movie review: Britannia Hospital

After Lost ended a few weeks ago, some of my friends wanted to continue our Tuesday night get-togethers and we all really liked the idea of having B-movie nights. We've decided to rotate hosting duties, and likewise give everyone a chance to pick something different for the night. Yesterday was the first night at my house. I didn't have any of the campy horror films that I usually think of when it comes to craptastic movies (except for the all-too-obvious Evil Dead II.) When we first proposed the idea, my immediate thought was of the movie Britannia Hospital, which is more strange and unknown than "so bad it's good".

In what other movie can you find a cross dresser, a midget, the queen of England, a cameo by Mark Hamill as a pot head, Malcom McDowell getting turned into a frankenstein monster who strangles a woman (after being decapitated) and an experimental surgeon who murders a patient, liquefies a brain for drinking and creates the "perfect human" - an enormous brain wired to machinery that, at the films climax, recites the "what a piece of work is a man" speech from Hamlet?

We bookended the feature with episodes of Flight of the Conchords. I've always been a nervous host, but I think the evening went well. One of my friends brought over cake and ice cream that perfectly complimented the strawberries from my family's farm.