from Hollywood and British television, when older and stepped out of the limelight, are offered some work, the era of 2010s cinema where production design like computer effects are more freely available, and a true sense of this particular film entirely existing because this is what Richard Driscoll wanted to make for himself, with absolutely not a wink of cutting any of the tangents out of this. It is also, infamously, one of his films used as evidence for his arrest and jail sentence for a £1.5m VAT fraud, when investigators from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) investigated the production and found he had falsified invoices¹. This included how a purported production and promotion budget of £12 million was around about £750,000 instead², or the fees for the stars in this film, including late comedian Rik Mayall's supposed £44,350 for four days’ filming was revealed as 6,000 for two days².

He is definitely one of those one-offs in cinema, whatever you think of the films, certainly a man gifted with the gab as, not including other films before and after, only here is where you can get a credit list including O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Mayall, Michael Madsen, Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg, former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy and others, including David Carradine even if likely here in outtakes. He also really wanted to remake The Blues Brothers (1980), which ultimate sets up why I really could not even appreciate the film in terms of a piece of delirium, that being for all its parts, its tantalising strange juxtaposing of actors from American cinema against British pop culture, its desire to indulge in areas I find not that interesting to see as a viewer instead transpired. There are aspects to the film which raise uncomfortable parts of Driscoll himself, but most of my experience of this comes from the one viewer who would have defended this for all the cheapest of CGI, the most random of tangents and the sense of self-indulgence, only to feel instead it did not progress to anything even if really an interesting form of self-indulgence. Remaking the John Landis film and paying tribute to others, in his own curious way, dragged Richard Driscoll's film down when one was envisioning stranger and more interesting ways to connect the disparate pieces altogether. This managed to get an article, written by Chris Bell and published in The Telegraph called Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made³, but I cannot even say my disinterest in the film is a vehement hate, but a long period of attrition where it loses me.

The set up is The Blue Brothers, only now following the Jews Brothers (director-writer Driscoll  and Darren Morgan), two Jewish musicians who are introduced having made the ill advised decision to perform for Neo-Nazis, leading to a tribute to the car chase from the John Landis movie with former Dr. Who Sylvester McCoy as a substitute Henry Gibson. Their name is an obvious if tasteless joke, but a pastiche to the original Saturday Night Live characters by way of musical numbers dubbed over the actors would have least been something, especially if this played to the lo-fi remake energy or even touched upon Yiddish music by way of local pub karaoke night. Their manager J.J. (Steve Guttenberg), in a room full of CGI flies in one of his only scenes, sets them up with a new gig, unfortunately this time for cannibals, explicitly getting into the premise of Two Thousand Maniacs by Herschell Gordon Lewis, of a group of people accidentally setting forth in a group of Southern Confederate ghosts. I suspect, rather than the original 1964, the version of the story nodded to is the 2005 remake as cult actor Bill Moseley is among these ones too as a cannibal southerner. It also shows how disquietingly easy it was, even in the early 2010s, to find Southern Confederate flags in the United Kingdom, as portions of the film were shot in Cornwall³, but cinema as well as other medium has referenced and even crossed paths with other productions and works from the past. The most obvious example to me, whilst not one of Wim Wenders' widely praised works in the slightest, is Palermo Shooting (2008), in which an acclaimed German director of highly regarded films effectively paid tribute to the filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, when they passed away, by crossing Blow-Up (1966) with The Seventh Seal (1957), and if an art house director as Wenders will pay tribute like this whilst creating new stories, there is nothing wrong in a lurid genre film here for Driscoll to do the same. Quentin Tarantino, he who is paid tribute to and recreated in Eldorado a lot, has done this himself so many times, but notable, even when overtly referencing images and dialogue from other films, he placed them in different contexts, which begins a concern with Eldorado itself.

This begins remaking the Blues Brothers with same songs used and lip synched by the cast throughout, as this is also a musical. This is then bolted onto 2001 Maniacs, as a horror-musical pastiche which is blasphemous to the former film but tantalising as a perverse crossover within itself, alongside the fact this was originally supposed to be seen in 3D as well at a time when the format returned in mainstream cinema into the early 2010s. Then there are all the other tributes which instead come off as if they are meant to be laughed at for getting the references, but not sewn into the context so they work without this in-joke. The opening of Reservoir Dogs (1992), with the George Baker Selection song Little Green Bag, is recreated with southern cannibals, there is a briefcase with glowing contents like Pulp Fiction (1994), and the Jew Brothers are confused as the Soggy Bottom Boys in reference to O, Brother Where Art Thou (2000). There is even an actor cast to play Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, just to have an actor who clearly plays Captain Jack Sparrow in his regular career as an impersonator there, in a random back story involving a lower budget CGI kraken. It all amounts to the film focuses on referencing and recreating other films other than its own ideas. Or, if to continue this, to subvert them as one would presume.

It is also very English, attempting to hide itself as an American set film despite actors who are wavering in accents, and literally a Las Vegas set diner scene which is shot in someone's kitchen. The later however offered something beautiful as a film, a remake or tribute to these films with this literal homemade look, with the waitress having the exact accent for an American diner, and the kind of ornaments I would find in a Hollywood themed cafe for a seaside. This idea of recreating the US films in English rooms and kitchens on a low budget is something I could get into for a surreal spin on proceedings, imagining the way this could go in pastiching films in a curious hybrid and allowing the odd crossovers this has. Where I find myself as a film viewer feeling exhausted and disinterested one hour into a two hour film is that the things that interest Richard Driscoll do not match anything of this in context, as we get the Aretha Franklin scene from Blues Brothers in that cafe among others recreated with no sense of interesting for this particular viewer, only bemusement as they feel not properly tethered into the world. You can be pretentious and/or random in your films, but as long as they feel they match the beats of the moment, they least make sense even if it is up to the individual viewer to either appreciate or hate the moments as a whole, but Eldorado's biggest problem is that the scenes are fragments which do not seem to even connect together in their own logic.

