The Following Post Contains Pictures of Naked Breasts and Too Many Princess Leahs

Double feck with sprinkles! So much for my heartfelt promise to blog more often. What's that? twice this year so far? Not good enough, Baldwin, not good enough at all. ..

Hmmm. What pathetic excuses can I find for this lack of bloggery... Merriol has gone back to work... Eben is getting more active (he's ten months old now and starting to want to explore everything)... I got paid to do a job... (Okay it was only three days but the principle counts)... my dog ate the modem...? Pathetic - no excuses at all.

Over the past few days it's been rearranging the bedroom that has occupied a lot of our time. Merriol and I have a king-sized bed. It's fine with just the two of us in it but when the kids decide that they can't sleep or need a cuddle they climb in too and before you know it Merriol and I are clinging to the edge, freezing cold, trying not to fall out as they claim squatters' rights on the nice warm bit in the middle. We are not alone, all parents go through this, well those who don't padlock their bedroom doors do. Not that we have a bedroom door yet. Another 'thing I must get round to making one day'. Last week Merriol came up with the genius solution to the problem; we've turned the bed sideways. We now sleep across the thing. It's a wee bit short and it felt a bit odd the first night not being able to stretch right out without your feet dangling in mid-air but three nights in and I don't notice. The kids easily fit in the extra space between us. They could play football and we wouldn't notice.

I've also been regretting not doing any cartoons recently. I've had a few ideas but nothing that has screamed out to be done and I've got rusty on Illustrator. I have opened it up and started a couple recently but I can't remember how to drive the damn thing. Too many whistles and bangs. Not enough short-term memory. To remind myself of what all those fucking buttons actually do I've invented the Society for the Promulgation of Fictitious Books and have been messing about making dust wrappers for books that don't actually exist. Here's the first two old penguin editions of books previously only though to exist with in the pages of another book.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen
and
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein

Give yourself a pat on the back if you can tell me which books they come from. (Answers are possibly upside down at the bottom of this post.) Out of sheer badness I plan on printing these out and wrapping them around any suitably sized books I swap on Readitswapit. Next up will be The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore by Kilgore Trout. (And I know the price on the pelican is wrongly aligned. It's fixed now.)

January...

1. Battlefield Earth (2000) - John Travolta's vanity project adaptation of L Ron Hubbard's 'Saga of the Year 3000'. (Things can only get better.).
   
   There is so much wrong with this movie it's hard to know where to begin...
   
   Battlefield Earth (for 'Earth' read 'North America') is set 1000 after the alien Psychlos have invaded and reduced Humans to a stone-age primitivism. Man, we are told is 'an endangered species'. Playing for the most part like a reworking of Planet of the Apes with the aliens standing in for the Apes, Battlefield Earth is stuffed full of cringeworthyness, from Travolta's towering, Shatneresque performance as the villain - his drunk scene is especially hilarious - to the high quality writing:
   
   

   "While you were still learning how to spell your name, I was being trained to conquer galaxies!"

   
   
   to the wonderfully crap, underachieving technobabble: 'Picto Cameras' and 'Compu-gradients' being my favourites. In the Olden Days, when SF was still "That Buck Rogers crap", writers were paid by the word. Stories weren't edited before they were published; they were weighed. It made sense for crap writers banging out a couple of thousand words a day, page turning tripe to stuff as many 'Syntho Caffs', 'Nicto Smokes', and any other 'Device O-matics' as they could get in. 'Syntho caff' paid twice as much as 'coffee' and sounded futuristic too!" but in 2000 there is no excuse. No excuse at all.
   
   The movie also celebrates the North American male's innate mastery of complex pieces of weaponry - one minute our bunch of stone-age primitives are having trouble grasping the concept that the lines on a map aren't actually drawn on the ground ("Maybe they've faded after a thousand years...") and, a few days later - I wish I were making this up - are flying Harrier Jumpjets like Gulf war veterans and arming atomic bombs. Admittedly they didn't figure out how to fly the Jump Jets and arm the bombs all by themselves; they found the manuals and a flight simulator first - but wow! do the US army build stuff to last, or do they build stuff to last? After lying about for a millennium, everything is in perfect working order - and still plugged into the mains. Which still works! Even the slide-projector containing the vital missing document is still ready to be fired up at the probe of an inquisitive finger.
   
   This must also be one of the few mainstream American movies to feature a suicide bomber as a hero.
   
   After watching it I started to read the book... it's worse.
   


2. Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) - An early Al Adamson and surprisingly coherent for one of his movies. Not that I'm saying it's good, it's dull, barely watchable but it's the least bewildering of his movies that I have seen so far with a couple of almost interesting shots.
   
