Junk Monkey

2012-02-01T23:16:00.002Z

So it's February the first already. the time of year I usually give something up. Fuck New Year's resolutions I seem to make Februaryish resolutions. My liver has enjoyed 9 years to the day without having to cope with any alcohol and it's been two or three days off a whole year since my lungs have been hammered with cigarette smoke. You know (he said putting on his best Woody Allen voice) if it wasn't for the smack and the hookers I don't know what I'd do...

Baboom tish!

Right, what to give up this year? No idea. I know it's not going to be watching films. I love watching films. As habits go it's less expensive than most and a lot more fun than some. AT the moment I am still working my way through the 200+ VHS tapes I got given a few months ago. A randomly selected VHS inserted into the machine without looking at it and see where we end up. Great fun.

This year I will watch some good films... this year I will watch some good films... this year....

January:

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999) - ...sometime this year. Freeway was a 1996 film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon and was, apparently, a 'twisted' modern day reworking the Little Red Riding Hood story. Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby stars Natasha Lyonne (hubba hubba! - but I'm weird) and is a 'twisted' reworking of the Hansel and Gretel story that segues from genre to genre without stopping to think where it's going. It starts out as a Women in Prison film with nude shower scenes and communal vomiting, turns into a 'killers on the run road movie' with a lesbian serial killer, before our 'heroines' end up in the lair of a child porn making transvestite nun in Mexico and for a moment or two the film starts to look like it's going to turn into a gory cannibal slasher film but it just stops instead. Written down like that it looks a lot more interesting than it was. I only stuck with it because I was hoping Natasha Lyonne was going to get naked. She didn't. (Well, not much.)
Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - Not bad little Vampire flick which plays with the silly notion that Max Schreck, the actor who played the vampire Count Orlok in Murnau's Nosferatu, was a real vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. Great cast headed by John Malkovich (who can do no wrong - apart from Mutant Chronicles), Willem Dafoe (who was Oscar nominated for this part), Udo Kier, and Cary Elwes (who are both favourites and both far funnier than you remember).
Planet of the Apes ( 1968 ) Again. Watched, this time, with Number1 daughter (aged 9) - and, after successfully hiding the case from her, the Statue of Liberty shot came as a real shocker to her. Job done.
Mary and Max (2009) - Australian claymation film about the long distance relationship between a young Australian girl and a middle-aged man from New York with Asberger's. Mrs JM was in tears at the end of it; I was bored rigid. Somewhere in there was a decent short but there wasn't enough to sustain a feature. Especially when 90% of the story was told through an omniscient third party voice-over narration. Anything with that much voice over starts to look like a radio play with pictures. As a comic book (sorry... graphic novel) it might have worked a lot better.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) - not great, but bearable, sequel which had a wonderfully downbeat ending. Everyone dies. The highlight for me tonight, watching for the first time in wide-screen and a decent quality, was spotting a member of the camera crew's discarded paper cup blowing into shot about 15 minutes in. A previously unreported smirky little film nerd goof that I'm off to log at the IMDb. (I'm so pathetic sometimes but it amuses me.)

Using Your Skill and Judgement...

---------------------------------------------^-------------------------
Escape From Planet of the Apes (1973) - confirming rule 7 of the Junk Monkey low budget film rule book: 'All time machines/travel in low budget movies take you to Los Angeles in the year the film was made - no matter how hard you try to make them go somewhere more interesting.' A not bad attempt at a Get Out of Jail Free card from the writer who blew up the whole planet - and by implication the entire population of the world at the end of the last movie.

Apparently, while we weren't looking, two of the apes from the previous films, plus another we hadn't met before, somehow managed to salvage a sunken spaceship, worked out how to fly it and did just that minutes before the world exploded and the shockwave hurled them back through time. Some serious suspending of disbelief had to be done. Better directed than number two which had a real hurried look about it, with some of the blocking looking very underdeveloped and hamfisted. Though there was one moment in this one when a short pan to establish someone sat in a room was followed by a cut back to the starting point of the pan - which started again in the same direction but then turned into a dolly shot instead. That was clunky. Two of my favourite 70's actors Eric Braeden and Bradford Dillman did their usual sterling stuff in support.
Some Like it Hot (1959) - Friday Night Film Club choice of Mrs. JM (one of her favourite films) First time up on the big screen for me. And again I was seeing the film as if it were new because of it. I was seeing Jack Lemmon do things that were new to me and for once I almost saw what people see in Marilyn Monroe. I've never understood what what all the fuss was about. Tonight I almost got it. Daughter Number 2 thought it was "Great" - she particularly loved the tango sequence.
The Funeral (1996) - Dir. Abel Ferrera. (see, I'm getting to the 'good' films). Another random pick from the huge VHS pile to give me a rest from the Planet of the Apes boxset. The Funeral is a slow paced, layered, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted (brilliant cast) nicely dressed gangster piece that left me stone cold. I'm not particularly disposed to gangster films - modern ones anyway. I still haven't seen any of the Godfather films and don't feel deprived. The film had things to say, there were flashes of real truth in the script - most of which fell to Walken's character but I just wasn't made to be interested in hearing them. The structure wobbled all over the place. A lot of the story was told in flashback from various viewpoints but it was all so vague and unfocussed that I ended up not caring. (Apart from noting at one point that cinematic rarity and irrational pet hate of mine: a flashback within a flashback.)

Off to the charity shop with it.
House of America (1997) - Wales. Tom Jones. Coal mining. Depression. Getting pissed. Family secrets. Smashing up the pub toilets. Unemployed. Coal mining. Incest. Mam's in the loony bin, nice room she got though. Suicide. Coal mining. Murder. Did I miss anything? Story obvious from about three minutes in and money from the Arts Council of Wales. "Well, that Trainspotting made a lot of money last year so it's obvious the world is gaggin' for Celtic fringe post-industrial misery innit?"

Based on one of those plays that gets public funding and is 'Important' and 'Says Something' and when it's translated into film looks exactly like a play that's been translated into a film. Yes, they may be standing in a field 'opening it out' but they're still talking stage dialogue, not film dialogue.

Thinking about it for 24 hours (not exclusively) I suspect the film was supposed to be a heartfelt cry against the swamping of Welsh culture by the all pervasive influence of America. As the only evidence of Welsh culture shown here were a couple of brief sound-bites of Tom Jones' songs and shots of bunches of miners (still in helmets and blackface coaldust) getting pissed in the pub I can see why our protagonists got obsessed with Jack Kerouac and necking neat Jack Daniels. Beats the fuck out of Max Boyce and Brains SA.

Can I go back to watching shit again? this arty crap is doing my head in.
The Brothers O'Toole (1973) - I'll watch anything with John Astin in it. The man is a comedy hero. Here he plays two parts in what is a very dull shambles of a film. When he's not on screen the pace drops to a crawl and the script just flounders about not going anywhere in particular - very slowly - and then Astin is back on screen and it's a funny little film again. He manages to get even the flattest of dialogue to be far better than it has any right to be (I suspect he rewrote many of his own lines). Another £1 well wasted in Poundland
Spawn (1997) - What. A. Piece. Of. Shit. Spawn is based on a comic book and looks it for every frame of it's running time. The lowest point for me was the moment when the demon, trying to bring an overly complex plan to start Armageddon to fruition, gloats over the recumbent body of his mortal minion evil, CIA-type chief played by Martin Sheen. At demon boy's suggestion Sheen's character has planted instant, total population of the world destroying, biological bombs all over the globe - and then left vital incriminating files on his desktop (like you do). He has also had a pacemaker type device fitted which will automatically set off the bombs if his heart stops beating. With me so far? Right. Demon boy spends most his very annoying screen time trying to manoeuvre dead, but bought back to life with superpowers, former hired killer Spawn into killing him. There is a climactic fight in a suburban house with Spawn's ex-wife and child used as pawns. Spawn can't bring himself to kill Sheen's character, because little Tammy will die too. Demon boy rants. "Then I will kill him and kickstart the apocalypse now!".* Martin Sheen had the good grace not to be in shot while this line was delivered. He may well not have been in the building - or even aware that it was in the script. I hope so.

At least the villain wasn't played by a British actor. (Very hard to cast a Brit as head of the CIA I would imagine.) The only Brit I could see in the cast was Nicol Williamson who got stiffed with that other standby role for British Male actors of a certain age, The Elder Mentor part. (Alec Guinness in Star Wars, Sean Connery in Highlander etc.) Apart from standing about telling our 'Hero' to use his powers wisely, he also had to do tons of rapid back-story, and narrative hole filling, voice-over narration. He didn't make another film for 15 years; then died. The first-time director is now only allowed to make things like Garfield's Fun Fest ( Video 2008 ).

*Geddit? Geddit? Do you geddit? Huh? Huh?
The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998) More late 20C Arts Council money poured into a film (I think it was trendy; 'Cool Britannia' and all that). This time they seem to have backed a vaguely commercial horse with Jude Law as an urban professional vampire and the always strange and watchable Elina Löwensohn as the woman he falls in love with. Not perfect but better than I was expecting after seeing the dreaded words 'Arts Council' in the credits.

Someone called Hitler Wong played a character called Noodles Chan. It's his only film.
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955) - Confusing and dull, low-budget radioactive undersea monster, and misguided scientist with beautiful(ish) daughter mess which racked up more shots of people putting on Scuba gear than an entire series of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and more crappy clichéd dialogue than normal. A lot of ouch! editing too, where vital shots had obviously not been done, and staging so clumsy it was wonderful. Ferinstance these two guys are supposed talking to each other: "Establishing shot please... let's see if we can do this in one..."

"Great guys, we'll cut away to cover the fluffs. Now the close-ups, and talk fast, we're running out of film..."

"Okay, that's a wrap, let's go get lunch."

I've no idea what these two are looking at but it's not each other unless they are in parallel universes - which is possible as their shoulders would appear to be occupying the same physical space. Crappy film making. Love it.
Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D (2011) - better than number 3! The kids loved it. I laughed aloud several times despite my better judgement. The only thing that really spoiled my reluctant enjoyment was my irrational hatred of Ricky Bloody Gervais whose smugness just annoys the tits off me. (Even when he's just doing a voice for a robot dog and doesn't thrust his very punchable, self-satisfied face at the camera.)
The Shaolin Temple (1982) - another hour and a half of my life spent watching Chinese people whacking the shit out of each other. One of these days I'll actually work out if I enjoy these films or not. This one had some great scenery and a young Jet Li eating his girlfriend's pet dog, spit-roast over a fire. Yum yum.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) - it's Jan the 16th and I may have just seen the best film of the year. I think.
Convergence (1999) - Christopher Lloyd shambles around Seattle being world-weary while very low-budget, spooky stuff happens to a girl in his office. It starts off okay, nice little X-Filey, millennial weirdness vibe building up and then it just goes nowhere and flounders around and all the spooky just gets not very interesting and by the time it's finally over it has turned into a New Age mumbo-jumbofest about 'converging energy lines' and 'patterns' and 'destiny' and characters giving full ponderous weight to every word while saying tedious things like this to one another:

Quote:

Angst ridden protagonist dude:
Why do I feel so empty inside;
like I've been betrayed?

Cafe owning mentor dude:
Maybe, because, in some way, you have.

Another dull waste of time and space.
Private Parts (1997) - I knew nothing about Howard Stern before I saw this autobiopic. Doubt if I really know anything now. But I enjoyed it. Laughed a lot. Paul Giamatti was, as always, brilliant.
Shark in a Bottle (2000) - A slacker, accident prone, postal worker, wanted for the possible slaughter of several co-workers, is forcibly recruited to work as a hit man. Shark in a Bottle is one of those films that really makes you think and ask it some fundamental questions. Questions like: Who the fuck thought this script was worth reading beyond page three let alone spending all the time and money and effort to shoot the bugger? Why does our 'hero' keep returning to his flat when he knows the 'bad' guys want to kill him (actually this one is pretty easy to answer: A. None of the neighbours ever complain about the powerful handguns being fired in it all day - someone did call the cops when he blew it up though. B. The budget didn't let him go anywhere else.) When are cheapo crappy film makers going to stop thinking "Hmmm. It looks like shit. I know! Let's pretend we're being mysterious by using some Angelo Badalamenti-like music over the really boring bits! You know, to give it a David Lynchy feel...". When is it going to end? Why is the remote control all the way over there? Was that supposed to be a twist ending? (Were we really supposed to forget about the dead hitman in the bathroom?) Is this supposed to be a comedy?

One of the longest 94 minutes of my life. Dreadful.
James and the Giant Peach (1996) - fun little family film which (as usual with films chosen by the kids) I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting too.
Hao xia (1979) aka Last Hurrah for Chivalry - more Chinese people wellying seven kinds of shit out of each other at the drop of a hat. This time John Woo was directing and some of the camera moves were far more complex than usual.
Sketch Artist (1992) - an above average made for TV / Direct to LaserDisc crime noir. Not great but not bad. The obligatory sex scene was almost justifiable and for once looked like a couple having realistic, frantic, make-up sex, not indulging some bizarre choreographed gymnastic workout with lots of soft-focus, body doubles, and panning camera-work. It actually looked like two people fucking. I am so bored with rubbish sex scenes. I was watching one supposedly erotic scene the other week, with all the ritualistic back-arching, finger-licking, nipple-slurping, et al and I was spotting continuity errors - 'Oh, the bra strap's back up... now it's down... now it's up again...' I think I'm getting old.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) - Early Peter Jackson. And interesting.
Sanctuary ( 1998 ) - Straight to video Priest With a Past 'thriller' (he was a CIA hitman) which almost breaks new ground for me. The whole story is told within a framing device of 'our hero' being interviewed by dark figures. Cue title. '6 Days ago. Chicago... ' and the story proper starts to unfold in a flashback - except it doesn't because, almost as soon as we are settled into Chicago six days ago, we are soon kibitzing on a second layer of our hero's flashbacks. He starts off by taking us to 'Langley four years previously' and then hop skipping about his whole life from childhood onwards through years of rigorous training to be a government within a government sponsored assassin - before running away and becoming a priest. With me so far? Good. During one of these flashbacks - within a flashback - the younger child/hero/priest/assassin has a moment where, in soft memory-inducing focus, he has a reverie remembering his dead mother. For a moment there is a non-diegetic sound cue as he recalls the sound of her voice and for a second the film teetered on the edge of diving into a flashback - within a flashback - within a flashback! Heady stuff. I don't recall ever having been that close to a narrative chasm that deep before. The rest of it was shit. Pure unadulterated shit which alternated from confusing to boring and back again with without breaking stride. The bad guys hunt him down, lots of innocent people end up dead, the Priest starts killing people again without a shred of remorse and foils the evil plot to - er - do evil stuff. (What was the Evil Plot? I've forgotten.) Whatever. It also has one of the dumbest 'twist' let's-set-up-a-sequel endings: The hooded figures from the start of the film turn out to be a secret society of Papacy within a Papacy Catholic Priest Hitmen/Ninjas who want to recruit him.... oh God....
The Big Swap ( 1998 ) - a group of friends, all of them irritating, smug, middle-class, professional wankers*, swap partners a couple of times and the wheels come off their semi-perfects lives.

Whoop de do.

A terribly wordy script full of place-holder dialogue like: "I thought we could try that new restaurant. You know, the one on the high street." delivered by far too many characters who are introduced en masse. We're given a voice-over guided tour of the whole cast in the first couple of minutes and after that we're on our own. Three minutes later the wheels are starting to come off relationships we know nothing about - and we're supposed to care? Oh come on!... it's hard to generate any sympathy for the simultaneous emotional problems of ten total strangers.

One of the leads now writes for preschool CBeebies regular Chuggington.

If the French had made this (even on this budget) it would have been sexy, elegant, sophisticated, and smart. (And the tits would have been less British too.) The French would have known how to make this film. (They should do, they've done it often enough.) But because it's British it's just awful. British Film just didn't know how to do sex.

*I don't think I quite meant that to read like it does - nice work if you can get it though.
Despicable Me (2010) - funnier than I remembered.
The Mesa of Lost Women (1953) - Whenever you hear someone say "X is the worst film I've ever seen!" you can pretty much guarantee they have never sat through any number of truly dreadful films like: Egagh, The Horrors of Spider island, The Wild Women of Wongo, Nude on the Moon, The Mesa of Lost Women etc.. All of them are dreadful but The Mesa of Lost Women is a wonder and a marvel. A film that defies watching and one of the films that started me in my exploration of Trash Movies. It's one I return to from time to time to get my bearings - or when I need a good sleep; great chunks of it are incredibly boring; I mean seriously, hypno-toad, trance inducing type boring.

The opening sequence alone is a masterpiece of incomprehensibility. A couple are rescued from the 'El Muerte Desert' ("The Desert... of Death!" as our VO narrator translates for us a couple of times). We start to see the story of how they came to be there told in flashback; but whose flashback we are watching is totally unclear. Is it the pilot rescued from the desert who is actually talking when the flashback starts? or is it comedy Mexican Pepe on whose face the camera is lingering as we fade with the helpful narrator hinting that Pepe knows more than he's telling? Is it the narrator's flashback? Who knows? By the end of the film ownership of the flashback is firmly established as being that of the pilot of the crashed plane - but there's a problem. The start of the flashback narrates events that the pilot has no knowledge of, which happened long before he appeared in the story, and about which he had no way of finding out during the course of the narrative. The only people who could have told him about them die within minutes of their meeting. I think the ownership of this flashback changes, during the course of the film, from one person to another. Possibly a unique event in the history of cinema.
Scandal (1989) - Okay, British Film can do sex. But only if it's a costume drama!
Mediterraneo (1991) - Gentle little film about a forgotten bunch of Italian soldiers stuck on a small Greek island during WW2. Out of radio contact, and cut off from the war, they slowly fall for the charms of the local girls and the gentle calm of the island. One of those films that lull you into such a feeling of warmth and security that you spend the second half of the film hiding behind your internal sofa waiting for the inevitable tragic misunderstanding; waiting for it all to go hideously wrong when the war catches up with them. It's a horrible feeling. I hate it. This time though things didn't go horribly wrong. Everyone lived!

Kannibal (2001) - a straight to DVD, self-financed, incomprehensibly plotted, dreadfully acted piece of serial-killer bumsplatter which is close to nudging Zombie Women of Satan off top spot in my Crappest Film ever Made in Britain list. Godawfully dreadful in every field. I can't work out what was worst aspect of the show,: whether it was the direction - which was, frankly, fucking awful, the script - which was, frankly, fucking awful, or the production values - which were even worse than fucking awful (when they were there at all). In the end though I decided it was the script. It's always down to the script in the end really, isn't it? As evidence I tender the following badly-delivered monologue. (Which I transcribed with much labour and swearing; I forget how cumbersome VHSs are for doing this sort of thing compared with DVDs.)

To set the scene: the killer, having finally messily disposed of all the members of a Russian Crime family, and their lesbian lovers (and eaten most of their livers), makes his way to New York. He leaves some flowers at a woman's grave, and thence to the sickbed of the aged matriarch of the Russian Mafia clan. 'Why are you doing this?' she wheezes through a layer of badly applied latex. In reply he inserts a tape into the convenient video player at the end of her bed. Cue a not very good English actress putting on a variable 'Noo Yawk' accent as she pretends to read the news straight to camera...

Quote:

"This is February the fourteenth sixty minute special coming to you from down-town New York. Today saw devastation and travesty (sic) in the streets of Manhattan like never before seen when a failed bank raid went wrong and one woman and her unborn child were killed instantly when a hijacked bus careered into the side of her station wagon. It all started at 5:45 when a gang of four armed men broke into the Federal Reserve Building. Unluckily for that (sic) an informant had raised the awareness of the police and a team of FBI were waiting. After a lengthy gun battle one of the men escaped and hijacked a local 201 bus to make his getaway. We understand the bus started its journey at 6:15, the hight of the rush hour traffic in Manhattan, and if it were not for police valour and diligence in this matter there could have been many more accidents. Within a short space of time police had set up various road blocks along the route the bus was travelling hoping to stop the carnage before it careered out of control. It was along the highway that the bus hit the station wagon causing it to smash into another vehicle head on killing the occupant on impact."

You have to admit it, that is a really great bit of shitty writing. "A failed bank raid that went wrong," does that mean it succeeded?
Another treasurable moment came earlier when the police inspector investigating the crimes wanted to know if someone was 'implied in the murders' instead of 'implicated' - a singularly dreadful bit of acting, by the way, from Lucien Morgan who turns in an astonishingly amateur looking performance that would have got him booed off the stages of village halls around the country had he tried it out in front of live audiences.

What I learned from watching this film: Shooting out on location, guerilla style; out on a London streets say, (guerilla style because you have no permissions to be filming on the public highway); shooting brief insert panning shots of a character walking round a corner; it's a neat idea to do it from inside a parked car. Passers-by and the police are less likely to spot you, and point at the camera, or try to arrest you. Pretty standard cheapo film making technique. But I'd make sure there's enough money in the budget to run the car through a car wash first. Panning shot with fingerprints and glassy smears over them look like shit.

This one's a keeper.

2012-01-21T21:01:00.003Z

While I'm at it (see my earlier post today) here's 3 month's worth of books which gets me up to date (ish). Real posting will resume soon.

September

The Dinosaur Hunters - Deborah Cadbury.

Modesty Blaise - Peter O'Donnel. I'm sad to say, camp trash fan that I am, that I have never seen the Joseph Losey film version with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp. This books turns out to be a novelization of a script that wasn't used. Dated, but trash crime/spy action fun with a bit more than the usual amount of character development.

Honey West: This Girl for Hire - G G Fickling. My scheme to spend September reading books with strong female protagonists wearing black and carrying a gun on the front cover comes to a grinding halt with this dull, badly written piece of 'tec drek. Girl private eye Honey West wanders around loosing her bra a lot and blunders around a Hollywood populated by six identical people who all hate each others guts and all have feeble excuses (and plenty of coincidence laden opportunities) to see every one of the others dead. I didn't finish it.

The Dylis Powell Film Reader - Ed. Christopher Cook. Collected reviews and other writings from one of the doyennes of grown-up British film Criticism. Enjoyable stuff. As a book, however, it had one major annoyance. Each section - some only a couple of pages long - was dated at the end of the piece. Personally I would have preferred the date at the start of the article so I knew whether she was talking about a film she had just seen for the first time in 1949, or coming back to thirty years later. I never knew if I was reading an initial response, or a mature consideration. I took to reading with a pencil in hand, flipping to the end of the next article, then writing the date I found at the end in at the start so I don't have to wonder next time I read / look something up in it. It pained me every time. I hate writing in books.

The Mad Old Ads - Dick Sutphen

Scrivener's Moon - Philip Reeve.

The Fortunes of Captain Blood - Rafael Sabatini. Swashbuckling nonsense from 1936 in which Captain Blood walks through six 'adventures' aided by a lot of luck, buckets of coincidence, and a motley assortment of minor characters who say things like, "Od's blood! He speaks aright!"

October

Tyranopolis (aka Future Glitter) - A E van Vogt. Another late (1973) bonkers piece of van Vogtiness which starts with the words:

Quote:

Professor Dun Higenroth read the offical letter with pursed lips:
"...Your good fortune to have won the Accolade for your field... Hence, your decapitation on behalf of your students in the advanced educational program... will take place on Patriotic Day. Congratulations..."
There was more, but that was the gist.

...and ends with an incidental character everyone had forgotten about from midway through the book suddenly reappearing on the last page and decapitating the villain for no apparent reason. In between there is the usual van Vogtian confusion of false starts, unexplained endings, and 'what the hell is going on?' middles.

The Winds of Gath - E C Tubb. The first of the 30+ book thud and blunder Dumarest Saga.

The Iron and the Anger - Francis S Rayer. A forgotten novel by a forgotten author. Though with prose like this at his fingertips you have to wonder why:

Quote:

Kyrie Michaelson stood by the wide workshop door. "Explain what this crystal you call mensite is and what it does," he urged gravely. His brows jutted bushily. He was a large man and his wide face was concentrated somberly.

dang it must have been great being an SF writer in the glory days of pulp.

The Hell of it All - Charlie Booker. Either I have overdosed on Charlie Booker or (more likely) I am Charlie Booker. many of his fulminations and 'misanthropic scribblings' strike me as perfectly reasonable and sensible.

Raven 5: A time of Dying - the fifth and final novel in the Raven Swordmistress of Chaos books written by the tag team of Robert Holdstock and Angus Wells. This one was written by Wells and is pretty dire. Stuffed to the gunwales with padding: detailed page-filling descriptions of rooms which the characters immediately leave never to return - that sort of thing. Expanding a paper thin plot: Five pages of plotless, "I'll tell you a tale", framing device. Ravening Beast terrorises a city. Ravening Beast captures Raven and takes her to another realm. Secondary hero companion rescues Raven who destroys Ravening Beast in the final pages. Two more pages of pointless framing device.

Barrier 346 - Karl Zeigfreid (R L Fanthorpe) A long time since I have read a Badger Book. They haven't improved while I wasn't looking at them.

November

101 Movies to Avoid: The Most Overrated Films Ever - Alan Smithee. Not bad little, read in one sitting, list book by someone who I would guess is in the business but has chosen to hide behind the pen name Alan Smithee, a name used by Hollywood directors for years when they didn't want their name to appear on the final product.

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor - Cameron McCabe. A really really odd detective novel which, after the story finishes on page 248 with the narrator/murderer about to be in turn murdered by the policeman in the case, there is a 50 page epilogue penned by one of the characters in the book explaining in laborious lit crit detail why what you have just read is all rubbish. At which point the original narrator comes back from the dead for a bit, and after it has been explained that everyone else in the book was in fact the lone murderer, it only remains for narrator of the epilogue to shoot someone dead in the last three words of the book. Everyone did it. Very very odd indeed.

Projections 12 - Var. Probably the least interesting of the Projections series I have read so far in that it spends a lot of its length talking about Film Schools which don't really interest me. Not the book's fault, mine. I like this series. It's ostensibly written by film makers for film makers though I suspect their readership is mostly made up of fanboys like me who like to think we are listening in on part the creative process. That's the trouble with eavesdropping, sometimes the conversations you listen to are a tad dull.

F.A.T.E. No 6 Settetee Alert! - by Greogory Kern. 'Adventures of Captain Kennedy Super-hero of the Spaceways.' Total rubbish with a cliffhanger '"Move and you die!' said a voice." endings to every chapter and a character so prescient he gets his people to investigate an evil corporation even though no one (his informant or the author) has mentioned their existence until he orders his minions into action.

Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Haxan, the World's Strangest Film, and the Man Who Made It - Jack Stevenson interesting little read. Could have done with a better editor though; some of the sentence structures were very odd.

The Ice Schooner - Michael Moorcock. I consumed huge numbers of Moorcock's books when I was a lad. I remember this one as being better than most of his Sciencey Sword and Fantasy nonsense. A Heart of Darkness type journey through madness and obsession to an mythic goal set in a post holocaustian ice-age world. Moby Dick on ice. And it was all right too, right up until the last couple of chapters when the destination is reached and great gobbits of exposition are thrown at the reader to explain everything and finish the book quickly. Pity.

The Black Corridor - Michael Moorcock. Written in the same year as The Ice Schooner (and at least one other novel - he was prolific was Mr Moorcock) this is a straight SF novel about loneliness and madness and isolation and it works. I read it one sitting. Hooked.

The Distant Suns - Michael Moorcock. Now here's the other side of Moorcock, infantile trash which I hope was written for the juvenile market. A plot Hugo Gernsback would have dismissed as simplistic, and characters and situations which wouldn't strain the readers of Enid Blyton. According to the introduction it was co-written with Jim Cawthorn - who I remember as an illustrator more than an author. I would guess they wrote alternate chapters and left each other with cliffhangers to resolve. Like this from chapter 23. Our hero has just found his wife (previously presumed eaten by troglodytes) in a camp of the primitive tribes-people who have just captured him:

Quote:

Gasping, he halted before her staring into the face he knew better than any other in his personal universe. The familiar wide green eyes looked calmly back at him without any sign of recognition. "Cathy!" he cried, "My God, what have they done to you?"

A brief chapter in some parallel action later he touches her face tenderly and all her memories instantly flood back.
Note in margin of original manuscript:

Quote:

Ha! You have to do better than that, Jim.

Hard to believe that this is the same author as The Black Corridor and harder to see why it was ever reprinted. (Even harder to fathom is why I just bought another copy having forgotten I'd just read it.)

December

Movies From the Mansion - George Perry. Gushy, well illustrated history of the first 50 years of Pinewood studios.

Critical Threshold - Brian M Stableford

Coraline - Neil Gaiman. Read to the kids. Number one daughter says 'it's better than the film' and it's a joy to read aloud.

The Drums of Dracula - Robert Lory. A New English Library Piece of shit from 1976 full of the most gloriously godawful writing:

Quote:

The Snake now had wound its way upwards to Euleila's thigh, a thigh which was trembling in almost volatile shudders as the snake's head rose even higher.

'Volatile shudders' wow! Actually I feel a bit sorry for Euleila a 'beautiful black woman' with a 'primitive mind' who, for the sin of being easily duped by our musclebound hero, gets stripped naked, chained to a wall, gang-raped, almost sacrificed on a voodoo altar (see above) then gets turned into a vampire before finally getting staked through the heart on the last page.

Quote:

When the door of the ramshackle house had closed behind the old black woman, an almost silent pair of wings disturbed the air across the way. they had descended from a height not all that great, but so swiftly that, even had there been eyes to see their movement, they would have had to be especially alert. A blink of the eyelids, and there would have been nothing to see.

But there was no observer. If there had been, the wings would not have come downward. They would have waited until the pair of red eyes between them had satisfied themselves that the risk of detection was gone.

For the space of four human heartbeats there was no sound in the street, no movement anywhere, including the darkest of the dark shadows between the two houses across the way from the door the old woman had entered. And then, suddenly, where there had been nothing, no one, there was.

Drums of Dracula is number five in a series of nine. I can't wait to find the rest.

Excavating Kafka - James Hawes. A fascinating debunking of the Kafka myth (lonely, isolated, unknown, tormented, persecuted Jewish genius) that places him in (and therefore his writing) in context. Turns out he was a well-liked son of a millionaire businessman father, and was well connected in literary circles. Kafka far from being an unknown was making a real name for himself before the minor inconvenience of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire got in the way. The tormented bit may be true, but no more than any other middle-class sado-masochist of the day.

Shadow and Light - Jonathan Rabb.

The Planets - Dava Sobel. Easy to read, science lite, whistle stop tour around the solar system that, nevertheless, made me grind my teeth by using variably Fahrenheit, Centigrade, and Kelvin scales from chapter to chapter. So the Sun's core was X Kelvin, one planet's surface was Y Centigrade and another's was Z Fahrenheit. It's a personal hate of mine but if you're going to use a system of measurement, stick to it! She also sometimes used centemeters and sometimes miles and, at one point, miles and 'Roman miles' in one sentence without giving any way of comparing the two. Grrrrrr.

The Master Weed (Another Adventure of the Space-Puppet) - John Rackham. Another oddity found in my attic. A 1954 'Tit-Bits Science Fiction Library' about the thrilling adventures of a Captain Video like space-ranger and his identical remote-controlable simulacrum. In this episode they thwart the evil plans of a mad scientist whose dastardly scheme to take over the planet Mars hinges upon everyone on the planet simultaneously smoking drugged cigarettes. So cunning is his plan that they all do just that! He would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for our meddling hero who turned up at the fateful event as a robot. He had to pretend to be drugged until he could rescue the token semi-naked space bimbo which he did by skewering the villain to a control panel with a casually discarded screwdriver - and then electrocuting her head. They don't write them like this any more.

2012-01-21T15:49:00.005Z

Oh No! It's a million and one films time! Just catching up. Here's November and December's traunch. I watched a few decent films. Highlights include finding several films never released on DVD and Meg Ryan naked.

The following list contains naughty words.

More photos, including those of
naked people, will be added later.

