It's that time of year again.

All over the world proud parents are suffering.

"Andthentheangelwentuptotheshepherdsand
theywereafraidandsaid
weareafraidandtheangelsaiddon'tbe
afraidforthebabyjesusisinthestable
sotheywentothebabyjesusandtherewas
maryandadonkey... "

School nativities.

By my calculations I have another ten years of the buggers to sit through. By the time Eben is treading the boards with a tea-towel wrapped round his head and a stuffed toy sheep under one arm for the final time I will be 60 odd and have been watching my kids be Angels, Josephs, Marys, Kings, and all the rest for 15 years. (Unless of course M and I have another kid in which case the clock is reset to minus ten again).
I don't mind school nativities too much. I can't stand organised religion in any shape or form and would happily see it banned from all schools the world over but for most kids it's their first real taste of drama and performance - both of which are GOOD things in my book. But why are school nativities so incredibly bland? Why do they always miss out the gory bits? (The Slaughter of the Innocents anyone?) And why no school Passion Plays at Easter? I can't believe there isn't one kid in every school the teachers wouldn't love to see nailed to a tree.

I just like the idea of little Timmy rushing home from school in floods of tears: "Daaaad! Waaaaaah! They picked me to play Jesus!"

I am a very cruel man.

All the crap movies I have watched last month. Fortunately it is a very short list.

1. Wild Wild World of Batwoman aka She Was a Hippy Vampire (MST3K) - Oh God!


2. Il gatto a nove code (1971) - Dario Argento does a Hitchcock with Ennio Morricone as his Bernard Herrmann.


3. Our Man Flint - Stupidly sexist semi-spoof of the Bond films which was actually a funnier than I was expecting - and a lot funnier than the Austin Powers movies which covered the same ground. Our Man Flint played it straight. No mugging to camera. The story was cigarette paper thin (blue ones) but had a rather groovy design and music vibe which I rather enjoyed.
   
   
   
   
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   You are not a pleasure unit....
   
   
   And, after careful repeated watching, at various speeds, of the seven or eight frames in which this girl is pulled from behind the glass panel before disappearing out of frame, I was able to answer one of those technical questions that has long bugged me about shower scenes in American movies of this period - answer: they wear flesh coloured bikinis.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Ah well. Another evening well spent then.


4. The Blue Umbrella (2005) - Merriol found this one, cruising through Blockbuster for suitable movies for the kids. We didn't realise it was in Hindi till it was in the machine and we were all snuggled up to watch it. It is, not to beat about the bush, a wonderful film. It's simple little tale of a poor Indian village girl who meets a Japanese tourist and swaps her amulet for the tourist's blue umbrella. The Umbrella is stolen, the thief is unmasked and eventually the girl forgives him. That's it. And it tore me up. Shredded me. I was in tears. Simple straightforward movie making, wonderfully acted, beautifully shot, and brilliantly edited. Not that it is perfect - even caught up in the emotion of the story, I noticed a few odd moments - a couple of line crossings, and a weird bit of focus pulling at one point which made me think the dialogue had been rewritten post-production and this was only usable shot the editor had. Sometimes I really wish the part of my brain that notices this sort of stuff would JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP! - till after the movie had finished at least. A delightful film.


5. Yor, the Hunter from the Future - about which I have already waxed lyrical.
   
   
6. When Worlds Collide (1951) - 1951 was a good year for heavily biblically subtexted SF movies. (See The Day the Earth Stood Still - last month?) This time it's Noah and the Flood that got reworked.


