My name is Ed and twice a week I watch a Nicolas Cage film and then play the lottery using numbers inspired by that film.

I kept trying to write an introduction to this along the lines of ‘Whatever happened to Michael Biehn, eh?’ but I mean the answer is pretty much ‘While he’s never made anything else well-remembered as The Terminator or Aliens, he’s been consistently in work, which is more than you can say, you lottery-playing hubrist.’

Having said that, he has been in some truly dire crap, including a film directed by Nicolas Cage’s brother. It’s called Deadfall, and Nicolas Cage is also in it, so I have now seen it. Here’s what happens in it:

Michael Biehn and his dad try to do a con but he accidentally shoots his dad (James Coburn) to death instead, so he has to go and do a con on his uncle (James Coburn, with different hair) who also wants him to do a con. But who is the real con? Can you con a con? Maybe we are all cons?

Deadfall is an extremely bad film. Rotten Tomatoes rank it as the lowest-rated film Nic Cage as ever been in, with an average score of zero. It does have a few things going for it — chiefly, Nicolas Cage is in it, playing Kinky John Fowler from off of Reeves & Mortimer.

Obviously he’s not actually playing Kinky John Fowler (who didn’t appear on screen until 1999, as far as I’m aware), but the characters, both insane lowlifes with terrible wigs, are just close enough to make you wonder if Vic Reeves ever saw Deadfall and consciously or unconciously paid homage. Cage is very much in his delirious ‘there is no such thing as over the top’ mode, and is by some distance the most entertaining thing in the film, shouting non-sequiturs and generally looking like he’s having a lot of fun. Sadly, he, and his wig, are fairly gruesomely dispatched about halfway through.

The latter half of the film flags — the exceptions being Charlie Sheen’s smooth-talking pool hustler, and a ludicrous crime lord with a robotic pincer instead of a hand, who appears to have escaped from a Roger Moore Bond movie. There’s almost something in it as piece of camp, but even if that’s what it’s going for, the tone is all over the place. Biehn seems to be half-asleep through-out, and completely asleep during the deathly dull expository monologues. The gratiutious sex scene is so badly shot and performed I could believe they were actually having sex.

Deadfall tanked pretty badly at the time, reportedly making less than $20,000 at the box office. But even if my theory about Kinky John isn’t true, Wikipedia reckons it did have one bit of lasting cultural impact:

It is also the prime influence on the song ‘Deadfall’, written by the American hardcore punk band Snot.

THE NUMBERS:

2 — There have been 3 films called Deadfall. This was the second. The first one was about Michael Caine being a cat burglar, the third is about snow or something. Neither of the other ones have Nicolas Cage in.

5 — The con at the end of the movie involves 5 carat diamonds. Apparently 5 carats is quite a good number of carats for a diamond. Maybe I will find out more about diamonds when I am a millionaire and can buy a hat made out of a diamond.

6 — At one point Michael Biehn is seen practising card counting. One of the cards he counts is the 6 of spades. Card counting is naughty.

20 — A man called Mitch is offered an ‘easy $20’ to do something illegal. The bloke who plays Mitch mainly dubs American voices onto them Japanese cartoons now, according to IMDB.

50 — The con Michael Biehn is doing with his dad at the start of the movie involves them spending “50 grand for $500,000”. Instead he ends up shooting his dad with real bullets, which is bad.

56 — Mickey Dolenz from off of the Monkees is in this for some reason. Someone gives him a note with ‘956’ written on it. I can’t remember why.

THE RESULT

1 number, so this went about as well for me as for everyone who invested money in Deadfall.

Christopher Coppola has directed a few other films, but only one of them even has a Wikipedia page. It’s about dead FBI agents who have to steal a crystal from Satan so they can go to heaven. Happily/sadly, Nicolas Cage isn’t in it.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

From the lowest-scoring Nic Cage film on Rotten Tomatoes to the highest-scoring: Red Rock West. [2020 note: this is no longer true]

My name is Ed and twice a week I watch a Nicolas Cage film and then play the lottery using numbers inspired by that film. And so the long tedious years before death pass marginally less slowly.

According to my spreadsheet of Nicolas Cage films I am now over a quarter of the way there!

Did you know that liberals can be racist too?