November

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) - Directed by Kenneth Branagh (which makes it Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was 'presented' (whatever that means) by Francis Ford Coppola who had, two years previously, made Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sometimes known as Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sadly - and I think they missed a trick here - they didn't go for broke and call this one Francis Ford Coppola's Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) - and what a pile of hysterically overwrought dog plops it is too. Full of jaw-dropping "you what?" moments. My favourite I think being the moment when Victor Frankenstein fulfils some fanboy notion of the writers when he cries out, mid-crisis, "we must reverse the polarity!"* The exploding Helena Bonham Carter was fun too. At the end of the film, unable to cope with the fact that her husband has chopped her head off and stitched it onto her childhood friend's body (and made a real pig's ear of her face while doing so) she smashes an oil lamp over her head then runs around the castle and everything bursts into flames - sometimes before she gets anywhere near them.

Nothing happens slowly in this film. Everything is full-throttle all the way. It is not subtle. And nothing much makes any kind of sense. Where for instance does Victor get the gallons of human amniotic fluid he needs to create 'The Bride' - and when? One minute he's unpacking crates preparing to knock up a mate for his creature; the next minute he decides against it and gets married instead and, that night, having spent most of the day riding in the general direction of 'away', the miffed creature turns up out of nowhere and rips out his new bride's heart on their honeymoon bed. "Oh for fuck sake!" cries Victor (who in a weirdly semi-incestuous way has been waiting to shag Helena Bonham-Carter's character for years). He gathers up her body and moments later is back at his home where, in the couple of hours he's been away someone - probably pixies - has fitted out his lab, filled a copper swimming pool with the aforementioned amniotic fluid, and stocked up all the batteries with electric eels (sic).

Amid all this hysterical bilge and lumbered with a face-full of rubber and a script made of wood, Robert DeNiro almost made the Creature work as a real character.

*Disappointingly this is not true. On checking my facts (always a mistake) and watching it again, with the subtitles on this time, I find he actually said "reduce the polarity". Damn!
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 ) - probably the most pointless film version of a book I have seen in years. It sticks closer than usual for Hollywood to the original book and relies on great chunks of voice over first person narration to tell the story. Too much. It's like listening to an abridged audio version of the book with moving pictures. Like some sort of drug fuelled Classics Illustrated comic. I was very disappointed.
Rango (2011) - that was great! And Jonny Depp redeemed himself for last night's trudge.
Troll 2 (1990) - Troll 2 is one of those legendarily bad movies that has developed a 'cult' following. I know a lot of films are labelled 'cult' but I think this one does deserve it. People organise screenings and chant along with the best bits, a documentary film, Best Worst Movie, was made in 2009 by the, now grown up, kid lead, reuniting the cast and exploring the sad world of film geeks and conventions.

Troll 2, made by an Italian crew with American amateur 'actors', tells the everyday story of an All-American Family (and the ghost of the dead grandfather) having a house-swap vacation in the small town of Nilbog (geddit?). Niblog is populated entirely by shape-shifting vegetarian goblins who eat humans (sic) that pass through town by converting them into plants. The goblins (the word 'troll'' is never mentioned in the film so why it's called Troll 2 is never explained) are ruled over by a scenery chewing, eyeball rolling Gothic Queen who glories in the name 'Creedence Leonore Gielgud'. Her ancestors moved to Nilbog generations ago 'from Stonehenge' (double sic). The film is a total bollocks of a mess. It lurches from one flatly-paced, badly-acted underwritten, dodgily-photographed, hamfistedly directed, incomprehensible scene to another with no regard to any kind of continuity or usual story telling techniques. The film can't make its mind up what it wants to be, but the suposedly 'horror' elements are far funnier than the 'comic' moments which, for the most part, are totally baffling until the penny drops that they are supposed to be laugh points. The scene where the RV fills with popcorn during the 'sex scene' has to be one of the oddest.

There's hardly a scene or shot (or gesture, or line) in this film that doesn't fail. It's all wrong. All of it. Every single shot. It even manages to screw up that old reliable weird little chill of the ball bouncing down the steps - when you know there's no one upstairs! Done right, as it was in The Changeling (1980), it can scare the bejesus out of the most cynical of movie watchers. Here it not only didn't make any sense - other than frightening the two people in the world for whom even the idea of a ball bouncing down a set of well lighted steps is terrifying, it wasn't shot well and was a pointless out-of-nowhere "what just happened?" moment which leads into one of the daftest, "even to deranged Italian film-makers it must be obvious this makes NO sense whatsoever" endings in 20th Century cinema.

This one's a keeper...
In the Cut (2003) ...this one isn't. I was driven to watch In the Cut by perversity (it's listed in my current non-fiction read, 101 Movies to Avoid: The Most Overrated Films Ever) and it was the first of many films mentioned in the book that I came across in my To Be Watched Pile. (Part of me really wants to alphabetize the 200 or so VHS tapes and DVDs in there but that way madness lies. I know it. But it's still tempting.) So, In the Cut. Shit film. Meg Ryan shows us her bits, and everyone who has ever seen ANY thriller movie in which the investigating cop has an affair with the heroine can chant-along-a-plot from there on in. Honestly, it's like the opening credits of Hanna-Barbera's Hong Kong Phooey*

"Who is this psycho-serial killer? The hunky detective? NO!... Cornelius Webb the Gacy obsessed student? No way man!... Detective Ritchie Rodriguez the mild mannered hunky detective's partner? - could be!..."

'Could be' my arse. It's ALWAYS the detective's partner. (That was a spoiler by the way.) Any flimsy credibility the plot may have started out with disappeared around the 45 minute mark when, after having hot and rumpy sex (Meg Ryan's bits, people!), our heroine and our detective have a little confessional session in which he tells her about how he lost his cherry, and she mentions the fact that he had seen her before (as he suspected), she watched him getting a blow job at the place and time where the killer's last victim was last seen. On hearing this the killer obsessed 'tec half-heartedly asks her a couple of questions, and after establishing that she has not only seen the victim - and almost certainly the killer - on the night of the murder, looks at his watch says 'I gotta go' and leaves. No reason. He just leaves. He leaves because the plot would have fallen on its stupid fat face if he had stayed in the room another second. One more question and the detective would have realised the only other person with the small (but distinctive enough to be seen across a room too dark to make out people's faces) tattoo on the inside of their wrist was... da da daaaa!!!!! His Partner!

At which point the movie would be over and we wouldn't be able to spend the next hour looking at Meg Ryan's bits, while our arses went numb wondering just how and why her character would even consider having sex with the piece of shit, emotionally stunted, moron detective. (In order to make this plot point even vaguely plausible the script has to drag in Kevin Bacon to broad-brushstoke in a previous lover as a total twitching stalking cartoon fruitcake loon. It really is as ham-fisted as that.)

And talking of ham-fisted, the only other heterosexual male (ie potential killer) with talking words in this show is one of Ryan's character's students. He's obsessed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and turns in his assignments liberally splattered with red, blood-like fluids. (I don't know why he didn't just walk around with a red painted kipper nailed to his forehead.) And why is every male in this show desperate to get in dowdy frump English teacher's knickers in the first place? Apart from feeding the film's screamingly obvious misandrist 'feminist' agenda item that all men are sexual predators and would happily shag a fridge if it was warm and didn't move too fast. (This is in fact true, but most of us are a little more subtle about it than the knuckledraggers shambling about here.)

I suspect - though I have no evidence - that the only reason this film got made (and the only reason people went to see it) was because Meg Ryan wanted to get away from her wholesome Nice Girl Next Door image and flashing her pubes in a serial killer flick seemed the way to go.

It wasn't.

I'm off to dig out all the other 'movies to avoid' in my pile....

EDIT: (Christ, I wish I hadn't watched this film. It's now 20 or so hours later and I'm still replaying it in my head - and not just the tits bits - and finding things I hate about it.) It's an incredibly insulting film, believing the audience is so stupid it won't spot the thudding great grinding and whirring as the mechanical plot strips its gears (eg our detective walking out on the smoking gun witness as mentioned above), because it's dazzling us with beauty shots of Meg Ryan reading snippets of poetry and asking us to contemplate their significance and meaning. Err, I don't get it. Must be fucking art then. It's a fucking art movie innit? What a clever person Jane Campion is; tits and poetry, all that's missing is the subtitles.

And just why did our sexually unsatisfied English teacher spend so long drawing a large lighthouse on the blackboard when her class were discussing To The Lighthouse. I think even inner-city New York kids know what a lighthouse looks like. But why did she then colour it in red? Is it possibly because a red light house looks a bit like AN ERECT PENIS????? and as the climax (sic) of the film takes place at a bright red lighthouse that looks like AN ERECT PENIS (just like the model of a bright red lighthouse that looks like AN ERECT PENIS on the killer's office desk) they had to drag in some foreshadowing somehow. I'll lay money the shot of that drawing is being used as a text book example of how not to do foreshadowing in film schools around the world.** You know, if Tony Scott had directed this film it would have been laughed off the screen and derided as sexploitative, career-wrecking shite; on the up side it might have had a car chase in it as padding instead of all the endless shots of city architecture and those lingering shots of American Flags which are non-American film-maker's shorthand for "I am holding up a mirror to your society! Gaze upon it and despair!"

I hate this film.

*Geoffrey H Christ! There's a live action Hong Kong Phooey film in pre-production!
** To be scrupulously fair we don't actually see her do the drawing so it may be that the serial killer drew it before she arrived in the class. It's still shit though.
Body Heat (1981) - My faith in the system is restored. No matter which way you slice it this is as near perfect a sweaty sexy noire as you are ever going to get. Every one in it is perfect (even, though it pains me to type this,William Hurt). The music is perfect. The pacing is spot on. There's not a bum note in the whole thing. This time of watching I was struck by the subtlety of the business meant to throw the audience off track. For instance, as our sleazy lawyer, Ned Racine, is arranging the body of his victim in the cellar, in a building he is about to torch - making it look like the victim died while committing arson - he carefully unwraps the body from the bloody plastic it has been wrapped in. (People don't usually commit arson wrapped in plastic bags.) He tosses the crumpled plastic into a corner. There is a shot of the plastic sheeting landing. For the next ten minutes I was convinced (and I have seen this film several times before) that this carelessly discarded plastic, which we had been carefully shown, was one of the "25 ways to fuck up" that our killer hadn't thought of. It wasn't. The victim's glasses which he always wore were not on the body. That was the killer's mistake. I had totally forgotten about them because of one simple shot of a plastic bag. Simple misdirection. The audience is looking for the mistake. Give them something that looks like one. Don't make a big thing of it, let them think "Aha! I spotted that." Let them have a few minutes of smug superiority and then have a character point out what they really should have noticed. Clever scriptwriting. Great editing. I love this film.
Amazon Warrior ( 1998 ) in a post-apocalyptic America where everyone has clean hair and good teeth, and suspiciously well maintained fences can be seen in the background, Tara, last of the Amazons, is hired to guide two women through dangerous territory. Plodding rubbish with clumsy fight sequences, even clumsier dialogue, and a budget that must have been in in the low dozens. One sequence in particular, where the 'king' hires our heroine, looks like it was filmed round the edges of a Renaissance Fair, not at a Renaissance Fair, but round the edges. As in:

"Quick, while no one is looking we can get all these costumed extras for free - yeah, well, they'll be standing with their backs to us watching something interesting happening out of sight of the camera - but they'll cost nothing!"

Total bilge, starring the producer and a lot of actors who went on to appear in such classics of his such as Vampire Time Travelers. Some of the actresses got their norks out (I love that word) thus leading us to the conclusion that no matter what: fire, flood, famine, or the end of the world by all out nuclear heck, the plastic boob implant industry will be alive and well and operating somewhere in southern California. One of those films where you know the actors walking towards the screen have hit their marks and are going to start talking because they're suddenly where the reflectors are adding fill light to their faces.
Brainstorm (1983) - Directed by Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm starts out as a great little slow paced, thoughtful, hard SF film playing with ideas about new breakthrough technology, turns somehow into an evil corporation/military combine thriller, has an extended sequence of clumsy slapstick comedy before ending in a mystic, revelatory, light-show. It's a bit of a mess. An interesting one but a mess. It might have been a bit less of a mess if one of the stars, Natalie Wood, hadn't died in the middle of the shoot.
Yojimbo (1961) - Akira Kurosawa. 'nuff said.
The City of Ember ( 2008 ) - Friday Night with the kids. I enjoyed it more than I expected but it didn't make much sense in the end. The closed world civilisation which has forgotten its history and where no-one (apart from our heroes) questions the existence of a world beyond the city boundaries is a tired old Science Fiction trope - but done here with some nice set design. The inclusion of giant insects and moles (which are not apparently in the book) skews the whole film into making you think that the humans here have been miniturized in some way to survive the holocaust mentioned in the prologue sequence. (Which is another old SF idea see James Blish's 1952 story 'Surface Tension' for a good example). This is hinted at several times during the film obliquely (one of the old Mayors, whose portraits we see at one point, is called Podd which is as near as damn it the name of the father in the Borrowers books) or overtly. A character finds a piece of beetle and looks it up in a book. points at the picture and asks his father how they used to be so little when they aren't now? There's a carnivorous mole rampaging round the tunnels below the city eating people. Things like that. The fact that the heroes, when they finally make it to the surface, appear to be normal sized human beings is just confusing and unsatisfying.
Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General (1968 ) - the 'Export Version' (ie more tits and violence). What a great film. I mean really horribly good.
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) - my annual watch of the ever-fascinating most famous contender for the best worst film ever.
A Bizarre Love Triangle (aka Cheoleobtneun anaewa paramanjanhan nampyeon geurigo taekwon sonyeo 2002) My first foray into Korean film. Within a framing device set at a wedding on the moon sometime in the near future (with some very very dodgy special effects and costumes that push all the wrong campness buttons) a guest tells how the three parents of one of the grooms (sorry, just told you the socko twist ending) got together. This turns out to be a long story of teenage lesbian lust, under-age schoolgirl seduction, suicide by self-immolation, kick-boxing, burglary, babies dying on operating tables, fruit fucking and sundry other everyday Korean pastimes, culminating in one of the central characters having a life changing revelation as she shits herself in a public toilet. It was at this point - somewhere about the two hour mark (the film is only 93 minutes long) that it finally dawned on me that I was watching 'a comedy' and I was supposed to be finding all this stuff funny. I can see why it was in the pre-owned bin of my local Blockbuster for pennies. It's going back.

Things I learned from this film:
1. You can show men sniffing artificial vaginas, women holding huge rubbery double-ended dildos, and waving strangely gyrating life-size artificial penises around on screen and still get a cert 15 in the UK. (qv 'bumping cunts'.*)
2. I do not understand Korean humour.
* You know that moment that sometimes happens when you type something and think: "this may be the first time in the history of the English language that these three words have ever been placed together in quite that order"? I just had it. 'qv bumping cunts'. Not a phrase you see every day - but a great name for a band!
Time and Tide (aka Shun liu Ni liu 2000) second Asian movie of the week (from Hong Kong this time) and the second Asian film to have a Lesbian getting pregnant after a one-night stand. Is this a common theme in Asian films? And why does everyone seem to steal cigarette lighters? I've watched 230 or so films so far this year; none have them have included scenes of cigarette lighter stealing until last night. The rest of the film was totally OTT Hong Kong Action nonsense which had me absolutely fascinated and totally lost in equal measure. I had no idea who anyone was or what was going on but everyone seemed to be having fun jumping out of seventh floor windows firing machine guns while talking on the phone to the person they were shooting at.
Invasion From Inner Earth (1972) - I first watched this jaw droppingly tedious piece of drek 4 years ago. Every now and then, while raking through my increasingly huge pile of shite films, looking for something to watch, I come across it and think,"It can't be as bad as I remember it". Tonight I proved myself wrong. It is.
Radioactive Dreams (1985) - A (possibly) not yet released on DVD piece of Big Box Video Trash from the glory days of Big Box Video Trash. Radioactive Dreams is the everyday story or two four year old boys left alone in a bomb shelter with nothing to read but hard-boiled detective fiction. They emerge 16 years later to a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of the usual MTV vibe post punk post Mad Max bestial types. This time the tribes were a little odder than the usual hairy biker types vs peaceful farmers, one tribe for instance was called The Disco Mutants and consisted of seven year boys wearing white suits who carried big hand guns and said 'fuck' a lot. In the end it all got very irritating with our two heroes looking more and more like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wandering around an endless series of early MTV music videos. Videos from back in the days when they pretended to tell a moodily lit 'story' and didn't just fill the screen with jiggling well-tanned body bits. The film seemed very familiar somehow, though I'd never seen before. Only when I looked director Albert Pyun up on IMDb did it click. He also directed Alien in LA which was very similar in that it featured a lot of pointless wandering around in a MTV style Mad Maxiverse. Unusually for a 1980s PostApoc flick there were no noticeable displays of fingerless gloves - though there was at least one incidence of that other good old 80s PA Flick cliché, the burning oil drum.
BASEketball ( 1998 ) - Trey Parker and Matt Stone star in a David Zucker film. Stupid, rude, crude, and very very funny.
Vampire in Venice ( aka Nosferatu a Venezia 1988 ) - Another not yet released on DVD piece of treasure from my Freecycle haul of last week. A weirdly slow, decadent, Italian vampire flick that took four writers, and (depending on who you believe) up to five directors to get to the screen. Klaus Kinski gets to do his usual wild-eyed fruitloopery, grope two naked ladies, and walk slowly towards (and occasionally away from) the camera a lot. Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasence appear in great chunks of what appears to be nearly, but not quite, the same film. And there are sequences of flamenco dancing vampire gypsies, priests being thrown out of upper storey windows and someone climbing up St Mark's Campanile then jumping off for no apparent reason (and getting caught in mid air by Klaus Kinski in a really crappy special effect). It sounds like a mess. And it is. The narrative lurches around all over the place, characters appear without introduction and then vanish without trace, but it's so oddly put together, and some of the photography and atmosphere is so beautiful, I was half convinced that if I kept watching it ought to make sense eventually. It didn't in the end but by then I was half convinced that it might make sense if I watched it again.

Which I will do.

One day.
The Naked Cage (1986) - A Cannon Films 'Women in Prison' piece of exploitation crap. The usual dutiful parade of all the clichés of the Women in Prison exploitation crap genre, you know, innocent blonde victim who can't act thown into a gaol, where no one wears a bra, run by a sadistic lesbian warden. Cue lots of cat fights, a bit of rape an obligatory shower scene. All topped off with a contrived happy ending. Even by the low standards of the genre this was a shoddy, and tedious, piece of shit. I was bored. A very long 91 minutes.

December

Snake & Crane: Arts of Shaolin ( 1978 ) - Jackie Chan hits people a lot for 96 minutes. Occasionally one of them gets to hit him back. I have no idea why.
Ella Enchanted (2004) - A teen / kids film that pitches its tent right in The Princess Bride, Shrek territory and doesn't do a bad job. A Friday Night Pizza Film Club that I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting.
Orlando (1992) - For the umpteenth time (it's a ravishingly beautiful piece of work in every department) but on the big(ish) screen for the first time. And I was struck by just how funny the film is; I laughed several times.
The Shadow (1994) - another failed attempt to create a movie franchise based on an existing character. The Shadow is a masked vigilante striking fear into the hearts on villains with his almost supernatural powers, and has been credited with being the model for many pulp heroes since. (Batman bears more than a passing resemblance.) He's been fighting crime on and off since 1930 in endless pulps, novels, comics, and on radio (as played by Orson Welles no less) and the character has appeared in previous films in 1937, 1938, and 1940. There is now a big budget remake on the cards with Sam Raimi 'at the helm' (as they say in the funny papers). The 1994 film looks great, the faux 30s design elements are great, but it does suffer from a plodding script and is, sadly, just very dull.
Star Pilot (1977)- an American dubbed version of the 1966 Italian film 2+5: Missione Hydra. Somewhere between 1966 when it was made, and 1977 when it was released in America as part of the Star Wars feeding frenzy 2+5: Missione Hydra accumulated footage from at least three other films. The American distributors edited in footage from Doomsday Machine (which was originally shot in 1967 - after the release of 2+5: Missione Hydra - and which in turn contained footage from an earlier, 1962, Japanese film Yôsei Gorasu). I don't know what was cut out to make room. The original has got to be more coherent than this version which was crammed with more trash SF clichés than average with apparently no attempt to join them together in any way. Knowing he was stuffed from the get go, the director hit upon a stunning device of distracting the audience from the plot deficiencies by dressing the insanely yummy heroine in a variety of costumes that cunningly alternated between LOOK AT MY TITS! and LOOK AT MY ARSE! subtlety. Even when she wasn't wandering around in nothing but a small piece of net with some feathers sewn on the crotch she had obviously been instructed to flirt with the camera as much as possible. Every time there's a scene of earnest clunking dialogue going on, she just walks in, waves her arse at the camera bounces up and down, and does just about everything she can to get the audience to look at her perky titties - bar holding up a hand-written sign saying 'TITS'! She can't even get a coffee cup in the background without doing an arabesque in 'Look at my Bum' pants:

She's upstaging us again, isn't she?

Oh to hell with it, long time since I posted any pics of Astro-crumpet. Some more screen caps of the little minx I think.

Here she is running back into a building during
an earthquake just to show us her knickers

Overhead shot of weightless writhing
- two years before Barbarella.

Oh no! They forgot to restore
her 'artificial weight'...

What the average girl, kidnapped by aliens,
and about to be attacked by men
in gorilla suits wears of an evening.

And this is what she looks like from the neck up.

I may well watch this one again - just to see if I can make any sense of it. I do know, however, that if I ever get to direct a film it is going to have a sequence in which a woman is dropped onto a trampoline in slow motion. As attempts to simulate weightlessness goes it wasn't bad. As attempts to show us the heroine's knickers go it was pretty desperate. Looked like fun though.
White Castle (1990) - She's 43 and a waitress in a burger joint; he's 27, a Jewish yuppie still in love with his dead wife. Join the dots. I defy anyone not to laugh at the climactic, emotionally charged pivotal moment when our yuppie hero finally realises he's lost the love of his life. At a party set up to get him together with a 'suitable', ie yuppie, wife, he takes her hand-held vacuum cleaner of the kitchen wall opens it, peers inside and wails, "There's no dust in her Dustbuster!" I nearly pissed myself with laughter.
Girl 6 - 1996. The first time I've seen a Spike Lee film since Malcom X back when it came out. I have no real reason for never having looked at any of his other films, I just haven't ever got round to seeing any. Girl 6 ended up on my screen tonight as part of the game I'm playing at the moment. Over in the corner of my living room is a huge cardboard box full of VHS tapes with no cases. I have no idea what's in the box. I choose one at random without looking at it and if I'm careful where I look as I put it in the machine, and FF past the black and white identification thingy that appears on-screen for a few seconds right at the start of the tape, I have no idea what I'm watching until the titles come up. It's fun.
The Club (1994) - one of those straight to video horror films starring 'Who?', 'Who?', and 'Never heard of him.' The clock is approaching midnight at the Prom night dance which, for unexplained reasons, is being held at a large mock Gothic mansion. A dreary slow plodding opening suddenly takes a sharp left turn into Lynch lite weirdness as all but six of the guest mysteriously vanish followed by lots of running up and down the same few corridors as the camera man tries out a variety of wide angle lenses. After a while it all got very samey and repetitive and the initial 'This is weird', vibe gave way to a 'This is dull' vibe. In the end it wasn't quite an 'but it was all a dream' ending - but not by much.
Tank Girl - Violent stupid and almost fun.
L'atalante (1934) - the older I get the more I realise I just don't 'get' French films. Especially those deemed by those who know to be 'classics'. Over on IMDb L'atalante is variously lauded as the most beautiful, the most erotic, or the saddest film ever made. There's hardly a dissenting voice on the boards; it is a 'masterpiece'. Maybe it is and maybe it's just me being thick but what I saw was a scrappy, almost amateurish film with the occasional nice shot but which jumped about from scene to scene with very little unifying style, some very dodgy transitions, a very very thin story with huge narrative jumps in it, annoyingly selfish characters, and some underwhelmingly unfunny 'comic interludes' (what the hell was all that nonsense in the dance hall with the singing peddler all about?). Maybe I'm just a pleb with plebby tastes but it just looked like minor league, of its time, best forgotten, so-what? (The cynic in me also wonders if the director hadn't been dying romantically young from TB during the shoot whether it would be remembered at all.)
The Corpse Bride (2005) - Daughter number one stretches her Pre-teen Disney-Noir Goth muscles and chooses this as her Friday Night Pizza and Film Night choice because: 'it's by the same people who made Coraline,' and 'it's stop motion animation not computer'.
Rush Hour ( 1998 ) - First time viewing, random Lucky-dip film of the night. Isn't Chris Tucker annoying? I mean annoying? I'd only ever seen him in The Fifth Element before, he was annoying in that but I assumed that that was the part. It wasn't; it was the persona. I doubt if I'll watch the sequels.
Metroland (1997) - I liked this. I really liked it. It 'spoke to me' as they say. Some nice acting and a great use of colour.
The Big Brass Ring (1999) - Political 'thriller'? based on an unfilmed script by Orson Welles.
Diva (1981) - un Film Policier which sort of convinced me that sometime I do 'get' French films but only, I suspect, if they have ludicrous moped chases through the Paris metro system and naked women in it. Why though does every French film seem to have to have at least one scene set in a woods at dawn? Total credibility stretching, coincidence-ridden, plot-hole ridden nonsense but done with great style.
Arlington Road (1999) - Pretty good.
Carry-on Spying (1964) - I was tired!
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) - there are only two reasons to watch this movie. They're pretty good reasons too.

2012-01-15T14:12:00.002Z

A new year. All sorts of stuff has happened since I last posted here. (New Year's resolutions about posting more often on my blog getting broken for one.) In lieu of anything interesting to report to the world, here's a list of every film I didn't manage to finish watching last year. Tomorrow I'll post the films I did manage to finish in November and December and then I'll be up to date and can think of following the kids around with a notebook in the hope that they will say something amusing or baffling.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Disaster Movie ( 2008 ) - dear Mother of God! this was awful. I lasted 20 minutes.

Brothers (2001) - and twenty minutes was all I lasted with this self-financed piece of bumdrizzle about lads on the pull in Greece. Just how bad is this movie? If I tell you it has more semi-naked and naked women in it than any other film I have seen this year and I STILL couldn't watch it, you may get some inclination of just how fucking crap this is.

Monster from Bikini Beach ( 2008 ) - a 95 minute 'comedy/horror' made for $10,000 dollars. A splatter homage to all those beach party monster films of the 60s - in living colour with more nudity, and gore, and I fell asleep. Dreadful. I can see why no one has bothered to reviewed it on IMDb. Usually cheapo drek like this can usually attract someone who was in it, or did the catering, to write something about how much fun they had making it. Not this one.

The Sasquatch Gang / The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang (depends whether you read the box or the opening credits 2006) I gave up after 15 minutes when I realised that the mumbling morons on screen were A. incomprehensible B. supposed to be funny C. not going to die violent and horrible deaths in the next two minutes.

Jambon Jambon (1992) even the prospect of Penelope Cruz appearing naked couldn't keep me interested in this haphazardly unfunny bore. I gave up after 30 minutes.

Mutant Chronicles (2008) - What a mess! I gave up after 30 minutes when the narrative structure had disintigrated to the point where the monk narrator (Ron Perlman hiding behind an Oirish accent) got fed up re-explaining the back story (and what had already happened on screen), stopped, and listed one by one the assembled team we didn't see him just recruit. One minute he's saying "I need twenty men and a fast ship," the next he's listing the crew recapping a sequence the director didn't shoot or cut. There was a lot of weird narrative dead ends in this and sundry bits of story flapping about looking for a home, so many in fact that I stopped the DVD at one point and looked it up on the IMDb convinced that what I was watching was a whole TV series hacked down to a 110 minute movie. It wasn't. It was supposed to be like this. What I was watching was a film based on a game. What the hell is John Malkovich doing shit like this for?

Battle in Heaven (2005) - piece of arty Mexican shit full of stupendously long shots in which nothing happened. Most of them were of nothing. Look! some traffic on the street. Look! some people walking. Look! some more people walking. Look! our 'hero', a bovine Mexican non-actor who stares at things that were off-screen a lot.
Occasionally the camera would hand-held pan from looking at his profile to follow his eyeline and we would see what he was looking at, the pan would then often continue past whatever he was looking at, come round in a full 360º and find HE HAD MOVED! Shit on a stick! The fat Mexican has moved! My willy sphincters could hardly contain my fucking water! After 45 minutes I started to watch it at FF X2. It didn't make any difference except I had to read what few subtitles there were a little bit faster. I turned off at the 50 minute mark. Imagine yourself being trapped in a cinema with the most obnoxiously pretentious 'I'm going to challenge and then redefine the whole diegesis in the narrative structuralism of cinematic language,' type arty wanker film student as he shows you seventeen hours of unedited rushes of rusty oil tanks by the side of a railway line. That would be preferable to watching this. It would be preferable because:

a. you wouldn't have to see overweight Mexicans fucking and
b. you could grab the director and force feed the little tosser with the endlessly spooling film till he exploded.

Bloodsuckers aka Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe (2005) - piece of shit Sci-Fi channel TV movie that must have looked so good on the back of the envelope it was written on. I really can just see how this show happened. The boss of The Sci-Fi channel walked into the the office one day and said "Firefly with Vampires! Here's a couple of million dollars. Come back Tuesday with a rough cut." It was dire. I mean unwatchably dire. The Sci-fi Channel's stuff is usually pretty stinky but this was just too far the other side of stinky, even for me. One of those shows that has a captain 'with a past' who is initially disliked by all the members of the renegade crew (who all have 'pasts' of their own to deal with) where everyone snarls and snipes at each other because it's the only way the writers can generate 'conflict'. The usual lazy TV bullshit.

Incubus (2006) - Six vaguely symmetrical young people, lost in the forest after a car crash and desperate to keep warm, break into a windowless building. The building is unmarked on any map but we know, from a pre-credit sequence, it has at least one axe-wielding crazy inside. I gave up at the point where the six vaguely symmetrical young people lost in the forest climb on the roof, kicked open the cover of a huge ventilation shaft and pulled out hitherto unmentioned ropes and abseiling gear which they had been carrying around in their rucksacks for no other reason that there had to be some way for the scriptwriters to get them into this building without them being able to leave. (The rope breaks.) Apparently this film is so bad it even bypassed the 'straight to DVD' route and went 'straight to download'. This was, according to the IMDb, 'The first direct-to-download film. The film premièred on t'internet and was released through AOL.'

Sci-Fighters (2004) Starring Don 'The Dragon' Wilson (I really should know better by now). Martial artists get stuck in a virtual reality game and have to kick things a lot to a pumping 80s style soundtrack. In the 80s this would have been crap. In 2004 it was well past its sell-by date, as were most of the Martial Artists on screen. I wouldn't like to say this to their faces (I value my nose too much) but they looked really slow and plodding (our hero is 50 and the heroine 47 - it shows). Some of the fight choreography just stank and the script and acting were laughable. I fell asleep.

Mimic (1997) I had hopes for this one. Based as it was on a short story by Donald A Wolheim, a writer and editor who knew his SF, and directed by Guillermo del Torro. I gave up after 50 minutes when I wandered off to the IMDb to find out just how long this boring, predictable there's 'something in the sewers' yawnfest was going to go on for. I didn't go back.

Invisible Mom - Another Fred Olen Ray film I couldn't be bothered with after the first ten minutes.

2011-12-12T18:46:00.004Z

Hello Blog, nice to see you are still here.

Today Holly emptied her school bag. She didn't want to do it but I asked her to. It was a mess in there. Needed sorting.

"Make two piles," I said. "One for stuff you want to keep, the other for stuff that's for the bin."
"Okay," she said and started taking things out of the bag. "I've been looking for that pencil!" A few minutes later she had an impressive pile on the keep heap and a smaller pile in the garbage.

She stopped taking things out and looked into the bag. She put her hand in and had a rummage.

"Okay," she said. "I think everything else in there can go in the compost..."

2011-11-02T23:37:00.002Z

Sorry, but after two or even three almost real posts it's time for: (Fanfare please...)

The relatively short list of every film I watched in October.

Beat (2000) - various progenitors of the 'beat movement' are imitated by various actors and the camera is pointed at them while they do so. I've never understood what made the the Beats so great; they've always come over to me like a bunch of self-obsessed pretentious druggy wankers but I guess their timing was right. I didn't come away from this film with my opinions changed or impressed in any way by the telling of the tale. Quite often you can see a film about characters you hate but still admire or enjoy the way the film is made. The music was nicely understated and whoever did the colour timing was good but other than that I was bored rigid.

