After parodying old-fashioned Hollywood cowboy movies in Lemonade Joe, the Czech Mel Brooks returned to affectionately lampooning American genres with Four Murders Are Enough, Darling. This time, classic crime flicks and pulp fiction are the targets, and Oldřich Lipský apparently never encountered a gag that he didn’t deem unworthy for inclusion in his movies. I say that in the best possible…

When I first visited Prague at the tail end of the ’90s, I was captivated by the city to the extent that it dominated my every waking thought. Like millions of visitors each year, it was the historic centre’s visual splendour that first set my heart racing, but it wasn’t long before I got to know the less postcard-friendly side as well. Attending a teaching course in the freezing winter of early…

Bikers (Bajkeři) – Martin Kopp, 2017

I have a confession to make. Lately, I have become addicted to lame Czech raunchy comedies. There are dozens on Netflix right now and I have the strange urge to crack through every single one of them, even though I know they will be mostly terrible. I don’t know why this craving has emerged, but I’m currently taking heavy doses of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer to help overcome this nasty…

Shotgun Justice, aka The Lady Terrorist (Teroristka) – Radek Bajgar, 2019

A movie about a 70-year-old woman who goes all Charles Bronson on a bunch of thugs? Half the fun of writing it must have been thinking up a title. Granny Get Your Gun immediately springs to mind, or, given the spaghetti western motifs in Jiří Hájek’s score, how about A Fistful of Werther’s? No, wait! A Mouthful of Dentures? Or, considering what must have been the film’s main influence, we could…

Men in Hope (Muži v naději) – Jiří Vejdělek, 2011

As Ronan Keating, that perennial purveyor of pop pap, once sang: “Life is a rollercoaster, just gotta ride it” – that’s the happy-go-lucky ethos of Men in Hope‘s Rudolf (Bolek Polívka), an ageing lothario and Prague cabbie with 138 extra-marital affairs under his belt. He even had a very movie-land former career as an international rollercoaster designer, providing him ample opportunity to cheat…

Insect (Hmyz) – Jan Švankmajer, 2018

Once on a family holiday, we were walking around the side streets of a small Welsh town when we stumbled upon an old bric-a-brac shop that was closed for many years. Among the dusty collection of forlorn objects in the window display sat a vintage doll with braided hair, a straw hat, and a yellowed cotton dress. Her cheeks were webbed with tiny cracks and one of her eyes was missing. With her…

Spindl (Špindl) – Milan Cieslar, 2017

I’ve reviewed quite a few older classics recently, so this week I decided to play Random Czech Movie Roulette with some of the newer content on Netflix. I landed on Milan Cieslar’s “romantic comedy” Špindl… Oh dear. Well, I said from the beginning that my blog would cover all Czech movies, including the bad ones, so here goes… Anna Polívková stars as Katka, a sad sack singleton in her…

Waiter, Scarper! (Vrchní, prchni!) – Ladislav Smoljak, 1981

According to a survey conducted in the late 2000s, married Czechs are almost twice as likely to have an affair than their counterparts in the USA. A large number of those interviewed also believe that extramarital dalliances are just the natural way of things. The Czech Republic is a comparatively atheistic nation, which may be a contributory factor – many Czechs don’t have the moralistic…