THE NUMBERS

1 — Tollman, the dodgy police chief,

Only joking! LOL! Here is my actual review:

Amos & Andrew’s title references Amos ’n’ Andy, a hugely popular radio and TV sitcom that ran from the 1920s to the 1960s that became fairly controversial because despite being set in Harlem, it was created, written and performed by white blokes (albeit that they did recast for the TV version). This has nothing directly to do with the film — but it does vaguely allude to the film’s themes.

Andrew is Samuel L Jackson, a wealthy playwright who’s decided to move a dead posh island in New England. His liberal elite neighbours assume he’s a burglar, because they are racists, and call the police, who are also racists, and surround the house after further misunderstandings lead them to believe there’s a hostage situation. When the chief of police figures out what’s happened he decides to evade responsibility by making a deal with recently arrested low-life Amos (Nicolas Cage). If Amos pretends to hold Andrew hostage, thus giving a ‘reason’ for the cops to have been there in the first place, they’ll let him go. Which almost works until Amos figures out that he might as well actually hold Andrew hostage and ask for some money while he’s at it, whilst Andrew refuses to be rescued because the police are such racist pricks.

Phew.

There’s almost something in it, but it doesn’t quite work. The patronising, ‘Ah, but isn’t everyone in this situation a little bit in the wrong?’ tone undercuts the whole thing: particularly rubbish is a sub-plot where an African-American priest leads an angry, torch-waving mob onto the island, which just sort of peters out after they accidentally set fire to Andrew’s house.

It’s underwritten — everyone constantly jumping to the wrong conclusion is obviously how farce works, but there’s never a sense of why any of this is happening, why these people would behave like this. As the film goes on we’re supposed to believe that Amos and Andrew are buddies now, but it never relies bothers to join the dots on that — Amos never displays any particularly redeeming features that he, or we, could warm to.

It’s a shame, as the cast themselves all pitch what little is there exactly right — special award to the always-great Brad Dourif who turns up as a particularly dimwitted cop. But underneath it all there’s not much of script.

THE NUMBERS

1 — Tollman, the dodgy police chief, tells a reporter that he can “fuck the 1st amendment”.

4 — Amos has a very classy tattoo which reads “4 Play”. I think it is about sex.

7 — Mr Gillman, Andrew’s neighbour, is a lawyer — at one point he mentions that he defended the Chicago Seven, a group of protestors who were charged with federal crimes after a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. SEE HE THINKS HE’S A LIBERAL BUT IT TURNS OU

18 — Among Amos’s previous crimes is “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” . He claims that “she looked 18”. He later hits on a 17-year-old. And yet I don’t think we’re supposed to actually really dislike this character?

39 — At one point Mr Gillman offers Amos his priceless baseball card collection, which includes a Ted Williams card from Williams’ rookie year, 1939. Fun fact: Ted Williams’ body is held in cryogenic suspension so one day he will be revived to play space baseball (or he would if cryogenics wasn’t a crock run by the crooked and delusional).

49 — The Gillmans’ house is at 49 Old Country Road.

THE RESULT

The lottery is stupid. Don’t play the lottery. I have played it 21 times and not even won it once.

I hate the lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Deadfall. Not that one. Or the other one. The one directed by Nic Cage’s brother.

You know that film where the bloke goes to a Las Vegas casino, gets into financial difficulties, and is then offered a way out which involves the love of his life having to go off with an extremely wealthy man who’s taken a shine to her?

No, not Indecent Proposal. The other one with almost exactly the same plot, Honeymoon In Vegas.

Which was released a year before Indecent Proposal, to be fair — although Indecent Proposal was based on a 1988 book. This is one of those strange bits of Hollywood ‘serendipity’ that happens every so often — in the summer of 1998 you could choose to see the Earth either destroyed by or saved from an asteroid depending on which blockbuster you went to see. Explanations that have been posited for this phenomenon range from the existence of a collective Hollywood unconscious to coked-up film executives not knowing when to shut up about the projects they’re working on.

Anyway, of these two, Indecent Proposal was the one with the cultural mileage — the basic gist is well known enough that you can write gags about it and most people will get it regardless of whether they’ve actually seen the (fairly mediocre) film — e.g. the episode of Peep Show where Jeremy is offered £530 for a night with his girlfriend.

But Honeymoon In Vegas is quite good — it’s a sweeter, funnier take on the idea — the rich guy (James Caan) is more cartoonishly villainous (he creates the couple’s financial trouble, rather than merely taking advantage of), but he’s after the girl (Sarah Jessica Parker) because she’s the double of his dearly departed wife.

