The Final Programme

Deeper View This psychedelic British sci-fi thriller from cult director Robert Fuest takes its cues from Michael Moorcock’s seminal 1965 novel of the same name, but takes it’s style and retro-futurist look from the London art scene of the time. The films director, Robert Fuest - best-known for the stylishly cult Dr Phibes horror films starring Vincent Price - also undertook the production design of the film, the result’s are second only to A Clockwork Orange for shear Pop Art splendour.

The classically trained Jon Finch heads an impressive cast - including Hugh Griffith, Patrick Magee & Sterling Hayden - as the flamboyant anti-hero Jerry Cornelius. The film stands as a reminder that cinema audiences never get to see much more of Finch on the big screen screen. The actor, who also appeared in Polanki’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Frenzy, gave up film work after a diabetic attack forced him out of 1979’s Alien, in which he was to play the iconic Kane – a role that ended up going to John Hurt. Finch was just 70 when he was found dead in his home in Hastings, while in 2012, the 84-year-old Fuest – who retired in the 1980s to take up his first love, painting – also passed away. But thankfully their memories live on in this bewildering, topsy-turvy slice of 1970s British sci-fi.

Synopsis A trio of scientists plan to create a self-replicating, immortal, hermaphrodite using the Final Programme developed by a dead, Nobel Prize-winning scientist.