7. Stardust - the Neil Gaiman one, not the David Essex one. And I was more than pleasantly surprised. It was nice to see the CGI serving the story for a change and not the other way around. And when things are going well I do really like 'the part of my brain that notices this sort of stuff', despite what I said a few movies ago. Towards the end of Stardust there is a tremendous battle between three witches and our hero, who is trying to rescue his true love from being sacrificed by them. Two of the witches are killed in the course of the fight but, just at the moment when the third, and strongest, witch has the helpless heroine and the hero at her mercy, there is sudden pause and we get a small panning shot from her POV of the desolation caused during the conflict. There is no one else in the room. There is no help coming for our heroes. The witch slashes with her knife - and frees the captive heroine. The witch turns away from them, what good are youth and beauty to her? Her sisters are dead what's the point?
   The shot we just saw wasn't really there to show us there was no hope for the heroes - though it did do that job very well - it was there to show us the witch's realisation that her life has no meaning any more.
   As the newly united lovers walk away, a cunning look comes over the witch's face and she attacks them again. She was toying with them. Now her sisters are dead she will not have to share the power that their deaths will bring her. The POV shot was her making sure they were dead. One simple shot and three different interpretations/uses of it presented - bang bang bang - one after the other. Great bit of movie making.


8. Teenage Monster - One of the few cowboy monster movies. Not a genre that caught on. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few others: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula ... erm .... Anyway! Using standing sets, three horses, no continuity girl, and about four interiors:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   (one of which is very strangely framed at the top - presumably the low angle they chose to shoot it from let the camera see the top of the set and the studio ceiling - until they shoved a piece of cardboard in the way) our gallant crew of no budget movie makers - also responsible for The Brain From Planet Aurus (qv.) - tell the story of a widowed mother and her son who, after possibly being struck by a fragment of meteorite - the narrative is a little vague about the details - and finding gold in their mine, move to the outskirts of town where the widow romances the sheriff and the boy (now grown up to be a hairy homicidal giant) kills people with relentless monotony.
   In the end the boy beast, with the usual instincts of the doomed tragic monster type, heads for the local high ground where he throws the blackmailing scheming minx, who has pretended to befriend him, off the top of a cliff before being shot down like the hairy teenage monster that he is. The End - of a very long 65 minutes.


9. War Of the Worlds - Not the Tom Cruise one, the 1953 George Pal one with Gene Barry. Better than I remember. The scenes where the mob take the scientists' vehicles, and wreck their chances of finding a weapon to defeat the seeming invincible Martians, must have been a real shock at the time. The conventions of the day would have had our heroes pulling a plot device out of the hat at the last moment ("It's crazy - but it might just work!") and saving the day but here, just at the point where you would expect this to start taking place, frantic selfish people spill out all over the screen and rip that hope away from the audience. Must have been much more disturbing to the well-ordered, conformist America of the Eisenhower years than it is today.


10. War Of the Worlds - The Tom Cruise one. Which was better than I expected and which I was quite enjoying - until the moment when Tim Robbins' character appeared on screen. Then it went tits up very fast. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them. Tom Cruise's character spends most of the movie running away, doing vaguely sensible things and generally not behaving like an action movie hero at all. So all that 'sensible' semi-realistic stuff almost outweighed all the bullshit stuff that was going on around him. Martian machines buried underground for millennia? Ray guns that vaporised people but not their clothes? - or at least not their outer garments, it seemed to vaporise their bras and panties pretty neatly, but has trouble with jeans and sweatshirts. I'll even let him get away with surviving having half a Jumbo Jet fall on his house, but it's later, having lost one of his kids and alone with his daughter, when things go wrong. In a scene almost recognisably drawn from a scene in the book, our hero meets a character called Ogilvy hiding in a cellar. (In the book Ogilvy was an astronomer, the character in the cellar was just called 'the artilleryman' though parts of Robbis character are also drawn from 'the Curate' in the book.) There are Martians all over the place and they are trapped, forced to keep quite in case they are discovered. Ogilvy's character is digging a tunnel and his continuous noise is putting them all in jeopardy. Our hero decides he has no option but to kill Ogilvy to save his own and his child's lives. He blindfolds his daughter and tells her to to sing while he goes to do the deed. This could have been - should have been - a horrible, terrible moment. Our decent, hard-working, loving family man forced to do something so horrible to protect those he loves. But it isn't. It isn't because the film-makers chickened out of making it a horrible terrible moment by making the character of Ogilvy creepyily weird, possible paedophile, so repulsive that people just wanted him disposed of. There was no moral ambiguity. Cruise was acting his cotton socks off in this scene but the moment had gone. Ogilvy was broad brush-stoke evil and therefore Cruise's character was entitled to dispose of him. Wouldn't it have been so much more interesting if Ogilvy had been nice. Helpful, friendly, nice - but just dangerously noisy. Wouldn't that have been one hell of a scene? Damn right it would. Oscar time all round I think, but Hollywood leading men don't kill 'nice' people do they? Three minutes later (having remembered he's an action hero) Cruise is blowing up previously impregnable Martian war machines with a couple of hand grenades he just happens to find lying about and reuniting his family. The End.