Daybreakers (2009) - A futuristic vampire flick which does that good old SF trick of saying "What if...?" and then riffing on it. This "What if...?" must have been something along the lines of, "What if the vampires in Matheson's 'I am Legion' had won?".* So - we get a nocturnal world which is pretty much the same as the modern world only run by vampires - with an ever dwindling supply of humans to feed from. Market forces come into play. Human blood prices skyrocket - cue cardboard cutout evil corporation blood farmers. (In this case the corporation really is evil 'cos it's run by Sam Neill who, since he was the Antichrist in Damien III: The Final Conflict, can play on-screen evil with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back - and he's a fucking vampire. An evil vampire corporation run by someone with Antichrist luggage; You don't get any more evil than this.) Vampire society is falling to pieces. One man holds out a possible hope for the future. Human-loving vampire scientist Ethan Hawke (who, since he played Vincent Freeman in Gattica can play lone sympathetic outsiders in a futuristic evil corporation with with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back). Unfortunately his formula for synthetic blood makes (vampire) people's heads explode. He makes contact with the human underground, who sense his inner decency and together they discover a blinder of a plot twist out of the arse cure, and after the usual amount of gun play, exploding vampires, and evil corporate suit types being dismembered in lifts, the heroes ride off into the sunrise with a voice over that suddenly makes the whole thing look like a shoddy 80s TV movie of the week pilot. Which is a pity because there was some interesting "What iffery" going on in the background. Some of the follow on logic that comes from having a society of vampires was pretty well worked out and fun. Trouble is the story it was there to support wasn't good enough to justify the effort. A nice try though.

* ...oh poo, I just remembered. They did win, didn't they? (At least they did in the original book.)

America Brown (2004) - an interesting buy from the Poundshop this one. Sometimes they have real films in there. Films you've never heard of right enough, full of people who you don't recognise but sometimes there's a goody in all the crappy, no-budget horror schlock.

America Brown is a first (and so far only) feature from writer director Paul Black. It's a story of a young football player suffering a crisis of guilt and self-doubt who escapes Texas for a while to track down his childhood football hero (now a priest in New York). The story isn't complicated and the film is slow, takes its time, is never hurried but is never boring. I'm keeping hold of this one though for one superbly well-judged moment of nothing happening on the screen which I thought was wonderful. Towards the end of the film our hero is leaving New York. He says goodbye to the three friends he has made. And then descends the steps into the subway and out of our sight off screen. We see the three friends looking down after him. It holds on them looking. And holds. And holds. And then one says. "I wish I could do that." All the time we watch the friends we expect a cut. A cut to an angle from their POV (or near enough) of the boy leaving maybe stopping and turning, a final wave before he's gone? We don't get it. We wait but it doesn't happen. We wait just like the characters we're watching are waiting. He doesn't turn around. He just walks out of their sight. "I wish I could do that." It was a lovely bit of film making. Loved it. (And a nice counterpoint to the fact that when the two characters met they bumped into each other in the street and then both, taken with what they see, looked back at each other.)

I wonder why I have suddenly started talking about films in the first person plural? I've obviously been reading far too many books of film criticism recently. Laocoon!)

Thunderpants (2002) with the kids - and not for the first time. I love this film. A good old-fashioned family film about an 11 year old boy with uncontrollable flatulence. I really don't know why Disney didn't pick this one up because it's a real 'follow your heart' story. A young boy surmounts all the obstacles placed behind him to find his gift and achieve his dream - with fart jokes, (lots of fart jokes) it also has ludicrous opera singing scenes with the hero 'singing the high bits with my arse', a kid facing a firing squad, ritual humiliation, more fart jokes, and some crackingly knowing OTT performances by well kent faces - before climaxing in the launch of a shuttle rescue mission - powered by a tube stuck up our hero's bum.

I find it hilarious. (Not a word I use lightly.) And I can thoroughly recommend it to all. If nothing else for the great weird design elements which mash -up an odd, never-really-happened, British early sixties (where the only vehicles on the streets are Minis and everything is various shades of bottle green) and a high-tech modern setting with an international space station and space shuttles. It's the kind of visual cognitive dissonance that I like.

And it's got fart jokes.

The Illusionist (2006) - I enjoyed that. Not sure it holds up plot wise (were we really expected to believe that the straw stables in the royal hunting lodge was unchanged for the several months between the night of the incident and the discovery of the locket?) but a good watch.

The Matrix (1999). I first saw this when it first came out and I thought it was a pile of vastly overrated crap. Now, many years later and having watched many more much worse movies since, I thought it might be worth giving it another try.

I still think it's crap.

Actually the first few minutes are okay I like the movie up till the point where Maurice Fishbourne does the big reveal and explains what it's all about. The whole 'we are just batteries' bit just pushes a big red 'Oh Fuck Off!' button in my head. I persevered though and watched the eye candy but the bit that really made me laugh out loud was the moment when Carrie-Ann Moss' character brings our hero back from the dead with a kiss. Oh, come on! What!?!? Somehow we managed to get from a semi-decent looking, what is going on? SF distopia into a la-la Disney world where dead people are bought back from the dead with a whisper of love. I expected her to start singing and bluebirds to join in the chorus. This sort of thing is fine in fairy tales. Makes sense in fairy tales, part of the fairy tales rule book that is but in a 'science fiction ' film? Pants!.

Until!

I realized it did make sense! Think about it. For the first umpty-x years of his life in The Matrix Reeves' character was a computer programmer. He lives alone in a room with computers. He's a hacker. He's a nerd. A social misfit. Now, just at the moment he's popping his clogs, a female woman of the opposite sex finally comes on to him? This is it! He might get sex! "Fuck this being dead lark," he's thinking with the last firing neurons in his head, "I might get to do sex - with someone else in the room! I'm going back!"

The Matrix Reloaded (2003) - more of the same but with more slo-mo and Keanu Reeves wearing a cassock. And a real dubious morality which (for all the fanboy knicker-wetting about how deep and philosophical these films are) boils down to us being asked to root for religious fundamental terrorists as they kill vast numbers of innocent bystanders, blow up power stations, and similar delights.

Altered States (1980) - given that it is directed by one of my least favourite directors, Ken Russell whose arty 'boundary pushing' just comes over as cheap and puerile self-indulgent wank to me, and that it starred one of my least favourite Hollywood actors, the plank of wood incarnate William Hurt, I enjoyed this a lot more that I expected. I came to scoff but I came away slightly impressed. Partially I think because Russell's throw-everything-at-the-screen-at-once, wacky, let's offend the Christians imaginary is largely confined to sequences where it actually makes some sense (ie one character's subjective drug-induced hallucinations) and Hurt's character is the sort of repressed unemotional lump that perfectly suits his repressed, clenched acting style.

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) - Shot in 30 days in Yugoslavia. A 'comedy horror' which wastes its pretty good cast on one lame gag after another. The last half hour is just painful to watch. Gina Davis was fun for the few minutes she was on but everyone else was either going through the motions or hamming it up horribly. The script stank. Not even old reliable Jeffrey Jones could rescue this - and he made bits of Howard the Duck watchable.

They Wait (2007) - above average horror flick which, though serving up nothing particularly new, served it up more than competently and with a few genuine 'Made ya jump!' moments along the way. Sort of like Poltergeist with a Chinese slant. Ghosts, not gore to the front here with many of the special effects being done in camera and not with a truckload of CGI in post. I like stuff like that, moments where someone has thought through an on-screen gag to the point where it's all done with the actors and the camera; one character stepping to one side to reveal there's someone standing behind them - when you know there can't be anyone there because of what you just saw in the previous shot. That sort of thing. I like that sort of thing. I much prefer that sort of thing which is smart, and thought about, than all the 'body parts flying through the windows and incommoding the passers by' stuff. Don't need to see that. That's easy. Scare me witless with an attractive girl standing motionless on the pavement, staring fixedly at a doorway? that's clever.

Arsenic and Old Lace - An all-time favourite. I'll be saying "Bon voyage!" in a Peter Lorre voice every time I leave a room for weeks now.
Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) - a good way to commission BIG SCREEN Film and Pizza (but Occasionally Onigiri) family film night. As usual with kid's films I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting.

King Kong (1933) - just to test if the new digital projector does black and white and 3:4. It does. Great film. Total cobblers but great fun.

Art School Confidential (2006) - Damn. One of those films I really really wanted to like a lot more than I did. Being the son of an Art College lecturer, and often spending great chunks of my holidays in the art school studios as Dad worked on sculptures. And having then gone on to be an art student myself, I was really impressed by the feel and the art direction here. They got the ambience and the look just right. It was horribly, accurately, grotesque without having to exaggerate anything. Some great laugh out loud lines too:

Jerome:

How long have you been painting triangles?

Professor Sandiford:

I was one of the first.

and

Professor Sandiford:

Now Eno, why haven't you

been doing the assignments?

Eno:

Frankly, I find them constricting and

largely irrelevant. My work has nothing

to with form or light or colour, but

with questioning the nature of

aesthetic experience.

Professor Sandiford:

I'll buy that.

Being two of my favourites. And I have forgiven John Malkovich for doing the shit Mutant Chronicles which is the last thing I saw him in. But in the end the whole serial murder mystery bit just didn't work for me and felt tacked on to make it sell-able to a studio.

On the double-plus good side we get to see Sophia Myles naked, which, sad old fart that I am, I think would go a long way to rescue any movie. Am I getting old? because I was surprised to find that lines like "We used to bump cunts." are rated 15. When I was 15 I didn't know what a cunt was! let alone that a certain type of lady liked to bump theirs with other ladies. Nice to know some things have improved over the last 40 years.

House of the Black Death (aka Blood of the Man Beast, Blood of the Man Devil - 1965) - a wonderfully incoherent pile of poo which just makes no sense. At all. None. I had no idea for its entire 89 minute run time what was supposed to be going on. As far as I could make out it had something to do with Lon Chaney Jr trying to take over power from John Carradine by running a coven and summonsing up a demon to get his hands on some sort of magical book. Carradine's son turns into a werewolf. A visiting doctor has a sliver of the Holy Grail in a crucifix. The film also has large-breasted British 50s sex bomb Sabrina belly dancing in a graveyard FOR NO APPARENT REASON WHATSOEVER. (Other than the obvious, her previous screen credit was as 'Virginia' in Blue Murder at St. Trinian's. If I remember rightly all her character did was sit there filling a tight-jumper with which she then tried to knock over the camera). There were great jumps in the narrative where a central character locked in a room not only transforms into a werewolf off-screen but then dies between one shot and another without any reason being given. Another pair of characters return from somewhere unexplained having seen something that completely turns one of their world views upside-down. (We never find out what they saw.) A character who, while guiding two others, says: "I'm only allowed to take you this far!" before abandoning them - only to reappear at their destination and then offer to guide them somewhere (else?). (They might have got away with this drastic bit of machete editing if the character in question hadn't been the only person in the entire film wearing a very identifiable black and white spotted shirt.) Another fine mess from Jerry Warren, the man who bought you Teenage Zombies, The Incredible Petrified World, and The Wild World of Batwoman - all of which I have seen at least twice and all of which, deliriously awful films that they are, are vastly better than this. To be fair, he was bought in at the last minute to 'rescue' the film which had been made by someone else. But how bad does a film have to be before you bring in Jerry Warren to rescue it?

Caged Heat (1974) - Jonathan 'Silence of the Lambs' Demme's first feature and a delightfully weird little movie it is too. It sets up all the typical Women in Prison clichés and then ignores them (apart from extended shower scenes. This was a Corman production it was probably in Demme's contract that there had to be X number of tits on screen taking up Y number of minutes of running time - on reflection that's probably all there was in his contract. Give us ten minutes of tits and you can do what you want with the rest of it, so long as it's in colour and in focus.) So lots of tits. Sadistic guards, pervert doctor, dream sequences, sexually repressed governor, cartoon ultra-violence, lots of tits, a weird post-hippy revolutionary vibe, and a terrific score by John Cale complementing some very weird and fun sound design. Loved it. (And not just for the tits.)

Matrix Revolutions (2003) - well that's them watched. God I was bored. Actually it started off disappointingly by not opening with Laurence Fishburne saying: "Previously, in the Matrix..." followed by one of those little two minute rapidly edited highlights of the previous films to bring you up to speed. You see, the previous film, Matrix Rides Again, had ended on an semi-cliffhanger and, even though I only watched it a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea what was going on at the start of this one. Towards the end of number three however, I was so bored I suddenly realised I was checking my mail on my phone. I NEVER check my mail while I'm watching a film, 99.9¼ of the time, no matter how awful it is, I watch the film. I may occasionally fall asleep while watching a film. I don't want to fall asleep, I want enjoy the movie, but sometimes... duh... wha? oh crap I fell aslee... who's he...? ...end credits? wha...? I fell asleep again... Okay... time for bed, try this one again tomorrow.

If I just can't watch it, if it is so unbearable that even I can't stomach it, I turn it off. And even then I'm trying to work out why I'm not liking it enough to do that.

At some point during Matrix Revolutions I became so uninvolved with the film that I forgot I was watching it. It just faded from my mind and became part of the background. Once I'd realised what had happened I stopped the film and went back a couple of chapters and sat on my hands for the rest of it. I wonder now why I bothered.

(Incidentally if you type "ascii code page" into IMDb's search engine as I just accidentally did while trying to how to do the ¼ thing up there, the first hit it returns is All Nude Page 3 Models: Eve Vorley and Charmaine Sinclair (1997) (V) How? Why? What!?)

Megamind (2010) - Friday night family film of some brilliance.

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) - a total joy.

Dune (1984) The David Lynch one (and not for the first time so I have no excuse) which, in a weird and grudging way, I quite like for the first half its run time. The second half things just get absurdly crammed in as Lynch runs out of ways to get characters to tell each other what was going on and he just shoves several hundred pages of densely plotted book into three quarters of an hour of screen time and it gets farcical. Afterwards, in a fit of pure masochism, I watched great chunks of the TV edit from which Lynch had his name removed. I don't blame him. His edit was weird and flawed but strangely interesting in places. (Like most of his films, I suppose.) The TV edit is just cheap and tacky.

2011-10-30T00:46:00.003+01:00

I think I've finally worked out why Peppa Pig is so popular; I saw this in a bookshop today:

On further inspection it turned out to be a Bumper Activity Book. I had been almost worried for a second.

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of my Life

2011-10-25T01:36:00.004+01:00

Eben:
(Clutching a small plastic tool-case
full of small plastic tools.)

Me got toolcase.  I make something.

Me:

What are you going to make?

Eben:

Pancakes.

.

Drawers for Windows 3.11

2011-10-24T18:17:00.004+01:00

This afternoon I finished a job that has been hanging around for a year or so. The bottom drawer of Merriol's chest of drawers has now finally had all the veneer replaced and new cockbeading run round the edge. It's not perfect but she has been without the thing for a long time and has recently been dropping really heavy hints:

"I don't care what it looks like - I WANT IT BACK!"

After last week's week of solitude when Merriol and the kids went down to Sheffield and let me ~~watch rubbish horror films~~ get on with some of the jobs that needed doing round here, I have finally got a grip on the guddle that is my workshop and can start to turn the tide of half-finished projects that is constupating it.

One of them was the drawer.

Tonight Daisy helped me bring it upstairs and put it in place. It isn't heavy I just enjoyed the 'help'. We slid it into the space. It stuck. The front edge protruded about 50mm into the room. We slid it out and looked in the carcass. Nothing there. We slid it back into position and tried again. It stuck again with the same 50mm protruding.

"Now why the hell isn't that going in?" I asked.
"Well it hasn't been in for a long time," said Daisy helpfully. "Maybe it doesn't recognise it."

Spends far too much time on the computer does that child.

2011-10-21T22:17:00.006+01:00

I am a happy man.

Last month my mum and dad bought me a digital projector for my birthday. Last week I ceiling mounted the thing under the balcony in our stupidly tall living room. Today I found (in a skip at the local recycling centre) a projection screen big enough to make use of it.

It took me about five minutes, a small piece of gaffer tape, and a large brass washer to fix the problem which had presumably got it thrown away in the first place. A bit of sorting of plugs and cables in the dangerous cable place behind all the electronics stacked in the space under the stairs* and we all settled down for tonight's regular Friday Night Family Film (with pizza) looking up at a 1.5m wide image thrown at it over our heads from the ceiling mounted projector. It is as close a simulacrum of a real cinema as I'm ever going to achieve, unless my Premium Bonds come up, and I loved it.

Daisy showed people to their seats. Next week she's going to have a box with choc ices in it slung round her neck.

There's something very special to me about looking UP at a cinema screen. Most films these days are consumed at home or in steeply raked cinemas where, more often than not, you are looking down on the screen or at least you're at at eye-level with it. Which is a pity. There's something very magical about being forced to look up at the action. If you think about it, churches and other places of transcendental entertainment are always designed to make you look up. All those high arches, splendid ceilings, crucifixes mounted high up on the walls. You worship kneeling down and heaven and god are up above you. The priest mounts a pulpit before he speaks. 'Lift your eyes and look to the heavens' Isaiah 40:26. There's something about human brains that gets all mystical when it's tilted back for a long time. Or, if not mystical, then certainly suggestible. This is why the stars of Hollywood's golden era(s) were worshipped. The audience were assuming the body postures of supplicants and this influenced the way they perceived what happened in front of their eyes**.

And big screens are great too because you have to move your eyes. With a television, even a large one most of what is happening on screen can be seen at a glance. With a big screen you have to move your eyes to find out what is happening. On a really big screen you have to turn your whole head. In the days when Real Cinemas ruled the world and screens were the size of football pitches stood on their side, people could get serious neck injuries from keeping up with the action.

Okay, here's an example. Standard head-on shot of two people sat in the front of a car driving along. Suspend your disbelief and put aside your knowledge that they are in fact in a car that is being towed, and there is a film crew sat on the bonnet (possibly in a large black tent to stop refection in the windscreen). You're watching two people, in a car, having a conversation. The director doesn't cut away from this angle for a long time. On a TV this is a pretty boring shot. There's two people staring out at you, you stare back, they're talking. On a large screen you can't look at both of their faces at the same time. You have to choose. As the conversation goes on you turn your attention from one face to another, and you don't necessarily look at the person who is doing the talking. As in real life you want to see (if you are at all interested) what the other person is thinking about what he is being told. By doing this, by turning your head, choosing which face to look at, you become a participant in the film instead of a mere observer.

I like being in the movies.

*From top to bottom: Record deck, Sky box, Amp., CD player, Cassette deck, MiniDisc player, audio switching box, DVD player, VHS player, and a PS2. Unplugged at the moment but contributing to the guddle are a Betamax player, a Nintendo 64, and a Sega Dreamcast - there's also an unidentified silvery box lurking back there which may be another satellite decoder; I'm scared to look. Add the three extension cables that this lot hang off, and all the cables for the possibly defunct TV amplification/distribution scheme Len and I built into this house some years ago (theoretically we should be able to pipe anything going into the TV to all the rooms upstairs), and you can see why I only go back there after telling people where I'm going and how long I expect to be. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes tie a rope to one of the kids and send them in after me."

I really must make a schematic of it all one day.

Remembering what combination of knobs and switches you need to twiddle on the front can be a bit daunting too.

** I realise this argument falls flat on its arse as soon as you mention the word 'balcony' but I like it.

2011-09-12T00:46:00.010+01:00

Gods! this piece of shit graphics is annoying me. It's from eBay's current sign-in page. 'Look,' it's supposed to say. 'You can trust us. We've got a scary woman with muscley arms standing behind a hatch half way up a wall. Nothing can get past her. You're safe.'

That's what it's supposed to imply.

What it say to me is: 'Walk right in and help yourself.' Look at those doors. Just look at them. There's no way they are going to meet. Just look at them. Push them to and there'd be a two foot gap between them. And what are those keys for? The key on the right is in a keyhole that isn't attached to a lock of any kind. There is a lock on the other door - you can tell it's a lock because the bolt is out - though what the bolt is supposed to go into isn't apparent because there's no where for it to fit into on the other door - not that they meet anyway.

Once inside, assuming you can get past scary, but reassuring, folded arms woman (arms crossed, a classic 'guarded' posture but with a calmly confident smile) - maybe by waiting she goes for a pee, she can't stand there all day - you're into the hub of eBay's crack team of cyber crime fighters. CSI:eBay. Who seem to be happily standing around chatting, looking out of the window, and generally goofing off rather than pummelling account-jackers to bloody pulps with blunt instruments or water-boarding those idiots who pointlessly list shit that no one in their right minds is going to buy (because a there are 30,000 identical items, without any bids on, already listed at a lower price.) That's what I want the people in charge of making sure my account isn't ripped off by some Russian scammers to be doing. I want eBay to be patrolled by Judge Dredd and rabid Rotweillers, not some extras from the Ikea catalogue.

Rant over.

2011-09-09T01:19:00.007+01:00

I'm going to jump the gun here and give you a wee chunk of this month's movie list 20 days early: Over the past few days I've climbed off my Crap Italian SF Tits and Arse Zombie Horror Movie treadmill and watched some real films. With subtitles and proper acting. No zombies. No spaceships. People. (Okay, sometimes they're naked people but it's ART naked, not Tits and Arse naked; there's a difference.) Two nights ago:

Le Mépris (1963) - Jean-Luc Godard is another one. I mean he's another 'great' French film director I just don't get. In Le Mépris we get to watch Bridgette Bardot and Michel Piccoli walk about a lot, climb in and out of the bath and wander about some more as they spend 70 minutes trying to work out whether to go Jack Palance's villa in Capri (or not), eventually they decide to go then spend 20 minutes being unhappy when they get there, "Why do you hate me?" - and then one of them dies in an off-screen road accident.

Okay...

Because the copy I watched was a VHS on the BFI Connoisseur label (50p inc. postage on eBay) I slipped out the insert to read the extensive notes printed therein:

'Following the gleeful iconoclasm of his early features, Godard achieved maturity in a string of masterworks interrupted, post 1968, by a decade of Laocoon-like struggles with Marxism and cinematic deconstruction.'

Laocoon it turns out (I looked him up) was a Trojan priest who got smitten by the gods for fucking in church. First blinded, and then strangled by a snake. (And I hereby repent of the quickie I had in that baptist church in Cardiff all those years ago with a Swedish girl whose name I forget.)

As you may have gathered I had never come across this Laocoon feller before in my puff.

This Laocoon Feller mid-smite.

Arty T&A (and willies)

Tonight, in the bath reading the final entry in the Dilys Powell Film Reader (which has been my bathroom book for the past couple of months), I read:

'Suddenly, as I recall whole days spent with eyes trained on a Laocoön-complex of heaving pectoral muscles and shoulder blades...'

Spooky.

Or not. Maybe it's some sort of badge of honour for film critics to mention him. Maybe it's part of some elaborate arty in-joke. The Laocoön Complicity, isn't that a Robert Ludlum? Now that I've cracked it I expect Alexander Walker to turn up on my doorstep with a bucketful of money and the key to the Sight and Sound executive bathroom.

Or not.

2011-09-01T20:50:00.002+01:00

Just to get the tediousnocity out of the way for the month, it's my monthly record of eyeball abuse. This week with tits! and Brian Blessed! (I almost had you interested there.)

August

Dragonslayer (1981) - which for my sins I have never seen before. Daughter number one chose it for a family film night - she's got a thing about dragons at the moment and was reassured that, because it was a Disney film, 'it wouldn't be (too) scary'. That's that rule of thumb gone down the drain then. We were both snuggled together on the sofa but I don't know who was reassuring whom. A Disney film with nudity and where the feisty princess gets eaten! What a eye-opener. I loved it. Fucking brilliant dragon too, but Ralph Richardson as usual, and without breaking sweat, stole the show away from everyone. Damn, that man had great timing. (H)

The Elevator (1996) - A successful Hollywood writer/producer gets trapped in a lift and he has to endure hearing four semi-demented short scripts of a wanabee writer trapped in there with him. An incredibly long 92 minutes. Starring the writer, and the producer (who were, at the time, married) the shorts we get to 'enjoy' are dull predictable talking-head two handers with occasionally some very abrupt lurches into stagy theatre lighting thrown in. Currently not flying off the shelves in Poundlands everywhere.

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) - What an unholy mess of a film. To help the audience cope with the previously unsuspected fact that fictional Scottish icon Connor MacCleod 'The Highlander' (played by Frenchman Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish oppo Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (played by real life Scottish icon, Sean Connery) are in fact really aliens from the planet Zogfart the script has to have characters recap the story so far:

Heroine:
Okay, now let me just see if I can get this straight... You're mortal there but you're immortal here, until you kill all the guys who're from there who've come here... and then you're mortal here. Unless you go back there, or some more guys from there come here, in which case you become immortal here - again.

MacCleod:
Something like that.

When they got round to making Highlander 3 they pretended this one hadn't happened.

The Lawnmower Man (1992) - One of those films that has been on my radar for a while - ie it keeps turning up in car boot sales but I have never actually got round to buying it. It usually manifests itself on one of those Hollywood four films on two DVD disc sets along with three other films no one wants to watch. Today I found it in one of my local charity shop haunts where they give away VHS tapes, they're so unsaleable these days. So, finally, I get to watch The Lawnmower Man for free! - well, for the price of the electricity used to power the TV and VHS player (+ 35 or so p for the popcorn) - and as it was originally intended. On a big box, ex-rental VHS with 20 minutes of trailers for films no one wanted to watch (then or since) and adverts for the Commodore Amiga 600 home computer.

The Lawnmower Man (when I finally got to it after all the hard sell) turns out to be your usual Hollywood mashup on the Frankenstein theme. This time thrown into the mix are great chunks of classic heartbreaker SF story Flowers for Algernon and slabs of Tron, other randomly tossed in ingredients included the Evil Corporation (whose evil minions handily keep boxes of easy to operate, push button demolition charges in their standard evil henchmen black vans), a cute kid, an evil priest, and an hilariously inept set piece in which an abusive father is chased round his own home by a telepathically controlled killer lawnmower. As shite as it sounds. There was a sequel - for which I am now actively searching.

Sphere ( 1988 ) - Ditto radar, ditto car boot sales, same charity shop. Sphere is Solaris underwater with explosions, mutilations, death and oodles of dodgy make-it-up-as-we-go-along Hollywood 'science'.

The trailers were less interesting on this tape. Couldn't tell you what they were for but I do remember noticing that more of them were adverts for things than for other films. This VHS copy was released a few years later than The Lawnmower Man one and for sale rather than rental. I guess the marketing guys have it all worked out that repeat viewers are more likely to be sold Mars Bars than being reminded of the awfulness of Project Shadowchaser. One thing that hadn't changed though was that both tapes started with British Voice-over Man loudly booming, "Beware of Illegal Video Cassettes!" at me. Makes them sound dead scary and dangerous. Like little cuboid gremlins that'll slide out from underneath the furniture and bite your ankles*. I watch my films with all the lights off and a bag of popcorn to hand in as close an approximation to a cinema experience as I can manage in my own living room (I even change seats twice before I'm happy and yesterday outdid myself by spilling a fizzy drink so the floor ended up all sticky). Before I sit down to a film these days I've taken to looking behind the sofa in case there are illegal video cassettes lurking down there, waiting to attack me during 'a scary bit'. God, I wish the films I watched were more interesting.

* The film rights to this stupid idea are still available, talk to my agent.

Alien Resurrection (1997) - Another set of dittos. Loathed and castigated by many die hard Alien fans (there are some weird people in the world; they're MOVIES, you saddos!). This is the fourth in the series, and looked at in isolation (it's many years since I saw 1, 2, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen 3 all the way through), is not that bad a film for a 'Oh crap we're trapped in an enclosed environment with KILLER THINGIES and the only way out takes us via an infeasibly complex route' type film. Okay, it goes a bit tits up at the end but so do a lot of other films loved by cadres of devoted hardcore fans. There were some nice touches here, a few genuine scares, and a couple of laugh out loud moments - the best surely being the moment when Rod Perlman's character freaks out after an Alien attack and uses a HUGE gun to shoot a normal sized spider on its web.

The script is credited to Joss Whedon and I was struck by the similarities between the ragtag crew of opportunists and smugglers from 'The Betty' and the ragtag crew of smugglers and opportunists from Firefly, a series Whedon brought to the screen 5 years later.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) - I wanted to like this so much. It started well but I was fed up and irritable by the end of it. So much so that I was in full on nitpicking mode. For example, when Edmund gets mortally wounded near the end, and then gets dosed with Susan's 'Get Out Of Jail' magic 'One Drop Will Cure Anything' juice that Father Christmas gave her - he recovers. One second Argh Ugh Snotty little twerp dying from having a sword thrust into his belly, the next, sitting up big hugs loves and kissy kissy. By Jingo that's some good stuff!. Why didn't it immediately heal the split lip the make-up department had been diligently keeping continuity with on his bottom lip? You can see I was really involved with the action can't you? And was the wicked Jadis's chariot pulled by polar bears as some kind of dig by the overtly Christian producers at well known atheist Philip Pullman's polar bear-like panserbjørne? The kids, needless to say, LOVED it. (L)

Cosmos War of the Planets (1977) Prompted by a post on another forum I rewatched this - and so can you! It's available free via http://www.archive.org/details/Cosmo...of_the_Planets. I thoroughly recommend it to all. It is a very unintentionally funny and very surreal film. I defies all known conventions of film logic (even Italian ones). For most of it's running time it Just. Makes. No. Sense. I imagine it would be even surrealier* and funnier stoned but even dead cold sober (9 years and counting) it's still laugh out loud stupid. And contains moments of SF genius that will live with you for years - no matter how hard you try to forget them. I especially recommend the 'sex' scene at the 23 minute mark. Now THAT's foreplay.

AND it has well-endowed Astro-crumpet to try and distract.
from the plot deficiencies. What more could a man ask for?

* there is now.

Ghostwatcher (2002) - Zero budget, underachieving 'horror' that almost had a couple of nice moments but was so plodding tedious that I ended up watching the last third with my thumb on the FF button of my remote. Another £1 wasted at Poundland. Laughing all the way to the bank those buggers.

Space Cowboys (2000) - I loved it. A real joy of a film - right until the moment they actually got into space and it suddenly went from being a gentle, amusing, and well presented tale about friendship and regret, redemption and ambition finally being achieved - and turned into Moonraker...

Holy crap what just happened?

It was like the last reel was from a different film, like The Dish suddenly turning into Mad Max for the last twenty minutes, or Gregory's Girl turning into Highlander II. The only saving grace was that it looked like nobody involved - apart from the special effects guys - gave a fart about this bolted on, 'we got to do this shit to sell it to the studios', 'action' sequence and it is an utter shambles.

Tropic Thunder ( 2008 ) - Started off funnily enough but by the end had descended into a slice of the usual America wish-fulfilment crap in which any bunch of American Male amateurs, no matter how stupid, armed with with automatic weapons - even loaded with blank ammunition - can beat the crap out of any army of non-Americans with automatic weapons, no mater how well-trained, profession, or desperate they are. The only thing that really kept me watching till the end was Robert Downey Jr.'s show-stealing turn as the Australian actor who 'blacked up' for his role and always stayed in character until he'd recorded the DVD commentary.

Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) - Some really shoddy science (simultaneous nuclear bomb tests knock the world out of orbit and towards the sun) but some great film making. A smart script that has our protagonists acting like real people in the face of possible catastrophic end of the world. They carry on doing their jobs and hope for the best. Nothing they can do, no false heroics, no Hollywood bullshit and even after studio interference the film has a wonderfully unresolved ending. (The world is basically fucked - or it isn't. We don't find out.)

I'd never seen it with the coloured bookend sections before, they were a nice surprise. The opening is tinted a hot bright orange and the film is told in a nice cool black and white flashback. And I don't remember it being so damn sweatily sexy either:

Curiously she didn't ever work for Disney again after this... )

Apparently I have been remembering a slightly less fleshy, American version in which the same scenes were played out with Janet Munro showing less boobage. We used to make damn fine films in this country.

The Bruce (1996) - and we also made some right old shit too. Starring Brian Blessed, Oliver Reed, and 'Wolf' from the Gladiators*...