   A young couple inherit an old castle (in California!?) with sitting tenants: Count Dracula, Mrs Dracula, a hunchback assistant, a creepy butler (John Carradine - hurrah!) and their resident escaped homicidal maniac played by the maniacally wooden Robert Dix. The script tries for comedy from time to time and fails then actually manages to lap itself at one point as an exchange between the Count and his victims is repeated almost verbatim a few minutes later in a different location. The climax, where the vampires are exposed to the sunlight and expire, is a classic. Tied to chairs they suffer the indignity of having their demise described by the hero and his girlfriend because there wasn't enough money in the budget to do ANY special effects at all at this point.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   Exterior shot of a sunrise. Cut to: Our hero and heroine looking on aghast:. Heroine: . Look - they're getting old..... Hero: Yuh... They must be several hundred years old... . It must be the blood that's kept 'em this young.... Cut to: An over-long shot of the hunchback assistant lurching up the papier-mâché stairs from the papier-mâché dungeon. Cut to: A closer angle of the hero and heroine: She: They're gone!. He: Turned to... dust..... Cut to: The count's and countesses' clothes sat in their chairs with a thin scattering of fag ash over the front..

   Before
   
   After
   
   
   

   Not only did they crumble to nothing off-screen but they did it while the camera was in another room!
   
   
   After that all that remains is getting chased by the hunchback, shooting him three times from point blank range before throwing the prop gun in his face (this incidentally seems to cause more pain than the .45 slugs to the belly). Then, after he catches them and whacks the hero unconscious ("Throw rubber guns at me will yah! Take that!"), we get to watch for a while as the girl beats helplessly against his back as he drags her off (she looks like she plays a mean set of bongos) He ties her to a post and douses her with petrol. Our hero wakes from his stupor whacks him in the back with a handy double-bladed axe (always surprising what you find lying around on Californian hillsides) which sticks out of the hunchbacks back (or rather the very obvious chunk of board under his tunic) like a joke-shop gag. The hero douses him in petrol, sets fire to him, and then pushes him off a cliff - not that anyone cares because, hard as it is to believe, all of that was so BORING! - apart from watching the board that the axe was stuck into wobble about, that was mildly interesting for a few seconds.


3. Swamp Thing (1982) - part of my ongoing on / off project to see every movie with the word 'Thing' in the title (there are 340 odd listed on IMDb) Swamp Thing is an adaptation of the DC comic of the same name, it stays fairly close to the original as I remember it and is just plain dull. Nice photography; swamps have never looked prettier. Lots of sunlight. Trouble was that, because it was so light, it made the Swamp Thing (I think I love you...) look very tatty (there was a rip in the back of the costume and during some shots you could see the actor was wearing jeans underneath). It did get a cinema release but the yellow lettering on the opening titles made me suspect the producers expected it to be on TV PDQ. Though I guess the scene where Adrienne Barbeau indulges in some Health and Efficiency type nude bathing didn't make it to the local cable stations.
   
   
   
   First gratuitous boob shot of the New Year as Adrienne Barbeau tries not to notice
   that the film crew is twice as big as it was during the mornings' shooting.
   
   
   Incidentally this woman's clothes dry in seconds. She gets thrown into the water quite often during this movie (no bad thing in itself) and within seconds of her emerging onto the river bank and as she runs away to be rescued once again by the not very mysterious Swamp Thing (but I want to know for sure....), her clothes are suddenly and miraculously only wet from the ankles down.
   
   Edit: Turns out that this was quite an expensive boob shot. Sometime in 2002, twenty years after the film was made, a woman in Texas called Mary Dorflinger rented the DVD of this film from Blockbusters for her nine year old son. She was shocked and horrified to find him seeing tits on the screen. Oh My God! TITS! Rampaging monsters, mercenaries machine gunning each other to death, women being shot in the back, and stabbed in the chest (not at the same time obviously), people being poisoned, and murdered on a whim was apparently okay for her nine year old son and friend - but a nice pair of knockers! Filth! Filth! MGM and Blockbuster recalled the movie. Contemporary News report.


4. Pitch Black ( 2000 )- Rather better than I was expecting. Still total nonsense though.


5. Dante 01 ( 2008 ) - nowhere as good as I was expecting and total bloody nonsense. A shuttle arrives at an orbiting prison ship (and there's one of my major SF movie 'oh-oh!'s right there. Name one (just ONE!) even half-way decent SF movie set in an off-world penal institution - go on....)
   