The central dilemma of Indecent Proposal is more or less sidestepped — this is rom-com territory with a happy ending visible from deep space. But the charm is in how it gets to that ending — the core of the film follows Jack (Nicolas Cage) as he desperately tries to catch up with his fiancee, who has been whisked off to Hawaii by the nefarious Tommy. It’s very much comedy of frustration as he’s waylaid at every turn by various characters including a time-wasting taxi driver (played by Pat Morita off of The Karate Kid), a showtune-singing local “Chief”, an obnoxious airline passenger and even the local police. Their eventual reunion is enabled by his joining a team of skydiving Elvis impersonators, for goodness’s sake.

The one bum note is that Betsy, the fiancee, is a bit underwritten — when it looks like she might actually ditch Jack altogether and marry the rich rotter, the turn of the narrative cog is a little too obvious and the characterisation loses credibility. Although she does in the end get to show a bit of agency, snapping out of it and escaping the marriage the baddy is practically forcing her into, Betsy ends up too little of a character, too much of a trophy.

Honeymoon In Vegas isn’t by any means a lost gem, but it’s a pleasant enough watch with just enough quirks to keep things ticking along. And, as ways to end a farce go, skydiving out of a plane dressed as Elvis has got to be, quite literally, up there.

THE NUMBERS

2 — Jack tells Betsy that they’ll be married in 2 hours, right after a quick game of poker. It’s this game that results in her having to go away with Tommy to ‘pay off’ Jack’s gambling debt.

4 — The opening sequence of the film, in which Jack’s mother makes him promise not to get married, before promptly carking it, take place 4 years before the main story. (The implication being that the events of the film are part of a curse — a result of him planning to break his vow.)

20 — Jack attempts to win the money he needs to buy Betsy out of the deal by playing roulette all his remaining money on number 19, which ‘feels good’. 20, which he’d earlier considered, actually wins.

21 — When Jack needs to get to Hawaii, he’s held up because the man at the front of the queue to buy tickets is asking a series of interminable questions in an attempt to find the cheapest way to fly to his nephew’s 21st birthday. The man in question is Ben Stein, who is good fun when he turns up in cameos like this (he’s the “Anyone? Anyone?” teacher in Ferris Bueller), and less good fun when he’s writing speeches for Nixon, opposing abortion, denying evolution and just generally being an appalling human.

30 — The Elvises skydive from 3000 feet. The film is steeped in Elvis — the soundtrack is mainly cover versions of Elvis songs, and the Las Vegas scenes have Elvis impersonators wandering around throughout. Possibly this was part of the attraction to the role for Cage, a fan, who’d only recently channelled the King for his role in Wild At Heart. He was also once married to Elvis’s daughter (albeit for 108 days), which sets a new bar for fanboy dedication.

38 — Tommy’s first wife (who apparently looked like Betsy — Sarah Jessica Parker even plays her when we briefly flash into his memories) sadly died at the age of 38. I mean, not that sadly, it’s only a film.

THE RESULT

One number. Not brilliant, but better than the nothing I’ve got for the past 3 films. Just 5 more numbers and I’ll be a millionaire!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

An episode of Saturday Night Live.

Oh.

Good.

The problem with playing the lottery with numbers you pick inspired by Nicolas Cage films is that you have to find the time to watch two Nicolas Cage films a week — I am a busy man with over three friends and, occasionally, paying work! But I am committed to this now, which is why on Wednesday morning I got up at 6am and watched Zandalee.

And if I could give anyone one piece of advice, it would be “Do not get up at 6am and watch Zandalee.”

The two words you never want to hear after “An erotic thriller starring…” are Judge and Reinhold. Reinhold, best known for the Beverly Hills Cop movies and, of course, wanking off in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, plays a frustrated poet-turned-businessman in New Orleans in this very boring film that is hard to pay attention to when you really would rather still be asleep.

Judge Reinhold is so sad that his willy has stopped working so he can’t put it in his wife, who is called Zandalee for some reason. Instead he has decided to grow a ludicrous moustache. Meanwhile his old friend Nicolas Cage (I expect the characters have names) is an Intense Artist with even stupider facial hair. However Nicolas Cage’s willy does still work so Zandalee lets him put it in her.

Marissa Tomei and Joe Pantoliano are in this. I know that because I wrote their names down. I hope they are proud.