...The Bruce, tells the story of Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick, as he unites the 13th Century Scots in a rebellion against the hated English, led by Edward I - not to be confused with the film Braveheart (which came out the year before) in which William Wallace, a commoner, unites the 13th Century Scots in their battle to overthrow English rule. Not that anyone would confuse the two. For starters Braveheart had a budget that extended beyond getting the local battle re-enactment societies to amble past the camera in their Sunday best and unenthusiastically cheer from time to time. I presume they could also afford some professionals. It must be hard trying to recreate the Battle of Bannockburn with a hundred amateurs and the one stunt man mentioned in the credits. Dreadful music too. It just maundered around trying to be endlessly stirring and ended up underlining the deficiencies in the direction and a script which flopped all over the place and pissed away all the hard work put in by the actors. One particularly dreadful moment came when Robert the Bruce encounters the treacherous Comyn in church. Comyn points out they cannot fight on hallowed ground, this sentiment, expressed by one Hairy Scot Wig (tm) bewigged actor to another can only mean one thing to a true red-blooded Scot (or bad movie fan)... HIGHLANDER! As the entire audience cry; "There can only be one!" the two have a badly arranged fight and Comyn is killed, but, sadly, not beheaded in an orgy of special effects. The Bruce flees and the body is discovered. "Murder! ... Sacrilege!" the discoverer cries. And continues to cry, over and over again, "Murder! ... Sacrilege! Sacrilege! ... Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as the directors leisurely pans down the victim's outstretched arm to eventually arrive at The Bruce's cross clutched in his hand. I guess the intention was to have this damning piece of evidence used later in the film to prove The Bruce as the killer - except it isn't. It's never mentioned again. Either the sequence it was placed there for was edited out, never shot, or, more likely than not, never scripted. So why have the extended shot in there at all? And why have the off-camera voice of the poor sod actor endlessly shouting "Murder! ... Sacrilege! ... Sacrilege! Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as it played? Well, there had to be something on the soundtrack I suppose but it's really down to bad editing and shitty direction. Add, rubbish lighting, minimal set dressing (everyone in the 13th Century lived in huge castles with no furniture, or small hovels with no crops in the surrounding fields), occasional adequate acting (did I mention Brian Blessed was in it?), and you have a seriously dull film on your hands.

*The trailer for production company Crowell Pictures' previous film, Chasing the Deer, contained the immortal line "...and introducing fish..." which sent my mind off in 34 different directions (including a hilarious 'Haddock meet Cod, Cod, Haddock' routine) before I was vastly disappointed to realise they meant Fish, the singer from Genesis-lite prog rockers Marrilion, making his feature film début.

Toy Story (1985?) - Eben, aged 2, gets to chose this week's Weekly Family Pizza Night film. He likes Buzz.

American Scary (2006) - A slight, cheaply made, documentary - ie lots of talking heads sat in front of wrinkled fabric draped across the background - giving a whistlestop history of the TV Horror Movie Host. A peculiar minor art in which people dress up in Halloween costumes and and introduce crappy films on local TV stations late at night. No Cassandra Peterson (Vampira) boo! but they managed to get Maila Nurmi (Vampira), and Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman) to talk to them. What could have been an interesting little project was spoiled by obvious TV slot editing and some dreadful music. As a way of gluing the rapid machine gun cutting of talking heads together someone had the bright idea of running music underneath everything like musak in a lift. It got very irritating.

Zombie Strippers ( 2008 ) - There were actually a couple of nice gags buried in this piece of shit. Small ones. Not worth digging for. Why do American males in films turn into howler monkeys at the sight of a pair of plastic tits? I spent half the film bemusedly fascinated by the rigid immobility of Jenna Jameson's boobs. I wasn't punching the air with mock hysteria like the extras in the club, I was trying to work out what they were. They were fascinating, looked like like pink soup bowls stuck on the front of her chest - with nipples on top.

The IMDB tells me that the film came in under budget, by which I can only assume the director didn't have a second cup of coffee.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Well that was an amiable bit of fun.

2011-09-01T20:36:00.003+01:00

Dear Blog. It's been months since I bored the world with an Every Book I have read list. In fact I don't seem to have done it at all this year. So here goes:

January

The Dancers of Noyo - Margaret St.Clair. 'How long would men dance beneath the whips of the androids?' Dull 1973 SF novel in which our heroes get captured and escaped with relentless monotony (sometimes between chapters) and a lot of unexplained spooky action at a distance stuff goes on, groovy cover though.
The City Dwellers - Charles Platt (1970) A collection of linked short stories, snaphots from a loose future history that charts the decline of the human population which clings stubbornly to a decaying city. Reminded me that I haven't read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles for a few years. I like books that are collections of short stories that form a larger narrative. Keith Roberts Pavane is very good example. The City Dwellers is a pale shadow of both those books.
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling Bedtime reading with the girls.
Projections 10 - ed. Mike Figgis
The Food of the Gods - HG Wells. 40 odd years since I read this. I must have been a tenacious reader as a kid or skipped a lot. I don't remember it being anything like a preachy as it is. People sermonise at each other at great length.
Diary of a Nobody - G & W Grossmith

February

Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon. Rollicking old-fashioned historical adventure yarn full of hairsbreadth escapes and convenient coincidences which only stopped me dead in its tracks once. The word 'teamster' seemed wildly out of place in the world of the Byzantine Empire.
The Syndic - C M Kornbluth. A 1953 SF novel set in a future where the Syndicate and the Mob rule. Surprisingly funny.
The Priests of PSI - Frank Herbert. More proof, if proof be needed, that had he not written Dune, Herbert would be long forgotten by now.
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem. I have meant to read this for a long long time. The 1972 film version has been a favourite of mine since I first saw it in the mid 70s. After repeated watchings I'm still no clearer what it's all about. Reading the book hasn't really helped me to a deeper understanding of it. The film is much more layered and mysterious, with the book (which in parts I found ponderously dull) acting as a central core from which much more interesting ideas and images have been spun.
Vortex: New Soviet SF - Ed. C G Bearne. More Soviet era SF. Short stories this time, a couple of them interesting, A couple just dull and a couple of them so hackneyed they wouldn't have been out place in a copy of Tales to Astonish:
Run to the Stars - Michael Scott Rohan. Modern(ish) but 'good old-fashioned', 'only one man can save the Earth', crash and bash SF. (Except that, in the end, he doesn't manage it and the implication is that he also fails to stop a planet full of aliens getting destroyed too.)

March

Toyman- E C Tubb. The third (of the 33) adventures of lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest as he wanders the galaxy looking for his lost home planet, Earth. I read several of these as a kid and remember them as not being that interesting. I was right. Page turning pulp from an author credited with writing over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, many of which I must have read but none that I can bring to mind. Curiously, re-reading Toyman 35 or so years after I first read it bought back none of the memories of time or place that re-reading half remembered books often invoke. Utterly forgettable - I probably didn't even notice I was reading it.
Tales of Wonder - H G Wells. Not quite as wonderful as they probably once were but interesting as precursors of modern SF. One story 'The Star' is an interesting precursor of Wells' own War of the Worlds.
Mission to the Stars - A E Van Vogt. More weirdness from Van Vogt - though not as weird and badly written as his later stuff. Starts out as a rip roaring full blown space opera (one spaceship has a crew of 30,000!) and ends as a cheesy romance. The odd shape of the book may be due to the fact it is a 'fix-up' of previously published stories.

Into the Labyrinth - Francoise Mallet-Joris. 'A tender and Brutal Story of Forbidden Love' no less.

A French teenager is seduced by her father's mistress and swans around wallowing in self-inflicted teenage misery for 150 pages before deciding to stop.

I adored her for saying that. She was holding in her lap a long sheaf of flowers and she looked, in her yellow blouse, like a dazzling idol a Mexican or Incan godess in a temple lost in the jungle full of precious stones and serpents. And on my shoulder she laid her hand, that brown, hard, lined hand of a haymaker, not at all the hand of a sexual pervert but rather a hand made to lie on the neck of a horse or the hip of a woman, with its fingers a little too flat, a little too supple, evoking the hands of Chinese torturers.

The author was only 19.

Veruchia - E C Tubb. More instantly forgettable adventure (5 of 33) with lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest. This time the book contained a fantastic amount of blank paper. Most publishers seem to like to start chapters on the recto (right hand) page so if a chapter ends somewhere on a right hand page it will be immediately followed by a blank verso (left hand) page. Here chapters are headed by a chapter number that takes up a whole page. The numbers aren't very big and are surrounded by a lot of white paper (well yellowish and slightly foxed paper, this book is 40 years old), this is followed by a blank verso page and the text of the next chapter starts about a third the way down the following recto. This book is 191 pages long. By the time you have taken away all the blurbs, printing history, 'other books by this author', title page, and advertising at the back, you are left with 181 pages. 18 pages of that (10%) are totally blank apart from the chapter numbers (that's whole pages, I haven't included all the bits, the blanks thirds at the start of every chapter and the half empty pages at their ends which must add up to another four or five pages in total). No wonder it didn't take long to read.

April

Of Time and Stars - Arthur C Clarke. More quaint, old-time SF shorts.
Kaleidoscope Century - John Barnes.
Raven 2: A Time of Ghosts - Richard Kirk the pen name for Robert Holdstock who was writing with his tongue firmly stuck in his cheek. Well, I hope he was taking the piss; it made me laugh so much.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney. A crackingly well paced little chiller which copped out at the end - the films' endings are a vast improvement.
Sea-horse in the Sky - Edmund Cooper. Read in one sitting, in one eyeball out the other, 'so what' SF.
The World Grabbers - Paul W Fairman. Mercifully short novel of indeterminate genre in which our hero goes from one pointless circular conversation to another without learning anything about his nemesis or why a mysterious group of mystics won't stop him from taking over the world. Right at the end of the book the mysterious group of mystics do decide to stop him taking over the world for no apparent reason (other than the author had hit his contracted number of words) and the book just stops. Groovy cover though..

by Jim Barker, on Flickr
Earth Abides - George R Stewart. Early (1949) post-apocalyptic SF.
A Rage in Harlem - Chester Himes

Another book bought for 25p just because I liked the cover. What a discovery. It's great. I'm on the lookout for more Himes.
Duel - Ed. William Patrick, a collection of "Horror stories of the road" that varied from ancient and creaky stories that just didn't bear resurrecting to a couple of interesting, more modern pieces. The best is the title story by Richard Matheson.
Charisma - Michael Coney. Mid 70s British SF novel which swithers between being a traditional crime novel (who did murder the obnoxious hotel owner businessman Mellors?) and a parallel world love story. The only people who can travel to a parallel world have to be dead in the world they are going to; if the person in the destination world was still alive and the two met they would cancel each other out and vanish. The hero loves a girl who is dead in this world and conversely he is dead in hers. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing between worlds as the hero becomes the main suspect in the murder case (probably because he did it - or rather his doppelgänger from another world did.) Lots of the same characters dying in different ways and it's all getting wonderfully confusing and mind-boggling before it all gets resolved in a cop-out ending that appears from nowhere. (But with a final twistette to sweeten the disappointment.) Christopher Nolan should make a film version.

May

Wildeblood's Empire - Brian M Stableford. Innocuous mid 70s SF.

The Anarchistic Colossus - A E van Vogt. Late, and therefore almost incoherent, van Vogt. Van Vogt is one of those rare writers who actually seemed to get worse over the years. SF writer and critic Damon Knight said that

van Vogt "is no giant; he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter." Knight described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published." About van Vogt's writing in general, Knight said:

In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real.

Wikipedia

And though I agree with just about every word of that I find his books compulsive reading. They are so odd I just can't put them down and while his contemporaries from the Golden Age went on to write longer and longer more complex tomes (I'm thinking particularly of Robert Heinlein's later doorstops of novels) van Vogt continued write fairly short books. This one clocks in at 176 pages and I had no idea what was going on for most of them.

The Wages of Fear - Georges Arnaud. Another book picked up because I liked the groovy cover - then remembered the film was pretty terrific.

The book is pretty good too. From time to time it looks like it's suffering from translator trouble and it takes a long time to get to the meat of the story but when we get there the almost suicidal attempt to drive two trucks loaded with Nitroglycerine along a rough and unmade South American road is gripping stuff.
Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905) - Edwin Lester Arnold. Limp 'I go to Mars by some magical means (flying carpet!?) and almost have some incredible coincidence-laden adventures, including rescuing and falling in love with a Martian princess, before being mysteriously returned to Earth'. Six years later Edgar Rice Burroughs used almost exactly the same storyline in his A Princess of Mars, Burroughs made his hero more vigorous and proactive, made the coincidences even more outrageous, and cleaned up. Princess of Mars still sells by the shitloads and is getting a film adaptation as we speak, Gullivar Jones is an obscure bit of SF that is almost totally forgotten; though the character Gullivar Jones does geekily turn up from time to time in more modern works. He is the first character to appear (magic carpet and all) in Vol 2 of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adventures.
Simon Rack: Earth Lies Dreaming - Laurence James. The first book by the incredibly prolific Laurence James (he wrote at least 150 books under various pseudonyms). The first of a short lived series, five books were published, featuring an interstellar James Bond type and his pun prone sidekick. All sex and violence. Being published in the seventies the violence is bone-crunching, eyeball-poppingly graphic and, being British, the sex never quite happens on the page. It's total shite.
The Monitors - Keith Laumer. Funny (in places)1960's SF.

June

The Undercover Aliens - AE van Vogt aka The House That Stood Still which is my second favourite pointless book title. (The first is The Man With Only One Head). More bewilderingly plotted nonsense from a master of the genre. This time the bewilderingly plotted nonsense concerns a bunch of immortal Aztec cultists and their radioactive marble house and one of their number's overly complex shenanigans to destroy the others and take over the world. When I tell you that the plot involves secret tunnels (as does every other van Vogt book I have read. I suspect he wrote secret passages into his spaceships when he could), immortal Aztecs pretending to be Martians and destroying nuclear bomb factories in hostile countries, secret spaceships that launched from (and returned to - without anyone noticing) downtown office blocks, lifelike masks which could be applied in seconds and make the wearer indistinguishable from whoever they were modelled upon, a three thousand year old mind-reading alien robot, a private investigator, phials of three thousand year old plus transuranic elements 'unknown on Earth', and a hero who manages to fall in love with the daughter of an ancient Roman official in Britain (shipwrecked in California (sic) on her way home to Rome) - and get slugged unconscious several times during the course of the 172 pages, you will have some idea of why, even having just finished the damn thing, I have no idea who did what to whom or why in the end. Imagine Enid Blyton deciding to write an SF novel while on acid. That's the flavour.
Screen Burn - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. I have no idea who half the people he was talking about were but his spleen is so well vented I don't think I missed much. Most wannabee celebulites are pretty interchangeable anyway (from what I gather from my brief glances at the covers of Hello!, Chat! Take a Break! and Twat! and the other celeb mags up on display at the checkouts in Morrisons - in true Charlie Brooker style I just made that last one up though, to continue in Brooker mode, it would make make a great magazine - Celebs naked from the waist down. I'd buy it.) More!
The Status Civilization - Robert Sheckley.
Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. Again.
The Saint Closes the Case - Leslie Charteris. I've never read a Saint book before which I thought was an oversight. I doubt if I will read another.

July

Body Politic - Paul Johnston. A serial killer novel set in an ill thought out Orwellian future. Another of those books set in a hypothesised future written by someone who don't like (or understand) SF. The author even disclaims any SFness on his webpage, "the novels are not sci-fi" he says. Which raises the question why bother coming up with a (not very) complex society different from our own in which to set the story? Sorry, kiddo, you do that and you've stuck a bloody big SF label on yourself no matter how hard you deny it's there and, unfortunately for you, it's going to get measured, judged, whatever by the rules of that particular genre. As a crime novel, I've read worse, as an SF novel, it's shit.
Adam, One Afternoon - Italio Calvino.
Wetworld - Mark Michalowski. A dire Dr Who novel only because daughter number one had just read it and I wanted to see what she what she was enjoying - she's young.
I am Legend - Richard Matheson. First time I had ever read it. Another Must read classic of the genre ticked off. Not bad.
The Underground Man - Ross MacDonald (a Lew Archer Mystery). Dreadfully dull. I will not be going back for more.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson. Many years since I read this. I had forgotten how funny it was.
Michael Tolliver Lives - Armistead Maupin. Many years since I read the Tales in the City books (end to end, in one go) and this was a wistfully sad little coda.
Foundation - Isaac Asimov. Another of those Great Novels of SF which, when you actually look at them objectively don't look that good all these years later. In this one we get to see the fall and rise of Galactic Empires via the medium of people in offices describing the political situation to each other in one to one meetings.
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre. One of those books which I am going to lend to people and loose.

August

The Eye in the Pyramid - Robert Shea and Anton Wilson. The first of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Not as weirdly compelling as when I read it back in the early 80s. But I was stoned half the time back then.

The Survivalist No. 6: The Savage Horde - Jerry Ahern. Jesus, Mary and all the Saints! This has to be THE single most fuckingly awful book I have ever read. 59 chapters spread over 208 pages (that's 3.5 pages per chapter - though some are actually less than a page long) of porny gun-wanking in which our 'hero', John Thomas Rourke, shoots people. Lots of people. He must kill at least hundred people in this book. He doesn't ask many questions before shooting them either, but it's all right really, this is Post Apoc America and the people he kills with relentless and boring frequency are all 'brigands' or 'wildmen', hairy ill-shaven (and therefore amoral) targets for clean shaven and God fearing him to gun down page after page after page after page.

“He already had the target-a man about six-foot four, unshaven, his black leather jacket mud-stained, a riot shotgun in his hands, the pump tromboning* as the twelve-gauge, roughly .70 caliber muzzle swung on line.”

To break the monotony reading about John Thomas shooting people in the head page after page we are often treated to fetishistic descriptions of guns being reloaded; the hero's weaponry: a pair of chromed Detonics Combat Master .45 pistols in Alessi shoulder holsters, Colt Python and Colt Lawman revolvers, an A.G. Russell Sting 1A knife, and a shoulder sling with a CAR-15 assault rifle; and, occasionally, a parallel story in which John Thomas' wife shoots hairy amoral, would be rapists in the head with either an M-16 assault rifle or .45 automatic - even their 8 year old son gets in the act and shoots the occasional hairy ill-shaven biker in the head - though he has to make do with an antique lever action .30-30 Winchester rifle. There are twenty-nine books in the series. Four books after this one (according to Wikipedia) the united Rourke family get themselves cryonically frozen and wake up 500 years later - by which time the human race will have presumably bred enough targets for them to bother getting up again.

*'Tromboning' is, apparently, a genuine shooting term and nothing to do with the male gay sexual act of the same name.

The Disaster Zone - J G Ballard.
Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex - Mary Roach. Mildly entertaining, but sometimes irritatingly smug, book about the science of sex. Very reassuring too, every time I read about another interestingly horrible sexual dysfunction it was like ticking off another 'No' box in some extensive medical check-list in my head. I came out the other end of the book reassured by my (relative) sexual non weirdness, but above all glad I don't spend my days doing any of this research for a living - or even masturbating pigs to orgasm to increase their fertility, as employees on Danish farms are encouraged to do (there is an illustration showing how to do this). Not one to read anywhere near kids who are likely to over your shoulder and ask, "What's that man doing?"

Star Trek vs Doctor Who

2011-08-30T00:08:00.005+01:00

Come back!this isn't one of those nerdy 'Could the TARDIS beat the Enterprise in a fistfight?' bits of fanfic. (Apart from anything else the answer too is bloody obvious to even bother asking the question.) No, this is a moment of blinding revelation about the nature of Life, the Universe and episodic television. (Apart from the Life and Universe bits.)

Last night, via the medium of the BBC iPlayer, Holly and I finally got to watch Let's Kill Hitler, the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. I love watching Dr Who with Holly. It's one of 'Our Things', a shared private bit of intergenerational fun. I loved Doctor Who as a kid and it's nice to be sharing the show with my children.

Halfway through last night's episode I remembered something that used to puzzle me. Not about Doctor Who but about Star Trek.

Star Trek first aired in 1966, three years after Doctor Who first hit the screen, and in its later revivals featured a strong theme of father/son relationships: Worf and Alexander, Pickard and Crusher Jr.* (and others eg), Benjamin and Jake Cisco, Data and his creator, and so on. ( In this one of the endless number of novels based on the series, even Spock discovers he has a son!)**. As I said, this strange emphasis used to puzzle me until I realized (long before I started doing the same thing with my own children) that Star Trek was one of the few shows that would be watched across the generations: by those who remembered the originals, and their children coming to it for the first time. (I guess that's why they called the first revival of the show Star Trek: The New Generation - I can be so slow on the uptake sometimes.) To capitalize on this Unique Selling Point the producers presented their loyal viewers with endless variations on the problems of male parent / child bonding. which usually ended with manly pats on the back and sometimes a hug. "I love you, son." " I love you too, dad." And at home on the sofa, father and son couch potatoes too would put aside their differences and America would be just that little bit better.

Last night I spotted that the BBC had realised they too had the same kind of cross generational demographic appeal and their show too was being watched by men and their kids. I say men because I don't remember girls being that interested in Doctor Who when I was kid. It may have changed with later reincarnations but in my day girls were far from interested. I doubt the women they grew into would be nostalgic for the real stuff. (Tom Baker is da man!)

The BBC's solution to the Star Trek problem (how do you keep grown males watching what is essentially a kids' show) is markedly different from Paramount's homely moral philosophy and re-enforcing of family values.

The BBC has gone for tits.

They've cast some serious crumpet as companions recently (okay, well maybe not Catherine Tate) and, most recently, cast the seriously crumpetty crumpet Karen Gillan as most recent female companion crumpet Amy Pond - and then dressed her up in male fetish fantasy button-pushing costumes like this:

WPC Amy Pond

and this:

Schoolgirl Amy Pond

and, most disturbingly***, this:

Japanese Sex Robot Amy Pond
(A bit of context here: this is a shape-shifting robot disguised as Amy)

(In next week's episode, Amy Pond disguises herself as a nun, and licks one of those really big Baby Doll lollipops - hereinafter known as 'lolitapops', and blows coy kisses at the screen.)

The Beeb has also called in the big guns by casting Alex Kingston as recurring character River Song. Now Alex Kington is undeniably:

A. A good actress and
B. Fwaaaaaaar!

...even without the director pointing the camera down the front of her blouse at every opportunity. Like this moment just after the moment Matt Smith has helpfully pulled open her jacket so we can all get a good look at her cleavage.

Thanks Matt. A truly inspired bit of upstaging there; I'm sure there was dialogue going on in this shot but I didn't notice any of it.

So, in short, Tits, the BBC's answer to keeping dads amused. Works for me.

Somewhere, as I'm typing this, the BBC is receiving an email pointing out that the two machine guns used by River Song to force a whole room of Nazi officials and their female companions to strip down to their underwear (did I mention this was a kids show?) were in fact 1943 issue Schmitt and Wesson .22 calibre semi-automatic breach loaders as the magazine was clearly of the semi-locking design patented by Otto Wangster in 1942 and thus it would be impossible for them to be in use in 1938 when this story was set.

Having made that up I suddenly feel an awful lot better about being fascinated by Alex Kingston's knockers for half an hour.

More next week. I hope.

----------

* I know Pickard isn't Crusher Jr.s real son (or did I miss that episode?) but the relationship is similar.

** The Doctor, it must be noted (Must it? Yes. Okay then... ) ended up having a daughter.

*** I can't make my mind up whether the disturbing bit is that they did it, or that I just thought they did.

It Looks Like People's Bums in an Airtight Container!

2011-08-23T23:51:00.007+01:00

It's August here in the Highlands of Scotland. The bees are buzzing round the honeysuckle. Meadowsweet, orchids, saxifrages and all sorts of other flowers I don't know the names of are blooming in profusion. Blackberries are starting to ripen, a few black ones dotted in among all the reddening clusters. The heather is yet to bloom. The roads are full of bewildered tourists from all corners of the world, driving with interesting and life threatening inventiveness in all sorts of directions. And the B&B owners have been hanging out their No Vacancies signs for weeks now. It is, in short, Late Summer - and the Cancer Research charity shop in Fort William has just put this year's Christmas cards on display.

The world has, finally, gone fucking mad hasn't it?

Things like that are why I hide in the house and watch shit like this. That and the midges.

July's eyeball abuse list:

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) - Friday Night Pizza with the Kids Film - which I enjoyed a hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to. I have a natural aversion to Jim Carey but thought he did a terrific job as the evil Count Olaf.

Breath (2007) - a film that is, according to a quote from Variety on the back cover,

"Quirky ... Marbled with weirdly comic and tender moments"

and which caused me to formulate a new rule of films: 'Inside every slow, quirky Art House film, no matter how marbled with anything it may be, there is a semi-decent short screaming to get out'. Christ, I was bored. Even at a meagre 84 minutes it felt like a piece that was stretched out far too long. I managed to stay awake until the end credits, in the vague hope of some great redeeming moment which didn't arrive, and then promptly fell asleep for two hours - during which I developed a severe pain in the left-hand side of my neck from sleeping awkwardly.

Dance of the Dead ( 2008 ) - "On the night of the big High-School Prom, the dead rise to eat the living, and the only people who can stop them are the losers who couldn't get dates to the dance." Stupid, overly-violent and (at moments) very funny low budget zombie film. The lead, Jared Kusnitz, was great.

The Last Seven (2010) - Another £1 of 3 not very well spent in PoundWorld. (The other two films I bought at the same time were Bloodrayne 2, and Mega Piranha.) The Last Seven looked to be the most interesting of the the three as it promised to play with one of my fave SF book/movie tropes. The one that starts with one man waking up in a seemingly deserted Earth - The Last Man on Earth, The Quiet Earth, The World, the Flesh and the Devil etc. etc. After taking an age to get started (after what looked suspiciously like TWO nested framing devices, and watching one of the producers of the show doubling as an actor walking around London for ten or so minutes) I began to think I should have gone with Mega Piranha. At least that would have delivered what it promised on the case - oh, though looking at the case again, maybe not; the cover shows a fish eating an aircraft carrier, this from production company The Asylum, the people who couldn't get their alien's masks to stay inside their actor's shirts in their ultra-crappy Princess of Mars knockbuster.

Ah well.

Back to The Last Seven. So, seven very variable actors meet up in a deserted London, with variably from shot to shot wet/dry streets, and say "What the fuck is happening?" to each other a lot. None of them remembers a thing about who they are or what they are doing there. They start to have flashbacks which seem to interlink. The flashbacks (which get very repetitive and are not as oblique a piece of storytelling as the film makers seem to think) have something to do with an SAS op gone wrong, a cover-up and someone nailing their own hands to a table. There's also a mysterious black clad figure with bad teeth, a blindfold and lots of blood running down his face popping up and popping out the survivor's eyes with his thumbs from time to time. By the time the end of the film heaves itself into view and the remaining characters finally realize they are all dead (or nearly so) and have been since the start of the film, the audience is having a collective M. Night Shyamalan moment and saying 'Is that it? Is that why I have sat here for the last 90 minutes? They're all fucking dead?' Yep, that was it. What a crashing disappointment. Mind you, my 'They are all dead' detectors are pretty well developed. I have never seen an episode of Lost and I knew the characters in that were dead after the third episode just from what the people I knew who did watch it told me about it.

The only thing that kept me there till the end was one of the actresses, Daisy Head, in her first feature film, wiping the screen with everyone else. The girl has got something.

Bolt ( 2008 ) - I was underwhelmed. The kids were entertained but not enthusiastic.

Mega Piranha (2010) - another straight to SyFy channel and pound-shop DVD pile piece of shit from The Asylum. 'Starring 80s Pop Sensation' Tiffany. (Who?) Mega Piranha has added a new person to my 'People I Want to Nail to a Wall Slowly' list. It's this guy:

Bill Parker

The 'editor' of the show, who, when presented with an Avid, seems to have randomly hit every available button in as short a time as possible, and added big Whoooosh! noises over every other cut in case we didn't notice how fucking cool his cutting was. Real ADHD editing. Leave nothing on the screen for more than 3 seconds, speed it, up slow it down, flip it, flop it, desaturate, 'hell, it's been over two minutes since we used that shot; we'll use it again, I wonder what this button does? Cool! cut paste - Y'know, I'm bored, why don't we let cat play with the keyboard for a bit? Hey! that's kind cool...'

Amid all this hyperactive bludgeoning - there, I suspect, only to disguise the utterly shit script - he manages to do perfectly stupid edits like this:

EXT: DAY: SWAMP

The hero and two assistant heroes are on the run.

Hero:
Come on let's move out... You too, Gordon...

They exit screen right

CUT TO:

EXT: DAY: ALMOST IDENTICAL BIT OF SWAMP

Enter Hero screen left.

Hero:
Wait here.

Actually, written down, it doesn't look that bad but on screen it looks terrible, like the characters have just taken only paces forwards and then stopped. I find it hard to believe they didn't have a single shot they could have cut away to to give a least a moment's impression of time passing. Not a single helicopter shot of jungles? reused CGI shot of cardboard piranhas? no shots of the bad guys combing the jungle for them? nothing? Nothing to rescue their hero from looking like an even bigger dick than he already looks? I don't believe it. Incredibly incompetent editing. And this was before we get to the content which included giant Piranhas eating nuclear submarines and ventriloquist SCUBA divers.

This wasn't a film. It was a product.

Actually my hat's off to one member of the crew: the composer who - if he is to be believed from his interview on the 'Making of' extra - only had 48 hours to score and record the soundtrack for the whole movie. He did an okay job.

BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007) - a straight to DVD Vampire western in which an evil vampire, Billy the Kid, and his posse of vampire cowboys take hostage the children of the small town of Deliverance. Cheesy, wobbly, loathed by many - just go read the bile heaped upon it IMDb reviews - and lurching from one over-cooked cliché to another without stopping; I rather enjoyed it. 90 minutes of stupid fun.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes ( 1988 ) - Rewatch of a joyously stupid film that just makes me laugh. I make no apologies.
The Invasion (2007) - the fourth(!) adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. The first one is a masterpiece of cold war paranoia, the second is a pretty damn good movie about cults and the alienation of modern cities (and it has that great downbeat ending with Donald Sutherland doing 'The Point'), the third I haven't seen but is highly regarded by some, and then there's this. Which is about Nicole Kidman getting 17 million dollars to appear in a movie. The first two adaptation ditch the novels pretty crappy WTF? cop out ending (the invading pods get fed up and float back off into space) and are better for it, the third (from what I've read) has an unsettlingly ambiguous "where're you going to run to?" ending, and this one has the combined scientists of the world pulling a vaccine out of their collective arses (in the nick of time) and crop spraying the world back to unhappiness once again, and you know what? It's shit.

Voyage of the Rock Aliens - a 1984 'Rock Science Fiction Musical starring Pia (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians) Zadora which made The Apple and Earth Girls are Easy look like masterpieces in comparison. If I tell you the best 'joke' in the whole film is that the high school to which the 30 year old Pia and her 25 year old boyfriend, Craig Sheffer, go is called 'Heidi' - Heidi High. Geddit? Eh? Geddit? - you'll have some idea about just how fucking dreadful this film was. I mean really fucking dreadful. I was on such a high after watching it. Hysteria. I should demand medals for watching this stuff.

Somehow the producers managed to convince 90 year old, four times nominated, one time Oscar winner Ruth Gordon to appear in it as the local sheriff. Baffling.What you may probably find more baffling is the fact that I went on my hands and knees to find this DVD and then had to convince the guy behind the till to sell it to me. Here's the scene: I'm in Poundland in Dundee raking through the not very inspiring piles of DVDs (many of them reduced to 50p - that uninteresting) when I noticed that down behind the shelves was a pile of DVDs and CDs that had fallen through the gaps in the shelving and were lying in an unsorted heap on the floor, out of sight of the passing punters. I love unsorted heaps ; can't resist them. You never know what you'll find in an unsorted heap. (Except you do by now). So I was instantly on my knees shoving aside piles of Fly Fishing Expert 23: How to Catch Bigger Perch with Angus McSomeone and pulling out long lost treasures - like lots of other Fly Fishing Expert DVDs and - Voyage of the Rock Aliens. Bingo! When I got to the till the guy behind the counter scanned my DVDs. Voyage of the Rock Aliens made the till make a funny noise. Instead of going 'beep!' as it had done with all the other discs, it went 'BeepityBeepety'... The till man looked at his till.