   
   I can wait...
   
   
   Anyway, on board the shuttle is a lady scientist and an almost catatonic prisoner. The lady scientist is there to test some super-dooper nano-tech DNA fixing gunk on disposable convicts, the prisoner is there to turn into a Christlike redeemer when the prison ship starts to plummet towards the hell-like planet below them (the 'Dante' of the title). For some unexplained reason, the director of the prison ship has given one of the inmates unfettered access to the ship's computer system. Including his password. Needless to say giving criminally insane suicidal computer geniuses complete access to the ship's computer system turns out not to be the brightest thing to have done. Type type type, overide overide, maniacal laughter - and the spaceship is plummeting to a fiery doom - and the only way to overide his overides is through a wee hatch in the prison quarters that leads to a cooling duct! (at this moment I want you to go here and press the button) ... blah, blah, blah anyway, they can't get to the big red button they have to push to save themselves.
   
   At this point our new prisoner, fed up with mumbling about 'The Light' and bringing fellow prisoners back from the dead (not to mention getting himself killed and bringing himself back to life) puts on a spacesuit, gets between the suspiciously cruciform hurtling space prison, holds out his arms and does something painful with a lot of special effects lights shooting out of his heart and aaaaa-aaaaaah! girly choir singing and the special effects get faster and faster and go round and round and everyone gets really excited till there is an orgasmic explosion of light and noise - and LO! the hell world of Dante is lush and earth-like and (maybe) LO! the spaceship isn't hurtling towards it any more and (presumably) LO! everyone was spared - or at least spared long enough to record some portentous voice over - in French. For LO! this was a French SF movie which brings me to 'Oh-oh!' number two. Name one! (ONE!) decent French SF movie (apart from La Jetée, Alphaville, Farenheit 451, Barberella, La Planète Sauvage, Le voyage dans la lune, La cité des enfants perdus, Delicatessen... - oh bugger! )
   
   
   Dante 01 is Marc Caro's first solo directorial gig. Caro co-directed, with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the joyfully dark La cité des enfants perdus (1995) and the even joyfully darker Delicatessen (1991). Jean-Pierre Jeunet also directed Amélie. My money is on Jeunet being the one with the sense of humour and Caro the one with his head up his arse.


6. Quintet (1979) - Robert Altman, there's a real movie director for you. An 'auteur' even. A real grown up director. Fucking Art innit?! The things that I findirritating on screen, the things I nitpick about and annoy the people who try to watch movies with me are those moment where the writer,director, set-designer, on screen caterer, or whoever, doesn't think it through to the end and, by a single act of omission - or commission - undoes all the other work done by everyone else who has worked on the movie. That moment of "Wait a bloody minute.... What just happened?" that stops the narrative dead in its tracks. (Not that this film's narrative needed a lot of stopping, because anyone who has ever seen it will know that Quintet's narrative drive has pretty well frozen solid before the end of the opening shot.) There are several of those moments in this movie. And you get so long to think about them too. The film is two hours long and the scripted dialogue probably ran to five pages. There's a lot of time to ponder its deficiencies.
   
   The movie is set in a frozen Earth. Another ice age has set in and the whole world is dying. It's cold. Very cold. It's actually very cold on the screen. The movie was shot in Canada in winter and there are
   
   icicles and real snow and people's breath misting from their mouths in every scene. Time and again we are reminded how fecking cold it is. People wear big hats and layers and layers of clothes and waddle around like over-dressed Weeble people. Must have been a horrible shoot. My nitpick comes in a sequence when our hero checks into a room of a hotel. Woken up in the middle of the night by voices coming from the room next door, he overhears a conversation of vital importance to the meagre plot through an large grill in the wall dividing the two rooms.
   
   I'm not questioning why there is a convenient grill in the wall between the two rooms. What got me annoyed was the fact that the grill had not been blocked up by the long term tenant with the noisy visitor. If you are trying to keep warm the last thing you need is a huge gaping hole in your wall that leads into an unoccupied unheated room. Trust me. I live like this, I watched this film sat on my living-room sofa under a duvet with a hot water bottle. My breath was misting as much as the actors'. If that whacking great hole was in my wall I'd block it up with something. Maybe not the best choice of movie to watch in an unheated room in midwinter but boy did it make me notice the lousy insulation in the film.


7. Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster - aka Mars Invades Puerto Rico (and others). After the crushing bore that was Quintet some quality crap. Almost Ed Woodian ( Woodlike? Woodonian? Woody?) in it's use of stock footage. I've never seen a movie that actually used stock footage out-takes before; those bits of NASA footage of chutes opening - eventually, and rear views from blasting-off rockets where nothing is happening because nothing has happened yet.
   
