That Odd Moment.......

[peter]

I don't know if anyone else has ever had this happen, but on just a couple of occasions, the fragile construction that is a film - a thing that takes you away from yourself, either well or badly - has actually broken down for me during the watching, and all of a sudden I've found myself experiencing not a film anymore, but instead a patched together series of scenes, often of increasing ridiculousness, that no longer hangs together as an exercise in the medium in which it is intended to sit.

The two films in which this occured for me were the Val Kilmer version of The Island of Dr Moreau and Kenneth Brannagh's Frankenstein. On both occasions I became convulsed with laughter as each sucessive turn of the film descended more into ham than the last. I promise there were no drugs included in this experience, nor do I dislike particularly either of the films [bot I have subsequently watched and managed to stay 'with them' untill the end] - but somehow something just on these occasions, tore up the suspension of disbelief and threw it out the window.