Till Man:
Oh. This item has been withdrawn.

Me:
Why?

Till Man:
What?

Me:
Why has it been withdrawn?

Till Man:
No idea. Maybe it's been reported
as faulty or something.

Me:
I'll take the risk.

Till Man:
What?

Me:
I'll take the risk. If it doesn't work
I promise not to bring it back.

Till Man:
Ok.

Beep!

Like I said. Medals.

Mutant (1984) - over-long (or very wrongly paced) low budget small town zombie pollution crap.
The House on Sorority Row (1983) - Meh.

Nerdy Rant...

2011-07-16T01:04:00.003+01:00

What is the point of CGI? I mean really? I have no idea any more. I used to know. Like most people I was gosh wow! blown away by the visuals in many a Hollywood film and have enjoyed more than my fair share of computer animated 'kids' films from Toy Story to Megamind but today, looking at the trailer for the soon to be released John Carter (of Mars), I really began to wonder.

Here's the thing. I'm not a total Comic Book/SF/fantasy film nerd. I'm not wetting my knickers in anticipation of the Avengers movie, haven't seen either of the Iron Man films, loath everything Trekkie, and don't have lustful thoughts about Wonder Woman, Deanna Troi, Agent Scully, the blonde one from Stargate, Claudia Christian, Seven of Nine, Number Six, Starbuck, Amy Pond or any of the women from Farscape*. I do not collect trading cards from any TV show or film, I do not engage in endless pointless on-line forum debates about whether the White Star ships from Babylon 5 could whup the USS Enterprise - NCC-1701 (it could) or any of the other total Comic Book/SF/fantasy film nerdy activities. I don't complain when Hollywood fucks up perfectly good SF stories and turns them into moronic Nic Cage films (well, not too much). And for the most part I actively avoid trailers and spoilers for new films. I like sitting down knowing as little as I can about a film. I like to just let them do their thing without having too many expectations or preconceptions in my head.

John Carter though...

John Carter is based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of those seminal books. I read it as a kid and it has stayed with me all my life. I read several of the sequels too. It's real thrilling daring-do nonsense fantasy adventure. Hard to read as an adult. I read A Princess of Mars for the first time in many many years recently; it is, quite frankly, awful. But the nostalgia for my lost sense of wonder carried me through. Like so many books important to the the history of SF it hasn't stood the test of time well.

So when I bumped into the newly released trailer on Youtube I had to have a peek. Just a little one. I mean I already know the story.

One of the central characters of the Martian Books and some would say one of SF's most important early characters is Tars Tarkas, Jeddack of the Tharks. He is (unsurprisingly) a Martian. One of the Green, Plains Martians. Here's part of Burroughs' description of them from chapter 3 of a Princess of Mars:

...long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.

The ears, which were slightly above the eyes and closer together, were small, cup-shaped antennae, protruding not more than an inch on these young specimens. Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears.
There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young.
The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.

Tars Tarkas, on his first appearance in the book, is described thus:

...huge and terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death. The man himself, for such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height and, on Earth, would have weighed some four hundred pounds. He sat his mount as we sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while the hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the side of his mount; his two left arms were outstretched laterally to help preserve his balance, the thing he rode having neither bridle or reins of any description for guidance.

I know what Tars Tarkas looks like, always have: big, green, six arms tusks. Lots of other people know what the big, green, six arms tusky bugger looks like too. Just go look up some of the weird wonderful (and occasionally disturbing) artwork that Google throws at you when you do a picture search for him.

How then given the description in the books and the obvious idea that the character is big and got huge fucking fangs and is one mean son of a bitch do the makers of the new film with a brazzillion dollars worth of GCI experience and the ability to create ANYTHING THEY WANT on screen come up with this as their CGI creation for the part:

Clickify for bignocity

Jar-Jar Shrek? Jesus fucking wept. Please tell me it isn't true. But this is a Disney film so maybe it is. I bet they've made Woola a cute kitten too. A wisecracking cute kitten.

I may have to go hide.

(On the other hand if this is not supposed to be Tars Tarkas, I take it all back.)

* This sentence contains a lie.

2011-07-05T16:34:00.002+01:00

Recently I blethered on about the stunning Top of the News story about a lost dog on Nevis Radio. Since then I have managed to avoid Radio Nevis entirely. (It's not hard.) Yesterday I had to go into the Fort to drop off a cheque at the Council Service Point. As I was waiting in the queue I realised that in the background Radio Nevis was being piped though speakers at us. I'd managed to hit the news. I listened for three minutes as the local news announcer for local news wittered on about a possibly lost dog. Someone has seen a Jack Russell terrier with a brown collar wandering around and wondered if it might be lost.

"Hold the front page, Furgus! There's a possible lost dog in Corpach!"

After his appeals for anyone to come forward if they thought they might know whose dog it was, the announcer signed off with the promise of an 'update in an hour'.

I can hardly wait.

Radio Nevis' Dog Squad hard at work.

2011-07-03T22:36:00.001+01:00

The URL http://www.the-junk-monkey.com/ is up for renewal. I can't afford to keep it up - I have better things to do with $100. And, truth be told, I really wasn't using the space, or the domain name, so I'll just save my money and not renew it. When they finally get round to noticing I haven't paid them, pull the plug, and wipe all my stuff, expect sudden big holes in this blog. I have saved everything off and will put it all back from some free hosting site somewhere.

2011-07-01T23:56:00.005+01:00

Go make a cuppa and have a pee: it's Every Bad Film (plus a couple of good ones) I watched this month in glorious black and white! There's only 24 of them and one I dismiss in one (very short) word.

(For those of you with short attention spans (or weak bladders) here's a link to Every Film I Have Watched in the Last Month: The Short Form which you have probably read already but have almost certainly forgotten.)

A Bay of Blood (1971) - Let's start another new month with another Mario Bava! - Just like I did last month. It's not a plan, it's just that A Bay of Blood arrived in the post this morning and was therefore on top of the Crap to Watch pile this evening (and I was too knackered to make any decisions about what to shove in the DVD player). The fact that it is now on top of my Back to eBay pile shows I haven't totally lost my critical faculties.
So, A Bay of Blood, a proto-splatter/slasher movie, deemed by many to be ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MOVIES EVER. Yeah... Right... 84 minutes of watching Italians aimlessly wandering to gruesome deaths as the camera zooms, pans, and racks focus trying to find them. Hmmmm. I wasn't impressed. Every character with a speaking part in this show ended up dead: impaled, garrotted, whacked with machetes, or blasted by their six year old kids with a shot gun for reasons which were not very obvious. Something to do with a prime bit of real estate and a will. I think it was supposed to be a very dark comedy. Whatever it was, it was released in the USA as Last House On The Left 2 - despite having nothing to do with the original Last House On The Left and even having been shot the year before. Another Mario Bava non-sequel. No pick axes in this one.
Rocketship X-M (1950) - for the umpteenth time. Another in the vast number of films in which the First Manned Mission to Mars Goes Horribly Wrong. (It's almost a sub-genre in it's own right.) This time though, the first manned mission is only supposed to be going to the moon, the fact that it misses and ends up on Mars is possibly due, the crew suspect, to divine intervention. God is also responsible for all the astronauts dying by the end of the show (almost unheard of in Space movies - before and since) But, as a reward for delivering the dire warnings against people blowing themselves back to the radioactive stone age like the Martians did, God makes the last few members of the crew feel uplifted and noble just before they plunge to a horrible fiery doom. Nice one, God. Some really bad space science on show here too: apparently in the 1950s rockets went 300 turbo miles due up, before turning at 90° to parallel the surface of the Earth, then gradually accelerated, somehow gaining extra momentum from the Earth's rotation, till they achieved escape velocity. The average Road Runner cartoon demonstrates a better grasp of physics. In space small things are, apparently, prone to become weightless far sooner than large things.
Shrek 4 - meh. (Told you.)
All the Kind Strangers (1974) - creepy little made for TV movie about a family of orphan children kidnapping adults to become their new parents. Our heroes are not the first to fall into their hands and there are more than a few cars drowned in the creek. It sort of held together, despite its obvious made for TV structure and some godawful 70s country music, right up to the pat 'give me the gun, kid, and we can just work this out' ending - at which point the end credits rolled so I didn't have to suffer a long disappointing let-down. If there was a film demanding a downbeat or ambiguous ending this was it. I bet the original script had the heroes die - or at least implied they did.
The Last Horror Film (1982) - continuing my totally unconscious habit of watching films released as sequels to films they have no connection with, The Last Horror Film (aka Fanatic and Fanatical Extreme was, apparently, released in Germany as Maniac 2: Love to Kill). It's an odd mix this one. Half giallo, half guerilla travelogue (the film is set in, and was filmed at, the 1981 Cannes Film Festival - cue lots of hand-held shots of real stars attending openings, and topless women on the beach). The pay-off of the framing device is genuinely funny, one of the best, comes out of nowhere, well-timed jokes I've seen for ages. It also has more film within a film end credit cards than any other film ever made AND it's got Caroline 'Starcrash' Munro in the bath. What more do you want?

A 'The End'.
Dead Awake (2001) - Ding! the sound of the crapshovel hitting a small gem amid all the dross. The other side of the same disc as The Last Horror Film - one of those Hollywood DVD two films on one DVD that look like pirate copies but aren't - Dead Awake is a nicely paced and very odd little thriller. And it's genuinely odd, not faux, 'let's be wacky and culty here' odd. Very dreamlike in places which is as it should be because the story is that of an insomniac yuppie, who hasn't slept for 10 months, witnessing a murder and getting charged with it. Genuinely and very weirdly funny too. I haven't had so much fun for ages.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock. And not, sadly, as good as I remember it. There were a couple of nice moments, famous moments, like the shot of Uncle Charlie bounding up the stairs and suddenly realising that, though the police no longer thought he was the murderer, he would have to kill his niece who knew he was. I really like the way Hitchcock lets the audience participate in the film like that. Letting you get inside a character's head by having the actor turn away from the camera at a crucial moment and making you supply the acting. But it seemed very talky and long, yet very hurried. I was also slightly annoyed by the fact that a sequence I remember being in the film was missing. It was missing because it was never there. My memory had seamlessly transplanted a moment from Strangers on a Train into Shadow of a Doubt and then got pissed off when it didn't arrive as expected.

X-Men:The Last Stand (2006) - I was bored rigid. Apart from Halle Berry's bum in those leather trousers, I can't think of a single moment of the film that wouldn't have been improved by less CGI, more acting (though, given the crapness of the script, there was bugger all for anyone to work with), and no Vinnie Jones; gods, than man can kill a movie dead in its tracks. I spent most of my time feeling sorry for the actors (apart from Vinnie Jones) who must have had aching noses at the end of each day from the amount of nostril flaring they were doing. Every shot someone was flaring their nostrils to suggest rage, or impotent rage, or suspicion, or shock, or long suppressed lerve, or hunger, or tireness. Any emotion in a Marvel movie can be shown by a tightening of the jaw and a flaring of the nostrils. Apart from grief. Grief is done by kneeling down, clenching everything from the buttocks upwards, tilting your head back, and screaming NOOOOOOOO! at a camera somewhere above your head. Hugh Jackman did that falling on his knees and shouting NOOOOOOOO! thing twice in this film, which I thought was a little excessive but it made a change from all the nostril flaring, and all the constipated Kung-Fu they were doing under all the CGI superpower stuff.

Quote:

Okay, Shawn, in this shot you're shooting your freeze ray at the 'flames shooting out of his hands' guy, so I want you to lean forward a bit... that's good. Grab a couple of imaginary melons... no, a bit lower. Good. Now imagine you are trying to squeeze one out - a real log. That's it! Great! First shit you've had all week... Really grit those teeth.... NNNNNNNNNNN. Looking good. Still needs something though. I know! Could you flare your nostrils too? That's it! Hold it... Cut! Print it! Thank you, and moving on...

The film also had two (count 'em two!) 'The end... or is it?' endings. But at least it was better than the second Fantastic 4 film - but that's not saying a lot, so was Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

Shaft (1971) - The music is great. The rest of it looks very dated and pedestrian. I know it was a revelation at the time. A Black PI hero? Unheard of, and its runaway success ushered in the whole Blaxploitation boom but looked at objectively 40 years later it's just not that good a film. Apart from the music. The music is just fucking genius.

I bet this bit went down well in Mississipi
Il Divo (2008) - visually appealing but, to me, incomprehensible retelling of a slice of recent Italian political history. I'm no wiser at the end of it about anything but the pictures were nice.
Saboteur (1942) - less than overwhelming Hitchcock - this is the one that ends with Dr. Auschlander from St Elsewhere falling off the Statue of Liberty.
The Opposite of Sex ( 1998 ) - A total delight.
Shoot or Be Shot (aka Shooting Stars 2002) - nothing much to add to my IMDb review after my first watching (6 years ago?! Holy Cow!) apart from noting it was a lot funnier than I remembered.
Clash of the Titans (1981) - one of those films I have been wanting to share with the kids for a while now and they loved it. Number two daughter was cuddled into me and had her hands over her eyes for the whole of the scary Medusa sequence. When it was over I said to her "It's okay, you can look now." and she replied "I am." She had watched the whole thing through a crack in her fingers. Job done.
Cyborg (1989) - written by someone with a real guitar fetish (the major characters are called Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremelo, Pearl, Marshall Stratt, Furman, etc.) Cyborg is your usual post-apocalyptic bollocks but because it is a Jean-Claude Van Damme post-apocalyptic bollocks there's more than the usual amount of kicking people in the face and sweaty grimacing. There are also more than the usual amount of post-apocalyptic bollocks stupidities on show too - including an unusually large number of randomly placed rusty oil drums with something burning in them. Not that they were used for anything - apart from one particularly hilarious moment when Van Damme kicks one of the endless supply of stunt-goon villains into one. On being kicked back onto one of the drums the villain immediately bursts into flames, staggers forward a few yards and falls onto the burnt-out shell of a wrecked car - which EXPLODES! (This whole scene taking place in the pouring rain.) The plot was assembled from bits of old westerns found lying around. Bits of The Searchers bolted on to Two Mules for Sister Sarah with chunks of Once Upon a Time in the West nailed on for good measure. Made cheaply, every shot is stretched out far beyond any logical sense; people run around in slow motion a lot because it takes longer for them to get where they are going and you don't have to write dialogue for slow motion scenes - but there is one glass painting of a post-apoc Atlanta Ga. that they had obviously spent a few quid on. We know they spent a few quid on it because it was on screen for 20 seconds - that's a hell of a long time for a static establishing shot in which nothing happens. "We paid for that fucker - keep it on the screen for as long as you can!" As a painting it was pretty crap, as an establishing shot it was pointless because it was immediately preceded one set of characters walking past a sign saying 'Atlanta Ga. Welcomes Careful Bands of Marauding Psychopaths' (or something) and it was immediately followed by a shot of another sign saying ATLANTA. Well, I get the message; I don't think we're in Kansas any more.... I'm glad to say I didn't pay any money for this movie; I found it on the street next to a recycling centre. I'm taking it back.
Deep Star Six (1989) - Alien underwater! Not bad to start with, a cast of (to me) unknowns (and Miguel Ferrer) putting in solid workaday performances as your standard mixed bag of a mixed sex crew who have just spent the last 6 months in an deep sea installation. Someday someone is going to make a film about a bunch of working Joes (and Jos) stuck together in a big tin can in a hostile environment without throwing a monster into the mix. Maybe it's just me but often I find the bits before our crew encounter the rapacious carnivorous THING much more interesting than all the running around screaming and doing stupid things just so they can get eaten that happens afterwards. After watching enough crap like this even the game of guessing which of our crew are going to get eaten and the order in which they get ate gets pretty boring too. You're black, you're the hero's best friend, and you got kids who send you cute drawings? You're fucking doomed, you are. And don't ever say "When we get out of this I want you to come visit me on my farm...." Speeches like that act as some sort of aperitif for rampaging rapacious carnivorous THINGs. It's like rubbing barbecue sauce all over yourself and shoving a sprig of rosemary up your bum - don't do it!

In Deep Star Six the THING is a rapacious giant carnivorous crustacean of some kind. The crew do all the usual stupid things they have to do to get eaten - and get very wet while they do it. As usual the two crew members voted most likely to survive in the first three minutes survive. And, as usual, the laws of physics don't make it past the first act.
Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) - The word 'The' was out of favour in 1959. Cheap mercifully short reworking of Key Largo, on skis, with a monster. Not as bad as it sounds.
The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) - Italian crime / slasher nonsense with a really bad case of the zooms. Just about every shot. Zoom Zoom Zoomity Zoom. I was getting motion sick by the end of it. Luckily there were no whip pans or I might have thrown up.
The Borrowers (1997) - another one of those films I have been boycotting for years as a needless American bastardization of a childhood treasure, but I was snookered into watching it with the kids as our Friday Night Pizza Night movie and .... I really enjoyed it. Once I had got over the hump of realising that the makers had jettisoned just about everything in the books apart from the names and heights of some of the characters I settled back and enjoyed the ride which, though not exactly ground-breaking in originality, was fun family fare and made me laugh aloud several times. The design elements were interesting too. The film appeared to be set in England but in a strange never-never time that was sort of the fifties and sort of the nineties - most of the cars for instance were Morris Minors and milk was delivered to the doorstep in glass bottles but houses had huge Americn Freezers with built in ice-dispensers and magnets stuck all over the doors. The same director went on to make the vastly underrated Thunderpants set in a similar not quite identifiable time. All the Morris Minors in that one were green.
Stone (1974) - another to me unknown film bought in a charity shop for pennies purely because I had A: never heard of it and B: it had an airbrushed chrome effect in the title:

...and a skull wearing a hat.

Not enough movie posters have skulls wearing hats.

Stone turns out to be a pretty terrific little low budget Australian biker film with some real drop dead moments. The opening titles are brilliant. And so simple.

Dead of Night (aka Mirror of Death 1988 ) - a screamingly bad piece of no budget crap about a (rather cute) woman conjuring up a evil spirit that enters her body through her dressing table mirror, lures men back to her home, kills them, then stashes them (standing up) in closets around the house. Really, really bad. Bad with a capital B. Screeds of badly written dialogue delivered by bad actors who (all credit to them) go for it with hopeless gusto. Some scenes look like a first read through. Lots of penguin flapping (those vague armflap gestures that bad actors do when they don't know what to do with their hands) and plenty of time to do it in. There's some fantastically long-winded dialogue in this film; e.g. (and trust me on this one, it's worth it. Suck it in and plough on through):

Quote:

INT. BATHROOM. DAY.

SARA (our sometime possessed heroine) is washing her face. She looks in the mirror and the face of SULA THE DEMON looking out at her. Sara screams in terror. RICHARD, Sara's sister's boyfriend and a seriously crap actor, appears, sees the demon, and pulls Sara away.

CUT TO:

INT. LIVING ROOM. DAY

Richard hurriedly picks up the phone and dials.

APRIL (SARA'S SISTER):

What're you going to do, Richard?

RICHARD:

Calling the police! I've heard and seen enough!

APRIL:

What're they gonna do but arrest Sarah so they can close their books and everything'll look good on their records.

RICHARD:

Got a better idea!? Let's hear it!

SARA:

How about calling the police so they can see this Sura first hand?

APRIL:

Oh, Sara, If Sura gets back in your body again we'll never get control of her. What we need right now is someone who knows how to deal with these things.

RICHARD:
(Shouting and giving a real master-class
in Penguinflapping frustration.)

Who knows how to deal with evil spirits floating out of mirrors!?

SARA:

I know it's going to sound stupid... but why don't we just look in the Yellow Pages?

So they do; they all rush to a table and pore over the Yellow Pages. This was not a comedy. This was serious. God, I hope it wasn't supposed to be a comedy. Because if it was I didn't notice. Whatever it was it was, it was a painful experience to watch. I spent a lot of the running time trying to work out how they got a trailer out of the thing. You know those times you go see a film and realise it was pretty crap and you had seen all the best bits in the trailer that had suckered you in in the first place? This film didn't have any best bits.

Someone in the editorial team knew it was a piece of shit too because right at the end, after all the credits have rolled and the screen has gone black, there is a repeated line of dialogue on the soundtrack. Just as you are about to hit the eject button, someone has edited in Richard the crap actor boyfriend's voice screaming:

"Oh my God! What was THAT!?"

Tripwire (1990) - another big box VHS that I bought for 10p solely because I had never heard of it and (also solely) because it had a picture of David Warner on the cover. In fact that's just about all it had on the front cover: David Warner holding a big gun. Now I like David Warner. I like him a lot. He's a jobbing actor who delivers what he's asked to deliver with a credibility that the material often doesn't deserve (Quest of the Delta Knights being a very good example) and he does a great line in villains (Tron, Time After Time, The Man With Two Brains, Time Bandits etc. etc.) but he's never been a big name box office draw and I did have to ask myself, "Just how badly underpowered does a film have to be that it has David Warner on the cover as the main selling point?"

I found out.

It was shit.
Prison Heat (1993) - All you really need to make a Women in Prison movie is four actresses (and I use the term loosely) willing to get naked, a shower block, and a wall. Bought to you by Global Pictures, the brains behind American Cyborg: Steel Warrior and Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, Prison Heat pushed the boat out and had a staircase as well. Even by the usually low WiP movie standards, it was pretty awful. Highlights include (some of the heroines' astounding knockers aside) our sadistic and corrupt cardboard villain pointing at the lead heroine and instructing one of his minions to "take her to solitary...." followed by a shot of the lead heroine being chained to a wall in a cell next to someone else - and an amazing moment when our feisty lead heroine hauls herself up into a skylight with another feisty heroine (Feisty Heroine 2) hanging onto her leg. Our feisty lead heroine lifts at least twice her own bodyweight up by her fingertips. In the next shot, from another angle, the lead feisty heroine has managed to get herself into a position which, from the establishing shot we have just seen, would be impossible to achieve (even without someone hanging off your legs). She then kicks out part of the window, before climbing out onto the roof, turning round and helping out Feisty Heroine 2 who has, presumably, been hovering in mid air all this time. Another 10p well wasted.
Wild Force (1986) - Wooo-Hoooo! Recently I have come to suspect that I have watched too many crappy films. So many that I have become totally inured to the things. I was starting to wonder if I was finally starting to get bored with my search for whatever it is I'm searching for (I'm still not sure). It has been a while since I really wholeheartedly enjoyed a really crappy movie. Sometimes these days they're feeling like a bit of a chore. Tonight I remembered why I do it. I've struck 10p big box VHS paydirt. Wild Force is a Philippine film. I know very little about the film industry of the Philippines but if Wild Force a good one (it got sold abroad so I guess it must be) I hate to think what the crap they couldn't export is like. It is a film of STAGGERING incompetence. I really don't know where to begin because once I start I suspect I'll still be ranting about its deficiencies and joys for days. But the moment where a minor villain swims across a swimming pool is a joy and will have to stand in for the whole.

The villain has information that the 'Team' of heroes need. He is sat by the side of an outdoor swimming pool, being attended by two bikini clad bimbos. The only female member of 'The Team' sits at a table on the other side of the large pool and, in a series of medium closeup shots alternating between the two of them, she makes goo goo eyes at him. It is sunny (but very windy) on her side of the swimming pool. It is raining heavily on his side. He likes the look of her (I prefer the two birds he has in his hands but there's no accounting for taste or the requirements of plot development). In a wider angle that lets us see both sides of the pool, he gets up from his chair (it's stopped raining on his side by the way) and dives into the pool leaving the bimbos wondering what to do. An assistant director tells them. The one on the left of the screen doesn't quite get it... "Step back, love... no back... further back.. stop looking at the camera...! No... BACK!" By the time she finally gets out of the frame the villain is across the pool and clambering out the other side in such an ungainly manner that he has his trunk-clad arse and dangly bits waving in our faces (thankfully from a long way away). Cut to a ridiculously low angle of him sucking in most of his substantial paunch and pointing his still dripping crotch at the attractive 'team' member. Two lines of dialogue later and there's a real WTF!? jump-cut to him coming out of the shower, wrapping a towel around himself and her (still fully and demurely clothed) sat on a bed. What the hell is going on?

The dialogue is terrific. And dubbed I suspect, in the producer's kitchen by three actors doing 'different voices' for different characters. A bit like you do when reading kids a bedtime story. I also suspect the actor playing the Maguffin, the kidnapped Doctor Johnston, did his own dubbing but as he is a terrible actor, and has (or effects) a southern drawl, and puts the emphasis on all the wrong syllables, he manages to sound like Slim Pickins on a trampoline. An image I will try to get out of my head as soon as I can.

And quite who all these blonde white people on the cover are I have no idea. The film was full of sweaty Filipinos. And all those helicopters? There was one in the film. One. Which they obviously only managed to blag for an hour or so for the filming, because whenever it landed or took off it always landed and took off from the same field - wherever it supposed to be, base camp, or somewhere several days march into the jungle - same field, same trees in the background, same hills in the distance.

This one is going to get rewatched many times. I haven't laughed so much in ages.

2011-06-22T23:15:00.003+01:00

I know my monthly 'Every Movie I Have Watched' posts don't exactly fill people with joy so here is the Readers' Digest version of just about every film I have watched over the last couple of years. Instead of, once a month, wading through my arse-numbingly tedious rants about thirty or so films I destroyed my brain with - just come here and read this instead. It'll save you hours.

Every Film I Have Watched in the Last Month:
The Short Form

A one-eyed cyborg bounty hunter, driven by the memory of his dead wife, stalks the post-apocalyptic wastelands known, as usual, as the 'Forbidden Zone'. He hunts down 'renegades' who are jailed, then forcibly recruited into taking part in Man's first (and therefore doomed) manned mission to Mars. Tricked into accompanying them by the Evil Corporation that runs everything, the cyborg meets a comely young female crew member with a penchant for wearing thin T-shirts and getting wet. On the way to Mars they encounter a derelict spaceship of unknown origin, board it and unwittingly bring back on-board a biologically unlikely (all teeth and penises), shape-changing, ravening creature which eats the crew one by one in order of ethnicity. The one-eyed cyborg and the girl with big knockers survive after outrageously breaking the fundamental laws of physics*. The end.

This film was almost certainly watched on a VHS tape that came in a big box with a picture on the front of a vaguely symmetrical (but unshaven) hero wearing a bandanna wrapped round his mullet, and holding some form of giant futuristic pump-action machine gun. The cover will also sport a woman almost not wearing a bikini while holding a very big sword with both hands. There will also be three cars, stripped of their roofs and gussied up with the sort of pointy, overly showy armour Renaissance knights used to pimp their horses with.

Above all this wish-fulfilling art work, that usually bears very little relation to what actually appears on the screen, the film's title is in block capitals and filled with a metallic gradient.

The film will almost certainly be preceded by trailers for films no one has ever heard of - many of them starring Emily Lloyd.

I love it.

*The Evil Corporation has really good lawyers and will get them off on appeal.

2011-06-13T12:18:00.001+01:00

I've been avoiding the news for months now. I used to be an avid consumer of news. (BBC news mostly - I trust the BBC. Deep down most Brits do. We pay for it. It's our news.) But somewhere over the last couple of years, finally pissed off with getting depressing crap shoved in my ear on an hourly basis, I stopped listening to the radio. No more infofacts about this week's killer 'flu, aircraft disaster, signs of global ecological collapse, penny-pinching, cost-cutting measures imposed on the poorest by sanctimonious millionaire bean-counters, and all the rest of the gloom, doom, and painful to listen to bilge. I just stopped. I don't even look at the headlines of the newspapers in the shops any more. I'm a reformed infojunkmonkey.

I'm not totally out of touch. I do get one of the Scottish Sundays - once a week (dur!) but it usually lies around the house unread (apart from the arts section) for a couple of months before I'll finally get round to looking at the news bits. The Business, and Sports bits are in the recycling before they've been in the house five minutes. Three month old news is fascinating when you're using it to line a bin or lay it under the cat litter tray. (Or at least more fascinating than lining a bin or shoving stuff under a cat litter tray.) After a couple of months it's amazing how very irrelevant (or wrong) it all is. We obviously didn't all die from pandemic Goose flu, the world wasn't hit by any giant asteroids (that I remember - mind you maybe it has been and I just haven't read that paper yet), and who the hell really cares who Ryan Giggs was shagging? (Who IS Ryan Giggs by the way?) I have got to like not knowing or caring what's going on. It's very liberating. I no longer spend time worrying about things that become irrelevant a few days later. Now I spend my time worrying about really important things that I actually have some control over like: 'What are we having for tea?', and 'Do those windows need cleaning or can I leave them for another year?', and 'Can I sneak another custard cream out of the tin without the kids noticing me at it and demanding their share?' You know, important stuff.

The other day I was in a local charity shop, raking through the books when the too loud radio playing in the corner - why is it always near the books? - broke off from playing crap hits from the 80s and announced the news. As this was Nevis Radio - a service that makes The Outer Hebrides Broadcasting Corporation look like CNN, I didn't run screaming from the building but I tried to ignore it. I actually managed it for a few seconds and if the news had been of the usual 'Politicians call each other stinky poo names,' or British Holiday makers upset by mass genocide in random third world country.' I might have succeeded. But I was blindsided. The big, breaking news, headline story in the Radio Nevis news for that day was....

Someone had found their lost dog.

Seriously that was it. Someone had found their lost dog. This dog. I don't know how long I stood there listening to the presenter (who I had probably passed in the street earlier in the day) shambolically stuttering on, about a dog, lost by its owners on the West Highland way a couple of weeks before, and then finally lured into a garage by a trail of dog food in Kinlochleven, but it felt like hours. It was probably only two or three minutes but it felt like an agonizingly long time. It was the sort of heart-warming, upbeat "... and finally..." story that anchormen squeeze into the last moments of a show to stop you slashing your wrists in despair after all the death, destruction, and celebrity shagging that they have just pummelled you with for the past half hour. (Oh! Christ! We're all going to die from leftie council sponsored suicide bombers letting off cancer bombs in Tescos pass the Stanley knife - Aaaahhh! Look at the ikkle doggie....) But stretched out to fill a whole news slot because, in the last 24 hours, bugger-all had happened in the whole of Lochaber (population 20,000 or thereabouts) worth mentioning. Or at least nothing anyone had bothered to bring to the attention of the stations crack team of news-hounds - aka Kirsty the switchboard operator.

Except it had.

The second item on the local news was that Fort William had been confirmed as the venue for the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup for at least the next two years. A decision that will pump tens of thousands of pounds into the local economy and help keep many local businesses afloat. But as the story combined both business and sport - I stopped listening. Maybe that's why it wasn't the lead.

2011-06-12T10:26:00.005+01:00

I have finally become invisible. This is an ambition I have had since I was about 16 when, in the school changing rooms one afternoon after PE, I realised that all the girls I secretly lusted after were, at that very moment, all probably naked in a shower the other side of the wall against which I was leaning (trying manfully to hide and not expose my own naked flesh to all the other bigger, louder, hairier boys in the room).

Today (35 years too late) I finally achieved it.

For weeks Merriol and the kids have been nagging me to shave: "Please shave, Daddy; you're prickly.","Any chance that..." "Go have a shave and I'll think about it...", etc.

I don't shave often. About three of four times a year. I hate it. But there comes a point when I get so fed up with the scratchiness of it, the constant nagging from the kids, and the lack of nookie that I give in and off it comes.

Last night I shaved. After everyone else was asleep and I had succumbed to another couple of episode of Battlestar Galactica I shaved. Took me three disposable razors, but it's off.

This morning no one noticed. It's now about half past ten in the morning I have been up for a couple of hours (give or take an hour) cooked breakfast, loaded the washing machine, etc., etc. etc.. and no one has noticed that I am now clean-shaven.

I have become invisible. All my family see of me is this disembodied beard floating around.

I'm off to the High School.

A Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of Somebody Else's Life

2011-06-11T21:10:00.004+01:00

Today Daisy, Eben and I are having a picnic in the quarry. Nearby a young lad and his parents are feeding the ducks and any other opportunistic birds that pass by.