   "Scramble all jets!" barks someone down the phone in a military manner. Note the word 'all' there - three weeks after shooting finished the following conversation was secretly taped in the editing room:.
   
   
   
   
   

   - Hey Boss! - Yes? - Dis stock footage you bought, it ain't no good. - Why? - Well dere's all sorts of different planes in it see. Look. Here's these guys getting into the planes ... - The pilots? - ... er yeh, them. Well, look; they get in these planes with the holes in the front - and then the planes that is takin' off have got pointy noses and shorter wings! They're different. Then these planes on this reel - the ones shooting the rockets - they's different again. - That's why I had the General say scramble all jets, Chico. - Oooooh! You sure am smart, boss.

8. The Lost Missile ( 1958 ) - More stock footage. I suspect this film has the largest stock to new footage ratio of any movie I have seen yet. It's incredible. There's stock footage of planes taking off from runways, civil defence exercises, lots of radar dishes (they were very fond of radar dishes in SF movies of this period for some reason) lots and lots of footage of military types passing each other bits of paper and punching numbers into electronic brains. The plot: an alien missile is circling the earth at a hight of five miles scouring a five-mile wide path of destruction below it. Everything gets wiped out by its millions degree radiation heat. Nothing can stop it. Hundreds of jet planes try to shoot it down but nothing can stop it, it relentlessly continues on its way, heading at 4000 miles an hour towards New York. Evacuate 8 million people in under an hour! It can't be done! Ottawa gets even less time and is destroyed. If only the government's latest nuclear warhead missile can be launched in time! The chief scientist sacrifices himself, dying of radiation poisoning to make sure the bomb is loaded. The missile is launched and blows up the alien with 20 seconds of the film's running time left. Somewhere. Somewhere beneath all the stock footage and clumsy direction is a possibly decent little movie trying to get out. The aliens are never seen. We don't know who they are, where they have come from, or even if the ship is piloted. It may just be a drone - someone on IMDb suggested that this is an early example of a Berserker. The narration in the movie is downbeat. The briefly sketched in personal stories are well sketched in and the characters are better drawn than the routine. There's some okay writing going on here. The movie is not afraid to kill people - the hero dies! - characters are introduced and killed. Cute family in the snow building a snowman. Little girl points up at a light in the sky. Daddy, what's that? Run! Blinding light! They all die. People huddle panic stricken in cellars - and die! It's a trick Erwin Allen and the disaster movie fad were to use again and again. It almost works. But every time it does - the relentless stock footage... oy! give us a break! One jet aeroplane taking off I can watch, two okay... but nineteen? Nineteen starts to look like padding.


9. The Time Guardian (1987) - I'm sure The Time Guardian made some sort of sense to someone somewhere at some point in the production process but by the time it got to my VHS player it was an unholy incoherent mess which made no sense whatsoever for nearly all of its running time. The movie 'stars' Dean Stockwell and Carrie Fisher in minor supporting roles that each could have been shot in a day (and I suspect Stockwell's was, consisting as it did of three or four scenes of him shouting at people in an unconvincing manner and then pressing a big red button). Carrie Fisher on the other hand gets to snarl with Princess Leah like disdain at someone who wishes he had the charisma of Han Solo's jockstrap, and wear a skin-tight silver top looks like it's been sprayed on - and for a moment the film got interesting. But only for a moment. Other than that one scene it is utter and incomprehensible garbage. Everybody shouts and snarls and is incomprehensibly mean to each other for no other reason than try and generate some 'drama' out of the confusion. The plot (as far as I could make it out) concerns a time-travelling city that is being pursued by evil cyborgs. Our hero accidentally blows off one of the legs of the city so they have to stop in the Australian outback in 1988 for repairs and a final showdown with the bad guys. Our hero goes ahead back in time (I'm really not sure what tense to write this in) to get a bulldozer to build a big mound to prop up the broken leg when the city arrives. (I'm not making this up, honest!). The bad guys show up. The local cops are corrupt and stupid, the local geologist is a girl with nice legs. In the end, in a flurry of poorly-executed clichés, the hero pulls out a big shiny, hitherto unmentioned, bit of the city's time travel device, points at the bad guys and they all vanish.
   
   This is not a bad film - this is a very bad film.
   
   The Italians made better SF films than this. The most horrible thing though is that the script was (in part) by John Baxter, a real SF writer. It was his only screenplay.


