television – The Magnificent 60s

Ludicrous production values point this in the direction of a laughable project, but a clever twist on both the detection picture and the survival genre and a heck of a lot of fun once it gets into the swing tilt this into the So Bad It’s Good category and a four-star rating for that.

Maybe there’s some of that post-ironic modernist stuff flying around in that we’re not meant to take the setting seriously. How could you when the only attempts to fill out the background of the Mexican jungle are one snake, one lizard and one crow and a pool of barracuda (yep, you heard me, somebody’s got to be able to chew off, for narrative purposes, a human face). Occasionally, reminiscent of the worst of the B-picture horror movies where actors had to strangle themselves with plastic snakes, here the characters take it in turns to slap their faces at supposed insects.

*Other morgues you might be interested in…*

But they’re never covered in sweat and there’s nary a tarantula or rattlesnake in sight. And any time one of them is due to be bumped off, they just have to wander away from camp.

This sets out its stall in disaster movie fashion. In classics like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1074) and Earthquake (1974) part of the fun was working out who would bite the dust.

Here, we’re told at the outset that out of the ten people aboard a light aircraft that’s crashed into the jungle nine don’t make it. So, over six episodes, we’ve got to guess who’s the survivor as well as why he or she feels obliged to get rid of his fellow passengers and it’s not as simple as in Sands of the Kalahari (1965) where it’s simply to increase one individual’s food stock.

Nor is it a simple matter of checking the billing. We know that Paul Newman and Steve McQueen aren’t going to be victims in The Towering Inferno, likewise Charlton Heston in Earthquake, but here none of the cast is familiar in the slightest, so no fans are going to bitch at their beloved idol being killed off, though Game of Thrones showed little compunction.

*“The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue” should you be interested.*

Naturally, the one creature that’s dominant in the jungle is the red herring. Virtually every character isn’t what they seem. Kevin (Eric McCormack), an ex-doctor, feels like somewhere along the line he’s been struck off; Zack (David Ajala) is certainly no insurance investigator; Dan (Adam Long) isn’t a novelist; millionaire’s daughter Amy (Jan Le) clearly has issues; Lisa (Siobhan MacSweeney) ain’t no ordinary housewife; and everyone’s suspicious of Sonja (Lydia Wilson) because she’s so guarded.

Alliances crumble once the body count rises. And gradually, the survivors realize they are not alone, there’s someone else in this neck of the jungle who will sabotage their efforts to set up a rudimentary transmitter. It’s not Flight of the Phoenix (1965) either or those others in the survival sub-genre where characters use their skills to find an escape. This lot do nothing more energetic than wait. Though they don’t have much energy left over after all their confrontations and squabbling over who’s the killer among them.

What writer Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War, 2002-2025) does brilliantly is take the hoary old detective tale and turn it upside down. Sure, we’re accustomed to multiple murders in virtually any episode of a television mystery, but setting the bar as high as nine killings, and telling us that fact from the off, making us wonder who will be next – a bit like Strictly, wondering who will be axed this week – provides this with the narrative fillip it requires.

And you forget about the lousy production values and go with the flow. Here and there sub-plots turn up the puzzle factor.

You may well, like me (he boasted), work out who the killer is and what he’s up to, but likely as not you won’t.

Apart from a marvelous turn from Siobhan MacSweeny, the dry head nun from the Derry Girls (2018) television series, nobody’s called upon to do much acting, except of the duplicitous kind as they keep their real characters under wraps.

Couple of good twists at the end.

Guilty pleasure (four-stars) or utter rubbish (two stars) – you choose.

Catch it on BBC and various streamers or on DVD.

“The herd comes first,” says matriarch Cara Dutton reading the riot act to a rancher’s daughter. Except it doesn’t. We’ve got umpteen diversions before herd matters lumber into frame. We’ve got dodgy accents, dodgy sheep, dodgy big-game hunters, even dodgier priests and nuns, and you have the feeling that the opening episodes are trying to cram in as many characters (and narrative arcs) as possible at the same time as deciding which ones, for dramatic effect, to kill off or fatally wound.

Some whose purpose remains obscure get beaten half to death anyway, in a quite bizarre segment, Native American Teonna Rainwater (Amina Nieves) has her hands beaten to a pulp by hardass nun Sister Mary (Jennifer Ehle), who in turn receives the same treatment from headmaster Father Renaud (Sebastian Roche) before he thrashes the young lass until she bleeds. Then we’ve got Spencer (Brendon Sklenar) whose only way to put out of his mind the horror of machine-gunning half the German army in the trenches of World War One is to head off to Africa and start knocking off elephants, leopards and lions, who have the temerity to get in some rich guy’s way. He’s not even that good a tracker, failing to notice that it’s two leopards not one who have been picking off humans. Presumably, the leopards had some clever way of masking their footprints.

*The original Harrison Ford in 1923 picture “Maytime.”*

Because of his failing he doesn’t notice the other leopard creeping up on some dumb rich blonde who’s stupid enough to venture out of her tent for late night ablutions. Even more surprising, nobody digs him up for this and, in fact, instead, another far more intelligent blonde Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer) takes a shine to him – perhaps because he has the temerity to call her Alex – and soon they are sharing a tree to escape marauding lions and hyenas.

And while I’m being picky, what kind of rancher’s daughter, Liz Stafford (Michelle Randolph), doesn’t know that “the herd comes first” and kicks up a ruckus when cattle take precedence over her impending marriage to Jack Dutton (Darren Mann).

You’ll probably be aware that this is a prequel-sequel (taking place before Yellowstone but after 1873) so I suppose you can expect some confusion as the series struggles to get all its ducks in a row. Throw in Prohibition, possibly to explain why machine guns are so easy to come by.

Anyway, the central narrative, once you’ve managed to put all these interruptions to one side, is that there’s a drought and tough ornery patriarch Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) isn’t inclined to share his lush pastures with the neighboring sheep farmers led by Banner Creighton (Jerome Flynn). But if in Yellowstone the ranchers occasionally had to abide by the law, here they take advantage of more lawless times and it’s not long before sheep farmers are being lynched. And it’s not long before revenge becomes the order of the day, the various Duttons ambushed in episode three, some so badly you might have believed this was the kind of horror film where you had to guess who lived and died. If Cara is anything to go by, nobody crosses the Duttons, as witnessed in the opening scene where she brutally guns down a fleeing wounded man.

I caught the first three episodes courtesy of British Airways when I was returning on the red eye from a trip to Los Angeles and had enjoyed what I had seen of Yellowstone (catching it on DVD rather than Paramount Plus) so I was looking forward to some slow-burn drama with electrifying acting.

What I got was a mini-series-by-numbers, unlikely development heaped on unlikely development, characters with no room to maneuver and closed-off from any arc and nothing of the freshness of the original. I’m so used to Harrison Ford turning off the charm by now and reverting to his grumpy old man persona and to Helen Mirren going tough that this almost seemed like routine. The two other love duets were just cliché. The white hunter and the English grand dame, and the spoiled rancher’s daughter with little to do but wail about how the cattle that brought her such prosperity were spoiling her life.

I had expected that I would enjoy such a tantalising glimpse of a new series that I’d be obliged to sign up for the streamer the minute I got home. But I think I can just as easily do without.

Category: television

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue (2025) or ** (depending)

1923 (2023) ***