Child:
Mum!

Child:
MUM!

Child:
MUM!

Mother:
(Giving in.)
What!?

Child:
(Pointing)
That seagull did a poo.

Nice to know it's not just my kids.

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of my Life

2011-06-05T22:41:00.003+01:00

EXT: DAY: A CAR BOOT SALE IN THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND.

IT IS SLIGHTLY DRIZZLY AND VERY MIDGEY. I AM RAKING THROUGH A STACKING-BOX FILLED WITH DVDS AND VHS TAPES. THERE IS NO PRICE LABEL TO BE SEEN.

Me:
(To vendor) How much are the DVDs?

Vendor:
Give me a quid. I don't want to take them
back with me. Give me a quid for the box.

Me:
The whole box?

Vendor:
Yeah. I just want to get rid of them.

Me:
Do I get the box as well?

Vendor:
No I need that. Hang on,
I'll get you a bag...

I won't bore you with all the contents but some are on their way to the nearest charity shop; the first one I watched had a chainsaw decapitation, Caroline Munro in the shower, and was as funny as hell; and a couple are on eBay. I'm a happy camper.

2011-06-01T20:18:00.001+01:00

May. In which I almost watched a few decent films:

Shock (1977 aka Beyond the Door II) - Mario Bava's last film which I bought for a quid at a charity shop (I sometimes wonder if all those nice old ladies know what they are selling). I was sold on this DVD by the tag line, 'Beyond the door the ever continuing cycle of evil is about to occur... again!'. I loved that 'again!'. The other thing that sold me on it was the fact that on the back of the sleeve they seemed to think the film was called 'The Grim Reaper'.

What we get on screen is the usual Italian OTT Grand Guignol full of nightmares that might be real, possibly possessed creepy children, pick-ax murder, walking wardrobes, and people slashing their own throats with Stanley knives. All good clean family fun. It would have been a lot more fun if we had actually been made to care about why any of this bloody nonsense was going on. As it was the film was just a series of set pieces of 'horror' with brief interludes of people explaining plot points to each other. Beyond the Door II has, as far as I can tell, nothing at all to do with any other film called Beyond the Door. It's a non-sequel.

Sleepwalker/s (1997) - that slash is there in the title because what I watched was called one thing on the disc, and another on the sleeve - and I wrote 'what I watched' because 'what I watched' turns out to have been nailed together from two episodes of a short-lived TV series (called Sleepwalkers). The show, which starred Naomi Watts in a vest (hubba hubba!), dealt with a team of investigators able to dive into other people's dreams. The show looks like it wasn't bad but was cancelled by the powers that be after 9 episodes.

The Last Producer (2000 aka Final Hit) - Burt Reynolds plays an over the hill movie producer desperate to raise $50,000 to option a hot script before a deadline. Almost a remake of The Independent but incredibly unfunny. I think it was supposed to be a comedy - and possibly a satire too. Desperately over-wordy, dull, confused, and self-indulgent. Turd of the year so far.

Witchboard III: The Possession (1995) - another one of my recent haul of four movies on two discs sets - featuring people you've never heard of (but vaguely recognise) in films no one wants to pay more than 50p to watch. This one was another of them directed by Peter Svatek ( - who? He also directed last month's Hemoglobin.) Possibly the only film ever made in which a character is attacked and killed by a butterfly collection. The evil fat banker collapsing behind his desk screaming in pain with dead butterflies stuck all over him has to be one of the most ludicrous things I have seen on screen for a while. Curiously enough it was my second film in a row where the central character has to raise 50,000 dollars and gets charged 25% interest by an overweight money lender.

IMDb's Plot keywords for the film are:

Ouija, Stockbroker, Landlord, Freak Accident, Ouija Board, Roman Numeral In Title, Numbered Sequel, Third In Trilogy, Spirit, Demon, Suicide, Sex, Sequel, Part Of Trilogy, Supernatural, Third Part, Djinn, Evil Spirit, Independent Film, Number In Title.

Which just about says it all.

Blade Runner (1982) - Thought it was about time I watched something worth watching. And what better to watch on Star Wars Day (May the 4th) but Blade Runner. Makes sense. (113)

Back to the Future: Part II - Pizza night with the kids. Part III next week.

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) - low budget, better than average independent SF. Not great but not bad, intriguing ideas let down by obvious cash limitations and uninspired direction. The director later sued the makers of The Island for plagiarism.

One Eyed Jacks (1961) - A western that was originally slated to be directed by Kubrick but ended up being directed by the film's star, Marlon Brando. It's been on my list for a while since I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that Brando was totally out of control during production and would sit around for days with a full crew just waiting for the right kind of wave to appear on the beach before he would shoot. The implication of the article was that the film was a self-indulgent product of a towering ego gone mad with power. The director's cut came in at 300 minutes - that's 5 hours! The released version ran to 141 minutes and, although over-long and sedate in some places still manages to look hurried in others, often the film jumps into scenes far too late for comfort and leaves the viewer too far behind. There is some good stuff here though; some cracking acting in minor parts and Karl Malden in particular was great as the villain. These days, for whatever reason, the film is in the public domain and the quality of the commercial DVD I watched was not good, the aspect ratio was cropped to 4:3 and god knows how many generations old the transferred tape was. It was not good at all, very faded. Even the version available here, at Archive.org looks better than my disc (and isn't badly cropped either). Which is a pity, because some of the cinematography was obviously very good even in the debased form I got to see it. The French, unsurprisingly, have restored it:

The above cap comes from the French restored version.

The commercial bare bones copy I watched last night looked like this:

And the copy on Archive.org looks like this:
The Day The Sky Exploded ( 1958 ) - I'm going to have to stop buying DVDs. The version of The Day The Sky Exploded available for free on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=Cb7zoNyXmMA) is far better quality than the disc I paid money for (albeit very little money). My home copy, which came as part of a boxset of crap, is very jumpy and transferred from a very battered print. I'm tempted to watch the whole movie again, on-line, just to find the moment where one of the female characters walks through a door and approaches two scientists hunched over a console. They are staring at a radar scope image of the impending, rapidly approaching, doom from space. They look up as she walks over to them and as she opens her mouth to speak, the film jumps and she vanishes - leaving the two scientists pondering deeply and concernedly about what she just said. We have no idea what they are thinking about because many feet of film are missing. I wonder if it's in the YouTube version? because I do wonder what she said; it was obviously very important to the two characters who heard her. I hope it was more interesting than the rest of the dialogue. A very dull film.

Smash and Grab (1937 aka Larceny Street) - Mildly diverting, very thin, British Thin Man knock off, with the leading man (scenarist, and producer) Jack Buchanan getting more Vaseline on the lens for his close-ups than the heroine. The heroine meanwhile spent most of her time trying to avoid turning her profile to the camera - it might just have been a coincidence but she did appear to have the sort of nose that would fill the screen. You can tell I was gripped can't you?

Flushed Away (2006) - a rewatch with the kids and funnier than I remember.

Wedlock (1991) - Just how many Rutger Hauer movies have I seen this year? (Enough for me to know how to spell his name at least. Hang on. I'll look... Armageddon, Flesh+Blood, Hemoglobin, Blade Runner... and this one. Five? Is that all? it feels like a lot more.) Wedlock almost sank my 'All films set in a future prison are automatically shite' rule. The future prison here has an almost good SF idea at its heart. All the prisoners are fitted with collars. Under certain circumstances the collars will explode taking the prisoner's head off with a spectacular and messy bang. The collars are electronically paired with another inmate's collar. Nobody knows who they are paired with. If paired collars get more than a fixed distance apart, or are tampered with, BOTH collars explode. The outer prison wall is just a line painted on the ground. Step over the line and there is no guarantee that your unknown partner is near enough to stop your head being blown off. This has the effect of turning the inmates into their own warders as it's in all of their individual interests to make sure that no one escapes in case they are linked with the escapee. It's a pretty nice idea to play SF games with. Our hero goes on the lam with a female prisoner who has found out that he is her partner and the script soon descends into a long chase as the ill matched pair (who have to stay within a hundred yards of each other) have to elude the law, the hero's former partners in crime, and it all gets very tedious. So (hurrah!) rule is intact though slightly modified: 'All films set in a future prison are automatically shite; no matter how well thought out the prison is.'

On the plus side it did have a brief appearance by the yummy O-Lan Jones who I last saw painted green and being the best thing in the otherwise fucking awful Martians Go Home

She looks good flesh coloured too.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - Number three child wouldn't go to sleep; I needed my nightly film fix. Solution? Turn off the lights and watch a 96 minute abstract documentary montage with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass and no dialogue*. 5 minutes later he was asleep in my arms. 90 minutes after that I managed to tear my eyes away from the screen... I love Koyaanisqatsi.

* Though my DVD copy does have subtitles. (I'm afraid to look.)

Gamer (2009) - Another piece of evidence to support my thesis that ''All films set in a future prison are automatically shite; no matter how well thought out the prison is.'' I have no idea how I manage to end up watching so many bad SF films set in futuristic penal systems; I certainly don't go looking for the things. They just turn up. My normal selection procedure for buying crappy second hand DVDs runs like this: Does it have Rutger Hauer in it? Yes. Have I ever heard of it? No. Does it have any combination of scantily clad women / explosions / men with rayguns and / or supposedly horrifying monsters on the front of the box? Is it less than a quid? If it scores more than three of the above it's an automatic purchase. This one failed most of those tests (all save the less than a quid one) but I bought it anyway - and it still turned out to be a totally shite SF movie.

Gameris a frenetic yet boring (an extremely difficult trick to pull off) mess that makes the Deathrace 2000 remake look sedate and interesting. (And, it turns out, a fucking bootleg too so I won't get my less than a quid back by selling it on eBay. Grrrrr.)

Back to the Future: Part III (1990) - My least favourite of the three (part 2 is the best) completing the Pizza Night run of the trilogy. Number one daughter was gripped by all of them.

Hell Comes to Frogtown ( 1988 ) - I was very disappointed. Mind you I don't suppose anything could live up to that title. Pretty meh Post-Apoc tale of a Keith Chegwin lookalike sent on a dangerous mission into a mutant reservation to rescue then impregnate six women being held captive by giant mutant frogs. The best joke comes in the first 10 seconds and after that it goes downhill rapidly but never makes it to the 'so bad it's good' depths - and was never going to be as funny as it thought it was.

The Time Travelers (1964) - a rewatch. It has its clunky moments - the 'comedic' moments were particularly heavy handed - but it still stands up head and shoulders above most of the SF dross of the period. And I was reminded of a thought I had the first time I saw it. I may have mentioned it somewhere before but I can't find it. This film was made in 1964, and in it various stage magic tricks are used to simulate incomprehensible future technology.

Clarke's oft-quoted third law, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' dates from 1973.

Beating Arthur C Clarke to the draw by 10 years? I'd be proud of that.

The Horror of Party Beach (1964) - even with the help of the MST3K crew this is a pretty unwatchable flick that promised WEIRD ATOMIC BEASTS THAT LIVE OFF HUMAN BLOOD!!! but then most cheapo SF/horror films of the day did the same.

Antropophagus (1980 aka The Grim Reaper) - So I find out why Shock (1977 aka Beyond the Door II) was mistakenly labelled The Grim Reaper on the back of the box. Just how many Italian horror movies are there that end with the villain being killed with a pick-axe? Not that many I would guess. Gods! this was a boring piece of crap. It's reckoned by many to be a seminal Italian horror masterpiece - though reading the forums those that do so all seem to have first seen it when they were about 12 - coming to it as an aged 50 year old it had me yawning from the start, checking the elapsed time after about 30 minutes and the rest of the show wondering why Italians seemed to think long silent shots of people walking around slowly is in any way scary. Maybe it's an Italian thing.

"Mama mia! I can't look! She's wandering aimlessly again!"

The version I saw was shorn of the two notorious shots that got it labelled as a 'Video Nasty' back in the days. I don't think I missed anything. Now to turn the disc over and watch...

The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II (1985) - a Charles B. Pierce pictures inc. production written by Charles B. Pierce, produced by Charles B. Pierce, directed by Charles B. Pierce and starring Charles B. Pierce - and his son Chuck. Filmed in Fouke, Arkansas (which is the way I felt when I had finished watching it) The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II (aka Boggy Creek ll: and the Legend Continues) treads a fine line between boredom and tedium. Nothing happens. And then it happens again. Sometimes nothing happens in flashback with a stocking tied over the lens to make it all misty and, you know, flashbacky. In short we spend 90 minutes watching Charles B. Pierce being a pompous prick telling people to 'be quiet' and 'get back' a lot - as nothing happens. And then it ends. Highlights include his co-star son (who plays one of his students) calling him 'Pop' on screen. And Charles B. Pierce running around in too short shorts and a tight moob-hugging shirt holding a handgun - jumping over a small bush! Charles B. Pierce also provided the endless soporific voice-over. Fans of Charles B. Pierce may like it.

Katalin Varga (2009) - slow, beautifully shot (and even more beautifully soundscaped) tale of revenge. Completed for £28,000 by a first time director with a stunning central performance by Hilda Peter.

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010) - which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting to and, I suspect, a lot more than the first one (which I can hardly remember).

Amateur (1994) - to my shame I only know one Hal Harltley film. This is it.

Alien Trespass (2009) - Hoooo boy! Another incredibly long 90 minutes in which trashy SF B-pictures from the 1950s are mercilessly and relentlessly homaged to death before your very eyes. The film climaxes with the alien monster attacking our heroes in a cinema showing The Blob (the climax of which has the alien blob of the title attacking the local cinema). Oh the recursive fun. This 'aliens attacking people in a cinema watching The Blob attack a cinema' is turning into the stock cliché ending for 'affectionate spoof' films relentlessly homaging trashy SF B-pictures of the period. Given the rich pickings in the cliché-ridden field which it's spoofing, Alien Trespass manages to miss or fumble every one of them it picked up. The pace is leaden. The story is an unfocused mess and the script is just a tedious bore. I wanted to like it. I really did. I love the originals but I sat there for the whole show waiting for a joke to arrive. Any joke. Didn't even have to be a good one.I was still waiting as the end credits rolled. The originals were funnier.

Mulholland Drive (2001) - second veiwing and I'm still bewildered. It took me four viewing before I 'got' Eraserhead. I think Mulholland Drive is about lesbians - but I'm not sure.

Another Brief snippet from the screenplay of my life:

2011-05-26T23:21:00.006+01:00

INT: KIDS' BEDROOM: DAY

It is time to get dressed for school.

HOLLY:

I've got a headache.

ME:

No you haven't, Holly, you're just

like me and mum. We're just not

good in the mornings. We're not

morning people.

HOLLY:

No, I like mornings; I just wish they

were later in the day.

2011-05-16T13:48:00.007+01:00

When I'm not staring at Lidl's packaging on the breakfast table trying to wake up in the morning, I occasionally find myself staring at Morrison's products with the same sense of bemusement. This milk carton for instance has been occupying my brain for some time now. (Or those portions of it functioning before the first coffee of the morning kicks in.)

The gate puzzled me for a long time, I spent ages trying to work out how you could make it in reality without the need for two dimensional planks - and why isn't it symmetrical? the joints where the diagonal meet the uprights are different top and bottom.

Then, for a while, I fretted over the typography. 'British' needs a capital letter; it's a proper noun but why does 'From' get one when 'long life whole milk' doesn't? and, for that matter, why does the 'Fat' in '4% Fat' get one? Maybe capital F's were cheap that week.

Finally the other day I cracked what it was that was really annoying me. It's so obvious. It's the cows. The one on the in the distance left is the same cow as the larger, nearer one. It's just been cloned, flipped and shrinked a bit.

It probably goes "Oom!".

2011-05-13T23:07:00.001+01:00

For reasons to boring to go into we didn't watch Back to The Future III, as we were planning to, tonight. So I drew this instead.

2011-05-01T21:12:00.006+01:00

Crashing bore post time again. Every film I watched in April.

Despicable Me (2010) - Enjoyable, with the kids, movie . I suspect I would have found it funnier if I hadn't seen Megamind recently.

Spirited Away (2001) - A Pizza night re-watch with the kids. Number One Daughter wanted to watch it in Japanese with subtitles but was overruled (strange child).

Dead Fire (1997) - Over-long, dull, made-for-TV piece of shit that, as a plot twist, had twin brothers sharing the same first name (huh?) and had more than its usual share of clichéd shit, 'Sci-Fi', shit clichés. The name C Thomas Howell, and the words 'Ruthless space terrorists' appeared on the DVD case; and that's about all you need to know really. Oh, and there was a futuristic prison sequence too - always a sign of grade A crap.

Pandorum (2009) - By gum! I just watched a movie with Paul W.S. Anderson's name in the credits without wanting to throw things at the screen at any point. SF horror nonsense that made sense - almost - and made me jump frequently.

Cat Women of the Moon (1953) - finally! After falling asleep more times than I want to think about, I finally get to the end ofCat Women of the Moon. I've seen it before but this time I couldn't sit down to watch it without falling asleep. I've been trying for days to get to the end of it but ZZzzzzzzzz every time. Was it worth it?Almost certainly not.

Franklyn ( 2008 ) - now if Neil Gaiman had really written this and Terry Gilliam had really directed it this might have had the makings of a crackingly weird little film. As it is, it looks like a bad pastiche mashup of Brazil, Neverwhere, and The Fisher King with an undercooked script that started of enigmatically, became tedious, and then obvious. Sort of like a Radio 4 afternoon play with a shitload of SFX. The design elements were great; the story bored the pants off me

Lottery funding was involved. My heart is starting to sink every time I see that National Lottery logo in the opening credits.

Tooth (2004) - A tooth fairy, leaves a gazzillion dollars under a little girl's pillow instead of the usual quarter, thus bankrupting Fairytopia and putting Christmas in danger. As a cynical old fart I thought it was a real bollocks of a film with a rotten, erratic, nonsensical story line and not enough of anything (humour, adventure, pathos, romance etc.) to make it at all interesting. My kids, on the other hand, laughed like drains all the way through. I guess I wasn't the target audience. I love hearing my kids laugh - even that weird snorting one that Daughter Number One does from time to time - so I enjoyed it despite myself.

Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) - 'British Sex comedies of the Seventies', words that should strike heart into the terror of everyone. If anyone asks me, "So what was so amazing about punk?" I'll show them this film and say, "Because this is what it was like before." On every level of everything this film is shite; the writing makes the average Carry-on film look like Oscar Wilde.

It's boggling to think, in these days of wall to wall internet porn, that the British were so uptight about nudity in 1974 that this un-erotic, flaccid parading of boobs, bums and the occasional flash of pubes got an 18 certificate. Even more boggling is the fact that enough people rushed to their local flea pits, macs on their laps, to make three sequels possible. Another 25p well spent in the Save the Children shop; I hope all those kids in Africa appreciate the pain I go through to keep them supplied with clean water, pencils, and rudimentary health care.

Best Bit of the Whole Film.
The Entity (1982) - a movie with it's own built-in sequel. The first half is terrific and builds up a nice frisson as Barbara Hershey puts a damn good performance as a single mum terrorised by an unseen supernatural force; and director Sidney J. Furie crams more Dutch angles into a movie than is humanly possible. Is all this supernatural stuff real? Is she really being repeatedly raped by a creature from another dimension? Or could the earnest, young psychologist be right and it's all in her head? It's gripping stuff. I really didn't know which way it would go and was made to jump several times. Great stuff. I was loving it.

I was loving it right up until the moment, almost exactly half way through the film, when someone else sees a manifestation. Suddenly the whole film collapses into a really stinky mess of para-psychological balderdash and ropey special effects with our heroine ending up in a giant laboratory, running around a mock-up of her own house, being chased by a vast, ceiling-mounted, liquid helium spraying 'entity' freezing machine that, with the inevitability of crap movie logic, 'the entity' has taken over.

If you get a chance watch this, do so. The first half is great. Stay with it till the moment when she's sobbing "You saw it! You saw it!" onto her friend's shoulder; that's the end of the movie. The sequel is crap.

(It occurred to me a day later that the second half does contain one piece of genius film-making. Whether it's terrible one sided telephone conversations (with actors repeating what the unseen participant in the conversation is telling them), or the frantic redressing of the same short corridor for endless Doctor Who type running around, it's always interesting to see the ways film makers manage to cut corners and save money. In The Entity the climax takes place in a vast laboratory in which there is a stark white mock-up of the house that has featured so prominently in the first half of the film. I feel really dumb but it took me 24 hours to realise the 'vast laboratory' was in fact the studio in which the film was shot and the 'mock-up of the house' was the half-finished, unpainted set. Clever. It's still crap though.)

V for Vendetta (2006) - That was fun.

Best Worst Movie (2009) - I was really in two minds about watching this. As someone who watches and enjoys deriding low budget hopeless movies I wasn't sure if a documentary film about the cast and crew of the execrable Troll 2 was something I could comfortably watch. For years I've enjoyed laughing at hapless and inept film makers. Presented with the opportunity to see a film made by the star of one of those films ,as he interviews the other members of the cast, left me nervous. What if they came over as genuine nice people who were bewildered and upset by the odium heaped on them. What if I felt sorry for them and started to question the strange enjoyment I got from watching ineptly made movies. I had a real fear that I would end up finding I was guilty of laughing at those who were to be pitied rather than scorned. I needn't have worried. Most of the people who were interviewed were in on the bad movie joke too and enjoyed it just as much as the audience. Best Worst Movie is not the greatest documentary feature (just as Troll 2 is not the best worst movie ever made) but it is a well made piece of work and gives some nice insights into the fleeting fame that comes with being in a cheap, badly made horror movie.

Innocent Blood (1992) - incredibly dull John Landis 'comedy horror' featuring vampire gangsters. In itself an amusing enough idea but I don't think I have looked at my watch so often during a film for ages. It seemed endless; a 30 minute's worth of story plot padded out with another 80 minutes of... well, padding. I am formulating a new rule, any film that has a cameo from Forrest J Ackerman in it is automatically shit. (Damn! I just went through his IMDb list and he was in Queen of Blood and The Time Travelers both of which were oddly good but all the other films on his list that I have seen Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Equinox, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women on the Moon, Future War - oh God! I'd forgotten that one - are crap. Especially Future War; that WAS shit.) Okay, a new rule, How about this? Any film with cameos from three or more directors in it is automatically shit. (Frank Oz, Sam Raimi, and Dario Argento all popped up in this one - so did Alfred Hitchcock via the medium of a clip from Strangers on a Train appearing on a TV a character was watching.)

Intrigue (1988 ) - a not very intriguing low-key, made for TV, spy movie with an American agent getting a former colleague back across the Iron Curtain. The emphasis is on character rather than plot (no explosions or car chases but lots of sitting on trains talking about 'the old days' - at one point a Russian agent complains about having to pay for his own dry cleaning). The emphasis on character does leave a couple of the plot points to just appear out of nowhere. Coincidentally the second film in a row to feature Robert Loggia.

Steel Frontier (1995) - a perfect 'widget movie'. A 'widget movie' (a term I have, as far as I know, just invented) is a film made by a competent crew who turn up on time in the mornings, do what they do till the end of the day, and then go back to their homes or hotels, then don't think about work until they clock on again the next day. It's just a job. What they do to pay the bills. They might as well be making widgets on a production line. Watching a widget movie feels like work too. .

In this one the usual Post-Apoc grunge costumes and scrapyard setbuilding is slapped onto a by-the-numbers spaghetti western plot. It's a post apoc America, populated by well fed, clean haired Americans with nice teeth, a lone drifter comes into a peaceful town taken over by rampaging psychotics (I wonder sometimes if the actors playing these parts ever get fed up of laughing all the time?) he kills all the bad guys. The End. There's lots of guns, lots of explosions, an attractive widow with a son, a few half-hearted attempts at making the central hero a Christ figure (albeit hip-firing a 50mm machine gun), lots of vehicles crashing into one another (after sometimes passing the same abandoned cars on the side of the road several time first. Maybe the drivers were getting dizzy from driving around in circles and lost control) and it's all very boring.

It's one of those films where you know the trailer started with deep trailer voice man saying, "In a world where....", and, a few words later, continued with, "Only one man..."

Hemoglobin (1997 aka Bleeders and The Decendent) - For some inexplicable reason the authorities decide to dig up all the graves on a remote Canadian island and relocate the bodies to the mainland. (Did our helpful, exposition dropping, boatman really tell the protagonists it was because the funeral director had been caught using 'substandard wood' in the coffins? or did I just dream it? - anyway, the upshot of this sudden removal of bodies is that the local population of inbred troglodytes, the descendants of that well-known source of all evil, the Dutch aristocracy, is deprived of their sole source of nutrition. Rutger Hauer gets to dissect a hermaphrodite that fell into a boat's propeller; and another character eats a pickled foetus; two sets of twins have sex (one set of twins is played by one woman donning a fake moustache and licking her own body-double's chest) and the audience wonders how 94 minutes can pass so sodding slowly. The pace was leaden. I think they were going for -- actually I have no idea what they were going for but I don't think dullness is what they intended. Plod plod plod. The trailer does the whole movie in two minutes - chest licking included.
Back to the Future - Pizza night with the kids and on a second viewing I was struck by what an incredibly well-constructed script this film had. Really well done all round, the kids loved it but were a bit worried by all the 'swearing'.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) - What a pile of arse! I loathe Star Trek - Why I seek out Star Trek movies and subject myself to them is a mystery that I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the years - and I am no nearer to an answer than when I started. I think this is the last of them I had to watch. I hope so. Most Star Trek movies are bollocks from beginning to end. This one didn't even manage to be bollocks. It was just undescended testicles.

2011-04-30T22:59:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I love the tourist season. I overheard this conversation in a café in Fort William this afternoon. A middle-aged lady of North British accent is on a mobile phone:

"We're going back to the cottage now... ...In Fort William... Just put on the sat-nav and it's in it... It's already in it... In the sat-nav... Just press the button and Fort Williams is in it... For the cottage... just follow that.... Press 'Previous Destination'... 'Previous Destination'... in the sat-nav... yes... the sat-nav... yes... No, press the button... 'Previous Destination'... Right... Right... See you."

She puts the phone away and turns to her friend. "They don't stand a cat in hell's chance, do they?"

Her friend shakes her head. "No," she says sadly. "No they don't."

2011-04-28T00:40:00.002+01:00

I did a new cartoon tonight! the first one for so long that I wasn't sure if my cartoon blog was still there. It is:

http://gosh-wow-productions.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html

2011-04-23T01:21:00.004+01:00

Oh, the worldwide interweb is a wonderful and dangerous thing.

Looking up a minor actress on the IMDb this evening, while trying to work out why I had just spent nearly two hours of my life watching the incredibly dull vampire gangster film Innocent Blood, I stumbled over a film which not only starred Emilio Estivez's Uncle but also John Travolta's brother, Patrick Swayze's brother, Silvester Stallone's mother, and Burt Ward - who used to play Robin in the 1960s Batman TV show. What a cast!

I now have a compulsion to waste 75 minutes of my life watching Beach Babes From Beyond.

What I don't have a compulsion to do is send Silvester Stallone's mum a picture of my arse (and $125) to have it 'read'. Arses, apparently, can reveal much about your personality and your destiny. Don't take my word for it; visit her Rumpology Website and get that photo of your own behnid (sic) analysed by an expert.

2011-04-20T21:29:00.006+01:00

We were in the Fort today. We went in on the bus as the car is still off the road after last week's stag whacking incident. Fort William bus station is, as you might well imagine, very small. Basically it's the side wall of Morrison's supermarket with a bit of a roof and a couple of benches. Today though I noticed a new addition, a giant LCD digital display screen full of useful bussy information.

Getting closer however...

IMPORTANT NOTICE

All the information shown on this display screen is
INCORRECT. Please disregard it completely.

Which made me wonder: why don't they just turn the bugger off?

.

2011-04-20T00:08:00.001+01:00

Another post over at CheesyBeats tonight:
Juanita Banana

2011-04-14T23:13:00.003+01:00

Nerts!

I am saying "Fuck!" a lot at the moment and wondering how much the car is going to cost to fix.

Merriol, and Holly have been away for a few days down in Sheffield and tonight Daisy, Eben, and I went to meet them at Bridge of Orchy station. It's a 45 minute drive up Glen Coe and across Ranoch Moor. The sort of scenery people come from all over the world to Scotland to see but a pain in the arse when it adds two hours onto a train journey to get you fifteen minutes closer to your destination. With me? No? Nor am I. Start again:

When people travel up on the train to us it makes sense for us to meet them at Bridge of Orchy station which is 45 minutes away to the south rather than Fort William (which is only 30 minutes away from us to the North) because it takes the train two hours to get from one to the other.

So, lots of heather, lots of mountains; beautiful scenery, some of it familiar the world over from such films as Braveheart, The Harry Potter, Highlander and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (it was big in India).

It's also full of deer.

I ran into a stag this evening. Coming back from picking Merriol and Holly up, just short of the Glencoe Ski lift (Rob Roy) Merriol spotted a group of deer off the side of the road . My eyes flick to the left to make sure none of them are coming our way and Bang! the stag of the group was right in front of me having leapt onto the road from the right. Big bang. Grip the steering wheel. Don't skid. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

Lost the nearside headlight and cracked a big expensive looking panel on the front of the car. No blood or mess on the bodywork that I could see in the dark but tufts of hair sticking out of a couple of places. The stag ran off after I hit it. It may well be okay and just walk with a limp for a few days. Big tough things Red Deer. Bloody frightening experience though.

2011-04-08T22:11:00.005+01:00

As promised this months marathon post of every film I watched last month (March).

Watchmen (2009) - oh that was fun! The best comic book movie I've seen for a long time. I didn't mind the omissions and changes made to the material from the original in the slightest.
Warlock (1989) - Another of my (mostly unconscious and accidental) attempt to work my way through David Twohy's entire back catalogue. After writing Critters 2, and long before The Chronicles of Riddick, Twohy knocked out this tale of an evil Warlock (Julian Sands) time travelling to contemporary LA (the terminus for all low budget time travel) pursued by ace witch hunter Richard E Grant wearing a 17th century mullet, a costume left over from one of the lesser Highlander movies, and a variable Scottish accent. Grant gives it all he's got but never really looks that comfortable with any of it. Julian Sands on the other hand is having a whale of a time hamming it up. The McGuffin here is 'The Grand Grimoire' a book so unspeakably evil that it has been broken up into three pieces and then cunningly hidden in a gay antique dealer's house, an Amish attic, and Richard E Grant's character's grave. Once the bits are assembled, the 'lost name of God' can be read and, when read backwards, the whole of creation can be undone. The moment where Sands' Warlock finally reads God's name is a classic. Lightning, thunder, swirling faux Industrial Light and Magic storm clouds. The Warlock is exultant:

"I know thy name!" he cries. " I know thy name!"

And then totally spoils the moment by not adding, "... and I know where you live!"

Jumanji (1995) - another one of those films I have avoided for years because it had Robin Williams in it. But, everyone having enjoyed the semi-sequel / remake Zathura: A Space Adventure, I thought I could put up with him for the duration of Pizza Night. I was more than pleasantly surprised. Williams was kept under control and not allowed to get mawkish and the film clipped along with so many inventive gags that I was laughing all the way through it. I'm not sure the It's a Wonderful Life homage/reference when William's character explored the town he had been away from for 26 years worked, that was a little bit clumsy and obvious, but once the narrative got back to the mayhem and the jokes it was a real treat.

Universal Soldier (1992) - Between directing the incredibly terrible Moon 44 and the almost good Stargate Roland Emmerich directed Universal Soldier with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren hitting each other a lot. Sometimes they hit each other in slow motion, sometimes not. Sometimes they shoot each other, or throw hand grenades at each other, or drive each other off roads and over cliffs in speeding vehicles or blow up isolated gas stations to try and get rid of each other again (they'd already killed each other in the prologue). In the end one of them ends up going through some very spiky, motorised farm equipment. But it has a happy ending and there was a sequel.

Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) - The sequel. More explosions, more guns, no Dolph Lundgren and none of the (limited) invention and fun of the original. The sort of pointless, explosion ridden shit that WWF WrestleMania fans wouldn't find too difficult to follow.

Demonwarp (1988 ) - Somehow, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity.