10. Alien Private Eye (1987) - Another one to treasure. Another 10p well spent in the Videos Nobody Wants pile at the local charity shop. And I'll think I'll hang onto this one; it's a cracker. A brilliant collection of bad non-actors with mullets taking it in turns to deliver - lines - I can't call it 'dialogue', it's just words. Written, directed, cast and produced by someone crediting himself as 'Viktor' and starring a bunch of nobodies (including someone called Nur Nur Cummings who, for some unknown unexplained reason - other than maybe to work in a couple of very lame Maltese Falcon references - did his part while doing a very bad, very variable, Peter Lorre impression). A Grade A Mess. I really can't work out how this got onto my TV screen. I really can't see how anyone down the long chain of producers, buyers, VHS distributors, rental companies etc. thought they were going to make any money out of this. I can only assume that the whole process got reversed somehow and the money went the other way, ending up with the people taking the video home from Blockbusters being paid to watch it. (Or at least take it home for the night.)


11. Princess of Mars (2009) - I suspect the only good thing to be said about this film is that for years those weird women who turn up at SF and comic conventions dressed like this:
    
    
    
    
    
    will suffer the constant humiliation of being asked:
    
    "Who are you meant to be then? Princess Leah or Deja Thoris from that crappy movie with Traci Lords?":
    
    
    
    
    Apart from the one at the back dressed as Tank Girl. I think she's safe.


12. Nothing Sacred - William Wellman's classic 1937 satire (written by Ben Hecht) of newspaper exploitation. Not as funny as I remember it, though little is these days.


13. Meet The Robinsons (2007) - Horribly overly-cute "Hey look at us! We're being whacky!!!!!" Disney SF which with less stuff thrown at the screen would have been so much better. The baddy was fun.


14. Weekend (1967) - Godard. French bloke, made films. Very important avant garde films. When I am reincarnated I want to be Godard. 90 minutes (You mean it wasn't three hours!) of painfully slow tracking shots and people shouting radical polemic while off-camera. I can do that. Give us a job! I had great fun watching director Mike Figgis, on one of the extras on the Artificial Eye DVD, saying nothing for 30 minutes. He was talking about Godard and his importance in the great scheme of things, he was using lots of words that sounded great and was very fluent and eloquent on his subject - but saying nothing. It was mesmerising. (Well the first half was then I got bored of being mesmerised and turned off. The second half may well have been very interesting. I doubt if I will ever find out though.)


15. The Core (2003) - Well that was pretty by the numbers. Popcorn SF with some laughably bad science. I've seen worse. Great chunks of it looked vaguely familiar which puzzled me for a while until I realised that the underground boring sequences were the 'inspiration' for much of the crappy version of Journey to The Centre of the Earth I watched recently.


16. Frau Im Mond (1929) - Two years after Metropolis, Fritz Lang turned another of his wife's SF novels into a bum-numbing three hour movie. Not as extraordinarily wonderful as Metropolis but still pretty damn good for an SF movie of that era - once you settle into the slow pace and get past stylised acting. Watching it I realised people don't act with their hands any more. In the silent era there was a whole language of gesture that has totally vanished. It's redundant. It became redundant as soon as the talkies came in. It's very beautiful to watch though, and I'm not sure I understand it all. There's one moment in this where the villain played by the incredibly villainous Fritz Rasp, having found the gold, stops himself from becoming over excited by placing the fingertips of his right hand on the inside of his left wrist, almost as if he is taking his own pulse. I have no idea if this was a convention of the silent acting style, of a popular health fad technique of the time, or something Rasp or Lang came up with on the set but it was strangely effective. I knew what he was doing with a single simple gesture. (Rasp is great. I've never come across him before and he steals the first half of the film. The moment where he transforms into disguise on camera is sheer bloody genius and worth the price of admission alone - one of those real 'how did they do that?' moments.)
    
    The launch sequence is wonderful and, as far as anyone can make out, the first time a countdown was used in a rocket launching.

Answers:
ǝlʇsɐɔ ɥƃıɥ ǝɥʇ uı uɐɯ ǝɥʇ s,ʞɔıp ʞ dılıɥd ɯoɹɟ sı ,uǝspuǝqɐ, ǝɥʇ
ɹnoɟ-ʎʇɥƃıǝ uǝǝʇǝuıu s,llǝʍɹo ɯoɹɟ sı ,uıǝʇsploƃ, ǝɥʇ

Feck! It's a month since I last blogged. I will do better this year. Promise. Just to start the ball rolling I'm going to clear the decks of...

Roll of drums please...

All The movies I watched in December! Yaaaaay!

Oh come, on it's not that bad.

