[Retro Review]: BIGGLES – ADVENTURES IN TIME
First published in July 2004 on Filmrot, I’m bringing over a lot of my back catalogue just because of a couple of praiseworthy e-mails I’ve had regarding some of the older reviews I’ve made public here on StalePopcorn. This is going to be made available on the ‘Main Page’ for twenty-four hours and then it’ll be archived in our Reviews Archive found at the bottom left of the page. Hope you enjoy the ‘flash-back’. 
There are just some films for which there is no logical explanation as to why you enjoy them. You know you shouldn’t. They’re poorly written and poorly performed but there’s just an over-whelming, unarguable entertaining quality to their badness that can’t be ignored. Well, at least that’s your view, blinded-by nostalgia, when you hit adulthood. As a child when you encounter such a film for the first time, you think it’s the greatest film ever made. Full stop. Screw your Star Wars or your Indiana Jones.
For me one of my favourite guilty-childhood-pleasures is Biggles: Adventures in Time. I watched it so much growing up that I broke the video tape of it and later bought it second hand during the final stages of my teenage years (along with Midnight Run as some of you might have heard me mention) but got rid of it soon after when I was mercilessly mocked by my friends for owning it.
Many years past. I often used to go into my DVD room (yes, I am sad enough to have a room in my flat specifically put aside for all my DVDs and my screenplays) and look on the shelf marked ‘Old Childhood Favourites’. As I perused the titles on display, I used to look sadly off into the distance and wonder where Biggles: Adventures in Time was, how he was doing and whether he would ever be released on DVD any time in the near future. There was Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Jaws 2, The Karate Kid trilogy, Labyrinth, North Shore, Porky’s, The Princess Bride, John Carpenter’s Starman, The Secret of My Success, Teen Wolf, Turner & Hooch and Willow to name but just a few titles from my misbegotten youth. But they didn’t mean anything without good old Biggles.
* cue wistful sigh * Flash forward to present day and whilst out shopping for food with my girlfriend, what should I find in the bargain basket of our local supermarket but a budget DVD release for good old Biggles: Adventures in Time. With a slew of extra features. All for ?4.97 no less. Hurray! But the question is, would the film hold up to the rose-tinted memories I had of Sunday afternoons in front of the television?
As a youngster, I’d read all of Captain W.E Johns’ Biggles novels. All ninety odd of them. Johns was a World War One veteran fighter pilot who wrote high-spirited adventures about a dare devil British dog fighter called Captain James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth whose courage and amazing aerial skills proved to be a saving grace in the fight against the Germans. The character was based initially on a fellow unidentified pilot who fought alongside the author and saved his life on several occasions, but with each passing novel the character took on more of the characteristics of Johns himself who snatched acts of heroism that he had carried out himself during the war and put them into his novels.
After the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark at the start of the eighties, producers Pom Oliver and Kent Walwin decided to capitalise on the period-era heroics of Indiana Jones by snatching up the rights to Captain W.E Johns’ creation. In a lucrative franchise move that puts Harry Potter to shame, they saw the various adventures throughout the ninety-three various Biggles novels as a goldmine of continual sequel opportunities. An initial script was commissioned and Oliver and Walwin started shopping their proposed movie around the various studios.
However, in a move that makes both producers integrity towards the source novel entirely questionable, by the time they actually found studio interest Raiders of the Lost Ark – and its Temple of Doom sequel/prequel – was no longer the “latest thing” and audiences were instead seeking their box office thrills from the adventures of time travelling teen Marty McFly in Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future. Fearing that the period adventure fad was long forgotten, the producers decided to try and incorporate the success of Indiana Jones with the then high profits of Back to the Future. Walwin himself took hold of the script they had by John Groves and started tearing into it to make it “cool” for the “kids”. His first move was to stick the sub-heading Adventures in Time onto the title, before over-hauling the initial script to ride the coat tails of success that Marty McFly and the Delorean had spawned:
Jim Ferguson (Alex Hyde-White) is a high flying (pardon the pun!) advertising executive in 80s New York City. Whilst at an important business party he is suddenly shrouded in blue electronic lightening and cast back to 1917, where he finds himself immediately caught up in a deadly aerial dogfight above the tattered battlefields of the First World War. The pilot is infamous flying ace Captain James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworh (Neil Dickson) but, before any explanation can be proffered, Jim is thrust back to 80s America. There Jim is approached by the mysterious Mr Raymond (Peter Cushing looking frail and quite poorly in what would be his last film role. He died almost immediately after filming was completed) who explains that Jim has a “time twin” who can call on him at any time of great need and/or when his life is endangered. Biggles is Jim’s “time twin”.
