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Highlander's on tonight on ITV4

It's one of those things that's popular with people like students, who savour the opportunity to feel superior to unsophisticated "ordinary people" who enjoy it in a non ironic way.
 
Did any of the sequels/spin-offs ever explore what happened if you cut off an Immortal's hand or other extremity?
 
Another good thing is that the main cop in it is also a cop in Police Squad/Naked Gun and he plays both parts exactly the same.
 
It's 138 minutes of cheesy 80's brilliance and I love it.
Sadly though it's 149 minutes long.

I'm sure the grand finale looked awesome on the storyboard. Classic rooftop showdown worthy of a Lazlo Woodbine thriller...

... but poor directing, execution and editing of these final scenes lets the whole film down.

Despite that it was still my favourite film in my early years as it captured the imagination and had history stuff.
 
teuchter said:
Is that an official post or a self appointed one?
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Seems to have been about as official as you could get - given that the main names behind the film are no longer around/active.

He had full cooperation from most of the remaining cast/production people, incl Lambert, Clancy Brown, Brian May and Roger Taylor and unlimited access to the production archive in Birkenhead.

I was also privy to him having a good long chat with the cinematographer of Highlander II and he knew a few things about the remake. :)


Currently he's working on a historic appraisal of Local Hero and we have offered to get involved with that too.
 
Gerry1time said:
No one seems sure when Freddie found out he had AIDS, but the closest we seem to get to it is April 1987, though he may have exhibited symptoms much earlier, and therefore suspected it himself.

Whether he did or didn’t suspect he had the condition at the time of writing songs for Highlander, the ‘who wants to live forever’ line seems very much in keeping with his attitude to life, from his not insubstantial debauchery away from the limelight in New York, to Peter Freestone’s stories of entire fridges in Garden Lodge stocked to the brim with champagne in case the need for such presented itself. Brian May’s typically understated epitaph to him on his statue on Lake Geneva, ‘lover of life, singer of songs’ points to this too. Imho anyway.
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Don't know when exactly Queen came on-board but Thorn-EMI started divesting itself of its non-tech businesses from 1984. After that, only Michael Kamen remained on the film for the orchestral parts of the score.
 
Gromit said:
It's 138 minutes of cheesy 80's brilliance and I love it.
Sadly though it's 149 minutes long.

I'm sure the grand finale looked awesome on the storyboard. Classic rooftop showdown worthy of a Lazlo Woodbine thriller...

... but poor directing, execution and editing of these final scenes lets the whole film down.

Despite that it was still my favourite film in my early years as it captured the imagination and had history stuff.
Click to expand...


Not quite poor directing - The change in producers and their interests didn't help it at all. Thorn-EMI wanted a slick/flashy/arty international blockbuster, sort-of The Duellists-meets-Conan the Barbarian and Mulcahy was the hotshot video director intended to make it appeal to the then new MTV generation but he had no track record with major movies, so neither Thorn-EMI or Cannon trusted him enough to make the film he wanted to and insisted he work with old-school/"safe hands" production people. Which only added to the many difficulties the film faced.

Cannon themselves didn't really know what to do with the film either, their stock in trade was low budget crime and action/adventure movies, so although they honoured the contracts that were already in place from Thorn-EMI but sought to bring the production costs right-down instead - which gives rise to the stories of Clancy Brown being told to get the bus from Glasgow to the location site and Connery threatening to walk-off the production when he found out that the crew and extras were being expected to pay for their own food.

Cannon's distributors didn't know what to do with it either, which resulted in an abortive first release in just a handful of cinemas in the US/UK, probably on the expectation of it going quickly to video, then giving it a wider, more committed release following Its a kind of Magic hitting the music charts.
 
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teuchter said:
It's one of those things that's popular with people like students, who savour the opportunity to feel superior to unsophisticated "ordinary people" who enjoy it in a non ironic way.
Click to expand...

True I first saw it as a student, on its original release but that was more because it was one of the films you could go and see for 50p in the 2 and 3 screens of the local Odeon on a Wednesday afternoon - probably a wet one and we almost certainly had a smoke before. Great fun, nothing else! :D
 
Another aside - Kurt Russell was the original choice for playing Connor Macleod.

Lambert was only taken-on later and due to his breakout role being largely non-verbal, nobody realised he couldn't speak English until after the ink was dry on the contract! :D
 
Boxing Day at 9:00pm on LEGEND*.


*Legend is available on Sky channel 148, Virgin Media channel 192, Freeview channel 69 and Freesat channel 137.

 
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