There is also an uncomfortable streak of violence, in language and gore, against female characters which cannot be ignored, one of the moments where the indulgences of the film do reveal something negative in the director-writer. The risk of any personal creation is that it reveals your worse side if you yourself are guilty of anything in your thoughts that should be rightly damned, which is more prominent as a danger both in auteurs and even in micro-to-lower budget genre cinema where the creators have more leeway to create how they want, but can shoot themselves in the foot metaphorically by opening up their worldviews far more to the public in letting them see their neuroses, obsessions and/or their worse sides. Here, if by accident or an uncomfortable axe to grind, Richard Driscoll does end up with horror scenes having this misogynistic streak, or even dialogue between male characters arguing that they should date strippers but never marry them, and other such moments which feel pointedly spiteful for no reason. This is content which should be warned of for any viewer who is still morbidly curious about the film. Everything else beyond this, where these moments jut out with distaste, is entirely tame with their issues. Even when they involve prurient nudity and blood, the issue becomes that, even in terms of unconventional cinema, it really does not qualify in terms of "weird" accept for me in terms of awkward. For me a film like this should be the world where Robert Llewellyn, the actor I grew up with as Kryten in the cult sci-fi comedy TV series Red Dwarf, should have crossed paths onscreen with Moseley from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) even if Driscoll had only a day's time with one of them, just to see how two actors from wildly different spectrums could have interacted and contrasted in performances, something sadly though we were never going to get in the presentation of the film we got.

This is where Daryl Hannah, even if she is still playing the ancillary angelic figure reciting Edgar Allen Poe poetry, where the Eldorado reference comes from, intervenes in a story which brings us Moseley and Jeff Fahey attempting to recreate the trailer battle she herself was in for Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004). What we get is like when the bean eating scene from Blazing Saddles (1974) is recreated in this film; what in the original context was undercutting a classical Western shot with fart gags, this nods to it without the set up to the punch line, which is felt with a lot of the moments here, punch lines without the set up to really make the film something which, on paper, should have been one of the most gleefully strange and ambitious genre films to exist even just in terms of cast.

David Carradine is in footage recorded at another time in a random ghost fight with a woman with no context to the story, with no ties to the entire production as an actor who passed at the time it was being made, and one actress, a stripper accidentally sent the Bar Mitzvah the musical brothers were meant to in the opening, is immediately never seen again despite being established in a long topless conversation scene over the phone with Steve Guttenberg, an entire segment lost because the actress never returned. The director was even dating the main female lead, Rebecca Linley, only to break up mid-production and force him to re-cut the entire film³, which is a case of unfortunate bad luck out of his hands, but there are times where this neither works as a full story, as pieces are undercutting into each other, or even as a symbolic and/or random piece of filmic brain fever because it still wants to try to be regularly plotted film. It has the cannibals and the musical leads, but also the cheated-on wife of a strip club owner stealing a glowing briefcase, prompting him and Michael Madsen after her, yet it undercuts itself by having characters quietly disposed of messily or off-screen, and even the ending is abruptly ended, not with an ironic middle finger against expectations but a sense the film just hastily ended without thinking how to.

Within this, you find yourself stumbling over moments that, in another context, would be memorable for whether emotional response, an abrupt scene of Brigitte Nielsen in a sing-along of the song Respect with strippers, or Jeff Fahey's random Vietnam War flashback with green screen. Sometimes there were moments which did actually win me over, showing how the film could have been special, Rik Mayall as Chef Mario, as a cannibal cook, briefly appearing lip-synching gamely to a rock guitar version of Verdi’s La Traviata, or Fahey himself as a dentist without a license working on teeth in his trailer to a reggae version of Groove Me. However, most of the film does not stick in the mind, or is drowning in all the material this has over nearly two hours length. For all this film's odd cameos, luridness, and unexpected musical choices (like a cover of Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf), nothing here ever reaches anything I myself as a viewer would find intentionally or unintentionally memorable. It feels not even with a real sense of the dreamlike or strange in the surreal sense. Despite everything about its production being shot between Cornwall and the United States, including the Wild West tourist attraction near Padstow The Spirit of the West for the cannibal's hometown of Eldorado, which could have really played this homemade tone to its advantage, it never wants this either. Even when it presents the bizarre sight of Michael Madsen lip-synching So Glad We Made It by Steve Winwood next to pole dancers, naked expect for Mexican lucha libre masks, it slipped out of the mind in the time after because the film continues on and on aimlessly. By the time of Fahey's Vietnam flashback, that was the moment too I learnt it had been fifty one minutes into Eldorado, and it already felt like I had wondered on for far too long. Eventually the film literally ends, without closure, with Daryl Hannah having her one single direct interaction with the main story, and even when Heaven is involved, which always symbolises a grand conclusion even if merely depicted with clouds here, there is not even the sense of a real conclusion. I write this review with no sense I am out to get Richard Driscoll but merely shrugging my shoulders wanting to know why the film, with all its interesting pieces, never got anywhere. All it feels like we got was, unfortunately, a group of what-ifs and jail time.

=======

1) Film producer Richard Driscoll jailed for three years for VAT fraud, written for BBC News and published on July 1st 2013.

2) How the ‘worst film-maker in the UK’ used Hollywood stars in huge Cornwall tax fraud, written by Lee Trewhela and published for the Cornwall Live on February 3rd 2019.

3) Eldorado: the bizarre story of the worst movie ever made, written by Chris Bell and published by The Telegraph on January 23rd 2017.