Cage gives it a good go but however hard you shout the lines tepid melodrama is still tepid melodrama. Eventually Judge Reinhold is so bored of being in this film that he drowns himself. Then Nicolas Cage covers himself in paint and Zandalee gets shot. I don’t know. I was quite hungover and then had to get up and go to an office because I still haven’t won the lottery.

THE NUMBERS

3 — At some point Nicolas Cage holds up a 3 of hearts. Maybe he was doing a magic trick? Can’t remember. Anyway it is probably a metaphor for the THREE HEARTS of the main people in this movie, which either get broken or shot.

5 — Steve Buscemi is in this movie as… a binman? Maybe? Anyone he offers to sell someone something for 5 dollars. I think? I don’t care to check.

12 — Something happened on January the 12th last year. I don’t know what but I definitely wrote this down in my notes.

17 — This was apparently one of the first films to get an NC-17 rating, which I think means it is a rude movie and you see all boobs and that. One IMDB reviewer says:

If you like nudity, I mean if you really, really, like nudity, this is one of the more frank nudist films I’ve seen.

25 — Judge Reinhold’s father was 25 when he started a radio station. I don’t remember why this would have come up, but it apparently did.

27 — Judge Reinhold and Nicolas Cage are said to have grown up on the same street, and to be the same age. Nicolas Cage was about 27 when this was released. Look, I don’t know, you try attempting to focus on the dialogue in pissing Zandalee at 6.30am.

THE RESULT

ZERO NUMBERS.

Fuck you Zandalee, fuck you, you terrible piece of shit, I am glad you went straight to video.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Honeymoon In Vegas, which I am going to watch at a sensible time.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

Winning The Lottery With Nicolas Cage LYNCH WEEK continues…

We’re barely a quarter of the way through Cage’s filmography but I think it’s reasonably safe to say that Wild At Heart is a ‘key text’ in reviewing the history of Nicolas Cage performances. Nothing could demand Cage’s defiantly non-naturalistic style more than the hypersurreality of a David Lynch film. Here he becomes ‘Sailor’, a sort of Elvis-on-steroids barrelling his way through various unpleasant parts of America via a few violent crime-related prison stays. Opposite him is Laura Dern (from Jurassic Park and something else, I expect) as his girlfriend Lula.

Wild At Heart is, I suppose, a sort of love story — Sailor and Lula’s passion propels them on a road trip to escape Lula’s mother, who will do anything to keep them apart. Oddly these two halves of the plot diverge fairly early and only very loosely intersect again — the mother character (played by Laura Dern’s actual mum, Diane Ladd, because I guess David Lynch was worried they’d get confused otherwise) sends various dubious associates after the couple but it’s not until fairly late in the film that any of this comes to much. However, it is basically worth it for the character of Mr Reindeer, a ludicrous gangster played by W. Morgan Sheppard, who takes phone calls while sat on the toilet looking at topless ladies.

W. Morgan Sheppard is one of those amazing actors who appears to have been in more or less everything ever made — from Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige to an episode of Minder. He was also in a TV movie based on a short story called The Lottery, but if you win that lottery you get stoned to death so let’s hope that isn’t an omen.

I mean, look, Wild At Heart is a David Lynch movie, so obviously saying it’s a “bit weird” is an understatement. It’s like a fever dream someone had after watching Bonnie and Clyde, an Elvis movie and the Wizard of Oz. Not that it’s an arbitrary collection of stuff — everything feels like a deliberate choice, even if it’s not always obvious why anyone would choose to do that. Having said that, by all accounts Lynch makes that choice in editing, going for a ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach during production.

In the end, it doesn’t quite work — the threads of the film are never quite pulled tightly together enough and it’s less than the sum of its parts. But they’re good parts — I haven’t even mentioned Willem Defoe’s turn as the terrifying, serpentine, Bobby Peru — and Cage’s performance is extraordinary. And not just in the film — his appearance on BBC talk show Wogan to promote the UK release has to be seen to be believed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTL6lx5Wo0

Still, more importantly, will Wild At Heart win me the lottery?

THE NUMBERS

2 — Smoking is cool, and Sailor is the coolest, so of course he smokes 2 cigarettes at once.

4 — A pornographic film is being made in room 4 of the motel that Sailor and Lula stay at, in order that the audience may infer something about the quality of the motel, I expect.

6 — Sailor and Lula’s child will be 6 years old when Sailor expects to get out of prison (again).