Demonwarp starts out routinely enough: before the credits, back in the cowboy days, a lone preacher is out for a walk with his horse (why he isn't riding it is never explained). The preacher is reading aloud from the Book of Revelation - which, in his copy of the Bible is at the front where you would expect Genesis to be - when something falls from the sky and makes a huge crater just off screen. The preacher praises the lord "It's The Second Coming!". After the credits we join George Kennedy playing Trivial Pursuit with his daughter while a point of view shot sneaks up on their rented cabin. Suddenly the door bursts in and something hairy knocks old George unconscious and absconds with girl. Cut to a 4x4 full of twenty-somethings info-dumping to each other about how "strange-shit" has been going on in Demon Woods for years. They arrive at the cabin and continue info dumping at each other for the next twenty minutes! (but both girls get their boobs out so it's a little less painful than it could have been - though the 'sex scene' was one of the dullest I've ever endured; two people mildly, and unenthusiastically, writhing while both desperately try to avoid touching anything that the other might consider an erogenous zone). All in all it's 30 minutes before the film actually gets going when Bigfoot strikes again by ripping out all the electrics from the Mystery Mobile and killing two of the boys.

Grrrrr... Grrrrr... Grrrpfff...
Oh bugger! can I try that again?

Hero boy and the girls decide to hike through the woods to the road - though 'meander' would be a more accurate description for what they actually do. Meanwhile, in different places, a lone hiker and two nubile young women are also in the woods. The hiker looks like he was added later to pad out the running time; he adds nothing to the story and doesn't meet any of the other characters and was obviously shot without sound - he gets no lines but does get some "Hmmmm"s and "...!?"s dubbed in afterwards. He has a severed human hand thrown at him and is then chased round the same tree a few times by the bigfoot's legs (hiring the legs was obviously cheaper than hiring the whole costume). The two nubile girls get their boobs out and do some sunbathing before bigfoot turns up and rips one girl's head off and the other girl runs into the woods past the same tree several times. (Okay, I'm confused. Are there now two Bigfeet running around out there?)

Luckily I grabbed this bloodstained T-shirt as I escaped...

The lone hiker is finally caught by bigfoot (number one?) and killed (silently). Lots of aimless wandering around later, the nubile girl meets up with the remains of Scooby-Do gang at the camp of George Kennedy (who has been wandering around the woods for a week laying bear traps and Wiley Coyote style tripwires with dynamite strapped to trees). The nubile girl is exhausted. "Get some water out of my tent," says George. Hero boy goes into George's tent / location production office and is attacked by the bigfoot! All that time wandering around looking for the bugger and it was in his tent all the time! Or is it another one? Who knows? Who cares? Fight fight fight and, as per Hollywood rule 67a subsection G, all the guns jam in the moment of crisis. The hero boy gets unconciousnicated, George gets a fatal battering and the girls...? Hero boy wakes up, grabs some dynamite and, picking a direction at random, determinedly wanders off. He finds dead George, he finds one of the girls shambling around with an eye hanging out of a socket, and he finds a cave full of zombies wearing Residents T-shirts and doing electronics.

Pass the soldering iron will you, Derrick?

At this point my WTF?ometer went off the scale. Apparently for years the bigfoots have been stealing electronic equipment and bringing it to the cave where a mixed bag of undead have been repairing an alien spaceship that landed there years ago.

Writer: "It's a bigfoot flick, with zombies! - and aliens... ...and tits!"

Producer:"I like it!"

This sequence does contain one genuinely interesting shot where we watch a zombie replace a circuit board shot from underneath. It's a sudden and weirdly interesting intrusion in all the basic 'square on to the action' set-ups that make up the rest of the film. The director was obviously very chuffed with this shot because he repeats it another four times in a very few minutes. Meanwhile, back at the action.... the hero boy shoots the bigfoot (or one of the bigfeet - I've lost track) who transmogrifies into his own uncle! (the disappearance of the uncle - who we have never met before - was mentioned in all the earlier infodumping, but as there were probably boobs on screen at that point I wasn't listening to the finer details.) Hero boy finds that his two friends and his girlfriend are also in the cave. Boy one is tied up, boy two is a zombie and the girlfriend is inside the flying saucer about to sacrificed by the preacher we met in the pre-credit sequence*. He going to feed her vital bodily organs to a demon-like alien who he believes to be an angel.

Yum yum!.... Liver....

After yet more fighting, boy one is injected with alien bigfooting serum - cueing what is probably the world's only Wolfman-like human-to-bigfoot transformation scene. Hero and girlfriend run away leaving him nobly holding the dynamite as he writhes in hirsute agony. As they run from the cave Hero boy and Girlfriend girl encounter Eye-dangling socket girl and shoot her dead - again - because she's a zombie (I think)... anyway there's a HUGE EXPLOSION in the cave and that's the end...

Time for you to jolt upright
in bed sweating a lot, darling

... or is it? Two false 'it was all a dream - or was it?' endings later and the credits finally roll. Another the end.

Mind bogglingly crap.

*No sign of his horse though.

The Blob (1988 ) - Gory remake. Too slick to be bad but not good enough to be interesting.

Prom Night (1980) - Tedious early mystery/slasher movie shot through that fuzzy softness filter they shot every Playboy centrefold of the period ( ...I am told). God it was boring in a very soft and fuzzy way. The director had seen some gialli and from time to time there were a couple of nicely set up stylistic bits, odd compositions, and a few interesting edits, but the one thing missing was any dramatic interest. If there was any possible opportunity to dissipate any feeling of tension that it had built up, the film would find it. And this wasn't anti-climaxing - building up the tension then letting the audience down with a bump for a moment before starting to ratchet up the terror again; it was just piss poor film making. The editing kept wandering off, taking us away to watch something else for far too long while we forgot about the mildly scary bit that we might have been possibly building up to. I'd guessed who the killer was in the first few minutes and the final marathon fight between the heroine and her boyfriend, and the killer on a disco floor (while the music kept on pumping - be-ba-pewwww!) just made me giggle. People cannot have life or death struggles to a disco beat - even in 1980 this must have been obvious.

Black Rainbow (1989) - In the Deep South a fake medium starts to predict real events including murder, a fact which puts her life in danger when the killer comes after her. Not badly done - and it had Jason Robards who I think is wonderful in everything.

Chasing The Deer (1994) - a film with 195 'Associate Producers' (ie investors) listed on the end credits, a terrible script that lurched from one undercooked cliché to another, and some frankly bafflingly amateur looking direction and editing that kept leaping the movie from one scene to another in alarming jumps. Though the production values for such a low budget film were excellent - I don't suppose there was a historical re-enactment society in the north of Britain that didn't end up in this show somewhere, and some of the locations were genuine - there were far far too many characters knocking about. In addition to the thin soap opera element (father and son separated by circumstances end up on opposing sides and die in each other's arms on the battlefield - yes, that hoary old chestnut of a story) there were dozens and dozens of other characters who would arrive on screen, address all those around them by their full rank and title so we knew who they were, before disappearing from the narrative never to be seen again (quite often taking all their friends with them). I guess the writers were aiming for some historical accuracy but time and time again I kept thinking, 'Oh god, not more Lord Whoevers and General Thisandthats. I don't need to meet all these people'.

People criticize 'Hollywood' movies for simplifying history, combining characters and trimming events to fit a convenient narrative structure, and watching this film I see why that process takes place. A film is not a history lecture, it doesn't come with footnotes and a reading list. First and foremost a film, even one based on historical events, is an entertainment. It can be polemical, emotive, manipulative and all those other things but unless it has some sort of a narrative that people engage with it's not going to keep its audience. Whatever 'message' (for want of a better word) the film maker wants to convey will be lost. I have no idea what the makers of Running the Deer wanted me to come away with. I didn't care about any of the characters I could identify, and I really had no clearer idea of the events of the 1745 Jacobite Rising than I couldn't have gleaned from any picture-book history of Scotland. The acting was adequate, though less than inspired (but given some of the clunky, very stagy dialogue the actors were asked to deliver I can't blame them for not setting the screen on fire. Most of the cast were unknown to me but Brian Blessed lent his beard to the occasion - and was the nominal 'star' of the show). Most of the time I felt I was watching some historical tableau of Scottish history presented by semi-professional actors. (A job I have done; I know what I'm talking about.)

There was however one really nice moment that suddenly set all the rest into context. For a few seconds the film actually looked like a film and not a 'living history' show. Before the final hopeless battle at Culloden there is a slow tracking shot of the ranks of Scottish troops facing the camera, arms at the ready, all speaking fervently in Gaelic. As the camera reaches one of our English speaking protagonists we hear his voice: "I am Alistair Campbell son of... etc.". Cut to Bonny Prince Charlie on his horse. He turns to his aide. "What are they doing?" he asks. The aide replies something along the lines of: 'they are reciting their lineage. It makes them remember who they are and brave in battle'. "Interesting... " says the prince, "Interesting... " Now that was a nice piece of film making. A moment where image, sound editing, and well delivered dialogue tell us something we don't know, show us something of the character of the men who are about to die, and something of the character of the prince for whom they are about to fight. (He has, after all, been leading them for months and only just noticed they do this before a battle?). Two shots worth saving surrounded by 90 minutes of padding.

I did come away from Chasing The Deer with one thing: I now take great pride in the fact that we in Scotland can make bad films as good as any bad films from the rest of the world.

The Ambulance (1990) - my second Larry Cohen movie (the first was The Stuff in which a killer pudding threatens to eat America) and not, I hope, my last. Funny as hell. I haven't laughed so much in ages. Here's a slice of the cheesy action. Eric Roberts is on the trail of a mysterious ambulance that picks up ill people from the streets but never delivers them to a hospital.

I'm afraid that Roberts' line, "You faggots! You faggots! You fight like stewardesses!" has just entered my top ten all time screen insults list.

The Secret of Moonacre ( 2008 ) - I have from time to time read in film books and magazines phrases like: 'the script was a couple of re-writes away from being finished'. I never really understood what it meant till watching this. All the elements for a good enchanting family film were there (the costumes and sets in particular were excellent) and though the acting was variable, Dakota Blue Richards and Juliet Stevenson were very good; Natascha McElhone was just terrible - I'm sure she's a nice woman and has done good work but she was as wooden as hell here and totally unconvincing. The SFX, of which there were a lot, also varied from the adequate to the beautiful; there were some nice pictures on the screen. What didn't work for me, however, was the script which never gelled. It stopped and started, never really got going, and had very obviously lost whole sections during post production. The most obvious 'deleted scene' (not available on the bare bones DVD I watched) being the 'love / hate relationship' that developed between the heroine and Robin, her male opposite number in the enemy camp. At one point, later on in the film, our heroine says something to the effect of: "Robin? I never want to see him again..." before storming off with a coy expression that makes us think she doesn't really mean it (tcha! teenagers eh?). This would have been all well and fine if we had actually seen her and Robin obviously falling in love while hating each other on sight. As it was, I had to back peddle like hell in my head through the film to even work out who Robin was....

Lottery Funding was involved.

Black Caesar (aka The Godfather of Harlem 1973) - More Larry Cohen. A fairly straight reworking of the Warner Brothers gangster tropes of the 30s and 40s, only, this being the 70s, it's the rise and fall of a tough black gangster rather than an Italian or Irish. A bit more violent and explicit in the sex and language department (I think Larry Cohen must have used every racial epithet available in the English language in his script) than Warners got away with. A couple of moving scenes and some seriously good acting - I particularly liked the look of disgust and disbelief on our protagonist's face when, having been shot in the belly, he goes for help from his stooge, a fake preacher through whose church he launders money - only to find the man has really gone and got religion. The only help the reverend offers his erstwhile boss is to attempt to heal the gunshot wound by getting possessed by the Holy Spirit and the laying on of hands. A vast improvement on the sanctimonious Irish priests that Edmund O'Brien used to play so often in the originals.

Lottery Funding was not involved.

Balls of Fury (2007) - I was in the mood for something stupid and funny and this delivered both. Basically Balls of Fury is Enter The Dragon with all the sweaty bone crunching Kung-Fu substituted by life or death Ping Pong matches. It's really stupid joke that just about stays funny after being stretched out to ninety minutes, but I doubt if they would have made it without Christopher Walken casually stealing the show from about the halfway mark.

Sabata (1969) - A Lee Van Cleef in a pretty standard Spaghetti Western. Van Cleef demonstrated his ability to stand iconicaly and his talent for staring suspiciously sideways out of the corner of his eye, while walking in a totally different direction to the one he was looking. He did that a lot. The camera crew had loads of fun with their zoom lens on every other shot. And one of the morally ambiguous protagonists has a banjo with a built in rifle. The music was hilarious.

Second Sight (1989) - still working my way through the Big Box VHS Paydirt pile. Totally forgettable frantic comedy about a psychic detective. I mean really forgettable. I only finished watching it half an hour ago and I can't remember how it ended. I can remember the denouement, but not the climax. There was one vaguely funny gag in the whole thing but it's not worth the effort in telling. I do remember writing my own gags at a couple of points and thinking one of them was worth writing down for future use - but I've forgotten what it was. Why do I watch this stuff? I can't remember that either. It must have seemed a good idea at the time.

Westender (2003) - Westender - what a terrible title for a medievalesque epic but, there you go, that's what they called it. Maybe it doesn't seem so bad in the USA but say Westender to me and I either hear the Pet Shop Boys in my head and / or conjure up an image of some posh, uptown version of Eastenders. Westender starts off very badly. A drunken gambler in a medievalesque bar (made from what appears to be machine plained, sawn timber) gambles away a ring, his final possession, gets into a fight, looses, and wakes up the next morning determined to get it back. The ring belonged to his lost love (she was burned at the stake apparently and he fished the ring out of the ashes). After a clumsy, exposition dropping, conversation with a gypsy girl he sets off to find the gambler who won the ring off him. He soon finds his man who, it transpires, has been robbed by bandits. Together they pursue the bandits in long sequences of very long, very beautiful and very languid shots with very little dialogue. Somewhere along the line I started thinking 'this looks like a short', a very long short but it had that shorty feel to it. Turns out I was right (yay me!); first-time director Brock Morse’s film school short script assignment grew into a 30-minute short that was filmed in three weeks, and, after gaining more funding, grew again into a full-length movie. It looks like several million dollars on the screen. It isn't, but it looks it (as an example of the limited budget one central character is played by the film's composer). The script picks up characters and drops them in a most unHollywood manner and never really gets much of a plot going, substituting instead a hero racked by inner turmoil - having your missus burned at the stake will do that to you - but by the time we get to the end of the show it has somehow turned itself into quite an interesting bit of film. Somehow. Just. I'm not entirely convinced it was worth the wait to get there but one of the better minimal budget student features I've seen. Spoiler: In the end he doesn't get his ring back but does rediscover what it means to be a man (or something else that ticks all the boxes in the 'Have you completed your Hero's Journey checklist'. Companion helper? Check... Supernatural aid? Check... Abyss: death and rebirth? Check... ).

Hana-Bi (aka Fireworks 1997) - okay.... my first Takeshi Kitano film. Not sure if I liked it but I was certainly watching the screen the whole time. I think I'll have to see more of his films before I decide whether I did like this or not.

Xizao ( aka Shower 1999) - nice simple sweet and touching film about daily life in a Beijing bathhouse.

Spy Kids (2001) - Friday night choice of number one daughter, it's been a long day and she wanted something familiar - I think we have seen it twice before. I quite like Spy Kids, it has some nice moments.

The Exterminator (1980) - After a recent bout of Far Eastern sub-titled art movies movies it's time to get back to the shit VHS pile. (Mind you one of the 'Art Movies' had at least seven or eight on-screen shootings, two off-screen shootings and a character loosing an eye in a particularly vicious chopstick-related incident.) Made six years after Death Wish (1974) and four years after Taxi Driver (1976) The Exterminator treads similar ground while looking like it was made long before either of them. A Vietnam vet bumps off the gang members who crippled his best bud ("That nigger was my best friend, motherfucker!"), he picks up a prostitute, sees scars on her and bumps off the pimp who did it to her (in the process shooting dead the state senator from New Jersey who likes to rape little boys in sleazy New York shitholes). He kills a Doberman with an electric carving knife, feeds a New York mobster through a meat grinder and shoots dead three Hispanic types who rob an old lady and tread on her glasses. Meanwhile a cop is sort of introduced, sort of has a fling with the crippled vet's doctor, and sort of investigates. For some reason the CIA decide to take over the case - not because a US Senator has been killed, but because, for some vague reason, having a vigilante killing mobsters is making the administration look bad two weeks before 'an election'. It's a muddled, unfocussed mess that takes itself far too seriously, takes too long to get wherever it goes (except where it jumps so far ahead of itself that it leaves the audience wondering what's happening), and then has a totally stupid Parallax View type ending that leaves our cop hero shot dead by a sniper's bullets as a voice over intones, "Washington will be pleased"

The shot where the cop goes for a Darwin Award, by cooking a hot dog by sticking two forks wired to the mains into it, has to be one of the oddest bits of business I've seen on the screen for a long time. It distracted me so much that I totally lost what the scene was about. I was too busy wondering if it was actually possible and / or common? Apparently it is possible.

There was a sequel!?
The Carpenter ( 1988 ) - another of those long forgotten, never released on DVD 'horror' flicks of the 80s. (And given that the only copy sold on eBay in the last 30 days went for 25p I can't see whoever owns the rights rushing to re-release it either.) This time a carpenter, who was executed in the electric chair, comes back from the dead to finish his dream house, now inhabited by a young married couple. She's just out of a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and he's screwing one of his student. At first only she can see the nocturnal visitor with a penchant for staple-gunning people's eyes shut. Is it all in her head? Or is she somehow responsible for the grisly murders? Did I care? Did I fuck. I was more interested in the director's insane overuse of tracking shots than anything that was happening between the characters. He was loving the hell out of his dolly was the director. The opening shot of almost every scene seemed to be a slow tracking shot watching someone who was going to be in the scene move slowly into a position to talk to another cast member. The movie was 89 minutes long I would guess a quarter of it was dolly shots with nothing happening in them.

The Plumber (1979) - and unless I can find something called The Interior Decorator in my To Be Watched pile that's me out of job title titled films for a bit. Just before making a string of great films: Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, and Dead Poets Society Peter Weir wrote and directed this small, made for TV movie about the plumber from hell making life a misery for an academic. Not bad, not great, but not bad, not bad at all.

Phantasm (1979) - This has been sat in my TBW pile for a couple of years now and I regret not having got round to it sooner. In Smalltownsville, somewhere in the Southern USA, strange things are going on in the local funeral home. Very strange things. In the end we discover the funeral director is an alien, reanimating human cadavers, compressing them to three foot two high dwarves, and then shipping them off in barrels to another planet to be used as slave labour. The Writer/Director (who was also cameraman and editor and, for all I know, caterer and honey wagon driver too) Don Coscarelli launched himself at the sort of plot Ed Wood might have baulked at but has done with style and self-knowing campness that makes it work. Not the greatest horror movie in the world but a damn fine B movie, way above the average. Very dreamlike in places.

Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (1970) - In an effort to sort of convince my wife (and me) that I'm keeping all these huge piles of VHSs and DVDs around for some sort of reason, other than most of the shite I watch has no resale value even on eBay, I will from time to time, re-watch one. Beyond The Valley of the Dolls is a very strange movie and even funnier and weirder on a second viewing than it was on the first. Telling the story of the events leading up to a quadrupedal homicide and triple wedding, the film charts the arrival of a three piece girl band and their manager in LA and their rapid decline into depravity and corruption (ie sex and drugs and, because this is a Russ Meyer film, more sex) via some of the most bonkers, campest dialogue put on screen. My favourite two lines both come from the villain of the piece, record producer Ronnie 'The Z-Man' Barzell: .

"This is my happening - and it freaks me out!"

and the unforgettable:

"You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!"

The editing is unbelievable; bang bang bang. It's almost like a metronome at times; all the cuts in some dialogue scenes appear to be exactly the same length no matter who is speaking or what is being said. It's very disconcerting. At other times the film goes into hyperdrive with everyone suddenly emoting in the manner of a daytime TV soap while syrupy music plays in the background. The scene where the doctor announces that the character who just attempted suicide on live TV may never walk again is an incredibly over the top send up of every daytime soap hospital scene. .

After all this strange camp parody, the brutal Manson Family-like murders at the end are suddenly very strangely upsetting. Especially as two of the victims are guilty of nothing more than being a happy lesbian couple. Even weirder is the sudden change in direction when, after the murders there is a fight in which the killer is shot, and the crippled would-be suicide suddenly feels movement in his toes - and the sun comes out - and everyone is happy and full of wonder and joy, surrounded by the mangled corpses of their friends right enough, but really, really happy for him. It's either a deranged masterpiece or the biggest pile of shit yet put on screen. I'm in the deranged masterpiece camp.

Cry-Baby (1990) - one of those films that just cheers me up no matter how often I watch it.

Mission Without Permission (aka Catch That Kid 2004) - Three kids, one an ace climber, one a whizz hacker, the other a mechanical wizard rob a high-tec, super-secure bank - taking along a baby brother that one of them has to babysit. As stupid as it sounds but fun family stuff. My kids loved it; "Better than Spy Kids" said one, she's wrong but she is only six. The photography was very good.

El Topo (1970) - one of those films that has been on the edge of my must see radar for years. A heavily religious surreal (very bloody) Tortilla Western made at the hight of the hippy era. It opens with a lone horseman holding an umbrella riding through a desert. Only when the horseman stops and dismounts do we realise he has a naked 7 year old boy riding with him. The black leather-clad rider makes the boy bury a teddy bear and a photo of his mother, then they both climb back on the horse and ride off. After that it gets weird. And then weirder. At the end, our 'hero', having been shot by his lesbian companions and spending untold years in a catatonic state being worshipped as a god in a cave, digs a tunnel to free his deformed worshippers. When he finally succeeds, with the help of his pregnant dwarf wife and his now grown up ex-monk son (who has sworn to kill him when they've finished), all the newly released troglodytes are massacred by the townsfolk who are then, in turn, massacred by our hero. Who then commits suicide by setting himself on fire. I'm sure it was all very pertinent at the time and obviously allegorical of the horrors of Vietnam but all these years later it left me pretty unimpressed as a film.
Megamind (2010) - I haven't had so much fun with a movie for ages. For once (or finally) Dreamworks got the balance right and made an animated kids movie that was as much fun for their parents. I laughed often and frequently and left my critical faculties hanging behind the door about three minutes in and just enjoyed myself. Smart and funny.
Frauengefängnis ( aka Barbed Wire Dolls, Caged Women 1975) - Another Jesus (Jess) Franco piece of shit. This time it's his take on the 'Women in Prison' genre. Like all WIP films it has lashings of lashings, rape, and lesbian seduction - and being a Jess Franco film has more pans, tilts, zooms and dodgy focus pulling in any given minute than most films have in their entire running time. (And more close-ups of female genitalia than the average movie manages too). All pretty sleazy, uninspiring, and forgettable apart from one truly weird piece of film making in the middle of the movie. One of the captive women is having a bad dream - cue flashback (complete with half a pot of Vaseline smeared round the lens) to the night her father tried to rape her. "No!" she screams, leaping naked from the bed and running out of the bedroom. He chases after her and grabs her hair, her mouth opens in a soundless scream and she is pulled backwards. (The scream is soundless because we are suddenly in slow motion the whole scene from here on in is played out in dreamtime slo-mo.) He throws her across the room and she ends up facing the wall. He comes behind her and turns her around. As she turns the actress hastily stifles a giggle and turns it into look of 'horror' and shoves him. He falls back, cracks his head on the mantelpiece and tumbles slowly to the floor as she runs out of the frame. End of flashback, cut back to her in bed having the bad dream.

So what?

The really really odd thing about this scene (and it is really very odd indeed) is that the girl and the father were acting in slow-motion. The camera is running at normal speed; there's no post-production trickery (assuming this movie had any post-production). What's going on here is that the actors were doing that comedy slow-motion acting where everyone tries to look like they are underwater and breathing treacle - and convincing no one. Coming in the middle of a sweaty piece of low-rent, nasty, dirty old man, BDSM fantasy it is just plain very very weird.

Get out of my movie!

Suite 16 (1994) - Would-be psycho-sexual, cat and mouse shenanigans between a young immoral hustler played by some Dutch bloke who looks great naked, and a rich, wheelchair-bound recluse played by Pete Postlethwaite - who, I'm glad to say, kept most of his kit on for the whole show. A very long 90 minutes in which I failed to suspend my disbelief for an instant.

The Atomic Brain ( aka Monstrosity 1964) - great title for a very dull tale about a mad old rich woman with an equally mad scientist (a 'Dr Frank' no less) in her cellar who spends his time transplanting animal brains into stolen corpses. He is looking for the breakthrough that will get him a Nobel Prize; she wants a new body to replace her wrinkled and worn out carcass - one of the three nubile servants she's just hired will do, but which one? The dark haired Hispanic one? no, she has a birthmark; best use her for the final experiment and graft a cat's brain into her head to see if using live humans is better than corpses. It works! Oh damn! The cat woman has escaped and half-blinded front-runner, statuesque blonde, Bea. (Whose 'English' accent is even weirder than Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins.) So it's down to German girl Nina. Mad old lady makes out her will so that Nina will inherit everything and prepares to swap brains. Nina nearly escapes but ends up strapped to the basement operating theatre next to the walk-in 'atomic cyclotron' so necessary for brain transplant surgery. At this point Dr Frank has a moment of blinding clarity and realises that once the head-swap has been done he will be dispensable and maybe it would make more sense if the old lady were to die and the nubile girly to inherit the money while remaining under his control. Genius! The Nobel Prize is almost his! Then, for some utterly inexplicable reason, he sticks the old lady's brain into the empty cat and walks into the walk-in 'atomic cyclotron'. Vengeful, as only a mad old lady finding her brain compressed into a cat can be, the mad old lady compressed into a cat carefully presses the buttons and throws the lever that Dr Frank had conveniently explained in reel one would reduce the house to radioactive ashes.

Kaboom!!!

I've made it sound a lot more exciting than it was.

The Onion Movie ( 2008 ) - A sketch show film that in the end does suddenly manage to pull an almost coherent narrative thread out of its disparate parts. Sort of like Amazon Women on the Moon and Kentucky Fried Movie, and, like them, very hit and miss. Because of the newsroom linking device that runs all the way through I kept thinking it was like a flabby Americanised version of Chris Morris's The Day Today.

Who's Harry Crumb? (1989) - unfunny comedy in which the only decent joke was used in the trailer. Watching Jeffrey Jones is always a treat and the cast were doing their best but no one was given anything in the way of funny stuff to do. All the 'humour' in the show was reserved for star (and producer) John Candy who seemed to think that getting a stuntman to pretend to be him and fall off things must be hilarious.

2011-04-07T01:03:00.000+01:00

I was playing with my vinyl tonight and posted a new entry on my much neglected Cheesybeats blog.

2011-04-05T00:07:00.004+01:00

I have to get a grip. I went to the local refuse disposal place today to dump a month's worth of Tetra Paks and six month's worth of accumulated bits of metal. I also took the vast pile of I Never Want to Watch That Again VHS tapes in the hallway. I need to get rid of the clutter! I need to make space! - I come home with an Edwardian dressing table I found in one of the skips. I don't think you are really allowed to take stuff away from the recycling place (ironically enough) but it was raining and the little men who shout "Oi!" were hiding in their hut. Basically, as usual, I came back with more than I went with. This cannot continue - but it's such a nice piece of furniture... No idea where it's going to go. I have to get a grip.

2011-04-01T22:48:00.006+01:00

It's the first of April Hurrah! Time for me to unburden myself of all the badly made films I have watched this month. First, The Very Good News; I'm not going to do it (today).

Second, The Good News; I watched three or four decent films last month; the Bad News is I also watched some 30 or so crappy ones.

Why? It's a question I often ask myself. Why do I seek out and watch such dreadful films as Universal Soldier: The Return, The Atomic Brain, and Demonwarp. Most of the time I ask myself the question as I'm actually watching the film. Why am I watching this shit? But sometimes I ponder on the question in a more general manner. The other day I thought about it while I was at the computer when someone asked me on a forum. This (tarted up a bit) is what I wrote in reply:

Why? To explain that I will first have to quote the oft quoted Sturgeon's Revelation:

“Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.”

The general interpretation of this, the way I think people tend to visualise it, is that there is this huge pile of crap with the 10% that is the good stuff sitting on the top. Like the yummy cream and sprinkles on the top of a trifle hiding all the cheaper custard, watery jelly, and soggy sponge lurking beneath.

I prefer to think of it as a bell curve where the X axis is frequency and the Y axis is quality... hang on, I'll draw it.

Like this:

Graph by the_junk_monkey, on Flickr

The 90% crud is the shaded area in the middle, a vast uninteresting bulk of mediocrity and hackwork. It's the areas at the extreme edges, where the graph shallows out, that contain the fascinating stuff.

People learn by making mistakes. People learn from watching other people making mistakes. I am somewhat passionate about film and I learn more about film making by watching people repeatedly fucking up than I do by watching great films. I like to see how things work. A really great film usually sweeps me along and involves me so deeply that I get so wrapped up in the story and the telling of the story, that I don't really notice how the story is being told. With a bad film it's easy to step back from whatever narrative there is trying to get out and enjoy the spectacle of watching the film fall to bits. Other times it's fun trying to find a narrative structure. You suspect there is one in there but you're dammed if you can find it. Ed Wood was very good at this game. What the hell is going on?

Another reason for watching bad film makers fuck up is to marvel at how inventive they are. Every time I watch a bad film I'm amazed by their ability to screw up in new and interesting ways. I suspect, and I've said often, that 90% of comedy is based on failure. Whether it as simple as Laurel and Hardy failing to get the piano up the set of stairs in The Music Box or Woody Allen's 'sophisticated' inability to be happy, comedy is based on failure and ineptitude. (I'm not sure what the other 10% is based on - knob jokes probably.)

Watching grown-ups failing to string a simple series of standard shots together is endlessly hilarious to me. (I read self-published books for the same reason.) In one film I watched this month the director managed to use what was obviously intended to be the establishing shot for the sequence after the interior it was intended to establish. I suspect this because he had left himself no way of cutting from one scene to another within the sequence. It was horrible! It was so horrible I had to rewind and watch it three or four times just to see how truly horribly horrible it really was.

A mistake I shall not make when the meteorite of solid gold lands in my back garden. When I am suddenly and inexplicably wealthy I plan on starting my own production company.

Here's a long blog entry I did a couple of years ago with a totally different set of reasons for watching hypercrap movies.

http://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.co...1_archive.html

"She's Like a Banana With a Headache!"

2011-03-25T21:34:00.002Z

I don't understand plumbing. Never have and I don't suppose I ever will. Once, many years ago while I was working for a living, I was employed as a building labourer. One day I was working on some alterations to a bathroom and had been told to take a shower unit off the wall. First thing I thought to do was check that the shower was disconected from the mains (it was an electric shower) I also made sure it was disconnected from the water mains. Electrics first; - and this is where I went wrong - I went to the main fuseboard, made sure the fuse marked 'SHOWER' was pulled (and then put in my pocket so it couldn't be accidentally put back in again by someone else as soon as I left). I made sure that the fuse in my pocket was in fact the right fuse and not the fuse for something else like the upstairs lights that had been mislabelled. I went back to the bathroom and tried to switch the shower on. No light. And no water comes out of the shower when I turn it on. No power. Good. Next I checked that the water to the bathroom was off by turning on the taps in the sink next to the shower. A dry gurgle and nothing. Sure now that it was safe to proceed, I unscrewed the shower's casing, disconnected the wiring (making the ends secure and safe in an insulated lump of chockblock). I unscrewed the couple of chunky screws holding the unit on the wall; now all I had to do was disconnect the water. I found the inlet pipe (not a difficult task as it was the only thing attaching the shower unit to the house) and selected a suitable spanner. Tea break soon. Great. Two twists of the spanner later and I felt a lurch. Suddenly I had a shower unit in my hands and a solid jet of water shooting horizontally past my face out of the pipe I had just been working; a solid jet of water that reached across the room, bounced back from the opposite wall, and hit me squarely between the shoulder blades.