11. The Great Garrick - a 1937 piece of nonsense directed by the great James Whale (better known for Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Showboat) which I love dearly. It's a flimsy piece of froth, totally set-bound and stagy but fun. It is my perfect Sunday Afternoon Movie. It's a shame and a puzzlement that it has never been released on VHS, DVD, Laserdisc - or any other home format you care to mention. I've had a treasured copy, taped off the telly some 20 or so years ago, and only recently managed to find a copy on line. The quality isn't the best but it'll do till someone at Criterion or somewhere rediscovers it and restores it.-
    
    
    
    

Ages since my last post. Sorry world. How have you managed without me? It is at this point I usually dump the screen full of every movie I watched last month. But I'm not because it's bloody freezing in the office and I want to go to bed and watch another one - so, to keep you going:


Part One of My New Top Ten Ways of Surviving a Science Fiction B-movie list (part two will be with you when I think of some more). The previous top ten list (as hosted by my good friend Mr BaliHai).

1. Don't go Anywhere Near the Derelict Ship. Just don't do it. Don't go near it. Don't go in it. No matter how interesting it looks, or how much insanely valuable Alludium Fosdex there is supposed to be on board, just don't do it. Because you will die. I guarantee it- unless maybe you look cute in a vest and panties, or you are a cat, then you're in with a chance. Within minutes of you opening the derelict's airlock door and waving insanely bright torches round the dusty interior - something, or someone, will start bumping off your pals one by one. (If you do find yourself on a derelict ship with something bumping off your pals one be careful to observe the following
   
   
   • DO NOT walk backwards down corridors, no matter how impressively huge a gun or flame-thrower you are holding. You're just asking for trouble.
     
     
2. Don't Take a Job as a Guard in an Off-world Penal Colony. I really don't have to spell this one out do I? Just turn the page and search the want ads and look for something a little safer - like juggling live hand grenades.
3. Giant Spider Webs are Usually Made by Giant Spiders. Giant Spiders are not vegetarians. They don't build those big sticky things to catch broccoli. Avoid. (Unless, very weirdly, you are made of broccoli - in which case I think you are probably safe.)
4. Women, Never, EVER! Tell Your Husband You're Pregnant Just After He's Walked Out on an Evil Corporation. This is a variation of 'Older Cop Syndrome' which happens a lot to police sergeants with only three days to go till retirement. Either way, death at the hands of evildoers is almost always guaranteed - usually within sight of your husband or partner who will be just that little bit too far away (probably buying you a hot dog) to be able to help you.
   

I just turned myself into a verb!

http://conjugator.reverso.net/force-conjugation-english-verb-junkmonkey.html

A new level / depth of displacement behaviour!


(We're on in two days and I still don't know my fucking lines... )

Remember a few days ago when I said I lived in hope of finding an LP cover as compulsively horrible as this one?


I should be careful what I wish for. Because today, in Ft. William's Save the Children's Cancer for Sick Animals shop, I find this:

Willie Sutherland is the guy in the glasses. He's blind. According to the minimal sleeve notes the guy on the right is Frank Coutts, the little girl is called Mandy Coutts and is, presumably, his daughter, neither of them (as far as I know) were blind. Nor was the photographer, or any of the three men and a dog Wick-based record label Grampian Records.