Stick with me. I swear to God I am not making this up!
Jim follows Mr Raymond to London to seek more answers as his trips back to 1917 become more and more frequent. It is explained to him Biggles is fighting to stop the Germans who are building a sonic super weapon (which basically looks like a giant satellite dish with holes drilled into it) that could change the course of the whole First World War. Jim must help his “time twin” in order to save the world. But when Jim’s own life becomes endangered at the hands of the British police, Biggles himself is sucked forward in time to the 80s in order to save his “time twin’s” life. There the two steal a modern day police helicopter and transport it back to 1917 to use against the Germans and in a deadly face of against the sonic super weapon itself.
God, if there was an Academy Award for the cheesiest, daftest, most money-hungry premise then Biggles: Adventures in Time would surely win it. Only the recent Bubba Ho Tep (my DVD review is coming very, very soon I promise) comes close to matching this. The film has very few recommendable qualities in terms of acting and screenwriting. However, what it does have – back on its release and now in the more cynical, higher-standards-of-expectation era of movie viewing – is an unmitigated desire to entertain.
From its surprisingly good aerial photography – the dog fights are actually carried out for real using old WW1 planes; no models were used and CGI wasn’t invented back then – to its kitsch, crazy rock opera score by some wacky foreign guy called ‘Stanislas’. The film’s theme song ‘Do You Wanna Be A Hero?’ is one of the greatest movie songs, right up there alongside the whole of the Over The Top soundtrack (Kenny Loggins is a God!!). Jon Anderson, of Jon & Vangelis fame, performs the song. How Vangelis must have been laughing come 1986 as he received great critical acclaim for his work in movies like Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, whilst his former partner screeches over the top of footage from Biggles ‘The Movie’.
But does the film hold up after all these years? Well it does indeed hark back to that era of inventiveness where a boy and his alien took a bicycle ride through the sky, Harry hid out at the Hendersons, Marty escaped Biff on a make-shift skateboard and a trio of inept science students saved NYC from ghosts and ghouls. Fair enough, I don’t think James Bigglesworth is a better action hero than Indiana Jones anymore (maybe those boys were right to beat me up in the school yard over that!) and I don’t cry like a wife mourning the death of her husband anymore when Biggles’ sweetheart is gunned down by his arch-nemesis, the German Black Barron.
However, there is still enough of my inner child left inside to find something fairly cool in a police helicopter flying over the trenches of World War One and taking out ‘the enemy’. Fair enough, you can’t polish a turd – as the saying goes – but you can dress the turd up in a flying cap and goggles and put him at the controls of a WW1 fighter plane, before sucking him forward to the early 80s… just for a laugh!
It’s woefully acted, it’s not at all respectful to the legacy of Captain W.E John’s creation and no matter how hard it tries, it cannot hide the fact that it’s over all final result is one desperate, not so much to gain a respected fan base, but to earn a shed load of cash riding the tidal wave of success of far superior movies (hell, they’ve got Jim Ferguson arrive in England dressed in a trilby and brown leather jacket with some designer stubble. Go figure!) But, as embarrassing as it is to say this, it is an entertaining hour and a half. As much as you want to hate it, it’s harmless boys own entertainment that you can’t help but get a slight kick out of… even though you’ll hide it when your friends come round.
DVD EXTRAS:
The extras are quite surprising for a budget DVD release of a film that isn’t even loved enough to be placed in the “cult” bracket. There’s a trailer and a vintage Making Of featurette, a music video (that stands alongside John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China attempt in the “What the Fuck?” section of my mind!), two UK kids television extracts (one of Saturday Superstore and one of Blue Peter – for the Brit readers, can I just say who can remember Sarah Green being such a fox?!?) and selected filmographies that actually contain a written tribute to Peter Cushing from Kim Newman, the horror connoisseur from Empire Magazine. Not bad for five quid huh?
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