25 — Lula tells Sailor the story of Jingle Dell, her Christmas-obsessed cousin (played in flashbacks by the lunatic Crispin Glover — his third and final appearance in the Cage filmography). Christmas is on December the 25th, I believe.

37 — Big Tuna, where they end up, has an elevation of 3700 feet, according to a sign. Big Tuna is a made up place, so do not attempt to visit it.

40 — Sailor is convinced to try bank robbery because he and Lula have only 40 dollars between them. It doesn’t go well. Don’t rob banks, it’s naughty.

THE RESULT

Not a single sodding number. Again. SCREW YOU DAVID LYNCH, I HOPE EVERYONE SAYS THE NEW TWIN PEAKS STINKS OF OLD WEE, AND THEN YOU FALL OVER IN A DOG POO.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Zandalee. An erotic thriller co-starring Judge Reinhold. Oh boy.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

This time: we reach the 1990s, with the first and possibly only film ever made about how a director wants to kiss a helicopter: Fire Birds!

You know when you’re watching film Top Gun, and Tom Cruise is all flying his plane and that — do you ever think “I wish this film was about helicopters instead. And also had a tenuous connection to the War on Drugs?”

Well luckily this piece of shit exists!

Here is pretty much the entire plot of Fire Birds: Nicolas Cage has to learn to fly a helicopter using only one of his eyes so he can go and shoot at bad drug helicopters. This is padded out to film length with just loads and loads of footage of helicopters because aren’t helicopters just the greatest? Don’t you wish you could be a helicopter? Or maybe even kiss a helicopter?

Someone wrote a script for an action movie and had the actual thought, “Yeah let’s have the main driver of this thing be a helicopter pilot trying to overcome his ‘left eye dominance’. And have a scene where he overcomes this by driving around in a car with a pair of woman’s pants and a periscope duct taped to his head.”

Meanwhile, he’s also trying to woo Sean Young with the unusual tactic of being a massively sexist arsehole (he doesn’t think women should kiss the helicopters), while their commander, Tommy Lee Jones, has a midlife crisis (they won’t let him kiss the helicopters anymore). But these sub-plots just sort of peter out in the finale as a newly right eye dominated Cage is now able to shoot the drug helicopters out of the sky. God Bless America.

Then a Phil Collins song plays. It isn’t even a Phil Collins song about helicopters. Oh yeah, director David Green’s previous movie was fucking Buster, another load of old crap starring Phil Collins as cheeky Great Train Robber Buster Edwards.

The film even managed to have 2 different, but both awful, titles — originally known as Wings of Apache, for the US release (but not the international one) it was given the even more terrible title of Fire Birds (I guess because helicopters fly and… sometimes go on fire?).

Sadly, given how rubbish the rest of the film is, Cage is in a relatively subdued mode — though he does briefly come to life inside the flight simulator, where while shooting at virtual bad guys, he repeatedly shouts “I AM THE GREATEST!” before embarking on a bizarre monologue:

“Shoot ‘em! Blast ‘em! Nab ‘em! Grab ‘em! Shake ‘em! Bake ‘em! Cook ‘em! Clean ‘em! Hose ‘em! Boil ‘em! Kick ‘em! Nab ‘em! Twist ‘em! Fry ‘em! ALL GONE! BYE! BYE!”

Later on, there is a bit where he is so annoyed that Sean Young won’t do kissing with him that he does gives a roundhouse kick to the air, which is also quite funny. But none of this is enough to save the film.

“We’re gonna do another Top Gun right — we’ve even got the guy who designed all the stunts with the planes — except this time it’s about helicopters and the script is written in crayon. Also we’ve got the bloke who directed fucking Buster locked in because he’s really into long sexy shots of helicopters. Also Sean Young’s arse in one scene, but mainly the helicopters.”

So yeah, don’t watch Fire Birds unless you too want to kiss the helicopters.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Apparently Nicolas Cage’s new helicopter will keep him “as busy as a 3-peckered goat”. I don’t know what this means but it is probably revolting.

5 — The film opens with the text of a speech George Bush (the first one) gave about bad drugs on 5 September 1989. Thanks to George Bush and the helicopters there are now no more bad drugs. Mission accomplished.

12 — A bogey is at 12 o’clock, which means a bad drugs helicopter is near Nicolas Cage’s mate’s helicopter. It then blows his mate up.