December

1. Sunshine -


2. The Time Machine (2002) - I didn't mind too much that they had moved the location to New York, I didn't mind too much that our hero was given a love interest (who dies early on in the film thus giving him the Hollywood motivation to invent the Time Machine to go back and rescue her). I didn't mind too much that the innocent, aimless, childlike and docile Eloi are here depicted as an aware and innovative bunch of bronzed, muscled, tattooed hunter-gatherers (though the fact that some of them spoke flawless American English after 80,000 years did make me snort peanuts), I don't even mind that the Morlocks suddenly had a complex, hivelike social structure (grafted on from Wells' The First Men in the Moon) but what I do mind. What I really do mind is the hero jamming a watch into the rapidly spinning components of his time machine, jumping off, out-running a whole bunch of specially bred killer orcs - sorry, 'morlocks' - and then being pulled to safety (just in time!) to avoid the unamed, unexplained, and unexpected deux ex machina temporal explosion light show special effects bonanza he just created which wipes out all signs of badness without touching any of the good guys. "Dunno how to end the movie, guys! So why don't we just throw a shitload of SFX at the screen and get out while everyone is still going 'Oooooh! shiney!'?" "Sounds good to me, it usually works." The author went on to write Star Trek 10 and no-one was surprised.

1. Feast of Flesh (1965) - The wonderful thing about crap cinema is that it knows no boundaries. Bad cinema,like great music, is truly international. So, made in Argentina in 1965 Feast of Flesh (aka Placer sangriento, and The Deadly Organ) is a weirdly dreamlike tale (I think there was a story) about a homicidal killer dressed in a pac-a-mac, rubber mask and gloves, and wearing a Beatle wig, lurking around a beach hotel, injecting nubile young bikini-clad women with heroin, hypnotising them with weird music (handily available on 45rpm 7" single), and fondling their boobies before killing them. An awful lot of boobies in this film. A lot of nipples too. They do things differently down South America way. Not that I'm complaining. Two inept policemen try to uncover the mystery assassin but when they're on screen it's all very dull - they are very stupid; it takes them two days to think of asking two eye-witnesses what make and colour the killer's car was. "Silver Porche? Hmmmm - make a note of that, sergeant."
   
   
   
   
   
   I'm not really a Lesbian you know, I'm a red herring...
   
   
   
   When our masked weirdo and the crumpet is on screen its much more interesting, and very odd. Very odd indeed. Half the time it's a very bad Beach Party type movie with a sketchily drawn predatory lesbian and a couple of gay boys, other times it's hand held arty weirdness with POV shots swapping bodies, long takes in which nothing happens, jump cuts and all very dark, 'One Big Light' lighting. If David Lynch had directed Beach Blanket Bingo with John Alton lighting it (in a hurry), it would have looked like this.


2. Salvage (1979) - They don't make 'em like this any more - more's the pity. Salvage is a TV movie, it's cheap, it's silly, and it's fun. The story: a rich bored scrap dealer builds a spaceship in his junk yard and salvages all the stuff left behind by one of the Apollo missions. After a couple of almost crises, the gallant crew of two return to a heroes' welcome. That's about all that happens but watching it I was reminded that America used to have (or at least used to sell itself as having) this whole attitude of 'get up and go', 'let's put on the show right here in the barn!', 'we can do it - all we need is a bit of gumption and some Good Old American know how'. What happened to that? I liked it (though I knew it was all bollocks). It was aspirational, it held out the promise of better things. These days everything American seems so self-centred and whiny. Salvage is total nonsense of course - navigating in space using a sextant!? - but jolly nonsense. I enjoyed it. It reminded me more than anything of the sort of short story Robert Heinlein used to write back in the 1940s even before one of the characters name-checked 'Destination Moon!' in the dialogue.


3. Count Dracula's Great Love (1975)- (aka El gran amor del conde Drácula, Cemetery Girls, Cemetery Tramps, Count Dracula's Greatest Love, Dracula's Great Love, Dracula's Virgin Lovers, I diabolici amori di nosferatu, Le grand amour du comte Dracula, The Great Love of Count Dracula, and in Finland: Draculan suuri rakkaus. So know you know.) By 1975 Spanish film-makers had discovered what Italian film-maker had always known. Filling the screen with boobs makes money. Unfortunately they hadn't solved the 'how to make them fit into a coherent story' problem. The story they did come up with here involved the hoary cliche of the coach-full of nubile young women (in different coloured dresses so we can tell them apart) breaking down just outside Dracula's castle and having to spend the night... nail on some guff about reincarnation, the love of a virgin needed to restore Dracula's daughter to life and lots and lots and lots of walking about just to fill up the running time - and that's about it. Oh, one thing makes it stand out. This is possibly the only vampire movie in which Dracula commits suicide by deliberately driving the stake through his own heart - though, it must be said, there was no one else to do it. By the time we got to the final reel everyone in the cast, apart from our no longer virgin heroine, was a vampire. As is usual in this sort of film most of the cast were out acted by their own breasts. Mucho bueno los knockas, si!

