Biggles 1986 ***

One name on a cast list that always makes us click is Peter Cushing; the perennially ancient leading man of many British horror films, and notably the Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. His final film was 1986’s Biggles, an attempt to build an Indiana Jones-style franchise from WE Johns’ classic character. Such efforts had gone on for decades before Back to The Future came out, and sent the team behind Biggles scuttling off in quite the wrong direction. Thus, somehow, Biggles (Neil Dickson) isn’t the main character in his own film; Alex Hyde White plays a catering salesman who is sent back in time to join forces with the WWI flying hero and stop the German army developing a deadly machine that kills using sound. Biggles; The Movie is something of a mess, never marrying the 1980’s story with the First Would War action. But director John Hough really knew how to stage action, and the helicopter vs biplane scenarios are physically impressive.  Worth seeing if only to answer the trivia question of which film features Cushing and Freddie Mercury; Another One Bites the Dust features here alongside a truly hideous score by Yes’s Jon Anderson. Dickson later reprised the role of Biggles, not for a sequel, but in Jack Bond’s musical It Couldn’t Happen Here for the Pet Shop Boys.