20 — Apparently Apache helicopters are so good and strong that you could survive a crash at 20Gs.

21 — The fictional helicopters in this film are played by the real helicopters of the 21st Cavalry Brigade.

40 — Tommy Lee Jones turns 40 so they throw him a surprise birthday party where he has to wear a crown with “40” written on it. They give him a helicopter cake so finally he can have a helicopter inside of him.

THE RESULT

1 number. AGAIN. God damn it how long is it going to take me to win the stupid lottery? As an unemployed man, watching Nicolas Cage films and playing the lottery is my only source of income now!

HELICOPTERS ARE RUBBISH AND I HOPE THEY ALL FLY INTO THE BIN.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Industrial Symphony No. 1. Which is apparently some sort of PLAY. La-di-dah!

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

This time: another bloody straight to video effort. Well, unless you happened to live in Italy. Because unusually for something in the canon of Cage, this is an Italian movie, albeit that it was shot in English, presumably with the same aim for international appeal that led to Cage being cast in the first place. Information about the production seems thin on the ground, although I have seen it suggested that this is because no-one involved has a good word to say about their time working on it.

The film is a historical war drama, following the adventures of Cage’s Lieutenant Silvestri during Italy’s military occupation of Ethiopia during the 1930s. My knowledge of this event is limited to some dim recollections of GSCE history lessons about the whole thing being a solid demonstration that the League of Nations (a sort of proto-UN formed between the World Wars) was a huge crock of shit, but this is all background detail here.

Instead, we follow Silvestri’s own strange little adventures as he first tries to get to the dentist, then struggles to get home to Italy to see his wife. The first portion is told in flashback as he relates his attempt to take a shortcut as he walks back to a base where he can get his dodgy tooth looked at.

Almost immediately we get a charmingly odd scene where for no explicable reason he decides to make a lizard smoke one of his cigarettes. I mean it is probably bad on some level to give what appears to be a real lizard a real cigarette but it is quite funny. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the last enjoyable thing in the film.

Later on his journey, he encounters a local woman and decides to rape her. Which is particularly unpleasant because the film seems to attempt to justify this by not having her mind that much after the fact. Luckily it alls gets sorted out by him accidentally shooting her, so he heads back to base wear he gets his teeth fixed and his return to Italy approved.

There do turn out to be consequences for Silvestri’s actions — his return to Italy is endangered when he believes that he has caught leprosy from his victim. But even when he finally confesses to her father (who’s just told him that she was not, after all, infected), there’s something uneasy about how detached the film is, as though it doesn’t really want to acknowledge the nastiness.

Cage does a reasonable job with what he’s given, especially towards the end as Silvestri’s fear, guilt and desperation appear to wear on his sanity, but it’s minor stuff. Without the sheer ludicrousness of something like Vampire’s Kiss there just isn’t anything that compelling about watching a basically unpleasant character like Silvestri.

To be charitable, Silvestri’s story should probably be read as an intentional metaphor for Italy’s terrible actions against Ethiopia in this era, as remorse for an appalling period in a nation’s history. But in the end it pulls its punches a little too much, leaving the viewer with not quite enough to really engage with — it presents some stuff happening, but fails to interrogate it, to show why that stuff happening might be worth thinking about.

Still, the bit where the lizard has a fag is good.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Silvestri fires 3 bullets in an attempt to kill a Hyena. He instead only manages to kill the Ethiopian woman.

6 — Silvestri’s colleague reckons that even if he confessed to shooting the woman, the worst punishment would be his leave being suspended for 6 months.

10 — A doctor explains to Silvestri that most likely symptoms of leprosy would only be displayed 10 to 20 years after infection. Warning: if you think you or someone you know might have leprosy, do not follow the advice given in this film. Bing informs me that it can take as little as 3 to 5 for symptoms to appear.

15 — The time in special army talk is 15 hundred and 30 hours when Silvestri’s superior stops their car to go for a wee. Silvestri uses this opportunity to fuck off with all his superior’s money so he can buy his way onto a ship home.

30 — When Silvestri attempts to sneak onboard a ship back to Italy the captain tells him he wants a bribe of 30,000 lira.

36 — The film is set in 1936. Other things that happened in 1936 include the opening of the first Butlin’s, the introduction of the speaking clock and the abdication of King Edward, none of which are mentioned in this film.

