I remain a total NUT for camp as Christmas Joan Collins flicks! Not often hailed by cult movie fanatics, Anwar Kawadri's luxuriously limber, fabulously fleet-footed, defecting ballet dancer melodrama 'Nutcracker' (1982) is not so much cold war angst, but deliciously cold cream cheese! This amusingly ribald lark has handsome Paul Nicholas as randy, opportunistic, story-breaking shutterbug Mike McCann and buxom Carol White as his equally libidinous, delightfully outspoken paramour Margaux Lasselle, both becoming erotically entwined in this adorably chipper, empty-headed dance flick, generously bejewelled with some beguilingly bawdy dialogue! I find this type of unrepentantly smutty/glitzy/chintzy 80s gubbinz irresistible, so why not take a sneaky pecan at the glisteringly glam/ham Joan Collins at her haughtily duplicitous, ostentatiously coutured, languorously lingeried, silkily snide best!!!
And lest we forget, the bizarrely underappreciated 'Nutcracker' generously introduces us to the entrancingly luscious Finola 'Staying Alive' Hughes as the impossibly limber 'Nadia' the boldly defecting Russian ballerina. While not without missteps, Kawadri's burnished 'Nutcracker' remains a heady, garishly glossy, lycra-lavish, blithely bed-hopping, perkily pirouetting 80s schlock classic! With most of the physical activities are of a more primal 'horizontal' variety, dance classists may want to look elsewhere, but ardent trash aficionados might well appreciate Nutcracker's hedonistic, gallopingly gaudy, innuendo-laden text and high-gloss disco-degenerated aesthetic! 'Nutcracker' boasts a marvellous supporting cast, including beloved rent-a-ruskie Vernon Dobtcheff, waspish Murray Melvin, and the urbane William Franklyn being deliciously sinister as the unrepentantly corrupt uncivil servant Sir Arthur Cartwright, plus a frothy, pop-tastic theme by Paul Nicholas and you have 101 sticky-sweet minutes of pure cinematic candy floss, and while the memories may not linger, it certainly tasted uncommonly yummy at the time!