Stevie Wonder was blind. So was Ray Charles. So were a brazzilion other blues, gospel, jazz and folk singers: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, Sonny Terry, and Blind Boy Fuller to name but a few easily lifted from Wikipedia.

None of them got stuffed with a record cover that made them look so predatorialy pervy. Even for 1972 this is one ugly fucking record cover.

Now I have had this LP for at least six hours I think the thing that disturbs me most about it is the spacing of the lettering, those huge gaps - there presumably to stop li'll Mandy's cotton socks getting in the way - very unsettling.

I Can't Multi-task! - I'm Only Seven....

One of the reasons I keep the film log I post here, is so that, in some future time, my kids can read it and a. understand some of the jokes and weird things I have been saying to them and b. find out the name of 'that movie' with a particular image or moment that has seared itself into their juvenile heads.

Over on IMDb there is a whole (busy) message board dedicated to answering questions about movies. A lot of them are along the lines of: "I saw this movie when I was a kid and I would love to know what it was - all I remember is that there is this bit where... " followed by some very sketchy, befuddled details. Quite often regulars on the forum name the elusive movie within minutes and the original poster is effusively grateful. " You guys are amazing! I've been looking for this movie for twenty years!" etc.

So, future Holly and Daisy, the movie with the girl with the blue umbrella was The Blue Umbrella, the bit with all the spiders flying into the sky was Charlotte's Web, and the reason Daddy has been giggling like an idiot for the last two days and bounding around like a loon screaming "Yor's World - he's the ma-aaaan!" is because he watched Yor: The Hunter From the Future....

I don't use the word 'awesome' if I can help it. It's not a word that fits too happily in the mouth of a middle aged, middlish-class Brit. It makes me sound like I'm desperately trying to cling on to my rapidly receding youth - like the balding, middle-aged Teddy Boys that caused me so much amusement in my own spotty adolescence. I avoid using 'awsome' for the same reason I avoid using words like: 'Dude', 'Rad', 'Bitchin' and 'Gnarly'. But I have to use it now. Yor: The Hunter From the Future is an awesome film.

If I had a comedy sidekick he would at this point pop up and say: "You're in awe of Yor?"

Yor is the Man! Yor is the prima inter pares of Italian SF movies, A truly wonderful piece of crap movie heaven on earth. If anyone ever asks me why I watch so many dreadful movies I will make them watch Yor. It's the eternal hope that I will find something as wonderful as Yor that makes me carry on. It is, in short, the dog's bollocks. Paydirt! The movie that has everything: a truly bewildering masterpiece of crap which proves, if nothing else, that the Italians invented Mashup years before anyone else thought of it.

Turn down the house lights and cue the post Flash Gordon, Queeny-lite type intro music of...

So, after we have recovered from the opening credits what happens? Or more to the point, what doesn't happen? Yor, (He's the man apparently) disappears from the screen for a few minutes and we spend a few blissful moments with a tribe of hippy cavemen who, apart from looking like they are about to announce the imminent arrival of Monty Python's Flying Circus, are tra la la blissfully happy in only the way that a bunch of characters due to be brutally slaughtered to a man by the end of the first reel can be.

Soon the happy hippy hunter-gatherers go on a hunt (or a gather) and within seconds one of the tribe, a pretty young female in a leather bikini and film-star teeth, spears what looks suspiciously like a small pig with ice-cream cones stuck all over it. But - Argh! What's this! Suddenly the badly dressed pig's mum heaves into view and the the front half of a giant cardboard flesh eating triceratops bursts out of the jungleywoods and attacks! Leather bikini girl is doomed! But suddenly YOR -

Aaahhhh! The Hero of the Universe!

- jumps out. Yor hits dinosaur with axe. (I am tempted here to make a joke about Italian dinosaurs being called 'Dino', but I won't.) Yor leaps over Dino's prongs like a Minoan bull dancer. Yor hit Dino again with the axe - right between the eyes this time. Dino die. Yor exultant.