THE RESULT

Another single number. Come on, gods of the Nouveau Shamanic, a man’s got to eat!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Fire Birds, released in the UK as Wings of the Apache. It’s basically Top Gun with helicopters. According to someone on an internet forum about flight simulators:

“That movie is an embarassment to all Apache pilots. My dad was actually there when they filmed the movie, the real pilots hated it.”

So that’s sure to be good.

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films.

I believe Nicolas Cage performances to constitute magical acts and that watching them in sequence could therefore in itself constitute a magical act that will lead to positive change in my own life. Or at least that’s what I tell people.

So far, I have not won the lottery. Also, I got made redundant this week. For the second time in 12 months. While this could cast some doubt on the whole theory, I maintain that it is too early to tell. Maybe the gods of the Nouveau Shamanic require some adversity before granting the reward at the end of this journey. So, I continue, with Vampire’s Kiss.

Cage’s performance as New York literary agent Peter Loew isn’t just the centre of Vampire’s Kiss, it essentially IS the entire film, and it is also incredible. This is the story of the unravelling of Loew, a broadly unpleasant yuppy with an easy but empty life, whose own psyche starts to eat itself, eventually causing him to believe that he has been transformed into a literal vampire.

One of the more notable scenes involves a monologue that, as written, is basically just Cage reciting the alphabet (he’s attempting to explain the concept of filing to his therapist). But the performance is astonishing — he is impassioned, frenetic — it almost turns into a kind of dance — as his self-righteous fury over nothing regresses into a childlike tantrum.

The film is packed with stuff like this; ostensibly a black comedy, as whole it isn’t particularly funny — but Cage is hilarious, and terrifying for it. He is almost implausibly over the top but it’s what the role requires — in context his ludicrous behaviour becomes mesmerising, menacing. His unwarranted persecution of his secretary over a lost file is genuinely terrifying — as though neither character nor actor know when to stop. There’s a scene where Peter Loew eats a live cockroach, and we are actually watching the actor Nicolas Cage eat a live cockroach, for real.

(SAFETY WARNING: At one point in this film, Peter Loew puts a gun loaded with blanks into his mouth and pulls the trigger, twice. This convinces him he is now immortal. This is absolutely not how blanks work, making gunpowder explode inside your head is a very bad idea, don’t do things just because Nicolas Cage does them.)

Cage’s performance aside, Vampire’s Kiss is at best patchy. We never get quite enough insight into what sets Loew on the path to madness — although apparently some of this was covered in scenes cut by the producers, the start of the film doesn’t give much of a read on whether we should feel sympathy or antipathy to the character in the first place.

It would also have been nice if Alva, the secretary who suffers from Loew’s torments, wasn’t quite so hapless all the way through — Peter’s ultimate comeuppance comes at the hands of her brother, which given all the horrible things she’s been through feels oddly unfair.

On the positive side, the New York locations that have been picked and the way they’re shot manage to deftly transform the whole city into one vast gothic castle — like a sort of 1980s Gormenghast.

Vampire’s Kiss might be the ur-Nicolas Cage film — it’s his wildest performance yet but his utter commitment to this completely unnaturalistic mode entirely pays off, as we witness the almost wilful self-destructiveness of a man who comes to believe that he is, quite literally, a monster.

If you like you could draw a comparison with the almost wilful self-destructiveness of a man attempting to watch 2 Nicolas Cage films a week and pretending it’s going to win him the lottery, but I’m almost definitely not going to start murdering women.

THE NUMBERS

6 — Loew’s long-suffering secretary Alva gets the number 6 train home.

15 — Loew asks Alva to go through all 15 files their firm holds relating to the German magazine Der Speigel, in order to find details of the use of a client’s short story.

22 — At one point Loew is seen watching the legendary 1922 vampire film Nosferatu (clearly an influence on Cage’s performance as his ‘transformation’ proceeds).

26 — There are 26 letters in the alphabet which, as noted above, Loew recites as part of one of the most entertaining scenes in Cage’s entire career.

35 — Having failed to grow his own vampire teeth, Loew attempts to buy some: he can’t afford a realistic set, so settles for some plastic ones costing $3.50

44 — The cab ride Loew takes to bring Alva back to the office so he can continue to be unpleasant to her costs $44.50.

THE RESULT

1 number. Truly, I am being tested. But I will endure.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Nicolas Cage fights for fascism in Ethiopia, in the obscure Italian movie Tempo di uccidere. Buon giorno!