1. Critters (1986) - It took it's time setting things up and, though it was cheesy and the SFX clunky, the acting and script were well above the level I was expecting. Above average 80s popcorn trash.

1. Journey to Middle Earth ( 2008 ) - Holy mother of crap! What a piece of shit! Okay, here's the premise - and please remember while you are reading this, that this is supposed to be based on a book by Jules Verne. The US military/industrial combine is about to do its first test run of a matter transmitter. They have a base in the US and one in Stuttgart (which is, as far as I recall, in Germany). So, wanting to test out this ground-breaking new piece of ultratech, does the combined intelligence of the US military combine (played by four actors - one of whom has a lip piercing) test the device with a guinea pig? or a white mouse? or even something totally inert like a house brick? (If you answered yes to any of those you really haven't been paying attention to the level of 'logic' in the movies I watch, have you?) No. The combined intelligences send through six - not one but SIX! - fit, young, busty women wearing combat trousers, and those tight grey vests that show up sweat very well. Just in case Stuttgart (which I'm still pretty sure is in Germany) wasn't civilised enough for our Amazons they carried with them binoculars, water canteens, radio communication equipment, rucksacks full of gear, and even automatic rifles! Needless to say they don't get to Stuttgart and end up being chased around a subterranean world populated by dinosaurs and giant spiders until some of them are rescued by the chief scientist in a giant atomic-powered, laser cannon firing, earth boring machine developed in the lab next door by - wait for it - his estranged wife. And you could see how that plot line is going to end before the end of the sentence can't you? The acting in this is god awful. Almost porn movie bad. The sort of acting where you can tell people are supposed to be worried because they chew their bottom lip.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   As a graduate of the Joey Tribbiani school of acting she has deliberately not learned her next line and is trying to read her script which she placed upside down on the floor next to her before the shot began.
   
   
   A straight to ex-rental bin movie that amazingly had a 'limited' release in the US.
   
   Woweee! The production company responsible for this piece of poo, the bandwagon-jumping, rip-off artists: The Asylum, are making a version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars with Tracy Lords as Dejah Thoris! Fucking priceless! (The fact there is another, more expensive version of this, out of copyright, work in the pipeline is a mere coincidence.)

1. Nuns on the Run - pretty terrible but after 30 minutes of Nacho Libre ( one of my few abandoned films this year) anything would be funny.

1. Circuitry Man - having been bemused to bits by the sequel which I watched back in June, I finally got to see the first one thanks to internet buddy Kubla Kraus who loaned me his copy in return for a candy bar. (Isn't the Internet wonderful!?) I was slightly less bemused by Circuitry Man than I was hoping to be. It dragged in places, spending far too long on the beauty shots but it had some really inventive low budget tricks - including one fight sequence which took place off camera and still managed to be very funny. It was odd enough to make me want to hunt up the only other film the director has done; Mix (2004). This might prove to be a bit more of a challenge as it only seems to have been shown in Hungary and not yet released anywhere on DVD. I'll have to email the director...

1. Car Wash - I like Car Wash. I have no idea why, it's not exactly action-packed, the characters a quickly sketched in and don't really develop much during the course of the show, in fact nothing much happens at all but it works.

1. Curse of the Swamp Creature - Not sure how many John Agar films I've seen this year but this has to be the worst. As an added bonus it was directed by Larry Buchanan, a director so inept he elevated anything he touches into fever-dream territory. This, as far as I am concerned, and I'm sure you know, is a good thing. Curse of the Swamp Creature is one of a small group of films he made for television by reworking old American International pictures. His movies are almost delirious, people moving between tiny sets with very little, or sometimes no, rhyme or reason via the medium of long sequences of people just walking about. The films of his that I have seen also have an absurdly high people just walking about in longshot to dialogue ratio. Walk. Walk. Walk. Cross-fade to more walking. The character arrives at a house we have never seen before and walks in through the front door. We hold on the front door. And hold on the door... and hold... the character finishes whatever they were doing in the house (we often never find out) comes out... and starts to walk back the way they came...
   