Yor drink Dino blood. Yor hero to tribe. Big party. Girl in the bikini do the hoochie-coochie dance because she suddenly has the hots for hero hunk man in bad Hulk wig. Suddenly! before the hoochie coochie gets really interesting, purple painted Neanderthal cavemen attack. Our hero, his newly acquired crumpet, and her elderly guardian flee - and everyone else is killed, apart from all the women who are captured and dragged away to be ravished. And the audience is happy! because we know where we are. We are in One Million Years BC country, okay, the heroine's boobs aren't as big as Raquel Welsh's (though Yor's are) and the monsters are rubbish, but let's just settle back and enjoy the anachronistic nonsense of cavemen vs. dinosaurs. Yay! Go dinosaurs!

Back to the plot.

Pausing only to possibly have implied off-screen sex in an old tree, Yor and the girl retire to a secret cave. But suddenly! they are attacked by the Purple painted Neanderthal cave men again. Yor is thrown off a thousand foot cliff, and bikini crumpet girl is carried away, struggling, to the usual implied fate worse than death.

Yor wakes up, only slightly pissed off to find himself at the bottom of a cliff (but basically unhurt) - 'Nya! I've been thrown into deeper ravines... ' - and climbs back up to the top again. At the top he meets the elderly guardian who, presumably, has just been sitting there all night waiting for Yor to not be dead after being thrown to his certain death and climb back up to meet him. Together they go to the lair of the purple people eaters. They've just about given up working out how to sneak up on the bad guys' cave without being spotted when they are attacked by a 'Beast of the Night', a bloody big bat thing. Yor knocks it out of the sky with one arrow, then punches the bugger a few times, and ...

... this is so fucking brilliant ...

... lifts the dead bat beast over his head and uses it as a hang glider!

He is the Ma - aaaan!

Yor hang-glides into the cave, drop kicks the head bad guy in the face, and kills everything that moves. (Apart from bikini girl of course.) Yor pulls a rock out of a huge dam the purple people eaters have, for some inexplicable reason, constructed inside their cave and everyone Yor hasn't already killed with his axe dies. (Including, presumably, all the women he was supposedly there to rescue.)

Next morning our three companions are in an arid desert, on the other side of the big mountain, looking for a mysterious woman who wears a medallion exactly like Yor's ("Like mine?" "Yes, like yours, Yor.") Yor goes on alone.

Suddenly! Yor is attacked by stuntmen wearing rags and carrying pointy sticks - which are on fire! Yor is captured and taken before their queen who looks suspiciously like she goes to the same crappy wig maker as he does and - Da Da Dahhhh! - has a medallion just like his. Somehow we have slipped from One Million Years BC land into some kind of Conanesque world. Where muscle-bound adventurer drift from place to place encountering weirdness magic and evil. Okay. I can live with that. Yay! Go Evil!

"You are like me! Who are we where do we come?" cries Yor. (I'm paraphrasing here.) "No idea." she says, "The people here say I fell from the sky and they found me next to this huge block of ice with these frozen bodies in it. They too are wearing medallions just like us." (But not that much.) "Don't stress about it though because you are about to be sacrificed." Yor objects to being sacrificed, grabs a sword with flames shooting out of the side of it, and - kills everybody!

And then the cave collapses for no apparent reason.

Everywhere this bugger goes things just self-destruct and hundreds of people die.

So now Yor has two women. (He grabbed the queen on the way out of the collapsing cave). Yor Happy. (Actually Yor VERY happy). Girlies not so.
Just when the cat fight (told you his movie has everything) is getting interesting they are SUDDENLY ATTACKED by the purple Neanderthal guys who weren't as dead as we thought - and Yor has to kill them all over again. During the fight the queen gets killed (not, for a change, by Yor) and is buried - but only after Yor takes her medallion. No point in burying jewellery is there? Muscle-bound, walking catastrophe he may be - but he's not stupid.

