Gillian Anderson – The Magnificent 60s

Pretentious rubbish. An almighty bore masquerading as a) a spoof on slash horror films and b) having something important to say while c) not coming anywhere close to achieving either. Another of the dumb propositions foisted upon us by the connivance of the film festival industry to chuck at the general public movies that hoity-toity festival progammers and audiences believe deserve wider attention.

The most annoying element of this is that the subtext is merely a variation of the Dracula hypothesis that women are sexually drawn to dangerous men who can drive them into ecstasies of fear and penetrate them with sharp weapons. Here, this is spelled out in more detail, “the heroine” only able to achieve orgasm through terror and after running terrified with her breasts bouncing around and her erect nipples visible through translucent material.

And if you can work out how anyone can walk around with a slab of metal stuck to their head, you’re better than me. Oh, and to keep the woke element happy, the killer transforms from male to female.

And while we’re at the barking mad end of the horror subgenre let’s ensure that it’s the monster who’s creating the movies from his lair deep under a lake and that everyone who appears in the movies are his creations.

This is in the Anora (2024) league for repetition. Where that was sex, sex, sex, until we got the point, and way after we had got the point, this is blood, blood, blood, gushing literally like fountains or explosions from what’s left of a body once the monster, known as Little Death (which as you’ll no doubt be aware is a sly nod to “le petit mort”, the French description of orgasm), has finished chopping off select body parts.

Too much of this film is bits of the Camp Miasma series of films, initially big hits but then fading to direct-to-video flops, and which contain little more than variations of blood, blood, blood and people being impaled or chopped up.

If there is any emotional element it’s frigid lesbian Kris (Hannah Einbinder), technically in a polyamory relationship but that’s only because she permits her female bisexual partner to regularly have sex with a male, finally managing to overcome her inhibitions, helped along by Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original star of the Camp Miasma picture who bowed out after the first episode, and now lives on an abandoned tourist attraction based on the original or the original set (I couldn’t work out which).

In between making eyes at Gillian and watching the old movies in a cinema at Camp Miasma, the full-of-herself Kris is pitching her barmy notion for a horror picture where all the characters are figments of the monster’s imagination. Actually, the movie business section is the only bit that works, although Kris fails to note the negative response from potential stars.

Given that blood is the dominant color scheme, it’s not surprising that Kris and Billy end up soaked in blood and wandering, in surreal splendour, around a service station where, with equal surreality, kids are more interested in shooting each other with water guns than any stray adults who haven’t bothered to change out of their blood-soaked Halloween costumes.

This has come at us with the glow of critical approval, but, actually beyond the very repetitive obvious and some smartass intellectual dialog, this is an over-inflated mess.

I felt sorry for Hannah Einbinder (Seekers of Infinite Love, 2026) who clearly can act but less so for X-Files star Gillian Anderson who draws too much on Sunset Boulevard (1950). Written and directed Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow, 2024) who should stop believing her own publicity.

Truly awful.

Except for the interviewee being an obliging idiot, this could as easily have turned into an own goal by a BBC desperately trumpeting its values to an indifferent nation that has been wooed away by the streamers. When the top dog is indulged by having her own top dog, a whippet, sitting at her feet everywhere she goes in BBC HQ and the supposed news bosses believe a scoop is snatching someone else’s scoop you’re on a very sticky wicket indeed.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that this show only came about because the person who set up the interview Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) had a severe case of schadenfreude and believing she hadn’t been sufficiently well rewarded wrote a book about the episode and nabs a writing credit here.

There’s not really a sympathetic character in the whole feature, unless you count the 450 journalists being shown the door because the Government won’t let the BBC raise the licence fee to cover its running costs and the BBC refuses to lower the fees it pays its top presenters (who only stay out of the goodness of their hearts because of course they would get richer pickings on commercial channels) to achieve the same end.

The only person who comes close is the sad-eyed Royal PR guru Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), heart roasted by looking after spoiled man-child Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell in an ill-fitting face mask) – inclined to throw a tantrum should some housekeeper fail to arrange his battalion of teddy bears in the correct order – and clearly desperate to believe the prince could not possibly be at fault. However, the idea that you would let such a dope loose on Newsnight, facing one of the world’s toughest interviewers in whippet-lover Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), shows remarkably poor judgement, especially when the prince just can’t see what all the fuss was about when he was doing the right thing by standing by his old pal, a convicted paedophile.

Anyone expecting proper investigative journalism or a thrilling narrative up to standards of All the Presidents Men (1976) or Spotlight (2015) – where the journalists actually do the hard work of the digging rather than just regurgitating a story that’s already out there, albeit with a bit more gloss, and the luxury of a one-hour time slot – would be looking in the wrong place.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had discovered just a little bit more about Bernstein and Woodward’s personal lives, whether they owned dogs or had girlfriends or maybe a sick mother, just to fluff out the story a bit, but luckily Alan J. Pakula had more to worry about than what clothes his Woodward and Bernstein had to wear when confronting their subjects.

The BBC high-ups, when not toddling off to sit in boxes at the opera, come across as up their own backsides. Sam is shown to be an outsider, who, unfortunately, dresses like she’s going clubbing, which gets everyone’s back up, but, red card here, seems surprisingly ignorant of the juicier details of the story she’s investigating.

Netflix has been on a roll with The Crown so presumably thought any story with a royal connection would be equally a ratings winner, not realizing that you still need interesting characters to snaffle the viewers and no number of angst-ridden people is going to cut it.

I can’t vouch for the truth of the impersonations of real characters, but while Gillian Anderson seems to catch the essence of Emily Maitlis, Rufus Sewell’s intonations are very much the actor’s own while the face mask seems to wobble from time to time. Billie Piper got the thumbs-up from Sam. I doubt if Amanda Thirsk would care for her worst PR moment to be dramatized but Keeley Hawes at least lends her gravitas.

Suicide by television is the best way to describe the prince, locked into a self-serving version of himself as charming war hero best suited to modelling Army uniforms glittering with medals. However, it struck me at the time and I was reminded of this omission here, that none of the investigative journalists have sought to investigate the small matter of the Pizza Express alibi. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to establish if Andrew was there on the night in question. Directed by Philip Martin.

This only goes to prove that not only can you lead a horse to water but without much encouragement you can get it to drown itself.

The original interview is better value than this. But we should perhaps thank Netflix for allowing its rival a moment in the sun.

Tag: Gillian Anderson

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) * – Seen at the Cinema

Scoop (2024) ***