   Agar was probably on set for a maximum of two days on this one. Most of his scenes are silent, walking about shots with only a few moments where he gets to speak. At the 'climax' of the film, the mad doctor releases his Swamp Creature from his lab. "Kill them! Kill them!" he shrieks, pointing at the sullen mob of bemused off-screen extras. (They're supposed to be a vengeful mob whipped up into a fever pitch by a Voodoo priest but they just stand there in a row looking badly-dressed and bemused.) "Kill them!" shrieks the mad doc. The swamp creature ambles off in the oposite direction and into the outdoor covered swimming pool full of alligators the doc has been using to dispose of the bodies. Agar releases the doc's wife from her cell and the two of them also amble over to the pool where the wife pleads with the Monster. The Monster writhes with inner turmoil, the doc screams with maniacal fervour, and Agar, the star of the movie, just stands there. He doesn't even move his head. Just stands there waiting to go home. This must have been a real fun shoot*. Anyway, the Monster grabs the doc, throws him to the 'gators then jumps in as well.
   The end.
   
   
   I need to see Buchanan's Mars Needs Women.
   
   *On reflection I think his silence was more to do with the lack of on-location sound recording. Most of the outdoor stuff in this flick seems to have been shot MOS and Agar obviously wasn't available (or affordable) to do the ADR.

1. Creature of Destruction - More Larry Buchanan fever dream stuff, this time concerning a stage psychic, his beautiful assistant and a series of motiveless murders committed by a man in a rubber monster suit who, in the end, turns out to be some sort of manifestation of the beautiful assistant's inner bestial nature - I think. Anyway the monster just vanishes when she is shot dead so I guess that is what we are supposed to think. But after 80 minutes contending with dialogue like this it's a bit difficult to think anything:
   
   
   
   
   
   

   Capt. Dell: Lieutenant Blake... Lt. Blake: Yes? Capt. Dell: Lieutenant, I'd like to point something out to you. Now - I saw those bodies and whoever mutilated them has a very special problem Lt. Blake: Yes, I realise that; tell me something new, captain. Capt. Dell: I am a psychologist. Lt. Blake: Well, as a psychologist what is your opinion of this 'doctor' Basso and his monster theory? Lt. Capt. Dell: That anything is possible? As a scientist I keep an open mind. Blake: Yes Captain, anything is possible...

   I've worked out the Larry Buchanan shooting technique. If I work this up, I could end up with a Dogma 95-like manifesto for crappy movie makers the world over:
   

   
   

   • Shoot it once, without sound and loop in the dialogue in the 'studio' afterwards. Shooting without sound is cheap. If the actor fluffs his line - so what? As long as everyone else keeps going, whole scenes can be covered in two or three takes. One wide shot and then a close-up of the more reliable actor in the scene - and "Thank you! on to the next set-up, guys! Come on, let's pick up the pace here - we've only got four days to shoot this turkey!".
     
     

   
   

   • Don't record any Wild Track or Atmos - techy terms for ambient room tone - ie the sound that a room makes when there's nobody making any noise in it. I know that sounds a bit Zen but different kinds of silence are very useful in the editing process. But you don't need it. Not if the whole sound track will be laid down by actors standing around a microphone and library music will be played under every scene. Spot sound effects will be needed from time to time but there's no need to try and match the acoustic of your sound effect to the supposed acoustic of the location. In Creature of Destruction seventeen people applauding on a beach sounds exactly the same as a hundred people applauding in a busy night club.
     

   
   

   • Fade out or cross-fade at the end of every scene - with all the money you saved not doing synch sound you've got a few dollars in the budget for opticals. (Always a good general rule of thumb in film editing: Not sure how to get out of a scene? Fade to black.)
     
     

   
   

   • Don't squander a penny more than you have to on hiring anything for longer than you have to - I did spend a chunk of this movie wondering why the lead sometimes wore an Air Force uniform, and sometimes didn't, until I realised he only wore it indoors. By the time they got round to shooting all the outdoor, daytime, stuff it had been sent back to the hire company. (Or the guy they had blagged it from went back on duty.)
     

   
   

   • Another good no-budget trick of the day was to get some poor wannabe pop singer and his band to contribute one of his 'swinging numbers' and fill the screen with gyrating tits and hips for five minutes as middle-aged teenagers Watusi their way to utter obscurity... And I just spent 45 minutes editing the example of this from the movie to show you and my editing program just went and crashed. Had I saved? Had I buggery. Grrrrrrrrr. -
     
     
     No... Hang on! I just found it, sorry:
     
     
     
   
   

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.
   
   
   
   
   .
   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.