Yor and his friends reach the sea. No sooner have they not even sat down for a rest, than they hear screams coming from a cave. They rush to the cave and find a Dinosaur (which looks suspiciously like the Triceratops he killed earlier, but without the big pointy bits) attacking women and children. (Doesn't anything this man kills stay dead?). They kill the Dino (again) and much happiness ensues and, not really understanding that they are dooming themselves to an early and messy death, the village invite Yor and his friends to stay and have a party. (They also try to give him another woman, but he passes.) Oh, and by the way, they say, something really weird happened round here recently. Something fell out of the sky and we killed the man who climbed out of it - and then it conveniently exploded so there is nothing to left to show you. Apart from this bit (I love the lengths low budget movie makers sometimes have to go to to get out of actually showing you anything on screen.) 'This bit', incidentally, looks very like a truck wing mirror with some bits of sticky-backed plastic stuck on to make it look a bit futurey. (I don't think we are in Hyperborea any more, Toto.) Anyway, party party party, la la la! happy happy Kaboom! Laser blasts from unseen circling spaceships explode the village - and everyone dies! (For a bit.)

Yor and his companions set sail on the (dead) headman's boat to the mysterious island of which he had (prior to dying) told them.

After the inevitable storm and shipwreck. Yor is captured by black suited robots left over from a slightly more expensive film starring Richard Kiel - that's right, this movie is cheaper than something starring the bloke who played a sidekick villain called 'Jaws' in a James Bond movie.

Somehow we have neatly segued from a really awful Conan rip off into a low rent post Star Wars SF movie, filmed in the same refinery they shoot every other low rent post Star Wars SF movie. There is a rebel underground trying to overthrow 'The Overlord' who is bent on 'doing evil' and making the same mistakes 'the ancients' did.

(Oh I get it! Were in the future that's why it's called Yor, the Hunter from the Future, oh yeah, I see - I can be so thick sometimes....)

These mistakes presumably include breeding a Master Race of androids, using Yor's sperm and bikini girl's body, to replace the old models, which are pretty plodding and useless, and look, as one reviewer so wonderfully put it: 'like Darth Vader had fucked Hello Kitty'.

"After you inseminate the woman, you die!"

Okay. Don't know about you but I think hearing that would pretty well squash my libido dead. So what's Evilon going to do now?

"Aha! After I wank you - and do something to her with a turkey baster - you will die!"?

The rebels choose this moment to - er - rebel. Why this moment? No idea. But this is the time they choose, and so, after a lot of running around shooting colour coded laser blasts (Goodies - green, Baddies - red), in which a couple of cavemen pick up 23rd century technology insanely quickly, and a couple of Action Man dolls serve as stunt doubles for some trapeze work (I kid you not), and a particularly pointless Lady of Shanghai type Hall of Mirrors sequence which did nothing to advance the plot but did give the audience a chance to have a good look at the film crew from several angles, Yor blows up the whole fucking island - and kills everybody!

It's incredible. Put this guy within three feet of anything that looks like an ordered society and it crumbles to bloody ruin within minutes. Apparently Edward Gibbon's massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is, for the most part, a chronicle of a happy enlightened culture, at ease with itself, and at peace with its neighbours. It's only towards the end, shortly after we read the phrase 'Then this bloke called Yor showed up', that it all starts going tits up.

It's now the end of the movie. The sun is setting in the west (it could be the east but let's assume it's the west) the island is sinking into the sea and Yor and his pals fly off into the setting to spread the word about not meddling with things man was not meant to meddle with (especially Yor's thing) and a voice over wonders aloud if he will succeed. I guess they were hoping for a series or at least a sequel.

I really hope they made one. Yor 2.

I'd invest in it.

Everything in the World is Boring - Except Crumpets and Gnocci

Continuing my fascination with the weirdness of LIDL's graphic design team:


Tron?

And now I come to think of it, aren't complimentary things usually free? Defined as "given free as a courtesy or favor" by one online dictionary. So are you supposed to help yourself? And why doesn't 'food' deserve a capital letter?
I need to to get out more - except this is what I do when I do go out.

Maybe I should stay in more.