Highlander

Saw this was on TV and intended to just watch 10 minutes or so before having an early night. Fat chance. If you're a movie geek of a certain age I defy you not to watch all of this once you've heard Connery's echoey voiceover at the start.

I've seen this loads of times and even though it somehow manages to get slightly more rubbish with each viewing, I still adore it. I realise that doesn't really make sense but who cares? Highlander is pretty much the perfect example of a 'guilty pleasure'. Here's some of the good/bad specialness that makes me love it so:

• The incredibly lame first fight between Kurgan and MacLeod. Like a couple of kids re-enacting a battle at a school play.
• MacLeod's cutesy-wutesy way with the ladies - "Aye blossom, the way you like it", "Aye, blossom I will".
• Director Mulcahy's overuse of the clever fades from one scene to the next. My favourite? Christopher Lambert's funny face merging into a massive wall mural of the Mona Lisa.
• Christopher Lambert's funny face in general.
• And his terrible, terrible acting.
• Garfield, the brilliantly antagonistic cop - "You cruisin for a piece of ass?"
• The moment MacLeod realises he's immortal. At the bottom of what is clearly a swimming pool pretending to be a loch with rubbish fake reeds.
• "You look like a woman you stupid haggis".
• The awful, collapsing foam walled castle with the crappy drawn background of the night sky.
• Tooled up vigilante guy - "Ok marine, this is for real".
• Rubbish autograph matching software on a computer that looks like a BBC micro.
• Bizarre animated monsters attacking MacLeod as he dangles on obvious wires whilst going through the orgasmic rush of the quickening.

I could go on and on and on. Like an immortal film reviewer or summink. It's just ones of those films where even the bad things about it are so endearing that they make you wub it even more.

At its heart though is a bloody good story. A group of individuals who (for reasons unexplained) are immortal and can only be killed by having their heads lopped off, are drawn to seek each other out in battle over many centuries - beheading away like whirling dervishes until one is left to collect 'the prize'. This rather brilliant concept provides the film with a canvas that includes vicious clans in 'Braveheart' style battles, a World War 2 flashback, a drunken 18th century duel and, um, a fight in a car park.

All of this is bloated out with some extravagantly hammy acting, an omnipresent soundtrack by Queen (seriously - everytime anyone puts the radio on its one of their songs) and a training montage. Every guilty pleasure has to have a training montage. Here you get Connery and Lambert having a right chuckle running after deers and insulting each other whilst their stunt doubles do swordy stuff on top of various cliff tops.

I should add, to make myself sound intelligent, that Highlander also raises some chinstroke-inducing questions on life and death in a couple of poignant scenes. Set to a Queen ballad naturally.

Highlander is a great film. Better than that, it's a great, rubbish film. A self-invented genre I have huge affection for and one that grew wonderfully out of control in the excess of the 1980's.

Oh and bonus points to anyone who can name two actors from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that also pop up in this.