Within seconds I was soaked through and my clothing weighed twice as much as I did. I was also screaming for help. I had dropped the shower unit (on my toe) and was leaning forward, both hands pressed against the pipe end. The water pressure was high so I didn't staunch all the flow but I did cut it down a little. The water that was coming out was now shooting up the inside of my sleeves and down out of my trouser legs, but as I couldn't get any wetter than I already was it didn't make much difference to me. My boss arrived. He took one look through the door at this screaming animated fountain, said "Fuck!" very loudly, and dived through the hatch in the floor that led to the underfloor crawl space. Within seconds he located the stopcock he had missed the last time he'd been down there and he cut the supply.

(This did make me wonder how he had managed to miss the bugger last time, but what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.)

What I should have done before anything else, was tried the shower. It was the type of electric shower that had to be connected to the mains and switched on before even cold water would come out. Switch off the power and nothing comes through even though there is a terrific water pressure behind it. Why it was on a different supply from the rest of the bathroom is (to me at least) a complete mystery.

Why am I bothering telling you all this? No idea really. The house we were working on was a reletively new build - less than ten years old at the time and all the plumbing was put in at the same time. My house is 130 years old and built before the village had any mains water supply. I don't know when it was first connected but the plumbing in it has been added piecemeal over the years by many people - me included. At the moment our upstairs toilet cistern won't stop filling up. You flush, it refills and, nine times out of ten, doesn't stop filling. This causes the excess water to go out the overflow with annoying gurgling noises. Nine times out of ten that it does this you have to wait for precisely the right moment and run the tap in the sink for 15 seconds then turn it off quickly - at which point the cistern makes a strange Grrrrrrrnk! noise and stops filling up. (The tenth time it doesn't and you have to flush it again or just put up with the gurgling all night.)

The really baffling part is why running the hot water in the kitchen downstairs should make the upstairs toilet suddenly start to fill up again and why turning on the kitchen sink cold water tap makes it stop.

Answers on a postcard please, because I haven't got a clue.

Snap!

2011-03-16T00:23:00.004Z

I'm developing a game to play while I do the housework. I have BBC Radio 4 on during the day1, and Radio 4 spends most of its time mildly entertaining me, or deeply irritating me depending on its mood. I find it very hard to turn off, even on those days when it's snarky and determined to get under my skin by being even more London-centric, fatuous, and patronising than usual.

I need a trigger to get me to turn it off when it's like that. Hence Radio 4 Bingo. I'm making a list of key annoying words and phrases that, when I hear someone using them on air, I can cross off a bingocard like grid. Once I've crossed off enough to shout "Bingo!", or "House!", (or whatever it is the mad old grannies who play bingo shout) I can turn off the radio.

So far the list is:

'Absolutely!' - when used in answer to a question - where 'yes' would have been a really good answer.
'Devastated' - double points if the so-called devastation is caused by something so trivial that you roll your eyebrows in disgust2. Earthquakes are devastating. Having it rain on your day out in Disneyland Paris is just a bit of a piss off.
'Issues' (as a noun).
Any new (to you) verbing3 of a noun. Today I heard an avant-guarde art gallery curator saying, of a group of artists, "What we do here is forefront them."
Any new (to you) piece of mangled English that makes you wish you knew more about grammar and syntax so could work out exactly what did just happened in your ears, e.g. today I heard "It depends how limitating it is..."
Bad creative writing in the weather forecast; "Over the night-time period" being a favourite at the moment.

This list will grow.

1 - Well, it's company innit?
2 - It takes practice.
3 - A point to me!

The Return of the Any Key

2011-03-15T00:28:00.002Z

I had a rush of deja-vu to the head yesterday. This computer doesn't have a floppy drive (for younger readers, a floppy drive is what you put floppy discs into - and if you don't know what they are then the rest of this post is going to make very little sense. So, to keep the yoofs entertained while us oldies get on with things, here's a really fuck ugly painting of teen pop idol Michael Jackson (I think) that I just found at fineartamerica.com - $300 Dollars and it's yours to burn in the privacy of your own bonfire.

Where was I? [Gods! that is ugly.] Anyway, this computer doesn't have a floppy drive and on Saturday, at a car boot sale, between buying DVDs of films I'll never get round to watching because they are all too good and serious Art Films - not the explosion ridden crap with sweaty large-breasted women in that I usually watch - I bought a portable 3½" drive that plugs into a USB hole. It was a quid. The man who sold it me asked why I wanted it - the tenor of his voice suggesting he thought this was a totally obsolete piece of shit and that I was some kind of weirdo. I told him for the same reason I still had a Betamax player - you never know; one day it might come in really useful. Thus, I suspect, confirming his suspicions.

Saturday evening I plugged it in and lo and behold! it worked! Fine, brilliant, great and dandy! Oooh! I've got an A: drive again! Long time since I've seen one of them. I grab a few discs off the top of the tottering pile 3½" floppies in the office and spend a happy half hour finding they are full of stuff that I can't work out why I kept. After a while I got bored with trying to fathom why I thought I needed to keep copies of every autoexec.bat I had ever modified, put the discs back on the pile, and went on to play with other simpler pleasures, like looking up the stories behind favourite crappy movies on the IMDb.

And thence to bed.

Sunday morning, I turn on the computer, go off and make a cup of coffee while it fires up, come back coffee in hand to find the screen suspiciously black with some sort of message in white lettering... oh oh! This is usually not good news.

'Non system disc or disc error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue.'

Panic. Oh gods! The machine just died! What the hell is a 'Non system disc or disc error...'? It took a few moments but the penny finally dropped. I'd left a disc in the floppy drive. I ejected the disc and hit the any key. A wave of pleasurable nostalgia washed over me. I used to do that all the time. Panic I mean. Every time.

So that was it. Another exciting day at JunkMonkey mansions. I'm off to bed now to listen to a recording of a 56K modem on my battery powered early 80s Phillips Skymaster 3 personal cassette player:

Shit, but that Michael Jackson picture is ugly.

2011-03-11T16:31:00.001Z

All parents have nightmares and fears for and about their kids. Sometimes the fears are about what they will do, sometimes they are about what could happen to them. I won't list them. If you're a parent you'll know what they are; if you're not you won't really understand. (I didn't before I became a father and spent the first couple of years after my first daughter was born in a semi-permanent state of terror.)

Today one of my deepest fears became a reality.

Holly came home from school with a violin.

Daisy! KerPlunk is not a Breakfast Cereal.

2011-03-07T23:42:00.002Z

Oh I'm in trash movie heaven. A couple of weeks ago I found a pile of big box VHS tapes in a local charity shop and have been diligently working my way through them. Last night's offering was Demonwarp (1988) - and, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity. I have been giggling all day at it's dreadfulness. Someone needs to let the world rediscover this masterpiece of shit.

I wonder how much it costs to buy the rights to a movie...

2011-03-03T23:45:00.006Z

Sorry to say I watched a lot of films last month:

The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) - a real odd one. Shot in 1976 but not 'ready for release' (whatever that means*) for another 10 years, the film takes place during the course of one day in the life of Faustus Bidgood, with a history of mental health problems and a Billy Liar like imagination, he works as a minor bureaucrat in the Newfoundland Department of Education. Lots of things are happening on this day. The final preparations for the annual charity concert in aid of crippled children are being made. The premier of Newfoundland has gone missing (again) leaving behind him cryptic clues - TV viewers are asked to help in the manhunt and could win a waffle iron if they come up with the solution as to his whereabouts. There is a child serial killer on the loose and the local TV's top children's entertainer, who dresses as a giant chicken, has resigned his job and gone on a three bottle bender while still in costume. One of Faustus' co-workers is pregnant but the father of the child is in doubt and Faustus' boss has a messianic dream of the future of education based on a vision he had when he saw his friend killed by a plummeting bag of frozen soup.

Faustus, accompanied by his childhood imaginary friend, tries to hide from all this chaos by living in an alternate fantasy reality where they staged a coup, declared Newfoundland to be an independent state, and he became president promising to resign after one year but, as president, he has a decision to make and keeps having a recurring dream that he is in fact a lowly filing clerk. There are flashbacks from at least two different characters. The fantasy (or are they?) sequences are shot in grainy black and white, there is a film within a film which represents some of Faustus' memories as a documentary and then a film within that film which purports to be the first, never to be released, Newfoundland feature film ever shot. It sounds like an unholy mess and it almost is but, amazingly, all these strands (maybe with the exception of the film within the film within the film) neatly tie up at the end. I liked it.

*Find out what 'that' means in an article from Cinema Canada - November 1986 here:

Star Trek (2009) - Meh.

The Jungle Book (1967) - Another Disney Friday night with the kids movie. Another very thin adaptation of a much loved book of my childhood. I do remember seeing this many many years ago in the cinema (I'm old enough to remember the days before the existence of museum pieces like VHS, Betamax, or even Laserdiscs) and hadn't seen it since. I was surprised at the amount of reused footage there was in it. Ka suffering the same fall from the same tree twice for example, and, as Daughter Number One pointed out, Bagheera climbs along the same tree branch several times - but then she has seen it four times.

Fugitive Alien (1987) - My first incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderments of the year. And first decent sighting of a SpaceBimbo this year too.

Space Barbie

Fugitive Alien tells the story of Ken, a 'Space Wolf', a killer elite space pirate, who has a crisis of conscience when out raiding one day and instead of gunning down a little boy (who also happens to be called Ken), he accidentally kills his best friend and fellow space pirate. Now an outcast and a traitor, he is mercilessly and relentlessly hunted for a few minutes until he escapes and joins the Earth Space fleet. After a lot of bewildering hanging about waiting for the story to really start his ship is sent on a mission to help another planet (populated by Japanese extras wearing Arab headresses) who are threatened by an enemy with a weapon so powerful it could destroy their 'whole constellation' (sic and wtf?). The second half of the film consists of Ken breaking out of jail on the Planet of the Japanese Arabs and springing one of the enemy soldiers too. Just as they are about to blast off for what our occasional narrator has called 'Their most exciting mission yet' the words 'To be continued' appear on screen and the thing just stops. Arse! What I have just spent an hour and a half watching turns out to be half an incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderment. The sequel, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II, was, according to the IMDb, released in 1986 - the year before the original. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true.

A standard tool used by American producers dubbing foreign SF films into English is to include quick, cheap to make, insert shots of hands flipping switches, and interesting dials with obvious English wording on them. I guess they would often be replacing shots of dials and switches with Cyrillic or Japanese writing next to them but sometimes I think they were just used to cover what would have otherwise been clumsy edits. The American producers weren't too bothered about where these shots came from - I remember one film where the inserts were probably shot in the dubbing studio as they recorded the new soundtrack; all the switches and dials in the spaceship were marked with things like 'Peak Wow' and 'decibels'. These shots were usually only a couple of seconds long, if that, but wherever the new inserts came from, the producers usually employed someone who could spell. Not here:

and how this briefly flashed up computer screenful of delivery details from a Utah metal products company to 25 East Union Avenue, North Salt Lake helped to identify the fleet of hostiles just outside the good guys' spaceship window is a total mystery.

Metropolis (1927) - I finally get to see what may well be the most complete, restored version of one of my long time favourite films (it is where my usual avatar comes from) - and I fall asleep.

Marooned (1969) - Three astronauts are trapped in their Apollo capsule and NASA (or 'the NASA' as one character pedantically refers to it here) attempts to rescue them before their oxygen runs out in 42 hours. This is a long film (134 minutes) and sometimes it felt like the 42 hours was playing out in real time with most of the screen time taken up with people reading screeds of numbers at each other. For once though the techno-babble was convincingly real and occasionally the film works, it does build up tension and the brief moments when emotions break through all the cold equations are more powerful because of it; Gene Hackman is particularly good as one of the doomed crew. I was less convinced by the ending which had a Russian spaceship turn up out of nowhere and one of the astronauts doing a Captain Oates but taking a third of their dwindling supply of oxygen with them. Not sure I followed the logic of that. I could have done with a bit more exposition in places.

Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) - Alex Proyas' first feature. An odd slow very low budget three hander. In a post apocalyptic future (fingerless gloves? check!) a brother and a sister live in a shack in the middle of a desert. He's in a wheelchair and dreams of flying, she's a religious bampot. One day a stranger arrives. The brother and the stranger build a flying machine and the stranger flies away. Some terrific visuals - even on the panned and scanned downloaded version I saw - more than made up for deficiencies in story and acting. Proyas' next film was The Crow.
MirrorMask (2005) - another début feature with stunning visuals. I loved it so did the kids. One of those films where all CGI stuff serves the story (or possibly was the story) rather than being added for sheer gosh-wowery.

Murder Party (2007) - I'm not a great modern horror fan so why I was watching a movie with someone holding two chainsaws on the front cover I'm not quite sure. Murder Party is a low/no budget horror/comedy that is almost funny in places. The plot is simple: a traffic warden finds an invitation to a Hallowe'en 'Murder Party' and decides to go. As soon as he arrives he is pounced upon by all the other guests who turn out to be an art collective in need of a victim for an artwork. It's a neat reversal of the usual low/no budget horror formula (take a bunch of teenagers to a deserted place and kill them off one by one). Here we have one victim and lots of killers. Things start to go wrong for our hero's captors when one of them has an allergic reaction to the non-organic raisins in his pumpkin cake and dies. Over the course of the evening the other 'artists', and several bystanders get themselves bumped off, in a variety of gory ways leaving our hero to go home. It almost works.

World Without End (1956) - another rewatch of an old favourite. Man's first manned mission to Mars (as always) goes horribly wrong and our gallant crew are hurled through time to a post-apoc world (this was the fifties so, damn!, no fingerless gloves) where brutish cave men rule the upper world and a dwindling scientific elite live below ground. The men of the future wear shiny futuristic caps and the women wear satin dresses with conical tits and hemlines that stop just below their bums. Our hero interlopers, with the aid of their standard issue handguns (so useful in a spaceship), and a home-made bazooka, fight off giant spiders, one-eyed mutant cavemen, and skulduggerous locals to save all the non-mutant cave men and get laid by the satin conical tit girls (though, this being the fifties, this last bit is only implied). If it wasn't so stodgily presented - for a lot of the time people stand in rows and take turns to tell each other stuff - this would be a real cracker.

Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds (1990) - every now and then I like to torture myself with a Star Trek movie. I've no idea why; I know they're tedious predictable shit even before I open the box, and, unlike most bad movies which are all unpredictably bad in their own special ways, Star Trek movies are all bad in the same ways. All so formulaic, self-referential and uninvolving that it's like watching the furniture being rearranged in someone else's house. Every now and then your hosts will stop and ask, "What do you think?" and you just have to be honest and say you can't tell the difference from the last time they asked you - though you suspect they might have swapped the sofas around.

The Enterprise

Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds was even more shittierly predictable and tedious than usual because it turned out to be a 'made for TV movie' cobbled together out of two regular episodes. (That'll teach me to read the small print a little more closely in future.) In this one the Enterprise meets the Borg again and Jean Luc P is captured and Borgified and everyone gets to recalibrate everything from the warp containment core to the kitchen toaster, and Jonathan Frakes (Ryker) gets more slow dolly shots moving in on him looking stern and decisive than any man in the history of episodic TV. And as most of these shots were done from a low angle to make him look heroic, we spent an awful lot of the 'movie's' running time staring up his nostrils. At least it made a change from watching him looking smug which is Frakes' other stock in trade pose.

At one point Patrick Stewart made a weird noise just before he spoke a line which had all the hallmarks of a bit of real acting escaping onto the screen. It was very lonely.

Lifeforce (1985) - The first manned mission to Haley's comet finds an derelict space ship. Now anyone who has ever seen ANY movies knows that entering derelict spaceships is just asking for trouble. Unfortunately our valiant crew have spent so long training to be astronauts they never watched anything other than training videos and happily go exploring. Inside they encounter a bunch of dead aliens and three perfectly preserved nude humans in suspended animation. The female of the three probably has the most beautiful tits seen on any screen during the eighties. Hypnotised by naked knockers (as most men are) the crew drag the bodies on board and head back for Earth and the plot goes into out of control free-fall with the movie ending up with rampaging alien vampire zombies destroying London, (I think they were covering all the bases when they pitched this one:

Writer: "It's a vampire flick, with zombies! - and aliens...
...and tits!"

Producer: "I like it!"

All Hail the Hypno-boobs!

This film has a real reputation for being awful and I was surprised to find the the opening sequences weren't that bad, but it didn't take long to descend into totally confused garbage. Towards the end I gave up trying to follow what was going on - though actors kept telling me at great length - and just felt sorry for Peter Firth (who probably thought this was going to be his big Hollywood break)as he wandered about in a polo-neck jumper trying to be the hero but being confounded at every turn by the incoherent script.

The first feature film to use Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a location and the second film I've watched in a row to feature Patrick Stewart being subsumed by an alien lifeform. He explodes in this one.

The Girl Cut in Two (La fille coupée en deux 2007) - by total coincidence Mathilda May, the naked hypno-boob girl of last night's film, was the first person on screen in The Girl Cut in Two. Inspired by the murder of Stanford White in 1906 the film tells the story of a TV weather girl torn between two lovers. A rich successful older novelist and a wealthy, but unbalanced playboy. The film asks us to believe that both men already detest each other - for reasons that are never really specified - and both of them instantly fall in love with the same girl within one day. She falls in love with one, marries the other - lots of post coital conversations, lots of people sitting round eating expensive meals and a hurried, patched together, scrappy ending that looks like it had been nailed into the script to stop the film going on for another couple of hours. I didn't believe a single frame of the whole damn thing.

Dream Warrior (2003) - a cinematic version of one of those bad self published novels which starts with enough backstory flashback voice-over intro to make you think you are watching a sequel (it isn't) and then just wanders around aimlessly wasting so much time you wonder why they didn't just include all that backstory in the main narrative and cut out all the waffle. A genuinely incompetent mess with a director who does amazingly inept things like using a point of view shot [handheld camera keeks round a pillar at two guards], then showing a wide of the actor whose point of view we are supposed to have experienced getting into position to see what we have just seen him see [sneak sneak up to the pillar then keek around it], then show us again what we have seen he has just seen now that he is finally in a position to see it. THEN - having established that handheld camera keeking round a pillar is a point of view shot - shows us the hero sneaking around in a series of handheld keeking round pillar shots without once hinting that there is anyone else around to be having these point of views of the hero. Garbage direction. Other highlights included Isaac Hayes being mystical in a purple burnoose:

Hayes:

Sometimes dreams are the only
thing worth having!

Hero:

What are you talking about*?

And, just to keep with self-published vibe, at least one typo in the credits; apparently there was someone responsible for 'UK Catsing'.

I really hope I don't see anything quite so dreadful as this for the rest of the year.

* Edit: I just realised this is even funnier if you do it in Cartman's voice.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Okay, I was wrong. For years I've had this down in my head as one of those annoyingly overly cutesy films I never wanted to see again. Watching it tonight with the kids I was pleasantly surprised at how funny it was - once I had got over the semi-Americanisation. (Still hate the fucking songs though.) The kids were enraptured by it. Afterwards number one daughter wanted to find the book to see how Veruca Salt met her fate in the original because it was different here to the Tim Burton version; geese instead of squirrels. (It was squirrels in the book.) She also thought the TV room sequence was better here, though she didn't explain why.

Timecode (2000) - another coincidence-driven rewatch. While sorting through some boxes of VHS tapes, consigning the ones I now have on DVD to the charity shop pile, I found a tape with a couple of editions of Moving Pictures which was, by far, the BBC's best ever TV program about films and film making. I watched a chunk, including the Mike Figgis interview mentioned on the Wikipedia page I just linked to, then I started on the next box. First tape that my hand touched? Mike Figgis' Timecode. So I had to watch it.

I remember being bowled over by it but this time I got really frustrated. Since first watching it I had read an interview with Figgis in which he talked about this film. Timecode was shot simultaneously on four cameras, the whole film consists of one continuous take from each of the cameras presented on a split screen like this...

...in which you have Salma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Stellan Skarsgård, Saffron Burrows all on screen, all acting at the same time in different locations. As the film progresses characters meet each other, cross from one strand of the story to another and from one corner of the screen to another - sometimes appearing in two or more quarters simultaneously from different angles. It is, as you may imagine very complex, and at times difficult to follow. In the interview Figgis said that he nudged the audience into watching particular parts of the screen with the sound. He mixed up the sound from the quarter/s he wanted the audience to concentrate on and faded out that from where he didn't. Simple and obvious enough, but I didn't know that the first time I saw it. This time, with that knowledge in my head, I was constantly fighting being pushed from one corner of the screen to another and desperately trying to make out conversations that were almost inaudible. I may investigate any available DVDs to see if there is one with an option to isolate the soundtracks - or even mix your own on the fly; that would be fun.

Ripley's Game (2002) - I never really understood the attraction of the Ripley character. I have tried to read a couple of the books and didn't get very far with either. Anthony Minghella's 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley Amazingly was, I thought, an interesting enough film but even though it charted the 'creation' of Ripley I still didn't understand him. As soon as John Malkovich appeared on screen in Ripley's Game I got it. Amazingly this went straight to DVD/Video in the States.

Jack the Ripper (1976) - very odd little Swiss/German take on the Jack the Ripper story which, apart from a couple of library establishing shots (one anachronistically putting the wrong queen on the throne), was shot entirely in Germany and looks it. Everything was just wrong. The architecture in particular and the furniture It all looked very un English. I suppose Germans get the same feeling of wrongness about Epping Forest standing in for Frankenstein country in all those Hammer films. Klaus Kinski did his usual going bonkers stuff - which is always fun - as the mad doctor / Jack the Ripper and got caught in the end - which added to the wrongness levels. Another Jess Franco film under my belt. Only another 148 or so to go.

Planet of the Apes (1967) - the superior original. I had forgotten how fantastic the score was. And so little of it too, very spare; unlike most Hollywood soundtracks these days. Jerry Goldsmith knew when to shut up and let the pictures do the work.

Ritana (aka Returner 2002) - Japan. A lone vigilante in the standard-issue, post Matrix, full-length leather coat shoots endless supplies of Ninja Yakuza, and helps a time-travelling cute girl rescue an alien (thus saving the world from the total pasting, end of human life, alien invasion which the girl has come back in time to prevent). Lots of explosions, lots of dodging slow-mo bullets while leaping 20 feet in the air shooting two hand guns in opposite directions mid somersault, lots of running around walkways and ducking behind pipes in an empty industrial site, not a lot of plot. Certainly nothing that hasn't been done a million times before in short stories, movies, TV shows, and comic books. Anime made flesh.

Survival Zone (1983) - Raking through the back room of one of the local charity shops today (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. First into the player tonight was this dreadful, post-apocalyptic piece of poo. After a voice-over telling us that the Neutron bomb war of 1987 has wiped out nearly all animal life on Earth, we find ourselves in South Africa. We meet a bunch of bestial, leather clad bikers who watch two of their number fight and then appear to eat the looser... we meet three nuns looking after a couple of orphans in a deserted mission... we meet handsome hunk who has just buried his mother and sets off in his Land Rover to see if there is anyone else alive... we meet a happy nuclear family living on a farm. That's about all you need to know really, it's standard western plot number 37b. Indians on the warpath, lone stranger, happy sheep farmers wanting no trouble. Exactly the same. Except with nun-eating involved."

"For those who are about to eat us
make us truly grateful, amen."

So, still peckish after the nuns, the bikers attack the farm. The hunk arrives and we find he is called Adam Strong (no kidding) and the farm is called 'Eden farm' (could this be symbolic? or just bollocks?), farmer and family kill all the indians - sorry evil, nun-chomping bikers. Adam kills the head biker by whacking his head off with a spade. The End. Incidentally the head biker is the only one of the horde to speak. At one point while he is haranguing his troops and dumping backstory (they had all escaped from jail - presumably jails are neutron bombproof in South Africa) he actually says: "I warned you not to drink that contaminated water, now you are all mute!" A brilliant line which saved the writers from having to write any bestial dialogue for the cannibal bikers ("Pass the ketchup please."?) and the producers from having to pay actors to deliver them. This might all sound vaguely entertaining but it's so laboriously overwritten (apart from the bikers); everyone who does speak gets to deliver screeds of repetitive, aimless dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot and then goes round the block and does it all again just in case we missed any of it. There are whole scenes of endless pointlessness that are just baffling in their utter pointlessnessnocity. In an early one we watch Adam playing solo pool in an abandoned pub for a while till he gets bored and wanders upstairs into a room, he looks about a bit, turns on the shower - aha! water! - he decides to stay SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! and then he's asleep in bed. Something creaks. Something moves! A mirror cracks. He leaps out of bed. Suddenly there is full-on poltergeist activity going on all around him! He runs out of the hotel... meanwhile somewhere else...

What had the sudden onset of poltergeist activity got to do with anything else in the movie? Sod all.

There's a lot of SUDDEN CUTTING AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! in this movie - usually accompanied by loud music to make it really obvious. (I think the sound editor hated the director's guts. "Look!" he seems to say, "The bastard fucked up again and had to SUDDENLY CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP!") My favourite one came when we watch our hero setting a trap that involved some of the heavily foreshadowed dynamite he just happens to have around the farm. It's dark, he's in the cellar, there are nunaphagic bikers all around, he sneaks up a three step stepladder to do something trappy with some string and a nail, first step, second step SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO THE MOON IN A CLOUDY SKY! sneak back down the ladder, second step, first step... We have no idea what the hell he did up there - not that we are any wiser at the end of the movie either. Incredifuckingbly dreadful. I loved every second of it. (I forgot to check if there were any fingerless gloves in this one.)

Steel Dawn (1987) - I feel sorry for those people who don't sit through the credits at the end of movies. Apart from the odd lollipop, (like the Tibetan monk gag at the end of the end credits for The Adventures of Prescilla Queen of the Desert), you do find the most glorious names lurking in them. Steel Dawn for instance had a stunt person called Panica Protopapa (only other IMDb listing is as an actor way down near the bottom of a Marjoe Gortner movie: American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt). Not as good a name as Yolanda Squatpump but then very few names are.

Steel Dawn is the usual post-apocalyptic desert stuff (Fingerless gloves? Check!) A stranger with no name (in the cast list he is just called 'Nomad') arrives at the farm of a widow and her son just as they are having trouble with the local megalomaniac land baron who wants to run them off their land blah blah blah. Sounds like every third cowboy movie ever made after Shane except there aren't any guns and everyone is dressed in BDSM fetishist wet dream leather gear and has HUGE hair. (The villain wears something Tina Turner would have been proud of; it looks like a couple of electrified stoats glued to his head.)

Ooh! Get me, I'm so evil...

As there are no guns on show, people fight with swords. The end result is that the movie looks less like a Post Apoc Western and more like a Post-Apoc Samurai movie. In the first half hour we get to watch Patrick Swayze walk a lot. I remember thinking he wasn't as good as Toshiro Mifune. Now that man could walk.

The Eye Creatures (1965) - Another of Larry Buchanan's fantastically dreadful TV remakes. This time Invasion of the Saucer Men gets the work-over. Aliens land but are defeated by middle aged teenagers shining their car headlights on them - eye monsters explode if you shine lights on them. Superbly dreadful with all the usual Larry Buchanan hallmarks of shoddiness: there are lots of over-long shots of people walking away from the camera and into a doorway. This is a classic Buchanan shot and quite often it signals the end of a scene. The scene often actually finished quite a while beforehand but Buchanan will usually wait till everyone has left the screen before he cuts to the next one. Not very good with transitions was Mr B. Not very good at anything really.

Cargo (2010) - I was a little disappointed, after all the good reviews I have read of this, that it wasn't better. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, but I had worked out the plot about five minutes in and after that it was just watching the dominoes topple. It looked great and the lack of gunplay was welcome but it did press several of my dumb SF buttons: things like the size of the ship (the Kassandra), which was full of huge spaces all full of air at a breathable pressure.

"Captain, I think we got a stowaway."
"Okay, put on your suits and vent the ship. Next problem please."

And the big engines firing all the time for four years! They only cut out about 30 seconds before they reach their destination; at which point the ship just stops (once the engines stop pushing it). At some point this ship goes FLT. It has to. Rhea, its destination, is 'four years' away from Earth. Proxima Centuri is about 4.2 light-years from us. So even if Rhea is around our nearest neighbour - and the implication is that it isn't - then the Kassandra must have gone faster than light to get there in the time. As it was constantly accelerating, when it got to Station 42 (aka Matrix in Space) it would have been doing at least lightspeed and, according to Einstein, would have accumulated enough relativistic mass to destroy the whole bloody planet as it hit.

As for the moment when our heroine jet packs straight into the open airlock of the moving spaceship at the end....

Gay Niggers from Outer Space (1992)- probably the most crappily amateur film, with some of the worst production values and dialogue I have seen for years - but so stupid it was quite endearing and genuinely funny. (Very short too.)

Flesh+Blood (1985) - Paul Verhoeven's first English language feature which owes more than a little to Kurosawa and was the third film I've watched this week that has nice Photoshop chrome gradient filled lettering on the video's cover. (Well, it's one way of choosing what to watch; next week I'll only watch videos that have skulls with glowing eyes on the front of the box.) You could tell this film had a bigger budget than the other two because the graphic designers knew how to adjust the settings and make the chrome effect a little more complex and subtle. Not sure what to make of the film. I was reminded at various times of Kurosawa's Ran, Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rutger Hauer did his usual sterling stuff and Jennifer Jason Lee was naked a lot. Either is a good enough reason to watch a film.

2011-03-02T23:24:00.002Z

Somehow it has become March without me noticing. Two days ago - a fact which caused me a little embarrassed today when I insisted the poor woman behind the counter at Blockbuster scanned the online voucher I had printed off. It would, in theory, have saved me a quid on the three DVDs I was attempting to buy from the three for a tenner bin. The voucher was valid till the end of February. She scanned it then told me it was out of date.
"It's valid till the first of March," I said. "It says so there, look!"
"Today's the second of March."
"It can't be. It was the twenty-eighth on Monday and today is only Wednesday so that means it's the thirtieth..."
"Of February...?
"Yes the thirtieth of... oh...."

It also means I have another month's worth of crappy movies to post up here and then I'll be caught up. But I'll do it tomorrow.

To keep you entertained until then, 'The 'Planet Stories' Fiasco', a part of my book that I am not writing - which has, over the last year or so, mutated from the world's worst science fiction book into the world's worst over-annotated bibliography of a non-existent author - is currently on display in the February 2011 edition of Mythaxis.

Sometime in the next couple of years I will finish the book I am not writing. I intend to make the book I am not writing exactly 50,000 words long - I read somewhere that for a book to count as a novel it has to be at least 50,000 words. My plan is to get to 49,998 words and then write 'The End' (or 49,997 words and write 'To Be Continued'; I haven't quite made my mind up). Once I've got enough words down - I'm currently about 13,000 words short - I will start deleting the really crap bits and replacing them with slightly better bits but still keeping it at exactly fifty-K words. I have no idea why I am doing this apart from the fact that it amuses me. When I've finally finally finished pratting about with it and decided that it is finally finally as funny as I can get it, I'll publish it somewhere as a free to air PDF and start writing dirty limericks for a bit. Or dirty haikus. Or just scrawling 'Bum' on pieces of paper. Something really short anyway.

2011-02-26T21:36:00.005Z

Not a bad haul for £15

I got a day off today. Merriol has been urging me to do this for weeks but I finally got round to doing it today. About 50 miles away from us over on the other side of Scotland there is a barn-like shed full of antiques / junk / treasure that is only open on Thursdays and Saturdays. Every time we go past (which isn't very often) we stop and have a look and I spend most of my time prising things out of the kids' hands and yelling, "Don't touch! - Anything!".

Along one side of the shed is a vast pile of books. Some are on shelves others are in piles on the floor. Some of the piles have fallen over. There are occasionally pieces of furniture stacked on top of them. Every time I've been to the shed I've had to drag myself away vowing one day to come back alone and sort through the pile uninterrupted from one end to another and not stop till I finished.

I did it today. Drove over in the morning, spent two or three hours moving several thousand books a few inches to the left and filling up a box with battered old Penguins and lurid SF novels - and what looks suspiciously like a first edition of Elizabeth David's Italian Food. It has lost its dust-wrapper and is a little battered but no matter; it's MINE!

.